On the Intellectual Life of Man

En and books have their favorite words. As the result of years of thoughtful life, of constant and studious dwelling upon one class of ideas, almost all men appropriate out of the great treasury of the language certain words which they make their own. Their friends grow used to hearing those words from their lips. The words become filled with their personality. Some color or shade or tone comes into them, as such a speaker habitually uses them, which indicates on which side he has approached their meaning, and they who honor him can hardly hear the words or speak them without entering into communion with his spirit.

If such an habitual use of certain words with certain tones is true and always fresh, if it does not come out of affectation and does not degenerate into mannerism, it often gives us the material for.

an excellent study of a man’s life and nature. If he is only real, we may judge him by his words. As he speaketh with his mouth so ishe. Tell me what words a man uses most, and reproduce for me the tones in which he speaks them, and I ought to be able to tell you a good deal about what sort of man he is. Count for me the favorite words of any book, and give me some idea of the association in which they stand, and I ought to know much of the book’s quality and of what influence it will exert on those who read it.

I am to speak to-day of the influence of Jesus upon intellectual life, upon the world of thought; and I know no better way to approach a subject so interesting, so rich, and yet, as it seems to me, in its central point so simple, than by observing the prominence of one word and the very marked and characteristic way in which that word is used in the book which tells us most of what we know about the mind of Jesus. The book is the Gospel of St. John. The word is truth. It is only in that one book that the word is found upon the lips of Jesus with any of

that special intonation which is peculiarly His own. There are three other Gospels, three other accounts of the Lord’s life, but in neither of them does this, which is his most characteristic utterance in the fourth Gospel, once appear. I need not pause to say that such a fact suggests no real difficulty or discrepancy between the records. As different as Matthew and John were from each other, so different must have been the words of their Master which were caught in the memory and treasured in the heart of each. In the same way in which Zenophon and Plato both wrote of Socrates, and, holding different mirrors on different sides of that wonderfully interesting figure, have given us, not two Socrateses, but, a completer Socrates than we could have had if only one of them had seen him and described him, so the first Gospel and the fourth enlarge each other, and the historic Jesus comes in the stereoscopic fulness of His recorded life and nature from the two. But Plato is more to us than Zenophon. The great Athenian lives ‘in the Dialogues as he does not in the Memorabilia. And John is more to us than Matthew.

A word of Jesus constantly appearing in those. discourses of Jesus which most impressed the most sympathetic and spiritual of his disciples will, if we can see what He meant by it, admit us very deeply into His heart and will. Such a word is ¢vuth, as it is used by Jesus constantly in the Gospel of St. John.

The word, then, is distinctly a word of the intellect. Whatever other elements may enter in, however it may enlarge itself and become a word of the entire nature, the intellectual element can never be cast out of it. He whose favorite word is truth must be a man who values intellectual life, who is not satisfied unless his own intellect is living, and who conceives of his fellow-men as beings in whom the intellect is an important and valuable part. This must belong to any habitual use of the word at all; and so, when we find it appearing constantly upon the lips of Jesus, in the record of that one of His disciples who understood Him best, we feel that we know this at least about Him, — that He cared for the intellect of man, that He desired to exercise some influence upon it, that He was not satisfied simply to win man’s affection by His kindness, nor to govern man’s will by His authority, but that He also wished to persuade man’s mind with truth.

But we must know something more of what a man’s conception about truth is before we can see what sort of influence he will exert upon men’s intellects. Take Martin Luther’s idea of truth, and Professor Huxley’s idea, and Mr. Emerson’s idea. How evident it is that the same words would be spoken in distinguishably different tones, and would strike with different force upon the hearer’s ears and character as secame from three such different men. And so it is not enough that we should know the fact that Jesus constantly talked of truth. That would assure us that He sought an intellectual influence. We must also know what He meant by truth, and how He spoke of it. That will reveal to us what kind of intellectual influence it was that He desired. Let us turn then to some of the sayings of Jesus concerning truth. And, as we look at them, remember it is not the essential importance of what He says that we want to dwell on, but merely the indication in His saying of what He means by truth, of which He speaks so much. On one occasion, when He had been speaking very powerfully about His own personal relation to His Father, a great many of His hearers were persuaded and believed on Him. Then Jesus said to those Jews that believed on Him, “If ye continue in My word, then are ye My disciples indeed; and ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” That puzzled them. It stirred their Jewish blood. They told Him that they were born of Abraham, and were no man’s slaves. “How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free?” And Jesus answered them, “Truly I say unto you, every man that committeth sin is the servant of sin.” That was the freedom that His truth was to bring, — a spiritual freedom, a freedom from wickedness, an untwisting of the tight cords from their hold on the personal nature. Truth was something which, when it came, would set the whole man free. By and by, in the same talk, He warmed into earnest pity not unmixed with indignation. Poor people! there they stood before Him, and would not, could not, understand the things He said to them. Would not and could not were all mixed together. But His indignation reaches back behind them. It cannot stop short of the Evil Spirit who is their deluder. “Ye are of your father the Devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a liar from the beginning and abode not in the truth.” Again, see what a moral thing the truth is. He who does not abide in it is not merely a doubter, not merely a disbeliever, he isa liar. The truth is truthfulness, The subjective and objective lose themselves in one another. Then let the whole strain change. The warm discussion, the earnest indignation, is long past and over. Jesus is sitting with the men who loved Him in the quiet atmosphere of the ast. Supper. A question of one of the disciples drew from Him the words which perhaps have fascinated and mysteriously fed as many souls as any words He ever spoke. “I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life,’ He said. “I am the Truth.’ We must have some notion of what truth meant to Him which shall be large enough to contain those words. A truth which a man could be; a truth which could sum up and consist of personal qualities. Evidently it is not mere fact, this truth of His; not something merely done, merely made, and standing finished and recognizable, to be walked around and measured and studied on the outside by any patient eye. It is something living, something ever taking shape, something spiritual, and to be known only from the inside by spiritual sympathy. The evening passed on, and by and by Jesus began to unfold to His disciples the promise of what He would do for them even after He had left them. He is going to send them the Comforter, He says. And this Comforter, when He is come, is to “reprove the

world of sin, of righteousness, and of judgment.” Deep words, and full of meaning, much of which we have not fathomed yet. But this, at least, we know is in them. It is a spiritual helper who is coming; a soul coming to help souls; a moral master who shall judge and rule the moral life. And — so when in a minute Jesus, as He goes on speaking, gives this Comforter another name, and says, “When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will lead you into all truth,’ we know again that truth cannot mean in Him merely objective verity; it must have in it the elements of character, since the leading of man into it by the Divine soul is to be the perfection of man’s life. The evening wears on still, and by and by Jesus has ceased to speak directly to His friends. His voice is heard in prayer. And in His prayer there comes what we may almost call His summing up and report of all His life to His Father. “For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they also might be sanctified through the truth,’ He says. It is His own character through which alone truth can come to make character in His disciples. It is the deep and satisfied declaration that His whole life had been given to seeking the fulfilment of the petition which He had just offered, “Sanctify them through Thy truth.” The same crowded night slowly creeps away, and in the morning everything is once more altered. Jesus is standing before Pilate. And as the strange interview goes on, He has once more occasion to declare the sum and purpose of His life. “To this end was I born,’ He says, “and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness to the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth My voice.” “Every man of the truth.” Again you see how the air grows hazy with the meeting of the subjective and objective conceptions. They are words of character. A “man of the truth” is something more than a man who knows the truth, whose intellect has seized it; that, we are sure, would be the very tamest paraphrase of the suggestive words. It would take the whole life and depth out of them. A “man of the truth” isa man into all whose life the truth has been pressed till he is full of it, till he has been given to it, and it has been given to him, he being always the complete being whose unity is in that total of moral, intellectual, and spiritual life which makes what we call character. He is the man of whom Pilate’s prisoner said, “He hears my voice.” -No wonder that Pilate, hearing a new sound in an old familiar word, felt all his old questions stir again within him, and asked with an interest which was too weary to be called a hope, “What is truth?”

These passages will show how the word truth sounds when Jesus says it. I have not hesitated. to multiply them, because out of them all comes forth, I think, a perfectly clear conception of what the intellectual life was in Jesus. The great fact concerning it is this, that in Him the intellect never works alone. You never can separate its workings from the complete operation of the whole nature. He never simply knows, but always loves and resolves at the same time. Truth which the mind discovers becomes immediately the possession of the affections and the will. It cannot remain in the condition of mere knowledge. Indeed, knowledge is no word of Jesus. Solomon in the Book of Proverbs is always talking about knowledge. Jesus, in the Gospel of John, is always talking about truth. So genuine is the unity of His being, that what comes to Him as knowledge is pressed and gathered into every part of Him, and fills His entire nature as truth. The rays of intellectual light are absorbed into the whole substance of the spontaneous affections and the unerring will. The right and the true, the wrong and the false, are not separable from one another. The life is simple because of its completeness. It is the true unity of a man.

When we see how constantly it is the crudity of an unappropriated, unassimilated intellectuality that disappoints us in intellectual people; when we find ourselves turning away from many a learned man whose knowledge has not been pressed into character; when we find that the action of the intellect forcing itself upon our notice because it is working out of proportion to or out of harmony with the other parts of a man’s nature, his conscience, his affections, and his active powers, always dissatisfies and makes us restless, and, with all the interest which we may feel in him, does not let us think that we have found the fullest and most perfect man, — when we see all this, it becomes clear to us what a distinguishing thing in Jesus was this unity of life in which the special action of the intellect was lost. We catch something of the spirit with which His disciple, fondly recurring years afterwards to the bright days when He first knew Jesus, twice used the same description of Him:

“The word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” “The law was given by Moses, but by Jesus Christ came grace and truth.”

We have only to dwell upon men’s best conception of a Deity to see how distinct and how lofty this conception of intellectuality is which the life of Jesus sets before us. The partialness which we see in man, and which lets us easily divide our fellow-men into classes and label them the men of intellect or the men of action, passes away as we mount to any thought of God which is at all worthy of Him. What God knows is one and the same with the love with which He loves and the resolve with which He wills. You cannot draw a fence through the great ocean of infinity. Mythology dreams of its many gods with many functions. The moment that one God stands forth above all gods, the many things which the partial deities do lose themselves in the one perfect thing which the one only Deity is. And all wisdom unites with all power and all love no less in the guiding of a little child along the slippery path which leads to manhood, than in the vast conduct of the destinies of the colossal man who lives through all the generations of the race.

We need only to think of the kind of human - creature who has always most easily commanded the instinctive admiration of his brethren, and we shall see that the same character reappears in him. It is not the intellectual man as such, not the man in whom intellect stands crudely forth as the controlling element in life, that other men are drawn to most. The greatest men that ever lived are those in whom you cannot separate the mental and moral lives. You cannot say just what part of their power and success is due to a good heart and what to a sound understanding. And in every circle there are apt to appear some persons of great influence and great attractiveness, of whom you never think as being specially intellectual. If any one calls them intellectual, it startles you; but as you think about your wonder, you discover that it does not come from an absence of the intellectual life in those who are thus spoken of, but from the fact that the intellectual part of them is so blended and lost in the rounded and symmetrical unity of their life that you have never been led to think of it by itself, All this is very frequently true concerning women, whose unity of life is often more apparent than is that of men.

Again, the superiority of this sort of life is. seen in the instinctive way with which men seek to produce it in their systems of education for the young. In the family and in the school, parents and teachers whose own ambitions are purely and hardly intellectual will rarely seek for children so narrow an existence as they are practically seeking for themselves. All men who have anything to do with education are drawn irresistibly into the valuing of character. They cannot disregard subjective life. They cannot sow seed over the fallow ground till they have first made it fertile with right emotion. And, on the other hand, the intellectual culture of the race, strong as the motives are that incite men to it for its own sake, could probably never maintain its ground and keep the enthusiastic interest of the best and wisest men if, in spite of countless disappointments, it were not clearly seen to have, upon the whole, a close connection with men’s moral conditions and the symmetrical completeness of their lives.

But perhaps what I am urging is seen most clearly if we watch the change which comes to all our natures in their loftiest, which are their truest, moods. The best study of essential human nature is to be found, not in the exceptional men who stand out distinct above their fellows, nor in the ordinary man in his ordinary moments, — when the fire of his life burns low, but in those states which come to all healthily susceptible human natures, in which their powers are most active with the least distortion, — times of exaltation, In which the exalted man is conscious that he is not transported out of himself, but is simply realizing himself ina supreme degree. And one of the characteristics of such times of healthy exaltation is the manifest unity of the life, and especially the way in which intellectual action, without being quenched, nay, burning at its very brightest, blends with the quickened activity of all the being, and is not even thought of by itself, A time of heroic sacrifice brings quick perceptions, which yet the hero has no time to dwell upon with pride before they are lost in the torrent of rich impulses which is sweeping through his life. The days when death comes near our life with that freedom and refinement which it always tries to bring, are days in which we think the truest and profoundest thoughts about the overpowering mystery; but it is so much else to us then besides a thing to think about, — it is something so much nearer and greater than a problem of the brain, — that we hardly know that we are thinking about it at all. So love and hope and joy and indignation and fervent admiration for a noble man, and any sudden sight of our own best possibilities, — all of these are conditions in which the intellect works vigorously, but it works in the midst of a being all quickened and exalted together, and so it is lost in the large action of the whole. “He who does not lose his reason in certain things,” says Lessing, “has none to lose.” But the reason is lost, not by any palsy or death that falls on it, but by the vehement life of will and affections, among which the life of the reason takes its true place as but one member of the perfect whole.

There is a noble passage of Wordsworth which tells this same story, and shows how under the greatest influences of nature the same rich blending of the life takes place. He is describing the

consecrating effects of early dawn: —

“What soul was his when from the naked top Of some bold headland he beheld the sun Rise up and bathe the world in light. He looked — Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth And ocean’s liquid mass, beneath him lay In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched, And in their silent faces did he read; Unutterable love. Sound needed not Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank The spectacle; sensation, soul, and form All melted into him. They swallowed up His animal being; in them did he live And by them did he live. They were his life. In such access of mind, in such high hour Of visitation from the Living God, Thought was not; in enjoyment it expired. No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request; Rapt into still communion that transcends The imperfect offices of prayer and praise, His mind was a thanksgiving to the Power That made him; it was blessedness and love!”

I must not dwell longer on these illustrations. This fact, so abundantly set forth in our own best experiences, is the fact that fills and explains the intellectual history of Jesus. The “mind of Christ,” of which one of His followers spoke years afterwards, is mingled and lost in the completeness of His life; and that completeness, to take one step farther, is represented to Himself by the obedience which He owed and always rendered to His Father. The unity of life is rescued from vagueness and made a true reality to Jesus by the one enveloping relation to God which comprehends it all. We shall understand that, I think, if we turn again to the unique and precious story in which is told us all that we know about the boyhood of Jesus. The child of twelve years old finds his way back to the Temple, where the sacredness of life and the connection of man with God had for the first time been set forth before Him in ceremonial richness. He cannot turn His back upon the wonderful, delightful place. He cannot go quietly down into Galilee, and leave the Temple, which is radiant with knowledge and holiness, behind Him. We must remember that the Temple was indeed the centre of knowledge for shew ews. slhere sat the doctors.. ‘There the law was taught. When Jesus, then, tarried in Jerusalem and clung about the Temple courts, it was the craving after knowledge, it was that sweet, vague outlook into vast cloud-swept fields of possible intelligence, which makes the poetry of every pure boy’s life to-day, — it was this lofty wish to know, that kept Him there. But when

His parents came back and found Him, and —

when, with a boy’s directness and a boy’s absorption in the present task, He looked up at them in surprise, as if it were a wonderful thing that any one should think He could be doing anything but just what He was doing then, and answered, “Wist ye not that I must be about My Father’s business?” it was an answer of obedience; all alive with thought; yet, when

He stated the purpose of His life, it was not —

thought, but duty. The intellectual activity was

held in the bosom of an obedience which made — the boy’s life a unit. Out of that obedience the

intellectual activity received its impulse, and to

the more and more complete fulfilment of that

obedience it contributed its results. Thus the character of the intellectual life of

Jesus was indicated at the very start. We have only to look at some of the striking moments of His mental experience, to see how that character ran through them all. There is much that might be said about the Temptation, — that mysterious experience in the wilderness with which His early life of contemplation passed over into the later life of action. All that I point out to you now is this, — that, while it is evident that in those terrible hours the whole nature of Jesus was submitted to a fearful struggle, and that, as not the least among the elements that made up the ordeal, His intellectual judgments were shaken, His knowledge of truth was invaded by tumultuous doubt, His sight of His Father was obscured, — yet, at the last, and as the sum of all, the question was not one of intelligence but of will. It was a choice of obediences that made the real crisis. It was the rejection of Satan’s “Fall down and worship me,” and the clear acceptance of “Thou shalt serve the Lord Thy God,” that marked the victory. “Then the Devil leaveth Him, and behold angels came and ministered unto Him.” The moment that the obedience of the life was established, the mental tumult settled into peace within it.

At the other end of the career of Jesus the same thing was seen. In the Garden of Gethsemane reason seemed to totter on her throne. For the last time the desperate hands had to cling to the truth in instant fear. But there, too, it is not by the direct conviction of the reason; it is by the adjustment of the whole life in obedience — to which, no doubt, the reason gave its assent, but which was a transaction far beyond the reason’s limits — that the trembling reason finds composure. When He said, “Thy will be done,” all the obscurity began to scatter, and those words which He said four days later, after He had risen, to His disciples, “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things?” — words with the echo in them of the same surprise with which He long before spoke to His parents in the Temple, — words full of the peace of satisfied intelligence, — began to take shape upon His lips,

It is a poor and pitiable life indeed that can- -not understand in some degree, out of its own history, this experience of the Temptation and of Gethsemane. Who of us has not bowed his will to some supreme law, accepted some obedience as the atmosphere in which his life must live, and found at once that his mind’s darkness turned to light, and that many a hard question found its answer? Who has not sometimes seemed to see it all as clear as daylight, that not by the sharpening of the intellect to supernatural acuteness, but by the submission of the nature to its true authority, man was at last to conquer truth; that not by agonizing struggles over contradictory evidence, but by the harmony with Him in whom the answers to all our doubts are folded, a harmony with Him brought by obedience to Him, our doubts must be enlightened?

But to return to Jesus, I think we have in what we have been saying the best light that we can get upon the method of His inspiration by His Father, and so, by inference, upon the method of all the inspiration of the holy men who spoke for God. When I hear Jesus say, “As My Father hath taught Me I speak these things; and He that sent Me is with Me: the Father hath not left Me alone; for I do always those things that please Him,” I cannot be surprised as I read on to the next verse and find that “As He spake those words many believed on Him.” For the words made the breadth and depth of His inspiration plain. At the base of it all lay His obedience: “For I do always those things that please Him.” Out of that obedience came continual communion. “He that sent Me is with Me. The Father hath not left Me alone.” And to the spirit lying close in that communion to the Father’s spirit, to the soul of the Son lying in its completeness on the soul of the Father, came the wisdom of the Father to be given to the world. What did they think of the next truth that Jesus uttered after He had thus explained Himself? Did it seem to them something which He by unusual penetration had discovered? Did it seem to them a single, separate message, apart from all other communication, told by God to Jesus to be told to them? They must have understood Him better than that. They must have known that, however the intelligence of Jesus had been illuminated to know this special truth, that special illumination of the intelligence was subordinate to and included in the consecration of the whole life by obedience; that in whatever sense Jesus knew this because God told Him, He never could have been told if underneath all the communication between Him and His Father it had-not been true at the base of everything that He and His Father were one. I cannot conceive of the true hearer of Jesus losing that large thought of His Lord’s inspiration ever again. Not a mere messagebringer could He ever seem; but the eternal truth manifest first in character before it presented itself in specific revelation; the Word of God, in which and by which the words of God through Him gained their authority and value. Once or twice Jesus declares with perfect frankness the limits of His knowledge. There are some things which He does not know. “Of that day and hour knoweth not the Son,” He says, “but the Father.” What does it mean? The ancient oracle or the modern fortune-teller could not do that and yet keep men’s faith.

They have no self, no character behind their words. Men do not believe properly in them, but only in their words. But Jesus always is behind His words. “Ye believe not,” He said once to the Jews, “because ye are not of My sheep.” /7e must possess men before His words could take possession of them. We must believe Him inspired, see Him full of God, before we can believe His words inspired, and see them ’ burn with truth. Not from simple brain to simple brain, as the reasoning of Euclid comes to its students, but from total character to total — character, comes the New Testament from God

to men.

If we turn now from the thought of Christ’s own intellectual life to think of the immediate influence which He exercised upon His disciples, I do not know how to approach that part of our subject better than through the medium of an analogy which must be suggested to any one who thoughtfully reads the record of Jesus along with the record of that only one among purely human teachers whom Christian men have ever ventured to compare with Him. No one can read the Gospel of St. John and then turn to what is left us of the life of Socrates, without being struck and almost startled with the suggested comparison between the account of Christ’s last talk with His disciples before His crucifixion, which is given in five chapters of that Gospel, and the beautiful story of what Socrates said to Simmias and Cebes and his other friends in the prison at Athens just before he drank the hemlock, — the story which Plato has written for us in the Phzedo. And nowhere could the essential difference as well as the likeness of the two great teachers become more apparent. Nowhere could the critics who loosely class Jesus and Socrates together see more distinctly where their classification fails, where the line runs beyond which Socrates cannot go, beyond which the nature of Jesus sweeps out of our sight.

I should like to dwell for a few moments on this comparison. The story in St. John is familiar enough. The points in the story which Plato tells I may venture to recall to you. The two may stand in our imagination side by side. And in their mere details there is much that suggests comparison. The quiet upper chamber at Jerusalem where the young man sits with His young companions at the simple supper, where venerable traditions blend with the joy of present companionship and the pain of coming separation, is set off against the rugged prison opening upon the Agora at Athens, where, in the inner chamber, the friends of Socrates have come to talk with him once more before he dies. The old man sits on the bed at first, with his leg drawn up, rubbing the spot from which the fetter had just been taken off preparatory to his death. The relief that he feels in his leg opens his talk with a remark upon the strange connection between pain and pleasure. By and by he drops his feet upon the floor, and so sits on the bedside, calmly talking. Once he drops his hand affectionately upon the head of Phzedo, as if he, too, would have a “disciple whom he loved,” and draw one trusting heart closer to him than the rest. His wife comes in to him with their three boys, and he talks with them kindly, but there is no tenderness, and after a little while he bids

a ee a ee them to be taken away, for they evidently trouble him. The humor that had played through all his life is with him to the last. Once he makes a pun. And at the very end, when the disciples asked him how they should bury him, he bids them bury him what way they will, “if only you can catch me and I do not give you the slip”; and as he speaks, he gently smiles to see how lightly all that he has been saying has sunk into them, and to fancy these clumsy affectionate Athenians chasing his fleeting spirit to cage it in a tomb. Once comes a message from the executioner to tell him about the poison he will have to drink, which is a sharp, violent note, intruding on the music of his thought, that somehow reminds us of the departure of Judas from the Passover table. For an instant the coming woe starts up dramatically real. There is one beautiful moment when the disciples are half convinced, but still frightened and trembling. Socrates sees it in their faces, and tells them of it. And Cebes answers, “Well, Socrates, suppose that we are frightened; do you encourage and comfort us. Or rather, suppose not that we are frightened, but that there is a child within us who is so.” And Socrates playfully takes up the pretty thought. “Ah, yes,’ he says, “we must find some charm that we can sing over this frightened child to quiet him,” and — so he goes on with his talk again. The words in which Phzedo afterwards recalls the impression that his master’s presence made on him that day might almost have been on the lips of John, “the had no painful feeling of pity, as might seem natural to a person present at such a catastrophe, nor did I feel a pleasure as on ordinary occasions when we talked philosophy, though the discourse was of the same kind. It was a peculiar feeling that possessed me, a strange mixture of pleasure and grief, when I thought that he would soon ceasé to be.” All through the conversation we can hear the religious festival in which the Athenians are engaged outside, to celebrate the return of the sacred ship from Delos, — the Passover, as it were, of the Athenian life. At last, without a shock, continuing the calm and peaceful teaching to the last, the great man takes the cup and drinks the poison, and all is over.

There lies his body before them, more eloquent in silence than any of the words he said.

And now what was it that they talked about on that last day? The discussion hovered and fluttered a little at first before it settled to its work; but it soon became a sustained argument for immortality. It is very hard to think that this man is just going to die, and knows it, who sits here calmly arguing that the soul must be immortal. And what were his arguments? Really, they were three. The first was the distinctness between the soul and the body, as testified by what was the favorite doctrine of Socrates, — the soul’s pre-existence. If the soul existed before the body, it surely might outlive it. Nay, it must be ready for the other bodies which are waiting for it. In support of this belief he dwells upon his theory of recollection to account for the presence of ideas in man which man never could have acquired by the senses. Then comes his second - argument, in which he pleads the indestructibility of the soul from its simplicity, its incomposite nature. Then Simmias and Cebes interpose two exquisitely stated difficulties; one suggesting that, after all, the soul may be to the body what the music is to the lyre; the other wondering whether the body may not possibly outlive the soul, as the unthinking cloth outlives the wise and skilful weaver by whose hand it was made. Socrates replies to both of them and satisfies them; and then goes on to his third argument, which is a long and very subtle one about ideas and their accessory attributes, in which he tries to draw the distinction between the imperishable idea and the perishable attributes of life.

These are his arguments. They are surrounded with an atmosphere of feeling. Reverence and gratitude to God, affection for his disciples, and a tender sense of duty, — these play around and through the whole discussion and give it softness and richness. It is not hard and cold. It does not rely wholly upon the worth of its arguments for its power. That is seen in the fact that, though the arguments in the shape in which Socrates puts them would convince no man of the truth of immortality to-day, still the whole scene remains as one of the sacred pictures of the human soul. That prison cell is one of the temples of man’s faith, one of the vestibules of immortality. But still the discourse is an argument. It is a search after knowledge. It is a struggle of the intellect. It is consoled by the thought of a divinity behind it which will make allowance for its deficiencies; but it feels no direct and present influence from the wisdom of that divinity. What it knows it must discover for itself, and hold, when it is won, as an intellectual conviction. Now turn the leaves of four hundred years, and in the chamber of the Passover feel the difference. As Jesus speaks, argument disappears. Conviction is attained by the immediate perception of life by life. “If ye had known Me, ye should have known My Father also, and from henceforth ye both know Him and have seen Him.” “In My Father’s house are many mansions: I go to prepare a place for you.” That is the argument of Jesus for immortality. It is not right to say that Socrates appeals to the reason and fails, while Jesus speaks to the

heart and succeeds. The appeal of Jesus is to the reason, too, only it is to that spiritual reason which is no special function of the nature, but is the best action of the whole nature working together, the affection and the will being the partners of the brain; or rather, for that does not express the intimacy of their life, the affection and the will being one manhood with the brain and sharing its intelligence. The difference of result is, in one word, the difference between convincing the intellect and making the man believe.

Ido not know that I can make this clearer,

and I must not steal the time to quote largely

from the discourse of Jesus in support of what I mean. But let us put one or two pairs of passages together. The philosopher asks, “Shall a man who really loves knowledge, and who is firmly persuaded that he shall never truly attain it except in Hades, be angry and sorry to have to die?” The Son of God says, “Now I go to Him that sent Me.” Socrates says, “Be well assured I do expect this, that I shall be among good men, though this I do not feel so confident about; but I shall go to gods who are good governors.” Jesus cries, “Now, O Father, glorify thou Me with Thine own self.’ Socrates draws in confused but elaborate detail the road to Hades and its geography. Jesus says, “In My Father’s house are many mansions”; and, “Father, I will that they whom Thou hast given Me be with Me where I am.’ Socrates is noble in his frank uncertainty about his life. “Whether I tried in the right way and with what success I shall know certainly when I arrive there, if it please God; Jesus is divine in His certainty. “O righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee, but I have known Thee.” “TI have finished the work which Thou gavest Me to do.” Socrates tells of a “demon,” or angel, who has the care of every man while he is alive, and when he is dead takes him to the place of judgment. Jesus says, “I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever.” “He shall testify of Me.” The sage consoles his disciples by sending them out to find other teachers. “Greece is a wide place, Cebes, and there are in it many good men. And there are, besides, many races of barbarians, all of whom are to be explored in search of some who can perform such a charm as we have spoken of.’ The Savior declares simply, “I will not leave you comfortless. I will come unto you.” Socrates says, when they ask him for his last legacy, “If you take good care of yourselves, you will always gratify me and mine most.” Jesus says, “This is My commandment, that ye love one another as I have loved you.” And, if we let our eye run out beyond the times when both the tragedies — the tragedy of Athens and the tragedy of Jerusalem — were finished, and see what thoughts of the two sufferers were left behind them, we hear Phzedo closing his long story with these words: “This was the end, Echecrates, of our friend: of all the men whom we have known, the best, the wisest, and the most just.” Nay; before the poison was given by the jailer’s hand we hear him say to his great prisoner, “I have found you the most generous and gentle and best of all who ever came here.” And then our thoughts run to Jerusalem, and hear the centurion who commanded the soldiers who crucified Jesus say, as he sees the

Crucified give up the ghost, “Truly this was —

the Son of God.”

I know not what to say to any man who does mot; icel the difference, I can almost dream what Socrates would say to any man who said there was no difference between Jesus and him. But how shall we state the difference? One is divine and human; the other is human only. One is Redeemer; the other is philosopher. One is inspired, and the other questions. One reveals, and the other argues. These statements, doubtless, are all true. And in them all there is wrapped up this, which is the truth of all the influence of Jesus over men’s minds, that where Socrates brings an argument to meet an objection, Jesus always brings a nature to meet a nature, — a whole being which the truth has filled with strength, to meet another whole being which error has filled with feebleness.

I must hasten on to speak of the special characteristics which this general character of His teaching gave to the influence which Jesus exercised over the intellectual life of His disciples. But let me ask you first to remember two notable utterances of His, in which He distinctly stated this theory of the mind and its work, which we have gathered by inference from many of His words. One of them is in those words which it would seem as if a great deal of the broadest and best religious thought of our age had almost taken for its motto. No doubt, like all mottoes, it has been often in danger of losing some of its profoundness by the very familiarity which it has gained, as a coin loses sharpness by the constant circulation which proves that men know its value; but, on the whole, I do not know what verse there is in the New Testament which any man who longed to see the intellect of men most alive and most thoroughly consecrated to the best uses, would sooner choose to write upon the walls of his thoughtful century than that which Jesus spoke in the Temple about the midst of the feast: “If any man will do My will, He shall know of the doctrine.” The other passage is that beautiful account of the simple and humble wonder of Judas, not Iscariot, who found it hard to believe that he and his brother disciples were to receive enlightenments from God which did not come to other men. And

Jesus went on to explain the process to him. “If a man love Me,” He said, “he will keep My words, and My Father will love him, and We will come to Him and make our abode with Him.” Those, I think, are the two critical passages in which Jesus gives us His doctrine of the intellectual life. They are as clear and definite as if they were written in a book of science. They ‘ both declare that in the highest things the intellect can never work alone for the discovery of truth. Truth, when it is won, is the possession of the whole nature. By the action of the whole nature only can it be gained. The king must go with his counsellors at his side and his army at his back, or he makes no conquest. The intellect must be surrounded by the richness of the affections and backed by the power of the will, or it attains no perfect truth.

Of such an influence, what was the effect on those disciples? What sort of an intellectual life did they attain? It is not hard to point out some, at least, of the habits of mind into which Jesus led them. The first is their habit of regarding the physical world as the utterance of a divine will, in sympathy with the divine character. There are two ways of looking at the earth which have divided men in all time. The one has counted it something outside of man, with only external relation to him, holding him, feeding him, forcing him to work. The other has counted it in some true sense a medium of revelation and influence from God to man. The first view is the view of science, and is always tending to hard superficialness, to the spiritual poverty of the fingering slave who will “peep and botanize upon his mother’s grave.” The other view is the view of poetry, and its corrupt tendency is toward superstition, — toward that excessive human self-consciousness which thinks that stars move and winds blow only to bring us messages out of the unseen world. Between these two conceptions of nature all human thought divides. “Poetry,” says Coleridge, “is not the proper antithesis to prose, but to science.” Science looks to the world for facts and knowledge; poetry asks of it influence and character. Science handles the material; poetry questions the creative soul within. Each has its proper business with this wondrous earth. Each makes its admirable kind of man. Sometimes, though very rarely, the two meet in the same man; but never so that one or the other is not in clear preponderance and does not give a distinct color to the character. Now of the Apostles there can be no doubt which view of the earth their Lord had led them to. His parables, — the stories of the wheat and tares in the field, of the fig-tree on the hillside, of the sheep wandering in the mountains, of the net dragged through the rushing waters of the lake, — all of them were poems; all of them sought in nature not the form, but the soul, not the shape, but the meaning. And when the disciples wanted to call down the fire from heaven to destroy a village of the Samaritans where Jesus had not been received, it was the poetic thought of nature that was in their minds. Nothing could have been more unscientific. It was very crude and ignorant, — poor poetry, poor sense of the meaning of the natural forces, of the purpose of the heavens and their fire, and of the way in which their power could be shown, — but it was the crudeness of the poet, not of the scientist; it was the vague and coarse effort of that same power which, made clear and fine, enabled them to understand the parables of Jesus and not to be offended at His miracles, — which finally prepared them for the resurrection, and made St. Matthew not afraid to write that when Jesus expired on the cross the earth quaked, and the rocks rent, and the graves were opened.

To this same spirit it belonged to easily acknowledge mystery, or the largeness of life, its necessary extension into regions which they had not explored. Men are made quite as much by their sense of what there is in the world which they do not know, as by the few truths of which they think that they have gained the mastery. The outlook into mystery has even a stronger intellectual influence than the inspection of discovered fact. The sin with which Jesus was always upbraiding the Pharisees — what He called hypocrisy — is at once a spiritual and an intellectual vice. It was a disbelief of the greatness of God which made it possible for them to dream of imposing upon Him. It was a pride in themselves which could not look into the vastness of truth. The unbelief which Jesus upbraids is not the doubt of special doctrine, but that narrow and worldly temper to which the whole world of mystery was inconceivable. The doubter whom Christ rebukes is not the earnest and eager believer who has become lost in the highways of faith. It is the unventuresome spirit which is incapable of faith at all, which has reduced the world to materialism like the Sadducee, or made duty into law and religion into ceremony like the Pharisee. For neither of them was there any outlook. For His disciples, the word of intellectual life, as of moral discipline, was “Watch.” “Expect new things. The world is large. Out of the darkness shall come light. Be ready for surprises.” Such readiness is the rightful possession only of men who live not in the forms but in the principles of things; and so the spiritual thoroughness into which Jesus led His disciples is bound up closely with the intellectual progress which they attained.

Again, Jesus inspired them with His own view of the actual condition of things around them, and of the way in which the better life of the world was to come, The character of Christ’s own reforming spirit was clear enough. He said that He wanted not to destroy, but to fulfil the agencies which He found here in the world. He never cared to reshape circumstances until He had regenerated men. He let the shell stand as He found it until the new life within could burst it for itself It is very wonderful to me to see how thoroughly His disciples caught His method. They could not have caught it so completely and so soon if it had not been that it was based on a large principle, if it had not been more than a special trick or tact. Almost instantly, as soon as the disciples began their work, they seem to have been filled with a true conception of its divine method, — that not from outside, but from inside; not by the remodelling of institutions,. but by the change of character; not by the suppression of vices, but by the destruction of sin, — the world was to be saved. That truth with whose vitality all modern life has flourished, with — the forgetfulness of which all modern history — has always tended to corruption, that truth only dreamed of by a few spiritual philosophers in the ancient world, — it is one of the marvellous phenomena of human thought, that it should have leaped full-grown to life with the first influence of Christianity. A few faint flutterings about the old methods of repression, and the disciples of Jesus settle at once to the new methods of development.

Another of the intellectual habits which naturally grew out of the first principles of Jesus was His discovery of interest in people whom the world generally would have found most uninteresting. And this same habit, passing over into His disciples, made the wide and democratic character of the new faith. There are signs enough that Jesus had His special feelings towards these men who were most congenial to Him. As the most prominent of all such signs, we all remember His peculiar love for the perceptive and appreciative John. At the table of the Last Supper, by the cross from which the Sufferer looked down on His few faithful friends, on the morning of the resurrection, at the Sea of Tiberias, where the risen Jesus met the familiar company again, — everywhere John appears as the disciple whom Jesus loved. We cannot picture to ourselves a character so definite as that of Jesus which should be destitute of such affinities; and yet, always, as we read the Gospels, there is a larger fact behind this special friendship, — there is a value of human nature and of all men who bear it, on the bosom of which this special friendship floats like a mere accident. The result is, a true freedom from fastidiousness, a breadth and quickness of sympathy and hope which gives a singular largeness to the intellectual life of Jesus, which we all recognize. Something of the same sort begins to show itself at once in His disciples. I do not know how we better can describe it than by saying that it keeps all the warmth and directness of personal intercourse without its distortions and partialities. This is an intellectual as well as a spiritual condition. It keeps thought and observation large, and makes the judgment at once earnest and true. It is the power that redeems the mind from narrowness while it still keeps it eager and intense.

There is one other habit which characterized always the thought of Jesus, and which also passed out from Him to his disciples. It is not easy to describe, but it seems to consist in a constant progress from the arbitrary and special to the essential and universal forms of thought. In one part of the Sermon on the Mount this habit of Jesus is supremely manifest. It is told in the fifth chapter of St. Matthew. The Pharisees — those dull and earthly spirits who yet have drawn forth for us the divinest words of Jesus — had followed the great Teacher and were persecuting Him with questions. Those questions were all of the same sort. They all began with some special law, sometimes of the Old Testament, sometimes of the Rabbinical traditions, and went on to the inevitable conflict of that law in its letter with the conditions of human life. The law was good, but the mere letter of the law became exhausted or confused before it had accomplished the purpose for which the law was evidently made. Jesus takes each of these laws and opens it. Its principle appears underneath its letter. It is seen to be no arbitrary enactment for the settlement of a special difficulty, but an essential truth, true everywhere. For instance, the prohibition of murder opens into the picture of a vigorous and vital peace out of which all malice and hatred should have faded away. The prohibition of adultery enlarges itself into the picture of a world all bright with purity. The command to perform an oath expands into the promise of a life so simply pure and faithful that in it no oath should ever need be spoken. The “eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth” changes into “resist not evil,’ and men see how all justice has mercy at its heart. There is nothing that marks the limits of men’s intellectual life more than the degree in which they have the power of this progress from the local to the universal, from the partial to the complete. All thought, like all life, must begin with specialness, must fasten itself upon one point of the great earth; but just as Jesus in his influence upon our race has left behind Judea and its geography — and gone forth to become the possession of the world, so it would seem as if His teaching were extend itself to the great principles which underlie those problems and which have their eRtions throughout all human life.

Indeed, I think that the figure which I just suggested is one that may give us a good deal of light. I remember years ago how the first sight of Palestine seemed to adjust for me the two thoughts of the local and the universal Christ as I had never been able to adjust them before. As one travels through that land, the New Testament story is rescued from vagueness and obscurity, and the historic life becomes a clear and realized fact; while at the same time the poverty of the country, the failure of the material to satisfy and account for and accompany the spiritual, sets one free for a larger and truer grasping of the Divine power. It is like the relation between an immortal word and the mortal lips that uttered it. The lips die, and you look at them when they are dead, and see at once how they were made to speak the word, how their whole mechanism was built for it, and yet how, even while they uttered it, they were dying in giving expression to what by its very nature was eternal. So Palestine, the home-land of Jesus, opens into Christendom; and so each arbitrary command and special revelation which He gave opens into eternal principles and universal truths.

A poetic conception of the world we live in, a willing acceptance of mystery, an expectation of progress by development, an absence of fastidiousness that comes from a sense of the possibilities of all humanity, and a perpetual enlargement of thought from the arbitrary into the essential, — these, then, I think, are the intellectual characteristics which Christ’s disciples gathered from their Master; and I think that we can see that these characteristics make, as we set them all together, a certain definite and recognizable type of mental life, one that we should know from every other if we met to-day a man in whom it was embodied. It is a type in which, according to the description which I tried to give, the intellect, while it is plentifully present, does not stand alone and force itself upon our thought. It is a type in which character is the result that impresses us, — character holding in harmony all the elements of the nature, rather than intellectuality, which is the predominant presence of one / element. It is a type in which righteousness and reason so coincide and co-operate that you can- not separate them, and do not want to. It is a type of life in which, fulfilling the conjunction which David loved so much to describe, “Mercy and Truth are met together.” ‘If I have rightly traced the general character of the mental life and influence of Jesus, we are prepared now, I think, to bring it home into association with that which through all these lectures we have held to be the central and formative idea of Jesus. I have drawn the indications of His intellectual character from what is told us in the Gospel of John. One key-word, truth, ap- pears, as I said, upon His lips, almost exclusively in that book. And now in that same book it is almost alone that Jesus is always calling God His Father. Mark does not quote at all such words, and Matthew and Luke quote them very seldom. The two, then, go together. That same profounder insight into the mind of Jesus which sees His intellectual life and influence not standing alone, but part of the whole nature, seizes also upon that representation which sums up His whole life as the life of a son lived in the household of his father. And we can see ourselves why this is so. As soon as we unite in our minds the various characteristics which we have seen to belong to the intellectuality of Jesus, and then look about the world for any picture of an intellectual life which shall present to us, however faintly, the total impression which they make, we find ourselves drawn at once to the learning child in His Father’s house. The poetic conception of the world, the satisfied acceptance of mystery, the constant thought of development, the absence of fastidiousness, and the perpetual opening of the arbitrary into the essential, — all of these blend most healthily in that primary type of intellectual influence which is seen wherever a docile child stands learning truth within his father’s house. It is no hard touch of intellect on intellect. It is a warm approach of life to life, — in which it is not merely knowledge but character, in which knowledge is held in solution, that passes over from the wiser to the foolisher. If this be true, then see what we have reached.

Here at the bottom of His intellectual life and influence, as at the bottom of all His other life and influence, lies the idea of Jesus. Still before all things, at the root and source of everything else that He is, He is the Son of God. Once, when they would not understand Him, He turned sadly and looked forward past the crucifixion into the prospect of a fuller comprehension of it, which, it may be, we are only now beginning to attain; and as He pictured it to his hope, this truth of His Sonship lay at the bottom of it. “When ye have lifted up the Son of Man,” He

said, “then shall ye know that I am He, and that I do nothing of Myself, but as My Father hath

taught Me I speak these things.” At the bottom

of His whole conception of intellectual life lies

the never-failing, never-fading consciousness that He is the child of God. You touch some flower of a parable, you are pierced by the sharp thorn of some rebuke, and when you ask for the secret.of the sweetness or the pain you find it in the life-blood of this idea that comes up out of the deep heart of His life. You ask yourself what is the one quality that you must put into the

setacsee” wonderful talk of Socrates to make it approach the vastly more wonderful talk of Jesus, and you can name nothing but this, so wholly lacking in the sage of Athens, so totally pervading every word of the Man of Palestine, — the consciousness - that He is God’s child, knowing God as a son knows a father, speaking with an authority which no scribe can have, not because He knows more. things, but because He knows everything differently in that ever-present sense of Sonship. There is one short story in the Gospel of St. John, which, if we had the time to study it in detail, would teem with illustration of what I have been saying. It is the story of Nicodemus, — a very precious passage for the understanding of the intellectual method of Jesus. Nicodemus is one of St. John’s men. Neither of the other writers is drawn to him. But St. John seems, as he writes the narrative, to feel that he is opening to us his Master’s very heart. If we had time to dwell minutely on the story, we should see how Jesus does for Nicodemus the three things

which every thorough teacher must do for every

scholar. He gives him new ideas, He deepens with these ideas his personal character and responsibility, and He builds for him new relations with his fellow-men. When Nicodemus goes away from Jesus, he carries with him the new truth of regeneration; he is trembling with the sense that, to make that truth thoroughly his, he himself must be a better man; and by and by he is seen setting himself against the current of his fellow-judges to speak a word for the Master who had spoken such educating words to him. These are the elements that make up the effect of all effective influence, — new truth, new character, new duty, not distinct, not distinguishable from each other, but all mingled in one complete change and elevation of the man’s whole nature. And when - we look for the spring. on which Christ laid His hand for such a comprehensive awakening of the man’s life, we find it where we should have looked for it, in the truth of sonship brought to the world in Him, — “God go loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son.” ‘There is an old legend which says that Nicodemus and Gamaliel and St. Stephen were buried close together, and that years afterwards their bodies were found side by side. In a certain way they belong together. They were all students of the things of God, various types of sacred wisdom. But if we want to rate them rightly, we shall find the fineness and the loftiness of their intellectual life to stand just in proportion to the fulness and clearness with which at the heart of each man’s knowledge lay the idea of Jesus, that man is the son of God.

I want to spend what little time is yet left me in this lecture and this course in trying to trace the presence in all the intellectual life of Christendom of those peculiar characteristics, or rather of that peculiar character, which we have seen to-day to belong to the intellectual life of Jesus and His disciples. Christ’s method of knowledge has been always present under the currents of modern thought and the impulses of modern study, and he who watches closely can see how they bear witness to its presence even while they are not conscious of it as they move upon its bosom. In one brief statement of it, the method of Jesus may be summed up thus: At the bottom of all truth lies the truth of truths, that man is the child of God. All that man knows is really a knowing of his Father, and can be thoroughly won only by obedience. And so the moral, the spiritual, and the intellectual lives are one.

The first consequence of the constant presence of this method is in a continual struggle after symmetry in the intellectual action of mankind. The tendency of modern times, often thwarted and defeated, is not to be thoroughly and finally content with one-sided development, with the use and development of certain special faculties of men. Sometimes this symmetry will be conceived of as something only to be attained by the race at large; others, more bold and idealistic, will dare to anticipate it even for the individual; but before all men who watch the human intellect there will hover a dream of the fulfilment of human life on every side, of the ultimate shaping of a symmetrical manhood in which the functions which seem contrary or independent shall be brought into absolute harmony and co-operation. Lacordaire writes of the “tortures of conscience struggling with genius.” The highest Christian hope for man pictures the issue of that struggle in a lofty peace where both shall find their perfect satisfaction. Goldsmith, when he dedicates his comedy of “She Stoops to Conquer” to Dr. Johnson, says, “It may serve the interests of mankind, also, to inform them that the greatest wit may be found in a character without impairing the most affected piety.” It may be doubted whether a somewhat finer wit and a somewhat — loftier piety than the great London sage .possessed must not be shown before the harmony of wit and piety shall be complete; but no man who is a Christian is willing to accept an impious wit or a witless piety as the final accomplishment of man, and all modern education, while it sometimes seems to attempt their union only by the rapid succession, and not by the harmonious mingling of the scientific and the moral instructions, acknowledges that both are necessary to the perfect man.

Again, the Christian thought of knowledge must always seek, not merely symmetry in the knowing man, but also harmony in all the knowledge he can win. Under one fatherhood the whole world becomes sacred. The old distinctions of useful and useless knowledge will not - hold. The responsibility of each man for the working of his intellect must be acknowledged. The sin of mental carelessness or wilfulness must take its place among the sins against which men struggle and for which they repent. The application of moral standards to history, to art, and to pure letters must be learned and taught. The isolation of the artistic impulse from all moral judgments and purposes must be restrained and remedied. The whole thought of art must be enlarged and mellowed till it develops a relation to the spiritual and moral natures as well as to the senses of mankind. It will lose, perhaps, the purity and simplicity which has belonged to the idea of art in classic and unchristian times, but it will become more and more a part of the general culture of human life. That is the change which has come between the Venus of Milo and the Moses of Michael Angelo; between the Iliad and Paradise Lost; between the Idyls of Theocritus and the best modern novel. Mere simplicity of method and effect have given place to harmony of method and effect, littleness to largeness, fastidiousness to sympathy, and the Christian world has really learned more and more to believe what the Christian poet sang, that

“He who feels contempt

For any living thing, hath faculties

That he hath never used: and Thought with him

Is in its infancy.” Another truth which modern and Christian thought must make more and more of as it grows riper is the immediateness of divine influence. The ancient poet invoked his muse as he began his poem, but the invocation must have meant very little to him. It was the striking of the strings before he settled into the full strain he meant to play; as if he said to the world, “Listen, for I] am ready with my song.” The Christian thinker summons no muse, but as he speaks there is a sense of something vast behind him out of which influences come to him; there is conviction which is not born out of mere self-conceit; there is earnestness which is not the self-excitement of the Pythian damsel on her tripod. There is in all men who command the ears of other men a sense of something behind them — some call it truth, some call it God — for which, for whom, they speak. This is the loftier tone in modern speculation. This is the feminine element in modern thought, perpetually inspiring and leading and lifting that masculine

reason,

“Whose halting wisdom after knows
What her diviner virtue fore discerns.”

The intellectual life of Christendom, again, tends to democracy. Less and less will it consent to be the privilege of the selected few. The fact is plain. The reason of the fact is no less clear to one who traces the idea of Jesus everywhere. It is impossible to keep the bounds of mental life shut against any man when the source of all men’s knowledge is in God, whe is the Father of us all, and when the faculty of knowledge is closely connected with the faculty of moral obedience, which is the right and duty of mankind. Instantly this began when Christianity was once a living fact. Peter stepped out of the chamber of the Pentecost and spoke to the great multitude in words which assumed in them the power of understanding, of judging, of deciding questions which up to that time had been the sacred possession of the scribes and doctors. There was nothing like that speech before that day. The germs of the modern sermon, the modern lecture, and the modern school were in it. Thenceforth men’s intellects might differ, but the intellectual chance was open to every man. To the dullest child belonged the right to learn all that he could learn, all that it was in him to learn, of His Father.

And yet once more. The everlasting progress of knowledge was assured. Once stretch an infinite life behind our human lives, on which they rest, in which they belong, and how the everlasting contradiction between the little that we know already, and the vast uncertain bulk of what we do not know, is robbed of its oppressiveness. There are two classes of men, with two dispositions, which come from that contradiction. One man, frightened at the great bulk of ignorance, refuses to look it in the face, flees for the preservation of his self-content to the little that-he knows, makes believe that that is all there is to know, and refuses to hear of any more. He is the bigot who lives through all the ages and is found in every climate of the globe and every region of human study. Another man is so fascinated by the unknown that he refuses to place value on the known. The little which man has gained amounts to nothing. And with the depreciation of all present knowledge comes the loss of any solid starting-point for advance into the great vague world that lies beyond. He is the sceptic who mocks the bigot for his obstructiveness, and yet himself makes no progress because he has no foothold from which he can move. It is like the vague air taunting the solid rock. If in our modern Christian times there is a better spirit than either of these men can show; if it is not necessary for us that we should be bigots or sceptics either; if it is possible for us to value every fragment of knowledge, not for itself alone, but for the whole, of which it is a part, and which it prophecies and promises; if, as we gaze into the darkness of the unknown we are not paralyzed, but inspired, because in what we know already we hold the clew which, as it runs out into the darkness, we can feel fastened at the other end to the throne around ‘which burns the unapproachable light of perfect knowledge toward which we may freely and eternally advance, — the reason of it all must be that the idea of Jesus has bound our ignorance and the knowledge of God together, and made it possible for man so to count all that his Father knows as the great region for his soul to grow in, and so to value the little he knows as the gift and pledge and promise of his Father, who knows — all, that he can neither be proud of his own wis- dom nor be dismayed before his own ignorance; but must live, as the child lives in his father’s house, the happy life of complete humility and unlimited hope.

I must not linger at the close. If in these lectures I have failed to show that which it has been upon my mind and heart to describe, I shall not in a few last words redeem my failure.

I dare not, I do not hope that I have succeeded; but I hope that I have not wholly failed. For .to me what I have tried to say is more and more the glory and the richness and the sweetness of all life. The idea of Jesus is the illumination and the inspiration of existence. Without it moral life becomes a barren expediency, and social life a hollow shell, and emotional life a meaningless excitement, and intellectual life an idle play or stupid drudgery. Without it the world is a puzzle, and death a horror, and eternity a blank.

More and more it shines the only hope of what - without it is all darkness. More and more the wild, sad, frightened cries of men who believe nothing, and the calm, earnest, patient prayers of men who believe so much that they long for perfect faith, seem to blend into the great appeal which Philip of Bethsaida made to Jesus at that Last Supper, where so much of our time in these four hours has been spent, — “Lord, show us the Father, and it sufficeth us.” And more and more the only answer to that appeal seems to come from the same blessed lips that answered Philip, the lips of the Mediator Jesus, who replies, “Have I been so long with you and yet hast thou not known Me? He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.”