In thus teaching that all duties should be fulfilled as something due to God, and under inspiration of love to Him, Christian ethics is not to be understood to mean that rational ethical theory is mistaken when it claims that men are to "do right because it is right." But it means to remind us where alone the absolute right is found--only in God. And it means that both the religious and the ethical life is to upraise and anchor us to Him, and to eternal righteousness as it is in Him. All duty is owed finally to God, because He is the one absolute righteous Being to whom the whole universe owes its very existence and all its blessings. Thus Christian ethics sets forth fully what rational thought has often caught a glimpse of and hinted at, but wanted vision to see clearly, viz.: that the goal of the ethical aim is to be "like God." Its aim, as is that of religion itself, is to bring our moral life into living fellowship with Him and His blessedness. This marked feature of Christian teaching presents the ethical view in its highest elevation, purification and power. ==Moral Guilt.== (4) In harmony with this close connection of the moral with the religious life, a further special feature of Christian ethics is a peculiar emphasis upon the guilt of offence against the moral law. In pagan ethics, often with no clear perception of the existence of God, always without just conception of his character, though the moral distinction was recognized and wrong was regarded as condemnable, yet because the wrong was viewed as traversing only an abstract principle or an accredited usage or order of best happiness, it evoked no strong sense of guilt. Right was always little else than a conforming of one's self to "nature," or "reason," or "civil authority," or conditions of "well-being" or "enjoyment," or at best to an ideal conception of virtue. In the ethical view which materialistic philosophies present, though the phenomenon of conscience is acknowledged and obedience to its direction admitted to be necessary for proper right order, yet the condemnatory judgment on immorality is rather a judgment of it as unwise, imprudent, and injurious than as guilty and worthy of punishment. It is at most a non-conformity to an impersonal, mechanically determined, ongoing nature. The whole utilitarian conception of morality, which makes it consist essentially in following the teachings of experience as to what is most advantageous and useful, may hold disregard of it as a great "evil," economically viewed, but almost annuls, if it does not completely remove, the idea of guilt, by substituting that of loss. Even in simply rational _theistic_ ethics, despite theistic pre-suppositions and conclusions, the view may still deal too much with abstractions and rest too much on abstract ideas or impersonal things. Right and wrong are, indeed, developed by natural relations, to which men are bound to conform, but only because these