country. It was an unreal,
fictitious self. He had been insane, beside himself, and now, as his
better life starts up in him, he comes to himself. As his father said
of him, he had been dead and was alive again. The renewal of the good
self in him was the resurrection of his true personality.

How deep that goes into one's doctrine of human nature! Never believe
that the sinning self is the true self. Your real personality is the
potential good in you. The moment that good springs into life you have
a right to say: "Now I know what I was {147} made for. I have come to
life. I have discovered myself." And then there is the religious
aspect of this same self-discovery. No sooner does this boy come to
himself than he says, "I will arise and go to my father." The
religious need follows at once from the self-awakening. Nay, was not
the religious need the source of the self-awakening? What was it that
brought him to himself but just the homesickness of the child for his
father's house? His self-discovery was but the answer of his soul to
the continuous love of God. Before he ever came to himself the father
was waiting for him. Antecedent to the ethical return was the
religious quickening. That is the relation of religion to conduct.
You make your resolutions, but it is God that prompts them. Your
self-discovery is the drawing of the Father. Your true self is his
son. How natural it all is,--an infinite law of love at the heart of
the universe--that is the centre of theology; a world that permits
moral alienation through the free will of man,--that is the problem of
philosophy; he came to himself,--that is the heart of ethics; I will go
to my Father,--that is the soul of religion.

{148}

LX

POPULARITY

_Luke_ xix. 37-43; _Matthew_ xxi. 17-23.

(PASSION WEEK--MONDAY)

The ministry of Jesus is as a whole not easy to arrange in any fixed
chronology. The order of events seems often to vary in the different
gospels, and sometimes these unstudied narratives seem in positive
conflict. But as the story draws to its close the paths of narrative
begin to converge, and as we approach the last days and enter on the
last week the incidents of each day become perfectly distinct, and one
can trace the life of Jesus as it moves on from his triumph of Palm
Sunday to his tragedy of the cross. As we enter then to-day on the
anniversary of the last week of the life of Jesus, the week before
Easter Sunday