human need. He saw nothing to admire in the character that was exemplary but pitiless. He was outraged by those who substituted pedantry for religion, and who were more concerned to keep their robes unpolluted than to cleanse and uplift the lives of men. He showed that the institutions of religion, prayer, fasting, and the Sabbath were for promoting a man's character rather than his reputation. According to his thought the conception of neighbor could not be limited by caste or blood, but was to be applied whenever relations of kindness and helpfulness were possible. And finally the great ideas of man's sonship and God's kingdom were given an entirely ethical content. Godlikeness was the test of sonship to God, and doing the will of God was what constituted entrance into his kingdom. Thus the religion of Christ was through and through the religion of ethical personality.

But in the second place, Christ carried the religious consciousness into every experience and function of life. The clothing of the lilies and the storms on the sea of Galilee, his daily work in the world and the cup pressed to his lips in the garden-all alike were from the hands of

the Father. Hence the filial spirit was to be carried into every relation of life. The Pharisee thought that God had withdrawn from his world since the glory had departed from Israel. Jesus taught men to know that he was always near. The ascetic held that the things of the physical life were a barrier to the life with God. Jesus taught that they were all from God, and all to be used in his service. The formalist forgot that God was nigh to the heart of man. Jesus made men mindful that the Father seeth in secret. The Jew could not believe that God looked with equal favor upon himself and upon the Gentile. Jesus saw his Father's hand distributing sunshine and rain to all alike, and taught that many should come from the East and the West and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of God. The filial life was open to all because the Father's love was all-embracing. Thus the religion of Christ was through and through a religion of the divine immanence, and one in which this faith was applied no less to human history than to nature.

In these two great characteristics of Jesus'

work we see the transformation which he wrought in ethical monotheism. He effected a synthesis between the religion of divine immanence and the religion of ethical personality, thus protecting the latter from legalism and the former from vague mysticism, and giving to both an unparalleled depth and intensity. This synthesis he accomplished not at all through outward ecclesiastical reform, nor through the introduction of novel ideas, but rather through his own personality. In his life, in his practical spiritual attitude toward God and nature and man, he brought into full and unimpaired unity spiritual truths that the world's greatest souls have never been able, apart from him, to lay hold of except in fragmentariness and isolation. God ever present in his world and capable of being known in inward experience, and yet as the consequence of this no depreciation of individuality and personality but their full ethical development, for in precisely this process of development God is most intimately known-this we may well believe to be Christ's supreme achievement, as viewed in the light of man's religious history.

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Our pragmatic method requires us to take one step further in this discussion, but that must be reserved for the next lecture. But we already have expressed, even though in merely outline fashion, the answer which Christian theology has to make to the great problem with which the present lecture has been concerned. Man has knowledge of God in many ways, but the fullest experience of him is conditioned upon the historic revelation in the personality of Jesus Christ. Through the unique worth and power of his personality we are introduced into that religion of the Spirit, in which ethical monotheism finds its fulfilment, and according to which we have an abiding fellowship with God and Christ through the development of moral personality. The great apostle of the religion of the Spirit teaches us that there are three things that abide-faith, hope, and love— and in proportion as these great fruits of the Spirit of Christ are realized in us we have an experience of the Eternal.

III

ONE INCREASING PURPOSE

THERE is no better evidence of the practical

nature of truth than the fact that the great insights have to be won afresh by each succeeding generation. Just as a boy cannot be simply told how to live by his father, but must learn his final lessons in the same way that his father did in the actual struggles of life-so one age cannot simply repeat the life of a preceding age, but must go on to grapple with new conditions as the preceding age had to do, thereby making its own contribution to the world's slowly accumulating treasuries of wisdom. If, indeed, an age attempts to do merely the work of repeating the thoughts and deeds of the past, it foredooms itself to defeat. It becomes an age in which there is no open vision. It forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out for itself cisterns, broken cisterns that can hold