2QO LECTURES AND ESSAYS [1870- 



hard heart and dull ears, gradually showing them more 

 and more of His will, His perfections, His glorious decree, 

 and so leading on to the full manifestation of His saving 

 purpose in Christ Jesus. In the life, death, and re 

 surrection of our Lord, God s saving self -manifestation 

 is absolutely complete. The sum and substance of 

 personal Christianity is just to come under the influence 

 of Christ s person as His Apostles did, giving up our 

 whole lives to Him, as one who shows Himself to us as 

 the ever-living, all-powerful, and all-loving Son of God, 

 by whom God reconciles the world to Himself. Such a 

 Christianity cannot be taught, for no third party can 

 teach me to love and trust even the most lovely char 

 acter. Saving faith is a thing directly between me and 

 God, and faith in Christ can be inspired only by God s Spirit, 

 by the Spirit of Christ. What a third person, what 

 religious instruction can effect is to display and impress 

 on the mind of the pupil, as vividly as possible, a lively 

 image of God s self-manifestation, to present the Sacred 

 History, which is the ground of all faith, in such a way 

 that the child shall, from his earliest years, be accustomed 

 to give to God and to Christ a real place in his daily life, 

 a place as real as he gives to his father or his brother. 

 If we look at the three first Gospels, we see that this 

 was just the character of our Lord s own teaching. The 

 Kingdom of Heaven that kingdom, which, though 

 unseen, is really in our midst, and to which our true and 

 eternal interests belong, of which we must learn to feel 

 ourselves members, giving our allegiance to Him as the 

 King such is the constant burden of His teaching to 

 which He seeks to give reality by every variety of state 

 ment and illustration. But whence does this doctrine 

 of the kingdom come ? From the Old Testament ! 

 Everywhere He assumes that there are certain ideas as 

 to the nature of the kingdom which do not now, for the 

 first time, need to be stated and proved. His miracles 

 proved the authority of Christ, as of Him by whom the 



