The growth
of the nation onward toward the true Image of God, the true Human Ideal;
the travail of the nation with the Divine-Human Character which at the
last came to the birth in Jesus the Christ; this was a mystery of natural,
organic evolution, which 'must give us pause' in every shallow denial of
a supernatural involution in human history. This makes true rationalism
reverent before 'that Holy Thing' born not alone of Mary but of Mary's
race, begotten plainly of the overshadowings of some Holy Ghost, of whom
our best judgment is, now as of old,--"He shall be called the Son of the
Highest."

The whole history of Israel is a growth of The Christ, and that is the
abiding wonder of it.

In such a mystic evolution it may well be, in history as in nature, that
the organic processes type the oncoming form of life; but to trace these
rightly there is needed a finer criticism than that which has given us the
orthodox typology.[29]

* * * * *

Let us pause here for to-day. And let us take home, as the heart-thought
of the morning, an assurance which may comfort us as we stand under the
shadow of Christmas. If the dear Christ's throne stood on any such flimsy
basis of prophecy as men have built up beneath it, then, when the
underpinnings came tumbling out, as to-day they are doing, we might fear
that His authority was dropping in with them; that no longer we were to
call Him Master and King; that criticism had pronounced His _decheance_.
But His throne really rests on a nation's growth of the human Ideal and
Divine Image. And, since this nation's growth was on the same general
lines as the religious and ethical progress of other races, His throne
rests on no less secure a foundation than humanity's evolution of the
human Ideal and Divine Image. Man's best and noblest life aspires after an
ideal which is the Christly character. Man's best and noblest thoughts of
God fashion a vision which is the God revealed in Christ. He is Humanity's
"Master of Life."

IV.

The wrong use of the Bible

"The Scriptures will be more studied than they have been, and in a
different manner--not as a magazine of propositions and mere dialectic
entities, but as inspirations and poetic forms of life; requiring,
also, divine inbreathings and exaltations in us, that we may ascend
into their meaning. No false _precision,_ which the nature and
conditions of spiritual truth forbid, will