height, we shall know that our Redeemer liveth; life comes from life, the life of the body from the life of the body, the life of the soul from the life of the soul. If we live in Christ, if we live by him, when we look up we shall see him, according to his word, on the clouds of heaven, we shall see him as Stephen beheld him at the right hand of God.

I conclude, therefore, that the fate of Jesus and his gospel is in no way bound up with the fate of miracle. It is evident, even if naturalism is to control men's views of all history, that the really great things in Christ and his gospel abide. His teaching abides, his character is safe, his spiritual leadership is unquestioned. He is still our Prophet, Priest, and King. His risen and glorified life in God remains attested by the witness of life. Only the fringe of his evangelical career is torn away. We lose the stilling of the storm, the walking on the sea, the feeding of the multitudes, the raising of the widow's only son and the dead Lazarus. We lose something, no doubt, and the loss, if it should become

inevitable, will be painful to many. But even here there is evidence of the greatness of our Lord. That he wrought wonders upon the physical life of men is beyond dispute. That he gained access to the souls of the plain people by his marvelous power as the healer of physical distress is not open to question. That he took the imagination of the people captive is attested by the tradition of wonders that came to invest his career. To all seri

ous minds, part of the evidence of the power of Jesus Christ will always be the epic of miracle embedded in his career. How great that epic is, it would be difficult to say; of what divine things it is the reflection, men may one day become noble enough to discover.

CHAPTER IV

THE CHRISTIAN LIFE AND MIRACLE

WHAT

I

are the essential things in the faith, in the ideals, in the experience and hope of a disciple of Jesus Christ to-day? It may be said that the disciple of to-day tries to take his place in the school of Christ. Somehow the Master becomes to him a living presence; the recorded remark, sermon, and parable are heard as if from the lips of the Divine speaker; the time, the scene, and the events of the evangelical record yield the vision of the great Teacher. Other disciples surround the Lord, and among them the honest and devout disciple of to-day.

In the school of Christ, recovered by the religious imagination working upon the Gospels, the disciple of to-day tries to read the meaning of the universe and the purpose

and

scope of human life through the mind of Jesus. He looks at the Infinite through the

soul of Jesus and says with him, "Our Father who art in heaven"; he looks upon his fellow men through that same Divine soul, and he sees that they are his brothers, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; he looks again, and this time the vision of Jesus leads him to unite in one vast family the Father in heaven and his children in the earth. He is further led by his Teacher to see that the total good of man is conveyed in the great prayer, "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven." Thus the disciple of to-day tries to gain the vision of Jesus, to form his intellect in that vision, to make it the substance and spirit of his philosophy of human existence and of the universe in which that existence finds itself.

There is now a question of the moral nature to be considered, a relation of feeling and will to the vision of Jesus. The disciple of to-day who tries to think of God and man more and more as Christ thought of them sees that this

ideal involves two others. It sets before him the ideal of the heart and of the active spirit. He must more and more feel toward God and man as Jesus felt; he must more and more behave as Jesus behaved. He must aim to reproduce in himself the most perfect trust in the righteous will of God and take into his being out of the being of the Highest his eternal magnanimity. He must consider the world of men as on the whole a noble but awful tragedy; he must regard it with patience, sympathy, compassion; his heart must aim at becoming more and more the heart of Christ.

To this he must add the force of a Christian will. He entertains his Master's vision of the kingdom of God, and toward the progressive realization of that kingdom in the face of the selfishness and brutality of the world he consecrates himself. This is the great test, as it is the chief privilege, of his discipleship. He sees that finally all the worth of the intellect and the heart come to the test of action. Religion is only a potentiality while it remains vision and passion; only as vision and passion