As we looked at chlorophyll, at colloids and the sea-urchin's egg, so let us look at Christian habits and beliefs. And in the first place we will fix our attention on the central 'mystery' of worship in the Christian Church. All the world over and from the first days of Christian apostles and brethren, a man going into one of their places of assembly would at some hour or another find their devotion apparently gathered about common, familiar, bread and wine, or, sometimes, bread alone. They would tell him that this bread 'is no longer common bread.' Nevertheless, in the ordinary or the scientific sense, it is, just as much 'common bread' as chlorophyll is the common colouring matter of the green wheat. They will tell him, too, that it is a 'sacramental' means of communion between God and themselves and between them and Christ, the Anointed Son of God. Just as we insist scientifically upon the fact that chlorophyll is the meeting-point between the power of the sun and our living selves, so Christians insist that the sacramental bread, whatever else it is or does, constitutes a meeting-point between them and God and his Christ. No doubt (they may say, if they understand such matters), for the mathematical physicist, bread, like everything else, may be finally reduced to a series of dynamical equations. Or it may be taken as ether and electrons; or as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and so forth; or, roughly, as what it comes to be at last, gases, water, and dust, like the bodies of us all. But each of these ways of looking at bread manifestly, even to the mind of that scientific man, leaves out something of its richness and fails to reckon with its use and purpose for life. By ordinary persons it is known as the 'staff' of life; and these ordinary persons, when they say it is this, are speaking poetry. In fact if you are to do justice to bread you must be something of an artist; you do it gross injustice—that is, you leave out of your account the most valuable thing about it—when you do not go beyond the scientific man's idealistic or abstract summing up. The poet's vision does better when he mates in the corn and the grape the glories of the sun and the expectancy of earth, and sees the bringing forth and revealing and communicating, through the grain and the wine, of a concealed and straining life. But the philosopher also has his contribution to a fulness of justice. He insists, after his manner, on 'spirit and life'; he disdains mechanism; he opens gates that science cannot pass, and shows that all real things have depth it cannot reach—a third dimension where it has discovered only two. He solidifies the schematic diagrams of the scientific man and gives reasons for the faith of the religious man, who goes further still.

Here in the Christian Sacrament, where the Christian says that the fullest justice is done to bread and wine in lifting them up to be a means of communion between God and man, science and philosophy, religion and art, may meet together.

For nearly two thousand years Christians have seen in 'this bread' of theirs matter impenetrated by spirit, and raised by it into another and a higher order. They have held to a doctrine of both in which neither was despised, or thought of as deceiving or unreal. Materialistic thought and theory, abstract spiritualism, all theories or doctrines that cut the world of experience in two with a rationalizing hatchet, have been powerless to loosen their hold. Matter informed and transformed by spirit; spirit pre-eminent over and including matter—these have been cardinal and inevitable implications in the sacramental worship of Christians. Cardinal and inevitable, too, is, in consequence, their view of the world as an affair of order superposed on order in a nature capable of being raised to the height of that which they call the supernatural, an earth that may become a new earth, a city of men that should rise to the noble state of a City of God.

We look back on the chemist's colloid that becomes, as protoplasm, no longer common colloid but one from which a world of living creatures has arisen. We see again a wonderful life informing and transforming matter, pre-eminent over it yet dependent on and manifesting through it. We see the chlorophyll of the plant raising chemical elements to a new order of being, and life in its onward march from order to order of manifesting consciousness, attaining at last man, creative in his spiritual freedom and dominance. We see that a Christian might point to man himself as the summing up of outward and visible signs and an inward and spiritual grace which science has made known, as reasonably as he may take bread as the central symbol of his worship. And he may tell us, or we may tell him, that these things are one—that there is everywhere 'continuity of process with the emergence of real differences' in a world that is 'sacramental' from its lowest to its highest order, from the speck of jelly to man. He and we both may see it as a world of outward and visible signs, each manifesting what the Christian names 'an inward and spiritual grace,' and we name—how do we name it? So far, only life, mysterious and mysteriously potent, communicating and communicated life.

We are encouraged to consider, further, this name and its meaning for us and above all in us. In us, we justly say, life is really different from what it is in the plant. We are 'persons'; plants are not. Life in us is personal, in the plant it is less than personal. But it is life, all the same and all through, from the impersonal to us, different though we assuredly are from the impersonal. And we can hardly escape asking ourselves whether, as they are now, men are of the highest order of real difference among the different orders embraced in the potency of life. Can life do no more and better, seeing that it has done so much? Is it, in itself, no more and better? The Christian answers these questions without one moment of hesitation. He says that 'the Holy Ghost,' the divine Spirit and Lord, is the 'Giver of Life'; and that there is an order of life in which this Lord and Giver is brought into personal relations with us, communicating with and communicated to us; so that by this communication we are raised beyond the state of children of earth and of the merely earthly life, to the high place of Sons of God, who know their Father and are at one with each other and with him.

If there is a thorough-going evolutionist anywhere it is the Christian. And it is his sacramental doctrine that gives consistency and persistence to his evolutionary convictions, if and when they are consistent and persistent. At times they are neither. At times the Christian, like the rest of us, fails to see the grandeur and universality of his own deepest principles. And then he belies them in word and deed; and his picture of the world of men and things is false to them and to himself.

It is these deepest principles that the enquirer should search out. When he has caught one glimpse of them he should thereby be strengthened against the falsifications that are offered him either by Christians or their contemners. Great principles are there, for his vision and enlightening. And in them he will find his own raised to a higher power. His evolution is then carried beyond the point where it so abruptly and unsatisfactorily breaks off. His potent life is there borne upward to the meeting-place with a Lord and a Giver of life. His personal, self-conscious and world-conscious, loving and self-sacrificing man, the crown of his evolutionary process, comes face to face with the source and fulfilment of all that he is and all that he so brokenly promises to be. Man himself crowns the sacramental world and is its greatest sacrament, revealing as in a glass darkly and by foretelling, the fulness of beauty and glory in all its grace. And the Christian points to one man as above all other men in the revealing office of mankind. He says that this man in no way distorts the beauty and glory given him; that in him very God is made known in and as very man. Here, plainly, the sacramental principle reaches its supreme height, and is taken beyond detail after detail to a wholeness covering every detail. If any one man is thus the unclouded revelation of God in terms of man, then it is true—as the Christian says it is—that the whole world of men and things is best, most faithfully and fully, stated, reasoned about, interpreted, through this man. Every particle of the bread we eat becomes for us no longer 'common bread.' It is bread shown for what it really is in the plan and process of God as these are made present to us, alive, pregnant of glory and beauty and power, in the living revelation of Jesus Christ.

The Christian sets his consecrated bread apart from all the rest of bread and things, and, we must own, he does well. For men see all things as in a glass darkly, and we are, most of us, the slaves of habit and victims of familiarity. What is everywhere and always soon comes to be nowhere and never for our interest and our attention. If the Christian had not kept as a rare thing, a thing enthroned, the bread that is for him no longer common bread, he would of a certainty often, if not for ever, have lost hold on the sublime principle it enshrines for him and for the world. The conflicting currents of speculative thought, as well as the weaknesses of his mental grasp, would have made him loose his hold upon it. Just because it stands there as the central symbol gathering up and establishing his worship and its sanctifying associations, it has lasted through the centuries, preserving its own great principle, a witness, a token and a sign not empty but 'effective'—signum efficax not only for thought but for all human life in its amplitude.