e in this matter. Roughly
speaking, the weakness of Catholic Christianity is to get involved in the
little things of "mint and anise and cummin"; whilst the weakness of
Protestantism is to become absorbed in the luxuries of one's own religious
experiences. The upshot of either is the same, namely, to be very
religious, and yet to forget the living God. I remember being very much
startled by an eminently pious Anglo-Catholic undergraduate at Oxford
saying to me, "The fact is, I am not interested in God the Father." It is
unwise to argue from one instance, but I seem to see there a symptom of a
widespread and tragic estrangement of institutional Christianity from the
mind of Christ. But I doubt whether things are much better on the other
side of the ecclesiastical street, where so often the worship of God has
downgraded into sitting and listening to sentimental music on Pleasant
Sunday Afternoons. Single instances are misleading, but I can never
dismiss the belief that there is something radically wrong with the world
of religion of which the representative was a Chapel, in my old parish at
Leeds, that indulged in a "fruit-banquet" on Good Friday. Right through
organised Christianity of all kinds there is, I think, a great absence of
the real Christian thing.

IX

But this brings round again the question, "What is this Christian thing?"
What are the characteristic and specific elements which, though they
cannot be nakedly abstracted from other elements, yet have to be kept
salient amid everything else? What is the Christianity which is generally
not in the conscious possession of men at the front, and yet receives the
seal of their glorious excellences? What is the Christianity which lies
hidden by traditional disguise and contemporary practice? Where is it to
be found?

X

At any rate, in the religion of Jesus of Nazareth. We are blessed by the
privilege, given to us by the work of realistic historians, of going to
Him as our real Brother. We can study the religion of this Man. It was
rooted first and last in one dominant reality--the Father and His will.
From the first sight given to us of Him as a boy and onwards He was rich
in one thing--He was rich towards God. He looked at the world without
insensibility to its pain, without evasion of its evil--rather with
uniquely sensitive insight into both--as God's world and the scene of
God's sovereign activity. And He expected others to share His view. He