to circulate. He dealt, in
other words, with the great ideas of God and the soul, which can alone
live in Him, however it may have sunk away from Him. These were to Him
the realities of all life and all religion. There are those, I know,
in our day, to whom these ideas are mere assumptions--"dogmas of a
tremendous kind," to assume which is to assume everything. But with
this order of thought we have in the meantime nothing to do. The
questions of materialism are outside of Christianity altogether. They
were nothing to Christ, whose whole thought moved in a higher sphere
of personal love, embracing this lower world. The spiritual life was
to Him the life of reality and fact; and so it is to all who live in
Him and know in Him. The soul and God are, if you will, dogmas to
science. They cannot well be anything else to a vision which is
outside of them, and cannot from their very nature ever reach them.
But within the religious sphere they are primary experiences, original
and simple data from which all others come. And our present argument
is, that Christ dealt almost exclusively with these broad and simple
elements of religion, and that He believed the life of religion to
rest within them. He spoke to men and women as having souls to be
saved; and He spoke of Himself and of God as able and willing to save
them. This was the "simplicity" that was in Him.

Everywhere in the Gospels this simplicity is obvious. Our Lord came
forth from no school. There is no traditional scheme of thought lying
behind his words which must be mastered before these words are
understood. But out of the fulness of His own spiritual nature He
spoke to the spiritual natures around Him, broken, helpless, and
worsted in the conflict with evil as He saw them. "The Spirit of the
Lord is upon me," He said at the opening of His Galilean ministry,
"because He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor, to heal
the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and
recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are
bruised."[1] These were the great realities that confronted Him in
life; and His mission was to restore the divine powers of humanity
thus everywhere impoverished, wounded, and enslaved. He healed the
sick and cured the maimed by His simple word. He forgave sins. He
spoke of good news to the miserable. All who had erred and gone out of
the way--who had fallen under the burthen, or been seduced by the
temptations, o