THE UNIVERSAL AND ABSOLUTE RELIGION 379 



ing religious responsibility. Looking then full upon the face of 

 Csesar, Jesus said: " You tell me I do not look upon the face of men. 

 Whose face is this upon which I am now looking, and the super- 

 scription whose? " They say unto him, " Caesar's." Then said 

 Jesus, " Render therefore unto Csesar the things which belong to 

 Csesar, and unto God the things which belong to God." Thus 

 Christ looked upon man's face, not superficially, not one-sidedly, 

 as did both the Herodians and the Pharisees: he pierced to the 

 deep, divine, composite pattern for man; he looked not upon 

 the mere accidents of color or race or artificial station by which we 

 are wont to gauge and value men; he looked to man's fundamental 

 constitution, and saw him as his Father saw him, not as Teuton, 

 Mongolian, or African; but man as man, man as the offspring of 

 God, man as the subject of eternal redemption. Looking upon the 

 face of man, in such a sense Jesus sought to remint the coin, so 

 as to bring out again into clearness the divine image, now defaced 

 by sin, which was originally there. Thus Jesus viewed man in 

 his integral, ideal completeness; and thus we are slowly learning 

 to view him. Thus all reform must view him, if it accomplishes 

 its mission. 



At this point, then, Christianity as cherishing the highest hope 

 conceivable respecting the reunion of all personal, social, political, 

 and national schisms of men into one society of brothers, has in 

 it the highest claim to universal acceptance. 



II 



But again, Christianity is adapted to become the final religion 

 through the accent it places upon the redemptive principle in 

 its idea of God. Other religions have their idea of deity, as 

 representing power, intelligence, will, moral character, and judg- 

 ment; but Christianity alone has at the very heart of its concep- 

 tion of deity the principle of recovery from moral evil. 



The Bible, indeed, on its first pages definitely records the sin 

 and fall of man, and straight through to the end it accentuates its 

 dread reality. Even without a Bible, men of all times and races 

 are aware of their sad condition in this respect. 



Let men philosophize as they may to explain away sin, yet 

 after all they recognize at least " a continuous abnormality " in 

 the life of man. At the best man's life is " an ever not-quite," 

 a falling short, a missing of the mark. Christianity, however, 

 presents this unparalleled characteristic that, while frankly recog- 

 nizing the mystery of man's sin, yet behind it all it holds out hope 

 of recovery from it. 



This purpose to redeem is set forth in the Bible as anterior to 



