The corresponding truth will be at once acknowledged. There is no real religion without virtue. If the godly man is not a good man, if he is not a sincere and pure-hearted man, “that man’s religion is vain”: no matter what his professions or his emotions, no matter what his services to the Church. He is one of those to whom Jesus Christ will say: “I know you not; depart from me, all ye that work iniquity.” There is a flaw in him somewhere, a rift within the lute that spoils all its music. “A good tree cannot bring forth corrupt fruit.”
In Christ’s garden there forms in clustered beauty and perfectness the ripe growth of virtue, which in the sunshine of His love and under the freshening breath of His Spirit sends forth its spices and “yieldeth its fruit every month.” In it there abide goodness, righteousness, truth—these three; and who shall say which of them is greatest?
I. Goodness stands first, as the most visible and obvious form of Christian excellence,—that which every one looks for in a religious man, and which every one admires when it is to be seen. Righteousness, regarded by itself, is not so readily appreciated. There is something austere and forbidding in it. “For a righteous man scarcely would one die”—you respect, even revere him; but you do not love him: “but for the good man peradventure, one would even dare to die.”
Christian goodness is the sanctification of the heart and its affections, renewed and governed by the love of God in Christ. It is, notwithstanding, but seldom inculcated in the New Testament;[136] because it is referred to its spring and principle in love. Goodness is love embodied. Now love, as the Christian knows it, is of God. “We love,” says the apostle John, “because He first loved us.... He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” This is the faith that makes good men,—the best the world has ever known, the best that it holds now. Vanity, selfishness, evil temper and desire are shamed and burnt out of the soul by the holy fire of the love of God in Jesus Christ our Lord. In the warm, tender light of the cross the heart is softened and cleansed, and expanded to the widest charity. It becomes the home of all generous instincts and pure affections. So “the fruit of the light is in all goodness.”
2. And righteousness.
This second and central definition applies a searching test to all spurious forms of goodness, superficial or sentimental,—to the goodness of mere good manners, or good nature. The principle of righteousness, fully understood, includes everything in moral worth, and is often used to denote in one word the entire fruit of God’s grace in man. For righteousness is the sanctification of the conscience. It is loyalty to God’s holy and perfect law. It is no mere outward keeping of formal rules, such as the legal righteousness of Judaism, no submission to necessity or calculation of advantages: it is a love of the law in a man’s inmost spirit; it is the quality of a heart one with that law, reconciled to it as it is reconciled to God Himself in Jesus Christ.
At the bottom, therefore, righteousness and goodness are one. Each is the counterface and complement of the other. Righteousness is to goodness as the strong backbone of principle, the firm hand and the vigorous grasp of duty, the steadfast foot that plants itself on the eternal ground of the right and true and stands against a world’s assault. Goodness without righteousness is a weak and fitful sentiment: righteousness without goodness is a dead formality. He cannot love God or his neighbour truly, who does not love God’s law; and he knows nothing aright of that law, who does not know that it is the law of love.
This also, this above all is “the fruit of the light.” Two watchwords we have from the lips of Jesus, two mottoes of His own life and mission,—the one given at the end, the other at the beginning of His course: “Greater love hath none than this, that one lay down his life for his friends”; and, “Thus it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness.” By a double flame was He consumed a sacrifice upon the cross,—by the passion of His zeal for God’s righteousness, and by the passion of His pity for mankind. In that twofold light we see light, and become “light in the Lord.” Therefore the fruit of the light, the moral product of a true faith in the gospel, is in all goodness and righteousness.
There is a danger of merging the latter in the former of these attributes. Evangelical piety is credited with an excess of the sentimental and emotional disposition, cultivated at the expense of the more sterling elements of character. High principle, scrupulous honour, stern fidelity to duty are no less essential to the image of Christ in the soul than are warm feeling and zealous devotion to His service. Jesus Christ the righteous, as His apostles loved to call Him, is the pattern of a manly faith, up to which we must grow in all things. “He is the propitiation for our sins.” Never was there an act of such unswerving integrity and absolute loyalty to the law of right as the sacrifice of Calvary. God forbid that we should magnify love at the expense of law, or make good feeling a substitute for duty.
3. Truth comes last in this enumeration, for it signifies the inward reality and depth of the other two.