The organic connection of the lesser truths of Christianity with this the greatest, is too great a subject to We will close with a restatement of

enter upon now. what we have said as applied to our personal lives. That which Christ did for the previous truths in the world, He does for us. We live, before we believe on Him, as possessors of isolated religious truths. We hold one at one time and another at another time, till particular truths, being over-insisted on, grow monstrous, and the unity of life is broken. We cannot concentrate our impulses to one end, for they need an inner bond of thought. One idea contends with another and usurps the throne of another. They have no wish to act together. Now it is obedience to the moral law which rules our conduct, till we drift into Pharisaism; now it is the freedom of the Gospel, till we drift into lawlessness. The truths we have are excellent, but disconnected from their brother-truths they tend to become half-truths, and their end is, not uncommonly, either to die of spiritual starvation, or to be changed into falsehoods. Now, as Christ harmonised and united the religious thoughts of the world, so, when He is truly received, does He bring the inner life of the soul into harmony. Under the reign of his love no truth can be pushed too far, for a single truth exclusively dwelt on is the parent of fanaticism or persecution. As the first principle of his rule of the physical world is order, so is it in the spiritual world of our hearts. He allots to each quality its work, He brings the truths we possess into an ordered phalanx, each one in its place and its best place; and, concentrating these, He inspires

them with his spirit, and drives them in penetrating onset against all the evil and falsehood in the soul.

They act together, because, in their centre, as the king of truths, they possess the knowledge that the whole nature of Man is united to God.

But here we pause. What that truth does for us as life goes on, and age and failure come; what it reveals when the mountain-pass of death is crossed amid the freezing air; what visions of a glory of the Lord to be revealed in Man, when the rose of eternity expands its infinitely foliaged cup, where every leaf is a nation and the stem which bears them Christ-we leave for the present to the future; it is enough for us to-day, that our statue is complete in idea. We have seen the blind strivings of the world accomplished in the Incarnation. We have seen the o'ermastering attraction with which Christ drew all truths into Himself, and concentrated in Himself their light, so that indeed He rose upon mankind as its universal sun. Let us part with the majestic thought, let it be our companion for the week.

THE CENTRAL TRUTH OF CHRISTIANITY.

'And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.'-John i. 14.

THE doctrine which we spoke of last Sunday as the distinctive doctrine of Christianity was the doctrine of a divine humanity. Whatever else Christianity derived from other religions, this at least was underived. Whatever else was interwoven into the Christian web from the threads spun by Jewish sage, or heathen philosopher, this was not. It was itself the warp on which the whole Christian woof was woven. Both Eastern and Western religions had seen this truth of God and Man in one, floating, a nebulous dream, before them, and had tried to resolve it into the guiding star of their thought, but their efforts closed in failure. The Oriental, beginning with God condescending to man, ended, at the very moment when he seemed nearest to the true conception, in a deification of the universe, in which God and man were both lost. The Western, beginning with man aspiring to God, found its grave in the Alexandrian Platonism, which, rejecting the deified world of the Greeks, ended in the conception of one Divine substance before which everything finite was only phenomenal, not actual. The Greek ended where the Hindoo began.

The circle of failure was complete.* But the proclamation of the true idea explained the failure, and realised the dream. Christ came, and the fountain idea of a true union of the Divine and Human broke upwards through the mountain-top of the world, and streamed on all sides down through the radiating valleys of the nations, drawing into itself all the local religious streams, and developing from itself new rivers of spiritual ideas.

Wherever it came, it fertilised the exhausted plains of human thought; wherever it came, new systems of thought rose like stately cities on its banks; wherever it came, it was the highway of civilisation, uniting by its waters the fresh conceptions of the younger peoples to the wise ideas of the older, till both were bound together in spiritual commerce on its stream.

All this has the vagueness of a comparison, but there is not a touch in it for which I have not a meaning, for to me all Christianity, and all the work of Christianity can be directly traced to one central source, the fact that in Christ Jesus Humanity was revealed as divine and Divinity as human; each side of the truth being equally important—the entering of God into man, the entering of man into God. This doctrine I accept, and for once I must deviate into the first person, not on the authority of Church or Bible, but because I feel the necessity of it to me. Not that I am foolish enough to despise authority. The fact that after nearly three hundred years of intellectual labour and of spiritual feeling upon this subject, the present doc

* See Dorner's Christology, Introduction.

trine emerged as a result cannot be without force to those who believe not only in the power of man to work out truth, but also in the directing influence of a Divine Spirit on the world. But authority must be

kept in its place. It is not the edifice, it is the buttresses of the edifice. It does not make a doctrine true to you or me, but if we feel a doctrine to be true, it is a support and strength to feeling. It is the second, not the first. Make it the first, and you must become the bigot and the denouncer of all who do not hold your doctrine. Make it the second, and you are freed from the dreadful burden of condemning the Theist, and unchristianising the Unitarian. We feel that the doctrine of the Divine humanity of Christ is true. .Well, does that lead us to condemn the Theist, or the Unitarian ? On the contrary, to sympathise with them to a certain point, because their essential elements are included in the doctrine we believe. We have reached it first through Theism, then through Unitarianism, and if we denounce either, we denounce the stages through which we have attained the higher form. Theism is true, but there is a higher truth. To believe in it now as the whole of truth appears to us to be an anachronism. To hold what it asserts as a part of truth appears to us to be a necessity. Unitarianism has a higher truth than Theism. Listen to this passage: "Not more clearly does the worship of the saintly soul, breathing through its window opened to the midnight, betray the secrets of its affections, than the mind of Jesus of Nazareth reveals the perfect thought and inmost love of the All-ruling God. Were he the only born-the