memory may label anything “Christian” that it fancies, and end by losing its own identity; and a Christianity which does not constantly keep learning of the Jesus of the New Testament, and renewing its convictions, ideals and purposes from Him, ceases to be vital.  We do not think of Christianity as a fixed quantity or an unchanging essence, but as a life; and life is ever growing and changing.  But with all its growth and change it keeps true to type, and the type is Jesus Christ.  The gospels, which conserve the impress of that Life upon men of faith, are anchors in the actual amid windy storms of speculation.  We are not constructing a Christ out of our spiritual experiences, but letting Him who gave life to these early followers, through their memories of Him, recreate us into His and their fellowship with God and man.

Their spiritual experiences are the sensitive plate which caught and kept for all time the image of the historic Jesus; but their experience is a memory, and there must be a further experience in us upon which this memory throws and fixes His image before we know Jesus Christ for ourselves.  Unless a man’s soul is unimpressionable, he cannot be faced with the Christ of the New Testament without being deeply affected.  “We needs must love the highest when we see it,” and to millions throughout the earth Jesus is their highest inspiration.  For them He ceases to belong to the past and becomes their most significant Contemporary.  They do not look back to Him; they look up to Him as their present Comrade and Lord; and in loyalty to Him they find themselves possessed of a new life.

In a previous chapter, we used the phrase “man’s response to his highest inspirations” as a description of religious experience; and in responding to the appeal of Jesus, His followers pass into the characteristically Christian experience of the Divine—­an experience which involves two main elements:  communion through Jesus with God, and communion with Jesus in God.

Communion through Jesus with God.  His singular religious experience they find themselves sharing to some degree.  They repeat His discoveries in the unseen and corroborate them.  God, the God and Father of Jesus Christ, becomes their God and Father, with whom they live in the trust and love and obedience of children.  And for them Jesus’ consciousness of God becomes authoritative.  It is not that they consider Him in possession of secret sources of information inaccessible to them, but that, incomparably more expert, He has penetrated farther and more surely into the unseen, and they trustfully follow Him.  He does not lord it over them as servants, but leads them as His friends.  “Man,” says Keats, in a remark which illustrates Jesus’ method with His disciples, “Man should not dispute or assert, but whisper results to his neighbor.”  He, who of old did not strive nor cry aloud, still so quietly gives those who obey Him His attitude towards God, that they scarcely realize how much they owe Him.  Only here and there a discerning follower, like Luther, is aware how all-important is the contribution that comes through a conscious sharing of Christ’s revelation, “Whosoever loses Christ, all faiths (of the Pope, the Jews, the Turks, the common rabble) become one faith.”