contrasted, and the adjustment attempted
between moral philosophy and what are known as the doctrines of grace.

Examples of this confusion are so numerous that if one were to proceed
to proof he would have to cite almost the entire European philosophy of
the last three hundred years. From Spinoza downward through the whole
naturalistic school, Moral Beauty is persistently regarded as synonymous
with religion and the spiritual life. The most earnest thinking of the
present day is steeped in the same confusion. We have even the
remarkable spectacle presented to us just now of a sublime
Morality-Religion divorced from Christianity altogether, and wedded to
the baldest form of materialism. It is claimed, moreover, that the moral
scheme of this high atheism is loftier and more perfect than that of
Christianity, and men are asked to take their choice as if the morality
were everything, the Christianity or the atheism which nourished it
being neither here nor there. Others, again, studying this moral beauty
carefully, have detected a something in its Christian forms which has
compelled them to declare that a distinction certainly exists. But in
scarcely a single instance is the gravity of the distinction more than
dimly apprehended. Few conceive of it as other than a difference of
degree, or could give a more definite account of it than Mr. Matthew
Arnold's "Religion is morality touched by Emotion"--an utterance
significant mainly as the testimony of an acute mind that a distinction
of some kind does exist. In a recent Symposium, where the question as to
"The influence upon Morality of a decline in Religious Belief," was
discussed at length by writers of whom this century is justly proud,
there appears scarcely so much as a recognition of the fathomless chasm
separating the leading terms of debate.

If beauty is the criterion of religion, this view of the relation of
religion to morality is justified. But what if there be the same
difference in the beauty of two separate characters that there is
between the mineral and the shell? What if there be a moral beauty and a
spiritual beauty? What answer shall we get if we demand a more
scientific distinction between characters than that based on mere
outward form? It is not enough from the standpoint of biological
religion to say of two characters that both are beautiful. For, again,
no fundamental distinction in Science depends upon beauty. We ask an
answer in terms of biology, ar