m that
message--it was complete.

True faith was simply trusting--trusting that Christ gave to the world
the revelation of God's plan. And the Saviour himself had pointed out
the proof: "If any man do his will, he shall know of the doctrine,
whether it be of God, or whether I speak for myself." Christ had
repeatedly rebuked those literal minds which had demanded material
evidence: true faith spurned it, just as true friendship, true love
between man and man, true trust scorned a written bond. To paraphrase
St. James's words, faith without trust is dead--because faith without
trust is impossible. God is a Spirit, only to be recognized in the
Spirit, and every one of the Saviour's utterances were--not of the flesh,
of the man--but of the Spirit within him. "He that hath seen me hath
seen the Father;" and "Why callest thou me good? none is good save one,
that is, God." The Spirit, the Universal Meaning of Life, incarnate in
the human Jesus.

To be born again was to overcome our spiritual blindness, and then,
and then only, we might behold the spirit shining in the soul of Christ.
That proof had sufficed for Mark, had sufficed for the writer of the
sublime Fourth Gospel, had sufficed for Paul. Let us lift this wondrous
fact, once and for all, out of the ecclesiastical setting and incorporate
it into our lives. Nor need the hearts of those who seek the Truth, who
fear not to face it, be troubled if they be satisfied, from the Gospels,
that the birth of Jesus was not miraculous. The physical never could
prove the spiritual, which was the real and everlasting, which no
discovery in science or history can take from us. The Godship of Christ
rested upon no dogma, it was a conviction born into us with the new
birth. And it becomes an integral part of our personality, our very
being.

The secret, then, lay in a presentation of the divine message which would
convince and transform and electrify those who heard it to action--a
presentation of the message in terms which the age could grasp. That is
what Paul had done, he had drawn his figures boldly from the customs of
the life of his day, but a more or less intimate knowledge of these
ancient customs were necessary before modern men and women could
understand those figures and parallels. And the Church must awake
to her opportunities, to her perception of the Cause. . . .

What, then, was the function, the mission of the Church Universal? Once
she had laid claim to temporal pow