Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/70

Rh that the unregenerate could believe and even tremble and yet remain unregenerate. The saving faith was seen to be not identical with the mere belief in God as Father. For the saving faith, divine grace was necessary, adding to the unregenerate recognition of the bare truth the devotion of the loving child of God. And therefore the church has never been content with the doctrine of Jesus in its undeveloped simplicity.

But if all this is so, then for us the morality of Jesus, considered as morality, is founded, not on the theological theory alone, but also on a peculiar insight that each man is to have into the duty of returning the divine love. That the divine love is real, gives a basis for all duty in case and only in case one first sees that it is one’s duty to return the divine love. And wherein is this insight as such any clearer than the direct insight into the duty of loving one’s neighbor? If a man loves not his brother whom he has seen, how shall he love God whom he has not seen? Is not the duty of gratitude first evident, if at all, in man’s relations to his fellows? Is not love given first as a duty to one’s companions, and only secondarily as a duty to God, and then only in case one believes in God? In other words, are we not here, as in the discussion with the realist at the outset, led to the view that not a physical doctrine, nor yet even the sublimest metaphysical doctrine, as such, but only an ethical doctrine, can be at the base of a system of ethics? The doctrine that God loves us is a foundation for duty only by virtue of the recognition of one yet more fundamental moral principle, the