(6) A special extension in the Christian ethical view is the truth that the moral law can be truly fulfilled only in and through a spiritual regeneration and renovation of the personal life. This is a truth which simply rational theories fail to formulate, though they are not without materials to justify the formulation of it. Few facts of life and history are more conspicuous than the impotence of the ethical perceptions and motives to get and maintain rightful rulership. Some hindering and disabling depravity in the human condition prevents attainment of the moral ideal. Apart from the dreadful sway of vice and crime and cruel wrong, even with the well-disposed, full duty to neither God nor man is completely realized. The words put by Ovid in the mouth of Medea: "Video meliora, proboque, detereora sequor" (I see and approve the better, I follow the worse), voice the moral weakness felt even in pagan consciousness. This incompetency of the ethical behests to accomplish the true and required life, Christianity confirms and emphasizes; and upon its basis unfolds the necessity of a deep, radical renewal of personal character.
In Christianity, let it be remembered, the moral law is a diviner and deeper reality than natural notions of men make it. It looks, with its divine eye, down into the very depths of the heart, and demands loyal and full duty through the whole range of personal relations with respect to both God and man. It spreads the force of moral obligation over religious duties, joining them in indissoluble union. "The law of the Lord is perfect," and requires this wholeness of duty and righteousness. Hence Christianity holds a merely natural morality always to be faulty, leaving men under the law's condemnation. Without a divine quickening and spiritual enabling, men can never be brought to true and full obedience and transformed into moral harmony and likeness with God. And the proclamation, looking to this part of the redemptive process, is: "Except a man be born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." Thus it becomes a unique distinction of the Christian ethical view, that it proposes to bring men to spiritual and moral endeavor and victory from the starting-point of a conviction and recognition of their own thorough incompetence for the moral task. It furnishes a true and adequate ability where it has broken up dependence on an insufficient one.
But this brings to us the moral task, which belongs to the next chapter.
[CHAPTER XII.]
THE ETHICAL TASK UNDER CHRISTIANITY.
The ethical task is to fulfil the moral law, to actualize the ethical ideal in conduct and character. It is to turn obligations into life. It is not enough to know duty, even in completest theory. It must be realized. In its most important and final view, ethics is a question of moral power.
The impotence of the conscience before the moral task has always been an impressive fact. The perception of duty has lacked efficiency for the enforcement of duty. Vision of the right largely fails to secure conformity to it. Even the clearest intellectual discriminations and illuminations of the moral law have often been only as the play of cold light, almost like the aurora of the north quickening nothing into life or fruitage. Here is found the chief point of failure in natural ethics. It has power to dictate, but not to move. It wants an efficient dynamic for overcoming the moral evil that has established itself in human nature and life—evil so positive and dominant as to justify an apostle in representing the better ethical will as disabled: "Ye cannot do the things that ye would." Prof. Flint says: "The wisdom of the heathen world, at its very best, was utterly inadequate to the accomplishment of such a task as creating a due abhorrence of sin, controlling the passions, purifying the heart, and ennobling the conduct."[67]
The aim of Christianity is supremely practical. It seeks to save from sin and bring to righteousness. It wastes no effort for simply speculative results. It comes "not in word only, but in power." Besides its service to morals in confirming and extending our needed knowledge of duty, its greatest ethical service is in supplying the needed dynamic or efficacious force for the realization of the holy life. How does it enable the moral task?
Completion of the Ethical View.