felt, when men fling theories out like his--schemes, too, like
his--wild and impracticable: "Ah, yes! what is at the heart of it
all? What but this awful experience which they have known and you
have not--the sight of your own folk hungering, life and faculty
wasted for want of mere food, and children growing up atrophied from
the cradle"? It is not easy to dissociate the language and the terms
of others from the meaning one gives to them oneself; it means
intellectual effort and intellectual discipline, a training of a
strenuous kind in sympathy and tenderness; but if we are to be fair,
it must be done. And the rule applies to Jesus also. Have we given
his meaning to his term--force, value, emotion, and suggestion? In a
later chapter we shall have to concentrate on one term of
his--God--and try to discover what he intends that term to convey.

The second canon is: Make sure of the experience behind the thought.
How does a man come to think and feel as he does? That is the
question antecedent to any real criticism. What is it that has led
him to such a view? It is more important for us to determine that,
than to decide at once whether we think him right or wrong. Again
and again the quiet and sympathetic study of what a man has been
through will modify our judgement upon his conclusions; it will
often change our own conclusions, or even our way of thinking. We
have, then, to ask ourselves, What is the experience that leads
Jesus to speak as he does, to think as he does? In his case, as in
every other, the central and crucial question is, What is his
experience of God? In other words, What has he found in God? what
relations has he with God? What does he expect of God? What is God
to him? Such questions, if we are candid and not too quick in
answering, will take us a long way. It was once said of a man, busy
with some labour problem, that he was "working it out in theory,
unclouded by a single fact." Is it not fair to say that many of our
current judgements upon Jesus Christ are no better founded? Can we
say that we have any real, sure, and intimate knowledge of his
experience of God? The old commentator, Bengel, wrote at the
beginning of his book that a man, who is setting out to interpret
Scripture, has to ask "by what right" he does it. What is our right
to an opinion on Jesus Christ?

The third canon will be: Ask of what type and of what dimensions the
nature must be, that is capable of that experience and of that