tradition." The fountain of God's Self-revealing still
streams. Religious truth comes to us from all quarters--from events of
today and contemporaneous prophets, from living epistles at our side and
the still small voice within; but as a simple matter of fact, its main
flow is still through this book. When we want God--want Him for our
guidance, our encouragement, our correction, our comfort, our
inspiration--we find Him in the record of these ancient experiences of
His Self-unveiling. When near his death, after years of agony on his
bed, when he himself had become a changed man, Heinrich Heine wrote: "I
attribute my enlightenment entirely and simply to the reading of a book.
Of a book? Yes! and it is an old homely book, modest as nature--a book
which has a look modest as the sun which warms us, as the bread which
nourishes us--a book as full of love and blessing as the old mother who
reads in it with her trembling lips, and this book is _the_ Book, the
Bible. With right is it named the Holy Scriptures. He who has lost his
God can find Him again in this book; and he who has never known Him, is
here struck by the breath of the Divine Word."

CHAPTER III

JESUS CHRIST

Three elements enter into every Christian's conception of his
Lord--history, experience and reflection. Jesus is to him a figure out
of the past, a force in the present, and a fact in his view of the
universe. Whether we be discussing the Christ of Paul, or of the Nicene
theologians, or of some thoughtful believer today, we must allow for the
memory of the Man of Nazareth handed down from those who knew Him in the
flesh, the acquaintance with the Lord of life resulting from personal
loyalty to His will, and the explanation of this Lord reached by the
mind, as, using the intellectual methods of its age, it tries to set His
figure in its mental world.

The Jesus of the primitive Church was One whom believers worshipped as
the Christ of God, in whose person and mission they saw the fulfilment
of Israel's prophecy and the inauguration of a new religious era. They
represent their conception of Him as corresponding to and created by His
own consciousness of Himself. He was aware of a unique relationship to
God--He is His Son, _the_ Son. And because of this divine sonship He is
the Messiah, commissioned to usher in the Kingdom of God, and to bring
forgiveness and eternal life to men. This He does by becoming their
Teacher and their lowly Servant, layi