sure help in the next day's difficulty--his
Saviour for ever from sin, and his great stand-by in translating the
Bible for the German people and in writing hymns for boys and girls.
"Nos nihil sumus", he wrote, "Christus solus est omnia".[35] In the
case of every great revival--the Wesleyan revival, and the smaller
ones in the United States, in the north of Ireland, in Wales--in
every one we find that, where anything is really achieved, it is
done by a new and thoroughgoing emphasis on Jesus Christ. It may be
put in language which to some ears is repulsive, in metaphors
strange or uncouth; but whatever the language, the fact that
underlies it is this--men are brought back to the reality, the
presence, the power, and the friendship of Jesus Christ; they are
called to a fresh venture on Jesus Christ, a fresh exploration: and
again and again the experience of a lifetime has justified the
venture.

This brings us to the most effective and fundamental method in the
exploration of Jesus, in some ways the most difficult of all, or
else the very simplest. The Church has been clear that there is
nothing like personal experiment, the personal venture. It is the
only clue to the experience. The saying of St Augustine (Sermon 43,
3), "Immo Credo ut intelligas," is to many of our minds offensive--I
think, because we give not quite the right meaning to his "Credo".
But, if the illustrations are not too simple, swimming and bicycling
offer parallels. A man will never understand how water holds up a
human body, as long as he stays on dry land. In practical things,
the venture comes first; and it is hard to see how a man is to
understand Christ without a personal experience of him. All parents
know how much better bachelors and maiden sisters understand
children than they do; but as soon as these great authorities have
children of their own, the position is altered a little.

The change that Jesus definitely operates in men, they have
described in various ways--rebirth, salvation, a new heart, and so
forth. What they have always emphasized in Jesus Christ, is that
they find he changes their outlook and develops new instincts in
them, and that in one way and another he saves from sin; and they
have been men who have learnt and adopted Jesus' own estimate of
sin. When, then, we remember that, with his serious view of sin, he
undertook man's redemption from it; when we add to this some real
reflection upon how much he has already done,