The Christian Ethic Author:William Angus Knight Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE DIVINE FATHERHOOD AND HUMAN BROTHERHOOD. Looking back from the vantage ground of the nineteenth century we find that in Christianity we ha... more »ve a new body of moral doctrine, due to at least two separate causes. In the first place, moral life has been evoked, and nourished, through the recognition of certain truths — both as to the Divine Nature, and the human—which were previously known only in fragment; but which have been brought out explicitly in the Christian Ethic, and have been harmonised with each other. These are (i) the truth of Monotheism, transfigured by Christianity into that of the Divine Fatherhood ; (2) the moral unity of the race, transfigured by Christianity into the universal Human Brotherhood ; and (3)' its moral destiny, illumined by Christianity in the form of Personal Immortality. There is further (4) the teaching of Christianity as to the nature of Evil, especially the distinction it draws between sins and faults ; (5) its teaching as to Duty, more particularly its positive character, as compared with the negative spirit of Hebraism ; and (6) its method of Reformation or Recovery, by the unification of the Divine and the human natures. In the second place, there were certain virtues connected with the life and the teaching of Jesus, which are pre-eminently Christian, because they were first exhibited in moral harmony by Him. To these two sources the distinctive features of the Christian ethic may be traced. Turning to the first class of virtues—or those which were due to the recognition of truths or ideas, lying previously in shadow or merely guessed at—the first point to be noted is the monotheistic root of the Christian Religion. Much of its morality arose out of the recognition of God, as morally related to the individua...« less