e that he has gone farther afield from
Oxford City than any other of its academic citizens, building for
himself a home on a hill two miles and more from Magdalen Bridge, with a
garden about it kept largely wild, and seats placed where the eye can
travel farthest.

This man, who is so unpushing and self-effacing, makes a contribution to
the Christian religion which deserves, I think, the thoughtful attention
of his contemporaries. It can be set forth in a few words, for his faith
is fastened in the conviction that the universe is far simpler than
science--for the moment--would allow us to think.

Let me explain at the outset that Unitarianism admits of a certain
diversity of faith. There are Unitarians who think and speak only of
God. There are others who lay their insistence on the humanity of Jesus,
exalting Him solely as the chief est of teachers. There are others who
choose to dwell on the uniqueness of Jesus, who feel in Him some
precious but quite inexpressible, certainly quite indefinable, spell of
divinity, and who love to lose themselves in mystical meditations
concerning His continual presence in the human spirit. Dr. Jacks, I
think, is to be numbered among these last. But, like all other
Unitarians, he makes no credal demands on mankind, save only the one
affirmation of their common faith, with its inevitable ergo: God is
Love, and therefore to be worshipped.

Robert Hall said to a Unitarian minister who always baptised "in the
Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost," attaching a
very sacred meaning to the words, "Why, sir, as I understand you, you
must consider that you baptise in the name of an abstraction, a man, and
a metaphor." More simple was the interpretation of a Japanese who, after
listening with a corrugated brow to the painful exposition of a recent
Duke of Argyll concerning the Trinity in Unity, and the Unity in
Trinity, suddenly exclaimed with radiant face, "Ah, yes, I see, a
Committee."

Dr. Jacks leaves these perplexities alone. For him, God is the Universal
Spirit, the Absolute Reality immanent in all phenomena, the Love which
reason finds in Goodness and intuition discovers in Beauty, the Father
of men, the End and the very Spirit of Evolution. And Jesus, so far as
human thought can reach into the infinite, is the Messenger of God, the
Revealer both of God's Personality and man's immortality, the great
Teacher of liberty. What else He may be we do not know, but may disco