"They are but broken lights of Thee; And Thou, O Lord, art more than they!"
It is Christ in us, it is the personal fellowship of the soul with Him and with the living God through Him, that forms the vital and constitutive factor of Christianity. Here is the secret of its moral efficacy. The Christ is the centre root and of the race; He is the image of God in which we were made. The life-blood of mankind flowed in Him as in its heart, and poured forth from Him as from its fountain in sacrifice for the common sin. Jesus gathered into Himself and restored the virtue of humanity broken into a thousand fragments; but He did much more than this. While He re-created in His personal character our lost manhood, by His death and resurrection He has gained for that ideal a transcendent power that seizes upon men and regenerates and transforms them. "With unveiled face beholding in the mirror the glory of the Lord, we are changed into the same image, [receiving the glory that we see] as from the Lord of the Spirit" (2 Cor. iii. 18).
There is, therefore, an evangelical ethics, a Christian science of life. "The law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus" has a system and method of its own. It has a rational solution and explanation to render for our moral problems. But its solution is given, as St Paul and as his Master loved to give it, in practice, not in theory. It teaches the art of living to multitudes to whom the names of ethics and moral science are unknown. Those who understand the method of Christ best are commonly too busy in its practice to theorize about it. They are physicians tending the sick and the dying, not professors in some school of medicine. Yet professors have their use, as well as practitioners. The task of developing a Christian science of life, of exhibiting the truth of revelation in its theoretical bearings and its relations to the thought of the age, forms a part of the practical duties of the Church and touches deeply the welfare of souls. For other times this work has been nobly accomplished by Christian thinkers. Shall we not pray the Lord of the harvest that He will thrust forth into this field fit labourers; that He will raise up men mighty through God to overthrow every high thing that exalts itself against His knowledge, and wise to build up to the level of the times the great fabric of Christian ethics and discipline?
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There emerge in this exhortation four distinct principles, which lay at the basis of St Paul's views of life and conduct.
I. In the first place, the fundamental truth of _the Fatherhood of God_, "Be imitators of God," he writes, "as beloved children." And in chapter iv. 24: "Put on the new man, which _was created after God_."
Man's life has its law, for it has its source, in the nature of the Eternal. Behind our race-instincts and the laws imposed on us in the long struggle for existence, behind those imperatives of practical reason involved in the structure of our intelligence, is the presence and the active will of Almighty God our heavenly Father. His image we see in the Son of man.
Here is the fountainhead of truth, from which the two great streams of philosophical thought upon morals have diverged. If man is the child of a Being absolutely good, then moral goodness belongs to the essence of his nature; it is discoverable in the instincts of his reason and will. Were not our nature warped by sin, such reasoning must have commanded immediate assent and led to consistent and self-evident results. Again, if man is the _child_ of God, the finite of the Infinite, his moral character must, presumably, have been in the beginning germinal rather than complete, needing--even apart from sin and its malformations--development and education, the discipline of a fatherly providence, inculcating the lessons and forming the habits which belong to his ripe manhood and full-grown stature. Intuitional morals bear witness to the God of creation; experimental morals to the God of providence and history. The Divine Fatherhood is the keystone of the arch in which they meet.