he world's history. We can begin, then, with the
serious study of the actual historical Jesus, whom people met in the
road and with whom they ate their meals, whom the soldiers nailed to
the cross, whom his disciples took to worshipping, and who has,
historically, re-created the world.

The second line of approach is rather more difficult, but with care
we can use Christological theories to recover the facts which those
who framed the theories intended to explain. We must remember here
once more the three historical canons laid down at the beginning. We
must above all things give the man's term his meaning, and ask what
was the experience behind his thought. When we come upon such
descriptions of Jesus as "Christ our Passover" (1 Cor. 5:7), or find
him called the Messiah, we must not let our own preconceptions as to
the value of the theories implied by the use of such language, nor
again our existing views of what is orthodox, determine our
conclusions; but we must ask what those who so explained Jesus
really meant to say, and what they had experienced which they
thought worth expressing. These people, as we see, were face to face
with a very great new experience, and they cast about for some means
of describing and explaining it. A slight illustration may suggest
the natural law in accordance with which they set about their task
of explanation. A child, of between two and three years old, was
watching his first snow-storm, gazing very intently at the flying
snow-flake, and evidently trying to think out what they were. At
last he hit it; they were "little birds." It is so that the mind,
infant or adult, is apt to work--explaining the new and unknown by
reference to the familiar. Snow-flakes are not little birds; they
are something quite different; yet there is a common element--they
both go flying through the air, and it was that fact which the
child's brain noticed and used. To explain Jesus, his friends and
contemporaries spoke of him as the Logos, the Sacrifice, "Christ our
Passover," the Messiah, and so forth. Of those terms not one is
intelligible to us to-day without a commentary. To ordinary people
Jesus is at once intelligible--far more so than the explanations of
him. Historically, it is he himself who has antiquated every one of
those conceptions, and, so far as they have survived, it has been in
virtue of association with him. They are the familiar language of
another day. "No one," said Dr. Rendel Harris, "