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laws, but it cannot inspire love or worship. Here lies the power and attractiveness of the Christ-idea: it is human and it is personal. Its upgrowth is generally contemporaneous with the retreat of the local and familiar Jahweh of Hebraism into the unfathomable depths of universalism, and may thus be taken as evidence of the common need of some mental haltingplace--some picturesque figure about which our limping thoughts may gather for restful and intimate devotion. The human spirit simply cannot bear the cold and awful separateness which universalism suggests, even though it be the immanence of deity. Hence the Messiah, and hence the Christ. But then, to those who know the historic process through which the Christ-idea has come into being, it can never be other than a slowly shaped and irregularly developed human conception. For those who, of necessity, must leave the discussion of such questions to others, this Christ of the imagination may well take the place of God; and, indeed, this is a manifest tendency of present religious

thought; it goes beyond the doctrine of the Trinity and makes Christ supreme. Should this process develop to its logical issue, this humanly created personality will inevitably be worshipped simply as God, though what shall be done with the man Jesus is a problem yet awaiting its solution. Already the battle is joined as to whether there ever was such an historic personage, or whether the whole story of his life be not a myth akin to others that have arisen in various religious cults throughout the world. If the latter issue be arrived at, we are simply no forwarder : we are only passing over the same ground as the ancients, and are changing our religious nomenclature without, to any appreciable extent, reaching nearer to the heart of things. Hence the pathetic importance of the cry 'Back to Jesus,' or 'Jesus versus Christ': that is to say, let us get back to that human reality which lies enshrined in the Christian faith. We do not need it for the purpose for which it has so long been used, as a means of forensic justification, or for restoring relations with

God that have never been forfeited; but we do want to find the human basis of that ideal which has proved so uplifting for man. That this person, whoever he may have been, has been so idealized as to be raised beyond our range of life is clear; but surely there must have been some one whose life was so much more than commonly noble as to be worthy of this exaltation; and it is this that we desire to find. The creation of another God is not what is needed: we already have one whose mystery can only be penetrated in and by the evidences of his ordered and beneficent power about us and in us, whose will is and must be the standard and measure of righteousness for all moral intelligence. There can be room for none other even in thought. To him we may appeal as readily as to any creature of our imagination. What we need is the certainty-if we can get it-that there lived one of our very own kind, who did discover in himself the true relations of the divine and human, and in so doing offered the noblest stimulus to a similar discovery in ourselves. If we

can find such a one within or behind the New Testament representations, it will be a source of common gladness; if not, we are still within the providence of God, whose mystery need not trouble us, so only that we do our utmost to live in harmony with what we know of his being and his relations with ourselves. If even the mystery deepens with the enlargement of our understanding, so much the less can an imaginary being make good our defect. In any case the so-called Christ of experience can hardly be a permanently workable thought, inasmuch as it can be none other than a personal, incommunicable, subjective presentation. Surely the God of experience is quite as effective, seeing that he has proved the strength of the noblest of our race, and of Jesus in especial.

In general, then, men must be content to walk humbly within the formless mystery of God, and find his will in the laws that pervade the universe-the whole of human nature included. To set a semi-divine Christ in his place is no gain to us either as a revelation of the divine mystery or

The man himself

as an example to us. It is otherwise if the term Christ be a token of honour for a real and simply good man, his name may fitly be the gathering symbol for all who worship God as the divine Father, and for all lovers of mankind. will be a stimulus towards a righteousness that can have no less than God as its source and man's welfare as its end. For this the world must ever remain a debtor to the Church even for the ideal of such a life; but not therefore will it consent to be held under authority which is not founded in reasonable intelligence. If the Church would serve mankind in fullest measure, it must appeal to the deepest and purest instincts of humanity, as did he whose name has become identified with our truest progress and our loftiest hopes both here and hereafter.

To have been a witness to and a subject. of this vast change is a great experience. Not a few have shared it to their abiding harm; others have fearfully returned to the narrow conditions of their traditional faith; but others rejoice in their adjust

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