of his account, such is the fact that emerges from the New Testament, critically understood.

Coming now to the ethical and religious character, the second is entirely simple, while the first, the ethical, is compounded of two elements. One of these is an infinite compassion for all suffering and sinful folk. In Çakya Mouni there was this same compassion; and I shall not quarrel with my Buddhist friends, whether to the manner born or very recently converted, who think it was more strongly marked in Çakya Mouni than in Jesus. If it was so, the world is so much the richer by that sign. But the compassion of Jesus floods the New Testament as the waters of the ocean flood its basin and its bounding shores. Was ever man more pitiful? I do not know. I do not care. I could not ask for anything beyond the limit of his scope. Even the miracle stories, which attest nothing supernatural, and cannot be themselves confirmed, are not so altogether meaningless as our cruder rationalists insist. They are spontaneous testimonies to the passionate humanity in Jesus, which, if it could have done so, would have made the blind to see, the lame to walk, the dead to live again. As was the compassion of Jesus for the suffering, so was his compassion for the sinful, but with a difference. All suffering appealed to him, but not all sin in the same manner and degree. He made a distinction between brutish and fiendish sins. With the former he was very tender: with the latter he was very stern. The sins of passion, those which his followers have dealt with most severely, were venial in his eyes in comparison with the sins of malignity and selfish calculation. Especially was his hatred of hypocrisy unlimited. When he struck at that, he struck with all his might.

And this brings us to the second element in his ethical character. (You will remember that I said that there were two.) His hatred of hypocrisy was simply the most vivid illustration of his passion for integrity, the unity, the oneness of the outward and the inward man, of thought and act. This was the only doctrine of atonement, at-one-ment, that

Jesus knew anything about; and this was very near the centre of his heart and life. It was not enough to do good: you must be good. "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they

shall see God."

And it was in the purity of his own heart, as in the stainless mirror of some mountain lake, that he saw reflected the benignity of his Heavenly Father's face. I have said that on the religious side the character of Jesus was simple, and it was so. The sum and substance of his religion SO much of it as was not ethical- was an unfaltering trust in God. He looked into his own heart, and wrote. His logic was exactly that of the Scotch epitaph:—

"Here lie I, Martin Elginbrod.

Have mercy on my soul, Lord God,
As I would have, if I were God,
And you were Martin Elginbrod."

It was exactly that of Browning when he sang in David's

name:

"Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,

That I doubt his own love can compete with it? here the parts shift;

Here the creature surpass the Creator; the end what began?"

Never could he believe any such stuff as that. And so he had his doctrine of forgiveness. It meant that man, having done wrong, having plunged deep in wickedness, has an infinite power of self-recovery. It meant and it did not exaggerate the healing genius of the world. Or, if it did not mean this consciously to him, this was the ethical truth which underlay his thought of the divine forgiveness. If God can get himself incarnate in somne kind-hearted man or woman, so much the swifter is the course, so much more sure the end. "Who is this that forgiveth sins?" asked some of those about him. As if there is anything that men can do more certainly than this, when they have the requisite amount of generous expectation, patience, love! Only there must be the requisite amount. And that means some

times so much that the heart that is big enough to hold it must be of a capacity that shames the stars of heaven.

In conclusion let me say, as I have said before, that Jesus is by no means one of the freaks or riddles of personality. He is not one of those who thwart and baffle us with their singularity, but a man remarkable for his simplicity. The lines of his spiritual architecture are not those of a labyrinth, but those of a great religious temple, frank and free and strong; of such a temple as, cleaving broadly to the earth, lifts one great spire, like Salisbury's, into the air and light and spaciousness of heaven. But those of you who have seen the glorious minster of Antwerp will remember how the people's homes and workshops snuggle up against its walls and buttresses. Even so the frank simplicity of Jesus has clustering about it a little world of homely, pleasant things; for he was every inch a man, and nothing was foreign to him of human work or play, of human joy or sorrow, of human victory or defeat. There is no life recorded that has more the accent of humanity, or that less requires anything supernatural to account for its immediate impression and its ultimate effect, than the life which at this merry Christmas time demands the well-considered admiration of all earnest men and women, of whatever sect or creed.

THE BIBLE OF THE HEART.

IN a very interesting passage Emerson has told us how there are several audiences in every audience. One speaker will find one of these audiences, and one of them another. Sometimes the same speaker, in the course of his address, will find them all,- the trivial, the common-sense, the imaginative, the intellectual, the moral, the religious. And it is just so with the Bible. It is at the same time one and several. A great many discussions about it are like the discussions of the two knights about the shield,—one saying it was silver, and the other it was gold, and dashing themselves together to prove it one thing or the other, the fact being it was both, but one of the two knights was looking on the silver side, the other on the golden. Matthew Arnold wrote a famous book about the Bible called "Literature and Dogma." There was here a clear indication of two of the Bibles that are bound up in the one, the literary and the dogmatic. Arnold's contention was that the Bible was literature, and not dogma, and what he said upon this head was deserving of the carefullest attention; and yet I cannot help thinking that he was too severe with those who think it a dogmatic book. For it is very certain to my mind that a great deal of it was meant to be dogmatic by the men who wrote it; that is to say, meant to be doctrinal finality. That is what dogma is,― doctrinal finality. The words "dogma" and "doctrine” are often used interchangeably; but a doctrine does not become a dogma until it is considered final and irreversible. Arnold, I am persuaded, vastly underrated the amount of dogma in the Bible,- not the amount of doctrinal finality in it, but the amount put forth as such; yet this element is generally so vastly overrated that we could not regret his