This mistake is so commonly made that it is worthy of some attention. There is, to be sure, a relationship between being good and being religious, but it is not the relationship of identity. It is the relationship of producer and produced, of antecedent and consequent, of cause and effect. It would be foolish to say that a dynamo and an electric light are the same thing; that green apples is a term synonymous with indigestion; that an architect’s plans are the same thing as a completed building; or that sex-attraction is but another name for the social institution called the family. In the same way it is an evidence of muddled thinking to maintain that being good is the same thing as being religious.
No matter what religion you take up, you will find that it is not, in essence, a system of ethics. It is, rather, an agency for strengthening people by means of contacts, real or fancied, with supernatural power, that they may have the courage and the power to fulfill a system of ethics. In other words, the essential thing about religion is its mysticism, the fruit of which is the nerving of men and women up to a system of morality. The purpose of religions, in their origins, will invariably be found to be the imparting to people of supernatural sanctions for, and supernatural power to fulfill, the ethical system deemed necessary by the culture of the worshipers. This, which is true of all religions, can be seen to be true of Christianity in particular if one will examine either the methods of its Founder or the expression which it took upon that Founder’s removal from it of his material Presence.
It is a matter that has often been remarked by disparagers of Jesus of Nazareth that there is nothing new in his ethical teachings, no original contribution to ethical thought. The Golden Rule was not his invention. The principle of universal fraternity was a part of much of Jewish Messianism in the century or two before He came. One can comb the ethical teachings of the Nazarene carefully and find not one whit of moral instruction that had not been uttered elsewhere before He came. He laid little stress upon moral instruction. The Sermon on the Mount is very largely a collection of ancient wise saws commented upon in such a way that the hearers might see their real significance. Indeed, He spoke truth when He said that his function was to fulfill, to round out to completion, the utterances of the Law and of the ancient prophets or preachers of his people.
And when he deals with erring individuals there is no attempt to instruct them in a new system of being good. The Magdalen is taught no new code of sex-morality. The unadorned command to ‘Go and sin no more’ implies that she already knew what she ought to have been. Apparently Levi and Zaccheus were not attracted from their ‘grafting’ habits by lectures on political science or the ethics of government. They felt somehow in Jesus a power sufficient to make them do what they already knew they ought to do. The centurion at the Cross exclaimed, ‘This was the Son of God,’ after hearing but seven brief cries, only the first of which had any connection with ethics, and that an indirect one. The thing about Jesus which attracted people was not especially the newness or beauty of his moral science. It was rather that men and women felt a power flowing from Him which they unhesitatingly deemed the power of God Himself — filling them with a force sufficient to make them deny the world, the flesh, and the selfish Devil, and aspire toward living up to a morality which they already perceived, but which theretofore they had deemed beyond their power of achievement.