...

the unbreathing things of nature... It is a meek and blessed influence, stealing in, as it were, unawares upon the heart; it is fresh from the hands of its author, glowing from the immediate presence of the great Spirit which pervades and quickens it; it is written on the arched sky, it looks out from every star, it is on the sailing cloud and in the invisible wind; it is among the hills and valleys of the earth, where the shrubless mountain-top pierces the thin atmosphere of eternal winter, or where the mighty forest fluctuates before the strong wind, with its dark waves of green foliage; it is spread out, like a legible language, upon the broad face of the unsleeping ocean. It is the poetry of nature! It is this which uplifts the spirit within us until it is strong enough to overlook the shadows of our place of probation; which breaks, link after link, the chain that binds us to materiality, and which opens to our imagination a world of spiritual beauty and holiness."

God, in a word, surrounds us with beauty, from the star-filled heavens above our heads to the flower-sprinkled grass under our feet; from the eastern skies where in glory the day is born, to the western horizon where in splendid but fading tints it dies. And this ministry of beauty has spiritual ends. And these ends are part of the original purpose of material beauty; for that cannot be in the conclusion which was not already in the premises. And this high office of natural beauty is missed by us only when by mere disuse we have killed the sensibilities to which it appeals. Now if there are religious forces streaming upon us through material things there must be some great Mind behind the veil of matter seeking religious ends in us, and using the very molecules and vibrations of the material universe to serve those ends. The witness of God and religion, in brief, is wrought into the very structure of the physical universe, and the witness of our own involuntary response to physical beauty attests it.

One weighty point is put thus:

Christianity, it is to be observed, is the one moral theory which could be translated into universal practice without destroying the world. If Plato's republic suddenly became the pattern of universal society slavery would reemerge; the brothel would take its place everywhere as a decorous piece of social machinery. If the Koran miraculously and suddenly shaped the world to its pattern a religion of cruelty would take the place of a religion of love. One half of the human race, the feminine half, would sink in the scale of being to the level of the dogs. Woman, on its teaching, is denied a soul here and a heaven hereafter.

But suppose that by some strange chance, and in the course of a single night, the Bible stole into the imagination of the whole world. Suppose it took possession of every human life; reshaped to its own pattern the ideals, the wills, the tempers, the politics, the literature, the appetites of mankind; and tomorrow morning the whole planet awoke with Christianity supreme everywhere. Whether the Bible be a reality or a falsehood, it is clear that certain things would immediately follow. There would not be a liar's tongue, a rogue's brain, a thief's palm left in the world! Henri Quatre's dream of a French millennium was "a fowl in every peasant's pot;" but the sudden and universal supremacy of the Christian religion in the world would put peace at every man's fireside and love in every human heart. There would be no scolding wives, no faithless husbands, no wrecked homes, no broken-hearted mothers, no fallen women. Hunger and strife and hate would vanish. If every man acted on the Golden

Rule, the immemorial quarrel betwixt the "haves" and the "have nots" would end at a breath. All social hates would die. The want of the world would disappear. Greed and selfishness would perish. The strife betwixt nations would come to an end. Milton's dream of a time when

"No war or battle's sound

Was heard the world around"

would come true, and “the idle spear and shield” would be “high up-hung" for ever. No one can doubt that if Christianity became the master force in every human life this is what would follow.

On the absurdity of supposing that we are able to conceive of a God greater, wiser and better than the one who really exists, the author says:

Have we contrived to build in our imagination a better God than really exists? Have we dreamed of Him doing nobler things than He actually has done, or could do? Is He a God who cannot reach the scale of our imagination, who is not so big, so rich in faculty, so lofty in purpose and action as our dreams picture Him? How did He come into existence? We have been able to dream of a love divine and eternal, which stoops from the crown of the heavens to save God's wandering children, and saves them by suffering for them. And the very dream of such a love, in its reflex effects, is, by the test of actual facts, the noblest force that has ever touched human character. Is God smaller than our dreams? Have we endowed Him with a loftiness and a tenderness of love of which He is, as a matter of fact, incapable? This is surely the most amazing paradox yet invented! No miracle recorded in the Bible requires so much faith for its acceptance.

Is it a dishonor to God that, being great, He stoops to us? Does it make Him less? Having made us so that we long for Him with the strongest passion human nature knows, is it a reproach to Him that He gives Himself to us! Would it be more to His glory if He mocked us? It is this very wedlock of the wisdom that planned the heavens, the measureless power that guides the stars, with the tenderness that stoops to the whispered prayer of a child, that counts the tears of the widow, that hears the sigh of the prodigal, which makes the inconceivable greatness of God. It completes the mighty curve of His attributes. And is it credible that we can conceive this amazing greatness and God not be capable of it?

"Like as a father pitieth his children." So runs the ancient psalm. And such pity ought to exist. It makes God Himself more divine. Pity sitting crowned beyond the stars, pity linked to infinite power and making that power its servant-if this be true, the universe shines with a new glory, and God Himself is more godlike. If we could be God, and choose what kind of God we would be, it would be this! Have we, then, imagined a nobler God than actually exists, and has our fancy framed a grander universe than He has been able to build? And the New Testament reading gives scale and definiteness to the pity of the Old Testament. "God so loved the world," runs the great message, "that He gave His only begotten Son. . . ." Here, in brief, is a revelation that opens a new moral kingdom to us, a kingdom of unimaginable tenderness and grace. And we are asked to believe that it is the mere creation of our broken fancy; that outside that kingdom the actual God sits, a Being too

small to fill its horizon, too petty to sit upon its throne, unworthy so much as to cross its threshold. And can human dreams outrange God's facts in this fashion? This is not credible. The message of redemption is a light breaking in on us from great realms above us. It is a revelation which proves itself. "The Incarnation," says Illingworth, "is its own evidence. It is here; and how did it come here, and why has it remained here except by being true?"

The Bible represents God as saying, "My thoughts are not as your thoughts, nor My ways as your ways. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so are My thoughts above your thoughts and My ways than your ways." And this ought to be true! The realities of God ought to be nobler than the dreams of man. It would be the perplexity and the despair of reason if this were not so. But, on the theory of unbelief, it is man who is able to say to God, "My thoughts are higher than your thoughts"! We have pitched our conceptions too high. Our poor dreams are fairer than God's realities! Yet, according to unbelief itself, this incredible inversion of ratio betwixt God and ourselves an inversion which makes man's thoughts too high for the scale of God's acts or God's character-obtains in only one realm. It is visibly false throughout all the mighty chambers of the physical universe. If we consider the scale, the transcendent forces, the measureless greatness of the visible universe, God's thoughts in that region outrun ours as the planet exceeds the atom. Our utmost science is only beginning to spell out the first letters in the great alphabet of God's material works. We are catching a broken vision of the illimitable horizon of the physical universe. The vastness of that universe, its mysterious heights and depths, the forces that beat in it, from the fires of the far-off sun to the mysterious energies throbbing in an atom of radium, all are great beyond our dreams.

But, on the theory of unbelief, when we enter the still loftier realm of the moral universe a strange thing happens. God shrinks in stature; man expands! In all the great forces of that realm, in love, in goodness, in pity, God's facts are smaller and poorer than man's dreams! In the physical realm our highest science cannot comprehend God's lowest works. What do we really know of space, of matter, of force, or of life? But in the spiritual order unbelief asks us to believe that a hundred nameless and forgotten impostors have been able to imagine more than God has ever been able to perform. They have dreamed of a loveliness to which God Himself has never attained! Where did we get this power of imagining something greater than there is in our Creator? Was there ever such a paradox offered to the sane intellect? It asks us to believe that the ocean itself has a narrower curve than one of the drops buried in its depths.

The eighth edition of this engaging and useful book, The Unrealized Logic of Religion, is published by our Methodist Book Concern for $1.25 net. It should sell as many copies as there are ministers and families in Methodism. It is not abstruse, but brightly suited to popular and general reading. We have exploited it here because it is helpful, attractive, in its way brilliant, and worthy to be read all round the world.

THE ARENA

SPIRITUAL INFLUENCES

CHRISTIANITY is the one unique religion of the world. It is spiritual in a preëminent degree, both in its character and mission. It operates upon spiritual lines. It is in itself a dispensation of spiritual life and power and truth. It had its origin in the life, precept and doctrine pictured and clearly exemplified by the great spiritual Teacher. All times are involved in the manifestation of God in the flesh, and must ever hang in rapture on the sayings which fell from his lips. The Lord Jesus Christ came down from heaven upon a spiritual mission: for the performance of great spiritual offices for the founding of a spiritual kingdom, and to bring spiritual deliverance to enchained manhood that the race might be led out of its darkness into his light, out of its thralldom into liberty, and be permitted to walk with and hold fellowship with God. The central luminary of the system is Christ. He is the true light. All other so-called lights fail to meet the purpose of enlightening the world. He came among men for the express purpose of revealing great fundamental spiritual facts and setting in active operation spiritual agencies to segregate himself and his principles in human life. He could have revealed the truths of physics, geology, chemistry, physiology, and the science of the mind, but these remained untouched by him. He might have enriched the materia medica, but he did not do so. Yet "he knew all things" essential. The laws of nature, the manifold discoveries of modern life, genius and enterprise were in his mind, yet he gave them not forth. Standing upon the eminence of the centuries he could look backward, clearly discerning its essential truths, and forward; he could disclose all the wisdom of the coming times, for with him all times revealed their secrets. He came not as a statesman to enact sumptuary laws, nor as a philanthropist to open jails or liberate criminals. Twice was he solicited to judge between men and twice he refused. He was asked for an opinion regarding government, but answered, "Render therefore unto Cæsar the things which pertain to him, and to God the things that belong to God." Slavery, oppression, anarchy existed in the world, yet he has not the name of a Wilberforce or a William Lloyd Garrison. The social evil prevailed, at night stalking forth in the cities of his day, but he only said to the Magdalene, "Go, and sin no more." Intemperance did its fiendish work then as now, yet he organized no Anti-Saloon League nor voted the Prohibition ticket. All these subordinate phases of reform, which man can and must operate, seemed not to come within the scope of his plan. The method he inaugurated, the work he mapped out for man to do, covered a far-reaching and comprehensive labor of love,

but first he must win the citadel of man's moral nature. He must capture his heart. Man's spirit transformed, his moral nature renewed, his character rightly centered, there shall large results be accomplished by his efforts. What man can do Christ left undone, but it must not always so remain. He whispered in the heart of this redeemed one the precious fact of the human brotherhood, based upon the greater fact of the Divine Fatherhood, and sent him on a quest of spiritual import, commissioning him to bring his fellow-estranged, fallen, prone, broken and bruised— back to the fold of the Great Shepherd and Divine Physician as well; and with the remedies at hand his spirit may be healed, his wrongs righted. The seal of adoption given him, the sonship of the finite in the family of the Infinite, the Divine law of love and conscious salvation shall be to him an assurance most tender and precious. It is thus that sin is dethroned, its power annihilated, and goodness and righteousness take its place in the soul. It is a revelation of spiritual truth, the proclamation of a spiritual law, and the establishment of a spiritual kingdom in human hearts and homes.

The supreme truth of the Scriptures is a spiritual one. The gospel is the dispensation of the Spirit, and its realities and fruits are everywhere to-day. To the one who becomes saved first lessons soon appear, and they are lessons of spiritual relationships and dependencies. As salvation comes by the witnessing Spirit its life is promulgated by activity in dispensing it to others. The throb and heart beat of spiritualistic influences at work in the churches of Christendom, working with the genius and enterprise of this active age but dominated by an unction from on high, the energy of the Spirit of God must fill out the great plan which Jesus came to earth and forever identified himself with humanity to inaugurate. The abiding influences which honor God and make his kingdom one of power among men are all based in spiritual quality.

The spirit of Jesus Christ is the dominant force for the present. "Without me ye can do nothing." "Through Christ which strengtheneth" the heart, large results are accomplished. His Mountain Sermon is to become, more and more, the supreme constitution of mankind. His Golden Rule, the moral gauge for measuring spiritual action, shall be laid alongside every man's task. As the church comes to know more fully his mission and character, his teachings and work, and the Divinest realm-the spirit of man-is fitted for his domination, her conceptions of God will be more fully heightened and her realization of moral obligation toward man more and more broadened. Then her life will emphasize the thought of spiritual power and the utilization of spiritual influence. Then Churchianity will give place to true Christianity; small, bigoted sectarianism will be swallowed up in catholicity; cold, clammy ecclesiasticism—the bane of present-day progress-will wane more and more, and Christ, the King of saints and Lord of life, shall wield the scepter and his power be abun