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renunciation, but in order that, purified of all the selfseeking which shuts out true riches, man may become the instrument at once of his own and of his fellows' perfection. If any one apprehend perfectibility, as it stands revealed in Christ, he cannot but adopt Christian ethics. For only thus will he gain for himself a completeness, which is indissolubly bound up with an identical perfection in others. As Christ was the first to proclaim that God can only be served in man, so He was the first to tell that such service will never be absolutely worthy until wrought in humanity as a whole. In this, His true humanitarianism, Christ supersedes Socrates. He appeals to the whole man and to mankind, while the Greek sage speaks only to the freeborn citizen, and to him rather as a thinker than as an essentially moral agent. For this reason, Christ's work is eternal, and whatever one may think of His nature, Christianity cannot be separated from His person.

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Eliminate the theory of Christ which was diffused among the Jews prior to His advent;1 admit that nothing is directly known of Him, save what is told in the discourses collected by Matthew, and in Peter's reminiscences edited by Mark-who had never seen the Master; 2 allow that the "pedantic ingenuity of rationalism is misdirected scarce at all,-and you do not detract one whit from the value of Christ's Christianity. His "application of ideas to life" still remains the one essential and commanding fact in His career. He not only promulgated but lived a principle, against which intellect cannot revolt, and for which conscience records its whole testimony. His religion is His, not

1 Cf. La Science des Religions, E. Burnouf, p. 242.

2 Cf. Through Nature to Christ, E. A. Abbott, p. 346 sq.; 373 note.

because He formulated any creed concerning Himself, but because He alone trod the only road to man's natural perfection. Christianity is inseparable from His person in no dogmatic sense, but as a matter of everyday experience. We cannot look back across the ages and fortify our faltering faith with "a tremulous quasi-knowledge of a whole globe of dogmas." Only if the Christ-life be reproducing itself here and now, can Christianity be regarded as in vital connection with the Person of its founder. That it is thus connected His veritable creation of righteousness proves. He did good for the sake of so doing, and this His revelation may, nay, must go on reproducing itself.

"So, each ray of thy will.

Every flash of thy passion and prowess, long over, shall thrill Thy whole people, the countless, with ardour, till they too give forth

A little cheer to their sons: who in turn, fill the South and the North

With the radiance thy seed was the germ of."2

Reasonableness and naturalness are the chief characteristics of Christ's revelation. Non mors sed voluntas sponte morientis.3 Only an unrivalled knowledge of the human heart in its origin and destiny could have effected the combination of material necessity and spiritual inevitableness by which it continues to sway the world. The complete humanity of Christ's life is the cause of the permanence of His religion.

"To say that a man has genius is to say that all he effects is truly and entirely the result of others' labours

1 The Kernel and the Husk, p. 257.

2 Saul, Robert Browning, Works, vol. vi. p. 122.

3 St Bernard.

them, as the fall of

and done by their power; that he is merely a stimulus, and owes his influence solely to his relation to an organisation built up, and a functional power accumulated, wholly by others. . . . Genius does things without force because it does not do an uplifted body needs no force." Of all the great this is true. But in relation to Christ, it receives an application sui generis. Theirs is the result of others' labours, and for Him too the whole course of civilisation had been preparing. But what he effected was not brought about once for all by the co-operation of prior and contemporary influences. His genius is not a mere expression of what others thought and urgently desired; it is a living force which still remains, and reproduces its own qualities in the lives of men now. "Heroes" and "Representative Men" are the quintessence of epochs; He is the germ which fructifies at all times. In this respect He is without parallel, and so we cannot separate His Person from His work.2

Nor does the contrast between Christ and the other masters cease here. He superseded Socrates, and it might very well seem, that after so many centuries, and in view of the "service of man," His time to depart had now also come. Notwithstanding, Christ's work cannot but remain so long as human nature retains its present constitution. Expansion is not without conditions. "Because our present house is too small for us, it is not to be inferred that we shall live henceforth in the

1 Philosophy and Religion, James Hinton, pp. 113, 114.

2 Lessing, in Die Religion Christi, and Herder in Ideen, like Goethe and others of the anti-eighteenth century school, seem to forget that the eternity of Christianity is not based, as they suppose, on a Person who is temporal, but on their own article of faith, that persons alone can transform a momentary act into an eternal principle.

open air. As a general rule of life and conduct, we see as yet no reason to believe that liberty, if this be its meaning, is better than service." Christ revealed the source of virtue in His life of lowly obedience. The "service of man," of which we now boast ourselves, is a bare possibility only through Christ's subservience and humiliation. It is easy to take humanity as we find it, and convenient to ignore this fact, but then it is also easy to accept light without a scrupulous recognition of the sun's agency. The peculiarity of Positivism is that, apart from its distinctive philosophical tenets, it is virtually a reproduction of one portion of Christ's principle. Why go about with a candle to see the sun? Its altruism is His also, but without the integration which He deemed necessary to complete the character of an individual. His consciousness of God -which is but the more spiritualised expression of what has been rediscovered as "cosmic religion"—had its counterpart in His consciousness of mankind, which is to-day the raison d'être of that second faith so called, the "religion of humanity."

The supremacy of Christ is further enhanced by the strange circumstance that His revelation is not, like the work of Socrates, of Luther, or of Carlyle, representative only of a specific stage in the world's development. Like others, He came at a crisis which was for Him. It used to be supposed that in Him divine revelation culminated, and remained final thenceforward. After a sort it did, but progress has been continuous since. God did not retire to rest after the well-known six days of creation; but, on the contrary,

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1 Prose Remains of A. H. Clough, p. 409.

2 Cf. The Service of Man, J. C. Morison, p. 177 (head fifth).

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is constantly active as on the first. It would have been for Him a poor occupation to compose this heavy world out of simple elements, and to keep it rolling in the sunbeams from year to year, if He had not had the plan of founding a nursery for a world of spirits upon this material basis. So He is now constantly active in higher natures to attract the lower ones." 1 In this later advance the Christian revelation is continually renewing itself. Historically it appeared at the time which was prepared for it. But it is not only a stage like others, for it is perpetuated in a principle which is the motive force of human nature, and must remain operative, no matter how circumstances may change. In the other masters we see all that is, in Christ there was all that ought to be. Socrates was the forerunner of later ideals, Christ Himself was the exhibition of the ideal in history. Christianity, just on account of those elements which differentiate it from Greek philosophy, constantly stimulates the higher life, and that without laying any restrictions upon intellectual activity. For Christ's work is a spontaneous revelation of human nature—of a nature which has spiritual as well as mental and material needs. His kingdom is not of this world, and only in so, far as this is true can it remain in the world. It makes little difference what dogmatic views recommend themselves to the individual mind. For there is religion without rites, and there may be churches without religion. But the power of a perfect life can never pass away. It is for humanity, because in man full expression was given to it.

The eternity of Christianity is based on human nature, the kaleidoscopic creeds are but accidental 1 Conversations of Goethe, Eckermann, pp. 569, 570.

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