of God because he had lived and
suffered and died in order to reveal to the world the meaning of this
life and of the hereafter--the meaning not only for the individual, but
for society as well. Nothing might be added to or subtracted from that
message--it was complete.

True faith was simply trusting--trusting that Christ gave to the world
the revelation of God's plan. And the Saviour himself had pointed out
the proof: "If any man do his will, he shall know of the doctrine,
whether it be of God, or whether I speak for myself." Christ had
repeatedly rebuked those literal minds which had demanded material
evidence: true faith spurned it, just as true friendship, true love
between man and man, true trust scorned a written bond. To paraphrase
St. James's words, faith without trust is dead--because faith without
trust is impossible. God is a Spirit, only to be recognized in the
Spirit, and every one of the Saviour's utterances were--not of the
flesh, of the man--but of the Spirit within him. "He that hath seen me
hath seen the Father;" and "Why callest thou me good? none is good save
one, that is, God." The Spirit, the Universal Meaning of Life, incarnate
in the human Jesus.

To be born again was to overcome our spiritual blindness, and then, and
then only, we might behold the spirit shining in the soul of Christ.
That proof had sufficed for Mark, had sufficed for the writer of the
sublime Fourth Gospel, had sufficed for Paul. Let us lift this
wondrous fact, once and for all, out of the ecclesiastical setting and
incorporate it into our lives. Nor need the hearts of those who seek the
Truth, who fear not to face it, be troubled if they be satisfied, from
the Gospels, that the birth of Jesus was not miraculous. The physical
never could prove the spiritual, which was the real and everlasting,
which no discovery in science or history can take from us. The Godship
of Christ rested upon no dogma, it was a conviction born into us with
the new birth. And it becomes an integral part of our personality, our
very being.

The secret, then, lay in a presentation of the divine message which
would convince and transform and electrify those who heard it to
action--a presentation of the message in terms which the age could
grasp. That is what Paul had done, he had drawn his figures boldly
from the customs of the life of his day, but a more or less intimate
knowledge of these ancient customs were necessary before modern men and
women co