supreme significance of
Christ's Life in His double revelation of the inherent nature of God,
and the immense value and potentiality of man, and that changes the
emphasis from schemes of salvation to interpretations of life, from the
magic significance of doctrine to the incalculable worth of the moral
will.

These men were weak in historical sense, and, like everybody else in
their generation, they used Scripture without much critical insight.
But they hit upon a principle which saved them from slavery to texts,
and which gave them a working faith in the steady moral and spiritual
development of man. I mean the principle that this Christ whom they
had discovered anew was an eternal manifestation of God, an immanent
Word of God, a Spirit brooding over the world of men, as in the
beginning over the face of the waters, present in the unfolding events
of history as well as in the far-away "dispensations of Grace." As a
result, they grew less interested in the problem that had fascinated so
many mystics, the problem of the super-empirical evolution of the
divine Consciousness; the super-temporal differentiation of the unity
of the Godhead into a Father and Son and self-revealing Holy Ghost; and
they tried rather to appreciate and to declare the concrete revelation
through Christ, and {xli} the import of His visible and invisible
presence in the world.[29]

This approach of Faith, this appreciation of the nature of God as He
has been unveiled in the ethical processes of history, especially in
the Person of Christ, and in His expanding conquest of the world, must
always be one of the great factors of spiritual religion. The profound
results of higher criticism, with its stern winnowings, have brought us
face to face with problems unknown to the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries. So much of what seemed the solid continent of historical
truth has weathered and crumbled away that some have wondered whether
any irreducible nucleus would remain firm and permanent above the flood
of the years, and whether the religion of the future must not dispense
with the historical element, and the Faith-aspect that goes with it,
and rest wholly upon present inward experience.

There are, however, I believe, no indications worth considering, of the
disappearance of Jesus Christ from human history. On the contrary, He
holds, as never before, the commanding place in history. He still
dominates conscience, by the moral sway of His Life