Such, then, is the good life which Christ reveals, and to which He calls
us. To say that to Him we owe our highest ideal of righteousness, is
only to affirm what no one now seriously denies. John Stuart Mill has,
it is true, alleged certain defects against Christianity as an ethical
system, yet Mill himself has frankly admitted that "it would not be easy
now, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of
virtue from the abstract to the concrete, than to endeavour so to live
that Christ would approve our life." If Christ be not our one Master in
the moral world, it will at least be soon enough to discuss a rival's
claims when he appears; as yet there is no sign of him. But the point I
am most anxious to emphasize just now is not simply that Jesus has put
before us an ideal, the highest of its kind in the world, but that there
is nothing of any kind to be desired before it. To be good as Christ was
good, here in very truth is the _summum bonum_ of life, the greatest
thing in the world, that which, before all other things, a man should
seek to make his own, There are times, perhaps, in the lives of all of
us when we are tempted to doubt it--times when the kingdoms of this
world, the kingdoms of wealth and power and knowledge lie stretched at
our feet, and the whispering fiend at our elbow bids us bow and enter
in. But once again, if we be true men, the moment comes,
"When the spirit's true endowments
Stand out plainly from its false ones,"
when the sacred, saving faith in righteousness returns, and we know that
Christ was right, that for ever and for ever it is true that better than
to be rich, or to be clever, or to be famous, is it to be true, to be
pure, to be good.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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