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earth, then naturally His W ord should carry more weight than that o f any other, and He taught emphatically, not only that there was a personal God whose Son He was, but that men should pray: “ Our Father which art in Heaven.” 3. Without a God the Christian cannot understand the facts of his own conscious ness.- Take first the idea o f God o f which he finds himself possessed on arriving at the age o f intelligence and responsibility. How it comes to pass that this great idea should arise within him if n o such being as God exists, is something he cannot understand. To say that he has simply inherited it from his parents or absorbed it from his contemporaries is not to solve the problem, but only to put it back from generation to generation. The question remains, How did this idea first originate in the soul? To answer that it gradually gréw up out o f totemism and animism as practiced „ by the low-grade races who, impelled by superstitious fears, conceived material objects to be inhabited by ghosts or spirits, ris equally an evasion o f the problem. Because again the question arises, How did these low-grade races arrive at the conception o f spirits as dis tinguished from bodies or material objects in general? Should it be responded that veneration for deceased ancestors begat the conception o f a God, one must further demand by what process o f reasoning they were conducted from the conception o f as many gods as there were deceased ances tors to that o f one Supreme Deity or Lord o f all. Thé only satisfactory explanation o f the latent consciousness o f God which man in all ages and lands has shown him self to be possessed o f is, that it is one of the soul’s intuitions, a part o f the intel lectual and moral furniture with which it comes into the world; that at first this idea or intuition lies within the soul as a seed corn whiqh gradually opens out as the soul rises into full possession o f its powers and is appealed to by external nat ure ; that had sin not entered into the world this idea or intuition would have
attention solely on the four records, the Christian discerns a personality that can not be accounted for on ordinary princi ples. It is not merely that Jesus per formed works such as none other man did, and spoke words such as never fell from mortal lips; it is that in addition His life was one o f incomparable goodness—of unwearied philanthropy, self-sacrificing love, lowly humility, patient meekness and spotless purity—such as never before had been witnessed on earth, and never since has been exhibited by any o f H is . fol lowers. It is that Jesus, being such a per sonality as described by those who beheld His glory to be that o f an only-begotten from a Father, full o f grace and truth, put. forth such pretensions and claims as were wholly unfitting in the lips o f a mere man, and much more o f a sinful man, declaring Himself to be the Light o f the World and the Bread o f L ife: giving out that He had power to forgive sins and to raise the dead; that He had pre-existed before He came to earth and would return to that pre-existent state when His work was done, which work was to die for men’s sins; that He would rise from the dead and ascend up into heaven, both o f which He actually did; and asserting that He was the Son o f God, the -equal o f ihe Father and the future Judge o f mankind. The Christian .studying this picture perceives that, while to it belong the lineaments o f a man, it also wears the likeness of. a God, and he reasons that if that picture was drawn from the life (and how otherwise could it have been drawn?) then a God must once have walked this earth in the person of Jesus. For the Christian no, other conclusion is possible. Certainly not that o f the New Theology, which makes of Jesus a . sinful man, distinguishing Him from Christ, the so-called ideal figure of the creeds, and calling Him divine only in the sense that other men are divine though in a lesser degree than He. But even the New Theology cannot escape from the implication o f its own creed. For if Jesus was the divinest man that ever lived pn
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