Nor is there any possibility of abandonment to the will of God _in general_, as the mystic seems often to feel. God's will means particulars all along the way of our life; and there is no communion with God except in this ethical will in particulars. At no point, therefore, can the religious life withdraw itself from the daily duty and maintain its own existence. The constant inevitable condition of the religious communion is the ethical will. Our providential place is God's place to find us. Where God has put us, just there he will best find us. This is further seen in the fact that the true Christian experience is a constant paradox: God ever satisfying, and yet ever impelling--never allowing us to remain where we are, but holding up to us the always higher ideal beyond; the law is ever, "Of his fulness we all received, and grace in place of grace."[52] The deepening communion with God is only through a constantly deepening moral life. Such a thoroughgoing ethicizing of religion as the social consciousness demands, we need not hesitate, therefore, to believe is possible. The truer religion is to its own great aspiration after God, the more certainly is it ethical. But the social consciousness, so far as it influences religion, not only tends to draw away from the falsely mystical, and to emphasize the personal and the ethical, it also tends to emphasize in religion the concretely, historically Christian. [43] Cf. _American Journal of Theology_, Oct., 1898, p. 824. [44] Psalm 25:14. [45] I John 4:7. [46] _The Communion of the Christian with God_, p. 230. [47] _Op. cit._, pp. 232-234. [48] John 10:10. [49] Matt. 11:27. [50] John 17:3. [51] Eph. 3:8. [52] John 1:16. Cf. Herrmann, _Op. cit._, pp. 92, 93. CHAPTER VIII _THE EMPHASIS OF THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS UPON THE HISTORICALLY CHRISTIAN IN RELIGION_ The fact that the social consciousness tends to emphasize in religion the concretely historically Christian, has been so inevitably involved in the preceding discussions, that it can be treated very briefly. I. THE SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS NEEDS HISTORICAL JUSTIFICATION The justification of the social consciousness, we have seen,[53] must be preëminently from history. Neither nature nor speculation can satisfy it. It needs to be able to believe in a living God who is in living relation to living men. It needs just such a justification as historical Christianity, and only historical Christianity, can give; it needs the assurance of an objective divine will in the world, definitely working in the line of its own ideals. It needs also to be able to give such definite content to the thought of God as shall be able to satisfy its own strong insistence upon the rational and the ethical as historical. II. CHRISTIANITY'S RESPONSE TO THIS NEED