S. THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.

THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD.

Then spake Jesus again unto them, saying, I am the Light of the World: he that followeth me shall not walk in Darkness, but shall have the Light of Life. — John 8:12.

Sometimes Jesus gathers His work and nature up in one descriptive word, and offers it, as it were out of i. wide-open hand, complete to His disciples. In such a word all the details of His relation to the soul and to the world are comprehensively included. As the disciple listens and receives it, he feels all his fragmentary and scattered experiences drawing together and rounding into unity. As, having heard it, he carries it forth with him into his life, he finds all future experiences claiming their places within it, and getting their meaning from it. Such words of Jesus are like spheres of crystal into which the world is gathered, and where the past and future, the small and great, may all be read.

It seems to me as if there were days on which we wanted to set one of these comprehensive words of Christ before our eyes and study it. There are days when we must give ourselves to some particular detail of Christian truth or conduct. There are other days when we are faced by the question of the whole meaning of the Christian faith and its relation to the great world of life. Vague and perplexed the soul is to which its faith does not come with distinct and special touches, pressing directly on every movement of its life. But poor and petty is the soul which has no large conception of its faith, always abiding around and enfolding its details and giving them the dignity and unity they need.

One of these comprehensive words of Jesus is our text this morning.

I want to ask you then to think with me what Jesus means when He declares Himself to be the "Light of the World" or the "Light of Life." The words come down to us out of the old Hebrew temple where He spoke them first. They pierce into the centre of our modern life. Nay, they have done much to make our modern life, and to make it different from the old Hebrew temple where they were spoken first. It will be good indeed if we can feel something of the power that is in them, and understand how clear is the conception of Life which they include, how far our present Christianity is an embodiment of that conception, how far it fails of it, how certain it is in being ever truer and truer to that conception that the faith of Christ must come to be the Master of the soul and of the world.

We may begin, then, by considering what would be the idea of Christ and His relation to the world which we should get if this were all we knew of Him, — if He as yet had told us nothing of Himself but what is wrapped up in these rich and simple words, "I am the Light of the World," "I am the Light of Life." They send us instantly abroad into the world of Nature. They set us on the hill-top watching the sunrise as it fills the east with glory. They show us the great plain flooded and beaten and quivering with the noon-day sun. They hush and elevate us with the mystery and sweetness and suggestiveness of the evening’s glow. There could be no image so abundant in its meaning; no fact plucked from the world of Nature could have such vast variety of truth to tell; and yet one meaning shines out from the depth of the figure and irradiates all its messages. They all are true by its truth. What is that meaning? It is the essential richness and possibility of the world and its essential belonging to the sun. Light may be great and glorious in itself. The sun may be tumultuous with fiery splendor; the atmosphere may roll in billows of glory for its million miles; but light as related to earth has its significance in the earth’s possibilities. The sun, as the world’s sun, is nothing without the world, on which it shines, and whose essential character and glory it displays. Do you see what I mean? When the sun rose this morning it found the world here. It did not make the world. It did not fling forth on its earliest ray this solid globe, which was not and would not have been but for the sun’s rising. What did it do? It found the world in darkness, torpid and heavy and asleep; with powers all wrapped up in sluggishness; with life that was hardly better or more alive than death. The sun found this great sleeping world and woke it. It bade it be itself. It quickened every slow and sluggish faculty. It called to the dull streams, and said, "Be quick;" to the dull birds and bade them sing; to the dull fields and made them grow; to the dull men and bade them talk and think and work. It flashed electric invitation to the whole mass of sleeping power which really was the world, and summoned it to action. It did not make the world. It did not sweep a dead world off and set a live world in its place. It did not start another set of processes unlike those which had been sluggishly moving in the darkness. It poured strength into the essential processes which belonged to the very nature of the earth which it illuminated. It glorified, intensified, fulfilled the earth; so that with the sun’s work incomplete, with part of the earth illuminated and the rest lying in the darkness still, we can most easily conceive of the dark region looking in its half -life drowsily over to the region which was flooded with light, and saying, " There, there is the true earth! That is the real planet. In light and not in darkness the earth truly is itself." That is the Parable of the Light. And now it seems to me to be of all importance to remember and assert all that to be distinctly a true parable of Christ. He says it is: "I am the Light of the World." A thousand things that means. A thousand subtle, mystic miracles of deep and intricate relationship between Christ and humanity must be enfolded in those words; but over and behind and within all other meanings, it means this, — the essential richness and possibility of humanity and its essential belonging to Divinity. Christ is unspeakably great and glorious in Himself. The glory which He had with His Father " before the world was, " of that we can only meditate and wonder; but the glory which He has had since the world was, the glory which He has had in relation to the world, is all bound up with the world’s possibilities, has all consisted in the utterance and revelation and fulfillment of capacities which were in the very nature of the world on which His Light has shone. Do you see what I mean? Christ rises on a soul. Christ rises on the world. I speak in crude and superficial language. For the moment I make no account of the deep and sacred truth, — the truth which alone is finally and absolutely true, — that Christ has always been with every soul and all the world. I talk in crude and superficial words, and say Christ comes to any soul or to the world. What is it that happens? If the figure of the Light is true, Christ when He comes finds the soul or the world really existent, really having within itself its holiest capabilities, really moving, though dimly and darkly, in spite of all its hindrances, in its true directions; and what He does for it is to quicken it through and through, to sound the bugle of its true life in its ears, to make it feel the nobleness of movements which have seemed to it ignoble, the hopefulness of impulses which have seemed hopeless, to bid it be itself. The little lives which do in little ways that which the life of Jesus does completely, the noble characters of which we think we have the right to say that they are the lights of human history, this is true also of them. They reveal and they inspire. The worthless becomes full of worth, the insignificant becomes full of meaning at their touch. They faintly catch the feeble reflection of His life who is the true Light of the World, the real illumination and inspiration of humanity. But metaphors bewilder and embarrass us when once we have caught their general meaning, and they begin to tempt us to follow them out into details into which they were not meant to lead us. Let us then leave the figure, and try to grasp the truth in its complete simplicity and see what some of its applications are. The truth is that every higher life to which man comes, and especially the highest life in Christ, is in the true line of man’s humanity; there is no transportation to a foreign region. There is the quickening and fulfilling of what man by the very essence of his nature is. The more man becomes irradiated with Divinity, the more, not the less, truly he is man. The fullest Christian experience is simply the fullest life. To enter into it therefore is no wise strange. The wonder and the unnaturalness is that any child of God should live outside of it, and so in all his life should never be himself. . When I repeat such truths they seem self-evident. No man, I think, denies them; and yet I feel the absence of their power all through men’s struggles for the Christian life. A sense of foreignness and unnaturalness and strangeness lies like a fog across the entrance of the divine country; a certain wonder whether I, a man, have any business there; an unreality about it all; a break and gulf between what the world is and what we know it ought to be, — all these are elements in the obscurity, the feebleness, the vague remoteness, of religion. And yet how clear the Bible is about it all! How clear Christ is! It is redemption and fulfillment which he comes to bring to man. Those are his words. There is a true humanity which is to be restored, and all whose unattained possibilities are to be filled out. There is no human affection, of fatherhood, brotherhood, childhood, which is not capable of expressing divine relations. Man is a child of God, for whom his Father’s’ house is waiting. The whole creation is groaning and travailing till man shall be complete. Christ comes not to destroy but to fulfill. What is the spirit of such words as those? Is it not all a claiming of man through all his life for God? Is it not an assertion that just so far as he is not God’s he is not truly man? Is it not a declaration that whatever he does in his true human nature, undistorted, unperverted, is divinely done, and therefore that the divine perfection of his life will be in the direction which these efforts of his nature indicate and prophesy?

I bid you to think whether to clearly believe this would not make the world more full of courage and of hope. If you could thoroughly believe that the divine life to which you were called was the completion, and not the abrogation and surrender, of your humanity, would you not be more strong and eager in your entrance on it? If below the superficial currents which so tremendously draw us away from righteousness and truth we always felt the tug and majestic pressure of the profoundest currents setting toward righteousness and truth, would not our souls be stronger? Shall we not think that? Shall we leave it to doubting lips to tell about the "tendency which makes for righteousness"? Shall we not tell of it, — we who believe in Christ, who made in His very being the declaration of the nativeness of righteousness to man, who bade all generations see in Him how the Son of Man is the Son of God in the foundation and intention of His life?

Let us see how all this is true in various applications. Apply it first to the standards of character. We talk of Christian character as if it were some separate and special thing unattempted, unsuggested by the human soul until it became aware of Christ. There would come a great flood of light and reality into it all if we knew thoroughly that the Christian character is nothing but the completed human character. The Christian is nothing but the true man. Nothing but the true man, do I say? As if that were a little thing! As if man, with any inflow of divinity, could be, could wish to be anything more or different from man! But we imagine a certain vague array of qualities which are to belong to the Christian life which are not the intrinsic human qualities; and so our Christian type becomes unreal, and our human type loses its dignity and greatness. Human courage, human patience, human trustiness, human humility, — those filled with the fire of God make the graces of the Christian life. We are still haunted by the false old distinction of the natural virtues and the Christian graces. The Christian graces are nothing but the natural virtues held up into the light of Christ. They are made of the same stuff; they are lifted along the same lines; but they have found their pinnacle. They have caught the illumination which their souls desire. Manliness has not been changed into Godliness; it has fulfilled itself in Godliness. As soon as we understand all this, then what a great, clear thing salvation becomes. It’s one idea is health. Not rescue from suffering, not plucking out of fire, not deportation to some strange, beautiful region where the winds blow with other influences and the skies drop with other dews, not the enchaining of the spirit with some unreal celestial spell, but health, — the cool, calm vigor of the normal human life; the making of the man to be himself; the calling up out of the depths of his being and the filling with vitality of that self which is truly he, — this is salvation! Of course it all assumes that in this mixture of good and evil which we call Man, this motley and medley which we call human character, it is the good and not the evil which is the foundation color of the whole. Man is a son of God on whom the Devil has laid his hand, not a child of the Devil whom God is trying to steal. That is the first truth of all religion. That is what Christ is teaching everywhere and always. " We called the chess-board white, we call it black; " but it is, this chess-board of our human life, white not black, — black spotted on white, not white spotted upon black.

It is easy to make this question of precedence and intrusion seem unimportant. "If man stands here to-day half bad, half good, what matters it how it came about, — whether the good intruded on the bad, or the bad upon the good? Here is the present actual condition. Is not that enough?" No, surely it is not. Everything depends in the great world upon whether Peace or War is the Intruder and the Rebel, upon whether Liberty or Slavery is the ideal possessor of the field. Everything depends in personal life upon whether Cowardice has invaded the rightful realm of Courage, or Courage has pitched its white tent on dusky fields which belong to Cowardice, or whether Truth or Falsehood is the ultimate king to whom the realm belongs. The great truth of Redemption, the great idea of Salvation, is that the realm belongs to Truth, that the Lie is everywhere and always an intruder and a foe. He came in, therefore he may be driven out. When he is driven out, and man is purely man, then man is saved. It is the glory and preciousness of the first mysterious, poetic chapters of Genesis that they are radiant through all their sadness with that truth. Does this make smaller or less important that great Power of God whereby the human life passes from the old condition to the new, — the power of conversion? Certainly not! What task could be more worthy of the Father’s power and love than this assertion and fulfillment of His child? All of our Christian thinking and talking has been and is haunted by a certain idea of failure and recommencement. Man is a failure, so there shall be a new attempt; and in place of the man we will make the Christian! There is nothing of that tone about what Jesus says. The Christian to Jesus is the man. The Christian, to all who think the thought of Jesus after Him, is the perfected and completed man.

Just see what this involves. Hear with what naturalness it clothes the invitations of the Gospel. They are not strange summons to some distant, unknown land; they are God’s call to you to be yourself. They appeal to a homesickness in your own heart and make it their confederate. That you should be the thing you have been, and not be that better thing, that new man which Is the oldest man, the first type and image of your being, is unnatural and awful. The world in the new light of the Gospel expects it of you, is longing for it. The creation, in Saint Paul’s great phrase, is groaning and travailing, waiting for the manifestation of this child of God which is hidden in your life. And all this vindicates itself by a mysterious and beautiful familiarity in the new life when you have begun to live it. With confidence I know that I could appeal to the experience of many of you who hear me, to recognize what I mean. I take a plant whose home is in the tropics, but which has grown to stunted life amid the granite of Vermont. I carry it and set it where its nature essentially belongs. Does it not know the warm earth, and does not the warm earth know it? Do not the palm-trees, and the sky which it sees through their broad leaves, and the warmer stars which glorify the sky at night speak to the amazed but satisfied heart of the poor plant in tones which it understands? And when a soul is set there where its nature always has belonged, in the obedience of God, in the dear love of Christ, does it not know the new life which embraces it? Ah, it has lived in it always in the idea of its being, in the conception of existence which has been always at its heart. It has walked the great halls of the divine obedience. It has stood by this river of divine refreshment. It has seen these great prospects of the celestial hope. It has climbed to these hill-tops of prophetic vision. They are not wholly strange. Nothing is wholly strange to any man when he becomes it, which it has always been in his nature to become. Because it has always been in man to become the fulfilled man, which is the Christian, therefore for a man to have become a Christian is never wholly strange.

See also here what a true ground there is for the appeal which you desire to make to other souls. It must be from the naturalness of the new life that you call out to your brethren. You must claim your brother for the holiness to which his nature essentially belongs. "Come home!" "Come home!" "I have found the homestead!" "I have found the Father!" "I have found the true manhood!" ’’I have found what you and I and all men were made to be!" So the soul out of the tropics cries out to its brother souls still lingering among the granite hills, and the voice has all the persuasiveness of Nature. The soft southern winds which bring it tell the souls to which it comes that it is true.

There are two sorts of attraction which draw, two sorts of fascination which hold, human nature everywhere, — the attraction of the natural and the attraction of the unnatural. The attraction of the natural everywhere is healthiest and highest. The attraction of the natural is the true attraction of Religion, — most of all, the attraction of the Christian Gospel. And yet again this makes the higher life intelligible, and so makes it real. This alone makes such a thing as Christian Manliness conceivable. Christian Unmanliness is what a great many of men’s pious, earnest struggles have been seeking. If the saint on to all eternity is to be the ever-ripening man, never changing into any new and unknown thing which he was not before, never to all eternity unfolding one capacity which was not in the substance of his humanity from its creation, then it follows that the most celestial and transcendent goodnesses must still be one in kind with the familiar virtues which sometimes in their crude and earthly shapes seem low and commonplace. Courage in all the worlds is the same courage. Truth before the throne of God is the same thing as when neighbor talks with neighbor on the street. Mercy will grow tenderer and finer, but will be the old blessed balm of life in the fields of eternity that it was in your workshop and your home. Unselfishness will expand and richen till it enfolds the life like sunshine, but it will be the same self-denial, opening into a richer self-indulgence, which it was when it first stole in with one thin sunbeam on the startled soul. There is no new world of virtues in any heaven or in any heavenly experience of life. God is good and man is good; and as man becomes more good, he becomes not merely more like God, but more himself. As he becomes more godly, he becomes more manly too. It is so hard for us to believe in the Mystery of Man. "Behold man is this," we say, shutting down some near gate which falls only just beyond, quite in sight of, what human nature already has attained. If man would go beyond that he must be something else than man. And just then something breaks the gate away, and lo, far out beyond where we can see stretches the Mystery of Man. The beautiful, the awful mystery of man! To him, to man, all lower lines have climbed, and having come to him, have found a field where evolution may go on forever. The mystery of man! How Christ believed in that! Oh, my dear friends, he who does not believe in that cannot enter into the full glory of the Incarnation, cannot really believe in Christ. Where the mysterious reach of manhood touches the divine, there Christ appears. No mere development of human nature outgoing any other reach that it has made, yet still not incapable of being matched, perhaps of being overcome; not that, not that, — unique and separate forever, — but possible, because of this same mystery of man in which the least of us has share. To him who knows the hither edges of that mystery in his own life, the story of how in, on, at its depths it should be able to receive and to contain divinity cannot seem incredible; may I not say, cannot seem strange?

Men talk about the Christhood, and say, "How strange it is! Strange that Christ should have been, — strange that Christ should have suffered for mankind. "I cannot see that so we most magnify Him or bring Him nearest to us. Once feel the mystery of man and is it strange? Once think it possible that God should fill a humanity with Himself, once see humanity capable of being filled with God, and can you conceive of His not doing it? Must there not be an Incarnation? Do you not instantly begin to search earth for the holy steps? Once think it possible that Christ can, and are you not sure that Christ must give himself for our Redemption? So only, when it seems inevitable and natural, does the Christhood become our pattern. Then only does it shine on the mountain-top up toward which we can feel the low lines of our low life aspiring. The Son of God is also the Son of Man. Then in us, the sons of men, there is the key to the secret of His being and His work. Know Christ that you may know yourself. But, oh, also know yourself that you may know Christ!

I think to every Christian there come times when all the strangeness disappears from the divine humanity which stands radiant at the centre of his faith. He finds it hard to believe in himself and in his brethren perhaps; but that Christ should be and should be Christ appears the one reasonable, natural, certain thing in all the universe. In Him all broken lines unite; in Him all scattered sounds are gathered into harmony; and out of the consummate certainty of Him, the soul comes back to find the certainty of common things which the lower faith holds, which advancing faith loses, and then finds again in Christ.

How every truth attains to its enlargement and reality in this great truth, — that the soul of man carries the highest possibilities within itself, and that what Christ does for it is to kindle and call forth these possibilities to actual existence. We do not understand the Church until we understand this truth. Seen in its light the Christian Church is nothing in the world except the promise and prophecy and picture of what the world in its idea is and always has been, and in its completion must visibly become. It is the primary crystallization of humanity. It is no favored, elect body caught from the ruin, given a salvation in which the rest can have no part. It is an attempt to realize the universal possibility. All men are its potential members. The strange thing for any man is not that he should be within it, but that he should be without it. Every good movement of any most secular sort is a struggle toward it, a part of its activity. All the world’s history is ecclesiastical history, is the story of the success and failure, the advance and hindrance of the ideal humanity, the Church of the living God. Well may the prophet poet greet it, —

"O heart of mine, keep patience; looking forth
As from the Mount of Vision I behold
Pure, just, and free the Church of Christ on earth, —
The martyr’s dream, the golden age foretold."

Tell me, my friends, can we not all think that we see a progress and elevation in men’s ideas about their souls’ conversion which would seem to show an entrance into the power of this truth? In old times more than today he who entered into the new life of Christ thought of himself as rescued, snatched from the wreck of a ruined and sinking world, given an exceptional privilege of safety. To-day more than in old times the saved soul looks with a delighted and awe-struck wonder into his new experience, and sees in it the true and natural destiny of all mankind. "Lo, because I am this, I know that all men may be it. God has but shown me in my soul’s experience of what all souls are capable." And so the new life does not separate the soul from, but brings it more deeply into sympathy with, all humanity.

I believe that here also is the real truth and the final satisfaction of men’s minds as concerns the Bible. As the spiritual life with which the Bible deals is the flower of human life, so the Book which deals with it is the flower of human books. But it is not thereby an unhuman book. It is the most human of all books. In it is seen the everlasting struggle of the man-life to fulfill itself in God. All books in which that universal struggle of humanity is told are younger brothers, — less clear and realized and developed utterances of that which is so vivid in the history of the sacred people and is perfect in the picture of the divine Man. I will not be puzzled, but rejoice when I find in all the sacred books, in all deep, serious books of every sort, fore gleams and adumbrations of the lights and shadows which lie distinct upon the Bible page. I will seek and find the assurance that my Bible is inspired of God not in virtue of its distance from, but in virtue of its nearness to, the human experience and heart. It is in that experience and heart that the real inspiration of God is given, and thence it issues into the written book: —

"Out of the heart of Nature rolled
The Burdens of the Bible old.
The Litanies of nations came
Like the volcano’s tongue of flame;
Up from the burning core below
The Canticles of love and woe." That book is most inspired which most worthily and deeply tells the story of the most inspired life. Is there not here the light of every darkness and the key to every riddle? The missionary goes into a heathen land. What shall he make of what he finds there? Shall he not see in it all the raw material and the suggested potency of that divine life which he knows that it is the rightful condition of the Sons of God to live? Shall he not be eager and ingenious, rather than reluctant, to find and recognize and proclaim the truth that the Father has left Himself without witness in no home where His children live? As in the crudest social ways and habits of the savage islanders he sees the beginnings and first efforts toward the most perfect and elaborate civilizations which the world contains, — the germs of constitutions, the promise of senates and cabinets and treaties, — so in the ignorant and half -brutal faiths shall he not discover the upward movement of the soul to which he shall then delight to offer all the rich light of the teaching which has come to his centuries of Christian faith, saying, "Lo, this is what it means: Whom you are ignorantly worshipping, Him declare I unto you"?

Among all the philosophies of history where is there one that matches with this simple story that man is the child of God, forever drawn to his Father, beaten back from Him by base waves of passion, sure to come to Him in the end. There is no philosophy of history which ever has been written like the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The first idea, the wanton wandering, the discontent, the brave return, the cordial welcome, — all are there. It is the history of man’s action and man’s thought; it is the story of his institutions and of his ideas; it holds the explanation of the past and the promise of the future; its beginning is where the first conception of what man shall be lies in the heart of the Creative Power; its end is in that endless life which man, having been reconciled to God and come to the completion of his idea, is to live in his Father’s house forever. Do we ask ourselves, as well we may, at what point in that long history the world is standing in this rich and interesting period in which we live? Who shall precisely say? But in the wonderful story of the Prodigal Son must there not have been one moment when at the very height of the revel there came a taste of bitterness into the wine, and when the faces of the harlots, in some gleam of fresh morning sunlight which broke into the hot and glaring chamber, seemed tawdry and false and cruel? Must there not have been a moment somewhere then, perhaps just when the carouse seemed most tempestuous and hopeless, a moment when the heart of the exile turned to his home, and the life with his father seemed so strong and simple and natural and real, so cool and sweet and true and healthy, that the miserable tumult and the gaudy glare about him for a moment became unreal and lost its hold? Much, much had yet to come, — the poverty and swine and husks, — before the boy gathered himself together and arose and said, " I will go to my father; " but the tide was turned, the face was set homeward, after that one moment of true sight of the true light in the hall of unnatural revel and resplendent sin. I sometimes think that there, in many ways just there, is where our age is standing with its startled and bewildered face.

I may be wrong or right about our age, I may be wrong or right about many of the ways in which it has appeared to me as if the truth which I have tried to preach to you to-day touches the great problems of religion and of life. But now I turn to you, young men and women, earnest and brave and hopeful — many of you also sorely perplexed and puzzled. What does this truth mean for you? Does it not mean everything for you if Truth and Courage and Unselfishness and Goodness are indeed natural to man and all Evil is unnatural and foreign?

There is indeed a superficial and a deeper nature. I am talking of the deeper nature. I am talking of the nature which belongs to every one of us as the child of God. I am talking, not of the waves which may be blown this way or that way upon the surface, but of the great tide which is heaving shoreward down below. The man who lives in that deeper nature, the man who believes himself the Son of God, is not surprised at his best moments and his noblest inspirations. He is not amazed when he does a brave thing or an unselfish thing. He is amazed at himself when he is a coward or a liar. He accepts self-restraint only as a temporary condition, an immediate necessity of life. Not self-restraint but self-indulgence, the free, unhindered utterance of the deepest nature, which is good, — that is the only final picture of man’s duty which he tolerates. And all the life is one; the specially and specifically religious being but the point at which the diamond for the moment shines, with all the diamond nature waiting in reserve through the whole substance of the precious stone.

Great is the power of a life which knows that its highest experiences are its truest experiences, that it is most itself when it is at its best. For it each high achievement, each splendid vision, is a sign and token of the whole nature’s possibility. What a piece of the man was for that shining instant, it is the duty of the whole man to be always. When the hand has once touched the rock the heart cannot be satisfied until the whole frame has been drawn up out of the waves and stands firm on its two feet on the solid stone. Are there not very many of us to whom the worst that we have been seems ever possible of repetition; but the best that we have ever been shines a strange and splendid miracle which cannot be repeated? The gutter in which we lay one day is always claiming us. The mountain-top on which we stood one glorious morning seems to have vanished from the earth. The very opposite of all that is the belief of him who knows himself the child of God. For him, for him alone, sin has its true horror. "What! Have I, who once have claimed God, whom once God has claimed, have I been down into the den of Devils? Have I brutalized my brain with drink? Have I let my heart burn with lust? Have I, the child of God, cheated and lied and been cruel and trodden on my brethren to satisfy my base ambition? "Oh, believe me, believe me, my dear friends, you never will know the horror and misery of sin till you know the glory and mystery of man. You never can estimate the disaster of an interruption till you know the worth of what it interrupts. You never will understand wickedness by dwelling on the innate depravity of man. You can understand wickedness only by knowing that the very word man means holiness and strength.

Here, too, lies the sublime and beautiful variety of human life. It is as beings come to their reality that they assert their individuality. In the gutter all the poor wretches lie huddled together, one indistinguishable mass of woe; but on the mountain-top each figure stands out separate and clear against the blueness of the sky. The intense variety of Light! The awful monotony of Darkness! Men are various; Christians ought to be various a thousand-fold. Strive for your best, that there you may find your most distinctive life. We cannot dream of what interest the world will have when every being in its human multitude shall shine with his own light and color, and be the child of God which it is possible for him to be, — which he has ever been in the true home -land of his Father’s thought. Do I talk fancies? Do I paint visions upon unsubstantial clouds? If it seem to you that I do, I beg you to come back now, as I close, to those words which I quoted to you at the beginning. "I am the Light of the World," said Jesus. Do you not see now what I meant when I declared that it was in making the world know itself that Christ was primarily the Power of the World’s Redemption? The Revealer and the Redeemer are not two persons, but only one, — one Saviour.

What then? If Christ can make you know yourself; if as you walk with Him day by day. He can reveal to you your sonship to the Father; if, keeping daily company with Him, you can come more and more to know how native is goodness and how unnatural sin is to the soul of man; if, dwelling with Him who is both God and Man, you can come to believe both in God and in Man through Him, then you are saved, — saved from contempt, saved from despair, saved into courage and hope and charity and the power to resist temptation, and the passionate pursuit of perfectness.

It is as simple and as clear as that. Our religion is not a system of ideas about Christ. It is Christ. To believe in Him is what? To say a creed? To join a church? No; but to have a great, strong, divine Master, whom we perfectly love, whom we perfectly trust, whom we will follow anywhere, and who, as we follow Him or walk by His side, is always drawing out in us our true nature and making us determined to be true to it through everything, is always compelling us to see through falsehood and find the deepest truth, which is, in one great utterance of it, that we are the sons of God, who is thus always " leading us to the Father. " The hope of the world is in the ever richer naturalness of the highest life. "The earth shall be full of the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea." Your hope and mine is the same. The day of our salvation has not come till every voice brings us one message; till Christ, the Light of the world, everywhere reveals to us the divine secret of our life; till everything without joins with the consciousness all alive within, and " the Spirit Itself beareth witness with our spirits that we are the children of God."