Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/64

Rh This thought was indeed a deep one, and if the Stoics gave but an imperfect practical realization of it to the world, they prepared thereby the way for the reception of the higher thought of Jesus, when that thought appeared. We may therefore more readily suggest the skeptical criticism of the Stoical thought by first looking at the well known completion of the notion of God’s fatherhood in the doctrine of Jesus.

Jesus founded his morality in his theology, yet he did not make moral distinctions dependent on the mere fact of divine reward or vengeance. An act is for him wrong, not because outside the kingdom of heaven there is weeping and gnashing of teeth; rather should we say that because the act is opposed to the very nature of the relation of sonship to God, as Jesus conceives this relation, therefore the doers of such acts cannot be in the kingdom of heaven, all whose citizens are sons of the King. And outside the kingdom there is darkness and weeping, simply because outside is outside. Therefore, if Jesus gives us a theological view of the nature of morality, he does not make morality dependent on the bare despotic will of God, but on a peculiar and necessary relation between God and his creatures. So long as God is what he is, and they remain his creatures, so long must this relation continue. Jesus in fact, as we know, gives us a higher and universal form of the morality of the prophets. They had said, Jahveh has saved his people, has chosen them