nd ratifies their confused yet
steadfast devotion. He is first among many brethren, giving full
utterance to their dumb trustfulness. In a world of mixed and partial
motives He is the absolute and unmitigated lover of God--loving with all
His mind and soul and strength, freely hazarding all upon the Father.

XI

Is not that enough? This simple element--this religion of Jesus--is it not
the one thing needful, possessed of which men may slough off all else in
the traditional deposits of Christianity? Yes, would certainly be the
answer if the men of His day had in fact been so possessed, and if men
were so possessed to-day. What was actual in Him was, is, in fact,
unrealised in them. He did find, of old, fellow-adventurers to share His
enterprise. But they could not share it to the end. He could love God
wholly, they only partially. He had to leave them, and they Him; He to do
the will of the Father, they to fail to do it. He alone could not only
announce but fulfil the first and great commandment; they in the end could
only be defied and broken by it.

So it was proved. And it is a result which any honest man can verify for
himself. As I have tried to show elsewhere,[1] the most rigorously human
and non-miraculous view of Jesus and the Gospels leads to this point, to
what may be called the porch where Peter wept, where the silence of God
broods over the tragedy of human failure.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _The Mind of the Disciples_ (Macmillan).

XII

"But the third day He rose again." Peter was not left in the porch, nor
are we. His broken hope was remade by the One fully trusted in by Jesus
only--by the "God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ."[2]

The Christian thing which we look for is the Good News of _God_ in Christ.
It is not only the religion _of_ Jesus our Brother, but religion _in_
Jesus, in Him revealing God to men. It is not only His human richness
towards God, but in Him the richness of God towards men. It is the Cross
not only as the climax of free loving self-offering to the Father, but as
itself the laying bare of the Father's heart--it is _God_ reconciling the
world unto Himself.

It is this--the revelation of God in Christ--of which the experience of
the war shows we are above all else in the world in need. God, not merely
assented to as a mysterious "One above," at the back of things, but God,
known and delighted in, in terms of Jesus Christ. It is one great light
which we need to wal