Our _sense of the value and sacredness of the person_ now for the first time gets its full justification. Men are not only creatures capable of joying and suffering, but children of God with a preciousness to be interpreted only in the light of Christ, and with the "power of the endless life" upon them. Concerning the value of the person, it is worth stopping just here, to notice that it is peculiarly true of the social consciousness, that it is not free to ignore such considerations upon immortality as those which weighed most with John Stuart Mill and Sully. Of the hope of immortality, Mill says: "The beneficial influence of such a hope is far from trifling. It makes life and human nature a far greater thing to the feelings, and gives greater strength as well as greater solemnity to all the sentiments which are awakened in us by our fellow-creatures, and by mankind at large." And Sully adds: "I would only say that if men are to abandon all hope of a future life, the loss, in point of cheering and sustaining influence, will be a vast one, and one not to be made good, so far as I can see, by any new idea of services to collective humanity."[27] Our _sense of obligation_ deepens with all this deepening of the value of men, and our conscience becomes only a true response to God's own life and character--in no mere figurative sense the voice of God in us. And our _love_ becomes simply entering a little way into God's own love, a sharing more and more in his life. And when one has once seen the social consciousness so transfigured in the light of Christ's revelation, he must believe that then, for the first time, he has seen the social consciousness at its highest, and that it is impossible for him to go back to the lower ideal. If the social consciousness is not an illusion, Christ's thought of God and of the life with God ought to be true; and if the world is an honest world, it is true. It is not only true that Christ has a social teaching, but that the social consciousness absolutely requires Christ's teaching for its own final justification. The Christian truth _is_ so great that it alone can give the social consciousness its fullest meaning, alone can enable it to understand itself, and alone can give it adequate motive and power; for, in Keim's words, "to-day, to-morrow, and forever we can know nothing better than that God is our Father, and that the Father is the rest of our souls."[28] [18] James, _Psychology_, Vol. II, pp. 367, 368. [19] _The Philosophical Review_, May, 1896, p. 228. [20] _Psychology_, Briefer Course, p. 461. [21] _Microcosmus_, Vol. II, p. 599. [22] See King, _Reconstruction in Theology_, pp. 54, 84, 102. [23] _Theory of Thought and Knowledge_, pp. 91, 111. [24] _Ethics and Revelation_, pp. 50, 243, 244. [25] _Introduction to Philosophy_, pp. 8, 9, 313. [26] _Searchings in the Silence_, p. 46. [27] Quoted by Orr, _The Christian View of God and the World_, pp. 160, 72.