s here the
Augustinian definition of the love of God as the highest and absolute,
the entirely simple, Moral end--an end which contains the demand of the
love of God in the stricter sense (self-sanctification, self-denial,
contemplation) and the demand of the love of our neighbour (the active
relating of all to God, the active interrelating of all in God, and the
most penetrating, mutual self-sacrifice for God). This Ethic, a mystical
interpretation of the Evangelical Preaching, forms indeed a strong
contrast to the This-World Ethic of the Natural Law, Aristotle, the
Decalogue and Natural Prosperity; but then this cannot fail to be the
case, given the entire fundamental character of the Christian
Ethic'.[50]

Thus the widest and most primitive contrasts here are, not Sin and
Redemption (though these, of course, remain) but Nature (however good in
its kind) and Supernature. The State becomes the complex of that
essentially good thing, Nature; the Church the complex of that
different, higher good, Supernature; roughly speaking, where the State
leaves off, the Church begins.

It lasted not long, before the Canonists and certain ruling Churchmen
helped to break up, in the consciousness of men at large, this noble
perception of the two-step ladder from God to man and from man to God.
And the Protestant Reformers, as a whole, went even beyond Saints Paul
and Augustine in exclusive preoccupation with Sin and Redemption.
Henceforth the single-step character of man's call now more than ever
predominates. The Protestant Reformation, like the French Revolution,
marks the existence of grave abuses, the need of large reforms, and,
especially on this point, the all but inevitable excessiveness of man
once he is aroused to such 'reforming' action. Certainly, to this hour,
Protestantism as such has produced, within and for religion
specifically, nothing that can seriously compare, in massive, balanced
completeness, with the work of the short-lived golden Middle Ages of
Aquinas and Dante. Hence, for our precise present purpose, we can
conclude our Jewish and Christian survey here.

3. Only a few words about Confucianism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, as
these, in some of their main outlines, illustrate the points especially
brought out by the Jewish Christian development.

Confucianism admittedly consists, at least as we have it, in a greatly
complicated system of the direct worship of Nature (Sun, Moon, Stars
especially) and of Ancesto