culmination of the ethical
monotheism of the Old Testament, which finds its highest ideal in
self-sacrificing love. Jesus Christ is the complete embodiment of this
ideal, in life and in death. This ideal he sets before men under the
traditional forms of the kingdom of God as the object to be attained, a
kingdom which takes upon itself the forms of the family, and realizes
itself in a new relationship of universal brotherhood. Such a religion
appeals for its self-verification not to its agreement with cosmological
conceptions, either ancient or modern, or with theories of philosophy,
however true these may be, but to the moral sense of man. On the one
hand, in its ethical development, it is nothing less than the outworking
of that principle of Jesus Christ which led him not only to
self-sacrificing labour but to the death upon the cross. On the other
hand, it finds its religious solution in the trust in a power not
ourselves which makes for the same righteousness which was incarnate in
Jesus Christ.

Thus Christianity, as religion, is on the one hand the adoration of God,
that is, of the highest and noblest, and this highest and noblest as
conceived not under forms of power or knowledge but in the form of
ethical self-devotion as embodied in Jesus Christ, and on the other hand
it meets the requirements of all religion in its dependence, not indeed
upon some absolute idea or omnipotent power, but in the belief that that
which appeals to the soul as worthy of supreme worship is also that in
which the soul may trust, and which shall deliver it from sin and fear
and death. Such a conception of Christianity can recognize many
embodiments in ritual, organization and dogma, but its test in all ages
and in all lands is conformity to the purpose of the life of Christ. The
Lord's Prayer in its oldest and simplest form is the expression of its
faith, and Christ's separation of mankind on the right hand and on the
left in accordance with their service or refusal of service to their
fellow-men is its own judgment of the right of any age or church to the
name Christian. This school also represents historic Christianity, and
maintains the continuity of its life through all the ages past with
Christ himself. But this continuity is not then in theological systems
or creeds, nor in sacraments and cult, nor in organization, but in the
noble company of all who have lived in simple trust in God and love to
humanity. It is this true Church of