Christianity, as taught by its Founder, is based on a transvaluation of values even more complete than that of Stoicism and the later Platonism, because, while it regards the objects of ordinary ambition as a positive hindrance to the higher life, it accepts and gives value to those pains of sympathy which Greek thought dreaded, as detracting from the calm enjoyment of the philosophic life.  This acceptance of the world’s suffering, from which every other spiritual religion and philosophy promise a way of escape, is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Christian ethics.  In practice, it thus achieves a more complete conquest of evil than any other system; and by bringing sorrow and sympathy into the Divine life, it not only presents the character and nature of the Deity in a new light, but opens out a new ideal of moral perfection.  This is not the place for a discussion of the main characteristics of the Gospel of Christ, and they are familiar to us all.  But, since we are now considering the charge of failure brought against Christianity in connexion with the present world-war, it seems necessary to emphasise two points which are not always remembered.

The first is that there is no evidence that the historical Christ ever intended to found a new institutional religion.  He neither attempted to make a schism in the Jewish Church nor to substitute a new system for it.  He placed Himself deliberately in the prophetic line, only claiming to sum up the series in Himself.  The whole manner of His life and teaching was prophetic.  The differences which undoubtedly may be found between His style and that of the older prophets do not remove Him from the company in which He clearly wished to stand.  He treated the institutional religion of His people with the independence and indifference of the prophet and mystic; and the hierarchy, which, like other hierarchies, had a sure instinct in discerning a dangerous enemy, was not slow to declare war to the knife against Him.  Such, He reminded His enemies, was the treatment which all the prophets had met with from the class to which those enemies belonged.  This, then, is the first fact to remember.  Institutional Christianity may be a legitimate and necessary historical development from the original Gospel, but it is something alien to the Gospel itself.  The first disciples believed that they had the Master’s authority for expecting the end of the existing world-order in their own lifetime.  They believed that He had come forward with the cry of ‘Hora novissima!’ Whether they misunderstood Him or not, they clearly could not have held this opinion if they had received instructions for the constitution of a Church.