that sin forms, the despair
and helplessness that sin induces, the dreadful indifference which
is its expression,--how shall they be removed? How shall the unfaith
which the mystery, the suffering, the evil of the world induce be
overcome? Being a sinner I do not dare, and being ignorant I do not
believe, to come. God is there and God wants us; like as a father
pitieth his children so He pitieth us. He knoweth our frame, He
remembereth that we are dust. We know that is true; again we do not
know it is true. All the sin that is in us and all which that sin
has done to us insists and insists that it is not true. And the mind
wonders--and wonders. What shall break that distrust; and melt away
the hardness so that we have an open mind; and send hope into despair,
hope with its accompanying confidence to act; change unfaith to
belief, until, in having faith, we thereby have that which faith
believes in? How amazing is life! We look out into the heavenly
country, we long to walk therein, we have so little power to stir hand
or foot to gain our entrance. We know it is there but all the facts of
our rebellious or self-centered life, individual and associated alike,
are against it and therefore we do not know that it is there.

Philosophy and reason and proofs of logic cannot greatly help us here.
No man was ever yet argued into the kingdom of God. We cannot convince
ourselves of our souls. For we are creatures, not minds; lives, not
ideas. Only life can convince life; only a Person but, of course,
a transcendent person that is more like Him than like us, can make
that Other-who-lives certain and sure for us. This necessity for some
intermediary who shall be a human yet more-than-human proof that
God is and that man may be one with Him; this reinforcing of the old
argument from subjective necessity by its verification in the actual
stuff of objective life, has been everywhere sought by men.

Saviours, redeemers, mediators, then, are not theological manikins.
They are not superfluous figures born of a mistaken notion of
the universe. They are not secondary gods, concessions to our
childishness. They, too, are called for in the nature of things. But
to really mediate they must have the qualities of both that which they
transmit and of those who receive the transmission. Most of all they
must have that "other" quality, so triumphant and self-verifying that
seeing it constrains belief. A mediator wholly unlike ourselves would
be