248 RELIGION 



stand strongly for education in its full modern sense, and not find 

 ourselves driven to the recognition of essential religion. 



II. Religion and Ethics 



From this comparison, now, of religion and education, let us turn 

 to the comparison of religion and ethics, and see here, too, how im- 

 possible it is to conceive either at its best apart from the other. 



(1) For, on the one hand, if the true ethical life is the fulfillment 

 of all personal relations, then an impartial and thoroughgoing ethics 

 must involve religion. For the spirit of the life that means to throw 

 itself with impartial loyalty into the fulfillment of all personal relations 

 in which it finds itself, certainly cannot logically leave out the most 

 fundamental and significant relation of all. And if there is a God 

 at all, the relation in which we stand to him must be just that most 

 fundamental and significant relation. Not to fulfill that relation is, 

 then, not merely to have failed on the religious side, but to have 

 failed in any consistent fulfillment of our acknowledged ethical aim. 

 From this point of view ethics involves religion. 



(2) Or if, on the other hand, we look at the matter from the point 

 of view of religion, we have here, too, to recognize that religion is the 

 fulfillment of exactly that personal relation which gives reality and 

 meaning and value to all other relations. These owe the very fact 

 of their existence to the purpose of God; they owe their meaning to 

 what he has put into them; and they have the value that is theirs 

 only because he has so established it. To the man of religious con- 

 viction, therefore, the religious position of one whom he loves be- 

 comes inevitably the most important of all matters; because he 

 knows that, in very fact, this relation to God is the one essential 

 relation which, itself set right, sets all others right. The religious 

 man believes, not without full warrant, that the man who has come 

 into a true relation to the God of character revealed in Jesus Christ 

 must thereby have put himself, in just that degree, into absolutely 

 right relations with other men. The first and second command- 

 ments are indissoluble; and religion is here seen to involve ethics, 

 as before ethics involved religion. 



(3) Indeed, if we strive to take the ethical laws simply as laws of 

 our own nature, even so we can hardly help connecting them with 

 the great ongoing righteous trend of the universe, else we could not 

 reverence them; and this is an essentially religious conviction. For 

 we must take the laws of our own being as at least a partial manifes- 

 tation of the essential nature of things. We have not conferred our 

 nature upon ourselves, and the laws which we find revealed in it 

 are not of our own creation. We cannot, therefore, recognize them 

 as carrying in any degree the consent of our reason and conscience 



