characters do actually belong to Christianity in its natural truth, and to show them there should be our object. This alone is really important.
And shown they can be. Certainty and grandeur are really and truly characters of Christianity. Theologians and popular religion have given a wrong turn to it all, and present it to us in a form which is fantastic and false; but the firm foundation for human life is to be found in it, and the true source for us of strength, joy, and peace. Sine viâ non itur, and Christianity can be shown to be mankind's indispensable way. The subject of the Old Testament, Salvation by righteousness, the subject of the New, Righteousness by Jesus Christ, are, in positive strict truth, man's most momentous matters of concern. The command of the Old Testament, 'Fear God and keep his commandments,' put into other words, what is it but this: 'Reverently obey the eternal power moving us to fulfil the true law of our being;'—and when shall that command be done away? The command of the New Testament: 'Watch that ye may be counted worthy to stand before the Son of Man,' put into other words, what is it? It is this: 'So live, as to be worthy of that high and true ideal of man and of man s life, which shall be at last victorious.' All the future is there.
Jesus himself, as he appears in the Gospels, and for the very reason that he is so manifestly above the heads of his reporters there, is, in the jargon of modern philosophy, an absolute; we cannot explain him, cannot get behind him and above him, cannot command him. He is therefore the perfection of an ideal, and it is as an ideal that the divine has its
