ter
another, for a Universal Religion, and there was nothing more to be done
but to await the coming to the birth. As plainly, by every sign, the
world-conditions were at length found for a safe issue of the "holy thing"
which Israel so long had carried within her bosom. There was needed a man
to body these scattered elements, to fuse the forces of the nation into a
personality, to live the dreams which a race had visioned. Religion is
never a code nor a theory, it is always a life. The ideal religion awaited
the ideal man. He came! As the nation held the holy child Jesus in her
arms, joying that a MAN was born into the world, she might have been
overheard singing:

Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace,
According to thy word:
For mine eyes have seen thy salvation,
Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people;
A light to lighten the Gentiles,
And the glory of thy people Israel.

The historical reality of Jesus is unquestionable. The essential features
of his life and thought are distinctly outlined through the mist of time,
and above the clouds of legend that hang low upon the horizon where he
disappeared. The threefold tradition preserves a clear-cut image of the
Son of Man. We see One in whom the ideals of Israel found a perfect
realization. He brought to the flower the conception of religion whose
germ lay seeded down in the Ten Words of Moses. In him worship and
aspiration were one. He lived the ethical and spiritual religion after
which the nation had patiently striven, through prophet and priest and
sage, through psalmist and through scribe. He _lived_ the vision of human
goodness which holy men of old had never succeeded in bringing down into
the flesh, beyond a blurred blocking in of the heavenly ideal. He _lived_
man's dream of goodness so gloriously that he became a more than man, in
whom was felt the coming nigh of the Eternal Holy One. The human form
divine, to which mankind aspired, took on its true and awful splendor, as
the image of the God whom the conscience worshipped. Every passing "I
would be," of the saints of old looked forth, transfigured from the face
of One who said "I AM."

True to Israel's ancient dream, around this righteous suffering servant of
the Eternal, the nations gathered, to be taught of God. The souls to whom
He gave power to become the sons of God became the family of the Heavenly
Father, in which there was "neither Greek nor Jew, c