It is worth emphasizing that this Personality in whom we find the revelation of God and the ideal of manhood is a figure in history.  When an apostle was speaking of “the one Mediator between God and men,” he laid stress on the fact that He was “Himself man.”  When a distinction is drawn between the Christ of experience and the Christ of history, we must not be confused.  The content of the name “Jesus” was given once for all in the impression made by the Man of Nazareth, One made “in all points” like ourselves.  We may understand Him better than those who knew Him in the flesh; we may see the bearing of His life on many situations that were entirely beyond even His ken; and so we may have “a larger Christ,” exactly as succeeding generations sometimes form truer estimates of men than contemporaries; but all that is authentic in our “larger Christ” was implicit in the Man of Galilee.  That to which we respond as to God is the historic Jesus mirrored in His disciples’ faith.  We agree with the eloquent words of Tertullian:  “We say, and before all men we say, and torn and bleeding under your tortures we cry out, ’We worship God through Christ.  Count Christ a man, if you please; by Him and in Him God would be known and adored.’” And our assurance that we can become like Jesus rests on the fact that this life has been already lived.  A mountain top, however lofty, we can hope to scale, for it is part of the same earth on which we stand; but a star, however alluring, we have no confidence of reaching.  Jesus’ worth as an example to us lies in our finding in Him “ideal manhood closed in real man.”

In fellowship through Jesus with God we discover that His victory is vicarious; He conquered for Himself and for us the world and sin and death.

He imparts His faith in the coming of the Divine Order in the world.  His followers share His fearless and masterful attitude towards physical forces; when they appear opposed to God’s purpose of love, the Christian is confident that they are not inherently antagonistic to it:  “to them that love God all things work together for good.”  What is called “nature” is not something fixed, but plastic; something which can be conformed to the will of the God and Father of Jesus.  A pestilential Panama, for instance, is not natural, but subnatural, and must be brought up to its divine nature, when it will serve the children of God.  The Rule of God in nature, like the Kingdom in Jesus’ parables, must both be awaited patiently—­for it will require advances in men’s consciences and knowledge to control physical forces in the interest of love—­and striven for believingly.  And even when bitter circumstances seem, whether only for the present or permanently, inescapable, when pain and disaster and death must be borne, the Christian accepts them as part of the loving and wise will of God, as his Lord acquiesced in His own suffering:  “The cup which the Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?” And Jesus confers His confidence