Social Questions from the Point of View of Christian Theology (Paperback)

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: III. JUSTICE AND FAITH. (Preached before the University of Oxford, 27th April 1884.) " Do we then make the law of none effect through faith ? God forbid, nay, we establish the law."?Romans iii. 31. A Christian who would compare the principles of Christian morality with those of a morality founded on any other basis than that of our relation to God finds himself confronted with a doctrine, claiming the authority of St. Paul, which seems to set at naught all rules of conduct and all deliberate discipline of life, and entirely to annul systematic morality: I mean the doctrine that man's righteousness is not of works but of faith. " Let a man believe," says this doctrine, "and he is righteous; he has by means of his faith a righteousness not his own. In no other way can a man be righteous; to build up a righteousness of works is hopeless and impossible." Butmorality has to do with works, with conduct, with aims and rules which are right not for some particular men only but for men as men. It is not surprising, therefore, that those who have thoroughly accepted the Pauline doctrine of justification by faith have often disparaged morality as worthless, and have even shown a still stronger unfriendliness towards it. The pursuit of virtue has been regarded as having a tendency to seduce men dangerously from the only true hope of acceptance with God. Students who had first been nourished on St. Paul, and who have afterwards been introduced to Aristotle and Butler, have said to themselves that human systems of ethics, even those which place conscience above experience or utility, belong to the region of what St. Paul termed the law and works, and are put aside as of no avail by the Gospel of justification by faith. The doctrine is one which no Christian can leave out of accou...