384 RELIGIOUS WORK 



Christian teacher to furnish a creedal religion ready-made with 

 answers to numerous speculative queries, but rather to put and 

 keep men on this clue, as we have called it. He is to point out 

 the next step, and then the successive steps toward the experi- 

 mental knowledge of Christ himself, rather than to a philosophy 

 about Christ. There is a place for the philosophy about Christ, 

 for theology, but this place is secondary. Christ is always within 

 personal touch of every soul, even though the soul does not know 

 it; and by pressing our opinions about Christ inopportunely, we 

 may widen the breach when we should close it. This touch with 

 Christ is realized through the adoption of the right personal atti- 

 tude in the light one really has, toward his ideal. The Bible calls 

 this ideal " the Word," or Jesus Christ, that " light which lighteth 

 every man that cometh into the world," the omnipresent living 

 Redeemer. 



To assume this willing attitude to one's ideal is faith, a faith 

 always morally rather than intellectually conditioned. Our will 

 has no power of itself to realize the essential Christ to the soul. 

 The will, however, can annul the practical living lie which controls 

 the life in its sinfulness, and the moment this is done the Spirit of 

 Christ rushes to the soul's confessed helplessness and effects faith 

 in him. As nature abhors a vacuum, so Christ abhors it; the mo- 

 ment, in the light one has, the will causes a sin to vacate the heart's 

 throne, that moment the Holy Spirit of Christ with infinite pres- 

 sure rushes in to fill the vacuum. God's interest in conferring 

 blessing is infinitely greater than man's in accepting it. 



Says Dr. Cremer: " The wondrous counter-effect of God against 

 man's sin is indeed a supernatural thing, the absolutely incon- 

 ceivable to human philosophy; it is different from anything which 

 elsewhere or otherwise ever takes place or can take place." This 

 is the interior, profound reality of the Christian religion. 



Now, assuming that this initiative of Christian experience, which 

 we have called the entrance on the clue to the experimental reali- 

 zation of the Christ, has taken place, Christianity depends for its 

 deeper intellectual apprehension of what has occurred, upon the 

 after-effect of such an experience, as the mind, like a waking 

 dreamer, casts its eye backward on the track over which the soul 

 has come. At this point, also, the Holy Scriptures, with indispens- 

 able value, come in to bring out into consciousness, to explain to 

 the understanding, the profound realization which has occurred, 

 as well as to afford a basis on which further subjective experiences 

 may be wrought. Here is the true place for objective truth. 



But, further, this loyalty to light which Christianity so values 

 receives from its divine author a peculiar attestation. This attes- 

 tation will come to him who follows the light of nature, although 



