As God's most intimate presence in the soul
And His most perfect image in the world.

The Eternal is absolutely beyond our reach, and our reason is worthless for the study of truth. We can neither test nor verify divine revelation, but must accept whatever has the sanction of the miraculous or the authority of the Church. God is then simply a governor, administering this world with its load of sin and sorrow, its innumerable lives charged with hope or despair, from a distance and from a throne-with justice but without sympathy. If God be outside, Christ is a messenger who comes from the unseen, accomplishes a work of expiation, reconciles God to the world and returns again to His place. We are creatures whom God has made, whom He can use as He pleases; we are debtors whom He may retain or lose at His sovereign pleasure. Judgment becomes a distant event in unknown circumstances, while Heaven and Hell are simply places. All that follows if there be no Holy Ghost and no spiritual presence of God in the human soul.

If, on the other hand, God pervades all things by His spirit, and lives especially in the hearts

of men, then another aspect is given to every relation of the soul to God. Our religious faculty responds to God as the eye to light. No priest is then needed to mediate between the soul and God, and to hold for us the keys of God's Kingdom. Every faithful soul can have direct communion with God, none interfering, and none being able to forbid. God becomes a Father doing the best He can for all His children both in this world and in that which is to come. It is now man who has to be reconciled to God, not God to man. It is God who seeks man as he wanders away from the Divine Presence, not man who is seeking a far off and hidden God. Theology rests not on Adam now, but on Christ, not on man's depravity but on Christ's Incarnation, not on the Church but on the Holy Ghost. Hell becomes that state of mind from which God is shut out, and Heaven is that purity where He can make His home. Nature is no longer a strange and hostile environment, redeemed by incursions of the supernatural but the vesture of the Eternal. And prayer becomes less and less a petition for a change in circumstances, and more and more the desire for conformity to the Divine will.

Never surely has religion been made more real and effectual, more persuasive and inspiring, than in this description of Jesus. Our Heavenly Father dwelling with His Son in every heart which has kept the great commandment and has been cleansed by love, is the Gospel of the Holy Ghost.

XVI

REASONABLENESS THE TOUCHSTONE OF

TRUTH

"I beseech you by the gentleness (or reasonableness) of Christ."-2 Cor. x. I.

ENTLENESS is in itself so beautiful a

GEN

word, and would form so excellent a text, that one hesitates to exchange it for

any other term, but gentleness is not quite what St. Paul intended in this appeal. The word which is translated gentleness has only come to assume that shade of meaning by a fortunate usage, and first of all conveys something more profound. It enshrines one of the most characteristic ideas of Greek thought, which might with advantage be acclimatized in our own thinking. The root is a word which means to be like, and so by an easy transition to be seemly, and our noun therefore has the sense of what is reasonable, or reasonableness. This conception was not Jewish, for the Jews were not a con

spicuously reasonable people, but it was of the essence of the Greek mind. The Greek believed that there was a certain standard of fitness which it might not be easy to define, but which was quite recognizable, and by which everything should be judged. It was not enough that any way of speaking had a certain authority, or that any line of action had the popular suffrages, the Greek referred it to his permanent and independent standard was it according to reason? Both thought and deed had to be estimated, not by the force behind them, or the number of people in their favour, but by their conformity to reason, for surely the supreme end of life, as Bishop Wilson, so dear to Matthew Arnold, used to say, is "to make reason and the will of God prevail."

Just as the Jew believed—to make this principle of reasonableness plainer-that there was such a rule in the universe as perfect and unchangeable righteousness, by which all actions are to be tried-a righteousness which does not vary with the fashions and moods of any generation, which can neither be manipulated by any school of morals, nor disestablished by a popular vote of any kind, any more than you can change the