The plan of this discourse leads us in the next place to consider the individual virtues to which, by their radical connexion with religion and a theological creed, Christian Ethics have shown a preference. But before attempting this it is obvious to remark how, by the atmosphere of piety in which they grow, and the theological soil in which they are rooted, the Christian virtues, as a whole and individually, are elevated to a much higher platform than belongs to any system of mere moral philosophy; and from this point of view we can understand how the divines of the school called Evangelical have been led to look down with such contempt as they generally do on every form of Christian preaching in which a round of mere moral duties is held up as in itself capable of performing the functions of a truly Christian life. The Evangelicals, narrow and bigoted as they too often are, especially in points of artificial and traditional orthodoxy, which they are unable to separate from the essence of the gospel, were quite right in this matter. It is not the mere duties performed, but the motives from which, and the inspiration by which, they are performed, that make the moral life of a truly Christian man so excellent. It is not merely that he is morally correct in all his intercourse with his fellow-men; not merely that he is richly furnished perhaps with all those born amiabilities which an acute Scotch speculator has designated as but the painted masks of virtue;[214.1] {215} the world may shower its plaudits on such cheap forms of native goodness as loudly as it pleases; Christian morality, by virtue of its lofty religious inspiration, aims at something more; the mere righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees it looks upon as an attainment utterly unworthy of a high moral ambition, as a vulgar something, the contentment with which would indicate an entire absence of that pure moral ideal, with the acknowledgment of which a religious morality--a system of ethics founded on the worship of the one true God--must necessarily start. Whatever morality the world may possess, as absolutely indispensable for the common movements of the social machine, Christianity, of course, accepts, but makes no account of in its characteristic appeals. It is rather the low maxims, the false authorities, and the spurious virtues, mixed up with the vulgar morality of the many, that it most mercilessly exposes and protests against. “_Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed in the renewing of your minds_.” “_But you are an elect people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation_.” Such is the lofty tone which it assumes, and from the days of St. Paul to Xavier and Howard has justified the assumption amply by its deeds. It aspires not merely to be moral; it would be the poetry of morality in a world where prose is the common currency. It intends to hold up to the whole human family a divine ideal of social heroism, which may some day be universally