said, as summing up the misconceptions of the world as to His mission, "I came not to send peace, but a sword," and throughout we see, as communicated through the medium of many minds, that His spiritual meanings were constantly misconceived. He says, it is true, that after His departure "the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you." So, at this late moment, just before the sacrifice of the cross, even those nearest to Him, His chosen disciples, did not fully understand Him. He had previously said, " And I will pray the Father, and He shall give you another Comforter, that He may abide with you forever, the Spirit of Truth whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth Him not, neither knows of Him; but ye know Him, for He dwelleth with you, and shall be in you." So that it was intimated to the disciples themselves that they were not, until after the sacrifice, equal to the truth, and that the world generally was incapable of seeing it.

But what is the truth which is referred to throughout by Christ, from the time of His reference to the Scriptures as predicting the coming of the Messiah, down to the period when, just before His death, He speaks in the most tender manner to the specially loved ones from whom He is about to depart? It was religious truth, the added fact to the prophecy, that God had sent the prophesied Messiah to redeem the world by a higher law and final sacrifice.

He had proved His mission by speaking as man had never spoken, and by acting as never man had acted. It was this central truth, with all its consequences, with which the Holy Ghost was to imbue the disciples, from whom it was to radiate in holy effluence upon mankind. Christ affirmed no other than religious truth, the truth as to the living God, His own mission as the Saviour of mankind, and the divine influence which thence

forth should illumine the minds of men. The world had to wait for centuries before the true cosmogony was known. The science of biology is of most recent growth, and that of geology scarcely dates back to the beginning of the century.

If men look to the continued beneficent spread of the Christian religion, it would be well for them to cast behind them all extraneous matter relating to truths that are independent of each other, occupying entirely different spheres of thought. It is the spirit in religious things which quickeneth: the flesh profiteth nothing. Cling to the idea that belief in Christianity is conditioned on belief in the literal meaning of every sentence and word of the Scriptures, and at any moment faith in them may be shattered. Believe that men cannot see beyond their discernment, cannot correctly interpret and communicate what they do not fully comprehend, but, notwithstanding, may be possessed of some great essential truth, and then the Christian religion is reconciled with every discovery of science,—not, as upheld by many of its defenders, weakly shifting from one to another untenable position. From this point of view the promised enlightenment from the Spirit of God, which was to comfort men, includes within it all that science may know and discover, for science is but one path of reverential approach to God.

Christianity, divested of the inevitable imperfection of the medium through which, through a long period, it gradually approached and finally reached mankind, rests within its own sphere upon as irrefragable evidence as any which can bring conviction to the mind. What if there are savage tribes which do not know of God? Is there not reason to believe that once such was the condition of man over all the earth? Is not the prospect most hopeful now, when we regard the enormous mental range between the extremes of men as represented by the savage and the civilized? What if the agnostic can speak of God as the Unknow

able? Does he not thereby grant the existence of God? Granted the existence of God, thereby is conceded His existence as the Creator. If He is the Creator, then He cannot be indifferent to the highest of His creatures on earth, the crown and summit there of his creative will, distinguished above all else by the development of mind. If we are to regard mind as no more than evolution of matter to high percipient consciousness, reacting upon the individual body, and, through utilitarian experience rising to conscience, then "we are," as Saint Paul says, "of all men most miserable." But if, on the contrary, we are to regard mind as the afflatus of the Divine Spirit, which, by gradual evolution, associated with corporal agencies fitted for the conditions of earthly life, eventually places man in the position of a being responsible through conscience to the Creator, we must deem it the sanest conclusion of the most mature thought.

The heathen and the worshiper of the one God alike yearned for a token of divine superintendence, prompted by the instinct and reason which, at a certain stage of mental development, looked beyond the earth for a token of an even grander revelation of the significance of creation. As, among monotheists, man was believed to have been created in the mental likeness of God, and to hold those relations with God which the maturing conscience leads him to conclude exist, it was naturally credited by millions of beings who dwelt on earth that, in due time, He would indicate His presence and His will. Men's belief that one might be so commissioned of God is, of course, no evidence that there would be such an advent. It affords merely presumption as to the probability that a sentiment so almost universally experienced at a certain stage of mental development represents an unrevealed truth.

Here, men, at a certain period of the history of the world, entered upon another and entirely different phase of evidence, the strength of which must be judged like that of any other

human evidence, for the appeal is on no other ground than to human reason, through evidence from human sources.

As has already been intimated, men being human, it could fully reach their understandings in no other way. The fact that the evidence is human upon which we are to believe or disbelieve in the commission of Christ as divine, is therefore no disparagement to its weight. Christ himself appealed to it as that which proved its divinity. All that we know and can possibly learn as to the earthly or divine must rest upon what can reach us through the avenues to the human intellect. The conceptions which at any time exist in the mind upon which perception can be based, are all that we possess by which to judge of and to accept or reject any new proposition. It is therefore only by this means of reaching the sort of conviction which we denominate truth, that our conclusions as to the divinity of Christ's mission must be reached.

That He lived and taught we must know, for, aside from the narrative of His followers, both those indifferent and those inimical to Him have recorded His existence and teachings. Josephus mentions Him, and Publius Lentulus, a Roman centurion, who happened to be stationed in Jerusalem, wrote to Rome a description of His ways, and even of His personal appearance. The fact of His existence, therefore, and of His teaching, and of the character of His teaching, cannot be denied. He indisputably lived, and, according to testimony of the most diverse kind, He died upon the cross, reviled by His persecutors, and sorrowed over by His friends, as no man before or since. He had lived and taught for years the way of life, which we now find embodied in what is called the gospel. He lived in the broad light of day as men have rarely lived. And in this time no flaw or stain was to be found from the beginning to the end. The evidence of this is more complete than that which any single man can acquire from personal observation of any event. Christ

is seen through the collective testimony of men of the most diverse minds and leanings, throughout His whole career, some of whom wrote of Him after His departure with such diversity, that the aggregate of testimony brings greater conviction than otherwise, because, while differing as to particulars, it never conflicts in essentials, or deviates from presenting the same perfectly majestic presence.

Fanaticism has had no such knowledge, nor ever such life and action. The ancients who had risen above the stature of their compatriots had taught a morality of the reason, but here was one who addressed men, compounded as they are of reason and sentiment, and who taught them that the highest reason in religion leads to the highest law of love. Christ spoke as one having authority to speak, and so conclusively to those who were not looking for an earthly king, that with a revelation of goodness which the world had never seen He carried all before Him in the triumphal advance which ended with His injunction to His disciples to go and teach all nations. None the less, because His example and teachings have been obscured by ceremonial and strife, have they continued to advance and conquer and rule the world to seeming perpetuity. Where would the world morally be now, if at the period of Christ's coming it had not been saved by His message from the condition into which it was plunged? Whence, therefore, one may well ask, could such a change as has overtaken it have come, except from God? Although the world was then, as the event proved, far enough advanced to be receptive of the highest moral law, it would still have gone on regardless of it if Christ had not appeared and shed upon it His enlightenment. That one lowly born and bred and educated should appear and prove himself the master and king of men, swaying a world centuries after His death, is not to be ascribed to any but divine commission.

The existence of God should be manifest through creation.