to do; and I know for me
he is the great Personality, whom I want to be like. That I know.
Theology did not give that to me, and theology cannot get it away from
me."

And what a basis as a test of character is this twofold injunction--this
great fundamental of Jesus! All religion that is genuine flowers in
character. It was Benjamin Jowett who said, and most truly: "The value
of a religion is in the ethical dividend that it pays." When the heart
is right towards God we have the basis, the essence of religion--the
consciousness of God in the soul of man. We have truth in the inward
parts. When the heart is right towards the fellow-man we have the
essential basis of ethics; for again we have truth in the inward parts.

Out of the heart are the issues of life. When the heart is right all
outward acts and relations are right. Love draws one to the very heart
of God; and love attunes one to all the highest and most valued
relationships in our human life.

Fear can never be a basis of either religion or ethics. The one who is
moved by fear makes his chief concern the avoidance of detection on the
one hand, or the escape of punishment on the other. Men of large calibre
have an unusual sagacity in sifting the unessential from the essential
as also the false from the true. Lincoln, when replying to the question
as to why he did not unite himself with some church organisation, said:
"When any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification
of membership, the Saviour's condensed statement of the substance of
both law and gospel: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy
heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour
as thyself, that church shall I join with all my heart and soul."

He was looked upon by many in his day as a non-Christian--by some as an
infidel. His whole life had a profound religious basis, so deep and so
all-absorbing that it gave him those wonderful elements of personality
that were instantly and instinctively noticed by, and that moved all men
who came in touch with him; and that sustained him so wonderfully,
according to his own confession, through those long, dark periods of the
great crisis, The fact that in yesterday's New York paper--Sunday
paper--I saw the notice of a sermon in one of our Presbyterian
pulpits--Lincoln, the Christian--shows that we have moved up a round
and are approaching more and more to an essential Christianity.

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