Read St. Mark, the earliest, the least corrupted, of the narratives.  It is a declaration of a new power in human life, and a record of its achievements.  It is this, and nothing else.  The one great word of that gospel is Faith—­not faith in a formula or an institution, but faith in the absolute supremacy of spirit.  Faith in spirit means power—­power over circumstance, power over matter, power over the heredity of our animal origin.  Jesus not only sets men free from the prison-house of material delusion, as Plato and others sought to do; He teaches them the way in which alone they can exercise spiritual dominion.

There were two things to which He set no limits:  one, the love of God, and the other, the power of Faith.

Let all the schools in the Church revise their definition of the word faith, and unity will come of itself.  Faith, as Jesus employed that term, meant making use of belief—­belief that the spiritual alone is the real.  Faith is the action of the soul.  It is the working of a power.  It is mastery of life.

Let the Church realise that Jesus taught this power of the soul.  Let her begin to exercise her own spiritual powers.  And then let her understand that she is in the world to teach men, to lead the advance of evolution, to educate humanity in the use of its highest powers.

A knowledge of the sense in which Jesus employed the word Faith is the clue to the recovery of Christian influence.

This is the suggestion which I venture to submit to the Church, at a moment in history when the harsh and brutal spirit of materialism is crushing all faith out of the soul and leaving the body no tenant but its appetites.

I do not think any observant man can deny that the whole “suggestion” of the modern world is of an evil nature, that is to say, of a nature which fastens upon the mind the delusions of the senses, making it believe that what it sees is reality, persuading it that the gratification of those senses is the end and object of existence.  The wages of this suggestion is death—­the death of the soul.

How far the world is gone from sanity, and how clearly science endorses Christ’s teaching, may be seen in the modern craze for unhealthy excitement, and in the medical condemnation of that morbid passion.  A well-known doctor in London, Sir Bruce Bruce-Porter, has lately condemned Grand Guignol as intensifying the emotion of fear or anxiety—­“Take no heed”—­and has declared anger, or any violence of feeling, to be a danger—­“Love your enemies”—­pointing out that “the experiment of inoculating a guinea-pig with the perspiration taken from the forehead of a man in a violent temper has resulted in the death of the guinea-pig with all the symptoms of strychnine poisoning.”