to’s use of the word, implies that “a shoemaker shall stick to his last,” that those who perform the humble functions shall be content to perform them in due subservience to their superiors. A very different meaning was attached to justice by the Hebrew prophets as I have explained in the last chapter. Again, a quite different conception of justice is framed and stressed by modern social reformers. Now it is this ambiguity of the moral vocabulary that conceals the novelty of Jesus’ precepts. Thus, to mention only a single capital instance, it has been asserted that the Golden Rule as taught by Jesus is not original, but substantially the same rule that had been laid down by Confucius 500 years before the time of Jesus. But on closer scrutiny it will be seen that the two Golden Rules are by no means the same. As propounded by32 the Chinese sage the rule appears to mean: Keep the balance true between thyself and thy neighbor; illustrate in thy conduct the principle of equilibrium. As impressed upon his disciples by Jesus it means: Look upon thy neighbor as thy other self; act towards him as if thou wert he.  
To return to my point, the impression of novelty which I received in reading the Gospels was definite and striking. The mythological idealization of Jesus, indeed, I put aside as a thing that did not concern me. On the other hand, to say with certain modern liberals that he was just a man, an infinitely gracious personality, one who exemplified in his life the virtues of forgiveness and self-sacrifice, did not satisfy me either. Buddha too had taught forgiveness: “For hatred is not conquered by hatred at any time; hatred is conquered by love.” It could not then be the bare precept of forgiveness that lets light on the secret of Jesus. And self-sacrifice—“Greater love hath no man than this, that he should lay down his life for his friend”—had been practiced within and without the pale of Hebraism.
 
That he continued the work of his Hebrew predecessors I made no doubt. On the Hebrew side he was a prophet, or rather, a saint in Israel. But I had just as little doubt that he took a step beyond his predecessors, that his teachings bear upon them the signature of originality.
 
To put my thought briefly, I came to conclude that the ethical originality of Jesus consists in a new way of dealing with the problem of evil, that is, of evil in the guise of oppression. The prophets, his predeces33sors, as we have seen, identified injustice with oppression; and in the first flush of their moral enthusiasm the more optimistic among them believed that justice as they conceived of it would presently triumph and that oppression would cease altogether—“Arise, shine, for thy light is come.” God would miraculously interfere, and bring about on earth a state of righteousness. But years and centuries passed by, and oppression, far from ceasing, became under the ruthless administration of Rome ever more grinding and terrible. The yoke of Rome weighed upon the Jews as it did upon other peoples; but perhaps, because they were more independent in spirit, it galled them more sorely. The fiery zealots among the Jews persisted in hoping that by supreme desperate efforts, God coming to their aid, they might yet succeed in shaking off this yoke—efforts which culminated in the horrors of the last siege of Jerusalem. Jesus was not of their way of thinking. He seems indeed to have believed that the end of the existing order was near. It was too incredibly bad to last. The world would be consumed by fire. A new earth and a new heaven would appear. But in the meantime how accommodate oneself to the intolerable fact of oppression? Jesus said, Resist not evil in the guise of oppression, it is irresistible. He mentions in particular three forms of intolerable oppression: a blow in the face, the stripping of a man of his garment, and the coercing him to do the arbitrary bidding of another. He says, Resist not evil, resist not oppression. Shall then evil triumph? Is the victim helplessly at the mercy of the injurer? Shall he even be told that in a servile spirit34 he must accept the indignities that are put upon him? No; this is not the meaning. Quite a different meaning is implied. And here the teaching of Jesus takes its novel turn. There is a way, he says to the victim, in which you can spiritually triumph over the evildoer, and make your peace with irresistible oppression. Use it as a means of self-purification; pause to consider what the inner motives are that lead your enemy, and others like him, to do such acts as they are guilty of, and to so violate your personality and that of others. The motives in them are lust, greed, anger, wilfulness, pride. Now turn your gaze inward upon yourself, look into your own heart and learn, perhaps to your amazement, that the same evil streams trickle through you; that you, too, are subject, even if it be only subconsciously and incipiently, to the same appetites, passions, and pride, that animate your injurers. Therefore let the sufferings you endure at the hands of those who allow these bad impulses free rein in their treatment of you lead you to expel the same bad impulses that stir potentially in your breast; let this experience fill you with a deeper horror of the evil, and prove the incentive to secure your own emancipation from its control. In this way you will achieve a real triumph over your enemy, and will be able to make your peace with oppression. There are other intolerable evils in the world besides oppression which nevertheless must be tolerated. The method of Jesus can be applied to these also. This method I regard as a permanent contribution to the ethical progress of humanity.
 
A second original trait in Jesus’ teaching I found in35 his conception of the spiritual nature, and of his doctrine of love as dependent on that conception. The conception or definition is still negative as in the non-violation ethics of the Hebrew prophets. The spiritual element in man is hidden. It cannot be apprehended as to what it is substantively. The attributes ascribed to it are the effects in which it manifests itself; this goes without saying. To define the spiritual nature means to describe these effects, these manifestations. According to the Hebrew predecessors of Jesus the spiritual power is to be conceived of as that which prompts a man to respect the holy precinct of personality in others and in himself. What the holy thing is remains unknown. This view leads to acts of justice and mercy, as above explained. According to Jesus the spiritual essence in man bids him expel the inner, impure impulses that lead to external violations. In brief, the spiritual power is conceived of in terms of purity. It is the pure thing in man that thrusts out as alien to itself whatever is impure—whatever is of the world, the flesh, and, in mythological language, whatever is Satanic. In this sense I say that the definition is negative. It marks out, indeed, a definite line of conduct; and it even leads, as we shall presently see, to active efforts in a specific direction. A negative principle may have certain positive results. But in the main, nevertheless, the teaching of Jesus enlightens us as to what shall not be rather than as to what shall be. From the Hebrew prophets we learn that there shall not be violation of personality or injustice, the positive concomitant being mercy; from Jesus’ teachings we learn that there shall not be im36purity in the inner forum, the positive by-product being the doctrine of love.
 
Taking over the Hebrew heritage, Jesus affirmed that the spiritual nature exists in all human beings. In every man there is presumed to be this inner power to reject the unclean admixtures, to ward off and repel the carnal solicitations, to withdraw from the “world,” and to move upward toward the source of purity, which is God. The spirituality of man consisting of purity, the Father-God, the Father of Lights, is likewise conceived as the absolutely pure, in this sense as the most holy. In every man there is a ray of the eternal light emanating from the eternal luminary, and all men are one in so far as their rays converge at the focus of Godhead. To love men is to be conscious of one’s unity with them in the central life, and to give effect to this consciousness. Hence Christian love, the love that Jesus taught, is no earthly love, no mere sentiment, or outreaching of the human affections. On the contrary, the natural human ties are repeatedly set aside in the logia. To love another is to love him in God. Later the current phrase became, to love him in Christ; that is, to think of him, and act towards him, as if he possessed the same capacity for purity with oneself.
 
The love of others in God or Christ encouraged a particular kind of earthly beneficence, and it especially inspired the followers of Jesus with an unparalleled zeal in works of remedial (though never of preventive) charity. This may at first sight seem paradoxical. The young man is advised to dispossess himself of all he has, and in the same breath is told to distribute his possessions37 among the poor. Why not rather scatter them to the winds? Why should not the poor too cease to toil and spin and take heed for the morrow? For their simple necessities God would provide. The two-fold attitude, however, is easy to understand if we remember that certain acts of helpfulness have a symbolic significance, as attesting the value we set upon the person to whose needs we minister, much as a flower offered to a beloved person emblematically intimates our sense of the beauty and worth of the one to whom the tribute is offered. Christian charity, on its earthly side, has a similar meaning and purpose. It is intended to efface the indignity to which human beings are subjected when reduced to extreme indigence or allowed to suffer without relief, for it is the disdain of the spiritual personality thus evinced which Jesus disallows. He bids his followers intimate by earthly tokens their consciousness of the super-earthly worth of their fellow-beings. But the pursuit of riches as such he nowhere encourages—quite the contrary. And it is certainly a mistake to represent Jesus, as has recently been done, as a kind of precursor of modern Socialism, and to think of him as one who, if he had lived in our time, would have laid stress on equality of opportunity for all to gain earthly possessions. He who advocated wealth for none could not be supposed to have sympathized with a social movement whose first object it is to secure wealth for all.
 
It is this interpretation of love that helped me to understand the interior meaning of the doctrine of the forgiveness of enemies as taught by Jesus, and to per38ceive wherein it differs from the apparently identical mode of behavior enjoined by Buddha and the Stoic Seneca. It plays a capital r?le in Jesus’ teaching. As illustrated by the proto-martyr Stephen it probably effected the conversion of Paul. Jesus says: “Bless them that curse you.” But how is it possible to bless those that curse us? How, for instance, was it possible for Stephen to bless the men of blood at the very moment when they were crushing him under stones? To bless them that curse you, to bless them that despitefully use you, means to distinguish between the spiritual possibilities latent in them and their overt conduct, to see the human, the potentially divine face behind the horrible mask, and to invoke the influence of the divine power upon them in order that it may change them into their purer, better selves.
 
With complete and eager appreciation of the points of excellence contained in these teachings, with a reverence which it is impossible to express in words for their incomparable Author, and with a large sense of the beneficent influence which they have exercised on human history, I still could not avoid the question, so vital for me, Have these ethical teachings of the great Master the stamp of finality upon them? Has Jesus really spoken the last word in ethics? Is nothing left for us but further to expand and apply the truth which he laid down once and for all? When theology goes, the last stand of apologetic writers is apt to be made on the ethics. The instinct to claim finality for the religion in which one has been brought up asserts itself in the claim that the moral teachings at least are un39exceptionable and valid for all time to come. The searcher who is in great moral perplexities and who seeks help for others and himself, is bound to ask and will ask in no captious spirit, is this so?
 
The decisive point is whether the ethical teachings of Jesus supply a principle which enables us to work with zest in the world, to take the keenest interest in all the manifold activities of human society, to embrace the world with the view of penetrating it with a spiritual purpose and of thus transforming it. Do these teachings exhibit a way of making the world and the flesh instrumental to the spirit, or do they serve to turn us away from the world and its interests, to abandon the world in despair? Is the conception of spirituality as purity adequate? Purity is certainly one aspect of morality; is it the sole or the principal factor in it? The other-worldly attitude in the Gospels is certainly clearly marked. It is the background on which the ethical precepts stand forth. Tyrrel has argued as against Harnack for the close connection between the thought of Jesus and the apocalyptic vision. I asked myself, Can the apocalyptic vision, that is to say the other-worldliness, be dissociated from the ethics, or is the relation between them necessary?11 If the world is speedily, almost immediately, coming to an end, then it is justifiable to prefer celibacy to marriage, to ignore the state, to counsel disregard of the toiling and the40 spinning. All of this is warranted on the assumption that the order of things in which these institutions and activities have their place is about to disappear.
 
But if this expectation is deceived, if things continue in their ancient course, if the world and the flesh persist, taking on ever new and more baffling shapes, how is a system of ethics which is based on the assumption of one state of things to be reconciled with a state of things exactly the opposite? How shall an ethical person conduct himself in a world which his philosophy of life teaches him to reject, but with which the necessities of his existence compel him to come to terms day by day and hour by hour? There must then be compromise. And the history of Christianity up to the present moment is the record of such compromises. Monasticism was one of the earliest. A distinction was made, so to speak, between perfect and imperfect Christians, between a class of men and women who lived in ascetic seclusion, as if the world did not exist, and another class, the greater number, who managed ethically as best they could, dependent on the supererogatory merits of the real Christians or saints to eke out their unholiness. Another species of compromise is illustrated, especially in Protestant countries. It appears as a division between the contracted sphere of holiness and the circumambient sphere of the practical life, in both of which, however, the same individual has his place. Chastity, forgiveness of personal enemies, and the like virtues are to be practiced in the contracted sphere of private life, the ability to practice these virtues being derived from mystical identification with Jesus. In the Christian’s public life41 no such identification is possible, and he is left to be consciously or unconsciously unholy. As a politician, as a competitor in the struggle for wealth, he remains without ethical direction. The ethical ideal of the Gospels requires for its setting the apocalyptic vision. It derives its cogency from the belief that the world is about to perish. Can it serve as a sufficient guide to those who must live in the world, and affirm their ethical personality in dealing with it? In politics, in business, in science, in art, must we not somehow see our way to the conception that these great interests are not alien to the spiritual nature, introducing perchance impure admixtures into it, but rather can be made subservient or instrumental to it? Yes; but instrumental in what way? At this point, not only the Christian system, but every one of the systems of ethics that have arisen since then has failed. And it is, moreover, perfectly evident that the instrumental function of the sex relation or of the pursuit of knowledge or of patriotism cannot be determined unless we first answer the one question which the ethical writers are in the habit of evading—Instrumental to what end? What is the ethical end? Instruments are means to ends—how can the means be rightly appraised without a definite conception of the end? And if the end be the affirmation of our ethical personality, of our spiritual nature, of that holy thing in us without which man loses his worth (and without which the rule of non-violation itself falls to the ground, since where there is nothing inviolable there can be no infringement), it is plain that we must seek a positive definition of the spiritual nature which shall serve as a principle of regulation42 where the empty concept of purity has manifestly failed.
 
Christian ethics has promoted the moral development of mankind in a thousand ways. It has helped even by its mythological embodiment of a transcendental idea to place the individual more firmly on his feet. It has emphasized the inner springs of conduct; it has given prominence to certain principal virtues of the private life; but, like every product of the mind and aspirations of man, it exhibits the limitations of the time and of the social conditions under which it arose. The conditions have since changed. Society has become infinitely more complex, and in consequence new moral problems have forced themselves upon men’s attention; and with the help of Christianity itself the human race has advanced beyond the point of view for which Christianity stands.12
 
Speaking again only for myself I could not assent to the position that finality appertains to the ethical teachings of the Gospel, that they or their Author have spoken the last word in ethics. I could not persuade myself that this is so because I failed to get from these teachings, inestimably precious as they are, an answer to the question that most pressed upon me—Instrumental in what sense, instrumental to what end?