“Yet living face to face with these great laws, Great truths, great mysteries, all who saw him near, Knew him how childlike, simple, free from flaws Of temper, full of love that casts out fear. Untired in charity, of cheer serene, Careless or gold or breath of praise to earn; Childhood or manhood’s ear content to win, And still as glad to teach as meek to learn.”[234.1] Here we have the general type of a chaste and {235} beautiful Christian humility in the shape of a living man. To this no one objects. It is the dogmas and the doctrinal paradoxes of the professional theologians that are so apt to fret us; to which, accordingly, here as in other cases, in judging of Christian ethics, we shall be wise in not attributing too much importance. But it were a very great mistake to imagine that in reference to the estimate of personal worth Christianity exercises only a repressing, and as some may picture it, a depressing, influence. On the contrary, there is no religion that has done so much in creating and fostering the feeling of personal worth and dignity. How is this? Plainly because, while the Christian doctrine prostrates every man in a humble equality before God, that very equality makes every man conscious of an equal personality as compared with any other man. All men are sinners; if that be a difficult doctrine to swallow there is one closely connected with it, which is more comfortable: all men are brethren; and if brethren, equal--a wise father has no favouritism. This is another consequence of that monotheistic fatherhood of which we have already spoken; it not only abolished nationalities, it created personalities. In the preaching of the gospel each individual is appealed to as a person with separate responsibilities; he has sinned individually, he repents individually, he is redeemed individually. In this affair of Christian salvation there is nothing done by proxy. Priests are not known in the Church. The people only are the priesthood;[235.1] each individual in the congregation has the value and the dignity of a {236} priest. From this equality of personal dignity before God two remarkable phenomena have flowed, both specially characteristic of modern society--the abolition of slavery and the rivalry of religious sects. Slavery, of course, must appear an intolerable anomaly to a man who believes that all men are brethren and all sons of God; to call a man brother and to sell him as a chattel is a lie too gross to be tolerated even by a world accustomed to cheat itself with the authority of all sorts of mere names. And as to the rivalry of multifarious sects and churches, which some people bewail as the one great gangrene of Christendom, it is really somewhat shallow not to see that in the moral as in the physical world diversity of form only proves the richness and the variety of the vital manifestation. The external unity after which some religious persons sigh existed