Here, then, we can almost look into it.  Yet when we do gaze, our eyes dazzle, our minds swerve, it is too much.  It is not easy, indeed, at the present time it seems to be impossible to reconcile the Christ of history with the Christ of experience.  Yet there would be neither right nor reason in saying that the former was more of a reality than the latter.  And all the time the heart from which great thoughts arise, “the heart which has its reasons of which the mind knows nothing,” says, Here in Him is the consummate quality, the absolute note of life.  Here the impossible has been accomplished.  Here the opposites meet and the contradictions blend.  Here is something so incredible that it is true.

Of course, Jesus is of us and He is ours.  That is true and it is inexpressibly sweet to remember it.  Again, to use our old solecism, that is the lesser part of the truth; the greater part, for men of religion, is that Jesus is of God, that He belongs to Him.  His chief office for our world has not been to show us what men can be like; it has been to give us the vision of the Eternal in a human face.  For if He does reveal God to man then He must hold, as President Tucker says, the quality and substance of the life which He reveals.

Here is where He differs immeasurably from even a Socrates.  What men want most to believe about Jesus is this, that when we commune with Him, we are with the infinite; that man’s just perception of the Eternal Spirit, his desire to escape from time into reality, may be fulfilled in Jesus.  That is the Gospel:  Come unto Him, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, for He will give you rest.  Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again.  But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.  If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.

Now, if all this is true, what is the religious preaching of Jesus, what aspect of His person meets the spiritual need?  Clearly, it is His transcendence.  It is not worthy of us to evade it because we cannot explain it.  Surely what has hastened our present paganism has been the removal from the forefront of our consciousness of Jesus the Saviour, the divine Redeemer, the absolute Meeter of an absolute need.  Of such preaching of Jesus we have today very little.  The pendulum has swung far to the left, to the other exclusive emphasis, too obviously influenced by the currents of the day.  It was perhaps inevitable that He should for a time drop out of His former place in Christian preaching under this combined humanistic and naturalistic movement.  But it means that again we have relinquished those values which have made Jesus the heart of humanity.