NATURAL VERSUS SUPERNATURAL 65 



Christ idea, and is filled and modified by it to an 

 extent the other is not. An emotional process is 

 more potent than a rational process. The know- 

 ledge thus gained is no more truly knowledge, but it 

 is more vital knowledge. It is not merely convic- 

 tion ; it is attraction and affiliation as well. But 

 this is true not of Jesus merely ; it is true of the 

 whole range of our experience. If the flower or 

 the bird or the tree awaken no emotion in the ob- 

 server, will he ever come truly to know it ? Unless 

 we love an author, can we ever get at his deepest 

 and most precious meaning ? Hence Goethe said, 

 " We learn to know nothing but what we love." 

 In this light, science sees that the love of Jesus^ 

 or of God, may transform a man's life, not by any 

 peculiar and supernatural process, but by a univer- 

 sal and well-known law ; namely, that we grow like 

 that which we love. Every object we look upon or 

 think of with the emotion of love, that object in a 

 measure we become. But to begin with, we are not 

 capable of loving it until we are in some degi'ee, 

 either potentially or actually, like it. No radically 

 un-Christlike nature will ever come to love Jesus. 

 Hence the subtile truth in the old doctrines that 

 have been so hardly and literally stated, "Except 

 God work in you to will and to do," etc. The 

 Christian, the virtuous, pious soul, is born and not 

 made, just as truly as is the poet or artist, and the 

 "new birth" in the one case can mean no more 

 than it does in the other. The true Christian only 

 gives a new name to his natural piety or aptitude 



