e of the Christian
Religion_, from which I have made most of the quotations in this
chapter, one is conscious throughout of a strong aversion from the field
of dogma and controversy, of deliberate determination of the writer to
keep himself in the pure region of the spirit.

Christianity, he tells us there, has seen many corruptions, but the most
serious of all is not to be found in any list of doctrines that have
gone wrong:

We find it rather in a change of atmosphere, in a loss of
brightness and radiant energy, in a tendency to revert in spirit,
if not in terminology, to much colder conceptions of God, of man,
and of the universe.

"As man in his innermost nature is a far higher being than he seems, so
the world in its innermost nature is a far nobler fabric than it seems."
To discover this man must live in his spirit.

"God," said Jesus, "is Spirit," and it is a definition of God which
goes behind and beneath all the other names that are applied to
Him.

The spirit is love; it is peace; it is joy; and perhaps joy most of
all. It is a joyous energy, having a centre in the soul of man.

It is not a foreign principle which has to be introduced into a man
from without; it belongs to the substance and structure of his
nature; it needs only to be liberated there; and when once that is
done it takes possession of all the forces of his being, repressing
nothing, but transfiguring everything, till all his motives and
desires are akindle and aglow with the fires and energy of that
central flame, with its love, its peace, its joy.

A man who sees so deeply into the truth of things, and lives so
habitually at the centre of existence, is not likely to display the
characteristics of the propagandist. But the work of Dr. Jacks at
Manchester College may yet give not only this country but the world--for
his students come from many nations--a little band of radiant
missionaries whose message will repel none and attract many.

BISHOP HENSLEY HENSON

DURHAM, Bishop of, since 1920; Rt. Rev. Herbert Hensley Henson; b.
London 8th Nov., 1863, 4th s. of Late Thomas Henson, Broadstairs
Kent, and Martha Fear; m. 1902 Isabella Caroline, o.d. of J.W.
Dennistoun of Dennistoun, N.B. Educ.: Privately and at Oxford.
First Class Modern History; Fellow of All Soul's College, Oxford,
1884-91, reelected 1896; B.D. 1898; Hon. D.