It would be a strange perversity if men
should reject Christ in the name of spiritual {162} religion when it is
to Christ, and to Him alone, that they owe the conception of what
spiritual religion is.'[16] To preach the doctrines of Theism without
reference to Christ is to deprive them of their most sublime
illustration, their most inspiring force, and their most convincing
proof.

It is as Christ is known that God is believed in. The attempt to
create enthusiasm for God while banishing the Gospel of Christ meets
with astonishingly small response. The 'Religion for all Mankind'
makes but little progress, is, in spite of the labours of
five-and-thirty years, confined, as we have seen, almost to a solitary
moderately sized congregation. And whether or not the 'facts' on which
the religion is based 'are never in dispute,' the religion itself is
often-times disputed very keenly. Modern assaults upon religious faith
are, as a rule, directed quite as much against Theism as {163} against
Christianity.[17] It is the Love, or even the existence, of the Living
God, it is human responsibility, it is life beyond the grave, that are
called in question as frequently as the Resurrection of Christ. The
assurance that God at sundry times and in divers manners has spoken by
prophets renders it not more but less improbable that He should speak
by a Son: the assurance that there is life beyond the grave for all
renders it not more but less improbable that Jesus rose from the dead.
Conversely those who believe in Jesus believe with a double intensity
in Him Whom He revealed. 'Ye believe in God,' said Christ, 'believe
also in Me.' For many of us now, it is because we believe in Christ
that we believe also in God. The Almighty and Eternal is beyond our
ken: the grace and truth of Jesus Christ come home to our hearts. The
Word that was in the beginning with God and was God, {164} is wrapt in
impenetrable mystery: the Word made Flesh can be seen and handled: has

wrought
With human hands the Creed of Creeds
In loveliness of perfect deeds,
More strong than all poetic thought.[18]

And however it may be in a few exceptional cases, where people
nominally renouncing Christ desperately cleave to a fragment of the
faith of their childhood, the fact remains that, where He ceases to be
acknowledged, faith in the Father Whom He manifested tends, gradually
or speedily, to vanish.

VI

The superiority of Theism t