Christ is a living fact confirmed perpetually by the truth of poetry. Let us explain our meaning by a saying of Aristotle, quoted so fondly by Matthew Arnold. "The superiority of poetry over history consists," says Aristotle, " in its possessing a higher truth and a higher seriousness." No wonder, then, that Tennyson and Browning and Whittier have held firmly to a divine Christ, while the radical critics would have abolished him from human history! No wonder that Olive Schreiner, when she pleads for the little ones of Jesus Christ, gets nearer to him than in all her thinkings! But what shall we say when history and poetry combine to give us the same Son of God, the same revelation of infinite love? What shall we say when the radical historian, after thirty years of investigation, tells us, "Yes, your New Testament is an honest book," and a woman of genius in her agony urges instinctively the Jesus of the cross, him with the pierced hands and pierced feet, to stir the hearts of modern men and women?

If the result of historical inquiry had been different, literature shows us how desperately men would have clung to Him who was rich, yet for our sakes became poor. They would have clung to him as their last possible dream of God, personal, tender, infinitely kind. In a kind of dumb terror they would have watched that dream dissolve, in spite of all their frantic efforts to detain it, as it vanished into the eternal silence and the eternal dark. But the gospels have not been taken from us; there they are, and there they remain. Jesus has been restored to us, his reality transcending all our traditions and all our conceptions of him!

3. But, finally, our age is beclouded with despair, beset with difficulties, and faint from vanished hope. What is Christ in such distress? The answer is obvious enough. This age must accept Christ as the perfect and the only perfect speech of God or resign itself to what Ibsen calls the eternal silence of the stars. The feeling is becoming more intense as our difficulties increase; a dumb God in bewilderments like ours were no God at all. This found an almost frantic expression in the poem entitled "Hope in God," with which Alfred de Musset concluded one of his celebrated nights. It is the cry of the prophets of Israel, "Tell me thy name! Show me thy glory! Bow

the heavens and come down!" The yearning has been intensified by the comparative study of religions. For these have shown us how the whole creation groans, how the search for truth is universal, and the disappointment also, unless, perad venture, Jesus is the Truth, and Jehovah did reveal himself to the prophets of Israel. In that case we can conceive the divine splendor striving to break through everywhere and finding it possible at last to make the glorious breach among the Jewish people. We must indeed take our choice. It is Christ or the eternal silence! Speech-consoling, quickening, divine speech-or hopeless, unbroken, implacable stillness! "How can God bear it?".exclaimed Dr. Holmes, in a moment of agonized reflection. "This ceaseless hum of human misery!" He could not bear it," said Jesus Christ, and so "he sent me, that men might not perish but have everlasting life." Take this away, and the story of the search and struggle for God, the religious history of the world, is a tissue of delusions, drenched and dyed in the bloody sweat of humanity. And in that case we do well to be angry and to fling away our hopes! Who are we to dream of immortality or even of progress? The universe is not a product, but a process. We are midgets only, maddened with our little touch of mind!

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And what is true of the religious aspirations is true equally of the social aspirations of our race. When the astronomer scoffs at my conceit and tells me it is a fragment of the wornout geocentric system, and when the biologist tells me that I am a moving sepulcher of inherited tendencies lighted by a little lamp I fondly call my soul, what shall I answer them, once you take away my Christ? Pascal used to say that the incarnation reinstated man in his self-respect. It revealed at once his meanness and his magnitude. Luther gloried in a similar thought. Out of Christ, Dr. Martin Luther was a pitiful worm; in Christ, he felt the throbbing of eternal life. We may strut and we may amble in the presence of our modern science after we give up Christ, but we dare not reflect, we dare not ponder, ourselves, under penalty of despair. Directly we do that we shrivel into hopeless insignificance. Hence the interest felt in Jesus Christ, the return to him in history and in theology, the desperate tenacity with which the best of men

cling to him personally, in spite of much bewilderment. Applied ideas, said Walter Bagehot, require two generations to make their consequences felt. Two generations have elapsed almost since Mr. Darwin startled the world with his Origin of Species, and we are beginning now to feel the consequences. The world is working toward a new morality, or, rather, the world is working back to the old morality that might makes right. The morality of Jesus is not natural; it is either divine or absurd. It is either the outflow of his perfect knowledge of God, or it is the mere dream of a Galilean peasant who mistook his own heart-beats in the presence of human sorrow for the throb of eternal love. Men are mad, it seems to us, who expect to save the moral code of Jesus after they have surrendered his divine authority. He started it. He must sustain it. And when his moral code has perished, what will remain? We are not saying that the Darwinian theories are incompatible with the Gospel of Christ. Our point is this, without Christ as Paul and John conceived him the ethics of Jesus will soon be ground to powder by those theories. For the ethics of Christ are the mind of Christ, and this mind has never been dominant. It has been barely possible even to believers, and, as Paul declared, it would have perished from their hearts but for the image of the living Christ and the promise of his victory. And we repeat our question, After Christ, what then? Why cheat ourselves with new terms and fine phrases? Altruism is at best a tendency, transient and limited. Why strive to make it universal? Why not assist nature by artificial selection? Why not drive the helpless cripple to the wall? Virtus is the only virtue. Weakness is the only vice. The brotherhood of man meant something to a divine Redeemer, friend, and brother, of the poor; but what does it mean to a candid biologist who attributes every existing species of life to the persistence with which each struggled to preserve itself and its offspring? "In Christ Jesus," to quote Pascal once more, "all contradictions are reconciled." In him we learned that God had chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty." In him we learned that the future of humanity depends, not upon the perpetuation, but the extinction,

of the struggle. In him we learned to care for the least and the feeblest, lest we lose the noblest and divinest. And therefore we enrich the modern world with ministries of mercy, therefore we go forth, like Jehovah in Habakkuk's vision, for the salvation of the poor.

But even if the ethical system of Jesus survived, whence could it derive the energy which it requires for its application? The influence of ideas is feebler than we imagine. They may appeal to us as eternally true. They may entrance us by their unearthly beauty and yet be as powerless to change our conduct as our stature. The crest of the wave is not the moving impulse of the billow; the ideas that break in beauty over the mind are not the shaping forces of the soul. The mere thoughts of Jesus Christ cannot save the generations, splendid as they seem. It is not the sight of his face that lifts us from the trough of the sea. This may help to keep us afloat, but the strong arm of the deliverer must snatch us from the devouring flood. Now the pessimism of our age, whether of a philosopher like Schopenhauer or a dramatist like Ibsen, is rooted in the conviction that character is not transformable. This is the deadly skepticism. This is the ruin of hope. This is the denial of God. We are what we must be. The essence of man is what he eats and what his ancestors have eaten. To educate him you must begin with his grandparents and the like.

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But Jesus Christ, with that wisdom which, as Mr. Romanes points out, prevents all conflicts with the discoveries of real science, met this difficulty with triumphant candor. you are, without me, simply what you have inherited. best of you and the worst of you must be born from above. You are not to be saved by your impulse, nor can you be saved by ideas; you must be saved by power, by the inflow of a diviner life." Ideas may regulate this new energy when it arrives; but ideas will not create it. Neither do ideas remove the hindrances to life. The poison of sin, the slavery of nature, the fear of men and of death, the tyranny of the multitude, the greed of the carnal mind-all these must perish in a divine combustion, and out of the flames must emerge a new creature in Christ Jesus.

The writer, for one, is ready to go with Ibsen and help blow up the world, if this deliverance is not within our reach. Paul thought it was. Jesus Christ delivered him from the body of death. Jesus Christ renewed him day by day. He was the source of courage, he was the replenishment of strength, he was the power of an endless life. This Jesus of Matthew and John and Paul is clothed with eternal and miraculous might. And this is the only Jesus that men ever worship. A teacher they might admire, thrilling to his utterances as one thrills to sublime music or the majestic murmur of the forest. A defeated and crucified enthusiast they might love and pity, bemoaning the wasted outpour of his precious being. But worship him they will not. The only Christ who can rule humanity must be at once the wisdom and power of God. For this age is writhing in the coils of the old misery; it stutters forth the old cry, "O wretched men that we are, who shall deliver us from the body of this death?" Only our age is more desperate than its predecessors. We are determined to know the worst and the best. Phantom theologies may have their little day. We may have, for a while, the Christ that wavers preached in the hazy splendor of uncertain imaginings. But we shall hear, and that right soon, the imperative command of an age fiercely in earnest, like the sharp voice of Cromwell to the preacher of his time, "Quit your fooling and come down!" Jesus of Nazareth was either a human creature like ourselves, or he was the miraculous inbreak of Almighty God into the common order of this world! Which of the two do you say that he was?

The coming century will never establish any nebulous pretender upon the throne of Jesus Christ. Men may chatter glibly about the Christ ideal, about the Messianic consciousness and the God-consciousness of Jesus. They will talk to the clouds. Democracy clamoring for a leader, humanity hungry for reality, yet bereft of hope and dignity by its discoveries, will push them aside with scoffs and blows. We are seeking, they will say, consolation and redemption. We might find them in a risen and a living Christ, but you are fools to mock us with your incantations over a handful of