But, if the ideal of man as a spiritual being is conceived as perfect, then it follows not only that its attainment is possible, but that it is necessary.  The guarantee of its own fulfilment which an ideal carries with it as an ideal, that is, as a potency in process of fulfilment, becomes complete when that ideal is absolute.  “If God be for us, who can be against us?” The absolute good, in the language of Emerson, is “too good not to be true.”  If such an ideal be latent in the nature of man, it brings the order of the universe over to his side.  For it implies a kinship between him, as a spiritual being, and the whole of existence.  The stars in their courses fight for him.  In other words, the moral ideal means nothing, if it does not imply a law which is universal.  It is a law which exists already, whether man recognizes it or not; it is the might in things, a law of which “no jot or tittle can in any wise pass away.”  The individual does not institute the moral law; he finds it to be written both within and without him.  His part is to recognize, not to create it; to make it valid in his own life and so to identify himself with it, that his service of it may be perfect freedom.

We thus conclude that morality, and even the self-condemnation, contrition, and consciousness of failure which it brings with it as phases of its growth, are witnesses of the presence, and the actual product of an absolute good in man.  Morality, in other words, rests upon, and is the self-evolution of the religious principle in man.

A similar line of proof would show that religion implies morality.  An absolute good is not conceivable, except in relation to the process whereby it manifests itself.  In the language of theology, we may say that God must create and redeem the world in order to be God; or that creation and redemption,—­the outflow of the universe from God as its source, and its return to Him through the salvation of mankind,—­reveal to us the nature of God.  Apart from this outgoing of the infinite to the finite and its return to itself through it, the name God would be an empty word, signifying a something unintelligible dwelling in the void beyond the realm of being.  But religion, as we have seen, is the recognition not of an unknown but of the absolute good as real; the joyous consciousness of the presence of God in all things.  And morality, in that it is the realization of an ideal which is perfect, is the process whereby the absolute good actualizes itself in man.  It is true that the ideal cannot be identified with the process; for it is the principle of the process, and therefore more than it.  Man does not reach “the last term of development,” for there is no last term to a being whose essence is progressive activity.  He does not therefore take the place of God, and his self-consciousness is never the absolute self-consciousness.  But still, in so far as his life is a progress towards the true and good, it is the process of truth and goodness within him.