John vi, 63.

The Gospels present to us the religion of the Spirit in its simplest form, and in its highest manifestation. The religion there presented to us is so simple that the child may live it; it is so satisfying that the saint will never outgrow it. The coming years may emphasize or amplify certain phases of it, but it is difficult to see how that form of religion which has subsisted for these two thousand years shall pass away. It has already earned the right to be called the religion of the Spirit. "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life." The Gospel is addressed to spiritual men, and issues in spiritual life.

It is worth our while to examine some of the phases that it presents to us in our present quest. If we ask ourselves, What contribution in particular did Jesus make to the religion of the Spirit? Four things stand out in distinction. Not that these are by any means all that he did, not even that they present necessarily the heart of his teaching, much less that they explain the wonderful influence of his life; but there are four things which he contributed to the religion of the Spirit for which each one of us owes him a debt of gratitude greater than we are likely to acknowledge, much less are we likely to pay.

For it was Jesus who presented to the world, in the form in which it would adhere, the gospel of the Divine Humanity. That emperors and chosen men here and there are divine men was nothing new in the world; but that a simple peasant, a child born in a manger, a young man whose father was a carpenter, and of whose mother all that was known was that her name was Mary, that he should call himself the Son of God, might indeed have been as surprising as it was real. He it was who seized upon the vast apprehension that human life, because of its humanity, is also divine. For this same soul spoke of himself not only as God's son ' but as man's son, and these are to be interpreted, not as contradictions, but as two phases of the same reality. The son of man is, by virtue of his being the son of man, son of God. And this he claimed, not for the rare spirits here and there as one now and again finds a coin with the inscription "the Divine Augustus," or "the Divine Caesar," in no such spirit as that, but common, humble, striving, laboring men, he called sons of God. It was said of him, and truly, that to as many as received him gave he the power to become sons of God. And the term "Son of God" was no mere emotional effusion with him; it was full of ethical significance. The peace-maker is the child of God; he who loves his kind is the child of God. And modern civilization, with its hospital which gathers up the wreckage of humanity; with its orphanage, which has the largest salvage process of gathering up the wayfarers and the little strangers in this world; these get their impetus, and their enthusiasm, more than we realize, from the simple teaching of this Galilean who saw that men are more valuable than sheep. And, as was intimated a moment ago, this is a debt which it is difficult for us to acknowledge and impossible to pay. One who reads his Epictetus, or his Marcus Aurelius, one who is familiar with these, sees foregleams of this truth. There was something in them akin to this; but here is the teaching that the average man with all his weakness, with his soiled hands, and his stained heart, was and is God's child, and that he is the son of God because he is the son of Man.

Or in the second place observe that a vast contribution was made to the religion of the Spirit by his emphasizing and putting into shape the latent and scattered teaching about the Holy Ghost. Jesus of Nazareth recognized that there is in man an up-flowing of his spiritual nature. There is a flowing upward from the depth of his heart, a yearning for spiritual reality. There is in us, by virtue of our humanity, a passion for God, the yearning for truth, the instinctive desire for holiness. That is the geyser which wells up in our hearts ; it is a yeast which disturbs our lives; it is the geist of Martin Luther; it is the ghost of the Saxon. And this is the Holy Ghost - a Spirit which yearns for holiness, and is therefore holy. And it does not disturb one when in his new domain he finds that this is in the neuter gender; neither does it disturb him when it is referred to also by the pronoun "he" or "who;" because he knows that when this Spirit is in a person it forthwith becomes personal because we are personal; and we refer to it not as "it" but "he." By a necessity of rhetoric we are obliged to refer to this Holy Spirit which is in us as if it were outside of us. I am not sure that I can make this plain to, you or to myself ; but it is strange in what a cage we live. Things that we know are within us we are rhetorically compelled to picture as being without us. We say, for instance, "I will go to the telegraph office and send greetings to my mother." We mean nothing of the kind; if we were to send greetings we would go to the express office, not to a telegraph office. What we mean is: "I will tell her through the telegraph that my love is with her." Similarly we say to one another: "Peace go with you," never dreaming that we think that there is something hovering in the air called "peace," and that in some mysterious way it is to pursue our friends. We know that peace is in their bosom, but with this strange rhetorical outburst we say: "Peace be with you; joy be yours," and it is a necessity of our nature that we thus speak of inner realities as if they were outer entities. So, often in the New Testament, we have the Holy Spirit spoken of as if it were far off, and then the rhetoric corrected by a parenthetical phrase "The Father," which suggests distance, "the Father abiding in you" - that in us which attracts us, impels us toward the source of all things, our heavenly Father. This Holy Spirit, this heavenly Ghost is the source of his teaching. He says distinctly that his Gospel of the Divine Humanity, and of the other things which we shall have occasion to note, is not an invention of his, is not something which he discovered with much pains; it is something that welled up within him; it is the Father speaking within him; and when they asked: "Whence hath this man this wisdom?" he tells us almost in modern phrases: "The words that you hear are not my words-it is the Father abiding in me who is doing his work. I deserve no credit; I am not remarkably wise, but the geyser in me is in action; the Holy Spirit is speaking through me." Therefore he says, in that profound transcendental outburst, "The Son can do nothing of himself; as he heareth so he speaketh, and I know that my judgment is just because I seek not mine own will, but the will of him that sent me." That is, I do not let my personal predilections, and my individual prejudices stand between me and the light. Like Michael Angelo I have the lamp on the front of my cap.

The Holy Spirit is the source of his teaching; it is the ground for his authority. We are told again and again that "he spoke as one having authority, and not as the scribes." By this we are given to understand that his teaching is not a matter of documentary records; it is not simply a question of looking up in the catalogue of life, or reading the indexes of experiences; it is listening rather to one's unspoiled intuitions. And when one speaks from that point of view, you acknowledge the authority because of his experience. So when he undertook to speak with scribes and pharisees he had great difficulty in making himself understood, and he said to them plainly: "I am from above," that is I speak of things from the spiritual point of view; "you are beneath;" you speak of things purely from the literary point of view; I am not able to meet you on that ground; "the words that I speak are spirit and life." And in that remarkably touching and tender interview between Jesus and Nicodemus we have the same collision. Two men speaking from such different points of view that it is almost impossible for them to understand each other. Jesus is from above; he is speaking from the point of view of spiritual experience. Nicodemus belongs to the school of the world; he has studied the Jewish textbooks; he is well lettered in scribism and phariseeism, but in vital experience he knows too little. The Master Says to him plainly ... That which is born of the flesh is flesh," that is the lower teaching of the religious life can never get beyond itself. If you once begin to depend upon authorities there is nowhere to stop. That which is born of the Spirit, on the other hand, is Spirit; and the only way to pass from the religion of the letter to the religion of the Spirit is to be born again. That is, to start life anew. That seems plain to us. It did not seem plain to Nicodemus, for he interpreted it after the flesh and said: "How can a man be born when he is old?" So when it is said that Jesus "spoke not as the scribes, but spoke as one having authority," it means, I take it, that he spoke from a deeper experience. Whosoever has had a deeper experience in any realm of life speaks with authority; his evidence is perfectly obvious, and 'he who will listen to him will have perceived that he speaks not as a mere theorist; he speaks because he has lived.

Or observe again that this Holy Spirit is not only the source of his teaching, the ground of his authority, it is the judge of the world. And here there is a subtlety and an insight about the thought of Jesus which at once raises him in our intellectual esteem, and at the same time makes it difficult for us to follow him. Indeed one sometimes thinks that his teaching has been so corrupted that it is almost hopelessly lost. We say for instance that Jesus Christ is to judge the world. What do we mean by that? We are told in the New Testament that we are all to appear before the judgment seat of Christ. What do we mean by that? It is perfectly simple if we will take the point of view of this great exponent of the religion of the Spirit. A man is to be judged by his own perceptions of moral values; he is to be judged by the light within him. "If any man hear me," (these are the words of the Master) "If any man hear me and believe me not, I do not condemn him; I judge him not. There is one that judgeth him, even the word that I speak.'' If I can present to you by any manner of means a better kind of life than you are living now, and you are able to see that it is a higher kind of life, you can never in this world descend to your old manner of life and still be happy. That ideal will haunt you as long as you live. It is not I who will condemn you and judge you when you fall from your high standard; it is the word which has gone forth to set before you a new standard. That is the judgment seat which the Master presents to every man. "Think not that I am to come to condemn the world; I am not come to condemn the world; I am come to save the world; if any man hear me and believe me not, I judge him not. The word that I speak, the higher standard of life that I offer him, that shall judge him." So, when it is said in the New Testament that we shall all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, what it means is so that we shall and do all appear before that judgment seat which Christ presented. Take an illustration from what we call the secular life. The moment Phidias carved his statue, a new standard for that kind of art was set. Henceforth many small carvers and engravers who had been satisfied with their work found themselves compelled to follow a higher ideal, Yet Phidias did not sit in judgment upon these second-rate men. He, in his fashion, could have said: "If any man beholds my work and accepts it not, the work itself shall judge him." When your Raphael paints his Transfiguration he does not sit in judgment over smaller painters. He gives the world a larger view of the art life, and in his fashion he might say: "If any man sees my work and admires it not, neither can he duplicate it, I judge him not; the work itself is its own judgment. Henceforth he must compare his work with this higher work and nevermore can he go back.

Here is a man, then, who feels that he has come into the world not to rock us to sleep, not to give us an opiate - "I come not to bring peace; I come to bring the sword; I come to let loose action; I come to instill principles, and the personal element does not enter into it at all. "The word that I speak is not my word; I judge no man, but the type of life I present offers a new standard of judgment to every man." And that, I believe, is literally true. Every great example that comes to us makes life harder and better; thus it makes us dissatisfied with our own meager attainments, puts forth a higher ideal, makes us more conscious of our short-comings, disturbs our ease, makes us restless until we make higher endeavors after the Christian life.

The Holy Ghost is the source of his teaching; it is the ground for the authority of his teaching; it is the judge of the world; it is his parting gift to the world. The expression that he used for it was a strange one. Notwithstanding that what we have just said was true he called it by another name; he called it the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the geyser which flows tip from the depth of the heart toward truth, and he called it the Comforter because we are so constituted that nothing but the truth will comfort us. No. We never believe lies willingly; we may be deceived and accept for the time things as true when they are not true, but we never rest with any case on that point. Man is made for truth; and his parting gift is the Spirit of truth which will lead you into all truth.

I sometimes have the feeling, friends, that, with all our adoration of Jesus of Nazareth, we have not been fair to him. We do not always give him credit for the vast insight that he had into the spiritual world. In fact I believe that we very rarely do that. We praise him and we mention his name, but we do not realize that here was a man who had a profounder insight into the realm of spiritual experiences than your Shakespeare had in the realm of literature. He was large enough to see that all the truth that has come into the world was due to one thing: man's desire for truth. That is the only way to get truth; it does not come by accident. So instead of giving his disciples a body of truth he gives them the spirit of truth. It might have been easier for him to write a few more parables, to have uttered a few more beatitudes, and have said to them: "This is all you need to know. Hereafter you need do not more thinking for yourselves; here is truth." He chose not to do that, but he said on the contrary: "I give you the great Comforter of the world-the Spirit of truth, the spirit of truth within you will lead you into all truth," and so it will.

Then what we said a moment ago about the Holy Ghost being within us is confirmed best from the Master's utterances. He says: "I leave with you the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it seeth him not." Why, that sounds as if it had been written in the twentieth century! "I leave with you the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it seeth him not; but ye know him for he is in you." Now the world is slow to accept that; the Spirit of truth will not reveal itself through the spectrum; it will not give itself up in the laboratory of life. We have absolutely nothing to show for it chemically speaking; and yet the most real thing in this world is the passion that burns in man's heart for art, for music, for beauty, for holiness. But no man ever saw the spirit of art; no man ever beheld the Spirit of truth. So the Master says: "The world will be slow to believe all this, but you may do more than believe it; you may know it for he is in you. I have shown you that these blind instincts that make your bosom uneasy are not relics of the brute; they are only inarticulate syllables -of the word of God." People have very largely forgotten that in his day he needed again to remind them of their Old Testament, how the word of God speaks to each man; he needed indeed to remind them of their realizations of the Holy Spirit. One man of the preceding generation was large enough to recognize that, and, strange as it may seem, it was Matthew Arnold who did it. But there were certain phases of Matthew Arnold's literary genius which made it almost inevitable that he should have a strong learning toward this Galilean spirit. So he says in this literary document: "If we describe the work of Christ by a short expression which may give the clearest view of it, we shall describe it thus: that he came to restore the intuition. He came, it is true, to save, and to give eternal life; but the way in which he did this was by restoring the intuition."

I believe these words to be literally true. Jesus said: "The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost." Mind, he does not say "'them who were lost," he did that; but in the text I am quoting he says: "I have come to seek and save that which was lost." What was lost? Self was lost. Your own instincts at that day had simply been mislabeled; men did not see that the Spirit or Ghost in man is a Holy Ghost. Jesus Christ restored to man his intuition. That is what the parable of the prodigal son means. It shows the picture of a man who has everything, if you please, to gratify his senses, but goes off into the far country of selfishness, and tries to satisfy himself with his lower nature. He cannot do it. It is all right for awhile, but after awhile, as it says: "There ariseth a great famine in the land." Man is a spiritual being; you and I are too finely woven to live the life of brutes. We cannot do it. "There ariseth a famine in that land," and by and by we say to ourselves: "This is not the kind of life that 1 was made for; I will arise and go to my Father."' Jesus says: "When he came to himself." When he came to himself, ah, there is the whole point. When he came to himself ! To come to himself and to come to his Father are one and the same thing. He came to restore the intuition! This Holy Ghost is the well of Jacob; it is out of this that the Master will give the Samaritan woman a drink of water so that she shall never thirst again. Having once found that the source of spiritual joy is within, she shall never again look in vain for it.

It is interesting to see that Marcus Aurelius used almost the same language: "Dig within thee," he says, "there is the fount of life, and if thou will ever dig waters shall flow up forever." And the Master says : "He that believeth, from within him shall flow forth streams of living water." This is the pearl of great price, to gain which a man will sell everything else; this is the self that the Master means when he says "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" It does not mean what we have often thought it meant. "What shall it profit a man to have a good time in this life if in the next life he is to suffer forever." The Master is not speaking of the next life; he is speaking of this life, and he is speaking to men and women like you and me who are tempted to be engrossed with the things of the flesh, and he says: "What does it amount to, though we gain the whole world and yet after all lose our own selfrespect?" "The Son of man came to seek and to save that which was lost;" he came to restore the intuition, the divinity of humanity, the present Holy Spirit, as our dear Dr. Hale used to call it, the present Holy Spirit.

The next contribution that he made to us is the gift of eternal life. It is an expression often on his lips; it occurs again and again in the Gospel, and we are in danger of forgetting what he meant by it. It is so important that it is worth while to recall our debt of gratitude for it. We are so prone to think that eternal life is a life which has one dimension only, namely, length. Probably if we should ask the first twenty people we meet on the street what the eternal life is they would tell us that it is the kind of life we are to live after we are dead. Jesus taught no such thing. With him eternal life has three dimensions, not only it has length to be sure, it also has breadth, but above all it has depth. The eternal life is not a life to come; it is a life, a quality of life which is to be here. So, when the young man comes to, the Master and says: "What shall I do to gain eternal life?" Here it is answered: "Keep the commandments." That is eternal life. Eternal life is the moral life raised to its highest power. "To love the Lord with all your heart, with all your mind, with all your soul, with all your strength," that is eternal life. It is living this present life in the flesh, not as a mere creature which to last a few days or a few years, but it is to live a godly life here, with not simply the dimensions of length, but also the dimensions of breadth and thickness. Said George Eliot:

So to live is heaven.

To make undying music in the world,

Breathing as beauteous order, that controls

With growing sway the growing life of man.

And in another place the Master describes the eternal life in terms which are unmistakable. He was not concerned about getting men to Heaven. He had better business; he was concerned in getting Heaven into men. "This is eternal life," he says. Now what is eternal life? "This is eternal life, to know Thee the only true God, and him who thou hast sent." That is, to see God in this world is to put into life a new quality, that is a quality which he calls eternal life. I do not know how that would have come to us in the good Providence if Jesus had not given it to us; but it was he who contributed to the religion of the Spirit more than any other the gift of eternal life.

His fourth contribution to the religion of the Spirit is his teaching of the Kingdom of God or the Kingdom of Heaven, as they are called almost interchangeably. "The Kingdom of Heaven," he says, "is within you." Let us think for a moment. The animal kingdom is in us, is it not? We know that the vegetable kingdom is within us-that the hair which grows on our heads is only a little removed from the wheat that grows in the field. The animal kingdom is also within us. Most of us keep the bars in good state of repair, so that the lion and the tiger do not often break through; but we can hear them howl and yelp; the animal kingdom is in us. But there is also latent in us a higher kingdom than that. It is the kingdom of men and women who in themselves feel the throbbing of this higher life. So this real kingdom he says, "cometh not with observation, "Men shall not say 'Lo, here or lo, there."' It is not political. It is personal. It is within. But being within it must come out. It was Florence Nightingale who said, "To be sure the Kingdom of' Heaven is within us, but we must see also that it gets out of us." So the Kingdom of Heaven in his teaching is not simply immediate and personal and subjective, it is a political, social body of men and women who, having these high ideas, organize themselves to propogate their kind in society. So, he says: "The Kingdom of Heaven is as if one should sow seed and sleep and wake, and in the morning it would grow, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear."

But when they asked him: "When will the kingdom of Heaven come?" he tells them distinctly that it must grow in men's hearts, that in the finer organization of society, by the freer reign of justice, compassion, the kingdom of heaven is to spread among men.

We have thus spoken of the religion of Jesus as being the religion of the Spirit in its simplest form, and in its highest expression. If you will recall. for a moment the five conditions for the religion of the Spirit, you will see how perfectly the teaching of the Master meets every one of these. The religion of the Spirit must be positive, free, progressive, practical, inclusive. The religion of Jesus Christ meets every one of these conditions. It is not a protest against the Old Testament; it is a flowering of the Old Testament. Now and again, to be sure, he rebukes Pharisees and Scribes, but beyond the rebuke there is a positive assertion and the affirmation of a higher life.

His faith is a free faith. "If the Son make you free," says he, "ye shall be free indeed; ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free." It is the only thing in- the world that does make you free. Ignorance is only another name for bondage.

The religion of the Master is free religion; it is a progressive religion; it is not a body of doctrine, but a Spirit and a life. "The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life;" "I have many things yet to say unto you, but you are not able to bear them but when the Spirit of truth has come in your hearts he will lead you unto all truth; and shall take of what is mine and give it to you." Then comes that wonderful, subtle saying of his: "All that the Father hath is mine; everything that God has belongs to us ultimately, for we are his children. Therefore I say, the Spirit of truth shall take of mine and give it to you." And modern Christianity, however it may differ from apostolic Christianity, is still the faith of Jesus of Nazareth, because it is "nominated in the bond," that whatever the Spirit of truth shall disclose to you in the twentieth century is exactly the thing I wish you to accept as my personal teaching. That is what I meant when I said that I do not see how we can outgrow the religion of Jesus of Nazareth.

It is practical. Here was no arbitrary test. "Not every one that saith to me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he that doeth the will." It is practical religion; his faith is an inclusive faith. You remember that great incident of his life when the disciples came to him and said: "Master, as we were on the way we saw some others casting out devils, and we rebuked them because they followed not with us. Desirest thou that we bid fire come down from Heaven and consume them?" You remember what he said. "Ye know not what spirit ye are of. The Son of Man came not to destroy man's life, but to save them, and verily I say unto you, whosoever shall do the will of my Father, the same is my father, and my mother, my brother and my sister."

There is a great deal of cheap talk about our having outgrown the Gospel. I think Matthew Arnold was right when some one said to him: "Mr. Arnold, do you think that Christianity has been a failure?" He said: "I do not know; it has never been tried."