ust fade away out of the thoughts of
men. It is impossible that men should keep on, year after year, age
after age, this simple dream of something which does not exist. It would
be like those pictures which the poet has drawn, something which appeals
to nothing in our human nature and stands only as a parable of something
that is a great deal lower than itself. The poet pictures to us in his
imagination those things which do not appeal to our life, because they
find nothing to correspond to their high portraits, to show those
transformations of nature into something that is entirely different and
foreign to itself. If religion be simply the dream that some men hold it
to be, if it simply be the cheating of man's soul with that which has no
reality to correspond to it, then it will be no more than this. Is there
any assurance that is given to us, that is before the soul of man, of
some great new life which it is given for man to seek, without which it
is given for no man to be satisfied? I do not know where any man could
find that assurance absolutely and entirely, unless there had stood
forth before us the person of Him who spoke these words and who
manifested them in His life. And therefore it is that, having pictured
to you the richness of the life which is open to every man, his own true
life, the large freedom into which he may go if, giving up his sins he
enters into the fulness of the life of God, I cannot help now calling
you to think about Him who gives, not merely by His words, but by the
whole of His own person and life, that manifestation of the reality of
the divine existence and tempts us to follow after Him. In other words,
we come to-day to think of Christ, Christ who claims to be the master of
the world, Christ from whom the revelation of that higher life has come,
not in its first instance in the manifestation of the words which he
spoke, for it had been the dream of human hearts through all the ages,
but who made it so distinct and clear that ever since the time of Christ
men have been able to cease to seek after it, men have never been able
to give up the hope and dream that it was there. It is our Christ in
whom we Christians believe. It is the Christ in whom a great many of you
listening to me now claim to believe--I do myself--in whom many of you
do believe, whom many of you have followed into that newer life. I would
to God that I could so set Him before you to-day, could so make you feel
his actual