Into the particular doctrines and institutions of religion it is not the purpose of this book to enter. These are matters which each individual learns best from his own father and mother, and from the church in which he has been brought up. Our account of ethics, however, would be seriously incomplete, were we to omit to point out the immense and indispensable strength and help we may gain for the moral life, by approaching it in the religious spirit.
+Ethics and religion each needs the other.+--They are in reality, one the detailed and particular, the other the comprehensive and universal aspect of the same world of duty and virtue. Morality without religion is a cold, dry, dreary, mass of disconnected rules and requirements. Religion without morality, is an empty, formal, unsubstantial shadow. Only when the two are united, only when we bring to the particular duties of ethics the infinite aspiration and inspiration of religion, and give to the universal forms of religion the concrete contents of human and temporal relationships, do we gain a spiritual life which is at the same time clear and strong, elevated and practical, ideal and real.
+Just as God includes all objects in his thought, all duties in his will, all virtues in his ideal; so the man who communes with him, and surrenders his will to him in obedience and trust and love, partakes of this same wholeness and holiness.+--Loving God, he is led to love all that God loves, to love all good. And holiness is the love of all that is good and the hatred of all that is evil.
Complete holiness is not wrought out in its concrete relations all at once, nor ever in this earthly life, by the religious, any more than by the moral man. Temptations are frequent all along the way, and the falls many and grievous to the last. But from all deliberately cherished identification of his inmost heart and will with evil, the truly religious man is forevermore set free. From the moment one's will is entirely surrendered to God, and the divine ideal of life and conduct is accepted, a new and holy life begins.
Old temptations may surprise him into unrighteous deeds; old habits may still assert themselves, old lusts may drift back on the returning tides of past associations; old vices may continue to crop out.