:f HISTOET OP ETHICS WITHIN OEGANIZED CHRISTIANITY BY THOMAS CUMING HALL, D.D. PROFESSOR OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS IN UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY. AUTHOR OF "the SOCIAL MEANING OF MODERN RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS IN ENGLAND," "THE MESSAGES OF JESUS ACCORDING TO THE SYNOPTISTS," ETC. NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1910 /■-/ 1 mmL Copyright, 1910, bt CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS Published September, 1910 In 9pemottam TO THE LOVING MEMORY OF eiorneltuo SuEler Sutler TO WHOM THE AUTHOR'S HEART WAS KNIT IN TENDEREST TIES OF LIFE-LONG FRIEND- SHIP, AND BY WHOSE LOVE HIS LIFE WAS ALWAYS QUICKENED AND REFRESHED — THIS BOOK IS MOST AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED May, /g/o 04108 PREFACE In sending out this history, which has been the labor of several years, the author turns back in memory to the many who have aided him. It is impossible to thank all those by name to whom the author is deeply indebted. But a special word of thanks is due to my friend and colleague Dr. Marvin R. Vincent, who has read the whole volume in proof, and out of his ripe and broad scholarship offered many invaluable suggestions and cor- rections. Professor Charles A. Briggs made most helpful sug- gestions in the inception of the work, both as regards system and method. Indeed to each and all of my colleagues I return heartfelt thanks for most valuable suggestions and inspirations as I worked in a field that, of necessity, trenched on all the theological disciplines. To those in charge of the libraries which I have used I wish also to return thanks for uniform kindness and courtesy. Whether in Berlin or Oxford, in New York or London, I have found everywhere most self-sacrificing eagerness to aid me in getting the books I needed. But a special word of thanks I owe to Professor and Geheimrat Dr. Pietsch- mann of Gottingen for unnumbered signs of special interest in this volume, and great courtesy in granting me special facilities in the splendid library he so ably directs. This book, if properly done, should prove exceedingly valua- ble, but as to whether it is well done others ueside the author must judge. He can only claim that he has gone directly and critically to the sources, and sought at first hand to understand the work of those whom he reviews. He has sought to estimate the ethical progress of the past as objectively and fairly as possi- ble. That blunders have been made, that errors have crept in, that partial views have been taken is inevitable. For all cor- viii PREFACE rections the author will be frankly grateful, and should the book find favor he will try to embody any such corrections in future editions. One main purpose has sustained the writer throughout much weary plodding, and that was to understand and help others understand the essential message of Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ. One of the painful truths brought home to us by any study of history is the fact that the simplicity of Jesus' teachings has been obscured and overlaid by intruding ele- ments. The simple things for which the Master stood, and which can be tried out in life we have deemed "impracti- cable," because "you can't change human nature." So eccle- siastical tradition has substituted theologies which cannot be tested in life, for ethics which may be. It has demanded belief in doubtfully true speculative and intellectual proposi- tions, and called such assent "faith," where the Master de- manded loving and trustful acceptance of simple canons of conduct, and identified such acceptance with loyalty to his purpose. The study of the history of ethics may lead, it is to be hoped, a chosen band to really resolutely insist upon putting in the foreground what Jesus put in the foreground, and rele- gating even true traditions to the background if they are of secondary importance for his purpose. We must as good Protestants complete the work of the Reformation and strip from historical organized Christianity the encumbering grave- clothes in which her life has been stifled. With good heart and hope the author puts forth his history of ethics within organ- ized Christianity, knowing well that the prayers of the ages are yet to be answered and God's kingdom will come and his will will be done on earth even as in heaven. 700 Park Ave., New York, May, 1910. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 3 CHAPTEK I. The Preparation for Christianity ... . lo Note of Introduction lo I. The Grecian (Classic) Contribution .... n II. The Hellenistic Preparation i8 III. The Roman Preparation 3° IV. The Old Testament Preparation . ... 32 II. New Testament Ethics 48 Introduction 48 I. The Ethics of Jesus 49 II. The Ethics of Paul 69 III. The Ethics of the Johannine Interpretation of Jesus 87 IV. The Ethics of the Other Canonical Writings 93 III. The Ethics of the Early Church 105 Introduction 105 I. The Ethics of Unorganized Christianity . . . no II. The Struggle for Individualization .... 124 III. The Intellectual Formulation of Christianity 143 IV. The Ethics of Ecclesiastical Organization . . 167 V. The Ethical Forces of Christianity . . . . 177 iz X CONTENTS CHAPTER I'ACE IV. The Old Catholic or Bishop's Church and Its Ethics 187 Note of Introduction 187 I. Athanasius and Monasticism 193 II. The Message of the Great Preachers . . . 202 III. The Monastery and Asceticism 215 IV. The Bishop's Church and Culture . . . . 221 V. The Bishop's Church and the Cult and Its Ethics 231 VI. The Church and Her Theology 235 VII. The Ethics of the Councils 251 V. The Militant Papacy and Its Ethics 258 I. The Separation of the East from the West . . 258 II. The Relation of Church and State .... 261 III. The Missionary Movement and the Mon- astery 269 VI. Scholasticism and Its Ethics 282 I. The Ethics of Scholasticism 282 II. Constructive Scholasticism 294 III. Critical Scholasticism 333 IV. Mystical Scholasticism 341 VII. The English Reformation and Its Ethics . . . 365 Note of General Introduction 365 I. The Ethics of the Forerunners of the Reforma- tion— Wyclif, the Lollards, Tyndale, Hooper 378 II. The Ethics of the Lollards 386 III. The Ethics of Puritanism — Thomas (\irt- wright, Travis, John Knox 396 CONTENTS xi CHAFTEK ^^'^^ IV. The Ethics of Anglo-Catholicism 410 V. The Ethics of Independency 424 VI. The Ethics of Philosophical Protestantism . 438 VIII. The Continental Reformation and Its Ethics . 468 I. The Ethics of Luther 468 II. The Ethics of Melanchthon 496 III. The Anabaptist Movement and Its Ethics . 505 IV. The Ethics of the Reformed Churches ... 509 V. The Ethics of John Calvin 518 VI. The Ethics of the Creeds of the Continental Reformation 533 VII. The Epigones of the Sixteenth and Seven- teenth Centuries 535 VIII. The New Protestant Casuistry 540 IX. The Ethics of Pietism in the Continental Churches 544 X. The Ethics of Post-Tridentine Roman Ca- tholicism 554 XI. The Ethics of Philosophical Protestantism on the Continent 5^3 IX. The Merging of Churchly with Philosophical Ethics — A Summary 576 Introductory Note 57^ Index 599 HISTORY OF ETHICS WITHIN ORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY vus, 28 (placed on the lips of Tiinaeus). * Phado, 97-101; "Republic," VI, S°l ff- THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 15 We shall also have occasion to notice the distinctly metaphysi- cal interest that attaches itself to the relative monotheism of Plato as contrasted with the purely ethical interest of Old Testament monotheism. Here again it is hard to escape the conviction that Plato has outweighed the prophets. The way in which as, for instance, in the Timaeus, the metaphysical and ethical interests are linked with cosmological speculations,* suggests the method of all early Christian theology. The cos- mogony of Genesis has little or no metaphysical interest. Its message is religious and ethical. For Plato the metaphysical was in the last analysis the only guarantee of the ethical. The value of God is that he is the foundation for all being, includ- ing of course as chiefly important the ethical verities. This intellectualism is fundamental to classical Greek ethics.^ It has most profoundly influenced all Christian thought. Our estimate of this influence may be that of Professor Harnack ' or that of Professor Pfleiderer,* but the facts are quite beyond dispute. The origin of metaphysical monotheism is to be sought, not in the prophets or even in Paul, much less in Jesus, but in Plato. On another field Platonic teaching has mingled with the ethics of the Old Testament and given a distinct color to the doctrines of Christianity. This is the important region of human guilt. The estimate of matter as changing, and in itself lower and evil and something to be escaped from, is wholly foreign to the older Jewish thought, whose God creates all things and all very good.^ A despondent view of life appears, however, very plainly in Plato,' and very soon began to deeply mark the think- ing of Christianity in the Hellenic world. Even in Paul we see the shadows of a despondent estimate of human life falling on • Timaeus, 30-48. "^Cf. Interesting discussion of "Motives" by Schmidt: "Ethik der alten Griechen," Berlin, 1881, vol. I, pp. 156-165 and 253-256. ' Cf. "Dogmengeschichte," 2d ed., 1888, vol. I, pp. loi-iio. *Cf. "Die Entwicklung des Christentums," 1907, p. 7. • Genesis i : 31. • C/. Phaedo, 66, 67, with the further development in Philo's "DeMundi officio," §§ 57-60. i6 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS his pages, although he had probably no direct knowledge of the sources whence they came. In the later stages of Plato's philosophy these elements of world-flight and asceticism seem even more pronounced.' He was perhaps influenced by his own political failures.^ He himself regarded the "Republic" as only a council of perfec- tion, and Plato had so low an estimate of Athens that he was himself strongly under the conviction that Athens at least could never really learn.' The life of philosophy was to be a life of retirement and contemplation far from the ' phenomenal confu- sions of the market and the street. In fact the philosopher of the " Republic" is very nearly the picture of the statesman and monk of the great Papal state at its best. It is impossible to overlook the influence exercised by Plato upon the whole conception of life born of the monastic ideal. In conjunction with the oriental and Egyptian notes, which appear also in Plato and are more and more apparent in Neoplatonism, we find the temper of the age from which Christianity sprang despondent as it looks out on human nature, and the doctrine of total depravity has its roots far more in Hellenistic than in Semitic soil.* In the teach- ing of Plato not only was the body a limitation upon pure knowledge, but even the psychic process so far as it dealt with particulars. Mystic salvation in its escape from particulars into the immediate revelation of the vision exactly corresponds to one phase of Plato's hope. So that more than once we face an estimate of life with its manifoldness that calls itself Christian, but whose real roots are in the soil of Greece. " On the formal side of the ethical thinking of the church, both Aristotle and Plato exercised a great and beneficent influence. All attempts to classify the virtues and to reduce to systematic form the moral life and its demands go back at once to either ' Cf. Timaeus, 69-71. *C/. Stcinhart, Karl: "Platon's Leben," Leipsic, 1873. •Apology 31, 32. ' C/. Schultz, H.: " Alttcstamentliche Theologie," 5th ed., pp. 493-5IX English translation, 2 vols., Edinburgh, 1892; vol. II, p. 24i-28a THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 17 Plato or Aristotle or to both.* . In the early chapters Aristotle cannot always be distinctly traced, and again it is Plato with his fourfold division of the virtues^ that dominates the early thought. In the attempt, indeed, to fit the ethical ideals of Christianity into these classic forms violence has often to be done either to the contents or to the forms. Indeed it is in following up this effort that the strong contrast between the classic and the Christian ideals comes into view.' At the same time it was from Greek and Roman models that early Christian- ity learnt what it knew of systematic co-ordinated thinking, and the strength of its teaching was due in large measure to contact with the flower of Greek culture in the works of Plato and Aristotle. However much we may regret the confusions that arose and that still persist between the classic and the Christian interests, we should never cease to be grateful for the intellectual schooling given the early church by contact with Grecian dialectics. The ethics of Plato were developed in the midst of a society commonly called democratic, but which was in truth a small slave-holding and highly aristocratically governed community. Plato himself belonged to the most highly privileged class in the state. This state itself was rapidly going to pieces under the burden of these privileged classes and under the strain of ex- ternal political complications. This decay was patent to all the thoughtful elements in the community. The " Republic " of Plato and the " Laws," so far as they are from his hand, represent an earnest and wonderfully inspiring attempt to suggest a new social construction to arrest the decay. On its purely formal side the work of Plato had enormous influence upon the social dreaming of Augustine, and through him moulded, in larger measure than is perhaps generally recognized, the great Priest- ' As in Thomas Aquinas. 2 ffoipla or Wisdom, dvdpla or Courage, ffu4>poaivij or Temperance, Self-con- trol, and SiKaiofftivfj or Justice. ^ Cf. Schaubach: " Das Verhaltniss der Moral des klassischen Alterthums zur christlichen Theologie. Theologische Studien und Kritiken," 1851, pp. 59-121. i8 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS state of the Middle Ages. Plato was, however, far from democratic in either his temper or his hope. At the same time he wished for an aristocracy of the noblest and an aristocracy trained for its work of self-sacrifice and duty by sacrifice and service. The Roman Catholic hierarchy was a bold attempt on a large and most impressive scale to realize this ideal. The relative success of the experiment was due to the fact that it was linked with that religious enthusiasm which Plato sought to infuse into Athenian life.^ And the history of the attempt goes far to justify the real insight of the great philosopher. At the same time the weaknesses of Plato's ideals were bom of the very social organization he wished to redeem. The aristocratic type of thought and feeling so prominent in the small, closely organized Greek cities reappears in the priestly reconstruction of the Middle Ages, and did so in part, at least, under the influence of the Platonic conceptions carried over by Augustine. The "Republic" reflects the caste spirit which played such havoc with the political and religious ideals of the Old Catholic church, and which, amid all semblance of democ- racy, even to this day give to the ethics of the Roman Commun- ion an aristocratic character. II. THE HELLENISTIC PREPARATION The Grecian life that is most plainly reflected in our earliest Christian sources is not that of either the Ionic or Attic periods, but that which since Droysen has been called Hellenism.^ Literature (in addition to list on page 7/. and of the standard histories of Greece). — Droysen, J. G.: "Geschichte des Hellcnismus"; 2d ed.; 3 vols.; Gotha, 1877-1878.— MahafTy, J. P.: "The Silver Age of the Greek World"; Chicago, 1906. — Hatch, Edwin: "The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church"; 3d ed.; by A. M. Fairbairn (Hibbert Lectures for 1888) ; London, 1891. — Zeller, E.: "Die Philosophie der Gricchen"; vol. III., ' Cf. Windelband, W.: "Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie," 4th ed., 1907, p. 105. English translation, "History of Philosophy," New York, 1901, p. 127. * Droysen, J. G.: "Geschichte des Hellcnismus," 3 vols., Gotha, 1877. See Von Wilamowitz-Mocllendorff: "Gricchische Literatur des Altertums" (Kultur der Gegcnwart, I, viii, 1907), p. 84. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 19 Greece became the world's teacher when her culture was scat- tered over all known lands and was forced upon the unwilling Orient by the conquests of Macedonia. Aristotle was Alexan- der's teacher, but the pupil had greater insight into the actual possibilities of empire than even his teacher. He saw that a really world-wide empire could not be built upon the basis of the intellectual aristocracy of the Greek city.* According to Plutarch, Aristotle advised Alexander to treat the Greeks as friends and relations and the barbarians as plants and animals.^ It was quite as impossible to build empire on such organization as Athens possessed as it would have been to build up a kingdom in the Middle Ages on the basis of the free city. Athens had in 309 B. C. a population of 21,000 free citizens, 10,000 "strangers " (^eW), free but not citizens, and 400,000 slaves.* The result of such a city organization was the intense particularism and the haughty patrician pride which marked the free cities of the Middle Ages. Such a spirit is as far removed from democ- racy as the east is from the west. The intellectual conquest of the world was effected only when this organization was broken down, and Grecian culture like Jewish religion had become relatively homeless. Moreover, this conquest was effected, like part i; Leipsic, 1903. — Rohde, E.: "Kleine Schriften"; Tubingen, 1902 (especially "Die Religion der Griechen"); in 2d vol., pp. 335-336. — Siebeck, H. : "Untersuchungen zur Philosophie der Griechen"; 2d ed.; Freiburg, 1888. — Wendland, P.: "Christentum und Hellenismus in ihren litterarischen Bezie- hungen"; Leipsic, 1902; and "Die hellenistisch-romische Kultur in ihren Beziehungen zu Judentum und Christentum"; Tubingen, 1907. — v. Wilamo- witz-Moellendorff: "Geschichte der griechischen Literatur (in der Kultur der Gegenwart"); Teil I, Abteilung VIII, pp. 3-238; 2d ed.; Berlin, 1907. — Cumont, Fr. : "Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain"; Paris, 1906. — Deissmann, G. A.: "Licht vom Osten"; 2d ed.; Tiibingen, 1909. ' Droysen, vol. II, pp. 15-17. * Aristot. apud Plut. de fort. Alexander i, 6. See also Aristotle, " Politics," I, I, quoted by Droysen. ' Boeckh's " Staatshaushaltung der Athener," 4 Biicher mit Inschriften, Berlin (ist ed., 1817; 3d ed., by Max Fraenkel, 1886), vol. I, p. 38, based on disputed census figures, which, however, Droysen accepts as accurate. Cf. vol. I, § III, p. 429 of ist ed., 1836. (Translated by Sir G. C. Lewis, London. 2 vols., 1828, 2d ed., 1842. Translated by A. Lamb, Boston, 1857, 2 vols.) 20 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS the political conquests of Alexander, by skilful use of the forces of the antagonists. The result was that with Alexander began that cosmopolitanism which fitted Greek thought to the condi- tions out of which came the still greater world-empire of Rome. Indeed the history of Hellenism stretches on into the intellectual life of Rome under the Caesars. Cicero founded an empire of thought which was based on Hellenism, and which contested with the Caesars for the dominion over men's minds,* and men sought in it consolation for lost national freedom. The histo- rians before Droysen have underestimated the achievements of this period, when science and speculation became the possession of an enlarging world. Alexander founded over seventy cities or trading colonies, and thus Hellenism became the mother of the modem city-development and taught Rome a lesson in the organization of an awakening world. Ihis cosmopolitanism was not gained without sacrifice. Greece lost her liberty, and the world of Hellenism is over- shadowed by the greatness of this loss. The unity of her thought gave way to a unity based on a synthesis of many elements, and at every point the student of Hellenic art or litera- ture marks concessions to the synthetic character of the whole movement. Into this synthesis enter three elements that have especial bearing upon the ethics of Christianity. It is a period of philosophic adaptation that is often rather conglomerate than an organized philosophic whole. During this time is born a popular religious philosophy with many elements drawn from oriental cults, and it is during this era that an oriental mysticism brings forth its full fruit, and is itself ennobled and purified by Hellenistic thought. This philosophic synthesis involved all possible combinations drawn from the teachings of the Academy, the Peripatetics, the Stoa, and from Epicurus as well as from the scepticism of the Middle Academy and the mysticism of Neo- platonism. The Stoicism which conquered Rome and became the religion of Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, was ' Cf. Cicero's own statement of his ambition in "De Divinatione," liber II, 5§ I. 2. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 21 mingled with the popular teaching of the Cynics * and the scepticism of Carneades. Panaetius the Rhodian^ (112 B. C.) Stoic rejected astrological prophecies, and the Middle Academy permanently influenced the stoic doctrine of causation.' Into this synthesis entered also elements drawn from oriental dualism with its fundamentally pessimistic outlook upon life. Thus we find already in Hellenism the struggle between a metaphysical monotheism and an ethical dualism which torments Christian thinking to this day.* This dualism marked the Stoi- cism which became the religion of the intelligent and which un- dermined the vulgar polytheism, not by attacking it as did the Epicureans, but by explaining it away. The drift of this synthesis was toward pantheistic monothe- ism. Rohde has, indeed, vigorously denied that the Greek mind had a tendency to monotheism,^ but in the intellectual struggles of the various schools metaphysical speculation led inevitably to monism. Indeed it became only a matter of the degree of culture in the various individuals how they combined this metaphysical monotheism with the popular polytheism. It was Stoicism that most skilfully wove together the ethical with the philosophical and religious interests, and thus became, as we shall see, even in Christian history, a substitute for an ethics based on the inspira- tions of the New Testament. In spite of its wide hold on cultivated minds. Epicureanism was from the beginning un- sympathetic to Christian feeling. It was more distinctly anti- religious in the sense of conscious insistence upon mental illu- mination as over against vulgar religious forms.* Whereas Christian feeling at its best never placed the emphasis upon in- * C/. Wendland, P.: "Die hellenistisch-romische Kultur." Tubingen, pp. 39-5°- ^ See Cicero's "De Divinatione," Liber II, § 42. ' C/. Windelband: "Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie." Tubingen, 1907, pp. 163-173. English translation, New York, 1901, pp. 197-209. * Cf. Windelband: " Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie." Tubingen, 1907, p. 158. English translation, New York, 1901, p. 190. *"Kleine Schriften," vol. II, p. 320. * Cf. Windelband: "Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie," 4th ed., 1907, pp. 141, 142. English translation, New York, 1901, pp. 170, 171. 22 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS tellectual illumination. It was also more readily misunderstood in its hedonism. For although it was in essence no more hedonistic than Stoicism, yet its definition of pleasure was more openly sensuous and more deliberately aesthetic than was com- patible with the sterner puritanism of early Christianity. Its very attempt to rescue human responsibility by detaching con- duct from a central power was not fitted to appeal to the aroused religious hope.' The Cynic-Stoic movement appealed most directly to the life that needed hope, consolation, and direction as, under the storms of war, old institutions, old faiths, and old altars went down. At the same time this very factor in the history of stoic ethics accounts in part for the extreme individualism that often limited its influence. Both Cynic and Stoic placed the individual in the centre of ethical interest. No considerations of either state or religious community could interfere with individual enlightened man doing that which advanced his own peace. Virtue was the satisfaction of the individual soul's longing for happiness. Cynicism went often the full length,^ but Stoicism also, like Epicureanism, had ever "happiness" conceived of as the peace of the individual in the foreground. It is not accurate to say that it was Christianity that discovered the individual. Individualism came with cosmopolitanism; and Stoicism rather than Christianity formulated it for all ages. But, on the other hand, Hellenistic Stoicism was distinctly aristocratic — and not even the popular preaching of the Cynics ever raised Hellenistic thought to the point of ascribing to every individual as such inherent value. The "wise" were those who fought their way into subjection of the world by trained indiffer- ence to the lower delights. But this way was only open to the few. Literary Stoicism as we know it retained to the last this aristocratic character, even in the Christian edition of it by ' Q". Schmidt, L.: "Die Ethik der alten Griechen," vol. I, pp. 287, 288. Where, however, he warns against the superficial treatment of Epicurus's doctrine in the classic passages "Diogenes Laertius," 10, 133, and "Cicero de Fato," 9, 18; 10, 23, and " De Natura Deorum," i, 25, 69. ' C/. Schmidt, L.: "Die Ethik der alten Griechen," vol. II, pp. 448-451. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 23 Ambrose of Milgji. The slave Epictetus, whose teaching savors less than the others of this intellectual aristocracy, yet ad- dressed himself to the ruling caste as we see from his complaints of the luxury and idleness of his hearers/ In Panaetius, in Cicero, in Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca the ethics are those of men separated deliberately from the crowd, seeking consolation amidst the disappointments in life in the consciousness of lonely victory over the world. So that a distinctly pharisaic element enters easily into its spirit. At the same time literary Stoicism did not constitute the whole of the movement. It could not have had as a philosophy any great influence over the average life. Literary Stoicism reveals almost no contact with the moral difificulties and struggles of the small trader or the petty agriculturist, who after all formed the great bulk of the population. There was, however, a popular as well as a literary Stoicism, and to understand its influence we must go to the Stoic-Cynic propaganda in sermon and tract, and must remember how wide was the scope of Greek ed- ucation.^ This popular Stoicism was a combination made from elements taken from all the schools of Grecian thought, and such a combi- nation was made the more easily because, marked as were the differences in the metaphysical constructions, they had on the ethical field distinct characteristics common to them all. They were all hedonistic. The resolute attainment of the highest/ happiness was the goal for the Academy and the Stoa, for the\ Epicurean and the Lyceum. They were all highly individualis- tic. The communal interests of Plato and Aristotle wellnigh disappear as the Greek city-state gave way to oriental empire. They were all deeply intellectualistic. Any redemption must come with knowledge, and however differently this knowledge was conceived, whether as magic illumination or scientific', insight, it was the sine qua non of all ethical living. They all ' Epictetus: "Enchiridion," cap. I, 6. * Cf. Wendland, P., in loc. cit., and Ussing, J. L. : "Erziehung und Jugend- unterricht bei den Griechen und Romern," new ed., Berlin, 1885. 24 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS saw in proud resistance to evil the mark of the ethical life (ciTapa^ia).^ ] It is easy both to overestimate and underestimate the ethics of this popular Stoicism. Its weakness was primarily that it taught resignation in the midst of evils where resignation is not in place. Its goal was individual extrication rather than a kingdom of righteous conditions. Its conception of law was high, but was legal and mechanical, and like all attempts to build an ethics upon pantheism, its code was rigid and cold, lacking alike in contact with the longings of the heart and the hopes of the mind. It gave the world seekers after God, but inspired to resignation rather than transforming faith, and rather drew men out of the world than flung them upon the world for its transformation. Into this popular Stoicism came also other than intellectual elements. Wilamowitz has pointed out ^ that the Hellenistic period was one of scientific triumph, compared to which the time of the Roman emperors was one of decay. No less must we insist that it was a time of great moral uplift and religious revival. As in all religious revivals, many strange elements entered into the movement. The very force and freshness of religious inspira- tion resents intellectual analysis, and so is apt to admit uncriti- cally the most foreign elements.^ The fierce invective of Christian apology has blinded men too easily to the real good in the age. Hatch says: "It is ques- tionable whether the average morality of civilized ages has largely varied . . . and it is probable on a priori grounds and from the nature of the evidence which remains, that there was in ancient Rome, as there is in modern London, a preponderating mass of those who loved their children and their homes, who were ' Cy. Windelband: "Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie," 4th ed., 1907, p. 136. English translation, New York, 1901, p. 165. ' "Die griechische Literatur dcs Altertums" (" Kultur der Gegenwart," I, viii), 2d ed., 1907, p. 84. * C/. Cumont, F. : "Les religions orientales," 1906, pp. 197-235. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 25 good neighbors and faithful friends." ^ This revived ethical and religious interest sought satisfaction in the strange and ancient cults of the Orient. Philosophy had to become a teaching of redemption, and in making the change from the cool seclusion of the schools to the heats of the street, oriental mystic rites and the authority of hoary antiquity had no small part in the transformation. Even in " men like Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius the Stoic teaching had become completely a philosophy of redemp- tion." ^ Much more do we find the Hellenistic-Roman world overrun by all sorts of religions proclaiming redemption. The age was, of course, a curious mingling of gross supersti- tion and highly modern types of thought.' But the age sought redemption. The immediate experience of evil, of a world to be overcome, of misery and dissatisfaction, called for ex- planation and relief. The simplest explanation is that matter is evil and spirit is good. This never was a Greek conception. But the religions to which it gave birth soon affected Greek thought. Into the Hellenistic world had come in early days the foreign ungrecian cult of Dionysus, with its dances, mystery, ecstasy, its uplift to divine life even if only in the single moment of rapt enthusiasm. Thrace also gave the Orphic cult with its mystic redemption, and in their inception, like all mysticism when pure and logical, these cults were non-ethical. The redemption was conceived of as physical and psychical uplift into the very being of God. But these were only forerunners of the mystic cults that made the Hellenistic world a strange conglomerate of Grecian philosophy and oriental religion. The great advance was the ethical transformation of these cults, and then ennobling ' Hatch, Edwin: "The Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church," 3d ed., London, 1891, pp. 139, 140. C/. also Friedlander, "Darstellungen aus der Sittengeschichte Roms, vol. Ill, pp. 676/"., c/. sth ed. ^ Windelband: "Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophic," 4th ed., 1907, p. 176. English translation, New York, 1901, p. 213. ' Cf. the scepticism of the Middle Academy, and the modern spirit of the second part of Cicero's "De Divinatione," Liber II, §§ 3, 4, 5, 59, etc. 26 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS of them by making them schools for self-restraint and entrances into the life of avowed fidelity to duty/ The Greek mind could not be content with a non-intellectual transformation of life. The Stoicism of the Hellenistic period clung to the overcoming of the world by knowledge, but added to it the asceticism char- acteristic of oriental dualism. Yet even the asceticism of Hellenism had an intellectual character. One of the most valuable lessons it taught as a preparation for the higher ethics of Christianity was the intellectual honesty which insisted upon rationalizing even the rites and mysteries given primarily on authority (Neoplatonism). The longing for immortality fixed upon these rites and mys- teries and united with them the philosophical speculations of the earlier period.' It was this period which formulated and in- trenched in human thought many of the most lasting conceptions of immortality, last judgments, and heaven and hell.^ From Persia came the cult that, profoundly modified, no doubt, by its contact with Hellenism, was yet as the Mithras cult to give the Roman soldier his religion,* and many rites and superstitions to the Christian church (see page 190). It was, perhaps, the fundamental weakness of Greek and Roman paganism that its mythology, and its physical and meta- physical character hindered the development of a religion essen- ' CJ. Rohde: "Die Religion der Griechen," p. 334, vol. II, of " Kleine Schrif- ten," 1902. * Cy. Rohde, Erwin: "Psyche; Seelenkult und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen," 4th ed., 2 vols., Tubingen, 1907. ' In Plato's description of last judgment in the " Republic," book X, 614-621 (Steph. ed.). *C/. Cumont, Fr.: "Texte et Monuments figures relatifs aux Myst^res de Mithra." BruxcUes, 1896, 1899, 2 vols, (especially the introduction). Also Cumont's article in Roscher's " Lexikon der griechischen und romischen My- thologie," vol. 2 (1894-1897), and his " Religions Orientalcs," Paris, 1907 (in " Annales du Mus6e Guimet "). Lajarde, " Recherches sur le cult public et les myst^res de Mithra en Orient et en Occident," 1867. Donsbach, "Die raum- liche Verbreitung und zeitliche Bcgrcnzung dcs Mithrasdienstes im romischen Reich," BrQnn, 1897. See a condensed account in Dill, S.: "Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius," London, 1904, pp. 547-626. Dieterich, A.: "Eine Mithrasliturgie," Leipsic, 1903. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 27 tially ethical in character/ by constantly putting the emphasis on other factors. How could cults that culminated in the worship of the Emperor give to the national life a religion primarily ethical ? The mystery became, however, a rite of purification whos% origin indeed was magic separation of the divine from the human and whose purification was thought of as physical. But as it is seen in the Hellenistic-Roman world it has an ethical character. And that feature of it seems to have undergone a rapid and wholesome development. Especially the Mithras cult seems to have placed the emphasis upon a really ethical purification, and so become an ethical religion of high value in the Hellenistic-Roman world, Cumont thinks Renan's judgment extreme, that if the triumph of Christianity had not come the world would have been "Mithradized." ^ At all events, it is certain that the cult centred about a struggle for the higher life by virtuous living and brave purification of the soul from baser elements. That in the later Roman world it was a serious, perhaps the most serious, rival which Christianity had is certain, and it was in so many ways so like Christianity that, oblivious to the fact that it was much older than the Christian church, the Christian apologists regarded it as a base imitation by the help of the devil.' This cult was only one of the forms under which the Orient influenced both the outward rite and the inward life of the period.'* The real groundwork of orientalism, as thus seen, is dualistic, and as Rohde says, "the unmutilated (un- entstellte) pantheism of the Stoic . . . knows no mystic and no ' Cf. Tzschirner, H. G.: "Der Fall des Heidenthums," ed. by C. W. Niedner, 1829, pp. 13-164. Bollinger: "Heidenthum und Judenthum, Vorhalle zur Geschichte des Christenthums," Regensburg, 1857. Schiirer, E.: "Geschichte des jiidischen Volkes," 3 vols., 1901, 1898. For full literature, see vol. Ill (1898), p. 109. English translation. * "On peut dire que, si le Christianisme edt dte arrete dans sa croissance par quelque maladie mortelle, le monde eut ^te mithriaste," Renan, "Marc-AurHe, et la fin du monde antique," 3d ed., Paris, 1882, p. 579. ' TertuUian, "De Corona," 15. "De Praescriptione Hseret," 40. "Justin Martyr Apol.," i, 66. * For an eloquent presentation of the influence, see Cumont's "Les religions orientales," pp. 1-23 and 237-254. 28 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS redemption/ but such contradictions exist in every age, and have never seriously hindered the most striking combinations. So in the Hellenistic-Roman world pantheism and dualism play each a part and live in relative peace with each other. Com- promises of the most startling character were common.*- So that in the popular religious cults differences, even of a far- reaching character, if only confined to the philosophical ground- work, exerted little divisive force. It is most unfortunate that we have so little trustworthy information about these religions of the humble. The evidence of extensive guild and trade combinations under the guise of religious associations, and of the economic character of many of these cults is overwhelming. One need not go as far as Osborne Ward in his utterly uncritical treatment,' yet the proletarian character of these religious mysteries explains on the one hand the few remains of any literary character, and on the other the tremendous hold they exercised upon the starved imagination of the poor. For the wealthy and intelligent class Stoicism became "a religion raised upon the ruins of popular polytheism," * and for the humble and unlearned the oriental cult or the Hellenic mystery furnished food for the religious and ethical life, the ethical elements being largely borrowed from philosophy.' In a later chapter (page 129) we shall have occasion to deal more fully with Neoplatonism in connection with the struggle in the church against Gnosticism. It will be sufficient here to » " Kleine Schriften," vol. II, p. 335. ' Cicero says: "And the habits of reverence for, and the discipline and rights of, the augurs, and the authority of the college, are still retained for the sake of their influence on the minds of the common people." " De Divinatione," Lib. n, § 33. Mueller's ed., IV, vol. II, p. 222. ' Ward, C. Osborne: "The Ancient Lowly," 2 vols., reprint by Kerr, Chicago, 1907. * Quotation from the admirable sketch in Weber's "History of Philosophy," pp. 140-148 of the English translation, New York, 1903. •It is only fitting to call attention to the work of Dcissmann, of Berlin, upon the relation of inscriptions to the life of the lowly. In his " Licht vom Osten," 1909. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 29 point out the history of those elements that so seriously affected pagan thinking, and which most definitely marked its ethics in the teachings of Neoplatonism. Plato, as we have seen (page 13), never completely separated between soul and body in the sense common to early Christianity.; The relation also of Plato to matter, although touched by the Pythagoreanism that influenced his later thought, never really leaves the Greek ground. Neopythagoreanism, however, fully taught the distinctively oriental dualism of mind and matter, and insisted upon the essential evil of the vXv as over against the principle of spirit as good.* In this attitude toward matter Stoicism itself was influenced by the oriental intrusion and the optimism of the older Stoics in the matter of the attainment of the ideal gave way in the later Stoicism to the despondent view of the inherent evil of all men because still in the body.^ The attitude toward matter became in Neopythagoreanism and Neoplatonism that of hostility as the seat of evil, and redemption was almost grossly conceived of as separation of soul and body; but in con- nection with the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, mere death was not redemption. The psyche had to be trained for its non-material life.' In various degrees this training was thought of ethically or physically. And thus there grew up those Neoplatonic systems which deeply impressed even into our own day the Christian church's teaching with regard to soul and body. ' Cf. interesting discussion of Plato as mystic in Wundt, Max: "Geschichte der griechischen Ethik," pp. 450-494, and especially 454-462, Leipsic, 1908. ' Windelband: " Geschichte der Philosophic," 1907, p. 192 and note. English translation, New York, 1901, p. 231 and note 2. * The beautiful work of Rohde in this field has already been often quoted and used. 30 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS III. THE ROMAN PREPARATION It is impossible to separate between the Roman world of thought and that of Hellenism so far as these worlds are intellect- ual systems. Rome simply accepted the teaching of Greece and from the point of view of thought added little or nothing. At the same time the adaptation of Hellenistic cosmopolitan- ism to the needs of a proud world-imperialism could not leave the systems of ethics founded upon this cosmopolitanism untouched. Cicero's "De Officiis " may be little more than a translation from the Greek, but the actual ethics of Cicero show plainly, even in the confusions, how the world of imperial ambitions amidst which he lived deeply influenced his ethical thinking. It was not un- natural that Cicero should give, through Ambrose's adaptation, an ethics to the young ecclesiastical empire. The Roman contribution to the ethics of Christianity was therefore rather in giving the preparation for a world-wide claim and in bridging the gulf between law and ethics. In Roman life the "munia" or duties of citizenship lay at the basis of the whole ethical development.^ The ethics were pro- nouncedly communal, and morals were organized life. If this led easily to legalism and externalism, it also gave fibre and strength to the whole social structure, and as the early church became the heir to Rome's imperial inheritance, she also took over a good share of Rome's legal ethics and her overestimate of external conformity to a given order.^ Rome spared the Literature. — Mommsen, Theodor: "Romische Geschichte" (especially vol. I). — Cicero, M. T. : Complete works; edited by Miiller; Leipsic, 1905 (espe- cially 4th section, vols. I, II, and III). — Dill, S.: "Roman Society from the Time of Nero to Marcus Aurelius"; London, 1905. — Juvenal: "The Satires." — Renan, Ernest: "Marc-Aurdle et la fin du monde antique"; 3d ed.; Paris, 1882. — Ferrero, G.: "The Rise and Decline of the Roman Empire"; 5 vols.; English translation by Zimmern; New York, 1907-1909. — v. Jhering, R.: "Der Gcist des romischen Rechts auf den verschiedencn Stufen seiner Entwickclung"; Leipsic, 1891; 5th cd. ' Kuhn, Emil: "Die stiitische und biirgerliche Verfassung des romischen Reichs bis auf die Zeiten Justinians," Leipsic, 1864, 1865, 2 vols., part i, pp. 7 jf. ' Cy. Mommsen, Theodor: "Romische Geschichte," vol. V, pp. 570-576. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 31 internal legal arrangements of conquered states as much as was possible. But the process by which she reduced to fundamental uniformity the various provinces was an exhibition of consum- mate instinctive governing power/ This process, however, in- volved changes in her own constitution and life. Her religion suffered most drearily under the constantly increasing complica- tion of her superstitions,^ and became more and more distinct from her ethics and social order. Upon the ethics of ecclesiastical Christianity, however, Rome left the stamp of her institutionalism. To this day duty to the organization, and the obligation of conformity even against the personal judgment, is at once an institutional and political strength and a religious and ethical weakness of the commun- ion which still bears the name of Rome. The ethics underlying Roman law was never Christian and remains substantially Stoic up to its very last formulation in the code of Napoleon. Even when it passes for Christian law it soon appears to the really Christian student that he is dealing with the exalted conceptions of Stoicism, but not with the Sermon on the Mount.^ The eclecticism characteristic of all Roman thought, and particularly of Cicero, enabled the later Roman men to take up Christian elements into their thinking, and thus to make a body of conceptions, often really hostile to Christian thinking, seemingly acceptable. No one could be more pro- nouncedly pagan than was Cicero, but Ambrose's edition of his ethics passes for Christian into our own age. And on the side of Rome's organization the influence upon Christian ethics was simply overwhelming. The Roman Catholic church became the heir of Rome's imperial policy and imperial ideals. Rome ruled by a judicious assertion of author- ity, stern and relentless where her sway seemed in any way in- volved, with the largest and most amazing concessions to in- ' Cy. Marquardt, 1.: "Romische Staatsverwaltung," ad ed., vol. I, pp. 497-567- * C/. Marquardt, I.: "Romische Staatsverwaltung," 2d ed. (revised by Georg Wissowa), Leipsic, 1881-1885, vol. Ill, pp. 1-480. * C/. von Jhering: "Geist des Romischen Rechts," vol. I. 32 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS dividual differences where her authority was taken for granted. This has marked the temper of historical Christianity ever since, and even in modern Protestantism (as in the state churches of England and Germany) still gives the model for imitation, often unconsciously. Nor is it a matter of indifference that Rome supplied the sacred language in which Christian ecclesiasticism was to do its thinking. More than once in the course of our history we shall have occasion to mark the fact that the use of Latin has a distinct and interesting influence upon the development of the ethics of Christianity. IV. THE OLD TESTAMENT PREPARATION What gives the ethics of the Old Testament its peculiar char- acter and universal significance is not simply its " desire to keep the flame of a pure service of God alight," * nor yet its monothe- ism, but its linking its ethics with its conception of God, and making the communal life the field for the exhibition of the qualities of the God the community worshipped. Just so soon as God was conceived of as final righteousness, even if the type of that righteousness was often poor and low. Literature. — See the literature given in Driver, S. R.: "An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament"; 8th ed., 1909. — Smith, H. P.: "Old Testament History"; New York, 1903 (see literature in the Preface). — Wade, G. W.: "Old Testament History"; London, 1901; pp. x-xii. — Kent, C. F.: "The Student's Old Testament"; New York; 4 vols, so far published, 1904, 1905, 1907, 1910; classified bibliography in appendices to each volume. — Well- hausen, Julius: "Israelitische und jiidische Geschichte"; Berlin, 1901. — ■ Winckler, Hugo: "Geschichte Israels"; Berlin, 1895-1900; 2 vols. — Cornill, C. H.: "Der Israelitische Prophetismus"; five lectures; Strasburg, 1900. — The articles in Cheyne's "Encyclopaedia Biblica" and Hastings's "Bible Dic- tionary," as well as the standard commentaries on the various books, good lists of which are given by Kent in the volumes mentioned. A good introduction to modern Bible study is Briggs, C. A.: "General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture"; New York, 1899. — Schultz, H.: " Alttestamentliche Theolo- gie"; 5th ed.; Tubingen, 1896; English translation, Edinburgh, 1S92; 2 vols. — Duff, A.: "The Theology and Ethics of the Hebrews"; New York, 1902. ' Curtius: "Gesammeltc Reden," Berlin, 1882, vol. H, pp. 2 and 9, quoted by Zieglcr: "Geschichte der christlichen Ethik," 2d cd., Strasburg, 1892, p. 14. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY S3 and the demand was made that the community should show its fidehty to its divinity by conforming to that type of righteousness, the way was at last open for a boundlessly fruitful ethical development. In all religions God is linked to his people by some bond. In Judaism at last this bond was interpreted in terms of the ethical life and in prophetism at its best in terms exclusively ethical.^ Thus at last the communal life was given not merely a political or legal, but an ethical content, and it was more and more clearly realized that the communal life was conditioned upon fulfilling righteousness. On the lowest plane this righteousness might be thought of as simply ritual correctness, a type of magic cleanness, but this never held the whole field of even the most priestly Jewish vision. It might be true that a ritual development gave a certain character to the ethics of Israel, but it never wholly dominated them. The ethical development cannot be traced as a simple matter of chronology, for the documents only permit of tentative recon- structions of the history, and these reconstructions show that various developments were going on side by side. Two main lines of development may be called the prophetic and the priestly. The school of the Deuteronomists sought to make a synthesis of these two main types, and later the Greek influence gave a still further " wisdom " type. In all the develop- ments, even in the "wisdom" documents, may be traced the slow ethical acquirements gained in the long process from the nomadic pastoral life of the early border tribes to the commercial trading life of the diaspora. The virtues of a gracious primitive hospitality and the shrewd thrift of a later commercial period jostle one another in the latest writings of the Greek period.^ The nation became, in part at least, a trading community. Tradition ascribed the transition period to the reign of Solomon, but the semi-nomadic "shepherds," like Amos of Tekoa, who ' Micah 6 : i-8; Amos 5 : 1-27; Ezekiel 18 • 1-9. * Proverbs 3 : 27 and 22 : 7. 34 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS travelled up and down the trade routes with their flocks and herds, may have long before Solomon's traditional date become Oriental merchants as one still sees them in the bazaars of Cairo and Constantinople. In the valleys of Palestine there persisted memories of all the economic stages through which the tribes of Israel passed. Shepherds watched their flocks and drove them from pasture to pasture as in the days of Jacob and Abraham. The vine dresser and small peasant farmers clustered about the foot- hills and made the richer soil of the valley yield up its fruit. The fisherman plied his trade on the inland lakes, while a more prosperous "diaspora" bound together Rome, Alexandria, and the cities of Asia Minor in an elaborate and most profitable system of money exchange. The impress of all these economic phases is upon the religion and morals of that Judaism whose chief records are the canon- ical books. Prophetism. — The Ethics of Prophetism in the seventh and eighth centuries before Christ mark the turning-point in the history of Israel. Material prosperity seems to have come in the life of the northern kingdom.^ Probably the developed trade routes and the relative safety of both northern and southern kingdoms as vassal states, playing off Egypt against the great rising northern powers, gave commerce and industry large rewards. Luxury became rife. Now to the stern, hardy semi- nomadic prophetism of the desert, represented by such faithful followers of Jehovah, or Jahwe, as Amos, the shepherd-merchant, this self-indulgence, and conformity to the religious cults of more advanced peoples amidst the pleasure-seeking of the town was a direct betrayal of the national God. If criticism be right in its conjectural excisions,^ the message of the older prophets was almost wholly a demand to return to the relative simplicity of * Amos 6 : i-6; Hosea 12 : 7-8. 2 Cf. articles in "Encyclopedia Biblica" (Cheyne) and in Hastings's "Bible Dictionary," on Amos, Micah, Hosca, and Isaiah. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 35 the older semi-nomadic period. The virtues praised and the vices denounced are those in the foreground of a relatively simple pastoral life. The new trading life, with its oppression of the debtor class, its private ownership of land and speculation in its increasing values, its violence and robbery under legal forms, with corruption of courts and perversion of justice, seemed to the nomad shepherd utterly abhorrent and destructive. As he sweeps the political horizon, made familiar to him, no doubt, as he travelled with his flocks and herds from north to south and south to north, he sees Damascus, Gaza, Ammon, and Moab judged for cruelty, slave-hunting, slaughter of women and children, sacrilege, and commercial greed; and realizes that these are more and more becoming the sins of the Hebrew tribes as they fall heirs to the life of the valleys. The remedy, however, is only a return to the simpler life. Moreover, the semi-nomadic prophetism never could evolve elaborate stated places of worship or complicated sacrificial ritual.^ The emphasis was put upon the strong righteousness of Jahwe, the firm protection of the poor and the oppressed.^ Commercial competition is the great destroyer of tribal and family bonds built up on the simple communism of the family group. Amos therefore fiercely denounces what, to him, was destructive of all the values he set store by. The negative denunciatory message of Amos is, however, supplemented by the utterances of the priestly Hosea, whose view of life is softer and more constructive. Jahwe is pictured as the forgiving husband, and one of the most fruitful religio- ethical conceptions of history is thus introduced. The relations of the nation to God as the Father of the nation is further expanded in the Isaian anthology, for Jahwe is thought of as at least the prospective Father of all nations.^ The prophetic con- ception of righteousness is high, and the communal life is the proper field for the moral man to prove his loyalty to Jahwe. The ritual elements are not wholly ignored, but they are dis- tinctly put in the secondary place. ^ And "to do justly and love * Amos 5 : 21-27. ^ Amos 8 : i-io. ^ Isaiah 56 : i-8. * Micah 6 : 8. 36 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS mercy and to walk humbly with God" forms the ethical content of loyalty to Jahwe. Moreover, Jahwe is a redeeming God * and to become the Redeemer of the whole earth.^ This redemption is ethical in character.^ God is the one God of righteousness and other gods are either nothing or are evil. To worship them is the sin of adultery, for the relationship between Jahwe and his people is thought of again in terms of the marriage relationship. This in- volved a constant idealization of the ''covenant" between God and his people. Even the legal elements that inhere in the con- ception of a covenant are swallowed up in the deeper thought of love as the very being of that covenant, and mutual loyalty as its chiefest crown. Thus the foundation was laid for a fairer eth- ical temple. The prophetic movement had, naturally, various levels, and its upward movement was not a steady onward progress. The prophets of the second temple period (Haggai and Zechariah, about 521) are far more concerned with the outward and visible signs of the nation's allegiance than with the inner quality of the service. Nor are we to define too sharply the prophetic movement. It stretched from the eighth century up to John the Baptist, in various degrees protesting against types of declension and disloyalty, and in various ways pro- claiming a return to an idealized simple worship of Jahwe, often linked with longings for the old nomadism (Essenes, John the Baptist in the wilderness), and identifying its ideals with a past impossible to recall. But the glory of Israel is its prophetism; from the early prophets of action (Elijah, Nahum, Micah) who left no writing, to John the Baptist, a long succession of noble spirits strove for a splendid ethical monotheism and a theocratic democracy. Other and weaker elements mingled with this teaching, but these things alone lift the prophetic writings and services of Old Testament history up amid God's pro\idential care of the race as his chiefest gifts to our ethical and religious life. ' Micah 6:4. ^ Isaian anthology. ' Isaiah 62 : 1-5 and many passages. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 37 The Early and Later Priestly Development. — As prophetism bore to the end the marks of its nomadic origin, so both the early and later priestly developments reveal constantly their close con- nection with sacred places which grew in stability and importance as the population became greater and more settled. That this transition period from nomadism to semi-agrarian conditions has always been linked with a great leader and law-giver called Moses is a presumption in favor of his historical character, although with the present data we may despair of defining exactly either his real place in the history or even of meeting all the objections and difficulties critical study has suggested. Yet it seems impossible not to believe that the whole period was dominated by one of those great constructive minds whose memory remains as a priceless treasure to his nation and the world. It is impossible to separate clearly the priestly elements of Israel's history from the prophetic. Yet the emphasis was so different that, from time to time, the ideals did sharply conflict. Nor was the priesthood any more at constant peace with the growing monarchy than prophetism. At the same time they had more in common with each other. Prophetism was not in its nature institutional; both the monarchy and the priesthood were. Prophetism was essentially radical, and even under the guise of a return to primitive piety it was essentially an unfolding of new and higher ethical ideals. Neither a monarchy nor a priesthood can escape conservatism. Indeed that is for both a large part of their social function. Prophetism was often critical and denunciatory to the point of destructiveness. The prophets' words were "too heaiy, the land could not bear them." The monarchy and priesthood stood for things as they substantially were, and wished only to purge the nation from the grosser sins. The legal development has an exceedingly early origin. The first "ten words" (Exodus 34) have already agricultural addi- tions to what was possibly in the beginning a purely pastoral 38 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS and nomadic code/ and the association of the name of Moses with the earliest codes as well as the carrying on of the codifica- tion by legal fiction in his name points to a beginning of a written law when first the people began to settle down about sacred places like Bethel and Gilgal and to make them centres of political life. The legal development as such does not rise to very great ethical heights. The recently discovered code of Hammurabi reflects a more homogeneous social condition and a more con- sistent legal aim. The old primitive lex talionis was firmly imbedded and never overcome. Polygamy and divorce were contemplated as constant social factors. Slavery is retained, but in a merciful form, and the ceremonial and external forms are hopelessly mingled with the moral and the inward. Even gross superstitions (Leviticus i6 : 8-10) are sanctioned, and through- ' Exodus 34 : 14-28. I Make no covenant with the inhabitants of the land. II Thou shalt worship no other Gods. Ill Thou shalt make thee no moulten Gods. ^?1"? ''^■^- IV Thou shalt keep the feast of unleavened bread. V All the first-born are mine. VI All the first-born of thy sons shalt thou redeem. VII On the seventh day thou shalt rest. VIII Three times a year thou shalt appear before Jahwe. IX Thou shalt not ofier the blood with unleavened bread. X Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's milk. [This is simply leaving out the agricultural words, some of which seem on their face to be later additions.] THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 39 out a utilitarian and superficial view of the nature of rewards and punishments appears. The whole ethics ranges within the present life, and even threatens that life by its mass of minute regulation, some of which had once sanitary justification but much of which had become merely meaningless routine. Yet, making all these concessions, it must be recognized that it was a great step forward when the rude and often fanatical nomad entered upon an ordered social state with its own legal character. It is at least open to question whether the legislation in its final form was ever more than a priestly dream and ideal bom during the later exilic days; but whether this be so or not, the evidences multiply that the laws of Leviticus were never the actual working laws of a Jewish state. They bore the marks of an increasingly centralized worship and a narrowing life. Yet while this is true, at the same time really lofty conceptions of Jahwe as a righteous God are never absent. Law conserves and crystallizes the ethical gains of communal experience and aids in carrying them over into new social organizations. An examination of the primitive Hebrew law-giving reveals the tribal communism in which the care of the poor and feeble is as natural as the care of members of a family one of the other. The commercial trading spirit was endangering, evidently, this community of feeling (Micah and early Isaiah), and the legal development faithfully attempted to stem this tide. The for- bidding of all interest in such a social state was, of course, im- possible of exact enforcement; but it was attempted, and the laws of mortgage and debt collection, if unpractical and unen- forceable in a trading community, yet showed the survival of ideals borrowed from the past. In one important respect the Torah began to have deep ethical significance. Amid a corrupt and corrupting civilization settled the little bands of pious Jews, who came trickling back from Babylon and Egypt that they might once more worship Jahwe on the sacred soil. To guard themselves and their chil- dren from the depravity and vice of the mixed populations amid which they lived, the "Holy Community" fenced the life of the 40 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS individual and family by ceremonial regulations resulting in, and intended to result in, the isolation and seclusion of the religious Jew. That this later priestly development was a hardening and formalizing process none can deny, but it is equally impossible to blind ourselves to the fact that the process alone, so far as we can see, saved for us the Old Testament writings, and a community built upon the foundation of ethical monotheism. Far from thinking of the Jew as naturally exclu- sive and prone to separation, the tendency seems to have been altogether on the other side. Only the severest ceremonial disci- pline and the most fanatical faith could save the Jew to his mission as he became a trader and a wanderer upon the face of the earth. The ethical significance of this ceremonial ex- clusiveness was simply tremendous. It resulted in a constant sifting process. Thousands of Jews in all ages have rationalized their faith and have as promptly been lost to Judaism. From the Christian point of view this may not be a great misfortune now, it would have been a world-calamity if the Jewish community as such had thus been lost, as the northern kingdom was lost, before its achievements on the religious and ethical fields had become the property of humanity. The preservation of these ethical conquests are not due to the nation as such, but to the Holy Community, the " Brotherhood of the Synagogue," whose faith and zeal kept the Torah from being lost amid the wrecks of the national life, as the waves of Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian, and Greek conquest overflowed the world. This Brotherhood of the Synagogue kept its character only by the in- creasing attention to the externals of the legal system. How really dear that law became to the devout heart may be seen in the 119th Psalm and the hymns of the second temple. Its significance as the only real preservative of the faith and morals of the community was an experience to which generation after generation of scribes could bear their witness. The ethics of the priestly set of documents, like its theology, is abstract and stiff, legal and external. The way of thinking is hard and narrow, yet it is exceedingly doubtful whether we would know OP / THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 41 anything about a prophetic ethics had it not been conserved for us in the midst of this very legalism. The Deuteronomic Synthesis. — The prophetic and priestly emphasis were happily never wholly separated, and early in the history of the nation arose a school of legal interpretation seeking to combine the ethical and religious quality of propheti- cism while conserving the Mosaic ceremonial and the ritual devoutly believed to have had its origin at Sinai. The lofty ethical and religious character of the Deuteronomic writers ^ is seen not only in the book from which is taken the name for the school, but also in the prophetic interpretation of the history. The priestly interpretation overemphasizes the element of ritual correctness, the Deuteronornic writers find the essence of the relationship between God and his people in the loving righteousness which constitutes God's character (Deut. 11 : 13- 26 and many other passages). The monotheism is exclusive and even stern (Deut. 12 : 2-4), the ritual demands are heavy and exacting, the place of ceremonial is large and burdensome, yet the emphasis is not on these things. These regulations, in fact, fit naturally into the life of obedience to moral regulation and religious exaltation. This type of thinking must not be confined to one revival period under Josiah. It is to be found all down the history, and the teachings of Jesus may be called the natural flowering of this synthetic process. The theme of the Deuteronomic school is the loving redemption of Jahwe, and the literature breathes the atmosphere of confident faith, even while it threatens wrong- doing and scourges all declension from the national religion. The appeal is throughout to Moses as the great prophet as well as law-giver, and the separation in the tradition between Moses the prophet and Aaron the priest gives great force to the ethical interpretation of the ritual law. The national significance of a pure worship and a high morality form the constant burden of the Deuteronomic school (Deut. 32 : 1-43; Judges 2 : 11-23; ' Among these are to be counted editors of historic books as Judges, Samuel, and Kings. 42 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS and many other passages). With the priestly writers these Deuteronomic writers see in the following after "strange" gods a principal cause of Israel's discomfiture, A centralized worship and elaborate sacrificial life is, more- over, equally with the priestly interpretation of the history, thrown back into a time when we see from the documents the school has itself preserved for us that the worship was scattered among many "high places" without any sense of wrong-doing on the part of the most developed religious life, and when every head of a family was by that fact a priest and offered sacrifices freely/ Happily the older traditions were already regarded as sacred, and seem little altered, and the school of writers in the Deuteronomic spirit content themselves with homiletic and ethical interpretation. These ethical advances are constantly along the line of spiritualized worship and social righteousness and humanity. The ethics are sometimes crudely eudaemonistic, but the eudcc- monism is of national character and therefore of a far loftier type than sometimes appears in the lower ranges of the nation's thought. Jahwe is always represented in the twofold aspect as a loving redeemer to a faithful and repentant Israel, and a stern judge and avenger when Israel wanders from the path of true worship and moral purity. Indeed the highest rhetoric of the school is expended in enforcing these two conceptions (Deut. 27 and 28, etc., etc.), and the picture of God as a God of vital righteousness and loving grace is of epoch-making beauty in the religious literature of the world. Note. — Literary criticism has not finished the work of histor- ical analysis, and many positions now accepted generally may yet be given up; but one point has been gained for all schools and for all time. We see in the Old Testament the gradual revelation of God in thq midst of human conditions, and realize that the revelation is constantly conditioned by the human life in which God reveals himself. The difficulty of exact historical ' Judges 6 : 1 1-22, etc., etc. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 43 reconstruction may be admitted. Many most attractive hypothe- ses may yet have to be altered or rejected. A reasonable agnosticism is a wholesome historical grace. It may be quite vain to attempt, for instance, to separate Isaiah into a first, a second, and a third writer, because probably we are dealing with the songs of a special religious and literary movement, with a common inspiration, but extending over a long period of time from the monarchy of Hezekiah to the joyful return of little bands of wanderers under Persian protection. So also the Deuteronomic "writer" is more likely a particular school of thought, again having a distinct historic origin in the religious movement of Josiah's time, but extending its literary activity, particularly its editorial work, far down into the exilic period. The sharp lines of the fashionable reconstruction may have to be softened, but the main oudines are fairly assured, and for religious and practical purposes we have now an outline of the Old Testament history far more fruitful than the impossible traditional and uncritical misunderstanding. It remains as a thing greatly to be desired that the devotional literature of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, be made to give up their contribution to the wonderful ethical advances of the " Brother- hood of the Synagogue" from which that literature, no doubt, sprang. The Contribution of Hellenized Judaism. — The power of the Jew to assimilate and be assimilated is generally underestimated because of the exclusive character of those who resist the process. Thousands of Jews must have been lost amid the civilization of Babylon. Egypt swallowed up, no doubt, many more, and all down history the capacity of the Jew for adaptation to foreign life and foreign thought has been just as remarkable as the persistence of that minority which conserves the exclusive life and thought. The Jew no more succeeded in withstanding the influence of Greek culture than he has withstood the various types of European culture. Educated Judaism evidently sought to withstand the inroads of foreign thought by interpreta- 44 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS tions in the spirit of ethical monotheism of the materials given from without. Thus both the priestly and the prophetic cos- mogonies may best be understood as an apologetic reinterpreta- tion of a Babylonian or some older cosmogony which had in it and behind it the dangers of an attractive but religiously de- structive polytheism. So also the literary activity of Judaism flung itself upon the reproduction of a history that would inspire the world with respect, and properly represent their ideals to the nations. Along exactly this line we have the "wisdom literature" and the works of Philo and Josephus. The moment we comprehend the aims of Philo and Josephus we see that in their day and in their own way they were trying honestly and sincerely to do what the priestly and prophetic writers had done in their time. There is no need to suppose intentional twisting or accommodation on the part of any of the writers, at the same time the trustworthy character of the history and the philosophical interpretation is effected by the undoubted attitude of special pleading. From the time of the Exile on we have a distinct ethical de- velopment which culminates in the New Testament. In that process all stages of resistance to foreign ideals and all kinds of skilful compromise may be traced. From Persia came the development of a crude dualism. Satan relieved Jahwe, as Wellhausen remarks, of many of the unethical characteristics still clinging to the old desert war-god. At the same time the monism of Judaism was too firmly rooted to give way wholly to dualism. The Exile had indeed raised many questions which the teachers of the period of the second temple had failed to answer. Dualism was a simple answer to some of these doubts, but it, too, seriously challenged the fundamental faith of the Holy Community to be really accepted in all its conse- quences. The most serious question that pressed for an answer was, "Why do the righteous suffer?" This doubt could no longer be ignored, and the ethical thought in the canonical books of this period largely centres about various answers to this searching THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 45 question. Of course from the priestly and organization point of view the obvious although superficial answer was that a temple to Jahwe had not yet been built and that the ritual obligations had never yet been fully met (Zechariah, Haggai). The most serious and thorough discussion was that of Job. In its original form, however, the conclusion was too agnostic and unsatis- factory for the average mind, and so we have the closing chapter and perhaps the speeches of Elihu added as a contribution to the solution of the problem. The most hopeful and religiously influential answer was that of the closing period of the anthology of Isaiah, where the final purpose of all suffering is found in the glory of a new heaven and new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness. In none of the answers does a future life play a large part. But in Isaiah, as in Daniel, there dawns the hope of a new era, in which all religious and ethical aspirations will be met and satis- fied by the revelation of Jahwe in a community of peace and happiness. In this new communal life all the awful doubts and difficulties raised by the failures and sufferings of the Holy Community were to be set at rest forever. The firmer and higher the faith in Jahwe was, by so much greater and more terrible seemed the desertion of the little company of the faithful. The tragedy of the situation was in the fact that Jahwe was not only thought of as almighty ruler, but as loving father.* A m.erely almighty ruler could do what he liked. But a loving father in covenant relation with his children cannot be unethical. And even though the conception of father- hood is oriental, and hence deeply tinged by despotism,^ never- theless the relationship is not simply that of creator and crea- tion, but of love and affection. Hence it happened that the more loving and intimate the relation between Jahwe and Israel was conceived of as existing, by so much the more was the poor heart of the faithful follower torn; and the stranger and more inexplicable becomes the op- pression and the defeat of the chosen child. ' Isaiah 63 : i6; 64 : 8. Jeremiah 31:9. * Isaiah 64 : 8. 46 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS The vision of a redemption was thus more and more thrust into the foreground. It was no new thought. The traditions of a fiight from Egypt still haunted the imaginations of Israel. The redemption was to come in catastrophic world-changes. The fall of Babylon, and wreck of the Persian supremacy were basal images upon which the Jewish apocalyptical literature fastened, and in Daniel, the Book of Enoch, etc., we have the developed solution of the nation's pain in great judgments and future deliverances so dramatic and so overwhelming that room for doubt as regards either the power or the righteousness of Jahwe could have no place. Yet this solution could not meet all needs. The rather crude ethics of this literature and its failure along the lines of any unifying philosophy gave rise to a rationalization more thorough- going. The ''wisdom" of the later Jewish writings was the starting-point. The method of procedure was, however, to remove God as such from the scene of the temporary trial and disaster, and to fill up the place thus made vacant by lesser and intermediary beings. Thus Philo and the Alexandrian Jews translated Plato's teaching. Wisdom becomes the Logos mediating in creation and providence between a transcendent God and the created world. Man is sharply divided into body and soul, and the metaphysical dualism of Platonic thought is religiously developed and exploited. Into Philo's synthesis come all the elements of world-flight, contemplative life,^ de- spondency, a doctrine of a final judgment and exaltation of the transcendent which mark Plato's later period.^ Combined with this is the distinctly Jewish hope of a great consummation and a final vision of God. This is reached not by asceticism, but in prophetic ecstasy. The final form of government is the theocratic democracy borrowed from the Old Testament prophets.^ The main em- phasis is upon God as the final good and knowledge of God as ' This quite apart from the writing which can scarcely be defended as by Philo: "Dc vita contcmplativa." Cf. "Legis Allegor," II, § i8. * Contra Zieglcr. ' Not from Stoics as Zeller argues. THE PREPARATION FOR CHRISTIANITY 47 the goal of all life. Philo uses many phrases in an Old Testa- ment sense, which he has borrowed from Greek philosophy, but which lead to misinterpretation of Philo, if his Jewish use of them is forgotten. His ethics is distinctly Hebrew rather than Greek, democratic rather than aristocratic, and this in spite of the hierarchy which he took over from the Platonic speculation. Note. — In the somewhat dreary rationalization of the Old Testament by Philo some things stand out clearly as character- istic probably of Judaism over wide sweeps, and not especially Alexandrian. First the real aim is to express Judaism in Greek phrases rather than to hellenize Judaism. Secondly, the chief interest always remains religious and ethical. Thirdly, the dominant character of certain Greek positions made it seem inevitable to find some harmony if the Old Testament was to be still retained. Hence, just as misguided Christian apologetics has always attempted to make the Old Testament teach the latest lesson of science, so the Jewish apologist rewrote his history to conform to what seemed assured historical data. As Josephus in the time of Roman supremacy, or the prophetic historian in the time of Babylonian ascendancy, so the Jewish philosopher Philo in Alexandria sought in the day of Greek philosophical dominance to rewrite his nation's wisdom in the language of the day.^ ' Side lights on this process may be gained in R. H. Charles's admirable "Critical History of the Doctrine of the Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity." The Jowett Lectures, 1898-1899. CJ. also Professor Deiss- mann's "Licht vom Osten," already mentioned. CHAPTER II NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS Introduction. — I. The Ethics of Jesus — II. The Ethics of Paul — III. The Johannine Interpretation — IV. The Ethics of the other Canonical Writers: Hebrews; James; The Revelation to John; The Ecclesi- astical Literature. INTRODUCTION The unity of life is a postulate of our faith, but its understand- ing demands our breaking it up into many elements and viewing it from many standing places. The canonical interpre- tations of Jesus cannot be forced into any mechanical and absolute harmony, and to rightly weigh the ethical teachings of the canonical books we must reckon with the distinct differences in interest and outlook on the world manifest to the candid student of the New Testament writings. Jesus has become historically the central figure ' in the struggle of humanity upward to the redeemed life. The "Christian Era" has become the important factor in the life-history of India, China, Japan, and the far-off island-continents then unknown. ' The critical question as to the historical character of Jesus and Paul has produced a large literature. After a survey of its arguments the writer is more convinced than ever of the historicity of Jesus and Paul, but for the ethical student it is suflBcient to say that no single fact is indispensable to the ideal which has power over us. The main works on the negative side are: Robertson, John M.: "Pagan Christs" (studies in comparative hierolog}-), London, 1903; Robertson, John M.: "Christianity and Mythology, London, 1900; Drews, Arthur: "Die Christus mythe," Jena, 1909; Burnouf, Emile: "La Science des Religions," 4th ed., 1885 (English translation by J. Liebe, London, 1888); Kalt- hofif. A.: "Das Christus-Problem," 2d ed., Leipsic, 1903; Kalthoff, A.: "Was wissen wir von Jesus?" Berlin, 1904; Smith, Wm. B.: "Der vorchristliche Jesus," Giessen, 1906; Jensen, P.: "Moses, Jesus, Paulus, drei Varianten des babylonischen Gottmenschen Gilgamesch," Frankfort-on-Main, 1909. 48 NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 49 This place in history no theological changes, no readjustment of values can now disturb. Whatever civilizations may come after ours, they can only come on the basis of that which rose on the wrecks of Grecian culture and Roman imperialism. The churchly reconstruction of life, the Christianized barbarism of the north, the entire reinterpretation of the ideals of existence, date from the life, death, and teachings of a lonely figure whose scattered phrases are given us in the pages of the New Testament. What were the ethics of Jesus, is a serious question. In various degrees the interpretations of those teachings drift apart from one another and from the original central instruction. The world-forces that culminate in the churchly society of the Middle Ages may be variously estimated and judged. For some the light went out when the cross rose above the palaces of Rome and Constantinople. But all must admit that the triumph of that cross was the outcome of the profound impression made in the midst of men by a Jewish peasant workman in the course of a public life extending over hardly more than three years at the most. The reasons for the rapid rise of the churchly society that called itself Christian do not belong here; we have, however, to enter upon the work of discovering the ideals and hopes which, centring about Jesus, gave us the canonical books, the ecclesias- tical societies east and west, and the modern civilization we call by courtesy Christian. I, THE ETHICS OF JESUS Our one interest is to ask the question : What was the organiz- ing ethical ideal of Jesus, as a man, working, struggling, and teaching ? What did he actually proclaim as the ethical ideal upon which he would have men organize all life ? Literature. — Briggs, Charles A.: "The Ethical Teaching of Jesus"; New York, 1904. — Weiss, Bernhard: "Lehrbuch der biblischen Theologie"; Berlin, 7th ed., 1903; translation of 3d ed., Edinburgh, 1882; 2 vols. — Wette, Wilhelm M. de: "Biblische Dogmatik des Alt, und Neuen Testaments"; 3d ed.; Ber- lin, 1831. — Neander, Augustus: "Geschichte der Pflanzung und Leitung der christlichen Kirche durch die Apostel"; 5th ed.; 1862; translated by J. S. 50 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS We have not now to do with the unfolding of these ideals, however legitimate such inferential unfolding may be, either in any personal interpretation of Jesus or in historical Christian- ity. With the outcome of his teaching, however inevitable, we are not immediately concerned. We wish simply to know, what did Jesus the Galilean rabbi teach as the ethical foundation of human life? At the very beginning of our inquiry we must remember the distinctly Jewish character of all we know of Jesus Christ. The Jewish mmd dealt with concrete problems and with things here on earth. The dualism of good and evil was forced upon him. But his faith in God compelled him to believe that that dualism was only temporary. God was sure to at last disclose himself as not only triumphant over all evil, but as ruler of this world and all its fortunes. Ryland, revised by Edw. Robinson, New York, 1865. — Toy, C. H.: "Judaism and Christianity"; Boston, 1890. — Rogge, Christian: "Der irdische Besitz im neuen Testament"; Gottingen, 1897. — Cone, Orello: "Rich and Poor in the New Testament"; New York, 1902. — Stevens, G. B.: "The Theology of the New Testament"; New York, 1899 (International Theological Library). — Beyschlag, W. : "Neutestamentliche Theologie"; 2d ed.; Halle, 1896; 2 vols.; also an English translation by Neil Buchanan, New York, 2d ed., 1895; in 2 vols. — Holtzmann, H. J.: "Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Tneologie"; Freiburg, 1897; 2 vols. — Pfleiderer, Otto: "Das Urchristentum, seine Schriften und Lehren"; 2d ed.; Berlin, 1902. — Wernle, Paul: "Die Anfiinge unserer Religion"; 2d ed.; Tubingen, 1904; also an English translation by G. A. Bienemann, New York; Putnam, 1903-1904; in 2 vols. — Gould, E. P.: "The Biblical Theology of the New Testament"; New York, 1900. — Wendt, H. H.: "Die Lehre Jesu"; 2d ed.; Gottingen, 1901; also an English translation by John Wilson, New York, 1892; 2 vols. — Mathews, Shailcr: "The Social Teaching of Jesus"; New York, 1897. — Peabody, F. G.: "Jesus Christ and the Social Question"; New York, 1901. — Weiss, Johannes: "Die Predigt Jesu vom Reich Gottes"; 2d ed.; Gottingen, 1900. — Liitgert, W.: "Das Reich Gottes nach den synoptischcn Evangelien"; Gutersloh, 1895. — Bousset, W.: "Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum"; Gottingen, 1892. — Jiilicher, Adolf: "Die Gleichnisreden Jesu"; Tubingen, 1899; 2 vols. — Weinel, H.: "Die Gleichnisse Jesu"; 2d ed.; Leipsic, 1904. — Jacoby, Her. mann: "Neutestamentliche Ethik"; Konigsberg, 1899. — Weiss, Johannes: "The Ethics of Jesus in Hastings's Bible Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels"; New York and Edinburgh, 1906; vol. I.; pp. 543-547. — Rau, Albrecht: "Die Ethik Jesu"; Giessen, 1899. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 51 Later interpretations of Jesus introduce elements we must gravely suspect as foreign to the thought and world of Jesus. We want to know simply and solely, so far as our materials enable us to know it, what did Jesus himself believe and teach ? In consequence of our aim we must exclude the interpretation of Jesus by Paul. Without in the least questioning the high value of this interpretation, or in any way doubting that it is a legitimate development of the spiritual meaning of Jesus for human life, we must clearly understand that Paul did not him- self pretend to base his teaching on the historical Jesus. For him the risen Christ and a living present revelation formed the foundation of his "gospel." Even if all the sayings gathered by Resch from Paul's writing as possible fragments of the teach- ings of Jesus are to be so considered, the ethical significance of actual quotations from the words of Jesus remains small and inconsiderable.^ In like manner we must exclude the Fourth Gospel. It also is a wonderful interpretation of the heart and spirit of Jesus. Yet at the present state of our scholarship it is quite impossible to separate finally between the elements that embody objective accounts of Jesus as teacher and worker and the subjective elements so prominent in the discourses. We may believe in many such elements. Even the history of the synoptic Gospels may have to be corrected from pages of the Fourth Gospel,^ yet it would be both uncandid and unwise to treat the Fourth Gospel as a whole as though it were an objective history of the life and sayings of Jesus. In fact its religious value is not in that direction. We are reduced, then, to the three first Gospels. Here again elements must be treated with extreme care. Earnest and intel- lectually sincere scholarship can hardly now accept the "ec- clesia" passages in Matthew (16 : 18 and 18 : 17) as undoubted ' C/. "Agrapha," by Alfred Resch, 1889, in "Texte und Untersuchungen," vol. V, 1889. 2 C/. "Das Johannes Evangelium," H. H. Wendt, Gottingen, 1900, pp. 45. 233- 52 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS reports of the words of Jesus. The best working hypothesis proposed as a solution of the synoptic problem accepts as a basis two documents, one of which is Mark almost as we have the Gospel, and the other a collection of "sayings" of Jesus. Luke and Matthew have woven these two together, mingling, however, material peculiar to themselves, and rearranging the "sayings," although keeping the order of Mark almost exactly. The additions of Matthew and Luke must then be treated cautiously, and upon the narrative of Mark, and the "sayings" as found in both Matthew and Luke, we must be content to base our first impression of Jesus as an ethical teacher. Side lights we may gain from later sources. The interpretation of Jesus of every age has had its own peculiar religious value; at the same time objective historical study cannot afford to confuse its conclusions with such interpretations no matter how valuable or how sound. In order to measure Jesus as an ethical teacher and to grasp surely the organized ideals that underlay his ethics, we must form some idea of the environment in which he taught and the style of his teaching. Although literary Rabbinism is for the most part much later than Jesus,* yet Rabbinism as a system of religious instruction and as a religious tendency existed long before him. Just as the Platonic ethics were profoundly in- fluenced by the opposition to the Sophists, so the ethics of Jesus grew up in opposition to and yet deeply influenced by the Rab- binical ideals. The style of Jesus bears witness to the influence upon him of the eschatological teaching of his day. Yet deeper still was the influence of the literature, sacred in the eyes of his religious world, in which he found an ethical basis for his opposition to the legalism and formality under which the religious and ethical life of his time groaned. The ethical precepts of that literature were largely contained in the wisdom (QDH) literature, and that type of ethical teaching finds its place in the original sayings of Jesus. We possess, it is true, only Greek renderings of the ' CJ. Enry. Brit., American Reprint, art. "Mishnah," XVI, 527. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 53 northern Galilean dialect in which Jesus probably spoke and taught. But it requires only a little care and attention to mark under the Greek dress the literary character of the original saying. Now no one in ordinary life would interpret poetry and proverb by the same rules we apply in the construction of legal documents or philosophical lore. Instinctively we are guided by the style of the saying to the method of its interpretation. The same thing is true of the teachings of Jesus. We must pass on the character of the particular saying, and in our interpretation we must be guided by the feeling for the literary class to which it belongs. Three great literary types influenced deeply the thought and style of Jesus. The exalted religious style of the prophetical poetry finds frequent reflection in his longer sayings; the sorite- what artificial epigram of the wisdom literature has also its counterpart; and the eschatological dreaming and vivid word painting of the latter Jewish period has its corresponding imagery in his latter work.^ In considering, then, the ethical scheme of Jesus, we must take into consideration the purpose and inspiration of each saying. It is of great importance to discover how far he was deliberately standing upon the ethical ground he found prepared in the past history of his people, and how far he was transcending or con- sciously opposing the conclusions of his religious and ethical environment. Jesus' ethics, like the ethics of Spinoza, was intensely " God- conscious." When he uses the term " Abba" he implies no such distinction as the Greek gives us between "Our" father and "my" father; this is reflected in Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer.^ For him God was all in all and absolutely sovereign.' The heaven is his throne, the earth his foot-stool; he marks the sparrow's fall* and numbers the hairs on our head; he clothes the lily of the field,' and his will was to be done on earth * Examples Matt, ii : 20-30; Mark 10 : 27; and Matt. 24. 2 Luke 11:2. irdrep. ' Matt. 5 : 35. * Matt. 10 : 29. * Matt. 6 : 28. 54 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS as completely as it is thought of being done in heaven.* Unity with the purpose 0} God rather than love to God is the basis of the thought of Jesus. In the original Mark Gospel the only mention of love to God is in a quotation from Deuteronomy.^ This im- pression of Jesus' teaching is well represented in the late litera- ture, as in the prayer of Jesus in the 17th of John. The ethical ideal of Jesus was "to do the will of God." ' To love God was self-understood. The impression made by the original teaching of Jesus is that ethics was thelemic (to coin a much-needed word from TO OeXrjfjLa) rather than emotional or intellectual. God was accepted as intellectually apprehended. Love to God pro- ceeded from right relation to him, rather than forming the basis for those relations. The basis of life and the world was the will of God. He who worked with this will had all things made possible to him.* Faith was this acceptance of God and his will as the ultimate basis of all life. Later Greek speculation sought to interpret this ethical sense of unity with God into a unique metaphysical relationship. Perhaps the beginning of the process is seen in the Fourth Gospel, but it certainly is not justi- fied by Jesus' own words, nor does the essentially Jewish think- ing of Paul give it any foundation. The consciousness of a unique relationship to God was ethical and not metaphysical.^ As the later Gospel put it: "His meat and drink was to do the will of him that sent him and to finish his work." • Moreover, the conception of this divine will was spiritual as well as ethical. The differentiation of God as an ethical God from the conceptions of him as simply a triumphant national war-hero had gone far during the captivity and in the later prophetic literature of the Old Testament. At the same time, the popular mind had no more grasped the difference then than it has now; and even the religious world of Jesus' time was caught in lower and false notions of the national relationship to Jahwe.' Jesus carried on the work of the later prophets in 'Matt. 6:10. => Mark 12: 30. 'Mark 3: 35. *Mark ii : 22-24. * Mark 12 : 1-9. •John 4 : 34. ' C/. John the Baptist's message, Matt. 3 : 9, where these notions are condemned. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 55 emphasizing the ethical rather than the national relationship to God. But he went further than the prophets in making this the sole basis of relationship/ As Schultz points out: ^ "That in the olden days more value was placed upon the blameless carrying out of the religious popu- lar customs; and that the prophets on this account had un- wearyingly to emphasize the fact that the great principles of morality formed the fundamentals of righteousness, we see in all the older prophets." Yet even in the prophets the basis of any possible morality was the fulfilment of ritual requirements; just as to-day many fairly intellectual Protestants cannot think any man a really "good" or "godly" man who does not keep one day in the week for observances they prize, or who cannot repeat "formulae" they think ritually necessary. The failure is, of course, in the conception of God as ethical. Jesus had so completely seen God as ethical that for him ritual requirement took its normal place as expedient and helpful, or hurtful and a hindrance in accordance with the changing requirements of man's life.^ The vast ethical advance thus described was due to Jesus' conception of the kind of righteousness God required and the character of the holiness ascribed to God. The perfection of God * is not based on simple power, but upon an essential right- eousness. Jesus drew the logical ethical consequence of the vision of God as given in Exodus 34 : 6 and developed more fully by the Deuteronomist; but in doing so realized that attach- ment to custom and ritual was accidental and not essential. His saying, " Destroy the temple and in three days I will build it again," was naturally misunderstood by even his friends. He expressed there his sense of the true relationship between the inward and the outward. For him the temple was but an out- * Matt. 5 : 20; 7 : 21-22. 2 "Alttestamentliche Theologie," XXI, p. 293, 2d ed., or English translation, vol. II, p. 923. * Mark 2 : 25-28, "David and show-bread and Sabbath made for man," and in Mark 7 : 15, "That which proceedeth out of a man that defileth." * Matt. 5 : 48. 56 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS ward expression that would in an indefinitely short period be easily rebuilt, if the essential ethical unity with God was not destroyed. It was in this sense also that he felt his presence made many otherwise perhaps useful ritual requirements, such as fasting, washing, etc.,^ unnecessary for his disciples so long as he was with them. The assumption by Jesus of an absolutely ethical God he never established by argument, nor would he have claimed for it originality. He would have, indeed did point back to Deuter- onomy and the Psalms as setting it forth. What was original in his teaching was the separating that conception from national and ritual entanglements and making it the sole foundation upon which he built up his moral system. Jesus assumed in consequence of his consciousness of God as righteousness, and as demanding from us only righteousness, the freedom and moral personality of every human being. The centurion reveals a faith not found in Israel.^ Yet the life of Jesus was too short and the material actually from his lips too scanty to assert that he either fully realized or fully exploited the logic of this position. The universalism of Luke may be as late a product as that of Paul; both are, however, legitimate outcomes of Jesus' conception of an ethical God as over against a national and unethical thought of him. The parables of Luke are certainly genuine, and that of the Good Samaritan reflects the logic that broke down so largely (for of course other ele- ments entered into the case) the national boundaries of the proclamation of Jesus. The definite "Good news" that Jesus proclaimed had, then, as presuppositions a sovereign ethical God in some moral rela- tionship to man, and logically to all men. That relationship Jesus taught his disciples to describe with the term "Abba," or father. The will of God which was for Jesus the moral founda- tion of life, was the will of a just and kindly father.' The ' Mark 2 : 18; Matt. 9 : 14. ^ Luke 7 : 9. ' Parable of Prodigal Son. Luke 15 : 11-32; Matt. 6 : 8, " Your Father know- eth what things ye have need of"; Matt. 7 : 1 1, " Ye being evil — good gifts," etc. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 57 fatherhood of God in relation to the nation of Israel was a fairly familiar figure, although probably the false terror before Jahwe as judge which made his name unpronounceable (mn'») also prevented the full content of even this prophetical phrase being realized. The good news that men were in personal relationship with God, independently of the nation's sins, and that personal repentance could establish relationships that even national judgments could not shake, was new religious teaching and exalted the conception of manhood at once. This teaching was in close connection with God^s Kingdom as proclaimed by Jesus. What was this Kingdom? Johannes Weiss, of Marburg, has given the most recent and the most careful answer to this important question,* and his answer has found wide acceptance among the younger New Testament scholars.^ In accordance with Dalman's theory, he asserts that the idea of Jesus is wholly eschatological. For Jesus the reign of God is always ("stets") an eschatological quantity about which a "presence" can only be alleged in so far as it is a fact that the "end" is already in process of be- ginning." ^ This is not the place to critically analyze the positions taken; sufficient it is to say that so far as the method 0} introduction of this "reign of God" * is concerned, this school is undoubtedly right. Although Jesus distinctly denies any knowledge of the time of the coming of the kingdom,^ he un- doubtedly expected it sharply, swiftly, and with catastrophe, and as an "eschatological quantity." But it is one-sided criticism of his words to fix attention solely on the method of the Kingdom's ultimate triumph. What was the essence of the Reign of God ? is the serious question. Here little light is given by the eschato- logical dreaming of such a literature as that to which Daniel belongs, and that side of Jesus' teaching does not concern us now at all. Happily we have abundant material at hand for ' "Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes," 1900. * CJ. " Theologische Litteraturzeitung," Oct. 12, 1901 (No. 21, coll. 563-568), article by Bousset in review. ^ Dalman quoted by Weiss, Job., p. 17 of "Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes " « D:cTr ni3-'p. s Matt. 24 : 36. 58 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS examination of the ethical content which Jesus ascribed to the Reign oj God. The organic basis of the teaching of Jesus was his placing of the emphasis upon the ethical factors in this Reign 0} God. In this he followed in the footsteps of Isaiah, Amos, and Hosea, but with greater clearness and precision and with greater powers of personal moral impression. He strongly insisted upon this re- ligio-ethical basis for the Reign of God, and he emphasized this religio-ethical factor as a condition for the personal participation in the glories of that reign. This we see in the fundamental teachings gathered from the "sayings-collection" in what we know as the Sermon on the Mount. The arrangement of this "Sermon" is, of course, the work of Matthew, but the contents as we have them in Luke and Matthew reflect the intensely ethical conception Jesus had of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom was thought of as coming in the apocalyptic visions of catastrophe, judgment, and change; but the nature of the King- dom when it came was not the material triumph of Judaism, but the triumph of Righteousness. No saying is more undoubt- edly that of Jesus than that of Matthew 6 : 33, " Seek ye first the Kingdom (or his Kingdom) and his righteousness (rrjv StKac- ocrvvrjv avrov) and all these things shall be added unto you." (Tipl^'HST Delitzsch renders r7)v htKaLocrvvrjv .) What mad- dened institutional religion, then, as it maddens it now, was to be told that the essence consisted not in a ritual or credal cor- rectness, but in an inner ethical character which it did not then, as it does not now, fully exemplify. The bitter hostility to Jesus was aroused by the fact that he went into details, and the class of professional religious teachers felt that their influence and teaching were the objects of his attack. That the organic basis of Jesus' proclamation was a national ethical reformation — to be completed only in the midst of cataclysmal changes — is seen in the fact that his proclamation was misunderstood. He was made a Galilean hero. "The common people heard him gladly." ' A national redemption ' Mark 12 : 37. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 59 from poverty and oppression as the result of Jesus' teaching was no doubt their crude hope. According to Jesus the rich were shut out from the Kingdom by their riches, and the poor were welcomed for their poverty. This was acceptable teaching to the humble but restless fishermen of northern Galilee, until he went on to emphasize the ethical change needed in them also to gain entrance to that Kingdom, when they also fell away. This national factor in the teaching of Jesus is often forgotten in the recognition of Christian universalism. Yet nothing is clearer than that not only did Jesus begin as a strictly national teacher, but that he himself only realized with sorrow, so far as he fully realized it, the hopeless character of his national work. Here also Jesus only filled out the dream of the exilic Isaiah. His desire was, indeed, a world-wide redemption, but the "suffering servant" was to be an ethically reformed Judaism. Repentance and good works were to save the nation, or a remnant of the nation, in the midst of coming catastrophies, and the re- deemed Israel was to teach righteousness to the world. The good news was to be proclaimed among all nations * and the "elect" would partake in the ethical change, and then the tribu- lation would destroy the wicked, and the Son of Man would come to a completed and triumphant Kingdom. This emphasis upon the ethical rather than upon the political and economic character of the Kingdom is not only seen in the Sermon on the Mount (so called) but in the material which Matthew gathers into the long discourse to the disciples.^ This material, however, is to be probably divided into two separate periods of the teaching of Jesus. The historical order of Mark may be provisionally accepted as the oldest and most correct one. That order practically divides the ministry of Jesus into two periods. The first was full of success, of hope, and of large personal expectation. Then came the coldness in Galilee and his final deposition from the place of a popular idol and coming national leader. From that time on the Mark material is intensely personal. The message is no 1 Mark 13 : 10. * Matt. 9 : 37-10 : 42. 6o HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS more to the nation but to the chosen group. They are to be made ready to do the work of Kingdom proclaimers, which the nation would not, was not, in fact, ethically fit to do. This division is not found in Matthew nor in John, although in Luke traces of it are to be distinctly seen. Yet it is a striking fact that Matthew in mixing sayings of the two periods in the sermon he constructs * involves Jesus in confusions from which Mark alone saves him, and in which Luke does not involve him.^ Mark distributes this material, and without question correctly. As long as Jesus had hope for the ethical reformation of Judaism he confined his message to it. He hoped it would then do the world work. When he considered a national change in so short a time as no longer possible, he turned to a small chosen group. The ideal became a redeemed spiritual community. The "ecclesia" passages of Matthew are, no doubt, a later addition. Jesus never probably used any word of Hebrew or Aramaic that would be translated by iKKXjjaia. The conception was simply a spiritually minded following, ethically fitted to be pro- claimers and forerunners of the coming ethical transformation. This then brings us to consider what Jesus looked upon as the ideal of personal ethics for such a spiritual community. Jesus never was a systematic teacher, as the contrast between him and the scribes goes to show. " They were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as having authority and not as the scribes." ^ He declared what seemed to him obvious and does not seem to have argued. His teaching was inspirational and not analytical. Hence it is impossible to arrange his teachings without doing a measure of injustice to them. Moreover, his personal ethical teaching was so interwoven with his religious faith that it is wellnigh impossible to separate it from the the- ological groundwork. The particular feature, however, of his teaching we may perhaps bring out under several heads, * Chapters 9 : 38-10 : 42. * Compare Matt. 10 : 5-15, where the messengers are to stay in Israel and preach only to their nation, with 10 : 16-23, where they are "messengers to the nations." * Mark i : 22. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 6i I. Morality was for Jesus not outward conduct but inner motive. The man who looks after the woman with lustful eye has committed adultery with her in his heart.^ This was not new, but it was a neglected and forgotten truth in the fatal transformation of the law to simple statutory requirements. In Job's defence (chapter XXXI) the hero of the drama is made to emphasize the inward spirit; even secretly he has not rejoiced at an enemy's misfortune, nor "has his heart been enticed" even "secretly" to worship moon or sun. Jesus, however, presses the logic home. All ritual and legal requirement is but symbolic of the real demand made upon the moral man for an inward purity of thought and hope. "Not that which entereth into the mouth defileth the man, but that which proceedeth out of the mouth, this defileth the man."^ "For out of the heart come forth evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, railings: these are the things which defile a man." ^ To eat with unwashed hands did not, therefore, defile a man. This logic made Jesus the radical destroyer of the existing moralities, which were as intimately bound up with outward things as much Protestant morality is bound up with "Sabbath keeping," "church going" and "Bible reading," no matter how mechanical. How sweeping the judgment was in the time of Jesus it is hard for us now to realize. No doubt Jesus' condemnation of all "judging" was the outcome of the attitude toward morality. How can any one judge (KUTaKpiveiv) another without reading the heart ? Hence to the woman taken in adultery (a scarcely doubtful tradition of Jesus) Jesus himself refuses condemnation. This is not to allege that he had any clear-cut philosophy on the relation of the state to the individual, or that he himself withheld all condemnation when he felt him- self in a position to weigh motives. He puts his dictum forth in poetical form. The version in Luke gives us a clew to the ar- rangement of the material: "Judge not and ye shall not be judged. Condemn not and ye shall not be condemned. With what judgment ye judge ' Matt. 5 : 2S. ^ Matt. 15 : ii. * Matt. 15 : 19-20. 62 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS Ye shall be judged. With what measure ye mete Ye shall be measured. *' Why look at the mote in your brother's eye And regard not the beam in your own? Or how say to your brother, lo here! Let me cast out the mote from your eye, And you see not the beam in your own! Hypocrite, cast out the beam from your eye And see clearly to cast out the mote from your brother's." This inward character of ethics had its basis in the spiritual experiences of the Old Testament as reflected in such hterature as the 51st Psalm: "Create a clean heart in me, O God; Renew a right spirit within me." And as in that Psalm, offerings and sacrifices began to take their place in the teachings of Jesus as non-essential. 11. This led to the proclamation by Jesus of the supreme importance of morality as thus defined. The identification of morality with ritual in his day had confused the issue before human life much as that issue is now confused by the identifica- tion of morality with opinion. The solemn scene of the Judgment poem ^ is based upon this sense of conduct as the criterion of life. Not every one that says "Lord, Lord," but only the man who "does the will" of his Father shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.^ Those even who have conjured with the name of Jesus and done in his name "mighty works," but whose life "worked iniquity," cannot be saved by their ritual correctness. Conduct springing from a good will is for Jesus the supreme test. " By their fruits ye shall know them." ^ Conduct is the outcome of the character. In a little poem given by Luke * Jesus empha- sizes this inwardness of morality at the same time that he asserts its supremacy: "It is not a good tree giving bad fruit: It is not a bad tree giving good fruit: For each tree by its fruit can be known. Matt. 25 : 31-46. ' Matt. 7:21. ' Matt. 7 : 20. * Luke 6 : 43. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 63 Not of thorns do men gather their figs: Not of brambles gather men grapes. The good man from good stores of his heart does his good: The bad man from bad stores of his heart does his bad: From the stores of the heart speaks the mouth." The supremacy of righteousness is the motive put always before the disciples. "Ye shall be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." ^ III. This righteousness is not only ethical as over against ritual correctness, and inwardness as over against simple con- formity to rule, but the character of it is deeply compassionate. This is not only seen in the exclusively Lucan parables ("The Good Samaritan," "The Lost Sheep," etc.), and in Jesus' own conduct as with the woman taken in adultery, or in the works of mercy recorded by Mark, but Jesus emphasizes it as belonging to any real righteousness. "It is not the will of your Father which is in heaven that one of these little ones should perish." ^ That the will of the Father is compassionate is the whole teaching of the parable of the Prodigal Son, and as our morality is to do this will our morality must be tender and compassionate. This made another point of strain between the teachings of Jesus and the popular ritual conception of righteousness. Again Jesus here consciously elaborates what he found, no doubt, in the prophetical books. Matthew, for instance, cites Hosea 6 : 6 as a parallel to Jesus' reply to those who objected to his eating with publicans and sinners,^ where the prophet says, "I desire mercy and not sacrifice." He makes the compassionate will of a father the basis for a personally compassionate morality. It is this in the ethical teaching of Jesus that Nietzsche finds so unsympathetic. It is opposed to the masterful aristocratic spirit that has given us nearly all our systems of political economy, of religion, and of morals. IV. The morality of Jesus was, however, distinctly "non- ascetic." This is seen not only in the impression he made as in contrast with John the Baptist, "The son of man came eating ' Matt. 5 : 20. = Matt. i8 : 14. » Matt. 9 : 13. 64 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS and drinking, and they say behold a gluttonous man, and a wine- bibber,"' and in the non-observance of his disciples of rules for fasting, etc., but in the cardinal doctrine lying at the basis of all his morality. For asceticism as a means of self-discipline Jesus had no rebuke, although he evidently attached little im- portance to it,^ but the ethical significance of asceticism is the conception of self-mortification as a method of access to God. For such asceticism Jesus had no place. Anything that hin- dered access to the ethical Kingdom v^^as to be ruthlessly sacri- ficed, hand, foot, or eye, but sacrificing the hand, foot, or eye would not give any access to the ethical Kingdom.^ This was the essence of the attitude of Jesus to riches. He saw in riches the bulwark of class pride, and a barrier to personal perfection, and he condemned them in that sense. At the same time mere poverty was no means of access to God. The interpretation put by Luke on the "sayings of Jesus" seems to favor the asceticism that marked much early Christian thinking, and no doubt as a means for ethical advance Jesus did regard ascetic practices differently from the average ethical thought of to-day. At the same time, even the expressions of Jesus on this sub- ject, stripped of later interpretations, are singularly free from ascetic practice, and permitted only as a means of self-disci- pline for ethical life, and not as constituting the ethical life. The matter of fasting , for instance, is nowhere condemned as such, but as constituting an essential part of the outward religious life of the Pharisees it is condemned.^ And it is nowhere recom- mended, although presupposed as possible.^ The one passage often quoted in its favor • has been omitted even by the Revised Version as textually untenable. Whereas it is distinctly asserted that his disciples did not fast.' V. Jesus saw in righteousness a "good in itself," but the poetical expressions of the "sayings-collection" speak also of reward. At the same time the "reward" is given by a heavenly ' Matt. II : 19. ' Matt. 9 : 14-17, friends of bridegroom. * Mark 9 : 42-45. * Matt. 6 : 16-17. * Matt. 9 : 15. * Matt. 17:21, "This kind gocth not out save," etc. ' Mark 2 : i8. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 65 Father and is carefully differentiated from the "thanks" that sinners render to "sinners."^ The Father is to recompense (the "openly" of Matthew is textually to be rejected).' Un- questioningly and submissively and in secret righteousness is to be wrought, and all "reward" awaited from the Father. The character of the "reward" Jesus distinctly refused to define.^ We are to aim at perfection as God is perfect, and he expects no reward, " sending his rain upon the just and the unjust." * Who loses his life finds it, if it is for Jesus' sake, i. e., for righteousness' sake,* and a righteous man receives the appropriate righteous man's reward.' Undoubtedly Jesus looked forward to a coming Kingdom in which these rewards were to be dispensed.^ In Luke the "reward" is eternal life, in Matthew it is "thrones judging Israel." It is impossible to say just how far Jesus went along this line of apocalyptic revelation, or just what the really under- lying thought was. The ethical advance was the connecting even of the apocalyptic dream with a righteousness that in no way bargains but trusts, and the severing of the very concep- tion of "reward" from the coarse material aspects of it with which even modern representations of heaven have often bur- dened the thought. VI. To the empiric morality of the day Jesus thus gives an idealistic foundation. He probably accepted many of the cur- rent ethical maxims of his generation uncritically. He, for instance, passes no comment on slavery or monarchical institu- tions as already there in force, nor did he in any way ethically examine fundamental rights in property or in fact any of the economical conditions whose ethical significance we are begin- ning slowly to recognize. Caesar was Ceesar, and, as the acknowl- edged authority even among the Jews, was one of the facts to be taken for granted. At the same time the ethical inspirations of » Luke 6:32. ' Matt. 6 : 4. ' Mark 10 : 40. (Scene with the Sons of Zebedee.) * Matt. 5 : 45. » Matt. 10 : 39. • Matt. 10 : 41. ^ Matt. 19 : 28-29; Luke 18 : 29. 66 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS Jesus were bound to be critically applied to empiric morality in every succeeding generation, with more or less success. VII. The whole teaching of Jesus in regard to personal morality had its real significance in its relation to the Kingdom of God, This reign of Righteousness could only be introduced and partaken of by those who had thus given themselves up to "watching until their Lord should come." The establishment of it was to be on the earth, "Thy will be done on earth even as in heaven." The Kingdom Parables ^ reflect the fact that Jesus expected that Kingdom suddenly and yet as the culmina- tion of a divine process. It was to be sought for.^ It was at the same time growing amidst unfavorable conditions.^ The search- ing examination of the "Kingdom Parables," by Jiilicher/ sup- ported as he is by Wendt and Weiss, make it impossible to use with confidence the details of these parables as in any way re- flecting the direct teaching of Jesus concerning his conception of the Reign of Heaven. The details, however, are not the important features. The character of the Kingdom is steadily represented as a divine fulfilment of righteousness on earth, introduced by calamity to all wrong-doers; an ethical revolution with the establishment in the world at large of a condition of things ideal in its peace and justice. The ethical conceptions are enlargements of such pictures as are found in the Exilic Isaiah.^ Jesus had compas- sion on the multitude,^ and shared their national feeling, as witnessed by his wonderful lament over Jerusalem.'' The re- demption was not to be simply ethical, it was to be national and race redemption. It is evident that the universalism of Jesus had its basis in the prophetic conception of the ends of the earth coming up to Jerusalem to see the standard of Jehovah, and bringing with them the exiled wanderers scattered over the earth.* That this proclamation of Jehovah was in the first instance a ' Matt. 13. = Matt. 13 : 44. ^ Matt. 13 : 39-43. *"Die Glcichnisrcden Jesu," vol. II, pp. 3-11, 128-133, 161-171, 514-538, 546-554, 569-581, 581-585. ^X'- » 40 : 9-31, 41 : 1-20, 65 : 13-25, etc. • Matt. 6 : 34. ^ Matt. 23 : 37, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem!" ' Isaiah 49 : 22-23. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 67 judgment is also on a line with the prophetic conception. In the despair of the solitary reformer before the massed corruption of his time, nothing but a judgment and a revolution seems ade- quate to effect the changes he sees must come. What differ- entiated the revolution Jesus expected from the ordinary political agitation was his reliance upon an ethically and spiritually trained community whose existence would justify the judgment, and whose office it would then be to exhibit the Reign of God. This community was organized, so far as we can speak of organization, on the old Hebrew democracy basis.^ The nations had lords who exercised authority; it was not to be so in the spiritual community. In it the " first among you shall be your servant," for "the Son of man came not to be ministered unto but to minister." It is doubtful, to say the least, whether Jesus contemplated any rites or sacraments as marks of this commu- nity, but he probably expected it to re-establish the spiritual Judaism with which he had no quarrel. The relations that were to bind men together were the bonds of obedience and righteousness.^ Those doing the will of his Father were his brethren and his sisters and his mother. These bonds were of a more sacred character than flesh and blood, hence in the time of ultimate stress these bonds would give way and brother would deliver up brother to death, and the father his child.^ The proclamation of this coming ethical Kingdom would, Jesus felt, be attended with the same risks all such proclamations had to run, but he had firm confidence that when the night should be darkest suddenly would come the dawn and the light. All, therefore, were to watch and continue patient in the hour of trib- ulation, as knowing that the hour of deliverance was at hand. VIII. The ethical teachings of Jesus were therefore grounded in faith that God was to create a new spiritual and ethical com- munity. He felt himself to be the herald of that coming King- dom, and to be its founder and teacher. In a certain sense that Kingdom was already potentially present,* as all the elements of ' Matt. 20 : 20-28. ^ Matt. 12 : 46-50. ' Matt. 10 : 21-22. * Luke 17 : 20-22. 68 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS judgment and ethical change were in the atmosphere, although its exact time of fruition could not be well determined. This realization of righteousness was to be the ethical revelation of God, the revealing of his heart and will. Jesus felt himself to be a revealer of that Father's heart, and a declarer of the only true life, that of union with that will and absolute obedience to it. Whether in the buoyant confidence of his earlier proclama- tion, when acceptance of his message by his own generation seemed a possibility; or in the darkening glooms of Gethsemane, when the day-dreams faded in the agony of great spiritual and physical strain, Jesus held firmly to the ethical character of a lov- ing Father, and looked with assurance past the struggles of time to an overwhelming revelation of that compassionate and righteous will in the perfected Kingdom on earth. Thus the Reign of God became the real organizing ethical ideal and the sustaining hope of Jesus' life. It was, no doubt, a bitter heart- breaking disappointment to him that the nation refused to accept his ethical ideals and to enter at once upon the estab- lishment of the Kingdom. He, however, never wavered in his faith that the Kingdom was to come, and when he turned to his disciples it was not to found an institution for conquest, but a spiritual ethical communion for proclamation. They were to eat of his flesh and drink of his life and live his ideals, and thus to share with him in the coming ethical triumphs of a redeemed humanity. He could, therefore, make no compromises, because his Kingdom was * not of this world, i. e., did not share its ideals or its methods. Righteousness could not be established on any basis but that of the unquestioned supremacy of the Father's will. In the description of the temptations on the mount, which no doubt reflects Jesus' pictorial account of his struggle up to his ideal, Jesus represents himself as refusing empire as the basis of the Kingdom, because empire involved compromise and partial submission to another will than the Father's. Jesus felt himself alone on the heights of his ethical dreaming, and yet on the other hand such was the \ividness of ' iK with the genitive is genitive of origin {^k tov K6ff^Lov). NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 69 his faith that he already saw empires faUing, and even then heard the cries of victory in the coming sudden achievement. In the earliest sources Jesus also linked the ethical triumph of the Kingdom with the spiritual energy of his own life and nature. He was himself the Bridegroom.* He could ''forgive sin." ^ The Fourth Gospel only emphasizes what is already in the "sayings." At the same time this energy is not magical, but spiritual and ethical. The way of attainment is union with him in doing the Father's will. The organic basis, therefore, for the teaching of Jesus is found in the realization of the loving will of God on earth and in all human life, and in the revelation of God as essentially com- passionate righteousness in the coming Kingdom. The dynamic force by which this is to be realized is the love of God awakened in men's hearts by the proclamation of his free forgiveness to repentant men, enabling them to live the forgiven life. Sin was separation from the Father, and meant misery and death. Forgiveness brought men back to the Father's house and gave them peace. This peace is here and now, but is to be fully made manifest when the Prince of this World is fully overcome and God reigns supreme. II. THE ETHICS OF PAUL The Pauline interpretation of Jesus is based upon his own personal experience.^ Jesus grew up, as far as we know, in the unchanging sense of perfect unity of life and will with his Father. Literature. — Stevens, G. B.: "The Pauline Theory"; New York, 1892 revised edition, 1897. — Bruce, A. B.: "St. Paul's Conception of Christianity" New York, 1894. — Sabatier, Auguste: "L'Apotre Paul"; 3d ed.; Paris, 1896 English translation by G. C. Findley, New York, 1891. — Pfleiderer, Otto: "Der Paulinismus"; 2d ed.; Leipsic, 1890; also in English translation by E. Peters, New York, 1885; in 2 vols.; London, 1877. — Juncker, Alfred: "Die Ethik des Apostels Paulus"; Halle, 1904. — Titius: "Neutestamentliche Lehre von der Seligkeit"; Freiberg, 1895-1900; 4 vols. — Ernesti, H. F.: "Die Ethik des Apos- tels Paulus"; 3d ed.; Gottingen, 1880. * Mark 2:19. ' Mark 2 : 5. ' Gal. I : 11-17; cf. Acts 9 : 1-9. 70 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS He had indeed advancing visions of his work and its methods,* and he passed through critical periods in his spiritual develop- ment as at Caisarea Philippi " or at Gethsemane,^ but there is no evidence of any anxious searching for God or convulsive re- action from sin, such as mark so generally the religious experi- ences that have told upon the world's history (Augustine, Francis of Assisi, Loyola, etc.). To love God with all his heart and his neighbor as himself was for Jesus the natural and inevitable outcome of the true relationship of the son to the Father.* With Paul the case was very different. He w^orshipped a just but exacting Ruler, and for him righteousness had consisted in exact fulfilment of legal requirement. He longed to be "righteous," and he had all the advantages of birth and training for the attainment of a most distinguished career of righteous- ness,^ and he had utterly failed.^ Paul, like Luther, found no peace in the most exact ritual correctness. Suddenly he saw God in Christ Jesus, no longer as stern law-giver, but as Re- deeming Father, and entered upon the freedom of loving son- ship.^ Neither Jesus nor Paul had any serious quarrel with the purer type of theological speculation prevalent in Judaism. Paul is not primarily a speculative theologian. God was for him one. His will was absolute and holy. He was present by his spirit in the world. The age was evil, and yet the world belonged to God and must one day acknowledge his governance. The Scriptures could not be broken, and the law had been given by Moses, and was holy. But Christ had died and fulfilled the law. How this happened Paul illustrated to himself from Hebrew history rather than cleared it up by any intellectual process.^ Prophecy had foretold the Messianic conquest of the whole earth, and Paul's Christology moves in tlic region of Messianic hope of the more spiritual and ethical character. The risen Christ was coming again, and God in Christ Jesus was the ' Matt. 4 : i-ii. - Mark 8 : 27-9 -.2. ' Mark 14 : 32-42. * Matt. 22 : 34-40. '^ Phil. 3 : 4-6. • Rom. 7 : 7-24. ' Gal. 4 : 1-7. * Rom. 9 and 10. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 71 Christian hope of glory/ In Jesus the Jewish dream of sonship with Jehovah had been completely fulfilled, and we in union with Jesus could enter upon that sonship and cry Abba, Father! In the Messianic death and resurrection the whole legal structure of the past had reached its climax and end. Hence- forth there only remained the proclamation of the Messianic hope, the establishment of the Messianic group, and the spread- ing abroad of the good news that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic faith, and the waiting for the consummation of the new age in which corruption and rebellion, sin and defilement would have no place. This sinless new age takes with Paul the place of "the Reign of God," as Jesus used that term. Paul no more than Jesus ever ceased to be a loyal Jew in thought, in hope, or in expression. Wliat Hellenistic culture he may have had contact with in Tarsus made no impression upon his fundamental view of the world, and it is exceedingly dangerous to a right understanding of Paul to use Greek categories in exchange for the Jewish ones in which Paul's thought so wholly moves. In Paul ethics was linked with a profound spiritual experience, and became a religious force for reorganizing a world socially and economically as well as morally and politically bankrupt. Stoicism had no such saving force, for it was aristocratic, cold, unemotional, individualistic, and non-religious. Oriental re- ligious fervors had no final saving power because they were de- spondent and essentially non-ethical. Neoplatonism was rela- tively barren because only within the reach of those who needed it least, and was loaded down with crude and false views of the world and life. Pauline Christianity swept with a mighty re- ligious enthusiasm over a fevered and disorganized life, and brought with it new views of God's loving purpose and splendid vistas of ethical triumphs and coming victory over the world of sin and death. The Pauline literature on which we may with assurance rely for a reconstruction of his essential message is mainly polemical. '■ I Thess., and captivity letters. 72 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS Leaving aside the vexed question of the doubtful epistles, Timothy, Titus, and II Thessalonians, we have two main groups of writings in which Paul unfolds very fully his ethical system. His main interest was ethical in both groups, but the background of the first group is theological and of the second Christological. To the first group belong Galatians, Romans, and the two letters to Corinth, as well as the first letter to the Thessalonians; in the second group are to be reckoned Philip- pians, Ephesians, and Colossians. And in Philemon we have a fine illustration of Paul's ethical method. The first group of letters deals mainly with the ethical content of the word " righteous," and the second group treats in the main of the springs of ethical conduct. These divisions are not and could not be sharply made. Paul was dealing practically with the extreme ethical needs of dreadfully neglected human life. The nearest approach to a systematic treatise is the letter to the Romans, and its relatively abstract and systematic form may in part be due to the fact that he was writing to a church with which as such he was not personally acquainted. We will then deal first with the content of the ethical life. I. Paul had no idea of breaking with Judaism any more than had his great master, but Judaism had to undergo an essen- tial change if it was to fulfil its Messianic mission.* Legal exactness was no substitute for essential righteousness. The proclamation of the secondary character of the "Torah" at once exposed Paul to honest and excited criticism by Jew and Jewish Christian alike. As a matter of most profound experi- ence the Jewish community saw in their legal and ceremonial observances the only effective barriers between them and their children and the horrible corruptions of the slave-ridden world about them. The Jewish home was not what it should have been,^ but it maintained itself in relative security against the awful deluge described in Rom. i : 24-32 and chiefly because of the separations resulting from the law. To the pious Jewish Christian the only way to the morality » Rom. 1 1 : 1-24. ' John 7 : 53-8 : 1 1. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 73 of Jesus was to become a Jew as Jesus had been a Jew, and when Paul's converts at Galatia went uncircumcised and Sabbathless they naturally remonstrated. Moreover, when Paul was cited as an authority for such lawless conduct they quite naturally attacked his apostolic authority, and denounced him as "lawless," a destroyer of morality, and as dangerous to the purity of the church. The poor Galatians were much taken aback, and followed the directions of the new teachers; upon which Paul wrote the immortal defence of his religious experience and apostolic char- acter which we have in Galatians. There he asserts the freedom of sonship with God,* and the fulfilment of the whole law in the one word "love." ^ But wherever he now went it was only to meet the suspicions, charges, and hatred engendered by his very radical treatment of legalism. Hence in preparing his way for work in Rome he puts his argument in still more syste- matic form as we have it in the wonderful treatise to the Romans. It must be remembered in reading Romans, first that Paul had no quarrel with the theology of his critics, and secondly that the book is throughout, and not in the last chapters only, an ethical treatise. --' The charge against Paul was that he was undermining moral- ity, and was anarchistic and dangerous to the home and church life of the really God-fearing community. He mingled with the uncircumcised and ate with the unclean: hence his critics hon- estly thought of him as an immoral man, as the average High- land Scotchman would now regard the Sabbath observance of even a pious German as stamping him as unchristian. Paul was for the pious Jewish-Christians a corrupter of youth, and they saw in him a tendency toward all kinds of ethical looseness and license. To this charge Paul addresses himself. Paul was therefore compelled to deal fully with the real content of the word righteous.^ With great tact therefore, after the first greeting, he puts himself en rapport with his readers by » Gal. 5:1. ^ Gal. 5 : 14. ' P^'^? dlKaios or in its abstract form ^il"!? diKatoffijvr]. 74 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS sharply denouncing in almost fierce abruptness the hideous sins of the heathen world which he was charged with condoning, but which he hates as they hate them, and for which he has a remedy. He is not ashamed of his gospel; it is a divine dynamic making for " righteousness." ^ It excludes absolutely the dreadful doings described in Rom. i : 18-32 against which God's just wrath is revealed. Paul puts himself at once on record as having no patience or sympathy with the man who leaves Judaism simply that he may be free to sink in this pool of corruption.^ God will judge all, and his wrath will mete out to all according to conduct.' From this judgment none can escape by simply leaving Judaism. But, alas, Paul goes on to show, there are Jews who glory in the law, are ceremonially correct, who deem themselves guides to the heathen, but who as a matter of fact cause God's name to be blasphemed by their immoralities, so that it should be apparent to all that mere ritual correctness was not "righteousness." These Jews were ritually correct! Hence, he argues, Judaism is not a letter but a spirit. Circumcision must be of the heart.* This dreadful experience of the powerlcssness of ritual and legal correctness to really keep a man pure raised a fearful question. The Jew had suffered terribly for his faith. The pious Jew saw in "righteousness" for himself and loved ones the reward of his faithfulness. If the law could not secure this then all his sufferings were in vain. "What did it profit" to be a Jew and suffer the exclusions and ignominies of circumcision? "^ Paul's answer to this question is wholly ethical in its interest, and is very noble and lofty in character. He makes four points, the last one in the fifth chapter, after a long parenthesis. First, to the Jew belongs the high honor of a peculiar service. To him were committed the oracles of God. He at least might know the will of God.* Secondly, although the Jew has not kept the law, this was his unrighteousness and reveals simply the fact that he is with the Greeks under a common condemnation, all have sinned, and all will be judged. Thirdly, but as God is the ' Rom. I : 16. * Rom. 2 : 1-16. ' Rom. 2 : 6. * Rom. 2 : 17-29. * Rom. 3:1. ' Rom. 3 : 2-8. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 75 God of both the Jew and the Gentile, so he has provided a righteousness, and made it manifest which is by faith in Jesus Christ, set forth to be a mercy seat through faith, and this right- eousness is accessible to all Jews and Gentiles, and the sins done before time are borne with in the goodness and forbear- ance of God, so that a man is justified apart from all legal cor- rectness, and both the circumcision and the uncircumcision are justified by faith. At this point the historical question emerges which Paul seeks to meet. All recognized the fact that Abraham was "8iKaLo<;,'^ or a "righteous man." Now Paul links all "righteousness" with a dynamic faith in Christ, and so seems to leave no place for Abraham. With great dialectic skill Paul turns the objection into an argument for his position. He makes three points. (a) Abraham's righteousness was "reckoned to him" and was therefore of grace and not of works,* a fact that David regarded as a blessing, (b) This righteousness, moreover, was reckoned to him while yet uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all who live in faith outside circumcision; ^ and so, as no part of the ritual law is more important than circumcision, it is evident that it is a mere seal of something more vital, i. e., of the faith needed by both the circumcision and the uncircumcision for the attainment of true "righteousness." (c) Hence he who would become a " SiKaioi;, " or righteous man, must not imitate only the outward sign, but take part in the vitalizing faith which made Abraham the father of the faithful.^ Paul thus makes it clear that he has no legal forgiveness in mind, but a dynamic force that will actually enable a man to live the righteous life. And this dynamic is of grace, through the love of God shed abroad in our hearts in Christ Jesus.^ The fifth chapter is given up to the exposition of the gift of God by grace of a free forgiveness on the basis of one act of righteousness, as sin came by one act of disobedience. Sin came as a dynamic for unrighteousness, and this loving faith appears as a dynamic for producing righteousness. This brings Paul back to his * Rom. 4 : 3-8. ^ Rom. 4:11. ' Rom. 4 : 23-25. * Rom. 5 : 5. 76 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS argument concerning the function of the law, and he argues, fourthly and lastly, that the law came in to make trespass abound that grace might still more abound. This was no doubt one of the points Paul had often argued, and to which objection must have been most strongly taken. "What," said the objectors, "shall we continue in sin that grace may abound?" This was the charge of lawlessness so often levelled at Paul, and he meets it at once. "No," he exclaims in the sixth chapter, "let this never be so!" We are dead to sin. His answer is a twofold one. (i) We are in vital union with Jesus Christ, who died once to sin, and rose, and we are arisen in the likeness of his resurrection. This is Paul's teaching of a vital, mystic union with the risen Christ, by which an actual force for living the righteous life becomes ours.^ (2) We are now bond-servants of righteousness as once we were bond- servants of unrighteousness. We are free from sin as once we were free from righteousness. We must therefore now bring forth fruit unto holiness as we once brought forth fruit unto iniquity, and the wages of sin is death, the gift of God is eternal life.^ For Paul ethical purity is life and unrighteousness is death. Paul thus only pushes to its logical outcome the old prophetic description of Jehovah. He is righteousness, and to share his life is to live righteously. And we share his life in union with the risen Christ, for Paul in the seventh chapter pushes the image of death to all outward legal regulation, and life to a spirit of righteousness, under the figure drawn from the marriage relation.' Then he plunges into personal experience. The law has revealed to him in the past his utter helplessness. The law was holy but could only flash its light upon the darkness of a helpless longing. It was powerless to gi\e peace. For even while Paul felt in his mind the holiness of the law, he had no power in his flesh to keep its precepts. Then came deliverance. The spirit of life * in Christ Jesus brought the power to subdue the flesh and its passions; as Christ ' Rom. 6 : 2-14. " Rom. 6 : 15-23 ' Rom. 7 : 1-6. * Rom. 8 : 2. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 77 Jesus condemned sin in the flesh and gained control of it, so all who are not in the flesh, i. e., living in its ideals and bond- servants to its passions, by union with him may live the life of the spirit. Here, then, Paul develops his teaching of an ethical dualism as a matter of profound personal experience. There is ^ a mind of the flesh {a-cip^) and a mind of the spirit. This mind of the flesh has a natural aflfinity with the body (aMfia) and the mind of the spirit a natural affinity to the human spirit, but it is not at all clear that Paul so far left the healthy thought of all Judaism as to think of the body as in itself evil. It was only the seat of this antagonistic principle, and would be redeemed by the spirit of Him who raised up Christ Jesus.^ Thus we enter upon our highest freedom when we are raised as sons of God with Christ Jesus and cry Abba, Father! ' The closing part of the eighth chapter is a splendid identifica- tion of all suffering with the redemptive life and suffering of Christ Jesus just so far as these sufferings bind us to the love of God in Christ Jesus, from which naught can separate us. Thus for Paul aU the suffering of the world points to a coming re- demption, for nothing can separate us from such love as God has revealed in Christ Jesus. At this point Paul again interrupts his argument to defend him- self against the charge of an unpatriotic depreciation of Judaism. Nothing is dearer to his heart, and he could wish himself sepa- rated even from Christ for his brethren's sake.* He revels in the glorious history of past possession of God.^ At the same time he must also recognize the fact of a dual Israel. There is a spiritual Israel, larger than the circumcision, * and this spiritual Israel is not such by virtue of any works or legal claims, but simply in the inscrutable election of an omnipotent God, making vessels of wrath as the potter makes his dishes, willing to show both his power and his goodness.' Paul is dealing here in no sense with the philosophical question of freedom, which could 'Rom. 8:6. ^ Rgm g . jo_ii, » Rom. 8 : 12-17. * Rom. 9:3. * Rom. 9:5. ^ Rom. 9 : 8. ^ Rom. 9 : 19-29. 78 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS hardly arise from his stand-point, but with ethical freedom within the limits set by the omnipotent purpose of God. It is a national election to special service with which Paul deals in the famous ninth chapter, and he charges Israel with failure as pronounced as that of the nations to attain to righteousness, and for the same reason — they sought it not by faith but by ritual correctness, whereas the nations who now seek it in faith do attain to it/ Paul argues further that this confusion of legal correctness with actual righteousness is what is hindering even those who have a zeal for God among the Israelites;^ hence it has hap- pened that the nations have entered in where Judaism has failed.^ Not, indeed, that Judaism has completely failed. There remains a large remnant * whom God's grace has spared and chosen, and indeed the Gentiles will need to remember that if God did not spare the tree onto which he grafted the Gentile church, no more will he spare the branches if they fail to stand in that righteousness which Paul regards as the goal of all being and the secret of all life. He hopes, moreover, that Israel will be provoked into a saving faith by the Gentile church, and to this end he pleads for that complete consecration of life (__to the perfect will of God which alone is rational service.^ ^ What, then, is the content of this righteous life ? In pursuit of ' his plan to demonstrate the ethical character of his gospel, Paul goes on to explicate the actual content of the ethical life. He deals first with the personal temper and attitude of the ethical man,® including the forgiveness of enemies and the overcoming evil with good. Then he sketches the ethical life in its relations to the social organization, thought of, however, as an outside power,' and to the social organization thought of in the second place as neighborhood,^ and then to the community of faith thought of as organized in a religious community,*' and so he closes the ethical treatise with an exhortation to common ' Rom. 9 : 30-33. ^ Rom. 10 : 1-3. ' Rom. 10 : 21. ' Rom. 11 : 4-5. * Rom. 12 : 1-2. " Rom. 12 : 3-21. ' Rom. ij : 1-7. ' Rom. 13 : 8-14. * Rom. 14 : I- 1 5 : 7. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 79 work and personal testimony to the ethical effectiveness of his proclamation of which so many seem afraid. ^ The content of righteousness is therefore, according to Paul, ' loving faith working out the will of God in all life. He opposes to all ritual and legal correctness the spirit of loving obedience by faith in God as seen in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. From this loving faith will proceed that which the law failed to produce, the really ethical life. Thus the ethics of Paul are based on the liberty of loving son- ship through faith in Christ Jesus. For Paul this faith was dynamic in character, a force that alone could overcome sin and death and give victory over the world. This was his own personal experience. What the authority of law, perfectly and sincerely recognized as holy, could not do in producing ethical character, because of the weakness of the flesh, he found could be done by faith working through love. Throughout Romans the contrast is between faith (Trio-Tt?) and law (w>09), but in chapter 5:5 the "love of God" {a^d-TTT) Tov deov) is spoken of as the spring of action, and Jesus Christ is the standing evidence of the love of God. The supreme sacrifice of love is a revelation of the Father's love and redeeming purpose overcoming the wrath of God (opY?; tov deov). The transition, however, from faith to love, and the ultimate identi- fication of the two, is not fully made in Romans. In his letters, however, to the church at Corinth, the ethical system of Paul has a further practical unfolding. To the man or community used to the pressure of external coercion, and accustomed to make such external coercion the measure of morality, the first period of freedom is fraught with danger. Liberty to do right degenerates into license to do evil. The boy at college after the strict discipline of a home, the church after the Reformation, and the litde religious community at Corinth are but examples of the common historical happening. Paul's doctrine of freedom from the outward coercion of law, and subjection to the inward coercion of faith working by love was not only misunderstood by his foes, but misinterpreted by 8o HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS those who thought themselves his friends. The thing Paul's enemies charged his gospel with — lawlessness — appeared in Corinth. No man and no community was ever quite "ripe" for the full exercise of ethical freedom. We learn by our mistakes and abuses. The community at Corinth broke up into quarrel- ling sects, and fornication appeared in a most disgusting shape. All sorts of questions of casuistry, some exceedingly intricate, appeared. For Paul it seemed very simple to decide at any moment just what was the "loving thing" to do, but for raw, ignorant followers there was wanting both his religious genius and the trained purpose. Even Paul was not always able to separate between social conventions and ethical laws, as in his treatment of woman's dress.^ And Paul himself begins the substitution of " tradition " ^ for the body of legal enactment he so firmly rejected, and he himself laid the foundation for a judging and condemning com- munity with the power of the social ban, and even the assumption of divine authority in inflicting the penalty for the soul's sake.^ At the same time he knew what must be at the root of the new life, and the letter to Corinth introduces another antithesis. The danger of substituting for "faith" a "knowledge" (71/600-19) or "wisdom" {co^Ca) was peculiarly Hellenistic. Paul real- ized that not upon knowledge any more than on the outward coercions of a legal system could the ethical life be built. Hence, after meeting the pressing questions of discipline and casuistry forced upon him by the disorders of Corinth, he develops that which he only hints at in Romans, his doctrine of the effective spring of ethical action. This spring is love (aydTrrj). Faith and hope function constantly, but love remains the eternal spring of life and action. In this letter Paul uses also the phrase " Kingdom of God," * but it has not the same content that the phrase bears in the synoptic usage, but rather only one side of that content, the eschatological. ' I Cor. II : 2-16. ' Kadut iraplbdiKa vfiiv, rij irapaZbvui Atarax*'''*- I Cor. 1 1 : a. »I Cor. 5 :3-7. *! Cor. 15 : 50. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 8i The triumph of the new age was to culminate with the reap- pearance of the risen Lord, and all would be changed: mortality (to OvrjTov) would put on incorruption {a^OapaCa), the goal of the ethical endeavor would be fully realized in the Messianic reign. This eschatology is bound up with the ethical struggle in the first letter to the Thessalonians/ This new life of sanctifi- cation is already the new age, but the consummation is not yet, and comes as a thief in the night, bringing condemnation to the wicked and splendid justification to those appointed unto salva- tion in Christ Jesus.^ The whole scheme of Jewish rewards and punishments, fitting but badly as it does into the Pauline ethical construction, is, however, always there, and indeed forms at times a very real moment.' The content of the righteous life, the purity, peace, goodness, and all the fruits of the spirit, * are to have a timeless exemplification in the new age. IV. The character of the love which is with Paul the spring of ethical action finds its fullest exposition in the letters ^ to the Philippians, Ephesians and Colossians. The type is found in the humble loving service of Christ Jesus.* The mind of Jesus is to be in us, and we are to know in it the power of his resurrection, the fellowship of his sufferings, and are to be con- formed to his death.' This identification in suffering and service is to be so complete that the believer fills out what was lacking in the redemptive sufferings of Christ.^ This love is primarily for the "household of faith," ^ but the whole "Kingdom of the Son of his love," ^^ and then the whole new order is the ultimate object of this loving service. In these letters the writer is forced to oppose the life of service in love as the spring of action to "philosophy and vain deceit" " proposed as a substitute. The mystic union of the church with the risen Christ, as a loving * As II Thessalonians furnishes the ethical student no new point of view, it is for us unimportant to discuss its genuine Pauline character. 2 1 Thess. 5:9. 'I Cor. 15 : 12-19. * Gal. 5 : 22. * These letters are Pauline, whether by Paul or no, and represent the progress of his thought. ^ Phil. 2 : i-ii. '' Phil. 3 : 10-16. » Col. I : 24. " Gal. 6 : 10. '"Col. 1 : 13. " Col. 2 : 8. V 82 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS fellowship, becomes more and more his theme/ and each letter ends with practical exhortation and explication of the sanctified life. Salvation is indeed sanctification,^ it is light as over against darkness. Christ is to dwell in our hearts through faith that we may be rooted in love.^ And more and more Christ Jesus becomes for the writer the absolute and complete manifestation of the Father's loving redeeming will. This loving divine will is to be our will, this love our love, and if this be the case then in the true freedom of sons we live the life of complete service, and evil will not be so much as named among us as becomes "holy ones." ^ This conception of the community of " holy ones" is taken from the Old Testament, but the spring of action is no longer fear and the coercions of an external law, but an actual indwelling of the invisible but risen Christ, who is present in the holy community for their complete sanctification, and who will ultimately reveal himself in his body which is the church.^ For the writer the spiritual man as such could not sin, but we are still in the flesh (eV t^ aapKi) and have temptations of the flesh, as in Gal. 4 : 13-15, which must be overcome, and he does not count himself as having laid hold of but as pressing on to the prize,* hence his practical experience taught him that those who were "spiritual" must restore such as were taken in a fault, in the spirit of meekness, lest they also be tempted/ and discipline of the flesh was necessary to maintain the supremacy of the spirit.^ The spiritual life on earth was a conflict, and that not with things visible, but with the invisible ; not simply against flesh and blood, but against spiritual wickedness,® and the final triumph would come only with the appearance of the Lord and the complete establishment of the sinless age.'" The dualism of Paul is therefore ethical and not metaphysical. The flesh is only the occasion of sin and is not in itself sinful, and spiritual forces are mustered on both sides of the conflict. * Eph. 3 : 1-19. ' Eph. 5 : 1-14. ' Eph. 3:17. * Eph. 5 : 3. "Col. 1:24. « Phil. 3 : 13-14. 'Gal. 6:1. » I Cor. 9 : 27. * Trvtu/ittTiKA T^s irovTjplai Eph. 6:12. '"I Thess. 4 : 13-18. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 83 About the nature of the resurrection body Paul did not care too closely to inquire; it would, however, be free from corrup- tion and be spiritually complete/ This hope was based upon the triumph of Christ over death and the grave, whose power and sting were sin.^ The ultimate triumph is ethical, and the goal the establishment of a kingdom of love and of righteousness, in which all members have their place and function, and without envy or jealousy,^ with Christ Jesus as the head and this com- munity as his body.* In the application of his fundamental principle to the conduct of life, with which Paul closes all his main treatments^ and which adorn all hi letters, Paul deals largely with the personal life and the life of the small ecclesiastical community. The early Christian could not be held responsible for that social order, which Jesus and Paul rightly regarded as rapidly passing away and as in itself condemned. Any social order was, how- ever, ordained of God, and obedience to it within the limits of the primary obedience to Christ was the duty of every Christian.® In the beautiful little note to Philemon returning him a slave whom Paul had converted to the hope of the gospel, Paul puts the whole relationship between man and man on such a basis that its logic excludes not only slavery but most of what to-day is held as being legitimate in the wage-relationship, as the slave- relationship was held legitimate in Paul's time. Onesimus was to be received as a brother, and in the well- regulated family the brother is neither exploited nor devoured. Brotherhood does not exclude service, and the slave is to remain a slave if God so wills ^ (Philemon 13), but it includes mutual service,* and the bond is not financial profit, but love in Christ Jesus. The holy community was one of activity, and working with the hands for daily bread was a Christian obligation in which Paul » I Cor. IS : 35-45. == I Cor. 15 : 55-56. ' I Cor. 12:12-31. * I Cor. 12 : 27. * Rom. 12 : 1-15 : 4; Gal. 5 : 13-6 : 10; Eph. 4 : 25-6 : 20; Phil. 3 : 1-4 : 9; Col. 3 : 5-4 : 6 * Rom. 13 : 1-6. ' I Cor. 7:21. * Philem. 19. 84 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS himself had his share. So that the saying in II Thess. 3 : 10 and the account there given of Paul's habit, if not from his pen, is certainly in accord with his habit and spirit. On sexual purity Paul naturally laid great stress, as the family is with him as with Jesus the constant type of the recon- structed society, and the relationship of husband to wife the most fitting figure of the relationship of Christ to his church.' To defile the body was, for Paul, to defile the temple of the Holy Spirit, to make a member of Christ's body impure.^ The virt- ues Paul emphasizes are those of spirit and heart, and the simple daily life of the average convert is glorified by making it a com- munion with God in Christ Jesus, r When one contrasts the ideal character as drawn from Paul's letters with any reasonable fulfilment of Plato's ideal, one is struck with the softer, tenderer, more child-like conception. The self-centred, almost haughty, aristocratic righteousness of the good man, the just citizen, the noble patriot, the loving friend, and true seeker after truth in Plato's dialogues seems cold and beautiful as a Grecian marble, compared to the loving gentleness of the Christian ideal. Not indeed that Paul's picture is ful- filled either in the feminine type or the monkish ideal, but in the warmer, softer lines we recognize a distinctly new ethical ideal emerging from the religious enthusiasm born of his contact with Christ Jesus. His picture of the relation of husband to wife, of child to parent, of fellow-Christian to fellow-Christian, whether bond or free, of citizen even to the oppressive and passing social order, is entirely different from any painted even on the heights of Roman Stoicism or amidst the beauties of Platonic ideals. Most striking and impressive is the vision of God in the face of Christ Jesus as Paul saw and proclaimed him. The right- eousness of God is no legal exactness, no unrelenting enforcement of holy law. God's grace is free; we are the free sons of a Father whose love has been not only exhibited but poured out in the life and blood of his Son, and what that Father longs for is our ' Eph. s : 22-33. ' I Cor. 6 : 12-20. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 85 sanctification, that we may be companions of his holiness and sit together in heavenly places with Christ Jesus. This is not the place to discuss especially the dogmatic system of the Pauline letters. It is easy to show that as we have them Christology is not quite clear or self-consistent, and that the doctrine of redemption moves in lines still Judaistic. Perhaps had we more of Paul's teaching, or had it in a less polemical form, some things now obscure might be cleared up, though it is equally possible that more difficulties would arise. Such was Paul's genius and so lofty and splendid his ethical point of view that he could not make room for the real diffi- culties his doctrine of ethical freedom raises. We all come out from authority timidly and looking back to the easy flesh-pots of past slavery. Few men shake off the chains wholly. The strain is tremendous, and Paul's poor little household churches seemed from any past race-experience wholly unfitted for the struggle. Paul's faith was in the supernatural indwelling grace of the forgiven life, but more than once he had to appeal to his own authority and even to threaten with spiritual penalty. But where, then, is the spiritual independence? Who is to decide between Paul claiming independence of even the apostles,* and some prophet claiming independence of Paul? The church was to try the spirits whether they were of God or not, but by what standard? The only answer Paul could give was "by my gospel." Paul himself had to go back to a tradition for the ad- ministration of the communion feast, as "received from the Lord," ^ and even with him the traditions were not lightly to be despised. He himself felt that even while throwing aside a whole system of past legal enactment, in some way its perfection and completeness had to be maintained and defended. Practically Paul seems to have sought to answer the question along the only lines possible. He founded organizations charged with the task of oversight and control. He could not foresee that there would arise out of this organization a legalism and spiritual tyranny as oppressive as the synagogue ever was, and ' Gal. 2 : 1-21. ' I Cor. 11 : 23-29. 86 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS vested with completer political and judicial powers than was ever the Sanhedrin. The ethical systems of Jesus and Paul are for mature minds. Undeveloped human life lends itself to tyranny, the weak long for shifted responsibility, the strong eagerly grasp the opportunity for exploitation. Jesus founded no church and laid no stress on any ritual or sacramentarian system, but Jesus was taken from his followers before the movement compelled organization. Paul and the apostles were faced by conditions that compelled organization, and the ethical system of Paul presupposed an organization sufficiently sanctified and transformed by vital union with the redeeming purpose of God in Christ Jesus to be entrusted with loving fraternal authority, as he felt he could himself be in- trusted with the paternal authority, an authority that has as its goal not feeding children always with milk, but developing men and women free in Christ Jesus to do righteousness. The early Christians, however, were not freemen, they were only freedmen. Paul was not understood,^ and his words were wrested by more than the ignorant and unsteadfast. To some the freedom in Christ Jesus meant, in spite of all Paul could do, license and antinomianism; to others his organization was a permanent source of power not for the training of independent spiritual life, but for holding in spiritual subjection, of course for their professed ultimate good, men and women. In all ages multitudes readily seek refuge from distracting but educative questioning in the dogmatisms of priestly and legal systems. Paul himself had sought peace in such surrender to a hierarchy. It was the last thing his spirit would have desired to establish again another hierarchy as exacting. Yet that is exactly what happened. In the system of Paul are the germs of all that came after. For weal or woe an organization sprang up that would have been an historic impossibility without his activity, which changed the dynamic into status, and gave to the world the hierarchy whose ethical systems it will become later our task to take up. « II Pet. 3 : i6. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 87 III. THE ETHICS OF THE JOHANNINE INTERPRETATION OF JESUS As time pa'ssed the Jewish-Christian danger of narrowness and legahsm had seemingly been overcome. Paul's ministry was no longer doubted, and the tragic fate of Jerusalem finally handed the hegemony of the Christian organization over to the Gentile section. At the same time the Jewish world was still the door through which Christianity was passing into the world's history, although it was now the Hellenized cosmopolitan Judaism which was scattered over the whole world, but which we know best through Philo and his following in Alexandria.^ And now the danger was a complicated one. Redemption was the theme of this religious view of the world against which, perhaps rather instinctively than with full consciousness of what it was, Paul and John protest. This redemption from darkness, error, and sin was thought of by the various sects and mysteries as essentially freedom from the body, and this freedom, it was taught, could be gained by initiation into various cults and by learning mystic formulas in connection with equally mystic rites. Even Judaism began to identify "wisdom" with these formulae, and to interpret its own primitive ceremonial in terms of the various astronomical and vegetal cycles which gave char- acter to these oriental sects. ^ Even Paul's own teaching of the risen Christ, known hence- forth not after the fiesh,^ seemed to give a common standing- LiTERATURE. — The best of the large literature is collected by Schmiedel, P. W., in Cheyne's "Encyclopaedia Biblica," and by Reynolds, H. R., in Hastings's "Bible Dictionary"; cf. also Sanday, "Authorship and Historii Characters of the Fourth Gospel"; New York, 1905. — Holtzmann, H. J.: "Johannes-Evangelium," in his "Hand-Commentar zum N. T.," 1890, and Bacon, B. W.: "The Fourth Gospel in Research and Debate," 1910. The more recent discussions are dealt with in the " Theologische Rundschau" for January, 1910. * Schurer, E.: "Geschichte des judischen Volkes," 3d ed., vol. I, pp. 1S7- 190; vol. II, pp. 21-67 and 72-175; also English translation. 2 One of the best introductions to this world of religious thought and feeling is the work already mentioned, Cumont's "Les Religions Orientales dans le Pag- anisme Romain," Paris, 1906. ^ Kara aapKo. II Cor. 5 : 16. 88 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS ground. The historical Jesus could be thrust aside and a divine light-giving principle placed in the foreground and identified with the risen and mystic indwelling Christ of the Pauline Christianity. Yet neither Paul nor John contemplated such a thing, and the Fourth Gospel is one long protest against this very process. This oriental intrusion was almost imme- diate. Gnostic Judaism was contemporary with Jesus and Paul, and even Paul had to guard his teaching from Gnostic distortion. The Fourth Gospel is a brave protest against an unethical and essentially irreligious explanation of Jesus as a magic ap- pearance that was not really human because humanity as flesh was evil. Jesus, he insists, was actually human, and he calls the witnesses from friend and foe to attest the reality of the man Jesus and to prove his earthly life. He also wishes to demon- strate that this historic figure is identical with the divine Person of the Pauline thought. The Johannine literature is more directly Christological than even Paul. The ethics is not so systematically developed, but a religious ethics is the central interest. The same fundamentally Jewish world of thought is at all points apparent. Ethics is in the last analysis the essential relement in the religious life, and in the foreground is Paul's doctrine of the freedom from death and sin and the victory over the grave by love. From the opening hymn to the final scene after the resur- rection, the Fourth Gospel is one long protest against the resolv- ing the historic Christian experience of God in the person of Jesus Christ into a vague metaphysics and a magic sacramental mystery.* For this reason the Gospel summons the witnesses one after another not only to attest the historical character of Jesus, as over against Doceticism, but also that they may bear witness to what Jesus meant for them. It is Jesus in the actual flesh who has miracle-working power and can raise the dead or turn water ' The treatment of baptism and the omission of the sacrament feast are per- haps noteworthy protests against the substitution of sacramental magic for ethical and religious life in the Hellenic and oriental mystery-worship. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 89 into wine. It is he that has power to lay down his life and to take it up again.* The surest tests of these oriental pagan fellowships was orthodox repetition of theological formulte and the right ad- ministration of the sacramental mysteries. John felt sure that only those who willed to do the will of the Father would even know of the knowledge ^ or teaching. The essentially unethical magic of sacred places common to all primitive paganism, but elaborated by these oriental sects, the Fourth Gospel attacks in Jesus' talk with the Samaritan woman.^ The way to redemption is not magic or formulas, but obedience to the Father's will as Jesus obeyed his Father.^ According to the Fourth Gospel the teaching of Jesus is very simple, and all the speculative elaboration of the oriental cult was simply ob- structive.* For the Fourth Gospel the actual ethical experience of overcoming the world and sin is bound up, not with some vague, transcendental Logos-principle, but with the actual in- carnation of God in an actual human being. The chief office of the Christian is as a witness to this ethically transforming power.® There are those who cannot believe because they are of the world and the world loves its own, but hates the Father,^ and to them the exhibition of God is only to their condemnation, seeing but not believing the "works." ^ Of course there is the mystery of the pre-existent divine life becoming flesh, but this is attested by the signs and wonders, and "the witness" of those who beheld his glory. The faith is thus based upon the impression Jesus made upon his generation, for many believed him who were afraid to say so,^ and upon the words and works Jesus did among men. And all classes and conditions of men are successively described as coming under this influence and accepting the claims of the * John II : 1-16; 2 : i-ii; lo : i8. ' John 7 : 17. • John 4 : 20-25. * John 17 and 15. ' John 3:12. •John 14 : 25-30; 21 : 15-18; I John i : 5-2 : 6; and many passages. ' John IS : 18-23. ° John 15 : 24. » John 12 : 42, 90 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS Messianic messenger: John the Baptist, Philip and Nathanael, Andrew and Peter, the Ruler of a wedding feast, Nicodemus, the woman of Samaria, the nobleman of Capernaum, and so on. The content of righteousness is the loving acceptance of this manifestation of God's love as seen in the historic Jesus, and the confession not with the lips only, but in loyal surrender to him that Jesus is the Christ, is the test of discipleship.^ Without doubt we have here a serious transposition of em- phasis. Orthodoxy rather than a right attitude of the heart toward the purpose of God is made the standard. As so often happens in trying to bar out the loose intellectualism of vague Neoplatonism and Jewish Gnosticism, the way is prepared for the substitution of formulae for life. For our author it was almost unthinkable that any one should sincerely repeat the now slowly gathering catchwords of the young ecclesiasticism, and not be devoted, as was the author himself, to those ethical ideals with which he had had communion in sharing the Kingdom purpose of Jesus Christ. The ethics of the Johannine literature is contained largely in the first letter. The criterion for the Christian life assumes a double aspect. For the author they must be held together. He who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten of God, and whosoever loveth him that begat lovcth him also that is begotten of him.^ The ethics flows from this "belief," but this belief is more than an intellectual perception, it is the verdict of the heart.^ At the same time the formula? begin to have a place which Jesus never gave them and which Paul never asserted.* However, love is still an essential element of any true " belief," for if we cannot love our brother whom we have seen, we cannot love God whom we have not seen,^ and out of this fountain of love flow all the real elements of good conduct.* Ethics consists in overcoming the world by faith ^ and thus possessing here and now eternal life.* The man begotten of ' I John 2 : 23. •' I John 5:1. '1 John 3 : 19-24. « I John 4: 1-6. 'I John 4: 20. « I John 3 : 3-12. M John 5 : 4-5. ' I John 5:11. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 91 God cannot sin, and the evil one toucheth him not.' Yet the point of view is not clear, for directions are given for dealing with the sinning brother, who sins "not unto death." For in this letter we have also that fateful beginning of a classification of sins into venial and mortal.^ If we read the literature of the early church in the light of other young enthusiasms we can understand this complete identification of opinion with conduct. It was hard for any Christian teacher to understand how we could suffer in the name of Jesus Christ, repeat the catchwords of the following, and not also share the ethical enthusiasm which lent real value to these phrases. Either test was sufficient for establishing the good-will of a disciple, either his orthodoxy or his conduct, because these could not be thought of as really separated. Exactly the same point of view appears in the time of the Reformation or to-day in the Socialist party. """^ The Johannine literature is aimed evidently at the beginnings of that reinterpretation of Jesus in the phrases, rites, and mys- teries of the popular pagan cults round about. In this reinter- pretation the catchwords of a Judaistic Gnosticism and a Hellenic syncretism were given a Christian sense, and the historic Jesus was explained away in eternal emanations, and in the identification with a creative Logos was made really a tcrtium quid between man and God, and all significance for human life was in danger of being lost in vague and unethical Gnostic speculation. Hence it is almost painful to find attri- buted to the simple-hearted Johannine author opinions he hardly understood, but so far as he did understand them desperately fought.^ If any one had asked the author of the first letter what he meant by the expression "greater is he that is in you,"* can any one doubt that his reply would be that of the Old Testament ' I John 5 : 18. = I John 5 : 16-17. ' Vide Ziegler's treatment, pp. 105-114, ' Geschichte der christlichen Ethik," 1892. * " fiel^wp iffriv 6 iv vfjiiv^" I John 4 : 4. 92 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS and not of Greek metaphysics ? that is to say, the union is ethical, one of love and purpose, one of sonship and parentage, not one of metaphysical unity which he would neither deny nor affirm because he was no more interested in it than many of the Anglo- Saxon readers of these pages will be. The heart and life of the Johannine author's faith was that in the historic Jesus God had become manifest to the world as forgiving, redeeming love, and that all who had faith to accept this appearance of God in human life as the Messiah would have worked in them the new birth and in union with the risen Christ would serve God in love and holiness. One thing more remains to be remembered. The ethics of both Paul and John were profoundly religious, they were an impartation from above or rather the outcome of an impartation. The spirit of God came as a dynamic force into the human life,* and thus life was sharply divided between those living the life of God, of love and righteousness; and the life of Satan, of hate, the world, and unrighteousness. The "natural virtues" were for the early Christian enthusiasts, as they have been to religious enthusiasm in all ages, but "glittering vices." There might be "sons of perdition" among the disciples,' but sooner or later, either in doctrine or conduct or both, they would be revealed and judgment meted out to them. To import into the Johan- nine literature, with its simple religious view of the world, ethical, philosophical, and metaphysical subtleties born of the Grecian schools is to misunderstand its message in all the strength and weakness of its religious enthusiasm born of contact with a great religious manifestation. Note. — The distinctly Jewish character of John's Gospel appears in the supremacy of God as Creator of all things (i : 3). The Jews were "God's own" (i : 11; cj. also i :3i), although he does not use the Pauline expression "sons of God" {mol tov 6eov), and perhaps softens it to "children of God" {rmva deov) (r : 12), yet this is in obedience to strong Jewish feeling of God's ' John 3 : 3-12. 'John 17 : 12. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 93 supremacy and separateness. Jesus is the "only begotten" {fiovoy€vri<;), we are only "children." No writer, not even Matthew, is more insistent on the fulfilment of Scripture (i : 23; 2 :i7; 5 :45; 7 142; 12 : 15, 3M0; 13 : 18; 15 125; 17 : 12; 19:24; 19 : 28, 36-37; 20:9), or more careful to identify Jesus with the Jewish hope of the Messiah (i : 41-45; 4 : 22-26), or dwells more on the exclusive claims of Judaism (4:22; 7 : 19; 8 : S3)' Even a high-priest must prophesy the truth (11 : 51), though unwittingly. IV. THE ETHICS OF THE OTHER CANONICAL WRITINGS The Book 0} Hebrews.— The modern student finds it hard to understand how any one could ever have assigned this letter to Paul. The style, aim, and argument separate it entirely from the literature we identify with him. The question of the circle to which the letter is addressed is not so easy.^ The prevalent opinion among recent critics that it is addressed to the Gentile Christians at Rome presents many difficulties, and it seems almost easier to fall back on the older opinion that it was ad- dressed to the free, allegorizing, Hellenistic Judaism, although not especially dealing with Gnosticism. The special purpose is to show how the continuity of religious history is to be maintained by the right understanding of the place of faith, and the letter reflects a time when the Pauline conception of faith had been accepted although by no means fully understood. Although the letter closes with ethical instructions (13 : 1-17), and is religious-ethical throughout, its main emphasis is a work- ing philosophy of religion; a brave attempt to demonstrate that all the spiritual values of Judaism had been conserved in the ' Cf. Zahn, Theod.: "Einleitung in das Neue Testament," 2 vols., 2d ed., Leipsic, 1900, vol. II, p. iii (English translation by M. W. Jacobus, Edin- burgh, 1909, 3 vols, vol. II, pp. 293-366); Harnack, A., in "Die Zeitschrift fiir die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft," 1900, p. 16; and Holtzmann, H. J.: "Einleitung in das N. T.," 3d ed., 1892, pp. 292-309, where literature is given very fully; Vincent, M. R.: Word Studies in the N. T., Scribner's, 1900, vol. IV, pp. 361-585. 94 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS Christian group. For the author faith is the assurance of things hoped for/ and this faith joins all the heroes of religious history into a great cloud of testifiers while the runner in the race leaps forward for the prize of high calling in Christ Jesus.^ The recurring sins of fornication, money-loving, the running after "strange teachings," and injunctions about meats are all con- demned, and the virtues of hospitality, visiting prisoners, obedi- ence to rulers, and offering sacrifices of praise are commended.^ The letter is at one with the Johannine literature in the em- phasis upon the oneness of the suffering historic Jesus and the risen Christ, and the making perfection in a future glory the end of the Christian life. The book deals with the question of angels as in a sense rivals of Jesus Christ,* thus pointing to an abuse that allegorizing Judaism (Philo) was likely to foster, but the letter can hardly be classed as an anti-gnostic document. One of the c^uestions raised has ethical significance, although generally treated as a theological topic, namely, the significance of sacrifice. And the answer of the letter is vague and unsatis- factory. The real interest is in establishing the priestly char- acter of Jesus rather than in using his death as symbolic of sacrifice. At this point the contacts with the Pauline and Johannine conceptions are strikingly few. The covenant character of the sacrifice is brought out,^ but the letter does not stop here; Jesus is at once sacrifice and priest. True it is that Jewish sacrifices cannot take away sin,® but the one sacrifice can and does.' How, the letter does not explain. It is an a^eai<; and the al^la t^? Biad7]ic7]<; makes the believer holy, and is the way into a living communion with God.* There is almost the contempt for the blood of bulls and goats characteristic of the eighth century prophets," at the same time they are done awa" with by fulfilment. »Heb. ii:i. » Heb. ii : 4-12 : 4. • Heb. 13 : 1-17. ♦Heb. 1:1-2: 12; cf. Col. 2 : 18. '■ Hub. 6 : 13-20; 7 : iS-25; 8 : 6-13; 9:1; ii-iS. « Heb. 10 : 1-4. ' Heb. 10 : 14. " llch. 10 : iS and 10 : 28-31. * Heb. 10 : 1-5. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 95 Sacrifice has always carried with it some taint of the immoral conception of God as a demon to be feared and bribed into good nature. At the same time the significance of sacrifice as a sharing of the meal with God and thus inviting him to fellow- ship and communion with the tribal group is almost equally potent, and both of these conceptions color the somewhat hazy view of Hebrews. On the one hand it is linked with the turning away of God's vengeance/ and on the other, as we have seen, it is the signal evidence of covenant relations with God. Thus sacrifice in some way cleans the conscience and prepares a way to God, but it is the living sacrifice of Jesus and not the sacrifices of beasts. This ethical interpretation of sacrifice marks an advance, although it had its distinct perils for the thought of the future church.^ James and The Revelation to John.— Two canonical books reflect almost nothing of Christianity as Paul and the author of the Fourth Gospel understood it. The contents of the Apocalypse and the letters of James have as their common in- terpretation of the Christian message the near coming of the Messiah, the formation of a community to await that coming in a spirit of loving brotherhood and good works. James ^ may not be, probably, indeed, is not, a polemic against Paul, but it is directed against the outcome of Paul's teaching in the minds of some of his followers. The legal Jewish character of both books is quite beyond dispute, and even if we allow for the fact that no author is likely to put his whole theology into one letter, yet Luther's judgment on both books is not far wrong. Luther called James a "strawy letter" ("eine recht stroherne"), mean- ing dry and juiceless from the evangelical point of view. The ethics of James is a noble and forceful statement of the loftiest morality of the Old Testament, combined with the old democracy of the Holy Community, in its best estate. It is filled ' Heb. 10 : 26-31. ~ Cf. Professor George F. Moore's article on "Sacrifice," in Cheyne's "Ency- clopaedia Biblica" for full exposition of the Biblical material. '■' 2 : 14-26, particularly. 96 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS with fine practical common sense and clear insight into the weaknesses that began to show themselves in the Christian com- munity, such as excessive respect for any exceptionally rich man who "patronized" the Christian community/ What that temp- tation was and is every observer knows. The Jewish dictum that he who offends against the law in one point is guilty of all,^ is in James (2 : 10) used to very different purpose from that to which Paul puts it. For Paul it was the condemnation of the whole law. For James as for Matthew (5 : 19) it was an in- centive to still greater legal care over conduct. James, however, had no quarrel with the law of liberty,^ which had become, no doubt, a catchword of the Pauline Christianity, but with the abuses arising from identifying license with liberty. But to combat this he goes about his task very differently and distinctly on a lower level than either Paul or John. He makes no such application of the "inborn word which is able to save," * as Paul makes of it in Romans. ' Christianity is with him an ethical ideal to be attained; with Paul it was a dynamic for at- taining the ideal. The letter of James would no more set a world on fire with new ethical enthusiasm than did Seneca's "Epistolae Morales." The letter shows no such grasp of the power of the forgiven life as is reflected in the Johannine mes- sage or the letter to Hebrews, The same is true of the Revelation of John. All that im- mediately concerns us are the ethical exhortations of the first chapters ^ and the closing beautiful poems of the consummation.® All of these move on the highest plane of Old Testament enthusiasm. The exhortations are fine reproductions of eighth and seventh century prophecy, and the consummation is a noble climax to Messianic dreaming; but there is nothing distinctively Christian in the whole book as Paul and John understood Christianity. It was Christian as, no doubt, many understood Jesus, and although Paul may not be deliberately ignored in 21 : 14, his omission from the apostolic number is significant. • James 2 : 1-13. * Gal. 3 : 10. ' James i : 25. * James 1:21. * Chapters 2 and 3. * Chapters 20 to 33. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 97 The God of the Revelation is the old conception of the war god of Sinai, who comes down in wrath and power to restore the chosen Holy Community to a place of prosperity, and to re- ward all its sufferings with appropriate bliss. This Holy Community is indeed no longer Jewish, but the persecuted Christian sect that has been called of God, because it saw in Jesus the Messianic hope and looked for his speedy coming in power, but without any serious change in its thought of God, because of the "Lamb of God," or any profound im- pression of the real force that was to transform human life and make the Messianic Kingdom possible. It moves between the poles of repentance and ultimate victory, along the path of suffering, in true Jewish fashion, the only real contact with Christ Jesus being the fact that he is the suffering Lamb already entered upon the victory and coming in power to share it with all who name his name and do his works. The Ecclesiastical Literature. — However little Jesus may have formally organized a following it was inevitable that a fellowship should gather about his memory. The faith in his resurrection became the foundation-stone of the new organization. Its triumphant proclamation of a risen Christ called many to the new life for which Jesus stood, and the new hope of his reap- pearance in glory, which stirred the hearts of his disciples, and made them ready to face danger and death in the name of their risen Master, The task of separating the materials that enter into the book of Acts may be left to the experts; we can only note that the simple Baur-Tubingen explanation of a deliberate attempt to harmonize two distinct conceptions does not explain the complicated phenomena by which the student is confronted in the New Testament literature. There were not simply two, there were many diverse tendencies, as we can see in the frequent rebukes of sectarian strife and by the way the church at Corinth was torn by faction. More and more a strong organization arose in the minds of the leaders as a necessity for holding together the various elements. We have seen how against his great fundamental 98 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS principle Paul found it necessary to assert himself as an outward authority, and to call upon the organization to assert its authority for the same purpose. Whatever may have been Paul's own theoretical conceptions about his fallibility/ he, like all great leaders, had no doubt at all about his being able to discern between the essential and non- essential elements in his teaching, and had no doubt whatsoever about the infallible character of his teaching when dealing with the essential things of faith.^ As, however, the great leaders died or were removed from the organizations they founded, the note of triumphant certainty could not be transferred to another generation, and an organization and a tradition began to take the place of the living voice, and memories of the "words of the Lord" or of directions given by the great apostles gradually became the rule of the organization's life. The formation of a Christian morality became the immediate concern of the church. It was enormously important that the persecutions should be for righteousness' sake,^ and that the persecutors should have no excuse for their oppression. And it was all-important that when Jesus came again he should find a holy community waiting for him.^ For all the leaders, Paul, the authors of I Peter, I Timothy, and Matthew, obedience to even oppressive rulers within the limits of loyalty to God was a most important duty. Only such innocent suffering bound life up with the life. and sufferings of Jesus; and the reality of the religious enthusiasm was alike for Paul, John, and James attested by "fruit unto holiness." The new church was born of a divine longing for vital justice, a justice neither ritual nor philosophy had attained to, but which faith born of contact with the life and death of Jesus gave assurance of; and the new fellowship was called together to realize that justice and give to the world the Holy Community. Paul addresses himself to the "saints" or "holy ones." * It was inevitable, therefore, that there should grow up a litera- ' As in I Cor. 7 : 25. ^ q^j 2:11. 3 1 Pet. 4 : 15-19. * Rev. 2 : 1-3 : 22. * Rom. 16 : 15. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 99 ture based on the teachings of the great leaders, and often in their name, in which this organization was now a most conspicu- ous factor. The first letter to Timothy in the name of Paul, but hardly likely to be as a whole or even in part from his pen, reflects the special moralities growing up for the church and its officers. Sound doctrine is as important as correct life, and the officers must be most especially beyond ethical reproach.^ The begin- nings of a false and legal asceticism are boldly condemned.^ The freedom of the gifts is now limited by the ecclesiastical arrange- ments.^ Arrangements are already made for the support of those giving themselves to ruling well.^ The responsible leaders are protected by special arrangements.^ When we ask ourselves what did "sound doctrine" mean to the average ignorant early Christian, it is impossible to believe that the things that interest us as theologians had then any more than now a real place in the lives of the religious following. "Sound doctrine" meant, however, unity for a fighting organ- ization. Early the little Christian church meant to gather from the whole world a "holy community" to prepare for the coming Utopia and to receive the Master when he came.^ This organ- ization had to defend itself and give a reason for the faith that was held so firmly.^ It was quite as important that all should give the same reason as that that reason should be right. The unity of a fighting propaganda was the real reason for the gradual formation of an ecclesiastical dogma ^ in which an ethics was, of course, included. The traditions had to be organized, and not Paul and Peter only; but the words of Jesus, the teach- ings of James and John, the traditional interpretations of the Psalms, and the usages of the early communities, had all to be woven into a unity and a self-consistent "teaching." The real interest was not theoretical, but practical, a platform on ' I Tim. 3 : 1-13. ^ I Tim. 4 : 1-5. » j Tim. 4 : 14. *■ I Tim. 5 : 17-18. » I Tim. 5 : 19. « Matt. 28 : 19. ■> I Pet. 3 : 15. * Cf. art., "Socialism as a Rival of Organized Christianity," "North Ameri- can Review," June, 1904. loo HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS which to stand and a definite picture of the future hope. In the Gospel of Matthew we have also the beginnings of this ecclesiasti- cal programme. The words of Jesus are taken out of their historical setting and arranged as an ethics and constitution for the coming Kingdom of Justice/ and the law of the church begins to be based definitely upon the personal authority of the apostles.^ In Paul the one intense longing was for personal holiness; to the vast mass to whom he addressed himself the longing was not so much for their own personal holiness as for a world without the wrongs and hardships other people's unholiness brought upon them. For Jesus and Paul, as for John also, righteousness and peace with God were eternal life. For the vast mass of Christians righteousness was a condition on which an eternal life could be secured, and eternal life was the new era of social justice, when the possessionless working class would enter upon its rights, joys, and rewards. The Gospel of Luke is full of this hope and longing of the oppressed proletariat.' Hence steadily the ethics of ecclesiasticism becomes a law to be imposed on others, rather than, as in the beginning, an autono- mous regulation of each life by a common loving enthusiasm. In the ecclesiastical portions of Matthew and Luke, and in I and II Timothy, I and II Peter (including Jude), and in the Chris- tian material in Revelation, we come more and more in contact with a law-giving organization to take the place of a dynamic spiritual principle. Nor was it possible for Paul the great organ- izer to overlook this obvious need. The dynamic spiritual voice, when it jailed or grew weak, must be strengthened or even sup- planted by the law-giving organization.'' The essential differ- ence between law and ethics is the character of the coercion. For law external coercion is essential, for an ethical compulsion the coercion must be internal. » Matt. 5, 6, and 7. ' Matt. 16 : 17-18. *Cf. Rogge, C: "Der irdische Besitz im Neucn Testament," 1897, and Cone, Orello: "The Rich and the Poor in the New Testament," New York, 1902. *I and II Corinthians and the Captivity Epistles. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS loi True the early church had no force of a physical character to enable it to transform its ethics into law, but the force of the communal ban ^ was even by Paul used evidently as a powerful external coercion; and more and more as fellowship with the Christian church cut a man off from other life and social contacts did the communal ban become a terrible instrument of external coercion. Let, for instance, in a manufacturing district in Germany, a Social Democrat who has cut himself off by his political opinions from all fellowship of an intimate character save with his fellow Social Democrats, fall under the displeasure of his group, and he has to choose between complete isolation or some kind of sub-. mission to his group. The splitting up of the Christian church into many followings has happily robbed her of this compulsion. The excommuni- cated Roman Catholic either maintains his social contacts or joins a Protestant body. In the early church this was not pos- sible. To go over to Christianity meant the severing of the most sacred ties.^ It was the strength of the early church, as of early Methodism in England or the Social Democracy in Germany, that public ridicule and ofificial and class hatreds made those who were thus outcast dependent in a singular degree upon each other. The beautiful prayer put on the lips of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel reflects this exclusive brotherhood spirit as over against the "world" which Jesus himself came to save. At the same time and for this very reason schism was most peculiarly weakening, for just as soon as a schismatic arose it was his intense interest and purpose to capture as large a follow- ing as possible so that social isolation would not result.^ And it was peculiarly the interest of a ban-enforcing church to make her penalty as heavy as possible. The bitterness against the schismatic was therefore tenfold greater than toward the world. So Paul does not forbid social intercourse with fornicators "of the world," but does forbid it with any Christian brother so guilty.* * I Cor. 5 : 9-13; II John 10, 11; and John 17 : 9. » Matt. 10 : 34-39- ' ^^^^- ^ ■ 15-18. « I Cor. 5 : 9-13. I02 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS Exactly the same forces and interests may be seen at work to-day in any manufacturing centre, where the trades-union, if fighting for life, is confronted by the same questions. The whole question of the "open shop," the "scab," and the en- forcement of the boycott throws a flood of light upon the gradual transformation of a Pauline ethics into a moral coercion, and finally an ecclesiastical legalism. The enforcement of this doctrinal and ethical unity became soon the enforcement of a mere external uniformity. Moral enthusiasm does not admit of unlimited external coercion, but does soon feel the need of regulation. And for such enforcement , all the arrangements of church discipline, officers, and acknowl- edged authority sprang up under the direction of the leaders.^ The Pastoral Epistles only represent a little more advanced stage of the inevitable progression. To quarrel with this organization is to quarrel with the facts of human life. At the same time we must not close our eyes to the truth that, from the very inception of the early church, there were forces at work changing a moral enthusiasm into an organized and eventually a tyrannical and immoral ecclesiasticism. Moreover the character of this authority deserves attention. The ecclesiastical canonical literature assumes an infallible leading of the spirit granted to the leaders of the movement. Paul's apostolate may have been seriously disputed, but when Paul or Apollos or Cephas had once been accepted as apostles, we may be quite sure that they wielded an authority no one in Christian circles dared to challenge. Later the " writings " given by inspiration took this place of undisputed authority. It is exceedingly unhistoric to try and import into the view of the world of the primitive Christian church the fine distinctions and — perhaps — justified doubts of a later century. It no more occurred in that age to any devout worshipper that his authority could make a mistake and still remain an authority, than it occurs to a well-trained child that father and mother may be wrong. The moral judgments of an ethical genius of the ' Acts 6 : 1-6; 15 : 1-29; Gal. 2 : i-io; I Cor. 12 : 28-29, etc. NEW TESTAMENT ETHICS 103 first class like Paul had for his hearers and had for himself an absolute character. When he "felt that he had the spirit" he had no doubts as to the infallible character of his moral judg- ment. There were times and places when he wavered or had "no commandment," ^ but once he had established his real apostolic character, as in his letter to the Galatians, then from his moral judgments when speaking in the Spirit he felt his hearers could not safely dissent. The New Testament literature moves in the atmosphere of these first great moral certitudes. In Hebrews " the things that were heard" (2 : i), and in II Timothy,^ "the scripture inspired of God," begin, indeed, to mark the transition, but the passing over is not complete. Indeed it is never complete. For practical purposes John Wesley and Martin Luther thought themselves as fully infallible as did Paul or the author of the Fourth Gospel. It is characteristic of the ethical judgment at its best and in its highest potency that with it goes this sense of absolute finality. On the sureness of that judgment the moralized man will stake earth and heaven, life here and hereafter (Who shall separate us ? Rom. 8 : 38). No definition of scriptural inspiration is given within the canonical limits, but who can doubt that had it been given it would satisfy the most exacting traditionalist? And one reason why no definition was given was because of this ex- ceeding sureness. None of the canonical books sinks to the level of a discussion of past ethical authority; in even the slightest and most doubtful contribution there is the freshness and spontaneity of ethical finality on the basis of an ethical enthusi- asm that brooked no useless questioning. The very identification of later writings with the names of the apostles marks the feeling that one infallible spirit moved upon the early church, that the religious and ethical feeling springing from this enthusiasm must be one,^ and that the truth upon any point of conscience was reachable, and could be in- fallibly made known. Indeed the sense that it had been made ' I Cor. 7 : 25. 23: 16. ^ One Lord, one faith, one baptism, Eph. 4 : 5. 104 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS known gave power and vigor to the proclamation of the ethical content that had its origin in the enthusiasm and love awakened in men's hearts by. the life and death and resurrection of Him whom His disciples accepted without reservation as the founder of that new order of social and personal righteousness — the new Heaven and the new Earth men dreamed of amid the corrup- tions, fears, and oppressions of a rotting social state. CHAPTER III THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH Introduction on the Types of Controlling Interest. — I. The Ethics of Un- organized Christianity: Hermas; The Letter of Barnabas; The First Letter of Clement; The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles; The Letter of Polycarp — II. The Struggle for Individualization: The formation of sects; The Ebionites; Gnosticism; The Ophites; Valentinus; Ptolemaeus to Flora; Marcion; Recognitions; Homilies — III. The Intellectual Formulation of Christianity: Justin Martyr; Clement of Alexandria; Origen; TertuUian — IV. The Ecclesiastical Formulation of Christianity: Ignatius; Cyprian — V. The Ethical Forces of Early Christianity: Family Purity; The Economic Brother- hood; Poverty; Slavery; Martyrdom; Hospitality; Social Organiza- tion; Democracy; Education. INTRODUCTION Before the canonical writings as we have them were finally edited and accepted, the expectation of a speedy coming of Jesus in person had begun to grow weaker/ In the place of this hope another interest was beginning to exercise its power. The ecclesiastical group with its own organization, aims, and life was Literature. — The various editions of the Apostolic Fathers. — Migne: "Patrologise Graecae" (Greek and Latin); vols. I-II; Paris, 1857. — Funk, F. X.: "Opera Patrum Apostolicorum" (Greek and Latin); 2 vols.; Tubingen, 1901. — Lightfoot, J. B.: "The Apostolic Fathers" (Greek and English); London, 1891; also in 5 vols., 1889-1890. — Gebhardt, Harnack, and Zahn: "Patrum Apostoli- corum Opera"; Leipsic, 1876-1878; smaller edition, Leipsic, 1877; reprinted 1894. — Hatch, Edward: "Organization of the Early Christian Churches"; London, 1881 (Bampton Lectures, 1880). — McGiffert, A. C: "A History of Christianity in the Apostolic Age"; New York, 1897 (International Theological Library). — Ritschl, A.: "Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche"; 2d ed.; 1857. — Miiller, K.: "Kirchengeschichte"; Band I; Freiburg, 1892. — Moller, W.: "Kirchengeschichte"; Bandl; 2ded.; Freiburg, 1902; English translation of ' n Thess. 2 : 2. 105 io6 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS becoming an interest in itself. It was not only being organized as a great propagandist society, but it fulfilled many functions in the great human life in which it was placed. Of course the propaganda was its primary reason for existence/ at the same time hospitality to strangers, the supply of social life to the lonely, of organized strength to the weak, of burial to the poor were all functions of the early church.^ One thing was, as we have seen (pages loi, 102) most essential. In the midst of a critical and hostile community it was of tremendous importance to maintain the outward unity of the organization. Uniformity became confused with unity, and indeed real unity was often seemingly less important in the eyes of the leaders than uni- formity of conduct. It became, therefore, wellnigh essential to gain a lasting and satisfactory basis for uniformity. The account in Acts ^ of the meeting at Jerusalem reveals the spirit and method that must have animated the early group. For Paul the only basis for the church life consisted in pos- session by the Holy Spirit. This possession must, of course, result in a distinct religious-moral type, and the approach to this type could alone be a basis for effective fellowship, which is the first edition, London, 1892. — Harnack, A. : " Lchrbuch der Dogmengeschichte "; Freiburg, 1888-1890; 3 vols.; English translation in 7 vols., Boston, 1895-1900. — Harnack, A.: "Die Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten"; Leipsic, 1902; second very much enlarged edition in 1906; English translation of the first edition by Moflatt: "The E.xpansion of Christianity in the First Three Centuries"; New York, 1904- 1905; 2 vols. — Gass, W.: "Geschichte der christlichen Ethik"; Berlin, 1881-1887.— Ziegler, Theo.: "Geschichte der christlichen Ethik"; Strasburg, 1892.— Bestmann, H.: "Geschichte der christlichen Sitte"; Nordhngen, 1880-1885.— Smith, W., and Cheetham, S.: "A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities"; 1875-1880. — Luthardt, C. E.: "Geschichte der christlichen Ethik." Last edition two vols, in one, 1888-1893; also English translation of the first vol. of first edition, Edinburgh, 1889. ' Matt. 16 : 13-20; 28 : 16-20. ^Harnack, A.: "Mission und Ausbreitung des Christentums," Book II, chap. 3, pp. 105-128, ed. 1902. English translation (1904-1905), vol. I, pp. 181-219. ' 15 : 1-29. THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH 107 holy temple of the Spirit.* No outward ritual such as baptism,^ and no ordinances or ritual days;^ no external government or even intellectual system apart from this possession by the Spirit could serve for Paul as a satisfactory basis of unity. But although Paul thought the fruit of the spirit was easily judged in its results/ yet in point of fact, even in his own day, men claimed membership who, though very far from the ideal type, Paul himself did not care to expel from the society.^ Hence a basis for unity was sought by the church of a more definite kind than the enthusiasms on which the early teachers so largely relied. This basis was found in various interests, and the prevailing emphasis determined the peculiar type. There were, roughly speaking, three distinct types of this em- phasis made prominently central in the struggle for the uni- formity and unity of the fighting organization. In historical order we may see first the Judaistic and legal moral ideal in- sisted upon as the central and important thing. Along with this moral ideal and interwoven with it were certain ceremonial and ritual customs, so that the high-minded Christian Jew could hardly understand how any one, for instance, could hold fast to this moral ideal as portrayed in Hermas and at the same time eat blood or things strangled. Hence the struggle, touched upon in Acts, which embittered the life of Paul was not simply a struggle for circumcision and the outward law, but for these things as symbols of a distinctly thought out moral type and ethical ideal. In the letter of James and in Hermas this ideal may best be studied, and one realizes at once how impossible it would have been to found an enthusiastic martyr church on such a basis. The ideal is noble, cold, and formal. It can no more stir the blood than Lessing's "Nathan the Wise," however willing we may be to assent to the admirable character of the type. It involved an entirely different conception of God and estimate of sin from that of Paul's teaching. However much the actual * Eph. 2 : 11-22. ^ I Cor. i : 17. * * Gal. 4 : 10. * Gal. 5 : 16-21. * Gal. 6 : i; Cor. 2 : 5-11. io8 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS activities of the Christian Hfe may be described in the same words, the rehgious ideal is most emphatically not the same. It was, as we have seen, no intentional polemic against Paul that found its way into James, for even his use of "the faith of Abraham" was only a reference to a standard illustration of the relationship of works to trust (c/. Philo's treatise, " De Migra- tione Abrahami," especially §§ i6 and 20); but none the less it should be quite impossible to honestly overlook the fact that the Old Catholic, or Bishop's church, had sooner or later to choose between the two conceptions of the Christian life as a basis for the establishment of a conquering organization. The second great historical interest was speculative. To the Hellenistic mind a unified view of the world, a common theory of knowledge, and a cosmogony deeply tinged with symbolic mythology took the place that the Jew gave to a common wor- ship, a legal system and training in a distinct moral system. For the Jew, his cosmogony, which he probably borrowed directly from Babylon, was only a background for the exhibition of Jehovah as the Creator. For the Hellenic mind the essence of the religious life was the interpretation of the world in a speculative system of truth. To hold this truth was to know God. The attempt to translate the religious and ethical enthusiasms of the early church into a speculative system and to make that system the uniform and essential basis of the world- wide propaganda, was the work Gnosticism undertook, and it was under the pressure of this attempt that the Old Catholic church, with the help of Greek-trained minds, formulated her creed ac- cepting and rejecting various elements, though constantly doing so with another interest than the purely intellectual one domi- nating her action.* For historically a third interest triumphed. The political instinct of Roman imperialism, which makes itself felt even in Clement's first letter, had a conception of law distinctly different ' Cf. Hatch: " The Organization of the Early Christian Churches," 1881, pp. 68-72; RitschI: "Die Entstehung dcr allkalholischen Kirche," 1S57, pp. 347-436- THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH 109 from that of Judaism. For the Roman world law was the expression of the group life in its relation to the individual; for Judaism law was the expression of a relation of the group to Jehovah. The collective responsibility of the group to Jehovah for the keeping of the law by the individual was exceedingly pronounced. In the thought of the early church this element was, no doubt, ever present. A holy group awaited the coming Messiah. But before long the eschatological interest * was swallowed up in the organization interest. Law becomes the basis of the propagan- dist organization because it regulates the conduct of the group to the individual in the thoroughly Roman sense. This legal regulation was all the more necessary as the church became more and more homogeneous and her influence in- creased. In the life of this Organization slaves and women found spheres for activity forbidden them in the "secular" world. The humble slaVe who was no factor in the public political life of Rome or the empire could yet become an impor- tant element in the "■ Imperium in imperio" (Bishop Calixtus). Uniformity of political organization, uniformity of ritual and worship, uniformity of authority and life, were symbols of the world-wide character of this new imperialism, and both intel- lectual systems and moral ideals were important but subject in the last analysis to these high political interests and world- conquering enthusiasms. Hence the ethical systems of the Old Catholic church from James to Augustine may be classed as belonging mainly either to the Judaistic, the Greek, or the Roman type, but with the last interest dominating. And although the three ideals are never wholly exclusive of other interests, yet the main current of ethical thought is always determined by the central interest, and often we must interpret current phrases, not in their historic or natural sense, but in the light of the interpretation put upon them by new conditions. There is a gradual assimilation of some exceedingly uncongenial elements in the prevailing dog- ' Matt. 24; Mark 13; Luke 21; Apoc, etc. no HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS matic construction, but the assimilation is never quite complete, and many contradictory ethical conceptions jostle one another within the system. As a dogmatic interest gradually usurped the place of the ethical the picture becomes more and more confused, and as the political interest gradually asserted its power and forced a dogmatic uniformity upon the world, it was a queer, discordant, systemless system both in theology and ethics that became "orthodox." One of the interesting examples of the old, essentially Jewish, conceptions of what should be the moral type on which the Christian church should build her life is found in the extraordi- narily popular book, "The Pastor or Shepherd ofHermas" (iroturjv), which enjoyed canonical or quasi-canonical authority in the early church. Irenceus, Clement, Origen, and, in his early days, even Tertullian, quote it as with authority. I. THE ETHICS OF UNORGANIZED CHRISTIANITY The Shepherd of Hermas.—ln the "Shepherd of Hermas," * written about loo to 150 A. D., we find a further development of that type of thought which, if not actually hostile to the Pauline interpretation of Christianity, was either perfectly ignorant of it or wholly failed to catch its real meaning. The ethical concep- tion of Hermas is Judaism touched by the asceticism of Hellen- istic thought. Righteousness consists in obedience to com- mandments. " Be not confounded," says the heavenly Shepherd messenger to him, "but stir up in thy mind virtue, through the * Greek editions: F. X. Funk, Latin translation, Tubingen, 18S1, 2 vols.; also Otto von Gebhardt and Harnack, in "Tc.xte und Untersuchungen," and also Latin translation, Mignc, vol. II. Translation in "Ante-Niccne Christian Fathers," vol. II of the "Apostolic Fathers." German translation by J. C. Mayer, 1869. Literature is very extensive; cf. Harnack's "Gcschichte der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius," vol. I, pp. 49-58, for the sources and manuscripts. Text and translation in Lightfoot's " Apostolic Fathers," London, 1885, 2 vols., in four parts, where also copious notes and literary references are given, with short introductions, revised texts, and translations, in one volume, London, 189 1. THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH iii commandments which I am about to give unto thee." * These commandments are preceded by a series of rather stupid and pointless "visions." Hermas finds the Lord "angry with him" for the sins of his family, and the church in the image of an old woman delivers messages in which martyrdom is placed very high.^ Hermas wants to sit at the right hand and is rebuked; ^ only those who have endured "scourgings, prisonments, great tribulations, crosses, wild beasts on account of his name " have given to them this "certain glory" {Bo^av tlvo) of sitting at the right hand. Baptism is the foundation of the church.* The righteous life is filled with recurring repentance,^ and yet after baptism only one repentance is permitted.^ This is only one illustration of the hesitancy in the casuistry to which ethics sinks in the treatment of the "Shepherd." Another is the atti- tude toward marriage. One wife is permitted, but a second marriage is deplored.' The opening scene rebukes Hermas for what surely must be interpreted symbolically, namely, longing for a wife of such beauty and grace as he once had seen in a slave girl whom he loved as a sister.^ The lesson being that even inno- cent love for things earthly is distracting for the soul. For the coming of the Lord is so nigh that possessions, except as affording a chance for giving alms, are a burden and a hinderance to the divine life.^ Yet the rich man may be the elm-tree to which the vine (the poor man) clings, and by giving fruit under the elm's (rich man's) protection contributes to the rich man's salvation, " for when therefore the rich man hands out to the poor man those things he needs, the poor man prays unto the Lord for the rich man, and God grants unto the rich man all good things ; because the poor man is rich in prayer, and his requests have great power with the Lord." ^° The crassness of this conception contrasts ' Vis. V, 4. ■ * Vis. Ill, c. 2, 1-4. The references are to Funk's edition. 3 Cf. Mark 10 : 35. * Vis. Ill, c. 3, 5. ^ Vis. Ill, c. 5, 2-5. *Mand., IV, c. 3, 6. "> r-fipei. oZv TT}v ayvelav Kal rrjv creixvdTtjTa. Mand. IV, c. 4, 3. ' Vis. I, c. I, 1-2; cf. with the interpretation in c. i, 8. * Sim. I, I. *" irXovcrla irpbs t6v debv. Sim. II, 6. 112 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS most unfavorably with James/ and reveals the lowering of the conception of the righteous man even from the Jewish Christian point of view.^ Hermas is a lineal descendant of the James type of moral ideal, but the enthusiasm has largely departed. At the same time fasting is to be of the spirit, and the true fast is keeping one's self from evil, and making the abstinence an opportunity for giving to the poor — therefore not in itself to be too highly thought of.' Angels play a leading part throughout, and the judgment scene is a very complicated estimate of various classes of men far removed in power and beauty from Matt. 25 : 31-45.'' As in the Apocalypse, the figure twelve plays a dis- tinct part,^ but the apostleship is enlarged to forty ,* and a further thirty-five "Prophets and ministers of the Lord" added.^ The virtues are set over against the vices in an instructive way, and are twelve in number: Faith, Abstinence ('EvAcpaTeta), Power (/^vvafjLL 20 : I, 9, 10. '30 : 3- '37 : 2- * I Cor. 12 : 12-30, the body and the members. * 40 : 1-2. • 40 : 3-5. "> 6 Xoidds AvOpuiros. ' 40 : 5. » 41 : 2. ii8 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS is complete; this the writer also does. These apostles, knowing that contention would arise, "appointed persons," and when "they should die other chosen and approved men should succeed in their ministry," and "it would be no small sin in us to reject those from their ministry who holily and without blame fulfil its duties." ~ The letter of Paul is cited, and " the sedition " is condemned. There is no attempt to enter into the merits of the question; the appeal is to the authority of tradition or the Bible ^ or the appointed "presbyters."^ The whole ethical horizon of the Pauline freedom of love is obscured again by the codes required for organization purposes and by the virtues needed in a closely compacted fighting propaganda. Love is sung in truly beautiful echoes of the Pauline proclamation,^ but it is only the love that subm^ts that says, "I am ready to depart; to go away whithersoever ye please, and to do what- soever ye shall desire of me, only let the flock of Christ ® be in peace with the presbyters that are set over her. He that shall do this shall get to himself a very great reward in Christ, and every place will receive him." ^ Submission to the presbyters is then identified with submission to God,^ and with a very beau- tiful doxology the letter closes. Lofty and beautiful as is the letter in many of its appeals, and true, and, no doubt, very essential as was its emphasis upon unity, concord, and peace, the ethics of the book is the ethics of an unquestioning submission to an outward authority. It is from Rome, and almost startles us with its anticipations of the dramatic changes that so soon overtook the ethical ideals of the spiritual kingdom of Jesus' dream. The Teaching oj the Twelve Apostles.^ — It is very tempting to deal in the contrasts between Jewish and Christian, between Greek and Roman tendencies; but one may easily be thus led '42:1-5. -44: 1-3. =■45:1- ■* 47 : 6. » 49 and 50. " rb irol/iviov toO xP'^'toO. ^ 54 • 3- ' 57 ■ '• ' The first edition, 1883, by Bryennios, was followed by many editions: Har- nack, 1884; Hilgenfeld, 1884; Wiinsche, text and German translation, 1884; J. Rendell Harris, 1887 (with facsimile autotype); Philip SchafT, 18S5; Hitch- cock and Brown, 1884; and a literature too large for complete citation. THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH 119 astray. For the ethical student there are more imperative forces than national or even racial factors. The needs of an organization, whether in China or Japan, in England or Ger- many, will produce rules of conduct and habits of mind exactly resembling each other so far as the needs of the organization happen to be the same. The early church was soon a fighting organization, with a settled purpose. It had as traditions the life of Judaism, but was made up of those who belonged also to the life of Rome and Greece. The compacting force of hostile attacks compelled it to adopt a special ethics and to consolidate its life and traditions. It took freely wherever it could find that which suited its purpose. In the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles we have the consolidation process which we have seen in the Roman letter going on in the atmosphere of the more strictly Jewish tradition. For our purpose it is of little consequence to trace the relation of the "Teachings" to the "Two ways" or to the Barnabas letter. The relation is evident.* As Clement's letter reminds us of Paul, the "Teaching" reminds us of James, but in both works the movement from the ethical freedom of the primitive apostolic enthusiasm to the conventional morality of an institutional life is the marked feature. The subjective and final certainties of a great moral insight begin to seek refuge in the traditions of the elders, the institutions of a church, and the conventions of a sect. This must be deplored, but we are not to suppose that any early institution ever lived on the level of Paul or John's religious convictions. The church as such never was on those heights, and without the formulation of the apostolic attainments, and the fixing of standards in an institu- tional life, we might never have had contact with these sources of constantly reviving enthusiasm. The church began to teach, not as Jesus and Paul had taught, but as the scribes. The Didache deals with Christian ethics on the basis of the Matthew tradition of the teachings of our Lord, then gives liturgical instructions and ecclesiastical directions, and ends ' If the author had to have an opinion he would follow Holtzmann in thinking of a common origin for both; so also Lightfoot. I20 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS with the expressed hope of the near coming of the kingdom in power. It is entirely without vital contact with the Pauline interpreta- tion of Christianity, but the omission of Paul in the "twelve" apostles only reflects perhaps unthinking usage, as in Justin Martyr's * 39; at least there is no obvious polemic against Paul's way of thinking such as even James suggests to some. One of the obvious "organization" virtues was alms, and these are duly enforced. Hospitality was another virtue of great weight in the loosely knit community, and it is carefully regulated, but also enforced.^ The term " Xpto-Te/ATro/jo? " ("Christ-monger"), showing how much this virtue was played upon by pretenders, and perhaps the quotation from a lost source in I : 6, " Let thine alms sweat ^ into thy hands till thou know to whom thou shouldst give," is a hint at this same evil of promiscuous aid to the unworthy. The commandments are enlarged to forbid sins not mentioned in the Matthew source nor in the Old Testament.* As in Barnabas and perhaps taken from a common source, we are bidden to love our neighbors better than ourselves,^ and the directions about the treatment of the slave recall Barnabas.' They are not to have command- ments laid upon them in bitterness, "lest they should not fear him who is God over both." In chapter IV we find the organization virtues receive the emphasis: "My child thou shalt remember night and day him that speaks to thee the word of God, and thou shalt honor him as the Lord,' for where the Lordship (dominion) {Kvpi6Tr)<;) is spoken of there is the Lord." ^ "Thou shalt not desire (make) division." ' Thou shalt not turn away him that needeth, but shalt share all things with thy brother, and shalt not say that they (possessions) are thine own, for if you are sharers in that which ' Apologia pro Christianis. ' 12 : 1-5. • Accepting Brycnnios's emendation of the text. * oil ■]ratSo6opi/i(r(ii . . . ov (Povfiaen riKvov ivipdopq. ov5i •)/evvT)divra. [yeyvrjOiy in Funk; ffvyrjO^vra in l.ightfoot). iiroKTtvtU. 2 : 2. '2:7 (virip t})v ^vx'fl^ ffov); cf. p. 1 14. •4:10. ' uis Ki/fiiov. '4:1. •4:3. THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH 121 is imperishable, how much more in perishable things ? * Slaves are to be subject to masters "as to the image of God." ^ "In the congregation thou shalt confess thy sins." ^ The gospel of work had become very necessary (II Thess. 3 : 7- 12); and chapter XII refers probably not to the individual attitude so much as to the associated church life and its responsibility for the wayfarer. The exceedingly un-Pauline character of the Teaching is plain in such an admonition as " Take heed that no one lead thee astray from this way of teaching, since he teaches thee apart from God. For if indeed thou art able to bear the whole yoke of the Lord, thou shalt be perfect,** but if thou art not able, what thou art able that do!'' and "against idol-offerings be exceedingly on thy guard, for it is a sacrifice of dead gods.' The attitude toward fasting is characteristic of the rapidly formalizing process. The fasts of the hypocrites are condemned, and are not to be kept, but on other days. The prayers are not to be as the hypocrites, but the Lord's Prayer is to be said three times a day! ' Forms of prayer are arranged for the sacramental seasons, but the old freedom is still permitted the "prophets."'' The fact that wandering prophets, like the modern evangelist, often gave trouble to the regular incumbents, and were in danger some- times of leading the church to despise the regular officers, is evident from XXI : 1-3. And the money-making character of some of the wandering prophets is also evident.^ These prophets were still the memories of the primitive and spontaneous ethical enthusiasm which, however, mingled, according to modern standards of judgment, with hysteria and with purely psycho- pathological elements, was yet the great force on which the movement at first rested for success. These early prophets spoke from a subjective conviction that was for them finality, and they made a similar impression on > 4 : 8. ^ ws TiJTTi^j Oeov. 4:11. ' 4 : H (cf- Matt. 18 : 17). * rfKetoi effTj. 6 : 1-2. 5 XaTpeia ydp iari OeCiv veKpdv. 6 : 3. 6 g . j_2_ ^ 10 : 7. '11:6 and 9. 122 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS their hearers. From now on, however, their teaching had to conform more and more to certain standards, rules, and previous ethical judgments. These steadily become an increasing burden upon prophetic freedom. We saw how in I John ' a dogmatic statement about Jesus Christ begins to limit theological free- dom, and now also certain ethical conceptions and postulates must be dogmatically accepted before the wandering prophet can obtain a hearing. In the "Teaching" these begin to find their formulation, and the "prophets" are watched and tested whether they teach in accordance with a certain standard, and these standards are set by established officers. Yet the prophetic freedom can never be completely fettered, and again and again we shall see it breaking the bonds of conventional ethical estimates and seeking, some- times rightly, sometimes wrongly, to readjust conduct to life. In chapter XIII elaborate arrangements are made for the payment of the prophets from the "first-fruits," and on the ground that they were "high-priests,"^ thus the natural but dangerous reintroduction of the priestly conception is made to go hand in hand with the organization development. And as a consequence priestly views of ethics and a priestly morality reassert them — even on the ground Paul had most prepared. An elective priesthood is an anomaly, but as yet the bishops and deacons were elected,^ and they were to be honored with the prophets and teachers.* The time of coming judgment was still thought of as at hand, and the appearance of the Lord was an ethical motive of first importance. No past faith or conduct would be of any value if on this coming the watch was not kept "for the whole of your faith shall not profit you except in the last season ye be found perfect." ^^ The closing vision is the familiar outline of apoca- lyptic vision as in Matt. 24:3-51, where one can hardly ' I John 2 : 22. * avTol yhp tlaiv oZ ipxteptU vixwv. 13 : 3. Comp. (cxt in Harris. ' XeipoTov/i'^\yiws groups under the name Ophites or Naasseni ^ a number of sects whose doctrines, as he por- trays them to us, and as we find them in Irenaeus and in the few fragments of writings still surviving, seem to have been a strange mingling of heathen elements and Greek philosophy with Christian ethical inspirations and enthusiasms. What probably bound them together was the resistance to the growing pressure of the ecclesiastical organization. They demanded, evidently, room for boundless speculation. They were, as Harnack justly observes, the heralds of the coming theologians. They felt the power of the ethical inspiration of Jesus as seen in the church, but they were also under the spell of cosmogonies and views of the world which they felt must be intellectually uni- fied. The symbolic interpretation of the myths of polytheism had been begun by Plato, the Greek mysteries had still further developed this escape from vulgar idolatry, now the Old Testa- ment had to submit at the hand of friend and foe to the same process. In this attempted synthesis much that seems to us absurd had then real meaning. The vague longings, the im- perfect sciences, the crude but often searching inquiries into nature and history find their expression in mystic hymns * and •Hippolytus: "Refutation of all heresies" (xari Trao-wv aJp^o-ewv e\e7xos), book V, chaps. 1-23; Irenaeus: "Adversus Haereses," book I, chap. 30; Clement of Alexandria: " Stromateis," book III, 1-4, and book IV, 12-13. ' From 6(pK or Ft"^ *'• e., serpent. * Hippolytus has preserved to us (V, 5) a hymn, the text of which is corrupt, but of which Harnack (" Sitzungsberichte der K. P. Akademie der Wissen- schaften," 1902, Anhang II, pp. 542-545) has given a critical version; following this text, save in two small particulars, the following is a rude rendering: "Nomos was the producer of the all, the Prostitos (or firstling) was Nous, the second was of the Prostitos, chaos outpoured, the third was Psyche born of both, fulfilling 132 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS secret rites. These rites and hymns sought to express the rela- tion of God to evil, of the redemption of Jesus to the sense of forgiveness, and at the same time to give content to the loved memories of religious forms whose real meaning was either lost or deliberately rejected. The ethical weaknesses of these fantastic speculations lie on their face. The world-view is dark and despondent. Re- demption is either magical and mechanical or is a matter of in- tellectual perception and not of ethical struggle. Death is the evil that must be overcome and not sin. Ignorance and not moral depravity, weakness and not will, are the subjects of interest. The allegorizing of old impure rituals did not really take away the superstitious debasing character inherent in them, and the ignorant accepted the superstitions and ignored the allegorizing morality. Indeed we may see in Irenseus and Hippolytus how, in fact, Gnosticism was bringing the superstition of Egypt, Phrygia, Assyria, Persia, Greece, and Rome under allegorized forms into the life of the early church, already too superstitious on its own account, and although all were not evil, many of these sects were actually bad and debasing.' It would be out of place here to the law (Harnack takes ip-ya^ofUv-n as passive, and apparently omits vbiu>v; Macmahon translates 'received its law of toil'). Hence in the form of a deer she (Psyche the soul), trembling, struggles with the clinging death, (his) oppor- tunity. Now having mastery she sees the light, now in misery plunged she wails, now bewailed she rejoices, now being judged she dies, now the unfortunate one sunk in misery, wandering is canght in a labyrinth! Then says Jesus, 'See Father! a being sought out by evils far from the (life-giving) breath wanders on earth, she seeks to flee from bitter chaos, and knows not whence to fly. On account of this one send me Father, having the seals I will descend, I will traverse all the ages {alCJvai), I will reveal all mysteries, I will manifest (i-iriM^w) the forms of gods, the secret things of the holy way I will hand down— called gnosis." ' The religious customs that seem to us so strange and horrible, such as prostitution in the temple and jus primer noctis, were survivals of past moralities. In early tribal life at a certain stage it was immoral for a woman to refuse herself to the men of her marriage group, and as sexual cxclusiveness arose, prostitution in the temple and many other strange customs became the price paid for this cxclusiveness. The religious character of the price paid rendered it permanent long after the origin had been forgotten. THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH 133 attempt to describe in detail the Peratce, the Sethians, the Cainites, the sects founded by Simon and Justinus. Some were evidently interested in adjusting Christian inspiration to the older heathen cults, some to the Old Testament, some to Hellenic speculation. Had we fuller material a division of Gnostic sects might, perhaps, be made on this basis, but it is often hard to say how far we are dealing in the pages of Hippolytus, Irenaeus, or TertuUian with caricatures and how far with actual faiths. In some of the Gnostic sects Jehovah is thought of as an actual evil demon, in some as righteous but not merciful, in some as good but limited. According to some the world was formed against the will of the Highest God; * according to others it represents a lower but necessary state of existence.^ Practically, in all systems, speculation seeks to mediate cos- mologically between the finite and the infinite, and to identify goodness with the infinite and evil with the finite. This struggle with the problem of evil gives Gnostic its significance to the ethical student. The early church never fully overcame the in- trusion of the dualistic and magical explanation of evil, and as the allegory in exegesis still haunts the theological study in re- fined form, so in subtle dress oriental dualism still casts its shadows over Christian explanations of evil. At the same time, the attempt, fanciful as may seem the outcome, to reconcile the existence of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus with the actual facts of sin and misery showed a deeper grasp of the in- ward difficulties of a religious philosophy than do some of the dogmatic orthodoxies of a growing but stiffening Catholic church. Valentinus' in particular may seem in the pictures of the eccle- ' Cf. Irenaeus, "Adv. Haer.," II, 2, 1-6. ^ iren^us, "Adv. Hasr.," II, 8, 1-2. * Came from Alexandria to Rome under the bishopric of Hyginus, and re- mained for a long time in connection with RomC; establishing a school of which Ptolemaeus was the head. Irenaeus, "Adv. Haer.," I, 2. TertuUian, "Adv. Hser.," I, cap. 4, etc. ("Ante-Nicene Fathers," vol. Ill, pp. 503-520). Besides the standard histories, see the admirable article by Preuschen, E., in Herzog- Hauck: "Realencyklopadie," vol. 20, pp. 395-417; and Hilgenfeld, A. : "Ketzer- geschichte des Urchristenthums," pp. 283-316. 134 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS siasticisms of his day an exceedingly absurd teacher, more es- pecially if we are to believe Irena^us and Tertullian, and think of him as inventing out of his own fantasy the "triads" and "monads" and "syzygies," the "aeons" and the "ogdoads" which seem to us so meaningless and fanciful. But this is a false conception of the entire situation. Valentinus found these things as much a part of an intense ethically religious life as washings and circumcision and feasts were part of the intense ethical life of Judaism; and they were linked with antiquity. Indeed they were linked with an antiquity that rivalled Judaism. In default of other and more effective measures of truthfulness, the antiquity of an opinion was the standard by which it was measured. We see that in the way the "fathers" are forever citing the past traditions, and we see it in the way the Old Testament was clung to with feverish anxiety lest Christianity should be charged with being unhistoric. The Gnostic heresy was evidently the desperate attempt to weave together two mighty impulses whose fundamental notes were the ethical longings of religious hearts. The one was the oriental despondent dualism of India and Persia, mingled with elements from Thrace and Greece, and bound together in the weird conglomerates of the mysteries of Asia Minor with Ephesus as chief centre.* The other was the new fresh en- thusiasm of the Christian church, despairing also of the present aeon, but looking forward with splendid faith to a new aeon in which should dwell righteousness. Valentinus evidently saw in Christianity, as he utiderstood it, the new and long-expected revelation or reincarnation of the light-bringing Logos. Even amidst the ignorant caricatures of the ecclesiastical opponents we see how he expected in Christianity to find East and West, Asia and Rome at last united on the basis of an exceedingly elastic symbolism in one religion sweeping in all the nations. For this synthesis the allegorical method, built up in order to explain away vulgar heathenism, could also be used to explain ' CJ. King, C. W., "The Gnostics and Their Remains," 1864, pp. 1-33. THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH 135 away alike vulgar Judaism and the vulgar literal and narrow Christianity of the day. The view of the world thus gained seems to us childish, but all the views of the world of that day seem so to us. Tertullian lived in a demon-peopled world, surrounded by the most fantastic miracles, amid the most extravagant superstitions, and only guarded by the magic of sacramental water and sacramental rites from present peril and everlasting death.^ Between the neo-heathenism of the rising Catholic church and the fairly full-fledged heathenism of Valentinus it was, as a matter of fact, only a question of degree. But what was it that gave force to the Gnostic movement and made it under Valentinus, Ptolemaeus, Basilides, Isidor, and Marcion one of the most liv- ing antagonists the Christian church had ? Very suggestive is Hamack's exposition ^ of the letter of Ptolemaeus to Flora, a Gnostic teacher to a devout Gnostic Christian, who is troubled by the law of Moses. The letter is preserved to us, in fairly good text, by Epiphanius (" Contra Hser." 2;^, 8-12, ed. Dindorfius, vol. II), and was written about 160 A. D. We have in it the key to the Gnostic symbolism. The ethics of Jesus and his view of God, as Hamack justly points out, are the standard by which the Old Testament is judged, and by that standard it is divided into three parts. One part is from God, for Jesus says, in the beginning God made man and wife: one part is from Moses, for Jesus says Moses for the hardness of your hearts, and one part is pure human tradition, for Jesus says, "Ye have made the word of God of none effect through your traditions," but even then Ptolemaeus goes on to show that the lofty character of God revealed by Jesus Christ as belonging to the Eternal Father could not belong to the Jehovah of the Old Testament, hence that this Jehovah is the demiurge of creation, just and righteous, but not the Eternal Redeeming Father of Jesus Christ. ' Cf. Tertullian, "De Baptismo." ' " Sitzungsberichte der K. P. Akademie der Wissenschaften," May 15, 1902, pp. 505-545- 136 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS We see at once the ethical problems with which Gnosticism struggled. It was because of their more perfect perception of the religious value of the conception of God as Jesus revealed him that made the acceptance of the growing Catholic theology difficult. It was just because of the growing valuation of antiquity ^ as a standard of truth that made the ancient symbol- isms of Persia and Asia Minor attractive, and it was because more and more the original ethical and religious enthusiasm that looked for another aeon was being dimmed by intellectual sub- stitutions for it, that Gnosticism was a formidable force with which the growing church had to battle. It was not, as some have supposed, that Gnosticism presented a break with the historical continuity, but that it presented the wrong continuity. As over against Marcion and Ptolema;us the Catholic church asserted her continuity with the religious life of Judaism. To this day this attitude includes strange con- tradictions and quite arbitrary use of the powers of non-observa- tion, but the instinct was truthful. The ethics of Judaism and not of the Orient; the monism of the Old Testament prophets and not even the spiritualized polytheism of India, Babylon, or Asia Minor; the optimism of the New Testament and not the despondency of theosophy were to win in the encounter which from the later letters of Paul until the council of Nicasa gave color to the whole development of the Christian life. For in these things a vital Christianity had her roots. Did we know more of the practical ethics of the Gnostics we might find that in some things they had advanced upon the every- day morality of the official church. The Essenes denounced slavery, and the Gnostics were evidently under the influence of Buddhist pity for all animal life. And in spite of the bitterness of the attacks made by Irena^us, Hippolytus, Tertullian, and others upon Valentinus and the Gnostics generally, it was their speculation and not their conduct which aroused the zealous hate of their opponents. In fact one of the developments of ' CJ. Tertullian, " Adv. Ha;r.," chaps. 29, 30. THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH 137 Gnosticism was an attempt to reform the church in the interests of an extreme ascetic morality. Marcion * distinctly stood for the oriental dualistic world- view. This appears not simply in his sympathy with Gnosticism, but in his emphasis upon a strict asceticism and a morality that precluded any mingling with the world. Wine, the theatre, all amusements, and the delights of home were forbidden. Marcion read into Paul this oriental asceticism, and in the interests of his redemptive theory rejected the God of the Old Testament as Judaistic and legal. In this god he saw an antagonistic principle to the Redeeming God. Matter is inherently the seat of evil, and redemption is freedom from the flesh. He was not a system-builder like the Gnostics, and his ethics are stern with self-renunciation. He favored martyrdom and looked to a gradual winning of the whole Christian church to his views. He organized his church on the basis of the first canon of sacred writings, which, however, he arbitrarily chose and mutilated. His dislike of legal Judaism was excessive. Marcion sought to exclude even Abraham from the inheritance with the saints,^ and in very sharp criticism he tried to strip the ecclesiastical canon of the elements he disliked, and which he regarded as a corruption of the faith. It was no mean attempt, but of course lacked all critical instru- ments. The excisions were arbitrary and subjective and as * Marcion was a rich ship-owner who as a Christian in Rome about 139 at- tempted to reform the local church. In 144 he was expelled and founded his own church, which lasted on until the sixth century. He was deeply interested in Cerdo the Gnostic, but his system is widely apart in many ways from Gnosticism. For literature, see Harnack: "Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte,"vol. I, 3d ed., 1894, pp. 254-271, English translation, I, pp. 266-285, and his article in "Zeit- schrift fiir wissenschatliche Theologie," XIX, 1876, pp. 80-120, "Beitrage zur Geschichte der marcionitischen Kirchen"; MuUer, Karl: " Kirchengeschichte," I, 1892, pp. 75-77; Moller, W. : "Lehrbuch der Kirchengeschichte," 2d ed., 1902, I, pp. 158-161; English translation of ist ed., I, 1892, pp. 148-150. The chief source is Tertullian versus Marcion and the attacks of the apologists Justin and Irenaeus. Cf. McGiffert's "Eusebius," p. 184, note 24. ^ Irenaeus, " Adv. Haer.," book IV, chap. 8. 138 HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS uncritical as the acceptance of the official church. Moreover the instinct of the official church was in the main truer, as we can now see, to the great ethical verities than was the clever but speculative and headstrong radical. In various ways the ori- ental character of the Gnostic thinking expressed itself. Marcion is accused by Hippolytus especially of "sorcery" and "sleight- of-hand," and of carrying on "operations by demons,"^ and dealing with the eucharistic cup as a cup of enchantments. So also Carpocrates and his followers "practise magical arts and incantations, philter and love potions." ^ The Gnostics are accused in the same chapter of antinomianism. No doubt extreme libertinism and extreme asceticism marked various schools. At the same time it is dangerous to accept the asser- tions of ancient bigoted orthodoxy passing judgment some time after those thus condemned were dead and unable to reply. It is interesting for instance to contrast the judgment of Clement of Alexandria on Basilides and Valentinus, who probably actually knew by personal contact what they taught, with the accounts of later critics.^ The firm rejection of their teachings is at the same time temperate, and even in the frank dealings with the peculiar views on sexual matters in book III there is evidence of a desire to understand and do justice to the divergent and false teaching. Bardesanes is one of the few whose views on the philosophical question is given us. He stood for free-will as over against the mechanical views that crass dualism logically involves, but on the whole such discussions were probably carried on in too symbolic a fashion to have gready affected the actual thinking of the church. Those who were struggling for church unity on the basis of submission to an ecclesiastical machine found their strongest foe in the intellectual independence of Hellenistic Gnosticism. If the teachings of Marcion were so utterly without historic basis, and were so entirely personal as the later apologists ' Book VI, 34. ^ Irenaeus, " Adv. Hacr.," book I, 25, 3. ' Clement of Alexandria, " Stromateis," book II, 3, 6, 8; book III, 1-4; book IV, 12. THE ETHICS OF THE EARLY CHURCH 139 are fond of making them appear, it is very remarkable how large a space he and his teachings take in the early apology of the growing Catholic church. If the attractive suggestion of McGiffert ^ is accepted, we owe the so-called Apostles' Creed in its older form to the effort of the Roman church to counteract the influence of Marcion and his followers. We certainly have in the pseudo-Clementine fragments^ skilful attempts to offset in the name of Clement the dangerous division threatened by Marcion. The "Recog- nitions"^ and the "Homilies" are certainly the remainders of probably a much larger literature. For our purpose the question of the literary dependence of the two on each other or on a third source is of little importance. We see here reflected an effort on the part of the rapidly organizing church to fight fire with fire, to oppose Marcion and his false gnosis by portray- ing Peter and the true gnosis. Marcion claimed Paul as his authority, so Paul is ignored, though not attacked, as where the Gentiles are represented as "wholly without a champion," * for Simon the magician is rather Marcion than Paul, and the warning against any teacher coming without a letter from James in Jerusalem, or whomso- ever would come after him,^ would not affect Paul, but did affect the Marcionite teachers. ^McGi£fert, A. C, "The Apostles' Creed: its Origin, its Purpose, etc.," New York, 1902. ^ For the state of the texts, see Harnack and Preuschen, in " Geschichte der Altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius " (1893), Erster Theil, pp. 212-231. ^"Recognitions." 'Aj'a7J'c6