1. _Life as intensity of being_.--'I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.'[4] 'More life and fuller' is the passion of every soul that has caught the vision and heard the call of Jesus. The supreme good consists not in suppressed vitality, but in power and freedom. Life in Christ is a full, rich existence. The doctrine of quietism and indifference to joy has no place in the ethic of Jesus. Life is manifested in inwardness of character, and not in pomp of circumstance. It consists not in what a man has, but in what he is.[5] The beatitudes, as the primary qualifications for the kingdom of God, emphasise the fundamental principle of the subordination of the material to the spiritual, and the contrast between inward and outward good.[6] Self-mastery is to extend to the inner life of man--to dominate the thoughts and words, and the very heart from which they issue. A divided life is impossible. The severest discipline, even renunciation, may be needful to secure that singleness of heart and strenuousness of aim which are for Jesus the very essence of life. 'Ye cannot serve God and mammon.'[7] In harmony with this saying is the opposition in the Johannine teaching between 'the world' and 'eternal life.'[8] The quality of life indeed depends not upon anything contingent or accidental, but upon an intense inward realisation of blessedness in Christ in comparison with which even {130} the privations and sufferings of this world are but as a shadow.[9] At the same time life is not a mere negation, not simply an escape from evil. It is a positive good, the enrichment and intensifying of the whole being by the indwelling of a new spiritual power. 'For me to live is Christ,' says St. Paul. 'This is life eternal,' says St. John, 'that they may know Thee the only true God, and Him whom Thou didst send, even Jesus Christ.'[10]