at goes on, and who is able to do even what
appears to be most impossible. He is a God of strict justice and
holiness; though he is so kind, his judgments have not ceased, but
are still impending over guilty men and a guilty people. It is he who
can cast both soul and body into hell. It is a God of such energy,
such zeal, who yet offers himself as the willing benefactor and
defender, and the loving guide and helper of the humblest of his
human creatures. In the second place, the terms of the union here
formed between God and man are such as can be found nowhere else. The
deity inspires man not to any particular kind of acts, not to
sacrifices, nor to withdrawal from the world, but inspires him simply
to realise himself. Man is assured of the sympathy of this great God,
and is then left in freedom as to the mode in which he should serve
him. No rules are prescribed; human life is not pressed into an
artificial mould, as is the case in so many great religions; no
preference is accorded to any one pursuit over others. This religion
is not a yoke to coerce men and to make them less, but an inspiration
capable of entering into every kind of life, and of making men
greater and better in whatever occupation. Even religious duties are
left to form themselves naturally; all that is insisted on is that
the child shall have living and real intercourse with the Father.
Prayer is necessary, and so is the practice of good works; the child
must keep in sympathy with the Father by doing as he does. Further
than this, the forms of the religious life are not prescribed. With
regard to morals, it is the same. The moral life is to build itself
up freely from within; goodness is not to be a matter of rule, but
the spontaneous and happy development of a principle which lives and
speaks deep in the centre of the heart. Jesus is not a lawgiver, save
in a metaphorical sense: the law which he sets up is nothing more
than that which every man, when he turns away from all that is
artificial, can find in his own breast.

It is one feature of the spontaneity and spirituality of the religion
of Jesus, that it has no constitution. Jesus regarded himself as the
founder not of a new religion, but only of an inner circle of more
devoted believers inside the old religion of his country; he did not
therefore feel called to draw up rules for a new faith, and the
result of this is that the mechanism of the religion is of later
growth. The authority of the f