spiritual life to stir within them. Christ henceforth, both by His own personal teaching and example, and also by the new light of God's character which He let in on men's hearts, Himself the channel through which that light was let in, became a new dynamic power of virtue, an inspirer of goodness. The virtue-making power which He used was different from that which had been employed by the philosophers. They addressed the reason, He touched the heart by His words, by His deeds, above all by contact with Himself. The two methods are well contrasted in the following passage of Ecce Homo:

'Who is the philosophic good man? He is one who has considered all the objects and consequences of human action; he has, in the first place, perceived that there is in him a principle of sympathy, the due development of which demands that he should habitually consider the advantage of others; he has been led by reflection to perceive that the advantage of one individual may often involve the injury of several; he has therefore concluded that it is necessary to lay down systematic rules for his actions, lest he should be led into such miscalculations, and he has in this reasonable and gradual manner arrived at a system of morality. This is the philosophic good man. Do we find the result satisfactory? Do we not find in him a languid, melancholic, dull and hard temperament of virtue? He does right, perhaps, but without warmth or promptitude. And no wonder! The principle of sympathy was feeble in him at the beginning for want of contact with those who might have called it into play, and it has been made feebler still by hard brain-work and solitude. On the other hand, who is the good man that we admire and love? How do men become for the most part pure, generous, and humane? By personal, not by logical influences. They have been reared by parents who had these qualities, they have lived in society which had a high tone, they have been accustomed to see just acts done, to hear gentle words spoken, and the justness and the gentleness have passed into their hearts and slowly moulded their habits, and made their moral discernment clear; they remember commands and prohibitions which it is a pleasure to obey for the sake of those who gave them; they think of those who may be dead, and say, How would this action appear to him? Would he approve that word, or disapprove it? . . . They are never alone, because the absent Examples, the Authorities they still revere, rule not their actions only, but their inmost hearts; because their conscience is indeed awake and alive, representing all the nobleness with which they stand in sympathy, and reporting their most hidden indecorum before a public opinion of the absent and the dead.'

It was this last mode of appeal, one not wholly unknown before His day, that Christ adopted. But though the channel was familiar, the use He made of it was not; for the influence He poured through it was not only the purest human, but the Divine. The philosophers had addressed the reason, and failed.

Christ laid hold of a passion which was latent in every man, and prevailed. What was this passion? It was the love, not of man, not of all men, nor yet of every man, but of the man in the man.' But this in all men is naturally a weak principle; how did He make it a powerful one, make it a law-making power, a root of morality in human nature?' He gave a command to love all men without exception, even our enemies. Now a command cannot create love; but with the commandment He gave himself to love, and to awake the love that lies dormant in every man. This, which is the central teaching of Ecce Homo, must be given in the author's own words, so full of beauty and power :-

'Did the command to love go forth to those who had never seen a human being they could revere? Could his followers turn upon him and say, How can we love a creature so degraded? . . . Of this race Christ Himself was a member, and to this day is it not the best answer to all blasphemers of the species, the best consolation when our sense of its degradation is keenest, that a human brain was behind his forehead, and a human heart beating in his breast, and that within the whole creation of God nothing more elevated or more attractive has yet been found than he? . . . It was because the edict of universal love went forth to men whose hearts were in no cynical mood, but possessed with a spirit of devotion to a man, that words which, at any other time, however grandly they might sound, would have been but words, penetrated so deeply, and along with the law of love the power of love was given. Therefore, also, the first Christians were enabled to dispense with philosophical phrases, and instead of saying that they loved the ideal of man, could simply say and feel that they loved Christ in every man. Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind' (and to all goodness), 'but on one condition, that they were first bound fast to Himself.'

To His followers who walked with Him on earth, His presence, and to many in every age since, His image, has been the strongest of all levers to lift them out of selfishness, and to create goodness in them. They have found in His life and character an objective conscience better than all other ideals of perfection; in their sympathy with Him they have had the most unerring test by which to discern what was right and what was wrong to do; and in their love and veneration for Him, a motive power beyond all other powers, enabling them to do what was right from the love of it,-a power of loving God and of loving man, because they loved both in Him. To such the law of love absorbed into itself the law of duty, and became, in a new and pre-eminent way, the fulfilling of the law. Morality to them was no longer subjection and obedience to a dead abstract law, which they might revere but could never love, but an in

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spiration caught by contagion with Him, who contained the moral law and all the springs of morality in Himself. This is that central truth, long tacitly recognised, but enforced with such power in Ecce Homo as almost to appear new.

If we were to go no farther, we have enough to prove that Christ introduced into the moral heart of man that which all philosophers have been unable to find,-a new dynamic force, which not only told them what was good, but inspired them with the love and the power of being good. In short, He was the living centre of a new moral and spiritual creation. But if we go thus far, we cannot stop here, we must go further than the author of Ecce Homo does. For Christ claimed for Himself, and all who have followed Him most closely have acknowledged, that there are other powers and truths in Him, which in that able survey are either left in the background or altogether passed by. Those more transcendent doctrines,-Christ's atonement, His resurrection, the indwelling of His Spirit, are as much part of the testimony about Christ, and of the agencies by which He has changed the world, as anything that we know of His character. You cannot cut off the one without shaking the foundations of the other; and these doctrines are, if true at all, not merely in conformity with the purest moral and spiritual principles, but must be their very essence, must lie at their very root. Those who have most laid to heart, and lived by these doctrines, have found in the Atonement the obliterating of the whole burden of past sin. This is not the place to enlarge on it. But no fact in man's moral history is more certain than this, that the simple statement of Scripture, Christ has appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of himself,' has been found efficacious to reach down to the lowest depths of men's souls beyond any other truth ever uttered on this earth. In the Resurrection, they have found the assurance that what conscience prophesies will in the end come true, that, though experience often seems against it, 'right is stronger than wrong, truth is better than falsehood, purity shall prevail over sensual indulgence, meekness shall inherit the earth; for right, truth, and purity are summed up in their champion Christ, and He has conquered death, the one unconquerable champion of the enemy.' In the promise of the indwelling Spirit, and its fulfilment, they have found a surety that the impulse which Christ first gave will not grow old, but will outlast time. One great practical result of these truths is the animating confidence they give that God is for us.' There is nothing so crushing to moral effort as the suspicion that however we may strive to live rightly, the great forces of the universe may be after all against us. But here the Atonement, the Resurrection come in. They tell us that this

suspicion is groundless,-that God is not against us, but on our side, that the faintest desire to be better He sympathizes with, and will help; that even on the heart where no such desire is yet stirring, He still looks tenderly, He wills its salvation. Can any greater strength for moral improvement be imagined than this?

The result of all that has been said is this, that only in vital Christianity, or rather, to speak plainly, in God revealed in Christ, lies the adequate and all-sufficient dynamic for man. For in Him thus revealed all the principles of man's composite nature find their object. The natural desire for happiness, the yearning of the affections, the moral needs of conscience, all are satisfied. And all these principles so centred are turned into motive powers, or rather into one composite motive power, in which the lower, more self-regarding elements, are gradually subordinated and absorbed by the higher.

But you say, perhaps, that these things, if true, are things of faith, and morality stands on grounds of reason. Is it so? Is it, then, certain that morality is independent of faith? To prefer an unseen duty because it is right, to a seen pleasure, because it is pleasant,-what is this but an act of faith? It requires faith to do the simplest moral act, if it is to be done morally. And the highest religious truths, if once they are apprehended vitally and spiritually from within, and not merely taken passively on authority from without, will be found to require but an expansion of that same principle of faith, by which, in its more elementary form, we realize simple moral truths.

There can be no manner of doubt that the promise 'I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them,' is the one great work which philosophy could not do, which the gospel has to some extent done. It has brought in that which moralists in vain sought after, and without which their schemes were vain- -a living 'virtue-making power.' This was held forth as a hope in the Old Testament, All my fresh springs are in thee; In thy light shall we see light;' Then shall I run in the way of thy commandments, when thou shalt enlarge my heart.' In the New it was abundantly fulfilled. To St. Paul and the first Christians the law became no longer a stern commandment, standing outside of them, threatening them from above, but a warm law of love within them—not only a higher discernment of the good, but a new and marvellous power to do it, cheerfully, and with joy. And down all the ages, whatever obscurations Christianity has undergone, this, the true apostolic succession, coming straight from the Divine Source to each individual recipient anew, has never failed.

In such as Augustine, À Kempis, Luther, Pascal, Leighton, Fénélon, Henry Martyn, the pure and sacred fire has been re-lit from age to age. They, by what they were, and what they did, became, each to their generation, the renewers of a deeper, more substantive morality. For the Christian light in them was not a tradition or an orthodoxy, but a living flame, enlightening and warming themselves, and passing from them to others. And so to this day their works are storehouses of moral and spiritual quickening, more than all the books of all the moralists. When you read Leighton, for instance, you feel yourself breathing a spiritual air, compared with which the atmosphere of the moral systems is dull and depressing. For in Leighton, and such men, morality is, as Mr. Arnold finely expresses it, lighted up with the emotion and inspiration needful for carrying the sage along the narrow way perfectly, for carrying the ordinary man along it at all.' The saintly Archbishop was but speaking of what few have a right to speak of, but what he had seen and known when he said--' One glance of God, a touch of His love, will free and enlarge the heart, so that it can deny all, and part with all, and make an entire renouncing of all, to follow Him.' Again, 'It is in His power to do it for thee. He can stretch and expand thy straitened heart, can hoist and spread the sails within thee, and then carry thee on swiftly; filling them, not with the vain air of men's applause, but with the sweet breathings and soft gales of His own Spirit, which carry it straight to the desired haven.'

This is the language of those who, like Leighton, have known most immediately, to use again his own words, the sensible presence of God, and shining of His clear-discovered face on them.' Perhaps ordinary men had better speak little of these things-they are so far beyond their experience. But because language like this has been often repeated as a mere hearsay, by those who had no experience of it, it has come to be considered by many a mere decorous tradition among religious people, which other men nauseate. Still, however overlaid it has been with words, and however remote from it most men must confess themselves to be, the thing here spoken of remains none the less a reality-towards which end not only the religious, but even the uprightly moral heart, must look and aspire.

In the light of these thoughts regarding the spiritual springs of morality, how vain appears that cry so often heard in this day, 'Give us Christian morality without the dogmas!' In as far as any dogmas may be the mere creations of Churches, or may be truths crusted over with human accretions, by all means let them be either swept away or purified. There is much need that all doc