werless. And thank God they are
powerless. There is no wanton waste in the moral world, any more than in
the material. There is only fruitful change and beneficent
transformation. Granted that the true story of Jesus of Nazareth was
from the beginning obscured by error and mistake; granted that those
errors and mistakes which were once the strength of Christianity are now
its weakness, and by the slow march and sentence of time are now
threatening, unless we can clear them away, to lessen the hold of Jesus
on the love and remembrance of man. What then? The fact is merely a call
to you and me, who recognise it, to go back to the roots of things, to
reconceive the Christ, to bring him afresh into our lives, to make the
life so freely given for man minister again in new ways to man's new
needs. Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great
ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.
And woe to our human weakness if it loose its hold one instant before it
must on any of those rare and precious possessions which have helped it
in the past, and may again inspire it in the future!

'_To reconceive the Christ!_ It is the special task of our age, though
in some sort and degree it has been the ever-recurring task of Europe
since the beginning.'

He paused, and then very simply, and so as to be understood by those who
heard him, he gave a rapid sketch of that great operation worked by the
best intellect of Europe during the last half-century--broadly
speaking--on the facts and documents of primitive Christianity. From all
sides and by the help of every conceivable instrument those facts have
been investigated, and now at last the great result--'the revivified
reconceived truth'--seems ready to emerge! Much may still be known--much
can never be known; but if we will, we may now discern the true features
of Jesus of Nazareth, as no generation but our own has been able to
discern them, since those who had seen and handled passed away.

'Let me try, however feebly, and draw it afresh for you, that life of
lives, that story of stories, as the labour of our own age in particular
has patiently revealed it to us. Come back with me through the
centuries; let us try and see the Christ of Galilee and the Christ of
Jerusalem as he was, before a credulous love and Jewish tradition and
Greek subtlety had at once dimmed and glorified the truth. Ah! do what
we will, it is so scanty and poor, this knowle