ons of him. With all the
super-subtlety that sometimes characterizes theologians, these men
had a passion for truth. It led them into paths where our minds find
a difficulty in following; but the motive was the imperative sense
that thinking men must examine and understand their supreme
experience--a motive that must weigh with men who are in earnest
about life. The great hymns of the Church--such as the "Dies Irae"
of Thomas of Celano, or Bernard's "Jesu dulcis memoria", or
Toplady's "Rock of Ages"--are transcripts from life, made by
deep-going and serious minds. The writers are recording, with deep
conviction of its worth, what they have discovered in experience. A
man who takes Christ seriously and will "examine life," will often
find in those great hymns, it may be with some surprise, an
anticipation of his own experience as Bunyan did in Luther's
Commentary on Galatians. Livingstone had "Jesu dulcis memoria"--the
Latin of it--ringing in his head as he travelled in unexplored
Africa. Men who did such work--work that lasts and is recognized
again and again to be genuine by others busy in the same
field--cannot have been random, light-hearted creatures. They were,
in fact, men tested in life, men of experience of wide and deep
experience--men with a gift for living, developed in heart as well
as in brain. The finest of Greek critics, Longinus, said that, "The
great style ("hupsos") is an echo of a great soul." Neander
said--and it is again and again true--that "it is the heart that
makes the theologian." Where we find a great hymn or a great
theology, we may be sure of finding a great nature and a great
experience behind it.

Let us sum up our general results so far. First of all, whatever be
the worth of the consensus of Christian opinion--and we have to
decide how much it is worth, bearing in mind the type of man who has
worked and suffered to make it in every age; and, I think, it runs
high, as the work of serious and explorative minds--the consensus of
Christian opinion gives the very highest name to Jesus Christ. Men,
who did not begin with any preconception in his favour, and who have
often had a great deal of difficulty in explaining to others--and
perhaps to themselves--the course by which they have reached their
conclusions, claim the utmost for Jesus--and this in spite of the
most desperate philosophical difficulties about monotheism. With a
strong sense of fact, with a deepening feeling for reality, with