influence of the
remission of our sin by our Heavenly Father.

Moreover, an ethical naturalist can also accomplish much in _self-denial_:
he can make many great sacrifices, if he can thereby reach a desirable end
that cannot be reached without acts of self-denial; he can show great
strength and patience in a resigned endurance of the inevitable; and if we
take into consideration the possibility of its being logically at variance
with his system, he may perform all that which the highest morality
requires. But a renunciation which is more than silent resignation, and
which under certain circumstances can also become a joyful renunciation of
all that was beloved and dear to man on earth, does not grow out of the
soil of naturalism, and is possible only there where man carries in himself
a possession which would render him still more fortunate and happy than the
idea of species, and where he knows the cross of Jesus, and understands the
word of the Lord: "He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that
loseth his life for my sake, shall find it." Strauss is a striking proof
that naturalism is not able to estimate the tasks of self-denial at their
full importance. In his "The Old Faith and the New," although he speaks
with great earnestness of moral demands, yet he deeply degrades that which
is connected with a Christian renunciation of self and the world, when he
reproaches Christianity with "a thorough cult of poverty and _mendicity_"
(!) and, regarding its demand for self-denial, he denies that it has any
comprehension of the tasks of {395} industry, of the virtues of home and
family life, of patriotism and civil virtue.

Finally, we may make a similar statement in regard to _humility_. There
certainly are ethical naturalists also who are modest. But when the
prophets of ethical naturalism again and again announce that the great aim
of all the discoveries of the evolution theory is to show us how far
mankind has fortunately progressed; when their spirit of devotion is
nourished by Goethe's Promethean word: "Hast thou not thyself accomplished
all, thou holy glowing heart?"--and even when Haeckel prints as the leading
motto of his "Anthropogeny" Goethe's poem "Prometheus"; when the struggle of
selection is also elevated to a moral principle, and the life-task of an
individual is limited to creating elbow-room for himself: then humility,
indeed, is a virtue which a naturalist may acquire, not through his
naturalism, but