until we know what he is do
we see how very little we are, and how far we have gone wrong. It is
his power of help and sympathy that teaches us the hardness of our
own hearts, our own fundamental want of sympathy. Again, until a man
knows Jesus Christ, he has little chance of even guessing the
grandeur of which he himself is capable. A man has, as he says, done
his best--for years, it may be, of strenuous endeavour; and then
comes the new experience of Jesus Christ, and he is lifted high
above his record, he gains a new power, a new tenderness, and he
does things incredible. We do not know the wrong or the right of
which man is capable, till we know Jesus Christ. The y of our
equation, then, does not tell us very much.

When it comes to the x, is it not very often a mixture--an
ill-adjusted mixture--of the Father of Jesus, with the rather
negative "beyond all being" of later Greek speculation, and perhaps
the Judge of Roman law? The exact proportions in the mixture will
vary with the thinker. But, in fact, is it not true now that we
really only know God through Jesus? For it is only in and through
Jesus that we take the trouble, and have the faith, to explore and
test God, to try experiments upon God, to know what he can do and
what he will do. It is only in Jesus that the Love of God (in the
New Testament sense), is tenable at all. It is evanescent apart from
Jesus; it rests on the assurance of his words, his work, his
personality. A vague diffused "love of God" for everything in
general and nothing in particular, we saw to be a quite different
thing from the personal attachment, with which, according to Jesus,
God loves the individual man. That is the centre of the Gospel; it
is belief in that, which has done everything in a rational world, as
we saw at the beginning; and it is a most impossible belief, never
long or very actively held apart from Jesus. Only in him can we
believe it. Only in him, too, is the new experience of God's
forgiveness and redemption possible, in all its fullness and
sureness and power. "Dieu me pardonnera," said Heine, "c'est son
metier";--but he had not the Christian sense of what it was that God
was to forgive. It is only in Jesus that we can live the real life
of prayer, in the intimate way of Jesus. All this means that we have
to solve our x from Jesus--not to discover him through it. The plain
fact is that we actually know Jesus a great deal better than we know
our x and our y, the el