They do so by assigning two pairs of reasons. First, the necessity is real because God prescribes good works, and because as tokens of the Holy Spirit they follow from true and living faith. Again, good works arise from the desire to promote God’s glory, in particular, in order to show gratitude for justification, and from the desire to attain subjective assurance of salvation.² But the very plenitude of these reasons, which no theologian has undertaken to bring into relation with one another, betrays some uncertainty as to the position. For if the question were put why God, Who attaches blessedness to justification by faith, prescribes good works and wishes to be glorified by them, it would be impossible to conceal the arbitrariness of such an arrangement. Practically the same answer would have to be given to the questions, on what ground the gift of the Holy Spirit coincides with justification, since the latter is not mediated by Him; and how faith, which in the case of justification is merely receptivity for Divine grace, can at the same time be an efficacious power acting on our fellow-men. Finally, it is not altogether obvious that good works should serve every believer as a ground for believing in his justification. The position that they must do so rests on the belief that both are effects of Divine grace. But here again the question arises, What have justification and good works in common even from this point of view? If nothing save justification by faith secures eternal life, if therefore good works do not, how is the assurance of justification and of eternal life to be gained from them, in so far as they are effects of Divine grace? And there is this further point. Our consciousness of justification expressly involves that in virtue of their continual imperfection we must look away from our good works as a criterion of our standing before God (p. 164). But now, it is maintained, should our faith in our justification be weak, we are to find the authentic ground for our consciousness of being justified in the fact that good works are present in some degree. Will a man really attain to that peace which justification ought to ensure to him, if placed between these two contradictory estimates of his moral action, both of which he is to accept simultaneously? Schneckenburger at least has asserted that such a supposition is intolerable to a Lutheran. But Schneckenburger is mistaken in supposing that the above-mentioned principle is alien to the creed and Dogmatics of Lutheranism.³ His view is correct only so far as the tendency to look for verification of the justified status to the moral struggle which is going on simultaneously, does not make its influence felt in the practical religious methods of Lutheranism until Spener. Otherwise, Spener himself could not have affirmed this principle as something novel and decisive in character. On the other hand, under the Reformed system this method of self-examination is partly encouraged by the conception of perseverantia gratiae, and partly rendered tolerable by the counterbalancing idea of election.

Within the domain of Lutheranism, self-examination of this kind, ever since it was recommended by Spener, has become the source of a widespread change in religious life, and at the same time the occasion of a dubious alteration in the doctrine of justification. On the one hand, Spener’s principle led to the Illumination (Aufklärung), i.e. to the result that people spared themselves the roundabout path of justification by Christ, and relied before God upon any performance of good works they could claim (vol. i. pp. 360, 372). On the other hand, in the Pietistic circles devoted to sanctification, a heightened enthusiasm for good works, and especially an ascetic aversion to secular life, was beyond all doubt originally fostered with the idea of finding in these marks of the state of grace assurance of justification through Christ. But such sanctification was not viewed directly as an effect of Divine grace, but as an object to be attained by personal effort, while at the same time it was conceived as the ultimate saving purpose of God. Either, now, the saintly activity which was to serve the believer as an evidence of his justification came to be regarded as possessing equal worth in God’s sight, or the high value placed upon sanctification lessened the attention given to justification, or both tendencies appeared together. This result comes out clearly in the theology of Bengel’s school. While referring the reader to my previous exposition of the views of Oetinger, Menken, von Meyer, and Beck (vol. i. pp. 608 ff., 623 ff.), I may describe as the interpretation of redemption common to them all that it consists in the communication of the positive power of a moral, sinless life, and as their view of justification, that it is God’s acknowledgment of the effectual obedience of faith, as a factor of real value even though requiring to be supplemented. The agreement between the leaders of Arminianism and this school, which in the case of Beck actually approximates to Catholic doctrine, is in the last resort to be explained historically by the fact that the teaching of the Reformers did not precisely settle the relation between justification and good works. The influence of this “sanctification”-pietism, however, left its mark likewise on the dictum of Schleiermacher, repeated by Nitzsch and Martensen, that justification and conversion are the aspects to be distinguished in regeneration (vol. i. pp. 531, 550). This view may possibly express merely the temporal coexistence of the two as conceived by the Reformers. This is the turn which Schweizer, at least, gives it.⁴ But with Schleiermacher the dictum really expresses the dependence of justification on conversion. But the inevitable result of this is to encourage the idea that the purpose of justification is to make sanctification possible and real, which is the declared tendency of the Catholic doctrine of justification (Gerechtmachung).

The distortion of the idea of justification in the schools of Bengel and Schleiermacher is the worst error brought about by the obscurity of the positions held by the Reformers regarding the necessity of good works. Without going so far, another distortion of the idea meets us close at hand in practical teaching. For, hardly anywhere, even in that preaching which is most faithful to the standards, does one discover thorough agreement with the Formula of Concord in asserting that salvation depends solely on faith. Rather, in order to guard against Antinomianism, the performance of good works is insisted on as a condition of salvation, i.e. good works are admitted to be a concomitant cause. This conjunction of the two, common in popular usage, is thrown into sharp relief in Kant’s treatment of the problem of the forgiveness of sins (vol. i. p. 456). For he draws attention to the fact that the hope of salvation is attached to two conditions, that our transgressions be cancelled before the Divine Judge, and that we walk in a new and dutiful life. Both conditions must of necessity hang together, and this is sought to be proved, says Kant, by deducing the one from the other. The two possible combinations between them, however, bring Kant to an antinomy of reason, i.e. to a contradiction between the orthodox and the rationalistic theory. For, to begin with, forgiveness appears as the necessary precondition of a good life; on the other hand, one cannot appropriate for one’s own forgiveness the penal satisfaction rendered by another, unless one devotes oneself to an amended walk and conversation. This contradiction is not theoretically so insoluble as Kant supposes; and therefore that we must decide practically for the second alternative——that the forgiveness of sins is dependent on reformation——is not so inevitable as he represents. For in life one may, indeed, begin with what we ought to do——that is the principle of all education; but the certainty of Divine forgiveness apprehended later is not therefore necessarily produced by one’s own activity. Rather, it may quite well be viewed as the insight we gain into the determining ground of our own activity, and as the condition of its merely relative worth. In that case, however, the question always recurs, how it can be proved that forgiveness, as the essential basis, makes moral activity possible, and, on the other hand, how good works can add anything further, if forgiveness has been fixed upon by God as the sufficient ground of eternal life. For one would think that if the specific result of justification or forgiveness is the capacity to lead a new life, then the Catholic or the Pietistic reading of justification as “making righteous” (Gerechtmachung), or real purification from sin, is indicated as the true one. On the other hand, if we cannot thoroughly believe the proposition that eternal life or blessedness is, under the conditions posited in Protestantism, coincident with justification, then the demand for good works as concomitant causes of blessedness can only be understood as due to the silent influence of the idea of merit.

If, on the other hand, the Reformers’ conception of justification or forgiveness is rigorously held to, and if the necessity for it is to be seen from the comparison of justification with good works, then what we come to is nothing more nor less than the principle that the forgiveness of God is necessary for the salvation (eternal life, blessedness) of believers, because works are inadequate to this purpose, owing to their imperfection. At the beginning of the Reformation, this position supplied the argument of most practical importance for stimulating religious self-examination as opposed to vulgar Catholicism; but the principle is really very far from furnishing a positive proof of comprehensive range. For the assertion that justification is necessary to eternal life is, in this connection, merely the obverse of the negative judgment that good works do not suffice for eternal life, because——it being presupposed that even the believer is relatively a sinner still—they are always imperfect. Thus the principle is held in reserve that, if good works were performed in perfect measure, they would suffice to establish a legal claim on God to eternal life. This principle, drawn from the dispensation assumed as original, implies that the relation of men to God, expressed in the Christian conception of religion, is properly a legal one (§ 33). But this position is not merely proved untenable in point of fact by the universality of sin: it is a logical absurdity to conceive the necessary dependence of man on God in respect of his destiny, as being at the same time a relation involving reciprocal rights. Since, then, even as a mere matter of fact, justification by faith and not the legal claim conferred by good works leads to eternal life, the proof which establishes the first view by the untenability of the second implies the more general truth that man’s highest destiny, fellowship with God, is the result of God’s entering into religious relations with him, for it cannot arise from a legal reciprocity between them. But either this is a tautology, or the logical sequence of these propositions must be reversed. The positive proof, therefore, that justification or forgiveness leads to eternal life, must be led otherwise than by the mere negation of the methods furnished by vulgar Catholicism, with which Luther tortured himself in vain, since at bottom they were absurd. Not until the proof of the connection between justification and eternal life has been formulated entirely anew, shall we also be able completely to refute the Socinian view that forgiveness is merely a supplement to the active obedience of faith, which in its turn has its roots in the free resolve of the individual. Under no circumstances, however, can the positive proof of the necessity of forgiveness be derived from its teleological relation to sanctification or good works, which, indeed, are taken into account in the Catholic doctrine of justification (Gerechtmachung) as the aim of the latter, but never in the Evangelical doctrine of justification (Gerechtsprechung). But this is not to be taken as foreclosing the question whether justification, even as conceived Evangelically, is not to be regarded as a precondition of good works and their right performance. But, according to the Evangelical interpretation, decisively as it is to be distinguished from the Catholic, justification is certainly not the direct means to that end.

§ 52. But why must so much circumlocution be expended in establishing as a general thesis the teleological relation of justification to eternal life? Not only is this connection between the two so directly suggested by statements of Paul (Rom. v. 17, 18); it is proclaimed by the whole Reformation. How often and how strongly does Luther emphasise the truth that life and blessedness are directly bound up with justification!⁵ Why has this connection not been kept in sight with sufficient clearness to ensure its predominating influence in theology? In the contrary fact—in the fact, that is, that any answer rather than Luther’s is given as to the purpose of justification—I find a singular token of uncertain tradition. And this uncertainty goes pretty far back, at least on Lutheran ground. The Formula of Concord, it is true, testifies to the connection between justification by faith and eternal life no less staunchly than Luther’s Catechism and the Apology of the C. A.⁶; but one seeks it in vain either in the C. A. itself or in Luther’s Articles of Smalcald. Moreover, while we certainly find it in Chemnitz and Hutter, the later theologians, who partly have no sense for teleological relations, and partly force the treatment of the doctrine of justification into the mould of controversy with Romish teaching, subsume the prospect of eternal life merely under the effecta iustificationis—that is, under a particular heading, and without distinguishing it specifically from other effecta, especially sanctification (active moral renewal).⁷ Thus the connection between justification and eternal life has not had that decisive weight given to it in Lutheran tradition which would have sufficed to repel the perpetual temptation to make sanctification or the good life the end of justification. Besides, theologians were content simply to enumerate the effects of justification—known to be such from passages in the Bible—without considering their significance or their mutual relations. Have then peace of conscience with God, free access to God, Divine sonship, and the hope of eternal life, nothing in common with one another, or are they ideas which require no explanation whatever? It has been shown that a group of Reformed theologians analysed justification into the forgiveness of sins and the bestowal of eternal life or adoption (p. 76); they thus recognised the extremely close relations between the two, to which the Reformed symbols likewise testify. Nevertheless, all this did not bring about a more favourable state of the inquiry. And though Schleiermacher adopted the distinction which the Reformed theologians had made in the idea of justification, yet he never came to see the full meaning of it, for he regarded Divine sonship as the guarantee, not of eternal life, but of sanctification.

But how are we to explain the fact that the sense for the teleological aspect of justification indicated above should have become so enfeebled that a wholly apocryphal connection between it and sanctification came predominantly to the front, though without ever attaining to clear consciousness? In my opinion, this is due to the projection of the idea of eternal life entirely into the next world, and the demarcation of the thought of it from all the relations of our present experience. Luther, indeed, did not view the matter in this light; yet he never devoted to the subject the theoretical consideration which it demanded. But Melanchthon and Calvin have already lost altogether that freshness of insight into the connection indicated, without which a correct theoretical representation of it simply need not be attempted. While justification has bound up with it the hope of, or as in Calvinistic circles it is called, the right to eternal life, yet this latter blessing itself was divested of every relation to the possible experience of the present, and its importance put in the shade. There co-operated further in the same direction the characteristically Catholic interpretation of eternal life which is derived from Augustine (vol. i. p. 117), and survives in both Confessions—the view, namely, that eternal life consists exclusively in the vision of God. If God, according to the Neo-Platonic view, has no relation to the world, then eternal life, attached as it is to cognition of Him, has no relation either to the world or to the common life of men, nor could it enter into any connection with the circle of our present experiences. Or, so far as it did so, either there came to the front the significance of good works as concomitant causes of eternal life, or in both Confessions a return was consistently made to the methods of Mysticism, by which Catholic piety anticipates even in this life that union with God which consists in separation from the world. But if religion is not only faith in God, but always a view of the world as well, then the Christian conception of eternal life must include not only the perfecting of fellowship with God, but also the specific attitude of the individual to the world. If our Reformation is really epoch-making, it must also supply the elements of another conception of eternal life, or blessedness, than obtained at the preceding stages of Christian history. In the notion of ἀφθαρσία the Greek Church merely perpetuated an idea of blessedness derived from the Hellenic mysteries. By its conception of the knowledge or vision of God the Latin Church merely gave its sanction to the aims of the Neo-Platonic philosophy. If the Reformation has no better and more Christian idea of eternal life and blessedness to offer, then those mystics belonging to the Evangelical Churches who revert to the Catholic view are not to be blamed.

But if we take our bearings from the New Testament, then, besides the vision of God (Heb. xii. 14), there enters into the content of eternal life also the exercise of a royal lordship (Rom. v. 17; 1 Cor. iv. 8; Col. iii. 3, 4; Jas. ii. 5; Heb. xii. 28). It is all the more worthy of note that Faustus Socinus has given expression to this idea, since he makes no further use of it in his system. For recognising the chief characteristic of the Divine Being is His dominium absolutum, and holding that the Divine image in man relates to his lordship over earthly things, Socinus concludes that the perfecting of the latter in the next life will consist in complete lordship over the refractory forces of the world.⁸ But Luther had already claimed this attribute, as a consequence of justification, for the Christian life here and now: “Christianus homo omnium dominus est liberrimus, nulli subiectus.” In the pages of his tract on Christian Freedom, the triad iustitia, vita, salus re-echoes so powerfully throughout, that one receives an impression not merely of their necessary connection, but almost of their identity. For Luther is so thoroughly conscious of life and salvation through fellowship with Christ, and in consequence of justification by faith, that for him the whole present is filled with the sense of security against death and hell. This negative aspect, however, is not the whole. But “as the Kingship of Christ is repeated in the believer, he possesses the spiritual power which reigns in the midst of foes, and is strong in the midst of afflictions. For as strength finds in weakness its uttermost test and trial, in every case we obtain salvation, so that suffering and death are forced to serve us and to work together for our salvation. This is the Christian’s priceless power and freedom” (vol. i. p. 182). The one feature in this picture to which objection must be taken is the conjunction of the statements of our priesthood in the “Christian Freedom” with these statements of our kingship. Luther, commenting on 1 Pet. ii. 9, has developed the attribute of kingship before that of priesthood, clearly under the influence of the verbal sequence βασίλειον ἱεράτευμα, though he analyses this combination into sacerdotium regale et regnum sacerdotale. The transition to the priesthood of Christians, now, he makes thus: “Nec solum reges omnium liberrimi, sed sacerdotes quoque sumus in aeternum, quod longe regno excellentius; per sacerdotium enim digni sumus coram deo apparere, etc.” But he ought to have demonstrated this pre-eminence by showing that that spiritual lordship over the world must also be subordinated causally to the unimpeded fellowship with God which is gained through justification. For if lordship over every evil is a consequence of justification by faith, then the bestowal of priestly rights and justification are identical. Luther remained oblivious of this, because he adduced the fundamental idea of priesthood—the right to appear before God—merely as the precondition of intercession on others’ behalf, and of assuming the duty of instruction in Divine things. But here, as elsewhere, he is under the influence of the confused idea that the universal priesthood implies the reproduction in each individual of the official priesthood, which, however, cannot be the case. In priesthood, as a common attribute of believers, the whole stress lies on this, that each believer stands near to God, or in fellowship with Him, without the intervention of any other, save Christ; that we employ this privilege in interceding for others is only to be regarded as a remoter consequence.

The question regarding the necessity of justification or forgiveness can only be solved by conceiving eternal life as the direct end and aim of that Divine operation. But if the idea of eternal life be applied merely to our state in the next life, then its content, too, lies beyond all experience, and cannot form the basis of knowledge of a scientific kind. Hopes and presentiments, though marked by the strongest subjective certainty, are not any the clearer for that, and contain in themselves no guarantee of the completeness of what one hopes, or has a presentiment of. Clearness and completeness of idea, however, are the conditions of comprehending anything, i.e. of understanding the necessary connection between the various elements of a thing, and between the thing and its given presuppositions. The Evangelical article of belief, therefore, that justification by faith establishes or brings with it assurance of eternal life, is of no use theologically, so long as this purposive aspect of justification cannot be verified in such experience as is possible now. It is true, the predominant tone of the writers of the New Testament tends to project eternal life, under the form of hope, into the next world, just as they limit the idea of the Divine Kingdom to the stage of its consummation (vol. ii. p. 295). But they point out clearly that the elements of the future life are to be found in our present experience of joy, blessedness, and the feeling of elevation (Jas. i. 9–12; 1 Pet. i. 5–9; Heb. vi. 5; cf. for Paul the use of καυχᾶσθαι, vol. ii. p. 343); and just as clearly Paul reckons joy in the Holy Ghost as part of the present reality of the Kingdom of God (Rom. xiv. 17). But Paul also asserts definitely the present existence of a specific life as the consequence of justification, as indeed the connection between the two is essential. “If Christ be in you, the body indeed is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness,” i.e. because of justification through Christ (Rom. viii. 10). Therewith agree the Johannine statements (1 John iii. 14, 15, v. 11–13), which, it is true, mention no special mediation as leading to this result, but for the same reason, too, express no divergence from Paul in this regard.

The religious significance of “life,” at both stages of the religion of the Bible, depends on the peculiar value of this attribute for God. The “living” God is the comprehensive expression employed in opposing the true religion to the natural religions, which admit sensuous representations of the gods, or dead idols, because in them the Divine Being is not opposed to nature. The living God, therefore, is the spiritual, self-determining Will, which is supreme over its ends and its creatures, and consequently must be distinguished from them all. Life, as the religious end of the worshippers of God, is accordingly conceived as the purposefulness of existence attained by abiding in dependence on God under the conditions which He has ordained, and directing our path steadfastly towards Him. These conditions are given by positive revelation. For, so far as concerns the religion of the Old Testament, it holds fast to the universal primitive assumption that to approach God uninvited leads to destruction; we must therefore be invited, or possess God’s verbal assurance of grace, or conform to the laws of sacrifice, in order to retain life when in proximity to God (vol. ii. p. 201). At the stage of Christianity the assurance of life attaches itself to the dispensation of revelation, i.e. to the acknowledgment and appropriation of the end represented by the Son of God. In the Hebrew religion the belief is dominant that life in proximity to God, or under His express protection, involves the political and economic welfare of the chosen people, and, for its individual members, the harmony of happiness and merit; all the restrictions of life due to irreligious adversaries are therefore felt by the Psalmists as a deprivation of their proper life. On the other hand, the spiritual character of the Christian view of the world and self culminates in this, that those relations which fall within the compass of outward self-preservation are not reckoned as essential to the determination of “life.” “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever shall lose it for the gospel’s sake shall save it” (Mark viii. 35). The conditions of the life guaranteed by God do not even include the political intactness of the Christian Church; on the contrary, the persecutions, the menaces by which the life of the community or the individual may be assailed, are regarded rather as subjects for rejoicing (Matt. v. 11, 12; Jas. i. 2; 1 Pet. i. 6; Heb. x. 34; 1 Thess. i. 6; Rom. v. 3).

These ideas, so opposed to men’s ordinary claims to life, show us that life in fellowship with God, at peace with God, and under God’s protection, simply cannot be construed religiously without at the same time taking into account the relation between it and the world. In Christianity the worshippers of God know the Creator and Lord of the world as their Father, but yet regard themselves in their given individual character, especially in their corporeal endowment, as parts of the world; it is therefore to be expected that some positive principle should be set up, according to which life with God includes independence of the ordinary outward conditionedness of existence. This principle is indicated by Jesus immediately after the precept cited above: “What shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his own life? for what is a substitute or equivalent for his own life?” (Mark viii. 36, 37). In this connection “life” means that state of spiritual self-determination which we distinguish from the conditions of bodily self-preservation, by relating it to common ends which are considered more valuable than bodily self-preservation. But inasmuch as voluntary fellowship with God, Who is Spirit, is regarded as the proper consummation to be reached in the line of these spiritual aims, it follows at once that the life of an individual has a higher worth than “the whole world.” For God, with Whom we enter into full fellowship in religion, is high above the world, as its Creator and as He Who makes the Kingdom of God the world’s one aim.

At this point the Christian view of the world exhibits a most violent paradox. The individual man is a part of the world; and as what is individual, in its reciprocal relations to multiplicity, forms the element of the created material world, so likewise the individual created spirit can never conceive himself as outside the compass of the world or of divided existence. And therefore the idea we have of our spiritual individuality can never be separated from the idea of our bodily organism. Now, if the spiritual individual has a higher worth than the whole world, then, in such a statement, he is no longer regarded as a part of the world, but as in himself a totality which can stand being compared with the world. To make this clear, it must be observed that it is as a spirit that the individual realises the character of a whole in his own order, whereas the world, as the value of divided existence, is conceived as belonging to nature. To nature belong not merely natural objects proper, but likewise all the social institutions of spiritual life; for all the spiritual commerce known to us is mediated through nature. Now the Christian view of the world is so constructed as to view the world as a whole from the standpoint of the Divine idea, for this enables us to raise ourselves above the world through fellowship with the Divine life (§ 27). Although even man, finding himself embedded in nature, regards himself as a limited portion of the world, yet, in virtue of his spiritual constitution and his Christian destiny, his life is a struggle to reach a position above the world. For while neither knowledge nor moral will gives him the means of reaching this goal, religion as such is the function by which the tension can be resolved between the given situation of the created spirit and his claims against the natural world. In Christianity, however, the idea of the universally human, moral Kingdom of God is posited as the final end of the world in such a way that all the natural and particular conditions of human fellowship are transcended, and humanity is raised above the world as a spiritual totality. This characteristic of the Christian religion of itself secures that each individual member of the Kingdom of God is from the first offered the possibility of becoming a totality in his own order, i.e. in a qualitative sense; for in the moral world, as a totality, each individual member, so far as he comes to possess moral character, is endowed with the worth of a totality. By holding out this prospect, Christianity satisfies the universal religious impulse which at previous stages fell short of its aim. But that which is prescribed, in the idea of the Kingdom of God, as the kind of moral activity proper to man, takes, in the conception of eternal life, the form of a corresponding view of the world and self, namely, that in actual fellowship with the true spiritual God the Christian feels himself as a whole raised above the world, inasmuch as he proves the spiritual worth of his individuality through his dominion over all possible restrictions arising from the divided world of nature. This attitude, which is held out as a prospect to men in the Christian religion, was deliberately and actually exemplified by its Founder (§ 49). It is intelligible, therefore, in view of the mediatorial position between God and man occupied by Jesus, that He should prescribe that one must be ready for His sake to sacrifice natural life for the maintenance of personal life or the attainment of that life, conceived as eternal life. For in that lordship over the world which He exercised, as representative of the Divine final end of the world, through His independence of all human authority and His willing acceptance and patient appropriation of suffering, He realised directly in His own person that eternal life which is opposed to the changes of natural things. By attachment to His person, and by appropriation of His aim, the same possession of eternal life is gained and Christ’s attitude towards the world assumed by others also. The worth of this attitude of spirit as superior to the divided and changing world of nature is thus all the more clearly brought out by the enjoined surrender of the natural conditions of our creaturely existence. The willing acceptance of this consequence of attachment to Christ is the highest proof of that freedom, prescribed and rendered possible by Christianity, which belongs to the spiritual life as capable of perfection in its own order.

I do not know that there is any view of the world which attributes a higher value to individual human life, or any form of life of a social kind which offers a more adequate satisfaction to the universal human endeavour to transcend the natural limitations of spiritual existence. When men have sought to outdo Christianity in freedom of thought (i.e. surely, in appreciation of the freedom of the individual), by the method of Pantheism, or have even thought to surpass Christian freedom of thought by adopting the materialistic view of the world, they have really, as Strauss has most recently done, set in comparison with the new wisdom a merely derivative or imperfectly formulated representation of Christianity. But in its true form Christianity is directly adapted to secure the spiritual freedom of the individual, and to attain the goal that each man, in his spiritual idiosyncrasy, should become a whole; for by connecting this, the destiny of man, with the perfect revelation of the supramundane God, that is, with the revelation of the universal final end of the world, the spiritual lordship of the members of the Divine Kingdom over the world, and their eternal life, are established. Now the principle which Jesus enunciated, and which He was the first to realise, finds a unanimous echo in the testimonies given by the writers of the New Testament. By directing our wills to God as the unchangeable Father from Whom comes every good and nothing but good (Jas. i. 17), Who, as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, claims our firm trust unbroken by any wavering of aim (i. 5, ii. 1), we raise ourselves above the world. For the elevation of soul, in which the Christian glories even in his lowliness, i.e. in the midst of persecution, marks him off from the real lowliness of the man who is rich in the world, who passes away like grass before the scorching wind (i. 9–11). Faith, moreover, which is immovable and firm, and includes in itself a treasury of riches, i.e. a peculiar amplitude of power, raises itself above the traditional conditions of worldly society, the precedence of the rich over the poor (ii. 1–5). What are these statements but descriptions of eternal life, in so far as it sets itself, as consisting in a steady direction of the will towards God’s end, in opposition to the standards involved in the changeableness of worldly life? For eternity, as a specific attribute of God, signifies the permanency of the direction of His will to His personal end (§ 37). The same conclusion follows from Paul’s assurance that the revealed love of God makes us conquerors over the evils which come upon Christians for God’s sake, because the change from life to death, the tension between present and future, the force, too, of natural and social institutions personified in the angelic powers, exercise no determining influence on the life of the Christian when compared with the permanency of the Divine love as revealed in Christ (Rom. viii. 35–39; 1 Cor. iii. 21–23). It is specially worthy of remark that Paul makes the status of Christian teachers subordinate to the independent powers of believers as such, although the latter owed to the former the fact of their being Christians at all. Yet Christians are represented as the superiors even of Peter and Paul, in so far as the estimation in which the apostles are held as party-authorities might pave the way for schism; since believers are rather taught to find an experimental realisation of their power over the world in the unbroken union of the religious community. For, as James testifies again (iv. 1–4), it is by schismatic controversy that love to the world, which is enmity against God, and therefore unworthy dependence on the world, make their way into the Christian community. And all Church history is a confirmation of this truth.

This potestas spiritualis, as Luther calls it, cannot be judged by ordinary sensible standards. On the contrary, as the Christian community, by its universal and spiritual tendency, roused its Jewish and heathen environment to suppress it by force, its members, as Paul expresses it in the Psalmist’s words, were accounted as sheep for the slaughter (Rom. viii. 36), i.e. as things most transitory and devoted to imminent destruction. The representatives of the Christian community, however, exhibit the power over the world which springs from peace with God by their reversal of the common verdict upon these evils, as upon evils in general. That which in the ordinary view is a restriction of freedom (§ 42), and proves itself such by exciting the feeling of pain, is invested, through the joy which springs from peace with God—through this expression of the harmonious feeling of life—with the precisely opposite value of a means which ministers to freedom (Rom. viii. 28). For when these experiences of evils do not become the occasions of apostasy from the Christian faith, when, as temptations, they still do not lead to bodily and social self-preservation being preferred to the duties of the Christian vocation, then their utility actually comes to be that of stimuli to endurance in the Christian faith, i.e. means to the assertion of freedom against the world (Jas. i. 2, 3; Rom. v. 3). In this way confirmation is given of Christ’s verdict that the amount of affliction is not the measure of the sin present, and that every conspicuous calamity is not, as was assumed by antiquity, a Divine punishment. The evils of persecution are rather, as no feeling of guilt exists, accepted simply as means for testing the Christian’s endurance in the faith. But from the assurance of peace with God possessed by the Christian community there arises, even in the case of single transgressions, the habit of regarding certain evils, even persecutions, as educative punishments, which, derived as they are from God’s fatherly goodness, are intended to purify practical conduct, but for that very reason imply no forfeiture of rights as regards fellowship with God (1 Pet. iv. 17–19; Heb. xii. 4–11; 1 Cor. xi. 32). It cannot be doubted that all these characteristics of eternal life enter into Paul’s conception of the freedom wherewith Christ has made us free (Gal. v. 1), and of which Paul himself was conscious in the manifold relations of social existence (Gal. ii. 4; 1 Cor. x. 29, ix. 1, 19). Therefore too, conversely, the consummation of eternal life, when it is openly confirmed by God’s final judgment, is described by God as the liberty of the children of God, which is called ἐλευθερία τῆς δόξης because it will be specifically acknowledged by God, and thus receive a guarantee of its consummation (Rom. viii. 21).

The result of this argument, finally, is that the combinations, which the Lutheran standards exhibit, of the idea of justification by faith with eternal life on the one hand, and with faith in God’s providence on the other (§§ 18, 25), are mutually equivalent, and that the exercise of the latter faith forms the content of the status of adoption by God, while it is just under the attribute of eternal life that that content must reveal itself at first. In the same way the faith in providence which dominates the world coincides with eternal life; for the most general conception of life comes to this, that one thing uses other things as ‘means to its end. Accordingly eternal life, in the Christian sense, is that spiritual independence, possible in the realm of Divine grace, which, in harmony with God’s providence, subdues all things to itself, so that they become means to blessedness, even when viewed externally they run counter to it.

§ 53. If, now, it is thinkable at all that freedom and spiritual power over the world should be mediated through good works, this cannot be true in the sense that they merit eternal life. For the very fact that God calls eternal life in men into being by opening to them fellowship with Himself, excludes every consideration of law and equity (Billigkeit). The acquisition of eternal life has a meaning only in a religious connection; for us Christians, however, law and equity are not forms of the religious relation. Still, are not good works possibly concomitant causes of eternal life? Even this hypothesis is, to say the least, infelicitous; and to decide upon it we require a more accurate definition of our ideas. It is characteristic of Luther that in the tractate “On Christian Freedom” he should give the negative reply he does to the question. For he declares the realm of moral action to be the opposite of freedom and blessedness, so far as in good works we manifest our servitude and slavery to other men to whom we are bound by life in the body. The latter circumstance, indeed, is not an adequate argument for moral fellowship; but Luther’s remark is so far quite accurate, as good works set up a connection between us and other men, who, to begin with, confront us merely as parts of the world. Viewed at this angle, good works, notwithstanding their origin in faith, and although the impulse to which they are due is spontaneous in form, occupy a position directly opposed to freedom and blessedness in God, have so far nothing in common with Him, and therefore cannot be conceived as even concomitant causes of these blessings. This truth is also verifiable by the following observation. If we intend good works pre-eminently to have an effect upon others, if, that is, we count on their being thereby stimulated to moral concord and led to enter into moral fellowship with us, we shall find, in the vast majority of cases, that the best will has no power over the result, but that in this respect we are limited by the independence of others. In such cases of reaction on the part of the world, however excellent our intention may be, we experience anything but freedom and blessedness; and if, nevertheless, we were to persevere in the method of doing good works for the sake of the expected results, we should involve ourselves in passionate impatience, and therefore also inwardly become slaves. Good works, therefore, when this aspect is emphasised, cannot be regarded even as concomitant causes of eternal life; for the intention aimed at the result is fitted neither to maintain freedom nor to increase it.

Nevertheless, conceived as good works, they have too clear an affinity with the religious direction of the will towards God, and with the freedom over the world springing thence, for any surprise to be caused by the statement that a man is blessed in his morally good action (Jas. i. 25). To be sure, Lutheran doctrine seems to have as little room for this universal experience as for the connection, also asserted by James, between law and freedom. Luther having once for all planted his foot on the Pauline assertion that law and faith are mutually exclusive (vol. ii. p. 309), which he did not understand in its originally limited reference to the Mosaic law, but referred to the Christian life also, Lutheran theology consistently arrived at the position that action in the Holy Spirit, which is normal in the Christian sense, is not mediated by any subjective reflection upon the moral law. Here we must make allowance for the fact that Luther never arrived at the distinction between moral law and civil law, and that he always included the latter in his conception of the former, while yet he exhibited a justifiable horror of applying a legal standard either to the religious or to the moral life, to justification or to the value of good works. Thus, although good works, as fruits of the Holy Spirit, are in merely objective harmony with the law, and are not regarded as implying any subjective reflection upon this standard, they are stripped of every relation to blessedness. According to Lutheran doctrine, the experience of blessedness has no relation, either objective or subjective, to the law; good works, which the regenerate soul as such performs, are in agreement with the law at least objectively; in other words, they contribute nothing to blessedness. On the other hand, by the Christian law James means the law of freedom, in so far as personal disposition and attention and fidelity are devoted to it. Blessedness for him, therefore, is a feature which accompanies the fulfilment of the moral law under these conditions; for it springs from free acquiescence in God’s final end. James, therefore, holds to freedom in the law, while Luther always finds freedom in the removal of the law, or at least in subjective abstraction from it. Nevertheless, Lutheran teaching approximates so closely to James’ line of thought, that one cannot but think it arbitrary that it should omit the final conclusion, that one is blessed in good works. For, under the title of Christian freedom, Luther has also brought in the voluntary character of moral obedience, which realises the ends of the law apart from any legal compulsion. This idea⁹ is very precisely expressed in the Formula of Concord, where it is said that believers, as regenerate, have, according to the Holy Spirit, taken the law into their hearts, and that their voluntary fulfilment of it is a life in the law.¹⁰ It does not, indeed, exactly serve completely to elucidate this idea of voluntariness that it is compared to the motion of the sun, regular with the necessity of natural law. For a disposition which regularly issues in obligatory moral action without the necessity of forming a distinct judgment of duty for each separate act, does not therefore stamp itself as a blind natural force. But it is astonishing that the direct identity of this temper in moral conduct with the freedom and blessedness indicated by Luther was not perceived, and that not even the citation of passages from the Psalms, which express the blessedness of the study of the law, should have led to the recognition of the fact that this blessedness extends also to action arising from an unselfish disposition. The result is that, however closely Lutheranism may approximate to the lines of the principle affirmed by James, it never comes to an agreement with him.

To solve this antinomy—that good works should be, on the one hand, an evidence of the bondage of men to their fellows as parts of the world, and on the other the medium of the experience of blessedness or freedom—we must put the question, Why morally good action is necessary in Christianity at all? What we want here is a theory in which the two pairs of reasons affirmed by the Reformers (p. 489) are combined. The universal ground of all moral conduct towards our fellow-men is that the Christian religion has for its end the Kingdom of God. This association of mankind, of the most comprehensive nature both extensively and intensively, cannot be realised otherwise than through works, concrete action, and speech. These works are good in so far as they are directed towards the universal end which guarantees the usefulness of all the members of the fellowship. Now, the moral law is the system of those ends, dispositions, and actions, which necessarily arise out of the universal end of the Kingdom of God. Love is the pervading motive of this organisation of law-determined action; but it is also the impulse which leads to the knowledge of all those ends which are comprehended in the moral law. Now, in the Christian view of the world, the Kingdom of God is the supramundane final end of the world, an end which at the same time is fixed, by the conception of God as love, as the content of the Divine personal end. Here, therefore, the arguments put forward by the Reformers, that good works are necessary from respect to the Divine commandment and to the end of glorifying God, find their deeper unity. The two other arguments, that good works are necessary as the fruits of faith and as proofs of one’s standing in grace, might also be reduced to this one. For we believe in God or trust in Him perfectly just in so far as we find our own most personal end in realising His Kingdom. However, we ought not to hide the fact that such a conclusion does not express the Reformers’ meaning. At most they merely touch upon the idea of the ethical Kingdom of God, but never grasp it seriously. So that, by the faith which produces good works and is evidenced by them, they understand faith in redemption and reconciliation, the faith which appropriates justification, and possesses assurance of eternal life, to begin with, apart from good works. This theory is transcended in the solution I have set forth. In order to prove that solution true, we must turn our investigation of the idea of the Kingdom of God to yet one more of its aspects.

The Kingdom of God, as God’s supramundane final end in the world, is superior, of course, to all motives which in any way may be reckoned as belonging to the natural world. The law of universal love transcends not only the motives arising out of the physical self-preservation of the individual and of the human species as such, but also the aims of spiritual self-preservation in the particular realms of moral fellowship, the family, civil vocation, social position, the State. In moral action, the goodness of which is measurable by these differentiated social ends, we are always dependent on the natural conditions of spiritual existence in the world. This is shown by the fact that, in all these provinces of life, with the relative goodness of action there may also be bound up occasions of sin. For apart from cases of purely individual selfishness, pride of family may set itself in opposition to the moral interests of friendship, and the interests of class in opposition to the aims of civic existence, while national vanity and love of power may militate against the humane recognition of the rights of other peoples. But the principle of universal love to men abstracts from all natural conditions and limitations of spiritual life in common, and therefore can give no stimulus to selfish emotions. But now the universality of the Kingdom of God as final end is proved by our having to take it up into our particular moral aims. It operates as supreme motive even in the conduct through which is realised fellowship with one’s family, with friends, with those of the same class, with one’s countrymen. Thus we enjoy freedom from the world, meaning by the world all those determining motives of lower rank which constitute the dependence of spiritual life upon the elements of the natural world.¹¹ For the principle of universal love, as the law both subjective and objective of the Kingdom of God, rests on the fact that men, as spiritual beings, are equal and of equal worth, while all other relations by which our spiritual life is interwoven with nature show such marks of heterogeneity that we can only in a limited sense predicate equality of them. In the circumstances described, therefore, the acknowledgment of the Kingdom of God as the final end in the world involves the supramundane character of the motive of universal love, and carries with it the principle that conduct animated by universal love constitutes freedom over the world.

This idea is, to begin with, not unrelated to that conception of freedom in which the human spirit as such finds the essence of its self-distinction from nature. Freedom, as independence of natural causes, as itself the cause which breaks the chain of natural causes operating upon us, we feel to be real when, by the universal conception of an end, we stop and deprive of their power those impulses to action which arise from the correspondence between individual propensities and the “goods” of the world, and which represent one element of natural necessity. The higher experience of freedom consists in this, that through the conception of a personal end we completely moderate and order our particular impulses in general, so that they are allowed free course only in the degree and at the time that they serve as a means to the final end we have in our mind. This stage of freedom, however, is not the highest, for the personal end by which the several sensuous or spiritual impulses are controlled may be bad as well as good. The different species of vice or of systematic selfishness, in which the personal end is confined to the satisfaction of a single propensity, and the different stages of a morally good character, which are devoted to social aims, are identical in the feature mentioned. The highest stage of freedom, therefore, will be that at which the supremely universal end of the association of mankind is made the personal end, and brought into relation with narrower forms of fellowship; for from an end such as this there can arise no stimulus to selfishness, whether coarser or more refined. Accordingly, that freedom over the world as a system of nature, which is manifested in practical life in the Kingdom of God, not merely lies in the line of that conception of freedom which can be affirmed in general, but forms the climax which freedom must of necessity be conceived as reaching if we are to have a complete idea of it at all.

The demonstration just given is a refutation of Kant’s position regarding the intelligible and non-empirical sense of freedom. Freedom is not merely an idea which we employ to judge our action—action, however, which experience shows not to be free, but determined at every step; freedom is itself experience. And while each act is motived, and springs from its motive necessarily, yet in varying measure those actions are free whose motive is the universal conception of an end which lays a restraining hand on the very impulse it has aroused. Kant’s conclusion was not merely theoretically unsatisfactory, in so far as it left unsolved the contradiction between the subjective claim to be free and the objective fact that action forms part of the causal nexus; it was practically useless as well, for it left no possibility open of action’s guiding itself by the law produced by freedom. On the other hand, this very connection asserted by Kant between freedom and the moral law is confirmed by the highest form of freedom as set forth above. The moral law, as the system of those dispositions, intentions, and actions which follow necessarily from the all-embracing end of the Kingdom of God and from the subjective motive of universal love (§ 32), cannot be codified so as to decide, in each possible case of morally good action, that such action is necessary. This is a consequence of the divergence which exists between the character of the disposition and the form the particular action may assume, a divergence which cannot be removed. For an objective regular norm may quite well be found for the general disposition in those correct inferences which follow from the ends comprised in the Kingdom of God; but no provision is contained therein for prescribing when we must act in accordance with this disposition, and when not. And so, whether in a particular given case it is necessary and a duty to act according to the general disposition indicated by the moral law, needs to be settled by a judgment guided by the particular circumstances. The formation of the idea of duty, accordingly, is conditioned not merely by the general disposition to obey the moral law, but also by the special virtues of conscientiousness, wisdom, and circumspection. But since the idea of duty represents the ramification of the general moral law into particular actions, the result is that freedom in this sense is the basis of the moral law, in other words, the basis of the application of the general principle to the particular cases of necessary action. Without the acquisition of moral freedom in the form of a good general disposition and of a development of special virtues, therefore, the moral law not only cannot be carried out, but cannot even in its whole range be known and objectively fixed. It is further to be considered, however, that the variable element in moral existence does not consist merely in those particular cases of action, as contrasted with which the virtue and disposition acquired might be viewed as unconditionally immutable. On the contrary, the contrast is merely relative. Even virtue, even the general moral disposition, is variable; they may be falsified, and they may be injured, if at any stage they are regarded as mechanically complete. They continue to exist only in so far as they are being perpetually reproduced. But this takes place only when the will, bent upon the universal moral end, ever anew actually produces for itself knowledge of the moral law, and therewith the law itself; for the law does not exist for us apart from our knowledge of it.

In these respects the autonomy claimed by Kant for the will which aims at the moral law is vindicated. The same autonomy proves to be a quality of the Christian law, although Kant himself regards Divine authority as a mark of heteronomy. But in the Christian view, Divine authority is very far from involving necessarily a statutory and merely objective form of the moral law. For the principle of universal love to man does not claim acceptance originally in the form of an objective rule, but is at work in the subjective disposition of the Founder of our religion. It was capable of being expressed as an objective formula because Christ regarded it as the law of the Kingdom of God He was going to found, and as the motive of the action He devoted to it, and because He took for granted that the members of the community of Christ, believing in God as their Father, consistently resolve likewise to obey the Lord of the Kingdom. Now the grade and the character of the moral law are shown by the fact that the final end, from which it receives its form, transcends the natural and particular, in other words, the secular conditionedness of the spiritual life. In the principle of universal love to man, the motives of natural relationship in family and nation, and the natural alliance arising from the relations of class and vocation, are limited so far that they do not militate against the fellowship of spiritual life or the true dignity of man which is in question. Or rather, while we regularly move and have our being in intercourse with our family, with those who belong to the same class, and with our fellow-countrymen, our limited natural goodwill towards them is idealised by our universal regard for the human dignity common to all. In social action for the final end of the Kingdom of God, too, no validity belongs to forms of egoism which might, owing to the struggle for pleasure and rewards, have the effect of forcing good action into the position of means to an alien end. Ideally interpreted, therefore, action for the supernatural final end of the Kingdom of God does not admit that other mark of heteronomy which is excluded by Kant from his conception of the absolute moral law.

The voluntariness of action for the end of the Kingdom of God, however, which properly should pervade our conduct in all the narrower provinces of life, is homogeneous with the manifestations of our religious freedom over the world. The final end, by which such action is guided, is as much supramundane as the attitude taken up by one whose general mood is so little affected by the opposition between happiness and suffering, by the changes of surrounding things, and the possible demands of human authority, that it preserves its identity in spite of them. The homogeneity of both aspects of the Christian life rests, too, upon a single ground, namely, on the commanding importance of the idea of God as supramundane, gracious, and benevolent. Since, therefore, eternal life and blessedness are experimentally enjoyed in this elevation of the feeling of self over the world, the motivation of action by the supramundane end of the Kingdom of God is necessarily reflected in blessedness. James, therefore, is not quite right when he says that the man who fulfils the law of freedom is blessed in his deed. But what he does express quite precisely in these words is the truth that blessedness accompanies a good deed which springs from the supreme motive, and not from a calculation of the result. For by acting in the latter way we should impose upon ourselves a limitation of freedom, and so far experience not blessedness, but its opposite. Finally, we gain here still another argument against the view that good works can merit eternal life. For if good action, under the conditions prescribed above, produces blessedness—in such a way, namely, that it is to us an experience of eternal life—the two cannot enter into experience in the form of the legal equivalents, service and reward.

The homogeneity which has been proved between the content of the self-feeling of the Christian as free from the world, and action from the supramundane motive of the Kingdom of God, serves to demonstrate the principle followed by the Reformers, that the Divine revelation given in Christianity both guarantees reconciliation with God, or liberation from the world, or eternal life, and imposes the duty of good works. Only when the homogeneity of both aspects is recognised can we justify the formula which adds the one to the other. But we certainly now gain also a criterion by which to test the proposition that good works are not to be taken as concomitant causes of eternal life. This, of course, is not true, if it is meant as coming under the category of merit and reward. But still good works and eternal life are not so unrelated to one another as Lutheran doctrine strives to make out. As the disposition which finds its motive in the supramundane end of the Kingdom of God itself comes within the compass of eternal life, therefore good works are, for one thing, manifestations of eternal life; but further, according to the law that the exercise of a power serves to strengthen and maintain it, they are organs of eternal life. Thus is proved the truth of St. Bernard’s dictum: non causa regni, sed via regnandi. Moreover, the homogeneity of both sides is shown by their peculiar interaction or mutual conditionedness. On the one hand, the action which finds its motive in the supramundane end of the Kingdom is necessarily subject to the influence of the experiences yielded by Christian freedom. In order to impress this final end vividly on the disposition, and to act in accordance with it, one needs that joyous feeling which removes the disabling and confining sense of evils, one needs freedom from care about the future, independence of social prejudices, and superiority to the fascination of success. On the other hand, action for the end of the Kingdom of God is necessary in order to prove, through the experience of blessedness which it yields, that eternal life, even in the directly religious feeling of self, is no passive possession, but that the Divine bestowal of this religious freedom over the world is really the only thing which makes possible the independence of one’s personal spiritual feeling.

All these discussions, however, are not sufficient to remove the impression that Christianity issues in two ideals for man, of which the one cannot be reduced to the other. It does not seem possible to get beyond what was assumed in this respect in our provisional description of the Christian religion (§ 2), namely, that it has for its aim the spiritual freedom, and the most comprehensive moral fellowship, of men. But while Luther, in his tract on Christian Freedom, affirms this two-sidedness, though in a somewhat harsh form, he offers at the same time another view of the matter, when with all his successors he adopts the affirmation of Paul (Gal. v. 6), that love is the necessary consequence of reconciling faith. For that implies that the determination to act for the final end of the Kingdom of God finds its sufficient ground in the fact of reconciliation with God. Now this position is not directly obvious when brought into comparison with Luther’s view, that in faith we address ourselves to God, and in action to men. It deserves to be opposed for this further reason, however, that the attainment of that freedom over the world, which is involved in faith in our reconciliation with God, makes each single believer appear as a whole in his own order, while in action for the Kingdom of God he possesses the significance merely of a part of the whole. How, then, is a sufficient basis to be found for this converse relation in the religious self-feeling, that as a whole in his own order a man is worth more than the whole world?

On the other hand, we must remember that the relation of the individual to the fellowship of the Kingdom of God, for whose good he acts, is not exhausted by the distinction of the part and the whole. Rather, it follows from the very nature of an ethical organism, that within it every properly articulated part counts as a whole. Any activity of a part in the service of the whole is a means of furthering the welfare of the whole, only when the aim of the whole is present in the mind as the motive of action. The individual subject, however, who in his special vocation acts from a good disposition for the promotion of the whole, himself acquires, through his thus conditioned development in moral character, the significance of a whole in his own order. Now in the morally good character there must be reckoned, not merely the permanent self-determination to act in accordance with the supramundane final end of the Divine Kingdom, but also that religious independence of the world through which a man first becomes conscious that in worth he is superior to the world. Independence of the world, then, or the Christian freedom which religious faith enjoys, must at the same time involve the power of bringing into play the supramundane motive of universal love to man, if what is called for is the practical exercise of fellowship with men. But just this side of the matter is unprovided for in the faith of the individual, who through his fellowship with God has experience of eternal life. Love, therefore, follows from faith in reconciliation only because the God in whom we put our faith has for His final aim the union of men in the Kingdom of God. Even thus, therefore, we fail to transcend the twofold aspect of Christianity.

To attain this end, perhaps we should have to introduce yet another consideration. On the one hand, the common moral end posited in Christianity is embraced in its religious aspect; for in the Kingdom of God, as God’s most personal end, what we do is, ultimately, to serve God; on the other hand, freedom from the world, or eternal life as experienced in faith, is likewise adapted to the intercourse and fellowship of men within the Kingdom of God. Reconciliation with God, too, and our corresponding freedom over the world, are not merely a uniform characteristic of all individuals alike, but the common quality through which a plurality forms a whole. But in order to secure this end, in order that each individual should experience reconciliation and Christian freedom over the world, not merely for himself but in his feeling of unity with all others, and in order that these common experiences should be truthfully expressed in prayer, it is necessary that mutual union should be sought by means of action in every direction from the motive of universal love to men. Whoever, accordingly, is by faith assured of his reconciliation, and at the same time desires to experience it as a possession of the community, has here a motive for seeking, by the exercise of love, union with those whom he needs to complete his social feeling of reconciliation. On this presupposition we can understand the statement that faith in reconciliation operates through love. But were we to follow out the line of this proposition, we might possibly come to the conclusion that we do good in order to enjoy the common blessedness. Such a conclusion would not violate the principle that the Kingdom of God must always be conceived as the final end. For that Kingdom proves itself to be the highest good by the fact that in the realisation of it we and all others are blessed together. The above proposition, therefore, must not be regarded as inadmissible; still, it does not exhaust the matter. Rather must action for the end of the Kingdom of God be directly deduced from the truth that we acknowledge this final end of God in believing in the Father of Jesus Christ. What we gain thereby, however, is not a simple subsumption of the ethical under the religious aspect of Christianity. And this conclusion, finally, is confirmed by the following consideration.

The Pauline formula, that faith worketh by love, ought not at all to be understood in the sense of a simple logical deduction, or in the sense of mechanical necessity. Belief in such a connection between love and faith is refuted not only by the fact that an obvious lack of love to man may be accompanied by an eminent degree of faith in reconciliation, but also by the consideration that love appears in the form of a personal resolve which is not as yet present in faith in reconciliation. For after all the direct relations of the two are different: faith faces towards God, and love towards man. So far, however, as faith in reconciliation seeks in reconciliation fellowship with others by manifesting loving action towards them, this forms a more secondary motive, which is no substitute for the special resolve to exercise love. Thus, love to men and good works do not follow directly from faith in so far as faith experiences reconciliation with God as an individual and social possession; rather do they follow from faith in so far as it appropriates the final end of the Kingdom of God, as the personal end of the God with whom we know ourselves reconciled. But if in conscious faith these aspects are accompanied by different feelings, namely, feelings of peace and of stimulus, then we cannot get beyond the difference and the alternation of the religious and the moral effects of Christianity. The moral impulse, though ultimately it is based on the thought of God, is not exhausted by the religious experience of reconciliation and of freedom over the world. The ethical necessity of love engendered by faith, which is the only necessity that can be affirmed, still retains the peculiar character belonging to the moral resolve by which the man who is reconciled to God accepts the task of the Kingdom of God. The moral necessity of this connection, however, follows from the fact that the same God both guarantees reconciliation and freedom from the world, and bestows the impulse to help in realising the Divine Kingdom. The heterogeneity of the two aspects of the Christian life, however, is balanced in the subjective result—that we are blessed in the experience that all things serve for our good, and that we are blessed in doing good. This feeling is therefore the same in both cases; for, in the experience of Christian freedom, as in action prompted by the motive of the Divine Kingdom, we occupy a position superior to those natural and particular conditions of life which are comprised in the conception of the world. When Luther adopted the maxim of Paul, that where faith reigns love likewise developes, he could not accept this rule, which it is impossible always to verify empirically, without indirectly admitting also the truth of James’ saying, that we are blessed in doing good. Consequently, the authors of the Formula of Concord, following in his track almost arrived at the same principle; and this truth failed to receive public recognition at their hands, only because they thought there was a greater danger of its being misused.

§ 54. The question regarding the necessity of the idea of justification or forgiveness points, first, to that combination of it with eternal life which is accepted not only by Luther, but also by the Socinians;¹² second, to the position which is given to this operation of Divine grace [justification], as the principle of the entire Christian life, by Luther and his followers as against the Socinians. In order to determine the conception of eternal life, Luther gathered together, under the conception of Christian freedom, all those indications used by New Testament writers to describe the true elevation of believers about the world; and at the same time he demonstrated the presence in the believer of a freedom or voluntariness of moral action which is homogeneous with that freedom. Calvin also gives expression to the latter idea.¹³ In the circle over which his influence extended, however, they failed to reach that more special formulation of this truth which is given in the Formula of Concord (p. 510), namely, the autonomy of moral action. By the special emphasis which it laid upon the duty of sanctification within the community, Calvinism was led to give the regulation of moral action the impress of statutory law. It never sought to bridge over the gulf between this and the recognition of the voluntariness of action which rises out of faith and the Holy Spirit,¹⁴ though more accurate thought would soon make clear the incongruity of these two views. Nay more, in Puritanism the pedantic conception of statutory law, which was most characteristically evinced by the prohibition of images and the Sabbath law, was carried still further in the principle that it is essentially as Lawgiver that Christ exercises His kingly office (p. 425). As compared with Calvinism, Lutheranism attained to deeper knowledge on this point, in that it identified the voluntariness of moral action due to the Holy Spirit with the taking up of the law into the disposition. But this principle has not been developed theoretically, and from other considerations the idea that the form of the law is statutory still remains firmly established in Lutheran orthodoxy also. We ought not, therefore, to exaggerate the difference between the two Confessions on this point, as though it were possible to prove a qualitative distinction between them in ethical temperament. Calvinists and Lutherans are at one in acknowledging in principle the voluntariness of moral action springing from the Holy Spirit and from faith in reconciliation; in this view they are united against the Socinians. The proof I am going to attempt of the Reformers’ conception of justification requires that, first of all, the leading features of Socinianism should be contrasted with the Lutheran and Calvinistic doctrine.

The Socinian system likewise testifies to the closest relation between justification and eternal life. The latter blessing is made dependent on the condition of faith, and thus derived from God’s free bounty in such a way that human merit is excluded. But eternal life is not merely limited to the next world; in accordance with the view of the Middle Ages, it is also represented as man’s supernatural goal, and this in such a way as to give it no place in the conception of created human nature. Moreover, the obedience which consists in fulfilling the law is reckoned as part of the faith which attains eternal life. But the forgiveness of sins, or the removal of the penalties which have been incurred, is, as a condition of eternal life, at times distinguished from it, at times combined with it, in order that the deficiency of imperfect fulfilment of the law may be raised to the level of the perfection of eternal life. For the Socinians find Christianity objectively in its perfect commandments and its perfect promises of eternal life and the Holy Spirit, Who implants the hope of life eternal, provided that the Divine commandments are fulfilled, at least so far as the power of the individual will allow. These principles of Christianity, viewed as an ethical school which still admits certain accidental religious features, mark out good action as the principal thing. But good action is kept firmly to the lines of statutory law. And this law is not construed as possessing merely genuinely moral contents: it is viewed as containing also the ceremonial commandments which inculcate the worship of God by means of the Lord’s Prayer and the Eucharist. Now, between the fulfilment of this duty and the supernatural goal of eternal life, no necessary and material relation, no point of identity, is demonstrated. The two are just as unrelated to one another as, in the Socinian theory, the nature of God and the nature of man; they are only conjoined with one another by the arbitrary will of God. Even the adoption in Ethics¹⁵ of the Aristotelian idea of virtue is not sufficient to annul or to counterbalance this eudaemonistic conjunction of good conduct and blessedness. What becomes clear, rather, is that this predominantly ethical representation of Christianity is a system of heteronomy, just as certainly as its roots are to be found in purely mediaeval motives. As regards the chief point, too, it falls very far short of the Lutheran doctrine that, as subjects of Christian faith, we live in the law and continually reproduce the law for ourselves through the Holy Spirit, inasmuch as we voluntarily act for the common final end marked out by love.

But without departing from these lines, other features of Christian freedom, far richer and more complete, have been drawn from the New Testament sources. The human will, which in Christianity is directed to the final end of the Kingdom of God, which transcends all natural or particular motives of moral action, proves itself to have attained the highest conceivable level of freedom, both by the independence of its motive from the natural texture of both individual and social life, and by the fact that it is guided by a free knowledge of the moral law, through which it perpetually produces that law. For the moral law exists completely only as a network of those judgments of duty which determine the necessary form of good action in each particular case; the judgment of duty in this sense, however, is always the product of an independent application of the universal law, through particular moral principles, to the individual’s situation at the moment in the moral society. This moral autonomy, however, is necessary for this special reason, that the law of universal love to our neighbour is altogether incapable of being drawn out into a statutory series of general commandments, for it is addressed, in the first place, not to our actions, but to our disposition. Now the meaning of this truth comes out in the distinction between legal and moral action, and serves to mark off the moral law from all kinds of civil law, both in conception and in practical application. For the principle of autonomy not only holds good within the circle of the universal moral law as such; we likewise act autonomously in each particular province of life, even in that of law and of the State, in so far as we deduce the principle of obedience to the statutory law, and the judgments of duty which embody it, from the validity of the universal moral law. On the other hand, even Divine authority does not imply the heteronomous character of the Christian moral law, for it lacks the statutory quality on which that character depends, and excludes all egoistical regard for purely individual pleasure or reward.

This freedom of action, of which the believer becomes capable as a member of the Kingdom of God, is homogeneous with those religious functions through which he gives effect to the attitude of superiority to the world rendered possible to him in Christianity (p. 516). Both sides belong together, as certainly as Christianity is par excellence the ethical religion. The separate elements of the two sides, on closer observation, likewise display features of interaction (p. 518). But at the same time it becomes clear that, as a whole and in principle, the religious functions—trust in God, humility and patience, thanksgiving and petition to God—through which the believer, according to the teaching of Luther, maintains his position against the world, take precedence of the series of moral functions in which we devote ourselves directly to man. For, in the first place, Christianity as a whole is a religion; in particular, it is the specifically moral religion. The religious functions peculiar to it, therefore, are the organs of the Christian life, which assume control of our moral actions. Now, since the latter are characterised by the fact that their motive lies in the idea of the Kingdom of God, no one can make this conjunction save he who sets his trust throughout in God as his Father; for this is the form in which he first really believes in the Kingdom of God as the destiny which rightly is his. Moreover, connected moral action in this province requires that we should be assured of our position as against the world, so far as this is possible, in view of the human weakness which still remains to us. We cannot with confidence undertake that self-abnegation and patience and long-suffering towards men which form a chief part of moral duty, unless through religious trust in God’s guidance we are a match for, or rather superior to, those obstacles, small and great, which nature and human society present. That an action is good and beneficial to the person whom it concerns, depends not only on our good disposition and intention, but also on the gladness which, through trust in God, we extract from our circumstances, which for the most part run counter to such a tone of feeling. Stephan Praetorius has given striking expression to this thought: “It is impossible that a strong and glad temper, thanksgiving, and a willing new obedience can follow where blessedness does not precede, and the Spirit of Christ is not present. This basis must be laid ere good works can be brought forth and built up in us.”¹⁶ Nay more, experience proves that through diligence in a good life-work, in the exercise of a calling that furthers the common weal, we can banish hindrances to joy which harassed us when at the beginning of the day we entered on its duties. But as a whole, the statement of James needs to be supplemented to the effect that we are already blessed in doing what is good, because we greet the law of freedom with that joy which, in principle, is a possession of the Christian in his situation amid the temptations of the world.

Despite the homogeneity which characterises the supramundane nature of the morality of the Kingdom of God, and dominion over the world through trust in God and patience, these religious functions have the precedence, for they condition the correlative moral posture of the mind. Thus the primary content of eternal life or blessedness is to be found in those religious functions which dominate the world. Why, now, is the forgiveness of sins by God, the removal of guilt, necessary to this end? The answer must be sought along the lines of the theory set forth in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (§ 25). Sin is unrighteousness, crime, etc., viewed in their wrong relation to God. This relation may be measured either by the contradiction between the action, the intention, the disposition, and the law of God, or by the contradiction between these and the authority which God exercises over man through His providence or care. Now this alternative, it is true, is a false one. For the validity of Divine law always presupposes the recognition of the authority which God acquires as man’s Benefactor and Provider (vol. i. p. 200). Thus the basal form of sin, in which it offends against religion, is the lack of reverence, or indifference towards God, and the lack of trust, or positive distrust of God. These two marks of sin which, in the Augsburg Confession and its Apology, Melanchthon undertakes, though vainly, to prove the basal form of sin even in the case of original sin (p. 341), shade off from one another, and therefore have no place in original sin, which is posited as in all cases identical. For a lack of reverence towards God always includes as well a lack of trust in Him; but, on the other hand, there may be a lack of trust in God coexisting with reverence towards Him. This distinction, on the whole, coincides with the distinction which relates to guilt against God. For in the first case we must allow for a dulness in the feeling of guilt, while in the second case that feeling is present, perhaps even in an accentuated degree. But when there is added to it a lack of trust towards God, what we have then is just that complicated condition of guilt, that separation from God, that bondage to the world, against which man cannot assert himself with his own resources, for it supplies him with all the motives which impel him to act and strive. If, now, in place of this condition there is to come its exact opposite, trust in God, not audaciously and arbitrarily and prematurely entertained, but pervaded by reverence towards Him—trust, moreover, which introduces the soul to the promises and the tasks of the Kingdom of God, and thus brings his will to direct itself to God’s end, and which, finally, makes the motives which spring from the world subordinate to the Divine final end—then his sin must be forgiven, and his guilt removed. And indeed we must here go back to the judgment of God, which makes it possible for one who, by appropriating the Divine judgment, becomes a believer, to form the corresponding estimate of himself. For a material, mechanical transformation of the sinner is altogether unthinkable, and is out of place, where what is at issue between him and God is his guilty relationship to God. For this relationship is simply not taken away when the sinner is made righteous mechanically—that is, say, through the infusion of love. Through the remission of guilt, through pardon, however, the sinner who appropriates it obtains the right, in virtue of his trust in the God whose authority he thus acknowledges, to approach Him, and to set himself above the world, which is no longer for him his ultimate source of impulse. And thus the argument carried on in the Augsburg Confession and its Apology, on lines suggested by Rom. v., is proved true and necessary.

This proof, it is true, is nothing but a demonstration of the harmony of the ideas which are bound up together in the Christian view of the world and the Christian estimate of self. The man who altogether rejects this system of ideas will find this proof meaningless too. A refutation of contrary views, or an indirect proof of the necessity of forgiveness, cannot be undertaken unless the opponent concedes at least one element in the Christian view of the world and of self. Such a concession he makes, when with Kant he finds in the moral union of men by the law of human worth the final end which is in the world and above the world, and recognises in freedom the volitional cause which out of itself produces the absolute law, independently of motives arising from natural causes. For these ideas are valid in Christianity also, or rather it was on Christianity that Kant modelled them. But just in so far as they ignore the supramundane worth of moral fellowship, the correlative authority of the moral law, and its correspondence with the specific conception of freedom, Socinianism and the Aufklärung and ordinary Rationalism remain entirely unaffected by an indirect proof of the validity in principle of the forgiveness of sin. The statutory law in Socinianism is always concerned merely with the action of the individual, and its acknowledgment of the lordship of Christ does not imply any idea of moral fellowship as a totality. Here there is no perception of the full importance of the law, for the form given to it is statutory, and no necessary relation is shown to exist between obedience to it and the eternal life which is promised. Under these circumstances, even the forgiveness of sins which is acknowledged serves only to weaken the obligatory character of the law. For if forgiveness implies that God, with eternal life in view, regards the imperfect obedience of each individual as perfect, this seems only a roundabout way of reaching the principle of the Aufklärung, that God demands no more from anyone than he is in a position to render in virtue of his individual endowments and his particular situation in life (vol. i. p. 393). This maxim, however, is a direct consequence of the fundamental tenet of the Wolffian Ethics—that the individual subject as such has for his task the perfecting of his own being in harmony with the law of nature. If this be our starting-point, it is likewise impossible to discover the possibility and the necessity of moral fellowship as a whole in its own order and a possession of supreme worth; and therefore the necessity in principle of the forgiveness of sins can never be proved to the subject who is thus thrown upon his own resources, and condemned to seek a merely relative morality.

The general necessity of the religious idea of forgiveness or justification thus results from the presupposition which appraises sin as guilt, and as indifference and mistrust towards God; as also from its teleological relation to eternal life, or that freedom over the world which is possible when man, instead of being separated from God and perpetually opposing His end, comes to cherish trust towards Him, and to have his will positively bent upon the promotion of His end. This radical change involved in reconciliation with God religious knowledge can derive from God alone, and that, too, in the most general sense, from the gracious will of God, the originality and autonomy of which is expressed in the form of the synthetic judgment:—the sinner is right with God, he belongs to God, he is brought near to God. As expressions of objective knowledge these propositions would be absurd, even if used by God Himself; as expressions of His will, the religious estimate of self can never conceive them apart from the result, that the sinner justified by God, or reconciled with Him, is brought to seek the Divine end. But under the circumstances described, this change in aim means, in the first instance, nothing but this, that human life, for the sake of God and of salvation, is to be raised above the motives which spring from the world. The application of this result to the conduct of life in particular, to the liberation of self-feeling from the restrictions of the world, to the acquisition of patience, further to the liberation of the moral disposition from sinful impulses and from the statutory interpretation of the moral law, to the production of a facility in moral action prompted by universal love to one’s neighbour—this is not attained without strain and inward conflict, and not without manifold intermediate causes. The moral necessity of these experiences of personal freedom, due to the Divine act of religious deliverance, is certain; but it is subject to still other conditions than is the logical synthesis by which our theoretical knowledge attaches these consequences to the Divine end, which the sinner appropriates as his own in undergoing the experience of justification or forgiveness by God.

Reference has been made (vol. ii. p. 355) to the fact that Paul deduces Christian freedom — the experimental content of which coincides with what is meant by eternal life — from the same act of Christ to which elsewhere he ascribes justification or forgiveness (Gal. v. 1), but that in other passages he brings freedom into connection with the Spirit of God as the Holy Spirit (Gal. iii. 14, iv. 5, 6; 2 Cor. iii. 17; Rom. viii. 2, 14-16). It has also been remarked that the conjunction of the Spirit of God in believers with their freedom does not imply that the nexus is a causal one. The co-operation of the Holy Spirit does not in this case involve any obscuration of the fact that freedom is derived from the act of justification dependent on the work of Christ. But since, nevertheless, the influence of the Holy Spirit and the fact of freedom cannot be unrelated to one another in the experience of the same subject, we must look for light to another combination of ideas employed by Paul. The hope of eternal life which issues from justification (Rom. v. 2) is witnessed to within us by the working of the Holy Spirit (viii. 13, 23). Thus the Holy Spirit, and our exercise in Him of self-sanctification, is the ground whereby we know the certainty of eternal life. Now, as a matter of fact, no distinction can be drawn between this certainty and the practical expression of Christian freedom over against the world. Thus the Holy Spirit, which coexists with freedom, is conceived by Paul precisely as the ground of our knowledge of freedom, not as the real ground of its existence. But now, what is meant by the Holy Spirit? The determination of this idea has been neglected by theology to such an extent that I cannot here, as we rapidly pass on, overtake the work which the question demands. Neglect of the subject has had this unfortunate practical consequence, that theologians either abstain from using the idea altogether, or understand by it a kind of resistless natural force which runs athwart the regular course of knowledge and the normal exercise of the will. In Paul’s usage of the idea, he identifies the knowledge—common to Christian believers—of God as their Father, Who proves His love to them through Christ (Gal. iv. 6; Rom. viii. 15, v. 5; 1 Cor. ii. 11, 12), and their knowledge of His Son as our Lord (1 Cor. xii. 3), with the function of self-knowledge peculiar to God Himself, because the knowledge of God which is possible to Christians is at one with the knowledge which God has of Himself. Accordingly, the Holy Spirit is described by Paul as the power, common to all Christians, of righteous conduct and of self-sanctification, or the formation of moral character (Rom. viii. 4, 13), which finds its motive in that perfect knowledge of God (p. 22). Although in this reference he points to the involuntariness of our knowledge of God as Father as a regular feature of it, yet he represents its ecstatic mode as neither the only nor the highest form of the knowledge of God. For if the whole of moral practice is derived from the Holy Spirit, this implies that the knowledge of God as our Father acts as the motive of the disposition from which spring righteousness and sanctification. This, however, is consistent; for the Christian consciousness that God in Christ is our Father necessarily includes the practical recognition of the final end of the Kingdom of God.

Under these circumstances, it would cause us no surprise whatever were freedom over the world in religious experience also causally connected with the Holy Spirit of God. For this freedom follows from our reception, through justification, into the fellowship of God, in such wise that in common we find in God our Father and in His love the ultimate ground of our attainment of freedom. To think of the influence of the Holy Spirit, in this connection, as a resistless natural force is absolutely forbidden; for freedom over the world, under all circumstances, must be learned, acquired, fought for. The above view, indeed, has yet another ground to recommend it. Our knowledge and invocation of God as our Father in the Holy Spirit is the effect of our reception as children of God through the judgment of adoption; our freedom over the world is the effect of the Divine judgment affirming our justification by God our Father in Christ. These judgments passed by God are in point of fact identical (§ 18); thus, too, our knowledge of God as our Father, and our freedom over the world, are related to one another simply as the different sides of the same experience. And as, nevertheless, freedom over the world is dependent on our union to God in Divine sonship (Rom. viii. 21), so its basis, too, may properly be placed in the Holy Spirit. We should be forbidden to take this view only if the influence of the Holy Spirit had always to be conceived as applying to moral action. For experiences of freedom over the world are not related to the course of moral activity as its consequences, even though they are conditioned by the proper exercise of that activity (§ 53). Thus, the freedom over the world enjoyed by believers, on the ground that their fellowship with God has been established through justification by God, likewise issues from the Holy Spirit, for justification is at the same time the reception of sinners into Divine Sonship, and it is in the power of the Holy Spirit that we give expression to our common acknowledgment of God as our Father.

1. Justification, or the forgiveness of sins, signifying as it does in principle that the relation of men to God is changed from the separation due to the feeling of guilt and mistrust, and from the opposition or enmity of sin, into the fellowship of trust and peace with God, has for its immediate end the introduction of men into the enjoyment of eternal life, which is present in our experiences of freedom or lordship over the world, and in the independence of self-feeling both from the restrictions and from the impulses due to natural causes or to particular sections of society.

2. Although no part of the direct aim of justification, or the forgiveness of sins, is the production of morally good action—for the latter finds its proximate motive in the supramundane final end of the Kingdom of God—still the freedom of the moral disposition from statutory law, a freedom which manifests itself in the continual production of the moral law in the form of special principles and particular judgments of duty, is a function similar in kind to religious freedom over the world, in the exercise of which without regard to result there is also given an experience of eternal life; in this respect, therefore, the course of moral action is conditioned by justification or reconciliation.

3. Justification, as the reception into God’s fellowship of sinners conscious of their guilt and formerly destitute of trust in God, and reconciliation, as the directing of the hitherto sinful will to the universal final end of God Himself, are, as the fundamental precondition of the Christian life, necessary in order to explain the fact that believers, through trust in God, humility, and patience, occupy that position of supremacy over the world which constitutes eternal life, and in which is experienced that blessedness which is in harmony with the God Who rules over the world as our Father through Christ.

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Footnotes

1. Calvin, Inst. iii. 14. 21: “Quod praeterea bona fidelium opera scriptura causas esse ostendit, cur illis dominus benefaciat, stat inconcussum, effectum nostrae salutis in dei patris dilectione situm esse, materiam in filii obedientia, instrumentum in spiritus illuminatione. Istis nihil obstat, quominus opera dominus tanquam causas inferiores amplectatur, sed unde id? nempe quos sua misericordia aeternae vitae hereditati destinavit, eos ordinaria sua dispensationae per opera bona inducit in eius possessionem. Quod in ordine dispensationis praecedit, posterioris causam nominat.” Conf. Helv., post. 16: “Nos sentimus per opera bona nos servari, illaque ad salutem ita esse necessaria, ut absque illis nemo unquam sit servatus. Gratia enim soliusque Christi beneficio servamur; opera necessario ex fide progignuntur. Ac improprie his salus attribuitur, quae propriissime adscribitur gratiae.” ↩

2. Apol. C. A. iii. 68, 155; Form. Conc. 4; Helv., post. 16; Catech. Pal. 86. ↩

3. Comparat. Dogmatik, i. p. 42; cf. Apol. C. A. iii. 155, 229, vide supra pp. 143, 144. Further, Quenstedt, P. iv. cap. 9, thes. 8, not. 2: “Per bona opera iustificatio nostra quoad nos a posteriori confirmatur.” Hollatz, P. iii. sec. 2, cap. 7, qu. 22: “Quicunque legem divinam, quantum in hac vitae infirmitate fieri potest, sincere servat, is fidei suae certus est.” ↩

4. Christliche Glaubenslehre, ii. 2, p. 135. ↩

5. Köstlin, ii. p. 461. ↩

6. Cf. supra, p. 67; also C. A. iii. 11, 75, 176, 199, 226. Catech. Min. v. “Where the forgiveness of sins is, there is also life and blessedness.” ↩

7. Cf. vol. i. pp. 276, 292; supra, p. 72. ↩

8. Praelectiones theol. cap. iii. (B. F. P. i. p. 539): “Imago divina, quam in altero seculo habituri sumus, in eo constituta est, quod omnibus inimicis nostris et morti ipsi atque infero plenissime dominabimur, nec aliquid in deo praestantius est, quam cunctarum rerum dominatus atque imperium.” ↩

9. Luther, De libertate christiana, p. 226, and Melanchthon, Loci theol. C. R. xxi. p. 1039, are less clear than Calvin, Inst. iii. 19. 4: “Altera forma libertatis est, ut conscientiae, non quasi legis necessitate coactae, legi obsequantur, sed legis ipsius iugo liberae voluntati dei ultro obediant.” ↩

10. Form. Conc., Epit. vi. 5: “Fructus spiritus sunt opera illa, quae spiritus dei per homines renatos operatur, et quae a credentibus fiunt, quatenus renati sunt, ita quidem sponte ac libere, quasi nullum praeceptum unquam accepissent. Et hoc modo filii dei in lege vivunt, et secundum normam legis divinae vitam suam instituunt.” Sol. decl. vi. §§ 4, 5: “Justificati in lege divina quotidie exercere se debent, sicut scriptum est: beatus, qui lege domini delectatur et in lege eius meditatur die ac nocte, … Lex divina cordibus ipsorum inscripta est.” ↩

11. On this point we have a controversy with Catholicism of the following kind. In the Catholic form of Christianity, the universal Christian morality of the Kingdom of God is realised in monasticism, i.e. outside the natural and particular provinces of the family, friendship, fellowship in civic vocation, and the State. The consequence is that the universal morality of Christianity becomes in monasticism a barren or even a pernicious particularism. For it is in the particular, not alongside or outside of it, that the universal finds its realisation, ↩

12. Catech. Racov. 453: “Iustificatio est, cum nos deus pro iustis habet, quod ea ratione facit, cum nobis et peccata remittit et nos vita aeterna donat.” ↩

13. Inst. iii. 19. 4: “Conscientiae legis ipsius iugo liberae voluntati dei ultro obediunt.” ↩

14. Conf. Helv. post. 16: “Docemus vere bona opera enasci ex fide viva per spiritum sanctum et a fidelibus fieri secundum voluntatem et regulam verbi dei … Diximus autem antea, legem dei, quae voluntas dei est, formulam nobis praescribere bonorum operum.” ↩

15. Ioh. Crell, Ethices seu doctrinae de moribus prolegomena. Ethica christiana, B. F. P. tom. iv. ↩

16. Morgenröthe evangelischer Weisheit, vol. i. p. 789, of the collection of treatises cited vol. i, p. 532 of this work, ↩