the radiance in even our dim world, 'the master light of all
our seeing.' We have almost all of us got to learn the practical power
of the Christian imagination, disciplined and spiritually enlightened,
to enrich and ennoble actual life. The objects which our imagination
should reflect are realities, but realities not yet developed. What
our imagination should do for us is to teach us to see things not as
they are, but as they are coming to be.

2. 'Life in Christ Jesus,' 'Christ living in me'--there can be no
question that these beautiful phrases which, if St. John's witness be
true, represent the teaching of Christ Himself[14], express also what
is most central in St. Paul's idea of Christianity. It was the great
merit of Matthew Arnold's _St. Paul and Protestantism_[15] that it
{220} recalled the fact to notice in ordinary educated circles. Recent
scientific study of St. Paul has gone in the same direction. The
doctrines of atonement and justification are essential to St. Paul's
theology, but not central: the doctrine of life in Christ, spiritual
and moral identification with Christ, is both essential and central.
The maintenance of this life of union is again, as Matthew Arnold
teaches us, the final and most developed function of faith--'that
Christ may dwell in our hearts by faith'; for faith is, or grows to be,
such devotion to Christ's person as desires to lose itself and its
selfish aims in Him and His work. But Matthew Arnold strangely leaves
out of sight the two-sidedness of this relation: we abide in Christ by
faith, {221} because Christ first of all abides in us by His
loving-kindness and grace. It is His love, always beforehand with
us--not merely to forgive us our sins, but to pour itself out in the
communicated Spirit--that takes us up within the circle of His own
life; it is the act of God incorporating us into Christ which evokes
and makes possible the response of our faith to realize His indwelling
and make the adhesion mutual. God's gift is prior to our response and
the ground of it; and moreover God's gift is permanent and abiding. It
would indeed be a thought of despair if the bond between Christ and us
depended upon the continuous energy of our faith to maintain it. Nay,
it is always there--unintermittent through all our broken efforts and
vicissitudes of will--always there for us to recur to. We are to
reckon ourselves 'dead to sin and alive to righteousness,' because and
only because