But even more significant than any specific content put into the term "life," was _what was involved in the idea itself_. The legalists had attempted to define conduct by a code, but there was an inherent vitality in the ideal of life, which refused to be measured or bounded. The "words of eternal life," which began the new moral movement of Christianity, had perhaps little definite content to the fishermen, and it is not easy to say just what they meant in moral terms to the writer of the Fourth Gospel who uses the phrase so often. With Paul, life as the realm of the spirit gets definition as it stands over against the "death" of sin and lust. But with all writers of Old or New Testament, whatever content it had, life meant above all the suggestion of something beyond, the gleam and dynamic power of a future not yet understood. It meant to Paul a progress which was governed not by law or "rudiments," but by freedom. Such a life would set itself new and higher standards; the laws and customs that had obtained were felt to be outgrown. The significance of early Christianity as a moral movement, aside from its elements of personal devotion and social unity to be noticed below, was the spirit of movement, the sense of newly forming horizons beyond the old, the conviction that as sons of God its followers had boundless possibilities, that they were not the children of the bond woman, but of the free. =5. The Social Ideal of Justice, Love, and Peace.=--We have seen how this ideal was framed in the setting of a kingdom of God. At first national, it became universal, and with a fraternity which the world is far from having realized, it was to know "neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free." At first military, it took on with seer and psalmist the form of a reign of peace and justice. After the fierce and crude powers typified by the lion and the bear and the leopard had passed, the seer saw a kingdom represented by a human form. Such a kingdom it was that should not pass away. Such was the kingdom "not of this world" which Jesus presented as his message. Membership in this moral kingdom was for the poor in spirit, the pure in heart, the merciful, the peace-makers, the hungerers after righteousness. Greatness in this moral community was to depend on service, not on power. The king should not fail till he had "set justice in the earth." He should "deliver the needy, and the poor."