confirmation of Christ's words-the appropriate physical signs which ought to accompany such pledges and promises. We do not believe in the doctrines for the sake of the miracles, nor yet in the miracles for the sake of the doctrines. We believe in both for the sake of both. They form parts of God's complex reasonable appeal to our consciences.

The fourth and last stage in our theological ascent is Christianity proper. If the gospel leads us to believe in God, we

also believe in Christ.

The place held, as we have already seen, by miracle points to this conclusion. Physical manifestations of the supernatural not only attest to us a God above nature, or a life beyond death, but also attest the presence and work in the world of God's only-begotten Son. Yet towards Christ, as towards

God, miracle is only a subordinate attestation.

The first ground of our religious faith in Christ is the fact that saving faith in God is impossible apart from Christ. We have no sure knowledge of the character of God except in the character of His Son. Hence Christian revelation is inseparable from the revealer. In other words, Christ Himself is part of the revelation; He bears witness to Himself. The New Testament is perfectly plain in telling us that Christ is not a phenomenal representation, but an absolute image of God, and the only way of approach to Him.

But God in Christ is not only showing Himself to us; He is working a work upon us. And Christian faith recognises the gift, made to us in Jesus Christ, as the greatest of all God's works. Here is the second ground of our religious faith in Christ.

Now, God works in many ways. One cannot have any sort or degree of faith without coming to recognise God's hand everywhere in nature and history. It is not, then, a peculiarity of Christian belief, in contradistinction to disbelief or halfbelief, that we recognise Divine operations as well as Divine revelations. No; but it is the peculiarity of true belief that we confess God's working concentrated in Jesus Christ-God's

personal presence in Him-God's imparting of Himself to us through Christ. In regard to the knowledge of God, no sincere half-believer can deny that Jesus Christ was a special

channel of Divine revelation. But true belief confesses the same thing as to God's gift of Himself, or as to God's working. It goes further: it confesses Christ, not as a channel, but as the avenue of communication between God and men. Christ Himself taught us this, speaking of Himself (in the language laid to His hand by God's providence), as the 'Messiah,' but interpreting Messiahship as only God in the flesh could dare to do. It is to Christ's work that God will have respect in all His gifts of grace; it is by the knowledge of Christ, and by conscious trust in Him, that the world at large, and individual souls under the ordinary course of God's providence, shall alone attain to moral victory. Christ works, as I have tried to point out elsewhere, in many ways; by creating a Church and a Christian community-by giving us laws, example, impulseby inviting, over and above all these, a personal faith in Him, and by promising the succour of His personal presence through the Spirit. These, however, do not constitute our present point. Our point is, that Christ works in the world—a work no other can share. So Christianity has taught from its origin. Men who dislike these claims may abandon Christianity, if they feel compelled to escape at all costs from Christ's claims. But no men have a right to remodel Christianity, or to alter the terms of the Divine message.

In Christ we obtain the universal elements of religious blessedness, though by a particular channel. He restores the revelation which sin had darkened. And here, in the region of will, He restores to us our moral victory, through the renewed indwelling of God, from whom sin had estranged us. Therefore the faith of redeemed sinners is a faith, not only in the character of God, but in Christ as the agent of God's character. Faith is belief both in God and in Christ; in God's Fatherly love; in Christ's historical work, as the finished realisation of God's redeeming purpose; in present communion

with God and Christ, on the ground of Christ's historical work, through the agency of Christ's historical work. Faith lays hold first of the eternal; then of the historical; then of the continuous present. It is properly belief, but a belief involving trust and the consent of the will-a belief, also, which is inseparable from repentance. The evidence on which our faith proceeds is the moral authoritativeness of those views of God revealed as facts in the work of Christ. Revelation, we may say, is not dogma, but history. God is the revealed, and Christ is the revelation. The Bible simply tells us what Christ's life showed Him to be, and what the first disciples proved or found Him to be after His Exaltation, during their own Christian career. But, if revelation is history, it is history as interpreted by the moral judgment of believing men. Although the facts by which it operates are attested past events, revelation is a continuous process, by which human minds are awakened to the knowledge of God, and sin, and Christ. Revelation is steeped in moral experience. Try to 'get it dry and naked, as a bare logical phenomenon—and, lo ! you have lost it. Dogmatist or apologist can only bear witness to it, in approximate, inadequate, intellectual forms. For instance; every Christian writer will do his best to say what revelation is, what the gospel is. But God forbid that any one should treat his stammering paragraphs as if they were equivalent to the thing itself. It is in the moral struggle-in repentance, prayer, aspiration, thanksgiving—that we have the presence and the witness of God's Spirit. But the moral struggle is not necessarily bound up with any views as to (e.g.) the ultimate penalty of sin. Faith lays hold of God, and of His salvation-confesses our guilt, stands in awe of Christ's judgment, hopes in His mercy. These things, then, are attested by His Spirit; but things which do not enter into the substance of the Christian life are no part of the Divinely attested message.

VII.

God is exposed

tox

Belief in Jesus Christ as part of our belief in to much hostile criticism at the present day. There is a disposition to weed out all contingent historical facts from the content of Christian faith, and to confine faith to eternal ideal principles. We shall be told that it is impossible for God to concentrate Himself in a single historical individual, even in a Jesus of Nazareth. We shall be told that men, who wish a solid basis for the moral life, confine themselves to the certainty of duty, or possibly manage to feel certain of God, -but turn away from such uncertainties as a sinless Saviour or a resurrection to immortality, and from the vain distractions which such thoughts breed.

These are, I think, the two leading arguments against the historical element in Christian faith--a speculative argument, and a practical.

Now Christians do not pretend to bring the kingdom of God under any a priori law. We might not have anticipated how God would disclose Himself, or on what conditions He would communicate Himself to us, for our redemption. Yet it is obvious to remark that a priori, man, the image of God, is suited to be the vehicle of Divine incarnation. And we are called upon to bear witness to certain facts, which we have heard and believed, by which also we are saved; and it seems to us to argue no small presumption when our critics tell us God cannot have been in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself. I am not fond of arguments from God's omnipotence. But our evidence here is not merely the omnipotence of God; it is a long experience of God's grace. Here we have to do with Christ, confessedly the greatest moral influence in history; and Christ tells us that He is God's Son, the last and highest of God's messengers. In that faith Christ finished His work. By that faith the Church was created and has been nourished. Is it not strange to be told that Christ was no doubt a good and holy man, but that His ruling idea of a

special Divine interposition in His life was a mere error of
the Zeitgeist?

Further, we meet with a direct negative the assertion that
contingent historical facts are irrelevant to faith. The evi-
dence for historical facts makes them morally congruous to
our religious belief. If you could pack morality into an a
priori formula, you would unfit it for the reason of man. We
live by probability; we are saved by hope. Both morality
and Christianity tell us, that by doing God's will we learn His
doctrine-that by following Christ we gain the light of life
-that we are the subjects of a moral process, which is accom-
panied by a corresponding growth or decline in our moral
perceptions. If it please God, there is no reason why the
recognition of the historical Christ as our God and Saviour
should not be part of the development of our moral perceptions
under the discipline of life. Belief in a priori truth has no
moral quality, in it; Euclid does not train the character.
Man's experience rests upon a basis of intellect—upon the
perception of necessary truths; but man's free will acts and
grows in an upper region of contingency, through moral per-
per-
ception, not through metaphysical certainty. Idealist reli-
relix←
gions work with only half of man, and with the wrong half.

Still further, we point out that no man is or can be independent of the historical process which lies behind him. The half-believer is himself the result of a Christian history. He will admit this; the question which divides us from him is the question, what elements are involved in that history. Now assuming for the moment that we are right-assuming that Christ is Divine-we point out that the earnest half-believer enjoys some or many of the benefits of Christ's redemption, even while he misconstrues it, and reduces it to the level of any other historical phenomenon. And we also point out that God, in charging the life of Jesus Christ with such tremendous spiritual forces, sent redemption into the world upon moral lines, making it work morally, socially, historically, by the growth of character, as other moral forces work. Of course, in hold