of life, by "fortuitous variations," by "accidental" shifts of level, or even by a blind élan vital. If there is an increasing purpose and a clearly culminating drama unfolding in this moving flood of life, then there is some Mind that sees the way, and some Will that directs the march of Life. And this confidence of ours in some divine Event to which the whole creation moves, {xxxviii} this insight that there must be a significant and adequate explanation for the immanent teleology and beauty with which our universe is crammed, is, once more, Reason's postulate of God. There is something in us, indissoluble from Reason itself—a Light, a Word, a Witness as these Spiritual Reformers insisted—which links us in all the deeper processes of self-consciousness with That Which Is and without which "knowledge" would be a mere flux of seemings, a flight of seriatim items.

IV

  When this world's pleasures for my soul sufficed,
  Ere my heart's plummet sounded depths of pain,
  I called on reason to control my brain,
  And scoffed at that old story of the Christ.

  But when o'er burning wastes my feet had trod,
  And all my life was desolate with loss,
  With bleeding hands I clung about the cross,
  And cried aloud, "Man needs a suffering God."[28]

There can be no doubt that the compulsions and implications of rational insight have brought multitudes of men to God, have given them an unescapable conviction of His reality, and have swayed their wills to live in conformity to His perfect Goodness; and it is also true that when for any cause this clue of rationality is missed or lost, men flounder about in the fog and pass through periods of inward tragedy amounting often to despair. But the approach of Reason still leaves much to be desired. It points to something deeper than the transitory flux of things, it raises our minds to some sort of ultimate and self-explanatory Reality, it compels the conviction that there is an all-inclusive Logos—Mind or Spirit—that explains what is and what ought to be, and what in the unfolding course of things is to be; but it does not bring us to a personal God who is our loving Friend and the {xxxix} intimate Companion of our souls, it does not help us solve the mystery of human suffering that lies heavily upon our lives, and it does not bring to our spirits the saving reinforcement of personal Love that must be a central feature of a spiritual and adequate religion.

There is still another way of approach to a Religion for mature minds which has been no less universally operative and no less dynamic in its transforming effects upon human lives than either of the two tendencies so far considered—I refer to the way of Faith. By Faith I mean the soul's moral or appreciative apprehension of God as historically revealed, particularly as revealed in the personal life of Jesus Christ. This Faith-way to God cannot be wholly separated—except by an artificial abstraction—from the inward way of mysticism, or from the implications of Reason. It is no blind acceptance of traditional opinions, no uncritical reliance on "authority," or on some mysterious infallible oracle. It is the spiritual response—or "assent," as Clement of Alexandria called it—the moral swing of our inmost self, as we catch insights of a loving Heart and holy Will revealed through the words and lives and sufferings of saints and prophets, who have lived by their vision of God, and supremely revealed in the Life and Love, the Passion and the Triumphs of that Person whose experience and character and incarnation of life's possibilities seem at last adequate for all the needs—the heights and the depths—of this complex life of ours.

It was Luther's living word which first brought the momentous significance of Faith to clear consciousness in the sixteenth century. But the new way of Faith meant many and discordant things, according to the preparation of the ears of those who heard. It spoke, as all Pentecosts do, to each man in his own tongue. To those who came to the Lutheran insight with a deep hunger of spirit for reality and with minds liberated by Humanistic studies, the Faith-message meant new heavens and a new earth. It was a new discovery of God, and a new estimate of man. They suddenly caught {xl} a vision of life as it was capable of becoming, and they committed their fortunes to the task of making that possible world real. By a shift of view, as revolutionary as that from Ptolemaic astronomy to the verifiable insight of Copernicus, they passed over from the dogma of a Christ who came to appease an angry God, and to found a Church as an ark of safety in a doomed world, to the living apprehension of a Christ—verifiable in experience—who revealed to them, in terms of His own nature, an eternally tender, loving, suffering, self-giving God, and who made them see, with the enlightened eyes of their heart, the divine possibilities of human life. Through this insight, they were the beginners of a new type of Christianity, which has become wide-spread and impressive in the modern world, a type that finds the supreme significance of Christ's Life in His double revelation of the inherent nature of God, and the immense value and potentiality of man, and that changes the emphasis from schemes of salvation to interpretations of life, from the magic significance of doctrine to the incalculable worth of the moral will.

These men were weak in historical sense, and, like everybody else in their generation, they used Scripture without much critical insight. But they hit upon a principle which saved them from slavery to texts, and which gave them a working faith in the steady moral and spiritual development of man. I mean the principle that this Christ whom they had discovered anew was an eternal manifestation of God, an immanent Word of God, a Spirit brooding over the world of men, as in the beginning over the face of the waters, present in the unfolding events of history as well as in the far-away "dispensations of Grace." As a result, they grew less interested in the problem that had fascinated so many mystics, the problem of the super-empirical evolution of the divine Consciousness; the super-temporal differentiation of the unity of the Godhead into a Father and Son and self-revealing Holy Ghost; and they tried rather to appreciate and to declare the concrete revelation through Christ, and {xli} the import of His visible and invisible presence in the world.[29]

This approach of Faith, this appreciation of the nature of God as He has been unveiled in the ethical processes of history, especially in the Person of Christ, and in His expanding conquest of the world, must always be one of the great factors of spiritual religion. The profound results of higher criticism, with its stern winnowings, have brought us face to face with problems unknown to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So much of what seemed the solid continent of historical truth has weathered and crumbled away that some have wondered whether any irreducible nucleus would remain firm and permanent above the flood of the years, and whether the religion of the future must not dispense with the historical element, and the Faith-aspect that goes with it, and rest wholly upon present inward experience.

There are, however, I believe, no indications worth considering, of the disappearance of Jesus Christ from human history. On the contrary, He holds, as never before, the commanding place in history. He still dominates conscience, by the moral sway of His Life of Goodness, as does no other Person who has ever lived; and by the attractive power of His life and love He still sets men to living counter to the strong thrust of instinct and impulse as does no one else who has ever touched the springs of conduct. The Faith-aspect is