=2.= But Christianity contributes immensely to the ethical view. It is, indeed, a great misconception to think that supernatural revelation has been given simply to teach morality, or to look on Christianity as merely a code of ethics. But though its first great object is redemption, presenting God to our view in redeeming love and activity, and offering deliverance from the guilt and life of sin, it necessarily also aims to recover men to personal righteousness. Indeed, both forgiveness and renewal look to this as the goal to which redemption is to bring its subjects. While primarily Christianity is a religion and redemptory, its ultimate aim is the establishment of men in obedience to God, righteousness, and excellence. The very summit of its purpose, the Alp that rises above every other Alp, is character and right life. So the very law of its movement is supremely ethical. Forgiveness of sin, justification by faith, stands as only the first step in the application of redemption, and beyond this Christianity pre-eminently means a life, the increasing recovery and perfection of human nature in its ethical character and action, enthroning the principles of duty, love, and righteousness in the conscience and the heart, and bringing personal conduct into rhythmic harmony with eternal righteousness and goodness. And the science of ethics has not properly completed its view until it has fully included the distinctive teaching of Christianity. For beyond all question the data of this teaching have produced the purest and loftiest moral life that the world has seen, the best product of the moral history of mankind. Its ideal is confessedly the highest and the best sustained. Even apart from the question of the well-proved supernatural claims of Christianity, its ethical work lifts its moral teachings to the most authoritative place, the supreme court, for the decisions and formulations of the complete scientific view. The total contribution of Christianity to morality comes along two lines of help: 1. In the way of fuller disclosure of moral principles and of essential duties; and 2. In the way of furnishing an efficient dynamic for their fulfilment. The first of these two topics claims attention in this chapter; the second must be left for the next.