circumstance.' And Bishop Wilson says: 'Look up to God' (by which he means just this: Consult your conscience) 'at all times, and you will, as in a glass, discover what is fit to be done.' And the Preacher's well-known sentence is exactly to the same effect: 'God made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions,'[1]—or, as it more correctly is, 'many abstruse reasonings.' Let us hold fast to this, and we shall find we have a stay by the help of which even poor weak men, with no pretensions to be logical athletes, may stand firmly.
And so, when we are asked, what is the object of religion?—let us reply: Conduct. And when we are asked further, what is conduct?—let us answer: Three-fourths of life.
And certainly we need not go far about to prove that conduct, or 'righteousness,' which is the object of religion, is in a special manner the object of Bible-religion. The word 'righteousness' is the master-word of the Old Testament. Keep judgment and do righteousness! Cease to do evil, learn to do well![2] these words being taken in their plainest sense of conduct. Offer the sacrifice, not of victims and ceremonies, as the way of the world in religion then was, but: Offer the sacrifice of righteousness![3] The great concern of the New Testament is likewise righteousness, but righteousness reached through particular means, righteousness by the means of Jesus Christ. A sentence which sums up the New Testament and assigns the ground whereon the Christian Church stands, is, as we have elsewhere said,[4] this: Let every one that nameth the name of Christ depart from iniquity![5] If we are to take a sentence which in like
- ↑ Ecclesiastes, vii, 29.
- ↑ Isaiah, lvi, 1; i, 16, 17.
- ↑ Psalm iv, 5.
- ↑ St. Paul and Protestantism, p. 159.
- ↑ II Timothy, ii, 19.
