Studying at its best the Christian view of the world of life—and it is not worth any man's while to study it at less—we find that Jesus Christ stands there always as greatest among prophets, though 'more than a prophet.' He is in the line of the prophets but at their head; he is their culmination and their fulfilment. He knew himself to be a prophet, and to have the lot of one who 'is not without honour save in his own country.' He lived and taught, and he and his teaching were received, after the manner of the prophets that had gone before. Like Isaiah and Jeremiah he spoke the language of drama and poetry, and gave body in parable and pictorial visions to his message. Like them he spoke and preached always with passion and as being conscious of a very wall of opposing forces. For him as for them the exaltation of religious machinery above religious life, and all self-satisfaction through mere forms and ceremonies, meant an onset of spiritual death. To use these things as a shelter within which a man might follow his self-seeking bent, whether of greed or of fear, was the worst (but one) of sins. 'Hypocrites,' that is, 'play-actors', 'generation of vipers,' he said of the professionally religious of his time. That there was for him one sin greater than such play-acting is of his own supreme greatness. No other prophet recognized and denounced as he did the sin that cannot be forgiven; for no other prophet had as he had the full personally realized revelation of an indwelling God whom man, consciously, might cast out. This, with his marvellous balance of judgement in regard to the letter or the machine and the spirit—the organ and the life that shapes and uses it—is a marked element in his differentia among prophets. And we, who are friends to them all in so far as they protest against depreciation of spirit and life, and against men who make of the products of life from which life has departed obstacles to the urgency of the present, have to consider whether we can go with him as far as he goes, or whether this element of difference between him and the rest is in any way to weaken our alliance with him. He is not only one among his fellows; he is also unquestionably different from them. Is there anything about this difference that should make us who are friends of the prophets quarrel with the Christian who accepts and welcomes it?

First, let us look at his attitude towards the instruments of religion as compared and contrasted with that of other prophets of his race. 'Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth,'—that is the note of the elder prophets. 'The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath'—that is his. The prophet of old was contemptuous of institutional and ceremonial religion; he suffered, as we say, from reaction and went to extremes, reprobating the instrument as well as the spirit that misinterpreted and misused it. Jesus taught in the synagogue, cleansed the temple from those who had made the historic house of prayer to be a den of thieves, sent the leper to show himself to the priest, and in general accepted the institutions of religion, and the hierarchical organization, of the place and people that were his own. Yet no man can say he overvalued these. His insistence on the spiritual freedom of man and the pre-eminence of spirit and life was both constant and passionate. The institution he accepted, as he accepted the tools of his carpenter's trade, the food and furniture of life as he found it, the language and the manners of his people. Freedom and unity, love, truth, beauty and holiness, as realities in the life of God and man, for these he pleaded, preached, worked, suffered and died. Yet those other things were not to be despised or left undone. He came and he lived not to destroy but to fulfil. In this he is pre-eminent among, apart from, the religious prophets who went before him. His piercing and balanced judgement was the primary source of Christian sacramentalism. He despised nothing of the earth and the body; he found a place for all in the life of the spirit. He was the first preacher to point to loveliness in the flowers of the field; and for twelve hundred years no other, in any nation or kind of religion, did the like. Then Francis of Assisi, his true follower, sang the Song of the Sun. The long history of Christian sacramentalism spreads out far and deep and gathers up in itself from all quarters the pursuit of beauty is well as the hunger and thirst after righteousness and truth; but its pure source is plain to see in the Gospels. There the fine adjustment of the relation between matter and spirit, life and its organs, is maintained. There the value and the meaning and pertinence of life's own instruments to its user, of the body to the soul, is as clearly insisted on as is the supremacy in both meaning and value of life itself. There is none of the abstract spiritualism that is one of the prophet's most dangerous snares. There is none of the contempt and the blinding reaction which so often disfigure and discredit his utterances. And for this, we who have come fresh from learning our new lesson about the movement of organic life and its difficult striving upon the earth may dare to praise him. It is a beginning for us. Not in this respect, at least, shall we stand aloof from him or complain that science or philosophy has built a barrier against him. That Christians the world over have lost touch with him in this regard as in others is for the moment nothing to us. We know that they are feeble and fallible like ourselves and that his way of judgement is hard. To keep the balance even, never to allow a secret materialism to be brought into the scale, or a protest to sink into repudiation—this is hard indeed. And we know that a thousand other temptations have beset the Christian during the centuries that have gone by and that, being as he is and just as we are ourselves, he has succumbed to not a few of them. We know all that; but we are seeking to find out what greatness it is that lies behind all the faults and follies, the absurdities, the crimes even, of Christians, and keeps Christianity alive and potent. We begin to see, perhaps, that this greatness is Christ—that it is 'Jesus the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee.'

Of this greatness and its character he himself had an unique consciousness which was a most important and most marked element in his difference from the Hebrew prophets before him. He 'spoke with authority and not as the Scribes,' not as those theologians and jurists whose strength rested on tradition and the letter of the past; he spoke, in short, as a prophet. So the people discovered. The voice of the prophets was characteristically authoritative and neither showed respect for tradition nor claimed its support. But the note of the prophets of old was 'Thus saith the Lord'; and the note of the prophet of Nazareth was 'I say unto you.' Both came among men with an authority lacking to the followers of tradition; but by the first it was thought of as delegated, in the second it was recognized as inherent. Not, 'the Lord said unto me,' but 'I say unto you.' The difference is enormous; it is also profound in significance and implications. It means, to begin with, a different knowledge of God. No longer is God only speaking to his messengers across a dividing space, speaking as a king upon his throne might to a subject at his feet, charging that subject with a mission. The message is no longer carried and reported by a man; it is originated in him and given by him. Jesus is conscious that the life and spirit of God are become his own life and spirit. He knows the indwelling God given to be made man in co-operative union with man, knows him in and through and as himself, the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee. He does not need to refer either to a God, or to a tradition, that is extraneous to himself. Therefore his prophetic authority exceeds not only that of the Scribes but that of all the prophets. It gave this impression to those of his contemporaries who had eyes to see and ears to hear. To such men it gives the same impression now. And if there are Christians who explain the impression and reason from it, erroneously, have we any right to be surprised? Consider the height to which we have been carried and the problems that open up before us as we survey this man. Consider the habits of interpretation most usual among us. Consider the tangibility and conspicuousness of things, the intangibility and, to the senses and the mind itself, the elusive mysteries of personality, of nature, of consciousness, even of knowledge and every other manifest activity. We cannot fairly blame Christians for what has been done among them in an attempt to explain and reason about Jesus Christ. The attempt has been honest enough and successful enough to hold the allegiance of thinking men for generations.

The truth is that we are learning, as we never learnt before, to question the manner of our own thinking about these high matters. We have become aware, as we were not, of the insidious materialism of our instruments of thought. We have learnt that to apply a logic of things and their qualities to problems of the nature of God and man is to ensure misunderstanding. So when Christians tell us that the person of Jesus Christ is divine and that he had, or was, or is, a human nature and a divine nature, and a human will and a divine will conjoined in the divine person, we see plainly that they are applying to the truth of him that logic of things and their qualities which they have acquired through dealing easily and habitually with things. They are trying to explain him by taking human nature as one thing or set of qualities, and divine nature as another, and they are joining them by a third. You see two vertical stones and one across the top. And if the stones are alive and the top one 'hypostatically' effects the union between the other two, stones they still are; or sets of qualities conceived as things, which is all the same.

The mighty consciousness of Jesus escaped entanglement by these logical, spatial, materialistic nets. He knew by experience the activity of a will in which the will of God and the will of man were united and engaged at once in one purpose. He knew, felt, lived, God and man as one in himself. And in the fulness of this he differed from all other prophets, for whom it was at best, and that but rarely, an unrealized ideal.

Shall we say, then, that for us and for Christians it is well not to reason about the problems he presents to thought? Even if we do, we shall reason and so will they. Neither we nor they can help it. But we may put our reasoning together, and learn each from the other. There is a meeting-place here, inviting us to join hands.