ircumcision nor
uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free, but Christ was all
and in all." In this holy brotherhood of the children of the All-Father,
we moderns take our places round our elder brother; feeling sure that we
have found the spiritual band or religion wherein society is to be held
together, through each man's holding hard by the God who is the perfection
of His own highest dreams.

* * * * *

Such then being the fact of Israel's historic travail and such her issue,
our fathers' sense of the supreme significance of Christ in human history
takes on a new light in our new knowledge.

The problem of religion is to find such a knowledge of the Being in whom
we live and move and have our being, as shall lead men's awe before this
mysterious Power up into an awe of a Power whom we may rightly worship,
trust and love. To find the key to this problem is to hold the secret of
all the puzzles of our weary world. Before the Power "manifest in the
flesh" in Jesus Christ, our souls hush, in an awe which breathes within us
worship, trust and love. And if this Power be the very Power felt in
history and in nature, whose ways therein are so often baffling to the
moral sense, then all is well. But, if this be so, the holy Power who is
shrined in Christ must show the features of the Mind which tabernacles in
nature. There can be no contradiction. Unquestionably an essential
characteristic of the Mind in nature is the method of its action. There
is a reign of Law. The highest generalization of the methods of this law
which man has reached reveals this Power as acting, through every sphere,
in continuous progressive development. One word embodies this supreme
generalization--evolution. Christianity must fit into this universal
order. Otherwise it either denies that order, which denial cannot be
received; or it is denied by that order, which denial is very certain to
be increasingly received. God "cannot deny Himself!" "I change not."

Here is where Christianity's hold of the human mind hinges in our age. The
old reading of the history of the preparation for Christ separated "those
whom God hath joined together." The new reading of that preparation
restores the needful unity.

Christianity is no exception amid the general order of nature. It follows
that providential plan. It grows from seed to flower. Its beginnings were
in a simple conception of ethical religion begotten in a heathe