it philosophy.  In these higher activities the line of likeness between man and the animal is of the faintest description; while the line of contrast becomes more and more pronounced and significant.  When we come to the summit of man the likeness vanishes utterly.  Among the lower life of the world there is no Magnificat, there is no Nunc Dimittis; the beginning and the end do not link themselves to the Eternal.  The brute has no religion, no temple, no priest, no Bible, no sacrament of love between itself and the invisible.  The tower of this church tells at once, and from afar, that it is a church.  Near at hand, much besides the tower tells the same story.  There is the cruciform foundation; there is the structure of its walls.  There is the outside with distinct note; there is the inside with its joyous beauty.  Look at the church closely and you need no tower to proclaim what it is.  And yet the tower is its most conspicuous witness:  at a distance it is the sole witness.  Religion is similarly the eminent token that man belongs to a divine order.  The basis of his being in sacrifice should repeat the same tale.  Civilization as a struggle after social righteousness should announce the same fact.  Man’s thoughts and feelings, and their manifold and marvelous expression in art, in institutions, and in systems of opinion, utter the same testimony.  And yet the tower of his being, high soaring and far seen, is his feeling for the invisible.  You do not know man until you behold him worshiping.

III.  The third fact in our human situation is that Christianity is the interpretation of religion.  You see the devout old Jew, Simeon, who met Jesus as His mother brought Him for the first time into the temple; and there you behold the old faith interpreted by the new.  All that was best in the Hebrew religion is conserved and carried higher in the Christian religion.  Everywhere the devoutest Jews were conscious of wants which the national faith did not meet.  They waited for the consolation of Israel, and when Christ came he supplied satisfactions which Hebraism could not supply.  Christianity commended itself to the disciples of Christ because it seemed to be their own faith at its best.  They were carried over into it by the logic of their previous belief and their deep human need.  Paul sought righteousness as a Jew; when he became a Christian, righteousness was still his great quest.  And Christianity commended itself to him because the national ideal of righteousness was set before him in a sublimer form, and because a new inspiration came to him in his pursuit of it.  The old immemorial goal of human endeavor was exalted, and the everlasting incentives were filled with the freshness of a divine life.  Thus the religious Jew, when Christ came, was like a convalescent patient.  The process of recovery was going on, but in a way that was discouragingly slow.  The longing was for the higher altitudes of the spirit, for the pure