illusions they are seeking and knocking for a central clue to the dark mystery of existence.

One day as they seek they will find. With a revulsion of delight in the truth of what seemed too good to be true, they will find Jesus Christ. For theirs is the temper and mind which disclose His potency. He came to seek and to save those who knew themselves to be lost. He has been impotent for centuries owing to the spiritual complacency of men. He has suffered every degree of patronage by intellectuals who have been interested in Him but have had no need of Him. He has been degraded by the transformation of His revolutionary disclosure into an established and conservative tradition at truce with the world and in bondage to propriety. But now His day returns, as human hearts are loosened to receive Him. A common need draws all the saints, both prodigals and elder sons, to reapprehend what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to learn anew His love which passeth knowledge.

Nothing helps more to a fresh appreciation of this than a study of the hearts that did originally receive Him. It must suffice here rather to point to the importance of the study than attempt it. The study required is of Jewish psychology. Jewish hearts were the solitary medium whereby Christ and His Gospel were given to the world. Jesus appealed to the faith in God that He found in His fellow-countrymen. He found the hearts of many very humanly apathetic, occupied with the necessities of existence, deluded by the shows of life, drugged by familiarity and tradition. But amid such cinders of the Jewish religion He found an unextinguished flame still burning. He found the fire of prophetic faith still alive in those who looked for the consolation of Israel.

Modern research by its study of historical scenes, backgrounds, climates, and contemporary ideas allows

us to stand beside those men, not as lay figures in the calendar, but as fellow human beings. By the same process, too, the Old Testament has been changed from a file of books into a line of men.1 Hence in some measure we can stretch hands across the centuries and live with the great prophets whose inspired teaching, before ever its spirit was condensed into literalism by canon or tradition, led Israel from the lower levels of local and tribal religion to the heights of belief in One God of all the earth. Thus we are led into the very factory of the faith which Jesus Christ presupposed. Archaism and distance drop away from the words of psalmist, preacher, and prophet. We enter the company of men whose national experience had brought them to interpret the whole world in terms of God. But we also learn how the very strength of their acquired convictions gave birth to agony and distress. For it was faith in God, then as now, that rendered men sensitive to godlessness. It was the certainty of God in the men whose mind moulded the Jewish Scriptures that gave rise to their uncertainty. The more ardent their belief in God the more quick their sense of its contradiction by the way of the world. So the ancient words ring with the dismay and perplexity that were created by the collision of Israel's religion with reality.

When Jesus came He took the world as He found it. He did not explain away the things that challenged faith. He appealed to existing faith. He preached no new theology, but grafted His message of fulfilment into the stock of Jewish faith in God wheresoever it was alive.

He found that with the mass of His fellow-countrymen belief in God was often no more than an assumption that justified traditional observance and conduct. But for a few He was able to draw that belief out of the background of assumption and familiarity, and to quicken it into being the central impulse of their lives.

1 Cf. Essay II. passim.

He

filled it with an expectation that for the time drove out of mind the thought of anything but glory and success. He raised it to its highest power in the confession of a follower that He, for all the smallness of the things of His day, nevertheless was Messiah. All the more, therefore, was that expectation overwhelmed by the events which gathered into themselves everything that any time had made the quick heart of the Jew shrink. The darkness of all the hours in which present fact had made Jewish trust in God falter was concentrated into an hour of darkness." The hour of Calvary, when at length it came, recapitulated all the questions which men have asked about God and His dealings with the world.

For Jesus had convinced a few Jews that all the previous ages of hope and trust had been met at last by a day of fulfilment. But that hope, in so far as it had been more than a convention, had been ever under challenge, ever eaten into by a sense of its own foolishness: never able finally to drive out a doubt of itself-doubt whether it were more than a projection of its own longings, or a common assumption, or a tradition from the past, doomed in the end to confutation by reality. And therefore in the end, at the climax of the day of fulfilment, the Cross seemed to be the finally victorious onset of a foe till then only kept at bay, and never beaten under foot.

Hence the faith that sprang out of the Cross, or rather, out of what followed it, was built on no lightlymade assumption about God. Its essence was assumption put to final proof on the hill where, as it were, the very nerve of the world was laid bare. The faith in God which Jesus found was uprooted by His cross to be replanted in the revelation of His Resurrection and coming in the Spirit. The foundations of trust in God were convulsed to be relaid in Him who nevertheless was the Christ. We are sure of this as we read the latter part of the New Testament. One thing

separates us from the men out of whose souls the written words flowed, namely, their certainty of God and of His relations to the world. The disclosure that had been made in and through Jesus Christ was the supreme disclosure the one desire of all restless human hearts -namely, the truth of God Himself, found to be where it seemed that He could not be. "This is the message which we have heard from Him, and announce unto you, that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all." That is the infinitely wonderful outcome of that day of final decision, when God Himself-trusted to by Jesus, adjured by priest and ruler, despaired of by disciples-came into judgment.

This central truth, while it was still new, answered all other questions. It was the immediate and dominating fact that absorbed into itself everything else. As the truth of God it included the truth of man; it contained within itself all the inferences and implications which the increasing energy of human thought in later days could draw out of it. Hence, for instance, the seeming simplicity of New Testament ethics. They can scarcely be disentangled from their plain secret, namely, the centripetal and mutual relationship of the soul to God in Jesus Christ. All maxims and philosophies were reduced to the simple task of walking in the light since the light had come.

But a change soon came. It could not be long before the one essential disclosure ceased through familiarity to hold the foremost place in human interest. The foundation of barest and most elementary faith in God once relaid came to be buried out of sight as men busied themselves with superstructures. Logical reasoning having accepted "the message "could not help but treat its chief purport as assumption and major premiss whence to draw out its necessary inferences. The minds of thinkers quickened to livelier consciousness were bound, as it were, to stand away from that which 1 John i. 5.

1

had come to them, in order to direct, analyse, explore, relate, and systematically to understand it.

The dangers of this are obvious, and Western thought has been busy since the Renaissance in pointing them out. No one can doubt that the proportion and perspective of the faith became altered by its intellectualization. It was made to wear the appearance of over-certainty about God. Because God was taken for granted, He was almost forgotten. He became the centre whence man's attention could stray to the circumference, to occupy itself with lesser objects of devotion. He was so far from being in doubt that undistracted energy could be devoted to precise controversies about His attributes, or to the dissection of the mystery of His sacramental presence, or to the association of His inspiration with every word of the Scriptures.

We can understand how static and immemorially founded Christianity came to appear, in days when Europe had become Christendom and Rome was still the centre of the world, when the East and South were far away, when the new world was yet unknown, and the dawn of the new knowledge had not broken.

We can understand, too, the relatively superficial character of the Reformation. Its convulsions never shook the foundations of the faith, but rather only laid them bare.

Finally, we can understand how, in regard to the primary elements of belief in God and man and nature, so many men came to look upon Christianity as relatively unimportant. The foundations once newly laid in Jesus were buried so deep that men came to look upon them as a part of the natural structure of existence. In a word, we can understand what we have called the Victorian attitude.

But the original conditions are coming round again to-day. The times of the impotence of Jesus Christ are passing. He was ever powerless with those who did not need Him. A knowledge of darkness is needed