EIGHTEEN centuries separate us from this history, but if we ask ourselves seriously, What gives us the courage to believe that God rules in history, not merely through teaching and knowledge, but as standing in its very midst, what gives us the courage to believe in an eternal life? we answer: We venture it because of Jesus Christ."

Adolf Harnack, Reden und Aufsätze, II, 14.

"Christ is the culmination of this divine history, because in Him history finds its perfect work. . . . Every soul that attains to a high moral and religious life bears His mark. The moral world in which we live is His work."

Auguste Sabatiee.

"Behold Him now when He comes!

Not the Christ of our subtle creeds.

But the Light of our hearts, of our homes,

Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs;

The Brother of want and blame.

The Lover of women and men.

With a love that puts to shame

All the passions of mortal ken.

 

Ah, no. Thou life of the heart.

Never shalt Thou depart,

Not till the heaven of God

Shall lighten each human clod;

Not till the world shall climb

To Thy height serene, sublime.

Shall the Christ who enters our door

Pass to return no more."

Richard Watson Gilder, The Passing of Christ.

Chapter IV

CHRIST AND FAITH

WHAT is the place of Christ in our working faith? Nowhere in our discussion is it more necessary than here to call to mind clearly our subject. A working faith is not a sum of doctrines which men must accept. Rather it is a great spiritual conviction, giving our life guidance by its insight and strength by its confidence. It is not a burden to be assumed, but a strength and preparation for life's tasks.

It is one of the tragedies in Christian history that again and again Christ has been made more a subject of theology than an object of faith. And so it has come to pass strangely that in our day for many searching souls the doctrines about Christ have become a stumbling block where Christ should have been for them the way. It is a very different picture that we find in the Gospels. What we see is Jesus as the inspiration of faith. He comes to men not as a problem, but as an answer.  He comes to men who have lost the living God in the midst of dead laws, and teaches them to say "Our Father." He speaks to men who have grown faint with long waiting, and their hearts leap up at His word, "The Kingdom of God is at hand." And men of doubt and fear and sin go out of His presence into a new world that is lit up with the presence of a great and merciful God.

Here is our question, Not what can our faith do for Christ, but what can He do for our faith.? Can He show us God? Can He make plain life's task and meaning? Can He help us live the life and work the task.? In the end the question of doctrine must come. We, who have felt His power, will need to say as those of old. What manner of man is this.? But the question does not come at the beginning. The great philosopher Kant once summed up the final needs of life in three questions : What can I know? What must I do? What may I hope for? These are the supreme questions for our working faith. What can I know? That is the question about God. What must I do? That is the question of duty. What may I hope for? That is the question of salvation, the help that my life needs here and the hope of the life beyond. What answer has Jesus for these questions?

Here, as elsewhere, we do not start with any appeal to authority, either of the Scripture or the Church. Jesus Christ is more than a doctrine of the Church. He is more, too, than any record of the past. We shall assume that the picture that comes to us in the Gospels is essentially true. But it is not a picture from the past that we build upon. It is what He means to-day as a living reality, which men may test in their lives. It is Jesus Christ as a religious force and fact whom we shall consider, the greatest fact in human history, the greatest force in human lives.

Jesus and the Question or God

What answer, then, can He give us to our first question, the question of God? What can I know? Is the world more than color and sound and form of finite things; more than inscrutable power and ruthless laws? Is there God, and what manner of being is He? There is only one teacher in this field of faith to-day, and that is Christ. True, there is still doubt and unbelief. Not all the questions of men have been settled. But wherever men have reached faith, there Jesus is Master. Philosophers may give us arguments for God, and theologians elaborate their doctrines. But where men pray today in lands of light and leading, the God to whom they lift their hearts is such a one as Jesus showed to men.

Men are wont to take this thought of God as a matter of course, without considering whence it came. We must go back if we are to understand \^hat Jesus did for our thought of God. The religion of Judaism in His day was legalism. God was the Giver of laws and the Keeper of books. His precepts He had left with men. He Himself sat aloft. Religion was not a living fellowship, but an endless round of duties. True, Israel had her hope, but that meant simply that in some future time God would redeem men and dwell with them. It \^as not so now. There was nothing higher outside of Judaism, nor nearly so high. The pagan faiths were dead. Philosophy spoke to a few, but gave even these at most an idea, not the certainty of a living and loving God. The God of the Stoics was pure and lofty, but far removed from the life of men. And the mystery-religions, that were rapidly spreading through the empire, were vainly trying to give men life and peace by ritual and sacrament, with no answer for the deeper question of sin and guilt.

Jesus came. He had no doctrines to teach men about God. He gave them no rites to perform by which to bring God near. He took the simplest word of human relationship and taught them to say, Our Father. Every lip that speaks that name to-day as it looks to heaven confesses its dependence upon Jesus. True, you will find the name applied to God before this. It is not, however, the vessel that counts, but the content. With other nations it meant only physical descent. In the Old Testament it is used here and there of Jehovah as father of the nation, or of the king as the nation's head. It is not the name for the single humble man to use. And so in the prayers of Israel a score of other names are used as the worshiper calls upon Jehovah, but nowhere does the psalmist say. Our Father. At most the name meant a certain kindly care which Jehovah had for His people; their king was fatherly. Jesus took the word and made it absolute. The King is Father.

But it is far more than a matter of name that we have to note. Jesus gave that name its meaning. This He did, first of all, not by what He said of God, but by the life of Sonship that He lived with His Father. It was His reverence and fear, it was His love and trust, it was His joyous obedience, above all it was His life of fellowship in prayer that showed men not simply what it was to be a son, but what manner of Father in heaven men had.

But more directly Jesus revealed the Father to men by the Spirit of the Father that was in Him. He speaks to us the same message to-day. Here is compassion and holiness; here is hatred of sin and merciful deliverance for the sinner; here is the spirit before which we bow in reverence and to which we look up in aspiration; here is righteousness that condemns us, and mercy in which we trust. Here was a new spirit in the world: a power that served, and not merely ruled; a holiness that was free from sin, and yet drew near to sinners; a majesty of life joined to humility of spirit. Jewish Pharisee and Roman Stoic represented the highest thought of the world of Jesus' day. Both of them, in order to save the majesty and holiness of God, had to think of him as separate from men. Jesus gave a new conception of holiness in that love that drew near to sinners, but only that it might overthrow sin. And men looked at all this holiness and mercy joined in one spirit in that simple life and said, This is the heart of God; here is "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ."¹

"So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too—

So, through the thunder comes a human voice

Saying, '0 heart I made, a heart beats here;

Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself!

Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of Mine,

     But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,

And thou must love Me who have died for thee!'"²

But Jesus gives us far more than the idea of God. He kindles the fire of religion in the hearts of men. Religion is not a doctrine or a deed. It is a spirit and a life. And life comes only from life. The first great deed of Jesus was to live the eternal life before men here in the midst of time. He showed us its simplicity and its depth, its beauty and its richness, its unshaken peace and its power to meet all that life could bring of duty or doubt or danger. He dwelt with God. It was his heart's passion to do the will of God; it was His strength to trust in God; it was His joy and peace to walk in fellowship with God. He opened the heavens to men's eyes and gave men a new earth filled with the presence of God. He saw that Presence in the color that touched the lily, in the lightning that flashed across the heavens, in the fallen sparrow by the roadside. Men saw His life thus filled by the Eternal and cried, "Show us the Father."³ They heard Him talk with God, and besought Him, "Lord, teach us to pray."⁴

It is the thought of God that determines our conception of religion. Because Jesus speaks for us the final word as to God, He has given the final form to religion. His religion is as remarkable for what it leaves out as for what it includes. It is the universal religion. Judaism was the loftiest faith of His day, but it was a religion for a nation. Others might worship Jehovah, but they must first become Jews. For Jesus there is one God and Father, who knows no privilege of rank or nation, who calls men as men to be His children. It is the spiritual religion. Jesus does not abolish forms, but they have no necessary place. They count only as men fill them with the spirit. The essence of religion is simply the pure heart and the humble soul before God, and invincible good-will toward men. And yet this religion of the heart was no matter of sentiment and dreams. Mere ecstasy, mere emotion, nay, not even worship was enough. The real practice of this religion was to be in the man's life with men. Men were to leave the gift at the altar and be reconciled to the brother. There was no room for those who said. Lord, Lord, but did not visit the brothers of the Lord when they were sick or in prison. It is the ethical religion. Not legalism. That is our way. We pile up laws to make men good. Jesus asked only for the right spirit. But how searching that demand! It is not enough to give alms; do you really love your brother? It is not enough to refrain from adultery; are your inmost thought and desire pure.? And His final test is no less than this: We must be children like our Father in heaven.5 It is a religion of divine redemption, redemption by God's act, not by man's effort. It is ethical, but it is more than that. It is God's demand, but it is also His gift. The spirit which He asks He Himself gives to men. Other religions show men searching for God. He brings God seeking men. That was the final meaning of His own life, as we shall see: "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself."⁶

We have not always held to this simple faith. It has been alike too simple and too lofty for men. We have burdened ourselves with long creeds and tried to make them the door to life; we have turned the New Testament into another law and worshiped the letter of a book; we have shut up the mercy of God to institution or sacrament. But the simple word of Jesus has broken through these barriers again and again. God's mercy is not bound to Church or form. It asks only the open door of a penitent heart. God's service is the love of men. And the children of God are those who are like Him in spirit.

Jesus and the Ideal of Life

Our second great question we have called the question of life: What must I do? What is right and just and good? What shall I make of myself? How shall I live with men?

First of all, we must say that Jesus is not a lawgiver nor a maker of rules. He did not come to give men a new code. He came to give them life. It is a gross, though common, misuse of the New Testament to make it a new book of the law. Again and again He refused to answer men's questions ; He threw them back upon themselves.

But all this, regarded more closely, is just one reason why Jesus stands first as a teacher of life. The best of rules are but for a day. How wide a gulf separates the simple rural life of Jesus' land and age from the puzzling complex that makes our life to-day! Had He been a mere giver of precepts He would have lost His place long since. Three needs we have in this realm of conduct and life, and Jesus gives them all. First, we need not laws, but an ideal. Second, we want that ideal not in words, but realized in actual life. Third, we need not merely the ideal, but moral passion and power.

It is not necessary for us here to analyze or sum up Jesus' teaching about the ideal. That of itself would not show us His mastery in this realm. For many, if not most, of His sayings we can find parallels among the rabbis or other teachers. But two facts remain clear. First, Jesus joined all these teachings in the unity of a personal ideal, in which nothing trivial, nothing secondary has its place; in which first things stand first. Second, and far more important, Jesus set that ideal before men in Himself and lit up every phrase with a life that 'words can not exhaust. It is that life, even more than His words, which makes Him master in the world of conscience. "John Stuart Mill once said that the human race could not often enough be reminded that there once lived a man by the name of Socrates. He was right, but it is more important to remind humanity again and again that there once stood in its midst a man by the name of Jesus Christ."7 So Hamack begins his discussion of "What is Christianity.?" We can do nothing more helpful for our study than simply to look at that life.

And, first of all, we note its purity. The taint of sin is upon all other lives. We turn to them, the greatest and the best, who

"Climbed the steep ascent to heaven

Through peril, toil, and pain." ⁸

They are the victors who o'ercame, whose names we cheer. But the marks of the conflict are upon them all. The stain of dust is on their garments, and they have all known defeat. His life, too, had its struggle, but He bears no stains and shows no scars of past sin or defeat. Our saints of earth are the last to speak of freedom from sin. The higher men rise spiritually, the more sensitive the conscience, the deeper the feeling of guilt. No men have uttered so deep a note of humble contrition as a Paul or an Augustine or a Luther. No man had so clear a vision of sin as Jesus. No man has ever made it so clear to men as the dark and damnable thing that it is. And yet He never once betrays even a passing sense of penitence or suggests a single time the consciousness of a need of forgiveness. He speaks the word of tender mercy to repentant sin, but it springs from no inner experience of its meaning, only from the unsounded deeps of divine compassion.

And yet there is nothing negative in this life. He is no recluse who has fled life's task in order to escape the world's temptation. The Church has spoken of His sinlessness, but the word seems negative and colorless. He is not the traditional saint, pale, austere, other-worldly. Rather it is the positive note and the note of richness that mark His life. The more we regard them, the more these two notes strike us with wonder: the completeness of the life that touches every side of our desire and endeavor, and the positiveness of the life that glows with passion and thrills us with its power.

He lived in a day remote from us, in a humble hamlet of a remote province of that old Roman world, and He belonged to a people who alone in that great empire had fenced themselves off successfully in race peculiarity and religion. The Jew alone refused to be cosmopolitan. The Gospels which present Him to us come from Jews, for Luke relied upon Jewish sources. And yet we turn to that figure and know no separation from Him. We read those pages, and nineteen centuries drop off like a garment. Only the eternal and timeless spirit speaks to us, and we hear it as the language of our day. We do not think of Him as Jew or as first-century dweller. He comes to us as man. And so He has come to men of all lands and all ages, not as another, but as their own.

The same fullness and completeness mark His life. Caesar is a great general, Augustine is a great theologian, Demosthenes an orator, Dante a poet. We have no class for Jesus. Never man spake as He, yet we do not class Him with the orators. He had the vision for beauty, and even through tradition and translation the beauty of His words shines out. Yet we never think of Him as artist or poet. He searched the deep things of life and has given us our final word for man and God, yet we do not call Him philosopher or theologian.

Yet what means most to us here is His completeness of character. All the qualities of a perfect life are present in Him. Elsewhere we find one or the other. In Him we find them joined. Nowhere is such humility, such utter dependence upon God; nowhere such courage and independence over against men. In Him we see the tenderness of a woman; but joined to it is a virility, a masterfulness which too often has been overlooked by theology and art alike. The Gospel pages show His love for children, His patience with all the weak; they show as well the flaming passion of a great and militant soul. He abounded with love and pity; and yet how stem He was with Himself. In simple, wholesome spirit He enters into all the joys of men; yet side by side in perfect unity we see the nights of prayer and the life of perfect fellowship with God. He craves the fellowship of men and the special sympathy and friendship of His chosen circle; and yet in the great moments He stands alone, alone in the wilderness, in the garden, at the cross.

What wonder that He speaks to every land and age, to every type of this race of ours. All have found their inspiration and ideal in Him. In Him is the spirit of all kind and tender mothers, of all loyal friends and lovers of men. He has been the inspiration of purity and truth, of all high and noble manhood that has quickened our lesser lives. His is the spirit of faith that has made men quiet and strong when all the world opposed them; the spirit of courage and chivalry, of all defense of weakness and all high hatred of wrong and oppression; the spirit of love and courage t*hat calls for men to-day to fight against ancient wrong and new abuse, against oppression and cruel lust and hardened greed, and all things that make earth foul and curse the children of men; the spirit of glad and confident service that loves men and fights evil, and knows that the kingdoms of sin must perish and the rule of God must come.

For nineteen centuries Jesus has led men along this path. All that has been high in spirit and endeavor they have caught from Him. It is but sober history to declare that He has become the conscience of our race. We have only one alternative to-day. It is the spirit of paganism or the spirit of Christ. The spirit of paganism is not yet gone. We see its selfishness, its worship of success and power, its scorn of all else. Now and then it ventures speech in some teacher like Nietzsche. But more and more it dwells in silence or hides its shame behind some show of deceiving phrases. All that the spirit of Christ means we do not yet know. But we do know that there is nothing beyond Him, as there is nothing higher than He to-day.

"O Lord and Master of us all,

     Whate'er our name or sign.

We own Thy sway, we hear Thy call,

     We test our lives by Thine."⁹

We have seen that the first need in this moral realm is not laws, but an ideal. The second need is to have that ideal realized in some life, so that it may have the meaning and power which life alone can give. We now note the third need, that of moral passion and power. In its deeper aspects we shall find the answer to this in the last part of our discussion. Here let us note but two facts, albeit facts of deep meaning. First, Jesus changed morality from a cold duty into a burning passion. There is no such thing as "mere morality" with Jesus. It is either more or nothing. Righteousness was no bare deed with Him. It was a spirit of self-surrender, of loyalty, of faith. It was a life to be lived, a new order to be established, a triumph in which men were to believe. It demanded the whole heart. That passion Jesus kindles in His followers. Others have set before men their ideals and have left them abashed, perhaps, but cold. Jesus sets men aflame with His own devotion. Only in such a passion is there moral safety and moral power for man; we are safe from the evil only when there is a good to which we surrender heart and soul. In His ethics of passion Jesus gives us the ethics of power.

Second, Jesus showed in His own life the power of this moral passion not only as victorious in His life, but as the power that rules the world. In the darkest hour of His life we hear Him say to His fearful followers, "Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."¹⁰ And He had! Not by force of arms, for such victories are but for a day. First of all, He ruled the kingdom of His own soul. And then He met the age-long forces of evil in the kingdoms of the world. There was brute force, set forth in Roman soldiery. There was the ancient selfishness of our race, with its malice and cunning and hate set forth in His enemies. And there was weakness and fear in His followers. And there was death itself that looked at Him from the cross. He faced them all, and conquered in the hour of the garden. He conquered not by an argument, nor an ecstasy, but by a great obedience and a great trust. The nineteen centuries that have followed are but a commentary on His words. Not hate and fear and force have won, but the Spirit of Him who met all this with love. And in the dark days that followed that death it was not simply an empty tomb that convinced the disciples, nor the vision of the risen Lord. It was the conviction that such a life could not die, that such a death was victory. A thousand other men might die and come to life again, and our old world would move on just the same. It was the death of such a life, and it was life from such a death, that has transformed the world. And when our theories and theodicies fail, when other powers come to threaten or seduce, when other skies are dark above our heads, we look at that life and say, Love is stronger than hate, good is mightier than evil,

"God 's in His heaven—

All's right with the world."¹¹

Jesus and the Question of Hope

Our third question remains: What may I hope for? That is far more than the question of the life beyond. It is the question of life here and now. We have seen how Jesus meets two great needs of our faith. He gives us the vision of God and the ideal of life. But there is a third and far deeper need. It is the need of power, the gift of life itself. We catch the vision of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ in all His holiness and mercy, and we see the life that Jesus lived with the Father. But who are we, with our sin and guilt, that we should dare to walk with this God.? We see the ideal of life that Jesus shows us; but how are we to achieve that in our own life? Religion means God and righteousness. Does it also mean help, help that we may walk with this God, help that we may achieve this righteousness? If Jesus stands first in the realm of ethics and in the realm of revelation, has He any place in this realm of power?

Let it be said at once that we come here to the real place of Jesus' Kingship. That is the meaning of those names in which the early Church spoke her faith when she called Him Lord and Master and Savior. Again, it is not a doctrine with which we are dealing, but a tremendous fact. In the realm of spiritual power Jesus stands first, and there is no second. The story is as easy to trace as is the marvelous development of applied power in industry in the last century. We know the story of iron and steam and electricity, of human power multiplied a hundred-fold by man's inventive skill. Here is another tale just as definite in its facts, and a thousand-fold more important because it concerns the higher reaches of life.

The world before Jesus gave no promise of anything unusual in a spiritual way. Judaism was losing its life in a hard system of legalism, whose dreary routine w as growing more dreary and hopeless as it left the prophetic spirit farther behind. The old faiths of the Roman world had lost their hold upon the minds of men. New faiths were springing up on every hand, but their very number spoke of men's longings rather than their faith, nor did one of them face the real problem, the making over of men in a new moral spirit and life. They were giving themselves to mysteries and sacraments by which they hoped to achieve immortality. The problems of sin and guilt and righteousness were not in their ken. Meanwhile vice was undermining the nations. It \^as this world that Jesus touched. From it He called forth the men who have been, through His Spirit, our leaders in faith and conduct to this day. Out of the Pharisees He led forth a Paul, from the publicans He called a Matthew, from ignorant peasants He made world-leaders, and beside them, equal in beauty of spirit and purity of life, the unnamed hosts who formed the communities of love and faith that soon spread throughout that Roman world. And that was only the beginning of the long line of great heroes and humble saints whose lives have blessed our kind. If we ask these men about their doctrines, they will differ. If we ask them about the power that has made over their lives, they will all make one reply. That common answer we find in the New Testament. Pervading all its pages there is this wonderful dependence upon Jesus Christ. All of them own themselves as His men, as those who have no faith, no hope, no strength except that which comes through Him.

What, then, is it, let us ask, which makes Christ master in this realm of character and life? How is He maker and saver of men? How does He bring help into the life of men?

First of all, He brings to men a sense of need and desire. Where Jesus begins with men is made plain enough by the Gospels. It is summed up in the word metanoia. The word repentance, of our English Bible, hardly translates it. It means a changed attitude of a life. The will is in it, but there is more than the will. The man's whole heart turns with a passion of sorrow and hatred from his sin, and with a deep desire toward God. An open heart is man's first need. How constantly He emphasized this! It fills the beatitudes, where He praises meekness, and purity, or singleness of heart, and the hunger and thirst after righteousness. That is why He places the child in the midst, the child that is open-hearted and humble and trustful. That was the stumbling-block with the Pharisees, who had lost the single eye and turned the light that was in them into darkness. And how His heart leaped with joy when Jesus found this sorrow and longing, which was most often, as we know, with humble folks and with publicans and sinners!

And if we ask how He wrought this we must say: by the ideal of life that He set before men and by the presence of God that He brought them, and these two in one. He had not so much to say about sin, except to Pharisees and some rich folks and mighty who were dead in their self-content. But to all men He brought the vision of the new life. He set it before them both in word and deed. He rebuked their sin and kindled their desire by the same message. It was the vision of holiness and the vision of God, that which made Isaiah cry out, "I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips;"¹² which made Peter exclaim, "Depart from me. Lord, for I am a sinful man!"¹³

All this, though it means so much, was but opening the doors of men's hearts. Jesus did more; He brought God in. He smote men with this sense of sin only that He might heal them again. He made them feel their separation from God only that He might draw them near. He held up before men such an ideal as had never been brought to them before. No outward deed, no observance of form would suffice. Men were to be children of the Father, like Him by an inner spirit of purity and mercy. And then He showed them this same Father giving to men what they could not themselves achieve. If men could not keep the outward law, how could they achieve the inner spirit? That question Jesus answered by His gospel of mercy. God is willing to take men into the fellowship, not because they are the sons of His Spirit, but that He may make them such. Frame the theology as you wish, this is the fact: Jesus made men believe in the mercy of God and brought them into His fellowship. When He wrought a deed of healing, men saw the finger of God. When He spoke the Lord of forgiveness, men heard the voice of God. He gave men courage to cast themselves upon the mercy of God. The age-long purpose of God has been simply this: to form a community of men who shall live in the fellowship of God, In that great purpose Jesus is the consummate agent of God. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself,"¹⁴ so Paul interpreted Jesus' life.

The supreme deed of that life the Church has always found in His death. Often it has interpreted that death crudely, mechanically. It is never to be separated from the life in our thinking. We must think of it not as a death having value in itself, but always as the death of this Christ of the holy and merciful life. However we conceive it, the fact remains: Here men have seen, as nowhere else, God's hatred of sin, and the depth of their guilt, and the mercy of God drawing men into fellowship with Himself. The cross is not a tragic accident; it is not a passing incident; it is God's supreme revelation of His purpose in the world, and His supreme deed in seeking men for Himself.

And so He who has given to men their highest ideal of life and their deepest conscience of sin and guilt, has given them also the sure confidence in God. Men have looked at Him and dared to believe in the mercy of God at the very moment that He revealed their sin. And so He has been the open door for the Spirit of God to enter men's lives. And however we explain it, the patent fact remains: Jesus Christ has been the creative moral force of history. Only life can mold life. Spirit alone can transform spirit. The only real agency that can make over men is a higher fellowship. And Christ means for men this fellowship and this life, "If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation."¹⁵

And so the Church has always called Him Lord and Master and Savior. Long before they discussed a doctrine of His person they made this confession which sprang from their lives. The generations since have shown one long line of witnesses to the same fact and faith. To the most sinful and degraded He has been the man of saving power, to the offscouring of our cities' slums, to the offspring of ages of savagery in Fiji or Africa. He has been equal to the deepest need. And He has been master of the purest souls. The noblest voices of our race have brought Him the deepest, humblest praise. Count them one and all, the strongest and most saintly, the men whose deed and spirit lead us still: Paul and John, Augustine and Francis of Assisi, Luther and Wesley, and saints of our age like William Booth and Phillips Brooks. They will be the first to say, All we have is from Him.

In Trinity churchyard at Boston you may see the monument erected to Phillips Brooks. There is the face of the preacher from whose lips so many thousands took their inspiration for life. Back of the figure, with His hand upon the preacher, you see the Christ. You may challenge the art of the monument, as some have done, but you may not deny its symbolism. The height which the noblest of our race have reached seems only to have given them a vantage from which they might better discern the depth of their need and the greatness of their Master. Not one of them would dream of setting his own name beside Him. In every other realm there are many masters. There is no one name that stands alone in philosophy or art or letters or science or invention. But when we come to the highest realm, where men ask for light for faith and help for life, we name One Name, and place no other beside it.

And He is the Master of nations as well as of men. Slowly but surely His spirit has been setting the ideals for nations, and its power has been directing their history and shaping their institutions. How many ancient wrongs that Spirit has overthrown! How many more stand condemned by it to-day! Never has that spirit wrought more mightily than in our own time. Before our eyes we see it laying hold of our modern industrial life, condemning its strife and selfishness and wrong, beginning here, too, its work of regeneration. Our very dissatisfaction, the sense of our social sin, is the fruit of His spirit working that repentance which must precede the new life. Men are ceasing to ask simply, Will it pay? They are saying, Is it right? is it loving? is it just between man and man? What the social order of to-morrow will be we can not tell. Of one thing we may be sure: it will be nearer the mind of Christ than the order of to-day.

On the border-line between Argentine and Chile these two nations have placed a monument sealing their treaty of peace. High on the range of the Andes it stands, three miles above the Pacific. There where arms have often clashed in war is a statue of Christ, twenty-six feet in height and resting upon a great hemisphere, and beneath is this inscription: "These mountains will crumble to dust ere Argentines and Chileans break the peace which at the feet of Christ the Redeemer they have sworn to keep." To-day we bring to Christ the questions and the needs of our single hearts. Some time the nations will sit at His feet, and His spirit shall settle all their questions.

So deeply has the spirit of Christ already entered into the life of Christian nations, despite all our evils, that we can hardly realize how much we owe to Him. Only a study of a land without Christ can show how much not only the single soul, but the life of the nation needs Him. Turn to such a land, its ignorance, its superstition, its degraded womanhood, its childhood without privilege, its lust unchallenged, its wrongs unrebuked. Our Western science will not renew the mind of such a land, our Western culture of mind will not give it moral power, our Western industry may but add to its burdens as with the child-labor in the factories of the new Japan. Who shall give it a conscience and the vision of a new life? Who shall train leaders in the spirit of unselfish service.? Who shall make human life sacred and transform human hearts? I can but answer by applying words that have been quoted by another with this meaning:

"I know of a land that is sunk in shame.

     Of hearts that faint and tire;

And I know of a Name, a Name, a Name,

     Can set this land on fire.

Its sound is a brand, its letters flame;

I know of a Name, a Name, a Name,

     Will set this land on fire." ¹⁶

His hatred of wrong, His love of men, His passion of service. His faith in God, His vision of a Kingdom on earth, are the hope of India and China to-day. Neither is there any other name wherein they must be saved.

Long years ago Jesus put His question to a little group of men: Who say ye that I am? He puts that question to us to-day. At the end of our answer, as it was with those disciples of old, there lies not the word of a moment, but the issue of eternal life. There are some questions that we do not need to decide. We do not need to choose sides as between Darwin and Lamarck. We do not need to determine what we should do as mayor of New York, nor how we should spend a million a year. But the matter of a working faith is not one of the optional questions of life. It is often said, "A man must live." Men have made the phrase a cheap excuse for selfishness and disloyalty. The words have a deeper meaning. In their true sense, that is indeed our first obligation. A man must live. That does not mean that he must shun pain, or win success, or even preserve his physical being. That is not life. Life is to find the meaning of our being, the ideal for our endeavor, a God to trust, and help that will keep us true. For such living a working faith is no luxury and no option. It is the solemn necessity of the higher nature which is our destiny and which we can not escape. No man may ask these questions to-day with honest and open spirit and pass by Jesus Christ. His question, too, is not optional for us. We look for the highest ideal, and His life stands before us. We ask for a Highest that we may trust and worship. He shows us holiness informed by love and power ruled by both, and teaches us to say. Our Father. We cry for help that we may reach our goal. He challenges us by His word: "Come, and I will give you rest; follow Me, and I will make you—men; be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."¹⁷ "Who say ye that I am?"¹⁸ He does not ask it to enforce homage, but to show us the way of life. And so, like those of old, we call Him Lord and Master and Savior, and we too say: "Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life?"¹⁹

Miracle and Doctrine

There are other questions that arise for us, which have been hotly discussed in our day. What of the miraculous in Jesus' life as reported by the Gospels, the stories of His birth and the miracles of His ministry? And what of the doctrine of the Church concerning His divinity, His dual nature as human and divine. His place in the Trinity.?

And first as to the miracles. As we have already concluded, we are bound by no reverence for the letter of a record to take every miracle as literal fact. We are bound rather to consider and to discriminate. Granted, then, that some stories of miracles may have arisen from misunderstanding or legend, what of the rest? Two things may be said in brief. If the supreme power of the world be personal, not material or natural, and if Jesus be the supreme manifestation of that Person in His purpose for the world, it is not only possible forthought, but reasonable as well that such a manifestation should be accompanied by the miraculous. Jesus' deeds of healing, for example, can only by unpardonable historical violence be taken out of the Gospels. Second, for our working faith this question of the miraculous is not the question of first importance. The miracles are no support or basis for our faith, either in the actual experience of the modern man or in logical reason. What is essential to our faith is this, that the supreme reality in the world is person, that the world is neither above God nor opposed to God, but exists by His power and is here as the instrument of Him that worketh His purpose in all things. It is not the miraculous that we need to concern ourselves about, but the supernatural; that is, this divine personal as the real and supreme power of the world. "God was in Christ," that is our great truth. However it may have been in the past, such a living faith is not built upon a demonstration of the miracles. Rather it is because of such a living faith that such a belief in the miracles has its place with us. It is Christ who makes credible the miracles, not the miracles which bring us to the faith in Christ.

And what as to the Church's doctrine as to the person of Christ? Let us note again what we have considered at the beginning. Christ is not a problem for our faith: He is its solution; He is not a burden: He is the help by which we rise. He makes us see the meaning of life. He brings us the sense of guilt and the high desire at the same time. He brings us the living God and leads us out of our sin into fellowship with Him. True, He comes with a challenge and a demand. But He does not ask us to believe doctrines about Him. He asks us to trust Him and obey Him. No man, indeed, ever asked so much of men as He. "Leave your nets," He says to one. "Sell all that you have," He says to another. "Forsake your home and kindred," He calls to a third. To them and to us all He says, "Arise and follow Me." The demand is one of obedience, and He speaks it only because He knows that He voices the will of God and that He brings life to men by the power of God. Such obedience is the simplest and the hardest demand that Jesus can make upon men. Until men answer this demand, it makes little difference what theories they hold about Him. The days that accepted the doctrine without question have often been times of deepest disloyalty to the Spirit of Christ, when men put His cross on their banners and carried pride and ambition and hatred and murder in their hearts. The supreme question for my working faith is, Can I trust Jesus Christ in the life that He demands, in the God of mercy whom He brings?

But the first does not rule out a second. This is the beginning; it is not the end. If Jesus Christ means all that has been set forth in these pages, then there is much more that must be said of Him. The very first Christians began saying this. In these discussions we have not gone beyond them. But we have taken their high words of confession to express our faith in Him. Simply to tell our experience of what Christ is to men, we have had to say Lord and Master and Savior. There is more that lies beyond. But what further must be considered lies mainly with theology, and need not be taken up in the outline of a working faith. The men of the New Testament said in the forms of their day the highest that they could of Him. The Greek theologians who framed the Church's doctrines said the highest that they could in the forms of their thought. Back of both was the faith and the life. The forms may change. We will hold to the faith and the life. The test at last will be here:

"Not he that repeateth the name,

But he that doeth the will." ²⁰

And that is why Christ Himself shall abide. The language of one age grows often strange to the next. But the life that God made remains in its needs the same, and the God who can meet those needs abides unchanging.

"Subtlest thought shall fail and learning falter.

     Churches change, forms perish, systems go,

But our human needs, they will not alter,

     Christ no after age shall e'er outgrow." ²¹