n which we live, it is the table at which we sit, it is the
fireside to which we draw near, the room that arches its graceful and
familiar presence over us; it is the bed on which we lie and think of
the past and anticipate the future and gather our refreshment. There is
no Christ except the present Christ for every man, unto whom all the
power of the historic Christ is always appearing, and who is great with
all the sweet solemnity that comes from the knowledge of what in the
future He is to be to the world and to the soul. I am anxious to-day to
impress this upon you: that the Christian faith is not a dogma, it is
not primarily a law, but is a personal presence and an immediate life
that is right here and now. I am anxious to have you know that to be a
Christian does not mean primarily to believe this or that. It does not
mean primarily, although it means necessarily afterward, to do this or
that. But it means to know the presence of a true personal Christ among
us and to follow. Here is the only true power by which a religion can
become perpetual. Men outgrow many dogmas which they hold. The lines in
which they try to live change their application to their lives. But I
know a person with a deep, true life; I enter into a friendship with one
who is worthy I should be his friend, and he is mine always. What is the
meaning of this sort of talk that we hear about a faith that they held
once, but they have outgrown? What is the reason of this expectation
that seems to have spread itself abroad, of necessity that the boy who
had a religion should lose his religion some time or other, and that by
and by he should take up a man's religion somewhere upon the other side
of the gulf of infidelity and godlessness, through which he has passed
in the mean while? You expect your boy of ten years old to be religious
with a child's sweet, trusting faith; and you hope that your man of
forty and fifty, beaten by the world, is to have found a God who can be
his salvation. But the years between? What do you think of your young
men of fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, and thirty years old? To have
outgrown the boy's faith, and not to have come to the man's faith? That
seems almost to be an awful fate and destiny which you expect for them.
But if our faith be this, then there shall be no need, no chance that a
man shall outgrow it. Know Christ with the first conceptions, imperfect
and crude, of his boy's life, and he shall go on knowing more and