its sins?

Is there not here the opportunity of an evangel, the dawning of an
immense hope on the world?

But let the Church ask herself, before she abandons her labour of
expounding doctrines concerning the Person of Christ, whether she is
quite clear as to the teaching of Jesus. "Not every one that saith unto
Me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven; but he that
doeth the will of My Father which is in heaven."

Read St. Mark, the earliest, the least corrupted, of the narratives. It
is a declaration of a new power in human life, and a record of its
achievements. It is this, and nothing else. The one great word of that
gospel is Faith--not faith in a formula or an institution, but faith in
the absolute supremacy of spirit. Faith in spirit means power--power
over circumstance, power over matter, power over the heredity of our
animal origin. Jesus not only sets men free from the prison-house of
material delusion, as Plato and others sought to do; He teaches them the
way in which alone they can exercise spiritual dominion.

There were two things to which He set no limits: one, the love of God,
and the other, the power of Faith.

Let all the schools in the Church revise their definition of the word
_faith_, and unity will come of itself. Faith, as Jesus employed that
term, meant _making use of belief_--belief that the spiritual alone is
the real. Faith is the action of the soul. It is the working of a
power. It is mastery of life.

Let the Church realise that Jesus taught this power of the soul. Let her
begin to exercise her own spiritual powers. And then let her understand
that she is in the world to teach men, to lead the advance of evolution,
to educate humanity in the use of its highest powers.

A knowledge of the sense in which Jesus employed the word Faith is the
clue to the recovery of Christian influence.

This is the suggestion which I venture to submit to the Church, at a
moment in history when the harsh and brutal spirit of materialism is
crushing all faith out of the soul and leaving the body no tenant but
its appetites.

I do not think any observant man can deny that the whole "suggestion" of
the modern world is of an evil nature, that is to say, of a nature which
fastens upon the mind the delusions of the senses, making it believe
that what it sees is reality, persuading it that the gratification of
those senses is the end and object of existence. The wages of this
suggestion is death