Thus Christianity is everywhere the interpreter of religion.  Everywhere it carries the world’s faith to its best.  It is the consummation both of the human need and the divine answer.  And to-day, in our own world, it goes on the same high errand.  The intuitions of righteousness, the sympathies with goodness, the wish for the more abundant life, the ideals and the struggles, the hope and the fear, without which man would not be man, find their interpreter in Christianity.  It is the soul carried to the utmost depth of its need and the loftiest height of its desire, and then made conscious that below its profoundest weakness and above its highest dream is the infinite Love that is educating its life.  It is the best wisdom of history speaking to the highest interests of man.  As mothers brought their children to Jesus that He might reveal the inmost meaning of childhood, open its treasure to the hearts that loved it, and by His consecrating touch assure it of perpetual increase; so are the nations bringing their religions to Him, and the noble among men their uncomprehended longing and hope.  He walks among us still as the Revealer, the Conserver, and the Consummator of life.

IV.  Lastly, Christianity finds it own interpretation in God.  We have seen man looking backward and finding the origin of his soul in the Soul that is behind nature.  We have seen his religion telling him that he can not live by bread alone, that he can rest only under the shelter of the unseen, that he is infinitely more akin to the invisible than to the visible, that he has a spirit and must therefore hunger for the fellowship of the eternal Spirit.  We see Christianity lifting this religious capacity to its highest, and bringing in the divine appeal in its sublimest form.  We behold the earth transfigured in this Christian dream, the ladder set that reaches from the dreamer to heaven, and upon it, going up and coming down, the great prayers of the soul and the tender responses of the Most High.  To what shall we refer this sublime, transfiguring dream?  Is it the delusion of the sleeper, or the whisper of God?  Is the ladder set up from the earth, or is it let down from above?  Did man shape it out of his abysmal desire, or did God make and establish it out of His love.  What can we say of that which is the highest wisdom, the widest sympathy, the divinest love, and the mightiest power in human history?  What can we do with that which is the true life of man?  Can the trees of the field, as they clap their hands and sing in the freshening breeze, do other than refer it to heaven?  And man, as he sees the light of Christ upon the Spirit behind nature, beholds in the gospel that which interprets his highest dreams, feels in Christianity the power to understand and to become his own best self—­can he do other than say that his Christian faith is the gift of God?  The star in the brook refers you for the explanation of its being to the star in the sky; and the glory of the gospel living in the depths of man’s soul has no other origin than the love of God.