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believe Him, or obey Him, or love Him, but that they should believe in Him, that they should recognise in Him a new source of power and life, by which obedience becomes possible and love becomes energetic, and so throw themselves wholly upon him and enjoy fellowship with the fulness of His glorified Being.

This unique claim is presented naturally, so to speak, under such circumstances and in such a form as to make its purpose and its effect historically intelligible. The 'signs' which the Lord wrought, and the teaching which He gave tend to the same conclusion.

Christ's signs are distinguished as a whole from all other wonderful works of His predecessors or followers, in the mode of their working, and in their individual character, and in relation to His whole redemption work (Matt. viii. 17), and raise and answer thoughts in many hearts. His words fix attention on Himself as being more than His teaching; and taken in their due succession as they have been recorded for us, they give a summary of His self-revelation.

What He did and what He said alike constrains us to turn for the secret of His message to what He was.

Christianity, to speak summarily, rests on the conviction that in the Life and Death and Resurrection of Christ something absolutely new and unparalleled has been added to the experience of men, something new objectively and not simply new as a combination or an interpretation of earlier or existing phenomena: that in Christ heaven and earth have been historically united: that in Him this union can be made real through all time to each believer: that His Nature and Person are such that in Him each man and all men can find a complete and harmonious consummation in an external order. The Life of Christ is something absolutely unique in the history of the world, unique not in degree but in kind. It is related to all else that is unfolded in time as birth, for example, is related to the development of the individual.

It is necessary that we should reflect upon these peculiar features of our Faith in order that we may understand the teaching of the New Testament, and the history of the Christian Church. All objections to the Gospels which are drawn from the exceptional or unparalleled character of the events which it affirms or implies are irrelevant. The Gospel is a Gospel because it is the proclamation of that which is new in human

from its unique character.

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experience, the Incarnation of the Word of God. By the announcement of this fact it lays open. the unseen about us, and thus quickens and supports the energy of Faith (Hebr. xi. 1.): it brings the sure promise of unity to all finite things, and thus satisfies the aim of Religion (Eph. i. 10; Col. i. 20): it reveals GOD so that we can approach Him with confidence under the forms of our human thought and feeling (John xiv. 9 ff.): it illuminates the dark places of the world so that we can look upon the chequered scenes of man's failure and sin and suffering without dismay (1 Cor. xv. 24 ff.).

Christ, to recapitulate in the shortest phrase what has been said, the Incarnate Word, Son of GOD, and Son of Man, is Himself in a most true sense the Gospel.

Viewed in this light the Gospel of the Word become flesh brings such an answer as we need, and as we are able to receive, to the riddles of life which widening experience proposes to us. We readily admit that we are not able to grasp completely or to systematise exactly the whole Truth which is presented to us. But we can see, with sufficient clearness to gain confidence in our work, that it throws light on the darkest mysteries of self and the world and GOD.

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How the Gospel meets

It shews us, to repeat a little more fully what has been already summarised, that we are not isolated units but parts of that one humanity which GOD made in His image to gain His likeness and which the Son of GOD, who became Son of man, has raised beyond the heavens in His body of glory: that we are enabled here to gain our freedom and realise our personality by fellowship with our Head: that every sorrow and pain is an element of discipline, and that the just anger of GOD is the other side of his sovereign love that nothing is lost of that which is revealed to us now under the conditions of sense, when the limitations of sense cease to be.

It shews us that in the consummation of man lies also the consummation of all created things: that there is not one lost good, or one lost pang, for all good is of and in Him who cannot change, and every pang answers to His law whose wisdom and mercy meet in righteousness: that the lesson of our intimate connexion with material things is not that we must be stripped of our spiritual glory, but that we must gladly learn to recognise in them unsuspected potentialities of a higher destiny.

It shews us that we can approach GOD with confidence under the forms of human thought and feeling, not with a part of our nature only

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but with the entire sum of our energies and powers that outward phenomena are, as it were, the words in which He speaks to us, disclosing as we can understand them the thoughts which lie behind, representing but not exhausting them: that, in a sense which gives confidence to prayer and vigour to action and assurance to hope, in Him we live and move and have our being.

The unchangeable sum of Christianity is the message: The Word was GOD, and the Word became flesh. This being so, it is clear that Christianity is not essentially a law for the regulation of our conduct: not a philosophy for the harmonious coordination of the facts of experience under our present forms of thought: not a system of worship by which men can approach their Maker in reverent devotion. It offers all these as the natural fruit of the Truth which it proclaims in the Incarnation and Resurrection of Christ. But Christ Himself, His Person and His Life, in time and beyond time, and not any scheme of doctrine which He delivered, is the central object and support of Faith.

An examination of the earliest records of the Christian Faith will prove, as I hold, beyond question that this was the general view of the Gospel which was taken from the first: that this