be found to spring mainly from this necessary attitude of imperious hostility. There is no time to temper blows in the moment of battle. A great victory is never gained by moderate blows; though, when gained, a wise general will always know how to use it with moderation. I will now proceed to attempt a sketch of Christian Ethics from the two points of view here indicated. FIRST, Let us inquire what is the steam-power, the lever, the motive force of Christian Ethics. And here at once the most distinctive part of the Christian moral system meets us in the face; it is presented to us prominently, essentially, radically as a religion. It is not merely connected with religion, not only, like the moral philosophy of Dr. Paley, willing to stamp its precepts with a religious sanction, and to found moral obligation upon the will of the Supreme Being; much less, like the philosophy of Socrates, ready to fraternize with religion, and eager to prove with Heraclitus, the profoundest of the pre-Socratic thinkers, that all human rules of conduct are derived ultimately from the necessity of the divine nature.[194.1] It is more than all this; it is a religion; by its mere epiphany it forms a church; in its starting-point, its career, and its consummation it is “a kingdom of Heaven upon earth.” In its method of presentation, though not certainly in its contents, it is as different from its great ally Platonism {195} as Platonism is from its great enemy, the Homeric theology; for Platonism, however nearly allied to Christianity, is a philosophy and not a religion; a philosophy which did not even propose to overthrow the Polytheistic faith, whose poet-theologer it had so rudely assaulted. The moral philosophy of the Greeks, indeed, generally was either a simple wisdom of life in the form of precepts loosely strung together, as in the early Gnomic poets, or it was a wisdom of life deduced from principles of reason, as in all the Socratic and post-Socratic teaching. But the Ethics of the Gospel came down upon men like a flash from Heaven; suddenly, violently, fervidly and explosively, not with a curious apparatus of slowly penetrating arguments. There is no talk about reasons here at all; the λόγος of St. John came afterwards and meant a very different thing. “_Repent ye, and be baptized, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand!_” is the form of the Evangelical appeal, in which no argument is attempted or indeed required. Your conscience tells you that you are rebels against God; as rebels you can only live under a curse; the whole sense-besotted Greek and Roman world is evidently lying under a curse; repent and be converted; return to God and be saved; to man there can be no safety anywhere except in God, who is the source of all good, and in Christ, who gave himself a living sacrifice that we might be redeemed from all evil. This is the whole style of the greatest moral Evangel the world has ever heard;