ABSTRACT
WE may now pause for a moment and look back over the ground which we have traversed. We began with observing the wide difference commonly supposed to exist between morality and religion. That difference, we found, does exist, but not in the fashion commonly imagined. Religion, and especially the Christian religion, certainly takes account of morality, but in a manner of its own. Righteousness is a matter of right conduct between persons, and is only possible when those persons are in a right relation to each other. To please God, Christianity teaches, we must have found our way into God’s family, and consequently must be able to look upon God as our Father, and upon other people as our brothers and sisters, actual or potential. This can only be done when we have first been enabled to take up the right relation to a third person, “the Son,” as he is often spoken of in the New Testament, or Christ himself. The teaching of ordinary ethics, on the other hand, knows nothing of these personal readjustments. It is rather concerned with the vain attempt to decide the dispute between our sense of duty and our natural desire for pleasure or advantage; and it ends, either in laying down a general law or formula which we must apply to individual instances ourselves, or in turning itself into a system of psychology. Thus the difference between 83the two would be, not the difference between the moral and the non-moral, but the difference between what has a basis in personal experience, and what has not.
