We find, again, that the inner meaning of the Logos is that through it, and in it, God and man come in touch with each other and become mutually intelligible.  Reconciliation, the victory of God, the mutual intelligibility of God and man—­all three terms centre in one great thought, a new union between God and man.  That, so far as I can see, is the common element; and that is, as men have conceived it, the very heart of the Christian experience.

In the third place, we can utilize the new experiments made upon Jesus Christ in the Reformation and in other revivals.  They come nearer to us; for the men who report are more practical and more scholarly in the modern way; they are more akin to us both in blood and in ideas.  Luther, for example, is a great spirit of the explorer type.  He went to scholarship and learnt the true meaning of “metanoia”—­that it was “re-thinking” and not “penance”—­and he grasped a new view of God there.  From scholarship he gained a truer view of Church history than he had been taught; and this too helped to clear his mind.  Above all, as “a great son of fact” (Carlyle’s name for him), his chief interest was the exploration of Jesus Christ—­would Christ stand all the weight that a man could throw upon him without assistance?  And Luther found that Christ could; and he at once turned his knowledge into action, as the world knows.  “Justification by faith” was his phrase, and he meant that we may trust Jesus Christ with all that we are, all that we have been, and all that we hope to be; that Jesus himself will carry all; that Jesus himself is all; that Jesus is at once Luther’s eternal salvation, and his sure help in the next day’s difficulty—­his Saviour for ever from sin, and his great stand-by in translating the Bible for the German people and in writing hymns for boys and girls.  “Nos nihil sumus”, he wrote, “Christus solus est omnia".[35] In the case of every great revival—­the Wesleyan revival, and the smaller ones in the United States, in the north of Ireland, in Wales—­in every one we find that, where anything is really achieved, it is done by a new and thoroughgoing emphasis on Jesus Christ.  It may be put in language which to some ears is repulsive, in metaphors strange or uncouth; but whatever the language, the fact that underlies it is this—­men are brought back to the reality, the presence, the power, and the friendship of Jesus Christ; they are called to a fresh venture on Jesus Christ, a fresh exploration:  and again and again the experience of a lifetime has justified the venture.

This brings us to the most effective and fundamental method in the exploration of Jesus, in some ways the most difficult of all, or else the very simplest.  The Church has been clear that there is nothing like personal experiment, the personal venture.  It is the only clue to the experience.  The saying of St Augustine (Sermon 43, 3), “Immo Credo ut intelligas,” is to many of our minds offensive—­I think, because we give not quite the right meaning