The answer to this question comes with great readiness from a host of those who tell us that the meaning of Christianity is summed up in a code of ethical principles. The endless strife of theological tongues has led weary souls to take refuge in the apparent simplicity of the moral law; the stress of the modern social problem has prompted others to fix their exclusive attention upon the Christian rule of conduct as offering the final solution. And so we hear from all sides the many voices that unite in the swelling chorus, whose burden is the lofty ethical precepts of the Sermon on the Mount or the noble utterances of the Hebrew prophets as the sum and substance of all essential Christianity: “Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them”; “Do justly, love mercy and walk humbly with thy God,”—Christianity means this and nothing more.

The assertion of an essentially moral Christianity comes to us backed with the authority of high scholarship. In the Hibbert Journal of October, 1908, in an article entitled “How may Christianity be Defended Today?” Professor McGiffert tells us that “to promote the reign of sympathy and service among men was the controlling purpose of Christ Himself,” that “modern study of Jesus has made this very clear, and we are recognizing with a unanimity never reached in other days that it was for this Jesus labored and for this He summoned men to follow Him.” The fact that this article, in spite of its confused reasoning and its inconclusiveness, is said to have been translated into several foreign languages, proves the strong hold which the moral interpretation of Christianity has obtained.

It is the purpose of the following pages to examine this view. We ask: What do the records teach? Do they permit the interpretation of Christianity as a set of moral laws? or do they imply something else, the religious or spiritual?

In an essay entitled “The Scepticism of Believers,” Leslie Stephen remarks a common confusion between unbelief and contrary belief. The term “belief” is at any historical moment almost invariably used to denote the established belief, that is, the belief supported by authority or by the consensus of opinion; while the term “unbelief” is used to denote dissent from the established belief, even when, as is most often the case, this dissent is itself due to belief. The established belief resists change, and must be attacked, weakened, or destroyed, before it is possible for another belief to get a hearing; hence assenters come to regard dissenters as destructive in their primary intent, and are blinded to the fact that there is another belief at stake, which may be as affirmative and constructive in its own terms as that which prevails. Thus modern religious orthodoxy has condemned as unbelief a certain secular tendency, which really has arisen, not from a love of mischief-making, but from a most devoted confidence in the uniformity of nature, and in the power of man to save himself. It is not wholly unjust to assert, as Leslie Stephen does assert, that, in opposing the free advance of science and of individualism, defenders of “the Faith” have virtually sought to prevent or destroy that faith in the enterprise of civilization which has mainly inspired the progress of the last two centuries.

With the ultimate purpose of helping to clarify thought on the subject of the supernatural, the present essay is a study of usage mostly in Christian history and particularly of today. It therefore notes the meanings which seem to be assigned to the word and to its synonyms and associates; and it includes some criticism of usage, according to the accepted laws of thought, such as may contribute to the purpose of clarification.

In a discussion of the great christological passages of the Synoptic Gospels we have seen that the messianism of Jesus was pre-eminently ethical and religious. His attitude toward current expectations of Israel's redemption resembled that of the prophets in being critical rather than originative. He ethicized and spiritualized a hope which in its origins and in its undisciplined popular manifestations had little to differentiate it from the expectations entertained by heathen worshippers of their tribal or national divinities.

The provisions for the fourth of the series of Dudleian Lectures are as follows:

“The fourth and last lecture I would have for the maintaining, explaining, and proving the validity of the ordination of ministers or pastors of the churches, and so their administration of the sacraments or ordinances of religion as the same hath been practiced in New England, from the first beginning of it, and so continued at this day. Not that I would in any wise invalidate Episcopal Ordination, as it is commonly called and practiced in the Church of England; but I do esteem the method of ordination as practiced in Scotland, at Geneva, and among the dissenters in England, and in the churches in this country, to be very safe, Scriptural and valid; and that the great Head of the church, by his blessed spirit, hath owned, sanctified, and blessed them accordingly, and will continue to do so to the end of the World. Amen.”

The topic of Sacerdotalism is naturally involved in the terms of this Foundation.

The term “Sacerdotalism” has been defined as “the doctrine that the man who ministers in sacred things, the institution through which and the office or order in which he ministers, the acts he performs, the sacraments and rites he celebrates, are so ordained and constituted of God as to be the peculiar channels of His grace, essential to true worship, necessary to the being of religion, and the full realization of the religious life.”

The study of the monuments of the early centuries of the Christian Era has hitherto received its inspiration from one or other of two sources. Christian scholars, like De Rossi and Wilpert and Kraus, have been interested in the subject because of its Christian content and significance, and classical scholars, like Wickhoff and Riegl, have studied the monuments of this period as the expiring forms of classic art. Both classes of scholars have, in great measure, confined their observations to the monuments of Italy, especially to those of Rome and to the distinctly Roman provinces. Against this point of view that “All roads lead to Rome,” a new battle-cry is raised, “Ex oriente lux.” It is not to Rome, but to Alexandria and Egypt, Ephesus and Asia Minor, Antioch and Syria, Jerusalem and Palestine, that we must look for the solution of early Christian and medieaval art. The new champion is Dr. Josef Strzygowski, and he is gathering adherents amongst the younger writers in various German universities.

That religion has a natural history, being included under the concepts that constitute the sciences of biology, psychology, and sociology, may by this time be assumed without argument. Details of the movement remain to be determined, but there is no longer any occasion to ask whether religion, or some form of it, is interpolated into the system of nature. But to adopt a principle is not the same as to apply it consistently. In spite of good intentions, remnants of the older view become incorporated into our would-be scientific structures. As instances, Professor King, in the book under review, specifies Max Müller's “perception of the infinite,” Morris Jastrow's “religious instinct,” Tiele's “innate sense of infinity,” Brinton's postulate of “ a religiosity of man as a part of his psychical being,” and the theological notion of the gradual revelation of a specific and so-to-say pre-determined idea of God. In all these King sees only so many interpolations. They inject a formed religious consciousness into history, instead of explaining the genesis of the consciousness itself. The author therefore undertakes to show how religion first emerges out of a pre-religious type of life, and how ceremonial, the gods, and the development of high religions can all be fully accounted for by strictly natural conditions. Whether or not all his conclusions are convincing, he has produced a book that must be reckoned with.