cle. For personality is the secret of both the Christian and Judaic systems, revelation by a person. The peculiarity of these systems is not their truth; there is not much question about truth. Men are sure to find it out first or last. And ethical truth is almost the first to clear itself in the human understanding. The old philosophies and mythologies are packed with undoubted truth; enough for all social and personal need if that were all that was necessary. It was inevitable that the precepts of love as the sum of duty should have early utterance; the human mind could not go amiss of them. But to connect them with a person for authority and inspiration was another matter; the efficacy of the precepts lies in the Person that utters them, and in the relation of this Person to man. The fault of Matthew Arnold's definition of God, "a power not ourselves that works for righteousness,' is, that it blurs the personality behind the righteousness, and so deprives it of motive. Whatever significance there is in the Jewish Scriptures lies in the personality emblazoned on every page, a God who is not a power only, but also a person, and a power because He is a person, not a "stream of tendency" flowing in free or hindered currents, destined perhaps to flow, but capable also of resistance, with some question of ultimate success, but the I am, the Personal Being! Cast this out, and they might have been burned with the books of Alexandria with little loss. But because they contain this uniform and self-attesting assertion of a personal God, as personal as man is, and the basis of

his personality, they have laid warm and nourishing at the roots of that civilization which is dominating the world.

There is reason in this. A relation of duty cannot be fully established and sustained except between persons. I owe no duty to force or to

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a stream of tendency," I merely fall in with, or resist it, without any play of my faculties except some sense of prudence. This would seem axiomatic, yet it is in the face of such axiomatic truth that we are asked to accept the theories of an unknowable God, theories that annihilate duty by rendering impossible a relation of duty. The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures have presented duty to the world, not only in a rational but in a commanding way, because they assert in the loftiest way the two correlative elements in duty, namely, the personality of man and the thorough personality of God. It is Christ's revelation of this personality, on each side, that constitutes Christianity. It was long before its facts crystallized into systems. The church sprang up about the revealing person of Christ; love to him was the bond that held it together; and so it continued to be till the image of Christ grew dim, and the Master was buried first beneath his church, and then under formal renderings of his truth, and to-day Christendom puts its churches and its theologies before its Lord.

There are those who contend that what we need is not the Christ himself but the truth of Christ; that if we accept the principles He taught, there need be no special enthusiasm or even thought

about their author. And thus Christianity is gradually reduced to a philosophy, and thence into mere maxims about good and evil, as though even in Christ's day they were not the lumber of the world.

But let us see if Christ was mistaken in planting his system upon personal love and devotion to Himself. Or, more broadly, why does this Faith, that claims to be the world's salvation, wear this guise of personal relations? Simply because in no other way can man be delivered from his evil. There may be exceptions here and there in whom natural dispositions are so happily blended that they have attained to a stainless if cold virtue. But take men as they are, the bulk and mass of humanity, they are too blind to find their way by the light of precepts, too firmly wedded to evil to be moved by theories of virtue, too solidly imbedded in the custom of an "evil world" to be extricated by any play of reason. And as to experience, the fancied teacher of wisdom, with its "hoard of maxims," it is the weakest of all. Polonius is but "a tedious old fool" to the Hamlets who are struggling with their own weakness in the hard play of human life. It is the subtlest thought in the profoundest drama, that Hamlet is searching for a human love to upstay and inspire him; it is the key to all his wild, testing talk with Ophelia; the love he found, but there was no strength in it; it could not draw together his scattered and faltering energies and set them to some definite end, and so his life sweeps on to its tragic close. There is in all these simply lack of motive-power. Men need instead something of

the nature of a passion to dislodge them, some deep swelling current of feeling to sweep them away from evil towards goodness, from self towards God. Suppose Christ had simply depicted the miseries of sin and the inherent fitness and excellence of the virtues, what would He have done? What become? Simply another Rabbi with a few followers for a generation. He began instead by forming personal relations with a few men, captivating them by his divine charms, making them feel at last that his love was more than a human love, even God's own love. Ideas, truths, principles, these are not lacking, but the essence of his power is not in them, for they have no power. The great, reflective novelist has well stated it in her earlier and wiser pages: "Ideas are often poor ghosts; our sun-filled eyes cannot discern them; they pass athwart us in their vapor, and cannot make themselves felt. But sometimes they are made flesh; they breathe upon us with warm breath, they touch us with soft responsive hands, they look at us with sad, sincere eyes, and speak to us in appealing tones; they are clothed in a living human soul, with all its conflicts, its faith, and its love. Then their presence is a power, then they shake us like a passion, and we are drawn after them with gentle compulsion, as flame is drawn to flame." And yet it is ideas that the loudvoiced wisdom of the age would have us believe to be the salvation of the world! God is driven farther and farther into unknowable heavens, the Christ is made to figure only on a dim and blurred page of history, the Spirit is thrust out on some

score of intellectual difficulty, all reduced to ideas and ghostly at that, and a selfish world is summoned to drop the principles that have made it what it is and that stand to it for the solidest realities, by a phantom-show of ideas for which it does not care, or but admires as some far-off unattainable glory! The Faith that is to redeem the world must have a surer method, it must have a vitalizing motive, and such a motive can proceed only from a person using the strongest force in a person- love. And thus the Christ comes before humanity, making God's love manifest in a human and personal way, so unfolding his divine beauty in word and deed that men kneel before Him, subdued into glad receptivity of his truth. Thus it was that the multitudes thronged about Him, that Zaccheus was won by his condescending pity, that this woman broke upon Him her fragrant tribute of honor, that Thomas said, "Let us also go, that we may die with Him," and Peter, with a devotion that outran his courage, "Even if I must die with thee, yet will I not deny thee," that John leaned upon his bosom, that the women of Jerusalem bewailed Him on the cross and lingered about his sepulchre, that Joseph claimed the privilege of his burial, that the disciples mourned while He lay in the tomb, that joy gave wings to their feet when they heard of his resurrection. And when He finally ascended, and the full scope of his love came to be realized, when his character and being began to stretch away into the infinite under the revelation of the Spirit, it stirred them to even deeper passion. His love, seen now