True faith was simply trusting—­trusting that Christ gave to the world the revelation of God’s plan.  And the Saviour himself had pointed out the proof:  “If any man do his will, he shall know of the doctrine, whether it be of God, or whether I speak for myself.”  Christ had repeatedly rebuked those literal minds which had demanded material evidence:  true faith spurned it, just as true friendship, true love between man and man, true trust scorned a written bond.  To paraphrase St. James’s words, faith without trust is dead—­because faith without trust is impossible.  God is a Spirit, only to be recognized in the Spirit, and every one of the Saviour’s utterances were—­not of the flesh, of the man—­but of the Spirit within him.  “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father;” and “Why callest thou me good? none is good save one, that is, God.”  The Spirit, the Universal Meaning of Life, incarnate in the human Jesus.

To be born again was to overcome our spiritual blindness, and then, and then only, we might behold the spirit shining in the soul of Christ.  That proof had sufficed for Mark, had sufficed for the writer of the sublime Fourth Gospel, had sufficed for Paul.  Let us lift this wondrous fact, once and for all, out of the ecclesiastical setting and incorporate it into our lives.  Nor need the hearts of those who seek the Truth, who fear not to face it, be troubled if they be satisfied, from the Gospels, that the birth of Jesus was not miraculous.  The physical never could prove the spiritual, which was the real and everlasting, which no discovery in science or history can take from us.  The Godship of Christ rested upon no dogma, it was a conviction born into us with the new birth.  And it becomes an integral part of our personality, our very being.

The secret, then, lay in a presentation of the divine message which would convince and transform and electrify those who heard it to action—­a presentation of the message in terms which the age could grasp.  That is what Paul had done, he had drawn his figures boldly from the customs of the life of his day, but a more or less intimate knowledge of these ancient customs were necessary before modern men and women could understand those figures and parallels.  And the Church must awake to her opportunities, to her perception of the Cause. . . .

What, then, was the function, the mission of the Church Universal?  Once she had laid claim to temporal power, believed herself to be the sole agency of God on earth, had spoken ex cathedra on philosophy, history, theology, and science, had undertaken to confer eternal bliss and to damn forever.  Her members, and even her priests, had gone from murder to mass and from mass to murder, and she had engaged in cruel wars and persecutions to curtail the liberties of mankind.  Under that conception religion was a form of insurance of the soul.  Perhaps a common, universal belief had been necessary in the dark ages before the sublime