been made in God's
image, and bears the divine impress in all the lineaments of body and
soul. His degradation cannot wholly obliterate his inherent nobility,
and indeed his actual corruption bears witness to his possible holiness.
Granting the hypothesis of evolution, matter even in its crudest
beginnings contains potentially all the rich variety of the natural and
spiritual life. The reality of a growing thing lies in its highest form
of being. In the light of the last we explain the first. If the
universe is, as science pronounces, an organic totality which is ever
converting its promise into actuality, then 'the ultimate interpretation
even of the lowest existence of the world, cannot be given except on
principles which are adequate to explain the highest.'[13] Christian
morality is therefore nothing else than the morality prepared from all
eternity, and is but the highest realisation of that which man even at
his lowest has ever been, though unconsciously, striving after. All that
is best and highest in man, all that he is capable of yet becoming, has
really existed within him from the very first, just as the flower and
leaf and fruit are contained implicitly in the seedling. This is the
Pauline view of human nature. Jesus Christ, according to the apostle, is
the End and Consummation of the whole creation. Everywhere in all men
there is a capacity for Christ. Whatever be his origin, man comes upon
the stage of being bearing within him a great and far-reaching destiny.
There is in him, as Browning says, 'a tendency to God.' He is not simply
what he is now, but all that he is yet to be.

II. Assuming, then, the inherent spirituality of man, we may now proceed
to examine his moral consciousness with a view to seeing how its various
constituents form what we have called the substratum of the Christian
life.

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1. We must guard against seeming to adopt the old and discredited
psychology which divides man into a number of separate and independent
faculties. Man is not made like a machine, of a number of adjusted
parts. _He is a unity_, a living organism, in which every part has
something of all the others; and all together, animated by one spirit,
constitute a Living whole which we call personality. While the Bible is
rich in terms denoting the different constituents of man, neither the Old
Testament nor the New regards human nature as a plurality of powers. A
bind of unity or hierarchy of the na