able service, and in our coldest hours keeps steadfast to what seemed good when we were aglow. The character of Christ, in its manifold unity, was the blended presence of all these forms of Love in one personality, each chastened and rounded by the coherence and impulse of the rest. Was there not the same holy love for men's souls in the searching, awakening words, "Scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!" as in the pleading, vindicating words, "Forgive them; they know not what they do?" The love that is of God is as holy as it is tender, as unyielding as it is unhating. Not of the love of God, but only of some one filament of religious sensibility taken for the whole, could it be true that it is feeble-hearted either in forcing ourselves on enterprise and sacrifice, or in looking for endurance, effort, martyrdom, from those we love, if through these lies the way of truth and holiness, of spiritual honour and peace with God.

It may be objected, that to define Christ as the impersonation of God's Love does not embrace the whole of his recorded being-that, for instance, the Resurrection is omitted. But the Resurrection, however historically regarded, makes no part of the genesis, or of the inner vitality, of Christ. Doubtless a belief in the Resurrection was of critical efficacy in converting the Apostles and the world, but it was of no efficacy in producing the soul of Jesus, and cannot enter into any definition of his personality. Though it has

worked as a gleam of light on God's imperishable union with His children, its immediate action was to lift the disciples from a Messianic to a spiritual conception of the kingdom of heaven. The Resurrection, however interpreted, belongs to the scaffolding of Christianity, not to the soul of Christ.

*

What, then, are the considerations mainly concerned in the question, "What is it to be a Christian?" The distinctest and fullest answer to which words are adequate was given by Christ: "Be ye perfect, as your Father who is in heaven is perfect." The concrete answer was in his own personality, the reality of life which no statement of doctrines, no articles of belief, though they were all true and all accepted, could compass or picture. In spiritual substance it is to have "the same mind in us that was also in Christ Jesus." It is to seek and serve God in the faith and hope which perfect love creates, delivered from the fear which perfect love casts out. It is to live in His presence; to watch for His visitings; to know through the depths of our being that a holy God who loves us must hold us responsible for our faithfulness to the quickenings of His grace; it is to have

"Were I to define divinity, I should rather call it a divine life than a divine science; it being something rather to be understood by a spiritual sensation than by any verbal description, as all things of sense and life are best known by sentient and vital faculties."-Smith's Select Discourses, p. 1: Cambridge, 1859.

the large bountifulness of heart, and where possible of hand, of the children of Him who causes His sun to shine on the evil and the good, and makes His rain to fall upon the just and upon the unjust; it is that fulfilment of the old commandment which makes the commandment ever fresh, in dear acknowledgment of claims that never can be cancelled, debts of the heart's own making, always being registered anew against itself: "A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another, as I have loved you, that ye love one another;" it is the love which cannot deny itself as God cannot deny Himself, and so will refuse no service and will countenance no wrong; which can urge its dearest upon solitude, suffering, privations, sacrifice, and death, if through these is their fellowship with Him who blesses ever and in all ways, but who will not go with us in anything that brings spiritual hurt, and will not spare us in anything that brings spiritual good.

It is but in a poor measure that any of us are Christians, in all the susceptibilities and in all the works of Love, in the vast range of its spirit from adoring humility for ourselves before God to self-forgetting enthusiasm for the kingdom of heaven; but it is in the power of us all more and more to draw our being from the Holiest known to us, breathing in us or realized for us, and by the most infallible and Christ-like way-the surest, the sweetest, and the

humblest-to make earthly life more and more heavenly, worshipping in spirit and in truth by honouring and serving our Father in honouring and serving His children.

II.

The Universality of Christianity.

JOHN xvii. 20:

"Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also that shall believe on me through their word; that they all may be one; as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that Thou hast sent me."

THESE words imply that there is to be no period of earthly progress in which men shall pass beyond discipleship to Christ: that his method is inexhaustible, himself a symbol of the living God, as fresh in significance, as uninjured by time, as the everlasting hills. Since they were spoken mankind has advanced indefinitely, but that vast and indescribable progress has not altered the spiritual position of humanity in relation to Jesus Christ. Not when he came to his own and his own received him not-when amid Judea's low and fierce fanaticism, forestalling the progression of ages, he spoke of universal interests in a universal language-not then more signally than now was he the needed Saviour and Healer of men's souls, the unapproached Teacher, the unworn Ideal, the only real Person to whom it would not shock the religious feel