tarianism of the West, Jesus Christ raises to the highest pitch the universal human sense and consciousness of personal freedom and of eternally and divinely free personality.

In the second place, Jesus Christ makes Himself at one with the earliest and best ethical thought of the West in that He places the issues and decision of life, and the happiness that is the sense or consciousness of life, not without but within us, not in the action upon us of environment, but in our own free and personal reaction upon environment. Environment is the condition, but we are the causes, of life and its blessedness — or the reverse. Aristotle had said: It is the energies, the acts and activities, of ourselves, of our own souls that control, that determine and constitute happiness. Nature makes us nothing; it constitutes us, by the possession and use of reason and freedom, to make ourselves all that in life we, that is we humanly, personally, become. It is the essence of personality that it is made to be the maker of itself. Now Jesus Christ emphasizes and deepens this great fact or truth of life when He says to us: The kingdom of Heaven is within you. He Himself had found and entered the kingdom of Heaven. He had discovered the meaning and had experienced the blessedness of human life, — even such a life as outwardly His own was. We shall see as we proceed, as the essential difference between Him and all others, that all that human philosophy in even an Aristotle could conceive or express, He was. More than that, He was all that He Himself taught. The kingdom of Heaven was all in Him, because His life

realized and embodied all that constitutes and belongs to the kingdom of Heaven.

In the third place, Jesus Christ is the great, the only, interpreter to us of the meaning and reason of human environment as we find it. It is not only that environment is the condition of life, that we determine ourselves only through our response to its action upon us. If we are to take actuality as we find it, if we deal not with theory but with actual conditions, our conclusion must be that only in an environment of evil can good determine or realize itself. Even in that lower world of mere animal evolution in which there is so much of purely natural or physical evil, and which we pronounce so inexplicable a mystery, can we see how there could have been the evolution of sensuous pleasure only through and in contrast with the sense of pain. But the question enters much more into the field of our experience and understanding when we pass into the world of moral action and life. Within the sphere of finite activity the development of moral good appears to be absolutely conditioned upon an environment of moral evil. To take it at once in its most developed form, there is no holiness possible or thinkable for us which is not a distinct attitude towards, a definite action upon, what we know as sin. If we did not know the one we should not know the other. Jesus Christ was no exception. His holiness was a resistance unto blood to sin. The moral significance of His death was that it was a death to sin. His perfection was accomplished through His personal attitude, His moral or spiritual superiority, to the things He suffered. There

ought to be no mystery to us in the outward experiences, in the temptations, the fierce trials, the afflictions and sufferings of Jesus Christ. We ought to know that the moral victory He won, the spiritual height He attained, could not have been won or attained by Him as man except through such an outward experience, except in reaction and conflict with such a world of spiritual and moral evil. The perfect realization by Jesus Christ of all that is true, beautiful, or good in humanity as personal response to all of spiritual, moral, and natural evil that met and assailed Him in His outward life, is God's answer, if not to the full meaning and necessity, yet to His own use in the world of actuality of the mystery of evil.

But, in the fourth place, the contribution of Jesus to the truth and meaning of human life goes nearer still to the heart of the matter. In the "virtue" of the Greek, the "righteousness" of the Hebrew, and the "holiness" of Christianity, we have three types or standards of human conduct and character. With the Greek man himself was the measure and the end. The ideal man was he who the most symmetrically, perfectly, and happily realized or fulfilled himself. As in plastic art he strove to express the perfect balance or proportion of physical beauty, so by a higher spiritual æsthetic perception and measurement he endeavoured to portray the fair features and proportions of the moral ideal, the "beautiful and good" in humanity. But the ideal man, if he combined in himself elements of both the beautiful and the good, the æsthetic and the moral, inclined very much more in the direction

of the former than of the latter. Self-respect, supreme regard for one's "own fair personality" was the dominant if not the sole motive. The ideal was a beautiful one, and true in so far as the highest beauty must necessarily approximate the true and the good. But there was still too much in it of egoism to allow of its identification with these.

The Hebrew saw in his standard and measure of human life and conduct something vaster and more objective than the perfection and beauty of his own earthly personality. The law with him was something more than that of nature or his own finite nature. The Greek or Roman virtue was the following or fulfilling of nature, the realizing of manhood. The Hebrew righteousness was the recognition of a law, and behind the law a personality, infinitely beyond and above himself or his own. The tribunal before which he bowed was not his own right reason or the wider wisdom of the community revising his private judgment. There was a judgment seat more awful than the æsthetic taste of the individual or the public opinion of society. The power not himself that made for righteousness, no matter how it came or how it revealed itself to him, was to him the sum of all reality. We need not in this connection dwell upon this conception of the standard or measure of life further than to remember that it was an objective universal law other than which there could be no rule or principle of obligation in the heavens above or in the earth beneath.

The Hebrew point of view, while relieving the standard of the finite human subjectivity which made man

alone the measure, was in danger of the opposite extreme of making the law too wholly objective; and we may add, of separating the power or presence behind the law too far from human life. If the law had needed to be made more objective and universal, it needed now again to become more subjective and more human. It was the problem in process of solution, how to combine the opposite truths of immanence and transcendence. Jesus Christ, by not stopping at the law but going at once behind and beyond it, by recognizing the fact that no objective law can produce subjective life or righteousness, because law is only the outward form, the expression or letter, of the inward substance which we call spirit, Jesus Christ took the third and final step which completes the account of human life. If the passage had needed to be made from finite subjectivity to infinite objectivity, equally necessary was the passage made once for all by Him from the infinite objective to the infinite subjective, from the absolute without us in the form of law to the absolute within us in the form of spirit. The essence of the moral teaching of Jesus was the change of venue from the tribunal of law to that of spirit. The act of humanity in His own person was most exactly expressed in the words: "Who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot." In Him eternal law had given place to eternal spirit, the letter that killeth to the spirit that giveth life.

We are considering the truth of Jesus just now not from the standpoint of Christianity but in its correlation with other reflections and conclusions upon human