he higher truths, and a comprehension of great principles.
A deep sympathy with truth is the important thing: this implies a
rectification of the spiritual nature--its harmonization with the
constitution of things. A great amount of abstract truth may be lodged
in one's brain, and this sympathy may be more or less wanting. To secure
it, the 'Word' of the teacher must become flesh,--it must be
contemplated in the flesh, living and breathing,--it must be represented
as _militant_, subject to accident and antagonism, but assuring men of
its unquenchable vitality, its relationship with the divine, through the
might of its resistance, and through its final _triumph_, though not
necessarily according to earthly standards of the triumphant. There are
novels which exhibit a somewhat low ideal of life through the general
squaring up of things at the end--the good being rewarded outwardly and
the bad punished. But

In the corrupted 'currents of this world,
Offence's gilded hand may shove by justice,
... but 'tis not so above.

The teachings of Jesus are clothed in circumstance and imagery which
were familiar to all whom he addressed. 'All these things spake Jesus
unto the multitude in parables; and without a parable spake he not unto
them.' To use the words of Archbishop Trench in his 'Unconscious
Prophecies of Heathendom,' 'In his life and person, the idea and the
fact at length kissed each other, and were thenceforward wedded
forever.'

The liberal-minded reader of the four records which we have of Christ's
life and teachings, must admit that he added little or nothing to the
previously existing knowledge of truth in the abstract; he rather caused
truth which philosophers and moralists had already intellectually
recognized, to be known 'by heart.' He presented it _concretely_, in his
own life and in his teachings, and thus worked it into that 'daily
bread' for which he commanded us to pray, and which alone will nourish
human sympathy and love. In its previous intellectual, abstract form, it
did not, and could not, become an element of spiritual life.

In the thirty beautiful little stories in the New Testament, educators
of the young, and indeed all educators in the fullest sense, may see
the cardinal principle of their calling, namely, that the greatest power
of ethical and religious truth can be secured only through the concrete,
and the personal, through that which is the truth, and not through an
abstract e