THE REWARD.
The reward of communion with God and comprehensive righteousness of conduct is spiritual life.—The righteous man, the man who walks with God, is in principle and purpose identified with every just cause, with every step of human progress, with every sphere of man's well-being. To him property is a sacred trust, time a golden opportunity, truth a divine revelation, Nature the visible garment of God, humanity a holy brotherhood, the family, society, and the state are God-ordained institutions, with God-given laws. Through the one fundamental devotion of his heart and will to God, the religious man is made a partaker in all these spheres of life in which the creative will of God is progressively revealed. All that is God's belong to the religious man. For he is God's child. And all these things are his inheritance.
To the religious man, therefore, there is open a boundless career for service, sacrifice, devotion and appropriation. Every power, every affection, every aspiration within him has its counterpart in the outward universe. The universe is his Father's house; and therefore his own home. All that it contains are so many opportunities for the development and realization of his God-given nature.
To dwell in active, friendly, loving relation to all that is without; to be
wedded to this goodly universe
In love and holy passion,
to be heirs with God of the spiritual riches it contains: this is life indeed. "The gift of God is eternal life."
Religion is the crown and consummation of ethics.—Religion gathers up into their unity the scattered fragments of duty and virtue which it has been the aim of our ethical studies to discern apart. Religion presents as the will of the all-wise, all-loving Father, those duties and virtues which ethics presents as the conditions of our own self-realization. Religion is the perfect circle of which the moral virtues are the constituent arcs. Fullness of life is the reward of righteousness, the gift of God, the one comprehensive good, of which the several rewards which follow the practice of particular duties and virtues are the constituent elements.
THE TEMPTATION.
The universal will of God, working in conformity with impartial law, and seeking the equal good of all, often seems to be in sharp conflict with the interests of the individual self.—If his working is irresistible we are tempted to repine and rebel. If his will is simply declared, and left for us to carry out by the free obedience of our wills, then we are tempted to sacrifice the universal good to which the divine will points, and to assert instead some selfish interest of our own. Self-will is, from the religious point of view, the form of all temptation. The ends at which God aims when he bids us sacrifice our immediate private interests are so remote that they seem to us unreal; and often they are so vast that we fail to comprehend them at all. In such crises faith alone can save us—faith to believe that God is wiser than we are, faith to believe that his universal laws are better than any private exceptions we can make in our own interest, faith to believe that the universal good is of more consequence than our individual gain. Such faith is hard to grasp and difficult to maintain; and consequently the temptation of self-will is exceedingly seductive, and is never far from any one of us.
THE VICE OF DEFECT.