God, shall know the doctrine." Is not the whole reason
why, for so many of us, the religion of Christ which we profess has so
little in it to content us, simply this, that we have never heartily
and honestly tried to practice it? We have accepted Christ's religion
indeed, as one which upon the whole should be accepted by virtuous men,
or as one which has sufficient superiorities to certain other forms of
religion to turn the scale of our intellectual hesitation, and win from
us reluctant acquiescence. But have we accepted it as the only
authoritative rule of practice? Have we ever tried to live one day of
our life so that it should resemble one of the days of the Son of Man?
Knowing what He thought and did, and how He felt, have we ever tried to
think and act and feel as He did--and if we have not, what wonder that
our religion, being wholly theoretical, appears to us tainted with
unreality, a thin-spun web of barren, fragile idealism which leaves us
querulous and discontented?

Such a sense of discontent should be for us, as it really is, the
signal of some deep mistake in our conception of religion. It should
at least cause us alarm, for what can be more alarming than that we
should be haunted with a sense of unreality in religion, yet still
profess religion for reasons which leave the heart indifferent and
barely serve to satisfy the intellect? And what can produce a keener
torture in a sincere mind than this eternal suspicion of unreality in a
religion whose conventional authority is acknowledged and accepted?

I am convinced that these feelings are general among great multitudes
of the more thoughtful and intelligent adherents of Christianity.
Religion rests with them upon a certain intellectual acquiescence, or
upon the equipoise of rational probabilities, or on the compromise of
intellectual hesitations. Their tastes are gratified by the normal
forms of worship, and their sentiments are softly stirred and
stimulated. But when the voice of the orator dies upon the porches of
the ear, and the music of the Church is silent, and the seduction of
splendid ceremonial is forgotten, there remains the uneasy sense that
between all this and the actual Carpenter-Redeemer there is a wide gulf
fixed; that Jesus scarcely lived and died to produce only such results
as these; that there must be some other method of interpreting His
life, much simpler, much truer, and much more satisfying. Is it
wonderful that among suc