rns contains the Omega as well as the Alpha of all
truth. There is no word in all the gospel that is an advance on that
initial word, the faith of which saves the most ignorant who trusts to
it. We begin with the end, if I may say so, and the highest truth is the
first truth that we learn. But the aspect which that truth bears to the
man when, first of all, it dawns upon him, and he sees in it the end of
his fears, the cleansing of his heart, the pardoning of his sins, his
acceptance with God, is a very different thing from the aspect that it
ought to wear to him, after, say forty years of pondering, of growing up
to it, after years of experience have taught him. Life is the best
commentary upon the truths of the gospel, and the experience teaches
their depths and their power, their far-reaching applications and
harmonies. So our growth in the knowledge of Jesus Christ is not a
growing away from the earliest lessons, or a leaving them behind, but a
growing up to and into them. So as to learn more fully and clearly all
their infinite contents of grace and truth. The treasure put into our
hands at first is discovered in its true preciousness as life and trial
test its metal and its inexhaustibleness. The child's lesson is the
man's lesson. All our Christian progress in knowledge consists in
bringing to light the deep meaning, the far-reaching consequences of the
fact of Christ's incarnation, death, and glory. 'God so loved the world
that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him
should not perish, but have everlasting life.' The same truth which
shone at first a star in a far-off sky, through a sinful man's night of
fear and agony, grows in brilliance as we draw nearer to it, until at
last it blazes, the central Sun of the Universe, the hearth for all
vital warmth, the fountain of all guiding light, the centre of all
energy. Christ in His manhood, in His divinity, Christ in His cross,
resurrection, and glory, is the object of all knowledge, and we grow in
the knowledge of Him by penetrating more deeply into the truths which we
have long ago learned, as well as by following them as they lead us into
new fields, and disclose unsuspected issues in creed and practice.

That growth will not be one-sided; for grace and knowledge will advance
side by side--the moral and spiritual keeping step with the
intellectual, the practical with the theoretical. And that growth will
have no term. It is growth towards an i