And when once Jesus is authoritative for a man, He is the supreme religious authority.  A tolerant Roman, like Alexander Severus, set statues of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, “and others of that sort,” in his lararium; and many today are inclined to make a similar religious combination.  Where Christ is concerned, there can be for His followers no other “of that sort.”  We cherish every discovery of the Divine by any saint of any faith which does not conflict with the revelation of Jesus; but to those who have found Him the Way to the Father, His consciousness of God is decisive.  In the margin of his copy of Bacon’s Essays, William Blake wrote opposite some statement of that worldly-wiseman, “This is certain:  if what Bacon says is true, what Christ says is false.”  A loyal Christian must set every opinion he meets as clearly in the light of his Lord’s mind, and choose accordingly his course in the seen and in the unseen.

When through Jesus we are in fellowship with His God, Jesus Himself becomes to us the revelation of God.  The Deity to whom we are led through His faith discloses Himself to us in Jesus’ character.  What we call Divine, as we worship it in One whom we picture in the heavens or indwelling within us, we discover at our side in Jesus; and if we are impelled to speak of the Deity of the Father, when we characterize our highest inspirations from the unseen, we cannot do less than speak of the Deity of the Son, through whom in the seen these same inspirations pass to us.  Jesus Himself awakens in us a religious response.  We instinctively adore Him, devote our all to Him, trust Him with a confidence as complete as we repose in God.  We are either idolaters, or Jesus is the unveiling in a human life of the Most High; He is to us God manifest in the flesh.

And Jesus is also the revelation of what man may become.  None ever had a sublimer faith in man than He who dared bid His followers be perfect as their Father is perfect.  He did not close His eyes to men’s glaring unlikeness to God; He said to His auditors, “ye being evil”; He believed in the necessity of their complete transformation through repentance.  But when He asked them to follow Him, He set no limits to the distance they would be able to go.  He did not warn them that they must stop at the foot of Calvary, while He climbed to the top; or that they could not go with Him in His intimacy with the Father.  Some Christians, out of reverence for Jesus, think it necessary to draw a sharp line between Him and ourselves, and remind us that we cannot overpass it; but He drew no such line.  He believed in the divine possibilities of divinely changed men.  As a matter of fact we find ourselves immeasurably beneath Him, and, the more we long to be like Him, the greater the distance between us seems to become.  But He is as confident that He can conform us to His likeness, as that He Himself is at one with His Father.