to depend only on self-help, is it any wonder that the moral task is directed, not to the development, elevation and joy of personal life, but to its repression, subjugation, and reduction, so as to bring it, at its earthly close, to Nirvana, extinction of conscious individual existence, as the greatest good! By as much as this theory of despair is suited to atrophy all nerve for the ethical task, and sink personality from its true intended elevation of divine fellowship and excellence into the inanity of unconscious being, by so much does the Christian truth of the assured success and victory of right and goodness in the advancing kingdom of God's grace and eternal love, exalting the worth and force of personality to the highest, inspire and sustain the moral endeavor. "Forasmuch as ye know that your labor is not in vain in the Lord." Much has been written in late years about "the evolution of the moral life," by writers who seek to account for it through the action of merely naturalistic forces in the human constitution and in its physical environment. The above contrast is suggestive of factors in the problem which many of these writers overlook. ==Religious Interest.== =3.= By uniting the moral side of life with the religious, and so bringing all the powers of the religious interest in vital help for the moral task. The common false diremption between morality and religion, classifying duties to God as religious, and only duties to fellow-men or self as moral, each standing in isolation, and largely of separate accomplishment, allowing men to be "moral" while repudiating all their duties to God, or "religious" while without a conscience enforcing duty to men, leaves flabby nerve for moral endeavor. All the mighty motives from the Godward side are lost. No quickening force for inter-human duties comes from a consciousness of God and his authority, or the future life. Any view that severs morality from God and is bounded by this world and temporal good, must fail to realize the moral life of man. But the Christian view allows no such separation. It unites the two as two sides of the same life of duty, out of one conscience, with vision of both God and men, and one heart true to the indivisible spirit of right. As religious duties are all moral, as obligations to God, and all moral duties are religious, as due to Him, the Christian consciousness of God must re-inforce and vivify with new efficiency the whole twofold moral endeavor. All the distinctly religious interests and forces, reverence of Deity, repentance before God, gratitude, faith, love, hope, spiritual joy, aspiration, desire of immortality and endless blessedness, thus brought into concurrent action with the Christianly enlightened natural conscience, bring an immensely advantageous condition for the actualization of the ethical life. "To believe in an ever-living and perfect Mind, supreme over the universe, is to invest moral distinctions with immensity and