01.01. Chapter 01

CHAPTER I THE CHRISTLIKE GOD

INTRODUCTORY FOR a good many years I have been holding interviews with young people about the problems of religious experience and theory. Very often I am asked by these younger persons and by older ones too, for that matter -why the church, and particularly the theologians, insist so stubbornly upon such features as the miraculous in the story of Jesus. The questioners say that there is so much in the life of Jesus that we can accept without taking miracle also! The wisdom and strength and beauty of the words and life and sacrifice of Jesus set before us an admittedly ideal character. Why not take Jesus just as the one complete life and try to make that life our own? This question is being urged to-day with such sincerity that we must face it, and face it sympathetically. It does not grow out of a mood of doubt. It may not be the voice of skepticism at all, but of belief belief in the possibilities of human nature, belief in the laws in the midst of which we live, belief in the instability of a perfect character. There is indeed a measure of justice in an impatience against dogmatists who will have it that if we cannot have a miraculous Christ we cannot have any Christ, in face of the fact that the picture of the Christ is actually before us, and that multitudes do take him as the perfect ideal without reference to the miraculous. Some of the defenders of the miraculous to-day speak so mechanically as to create a much less vital spiritual impression than do many of those who reject miracle outright.

I wish it understood that I am not now concerned with the miraculous as such but, rather, with the question raised as to why believers in Christ hold fast to miracle in their interpretation of him. The answer is, of course, that they hold to miracle as a witness to divinity, and the answer makes it clear that there is a sound aim back of much of the emphasis on miracle. The craving for marvel as such for sign and wonder has no more spiritual value to-day than when Jesus called the craving the mark of an evil and adulterous generation. All through the history of religion the true priests of God have had to fight against this hankering for some thing which is often but little better than magic. Still, if we look at the defense of miracle at least implied in the great creedal statements of the church, the intent of the defense is entirely clear, namely, to connect Christ so closely with God that men can believe in a Christlike God. The methods by which thinkers have sought to establish this connection have often been faulty enough, because the general world view of the thinkers has often been at fault. For example, men have at times believed that God once for all created the world and then set it to go on by itself. The only way he could get into it thereafter was thought of as through miracle. Hence, whatever seemed natural about the life of Jesus was by its naturalness shut off from the divine. The defenders of miracle were under a system of philosophy which almost forced them to rely upon miracle as the only intelligible path through which God could reach men, inadequate as that path is to us of a later day. By whatever means, miraculous or otherwise, as have seemed adequate at the moment, the church has always aimed to keep the connection of Christ and God the closest possible. There has been no term of intimacy closer than that of Son, and the church has always insisted upon calling Jesus the Son of God. It is the insistence that must be kept in mind. If the form of philosophy of a period has lent itself readily to making Jesus divine, that philosophy has been freely utilized, as witness the use by the church of the Logos notion.

If the philosophy has not lent itself to the exaltation of Christ, the church has affirmed his exaltation nevertheless, as in the deistic period noted above, in which period, with natural processes represented as going on of themselves, theology found the proof of Christ’s divinity in his miraculously breaking through the natural processes. The attempt is always to carry Christ as close to God as possible. If we think of God as triune, the Son is the second Person of the Trinity. Some ardent teachers would almost make him the first Person, as did a celebrated Methodist theologian who once spoke of Jesus as God Almighty. The church has usually, however, condemned such extreme putting of Christ’s divinity as heresy, insisting that this claim for Jesus would empty the word "Son" of its essential force.

It is this insistence upon divinity that puzzles so many of the younger students of the life of Christ. Why cannot we take that life, just as far as we can interpret it into terms that we can understand, as a statement of the human ideal? Some students can hardly restrain their resentment at the tendency to deify Jesus, since that tendency seems to them to rob him of his supreme value as a human ideal. To such students the tendency to make man into God seems not much better than other attempts of the kind which were characteristic even of the heathenism into which Christianity came. Critics point out to us that in the early days of the church it was quite common even for popular thought to deify a man. On that memorable occasion in Paul’s missionary journey through South Galatia when the multitudes called Barnabas Zeus and Paul Mercury, they were acting true to that idea of their time which conceived of gods as capable of appearing in human form, and which found it easy to believe that a man could become a god. Is not this tendency to deify Jesus more heathen than Christian? Are we not most truly Christian when we cut loose from a heathen propensity and take Jesus simply for the character that he was and for the ideal that he is?

I would not discourage anyone from making the utmost of the human ideal set before us in Jesus, but the present-day protest against conceiving of him as divine does not quite meet the point. There can be no doubt that the early church and the church in all later ages, indeed has sought to give Jesus highest honor; but the explanations which would account for the doctrine of his divinity merely in terms of a desire to honor him fall short. It is true that the more the significance of Jesus grew upon the mind of the church the larger the terms used to describe him. Prophet, Messiah, victor-over-death, virgin-born, Son of God, Logos, second Person of the Trinity all indicate the increasing depth of the impression which Jesus has made upon the church; and these are all terms of honor, but their significance is more than honorific.

Why is it, then, that the church holds so tightly to the terms and Scriptures and theologies which conceive of Jesus as divine, if it is not to honor Jesus? The answer is, not that the church is trying to lift Christ up to God, but to think of God in terms of Christ. The essential is not merely the Godlikeness of Christ but the Christlikeness of God. This may seem to be a fine point; but fine as it may be it is significant just now as marking a shift in emphasis in theological debate from that which we used to hear a quarter-century ago. The former debate spoke in terms of the divinity, or deity, of Christ. The present emphasis is on the Christlikeness of Deity. The course of church history does indeed look as if men were trying to give increasing honor to Christ, but, after all, the back-lying aim has been and is to interpret God in terms of Christ. The various theological formulas have been so many instruments of such interpretation. It is true that some thinkers have so spoken as to make the theological phrasing an end-in-itself. Then we have had a predominantly intellectualistic ecclesiasticism, with assent to a creed the official requisite to salvation, and with neglect of the spiritual purpose of the intellectual statement that purpose being the enforcement of the belief that God is like Christ. All the elaborately contrived doctrines of miracle, of incarnation, of trinity, of atonement, no matter how difficult to understand intellectually, are clear enough in their central intent, namely, to show God in Christ. Understand, I do not for a moment maintain that the soundness of the aim makes the methods intellectually sound. Back in the early ages of the church there were some probably only a few thinkers who taught that Satan had a claim on the souls of men which only the death of the Son of God could satisfy, and that God met the obligation by sending the Son to the cross. As an intellectual construetion this theory arouses only amused pity to-day, but its aim is as self-evident as that of any theory of atonement ever built, namely, to declare that God himself will do whatever is necessary for the salvation of men. All our formal theological creeds may be likewise inadequate as creeds, but all that are central aim at enforcing the belief that not only in Christ do we see God, but in God we see Christ.

What is the difference between the older emphasis and the newer? Not much in actual statement, and yet a good deal in focus and perspective. If we think of the teaching of the divinity of Christ as resulting from progressive exaltation of Christ, we may think of God as, indeed, including Christ, but as including much besides with God as an all inclusive Absolute reconciling everything in himself. If in God we see essential Christlikeness, the focus is a little different. Christ is of God as the center of his being, the Word which is constantly in the Divine Mind. In short, the Christlikeness of God has been central to Christianity, and the church will not likely surrender a theology which seems to defend this Christlikeness except for a theology which defends it better. That such better statements will be forthcoming in the future I see no reason to doubt. Every age must phrase the Christlikeness of God in its own terms, and even the best formulations thus far made leave much to be desired. I repeat that we must keep clear the difference between the aim of the formulas and the formulas themselves. An intellectualist might revel in a formal theology without a trace of interest in the Christlikeness of God, and a firm believer in such Christlikeness might regard all the formal creeds with weariness and distaste. It is the intention of the present treatment to look at the commoner philosophical and theological statements about God the so called "attributes of God" to see how they must be interpreted if we think of God as Christ like.

Someone declares, however, that he is not yet satisfied with thus raising question about God when we study Christ. Are we not wiser, at least more sensible, to keep close to the Christ of the human ideal? Why is it necessary to take on all these theories of the divinity of Jesus when the splendid humanity of Jesus stands on its own right before us? To which I reply that I am not trying to get anyone to accept theories of the divinity of Jesus. I am trying instead to show the direction in which these theories point. They who insist on the humanity of Jesus must not forget that this humanity itself is always pointing out beyond itself and is in part responsible for the theories. The very perfection of the humanity starts theories of divinity. I repeat, however, that I am not concerned with the theories as such. They may all be true or all false, or some may be true and some may be false, or all may be partly true and partly false; at the best all are inadequate. As theories they have to stand or fall on their intellectual and logical merits, but I am not now thinking of their logic. I am thinking of them as effects of a cause. That cause is the conviction that God is like unto Christ, and that in Christ we find God. As long as the church holds to that aconvietion theologies will be forthcoming to attempt to explain the relation of Christ to God; but I am not to concern myself in this treatment with the theologies, except to ask whether they themselves square with their own fundamental aim, to establish the Christlikeness of God. AN IRREPRESSIBLE QUESTION

Why should we, however, keep raising the question about God? Because that is the one question with which every age is sooner or later concerned, and that is the question especially before our own age. I said a moment ago that young people are peculiarly prone to impatience with theological inquiries, by which I mean that they are impatient with the conventional and technical theological phrasing of inquiries. Young people of to-day, nevertheless, are always asking about God. Even if they take Jesus just as the human ideal they cannot move an inch into the study of Jesus without having questions about God arise squarely across the path. The question as to the Divine Nature is more and more insistent to-day. The demand is not so much for a proof of the existence of God as for a conception of his character in which we can trust. I do not know that there is much out-and-out materialism in current philosophy. The fact that the universe is intelligible at all means to most thinkers that it is founded in thought. The difficulty is with the nature of the Thinker or rather of the Doer. The universe may be uttering speech and intelligible speech up to a point, but is the speech worth listening to? At the same moment that the universe is more and more conceded to be the expression of thought, there is more and more doubt as to whether the thought is worth expressing.

It may be that the whole thought is too large for our grasp. We may be like children who have learned to read without yet being able to master the meaning of the whole volume, or page, or sentence. We know what the words mean, but the sentences are still too vast for us. Or it may be that some meanings of the universe are not intended for us at all, or not intended for us yet. For example, we used to conceive of the material universe as created primarily for men. Everything in the universe was to be judged by its fitness for a human purpose. We should with difficulty hold such a view to-day. It is open to us to believe that everything in the universe is to be judged by its reference to the purposes of persons or a Person but hardly by reference to human persons. This world may, indeed, be just the kind of world best fitted for the moral training of men, at least in the first steps of that training, but could that have been the only purpose in the creation of the world? It is a marvelous power that mind has of reading off some information concerning an astronomical universe which can be measured only in "light-years," but we cannot believe that the immeasurable reaches of stellar space were put forth just to exercise the mind of man. This does not at all imply that I would belittle the human intelligence. The physical home of man may indeed be an insignificant, off-the-road corner in space, but the mind that can find that out is not itself insignificant, and the power to read off the messages as to the distances of the stars, and their constitution, and their probable past and future, makes this speck of cosmic dust on which we spin through space of mighty meaning. Still, one of the tokens of the greatness of the mind of man is its unwillingness to believe that all this physical universe exists merely that man may understand it. The universe may well be the best for the purpose of man’s moral development, but one sign of that fitness might be that it was not intended for man alone. In some respects the universe seems to be what it is and to do what it does pretty much on its own account it being the privilege of man to fit himself into the scheme of things as best he may. The further his knowledge reaches the further the spread of the unknown out beyond. The more he learns the more there is to learn, which is to say, the more he learns the less he knows. For with the increase of the knowledge of the processes by which the world moves there is the increase of the sorrow which arises from increasing inability to make out what it is all about. Knowledge in any field leadeth to mystery.

There is not much need of my speaking of the problem of pain, except to say that we are about as far off from understanding its purpose as the first man who ever felt a twinge or an ache. Oh, of course, we may prattle glibly about the beneficent uses of pain about its efficacy as a warning, and about its being the foil against which we know pleasure; and all this has its trace of value. Here, again, however, it seems most reasonable to say that we find ourselves in a universe in which pain is a feature, and that we adjust ourselves to pain and make what use of it we can. In the life of almost any individual there is more pain than he can use for moral and spiritual purposes. With many it comes in such volume as to leave no strength for learning any lessons; and with some its usefulness as a warning is marred by the fact that it starts too late and continues so long as to be worse than the danger it is warning against. If we should see medicinal plants growing by the ten million and then conclude that these plants were for the healing of men whose numbers never reach beyond a few score, we should probably soon revise our conclusion into the more modest one that the plants are here and the men can use them. Minimize the fact of pain all we can, discount it as much as we please, there is still more left than we can explain on any theory that the race has yet heard. Moreover, when we think of animal pain, where presumably no moral values are being wrought out, the mystery becomes densely opaque. A world in which men suffer for the sake of moral development could be construed in intelligible terms, if the development and the suffering were in some reasonable proportion to one another; but on the problem of animal suffering all human wisdom is dumb. There is simply no making anything of it by man’s reason.

Men have about given up the possibility of finding a God whom they can fully understand. Of old it was said that his thoughts are not as our thoughts nor his ways like our ways. The search, then, has become that for a God whom we can trust, when we cannot understand him. If, indeed, men are what the Christian revelation conceives them to be immortal beings with illimitable reaches of possible development before them they can well afford to possess their souls in patience while waiting for larger light. They could have no ground of complaint if the Divine Being placed them for a time in conditions which they could not possibly understand. There might be every reason in the divine wisdom for doing thus. The earth might be the best conceivable place in which to start a race like ours and yet have a score of other purposes with little connection with men. So our demand for Christ to-day comes not out of the evidences of order we see in the world, but out of the meaninglessness of the world for our minds. If a believer declares that he discerns the evidences of reason in the world and that therefore he accepts the Christian revelation of God, well and good; but for most men the actual movement of thought is not so much from a world of reason to a God whom they can understand, as from a world of mystery to a God whom they cannot understand, but whom they can trust. If God is like unto Christ, in some respects the mystery becomes deeper than ever, but to a God in Christ we can certainly fasten our faith. Our confidence increases at the moment when our knowledge shrinks. THE SEARCH FOR POWER The other important reason for accepting God as in Christ comes out of the difficulty of realizing in our lives that human ideal which we spoke of as in Christ, as long as we take Christ merely as an ideal. I repeat again that I have not the slightest objection to what might be called the total humanizing of the Christ life in regard to its actual earthly conditions. I mean by this the explanation of miracle, for example, in terms of laws which may be intelligible to us, though my expectations in this regard are slight indeed. I at present see no way of accounting for the miracles of Jesus by any laws now in our grasp, but I have no objection to such interpretations if they can bear the weight necessarily put upon them. I mean that the divineness of the life in Christ might conceivably be expressed so humanly as to enforce the fine word of Dr. Henry van Dyke that in Christ we see the human side of God himself, as if humanity were an essential of the divine life. Strip the life of Jesus of everything suggestive of physical miracle; let everything come within the range of the human, so to speak would that of itself make the ideal in Christ an imitable ideal, capable of being seized and lived out into expression by men on earth? I do not think so. Power to attain the ideal might be lacking. The ideal would, indeed, be most glorious to contemplate, but there would be nothing in it itself to make one like unto it. The more complete the perfection of the ideal the more likely would it be to discourage the ordinary man. We have geniuses in the realms of literature and art and of invention. It is indeed sound advice to tell the young mind to imitate Shakespeare, or Michael Angelo, or Watt, but the more the ordinary mind learns about genius the more it despairs of imitation. Genius is, indeed, full of light for the guidance of men, but it is not largely imitable in those characteristics which make it genius. How often we have heard a man great in art or practical achievement try to tell the secret of his own success! What platitudes he utters! He tells us, it may be, that his success is due to hard work. No doubt he would not have succeeded if he had not worked, but that explanation gets us nowhere. The great man himself does not know his own secret. His achievement may stand out clearly as a benefaction to all mankind to the end of time, but his own genius cannot be reproduced by others.

Now, this is especially true in the realm of character. Character can be imitated only to a slight degree. Moreover, the wear and tear of daily living is such that men tire out in the pursuit of the good life. With the best intentions men get discouraged by repeated failures. They do not definitely give up, it may be, but they loosen hold of the higher principles and cease to care. The chief tragedies of the moral life come of this moral weariness. The most deadening question one can ask as to the moral life is "What is the use?" When life is young there is a tingle about the moral battle on its own account; but the years come on without fail. All sorts of compromises have to be made as practical adjustments to the world in which we live. Legitimate hopes are thwarted, griefs settle down upon us, power begins to slacken. The mockery of death is on every hand. Then comes the question, "What is the use?" This does not mean that a man who has fought a noble battle all his life is about to cease fighting. It does not mean that he will give himself up to selfish indulgence. It does mean that he has lost the zest of the moral struggle. He may hang on grimly to the end, but with the inner fire burning low. To exhort such a man to imitate Christ is about like advising a poor artist who has come to middle life with a sense of failure to imitate Raphael. He would gladly imitate Christ if he could, but he lacks the power.

I do not wish my putting of this matter to be so extreme as to leave the impression that every man who imitates Christ as a human ideal comes thus to despair. There are rare souls who find in what seems to them the meaninglessness of the universe a challenge to inner rectitude. They look to the coming of night without dismay. They greet death and everything else with a cheer. They aver that if the moral life is to be but for a few brief instants, they will nevertheless hold these instants as the supreme opportunity. They ask nothing but the chance at such instants.

It is the custom in some quarters not to take profession of devotion to this gloomy creed very seriously. There is indeed about a good deal of such profession a suggestion of moral snobbery, as if the devotees scorned the moral aids which common folk need, and gave themselves to a high and rarified morality on its own account. Moreover, while it seems unfair to say so, some of the adherents to this set of negations make free and easy adjustments to the present order of things, adjustments which do not suggest any desperate moral rigor in practice.

Still, the statement of devotion to the moral values on their own account is not to be dismissed lightly. There is so much in religious thought and practice not moral at all that it is a relief to find the moral on its own account so exalted. It is as if one should say that these moral values themselves are of such consequence that a few fleeting instants of gazing upon them are worth more than eternities of contemplation of all other values whatsoever. The moral ideals belong to the timeless realm, though we may have no considerable chance to think of them. Now, I repeat there is a worth here that we must not forget. In the Christian system the moral realities stand at the center, and stand there on their own account. Some philosophers are seriously and sincerely trying to strip those realities of everything which they consider nonessential. Can they, however, carry the stripping process so far? Does moral value remain valuable when it is thus taken by itself without clear relation to the system of actualities, or with apparently so little essential connection with that system? These thinkers all seem hesitant to push a like stripping process to other values. Take the intellectual values. All thinkers, of course, insist upon truth, else there would be no reason for debating. How long could they preach an utter devotion to truth if they did not believe in truth as holding for the system of things? Of course one may say, as did John Stuart Mill, that two and two may make five in some other planet, but nobody will take that seriously. Truth, however, insists upon being taken seriously. The scientist may, indeed, be discovering truths of only relative importance, but underneath all his study is the assumption of law that holds throughout the universe. Just how long science would go forward if there were no assumption of such law is doubtful.

It is interesting to note what a tough problem this question as to truth constitutes for those who protest that moral values are not necessarily to be conceived of as holding good for a universe. Think of the plight of those moralists whose morality is avowedly a lack of morality. Their advice is that men follow out each his own impulses, no matter what those impulses may be. In contemplating the consequences of such advice the advisers are marvelously complacent at breaches of customary morality having to do with sex relations, for example, but they do not seem so enthusiastic in advising men to tell lies, if the impulse toward self-realization takes the direction of lying. At least they would not advise too many freedom-seekers to take to lying at the same time. The reason, of course, is that if there are too many liars there is no basis for living together, or getting along together in communities whatever. If, however, we should follow out the implications of the ordinary, everyday assumption that men are telling the truth we should find that those assumptions carry us pretty far. The pursuit of truth as an ideal, and the assumption of truth as a basis for getting along together, are in scientific and practical life precisely similar to that which we make in the religious life when we conceive of God as like Christ. The assumption is necessary hi each realm to make the life in that realm scientific search, or practical activity, or the imitation of the human ideal in Christ worth while. At this juncture someone remarks that as a matter-of-fact the ordinary religious life that is to say, the life of the ordinary believer makes no assumptions whatever, or no reasoned assumptions. I am willing to concede this. Any minister who has served for any length of time in pastorates knows the haphazard, hand-to-mouth existence in spiritual concerns characteristic of masses of church attendants. What religious experience there is in many such lives began with the conventional instruction in the home or at Bible School and went but a little distance at the best. The life is lived in unconscious dependence upon spiritual food picked up here and there, upon the religious atmosphere of the church community, upon prayer which may never be very serious except in moments of real or imagined crisis. In other words, men live in the realm of religious experience just about as in the other realms. They are not careful reasoners, or reasoners at all. Their loyalty to their country, for example, and their loyalty to their church are much of a piece. There can be no doubt of either loyalty, nor can there be any doubt of their embarrassment if they are asked to give reasons for their patriotism or their faith. The ordinary human being does not tend to philosophizing, or even to intense thoughtfulness, in any phase of his daily experience.

Still, there are unconscious assumptions even in such experience. The ordinary believer has, in evangelical circles, connected Christ with God. To be sure, his notion is altogether unsystematic, but the notion is real, nevertheless. Speak to him of’ cutting that connection and he is at a loss. He may not be able to tell why the connection should not be cut, but he does not wish it cut. Under pressure he will accept, or hospitably listen to, the crudest theories of Christ’s divinity rather than give up that divinity. Or, if he cannot believe in the divinity in the old form, he is likely to become increasingly indifferent to all religious appeal.

Now there are, in spite of this attitude of unreasoned assumption on the part of masses of believers, increasing numbers of persons who do try to think as far as thought will carry them in religion. Such persons desire to scrutinize the assumptions they make and to pull them out into the full light. They find it increasingly hard to follow an ideal as a bare ideal. They are honest enough with themselves to recognize that they need help. They find help in the belief that God himself is like unto the Christ they are trying to follow.

We are not yet through with objections. This type of help is not itself an aid to some. It seems to suggest that a man is not himself adequate to the moral task of living a life like that of Christ, and must look to a force not himself to win the battle for him. That some Christian prayer and testimony do suggest divine aid of dubious worth there can be no doubt, but I am not now thinking of aid which comes as some miraculous increase of the soul’s forces. I have in mind the encouragement and spiritual strength which reach men in the moral struggle from reliance on the revelation of God in Christ.

Think how much depends in the moral struggle upon our conception of God, or upon our conception of the nature of the universe if we will not admit the existence of God. Let the moral ideal stand out before us, on its own account. I do not see how we can escape asking ourselves as to the significance of that ideal for the universe itself. It is all well enough to say that the ideal is what it is on its own account, but the questions surge up nevertheless. Has the ideal no meaning for the universe outside ourselves? I repeat that this question is just as relevant as that of the scientist as to whether the laws which he finds in his laboratory hold good outside the laboratory.

Further, there are intimate problems affecting peace of conscience in relation to the ideal. What about mistakes and failures past, present, and to come? The system of nature, if it is only a system of law, picks up mistakes and successes alike and carries them out to consequences. Here, again, we are reminded that the moral ideal is an end-in-itself and so on and on. The question, however, will not down. Is the universe in which we live friendly to the pursuit of the moral ideal? Does it make any difference to the universe whether a man tries to be righteous or not? Is the world in which we are placed kindly to the man who makes mistakes, or hostile, or indifferent? Is a new start after a blunder possible? Or does the blunder trail forever at our heels? I admit again and again that I am quite aware that all this means just nothing at all to hosts of conventionally good people. Such persons, important and indispensable as they are, do not take the moral struggle with the seriousness of the fundamentally moral man moral in the same degree of earnestness that marks genuine artists or scientists in pursuit of ideals. The moral ideal of Christianity is not that of a merely conventional code. The ordinary man I mean the ordinary man so far as his devotion to his moral ideals is concerned does the best he can and lets it go at that. His advice for those who make mistakes is to set them right as far as possible and then forget them. I do not declaim against this mood, but I do insist that it does not contain within itself the promise of moral advance for the seriously minded, for whom the ideal is ever reaching out beyond, or, rather, stretching back toward them from beyond their reach. We who try to take the moral ideal seriously arise in the morning and think that we shall be nearer the goal at nightfall, but sunset finds the goal far beyond where it appeared at sunrise. The longer we live the more unworthy we appear to ourselves when compared with the ideal we have sought. As with the individual so with the race. Leaders have always avowed that just over the next hill has lain Utopia, but when men have mounted the hill, not hills but mountains lie farther beyond. True, we make advance. Looking back over the road we see that we have indeed come a long distance, but the longer we go the longer seems the distance yet to travel. Thousands of years from now the teachers of individual and social morality will tell men that the world of moral conquest has hardly begun. There is no discharge in this war. If it be asked how the case is any different hi the realm of morals than in science, we admit that the pursuit of the scientific ideal is likewise without end, but the scientist more readily assumes that the universe is friendly to his task. It does not seem an effort or strain to him to believe that law reigns throughout the universe. Say what he will, that assumption underlies all that he does. Moreover, his failures do not carry with them such a sense of ill-desert. His mistakes do not haunt his memory. He is whole-heartedly devoted to his task and does not worry over failures. Why cannot the moralist likewise take his own good intentions for granted and cease to worry? Of course he can do this even if he feels that he is in a hostile universe. He can defy the universe, making allowances in his own mind for his own mistakes, rejoicing in his own strength. This, however, is in the end likely to be futile, especially if we are trying to build up a moral society. A man might likewise defy society all his life in the name of a superior devotion to morality. The spectacle would be bracing and exhilarating, but it would be futile in the end. If we can make the assumption that the universe is at bottom constitutionally moral, just as the .scientist assumes that it is constitutionally intelligible, everything changes for the better. The moral struggle seems to be worth while. We are helped not by some strength that dynamically empowers us and carries us along by compulsion, but by the assurance itself that we are on the right track and that we shall finally arrive. The reenforcement of the soul comes through spiritual channels, through the admission that the goal is, indeed, now far put of reach, but that our paths lead toward it, that others are traveling thither, that all is in the hands of a God like unto Christ, who takes intentions for deeds, who helps not by miraculous wonders but by opening up the best in the life through spiritual contacts. The struggle is stern enough at the best, but the sternness itself is joy once the worthwhileness of the moral attempt becomes clear. If God is like Christ, the attempt is surely worth while.

If, however, we only had a full revelation of what the life of Jesus was on earth! The critics have so cut into the records that we cannot claim to know as much about Jesus as we ought if we are to think of God as like unto him. We have all found that the attempt to meet our moral duties by asking what Jesus would do is empty, so far as getting light on a detailed situation is concerned. We find it increasingly hard to know the mind of Christ. Has not an outstanding scholar within the ranks of the church recently told us that even many of Christ’s teachings about God show the limitations of the theology of his time?

All this has nothing to do with the main point I am trying to urge, namely, that we have in Christ a revelation of God which we can trust when we do not understand. Let us imagine, if our theology will not allow us to grant it, that God could live on earth as a man. What should we desire most in God living under human conditions? Should we ask for manifestations of power and of knowledge? Probably we should; but when we had pulled ourselves together to ask the question most worth while, what could we ask except as to a revelation of the spirit in which the universe is carried forward? What does it all mean? At what does it all aim? Does the moral spirit count? Is that the chief fact about the universe?

I have read many protests against the claims for the divinity of Christ. I have read very few based on the assumption that we do not have in Christ a revelation of a spirit and temper which we should like to see established as holding good for God. Can we think of any spirit which we should sooner see established at the heart of the universe than that of Christ? Can we think of any purpose which we should prefer to believe to be the purpose of God rather than the righteous love revealed in Christ? The central spirit the moral quality of the life of Christ is clear no matter whether we can find in the Gospels a detailed guide for moral conduct or not. I admit the uselessness of asking what Jesus would do as suggesting detailed commands as to what we should do. It is not possible to make the Gospels a set of ethical regulations. All we can do is to catch the spirit of Jesus and strive to live in that spirit. The only answer there can be as to what Jesus would do, is that Jesus would do whatever we ought to do, if he were put in our place.

I urge once more that this search for specific rules is off the track. We have to find our own way through the detailed intricacies of the moral tangle for ourselves. A codified set of rules for us might be completely disheartening. What we crave is assurance as to the worthwhileness of our struggle. Probably it is a mercy that we do not know more about the actual deeds of Jesus than we do, for many of us are so literally minded, that, with more detail, we should miss the spirit altogether. The Gospels set forth the spirit of Christ so that anyone can follow him or accept him as the revelation of the nature of God himself. Critical study of the Scriptures has only made this essential revelation clearer.