BIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS 27 



Lord, I will put My law in their inward parts, and in 

 their hearts will I write it, and I will be to them a God, 

 and they shall be to me a people ; and they shall no 

 longer say each to his brother, ' know the Lord,' for all 

 shall know Me, from the least to the greatest/' Here 

 then, in the seventh century before Christ, we find the 

 doctrine of the Light Within, proclaimed by the greatest 

 of the prophets of IsraeL Does anyone suggest that 

 this is cold morality ? Is it not full of religious fire and 

 inspiration ? It is true enough that the moral law is 

 cold and uninspiring when set forth in the written pages 

 of a legal code ; but when we realise that the moral law 

 which we find written in our hearts is the very Nature 

 of God trying to express itself in our lives, then surely 

 it becomes full of life and inspiration ♦ It becomes for 

 us the only possible religion — the Power of God unto 

 Salvation, 



And now let us consider for a moment what an 

 optimistic view of life is given by the doctrine of the Light 

 Within, I well remember some years ago hearing one 

 of our leading Nonconformist ministers saying that he 

 had litde hope for the future, *' human nature being what 

 it is/' No doubt he regarded human nature as being 

 depraved ; but it is not human nature that is at fault ; 

 we have no right to thus throw the blame on God 

 Almighty, As Jesus held a sweet babe in His arms, 

 He said ** Whosoever shall receive one of these little ones 

 in My Name receiveth Me," and if this meant anything 

 at all, it meant that Jesus saw in every little child a 

 potential Saviour, And Jesus was right. Human nattire 

 is full of the most glorious possibilities ; such depravity 

 as there is — and God knows there is plenty — is due, not 

 to human nature, but to human institutions, such, for 

 example, as the capitalist system under which we live, 

 and which seems to have for its object the crushing of 

 all idealism out of life, and the abolition of every motive 



