comforting the sorrowful, and fighting the battles of justice and liberty for the whole world—is as truly a revival of Christ's religion as any that was ever nurtured under church roofs. He who, inspired by the divine life of love, service and sacrifice, is carrying glad tidings to the poor, deliverance to the captive, sight to the blind, and liberty to the bruised is a follower of Jesus Christ.

What is the secret of the life which Jesus Christ bestowed upon the world by his teaching, his example and his person, he tells us in his fourth definition of his mission. Just before his death Jesus called his disciples together for a last conference, and he brought that sacred conference to its close by a prayer which produced so profound an influence upon his disciples that one of their number subsequently wrote it down and years afterward gave it to the world. In the opening sentences of that prayer Christ pours forth out of a full heart a solemn thanksgiving to the Father for the mission with which he has been entrusted, and thus expresses the very secret of that mission: "Thou hast given him power over all flesh that he should give eternal life to as many as thou hast

given him. And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent."

What eternal life means to others, what it should mean to others, I have neither the ability nor the ambition to tell. This is simply a narrative of what it has meant to me in my life, and here I interrupt the narrative in order to indicate in the next chapter the message of the Old Testament prophets who have helped me by their message to understand the mission of the Christ.

CHAPTER VI

I AM COME TO FULFILL THE LAW AND THE

PROPHETS

PROFESSOR WILLIAM JAMES in his interesting volume on "Varieties of Religious Experience," thus summarizes his survey of the field of religion: "The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other; but there is a certain uniform deliverance in which religions all appear to meet. It consists of two parts: (1) An uneasiness; and (2) its solution. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a sense that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. The solution is a sense that we are saved from this wrongness by making connection with the higher powers."

There are then two questions which religion has to answer: First, What are the higher powers? Second, How shall we make proper connection with them? Before considering the answer of Jesus to

these two questions of religion, What are the higher powers, and How can man make proper connection with them to remedy the present wrongness, it is necessary to consider the answer of Judaism, which Jesus came to interpret and complete.

In studying the life and literature of the ancient Hebrews as portrayed in the Old Testament the student should always bear in mind a simple principle which has often been ignored, alike by the critics and the eulogists of that collection. The Old Testament represents the developing life of a people through a period of at least a thousand years. It therefore portrays the crudities, the errors, and the vices of a people out of which they have been led, no less than the principles inculcated by their leaders. And in the Old Testament the defects in the national character are depicted with extraordinary fidelity. But in attempting to estimate the influence of any people upon modern thought and life we do not measure that influence by the ignorances, superstitions, and falsities of the common people, but by the truths which their great leaders have interpreted. We do not think the

message of Great Britain has been absolutism because the Stuarts were absolutists, nor that the message of America is the righteousness of slavery because at one time in its history it maintained an almost pagan slave system. England is interpreted by its overthrow of the Stuarts and America by its emancipation of the slaves. The slaughter of the Canaanites and the imprecatory psalms are not a part of the message of Israel. They indicate the native savagery of the people and make more luminous the message of their prophetic leaders.

And this message itself was a developing message. The truth of God grows in the mind of a race as in the mind of an individual. In measuring the character and influence of a nation, we have to consider, not its condition at any one stage of its progress, but the direction in which it progressed; not the opinions of its majority, but the ideals of its leaders.

The Hebrew prophets were not the first monotheists. The great thinkers in all ages of the world and in all forms of religion have tended toward belief in one Infinite and Eternal Energy. This was the philosophy, if it was not the faith, of the