and bracing atmosphere of some exalted leader, for an environment richer in healing ministry and in restoring power.  That longing Christ met.  He carried His believing countrymen on to the heights.  He surrounded them with the freshness of His own spirit.  He put over them a new sky.  He took them into a new environment, rich with His truth and grace, tender with infinite sympathy, stored with the forces that work for spiritual vigor, filled with the love of His Father.  Ask Peter or James or John or Paul, ask any believing Jew and he will tell you that Christianity is simply the consummation of his faith as a Jew.

The gospel moves along the same line of self-verification with reference to all the great religions.  The Persian believes in eternal light, and he hates the contending darkness.  Christianity says that God is light, and that in Him is no darkness at all; that Jesus is the Light of the world, and that whosoever followeth Him shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.  The Greek was full of humanity, and he could not help making his gods and goddesses simply larger and more beautiful men and women.  What is the soul of that amazingly beautiful and seemingly fantastic mythology of the Greeks?  Why do they worship Apollo and Aphrodite, Hermes and Athene?  Because they can think of nothing higher than ideal humanity.  And Christ comes, the ideal man.  The beauty of the Lord is upon Him.  His thoughts and feelings and purpose and character are the most perfect things in the world.  He identifies Himself with man, and He identifies Himself with God.  He is the Son of man, and as such He is the Son of God.  And thus a human.  God, a human universe, a human religion is offered to the Greek, and in place of the wonderful mythology the clear, warm, divine fact.  The Mohammedan believes in will; and the gospel puts before him that ultimate irresistible Will as a Will to all good, eternally burdened with love, and nothing but love, for man.  The Hindu is smitten with an endless craving after rest, and he thinks the path to peace lies in the diminution and final extinction of being.  Christ goes to the Hindu and says:  “Come unto me all ye that are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly of heart, and ye shall find rest unto your souls.  For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

He sets before the Hindu an infinite social peace; he calls into play the moral will that for ages has been allowed to slumber.  The goal is high social harmony; the path to it is the intelligent will in faithful, inspired, victorious obedience.  The need of the Hindu is not less but more and better existence.  The way out of his despair is through fulness of life.  His misery is but the dumb prayer for eternal life, that is, for existence supreme in its character and in its volume.