-Righteous and
All-Loving God as the only hope for the regeneration of mankind, we
cannot shut our eyes to the fact that where faith in Christ fades,
faith in God has a tendency to become vague and dim. He ceases to be
thought of as a Friend and Help at hand: He is resolved into a Creator
infinitely distant or into a Law, immovable, inexorable, a blind,
unconscious Fate. It is Christ Who gives life to the thought of God.
It is the Word made Flesh that makes the Eternal Word more real. The
attempt of the Deists to purify religion by the preaching of a God who
had not {168} revealed Himself, and could not reveal Himself, in a Son,
came to nothing. Voltaire's chapel at Ferney still stands, but nobody
worships in it. Religion seemed to slumber: belief in God seemed to be
decaying, when the preaching of the name and the work of Christ again
aroused it into life. And so it is now. Whatever the ability,
whatever the sincerity of the advocates of belief in God without
reference to Christ, it lacks motive-power, it lacks the missionary
spirit. If we may judge by the past, Theism without Christ is a faith
which will not spread, which will not lay hold on the labouring and the
heavy laden: which may be maintained as a theory, but which will not be
as a fire in the souls of men diffusing itself by kindling other souls.
It is from Christ alone, from Christ the manifestation of what God is
in Heart and Mind, from Christ the manifestation of what man ought to
be, from Christ Who said, 'In My Father's house are many {169}
mansions: he that hath seen Me hath seen the Father,' that there comes
with an authority to which, in face of the difficulties besetting the
present and the future, the human soul will bow, with a soothing power
to which the human spirit will gladly yield--it is from Christ alone
that there comes the Divine injunction, 'Let not your heart be
troubled, ye believe in God, believe also in Me.' It is as He is
clearly seen and truly known that the clouds of error and superstition
vanish from the Face of God, and men are drawn to worship and to trust.

[1] Longfellow, _Song of Hiawatha_.

[2] Keble, _Christian Year_.

[3] Bishop Gore, _The Christian Creed_.

[4] Appendix XX.

[5] _Phases of Faith_.

[6] _The Soul: its Sorrows and Aspirations_.

[7] _The Soul: its Sorrows and Aspirations_.

[8] _The Soul_.

[9] _Alone to the Alone_.

[10] _Alone to the Alone_.

[11] _Alone to the Alone_.

[12] A