"I do not need to decide whether he was born of a virgin. I do not need to decide whether he rose from the dead. I do not need to decide whether he made water into wine, or fed five thousand with two loaves and five small fishes. Take all that away, and still he stands the one transcendent figure toward whom the world has been steadily growing, and whom the world has not yet overtaken even in his teachings.... I do not need to know what is his metaphysical relation to the Infinite. I say it reverently--I do not care. I know for me he is the great Teacher; I know for me he is the great Leader whose work I want to do; and I know for me he is the great Personality, whom I want to be like. That I know. Theology did not give that to me, and theology cannot get it away from me."
And what a basis as a test of character is this twofold injunction--this great fundamental of Jesus! All religion that is genuine flowers in character. It was Benjamin Jowett who said, and most truly: "The value of a religion is in the ethical dividend that it pays." When the heart is right towards God we have the basis, the essence of religion--the consciousness of God in the soul of man. We have truth in the inward parts. When the heart is right towards the fellow-man we have the essential basis of ethics; for again we have truth in the inward parts.
Out of the heart are the issues of life. When the heart is right all outward acts and relations are right. Love draws one to the very heart of God; and love attunes one to all the highest and most valued relationships in our human life.
Fear can never be a basis of either religion or ethics. The one who is moved by fear makes his chief concern the avoidance of detection on the one hand, or the escape of punishment on the other. Men of large calibre have an unusual sagacity in sifting the unessential from the essential as also the false from the true. Lincoln, when replying to the question as to why he did not unite himself with some church organisation, said: "When any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification of membership, the Saviour's condensed statement of the substance of both law and gospel: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and thy neighbour as thyself, that church shall I join with all my heart and soul."