We are finding more and more that the simple fundamentals of life and
conduct as portrayed by the Christ of Nazareth not only constitutes a
great idealism, but the only practical way of life. Compared to this and
to the need that it come more speedily and more universally into
operation in the life of the world today, truly "sectarian peculiarities
are obsolete impertinences."

Our time needs again more the prophet and less the priest. It needs the
God-impelled life and voice of the prophet with his face to the future,
both God-ward and man-ward, burning with an undivided devotion to truth
and righteousness. It needs less the priest, too often with his back to
the future and too often the pliant tool of the organisation whose chief
concern is, and ever has been, the preservation of itself under the
ostensible purpose of the preservation of the truth once delivered, the
same that Jesus with his keen powers of penetration saw killed the
Spirit as a high moral guide and as an inspirer to high and
unself-centred endeavour, and that he characterised with such scathing
scorn. There are splendid exceptions; but this is the rule now even as
it was in his day.

The prophet is concerned with truth, not a system; with righteousness,
not custom; with justice, not expediency. Is there a man who would dare
say that if Christianity--the Christianity of the Christ--had been
actually in vogue, in practice in all the countries of Christendom
during the last fifty years, during the last twenty-five years, that
this colossal and gruesome war would ever have come about? No
clear-thinking and honest man would or could say that it would. We need
again the voice of the prophet, clear-seeing, high-purposed, and
unafraid. We need again the touch of the prophet's hand to lead us back
to those simple fundamental teachings of the Christ of Nazareth, that
are life-giving to the individual, and that are world-saving.

We speak of our Christian civilisation, and the common man, especially
in times like these, asks what it is, where it is--and God knows that we
have been for many hundred years wandering in the wilderness. He is
thinking that the Kingdom of God on earth that the true teachings of
Jesus predicated, and that he laboured so hard to actualise, needs some
speeding up. There is a world-wide yearning for spiritual peace and
righteousness on the part of the common man. He is finding it
occasionally in established religion, but often, perhaps