our modern life the most appropriate home for the honest seeker after truth, to whom the mediæval traditions of the current and traditional "Christianity," that has so greatly departed from the thoughts and ways of Christ, have become for ever impossible, must be one that, while it gives the fullest scope for the true spiritual emotions and aspirations of the Christian life, shall not offend his conscience nor bind on him a yoke that neither he nor his fathers were able to bear. It must not stifle his worship in ceremonial; it must not exact subscription to the traditional creeds in which his grandparents were suckled; it must not in proud isolation treat those who are doing the Master's work of casting out the devils of impurity, intemperance, insincerity, and ignorance with contumely, nor cast them out on the plea that they, follow not US. Above all it must be animated with the spirit of the Master in its interpretation of the duties of man to man. A sad example of the way in which the nominal Churches of Christ have left behind them the gentle spirit of Jesus, and His commands. as to conduct of man toward man, was afforded during the late South African war, when it was left to heretics and sceptics, to the outcasts of orthodoxy, to Agnostics, Positivists, Unitarians, Quakers, and Freethinkers, to protest against that barbaric defiance of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. War between nations must go, as duelling and slavery have gone, from the things possible to any nation professing to follow Christ.

In the ideal Christian community Christianity will not be swamped in a medieval Christology. The new Protestantism will set forth a religion of

life and conduct inspired by the spirit of Christ from within, leaving little room for any waste of energies upon the metaphysics of the school man or the traditions of antiquity. Why dispute about a legendary fall when the sad scenes of human degradation, and the bitter consciousness of proneness to sin, are patent facts in our own lives? Why try to force belief in a miraculous birth which, if believed in, robs the humanity of Jesus of half its force, when it is recognised that a revelation of the wholly Divine may be immanent in one who was also in His nature wholly human? Why quarrel about miracles when every day, if we have eyes to see, we may observe the spirit of God working miracles not on the winds and waves, but on the lives of men and women redeemed from the degradation of sin, and renewed in the spirit of their minds through the love that Christ bore to them? Why build upon the crime of murder-murder of the divinest Being that ever walked this earth-a scheme of redemption repellant to the purest conception of the Fatherhood of God? The pure religion of Jesus must not be trammelled by insistence upon the pious thoughts of the ecclesiastics, whether of the seventeenth century, or of the fourth, or even of the second. For all these man-made schemes and theories are destined to melt away into nothingness. When the cloud that has descended upon the ages shall have lifted, we shall see no man upon the Mount save Jesus only; and the light of life that emanates from Him in this transfiguration will illuminate our souls with a personal religion needing not to be based on a legendary fall, a miraculous birth, a fearful murder, or an empty

tomb. Christ remains to His faithful followers an endless and priceless possession, a true light lighting every man. So then the follower of Christ who has been willing to leave the nearest and dearest, to renounce himself and to become a partaker in His suffering, becomes a sharer, too, in His transfiguration. He will know in his own experience that new birth to righteousness, in which, under the transforming work of the Holy Spirit, he has become a new creature, from whom the old things have passed away. He will have put to death the old sinful nature, and have risen with Christ into newness of life. He will have learned in a new and joyful sense how fellowship in the Kingdom of Heaven binds him by ties of sacred love and duty to all his fellow creatures. He will have found in the community of those whose hearts are thus illuminated and guided by the spirit of Jesus, by whatever denomination they may be called, a true communion of faith, a Church of the first-born, whose names are written in heaven.

CHAPTER XII

Life and Creed

HR

OW unimportant, relatively, is the creed, that is to say the formulated theory of belief, which a man holds, is demonstrated by the undeniable fact that in every Christian community, orthodox or unorthodox, be its creed full or scanty, be its confession of faith Catholic, Evangelical, or Unitarian, there have been, and are still to be found, men and women of Christlike spirit and saintly walk, whose whole

existence is a witness to the Divine life living and moving in them.

No two men's creeds ever are the same, nor ought they to be. What a man believes, depends not only on what he has been taught, but on his ancestral heritage, on his frame and furniture. of mind, on his susceptibility to religious emotions, on the experiences of his life. And as we come of different ancestries, have intellects differently developed, have had different experiences, and are of differing susceptibilities, we necessarily, even if our religious education were the same, should differ in the theoretical views we hold of religious truth. Even if we should agree to formulate our beliefs in identical terms, the words would not convey the same intent to different minds.' We cannot compel words to convey the same identical meaning to every mind that fact of itself demonstrates the absurdity of requiring the submission of all to any verbal document called a creed. Any one who has studied the controversies of the third and fourth centuries about the nature of Christ, and one Council pronounced anathema on those who should declare Christ to be a different person from God the Father, and how another pronounced anathema on those who should declare Christ to be the same person as God the Father, must know how futile was the controversy, since the very term "person"-hypostasis

1 For example: the words " He descended into hell," would convey very different meanings to Dr. W. S. Lilly and to General Bramwell Booth. Again, how different would be the implications conveyed by the words, "Maker of heaven and earth" to a devout geologist such as the Rev. Canon Bonney, or to a devout astronomer such as the late Sir William Huggins, from those which they would convey to a person such as the late Father Tabb, who spoke of the earth as a toy ball for the infant Jesus to play with!