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education in men, not having originally been in their nature, is to beg the question. What we have to do with is what lies before us, and if I were asked what is the most universal characteristic of man, that which most clearly distinguishes him from the lower animals, I should answer, that it was the passion for solving what is called the insoluble, the desire of knowing what is said to be unknowable.

I meet that longing everywhere. There is no history which is not full of it. There is no savage nation which has learnt the first rudiments of thought, in which you do not find it. There is no poetry which does not bear the traces of it-nay, whose noblest passages are not inspired by it. There is scarcely a single philosophy which does not work at it, or at least acknowledge it by endeavouring to lay it aside. One cannot talk for an hour to a friend without touching it at some point, nor take up a newspaper without seeing its influence; and if Christ had started a religion for mankind with the dictum, Lay aside thinking about these questions, his religion would seem to be unfit for men; it would have shut out the whole of the most curious part of our being. But He did the exact contrary, He recognised these questions as the first and the most important. He came, He said, for the express purpose of enabling us to solve them sufficiently. He said that truth was to be found, that God could be known, that immortality was a reality, that evil was to be overthrown, that we came from God and went to God.

But to solve these questions and to know God is not

done at once. It is the work of a lifetime. Christ said that there were answers to be found; He did not reveal the answers at once. He did not wish to take away from men the discipline of personal effort, nor to free them from the pain, the victory over which would give them spiritual strength, the endurance of which would make them men. He put them in the way of solving these questions for themselves. By asking and seeking, by prayer and humility, they were to solve the apparently insoluble. By doing his will, by living his life of holiness, self-sacrifice, and devotion to truth, they were at last to know the truth.

Therefore, because these problems which are called insoluble were left by Christ as personal questions which every man born into the world must solve for himself, human effort after God can never suffer the stagnation which complete knowledge would produce in imperfect man. Religious emotions, the play of feeling and intellect around spiritual things, desire after higher good, prayer, active work towards a more perfect love and towards the winning of truth, are all kept up in us by the sense of imperfect knowledge, imperfect spiritual being, and, in addition, by the hope which grows stronger through the experience of growth, that we shall know even as we are known, and become perfect even as our God.

Remove from religion these difficult questions, and the hope and the passion of discovering their answers, and I believe that all religious emotions will die, and all religion of any kind finally perish in contact with the world.

It is because Christianity as taught by Christ acknowledges these questions as necessarily human; it is because it leaves their solution to personal effort, and so secures an undying source of religious effort and emotion; it is because it promises that those who follow the method of Christ, and live his life, shall solve them; that Christianity belongs to men, is calculated to expand, to suit men in every age. If so, there is another reason which may be alleged for its eternal fitness for the race.

Lastly, if what Christianity says be true, that we shall all enter into a life everlasting, these three qualities in Christ's religion of which I have spoken are not without their meaning or their value to us there.

That our religion should be without a system, will enable us, in a new life and under new conditions, to reorganise it without difficulty, to fit it into the new circumstances of our being, to use it in novel ways.

That our religion is a human religion, that it appeals directly to human nature, that it is nothing apart from mankind, that it is woven up with all the desires and hopes and sorrows of men, that it bids us concentrate all the race into One Person, and love all men in Him, that it throws all our effort and enthusiasm on the progress of mankind, these do not belong to this world alone. If we live again, we shall live in a higher way, in the race; for we shall live in Christ, not an isolated life, but a life in all mankind. We shall be more united with our fellow-men, more ready to give ourselves away to them, more interested in the progress of mankind, more able to help. Never, as long as Christ

is, can we forget, or cease our communion with, the whole world of men.

And finally, that even after attaining much, enough at least to set us in all the peace which is good for us, there should remain, as I think there will remain, in the eternal life, certain questions which we shall have to solve, certain things which man cannot wholly know, it will not be an evil but a good thing for us. For that there should always be things above us and unknown, ensures our eternal aspiration, ensures to us the passionate delight of ceaseless progress.

THE FITNESS OF CHRISTIANITY FOR MANKIND.

'Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: which indeed is the least of all seeds: but when it is grown, it is the greatest among herbs, and becometh a tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in the branches thereof.'Matt. xiii. 31, 32.

THOSE who love variety of colour and variety of form can scarcely reap a deeper pleasure than is his who walks slowly through the lower part of one of the Italian valleys of the Alps when spring is at its height. The meadows are full of flowers, at once so brilliant, soft, and manifold of hue, that the grass seems sown with dust of rainbows. The grey boulders, which lie like castles on the sloping lawns, are stained scarlet and gold and bronze with many lichens. Chestnut and walnut spread their rich leaves below; above, the oak clusters in the hollow places; higher still, the pines climb the heights in dark battalions. Colour, form, development, are all different; cach flower, leaf, and tree each variety of grass or lichen, has its own. peculiar beauty, its own individuality.

It seems impossible to include them all under one term, to say that they are all substantially one thing. Yet they are all transmuted sunshine. Every fibre,

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