a judge or a divider,'
or 'Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's.' No one on
reflection can now fail to see the essential incompatibility between
slavery and the Christian spirit; yet it was perhaps fourteen hundred
years before a single Christian thinker definitely enunciated that
incompatibility, and more than eighteen hundred years before slavery
was actually banished from all nominally Christian lands. Who can
doubt that many features of our existing social system are equally
incompatible with the principles of Christ's teaching, and that the
{167} accepted Christian morality of a hundred years hence will
definitely condemn many things which the average Christian Conscience
now allows?

And then there is another kind of development in Ethics which is
equally necessary. The Christian law of Love bids us promote the true
good of our fellow-men, bids us regard another man's good as equally
valuable with our own or with the like good of any other. But what is
this good life which we are to promote? As to that our Lord has only
laid down a few very general principles--the supreme value of Love
itself, the superiority of the spiritual to the carnal, the importance
of sexual purity. These principles our consciences still acknowledge,
and there are no others of equal importance. But what of the
intellectual life? Has that no value? Our Lord never depreciated it,
as so many religious founders and reformers have done. But he has
given us no explicit guidance about it. When the Christian ideal
embraced within itself a recognition of the value and duty of Culture,
it was borrowing from Greece. And when we turn from Ethics to
Theology, the actual fact of development is no less indisputable.
Every alteration of the ethical ideal has brought with it some
alteration in our idea of God. We can no longer endure theories of the
Atonement which are opposed to modern ideas of Justice, though they
were quite compatible with {168} patristic or medieval ideas of
Justice. The advances of Science have altered our whole conception of
God's mode of acting upon or governing the world. None of these things
are religiously so important as the great principle of the Fatherhood
of God, nor have they in any way tended to modify its truth or its
supreme importance. But they do imply that our Theology is not and
cannot be in all points the same as that of the first Christians.

Now with these presuppositions let us approac