THE GOD OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

THE truest definition of Christianity is Jesus Christ. One of the earliest and best Christian creeds is that contained in Paul's phrase, "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ," or, as a modern writer has put it, "I believe in God through Jesus Christ our Lord." ¹  At whatever point we consider Christianity, whether it be its conception of life, its thought of man, its doctrine of salvation, its idea of the Church, its hope for the future, everywhere it is Jesus who determines its nature. And that is eminently true of its thought of God which is the heart of its faith. It is in this light that our study has been made so far, but we need now to turn specifically to this consideration: What is the meaning of God as known in Jesus Christ?

Our study is not primarily, let it be noted, a study of the nature of Christ, but of the nature of God. There has been a curious inversion here in the history of Christian thought. The writers of the New Testament with a sure touch show that their supreme interest in Christ is that in him they know God and have God. Their great question is the question about

God: Can we know him? What is he like? What is his will for us, what his purpose? And they have found an answer in Jesus. Jesus they know, and in him God is known. "God was in Christ," says Paul, summing up the message of the Christian embassy. ² "No man hath seen God at any time/' says the author of the Fourth Gospel; "the only begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him." ³ The theologies of the Church, however, have spent little time in discussing the difference which Jesus has made in man's thought of God; and you by no means always gain the impression that the God of the creeds is above everything else the Christlike God. On the other hand a vast amount of time has been spent in considering the other question of the nature of Christ and whether he 'be really like God. But, as Bishop Temple suggests: "To ask whether Christ is divine is to suggest that Christ is an enigma while deity is a simple and familiar conception. The truth is the exact opposite to this. We know, if we will open our eyes and look, the life and character of Christ; but of God we have no clear vision." ⁴ And Christian thinking has no greater need than this, to ask seriously what it means really to believe that we have "the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." Can there be any greater conviction than this, that in a world of mingled darkness and broken gleams there has come to us a sure light, that the Eternal Spirit has surely and fully revealed himself to us by appearing in time, and has let us know what he is and what we may hope for?

And first we need to turn to the historic Jesus. What was this life in time in which the Eternal was known to men? Nineteen centuries ago a young man went forth from his home in a village of an outlyjng Roman province. All his years had been lived in humblest surroundings; he was the son of an artisan and himself had worked at the carpenter's bench. But his heart had been stirred by the tale of a prophet that had arisen, and his soul answered to the message of righteousness and repentance and coming deliverance which came from the stern preacher. Asking for himself also the rite of baptism, he who had lived his life in simplest, purest fellowship with God, received the assurance that he was the Deliverer whom his nation expected. Driven by the Spirit of God, stirred to his depths by the great conviction of his mission, he leaves the prophet and the throngs to be alone with God and the question of his life. And so at last he goes forth, not to assert authority, not to claim homage as king or rally a people to throw off the yoke of their foes, but as a humble teacher, wandering up and down the land, speaking to who would listen. Great multitudes follow him, attracted by healings which he wrought, only to leave him when the searching demand of his message becomes plain. More and more he gives himself to the little group of his dose followers. To them he declares at length that he must bear his witness in the city of his people, though he sees the danger even more clearly than they. There in the great city, after but a few short years of work, the leaders whose enmity he has won put him to death. That death he meets, not without a struggle, but with the final assurance that by his very death he is serving God's end and that the future is sure. The event confirmed his faith; his death was not the end, but the beginning of the greatest religious movement of mankind.

Jesus left behind him, as we know, no writings, and of those words of his, flung forth upon the air, probably not one was written down in his lifetime. He left no organization or prescription for any, so far as record shows. He left no creed for men to accept, no code prescribed for conduct. But it takes little study to show the immense advantage which Christianity has had in the possession of this life story. That is illustrated in her struggle with the two main forms of religion that competed with her for the suffrage of the Roman world. On the one hand were the mystery religions, in externals not without some likeness to Christianity, offering salvation through various rites to the members of a fellowship gathered about the figure of some hero god. But Dionysus and Mithra and Isis and Attis were mythical figures; Jesus had lived among men and to his life and teachings men could always turn. On the other hand were the speculative systems, whether the older Grecian philosophies or the theosophies which then as now came from the East. Against them the new faith brought to bear the conviction that in this historic life and death a living God had come to men and had done something for men.

Such is the plain historic fact. What is the meaning which Christianity has found in this fact? Why is Jesus not simply one among other great teachers, but central and supreme? What is it in the experience of men that has led them to give him this absolute place? It is not enough to quote titles from the New Testament ; our theology is not made by words, even from the Bible. We must go back to the experience of the Church, the historic Church and the living Church of to-day, and ask what it was which led men to use these names for Jesus.

We put first the moral lordship of Jesus. The Church has called him Lord and Master, and the consciousness of this authority is evident in Jesus himself. He called unto him whom he would, and they followed him. He demanded the utmost of men, an absolute obedience which reached the inmost thoughts and desires as well as outward words and deeds. He took the highest authority of the past and said, "It is written ; ... but I say unto you. This absolute authority does not mean external authority. It was not to himself in individual fashion that Jesus required submission; it was to the truth, to love, to righteousness, to God. Only, he knew that these were in him and spoke through him. His ethics was the ethics in which authority and freedom united, in which men were set free because they had found the highest and surrendered utterly to it. It was an ethics of the spirit. Nothing more terrible could happen than to have the light that was in a man turn into darkness: nothing better could happen than for a man to have in him the spirit of the Father and to live that spirit out as the brother of men.

This moral mastery of Jesus appears at two places. First of all he has made plain to us what human life is, the life in which a man achieves his real self. We talk about humanity being weak and wicked and foolish. But that is not real humanity; that is humanity gone astray, or humanity on the road with its goal still far off. The real meaning of humanity we see in Jesus. There we see what we ought to be, our real selves. And more and more men are recognizing that. We may be laggard in obedience, or faithless in performance, or we may set up the standard of our own selfish will, but for thoughtful and sincere men Jesus is becoming more and more the conscience of the race.

The second place of Jesus' mastery appears when we turn from the individual ideal to the social goal. No one will dream of saying to-day that the social life of our humankind in state and industry and other relations is a success. What Christianity sees is that the key to the future lies in the moral lordship of Jesus. That again may be easily misunderstood. A crude expression of it is a picture of a millennium with a returned and visible Christ ruling an autocratic state. What we mean ,is much deeper, much more searching. We mean that the goal of humanity is to be a life in which the spirit of Jesus is to have sway. If he stands for the ways of reason and justice and goodwill, then there must be an end of militarism with its reliance upon force. If he stands for brotherhood, then we must find a way of transcending the walls which nationalistic selfishness and race fear and prejudice have erected, and of securing a united world. If he stands for cooperation and the life of service, then we must seek an industrial order in which the method of warfare and the motive of individual profit will be displaced from their present preeminence. We call this the kingdom of God, but when we want to give real meaning to the phrase, it becomes, as it was with Paul for example, the rule of the spirit of Christ. And this rule of the Christ spirit is not simply our dream for the future: it is the commanding authority for the present social life, more and more recognized by Christian conscience.

But what has been said about this rule of the Christ spirit implies another important fact: the moral lordship of Jesus does not rest simply upon what he said, but even more upon what he was. It is beside the mark to talk about the inadequacy of Jesus' social teachings as a guide for our modern life. Jesus did not lay down rules concerning industry and property and the state: he did what was more important, he showed men the way of the spirit. And this spirit was first of all in his own way of life. The moral lordship of Jesus cannot be discussed without considering the moral character and achievement of Jesus. It is strange how little attention has been paid to this by the theology of the Church as compared with its discussion of substance and natures about which its knowledge has been so much less. Yet this is of the most vital interest to the Christian man.

Look at the facts first. It is not just the sinlessness of Jesus that we are considering. To that Christian faith has held, but that of itself is negative. And sometimes it has been joined to an idea of Jesus' life that made it less than human, as though back of the appearance of a man there dwelt some divine being who felt no real temptation, who lived without real growth or conflict and could not really do wrong. The full moral mastery of Jesus is not kept if we yield to any such heresy, however orthodox some people may suppose it. We keep it only as we find in Jesus a true and full human life, a life which was a real achievement, a life that was made perfect under the conditions under which we must live. Let us be grateful here that the stubborn facts of the Gospels have saved us from an error so fatal to our deeper needs.

We find in Jesus a life that has known temptation and conquered it. We find in him a life that grew through the years to its full attainment. But when we seek to describe that character, our words are too weak and our discernment too slight. He lived the perfect life with God. His was an titter devotion to the will of his Father; it was not a burden, an exaction, it was his joy and his strength. "My meat is to do the will of him that sent me." He had an absolute confidence in God. No one saw more clearly than he the power of evil, or shrank from it more, and the story of Gethsemane tells the tale of his struggle when he faced its full meaning at last, Yet so clear for him was the power of God, so utterly sure was he of God's perfect goodness that his life moves on before us as one not only of trust but of radiant joy and peace. He lived a life of simple humility and dependence upon God. All that he had came from God; it was the Spirit of God that spoke through him, it was by the finger of God that he cast out demons. "I can of myself do nothing." His praying is an expression of this dependence, and in this dependence is rooted his independence over against all else.

In his relation to others he lived what he taught and was himself more than all his teaching. He had a genius for friendship; he was human, accessible, loving. He had a spirit of utter goodwill for all men, and no lack of desert, no indifference or ingratitude, no answering hatred even, could overcome it. He gave the word "love'* a new meaning by his life. He brought his own life wholly under the ideal of service. And yet all this was at the farthest remove from sentimentality or weakness. There was a certain sternness and inflexibility in him. Because he loved men he could not be satisfied with less than the highest for them. He had a passion for justice and a hatred of all sin and impurity.

Most wonderful is the completeness of his life. It is not mere sinlessness that makes him an ideal for men; it is the remarkable fact that in his character men of all times, of every race and station and condition, have found that which has inspired and commanded them. "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 stern 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." ⁵

How shall we interpret this moral and spiritual mastery of Jesus ? It is an interesting fact that in the past men have sought the grounds for calling Jesus divine first of all in the physical, the external, in miracles of virgin birth and bodily resurrection, and in miracles wrought by him. We are coming to see that the divine meaning of Christ must be sought first of all in his life, in his own moral and spiritual being. Of this life we must say two things. First it was genuinely human, not something settled in advance. He learned, he grew, he prayed, he fought temptation; It was not a sham humanity whose course was absolutely determined by something that came into the world with him. On the other hand we must say . that this life was the deed of God, the gift of God, the absolute manifestation of God. Here was one human life that was wholly open to God, that had no will but God's will, no desire but God. For that reason it was possible for this life to be filled and possessed and constituted by the divine. So much, without any further theory, seems demanded by the Gospel accounts.

If this be true, then this is the first place where Christianity as the absolute religion expresses itself, then we have here the absolute ideal of life and will of God for men. Is it not time that the Church itself appreciated this more ? Here in fact is the crucial test for Christianity just now. The most dangerous paganism to-day is that which is right in our midst, which is willing to do homage to the Church and to repeat the words of our creeds, but which will not recognize the right of the spirit of Christ as the only rule for business and state and every other part of human life. Impossible idealism, foolish sentimental-ism, religion mixing up in politics: such are the words of men who tell us that business is business, that we live in a practical age, and that we must take men as they are. But if Christianity be the absolute religion, then here we must stand because we cannot do otherwise, and we must declare as against paganism, with its gods of force and selfishness and cunning, that the eternal God himself speaks to us in the spirit of Jesus Christ, and that there is no other way by which men and nations may be saved.

From the moral lordship of Jesus we thus pass to our second consideration of his meaning, and that is in the sphere of salvation. The idea of salvation is not limited to the Christian religion. It is, in fact, the common concern of all religions. The first thing that man wants from his religion is help, deliverance from the ills that weigh upon him, and the promise of the good for which he longs. It is an interesting fact that the word "Savior" is applied to Jesus but very little in the New Testament, and even the word "salvation" is used very sparingly in the older books. But that does not alter the fact that this was the supreme interest of the early Christians. This was the heart of their hope, "that it was he who should redeem Israel."

The Church has often narrowed the idea of salvation and lost its larger meanings. Sometimes it has seemed to denote no more than some arrangement connected with the death of Jesus by which it became possible for God to forgive sins. We are coming again to see its larger meaning. For it should not be made to stand for anything less than humanity's deliverance from all its ills and the gift to humanity of all its life. Salvation, in other words, involves that to which we are saved as well as that from which we are saved, and it must be as broad as life itself, life individual and social, in this world and in that to come.

What then is the meaning of Jesus for this supreme concern of man? The offers of salvation have been as numerous as have been the religions and philosophies of life. The mystery religions of the early Christian centuries, the great rivals of Christianity, were preeminently religions of redemption. We see about us to-day innumerable modern cults, social, philosophical, psychological, mystical, each making its appeal to the same interest. What does Jesus stand for here ? How does he bring life and help to men? Our answer to this to-day must be more social and more psychological than it has been in the past. It must include, not simply individual experience but the social life and needs as well, and it must be set forth in terms of the actual moral, religious experience of men.

The Christian solution is marked first of all by its diagnosis of the evil from which men are to be delivered. There are, of course, weakness and suffering and poverty and ignorance and human folly; but the supreme problem is that of sin. Sin, Christianity teaches, is selfishness and selfishness is disruption for the social group and death for the individual in all higher life. Sin, it declares, is the fundamental disloyalty, man's "No" to the highest which he sees, no to conscience, to his highest self, to God. Its necessary result is isolation from one's fellows, from the forces of good, from God. This Jesus saw, but he saw too that the deliverance of man must come through a new attitude, a new spirit, and a renewed relation with God.

What then, in terms of actual experience of help, has Jesus done for men in all these years? He has shown men what sin really is and what life may be, waking a hatred for sin, stirring the desire for this life. He has shown men God, the God of righteousness and holiness, the God of mercy and infinite goodwill; and to those who have known him he has made this God near and real. And then he has led men into living fellowship with that God, a fellowship which has become the transforming power of life. We know how many things stand in the way of such a fellowship with the Eternal which is the heart of religion. To some men God seems so far off and so unreal. For some he means the hard renunciation of the old way of self-will and lower interests. And some who know their sin and have caught the vision of the good and of God, are simply wakened to the realization of how the evil of their impotent lives separates them from such a God. But the Jesus who gives the vision and kindles the desire has met this last problem as well, and in his own way. He has not minimized men's sin nor abated from the vision of the high God, but he has given men the courage to believe in a God of mercy who seeks men in their sins, a God who in forgiveness receives men as his children in order that in this new fellowship they may have the power indeed to become his children. And thus he has met the final problem of life, the problem of moral and spiritual dynamic.

The social meaning of the doctrine of salvation has been too much neglected in the past or else misunderstood. This that we call the social gospel, however, is not new, nor is it a separate kind of Gospel. Social salvation is like any salvation; it simply means that we have come to realize more clearly that human life is something more than individual experience and conduct, and that Christianity can aim at nothing less than the redemption of all life. The meaning of Christianity for this life we have already considered in part in our study of the democracy of God. Here it remains to point out that we are dealing not simply with ethics, nor yet with a social transformation that will take place automatically as individuals one by one become good. Rather we are dealing with a real social salvation. The way of Christ for men in their social life is the same as for their more individual problems. We must learn to see our sin in this our associated life and to hate it, our wars and intrigues and oppressions, our public corruption and our civic indifference, our boast of high ideals and the actual poverty and ignorance and suffering of great masses even in the most favored lands. We must repent and seek forgiveness. We must as peoples devote ourselves in a new consecration to truth and justice and mercy and service—that is, to God. And we must seek a new heart without which we shall never reach the new day.

Such is the way of salvation for which Christ stands, the way that we find indicated by his words, his spirit, his life, his death, and what these have meant in the life of his followers. Here is the power that has been transforming men and women for these many centuries, the power upon which the world waits to-day, What does it mean? What else except what the early Church saw and Christian men ever since? When we look at all this we can only say, "This is the finger of God." What we have here is God working among men. Here is the will of God, this forgiveness is the mercy of God, this help can be nothing less than the power of God. So we confess with Paul, "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." The first and foremost significance of all this is for our meaning of God: this is what God is doing, this is what God is like.

There is a significant testimony to be found in the way in which men, some of them outside the Christian Church, are coming to see that the Christ spirit is the only way out of the terrible conditions that press upon us to-day. Here are the words of Professor Gilbert Murray, himself an agnostic in the common sense of the term: "The common man, after this surfeit of hatred, is wearying for a return to love; after this welter of bestial cruelty, is searching for some dawn of Divine mercy; after this horror of ill-doing and foulness unforgettable is crying out, each man in his loneliness, for the spirit that is called Christ." This is real faith. And we have the same confession when Sir Philip Gibbs makes his plea for the spirit of mercy and good will and declares, "Europe needs a new heart." These men are saying in effect that the need of men and the heart of the divine are found in the spirit of Christ.

And so we come to the third place in which we see the supremacy of Jesus, or, shall we say, his absolute meaning for us. Jesus is the master of the faith of men, he is the revelation of God. What would you ask of the sphinx, some one proposed to F. W. H. Myers, if you could be assured' of an answer to a single question. "Is the universe friendly to me?" was the reply. That is what we all want to know. To believe in some kind of a God is not hard, to realize that the world has some sort of oneness, that there is a Power that moves in it all and this power is one. But is this a power like ourselves? Can we speak to it and will it hear? And does it care, is it friendly, is it good? Can we say with Browning in his "Reverie":

"From the first Power was— I knew.

     Life has made clear to me

That, strive but for closer view,

     Love were as plain to see."

Now the supreme meaning of Christ for faith lies here; he has fixed for us our ideal of the character of God and he has given us the courage to believe in a God like this. For our study then of this central matter of the character of God we go to Jesus. Our creeds, as Hastings Rashdall has pointed out, set forth everything except the character of God, which is the real matter for us. What has Jesus to teach about the character of God?

The holiness of God is as truly a part of Jesus' thought as of that of the Old Testament. In its earliest connotation, as we have seen, holiness had reference not to moral character but to the sovereignty, the majesty of God as the exalted one. It came unfortunately to be connected too much with the idea of separation, of ceremonial cleanness, and with matters of ritual. That may be the reason why, outside of a single passage in John, there is no word of Jesus which associates the term "holy" with God. But even in the Old Testament holiness had come to have a moral meaning; the prophet saw that it was in moral character, in righteousness and mercy, that the majesty arid elevation of God were most plainly to be found. "My thoughts are not your thoughts he declares. I will show mercy, not vengeance; "for I am God and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee." ⁶ And Jesus held the idea of holiness, though he did not use the word. For Jesus God was holy in both senses. God is utter and perfect goodness. God is also majesty and power, and men are to worship in awe and to pray, "Hallowed be thy name." The message of the mercy of God has its deepest meaning because it is this God that is lifted up who thus draws near to men. The thought of the righteousness of God, so significant with the prophets, is also present with Jesus. With him, as with them, it is not the idea of a God measuring out to men reward or punishment as they deserve; that is our legalistic degradation of the term. The prophet saw righteousness and redemption as one. Jehovah was "a just God and a Savior." It meant one and the same thing when he said, "I will bring near my righteousness, and my salvation will not tarry." ⁷ Jesus gave the deathblow to legalism, the religion of rights. ⁸ The Sermon on the Mount makes clear the difference in human life between righteousness and rights (justitia and jus). Righteousness, or justice, looks to that order of life in which all, least and greatest, will have the fairest and fullest chance which the thought and devotion of .man can secure. A righteous God is one who seeks this for men and who asks this spirit of men. It is itself inseparable from mercy. It is not a hard practice, but a high passion devoted to this great goal. It is concerned with the welfare of man. It is the spirit which made Jesus utter that extraordinary word, that it were better for a man to be drowned in the sea than to make even a little child to stumble. The God of Jesus, the righteous God, is one whose throne is moved when men are hard or cruel toward their fellow men.

But the heart of Jesus' conception of God is the thought of his love. Never had this been seized so clearly, never set forth with such beauty and power. This too was not new. The Old Testament has a deep sense of the mercy of God and speaks of God as Father. But love never became so central and so constitutive of the deepest nature of God as with Jesus. With him it is an overflowing goodness to which there is no limit. The least of God's creation shares in his loving thought, the flower whose brief beauty came from him, the unnoticed sparrow whose fall does not escape his eye. There is no line drawn here because of race, there is no limit from lack of desert. His love is like the sun that floods all the earth alike, going out to the evil as to the good. And yet it is not something impersonal and vague, like this enveloping light of day. It is an individual concern, it is like the love of a father for whom each boy, no matter how large the household circle, has his own place of affection and concern. But this goodness is not sentimentality; this love is moral in its quality and its power. It has no counterpart in the weak indulgence which parents often show their children. Its concern is not to give us ease and spare us pain, but to secure for us the highest life at whatever cost. It offers men the incalculable gift of fellowship with God; but the gift, though free, is most exacting in what it demands in return. It is a case of "the utmost for the highest," man's surrender of his highest thought, his deepest purpose, his central affection. And it is a love which costs God as well as man, if the cross of Christ be, as we hold, the very deed of God. The love of God is one that sorrows for men, and suffers with them and for them, and goes out to seek them. Such a love is reconciling, redemptive. And such a fellowship is the highest creative moral power that we know. With such a vision of God one can easily see how fear and distrust on the one hand and the failure of utter devotion on the other were the deepest of sins of" men in the thought of Jesus.

In all this we must recall again the fact that it is not simply with Jesus' teaching about-the character of God that we are concerned. It was out of his own life that this vision grew, and it was the spirit of that life that weighed with men even more than his words. The faith of the Church is here summed up when we say that we believe in a Christlike God. We know what the Father is when we look upon the Son.

The limits of time as well as of the theme of these addresses rule out the consideration of the question of the person of Christ and of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. We are concerned with the meaning of God as he comes to men in Jesus Christ. It is well, however, to remind ourselves again and again, especially in times of controversy, that the vital elements of Christian faith lie here in the realm of religious experience and moral conduct. We have asked three great questions concerning God, the greatest questions that the mind of man can propose: What is God like in his character, in his attitude toward men? What is the will of God for man, the ideal of individual life and the goal of our humanity? What help may we have from God? In the answer to these questions the place of Jesus is secure, and is absolute. This was the faith of men before they discussed matters of substance and essence and person. This is the faith that theology will emphasize more in the future. So conservative a theologian as Dr. James Denney held this in his later writings: "It is of no use to revert to the decision of Nicsea and Chalcedon in the present distress. . . . Christology in future will not find expression in terms like substance, hypostasis, and personal It may humble itself and acquiesce in agnosticism as far as the questions are concerned which these terms were employed to answer; but on the twofold ground that we owe to Jesus our knowledge of the Father and that the kingdom of God for which we hope is a kingdom which comes as his ascendency in human life is realized, it will assert for Jesus a place which is all his own in Christian faith—a faith in virtue of which he determines once for all both the believer's relation to God and his relation to his fellow men." ⁹ The discussion of the person of Christ will inevitably go on, but we have lost something of the confidence that our theories represent the absolute truth, and something of the dogmatism that once sought to enforce uniformity here. We have learned a little more truly where religion itself really lies, and where Christian unity is to be sought. The formal creeds have their value, but it is plain historical fact that no one set of definitions has ever commanded universal assent in the Church. And it is equally true that through the divisions and disputes of the ages there has remained the unity of those who found in Jesus Christ the God whom they could trust, the ideal that could command their conscience, the saving help by which they lived.

NOTE.

The quotation from Dr. James Denney, given on page 98, should be stated in full: "I believe in God through Jesus Christ His only Son, our Lord and Saviour" (p. 350, "Jesus and the Gospel"). Dr. Denney's Conclusion (pp. 329-361) deserves careful reading. No one has stated more clearly or strongly than this conservative theologian the central and absolute place of Jesus for historic Christianity, for its conception of God and life and for its experience of the saving help of God. But Dr. Denney saw, as many conservatives of our day do not see, the difference between the place of Christ in faith and the theological interpretations. "It is this distinction," he declares, "between soundness in faith—a genuinely Christian attitude of the soul to Christ, in virtue of which Christ determines the spiritual life throughout—and soundness in doctrine—the acceptance of some established intellectual construction of faith, on which emphasis needs to be laid" (page 340).

1) James Denney.

2) 2 Corinthians v. 19.

3) John i. 18.

4) "Foundations," page 214.

5) From the author's "A Working Faith," page 133

6) Isaiah lv.; Hosea xi. 8, 9.

7) Isaiah xlv. 21; xlvi. 13.

8) Matthew xx, 1-15.

9) The Constructive Quarterly, June, 1914.