points us to the Christ without. To the yearning cry of the human spirit, stricken with fear and loneliness in the great solitude of being, aghast before the enigma of death and the veiled mystery beyond the cry of the strayed child for the Hand of the Father in the night of desertion, "My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God"Christ makes answer in words of invitation : "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light." In Christ we see the Ideal of humanity and the Image of the Father. In making God known to us He reveals to us also ourselves, whence we come, what we may be, whereto we are tending. "I and the Father are one "-so He links together man and God, and consecrates manhood to be for ever the mirror of Godhead, and disallows the suggestions of experience, and enables the victories of faith. "Seeing it is God that said, Light shall shine out of darkness, who shined in our hearts, to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the Face of Jesus Christ." So, the All-Great, were the All-loving too- "And thou must love me, who have died for thee!" Yes; the God Whom we Christians worship, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is a God Who loves us and Whom we love. K IX CHRISTIANITY, THE CLIMAX OF THEISM1 LET NOT YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED: YE BELIEVE IN God, believe ALSO IN ME.-St. John xiv. 1. MANY causes have united in bringing about a state of unrest within the sphere of Religion. It seems to be the case that crises of intellectual disturbance are recurrent among Christians, and, certainly, they never fail to bring severe mental distress and, in some instances, even a total collapse of belief to individuals, while they seem to lower the whole standard of religious sincerity, and to bring a blight upon spiritual enthusiasm. At such crises Christian men are, in spite of themselves, compelled to examine the conventional formulæ of belief, and to discover what are the foundations of their own personal 1 Preached on the fourth Sunday after Epiphany (February 1, 1903) in St. Margaret's, Westminster. religion. And there can be no question that this process is both painful and salutary. Painful it must always be to bring under discussion and analysis convictions that we have received as so Divinely true as to be above cavil or inquiry ; salutary it can never fail to be to rise, at whatever cost of personal suffering, out of the unquestioning receptiveness of childhood into the anxious caution and deliberate decision of responsible manhood. Such a crisis of mental sifting, and, through mental sifting, of spiritual development, came to the disciples of Christ when "His hour came" and He had to pass away from them. The wonderful discourses in the upper room, spoken at the Table of the first Eucharist which give to the Fourth Gospel its extraordinary and imperishable attractiveness-discover to us the Master, fully conscious of the trial about to come upon His followers by reason of His departure, engaged in the tender and difficult task of preparing them in advance. Take what view you will of the difficult and, as yet, unsolved problems raised by criticism as to the date, origin, and character of the Fourth Gospel, and still the intrinsic power and beauty of those discourses (set as they are in an historic context so pathetic and so probable, and bearing to the modern reader the solemn affirmations and credentials of eighteen centuries of spiritual testing and spiritual acceptance) will secure for them a place in your regard, which is scarcely, if at all, lower than any which unquestioning piety could provide. Personally, I am convinced that these inimitable discourses enshrine a genuine Dominical tradition, delivered, either directly or at second hand, through the agency of "the disciple whom Jesus loved"; and, to my thinking, the fact that, as they stand in the Gospel, they are not the ipsissima verba of the Master Himself, but a free yet careful version of His teaching by one who had absorbed it into the very texture and course of his own thought, realised it in its coherent wholeness, and added to it the authentication of his own spiritual experience, so far from diminishing, does even enhance its value for us. Be this as it may, I shall not ask you this morning to give any other authority to the text than that which belongs to it as deeply and luminously true. My thesis is that in the words before us we have the true line of Christian Apologetic indicated, that belief in Christ is a legitimate consequence of belief in God, and that, in truth, Christianity is the climax and flower of Theism. Whether the words be Christ's very own, or rather St. John's, or even |