of Goodness, as
does no other Person who has ever lived; and by the attractive power of
His life and love He still sets men to living counter to the strong
thrust of instinct and impulse as does no one else who has ever touched
the springs of conduct. The Faith-aspect is still a very live element
in religion, and it is, as it has been so often before, precisely the
aspect which supplies concrete body and filling and objective ethical
direction to our deep sub-conscious yearnings and strivings and
experiences.
Once at least there shone through the thin veil of matter a personal
Life which brought another kind of world than this world of natural law
and utilitarian aims full into light. There broke through here in the
face of Jesus {xlii} Christ a revelation of Purpose in the universe so
far beyond the vague trend of purpose dimly felt in slowly evolving
life that it is possible here to catch an illuminating vision of what
the goal of the long drama may be--the unveiling of sons of God. Here
the discovery can be made that the deepest Reality toward which Reason
points, and which the mystical experience _feels_, is no vague
Something Beyond, but a living, loving Some One, dealing with us as
Person with person. In Him there comes to focus in a Life that we can
love and appreciate a personal character which impresses us as being
absolutely good, and as being in its inexhaustible depth of Love and
Grace worthy to be taken as the revelation of the true nature of the
God whom all human hearts long for. And finally through this personal
revelation of God in Christ there has come to us a clear insight that
pain and suffering and tragedy can be taken up into a self-chosen Life
and absorbed without spoiling its immense joy, and that precisely
through suffering-love, joyously accepted, a Person expressing in the
world the heart of God may become the moral and spiritual Saviour of
others. As von Hugel has finely said: "A Person came and lived and
loved, and did and taught, and died and rose again, and lives on by His
power and His Spirit forever within us and amongst us, so unspeakably
rich and yet so simple, so sublime and yet so homely, so divinely above
us precisely in being so divinely near that His character and teaching
require, for an ever fuller yet never complete understanding, the
varying study, and different experiments and applications, embodiments
and unrollings of all the races and civilizations, of all the
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