year after year, coming
back with increased vitality, with more reality and strength behind
it; coming back because the Christ within the Church, finding that
forgetfulness was coming over the modern mind, has, as in the olden
days, used a scourge of whipcord instead of only the voice of love.
For inasmuch as the voice of love was not listened to, and the reality
of His presence was being forgotten, He has used the whip of what is
called the Higher Criticism to drive men out of books back to the
living Master of the Christian faith. When you build the house of your
faith on books and manuscripts, on councils and traditions, you are
building on the sand, and the storm has come--the storm of criticism,
of investigation, of scholarship, and the house of faith totters,
because it is founded on the sand. But build the house of your faith
on the rock of human experience, on the one rock on which every true
Church is founded, the individual touch between the human Spirit and
the divine, the personal experience of the human man on earth with the
divine Man in the heaven, beside and around him, and you build the
house of your faith on a rock that nothing can shake nor destroy, and
it will shelter you, no matter what storms may rage outside. And so,
as in the temple, the whip has been used in order that men may learn
what they would not learn by the gentle instruction spoken only in the
words of the friend. The enemy has been used for it, the foe, the
assailant, who has made sharp his weapons, and has cut many of the old
manuscripts in pieces; and the result of that is that the Christian
Church is thrown back upon the Christ Himself, no longer seen dimly
through history, but in vivid reality before the eyes of the heart of
the Christian, and that He will give to Christianity a new life. The
mystic belief will come back, and the literal interpretations will
fall away. And when that is done, then Christianity shall have renewed
its youth and its power, and shall know that the Master is living in
His Church, and is still the Master of life and death, as in the olden
days.

And by a very real instinct you will find that the most earnest
Christians cling to the humanity of Jesus, and that is the value of
the Master to us, when inside our hearts is written the truth of His
existence. If there were only such men as we, and God, the gulf would
be too vast, the difference too terrible--nothing to encourage us to
believe that Divinity wa