408 
of rules,, and given to man reasons for them ; Christ's was a 
more philosophic way. He entered into the chamber of the 
heart, touched the springs of action with a holy fire, and thus 
sought to establish practical morality by kindling up an en- 
thusiasm for the race. “ Make the tree good " was the way 
by which He sought to obtain “good fruit." And in this 
His teaching was strictly philosophical. Hot that I mean it 
to be understood for one moment that the doctrines of grace 
are or can be superseded ; what I mean is this, that grace is 
made to work in man's moral nature as God has formed it. 
The powers of reason are treated by the F ounder of Christianity 
as regulative merely, and the mere intellectualist, such as Mr. 
Mill, misses the root of the matter when he seeks to build up 
an ethical system upon merely rationalistic grounds. The 
springs of moral action are seated in the affections, — the sen- 
sitivity, to use a good general term ; and they have their incen- 
tive, their correlate in “ whatsoever things are true, whatsoever 
things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever 
things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, and whatsoever 
things are of good report," which St. Paul bade the Philippians 
“ think on," if there be any such thing as virtue . 
No doubt it may be said that such an object as virtue, pure 
and simple, is hardly, if ever, seen among men. But it was 
seen, I believe, in the person of Christ. And it is worthy of 
remark that He, the great Moral Teacher, who is called the 
“ Son of man," the type of mankind in its pure form, was the 
very object which He bid his followers look at. Individual 
cases were to be viewed as through Him, the perfect type. 
To feed the hungry was to be regarded as feeding Him,. To 
visit the afflicted and relieve the needy is called the visiting 
and relieving of Him. “ I was an hungered, I was thirsty, &c." 
Thus we find the active and moral powers of man directed in 
theory to a perfect objective model of virtue. Christianity is 
hereby shown to be not simply practical but sublimely ethical. 
It strikes an inward personal chord, which is love , and it 
points to the establishment of a universal brotherhood, where 
the ruling principle shall be a spirit of universal benevolence. 
To lay hold of these great principles is to have, in an ethical 
sense, “ Christ formed within," to advance to the “ measure of 
His stature that is to say, ethical perfection. 
Now of all the systems of virtue, the theories propounded 
respecting it, there is not one that can be said to rival the 
teaching of Christ. But there is one which comes very near 
to it, — I mean the eclectic system of the Platonists, which, 
after the age of Augustus, made virtue consist in benevolence. 
Dr. Adam Smith thus describes it : — 
