s of Christ_ by historical students have their value
when our main aim is historical information; but the best of them is
poor indeed compared with our gospels when we wish to attain the life of
Christ's followers. The humblest reader of the New Testament has the
same chance with the most learned scholar of attaining a true knowledge
of Jesus for religious purposes; and Jesus remains, as He would surely
wish to remain, a democratic figure accessible to all in the simply told
narratives of the evangelists.

Each age seems to have its own way of phrasing its religious needs; and
various elements in the picture of Jesus have been prized by the
succeeding ages as of special worth. Our generation finds itself
religiously most interested in three outstanding features in the record
of His life:

(1) _His singular religious experience._ His first followers were
impressed with His unique relation to God when they saw in Him the
awaited Messiah. The narratives represent Him as invariably trusting,
loving, obeying the Most High as the Father, Lord of heaven and earth.
His sayings lay special stress on God's tender personal interest in
every child of His, on His stern judgment of hypocrites, on His
Self-sacrificing love, and on His kindness to the unthankful and the
evil. While it is not easy for us with the limited materials at hand to
discriminate clearly between the elements in Jesus' thought of God which
He shared with His contemporaries, and those which were His own
contribution, so discerning a believer as Paul, reared in the most
earnest circles of Jewish thought, could not name the God to whom he had
been brought through Jesus, without mentioning Jesus Himself; God was to
him "the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." The Deity Paul
worshipped may be described as that loving Response from the unseen
which answered the trust of Jesus; or rather that personal Approach to
man from the unseen which produced Jesus. Men who had not been atheists
before they became Christians are addressed by another writer as
"through Jesus believers in God." It is not enough to say that in Jesus'
experience God was Father; others before Him, both within and without
Israel, had known the Divine Fatherhood. It was the fatherliness in God
which evoked and corresponded to Jesus' sonship, that formed His new and
distinctive contribution. A mutual relationship is expressed in the
saying: "No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any