Substance and shadow

Table Of Contents

PAGE

Chapter I

Relation of Swedenborg to the Intellect. — His staunch vindication of human equality. — The angels devoid of personal worth. — Swedenborg's statements imply a profound Philosophy.

— Its fundamental notion, the dependence of Morality. — Our

tt »al force a perpetual communication 31

Chapter II

vforal life in order to spiritual. — Kant and Swedenborg. — ~ ..edenborg's doctrine of the origin of Evil. — His sincere testimony to the actuality of creation. — Infinite love necessarily creative 50

Chapter III

How the letter of Revelation degrades its spiritual contents.

— Time and Space constitutional conditions of our consciousness. — Natural Religion affronts the heart even more than the head. — The Divine perfection is eminently human 65

Chapter IV

The Divine Humiliation. — The creature must necessarily antagonize the creative perfection. — Personality the true marvel of creation. — The creature's identity the prime interest of creation. — The practical obstacle to it in the nature of the creature. — Revelation alone competent to the question 78 iv Table of Contents.

Chapter V. Page

Philosophy's true function. — Treachery of philosophers to it. — Sir William Hamilton makes scepticism the basis of faith. — Kant makes real things unintelligible, and intelligible things unreal. — Sir William Hamilton runs Kant's doctrine into the ground. — Between the two Philosophy is reduced to a pious hiccup. — Philosophy is totally unharmed by the Positivists. — The total problem of Philosophy is to reconcile Freedom with Dependence. — Swedenborg alone solves it honestly and without ostentation 89

Chapter VI

Swedenborg's Doctrine of Nature. — Nature's total subordination to spirit. — Discrimination of moral from spiritual life, largely illustrated > 106

Chapter VII

Incompetency of reason in spiritual things. — Nature is an implication of the spiritual world. — It is according to Swedenborg the Hand of God's Power. — Moral righteousness incompatible with spiritual innocence. — The Law is intended to minister death. — Moral force characterizes us only in the infancy of our spiritual development. — The Law alone gives a knowledge of sin. — Delight in ritual righteousness fatal to spiritual life. — Our spiritual creation contingent upon our natural redemption. — We are born only to be reborn 118

Chapter VIII

Morality is a platform for our spiritual regeneration. — It is the subject earth of spiritual existence. — Natural existences forms of use. — Spiritual existences forms of power. — Nature's discords harmonized in man. — Our moral discords harmonized in the social development of the race. — Society or fellowship among men the proper outcome of the Divine redemption of Nature. — Thus the moral sentiment claims only a social glorification. — Individual regeneration is a fruit of our natural redemption. — Church and Srate are mere factors of a perfect society. — The Divine benignity 137

Chapter IX

The letter of religion inversely serviceable to its spirit. — Revelation implies a veiling of spiritual truth ; /". e. a lowering

Table of Contents. v

PAGE

of it to the capacity of carnal minds. — The Divine is primarily akin to our least reputable interests; or has chief regard to what men esteem the least. — Hostility of the religious conscience to God's humane perfection. — The fearful perversion which Orthodoxy makes of the Christian Atonement. — Rituality fatal to spirituality 156

Chapter X

Testimony of experience. — The aim of all God's dealings with us is to undermine our virtue, or our conceit of our ability to be better in ourselves than other people. — Redemption the sole secret of creation. — The conscience of sin. — It is the only legitimate fruit of religious culture. — Is the conscience of sin real or dramatic ? — The sectarian view absurd. — The judgment is exclusively a spiritual one. — The philosophic meaning of the judgment. — The true confession of sin is never a ritual one. — One's conscience of sin means inwardly his worship of God's perfection. — It is a mere practical declaration that God's goodness is ineffable 168

Chapter XI

The Church affects a real sanctity. — She lives by adroitly flattering our self-righteous instincts. — Moral righteousness when regarded as a positive quantity, fatal to spiritual innocence and peace. — The church embodies and authenticates our natural sottishness in Divine things. — She is the refuge and citadel of a frenzied egotism and unbelief. — There are very many in the church who are not of it. — The church cannot confer both a literal and a spiritual sanctity. — Which alternative does she see fit to adopt ? — She adopts the latter 188

Chapter XII

Salvation and damnation, spiritually interpreted, mean severally to love and hate our kind. — The tap-root of character is one's conception of God. — The unhandsome fruits of Catholic religiosity. — The subtler but more harmful fruits of Protestant fanaticism. — When the son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth ? — The Jew and the Christian are, respectively, carnal type and spiritual substance. — Religion is now the idol of men's impure devotion. — The sole legitimate force of religion cathartic not alimentative. — The true enemy of God is

always the saint, never the sinner 203 vi Table of Contents,

Chapter XIII. Page

The kingdom of God to come on earth. — Man is a microcosm because the cosmos is a grand man. — The heart of men is much in advance of their head. — Regeneration impossible save through a redemption of Nature. — In Christ God is revealed as a glorified Natural man : hence Christianity portends a Divine innocence for man in the sphere of his natural life. — Our religious life is a standing opprobrium to the Divine name. — The life which Christ inaugurates in human nature is not post-mortem existence. — God is perfect Man 224

Chapter XIV

The thorough redemption of Nature in Christ. — Christ is not a spirit but a Divine natural man. — Swedenborg scouts the notion of any arbitrary power in God, there being no infant who has not more. — Angel and devil both involved in Man. — Influence of the Christian truth in the natural sphere of the mind. — In Divine order the First is last, and the Last first. — Hell is glorified in conventional, Heaven in true, Manhood 241

Chapter XV

Nature implied in Man. — Incompetency of the church to interpret Revelation. Both Theology and Philosophy as at present administered only inflame our native Pharisaism. — There is but One Life, and we are His constant creatures. — The philosophic idea of creation. — It is the giving inward substance to what in itself is pure form. — Our subjective history involved in our objective creation. — A subject can never properly be his own object. — Kant refutes creation by the fiction of noumenal existence. — Sir William Hamilton hereupon degrades Philosophy into snivel 256

Chapter XVI

Constitution is not character, any more than heart and lungs are the body. — Kant habitually confounds the two things, or supposes that you give being to things when you give them phenomenality. — Idealism the bane of Philosophy from the beginning of time till now. — Swedenborg puts a stop to philosophic guessing. — Hamilton and Mansel's testimony to Philosophy. — They make it an abject scepticism relieved by Cant • 274

Table of Contents, vii

Chapter XVII

PAGE Kant's analysis of knowledge. — He makes knowledge a fact of physical constitution, not of spiritual creation. — Science has to do with the constitution of things ; Philosophy with their creation. — Science deals with the finite and relative ; Philosophy with the infinite and absolute. — Facts of life known from within ; facts of existence from without. — The constitution of a thing, or what makes it appear, is never what creates it, or makes it be. — Life implies existence ; soul body* • 286

Chapter XVIII

Life or consciousness unites what sense and reason disunite.

— Sir William Hamilton's curious theory of the causal judgment. — He finds the cause of a thing in the thing's own entrails. — Thus he thinks saltpetre is not merely constituted but caused by K O and N 05. — Cause evoked only to explain some breach of natural order. — We never ask the cause of Things, but only of their mutations. — Sir W. Hamilton stultifies intelligence by confounding Finiteness with Phenomenality. — They are as distinct as sense and reason. — Cause is adduced to explain facts of phenomenal not of fixed existence.

— It is not a sensible but a rational inquest. — Cause is a scientific rudiment of the philosophic idea of creation. — The force of the causal judgment is in its educating or disciplining

the intellect 299

Chapter XIX

John Mill's broad human sympathies. — His failure nevertheless to explain the causal instinct. — He also sinks the philosopher in the man of science. — He restricts cause to a merely constitutive not creative import. — He makes it signify only what identifies, not what individualizes things. — Philosophy reverses this judgment, giving cause a creative efficacy, or making it an attestation exclusively of the spiritual side of life, not of its material. — Cause invariably opens up the supernatural realm. — It is in this point of view solely that Philosophy envisages it. — Men of mere thought, not of life, like Kant, Sir William Hamilton, and the rest, deny cause a spiritual implication, because they resolve spiritual being itself into physical constitution. — Kant makes the dissecting-room the school of Philosophy. — He found life so dazzling a thing to contemplate, that he betook himself, to the unspeakable comfort of viii Table of Contents.

PAGE

his optics, to the contemplation of death instead : only unfortunately he misnamed that death life; and so, by his great authority over men of thought, not of life, stirred up any amount of dreary sepulchral literature. — His pretension to be the Copernicus of Philosophy. — His German and Scotch disciples- • 322

CHAPTER XX. The fundamental misconception of the Critical Philosophy

— Kant's dread of Philosophy, lest it plainly avouch creation.

— Common sense affirms creation. — Pseudo Philosophy denies it. — Kant's fatal philosophic delinquency, in exteriorating object to subject. — The extraordinary performances of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel thereupon. — The testimony of sense one thing ; that of consciousness another. — Kant confounds them.

— He thought finite and relative to be one and the same conception. — Sense divorces what consciousness marries. — Kant reduces Philosophy to a requiem over deceased hopes. — Nature a correspondence of the things of the mind. — Man its sole unity 347

Chapter XXI

Alleged duality of Man and Nature in consciousness. — Their real unity there. — The objective sphere in life always controls the subjective sphere. — The ground of Kant's mistake. — Are we properly active or passive in knowledge? — Noumenal existence fatal to creation. — Nature necessary to posit the creature, or give him identity. — Import of the distinction between Identity and Individuality. — Philosophy must accept the guidance of Revelation. — Uncontrolled by Philosophy science is necessarily atheistic and logic pantheistic 371

Chapter XXII

God is not voluntarily but spontaneously creative. — He cannot create Life,- but only communicate it. — Before life can be communicated, a basis of communication must be organized.

— Creation in order to be real exacts selfhood in the creature ; and hence claims to be a purely spiritual operation of God. — Orthodoxy turns creation into a mere physical exploit of God.

— In truth, however, Nature is but a mask of God's spiritual presence. — The creature's identity the supreme care of the creative Love. — This interest requires that he be an inverse image of God's perfection. — Community, the essence of Na-

Table of Contents. ix

PAGE

ture, inversely images the Divine unity. — Nature's sole function is to embody the spiritual creation. — She incorporates spirit 395

CHAPTER XXIIT.

Nature's part in creation is purely mediatorial. — It is implied in Man as body is implied in soul. — History is the vindication of the human form in creation. — Adam a symbol of the Divine celestial, Eve of the Divine natural, mind. — We know ourselves at first only as sensuously defined. — Swedenborg compels Nature into the limits of consciousness. — Our identity and our individuality equally abject masks of God's creative presence in us 419

Chapter XXIV

The problem of creation. — Insoluble to faith and science alike. — Atheism or Pantheism a necessary logical result. — God must give His creature moral consciousness as well as physical being. — The inevitable implication of the finite consciousness. — Science is but a bridge between Religion and Philosophy. — Formula of our intellectual progress : Religion, Science, Philosophy. — Natural religion is bound to give way to science, while science herself however has no pretension to finality. — Science is only a handmaid to Philosophy. — Philosophy alone has power livingly to reinstate religion. — Religion the heart, science the lungs, of the mind. — Science purges Faith of its sensuous elements. — Philosophy is the brain of the mind ♦ 434

Chapter XXV

History summed up in the interests of church, state, and society. — Its practical scope is to free Eve from the domination of Adam ; that is, invert the relation of subserviency which the principle of Individuality is under to that of Universality. — It transfigures our natural communism itself into the intensest individuality. — Man by creation is perfectly imbecile in himself. — Neither man angel nor devil has the least power in himself. — Man's freedom utterly pliant to the Divine behests. — Marble is not so pliant to the hand of the sculptor. — Our native evil a negative witness to the divinity of our origin. — Our experience of evil strictly constitutional or subjective. — Evil for man means the domination of the individual by the common 1

Table of Contents.

PAGE life. — Good on the other hand means the social subjection of the common to the individual life 46 1

Chapter XXVI

Spiritual import of the Gospel. — Creation means the giving natural substance to spiritual form. — Nature means the principle of community in all existence. — Philosophic bearing of the Christian truth. — Consciousness always identifies us with maternal nature. — Why does the wife's personality merge in that of the husband ? — The reason to be found only in the symbolism of marriage. — Marriage typifies the union of infinite and finite in true manhood. — What has so long blinded us to the spiritual contents of Revelation ? — The church's superstition. — Gloria in excelsis domino 484

THE INTRODUCTION.

The leading words of my title-page call for a precise definition, in order that the reader may clearly discern the aim of the discussion to which I invite his attention.

By morality I mean that sentiment of selfhood or property which every man not an idiot feels in his own body. It is a state of conscious freedom or rationality, exempting him from the further control of parents or guardians, and entitling him in his own estimation and that of his fellows, to the undivided ownership of his words and deeds. It is the basis of conscience in man, or what enables him to appropriate good and evil to himself, instead of ascribing the former as he may one day learn to do exclusively to celestial, the latter exclusively to infernal influence. The word is often viciously used as a synonyme of spiritual goodness, as when we say, "A is a very moral man," meaning a just one ; or, "B is a very immoral man," meaning an unjust one. No man can be either good or evil, either just or unjust, but by virtue of his morality; /. e. unless he have selfhood or freedom entitling him to own his action. This is a conditio sine qua non. The action by which he becomes pronounced either the one sort of man or the other could not be his action, and consequently could never afford a basis for his spiritual development, unless he possessed this original moral force, or strict neutrality with respect to heaven and hell ; but would on the contrary be an effect in every case of overpowering spiritual influence. We should be very careful, therefore, not to confound the condition of an event with the event itself, as we do when we call the good man moral, and deny morality to the evil man. For if the good man alone be moral, while the evil man is immoral, then morality ceases to be any longer the distinctive badge of human nature itself, which separates it from all lower natures (so furnishing a platform for God's spiritual descent into it), and becomes the mere arbitrary endowment of certain persons. The error in question originates in, at least is greatly promoted by, our habit of calling the decalogue " the moral law." As the law is instinct with an ineffable Divine sanctity, we get at last to think that the word which we so commonly couple with it partakes of right the same sanctity, and accordingly call only the man who obeys it moral, while he who disobeys it is immoral. In point of fact, however, morality means nothing more nor less than that state of natural neutrality or indifference to good and evil, to heaven and hell, which distinguishes man from all other existence, and endows him alone with selfhood or freedom. Thus the term properly designates our natural majority or manhood, what every man, as man, possesses in common with every other man.

By religion I mean — what is invariably meant by the term where the thing itself still exists — such a conscience on man's part of a forfeiture of the Divine favor, as perpetually urges him to make sacrifices of his ease, his convenience, his wealth, and if need be his life, in order to restore himself! if so it be possible, to that favor. This is religion in its literal form ; natural religion ; religion as it stands authenticated by the universal instincts of the race, before it has undergone a spiritual conversion into life, and while claiming still a purely ritual embodiment It is however in this gross form the germ of all humane culture. Accordingly we sometimes use the term in an accommodated sense, /. e. to express the spiritual results with which religion is fraught rather than the mere carnal embodiment it first of all offers to such results. Thus the apostle James says: Pure and undefiled religion (/. e., religion viewed no longer as a letter, but as a spirit), is to visit the fatherless and the widow, and keep oneself unspotted from the world (/. e., has exclusive reference to the life). We also say proverbially, handsome is that handsome does ; not meaning of course to stretch the word handsome out of its literal dimensions, but only by an intelligible metonomy of body for soul, or what is natural for what is spiritual, to express in a compendious way the superiority of moral to physical beauty. My reader will always understand me, then, as using the word religion in its strictly literal signification, to indicate our ritual or ceremonious homage to the Divine name.

Now morality and religion, thus interpreted, are regarded on my title-page as concurring to promote the evolution of man's spiritual destiny on earth.

Man's destiny on earth, as I am led to conceive it, consists in the realization of a perfect society, fellowship, or brotherhood among men, proceeding upon such a complete Divine subjugation in the bosom of the race, first of self-love to brotherly love, and then of both loves to universal love or the love of God, as will amount to a regenerate nature in man, by converting first his merely natural consciousness, which is one of comparative isolation and impotence, into a social consciousness, which is one of comparative omnipresence and omnipotence; and then and thereby exalting his moral freedom, which is a purely negative one, into an aesthetic or positive form : so making spontaneity and not will, delight and no longer obligation, the spring of his activity.

But morality and religion are further regarded on the title-page as bearing, in the evolution of the spiritual destiny of man on earth, the relation respectively of substance and shadow. It only remains that I explicate this point, in order to put in the reader's hands the clew to my entire thought.

A shadow is a phenomenon of vision produced by some body intercepting the light. Thus the shadow of the tree upon the lawn is an effect of the tree intercepting the sun's rays. My shadow on the wall is an effect of my body intercepting the rays of the candle, and so forth. Evidently then three things concur to constitute a shadow: 1. a light; 2. an opaque body which drinks up or refuses to transmit its rays ; 3. a background or suitable plane of projection on which such refusal becomes stamped. Thus the shadow which anything casts is strictly proportionate to its power of absorbing the light, or appropriating it to itself: which is only saying, in other words, that the shadow of a thing is the exact measure of its finiteness or imperfection, /. e. of its destitution of true being. And this remark prepares us to ask what purpose the shadow serves, what intellectual use it renders.

Obviously the use or purpose of shadows is to attest finite substance, or separate between phenomenal and real existence. Real existence is that which exists in itself, being vitalized from within. Phenomenal existence is that which exists only by virtue of its implication in something not itself, being vitalized wholly from without. In short real existence is spiritual ; phenomenal existence natural. So far as I am spiritual, that is, to all the extent of my aesthetic or spontaneous life, I am a real existence, possessing life Jn myself. So far as I am simply natural, that is, to all the extent of my instinctual and voluntary life, I am a phenomenal existence, deriving my life from without. My spiritual manhood consequently casts no shadow. Whatsoever I do spontaneously; whatsoever I do in obedience to the inspiration of Beauty; whatsoever I do, in short, from individual taste or attraction in opposition to the common instinct of self-preservation ; is good and beautiful in itself, is positively or infinitely good, as being without any contrast or oppugnancy of evil. But my physical and moral existence never fails to project a shadow. Let me be as beautiful physically as Venus or Apollo, still I am not really or positively, but only actually or apparently, so ; as by contrast with some opposite ugliness. Let me be morally as good as all saints and angels, it is yet not a good which is positive or stands by itself, but one which stands in the opposition of evil. In short, my beauty in the one case, and my goodness in the other, is finite ; and like all finite existence claims its attendant and attesting shadow.

Clearly, then, the purpose of shadows is to attest finite or imperfect existence, existence which does not involve its own substance. The shadow which the tree casts upon the lawn, and that which my body projects upon the wall behind me, are a mute confession on the part of body and .tree that they are purely finite and phenomenal existences: that while they sensibly appear to be in themselves, their being is yet in something very superior to themselves. Seek this tree a few years hence, and you will find no vestige of it remaining. Ask for this body a

The Introduttion. 9

few months hence, possibly, and it will be indistinguishable from the dust of the earth. This is what the shadow invariably says : — that the substance which projects it is a mere appearance to the senses, not a reality to the philosophic understanding; and that if we would penetrate the world of realities we must transcend the realm of sense, the finite realm, and enter that of mind or spirit.

We now fairly discern the constitution of the shadow, and what is its rational scope and significance; and are thus prepared to interpret the greatest of shadows which we call Religion, and which falls everywhere across the page of human history darkening the face of day, turning the fairest promise of nature to blight, undermining the most towering pride of morality by a subtle conscience of sin, and forbidding man to content himself with a righteousness, a peace and a power which shall be anything less than Divine.

The reader recalls the constitution of the shadow, namely, that it is always an effect of some opaque body intercepting the rays of light. Thus the shadow which the tree projects upon the lawn is an effect of the tree intercepting the sun's rays ; and the shadow of my person on the wall an effect of my body intercepting the rays of the lamp. In like manner precisely this stupendous shadow designated by the name of Religion, is an effect produced by our moral consciousness intercepting the rays of the Divine Truth as they shine forth from man's social destiny. The three elements which determine its constitution as a shadow are thus distributed : History being the sole field of its projection; Morality the opaque substance which alone projects it; and the Social principle, the principle of a perfect society fellowship or brotherhood among men, being the great Divine light, of whose obscuration by morality religion has always been at once the shadow and the scourge. So much definition seems due by way of preface in vindication of the title of my book, or in order to apprise my reader that I regard Religion and Morality as respectively shadow and substance in their relation to the social development of the race. Society — fellowship — equality — fraternity, whatever name you give it, is the central sun of human destiny, originating all its motion, and determining the pathway of its progress towards infinite Love and Wisdom. Morality and Religion together constitute the subject-earth of self-love which revolves about this centre, now in light now in shade; morality being the illuminated side of that love, religion its obscured side; the one constituting the splendor of its day, the other the darkness of its night. Morality is the summer lustihood and luxuriance of self-love, clothing its mineral ribs with vegetable grace-, permeating its rigid trunk with sap, decorating its gnarled limbs with foliage, glorifying every reluctant virgin bud and every modest wifely blossom into rich ripe motherly fruit. Religion is the icy winter which blights this summer fertilitv, which arrests the ascent of its

The Introduction. ll

vivifying sap, and humbles its superb life to the ground, in the interests of a spring that shall be perennial, and of autumns bursting with imperishable fruit. In other words, religion has no substantive force. Her sole errand on earth has been to dog the footsteps of morality, to humble the pride of selfhood which man derives from nature, and so soften his interiors to the reception of Divine Truth, as that truth stands fulfilled in the organization of human equality or fellowship.

The backbone of morality has long been providentially broken. The moral force men once had, the power of controlling natural appetite and passion, has abated, and in its place has come a sense of God's presence in Nature, and the aspiration to realize in life the infinite Beauty which she reveals. Almost no one is now strong by himself, strong against the floods of natural arrogance and cupidity which are sure to assail him, but only by association with others. Scarcely any one resists the temptation to which he is naturally prone on religious grounds, or from a sentiment of reverence to the Divine name, but only on social grounds or from a sentiment of what is due to good-fellowship. The failure to see this great change in human nature, and to organize it betimes in appropriate institutions, is what keeps us in this state of public and private demoralization, which has at last resulted in the downfall of our political edifice. See what thorough-paced unconscious scoundrels we have long had for politicians. Observe how apt our men in office are to lend themselves to atrocious jobbery; how incessantly public and private trusts are betrayed; how our clergy in such large numbers habitually emasculate and stultify the gospel, in order to adapt it to the dainty ears of the fierce worldlings who underpin their ecclesiastical consequence ; how ostentation, unbridled luxury of every sort, and the shameless apery of foreign class-pretension, even down to the decorating our imported servants with imported liveries, are corrupting us from our original democratic simplicity ; how rapidly immodesty, dissipation, insolence, and the most unblushing egotism are vulgarizing the manners, hardening the visages, and hopelessly blasting the hereditary remains of innocence of our rich young men and women ; — and who can doubt that Jeff Davis, Joe Smith, filibuster Walker, secretary Floyd, James Buchanan, and all the other dismal signs and portents of our current political and religious life, have been only so many providential scourges sent to devastate and consume a world long ripe for the Divine judgment ?

The only possible explanation of the existing crisis in human affairs, everywhere indeed, compatible with the Divine sovereignty, is, that the moral force in man no longer subserves the great spiritual uses which once sanctified and sweetened it ; that the mission which was once Divinely given it of nurturing men for the skies has been revoked and put in more competent hands. This to my judgment is as plain as anything can well be. The moral force was never anything but a scaffolding for God's spiritual house in the soul; it was never designed to give permanent substance but only temporary form to God's finished work in human nature ; and when accordingly it ceases to look upon itself in this subordinate plight, and insists upon being treated not as the scaffolding but as the house, not as the mould but as the substance to be moulded, not as the matrix but as the gem, in short, not as an accessory but as a principal, it loses even this justification and becomes a positive nuisance. The social sentiment, the sense of a living organic unity among men, is accordingly fast absorbing it or taking it up into its own higher circulation, whence it will be reproduced in every regenerate aesthetic form. Art is the resurgent form of human activity. The artist or producer is the only regenerate image of God in nature, the only living revelation of the Lord on earth. Society itself will erelong release her every subject from that responsibility to his own material interests which has hitherto degraded human life to the ground, and by providing for his honest and orderly physical subsistence, leave his heart and mind and hand free to the only inspiration they spontaneously acknowledge, — that of infinite Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. This most profound and intimate life of God in our nature is groping its way to more and more vivid consciousness in us every day ; and the consequence is that we see the proud old Pagan ideal of moral virtue, a virtue which inheres in the subject himself as finitely constituted or differenced from all other men, giving place to the humble and harmless Christian ideal of a purely spiritual virtue in man, a virtue which inheres in him only as he becomes infinitely constituted, or united with all other men, by the unlimited indwelling of God in his nature. The Pagan goodness proceeds upon self-denial, and hence implies merit. The Christian goodness proceeds upon the frankest and fullest possible self-assertion, and hence implies boundless humility or gratitude. "After those days, saith the Lord, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts."