that before every man our Lord does
present the vision of a possible and perfect self. Christianity does not
destroy 'the will to live,' but only the will to live at all costs. Even
mediaeval piety only inculcated self-mortification as a stage towards a
higher {129} self-affirmation. Christ nowhere condemns the inherent
desire for a complete life. The end, indeed, which each man should place
before himself is self-mastery and freedom from the world;[3] but it is a
mastery and freedom which are to be gained not by asceticism but by
conquest. Christ would awaken in every man the consciousness of the
priceless worth of his soul, and would have him realise in his own person
God's idea of manhood.

The ideal of self-realisation includes three distinct elements:

1. _Life as intensity of being_.--'I am come that they might have life,
and that they might have it more abundantly.'[4] 'More life and fuller'
is the passion of every soul that has caught the vision and heard the
call of Jesus. The supreme good consists not in suppressed vitality, but
in power and freedom. Life in Christ is a full, rich existence. The
doctrine of quietism and indifference to joy has no place in the ethic of
Jesus. Life is manifested in inwardness of character, and not in pomp of
circumstance. It consists not in what a man has, but in what he is.[5]
The beatitudes, as the primary qualifications for the kingdom of God,
emphasise the fundamental principle of the subordination of the material
to the spiritual, and the contrast between inward and outward good.[6]
Self-mastery is to extend to the inner life of man--to dominate the
thoughts and words, and the very heart from which they issue. A divided
life is impossible. The severest discipline, even renunciation, may be
needful to secure that singleness of heart and strenuousness of aim which
are for Jesus the very essence of life. 'Ye cannot serve God and
mammon.'[7] In harmony with this saying is the opposition in the
Johannine teaching between 'the world' and 'eternal life.'[8] The
quality of life indeed depends not upon anything contingent or
accidental, but upon an intense inward realisation of blessedness in
Christ in comparison with which even {130} the privations and sufferings
of this world are but as a shadow.[9] At the same time life is not a
mere negation, not simply an escape from evil. It is a positive good,
the enrichment and intensifying of the whole being by the indwel