I said that there were many things that people attached to Christianity that did not belong to Christianity.  I know there are.  It is impossible that a great system like the system of Christ, a great person like the great person of Christ, should be in the world, and men not have speculated and thought in regard to Him.  Those are not Christianity.  I want to-day, if I may do nothing else, to tell you absolutely how simple and single the Christian faith, the Christ, really is.  It is not the inspiration of this book or any theory in regard to its inspiration.  It is not the election of certain souls and the perdition of other souls.  It is not the length of man’s punishment, whether it is going to be forever and ever, or whether man is to go to his restoration.  It is not even the constitution of the divine life, the great truth of the way in which God lives within His own nature.  None of these are the essence of the Christian faith, but simply this:  The testimony of the divine in man to the divine in man that lifts the man up and says:  “For me to be brutal is unmanly; to be divine is to be my only true self.”  Why do I believe in God?  If some man asked me, when on the street, I think I should have an answer to give him.  I could give one great reason—­two great reasons which are really but one great reason—­why I believe in God.  I believe in God, my friends, I believe in God with all my soul, because this world is inexplicable without Him and explicable with Him, and because Jesus Christ believed in Him; and it was Jesus Christ that showed me that this world demanded God and was inexplicable without Him; that made certain every suspicion and dream that I had had before, and Jesus Christ believed in Him.  Shall I go to the expert about chemistry or geology and ask him the truth with regard to the structure of the world and the meeting of its atoms and forces?  And shall not I go to the spiritual expert, to him in whom the spiritual life of man has been clearest, and say, “O Christ, tell me what is the centre and source and end of all?” When he says, “God,” shall I not believe Him?

It is impossible, as I have suggested to you again and again in what I have been saying, that a man can have his mind open to the receipt of the truth of a person unless he be a certain kind of man himself.  I do not know but the basest and the wickedest man who lives may believe in the Copernican theory, or that two and two make four, yet I cannot help believing that if he were a better and truer man he would believe even those truths, outside of himself, of science and arithmetic, more fully and deeply.  Men were not all astray in the first thing that they were seeking after, though they were wofully astray in many things that they said about it, when they talked about faith and works.  Faith enters in through the soul that does a noble deed, and in the coming in of that faith the higher deed becomes possible to him.  Hear the words that Jesus said, words that our age must