saw, was Christ or nothing. And every
day it is becoming clearer that this is the alternative, that between
Christianity and the blankest Atheism there is no middle place. Indeed
we may say that between Christianity, with its supernatural facts, and
materialism, which admits of no supernatural at all, and of nothing
spiritual and immortal, there is no logical standing-ground. A man's
choice lies between these two--either Christ with His claims in all
their fulness, or a material universe working out its life under the
impulse of some inscrutable force. There are of course men who are
neither Christians nor materialists; but that is because they have not
yet found their intellectual resting-place. As soon as they obey reason,
they will travel to one or other of these extremes, for between the two
is no logical standing-ground. If there is a God, then there seems
nothing incredible, nothing even very surprising, in Christianity.
Christianity becomes merely the flower or fruit for which the world
exists, the element in the world's history which gives meaning and glory
to the whole of it: without Christianity and all it involves the world
lacks interest of the highest kind. If a man finds he cannot admit the
possibility of such an interference in the world's monotonous way as
the Incarnation implies, it is because there is in his mind an Atheistic
tendency, a tendency to make the laws of the world more than the
Creator; to make the world itself God, the highest thing. The Atheist's
position is thoroughgoing and logical; and against the Atheist the man
who professes to believe in a Personal God and yet denies miracle is
helpless. And in point of fact Atheistic writers are rapidly sweeping
the field of all other antagonists, and the intermediate positions
between Christianity and Atheism are becoming daily more untenable.

Any one then who is offended at the supernatural in Christianity, and is
disposed to turn away and walk no more with Christ, should view the
alternative, and consider what it is with which he must throw in his
lot. To retain what is called the spirit of Christ, and reject all that
is miraculous and above our present comprehension, is to commit oneself
to a path which naturally leads to disbelief in God. We must choose
between Christ as He stands in the gospels, claiming to be Divine,
rising from the dead and now alive; and a world in which there is no God
manifest in the flesh or anywhere else, a world that