re they can understand
the forces of the unseen universe within and without. He affirmed the
kingdom of God and of heaven to be latent in the life of man, and
promised no peace for the soul here or hereafter until its innate
capabilities for wisdom, love, and power for good are developed and
exercised. His precepts and example would be foolishness and a
stumbling-block, his character an unattainable ideal, were it other
than the first fruit ripened on the tree of life, the promise of a
perfected race.

We only apprehend its vital value, as we can trace in our own
experience and that of others, the growth and fruition of that
seed-principle of Truth around which the New Testament story has been
crystallized. This re-conception of the Christ is, like the first one,
essentially of the soul and intrinsically immaculate. It then matters
little when or by whom the Gospels and Epistles were originally
written; for the book as a whole is lifted forever above the level of
legend and myth, on the one hand, and that of a merely historical
narrative on the other, because the persons and events mentioned and
described represent laws and principles permanent in operation, and
reveal faculties whose reality and value we are daily called upon to
demonstrate. We can, when we so will it, verify, each in his own
subjective consciousness, all that the wondrous story of nineteen
centuries ago relates as having taken place in the outward objective
world of form and phenomena. For unto every "excellent Theophilus,"
every lover of the good and true, the gospel of the Christ is, through
the conscience, reconveyed, even as delivered by those who from the
first have been its messengers.

The faith of Abraham and law of Moses, the line of patriarch, priest,
and prophet, that linked the life of Jesus with that of primitive man,
we find repictured in the working of those evolutionary forces that
constitute each one of us an epitome of the past, a miniature of
society. As children of earth we give due credit to each factor in
heredity and environment that makes us what we are as we pass through
planes of physical, intellectual, and moral development. But a still
higher kingdom of consciousness is at hand, which forces us to feel
that as brethren of the Son of Man we are also sons of God.

In every wilderness of human life that stands instead of the oncoming
paradise, a voice of preparation loudly calls. It is the self-same cry
which of old the Ba