IC-NRLF 
 
THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 GIFT OF 
 HORACE W. CARPENTIER 
 
Manchester College, Oxford. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN THE LIGHT OF 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. 
 
 En Hbfcress 
 
 BY THE 
 
 . 
 
 Rev. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, ty.A., D.Litt., 
 
 ON f rmt^&yg&i^?.;qti&& 
 OPENING OF THE 121sr SESSION, 
 
 15TH OCTOBER, 1906. 
 
 The College adheres to its original principle of freely imparting 
 Theological knowledge, without insisting on the adoption of particular 
 Theological doctrines. 
 
 H. RAWSON & CO., PRINTERS, 16, NEW BROWN STREET [21,274]. 
 
 1906. 
 
Manchester College, Oxford. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN THE LIGHT OF 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. 
 
 Hn Hbfcress 
 
 BY THE 
 
 Rev. J. ESTLIN CARPENTER, M.A., D.Litt, 
 
 ON THE OCCASION OF THE 
 
 OPENING OF THE 121ST SESSION. 
 
 15TH OCTOBER, 1906. 
 
 The College adheres to its original principle of freely imparting 
 Theological knowledge without insisting on the adoption of particular 
 Theological doctrines. 
 
 H, RAWSON & CO., PRINTERS, 16, NEW BROWN STREET [21,274]. 
 
 1906. 
 
OAAKimift 
 
CHRISTIANITY IN THE LIGHT OF 
 RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. 
 
 GENTLEMEN, 
 
 The College which calls us together again to-day exists 
 to " promote the study of religion, theology, and philosophy, 
 without insisting on the adoption of particular doctrines." This 
 study is organised for the most part with a special object, and it 
 is pursued under special conditions. That object is the prepara- 
 tion for the ministry of religion; and the chief of those conditions 
 is freedom from dogmatic control. On the importance of this 
 condition I need not dwell. It is the heritage of more than two 
 centuries of faith and prayer, and we are bound to hand it on 
 unimpaired to the generations to come. At the gate of the oldest 
 of British universities we are its solitary and inconspicuous 
 champions. But the silent homage to it spreads from year to 
 year and land to land, and it is -not the property of any 
 sect, or associated exclusively with any type of theological 
 belief. Only recently one of the most renowned divinity schools 
 in America discovered that the Westminster Confession, which 
 had hitherto served as its standard of doctrine, was no part of its 
 legal foundation. It was promptly eliminated, and the great 
 Union Seminary of New York, which counts nearly two hundred 
 students on its roll, became by constitution as free as ourselves. 
 No longer need I vindicate the spiritual significance of this 
 principle for the student of religion. That has been done on 
 important occasions in our recent history with unsurpassed 
 clearness and fervour by the beloved arid revered teacher in 
 whose place I speak to you to-day, and his expositions of its 
 
 M808703 
 
meaning and scope, together with those more widely known 
 writings which have placed him in the front rank of modern 
 English theologians, I commend to your earnest attention. Let 
 me only remind you that it lays on all who come within its 
 range, to teach or learn, austere demands a love of truth which 
 can overcome all prejudices, courage to face all difficulties without 
 fear, sincerity and simplicity of purpose, patience of heart for 
 tireless labour and unfailing trust. 
 
 I. 
 
 From the condition I turn to the purpose of your study. 
 You seek to serve your fellow men through the ministry of 
 religion. It matters not whether that ministry be exercised 
 within our four seas or in the Far East ; the spiritual needs of 
 man do not differ in England, India, or Japan. The intellectual 
 outlook may indeed vary ; the moral tradition, the social organi- 
 sation, may change. But the fundamental elements of life, the 
 constitution of our moral nature, do not depend on climate, race, 
 or language. Man thinks, feels, hopes, loves, wills, on every 
 continent, from zone to zone all round the earth, and though 
 the interpretations of his experience may differ, its essential 
 factors still remain the -same. Beneath his feet the same 
 earth bears him up, over his head arches the same sky, the 
 visible symbols to ancient imagination of the parental powers 
 which produce and sustain him. Everywhere man is born and 
 dies, everywhere he toils and struggles, everywhere he rises and 
 falls, everywhere he blunders and succeeds, everywhere he suffers 
 and aspires, everywhere he sorrows and rejoices ; and the mighty 
 sum of energies and desires, of frustrated effort, of achieved 
 progress, of baffled endeavour, of triumphant advance the 
 victories of the strong, the humiliations of the weak, the 
 oppressions of the cruel, the patience of the lowly, the opposi- 
 tions of falsehood and truth, of self-aggrandisement and self- 
 renunciation make up the vast and bewildering scene of our 
 
existence. Through these confusions you seek to find a way 
 that you may become guides to other men. Into the gloom you 
 would bring a light from heaven that your brothers here and 
 there may cease from fighting shadows, and may be at rest. 
 Above the discords you would sound the call to courage, 
 steadfastness, and joy. as those who would say " Be of good 
 cheer, we are not alone, the Father is with us, we can do all 
 things through him who strengthens us." This is the note of 
 religion. It will often be your business to impart knowledge, 
 but you will not stir the hearts of men by instruction alone ; 
 the ministry of religion will call upon you to be something more 
 than teachers. You may often resort for special purposes to the 
 Press, and through the columns of the newspaper you may 
 address scores or hundreds for every one that listens to your 
 spoken word ; but the preacher must openly declare what the 
 journalist will veil in secrecy and reserve. You will again and 
 again advocate social causes, and temperance and purity, civic 
 betterment and international peace, will enlist your labour ; but 
 your work will not be accomplished solely by social reform : do 
 not mistake the part for the whole, or the means for the end. 
 Behind, above, around, within, all human things, is God ; and 
 the test of your ministry will lie in your power to make this 
 tremendous and perpetual fact the source of help and gladness 
 to all within your reach. When the young Aberdeen professor, 
 Henry Scougall (in 1677), described religion as the "life of God 
 in the soul of man," he summed up in a pregnant phrase a truth 
 which the seers of all ages hold in common. That this life 
 varies in intensity, clearness, purity, through the dull and 
 grosser media of our human experience, is the testimony alike 
 of personal consciousness and the whole history of faith. To 
 disengage it from its " muddy vesture of decay," and recognise 
 it in the spirit of truth and righteousness and love, to interpret 
 its everlasting claims, to glorify duty by its august sanctions, to 
 inspire trust in its infinite purposes, to create confidence in its 
 
6 
 
 continuous support, this is the task of the ministry of religion. 
 I welcome you to the preparation for it with sympathy ; we are 
 to walk together along common paths. To-day I offer you some 
 counsels, as an elder comrade on the way, concerning the relation 
 of your studies here to your future work. 
 
 The method of your preparation for this work must be chiefly 
 determined by your conception of that work itself. Have you 
 come hither as to a lawyer's office or a hospital, to learn the 
 secrets of an honourable craft, or qualify yourselves for a 
 respectable profession ? Have you chosen this, not, indeed, as a 
 path to affluence, but as containing at least the promise of 
 a livelihood with the minimum of effort or competitive 
 endeavour ? Are your tastes literary, and do you prefer the 
 student's desk to the banker's counter or the humbler lines of 
 trade ? Or are you here to be confirmed in your own opinions 
 and trained as the agent of a party or a sect ? Were these, 
 indeed, the motives of your enrolment in our little band, I would 
 bid you recognise at once that you have gravely misconceived 
 the purpose of this College, and I would urge you to withdraw 
 while there is yet time from a vocation to which you have not 
 been called. But if you have been quickened with the awe and 
 love of God, if the vision of his kingdom has arisen, however 
 dimly, before your eyes, if you have felt that life holds no better 
 thing for you than to be (however feebly) the messenger of his 
 truth, and righteousness, then remember the nature of the 
 function you assume, and humbly pray for strength to fulfil it. 
 No church, no teacher, no institution, can accredit you. We 
 can transmit to you no commission, confer on you no power, 
 which is not yours already by natural endowment or the grace 
 of God, nor can we place in your hands a book of infallible 
 oracles for you to expound, so that your work shall be done 
 when you have imparted a knowledge of the saving word. 
 Eevelation can no longer be interpreted as the inerrant com- 
 munication of supernatural truth. The great theological change 
 
of the last century in which this College bore its share through 
 the wide learning and the spiritual serenity of John James Tayler, 
 and the philosophical genius and splendid literary power of 
 James Martineau, has cast a wholly new light on the nature 
 and sources of religion, and by inevitable consequence on the 
 work of the ministry. Looking back at fourscore years and ten 
 over the inner meaning of his long labours, Dr. Martineau thus 
 defined their significance : " The substitution of Religion at 
 first-hand, straight out of the immediate interaction between the 
 Soul and God, for religion at second-hand, fetched by copying out 
 of anonymous traditions of the Eastern Mediterranean eighteen 
 centuries ago, has been the really directing, though hardly 
 conscious, aim of my responsible years of life." 1 It is upon this 
 foundation that your work now stands, " Eeligion at first hand, 
 straight out of the immediate interaction between the Soul and 
 God." The value of your service will depend on your ability 
 first of all to realise, and secondly to interpret and express this 
 solemn truth. You cannot confront it with a light heart. You 
 aspire to be the servants of the Most High ; and no college 
 training can command the gifts of the Spirit which will set fit 
 thoughts in your mind, or adequate words upon your tongue. 
 Does the discipline of the class-room, then, count for nothing ? 
 If the conception of the ministry in its highest form is that of 
 prophecy, are you thereby exempted from all personal labour, 
 and discharged from the student's tasks ? By no means. The 
 spirit indeed bloweth where it listeth, nor is it ours to tell why 
 the divine fire is kindled in one heart while a brother's still 
 remains unmoved. But if we know not the original conditions 
 of God's gifts, we do know something of the means by which 
 they may be quickened and confirmed. A gift that is not 
 cherished will lose alike its value and its force ; and a gift of 
 which you can render no account, which you cannot fit in with 
 other parts of your experience, and justify intelligibly at least to 
 
 1 To Prof. W. Knight : James Martineau, Theologian and Teacher, p. 540. 
 
8 
 
 some around you, will cease to have meaning either for you or 
 them ; it will fade away, and disappear, and leave you lamenting 
 the illusions of a dream. 
 
 What safeguards can we offer you against this dissipation of 
 your first fervours, what helps will foster and expand your seed 
 of life ? In the first place, it is the business of philosophy to 
 set forth clearly and explicitly that which dwells obscurely and 
 confusedly within your mind. It seeks to make intelligible to 
 you the august relationship of God and man, of which you are 
 already dimly conscious. It aims to provide you, not indeed 
 with a solution of all mysteries, but with such a reasoned 
 interpretation of your being and the world in which you live, as 
 shall give firmness and consistency to your thought, and enable 
 you to confront without fear the spirit of denial. " nationalism," 
 says its latest historian, Mr. A. W. Benn, " is the habit of using 
 reason for the destruction of religious belief." I will subscribe 
 to no such limitation. I am not concerned with the propriety 
 of the use of a word. The writer who thus defines his meaning 
 is entitled to intellectual respect if he is consistent in its 
 application. But he is at least open to the reply that reason 
 has a wider scope and nature than the reasoning which he 
 employs for this end. Keason may indeed undo ecclesiastical 
 formulae, and compel us in due course to rewrite the creeds. 
 It may call again and again for the reinterpretation of our 
 experience, and in the process it may profoundly modify the 
 experience itself. But it cannot eliminate itself from the world, 
 for it is only because the mind of man and the universe around 
 him are related, that any science is possible at all ; and religion, 
 therefore, which seeks for the unity and meaning of life in the 
 vast order of the whole, can never be anything but rational. 
 To the study of philosophy, accordingly, I commend you as the 
 intellectual foundation of your teaching. Be not afraid of the 
 labours she imposes. She is an exacting mistress, but in the 
 pursuit of her is a high reward. She opens to you the fellowship 
 
of truth ; and to bear witness to the truth, as the author of the 
 Fourth Gospel taught us long ago, it is well worth while to be 
 born, to live, and die. 
 
 III. 
 
 . But there is a second aid to the student of the ministry 
 which possesses a greater power and more penetrating force. The 
 spirit which has discerned visions of beauty must learn to 
 translate them into noble form by familiarity with the works 
 of the great artists ; he can obtain no mastery of line or colour 
 without method. The musician must understand the laws of 
 sound, he must comprehend the modes in which the creators of 
 melody and harmony have employed their themes and combined 
 their instruments, as the expression of the spiritual passions of 
 hope and joy, of sorrow or peace. And in like manner he who 
 would portray the unseen realities of beauty and good, he who 
 would draw from the thousand strings of the harp of life the 
 deathless music of aspiration and comfort, must have learned 
 to behold the prophet's vision, and hear the song of gladness 
 to which the walls of the city of God are for ever rising 
 in our midst. The world at large does not live by philosophy, 
 but by the devout experience of men and women. The 
 ministry of counsel and rebuke, of courage for the struggling, 
 of rest for the storm-tossed, requires that we should under- 
 stand the heart-secrets of others and know how the leaders 
 of the faith have learned to suffer and be strong. For this 
 purpose the records of the religious life lie open to you. They 
 are not always easy reading. They are often entangled in beliefs 
 which we have discarded, and embodied in forms which appeal 
 to us no more. It will be your task to distinguish between the 
 passing and the permanent elements of religion, and learn how 
 to shape them anew so as to make them potent for the needs of 
 to-day. To this end you must follow them to their sources, and 
 realise their intensest and most vital forms. For the Christian, 
 
10 
 
 the great book of religion is the Bible, arid the historic origin of 
 his faith lies in the life and teaching of Jesus. But the study of 
 the New Testament has entered in our time on to new paths, the 
 end of which it is impossible to foresee. The theologians, even 
 of my boyhood, believed that its various authors spoke with one 
 voice of revealed and revealing truth. The nature of Jesus, for 
 example, was matter of historic fact ; historic fact could happen 
 in but one way, and the testimony of its witnesses must be 
 uniform from end to end. The Christian life which was founded 
 on the gospel, was equally simple. The precepts of Jesus were 
 the sole and sufficient guide ; and the language of devotion 
 amongst us two generations back could find no meaning in the 
 words that were dear to the heart of Evangelical piety. When 
 Dr. Martineau, just half a century ago, preached a famous 
 sermon at Norwich entitled " One Gospel in many Dialects," 1 
 the criticism which it provoked disclosed how much his con- 
 temporaries had yet to learn. For he pleaded that the truths 
 of Christianity, alighting upon different minds, spontaneously 
 assumed different forms as they were interpreted by varying 
 types of experience. To one the Gospel presented itself as a 
 new Law, and Jesus sat upon the Mount to replace the com- 
 mandments of Moses with fresh legislation from on high. The 
 appeal of Christ was thus addressed predominantly to our wills, 
 " This do, and thou shalt live." To faithfulness of service was 
 attached the promise of appropriate reward, "Enter thou into 
 the joy of thy Lord." What, then, of the reluctant spirit that 
 struggled to obey the Law and failed, or even that faithfully 
 discharged the Law and found it wanting ? What of the 
 conscience that punctually rendered its legal dues, yet, when 
 all was done that Law required, was still torn with unsatisfied 
 endeavour ? What of the aspiring soul that found no peace in 
 the familiar round, and craved a new object of affection that 
 might raise it out of death, and with fresh devotion quench all 
 
 1 Studies of Christianity, p. 399. 
 
11 
 
 vain desire ? Before the spirit that feels itself enslaved to sin 
 beneath the Law there rises an image of self-sacrificing love, 
 which wakens faith and fills the whole being with new life. 
 What was out of reach to the bondman under rule, immediately 
 becomes possible to the freedom of sonship. The Christianity 
 of the Apostle Paul, reproduced along the lines of Christian 
 history in an Augustine, a Luther, or a Bunyan, presents us 
 with the type of passionate natures which long for something 
 beyond mere ethical control. When the demands of affection are 
 unsatisfied with the moral pieties, they can rest content with 
 nothing short of mystic identification with the power that has 
 lifted them above themselves. It is of the nature of this 
 vehement and tumultuous life that it should express itself 
 through crises of struggle and of peace ; that the past should 
 appear enveloped in the shadow of sin, which dissolves by the 
 experience of a moment into a glow of joy. To others, however, 
 it is impossible thus to divide the years either of personal life 
 or of human history into periods of dramatic progress marked 
 by catastrophes of fall and redemption, of resurrection and 
 judgment. The world is already the scene of the divine thought, 
 present since the beginning when the heavenly reason, issuing 
 from the timeless depths of the infinite life, became articulate 
 in the universe we know, and bound together its remotest parts 
 in one intelligible sphere of light and love. Nor could humanity 
 have been overlooked by its illuminating activity. The divine 
 Word must have lighted everyone, and the long story of the 
 race was the continuous self -revelation of the Eternal. Man 
 dwells already, therefore, in two worlds, though the veil of 
 blindness that lies upon his eyes often hides from him the 
 meaning of his heavenly kinship. Only let the healing touch 
 descend, and he discerns that the immensities around him are 
 filled with the heavenly presence, and he himself can feel and 
 think, can love and pray, only because he dwells in God, and 
 God in him. In such high fellowship the barriers of sense are 
 
12 
 
 done away. The vision of the everlasting life is independent of 
 the accident of death. In knowledge rather than in obedient 
 self-mastery or loving self -surrender is the secret of eternal life. 
 God is spirit, and the hour of his true worship has arrived for 
 
 evermore. 
 
 IV. 
 
 In some such mode as this could our great philosophic 
 theologian vindicate the diversities of type which the New 
 Testament presents, and declare that we may thereby not only 
 justify the divisions of Christendom, but even cease to wish that 
 they should disappear. The development of New Testament 
 theology during the last fifty years has added many a detail to 
 the picture which he sketched, but the persistent and relentless 
 search for historic truth has somewhat altered our point of view, 
 as is indeed exemplified in Dr. Martineau's own latest work, 
 The Seat of Authority in Religion. On the one hand enlarged 
 knowledge of the apocalyptic literature before and after the 
 actual years of Jesus has disclosed the sources of much of the 
 doctrine of the New Testament concerned with the person of 
 the Messiah and the expectation of the judgment and the end 
 of the age. And on the other hand a deeper insight into the 
 forms of religious belief by which the early church was sur- 
 rounded, has brought to light the remarkable circumstance that 
 some of what were formerly supposed to be its most peculiar 
 ideas and distinctive experiences, were after all shared by other 
 religions and realised under other sacred names. I have already 
 in an Address last year invited your attention to some illustrations 
 of these facts. 1 Let me pass on to another consideration suggested 
 by recent study of the psychology of religion, viz., the connection 
 between doctrine and experience. 
 
 The first great constructor of Christian doctrine is the 
 Apostle Paul. The exigencies of his mission required him to 
 frame a defence of Christianity against both Jew and Gentile. 
 
 1 Christianity in the Light of Historical Science, 1905. 
 
13 
 
 It was he, accordingly who laid down the main lines of the great 
 interpretation, which the Fourth Evangelist, writing at a later 
 date, could translate into other moulds more closely akin to 
 Hellenic thought. The student of those wonderful letters which 
 are the first records of Christian endeavour, is confronted with 
 an impassioned type of religious life wholly different from that 
 presented in the First Three Gospels by Jesus himself. The 
 Apostle moves off the field of history into an upper world of 
 speculative interpretation, where we stand face to face with a 
 contrast which may be best expressed in the words of the 
 distinguished Principal of Mansfield College : x 
 
 "As a Teacher there are many men in many lands and times 
 with whom he (Jesus) may be compared ; but as a creative and 
 sovereign personality there are in the whole of history only two or 
 three, if indeed there are so many, with any claim to stand by his 
 side. As a Teacher he is a natural person with historic antecedents, 
 a social environment, a religious ancestry, and a position honourable 
 but not unique among the great masters of mind ; but as a sovereign 
 personality he is a new being, without father, or mother, or genealogy, 
 separate, supreme, creating by his very appearing a new spiritual 
 type or order. As a Teacher we can easily conceive him as a Jew 
 and a peasant, the lineal descendant of the prophets, and near of 
 kin to the Rabbis of Israel ; but there is no harder intellectual task 
 than to relate the sovereign personality to the Jewish peasant, his 
 antecedents and environment." 
 
 This higher personality first appears in the writings of Paul. 
 He wears a radiant form of glory from which all elements of 
 race, language, nationality, have dropped away ; in which, more- 
 over, he is identified with the Spirit, and becomes the source of all 
 the graces and gifts that pervade the Church. His earthly career 
 (if I understand the Apostle aright I know how I differ from the 
 profoundest of our living students) was only a brief episode 
 between two ages of heavenly glory, one in which he had already 
 in some sense dwelt with God before the world and served as the 
 divine instrument in creation, the other in which, in virtue of his 
 obedience to the cross, he had been raised to the dignity of Lord 
 at God's right hand. There he was endowed with sovereignty 
 1 Philosophy of the Christian Religion, p. 304. 
 
14 
 
 over the dwellers in the heavenly spheres; there he should 
 triumph over the forces of evil ; there he should reign till the 
 final hour when he destroyed at last the enmity of death. Then, 
 when the resurrection and judgment were completed, he should 
 resign his delegated power, return to subjection beneath him 
 who had invested him with his temporary authority, that, in 
 the timeless immensity of being, God might be all in all. Into 
 this cosmic framework the apostle fits his great doctrines of the 
 destinies of Israel, the significance of the Law, the conflicts of 
 sin and righteousness, the meaning of Christ's redemptive death, 
 the gifts of the Spirit, the organic unity of the Church, the 
 mystic identification of the believer with his heavenly Lord. 
 And the root of the whole lies, as all serious interpreters are 
 now agreed, in that great moment when (to use his own phrase) 
 it was the good pleasure of God to reveal his Son in him. That 
 mighty change produced an experience so intense that the 
 apostle could only compare it to death, burial, and resurrection. 
 He, too, has been crucified. The old man lies in the grave ; he 
 feels himself new made ; he has already risen and sits in 
 heavenly places ; he, too, is on the way to a share in the great 
 consummation. To meet his Lord he will be caught up into the 
 air, and he looks forward to judging angels. To explain this 
 change, to account for corresponding changes in those to whom 
 he writes, to set the new life of which he is the herald in the 
 purposes of God for Israel on the one hand and the Gentiles on 
 the other, to find a place for Christ in the mysteries of the 
 Father's providential guidance of the world, he uses the scriptures 
 of his people, the phases of contemporary belief, the theology of 
 the Pharisees, the hopes of apocalyptic visionaries, and reasonings 
 of his own, all fused together in one glow of impassioned trust. 
 Powers and processes, the physical and the spiritual, moral 
 energies emerging anon into personality and then dropping back 
 into impersonal indefiniteness, a world-system conceived on a 
 scale which our astronomy has long since broken up, a time- 
 
15 
 
 scheme which history has completely outgrown, blend in the 
 pages of these letters which can never cease to be the inspiration 
 of the missionary, the support of the champion of liberty, the 
 call to personal effort, the consolation of those who have 
 shuddered at unsuspected deeps of evil in their own hearts and 
 have sought refuge from their weakness in a higher strength, the 
 joy of those who have humbly learned to walk in the spirit. 
 
 Through this bewildering mixture of the real and the unreal 
 the minister of religion who makes the New Testament his chief 
 book of devotion must learn to find his way. And he cannot 
 escape the question, how far is the experience of the believer in 
 the twentieth century bound to conform to that of the apostle 
 in the first ? If he inquires of either of the two great creations 
 of modern English religion which, without any tradition or 
 national resources at their back, have thrown their arms all 
 round the world, the Methodism of the eighteenth century or 
 the Salvation Army of to-day, the answer is decisive. There is 
 no access to God but through conversion and the redeeming 
 blood of Christ. The student of Christian history, however, is 
 soon aware that Christian experience assumes many forms, and 
 is mediated by very different agencies. Even within the New 
 Testament itself, how striking is the contrast between the letters 
 of Paul and the apostolic sermons in the book of Acts. Gaze 
 with the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews into the heavenly 
 sanctuary where the great high priest, who was himself the 
 victim of his sacrifice, is seated at the right hand of the throne ; 
 pierce through the blinding, glare of apocalyptic splendours to 
 the rider on the white horse with a sharp sword in his mouth 
 wherewith to smite the nations ; read the sober exhortations of 
 James ; examine the forms of post-apostolic thought in Clement, 
 Barnabas, the Teaching of the Twelve, Hermas's Shepherd, the 
 writings of Justin the Martyr, you will find Christianity 
 presented as an ethical life, a new philosophy, a moral, not a 
 ceremonial law, but the distinctive features of the Pauline 
 
16 
 
 teaching reappear only in the Fourth Gospel and Ignatius, and 
 some of its most characteristic elements have been already 
 dropped upon the way. The type which is held up to us as the 
 rule and norm of our spiritual life, falls into the background of 
 early Christian thought. It was the doctrine of the Word 
 which supplied the basis for the great dogmatic constructions 
 of the Church. It might be too much to say that one half of 
 the apostle to the Gentiles was unintelligible because he was a 
 Jew, and the other half was incomprehensible because he was 
 Paul. A spirit of such rare individuality could work wonders 
 on the souls he personally awakened. But when the magic 
 of his presence was withdrawn, the specific character of his 
 experience failed to reproduce itself, and the Christian organi- 
 sation of teaching and of life was developed along other lines. 
 
 V. 
 
 In modern times, however, the experience of communion with 
 the living Christ is earnestly pressed upon us as the essence of 
 Evangelical religion. It is especially connected with certain 
 crises of the moral and spiritual life, the conviction of sin, and 
 the sense of forgiveness. 1 But it is by no means limited to 
 these. The whole sphere of personal welfare and of the interior 
 desires day by day is referred to him. Have we need of divine 
 help in the struggle with evil temper, with envy, jealousy, or base 
 ambition ? Do we want strength in the weariness of daily duty ? 
 Do we seek increase of faith in seasons of doubt, or in moments 
 of peril exclaim, " Save, Lord, we perish " ? The answering aid 
 guarantees the reality of the object of our petitions, and becomes 
 the inexpugnable witness of the truth. There is an apparent 
 finality about this evidence which makes any attempt to analyse 
 it seem like a rude intrusion into the sanctuary ; 
 
 And like a man in wrath the heart 
 Stands up and answers, I have felt. 
 
 1 Dale, The Living Christ, p. 36. 
 
17 
 
 But the teacher who does not share the specific forms of 
 these experiences, must needs desire if he can to learn from 
 their exponents how to recognise the validity of their inter- 
 pretation. The soul is, by hypothesis, in contact with a mighty 
 spiritual power, other than itself and yet within. The question 
 is, under what forms this power is to be recognised. How can 
 we identify it with a historic figure like the living Christ in two 
 natures, divine and human, the manhood being taken into God ? 
 If we ask the most learned of Wesleyan divines, Dr. Beet, we 
 shall be informed that this power is no other than the Spirit. 1 
 It is the Spirit that dwells in the heart of the believer. It is 
 the Spirit that is the source of graces, of faith, hope, and 
 love. It is the Spirit that operates on conscience and affec- 
 tion, and the Spirit is only identified with Christ by a 
 text in St. Paul. Or the Presbyterian, Dr. Forrest, will 
 admit to us that by no conscious distinction can the soul 
 mark off its communion with the Son from communion 
 with the Father, 2 agreeing in this, it would seem, with the 
 German mystic Suso, nearly six centuries ago, who laid down that 
 in the highest condition of union with God the soul takes no note 
 of the Persons separately. 3 The Scotch theologian, therefore, 
 also recognises that he knows that Christ is there only because 
 the Scripture witness tells him 4 ; and so we are once more 
 referred back to history. Does the Congregationalist, Dr. Dale, 
 affirm that the record is not needed ? Though the Gospels 
 should be blotted from the scroll of time, the testimony of the 
 Church would be sufficient ; is there not a continuity of 
 experience for which Augustine and Luther vouch ? The 
 Presbyterian demurs ; amid the liabilities of extravagance and 
 illusion authority is needed to regulate and correct. 5 In other 
 
 1 The New Life in Christ, 1895, p. 168. 2 The Christ of Experience, p. 166. 
 
 8 Inge, Christian Mysticism (1899), p. 178. 4 The Christ of Experience, p. 206. 
 
 5 Ibid., pp. 324333. 
 
18 
 
 words the experience of " the living Christ " does not, after all, 
 authenticate itself. It needs a recognised standard for its 
 guarantee ; and that which is invoked to render historic testimony 
 credible, and provide a spiritual vindication of traditional record, 
 requires after all the confirmation of the very authority which 
 it is summoned to support. 
 
 I will not now ask how far this type of teaching about the 
 conditions of divine forgiveness coincides with that of Jesus 
 himself. I am not here concerned with ultimate theological 
 truths but with the historic forms of the religious life. The 
 majority of Christendom has fashioned its faith upon other lines, 
 and found the secret of strength not in the Evangelical 
 individualism of the work of the spirit, but in the Catholic 
 conception of sacramental communion. The stress here falls 
 upon the Church with its hierarchy and powers, conceived as the 
 mystic body of Christ ; and the Anglican student of Christian 
 mysticism accordingly tells us that " what joins us to Christ is 
 not so much a unity of the individual soul with the heavenly 
 Christ as an organic unity with all men." 1 The central idea of 
 Eucharistic devotion is still, as with Paul, the Passion. But it is 
 worked out in a totally different way. In the daily sacrifice of 
 the mass it is repeated in bloodless fashion on tens of thousands of 
 altars, and the believer in communicating actually feeds upon his 
 Lord. Every student of the Middle Ages knows how exalted 
 was the faith which gathered round the consecrated elements. 
 The enthusiasm of holy adventure poured itself into the legends 
 of the Grail which Tennyson has transmuted for us into 
 permanent types of spiritual endeavour, failure, and achievement. 
 The rapture of union, present more or less in Christian literature 
 ever since Origen interpreted the Song of Songs in terms of the 
 mystic bride of Christ, thrilled through Augustine, and inspired 
 the fiery Bernard or the brothers of St. Victor, Kichard and 
 Hugh. If the incidents of impassioned experience are to 
 
 1 Inge, Christian Mysticism, p. 68. 
 
19 
 
 determine the forms of faith, let the student consider the 
 work wrought, for example, by Catherine of Siena on her 
 turbulent age. The house still stands at the bottom of one 
 of the hills within the city walls where, in 1367, at the age of 
 twenty, she espoused herself to the virgin Christ. Pass into the 
 great church of San Domenico on the heights hard by, and you 
 enter at the foot of the nave the little Capella delle Volte. It 
 was the scene of many a divine colloquy where she conversed 
 familiarly with Jesus Christ, her spouse. There she gave a 
 little silver cross which she had threaded on her rosary to a 
 poor man, who was none other than her heavenly Lord, who 
 afterwards told her that he would show it on the judgment day 
 to the whole world. There occurred those two strange visions, 
 the first on July 18, 1370, when Christ took away her heart, the 
 second two days later, when he reappeared, bearing in his hand 
 a rosy heart of flame, which he placed in her side ; and from 
 that time no contradiction could disturb her. In the chapel 
 dedicated to her, further up the nave, stands a little wooden 
 crucifix brought from a church at Pisa, where the saint had 
 once knelt before it at communion ; and Christ (so her confessor 
 Kaimund relates) had descended from the cross and imparted to 
 her the sacred wounds. 1 And all the while, in the midst of 
 intense bodily suffering, she is sustained with a holy joy as she 
 tends the sick, ministers to the lepers, comforts the plague- 
 stricken, heals the feuds of the nobles, reconciles the enemies of 
 the state ; and at length, by sheer might of spiritual influence, 
 in the face of a corrupted papal court stabbed in the foot by 
 the Pope's own niece as she knelt in prayer before the altar she 
 brings back Gregory XI. from Avignon to Rome, and terminates 
 the long exile satirically known as the Babylonish captivity. 
 Unconsumed by incessant toil she conducts an immense corre- 
 spondence, and composes the dialogues of the soul with Christ, 
 in which (to use the words of the most learned and sympathetic 
 
 1 Drane, St. Catherine of Siena, vol. i., p. 307. 
 
20 
 
 English student of her time) we seem to hear " Catherine's 
 rendering into finite words of unspeakable things which she has 
 learned by intuition in that half-hour during which there is 
 silence in heaven." 1 No one can follow the phases of this 
 extraordinary union of the mystical and the practical without 
 the conviction that her energy was fed from unseen springs : 
 must not the Evangelical critic who regards the Catholic faith 
 in transubstantiation as illusory, admit with her confessor, 
 Brother Eaimund, " We are in the valley, and we presume to 
 judge concerning what is on the summit of the mountain " ? 
 
 Or turn to Paris in the most brilliant age of France. Study 
 the life of one, rich, beautiful, accomplished, but unhappily 
 married. On July 22, 1672, she signs a covenant sent to her by 
 her friend, Genevieve Granger, a Benedictine prioress, " I hence- 
 forth take Jesus Christ to be mine, and I give myself to him, 
 unworthy though I am, to be his spouse. I ask of him in this 
 marriage of spirit with spirit that I may be of the same mind 
 with him, meek, pure, nothing in myself, and united in God's 
 will. And, pledged as I am to be his, I accept as a part of my 
 marriage portion the temptations and sorrows, the crosses and 
 contempt, which fell to him." Read the story of her philan- 
 thropies, her friendships, her imprisonments. It is Mine. Guion, 2 
 whose hymns, through Cowper's translation, have long been part 
 of our English devotion. To her, too, as to the devout nuns of 
 Port Royal, the secret of strength in sorrow and suffering and 
 persecution lay in the august privilege of the Eucharist. " 
 happy minds and blessed souls," says Thomas a Kern pis, " who 
 have the privilege of receiving thee, their God, with devout 
 affection, and in so receiving thee are permitted to be full of 
 spiritual joy." 
 
 There was, however, another aspect of Christ in mediseval 
 thought. If in the one character he was seen again and again as 
 
 1 Gardner, Hibbert Journal, April, 1906. 
 
 2 Life, by Upham, p. 98. 
 
21 
 
 a gentle child or tender lamb within the holy bread, at other 
 times he loomed vast and dreadful as the Rex tremendce 
 majestatis, the judge who hurled the sinner into hell. Already, 
 in the fresco, formerly attributed to Orcagna, in the Campo 
 Santo at Pisa, he stands in the terrific attitude in which Michael 
 Angelo afterwards depicted him in the Sis tine chapel. There, 
 however, the Virgin Mary appears as intercessor, just as in other 
 schemes of thought Christ had himself interposed for sinners 
 before the Father's wrath. Everyone knows how many are the 
 elements which contributed to exalt her as she rose before the 
 believer, head of all martyrs, queen of the heavenly choir, 
 protectress of the family and the state, mother of the Creator 
 and spouse of God. By her obedience, purity, humility, and 
 self-sacrifice, she takes part with the Trinity in the Incarnation, 
 and thus has her share in the redemption of the world. She 
 even participates in the Passion of her Son, offers him to the 
 Father, and realises at least the anguish of consent. Once more, 
 I am not concerned with the truths of theologic forms, but with 
 the manifestations of religious experience. The whole of life is 
 entrusted to her care. Her joys, her sorrows, become the 
 spiritual types to which the believer looks and is enlightened. 
 The great monastic orders laid their self-renunciations at her 
 feet. In her name and to her chastity was knighthood 
 consecrated. She was the inspiration of poetry, and the supreme 
 object of art. The peasant among the mountains still places his 
 home and his fields under her guardianship ; and the cultivated 
 people of the city find in her no less their refuge and strength. 
 Wandering one day among the ecclesiastical antiquities of Paris, 
 I entered a chapel in one of the oldest churches in the Latin 
 quarter. Its walls from floor to roof were crowded with 
 hundreds of tablets which all told the same tale with strange 
 monotony. They all belonged to the terrible year 1870-1871. 
 Here were recorded the fulfilments of vows for husband, father, 
 brother, and son, serving in the trenches during the siege. Here 
 
22 
 
 were thanksgivings for deliverance, for rescue from danger by 
 wounds, famine, or disease, during that dreadful winter, as whole 
 families were united in safety and in faith. It was a spectacle 
 of infinite pathos. What suffering, what anxiety, what consola- 
 tion ! For the desires that were not granted there were no 
 tablets of resignation. But if religion is to be founded upon 
 experience in answer to prayer, how can the Evangelical deny 
 the Catholic's plea ? 
 
 VI. 
 
 But the argument may be carried one step further. If we 
 discern " One G-ospel in many Dialects " within the limits of the 
 New Testament, if the Christian churches, age after age, produce 
 fresh varieties of sacred speech, intelligible at least to their day 
 and generation, by the exaltation of the few or the faith of the 
 many, what shall be said of the other voices in the great chorus 
 of the world's religions ? Are they not, too, members of the 
 same wide fraternity of tongues ? It was a saying of Augustine 
 that there is no false doctrine which fails to contain some truth 
 Nulla falsa doctrina est quae non aliqica vera intermisceat. 1 Had 
 Augustine ever read the " Lord's Song " or Bhagavad-Grita, the 
 most sacred book of the followers of Vishnu, he would have found 
 a remarkable application of his principle. It comes to us 
 incorporated in one of the two colossal epics of Indian literature, 
 the Makabharata. There it is strangely inserted as an episode 
 in the struggle between the sons of Pandu and the son 
 of Kuru. The hosts on either side are arrayed for battle, 
 when the knight Arjuna (one of the sons of Pandu), stricken 
 with remorse at the approaching slaughter, addresses Krishna, 
 who acts as his charioteer. Krishna is, in fact, the incarnation of 
 the beneficent God, Vishnu, creator and sustainer of the world. 
 He answers with a discourse on the heavenly wisdom or mystic 
 knowledge by which the believer shall be freed from sin, and 
 
 1 Qucest. Evv. ii. 40. 
 
23 
 
 united in spirit with the universal Lord. In its present place it 
 would seem to have received additions in the interest of more 
 than one philosophic school. Its date cannot be determined 
 with any certainty, though there is good reason for thinking 
 that its earliest form may be carried back at least two centuries 
 before our era. It breathes so exalted a piety that it has been 
 gravely argued that it had felt, though far off, the touch of 
 Christ. The attempt of an enthusiastic German, Dr. Lorinser 
 (1869), to prove that its author was acquainted with all the 
 Gospels, the Book of Acts, and all the Epistles except those to 
 the Thessalonians, Philemon, and the Hebrews, has not, indeed, 
 found any support. But when so cautious a scholar as Professor 
 Hopkins (of Pennsylvania) makes an elaborate comparison of 
 it with the Fourth Gospel, 1 his argument in favour of the 
 dependence of the Indian poem, though not to me convincing, 
 must be heard with respect. The higher thought of India (as is 
 well known) soared far above the traditional scriptures with 
 their superstructures of ritual and Law. These belonged to the 
 lower scheme of works and merit, which detained the agent 
 in the round of transmigration. From this the philosophy of 
 religion sought to lead him into the world of spiritual reality 
 beyond all change. The Pauline gospel was more closely 
 involved in legal categories, especially in its account of the 
 death of Christ by which the Law was proved to have undone 
 itself. The Hindu sage is not embarrassed by the necessity of 
 linking the incarnate Vishnu with the ceremonial system. The 
 conceptions of divine promise and purpose, which play so large 
 a part in Pauline thought, are lacking in India, arid law and 
 ritual could be more easily referred to a lower plane. The 
 language of sacrifice which gathers round the person of the 
 Messiah finds no place, therefore, in the story of Krishna. 
 He is the incarnation of Yishnu sent forth to deliver 
 men from their sins, to overcome the powers of evil, 
 
 1 India, Old. and New (1901), p. 155. 
 
 
 
24 
 
 and to establish the rule of righteousness on earth. His 
 death, however, by the stray shaft of a hunter, who implores his 
 forgiveness and is immediately sent to the world above in a 
 heavenly car, possesses no kind of redemptive value. In a 
 scheme which provided an exact moral equivalent for every 
 thought and act of good or evil, according to the doctrine of the 
 Deed (Karma), no form of vicarious atonement was possible. 
 On the other hand, above the religion of works rises, in the 
 " Lord's Song," the religion of Ihakti, fervent devotion or love. 
 The ultimate principle of salvation, indeed, as in the Fourth 
 Gospel, is knowledge. " Coming into this knowledge," says the 
 Lord, "men become one in nature with me." 1 But this know- 
 ledge is attained through fervent love. " By love he knows me in 
 truth, who and what I am; then knowing me in truth he forthwith 
 enters into me." 2 " Have thy mind on me, thy love towards me, 
 thy sacrifice (used metaphorically of worship) toward me; do 
 homage to me." 3 "Abandoning all righteous deeds (i.e., reliance 
 on works as the means of salvation), see me as thy sole refuge. 
 I will deliver thee from all sins." The doctrine of "mutual 
 inherence," as the late Dr. Moberley designated the Pauline and 
 Johanriine view of the relations of the believer and Christ, 
 reappears in the promise of Krishna to the disciple : " They that 
 worship me with love dwell in me, and I in them." 4 And the 
 salvation of the true believer, however guilty be his past, is 
 sure : " Even though he be a doer of exceeding evil that worships 
 me with undivided worship, he shall be deemed good, for he is of 
 right purpose. Speedily he becomes righteous of soul, and comes 
 to lasting peace. son of Kunti, be assured that none who is 
 devoted to me is lost." 5 The demand of God from man, the 
 condition of true worship, is love. The response of God to man 
 is expressed in prasdda, identified in the physical world with 
 clearness or radiance ; in the inner realm with calmness and 
 serenity of mind, or, when directed towards others, with favour 
 1 xiv. 2, 2 xviii. 55. s xviii. 65-66. * ix. 29. 5 ix. 30-31. 
 
25 
 
 or grace. This is the ultimate possession of the believer : " If 
 thou hast thy thought on me, thou shalt by my grace pass over 
 all hard ways." 1 "In him seek refuge with thy whole soul; by 
 his grace thou shalt win supreme peace, the everlasting realm." 2 
 Here, then, is a religion of incarnation, which is at the same 
 time a religion of revelation and deliverance; and Krishna 
 declares ; " I am born age after age for the saving of the good, 
 the destruction of evil-doers, and the establishing of virtue (or 
 religion)." Keligiously the world is the creation of a gracious 
 God. It is brought forth by his free grace, and his beneficence 
 in its production becomes the type for his human worshipper. 
 He guides its course, holding the door of deliverance open to all 
 who seek it ; and accordingly we read : " He who serves me with 
 unswerving endeavour of love becomes fit for the partaking of 
 the divine nature (Brahmahood). For I am the image of Brahma, 
 of the eternal and infinite, of the everlasting truth, and of 
 absolute joy." 8 
 
 The story of Hindu theology is full of bewildering intricacies 
 which are hardly likely even to arouse the passing interest of the 
 ordinary Western believer. But they are assuredly of profound 
 significance to the student of religious experience. For similar 
 facts must be explained by similar causes ; and corresponding 
 types of trust and endeavour imply like play of thought upon 
 the vicissitudes of the spirit within. Why, asked the ancient 
 sages long before, should some men have reached the vision of 
 reality, and discerned the identity of the self within the heart 
 with " the True of the True," the absolute and universal ? It was 
 because their eyes had been opened, and the Great Self had 
 chosen them for his own. Here was already a doctrine of 
 election ; the religion of devotion or love readily suggested a 
 variety of fresh problems which the subtle speculative activity of 
 the Hindu mind delighted to throw into quaint, imaginative 
 forms. Was salvation due to the irresistible and free action of 
 1 xviii. 58. 2 xviii. 62. 3 xiv. 26-27. 
 
26 
 
 God, or did it depend in any way on the co-operation of 
 man ? Where lay the initiative, in divine grace or human 
 endeavour ? The disputants on the one side advanced the 
 argument of the cat. " God seizes the soul," they urged, 
 "and saves it, just as a cat carries away its little ones from 
 danger." " Nay, rather, " replied the advocates on the other, with 
 the argument of the monkey, " the soul seizes hold of God, and 
 saves itself by him, just as the young one of the monkey escapes 
 from peril by clinging to its mother's side." And out of these 
 dilemmas arose yet another. How can God, if he is just and 
 good, resolve to choose some and pass over others ? Or, from 
 the counter point of view, if he is Almighty, how can there be 
 action of human wills independent or opposed to his ? Or yet, 
 again, when faith and grace have once been given, can they be 
 forfeited, or is the perseverance of the saints assured ? 1 
 
 Why should I fetch these items of controversy out of the 
 obscurity of a distant land ? For two reasons : In the first 
 place they warn us against what may be called provincialism in 
 religion. The types of faith and life, with which we are familiar, 
 are not all unknown elsewhere. The mysteries of God and the 
 secrets of the soul have been the age-long objects' of devout 
 thought without as well as within the pale of Christendom. 
 But, secondly, they have never had so firm a seat in specific 
 human personalities. They have not been embodied in a great 
 tradition which guarded their noblest forms against dispersal in 
 vague clouds of myth. No one would compare the legends of 
 Krishna in the Puranas with the story of the Gospels, except 
 for some curiosity of occasional detail. The Christian student 
 for the ministry of religion returns, therefore, to the first 
 interpreters of Christian experience, the first creators of 
 Christian theology, to Paul and John. Is it simply to repeat 
 their phrases ? Nay, but to get back through them to the 
 Master who stands above them both. The reply to the philo- 
 
 1 Barth, Religions of India, p. 227. 
 
27 
 
 sophic inquirer who seeks for the differentiation of Christianity 
 among the religions of the world is not difficult Lo find. Paul 
 and John have the same explanations. In Pauline language it 
 is " the spirit of life in Christ Jesus." The Johannine Jesus 
 uses the same great word : " I am come that they may have 
 life, and may have it abundantly." And this spirit has two 
 aspects. As it looks out on man it begets human helpfulness : 
 " I am in the midst of you as he that serveth." As it looks up 
 to God it prompts the surrender of sonship : " Father, not my 
 will but thine be done." Here are the inspirations of duty and 
 faith. Service and trust must be the two keys of your future 
 work. I do not say that they will unlock all mysteries. There 
 are secrets of discipline and destiny which God keeps in reserve : 
 they are known only to those who enter into the joy of their 
 Lord. But on these two mighty impulses the vast fabric of the 
 Church has been erected. We have been told lately that in the 
 teaching of religion, even to children, the Gospels must be 
 interpreted by the Church. I believe that to be profoundly 
 true, if we are agreed on what we mean by the Church. If we 
 have only in view the decisions of its councils and the propositions 
 of its creeds, it is sufficient to reply that the clauses of the 
 Quicunque vidt do not help rne to understand the Sermon on the 
 Mount. But if we have regard to the totality of believers, one 
 great fact will emerge through all varieties of doctrine and rite. 
 The fundamental arid impelling power that unifies the whole, 
 that sends the missionary to distant lands, or the martyr to the 
 stake, or the scholar to his desk, or the nun to her works of 
 charity, or the Sunday School teacher to his class that keeps 
 the great host of faithful workers in all times and lands for God 
 and man at their posts of duty, and sustains the " dim common 
 populations " as they bear the sorrows and endure the hardships 
 of our mortal lot, is the imitatio Christi, the effort, how often 
 inarticulate and baffled, but never wholly futile, to appropriate 
 and reproduce some element in the experience of Jesus. This is 
 
28 
 
 the witness of Christian history, and this is what makes its 
 study an aid of the highest importance to the Christian minister. 
 We are learning now that the fellowship of the Spirit of Life is 
 wider than any creed, and God gives us access to it in many 
 different ways. He who seeks to be its minister to other men, 
 must learn to carry it into fields im visited by Jesus ; into the 
 devotion to truth, which is the glory of science, and the love of 
 beauty, which is the secret of poetry and art ; into the industrial 
 enterprises reared on the toil of the people ; into the purposes of 
 civic and national welfare in the great fight with ignorance and 
 suffering and sin; nay, I may add, into the obscure impulses 
 which bring races and civilisations into conflict, and the means 
 which may secure the pre-eminence of the Prince of Peace. Be 
 not alarmed. You are not called to do all these things at once. 
 But you are called to recognise that as life slowly tends to grow 
 more complex, the demands upon the ministry will continually 
 increase. I set before you, therefore, high aims, and I ask you to 
 give to the College your best energies. On the threshold of a 
 venerable chapel in Numidia was carved the inscription, Bonus 
 intra, melior exi. The aspiration of the ancient worshipper may 
 well become the modern student. A college that is dedicated 
 " to truth, to liberty, to religion," must needs be a sanctuary of 
 faith and prayer. I cannot predict for you an easy life : you 
 are content to face the unknown future with a cheerful 
 trust. The lines will not always fall to you in pleasant 
 places, and you may be early confronted with grim facts 
 of failure or pain. But if you have learned the lesson of 
 discipleship, and are able to say in humble confidence with 
 the Apostle Paul, " Our sufficiency is of God," the wonder 
 and the joy of your work will grow even through frequent trial 
 and possible defeat. You may find but small opportunities ; your 
 message may only reach a few ; you may be for ever haunted by 
 the sense of your inadequacy to realise the greatness of your 
 calling ; you may have little share in the redemptive labours of 
 
29 
 
 our age ; you may be excluded from precious fellowship which 
 would sustain your spirit ; what then ? You will be ministers 
 of God God always working, always teaching, always loving ; 
 God known in the grandeur of the world ; God revealed in the 
 mighty growth of the human spirit ; God recognised by the 
 testimony of innumerable faithful souls ; God calling us for ever 
 forwards to new knowledge, clearer vision, wider truth ; God our 
 infinite source, and God our everlasting goal. And in weakness 
 and obscurity you will still raise the song, " the depth of the 
 riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God ! How 
 unsearchable are his judgments and his ways past tracing out ! 
 For of him, and through him, and unto him, are all things. To 
 him be the glory for ever. Amen." 
 
Y 
 
 GAYLORD 
 
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 Manufacturers 
 Syracuse, N. Y. 
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