p to a saner view is, to understand--if a man
has sense enough to reach so high--that the subtlest discoveries ever
made by man, all put together, do not make one wave of that Atlantic as
to novelty and originality which lies in the moral scheme of
Christianity. I do not mean in the total scheme of Christianity,
redemption, etc. No, but in the ethics.

All ethics that ever Greece refined or Rome illustrated, was, and could
be, only the same universal system of social ethics--ethics proper and
exclusive to man and man _inter se_, with no glimpse of any upward
relationship.

Now Christianity looks upward for the first time. This in the first
place. Secondly, out of that upward look Christianity looks secondarily
down again, and reacts even upon the social ethics in the most
tremendous way.

_For my Book on the Relations of Christianity to Man._--S. T. C. cites
Jeremy Taylor, etc., for horrible passages on the gloomy state of the
chances for virtuous Pagans. S. T. C. in a more liberal generation is
shocked; and of course in his readers as in himself secretly, he
professes more liberal ideas. Aye, but how is he entitled to these
ideas? For, on further consideration, it is not Cicero only, or
Epictetus only, that would suffer under this law of Christianity viewed
in its reagency, but also Abraham, David, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Hezekiah.
Because, how could they benefit by a Redeemer not yet revealed--nay, by
a Redeemer not even existing? For it is not the second person in the
Trinity--not He separately and abstractedly--that is the Redeemer, but
that second person incarnated. St. Paul apparently wished to smuggle
this tremendous question into a fraudulent solution, by mixing up
Abraham (with others pre-Christian and Christian) into the long array of
those whose _Faith_ had saved them. But faith in whom? General faith in
God is not the thing, it is faith in Jesus Christ; and we are solemnly
told in many shapes that no other name was given on earth through which
men could be delivered. Indeed, if not, how is the Messiah of such
exclusive and paramount importance to man? The Messiah was as yet (viz.,
in Abraham's time) a prophecy--a dim, prophetic outline of one who
_should_ be revealed. But if Abraham and many others could do without
Him, if this was a dispensable idea, how was it in any case, first or
last, indispensable? Besides, recur to the theory of Christianity. Most
undeniably it was this, that neither of the two elements