tihxaxy of trhe t:heoloc[(cal Seminary 
 
 PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 The Estate of the 
 Rev. John B, Wiedinger 
 
 BR 125 .A56 1910 
 Andrews, George A. 1870- 
 What is essential? 
 
■ ' ■ '^^ t7 ^. 
 
Wl^ati^ tmntiali 
 
What is Essential? 
 
 BY 
 
 GEORGE ARTHUR ANDREWS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 THOMAS Y. CROWE LL & CO. 
 
 PUBLISHERS 
 
Copyright, 1910, by Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. 
 
 Published September, 1910 
 
I^reface 
 
 wo travelers were one day 
 occupying the same seat in a 
 railway train. One of them 
 was a very youthful student of 
 the "New Theology." The 
 other was a confirmed Roman 
 Catholic. As the two journeyed they fell into 
 conversation, and soon from matters incon- 
 sequential they passed to a serious considera- 
 tion of the nature of the Christian religion. 
 The discussion waxed long and eloquent, but 
 it ended precisely where it began. The "New 
 Theologian" left the car convinced that the 
 Catholic was a hopeless bigot, while the Catho- 
 lic departed in full assurance that the "New 
 Theologian" was a willful heretic. Yet both 
 men were followers of the same Christ. The 
 inability to understand each other was due 
 solely to the different view points from which 
 they interpreted the religion of Christ. 
 Herein lies the reason for the prevalence of 
 [v] 
 
Puiatt 
 
 seemingly contradictory conceptions concern- 
 ing the nature of the Christian religion, — in 
 unsympathetic view points. The view points 
 of the traditionalist and of the rationalist, of the 
 Catholic and of the Protestant, of the con- 
 servative and of the radical, of the conformist 
 and of the independent, of the seer and of the 
 doer, — these view points are mutually exclu- 
 sive. Therefore the conceptions derived from 
 the view points appear at times hopelessly at 
 variance. 
 
 And herein lies the reason for an inquiry con- 
 cerning the essentials of our religion, — in the 
 need, among the variety of changing and con- 
 tradictory conceptions of religion, for the dis- 
 cernment of that which is necessarily involved 
 in its nature. This is the object of our search, 
 the elemental, the vital, the very essence of the 
 religion of Christ. 
 
 This little book is more of an inquiry than an 
 answer. It is a suggestion and not an assertion. 
 It will be some time before the very bed-rock 
 bottom of the essence of our religion is reached 
 by the inquiring mind. Perhaps it can never be 
 [vi] 
 
Pvtfact 
 
 reached. Be that as it may, here the attempt is 
 to make but a few soundings, in the hope that 
 some human craft, perhaps in danger of re- 
 ligious shipwreck, may be piloted amid the 
 dangers of unsatisfying speculations to a place 
 of firm anchorage. 
 
 The author gratefully acknowledges his in- 
 debtedness to those friends who have helped 
 him in his work by the criticism of his manu- 
 script. Especially does he wish to thank 
 Professor William Newton Clarke of Colgate 
 University, for valuable literary and theological 
 suggestions. 
 
 [vii] 
 
Contentis 
 
 CHAP, PAGE 
 
 I. Who is the Essential Christian ? 
 
 1. The Ascetic Conception 3 
 
 2. The Conformist Conception 7 
 
 3. "Back to Christ" 11 
 
 4. The Imitation of Jesus 15 
 II. What is the Essential Christian Creed? 
 
 1. A Popular Demand of the Day 23 
 
 2. The Unessential Christian Belief 27 
 
 3. The Creed of Christ 32 
 
 4. The Omissions from Christ's Creed 37 
 
 5. The Essential Creed of the Christian 40 
 
 III. What is the Essential Christian Experience? 
 
 1. The Need of Personal Experience 47 
 
 2. A Prevalent Misapprehension 51 
 
 3. The Religious Experience of Jesus 57 
 
 4. The Interference of Sin 66 
 
 5. The Essential Experiences of the Christian 73 
 
 IV. What is the Essential Christian Revelation ? 
 
 1. The Bible; its Accepted Preeminence 83 
 
 2. The Bible; its Fundamental Helpfulness 87 
 
 3. The Revelation in Christ 90 
 
 4. The Revelation in Humanity 94 
 
 5. The True Test of All Inspired Revelation 97 
 V. What is the Essential Christian Church? 
 
 1. The Historic Church 105 
 
 2. The Church, a Means to an End 109 
 
 [ix] 
 
Contend 
 
 3. The Distinctive Function of the Church 114 
 
 4. The Assistance of Church Membership 119 
 
 5. The Value of PubUc Worship 123 
 VI. What is the Essential Christian AcrmrY? 
 
 1. Christianity and Personal Salvation 131 
 
 2. Christianity and Personal Sacrifice 137 
 
 3. Christianity and Philanthropy 143 
 
 4. The Quest for the Kingdom of God 147 
 
 [xl 
 
I^i^at (0 cBjsjienttal? 
 
 [I] 
 
CHAPTER FIRST 
 
 Sec. 1. The Ascetic Conception 
 
 N English writer a few years 
 ago attempted to describe the 
 follower of Christ in a novel 
 which he called "The Chris- 
 tian." The title was a mis- 
 nomer. The stern, joyless, 
 fanatical John Storm was no more like the 
 Christian than John the Baptist was like Jesus 
 Christ. But in fashioning his hero after the 
 likeness of Christ's forerunner instead of in the 
 likeness of Christ himself, Hall Caine was but 
 following a custom which has been more or less 
 prevalent for nearly twenty centuries. 
 It is indeed true that modern asceticism is of a 
 much milder type than that which characterized 
 mediaeval Christianity. At first sight, it may 
 seem that the family man, who to-day denies 
 himself meat only on Fridays, can claim very 
 [3] 
 
WW ijS €)3jsenttal 
 
 little resemblance to the man of the past cen- 
 turies, who on all the days of his companionless 
 existence partook only of bread and water. 
 But though the practice of self-denial is now 
 somewhat less rigorous, the motive for the 
 self-denial is too often fundamentally the same. 
 It is a self-denial which has its purpose only in 
 a form of selfishness. The celibate monk lived 
 on bread and water not for any good that his 
 abstinence might bring to others, but only for 
 the eternal good he hoped to attain for himself. 
 All abstinences for like purposes must be like- 
 wise characterized. They are selfish, and 
 selfishness in any form is unchristian. 
 Yet the ascetic type of the Christian is with us 
 wherever we turn. There are men and women 
 everywhere who separate themselves from so- 
 called worldly indulgences and amusements, 
 who are wont to practice only the passive vir- 
 tues and to obey only the prohibitive com- 
 mandments. Their motive is the same as that 
 which prompted the monastic to deny himself 
 domestic felicity and physical sustenance. They 
 deny themselves now in order that by and by 
 [4] 
 
they may save themselves. So prevalent even 
 to-day is this ascetic conception of Christianity 
 which has its motive in self-seeking, that we 
 find preachers and evangelists still urging men 
 and women to forego certain social amusements 
 and personal indulgences for fear of what will 
 happen to them if they do not, or for the 
 reward that may come to them if they do. 
 Young people, when asked to avow the life of 
 Christ, inevitably inquire first what they must 
 give up to be Christians, and too often are they 
 taught to weigh the cost of a demanded denial 
 only against the value of a promised reward. 
 "You must give up this or that self-indulgence 
 and pleasure," they are told, "but you will ob- 
 tain in return peace in this world and in the 
 world to come eternal life." 
 Now, if the one purpose of the Christian life 
 were to save one's self, this ascetic conception of 
 Christian living would be tenable. Assuming 
 this purpose, monasteries and nunneries would 
 follow as the legitimate and logical conse- 
 quences, and the mortification of the flesh 
 would become indeed an admirable virtue. If 
 [S] 
 
I^l^at ijs €j80ential 
 
 personal salvation into heaven be the one su- 
 preme purpose of the Christian religion, not 
 only must we highly commend the " Christian" 
 of Mr. Caine's imagination, but also must we 
 commend all living Christians who have denied 
 themselves any pleasure of this world in order 
 that they may attain the bliss of the world to 
 come. 
 
 But this selfish object is not and cannot be the 
 purpose of the true follower of the unselfish 
 Christ. Personal salvation is only one of the 
 results of Christian living, — never its purpose. 
 He who would save his life must lose it, said 
 Jesus. And the only way to attain salvation, 
 he declared, was not to seek it as an end in 
 itself, but to find it as a by-product of self- 
 forgetful service. 
 
 One may be an ascetic and still be a Christian, 
 but his asceticism does not make him a Chris- 
 tian. The essence of Christianity does not lie 
 in the self-denial of him who hopes thereby to 
 gain something more desirable for himself. 
 One cannot condemn another for such self- 
 denial. It is every man's privilege to forego a 
 [6] 
 
 / 
 
pleasure to-day for the enjoyment of an an- 
 ticipated greater pleasure to-morrow. We all 
 do that, but we do it because we are prudent, — 
 not because we are Christians. 
 The Christian virtue of self-denial is the denial 
 of self for the sake of the welfare of someone 
 else. Only such self-denial should be dignified 
 by the name of sacrifice. Only such can prop- 
 erly be said to inhere in essential Christianity. 
 
 Sec. 2. The Conformist Conception 
 
 A man of a somewhat cynical turn of mind 
 once made the statement that so far as he had 
 observed, Christianity was but another name 
 for conformity. By this remark he evidently 
 meant to assert that the Christian profession 
 was not a matter of inner principles but of 
 outer practices. 
 
 He had observed, it may be, that those who had 
 professed to be followers of Christ and those 
 who had made no such profession were appar- 
 ently actuated by the same life-purposes. He 
 doubtless had seen professed Christians who 
 were quick-tempered and unforgiving. He had 
 
 [7] 
 
3^]^at (0 Cis^ential 
 
 seen those who were proud and arrogant, 
 opinionated and bigoted. He had seen pro- 
 fessed Christians in business who manifested a 
 selfish and grasping disposition, perhaps even 
 those who stooped to base and immoral methods 
 to increase their personal profit. 
 It is possible that he had observed that pro- 
 fessed Christians, even in their organized Chris- 
 tian activities, were not always actuated by the 
 spirit of humility and of gentle forbearance. 
 It is barely conceivable that he had seen church 
 members wrangling for positions of honor in 
 the very Church of God, and quarreling with 
 their brethren in Christ over matters of per- 
 sonal opinion and of personal preference. 
 Yet this man had likewise observed that all 
 these proud, bigoted, selfish, quarreling Chris- 
 tians were conformists. They practiced certain 
 Christian forms and participated in certain 
 Christian ceremonies. For instance, they went 
 to church on Sunday morning. They repeated 
 together certain formulas and articles of faith. 
 They bowed reverently during public prayer. 
 In some churches they responded audibly to the 
 [8] 
 
prayers with commendable fervency. They 
 listened politely to the rhetorical sentences of 
 cultured preachers. But after the weekly serv- 
 ice was over they went back to their homes to 
 take up again their schemes of business and 
 political trickery, or to renew their struggle for 
 social supremacy. 
 
 Though this picture is happily somewhat over- 
 drawn, the man is perhaps excusable for his 
 cynical inference. In these days of the popu- 
 larity of the Christian religion, conformity to 
 accepted Christian customs has become indeed 
 a serious menace to vital Christianity. There 
 is no temptation more insidious than the temp- 
 tation to allow the habitual to become the 
 formal. The acts which we perform with re- 
 current regularity are always those acts which 
 are in most danger of losing their vitality. This 
 is true whether the acts in their significance be 
 domestic, industrial, social or religious. The 
 home-maker is in danger from the treadmill 
 of routine. The clerk in the office is in im- 
 minent peril of becoming a lifeless machine. 
 The lady on her customary round of social calls 
 [9] 
 
Wi^at ijs t^mitial 
 
 is extremely liable to make the calls in a listless 
 and perfunctory manner. We need not, there- 
 fore, be surprised if the Christian in his re- 
 current religious duties is in danger of deterio- 
 rating into a formalist. 
 
 For indeed the expression of the Christian life, 
 as well as the expression of any other phase 
 of human life, demands its routine of duties. 
 There must be Christian habits as well as 
 business and social habits. The habitual con- 
 formist to accepted Christian customs is no 
 more to be condemned than he who conforms 
 his business methods to the conventional busi- 
 ness customs of his day. 
 
 But when thus we admit the necessity for regu- 
 lar Christian customs and therefore the ad- 
 visability of habitual Christian conformity, we 
 do not therefore admit the necessity of a loss 
 to Christian vitality. In the recurrent Christian 
 ceremonies there is indeed danger of such a 
 loss; sadly must we confess that many in their 
 conformity have seemed to meet with loss; but 
 the loss is not necessary. When a man goes to 
 his habitual business equipped with the purpose 
 [10] 
 
that through the daily routine he will attain 
 success, his conformity to business customs will 
 not endanger his business achievement. So 
 when a man is determined to let recurrent 
 Christian observances be to him an expression 
 of his purpose to succeed in Christian living, 
 that man is in no serious danger of losing the 
 vitality of his religion. 
 
 Our cynical friend, then, was wrong in his 
 excusable inference. Christianity is not con- 
 formity. At its worst, conformity may become 
 a substitute for Christianity. At its very best, 
 it can only be considered as one expression of 
 Christianity. No man is a Christian because 
 he conforms to prescribed Christian customs. 
 If he does conform, it must be only because 
 through the habitual participation in Christian 
 observances he hopes the better to succeed in 
 Christian living. 
 
 Sec. 3. "Back to Christ'" 
 
 A decade or more ago the cry " Back to Christ" 
 
 became the shibboleth of many Christian 
 
 thinkers, some of whom were possessed of 
 
 [11] 
 
3^]^at tj3 CjJjsetxttal 
 
 temperaments distinctly iconoclastic. As used 
 by these the cry became the signal for the 
 attempted disparagement of historic Chris- 
 tianity. The extremists of this type of thinkers 
 would allow no necessary growth from the seed 
 planted by Jesus. They insisted that his reli- 
 gion must be considered as having sprung 
 from him full grown and completely armed, 
 just as Pallas Athene is fabled to have sprung 
 from the head of Zeus. Of course, no writer 
 said exactly this in words, but this is a log- 
 ical inference from their destructive asser- 
 tions. 
 
 When we demand that the Christian of to-day 
 shall be no different from the contemporary 
 follower of the historic Jesus of Nazareth, we 
 make the demand that Christianity of all of 
 God's forces shall be the only force which shall 
 not be subject to His universal law of develop- 
 ment. When we make this one exception for 
 our religion, we make of our religion the one 
 thing in all God's world which is not only un- 
 natural but which is inert and lifeless. If 
 Christianity be a living thing, it must be a 
 [12] 
 
growing thing. If it be divine, it must be 
 capable of development. 
 
 The cry "Back to Christ" when taken thus to 
 preclude all development from Christ, would 
 lead us to illogical and impossible conclusions, 
 and to most absurd practices. "Back to 
 Christ" would be back to Jewry. If we should 
 do exactly as Christ did, not only should we 
 travel bareheaded and clothe our feet in san- 
 dals, but we should observe the Jewish Sab- 
 bath, and worship in the synagogue. We should 
 have for our sacred books only the Law and 
 the Prophets, for "Back to Christ" literally 
 interpreted involves the loss to us of the re- 
 ligious value of all the books of the New Testa- 
 ment, except indeed the biographies contained 
 in the Gospels. If we should go back to Christ 
 in this literal sense, we should go back of the 
 Church, back of all forms of organized Chris- 
 tianity, back of all attempts at systematic 
 Christian teaching, back to a time of an unco- 
 ordinated individualism, from which, deprived 
 of its organized and historic development, there 
 would result only anarchy and chaos. 
 [13] 
 
W^at (0 tmmtial 
 
 But, fortunately, we cannot thus go back to 
 him. Try as hard as we may, we cannot take 
 the fruit of two thousand years of Christian 
 growth and make of it only the seed from 
 which the fruit has developed. We cannot do 
 that, any more than we can cause the apple in 
 our hand to dwindle to the tiny black seed 
 which held the germ of the apple's life. We 
 may not claim that the fruit of Christianity is 
 yet fully grown. The apple may be small and 
 unripe, but it is nevertheless something differ- 
 ent from its germinal seed, something different 
 and something more. That is because it is the 
 fruition of a living germ, and both the germ 
 and the process of growth are divine. 
 Yet " Back to Christ " in a sense we must all go 
 for our conception of his religion. Back to 
 him, not for the fruit of Christianity, but for 
 its germ. Back to him must we go for the 
 eternal life-giving principle which, through the 
 sunlight of God's favor and the raindrops of 
 the tears of many sacrifices, has grown until it 
 has civilized nations, aye, and which shall grow 
 until "all the kingdoms of the world have be- 
 
come the Kingdom of our Lord and Savior 
 Jesus Christ." 
 
 For though we must expect our fundamental 
 Christianity of to-day to be something other 
 and more than the Christianity of two thousand 
 years ago, there can be in our developed and 
 developing religion only that whose embryo 
 was in Christ. The germinal seed of our 
 Christian religion is Christ himself. It is not 
 any teaching of Christ, much less is it any 
 doctrine about Christ, but Christ in his very 
 life and character. All, therefore, that inheres 
 in the essential nature of Christianity must 
 have its origin in Christ and must find its ex- 
 pression in a likeness to Christ. When we 
 have understood what likeness to Christ in- 
 volves in our present day, we have understood 
 the very essence of Christianity. When we 
 have applied that knowledge to our own lives, 
 we have become Christians. 
 
 Sec. 4. The Imitation of Jesus 
 
 Some Gttompt to imitate Christ has never been 
 
 absent from historic Christianity. Too often, 
 
 [15] 
 
I^i^at tj8 CjSjsenttal 
 
 however, the imitation of him has been literal 
 instead of spiritual, an imitation of the human 
 setting of his life instead of an appropriation of 
 the divine spirit that was within him. 
 Jesus was poor, so certain monks took upon 
 themselves the vow of poverty. Jesus never 
 married, so churchmen became celibates. Jesus 
 washed his disciples' feet, so the Pope annually 
 washes the feet of twelve dirty beggars. Jesus 
 was baptized in early manhood, and we have a 
 whole denomination who make adult baptism 
 the basis of their denominational separation. 
 Jesus is reported to have healed the sick with 
 the touch of his hand, and behold we are sur- 
 rounded by myriads of quack practitioners, 
 Christian Scientists and faith-healers, who deny 
 the efficacy of every other school of healing but 
 their own, and who eschew all the remedies 
 provided in God's world and discovered by 
 God's children. 
 
 Jesus shared the popular beliefs of his day. 
 He believed in demonology, in the existence of 
 a personal devil, and in the control of human 
 individuals by the devil's emissaries. There- 
 [16] 
 
fore we have a page in the history of our own 
 country sullied by the superstition of witchcraft. 
 Therefore, too, we have even to this present day 
 those who persist in attributing the deviltry of 
 their own meannesses to the subjugation of an 
 omnipotent arch enemy of the omnipotent 
 God. 
 
 But no attempt to imitate the exact things 
 which Jesus did, or to share his first-century 
 beliefs, can be called essentially Christian, for 
 none are in very essence Christlike. The 
 reality of my likeness to my great-grandfather 
 does not consist in my wearing knee breeches 
 and adorning my head with a peruke. Nor 
 does it consist in my refusal to accept the 
 verities of science which have been demon- 
 strated since his day. I am like my ancestor 
 because in me there is something of the spirit 
 that was in him, because I can appreciate his 
 ideals and life-purpose, because I have like 
 aspirations and similar methods of endeavor. 
 But my aspirations and my methods of work 
 I must apply to twentieth-century conditions. 
 The very development of the Christian religion 
 [17] 
 
^i^at t^ t^^mtial 
 
 has so modified and ennobled the conditions 
 of hfe that no man can claim to be Christlike 
 to-day who does only what Jesus did twenty 
 centuries ago. To be like Christ, he must 
 apply the spirit of Christ to the century in 
 which he himself is living. 
 
 Some unsatisfactory attempts have been made 
 of late years to imagine what Christ would be 
 like if he should come to Chicago or to Boston. 
 The simple truth is, that in such an instance 
 Christ would outwardly be much like the ordi- 
 nary American citizen of to-day. He would 
 believe the truths of the twentieth century just 
 as in his time he believed the truths of the first 
 century. He would accept the conclusions of 
 modern science. He would use the help of 
 modern discoveries. The motive of his life 
 would be the same; its manner of expression 
 would be different. He would still alleviate 
 human suffering, he might even cure the sick, 
 but probably he would do it to-day by the ap- 
 plication of a knowledge of physiology, psy- 
 chology and hygiene rather than by the per- 
 formance of miracles. He would still forgive 
 [18] 
 
sin, but he would not appear to explain sin as 
 the work of a personal devil. 
 If Christ should come to America to-day he 
 would not be crucified, nor would he be put 
 to death by any more modern and refined 
 method of capital punishment. He would not 
 be put to death at all. He would not sufi^er 
 even the martyrdom of active hatred. He 
 would suffer to-day from passive indifference. 
 Nowhere in all the length and breadth of this 
 tolerant land would men pick up stones to cast 
 at him, but many would pass him by with 
 averted faces in their selfish pursuit of pleasure 
 and of profit. 
 
 Here, too, in the sufferings of Christ must we 
 separate the essential, eternal element from the 
 form in which it was clothed in the age in 
 which he lived. It was not the Roman cross 
 which made Christ suffer; it was the sin of the 
 people which brought him to the cross. It was 
 not the hatred of his followers which made him 
 a "man of sorrows and acquainted with grief"; 
 it was the selfishness which caused them to hate 
 him who was pure and loving. He would have 
 [19] 
 
^]^at ijs CjSjsential 
 
 "gathered them to himself" and they "would 
 not." That unwillingness of selfishness caused 
 the cross in the first century. In the twentieth 
 century it would cause only indifference. But 
 the suffering of the Savior would be the same 
 so long as men "would not." 
 Imagining thus a different setting to the life of 
 Christ, though our imagination must prove 
 hopelessly inadequate, we nevertheless find 
 help in differentiating the actual experiences of 
 Jesus from the essential spirit which actuated 
 him. Thus, the actual poverty of his condition 
 was incidental because he happened to be born 
 into the family of a poor carpenter; but his 
 humility of spirit was essential. His baptism 
 by John in the Jordan was incidental, the mode 
 of his consecration being determined by the 
 time and the place; but the purpose of his 
 baptism, to manifest his consecration to his 
 life-work, was essential. The form in which 
 temptation was presented to him was inci- 
 dental; the power to resist, essential. The 
 method of his ministry was occasioned by the 
 times in which he lived, the miracles, therefore, 
 [20] 
 
may be considered incidental; but the loving 
 purpose of the ministry was essential. So, the 
 physical suffering of the tragedy of Calvary 
 was incidental, occasioned by the malignant 
 hatred of the scribes and Pharisees and the 
 cruel cowardice of a self-seeking Roman gov- 
 ernor; but the spiritual suffering, sorrow for 
 unrepentant sinners, was essential. 
 To be like Christ, then, is to be humble in 
 spirit, to be consecrated to service, to be strong 
 to resist temptations, to be patient and sympa- 
 thetic in ministry, and to be sorry for unre- 
 pentant sinners. These Christlike qualities the 
 Christian of to-day must apply to the condi- 
 tions of to-day. 
 
 The possession of these qualities will lead him 
 to self-denial, but the self-denial will be for 
 the purpose of helping others instead of saving 
 himself. 
 
 The possession of these qualities will pre- 
 sumably lead him into conformity with some 
 prevalent type of Christian observance, a con- 
 formity wherein he may publicly acknowledge, 
 his consecration to service, and whereby he 
 [21] 
 
Wl^at 10 €^^mtial 
 
 may make his service as efficacious as possible. 
 But his conformity will be an expression of his 
 Christlikeness. It cannot in itself cause his 
 Christlikeness. 
 
 The possession of these qualities in the present 
 stage of the development of Christ's religion 
 will compel the Christian to do certain things 
 which were not thought of in Christ's time. It 
 may force him to believe some things which 
 were unbelievable before Christ's leaven had 
 leavened the mass of the world's ignorance. 
 But the spirit which vitalizes his beliefs and ac- 
 tuates his deeds will be in him the fruit of the 
 germinal spirit of Christ. 
 
 The essential Christian is one who strives to be 
 actuated by the spirit of Christ. 
 
 [22] 
 
CHAPTER SECOND 
 
 Creen? 
 
 Sec. 1. A Popular Demand of the Day 
 
 T is quite the fashion in these 
 days to belittle any definite 
 form of C h r i st i a n belief. 
 Creed subscription has been 
 relegated to the realms of ob- 
 livion not only by the outside 
 critics of the religion of Jesus, but even by some 
 of its most prominent exponents. Give us a 
 practical religion, not a speculative philosophy, 
 is a demand of the day. And in answer to this 
 demand, episcopates and presbyteries are over- 
 hauling their ancient formulas of faith, while 
 some independent churches have already filed 
 away the creeds of their fathers, substituting 
 therefor simple declarations of Christian pur- 
 pose, and short covenants of church loyalty. 
 This popular demand for a practical religion 
 [23] 
 
Wi^at i^ C^jsential 
 
 is expressive of a particular stage of the develop- 
 ment of the religion of Christ. Indeed it is 
 one of the signs which seem to indicate the 
 beginning of a new epoch of Christian activ- 
 ity. If one were to attempt to describe in a 
 word the manifestation of the Christian religion 
 which is characteristic of the twentieth cen- 
 tury, one would use the word philanthropy. 
 In former less busy and more philosophic 
 centuries, Christians were naturally interested 
 in a desire to understand God. Those were 
 the days of theology. But in this practical, 
 busy age, speculative explorations into the 
 realm of the abstruse and intangible have 
 ceased to be of paramount interest. To-day, 
 instead of asking, "What can I believe about 
 God?" men are asking, "What can I do for 
 men?" 
 
 This is a change of interest in the religion of 
 Christ, but by no means a lack of interest. It 
 is a change which we should naturally expect, 
 if we but remembered that the religion of 
 Jesus, like everything else in God's world, is 
 a development, and if we gave due weight to 
 [24] 
 
W^at i^ tt)t &mitial CreeD 
 
 the modifying truth that the development of 
 rehgion must run parallel to the development 
 of society. 
 
 The century just opening to us is a century 
 which is marked by intense activity along all 
 lines of human interest. It will not be a great 
 literary age. It will be an age impatient of 
 abstruse thinking and of philosophical reason- 
 ing. The brains of this century will be devoted 
 for the most part to the pursuit of tangible 
 achievements. Scientists will turn their atten- 
 tion more and more towards discoveries which 
 shall be not merely interesting but useful. 
 Writers and lecturers will deal more exclu- 
 sively with themes that are closely connected 
 with the everyday work of a busy world. Phi- 
 losophers and essayists will be practical utili- 
 tarians, at least in what they contribute to the 
 world's thought. But by far the most of the 
 brain effort of the next century will be directed 
 towards industry and commerce, government 
 and finance, civic and social improvements. 
 Since the universal trend of the times is toward 
 activity, the trend of the religion of Jesus 
 [25] 
 
W}^at i^ e^^mtial 
 
 must be towards a Christlike control of that 
 activity. Preachers, evangelists and Christian 
 reformers in this century must tell men how 
 they may act like Christ rather than merely 
 what they must think about Christ. Churches 
 must increasingly inspire their members to the 
 ministry of the poor, the sick, and the un- 
 fortunate, and they must not be content if they 
 only furnish a place of worship for their own 
 supporters. If clergymen and church officers 
 will but heed the signs of the times, the com- 
 ing years will be productive of great progress 
 toward the Christian solution of the problems 
 of industry and politics, towards the betterment 
 of the condition of the poor, and towards the 
 decrease of the selfishness of the rich. It will 
 be a century made notable by the successful 
 operation of many forms of Christian charity, 
 and by the development of new enterprises for 
 the Christianization of the world. 
 Every man, then, who is interested in the ad- 
 vance of the Kingdom of God in the world 
 should hail the cry for the revision or the abo- 
 lition of church creeds as the herald of new 
 [26] 
 
Wt^at i^ ti^e (Bmntial Cteed 
 
 opportunities for Christian activity. For, be 
 sure of this, there would be no such demand 
 if men were indifferent to the Christian rehgion. 
 It is because they are practically and truly re- 
 ligious that they are impatient of the repetition 
 of old formulas which have in themselves no 
 necessary connection with Christian living. The 
 demand of the day is not for the abolition of any 
 belief which may be necessary to rational Chris- 
 tian activity, but it is a demand most insistent 
 and imperative for the abolition of all beliefs that 
 are not necessarily involved in the very essence 
 of the religion of Jesus. 
 
 Sec. 2. The Unessential Christian Belief 
 
 The unessential Christian belief is that belief 
 of the intellect which has no direct bearing upon 
 the conduct of the life. In other words, it is 
 the belief which is not convertible into action. 
 If in itself it can neither make a man better, 
 nor inspire his effort, then it is unessential. It 
 may be true, but it is not vital. It may be rea- 
 sonable and logical, but it is not fundamental. 
 Christianity is the art of living, not a mere 
 [27] 
 
W}^at i^ C^jsenttal 
 
 science of life. The Christian, therefore, 
 must be considered only as an artist. As an 
 artist, he needs a belief in certain practical 
 verities. But he can leave to the scientist all 
 philosophical speculations which may seek 
 to account for those verities. 
 For illustration, suppose a man is set to till 
 the soil. If he is to be a successful agricul- 
 turist, he must believe certain fundamental 
 truths concerning the rotation of the seasons 
 and the fertility of the soil. Did he not be- 
 lieve these verities, as a rational man he would 
 not plow his field nor plant his seed; hence 
 he could not reap his harvest. But he does not 
 need to understand all the scientific explanations 
 of atmospheric pressure, of climatic changes, 
 and of the chemical properties of the soil. He 
 needs to believe that the seed will grow, else he 
 will not plant it, but he need not be compelled 
 to believe all the speculative theories which try 
 to account for the seed's inherent vitality. 
 If we accept this analogy, we are ready for a 
 general statement concerning the Christian's 
 beliefs that are unessential. The Christian, 
 [28] 
 
since he is a rational being, must believe that 
 the seed which he drops will grow. He must 
 believe that a good deed will have a good influ- 
 ence, or he will not try to perform good deeds. 
 He must believe that a life of sacrifice is more 
 noble than a. life of selfishness, or he will not 
 try to live such a life. But to be successful 
 in living Christ's life, he does not need to be- 
 lieve the theologian's scientific theories con- 
 cerning the reason why good deeds bear good 
 fruit; nor yet need he accept either the oldest 
 or the newest theological explanation of the 
 origin of love. The explanation may be cor- 
 rect; that is, some explanation may be correct. 
 Evidently all explanations cannot be true in 
 all their details, for many of them are inher- 
 ently contradictory. But whether the theo- 
 logical explanation be true or not, is now be- 
 side the question. It is not vital. Just as the 
 verity of sunlight is independent of all astro- 
 nomical explanations concerning the origin of 
 the sun, so the verity of the life of Christian 
 love is independent of all theological explana- 
 tions of the nature of that love. 
 [29] 
 
Wi^at i^ C^jsmtial 
 
 It does not follow, therefore, that theology has 
 no reason for existence. That would be like 
 the affirmation that astronomy and chemistry 
 are unneeded sciences. But theological specu- 
 lation is only for the Christian man of science. 
 The Christian practitioner need accept no par- 
 ticular dogma of speculative theology. He need 
 believe only the verities which he can convert 
 into action and which, therefore, alone can af- 
 fect the cultivation of his character. 
 Should one attempt to enumerate the specific 
 doctrines of the Church that are thus to be 
 classified as unessential, he would surely be 
 severely criticised. In prudence, it would be 
 much safer to leave to each individual the ap- 
 plication of the general principle which has here 
 been stated. At the risk, however, of adverse 
 criticism, for the sake both of clearness and 
 of comprehensiveness, the application of the 
 principle must be made somewhat specific. 
 If the proposition be true that Christ is the 
 vital principle of the Christian religion, and 
 that essential Christianity is Christlikeness, we 
 should not hesitate to deduce from this prop- 
 [30] 
 
osition the following corollary relating to the 
 Christian belief. The Christian's essential be- 
 lief is that which has grown from Christ. And, 
 on the contrary, all beliefs are unessential which 
 do not have their origin in him. 
 This assertion does not mean to imply that 
 there can be no enlargement and development 
 of Christian doctrine. There must be growth. 
 As Christianity itself is a development arising 
 from the application of Christ's principle of 
 life to succeeding conditions, so the truths of 
 Christianity must be developed along parallel 
 lines. There will always be a demand for a 
 new theology to keep pace with the growth 
 of vital religion. One may to-day reasonably 
 believe truths about God and Christ, which 
 Paul and Augustine did not believe, — but to 
 be a Christian he need not believe any truth 
 which has not grown naturally and inevitably 
 from the truth that actuated Christ himself. 
 The dogmas of theology which Jesus did not 
 make the basis of his life may safely be con- 
 sidered as unnecessary to the foundation of 
 the Christian's life. 
 
 [31] 
 
Wl^at i^ (Bmntial 
 
 Sec. 3. The Creed of Christ 
 In the attempt to understand the essential 
 verities of Christ's religion very much has been 
 said and written concerning what Jesus taught 
 others to beheve, but too httle has ever been 
 suggested concerning what Jesus himself be- 
 lieved in its relation to the demanded Christian 
 belief. Yet since Jesus, however we may 
 interpret him theologically, must have been 
 in his earthly life mentally akin to all other 
 men, he must as a rational being have taught 
 certain things only because first he believed 
 certain truths. He must have acted, not from 
 impulse, but from reasonable motive. Behind 
 all his works and his deeds there must have 
 been actuating convictions. Being thus like 
 all mankind a man of reasoning motives, his 
 character cannot be adequately explained with- 
 out reference to the faith in him which deter- 
 mined his character. 
 
 What was the vital creed of Jesus? What 
 reason had he for the early consecration of him- 
 self to the service of mankind ? What faith 
 empowered his resistance of temptation, and 
 [32] 
 
enabled his patient, sympathetic ministry for 
 others ? What conviction sustained him in asro- 
 nizing Gethsemane and on sacrificial Calvary ? 
 Can we answer such questions as these ? 
 It is always hazardous to detach the isolated 
 sayings of any man and to affirm that here he 
 expresses his very self, that this is the man's 
 deepest conviction. For we cannot really 
 know any man's deepest convictions until we 
 know the whole of his life. Perhaps perfectly 
 to comprehend the inmost thoughts and the 
 actuating motives of the Savior of men, would 
 mean that we must know him as we can never 
 know him from the meager, broken accounts 
 of the Gospel narratives. Yet so much of 
 himself has been revealed in these narratives 
 that a sympathetic and unprejudiced student 
 of the Gospels cannot fail to catch at least 
 some glimpse of the actuating convictions of 
 his life. 
 
 Let the earnest seeker after truth turn again 
 to the biographies of Jesus with the one pur- 
 pose to discover the faith which actuated him, 
 and he will find persisting throughout all the 
 [33] 
 
W)^at i^ €^^mtial 
 
 narrative of his life three controlling ideas. 
 From the many passages which incorporate 
 these ideas the following are selected because 
 of their conciseness: 
 
 " I must work the works of him that sent me." 
 (John 9:4.) 
 
 " The Son of man came to seek and to save that 
 which was lost." (Luke 19: 10.) 
 "From this time Jesus began to show his 
 disciples that he must suffer many things." 
 (Matt. 16:21.) 
 
 The first two passages are the avowal of the 
 purpose of his life; the last expresses his con- 
 viction concerning the method by which the 
 purpose was to be fulfilled. 
 If one were searching for evidence concerning 
 Christ's belief about matters which did not 
 primarily influence his life, he would find it 
 necessary to add to the passages which express 
 these three fundamental and controlling ideas. 
 One could discover words, for example, which 
 seem to indicate his belief in his own preex- 
 istence. Certainly it could be shown that he 
 believed in his postexistence. The narratives 
 [34] 
 
I^i^at tjs tl)e (iBj3)3enttal CteeD 
 
 contain some evidence that he believed in a time 
 of final judgment, and in the separation of the 
 good from the bad. Most assuredly, too, one 
 could infer that Jesus believed in the Kingdom 
 of God in the heart of the individual, and in the 
 prevalence of the Kingdom in all the world. 
 But these beliefs were not the primary, actuat- 
 ing forces in his life. He neither said nor 
 implied that he performed deeds of kindness, 
 because he believed he had been with God or 
 because he hoped to go to God. He did not 
 heal the sick nor forgive sinners because he 
 hoped thereby to win for himself a reward in 
 the day of judgment. He did not teach that 
 he gave himself "a ransom for many" simply 
 because he hoped thus to hasten the advance 
 of God's Kingdom in the world. He ministered 
 to men, he loved men, he died for men, because 
 he believed that he must work the works of God 
 and because he believed that work was to save 
 lost souls by sacrifice. 
 
 From these passages, then, which reveal all of 
 
 the belief of Jesus which primarily actuated 
 
 his conduct, with some temerity but with rea- 
 
 [35] 
 
W}^at i^ €isjscntial 
 
 sonable certainty we can deduce Christ's funda- 
 mental creed. Let us arrange this creed in the 
 form of Articles of Faith. 
 
 THE CREED OF JESUS 
 
 1. I believe that God is my Father, whose work 
 I must do. 
 
 2. I believe that man is my brother, whose 
 soul I must save. 
 
 3. I believe that I must serve my Father and 
 save my brother by the sacrifice of love. 
 
 Only three simple articles, but what a com- 
 plete creed they make! The Fatherhood of 
 God, the brotherhood of man, and the com- 
 pulsion to sacrifice. 
 
 But as we think of this attempt to formulate 
 the creed of Jesus, we must remember that 
 the compulsions it suggests were to him not 
 the obligations of hateful duty but the joyful 
 service of abundant love. It was his Father 
 whose work he must do, the Father w^hose na- 
 ture of purity and justice and truth he knew, 
 the Father whom he loved and who loved him. 
 It was his brother whom he must save, the 
 [36] 
 
I^l^at ijs ti^e €mtntial CreeD 
 
 brother for whom his soul yearned, the brother 
 whom he would "gather to himself as the hen 
 gathereth her chickens under her wings." It 
 was the sacrifice of love which he must per- 
 form; not the obligation of stern necessity, 
 but the sweet voluntary offering of love's one 
 way of service. 
 
 So we must think of the "must" in the creed 
 of Christ only as the sweet compulsion of his 
 filial, fraternal, unselfish love. And we shall 
 not understand the creed in its full significance 
 to the Savior himself until we flood it with the 
 light of that ecstasy of voluntary offering which 
 found its sublime expression in the earnest wish 
 of his heart, " that my joy might remain in you." 
 
 Sec. 4. The Omissions from Christ's Creed 
 
 When one seeks honestly and earnestly for 
 the actuating faith of Christ's life, he must be 
 struck first of all by the many notable omis- 
 sions from the creed that actuated his conduct 
 and formed his character. Rev. John Watson, 
 of revered memory, never made a truer obser- 
 vation than when in his "Mind of the Master" 
 [37] 
 
I^l^at i^ €^mxtial 
 
 he said that "no one can fail to detect an 
 immense difference between the teachings of 
 Christ and the creeds which have been made 
 by Christians. ... It does not matter what 
 creed you select, the Nicene, or the Westmin- 
 ster Catechism, they all have a family likeness 
 to each other, and a family unlikeness to the 
 Sermon on the Mount. They deal with differ- 
 ent subjects, and they move in a different at- 
 mosphere." 
 
 How lamentably true are these words! Ex- 
 amine the creeds of men. They dwell, as 
 Dr. Watson recalls, "on the relation of the 
 three Persons in the Trinity; on the divine and 
 human natures in the person of Jesus; on his 
 miraculous birth through the power of the 
 Holy Ghost; on the connection between his 
 sacrifice and the divine law; on the nature of 
 the penalty Christ paid, and its reference to 
 the atonement; on the purposes of God re- 
 garding the salvation of individuals, and the 
 collision between the human will and the di- 
 vine will; on the means by which grace is 
 conveyed to the soul; on the mystery of the 
 
 rssi 
 
Wl)at i^ tl^e emntial CreeD 
 
 sacraments; and on the condition of the hu- 
 man soul after death." 
 
 Now, compare these concerns of the creeds of 
 men with the concerns of Christ's creed. On 
 all these questions which have constituted the 
 body of the Christian dogma of churches Jesus 
 was notably silent. Not one of them was an 
 actuating principle in his life. 
 An examination of that most popular and 
 most simple of the creeds used in public wor- 
 ship, the so-called Apostles' Creed, reveals 
 the astounding fact that this creed contains 
 for the most part only those beliefs which 
 Christ's creed omitted, and that it omits al- 
 most all that Christ's creed contained. The 
 Apostles' Creed omits all reference to Christ's 
 life, passing from his miraculous birth immedi- 
 ately to his physical sufferings. The creed of 
 Jesus was concerned almost wholly with his 
 life. If he believed in his miraculous birth, he 
 never said anything about it, much less did 
 he make such a belief a cause for his life of 
 service. If he knew the exact relation which 
 he in his personality bore to the personality 
 [39] 
 
I^i^at tjs CjSjsential 
 
 of God, he spoke of that relationship only 
 incidentally, claiming for himself only that he 
 did the Father's work. Even what he believed 
 about his death had apparently no reference 
 to sacrificial atonement, but rather to the 
 inevitable method of service. He believed 
 that he must serve God and save men, there- 
 fore he believed that in a world of sin he must 
 suffer. 
 
 Startlingly significant is the conclusion of these 
 considerations. Practically all that the his- 
 toric faith of the church has demanded as a 
 basis of church membership and of Christian 
 fellowship is absent from the actuating con- 
 victions of Christ himself. In other words, 
 that which has been demanded of the followers 
 of Christ as the basis of their Christlike living 
 was not at all the basis of Christ's life. 
 
 Sec. 5. The Essential Creed of the Christian 
 
 From the necessary negations of the previous 
 section we turn with relief to the more positive 
 consideration. When he who would be a 
 follower of Christ asks to-day, "What must I 
 [40] 
 
believe to be a Christian?" the answer is two- 
 fold: "If you would follow Christ you must 
 accept the beliefs of Christ which made him 
 what he was," and, "If you would really be 
 Christlike, you must accept these beliefs as he 
 accepted them." 
 
 In view of what has already been said in the 
 last two sections, the first answer needs no 
 illustration and but little comment. The be- 
 liefs of Jesus which formed his character and 
 influenced his ministry were the three beliefs in 
 the Fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of 
 man, and love's compulsion to sacrificing serv- 
 ice. Since these were the formative influences 
 in his life, one cannot reasonably hope to follow 
 that life without their acceptance. Besides these 
 truths, the Christian may believe anything that 
 seems to him reasonable. He may accept im- 
 plicitly the longest creed in Christendom, but 
 that will help him only theologically. Accept- 
 ing such a creed, he may be called by his fellows 
 soundly orthodox, but to be truly Christian, he 
 need accept only those beliefs which were fun- 
 damental to Chi-ist himself. 
 [41] 
 
W^at i^ Cjsjsential 
 
 The second answer perhaps needs more expla- 
 nation. The Christian must accept the actuat- 
 ing faith of Christ as Christ accepted it. A 
 moment's reflection will convince anyone that 
 Christ's creed was not accepted merely in 
 an intellectual sense, but in an ethical sense. 
 There was a personal significance to each of 
 the three articles of his belief. There was an 
 irresistible compulsion about them all. 
 He did not believe merely in a "Father Al- 
 mighty, Maker of heaven and earth." He 
 believed that God was his Father, and that be- 
 lief carried with it a compulsion to filial obedi- 
 ence and service. 
 
 He did not believe in the brotherhood of man 
 in vague, universal terms, simply because the 
 logic of his thinking compelled him to see that 
 this behef was the inevitable consequence of 
 the Fatherhood of God. He believed that 
 men were his brethren, and again the belief 
 carried with it a compulsion, the compulsion 
 to fraternal helpfulness. His brother he must 
 save. 
 
 Nor did Jesus believe in the necessity of suflFer- 
 [42] 
 
ing and sacrifice, simply as a philosophical 
 formula, a mere matter of deduction from the 
 fundamental nature of the expression of love, 
 much less as a necessary theory concerning 
 any form of atonement. He believed that he 
 must suffer. He believed that the love of the 
 Father whom he would joyfully serve must be 
 expressed to the brother whom he would gladly 
 save by his sacrifice. 
 
 To be like Christ the Christian must believe 
 as Christ believed. Merely to believe in the 
 Father of love with his intellect will not help 
 him to be Christlike. God must be his Father, 
 and this filial relationship he must gladly ac- 
 cept. He, too, must believe that he must work 
 the works of Him that sent him. 
 
 The Christian cannot believe in the univer- 
 sal brotherhood of man as a mere matter of 
 theory. He must believe that the man in need 
 who happens to be nearest him is his brother, 
 and this fraternal relationship he must joyfully 
 acknowledge. He must believe that he, too, 
 must save his brother. 
 
 Nor can he be a true Christian by believing 
 [43] 
 
W^at ij3 €js^enttal 
 
 only in the necessity of someone else's sacrifice. 
 It will not vitally help him to be a Christian 
 to believe that Christ sacrificed for him. He 
 must believe that he must sacrifice for others. 
 He, too, must be fully convinced that his filial 
 duty to God and his fraternal relations vsrith 
 men demand that he "must suffer many 
 things," and it must be his ideal to be so filled 
 with the Christlike love that he can accept the 
 suffering with joy unspeakable. 
 The essential creed of the Christian is brief 
 and simple, but it is personal and compelling. 
 Let us think of it soberly. Let us not only 
 believe it with our minds; let us accept it with 
 our wills. Here it is. 
 
 THE ESSENTIAL CREED OF THE CHRISTIAN 
 
 Article 1. I believe that God is my Father 
 
 whom I must serve. 
 
 Article 2. I believe that man is my brother 
 
 whom I must save. 
 
 Article 3. I believe that I must serve my 
 
 Father and save my brother by the sacrifice 
 
 of love. 
 
 [44] 
 
W\)at i^ t^t €mntial CreeD 
 
 All of which the Christian may express in 
 terms of his relationship to Christ, remember- 
 ing that in himself as in Jesus, the compulsions 
 of his belief are the sweet, joyful compulsions 
 of filial, fraternal, unselfish love: 
 / believe that the truths which were actuating 
 convictions in Christ must move me to follow 
 his example. 
 
 [45] 
 
CHAPTER THIRD 
 
 Cjcpcrience? 
 
 Sec. 1 . The Need of Personal Experience 
 
 HE modern demand for a prac- 
 tical Christianity has popu- 
 larly been supposed to have 
 deprecatory reference not only 
 to the creeds of churches, but 
 to the personal religious expe- 
 riences of Christians. Such terms as repent- 
 ance, conversion, consecration, and communion 
 have of late been treated lightly as the relics 
 of a Christianity long since outgrown; and 
 such terms as benevolence, charity, and social 
 service have been supposed to supplant them. 
 We remarked in our last chapter that a prev- 
 alent impatience with meaningless and unes- 
 sential theological formulas was a sure sign of 
 the beginning of a new era of Christian ac- 
 tivity. Now we must observe that an era of 
 [47] 
 
W\)at i^ (B^^mtM 
 
 Christian philanthropy must inevitably be 
 marked by a depreciation of personal experi- 
 ences. Philanthropy is a word whose signifi- 
 cance is wholly social. Repentance and con- 
 version are words whose significance is wholly 
 personal. We may go still farther. Essential 
 Christianity as we have tried to define it is 
 simply Christlikeness, and Christlikeness in its 
 essential method of expression is simply and 
 solely the ministry of unselfishness. But un- 
 selfishness, too, is a word which has no mean- 
 ing apart from its social application, while re- 
 pentance and conversion are words which have 
 no meaning apart from their personal applica- 
 tion. 
 
 These observations lead us logically to the 
 following conclusion. Personal religious ex- 
 perience cannot be considered as the end of 
 the Christian life. The end of the Christian 
 life is social service. 
 
 But this conclusion by no means denies the 
 necessity of the personal experience. The 
 social service of the Christian is indeed some- 
 thing that must be intensely unselfish in its 
 [48] 
 
W\)at 10 ti^e (B^mxtial Cjcperience 
 
 motive and social in its operation. Christian 
 philanthropy must always have more refer- 
 ence to other men than it has to self. Yet 
 though service has a social object, to be really 
 Christian it must have a personal subject. 
 We give to others. We give of ourselves. 
 If Christian charity were only the cold-blooded 
 bestowal of the coin upon the beggar, the 
 personal experience of the benefactor would be 
 immaterial. The coin will purchase as much 
 of the needed food and clothing, whether it 
 be bestowed by a character the most sainted 
 or the most sordid. Indeed the purchasing 
 power of the coin would be the same even 
 though it should be turned out into the hand 
 of the beggar by the operation of an insensate 
 machine. Much of our charity may perhaps 
 be characterized as machine-like. But such 
 charity is not of the essence of Christianity. 
 In essential Christianity one cannot separate 
 the gift from the giver. To be truly Christ- 
 like is to give one's self. True Christian 
 charity, then, has its personal as well as its 
 social significance. Hence the personal char- 
 [491 
 
W\)at ti8 e^^mtial 
 
 acter of the Christian is of utmost importance, 
 even though the object of his Christianity be 
 social and not personal at all. Because his 
 personal character is of importance, the per- 
 sonal experiences which have helped to form the 
 character become of fundamental interest. 
 We must here be careful to give a compre- 
 hensive significance to the term experience. 
 Personal experience is simply personal history. 
 All the hopes and aspirations, the achieve- 
 ments and the disappointments which have 
 made the man what he is, constitute his experi- 
 ence. All the hopes and aspirations, all the 
 struggles and the failures which have made 
 him religiously what he is, constitute his reli- 
 gious experience. 
 
 It has too often been customary to limit reli- 
 gious experiences to certain crises in personal 
 history. Such limitation we must carefully 
 avoid. Certain crises may mark certain stages 
 of development, but the development may be 
 a reality even though the crises be not apparent. 
 The history of the development of personal 
 Christian character should be marked off into 
 [50] 
 
W^at ijeJ ti)t €^mitial txpnimtt 
 
 epochs only for the sake of convenience. Names 
 should be given to the description of those 
 epochs only with the utmost caution, and with 
 the frankest confession of their inadequacy. 
 Since no two persons were ever exactly alike, 
 it is safe to say that no two ever had precisely 
 the same personal experiences. In religion 
 as VvcU as in all other phases of human living, 
 we shall always have variety of experience. 
 But the variety will be in details rather than in 
 fundamentals. The differences will be in the 
 degree in which men become conscious of the 
 experiences, rather than in a real difference 
 in the experiences themselves. Certain in- 
 evitable characteristics will always mark the 
 personal development of him who becomes 
 really Christlike, for certain fundamental char- 
 acteristics are observable in the personal de- 
 velopment of the Christ, whom the Christian 
 must follow. 
 
 Sec. 2. A Prevalent Misapprehension 
 
 Before we turn to a consideration of Christ's 
 personal experiences and their relation to the 
 
 [51] 
 
I^l^at ijs &^tntiai 
 
 necessary experiences of the Christian, we 
 must pause for a moment to clear from our 
 proposed pathway the rubbish of a grave mis- 
 apprehension. 
 
 It has been too much the habit of certain 
 Christian teachers and preachers to relate the 
 personal experiences of Christians to their hope 
 of personal salvation into heaven. The plea 
 for personal salvation has been based upon the 
 threatened eternal punishment of continued sin. 
 The acceptance of Christ's sacrifice has been 
 urged as the means of deliverance. The sum- 
 mum bonum of Christian desire has been pre- 
 sented as the assurance of the possession of 
 a "mansion in the sky." With this personal 
 salvation into heaven as the one desired end 
 of the Christian profession, the corresponding 
 experiences of the Christian, commonly ac- 
 cepted as such, have been these: — (1) A griev- 
 ous consciousness of the guilt of sin; (2) an 
 exultant consciousness of the removal of the 
 guilt by the "blood of Jesus"; and, (3) a peace- 
 ful, not to say prideful, consciousness of the 
 assurance of eternal bliss. 
 [52] 
 
I^l^at ijs tl^e CjSisential (^jtrperience 
 
 All these experiences are based upon the most 
 childish and most selfish conception of the 
 Christian religion. When such experiences 
 as these are demanded of the Christian, and 
 only such, the implication is that the religion 
 of Jesus has no significance except as it relates 
 to one's own individual and selfish welfare. 
 Inasmuch as the Christian religion is more 
 than a manner of the deliverance of the in- 
 dividual soul from eternal punishment, in so 
 much more must the experiences of the Chris- 
 tian have other than this ultra-selfish applica- 
 tion. 
 
 Not all people are alike introspective. It may 
 be that there are some people too busy trying 
 to help their unfortunate neighbors to give 
 much thought to their own unfortunate selves. 
 It may be that there are those who are more 
 burdened for the sins of others than for their 
 own sins. It is possible that there are some 
 who are more anxious to secure for others 
 decent dwelling places upon the earth than to 
 secure for themselves the mansions of heaven. 
 Now, these people who are apparently more 
 [53] 
 
WW i^ e^^mtial 
 
 interested in the welfare of others than in their 
 own welfare are no less Christian people than 
 their more introspective neighbors. Indeed, 
 if Christianity be the philanthropic service of 
 others, they may truly be called Christians of 
 the more mature type; and the fact that so 
 many men are to-day more interested in the 
 present salvation of society than in the fu- 
 ture salvation of themselves may be taken as 
 a direct proof of development towards the 
 religious ideal of Jesus. For the one object 
 of the ministry of Jesus was the salvation of 
 others. And Jesus taught the truth that the 
 Christian world has not yet entirely learned — 
 that no man should think first of saving his 
 own life, but that his own salvation would 
 result from his service of others. 
 We must frankly admit, then, that those reli- 
 gious experiences which arise from the intro- 
 spective habit of mind are not the essential 
 Christian experiences. They may be real ex- 
 periences to some; they cannot be demanded 
 of all. But when we make this admission we 
 do not at all do away with the necessity of the 
 [54] 
 
W\)at tjs tlje (B^^mtial ci^jcperience 
 
 personal religious experience. We must still 
 remember that the social object of Christian 
 living always demands a personal subject. 
 Social helpfulness is the result of personal 
 experience just as truly as is personal piety. 
 To do good is as much a personal acquirement 
 as to be good. The mode of the personal 
 Christian experience will change as the object 
 of the Christian life develops from the crude, 
 selfish conception of individual salvation into 
 the more mature and unselfish conception of 
 social service. The mode of the experience will 
 change, but the intensive personality of the ex- 
 perience will remain the same. 
 In this more mature conception there may be 
 little of the consciousness of personal guilt 
 for one's own sins, but there must be much 
 of the consciousness of personal responsibility 
 for the sins of others. There may be no exult- 
 ant consciousness of the salvation of one's 
 self by the sacrifice of Christ, but there should 
 be an equally exultant consciousness of the 
 joy of serving someone else by one's own sac- 
 rifice. There may, indeed, be no evidence at 
 [55] 
 
Wi)at ijs Cjsjsential 
 
 all of the peaceful assurance of the future 
 heavenly mansion furnished by God for one's 
 self, but we should expect the trustful, helpful 
 assurance of clean, pure, wholesome earthly 
 habitations furnished by those who are trying 
 to work together with God for the promotion 
 of his Kingdom here and now. 
 The man who has experienced within himself 
 a feeling of personal responsibility for others, 
 a personal satisfaction in helping some other 
 ever so little, and an abiding hope of the even- 
 tual establishment of the divine Kingdom upon 
 the earth, — that man must be considered ac- 
 cording to Christ's standard as really a Chris- 
 tian as he who experiences the corresponding 
 emotions with reference to his own eternal wel- 
 fare. If the latter man experiences only those 
 emotions which have their intensely selfish 
 causation, the former must be considered the 
 more mature and, therefore, the more Christ- 
 like Christian. 
 
 We must free our minds, then, from the mis- 
 apprehension that the essential personal ex- 
 periences of the Christian must arise either 
 [56] 
 
Wl^at fe t])z dmntial txvttimct 
 
 from any conception of one's own personal 
 lost condition apart from Christ or from any 
 desire for one's own personal salvation through 
 Christ. True Christian experiences of a lower 
 order may in some instances arise from these 
 lower conceptions and desires; but the vital 
 Christian experience arises from the concep- 
 tion of the lost condition of other men and 
 from the desire to render to these a Christlike 
 service. 
 
 Sec. 3. The Religious Experience of Jesus 
 
 We are ready now to try to understand the re- 
 ligious experiences of Jesus, our Master, and 
 our one Example. Unfortunately very httle 
 attention has ever been given to the study of 
 the religious experience of Christ in its relation 
 to the essential religious experience of Chris- 
 tians. The Church has always insisted upon 
 the necessity of the religious experience of the 
 professed follower of Christ, but it has never 
 based that necessity upon the recorded experi- 
 ence of Christ himself. Indeed, the Church has 
 in general considered Christ's personality so 
 [57] 
 
W^at i^ &^mtial 
 
 unique as to separate him from all possible 
 experiences of anyone else. Preachers have 
 bidden their congregations with one breath to 
 follow Jesus, and with the next breath they 
 have declared that by his miraculous birth he 
 was lifted above humanity to a position hu- 
 manly unattainable. Evangelists have ex- 
 horted their hearers to grow like Christ, at 
 the same time that they have asserted that 
 Christ's unique relation with God has made 
 his character unapproachable. In short, the 
 Christlikeness of the demanded Christian ex- 
 perience has been made impossible by the very 
 teachings that have required it. 
 To make good this assertion, let us consider 
 a few specifications. The Church has de- 
 manded of Christians the experience of repent- 
 ance. Jesus did not repent. The Church has 
 considered it essential that Christians must be 
 converted. There is no record that Christ 
 was converted. Some Christian teachers have 
 taught the necessity of a revolutionary crisis 
 after conversion, called the conscious experience 
 of sanctification or the Baptism of the Holy 
 [58] 
 
1^]^at ij3 tt^t (B^^mtial txpniznct 
 
 Ghost. The hfe of Jesus witnesses no such 
 revolutionary crisis. The Church has preached 
 John the Baptist's message of repentance; it 
 has upheld the Saul of Tarsus type of conver- 
 sion; it has magnified the Pentecostal experi- 
 ence of the disciples. The Christian teachers 
 of the centuries past have asserted that the 
 essential characteristic of the Christian's ex- 
 perience shall be revolutionary, while the expe- 
 rience of Jesus was evolutionary. Jesus, as the 
 narrative distinctly states, "grew in favor with 
 God." (Luke 2: 52.) But since Paul's time we 
 have been told that the follower of Jesus can 
 be saved only " by the grace of God." (Vide 
 Eph. 2:5.) 
 
 It is this phrase "grew in favor," or, as the 
 Greek words may be more correctly translated, 
 "grew in grace," which furnishes us with the 
 key to the religious experience of Jesus. 
 The phrase in the first place necessitates our 
 belief in the initial immaturity of the character 
 of Jesus, for were his character perfect from 
 his birth there could have been no growth. 
 However we may interpret Christ theologically, 
 [59] 
 
3^]^at i^ e^^mtial 
 
 the historic person of Jesus began his Hfe in 
 spiritual immaturity, just as he began his hfe 
 in physical immaturity. We can no more 
 think of his soul as fully equipped at birth for 
 the complete expression of God's love than 
 we can think of the infant body in the Bethle- 
 hem manger as fully equipped to bear the 
 suffering of Calvary. Jesus began with im- 
 maturity. 
 
 But this immaturity of soul must be distin- 
 guished from spiritual blemish. We are no 
 more compelled to believe that spiritual incom- 
 pleteness is sinfulness than we are to believe 
 that physical incompleteness is synonymous 
 with some malformation of the body. Imma- 
 turity is an incompleteness which needs only 
 development. It is something which can be 
 overcome by growth. 
 
 The process of the development of the soul of 
 Jesus was a process which can be conveniently 
 divided into epochs, though no notably ap- 
 parent crises mark the limits of those epochs. 
 1. The first epoch of Christ's personal reli- 
 gious history seems to run quite parallel with 
 [60] 
 
Wi^at i^ t\)t (Bmntial Cjcperience 
 
 that period of physical development which 
 ends at adolescence. We cannot be sure that 
 Jesus at the beginning of adolescence became 
 conscious of any clearly defined religious 
 emotion. Our record of this time of his life 
 is lamentably meager. Only one glimpse do 
 we get of him at this stage of his development, 
 and that is contained in a portion of the Gospel 
 of Luke, whose authenticity has been called in 
 question. Jesus, according to this narrative, 
 went with his parents to the temple at Jerusa- 
 lem. He was then twelve years of age. When 
 his parents started to return from their act of 
 customary Jewish worship, Jesus lingered 
 behind. After some search they found him 
 discussing religious matters with the religious 
 leaders of his day, and he silenced his parents' 
 natural complaint at his conduct by asking if 
 they did not know that "he must be about 
 his Father's business." 
 
 These words, reported to have been spoken by 
 the boy Jesus, offer no conclusive proof of the 
 personal experience through which he was pass- 
 ing, but the suggestion of the words is illumina- 
 [Gl] 
 
WW i^ €^^tntial 
 
 ting. Indeed, if Jesus never said these exact 
 words at all, we know from the expressed con- 
 viction of his later life (Vide John 9:4) that 
 he must previously have passed through a re- 
 ligious experience which these words quite ac- 
 curately describe. At what may have been an 
 epochal stage in his physical development he 
 entered upon a new epoch in his religious his- 
 tory. It was the epoch of the consciousness of 
 God the Father. It was the glad welcoming 
 into his life of the compulsion of his obligation 
 to the Father. 
 
 2. Our narratives give us no further glimpse 
 of Christ's growth in grace until we come to 
 the baptism in the Jordan, which marked the 
 beginning of his public ministry. We cannot, 
 therefore, trace the process by which the early 
 acceptance of his duty to his Father evolved 
 the consciousness of the necessity of his own 
 personal ministry. But we can witness the 
 act which expressed his acceptance of the 
 ministry. The baptism was his act of conse- 
 cration to the service of others. Earlier in life 
 he had accepted his filial obligation to God. 
 [62] 
 
Now in the Jordan he avows his acceptance 
 of the consequent obligation to his fellow men. 
 The epoch in his religious history whose out- 
 ward sign was expressed by his baptism was 
 the epoch of the consciousness of the needs of 
 men. It was the acceptance into his life of the 
 compulsion of service. 
 
 3. The record of the ministry of Jesus begins 
 with the account of the temptation in the 
 wilderness and ends with the institution of 
 the Lord's Supper in the upper room at Jeru- 
 salem. In other words, it begins with the 
 allurements of a costless ministry and ends 
 with the sublime symbolism of the true minis- 
 try's cost in sacrifice. From the temptations, 
 though they are allegorically reported, we are 
 to learn not only that he was "in all points 
 tempted like as we are," but also that he was 
 tempted exactly as we are, to choose the less 
 costly method of service. From the institution 
 of the Lord's Supper we are to learn not only 
 that Jesus would have his disciples remem- 
 ber the sufferings of his service, but also that 
 he would have them learn what he himself 
 [63] 
 
Wi^at (js cBjSjscnttal 
 
 had learned— that all service must cost suffer- 
 ing. 
 
 Along all the hard road which led from the 
 real temptation of Jesus to his real acceptance 
 of the way of sacrijfice, we cannot follow. We 
 know not just when he became conscious in 
 himself of complete victory over the tempta- 
 tion. We cannot tell just when he accepted 
 in his consciousness the truth which he tried 
 to impart to his disciples when he began to 
 teach them "that he must suffer many things." 
 But we need not know the precise moment when 
 there came to him this new self-consciousness. 
 All we need to understand is that the conscious- 
 ness did come to him. Some time after the 
 recorded temptation to evade suffering, and 
 some time before the institution of the sacred 
 symbol of suffering, Jesus entered into another 
 epoch of personal history. This last epoch 
 was the consciousness of the need of sacrifice. 
 It was the acceptance into his life of the way 
 by which he must serve his Father and save 
 his brethren. 
 
 The Savior's "growth in grace," then, we 
 [64] 
 
W}^at i^ t^t d^^mtial Cjcpetience 
 
 may with reasonable accuracy mark off into 
 three stages of development. They were, the 
 consciousness of the acceptance of his filial 
 relation to God, the consciousness of his 
 acceptance of his fraternal obligations to men, 
 and the consciousness of his acceptance of the 
 way of sacrifice. 
 
 These three discernible stages in what we may 
 call Christ's religious experience follow closely, 
 as inevitably they must, the three fundamental 
 convictions which we called his creed. The 
 convictions would not have been vital unless 
 they had culminated in experiences. The 
 experiences would not have been real had 
 they not developed from convictions. 
 Let us summarize. Jesus "grew in grace" 
 through the consciousness of the Fatherhood 
 of God, the consciousness of the brotherhood 
 of man, and the consciousness of the necessity 
 of sacrifice. His character was developed 
 through the joyful acceptance into his life of 
 the obligations of these three conscious experi- 
 ences which were in turn the result of his 
 inner convictions. Because of these experi- 
 [65] 
 
W\iat fjs Cjijsential 
 
 ences he became the one whom we must fol- 
 low, if we would be really Christlike. 
 
 Sec. 4. The Interference of Sin 
 
 In our consideration of the religious experi- 
 ences of Jesus, we must always stand amazed 
 at his utter unconsciousness of the experience 
 of sin. Here, indeed, have we discovered his 
 real uniqueness. No other person has ever 
 dared to challenge his fellows with such fear- 
 less words as these : " Which of you convicteth 
 me of sin ? " Not one besides him has ever suc- 
 cessfully claimed entire freedom from guilt. 
 Yet Jesus was almost constantly performing 
 acts which were justly censured by his contem- 
 poraries. When he ate with publicans and sin- 
 ners, he was guilty of a breach of ceremonial- 
 ism, considered most vital to the religion of his 
 people; and one can find no fault with the 
 scribes and Pharisees for their condemnation of 
 his conduct. When he healed the sick on the 
 Sabbath, he was, according to rabbinical inter- 
 pretation, breaking a command of Jehovah; and 
 the severe criticism of the rabbis was inevitable. 
 [66] 
 
I^i^at i^ ti^e €^^mtial Cjcperience 
 
 When he justified his disciples for a hke in- 
 fringement of the Sabbath law, in their case 
 with no excuse of benevolent intention, but 
 only to satisfy their own hunger, he mani- 
 fested a disregard for sacred tradition which 
 was apparently without excuse; and the 
 consequent hatred of the upholders of those 
 traditions he must have expected. 
 Whenever Jesus did anything which his 
 contemporaries were wont to characterize as 
 sin, he always explained away the supposed 
 sinfulness of the act by an appeal to a higher 
 tribunal. The law of ceremonial cleanliness 
 must give place to the law of the service of the 
 lost. The infringement of the literal interpreta- 
 tion of specific commands did not matter, pro- 
 vided the motive of the infringement was that 
 of unselfish benevolence. Men were not made 
 for laws ; laws were made for men. " Therefore 
 the Son of man is Lord also of the Sabbath." 
 It is very significant that Jesus used the term 
 "Son of man" when he thus announced his 
 superiority to the traditions of the elders. 
 From the context, this use of the phrase cannot 
 [67] 
 
W}^at i^ CjSjsential 
 
 logically be taken to refer to any claim of 
 divineness which Jesus made for himself 
 alone, but solely to a claim of ideal humanness 
 which he made for all mankind. It was as 
 though he were exemplifying in himself the 
 truth that all men are ideally greater than the 
 laws which have been enacted for their gov- 
 ernment, and that therefore no man should 
 be judged by his infringement of this or that 
 commandment. Only should he be judged by 
 the selfishness or the unselfishness of the mo- 
 tive which actuated him. 
 
 Such reflections as these lead inevitably to 
 the following conclusion: 
 
 Though Jesus was the only person who ever 
 fully demonstrated his independence of man- 
 made laws by the constant manifestation of 
 sinless motives, ideally all persons ought, like 
 him, to be above human law. And again, 
 like him, they ought to be emancipated from 
 law by participation in love. They ought to be 
 superior to all laws of human government, be- 
 cause they ought always to be actuated by the 
 unselfish motives of their divine inheritance. 
 [68] 
 
Wi)^t (js tl^e €0jsential tvpttimct 
 
 When we give to sinlessness the spiritual sig- 
 nificance illustrated by Jesus, that of perfect 
 inward obedience to the motive of love, rather 
 than that of perfect outward obedience to 
 the laws of men, we can claim for ideal hu- 
 manity, created in God's image, nothing less 
 than Jesus claimed for himself as the Son of 
 man. When we observe that no one but Jesus 
 has attained this ideal, we must not therefore 
 conclude that the ideal itself has become im- 
 paired. We must assume only that individual 
 attempts to attain the ideal have failed. 
 Sin, theologically considered, has too often 
 been supposed to lower the human ideal. It 
 has been assumed that since one man once 
 failed to be what he ought, all other men can- 
 not expect to be what they ought. Because 
 of the sin of Adam, theology has been prone 
 to consign all men to a state of original sin- 
 fulness. But over against this theological 
 conception of the necessary universality of 
 sin we must put the one example of the sin- 
 lessness of Jesus. Instead of saying that be- 
 cause one man sinned all others must sin, we 
 [69] 
 
W}^at i^ €mmtiv'. 
 
 should say that because one man was sinless 
 all others ought to be sinless. Instead of 
 assuming that sin is a necessary experience of 
 humanity because of Adam, we who are Chris- 
 tians should deny its necessity because of 
 Christ. 
 
 But when we are bold enough to make this 
 denial of necessary sin, we must be careful to 
 understand just what we mean by sin. Im- 
 maturity is not sin. Jesus was born immature. 
 An inherited tendency to wrongdoing is not 
 sin. Jesus, whether he was born of one human 
 parent or of two, must have shared somewhat 
 in the common inheritance of humanity. The 
 selfish desire which makes temptation real is not 
 sin. Since Jesus v/as tempted he must have 
 felt a desire for the selfish end, else had there 
 been no reality to the temptation. Sin is the 
 conscious, willful choice of the selfish. To sin is 
 to yield to the selfish desire. To sin is voli- 
 tionally to follow the inherited tendency to evil. 
 Mistakes and failures must ever be the product 
 of immaturity, but sin is an act only of the con- 
 scious volition of the mature. The necessity for 
 [70] 
 
B^l^at i^ tl^e C^jsential Cjcpetience 
 
 the experience of such sin we who beHeve that 
 Christ was our example must stoutly deny, even 
 while we sorrowfully admit that the fact of such 
 sin is present with us all. 
 
 We must go farther than this. We must deny 
 not only the necessity of the experience of 
 sin, but also the consequent necessity of those 
 religious experiences which assume necessary 
 sin as their condition. 
 
 Obviously, if we deny that sin is necessary we 
 must also deny the necessity of repentance. 
 No man needs to repent of sin for which he 
 has not been personally responsible. Descent 
 from x\dam does not call for repentance, but 
 only actual participation in conscious wrong- 
 doing. 
 
 Again, if we deny the necessary participation 
 in sin of all humanity, we must deny that the 
 experience of conversion is necessary to all 
 men. No man needs to turn from sin unless 
 he himself has by an act of free will consciously 
 pursued sin. 
 
 We must hold up as the ideal of Christian 
 
 attainment, then, not these revolutionary ex- 
 
 [71] 
 
Wl^at i^ €^^mtial 
 
 periences which presuppose the soul's mal- 
 formation, but only and always those evolu- 
 tionary experiences of Jesus himself, which 
 presuppose only immaturity. 
 Repentance and conversion will be necessary 
 Christian experiences to that man to whom 
 sin is a conscious human experience. Repent- 
 ance is sorrow for the sin, and conversion is turn- 
 ing away from its pursuit. But these experiences 
 are necessary only because of the accident of 
 sin. They are not necessary because of any 
 fundamental characteristic of humanity. 
 We must be careful, indeed, that we do not 
 teach men that they need to sin in order that 
 they may be "saved by grace." Jesus has 
 taught men that God will be graciously for- 
 giving, when they have sinned. But though 
 the prodigal son was saved by grace, the 
 elder brother had the preferable commenda- 
 tion, "Son, thou art always with me." The 
 commended faithfulness of the elder brother 
 and not the forgiven profligacy of the younger 
 is the type of the more desirable relationship 
 of men with God. We must teach men that 
 [72] 
 
I^i^at i^ ti^e t^^mtial (Bxvtmntt 
 
 they need not go away from their Father's 
 home. We must teach them so to Hve that 
 they will need only to "grow in grace." The 
 natural way for the soul to come into the experi- 
 ence of Christianity is the way of develop- 
 ment. Christian nurture is nearer Christ's 
 way than Christian revivals. Evolution is 
 more natural than revolution. Sin is an 
 interference with the natural order of the 
 soul's growth, and not a necessary experience 
 in that growth. 
 
 Sec. 5. The Essential Experiences of the 
 Christian 
 Let us now go back to the experiences of Jesus 
 which we saw could be appropriately designated 
 as the inevitable consequences of the three ac- 
 tuating convictions of his life, the experiences 
 of filial relationship with God, of fraternal re- 
 lationship to men, and of love's compulsion to 
 sacrifice. We have now to inquire in just what 
 sense these experiences are essential to the 
 Christian of to-day. Must we expect the Chris- 
 tian's experiences to be literally identical with 
 [73] 
 
W^at t0 CjSisenttal 
 
 Christ's? Shall we insist that the Christian 
 must become conscious of all these experiences 
 each in its turn ? And are we to believe that 
 these experiences are wholly unrelated to any 
 of the experiences of Christians commonly ac- 
 cepted throughout all the ages of historic Chris- 
 tianity ? 
 
 The answer to the last question is a decided 
 negative. Far from being unrelated to the 
 common experiences of professed Christians, 
 the experiences of Christ are in their funda- 
 mental characteristics identical with those ex- 
 periences which organized Christianity has 
 uniformly demanded of its adherents. The 
 answers to the previous questions will be made 
 apparent if we trace this identity somewhat in 
 detail. 
 
 1. The New Birth is the name which organized 
 Christianity has generally used to designate the 
 beginning of Christian experience. Some por- 
 tions of the Christian Church insist that the new 
 birth shall be accompanied by evidences of re- 
 pentance, and that in its essence it is a conver- 
 sion from a state of sinfulness. Other parts of 
 [74] 
 
the Church Universal see in the new birth only 
 an evidence of the initial stage of spiritual de- 
 velopment, which needs but confirmation. But 
 all the Church is practically united in its in- 
 sistence upon a necessary beginning of the spir- 
 itual life. 
 
 That is all that is essential in the fundamental 
 idea of the new birth. The new birth is a be- 
 ginning. Just as physical birth is the begin- 
 ning of physical life, so the "New Birth" is the 
 beginning of spiritual life. 
 
 The first consciousness of the new life is in both 
 instances the consciousness of filial dependence. 
 In both instances, too, the fact of the birth 
 may normally antedate the consciousness of the 
 birth. All that is necessary to the Christian's 
 consciousness is that at some time he shall feel 
 within himself the impulses of a divine concep- 
 tion. As Jesus expressed it, he must feel the 
 compulsion to work the works of God. 
 As to how this new feeling may have originated 
 he need not question. The fact of the new birth 
 is to be inferred from its observed results, not 
 from an understanding of the nature of its in- 
 [75] 
 
^l^at i^ CjSjsenttal 
 
 ception. Just as we know a child has been born 
 of human parents when we witness its Hfe, so 
 we know a soul has been born of God when we 
 witness its love. Like Nicodemus, the Christian 
 Church has sometimes asked how these things 
 could be. But it is absolutely impertinent to 
 meet the manifestations of life itself with a spec- 
 ulative inquiry concerning the origin of life. 
 The essential characteristic of the new birth is 
 not conditioned by the experience of sin. It is 
 just the beginning of a new and natural phase 
 of human development. We can properly say 
 that a child has been born intellectually when 
 first he becomes conscious of a thirst for knowl- 
 edge, or we can say that a man has been born 
 morally when he first feels within himself the 
 compulsion of conscience. Some of these new 
 births may be accompanied by observable signs. 
 Some men may be able to say, " On such and 
 such a day I was born intellectually, or morally, 
 or religiously." But the knowledge of the exact 
 beginning is by no means necessary. 
 When a human soul becomes conscious of its 
 obligation to a divine Father, that soul has been 
 [76] 
 
W^at (js ti^e cBjSisential Cjcperience 
 
 born. The time and the place and the circum- 
 stances of his birth are immaterial. He is a 
 child of God. 
 
 2. Baptism is the universally accepted method 
 by which professed Christians for nearly twenty 
 centuries have expressed their consecration to 
 the service of mankind. It is unfortunate that 
 this method of consecration should have come 
 to be considered only as a sacrament of the 
 Church. It cannot properly be considered as 
 such, for baptism antedates by many years the 
 organization of the Church. Moreover, bap- 
 tism as embraced by Jesus himself was not ex- 
 pressive of his admission to any formally or- 
 ganized body of believers ; it was expressive only 
 of his purpose to serve men. Baptism, then, if 
 it really means anything to the Christian, means 
 the expression of his experience of consecra- 
 tion. 
 
 The form of the expression does not matter. 
 Jesus was probably immersed. But when any 
 body of Christians have substituted sprinkling 
 for immersion, they have thereby practically 
 denied the necessity for the preservation of the 
 [77] 
 
W}^at i^ ^jsjsential 
 
 particular form used by Jesus himself. And 
 when we once admit that the particular form 
 of the consecration of Jesus in any of its details 
 does not bind his followers, we have virtually 
 admitted the immateriality of any form of ex- 
 pression. In this matter as in all others, the 
 Christian is not called upon to do precisely the 
 thing which Jesus did in precisely the same way. 
 He is to be actuated by the spirit of Jesus. 
 The Christian, then, may express his acknowl- 
 edgment of the purpose to serve others in any 
 form of consecration that may seem to him best 
 adapted to his needs. He may be immersed. 
 He may be sprinkled. He may find none of the 
 accepted forms of baptism suitable either to his 
 needs or to his conditions. But in some way he, 
 to be like Christ, must accept and publicly ex- 
 press the obligation of his fraternal service. 
 Whether he submit to any church ordinance of 
 baptism is immaterial, but really to be Christ- 
 like he must become openly consecrated to 
 Christlike endeavor. 
 
 3. By the Communion of the Lord's Supper 
 
 Christians throughout all the ages of Christian 
 
 [78] 
 
Wi)at i^ tl^e &^mt\al €xpztimct 
 
 history have been accustomed to express their 
 relation to sacrifice, though they have some- 
 times understood it to signify their acceptance 
 of Christ's sacrifice instead of their obhgation 
 to sacrifice for others. Unfortunately, the 
 Communion of the Lord's Supper, like the 
 ordinance of baptism, has been appropriated 
 by the Church as a sacrament. More unfor- 
 tunate still, most branches of the Christian 
 Church have insisted that only those can prop- 
 erly commune who have been conventionally 
 inducted into church membership. There was 
 no organized church, however, when Jesus in- 
 stituted the Lord's Supper. Those who com- 
 muned with him at the first table of our Lord 
 had confessed no definite creed nor observed 
 any fixed ecclesiastical ceremony. 
 Another unfortunate circumstance is that the 
 Church Universal is not agreed as to the exact 
 significance of that institution which they have 
 called a sacrament. A part of the Church has 
 made the Lord's Supper to mean only an act in 
 memory of the sacrifice of Christ. Another por- 
 tion of the Church has considered it to embody 
 [79] 
 
Wi^at i^ (B^^mtial 
 
 the actual presence of the body and blood of 
 him who died that men might live. Sadly has 
 the entire Church been prone to miss the full 
 significance of the institution, as the expression 
 of the communicant's willingness to sacrifice in 
 Christ's spirit. But only as such does the com- 
 munion of the Lord's Supper have vital signifi- 
 cance to the true Christian. He may by the 
 communion reverently and adorably remember 
 the sacrifice of Christ, but unless he also ex- 
 presses in the communion his own acceptance of 
 Christ's method of service, the communion in 
 itself will have no practical effect upon his 
 Christian living. If the communion is to mean 
 anything vital to the Christian, it must mean 
 the expression of the truth that like Jesus, he 
 has experienced the obligation upon him of 
 love's one way of service. 
 Let the Christian become conscious within him- 
 self of his acceptance of the way of sacrifice, 
 and he may express this inner experience in any 
 outward observance that may seem to him to be 
 adequate. He may express it in the worship of 
 the Mass. He may express it by receiving the 
 [80] 
 
W^at i^ ti^e dmntial Cjcpertence 
 
 emblems of sacrifice from the hands of the 
 serving deacons or rectors. He may express it 
 in the moment of silent communion without 
 visible emblems. Or he may express it in no 
 church ordinance at all, but only in the secrecy 
 of his own heart. But however he may choose 
 to express his community with the sacrifice of 
 Christ, let him be sure that he feels it. For he 
 cannot truly be a Christian unless with Christ 
 he has consciously accepted the obligation and 
 the privilege of sacrificing service. 
 Let us briefly summarize the results of our in- 
 quiry concerning the Christian's essential ex- 
 periences. They must be in spirit like the ex- 
 periences of Jesus himself. Like Christ, the 
 Christian must become joyfully conscious of the 
 compulsion of his filial relationship with God. 
 Like him, he must consciously and voluntarily 
 consecrate himself to the service of men. Like 
 him, he must definitely accept as the principle of 
 his life love's method of sacrifice. If to these 
 three essential experiences he must add the ex- 
 periences of repentance and of conversion, it is 
 not because of anything that is fundamental 
 [81] 
 
Wi^at tjs Cjsjsenttal 
 
 to his human nature ; it is because he has chosen 
 to go contrary to his God-created nature into 
 ways of selfishness and of sin. Though we 
 must admit that it will be some time before the 
 ideal evolutionary experiences of Jesus him- 
 self will be all that the Christian needs, we must 
 be careful to remember that the revolutionary 
 experiences are necessary only because of the 
 interference of sin, and not because they are in 
 any ways involved in the nature of the religion 
 of Jesus. Men may need to be "saved by 
 grace." They ought to need only to "grow in 
 grace." 
 
 The essential Christian experiences are the ex- 
 periences of Jesus. 
 
 [82] 
 
CHAPTER FOURTH 
 
 Eebelatton? 
 
 Sec. 1. TJie Bible; Its Accepted Preeminence 
 
 F an intelligent inhabitant of 
 Mars who had never heard of 
 Jesus of Nazareth should 
 visit the earth, and should be- 
 gin a careful study of the re- 
 ligion called Christian, he 
 would naturally conclude that the religion was 
 founded upon a Book instead of upon a Life. 
 To this erroneous conclusion he would be led 
 by the observation of many things. 
 In the first place he would observe that the 
 preachers of the Christian religion are accus- 
 tomed to base their homilies and exhortations 
 upon passages taken from only one Book. He 
 would observe that as a rule these preachers 
 make no careful distinctions between the parts 
 of the Book, that they reinforce their state- 
 [83] 
 
W}^at i^ €^^mtial 
 
 ments with impartiality by words taken from 
 the Gospels, or from the Epistles, from the 
 Book of Genesis, or from the Book of Revela- 
 tion. What is more pertinent, he would ob- 
 serve that these preachers give reverence to the 
 utterances of certain Jewish writers, who never 
 knew Christ at all, but who lived centuries be- 
 fore his day, and that they give to these pre- 
 Christian writers more reverence than they are 
 wont to accord to any modern Christian student 
 of Christ's life. In brief, this intelligent ob- 
 server would find the accredited preachers of 
 the religion of Christ to be Bible preachers. 
 Again, this keen and interested student of the 
 Christian religion would observe that in the 
 schools where the Christian religion is taught to 
 children and youth the only text-book in com- 
 mon use is the same single Book. He would 
 find the entire body of Christian youths de- 
 voting much time to the study of Joshua, and of 
 Samson, and of Elijah, gravely and reverently 
 considering such incidents of unreligious value 
 as the tying of firebrands to the tails of foxes, 
 or as the ascent into the clouds of a prophet in 
 [84] 
 
I^i^at ijs ti^e CjSjsential Eetielatton 
 
 a chariot of fire. But he would note that this 
 body of Christian pupils gives little, if any at- 
 tention to the development of the religion of 
 Christ after the first century, that it spends 
 practically no time at all upon the discussion of 
 present-day Christianity, and that it evidently 
 ignores altogether the biographies of Christian 
 heroes of modern times as well as the applica- 
 tion of Christian principles to modern condi- 
 tions. In short, he would find the only recog- 
 nized school of the Christian religion to be a 
 Bible school. 
 
 Once more, our imaginary Martian visitor 
 would discover that among professed Chris- 
 tians the question of the authority of their re- 
 ligion is apparently inseparable from the ques- 
 tion of the authority of this same all-important 
 Book. He would learn that no suggestion of 
 literary criticism of the Book has ever yet been 
 given to the world that has not been supposed 
 at first to threaten the spiritual vitality of the 
 religion. He would discover that even to this 
 day the careful critics of the Bible are held by 
 some to be destroyers of the very religion of 
 [85] 
 
3^]^at iss €^mxtial 
 
 Christ. In other words, the questioning student 
 of our religion would find that the authority of 
 the religion seems inextricably confused with 
 the question of Biblical interpretation. 
 Who could blame this Martian, then, if in view 
 of all these observations he should say that he 
 perceived that men called themselves Chris- 
 tians because they believed in a Book .'' How 
 could we justly criticise him if he failed alto- 
 gether to discern that Christianity in its essence 
 is a manner of Life.'' Nay, more, so long as 
 this indiscriminating and exclusive authority is 
 given to all of the body of Jewish literature 
 which happens to be bound in one volume, how 
 can we reasonably expect any real student of 
 our religion to escape the error of our imaginary 
 student ? 
 
 Yet Jesus himself declared that he was the Way, 
 he was the Truth, he was the Life. Most clearly 
 indeed did Jesus evidence his own emancipation 
 from observances and ceremonies commanded 
 by those books which the followers of Jesus 
 still hold to be most sacred and authoritative. 
 Most emphatically did Jesus teach that vitally 
 [86] 
 
W\)at 10 ti^e CjJjscntial Eebelation 
 
 to believe in him meant really to have fellow- 
 ship with his spirit, and that the authority of 
 his religion could have no recognized basis ex- 
 cept the authority of him who dared to affirm, 
 "/ say unto you." 
 
 Sec. 2. The Bible; Its Fundamental 
 Helpfulness 
 
 Wherein, then, shall we find any need of the 
 Bible in the life of the Christian ? 
 One suggested answer to this pertinent ques- 
 tion is as follows: We, as Christians, need the 
 Bible because the Bible is our only source 
 of information concerning Christ. Evidently, 
 however, this answer is at best only partial. 
 The direct information concerning Christ 
 which the Bible furnishes is limited to a very 
 few pages. We have practically all of it in 
 any one of the Synoptic Gospels. Indeed, not 
 the whole of any of these Gospels would be 
 absolutely necessary for the sole purpose of 
 obtaining facts and information concerning 
 Christ. For much of each of the Gospels is 
 occupied with the observations and deduc- 
 [87] 
 
Wi^at (j8 (t^^mtial 
 
 tions of the author, and with other like extra- 
 neous matter. Shall we say that the chapters 
 which relate the bare facts of the incidents 
 of his life and his simple unedited sayings 
 are all that we need from the Bible ? This, 
 indeed, is a fundamental need of the Book, 
 but it is not its whole need. 
 A more comprehensive answer to our question 
 has been thus suggested. We need the entire 
 Bible because it is the setting of the jewel of 
 the actual Christ biography. We need the 
 Old Testament because it leads up to Christ, 
 and the New Testament because it develops 
 from Christ. Just as no man's life can be 
 thoroughly understood apart from its connec- 
 tion with precedent and subsequent events, 
 so we cannot hope to know the historic Christ 
 apart from the history of his people. This 
 also explains in part why the Bible is funda- 
 mentally helpful to the Christian, but not 
 even yet have we found the complete answer 
 to our query. 
 
 It is not simply the historic Christ whom Chris- 
 tians need to know. If the Christian be he 
 [88] 
 
W^at i^ t)^t t^^mtial Eebelation 
 
 who is striving to be actuated by the spirit of 
 Christ, and not merely he who seeks to imitate 
 the particular things which Christ did, then 
 the Christian needs to know more than the 
 human setting of the historic Jesus. He needs 
 to know the divine setting which was the eternal 
 spirit manifested in Jesus. He needs to know 
 not only the one actual and supreme example 
 of the suffering of eternal love; he needs to 
 know the yearning love itself which was thus 
 exemplified. To know Jesus Christ is not all 
 of that "eternal life" which is but another 
 name for the Christlike life. Back of the knowl- 
 edge of this one concrete expression of love in 
 Christ there must be, according to the Savior's 
 own words, the knowledge of "the one true 
 God." 
 
 The Bible is a help to the Christian in his 
 quest for God. In it he can study the revela- 
 tion of God historically, in the relation of Je- 
 hovah to the people of Israel. In the Bible 
 he can study the revelation of God as an evolu- 
 tion, from the crudest conception of a jealous, 
 partial, unapproachable and unnamable deity 
 [89] 
 
^]^at ii8 e^^mtial 
 
 up to the apprehension of Him as the loving, 
 forgiving Father of all mankind. In the Bible 
 he can study God inspirationally, deriving 
 from prophecy and from psalm, from history 
 and from legend, from parable and from fact, 
 many uplifting and ennobling thoughts of his 
 relation to "Him in whom we live and move 
 and have our being." Thus through the Bible 
 do we come to know something of Him who 
 in essence is a spirit, and whose final defini- 
 tion is Love. Thus can we be helped to 
 know something of Him whose spirit of love 
 Christ tried to show to all the world. The 
 Life is the fundamental revelation of Love. 
 The Bible is the revelation of that Life's in- 
 spiration. 
 
 Sec. 3. The Revelation in Christ 
 
 The life of Christ is to the Christian the most 
 fundamental and vital revelation of God. But 
 when we think of Christ's life as the revelation 
 of God, we must be careful to include all the 
 life, — its birth, its development, its ministry, 
 its suffering, and its sacrifice. 
 [90] 
 
To say that Christ has revealed God only in 
 the sacrifice of Calvary is unduly to limit the 
 meaning of his life. The death was only the 
 end of the life of revelation and, as has been 
 suggested in a previous chapter, the particular 
 manner of the death was due to the sinful 
 bigotry of the scribes and Pharisees and to 
 the sinful cowardice of the Roman Governor, 
 Pilate. On the other hand, to say that Christ 
 revealed God only because of a supposed 
 miracle connected with his advent upon the 
 earth is unduly to limit the manifestation of 
 God to the unusual, the spectacular, and the 
 inexplicable. Those who base their acceptance 
 of the revelation of God in Christ only upon 
 some theory of sacrificial atonement, or only 
 upon some mystery of divine incarnation, are 
 alike negligent of the whole meaning and value 
 of his life to the struggling Christian. Irre- 
 spective of what may seem to the individual 
 Christian to be a reasonable theological be- 
 lief about Christ's relation to God, all Chris- 
 tians may find in him the revelation of God. 
 In Christ they are not merely to believe that 
 [91] 
 
^]^at 10 Cjsjsenttal 
 
 God was in the world, in Christ they are really 
 to see God in the world. 
 
 In the birth at Bethlehem they are to see, not 
 the result of a mystery, but the beginning of a 
 life of reality. In the boy's obedience to his 
 Nazarene parents, they are to learn that the 
 way of the development of the life divine is the 
 way of humble submission. In Christ's minis- 
 try to the sick and in his tenderness with the 
 sinful they are to discern how God deals with 
 the unfortunate in body and in soul. In the 
 suffering of Jesus which finds its best expres- 
 sion in the words, "How often would I have 
 gathered ye, and ye would not" they are to 
 catch some glimpse of the suffering, bleeding 
 heart of infinite Love rejected. In the blazing 
 indignation of this divine man of purity and 
 of love, in his scathing denunciation of hypoc- 
 risy, and in his fearless cleansing of the syna- 
 gogue's corruption, they are to see the reverse 
 side of the love of the infinite, the inevitable 
 wrath of that divine love against all forms of 
 unrepented pride and greed. And, finally, in the 
 death on the cross they are to discover some- 
 [92] 
 
thing of the immensity of the love that counts 
 no cost of sacrifice too much to pay for the joy 
 of service and of helpfulness. 
 God was in this life of infantile weakness and 
 of natural human development; God was in 
 this life of ministry to the needy and of the 
 forgiveness of the sinner; God was in this life 
 of righteous indignation and of purifying love; 
 God was in this life of suffering love and of 
 costly sacrifice. Whether we call Jesus the 
 Incarnate Son of God, the Sacrificial Atone- 
 ment, or the Perfect Man, the fact that his 
 life revealed God remains unaltered. 
 The Christian who has found God in Christ 
 has found his dearest and most vital revela- 
 tion both of the Father's love and of the 
 Father's will. Without this recognition of 
 God in the life of his espoused Master and 
 Lord, the Christian is deprived of that divine 
 causality which alone can make his religion 
 vital and efficient. To attempt to follow Jesus 
 merely as a good man whose life reveals no 
 eternal divine essence, is the attempt to measure 
 one's religious life by a mere human standard; 
 [93] 
 
W}^at i^ (B^^mtial 
 
 but the attempt to follow God as revealed 
 in the life of Jesus connects the Christian's 
 Christlike endeavors with the divine purpose, 
 and makes the goal of his religious aspiration 
 nothing less than the limitless, eternal truth 
 and boundless love of God himself. 
 
 Sec. 4. The Revelation in Humanity 
 
 Such a conception of the revelation of God in 
 Christ as that suggested in our last section 
 necessitates as its corollary the discernment 
 of His revelation of Himself in all humanity. 
 If the revelation of God in Christ depended 
 upon any theological conception of Christ's 
 uniqueness, we might assume that no natural 
 man could ever reveal God. But if we dis- 
 cern in Christ's life of service and of sacrifice 
 a revelation of God which is absolutely inde- 
 pendent of any conception of his preexistence 
 or of his postexistence, of his miraculous birth 
 or of his sacrificial death, then we must admit 
 the truth that the same God may be revealed 
 in a similar way by any human being. We 
 must then recognize that God is revealed in 
 [94] 
 
l^i^at i^ tl^e tmtntial MtUlation 
 
 all acts of love and of service performed by 
 any of his children anywhere. We must rec- 
 ognize in all humanity the capacity for God. 
 The Christian v/ho can thus discern in his 
 fellow men the revelation of God does thereby 
 establish a basis for hopeful Christian service 
 without which his Christian life would be 
 narrow, one-sided, and inefficient. This Chris- 
 tian sees in all men, even the basest, the possi- 
 bility of Godlikeness. He touches the life of 
 the individual sinner with the expectant hope 
 that the touch will prove effective because of a 
 response from the indwelling germ of divine- 
 ness. He works for the redemption of society, 
 inspired and emboldened to appeal to the moral 
 consciousness of men by the assurance that the 
 so-called "public conscience" is the evidence of 
 the indwelling God. He hopes for the ultimate 
 victory of justice and of purity, of honor and of 
 righteousness, because he sees God in men and 
 he knows that greater is He who is within them 
 than any power of evil outside them. 
 Again, the Christian who has found the revela- 
 tion of God in humanity has discerned his 
 [95] 
 
W^at i^ e^^tntial 
 
 own relation to humanity. To this man the 
 human race is not a conglomeration of unre- 
 lated individuals, but a molecule of which 
 every individual is a needed atom. When he 
 has seen God in his fellow men, the Christian 
 has caught some glimpse of the meaning of 
 divine brotherhood. He has made some ad- 
 vance in the perception of the one divine 
 family whose Father is God and whose ideal 
 is unity with God. Perceiving the unity of 
 the family of God, he has conceived himself 
 as an essential part of the divine family, an 
 entity in the unity, an individuality with in- 
 dividual powers and functions, — but a needed 
 member with all his fellow men in the one 
 divine brotherhood. 
 
 The brotherhood of man is conditioned not 
 only by the Fatherhood of God, but by the 
 existence of a divine parental likeness in every 
 human being. So the Christian, who to be a 
 Christian must live in brotherly relations with 
 his fellows, must be able to discern God's pres- 
 ence in them all. The nature of his Christian 
 service is not to bring God into men's lives, 
 [96] 
 
Wl^at i^ t})t (Bmntial MtUlation 
 
 but to help them in their lives to manifest the 
 God-Spirit already there. 
 
 In the life of Christ the Christian sees the 
 revelation of God in that life's uninterrupted 
 sinlessness and in its perfect love. In the 
 lives of other men he sees the revelation of 
 God in their occasional victories and benefac- 
 tions. In the lives of all men he sees the reve- 
 lation of God in their potential victory over 
 sin and in their power of righteousness. Pat- 
 terning his life after the most perfect revelation 
 he follows God in Christ, and thus he helps 
 to bring men to a realization of the God in 
 themselves. 
 
 Sec. 5. The True Test of all Inspired Revelation 
 
 In the previous sections of this chapter we 
 have tried to suggest the fundamental help- 
 fulness to the Christian of the Biblical revela- 
 tion, and the vital way in which he may view 
 the revelation of God both in Christ and in all 
 humanity. But we have not yet exhausted 
 all the ways in which God reveals Himself to 
 men, nor could the subject be treated exhaust- 
 [97] 
 
W\^at ijs e^^mtial 
 
 ively within the limits of any one volume. 
 Here there can be indicated only the sure test 
 of all divine revelation. 
 
 The test of an inspired revelation of God is 
 the measure of its inspiration of men. When 
 we apply this test to the Bible, we cannot be- 
 lieve either that all portions of the Bible are 
 equally inspired, or that the possibilities of writ- 
 ten revelation have been exhausted in canon- 
 ical scriptures. When we apply the test to the 
 life of Christ, we cannot believe either that all 
 acts of Christ reveal God with equal force and 
 power, or that all the possible living revela- 
 tions of God were exhausted in this one su- 
 preme revelation. 
 
 Let us apply the test more in detail. First, to 
 written revelation. What writing contains the 
 more inspiring revelation of God, — the book 
 of Esther wherein God is not once named, or 
 the book of the " Pilgrim's Progress " wherein 
 the soul experiences of the aspirant after a 
 godly life are most clearly portrayed ? Shall 
 we give to the love poems of the Song of Solo- 
 mon a position of sacred honor which we shall 
 [98] 
 
W^at 10 tl^e CjSjsential ISebelation 
 
 deny to the poems of John Milton ? Shall we 
 reverence the history of the children of Israel 
 of a thousand years before Christ, and not 
 reverence the Christian history of all the 
 children of God of a thousand and more years 
 after Christ? Shall we find an inspiring reve- 
 lation of God in the account of an ancient 
 people's ascent from slavery, and find no in- 
 spiring revelation of the same God in the rec- 
 ord of a modern people's advancement in 
 civilization ? Shall we derive religious inspi- 
 ration from the homilies and exhortations of 
 Isaiah and Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and deny 
 all inspirational value to the sermons of Spur- 
 geon and Beecher and Brooks and Moody? 
 Shall we attribute to the personal letter of 
 Paul addressed to his friend Philemon a vital 
 religious helpfulness which we shall deny to 
 be present in the letters of a foreign missionary 
 in Africa or in India addressed to his praying 
 friends and supporters in America ? Shall we 
 conceive that John's vision on the Isle of 
 Patmos was inspired, and that Lowell's 
 " Vision of Sir Launfal" was uninspired ? 
 [99] 
 
^l^at i^ €mntial 
 
 When we ask ourselves such questions as these, 
 the truth confronts us that the vital Christian 
 revelation cannot be limited to the writings of 
 any age or of any people. The real value of the 
 writing is to be measured only by the good it 
 inspires in the reader. The test of its inspira- 
 tion lies not in its canonicity, but in its helpful- 
 ness. 
 
 When we apply this test, the measure of its in- 
 spiring power, to the living revelation in Christ, 
 we must ask such questions as these: Must we 
 believe that Christ's reported blasting of the 
 fig tree presents an inspiring revelation of God 
 just because it was done by Christ ? Must we 
 say that the recorded spectacular appearance 
 of Jesus walking upon the water is of as much 
 inspirational value to us as the account of his un- 
 selfish prayer for his murderers ? Can we find 
 God in the cures of Jesus whose method we do 
 not yet understand, and fail to find Him in the 
 more numerous but after all more wonder- 
 ful cures of modern physicians accomplished 
 through the understanding of God's laws and 
 the application of God's remedies? Because 
 [100] 
 
Wi^at tjS ti^e t^^zntial ISebelation 
 
 the sacrifice of Jesus seems to us to manifest 
 the supreme love of God must we therefore 
 deny the existence of any revelation of God's 
 love in the redemptive suffering of martyred 
 Christians, of patriotic and heroic soldiers 
 murdered in the cause of justice, or of yearn- 
 ing, anxious parents dying of broken hearts for 
 their wayward sons and daughters ? 
 Just to ask these questions is to suggest their 
 answers. There is only one healing, redeem- 
 ing power in all the universe. It is God's 
 power. Wherever and by whomsoever we see 
 the process of redemption going on, there we 
 know that we see the revelation of God's 
 power. So there is only one kind of real love 
 in the world. It is God's kind, the kind that is 
 unselfish to the cost of sacrifice. Wherever and 
 in whomsoever we see the sacrifice of unselfish- 
 ness, there we see the revelation of the love that 
 is God's. The religious value of the revealing 
 life of Jesus of Nazareth or of the life of any 
 other man, is to be measured wholly by the 
 good influence of that life. Again, the test of 
 its inspiration by God and of its revelation of 
 [101] 
 
I^l^at i.^ emntial 
 
 God, is to be estimated by its power to inspire 
 and help others. 
 
 It is significant that Jesus evidently found more 
 inspiration in contemporary events than in the 
 sacred writings of his people. The texts of his 
 sermons were suggested by Nature more often 
 than by the Law or the Prophets. His truths 
 were enforced by parables more than by Bib- 
 lical citations. To him, God was revealed in 
 the self-sacrificing generosity of the widow with 
 her two mites as well as in the commandments 
 of Moses, — in the beautiful adornment of the 
 lilies of the field as well as in the prophecies of 
 Isaiah and of Jeremiah. 
 
 To know God as Jesus knew him is the Chris- 
 tian's ideal, and whatever reveals to him God is 
 the vital Christian revelation. He may find the 
 revelation of God in writings called sacred or 
 secular. He may find the revelation in a scien- 
 tific treatise; he may find it in history or in bi- 
 ography ; he may find it even in some recorded 
 event of current history, in some newspaper 
 item of the biography of the living. He may 
 find God in ancient poetry or in modern poetry, 
 [102] 
 
W\iat ijs ti^e tmntial muiation 
 
 in psalm or in hymn, in prophecy or in sermon. 
 He may find Him revealed in the written pages 
 of books, or in the more beautiful unwritten 
 pages of Nature. But wherever or however he 
 may find God, revealed in His majesty and 
 wisdom and beneficence and love, there has he 
 found the very essence of the Christian revela- 
 tion. 
 
 To the Christian, as to Jesus, the essential Chris- 
 tian revelation is all that, and only that, which to 
 him manifests God. 
 
 [103] 
 
CHAPTER FIFTH 
 
 
 
 Sec. 1. The Historic Church 
 
 FTER the death of Jesus his 
 disciples fell into the habit 
 of assembling themselves to- 
 gether for confession, for mu- 
 tual encouragement, and for 
 united helpfulness. The first 
 of such assemblies as recorded in the narrative 
 of the Acts of the Apostles occurred in the upper 
 room at Jerusalem, possibly the same room 
 wherein Jesus in company with his disciples 
 had celebrated the last Passover. 
 The room was hallowed by sacred memories. 
 Just as many a bereaved heart has experienced 
 a sense of the nearness of the departed in some 
 spot beloved for its intimate associations, so here 
 the bereaved disciples of Jesus came close to the 
 spiritual presence of him whom they mourned. 
 [105] 
 
W]^at i^ e^^mtial 
 
 It was natural that in this hallowed place the 
 disciples should receive new inspiration con- 
 cerning the nature of the work they were to do 
 in the name of Christ, as well as an endowment 
 of power for the accomplishment of that work. 
 Out from this meeting place they went to teach 
 and to preach, and to make converts to their 
 cause. From the meeting there thus developed 
 the beginning of the propaganda of the Chris- 
 tian religion. 
 
 By insensible degrees, however, the public 
 assembly began to assume new prerogatives. 
 After a while the Christians came together no 
 longer merely for confession, for inspiration, 
 and for power; they came together for the dis- 
 cussion of doctrine and for the establishment of 
 government. No thoughtful person will say 
 that either was unnecessary. The rapidly in- 
 creasing number of Christ's followers could 
 never have become a force in the world without 
 organization, and no organization could have 
 been efficient which did not seek both to sat- 
 isfy men's intellects, and to command their alle- 
 giance. Hence the beginning of the Church as 
 [106] 
 
we know it to-day, not simply an assembly of 
 Christians, but an organization of Christians, 
 adhering to some form of government and 
 avowing some kind of doctrine. 
 It was natural that the doctrine which the 
 organized followers of Jesus avowed should 
 become more and more particularized as the 
 years passed by. But as the doctrines became 
 attenuated, there inevitably arose diversities 
 of opinion. Whereas all Christians could be 
 agreed, for instance, in the doctrine that Christ 
 was their Savior, when men began to ques- 
 tion as to how he became their Savior there 
 followed necessarily endless discussions. On 
 general truths men can be generally united; 
 upon the specific, explanatory details of those 
 truths, we may expect that they will always be 
 divided. 
 
 Moreover, not only did the doctrines of the 
 Church become particularized, but the govern- 
 ment of the Church became abused. The recog- 
 nized heads of the Church, in theory successors 
 to Peter and to Christ himself, became in prac- 
 tice too much the seekers after their own selfish 
 
 r 107 1 
 
a^i^at f j3 CjSjsenttal 
 
 ends. The government of the Church was used 
 for the furtherance of men's private greed, and 
 for the usurpation of temporal authority. 
 The great Protestant movement was in reality 
 a demand for the restoration in the Church's 
 government of the principle of Christ's unself- 
 ishness. But Protestantism in turn came to 
 manifest a tendency to the arrogant assump- 
 tion of authority. And in Protestant churches 
 the abuse of power has given rise to new prot- 
 estations, and new divisions, until one wonders 
 if the divisive process will ever end. 
 By these two influences, the particularization 
 of doctrine and the abuse of the power of gov- 
 ernment, it has come to pass that the Church 
 Universal is to-day apparently universal in 
 little more than its name. After nearly twenty 
 centuries of Christian history it has been es- 
 timated that there are at present one hundred 
 and eighty-six different sects of Christians. 
 They differ from each other on matters of doc- 
 trine and of ritual and of government. All 
 are avowedly based upon the authority of the 
 one Christ. But they do not all sympathet- 
 [108] 
 
ically try to understand each other's point of 
 view, while some even refuse to recognize as 
 real Christians all those who do not worship 
 with themselves. Meanwhile, the unchurched 
 masses look at the minutely divided Church 
 with amazement, sometimes with amusement. 
 And when they see professed Christian men 
 and women zealous only for the welfare of their 
 own church and often jealous of the prosperity 
 of a neighboring church, they think, and some 
 of them say, that the professed religion of Jesus 
 is indistinguishable from a narrow and bigoted 
 ecclesiasticism. 
 
 Sec. 2. The Church, a Means to an End 
 
 There is some excuse for the unchurched ob- 
 server's mistake in confusing Christianity with 
 ecclesiasticism, for indeed many church people 
 are apparently more interested in the main- 
 tenance of the prosperity of their own particu- 
 lar church than in the promotion of Christ's 
 universal kingdom of love. 
 There are church people, for instance, who 
 seem to feel that they have done their whole 
 [109] 
 
W^at tjs CjJjSenttal 
 
 Christian duty if they but pay money into their 
 own church's treasury. Some of these people 
 give most generously and liberally. They erect 
 costly church edifices, which they furnish lux- 
 uriously. Their church is richly carpeted. 
 Their pews are deeply cushioned. Their me- 
 morial windows are most magnificent. Their 
 organ is as expensive as it is sonorous. The 
 choir of their church is widely advertised as the 
 most liberally paid of any in the city. Their 
 preacher is the most eloquent who can be lured 
 from some smaller and more plebeian congrega- 
 tion by the pressing necessity of a larger salary. 
 And some of the supporters of this richly en- 
 dowed church sit comfortably in their cush- 
 ioned pews of a Sunday morning in the smug 
 self-satisfaction that they have ministered unto 
 the Lord, when really they have but provided 
 themselves with the beautiful things that are 
 pleasing to their own cultured eyes, and with 
 the melodious sounds that are soothing to their 
 own aesthetic ears. For men to provide for 
 themselves a suitable place wherein to worship 
 God ought not to be considered in itself any 
 [110] 
 
more really a Christian enterprise than for them 
 to provide for themselves a place wherein they 
 can eat and sleep, or a place wherein they can 
 mingle with their exclusive friends in social 
 intercourse and amusement. 
 Nor is this all. Many church people, who would 
 scorn to think they had done all of their Chris- 
 tian duty by giving money to their own church, 
 seem to think that they have done all that can 
 be required of them by giving time to the 
 church. To these the end of the Christian life 
 seems to be not merely the maintenance of a 
 beautiful church building, but the maintenance 
 of the conventional institutions of a churchly 
 activity. These go always to the Sunday morn- 
 ing and evening services of their church. They 
 attend its midweek prayer meeting or lecture. 
 They send their children to Sunday School and 
 their young people to its Christian Endeavor 
 Society. They belong to its Men's Club or to 
 its Women's Sewing Circle. They patronize 
 its socials, its entertainments, and its fairs. 
 They expect their hired minister to give all his 
 time and energy to the maintenance of this 
 [111] 
 
3^]^at t0 Cjs^enttal 
 
 little round of ecclesiastical activity, and they 
 estimate the help their church may be in God's 
 kingdom only by the size of its prayer meeting, 
 by the attendance at its social functions, and 
 by the increase of its own membership. But 
 meanwhile, for men to maintain an actively 
 flourishing church may not in itself be any 
 more truly a Christlike activity than for them 
 to maintain a flourishing business or a flourish- 
 ing lodge or a flourishing club. 
 The Church at its very best is only a means to 
 an end, never an end in itself. The one end of 
 the Church's existence is the promotion of the 
 religion of Jesus. 
 
 If this proposition needed any demonstration 
 the history of the foundation of the church 
 would be sufficient. The Church was estab- 
 lished by Christians from motives of expedi- 
 ency and from the felt need for fellowship and 
 collective instruction. It was not organized 
 for the promotion of its own welfare, but to help 
 Christians in the promotion of their Christian 
 living. Historically, the Church, like the Sab- 
 bath, was made for man, not man for the Church. 
 [112] 
 
If Christians no longer need the Church to help 
 them to live Christ's life, then the Church has 
 no reason for its continued existence. Surely 
 no church has the right to demand the devo- 
 tion and homage of the Christian people of the 
 twentieth century just because the Christians 
 of the first century found it advisable and help- 
 ful to come together in the public assembly for 
 worship, for instruction, for mutual comfort, 
 and for fraternal fellowship. The Church can- 
 not be considered as divine in its inception and 
 divine in its continued existence apart from its 
 continued helpfulness to men. 
 And just as the Church itself has no reason for 
 existence apart from its usefulness, so no spe- 
 cialized activity of the Church can be con- 
 sidered necessary which has lost its power of 
 helpfulness. If the prayer meeting cannot be 
 helpful to the promotion of Christian living 
 there is no reason why it should be maintained. 
 If the socials cannot minister to the Christian 
 welfare of men, they should be abandoned. 
 The Church and all customary avenues of the 
 Church's activity are of use only as they have 
 [113] 
 
WW i^ CjSjsential 
 
 in themselves the power to inspire men and to 
 help men to live like Christ. The end of these 
 churchly activities is not their own prosperity 
 and liveliness, the end is their service in the 
 promotion of the kingdom of God. 
 
 Sec. 3. The Distinctive Function of the Church 
 
 As has been indicated in the preceding section, 
 it is the one distinctive function of the Church 
 to promote the Christian life, — not only the 
 Christian life of its own constituency but also 
 the Christian life of the community and of the 
 world. 
 
 To accomplish this one purpose of its existence, 
 the Church must do more than to furnish a form 
 of worship which shall be pleasing to its own 
 members. It must furnish a worship that shall 
 be vital and strengthening. The worship must 
 be nutritious. It must be in the nature of spir- 
 itual food which the worshipers can assimilate 
 and digest, and which shall strengthen them 
 for the toils and trials and temptations of their 
 daily life. It is the object of the Church not 
 merely to bring its members to worship God, 
 [114] 
 
but through their worship to strengthen them 
 for the service of men. 
 
 The Church must do more than to teach theo- 
 logical truths and to expound Biblical passages. 
 It must apply the truths to the present needs, 
 not only of the listening congregation, but of 
 society at large to which this one congregation 
 must minister. It must not, then, be content 
 with teaching the truth, it must inspire right- 
 eousness. It must send men out of the Church, 
 not merely saying, "How true this is which I 
 have heard to-day" but saying, "How impera- 
 tive it is that I should try to do what I have 
 heard this day." It is not the function of the 
 Church to make men believe, but to make 
 them do. 
 
 The Church must do more than to equip gym- 
 nasiums and maintain industrial bureaus. It 
 must do more than to establish evening schools 
 and to provide secular instruction. It must do 
 more even than to convert its assembly rooms 
 into clinics, and to advertise to cure the sick 
 either by faith or by hypnotism, or by the 
 vaunted knowledge of the nothingness of matter 
 [115] 
 
W\^at t0 cEjSjsential 
 
 and the allness of mind. All these physiolog- 
 ical, industrial and intellectual activities are, 
 indeed, Christian activities, but they can best 
 be performed by agencies wholly divorced from 
 the Church, by those men who are free from all 
 possible charge of narrow denominationalism, 
 by those who have been specially trained for 
 these specific parts of a truly Christian ministry. 
 But the Church must do more than these inas- 
 much as the source and the inspiration of any 
 movement are more than the movement itself. 
 The Church must inspire men to do under these 
 other Christian agencies this needed work of 
 ministry to others. It is not the function of the 
 Church to usurp the work of its industrial and 
 social allies in the promotion of God's Kingdom, 
 but so to interpret the religion of Jesus and so 
 to apply it to present conditions as to inspire 
 men to work with and through these allies for 
 the betterment of mankind. 
 The Church must do more than to purify 
 politics, to enforce law, or to cleanse munici- 
 palities. The Church cannot be a political 
 power, not even a political purifying power. 
 [116] 
 
The union of the State with the Church worked 
 disastrously for both. The assumption by 
 the Church of the functions of the State must 
 always end in disaster. But again, the Church 
 must do more than this in that the Church 
 must inculcate such a love for purity and 
 righteousness and such a hatred for vice and 
 sin as shall send men out from the Church on 
 fire with the righteous indignation of avenging 
 angels. With the " sword of the spirit " and with 
 the " breastplate of righteousness," the Church 
 must equip the soldiers of the army of God 
 who, under the flag of patriotic citizenship, 
 must fight the manifold forms of evil in both 
 municipality and nation; aye, and who will 
 fight until the victory of God is won. 
 It follows, finally, that the Church must do 
 more than to seek to increase its roll of mem- 
 bers. The end of the Church's existence is not 
 to make church members but to make work- 
 ing, helpful Christians, Instead of being con- 
 tent to get men into the Church, the Church 
 must be satisfied only when it sends men out 
 from the Church to serve other men. 
 [117] 
 
I^I^at 10 (B^^mtial 
 
 To interpret the religion of Jesus and to apply 
 that rehgion to present conditions and to pres- 
 ent needs; to inspire men to Hve Christ's re- 
 ligion, to do in the world the work of ministry 
 to the needy and of salvation to the sinful, — 
 to do the same kind of work to-day which 
 Jesus did in the first century in Judea and 
 Galilee; — this is the one essential function of 
 the Christian church. If it is doing this work, 
 its denominational name is of little interest, 
 its professed theology of little concern, its 
 accepted ritual an immaterial matter. If it 
 is not doing this work, no power of Pope or of 
 Synod, of presbytery or of episcopacy, can 
 save it from its deserved fate of annihilation. 
 Observers differ as to the real helpfulness of 
 the present Christian Church. Some writers 
 are marshaling the statistics of church mem- 
 bership and of church attendance, and from 
 these they are making the deduction that the 
 Church is declining in power and in influence. 
 Such statistics are utterly worthless, and the 
 conclusions drawn from them must be con- 
 sidered null and void; for the value of any 
 [118] 
 
church, — its real vahie to the Kingdom of 
 God, — is to be measured not by the size of its 
 membership or of its weekly congregations, 
 but by the extent of its influence in the world. 
 How many men are being inspired in the 
 Church and by the Church to live useful lives, 
 to be faithful and helpful in their homes, 
 honest and industrious in their business, clean 
 and patriotic in their citizenship, kind and 
 patient in their friendship, thoughtful and 
 generous in their benevolence ? These sta- 
 tistics are not at hand. But so long as one 
 man has been helped by the Church to be a 
 better man, the Church has justified its exist- 
 ence. And the Church which has helped 
 any can help all. 
 
 Sec. 4. The Assistance of Church Membership 
 
 Let us see now more in detail just what the 
 Christian needs from a church. Since historic- 
 ally there were Christians before there was any 
 church at all, logically it follows that there 
 may be Christians outside the Church. Chris- 
 tians, then, do not need the Church as a basis 
 [119] 
 
Wi^at i^ €mmtial 
 
 of their Christianity. No man can become a 
 Christian simply by joining a church, and no 
 church can justly claim that those not in its 
 membership are therefore not Christians. A 
 man is a Christian first, because he is trying 
 to be actuated by the spirit of Christ. He may 
 become a church member afterwards, because 
 through the organization of the Church he 
 believes he can best confess his Christian pur- 
 pose and assist in Christian activity. 
 The fundamental assistance of church mem- 
 bership to the Christian is this: the Church in 
 its purity offers to the individual Christian 
 the means of public confession; it offers, too, 
 the assistance of a mutual encouragement, 
 and the opportunity for united effort. Since 
 no man who is a social being can live any 
 phase of his life alone, he cannot expect to 
 live his Christian life alone. If he is really 
 Christlike, he will try to make others more 
 Christlike. If he is soundly logical, he will 
 perceive that he can do this best in fellow- 
 ship with others who are actuated by like 
 motives. 
 
 [120] 
 
But which one of the various churches shall 
 the Christian select as most helpful to himself ? 
 Unfortunately he has not perfect freedom of 
 choice. The insistence of churches upon the 
 acceptance of a detailed theology has excluded 
 many an earnest Christian from their helpful 
 fellowship, and the standard of membership 
 must be modified before many Christian men 
 of intellectual candor can honestly unite with 
 the Church. No church should demand as 
 its basis of membership anything other than a 
 declaration of Christian purpose and an assent 
 to a simple covenant, promising personal 
 allegiance to the church and brotherly regard 
 for all its members. If all churches should 
 agree in demanding this, and this only, the 
 much desired day of church unity would be 
 at hand. So long as churches insist upon 
 particular interpretations of dogma, so long 
 will the day of union be delayed. The Church 
 in its essence belongs rightly to all Christians, 
 whatever may be their different interpreta- 
 tions of theological doctrine. But we must 
 bring the Church back to the original purity 
 [121] 
 
WW tj8 CjSjsential 
 
 of that assembly in the upper room at Jerusa- 
 lem before we can expect it to be to Christians 
 all that ideally it should be. 
 Yet no Christian should refrain from joining 
 the Church because he fancies some of its mem- 
 bers may be narrow bigots. Among the great 
 variety of churches offered, it would seem that 
 every man ought to find some one wherein he 
 can conscientiously hope to advance the King- 
 dom of God upon the earth, and through 
 whose organization he can do Christlike work 
 shoulder to shoulder with his fellows. There 
 is an avowed sensitiveness concerning church 
 creeds and dogmas which sometimes amounts 
 to an excuse for the neglect of duty. Granted 
 that the churches of the day need purification, 
 granted that the most of them cling too closely 
 to the traditions of men and do not follow 
 closely enough the spirit of Jesus, the best 
 way to purify the Church is not to stand out- 
 side to criticise but to go in to cleanse. 
 The strong, broad-minded Christians who are 
 trying to live their life outside the Church 
 could do much to make the Church what it 
 [122] 
 
ought to be if they only would. The Church 
 needs them, and they need the Church. The 
 Church needs the help and the personal alle- 
 giance of all Christians in its efforts to Chris- 
 tianize the world. All Christians need the 
 Church in their efforts to follow Christ. Or- 
 ganization gives power. Public confession 
 generates personal responsibility. Fellowship 
 brings courage and strength. These things 
 the Church can give to the Christian. All 
 these the Christian needs if he is really to live 
 the Christlike life. 
 
 Sec. 5. The Value oj Public Worship 
 
 When a biographer of Robert Louis Stevenson 
 said of that illustrious author that "he was 
 too broad to worship God within the narrow 
 confines of any church edifice," he did not 
 mean his readers to infer that Mr. Stevenson 
 was irreligious. Indeed, quite the contrary. 
 The writer meant in substance to assert that 
 to Mr. Stevenson religious worship seemed 
 something too sublime and too divine to be 
 confined within the doors of human workman- 
 [123] 
 
Wl^at i^ e^^mtial 
 
 ship, something too personal and too private to 
 be paraded in piibHc, something which in its 
 nature was too exclusively a matter between 
 God and the individual to be shared with any 
 other human being. The writer would have us 
 believe that in order to preserve the sublimity 
 of his religion as well as to preserve his own 
 independence, Mr. Stevenson went "alone into 
 the woods to worship God," and refused to 
 worship with his fellow men in some church 
 edifice. 
 
 The genuineness of Mr. Stevenson's religious 
 nature is not here called in question. There 
 may be some natures who do not feel the need 
 for themselves of participation in any form of 
 public worship, but no man can live his Chris- 
 tian life only for himself. A genuinely religious 
 man may find all he needs to receive from wor- 
 ship in the woods alone with God, but the 
 truly Christian man cannot expect to give all 
 that he ought in worship except in the public 
 assembly. The fundamental helpfulness of 
 private worship is to get from God. An added 
 helpfulness in public worship is to give to men. 
 [124] 
 
True worship has its social as well as its per- 
 sonal value. It is, indeed, first of all a matter 
 between the individual soul and God, but just 
 because it is that, it becomes therefore a matter 
 between the individual soul and other souls. 
 The closer one comes to the divine love, the 
 more will one's heart be filled with human 
 love. If, indeed, the Christian by worship 
 comes near to God, he therefore by the same 
 act comes nearer to all his fellows. 
 Hence the value of public worship, not that 
 men should be "heard for their much speak- 
 ing," or reverenced either for their many 
 prayers or for their pious genuflections; but 
 that the worshipful heart of the individual 
 may communicate something of its worshipful 
 spirit to his neighbor, and that the soul aspir- 
 ing to God may help by its own aspiration to 
 bear some other soul nearer to Him. 
 When a man looks for the first time at the 
 sublimity of the great Falls of Niagara, or 
 when he but witnesses an unusually glorious 
 sunset, if he be a man who has known human 
 love, he wishes that his loved one might stand 
 [125] 
 
W]^at tj3 €j3j2Jential 
 
 at his side to share with him the inspiration 
 of the moment. If that loved one be by his 
 side, then the two sympathetic souls are drawn 
 closer together by this experience of their 
 mutual adoration of the sublime. 
 So when the soul looks upward to God, there 
 should naturally follow the wish for human 
 companionship. If the friend be by the side 
 of the worshiper, the two are drawn closer 
 together in their human love by this act of 
 their aspiration for the divine. There may be 
 some pathetically lonely souls who prefer to 
 stand without human companionship in the 
 presence of the manifestations of God. But 
 these are they who know nothing of the inevi- 
 table human overflow of the true worship of 
 the divine. 
 
 One could wish that Mr. Stevenson had been 
 able to discern that the public worshipers of 
 God were not bound by the narrow walls of 
 the church edifice, but by the natural ties of 
 similar aims and of common purposes. Had 
 he discerned this, he might have been able to 
 help others by sharing with them his religious 
 [ 126 ] 
 
aspirations, just as he helped so many by shar- 
 ing with them his hterary genius. 
 To help others, this is the fundamental aim of 
 the Christian, and he must not lose sight of 
 this aim in his worship of God any more than 
 in his more direct service for men. The most 
 valuable assistance which the Church has yet 
 been able to give to the Christian has been 
 the assistance of public worship. Wherever 
 the element of public worship has been mini- 
 mized in the Church, there the helpfulness of 
 the Church has been most meager. Should 
 this function of the Church's activity conceiv- 
 ably be omitted altogether, it is as well con- 
 ceivable that the Church would soon cease to 
 exist. 
 
 We must, of course, leave the particular form 
 of public worship to the choice of the individual. 
 He will be guided to his choice by youthful 
 training and by present environment. He 
 may be influenced by the limitations of oppor- 
 tunity, and by the demands of expediency. 
 Insistence upon any form should not be a 
 matter of conscience to any follower of him 
 [127] 
 
3^]^at t0 CjSjsenttal 
 
 who taught that not "in this mountain nor 
 yet in Jerusalem" but "in spirit and in truth," 
 should men worship the Father who is a 
 Spirit. 
 
 The Christian who is not unduly stiff or un- 
 sympathetically prejudiced ought to be able 
 to worship not only alone in the woods, but 
 also in whatever place and in whatever way 
 he may find his brethren honestly striving to 
 worship the Father of all mankind. When 
 thus he tries to embody in form or in ritual 
 the sincere spirit of the true worshiper, he will 
 always find help. He will find help for himself 
 because the act of worship will bring him out 
 of himself and into a closer touch with the in- 
 finite God. But, what is of more consequence, 
 he will also find the usefulness of his Christian 
 life increased by the overflow from his act of 
 worship which will touch with helpful sympathy 
 and uplifting power the hearts of all who wor- 
 ship with him. 
 
 The essential Christian Church is the assembly 
 
 of all those who in their worship would seek to 
 
 help others as well as themselves. It is the 
 
 [128] 
 
organization of those who, by the public pro- 
 fession of their Christian purpose and by 
 the mutual participation of their Christian serv- 
 ice, try to minister to others in the spirit of 
 Christ. 
 
 [129] 
 
CHAPTER SIXTH 
 
 actibitt? 
 
 Sec. 1. Christianity and Personal Salvation 
 
 FAVORITE word often upon 
 the lips of the Great Teacher 
 of the Christian religion was 
 the word " Watch." He bade 
 his hearers watch, for they 
 knew "neither the day nor 
 the hour wherein the Son of man cometh." 
 (Matt. 25: 13.) He enjoined the spirit of vigi- 
 lance upon his disciples, whose weary bodies 
 would not let them watch with him for one 
 hour. They were to watch, "that they enter 
 not into temptation." (Matt. 26 : 41.) 
 It seems evident from these and other similar 
 instructions of Jesus that in his mind vigilance 
 was one of the requisite modes of true Chris- 
 tian activity. It was not merely a vigilance 
 imposed by the possible unexpectedness of 
 [1311 
 
^l^at tjs Cjs^ential 
 
 death, but a vigilance imposed by the exigencies 
 of life. 
 
 We are very wrong if we think his parable of 
 the ten virgins had reference only to the com- 
 ing of the angel of death. The Bridegroom 
 does not come only to take men out of the 
 world, but also to fit them to live in the world. 
 Christians are not just to watch that they may 
 be ready to go to heaven when they die; they 
 are to watch that they may be ready to make 
 this world more like heaven while they live. 
 The Bridegroom is the opportunity for serv- 
 ice. The opportunity comes at the most unex- 
 pected moment. Sometimes, therefore, it finds 
 men ready, and sometimes unready. Some 
 have supplied the lamps of their personalities 
 with the equipment which enables them to 
 grasp the opportunity; and some dillydallying, 
 lackadaisical souls have neglected to provide 
 the necessary personal equipment, indulging 
 the fond and futile hope that they can grasp 
 the opportunity and shine in the world with no 
 need of a costly and painstaking preparation. 
 The figure of the parable thus understood 
 [132] 
 
clearly interprets the significance of Christ's 
 command to watch, and becomes most sug- 
 gestive to us in our attempt to understand the 
 nature of real and efficient Christian activity. 
 The watchfulness necessary in the Christian 
 is the preparedness of personal development. 
 It is not enough for the Christian to have good 
 intentions; he must fit himself for the accom- 
 plishment of good intentions. Neither to 
 mean to keep from evil nor to mean to do good 
 will make one a strong and active Christian; 
 only a preparedness to resist the evil and a 
 readiness to embrace the good will make his 
 professed Christianity really worth while. Both 
 according to Christ's teaching and according to 
 the experience of the human race, every true 
 man must be prepared for two emergencies: 
 on the one hand he must be ready to meet 
 the temptation to do evil, and on the other he 
 must be ready for the opportunities to do good. 
 He must watch for the coming both of the 
 " devil ' ' and of the " Son of man. " The " devil 
 comes to him as an angel of light, wearing many 
 and varying guises of allurement. The " Son of 
 [133] 
 
I^i^at 10 €^^tntial 
 
 man" comes to him in the person of every 
 needy soul whom he ought to help and whom 
 he might help if he were only ready. 
 Therefore it is a part of the true Christian 
 activity for every man to see that the lamp of 
 his own personality is fully equipped. He must 
 make and keep himself as strong physically 
 as it is possible for him to be. He must ob- 
 serve the laws of health and of hygiene. He 
 must exercise in the open air. He must be not 
 merely a total abstainer from some things, 
 but temperate in his use of all things. He 
 may need every ounce of his possible physical 
 strength some day to resist a strong tempta- 
 tion or to rescue a neighbor from danger. Aye, 
 he needs his strength every day to meet the 
 daily temptations and to help him to bear the 
 trials and to perform the duties of his every- 
 day life. 
 
 The Christian, too, must cultivate his mind. 
 He must not only study the thoughts of others; 
 he must learn to think for himself. He should 
 be clearly sure of his own position upon all 
 questions of domestic, industrial, social, po- 
 [134] 
 
W^at 10 ti^e CjsJjsmttal actttit^ 
 
 litical, and religious importance. He must be 
 able "to give a reason for the faith that is in 
 him." This, too, because a clear mind is one 
 of the best defenses against the insidious 
 suggestions of evil, and because by his clear 
 thinking he will always be ready for the oppor- 
 tunity to illuminate the pathway of his ques- 
 tioning, doubting, despairing friend. 
 Also, the true Christian must attend to the 
 distinctively spiritual equipment of his per- 
 sonality. He must use the means of spirit- 
 ual exercise which are the most beneficial to 
 himself, whether that exercise consists for the 
 most part in private prayer and personal 
 devotions or whether it be found in the more 
 energetic wrestlings with the powers of evil. 
 He must keep his own "conscience void of 
 offense towards God," for thus only will he 
 be able to withstand the "fiery darts of the 
 evil," and thus only will he win the confidence 
 of those men in need whom he must be ever 
 ready to help. 
 
 All these are distinctly personal equipments. 
 
 They are things which every man must get 
 
 [135] 
 
W}^at ijs (B^^mtial 
 
 for himself or go without. The wise virgins 
 did not give to their fooHsh sisters because 
 they were contemptibly stingy, but because 
 they were unable to give what was required. 
 "You can drive a horse to water but you can- 
 not make him drink." You can tell the youth 
 the underlying principles of health and strength, 
 but you cannot give him a strong body. You 
 may show him the way of knowledge, but you 
 cannot make him learned. You may expound 
 to men moral and religious precepts, but the 
 men will continue immoral and irreligious so 
 long as they will. There are some things 
 which every man must "go and buy" for 
 himself; and the cost price of these things 
 must be paid in the hard coin of one's own 
 personal experiences. 
 
 So there is a true sense in which some of the 
 activity of the Christian is concerned only 
 with himself. And here is the excuse for 
 preachers' continued insistence upon the ne- 
 cessity of personal salvation. Define personal 
 salvation as personal equipment for service; 
 describe the method of its attainment as that 
 [136] 
 
spirit of watchfulness which seeks to be always 
 prepared; remember that the end of the sal- 
 vation is not merely heaven for one's self, but 
 heaven for others; and we have before us the 
 true relation of the Christian's personal salva- 
 tion to the vital Christian activity. To watch 
 with every fortification of defense guarded 
 that he may not fall into temptation; to watch 
 with every implement of service prepared for 
 instant use that he may be ready for the oppor- 
 tunity of helpfulness: — this must always be 
 done by the man who would take his part in 
 the activity of the religion of Jesus. 
 
 Sec. 2. Christianity and Personal Sacrifice 
 
 Most Christian teachers have agreed that all 
 truly Christian activity must involve some 
 personal sacrifice. But agreeing in the neces- 
 sity of the sacrifice they have disagreed both as 
 to its purpose and nature. 
 
 The purpose of the sacrifice has sometimes 
 been taught as the propitiation of God. This 
 was apparently the purpose sought by the 
 children of Israel in their sacrifices of the first 
 [137] 
 
W^^at i^ a^^mtial 
 
 fruits of the harvest and of the best animals 
 of the flocks and herds. The underlying idea 
 of these "burnt offerings" seems to have been 
 not merely to show their gratitude to God for 
 past favors, but to insure his continued benevo- 
 lence. The God of the people of the Exodus 
 was conceived as a jealous God. That He 
 might not turn away His face in anger, these 
 uninstructed slaves offered Him the best of 
 their possessions. 
 
 It would be unnecessary in this enlightened 
 age to speak of this mistaken conception of 
 the purpose of sacrifice were there not so many 
 evidences of the persistence of the crude idea 
 even in the minds of those who supposedly 
 have learned something of the true nature of 
 God's love from Christ himself. There are 
 some Christian people whose whole religious 
 activity seems to partake of this nature of a 
 propitiatory sacrifice. They go to church be- 
 cause they feel that church attendance will be 
 pleasing to God. They abstain from certain 
 amusements and self-indulgences because their 
 self-denials will win God's approval. They 
 [138] 
 
give their money to charities and to benevo- 
 lences, not always because they want to help 
 these worthy and needy causes, but sometimes 
 because in some way they believe their gifts 
 will win them divine favor, or, in their own 
 vernacular, "bring them good luck." 
 The reason that none of these so-called sacri- 
 fices can be called true Christian activity is 
 because they all arise from a spirit of selfish- 
 ness. When one denies himself some present 
 desire for something in the future which he 
 believes will be more desirable, we rightly 
 call him prudent, but such selfish prudence 
 does not entitle liim to the holy name of Chris- 
 tian. All self-denials for the purpose of win- 
 ning God's favor must be catalogued only under 
 the head of deeds of prudence. If the children 
 of Israel believed that God's favor was worth 
 keeping, and that it could not be continued 
 in their behalf without the sacrifice of rams 
 and bullocks, they did wisely to offer the sac- 
 rifices. If a professed Christian to-day be- 
 lieves that God's favor is worth preserving 
 and that he cannot keep it unless he gives up 
 [139] 
 
Wi^at tjs €^^mtial 
 
 playing games of chance, he would be very 
 foolish and imprudent not to make the re- 
 quired self-denial. If he would rather go to 
 heaven when he dies than to go to horse races 
 while he lives, and if he honestly thinks he 
 cannot do both, he is wise in choosing that 
 which he more earnestly desires. But let not 
 this selfish prudence of his be ennobled by the 
 name of Christian sacrifice. The purpose of 
 that sacrifice which is really a part of vital 
 Christian activity cannot be to win anything 
 for one's self, not even the favor of God or the 
 eternal bliss of heaven. 
 
 Again, strange as it may seem, the purpose of 
 some personal sacrifices that have been digni- 
 fied by the name of Christian, have their real, 
 though not apparent purpose, in the propitia- 
 tion of men. Many a Christian man has 
 limited his freedom, both of thought and of 
 action, to meet the demands of some hard- 
 shelled, narrow-minded fanatics who have 
 mistaken their own prejudiced notions for the 
 eternal decrees of God. It is true that the 
 apostle Paul enjoined a loving thought for the 
 [140] 
 
"weaker brother" but he did not recommend 
 a timorous bondage to the rehgious bigot. 
 When one refrains from doing anything con- 
 cerning which he has freedom of choice and 
 action for fear some of his friends may mis- 
 understand and disapprove, he is certainly 
 acting within his rights. If he prefers the good 
 opinion of these friends to the exercise of his 
 hberty in certain directions, let him make the 
 choice according to his preference. But let 
 him not believe that he is any better Chris- 
 tian for this self-denial. No self-denial which 
 seeks only the approval of men can be included 
 in the sacrifices that partake of the nature of 
 real Christian activity. 
 
 The sacrifice involved in the necessary activity 
 of the Christian is the sacrifice demanded by 
 love for the purpose of helping someone else. 
 Just as Jesus did not ascend Calvary to win 
 God's favor or to meet with the approval of 
 men, so the true sacrifice of the Christian must 
 be purged from all self-seeking motives. 
 The nature of the sacrifice that is Christlike is 
 not merely a self-denial, it is a self-impartation. 
 [141] 
 
W\^at ijs Cjs^ential 
 
 Christians are not just to deny themselves some- 
 thing now for some future good by and by, they 
 are to give something of themselves to others. 
 Christian sacrifice is the natural expression of 
 love. The man who has not learned to love 
 can know nothing of sacrifice. He who really 
 does love need not worry about the hardness of 
 the sacrifice, for to him the sacrifice will be 
 natural and easy. 
 
 It is a great mistake to talk to the would-be 
 Christian of Christianity's cost in terms of sac- 
 rifice. It is like trying to compel him to under- 
 stand a page of the Hebrew Bible before he has 
 learned even the Hebrew alphabet. Teach the 
 youthful student of Christianity first the alpha- 
 bet of love. Show him the wonderful love of 
 God. Picture to him the needs of God's loved 
 children whom he can help. Be gentle and 
 patient with him until he can apply the lesson 
 in simple deeds of kindness and mercy. And 
 lo, almost before he knows it, he has come to 
 express himself naturally in the terms of Chris- 
 tian sacrifice. 
 
 No man can be a truly active Christian who 
 [142] 
 
does not give of himself to make others better. 
 He may make the sacrifice in many different 
 ways. Something of himself he may give as 
 he offers the money which is the product of 
 his industry. Something of himself he may 
 give in the surrender of the self-indulgence 
 which to him would be pleasing. Something 
 of himself he may bestow in the unselfish use 
 of his time and in the thoughtful, benevolent 
 expenditure of his energy. Whoever gives of 
 himself in anyway for the good of his neigh- 
 bor is engaged in the activity which is truly 
 Christian. 
 
 " Who gives of himself with his gift feeds three — 
 Himself, his hungering neighbor and me." 
 
 Sec. 3. Christianity and Philanthropy 
 Some thinkers have found the complete de- 
 scription of the Christian life as taught by Jesus 
 to lie in the parable of the Good Samaritan. 
 These have sometimes read into the parable 
 not only the commendation of acts of sympa- 
 thetic service, but also the condemnation of 
 all forms of professed personal religion. Jesus 
 [143] 
 
Wf^at i^ Cjsjsenttal 
 
 did not bid the inquiring lawyer to imitate 
 the priest and the Levite, but to go and do 
 like the Samaritan. Therefore, it is argued, 
 he meant to imply that Christians were not to 
 be avowed religionists at all, but only helpful 
 philanthropists. 
 
 The century in which we are now living, as 
 has already been remarked in a preceding 
 connection, is one in which this philanthropic 
 conception of Christianity is especially pre- 
 dominant. Everywhere about us we find men 
 who openly claim to have little regard for pro- 
 fessed Christianity, but who give much time, 
 money and thought to specific forms of phil- 
 anthropic and charitable endeavor. Hospitals 
 and institutions for the blind, the deaf and the 
 dumb ; schools, colleges, libraries, reading rooms 
 and gymnasiums ; homes for the aged, the des- 
 titute and the fallen; orphanages, social settle- 
 ments and city missions ; — these are only a few 
 of the many enterprises for the betterment of 
 humanity which receive the generous support 
 of thousands of people who do not profess to be 
 Christians at all. 
 
 [ 144 ] 
 
W^at 10 tl^e tmntial ^ctiUtv 
 
 To all these home institutions of salvation we 
 must also add to-day the evidence of an in- 
 creasing interest in foreign missions, and it 
 must be remembered that the increase of 
 interest in missions is manifestly due to the 
 somewhat recent change in the motive of 
 missions. So long as missionaries sought only 
 to rescue heathen from an eternal hell they 
 received little encouragement from practical 
 philanthropists; but when the missionaries 
 avowed their purpose to fit heathen people 
 for a healthy, intelligent, serviceable life on the 
 earth, philanthropists began to rally to their 
 support. 
 
 There should be little need here to discuss the 
 question of the exact identity of philanthropy 
 and Christianity. Christianity has to do with 
 all of a man 's life ; philanthropy with that part 
 of his life which is associated with his fellows. 
 Christianity concerns itself with the man's re- 
 lation to his God as well as to his fellow man, 
 and with his relation to himself as well as to 
 either. If there were only one man upon the 
 face of the earth, that man conceivably could 
 [145] 
 
WW i^ CjSjsential 
 
 still be a Christian though obviously he could 
 not be a philanthropist. He could try to be 
 actuated by the spirit of him who overcame 
 temptations alone in the wilderness and who 
 communed with his Father alone on the moun- 
 tain side, even though he could not undertake 
 a ministry for his fellow men. But this is 
 imaginary. So long as there is more than one 
 man upon the face of the earth, no one can 
 call himself a true Christian unless like Christ 
 he loves and serves his brethren. Jesus in the 
 parable did not condemn all profession of re- 
 ligion, but only its selfish and formal profes- 
 sion. 
 
 Had the Levite ministered to the destitute and 
 wounded traveler, he would doubtless have 
 been commended as was the Samaritan. Else- 
 where Jesus emphatically enforced the need of a 
 public profession of religion (vide Matt. 10 : 32, 
 33) and the only time when he described the 
 whole Christian life, he clothed his description 
 in the two commandments, of which love to 
 man was the subject only of the second. The 
 first was, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God." 
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The second was like to it, " Thou shalt love thy 
 neighbor as thyself." (Mark 12: 30, 31.) 
 Philanthropy, then, must be considered not as 
 identical with Christianity, but as the inevi- 
 table expression of Christianity in human rela- 
 tionship. We must consider the deed of the 
 Good Samaritan as essentially a Christlike 
 deed, and we must consider the multitude of 
 organized forms of charities and missions as 
 so many opportunities for the true Christian to 
 express his Christianity in human terms. Phil- 
 anthropy is the human language of that religion 
 which in its essence is divine. Just as one's 
 inner thoughts can be expressed outwardly only 
 by words and signs, so one's inner relations with 
 the God of love and a Christlike spirit can be 
 expressed outwardly only in the human lan- 
 guage of philanthropy. 
 
 Sec. 4, The Quest for the Kingdom of God 
 
 When Jesus taught his hearers to seek first 
 the Kingdom of God, he made it very clear 
 that the primary activity of the Christian life 
 had its relation to the service of God as King. 
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 Unfortunately, however, he did not in this 
 instance so clearly define the nature of God's 
 Kingdom as to preclude all possibility of mis- 
 understanding. Thus, though Christians have 
 agreed that the work of Christians is to pro- 
 mote God's Kingdom, they have not always 
 agreed as to precisely what work will best 
 promote it. 
 
 Some have interpreted the Kingdom of God 
 to have reference only to a future state of 
 existence. They have made the term synony- 
 mous with the kingdom of heaven, under- 
 standing heaven to signify the spiritual happi- 
 ness of those who have been emancipated 
 from earthly limitations. To these, to seek 
 the Kingdom of God has meant only to seek 
 heaven. By logical inference, according to 
 this interpretation no man can be a citizen of 
 God's Kingdom until after he has died. All, 
 therefore, that he needs to do in this state of 
 his existence is to fit himself and others for 
 post-mortem citizenship. Much as the boy in 
 school theoretically devotes himself to the prep- 
 aration for citizenship in his country, so men 
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in this life are to devote themselves only to 
 preparation for the life to come. The earthly 
 activity of the Christian is thus conceived in 
 its last analysis to be unsocial. If he acknowl- 
 edges any responsibility for the society in 
 which he now lives, it is not a responsibility 
 to make the present society better, but only 
 to make the present members of society more 
 fit for a future existence. 
 
 But while no careful student of the teachings 
 of Christ can fail to recognize that he suggested 
 more or less definitely a future life, the un- 
 prejudiced student will observe that the picture 
 of God's Kingdom in heaven is at best very 
 dimly outlined, while the conception of God's 
 Kingdom upon the earth stands out in boldest 
 relief. 
 
 Christ's picture of God's Kingdom is one pic- 
 ture. There are not two kingdoms of God, 
 one here and one there. But the Kingdom 
 here, which constitutes the foreground of the 
 picture, insensibly becomes merged into the 
 more obscure but perhaps more beautiful lines 
 of the distant Kingdom beyond. The true per- 
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 spective of Christ's teachings makes the King- 
 dom of God upon the earth of primary im- 
 portance, though one who views the whole of 
 his teachings will catch something of the glory 
 dimly outlined in the background beyond the 
 distant hills. 
 
 With this picture of Christ before us, we must 
 not say that a Christian shall be engaged prin- 
 cipally in the preparation either of himself or 
 of his fellows for heaven. But, on the other 
 hand, we must not forbid him to be interested 
 in that which assuredly was a part of Christ's 
 teachings. We can neither bid the Christian 
 to spurn earthly conditions while he seeks 
 heaven, nor to forget heavenly conditions 
 while he works upon the earth. It must be 
 the one object of the Christian's activity to 
 harmonize the earthly with the heavenly. He 
 must strive so skilfully to blend the two that 
 no man can say, "Here earth ends and there 
 begins heaven," but so that all will say, "We 
 cannot tell where earthly conditions cease, for 
 truly the glory of heaven itself has filled the 
 earth." 
 
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This is the ideal state for which the true Chris- 
 tian must toil, the state of a heaven-like earth. 
 The true Christian will strive for heaven, but 
 not merely for a future heaven. He will strive 
 for a present heaven. He will strive to fulfill 
 the petition which the Savior himself taught, 
 "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done upon 
 the earth as it is in heaven." 
 It follows, therefore, that the Christian will be 
 necessarily interested in everything that per- 
 tains to earthly conditions. He will work for 
 individuals, because individuals are a part of 
 society, and because each individual is a 
 brother subject of his King. He will be in- 
 terested in all that concerns the individual, 
 ministering to his body as well as to his soul, 
 promoting his intellectual welfare as well as 
 his spiritual welfare, serving him on week- 
 days as well as on Sundays, by an honest day's 
 toil as well as by a religious testimony, in the 
 workshop at the time of business as well as in 
 the church at the hour of worship. Especially 
 will he be interested in that individual who is 
 most in need. He will help the man in need 
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 according to his ability, rejoicing if he can 
 but "give a cup of cold water" in the spirit of 
 a disciple of Jesus. 
 
 But the Christian, too, will be interested in 
 the larger problems of the body of God's chil- 
 dren in their relations to each other. He will 
 not rest content so long as evil social condi- 
 tions remain unrighted. He will lift his voice 
 in indignant protest against all forms of le- 
 galized injustice and iniquity. He will exercise 
 his rights of civil citizenship as one who is as 
 well a citizen of the Kingdom divine. He will 
 strive so far as in him lies to guard the sanctity 
 of the home, to preserve from selfish, political 
 encroachments the interests of the school, to 
 maintain the purity of the Church, and to pro- 
 mote the best Christian welfare of the State. 
 His work will be for society as well as for the 
 individual, and his work will not be complete 
 until all men have become one in Christ even 
 as Christ was one with God. 
 By the exercise of a dauntless courage and of a 
 patient sympathy, by exhortation and by admoni- 
 tion, by precept and by example, the Christian 
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 will strive to make this world the Kingdom of his 
 Lord and Savior. And striving for God's King- 
 dom here, he will open the doors of heaven 
 eternal, both for him,self and for those over whom, 
 God may have given him influence. 
 
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