are weak ethically
The Bible is strong in both directions. Hence its power. Either ethical or
spiritual power alone is defective. Morality without spirituality is
principle without passion. Spirituality without morality is passion
without principle. Union supplements the defectiveness of each alone, and
develops its full forcefulness. The Bible marries morality and
spirituality, and these twain become one. The secularities become sacred,
and the sanctities become sound.

According to the Bible, he who keeps the Ten Words obeys God. The "merely
moral" man is a worshipper of God, though the worship may be silent. In
Kant's great saying, They are always in the service of God whose actions
are moral. Virtue becomes consciously religious, as she learns to
recognize what she is in love with in loving goodness. As the love of
goodness rises into a passion for the ideal forms of Justice, Purity and
Truth, it takes on a real religiousness. It may think to stop short in an
ethical culture, but it cannot. To feed its own aspirations it must
worship the Ideal Righteousness as a reality. Its desires become prayers,
its hopes become praises. Even though in mute longings, it pleads

O Lord, open thou our lips, and our mouth shall shew forth Thy praise.

Reversing the identification of religion with morality that is wrought by
the Bible, its influence is equally impressive. Religion is not the
emotion of man in the presence of the invisible in nature, unless that
invisible is felt to be essentially moral. Religion is not the finest of
feelings before the invisible in man, unless that unseen is also felt to
be ethical. The Natural Religion, however nobly stated, which accepts any
form of poetic ideals as religion, is very imperfect and not at all
Biblical. Shelley's feelings for the spirit of Beauty are exquisitely
fine, but under the light of the Bible they are seen to be only latently
religious. A more penetrating-vision will see in the Ideal Beauty a Moral
Form, and then aesthetics will translate itself into ethics. The unmoral
sentiment of a Shelley for Beauty may issue in another generation in the
immoral sentiment of a Swinburne. Even thus the vision of the Aphrodite
sank into the dream of a Venus. An Oscar Wilde's maunderings over an art
which has no reference to morality may possibly be poetry, but they
certainly are not religion according to the Bible, for all his blasphemous
apostrophes to Christ between his praises of lic