{128} Rather his value can only be realised in the life of the community to which he truly belongs. The effort to help others is the truest way to reveal the hidden worth of one's own life; and he who withholds his sympathy from the needy has proved himself unworthy of the kingdom. While the writers of the New Testament vary in their mode of presenting the ultimate goal of man, they are at one in regarding it as an exalted form of _life_. What they all seek to commend is a condition of being involving a gradual assimilation to, and communion with, God. The distinctive gift of the Gospel is the gift of life. 'I am the Life,' says Christ. And the apostle's confession is in harmony with his Master's claim--'For me to live is Christ.' Salvation is nothing else than the restoration, preservation, and exaltation of life. Corresponding, therefore, to the three great conceptions of Life in the New Testament, and especially in the teaching of Jesus--'Eternal Life,' 'the kingdom of God,' and the perfection of the divine Fatherhood, 'Perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect'--there are three aspects, individual, social, and divine, in which we may view the Christian ideal. I Self-realisation is not, indeed, a scriptural word. But rightly understood it is a true element in the conception of life, and may, we think, be legitimately drawn from the ethical teaching of the New Testament.[1] Though the free full development of the individual personality as we conceive it in modern times does not receive explicit statement,[2] still one cannot doubt, that before every man our Lord does present the vision of a possible and perfect self. Christianity does not destroy 'the will to live,' but only the will to live at all costs. Even mediaeval piety only inculcated self-mortification as a stage towards a higher {129} self-affirmation. Christ nowhere condemns the inherent desire for a complete life. The end, indeed, which each man should place before himself is self-mastery and freedom from the world;[3] but it is a mastery and freedom which are to be gained not by asceticism but by conquest. Christ would awaken in every man the consciousness of the priceless worth of his soul, and would have him realise in his own person God's idea of manhood. The ideal of self-realisation includes three distinct elements: