05.03.04 - The Ideal of Christian Ethics

(4) The Ideal of Christian Ethics

Christian ethics do not aim at the regeneration, the elevation and regulation of society by State laws and enactments, or the legal enforcement of socialistic and ideal measures, but by Divine and spiritual influences, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit, making men new creatures in Christ Jesus, by begetting within them a divine and spiritual life. The aim and ideal is unlike that of all other systems, and superior to them. It is not the high-minded man of Aristotle, nor the virtuous man of Plato, nor the wise man of Socrates, nor the self-regarding prudence of Epicureanism, nor the insensibility, indifference, and fatalism of the earlier and later Stoicism, nor the great and kingly man of Carlylism, nor the refined and cultured man of modern Idealism that is the pattern and example; but the Man, the perfect Man Christ Jesus, Who was “ holy, harmless, undefiled,” in “Whose mouth was no guile,” “Who went about doing good.”