The books of the New Testament were also written in an age of great moral corruption.  Judaism was virtually dead; the current religion in the Holy City was “a sad perversion of the truth.”  Hypocrisy sat in high places when John Baptist came with his protest and his rebukes.  The Herods, who held the sceptres of provincial authority, were either base time-servers, or worse, they were monsters of lust and depravity.  In the far-off capitals of the dominant heathen races vice had attained its full fruitage and was already going to seed and consequent decay.  Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, and Antioch were steeped in iniquity, while the emperors who wielded the sceptre of the Roman empire were hastening the ruin of the existing civilization.  It was in such an age and amid such surroundings that the Gospels and the Epistles came forth as the lotus springs, pure and radiant from the foul and fetid quagmire.  What could have produced them?  The widely accepted rule that religions are the products of their environments is surely at fault here.  Neither in the natural impulses of a dozen Judean fishermen and peasants, nor in the bigoted breast of Saul of Tarsus, could these unique and sublime conceptions have found their genesis.  They are manifestly divine.  How exalted is the portraiture of the Christ!  What human skill could have depicted a character which no ideal of our best modern culture can equal?

In all the New Testament there are none but the highest and purest ethical teachings, and even the most poetical descriptions of heaven are free from any faintest tinge of human folly.  The Apocalypse is full of images which appeal to the senses, but there is nothing which does not minister to the most rigid purity; while the representations which Paul makes of eternal felicity are strictly and conspicuously spiritual and elevating.  Everywhere, from Matthew to Revelations, it is the pure in heart who shall see God, and the inducement held out is to be pure because He is pure.  And although the gift of eternal life is a free gift, yet it affords no excuse for laxity.  The sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans is a remonstrance against all presumption in those that are “under grace.”  “Reckon ye yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through our Lord Jesus Christ.  Let not sin therefore rule in your mortal body that ye should obey it in the lusts thereof.  Neither yield ye your members as instruments of unrighteousness unto sin, but yield yourselves unto God as those that are alive from the dead."[230] The religion of the New Testament is a spiritual religion, the resurrection body is a spiritual body; heaven is not an Indian hunting-ground, nor a Vikings Valhalla of shield-clad warriors, nor a Moslem harem.  It is a spiritual abode, and its companionships are with God and the Lamb, with the church of the first-born and of saints made perfect.  Now, all that we can say of these lofty and pure conceptions is that flesh and blood never revealed them.  They are divine.  They are out of the range of our native humanity; they are not the things that human nature desires, and it is only by the high culture of transforming grace that human aspirations are raised to their level.