1. Involved in Relation to Christ.—In the first place, then, it probably may be safely claimed that there is no test of the moral life of a man so certain as his attitude toward Christ. Setting aside, now, any special religious claims of Christ altogether, and recognizing him only as earth's highest character, the supreme artist in living, who knows the secret of the moral life more surely and more perfectly than any other, he becomes even so the surest touch-stone of character; and the iron filings will not be more certainly attracted to the magnet than will the men of highest character be attracted to Christ when he is really seen as he is. There is no test of character so certain as the test of one's personal relation to the best persons. The personal attitude toward Christ is the supreme test. In receiving him, in becoming his disciples in a completer sense than we own ourselves the disciples of any other, we make the supreme moral choice of our lives; and, if no more is true than has been already said, we so accept as a matter of fact the fullest historical revelation of God at the same time. The ethical and religious here fall absolutely together. And all the subsequent choices of our Christian life, if true to Christ, are necessarily moral.
2. The Divine Will Felt in the Ethical Command.—In the second place, the sense of the presence of God, of the divine will laid upon us, if we have the religious feeling at all, comes to us nowhere in our common life so certainly and so persistently as in a sense of obligation which we cannot shake off, a sense of facing a clear duty. To run away from this, we are made to feel, is plainly to run away from God. Is this not a simply true interpretation of the common consciousness? Here, then, the religious experience is in the very sphere of the ethical, and identical with it.
3. Involved in the Nature of God's Gifts.—Again, God's gifts in religion are of such a kind that they simply cannot be given to the unwilling soul; just to receive them, therefore, implies willingness to use them; and faith becomes inevitably both "a gift and an activity." However one names God's gifts in religion, so long as the relation is kept a spiritual one at all, receiving the gift requires a real ethical attitude in the recipient. A real forgiveness, for example, involves personal reconciliation, restored personal relations; and reconciliation is mutual. One cannot, then, be said in any true sense to accept forgiveness from God who is not himself in an attitude of reconciliation with God, of harmony of will with him. In the same way, peace with God, the gift of the Spirit, life, God's own life, cannot be really given to any man without an ethical response on his part in a definite attitude of will. Anything arbitrary here is, therefore, necessarily shut out. God's gifts in religion are of such a kind that they simply cannot be given to the unwilling soul. They are not things to be mechanically poured out on men. We have no need, consequently, to guard our religious statements in this respect. We cannot even receive from God the spiritual gifts of the religious relation without the active will. Here, too, religion is certainly ethical.
4. Communion with God, through Harmony with His Ethical Will.—Or, one may say, desire for real communion with God seeks God himself, not things, or some experience merely. But the very center of personality is the will; any genuine seeking of God himself, therefore, to commune with him, requires unity with his ethical will. The deepest religious motive is at the same time, thus, an impulse to character.
5. The Vision of God for the Pure in Heart.—Christ's own statement—"Blessed are the pure in heart; for they shall see God"—suggests another aspect of this essential unity of the religious and the ethical. The connection in the beatitude is no chance one. The highest and completest revelation of personality, human or divine, can be made only to the reverent. God reveals himself to the reverent soul, and most of all to the pure—to those souls that are reverent of personality throughout and under the severest pressure. Therefore, the pure in heart shall see God. "The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him."[44] The vision of God requires the spirit that is reverent of personality, and this spirit is the abiding source of the finest ethical living.
6. Sharing the Life of God.—But perhaps the clearest and most satisfactory putting of the relation is this. The very meaning of religion is sharing the life of God. As soon, now, as God is conceived as essentially holy and loving, a God of character, a living will and not a substance—and Christianity to be true to itself, must always so conceive him—so soon religion and morality are indissolubly united. God's life, according to Christ's teaching, is the life of constant and perfect self-giving. To share the life of God, therefore, to share his single purpose, is to come into the life of loving service. The two fall together from the point of view of the social consciousness. And we are "saved," we come into the real religious life, only in the proportion in which we have really learned to love. "Everyone that loveth is begotten of God, and knoweth God."[45] The old separation of religion and character is impossible from this point of view.
7. Christ, as Satisfying Our Highest Claims on Life.—But we may still profitably press the question: Is the Christian religion—the special faith in the revelation of God in Christ, the best way to righteousness? does it necessarily, most naturally, most spontaneously, and most joyfully carry righteousness of life with it? If this is to be true, Christian faith, in Herrmann's language, "must give men the power to submit with joy to the claims of duty."[46] It may be doubted whether any one has dealt with this question as satisfactorily as Herrmann himself, and a few sentences may well be quoted from his discussion. "We know that the ordinary instinctive way in which men seek the satisfaction of all the needs of life makes it impossible to submit honestly to the demands of duty, and we see, also, the falsity of the childish idea of the mystics that this instinct should be extirpated; it follows, then, that we can only seek moral deliverance in a true and perfect satisfaction of our craving for life.... Now just such a feeling of perfect inner contentment is possible to the Christian, and he has it just in proportion as he understands that God turns to him in Christ.... This is redemption, that Christ creates within us a living joy, whose brightness beams even from the eye of sorrow, and tells the world of a power it cannot comprehend. And the power that works redemption is the fact that in our world there is a Man whose appearance can at any moment be to us the mighty Word of God, snatching us out of our troubles and making us to feel that he desires to have us for his own, and so setting us free from the world and from our own instinctive nature."[47]
Christ, that is, has no desire to withdraw himself from the test of the largest life. He is able to satisfy the highest demands for life. He courts the trial. He claims to offer life, the largest life. "I came," he says, "that they may have life, and may have it abundantly."[48] His way of deliverance is not negative but positive, not limiting but fulfilling. He is able to give such largeness of life in himself, such inner satisfaction of the craving for life, as makes a lower life lose its power over us, the larger and higher life driving out the meaner and lower. This is positive victory, supplanting the lower with the higher; just as in literature, in music, in friendship, and in love, we expect the best to break down the taste for the lower.
8. The Vision of the Riches of the Life of Christ, Ethically Conditioned.—But the thought of Christ's satisfying our highest claim on life deserves to be carried further, if it is to be saved from vagueness and to have its full power with us. The highest value in the world is a personal life. So Christ has made us feel. It is finally the only value, for all other so-called values borrow their value from persons. The highest joy conceivable is entering into the riches of another's personal life through his willing self-revelation. Now it is no fine fancy that the supremely rich life of the world's history is Christ's. God can only be known, if we are not to fall back into the vagaries of mysticism, in his concrete manifestation; and God opens out in Christ, the New Testament believes, the inexhaustible wealth of his own personal life. It is God's highest gift, the gift of himself. "No one knoweth the Son save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth to reveal him."[49] "This is life eternal, that they should know thee, the only true God, and him whom thou didst send."[50] So it seemed to Paul: "Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, was this grace given, to preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ."[51] Do we not here catch a glimpse of what the depth of that satisfaction with the inner life of God in Christ may be?
"For He who hath the heart of God sufficed, Can satisfy all hearts,—yea, thine and mine."