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thinkers, and able to give them fit because elegant expression; but these Christian preachers, why they are fishermen, and publicans, and weavers, and cobblers, the porters that stand on our quays and run on our errands, ignorant Jews, illiterate Greeks, the veriest barbarians, enthusiasts without the gift of refined thought or cultured speech." But now, let us take Celsus at his word, accepting his testimony as true, and what then? Does he not become one of our oldest, though most unconscious, witnesses to the power of Christ? It was a new thing in the history and experience of man that men such as Celsus described should become grander and mightier than any known to his academies, possessed of ideas as to God, as to man and society and the state, sublimer than Plato had ever imagined-men wiser in their notions of civil rights and political duties than Solon, dreaming of more splendid conquests than had ever dawned on the soul of Alexander or Cæsar, working at the foundations of a city infinitely nobler in ideal, as it was to be incomparably grander in history, than the city Athene loved and shielded, or the city Romulus founded and Jove guided to universal empire. To make these men out of what they were into what they became was to do a Divine work. Their call was the regeneration of man, their change the renovation of the world. Their preaching created the kingdom of the Spirit, broke the idol of the tribe, replaced it by the idea of humanity, and taught men to live for man by living for God. He who created the apostles and fathers of the Church recreated humanity.

3. But this was only one aspect of His action; the men He called to faith He also called to virtue. He

bound together belief and conduct, religion and morals as they had never been bound before. Men had been taught in the schools to know, but not to practise, virtue; Christ made the common people virtuous, and with a virtue finer in quality, nobler in range than the best of the schools had ever thought of. The result was extraordinary, but the simplicity of the means that achieved it was more extraordinary still. Christ made a grand discovery; He discovered the power of pure and simple human love. Before Him Love, Eros, Amor, had been known to the poets. They had sung its praises, its pleasures, its pains, the mighty passion with which it craved one earth, one heaven, one immortality; yet their love was but passion, a search after joys dear to the poorer self, living to be indulged, dying of indulgence. But Christ lifted love into a diviner atmosphere by giving it a new object, made it a new thing, mightiest and most propulsive of spiritual forces. Love of Christ was no sensuous passion; it was affection purified by the purity of the person it embraced. And while most intensely personal, it was as strongly universal, for love of Christ is love of man, of all the ends, purposes, agencies he embodies. To love Christ is not simply to love an individual; it is to love the race, the humanity He personalized. There is no affection like it, so universal yet so concrete, so diffused yet so concentrated, so broadly human yet so special in its aims, so direct in its action. The universalism in Christ's person universalizes the love, makes it seek to attain a manhood as pure as His, to become a benevolence as broad as His, to form a society correspondent to Him. No man can love Christ and spare the ill He hated, or despise the men He died to

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redeem. In loving Him we love mankind, in loving man we love Him and all He represents and contains.

The love of Christ was thus for the whole life moral and social, alike of the individual and the race, both a statical and a dynamical force. It created, as it were, a true centre of gravity for collective man, which was at once to maintain the equilibrium of all his native moral forces, regulate their action and determine their development. The humanity of Christ is an inexhaustible ideal for the race. It has so bound it to God, so penetrated mankind with theistic associations and relations, so transfigured it with the hopes and aims and ideals that spring out of its Divine kinship and destiny, so, in a word, worked the filiation of earth and heaven that no corporate unity or collective immortality can satisfy our notion of man; he has in him capabilities of indefinite progress, before him the hope of realizing the ideal dreamed by the Creator when He thought into being the world of free and rational spirit. It is this boundless significance of the person of Christ for humanity that makes love of Him a dynamical force so persistent and mighty. Love of Him can never be satisfied with what has been achieved, for His ideal is, as it were, insatiable, demands a perfection that the nearer it is approached only the more retreats. Yet the perfection that so eludes us is not illusive; every step forward is a step in real attainment, brings us nearer the goal of a perfected humanity, personal and collective. While His history lies behind us, He Himself is an ideal that moves ever before, and to love Him is to be drawn towards a good whose infinite promise is the mother of all our noblest performance.

4. But we cannot rightly apprehend all that is meant by Christ's power to create and control the men He called, and the society they formed, till we have studied its action in history. Through these men and this society He has acted and still acts on man. His action is at once collective and individual, through the whole society and through each of its component units. By what He has done through this twofold agency, He has profoundly modified the history and development of man, been the most potent and plastic spirit in our modern civilization. Just take one phase of His historical action,-what He has accomplished through great personalities. Were He dropped out of history, with all the historical personalities He has fashioned, it is hardly possible to conceive what today would be. The mightiest civilizing agencies are persons; the mightiest civilizing persons have been Christian men. No man in the ancient world, be he poet or philosopher, warrior or statesman, did as much to create the permanent humaner and higher elements of our civilization as Peter, and John, and Paul, men altogether obscure and commonplace till touched by the creative hand of Christ. The men who have most thoroughly understood Him have been centres of the noblest dynamical and moral forces in history, Athanasius, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas. But select one century and let it suffice, say the sixteenth. It was the century that achieved our freedom, that vindicated the rights of reason, the supremacy of the conscience, the duty of the intellect to know for itself God and the truth of God. But what made the sixteenth a so pre-eminent century? Not Leo X., the pagan disguised as pope; not Charles V., heir of

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many dynasties, monarch of many lands; not Francis I., losing all but honour at Pavia, perhaps without honour to lose; not Henry VIII., self-willed, sensuous, disowning popes and burning bishops, that he might marry as he willed! The age owed little to these men; all they did was to do their best to mar it. Its makers were Luther, the man of quickened conscience, of strong faith and true heart, who first taught the Scriptures to speak German and German to become a tongue of the learned; Zwingli, the heroic soldier-preacher, who loved his kind as he loved his reason, and believed in a God so good as to mean His heaven for man; Calvin, the theocratic legislator, the man stern of spirit, resolute of will, as strong in practice as in intellect, building his City of God according to the severest principles of a theology so like ancient Stoicism, yet so infinitely more; Tyndale, the man who loved the Gospel and made it live for the English people by clothing it in their English speech; Knox, the preacher, loyal to his people, tender of heart, bold in word, creating at the same moment and by the one splendid act a nation, a Church, and a school system, best and broadest of his own day, and even of ours. These were the men who made the century, but who made the men? In whose name, in whose strength, by obedience to whose will, as they understood and believed it, did they live and act? Did not their inspiration come straight from Christ? Abolish these men, and the sixteenth century loses its significance; abolish Christ, and you abolish the men. Yet what is true of it, is true of all the Christian centuries. Subtract the Christian personalities and the ideas that reigned in and