Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/68

Rh For many in all the future history of our race this idea will be harder to establish than will be the moral doctrine that was deduced by Jesus from it. For many who with steadfast faith accept the doctrine of God’s fatherhood, their ultimate reason will rather be that, first accepting the morality of Jesus, they find it most natural to accept therewith what they understand to be his theology. His moral doctrine will be to them the insight, the theology will be taken on trust. Many others will accept indeed the morality, but be unable to accept the theology. In ethical faith they will be Christians, in theology Agnostics. And therefore, to the philosophic student, who must prove all things, and hold fast only what he finds sure, it is impossible to take the theology of Jesus on simple faith, and not profitable to postpone the discussion of the moral problems until he first shall have established a theology. Morality is for us the starting-point of our inquiry. Theology comes later, if at all. And, as we shall presently see, the theology, if accepted, would not satisfy all the questions of the ethical inquirer.

Yet if the doctrine of Jesus does not belong among the purely idealistic theories of duty, since it gives duty the fact of God’s fatherhood as its foundation, it has one aspect that would make the recapitulation of it necessary even in the course of a study of purely ideal ethics. For, while this doctrine founds duty ultimately on the consciousness that God is a Father, and so on a belief in a physical or metaphysical truth, still the immediate ground of the idea of duty to one’s neighbor is the