not simply which makes no part of Christianity, but which is absolutely hostile to the spirit of Christianity itself.  Many and many a sceptical lecturer is denouncing that which Christian men would, with all their hearts, denounce; is declaring that to be untrue which no true Christian thinker really believes, that which is no real part of the great Christian faith, which is our glory.  Do not think when I speak thus, when I say that there are things attached to Christianity which men do not believe, that they do not believe in the great truth of Jesus, without them, which men denouncing think that they are denouncing the religion which is saving the world.  Do not think that I am simply paring away our great Christian faith, and making it mean just as little as possible in order that men may accept it into their lives.  I am coming to the heart and soul of it.  I want to know, if my life is all bound up with this religion of Jesus Christ, I want to know intrinsically what that religion is.  I will scatter a thousand things which in the devout thought of men have fastened themselves to it.  It is but clearing the ship for action, the making it ready that it may do its work, the binding everything tight just before the storm comes on, for that is just the moment when nothing essential to the ship itself must be cast away, when I make sure, if I can, that every plank and timber, that every iron and brass is in its true place and ready for the strain that may be put upon it.

But what, then, is the Christian religion?  It is the simple following of the divine person, Jesus Christ, who, entering into our humanity, has made evident two things—­the love of God for that humanity, and the power of that humanity to answer to the love of God.  The one thing that the eye of the Christian sees and never can lose is that majestic, simple figure, great in its simplicity, in its innocence, in its purity and in its unworldliness, that walked once on this earth and that walks forever through the lives of men, showing Himself to human kind, manifest in human kind.  The power to receive it, the divine life wakened in every child of man by the divine life manifested in Jesus Christ.  That is the great Christian faith, and the man becomes a Christian in his belief when he assures himself that that manifestation of the divine life has been made and is perpetually being made, and he answers to that appeal of the Christ.  He manifests his belief in action when he gives himself to the education and the guiding of that Christ, that in him there may be awakened the life of divinity, which is his true human life.  Is it not glorious, this absolute simplicity of the Christian faith?  It is not primarily a truth; it is a person, it is He who walked in Galilee and Judea, who sat in the houses of mankind, who hung upon the cross, in order that He might perfectly manifest how God could live and how man could suffer in the obedience to the life of God, and then sent forth out of that inspiration and said, “Lo, I am with you always, doing this very thing, being this very Saviour, even to the end of the world.”  That which the Christian man believes to-day as a Christian, whatever else he may believe in his private speculation, in his personal opinion, is this:  The life of God manifest in Jesus of Nazareth and thenceforth going out into the world wakening the divine capacity in every man.