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THE KING’S BUSINESS
rial environment and bread enough to eat. But the great thinkers of this world are beginning to realize that man needs more than bread to feed and sustain his life. He has a life be yond the mere animal existence which is sustained by the material. Not only so, but also, that this life is the real life that determines the character and scope o f life. Prof. Eucken speaks for this new tendency when he says, “ the only possible remedy is to rad ically alter the conception of man himself, to distinguish within him the narrower and the larger life, the life that is straitened and finite, and can never transcend itself and an infinite life through which he enjoys commun ion with the immensity and the truth of the universe. Can man rise to this spiritual level? On the possibility of his doing so rests all our hope of sup plying any meaning and value to life.” This is another way of saying that life in order to be thoroughly understood must be spiritually interpreted and fur ther it means that life if it is to be realized at its best, must be realized in a definite relation with a transcendent power. One of our own philosophers has gone further than this and has de clared that man has relations with God and in yielding himself to the in fluence. of this relation he realizes his greatest possibilities. He dares to call this transcendent power what Christ revealed it to be —God Our Father. We are well within the truth when we say, that this attempt to. give life a spiritual basis and interpretation is one of the strongest tendencies in our most recent thought. It was not the fashion fifteen years ago, but it is most decidedly so today. This conception fits into the concep tion which we tried to give of -God, perfectly. The supreme fact in Christ’s revelation of God is the fact of Fatherhood. The essential fact of fatherhood is the paternal passion.
Therefore we expect when we come to examine the goal of creation to find life expressed so as to be able to re produce the life of God. This is what we find, in man. He is a being with fundamental relations with God which make possible the reflection of the life of God in him. If this be granted, we must find in this relationship the supreme fact concerning life and the fact which gives it its deepest and most significant meaning. It is this fact that made possible the life of Jesus and apart from it His life would be impossible. This means that we are made for God and apart from Him it is impossible to realizé life in its truest and best meanings. It is in here at this heart of things that sin, and redemption must find their final interpretations. For the present we content ourselves with noting the fact that modern thinking forces us to recognize the fact that Christ demonstrated long ago— the deepest and most fundamental re lationship o f life is its relation with God and the Father Almighty maker of Heaven and Earth. In the second place we find in this tendency in modern thought a disposi tion to increasingly emphasize the fact of immortality. One of the greatest living scientists thought it worth while to make this the subject of his address from the President’s chair in the Brit ish association of scientists. He con tended in that address that practically everything we know about human life tends to corroborate the idea o f im mortality. It is becoming so obvious that a large number of our thinking men feel that they are quite justified in taking it for granted in many of the statements which they make concern ing man. In the third place all the firm ten dencies in recent psychological stud ies are towards a conception of per sonality which strikingly corroborates
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