of all life—­personal, social, and national—­from the very foundations, on new lines—­what is called a transvaluation of all values.  With a new centre, everything has to be thought out anew into what St. Paul calls the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4:13).  Then finally the question comes, how to secure continuity?  Will the movement outlast his personal influence?  These are his problems—­large enough, every one of them.  How does he face them?

The Gospel began with friendship, and we know from common life what that is, and how it works.  Old acquaintance and intimacy are the heart of it.  The mind is on the alert when we meet the stranger—­quick and eager to master his outlook and his ways of thought, to see who and what he is—­it is critical, self-protective, rather than receptive.  But, as time goes on, we notice less, we study the man less as we see more of him.  Yet, in this easier and more careless intercourse, when the mind is off guard, it is receiving a host of unnoticed impressions, which in the long run may have extraordinary influence.  Pleasant and easy-going, a perpetual source of interest and rest of mind, the friendship continues, till we find to our surprise that we are changed.  Stage by stage, as one comes to know one’s friend, by unconscious and freely given sympathy, one lives the other man’s life, sees and feels things as he does, slips into his language, and, by degrees, into his thoughts—­and then wakes up to find oneself, as it were, remade by the other’s personality, so close has been the identification with the man we grew to love.  This is what we find in our own lives; and we find it in the Gospels.

A sentence from St. Augustine’s Confessions gives us the key to the whole story.  “Sed ex amante alio accenditur alius” ("Confessions”, iv. 14, 911).  “One loving spirit sets another on fire.”  Jesus brings men to the new exploration of God, to the new commitment of themselves to God, simply by the ordinary mechanism of friendship and love.  This, in plain English, is after all the idea of Incarnation—­friendship and identification.  Jesus has a genius for friendship, a gift for understanding the feelings of men.  Look, for example, at the quick word to Jairus.  As soon as the message comes to him that his daughter is dead, Jesus wheels round on him at once with a word of courage (Mark 5:36).  This quickness in understanding, in feeling with people, marks him throughout.  An instinctive care for other people’s small necessities is a great mark of friendship, and Jesus has it.  We find him saying to his disciples:  “Come ye yourselves apart privately into a desert place, and rest awhile” (Mark 6:31).  What a beautiful suggestion!  He himself, it is clear from the records, felt the need of privacy, of being by oneself, of quiet; and he took his quiet hours in the open, in the wild, where there was solitude and Nature, and there he would take his friends.  There were so many coming and going, that they had no leisure to eat, and Jesus says to