The second line of approach is rather more difficult, but with care we can use Christological theories to recover the facts which those who framed the theories intended to explain.  We must remember here once more the three historical canons laid down at the beginning.  We must above all things give the man’s term his meaning, and ask what was the experience behind his thought.  When we come upon such descriptions of Jesus as “Christ our Passover” (1 Cor. 5:7), or find him called the Messiah, we must not let our own preconceptions as to the value of the theories implied by the use of such language, nor again our existing views of what is orthodox, determine our conclusions; but we must ask what those who so explained Jesus really meant to say, and what they had experienced which they thought worth expressing.  These people, as we see, were face to face with a very great new experience, and they cast about for some means of describing and explaining it.  A slight illustration may suggest the natural law in accordance with which they set about their task of explanation.  A child, of between two and three years old, was watching his first snow-storm, gazing very intently at the flying snow-flake, and evidently trying to think out what they were.  At last he hit it; they were “little birds.”  It is so that the mind, infant or adult, is apt to work—­explaining the new and unknown by reference to the familiar.  Snow-flakes are not little birds; they are something quite different; yet there is a common element—­they both go flying through the air, and it was that fact which the child’s brain noticed and used.  To explain Jesus, his friends and contemporaries spoke of him as the Logos, the Sacrifice, “Christ our Passover,” the Messiah, and so forth.  Of those terms not one is intelligible to us to-day without a commentary.  To ordinary people Jesus is at once intelligible—­far more so than the explanations of him.  Historically, it is he himself who has antiquated every one of those conceptions, and, so far as they have survived, it has been in virtue of association with him.  They are the familiar language of another day.  “No one,” said Dr. Rendel Harris, “can sing, ’How sweet the name of Logos sounds.’” Synesius of Cyrene did try to sing it, but most human beings prefer St. Bernard or John Newton.

The inner significance of each term will point to the real experience of the man using it.  He employs a metaphor, a simile, or a technical term to explain something.  Can we penetrate to the analogy which he finds between the Jesus of the new experience and the old term which he uses?  Can we, when we see what he has experienced, grasp the substance and build on that to the neglect of the term?  When we look at the terms, we find that the essence of sacrifice was reconciliation between God and man (we shall return to this a little later), and that the Messiah was understood to be destined to achieve God’s purpose and God’s meaning for mankind and for each man.