Bible's loyalty to him, presses home his question "how can you differ from a view which is so plainly founded on Scripture?" but the question loses its force when we find it urged in the same words from opposing schools. We are far from asserting that the Bible is rightly open to this multiplicity of interpretations; but we cannot deny that they exist. Which is the interpretation, therefore, of the Scriptural teaching of Christ that we reject at our peril? Are we safe so long as we accept some one of them, Catholic, Calvinist, or Unitarian? If on the other hand we merely acknowledge that Christ has some claim to our allegiance, either as the Son of God (however we understand that much disputed term), or simply as one of the great worldteachers, can we be said to accept him in the sense necessary for salvation?

IV. Even to settle this question would not give us a final solution of our difficulty. What of those who have neither read nor heard of Christ, and so have had no chance of either accepting or rejecting him? If, as we supposed our theologian to tell us, an apparently good character cannot but be made bad by the conscious rejection of Christ, what of the apparently good characters to which such rejection is impossible, because of his never having been offered for their acceptance? Are they restricted to a semblance of goodness which in the eyes of God is no more than a worthless imitation? Are such lives as valueless and reprobate as that of the hardened sinner who has said, not only "evil, be thou my good," but also "Christ, I will have none of thee"? In other ages the Christian conscience did not shrink from this harsh assertion. Even Dante could do no more for the best of the heathen, than to consign them, with the exception of a Rhipeus or a Trajan, to a pain

less limbo on the confines of the infernal regions: and little children, too young to accept or reject consciously any view of Christ, were for ever shut out of heaven if they did not happen to have been baptised. With one who still clings to this view we cannot profess to argue. But if we refuse to exclude either children in age or children in religious education from the mercies of God, we cannot make the simple acceptance or rejection of Christ the test of the worth of character in the sight of God. "Rejection of Christ" must be altered to "rejection of the purest ideal that the individual can conceive"; and this is nothing else than the choice of the lower instead of the higher.

This test, starting from the individual, is applicable to the individual in every case; to Jew and Greek alike, to all sorts and conditions of men, to antiquity and to the present time. We shall believe that Trajan, for example, has found salvation, not because, unlike other virtuous pagans, he had the good fortune to gain Gregory's intercession, but because, as Dante himself admits, his honest and pure love and exercise of justice had made him worthy of a place among the glorified judges of the earth in Paradise. We shall set David in his company, not because, after a grievous sin, he consciously availed himself of the merits of Christ, but because, after committing himself to the lower, he ascended from it, in real sorrow of heart, to the higher, in reliance on all that could be then known of a merciful God. Our condemnation of Nero does not rest on the fact that he neglected the witness to a dead Nazarene said to be alive by a Jew from Tarsus, but on our instinctive horror at one who set himself to outrage everything that the human mind held sacred. 1 Dante, "Paradise,” xx. 112.

But here finally the test of the dogmatist is seen to be inapplicable. The only universal test which we can use is moral rather than distinctly religious; and even for the man who has lived in the full light of the Christian dispensation, the question, whether he has accepted Christ, is really the same as the question propounded to every man of every dispensation, whether he has submitted himself to the highest authority he knows. To many a Christian, religion in practice is little more than morality :-the keeping of certain rules, obeying the law as enunciated by Christ, doing one's duty to God and man. This lower ideal of religion may be brushed aside with the words, "this might be pagan teaching, now hear mine," and religion may be felt by the maturer Christian to rest upon the indwelling power of a love that saves from wrong-doing; still, to reach this higher plane, the first necessity is submission.

Unless we are to confuse all distinction between the religious and the moral elements of life, the religious, which consists in loving communion with God, must be preceded by the moral, deliberate surrender to an acknowledged authority. When once the moral act of this definite surrender has been performed, whether as the result of an "emotional conversion" or an intellectual "closing with" the authority and the conditions imposed, or a mixture of both, in any case what follows will depend upon the disposition and the environment of the individual. Asoka surrendering himself to the solemn charm of Buddha, the high-spirited young Ali devoting himself to the cause of his adopted father Mohammed, Elias of Cortona joyfully embracing poverty for love of the child-like Francis of Assisi, Luther hurling himself, lion-like, against the barrier of circumstance in his

determination to be satisfied with nothing less than the soul's immediate access to Christ, all are alike in making the great decision as it is presented to them, but they differ in the extent of spiritual expansion made possible to them by the influences to which they pledged their obedience. Each of them, like

all men before or since, had to face the question, moral rather than distinctly religious, "are you willing to follow the best you know, whatever demands it may make?" The test of goodness, therefore, in character as in act, remains a moral one; what makes act or character bad is that which is a fault, not simply to religion, but to ethics.

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V. Now, does not all this appear to force us to a still wider divergence from the Biblical conception of God's purpose to save the world through Christ? How can we reconcile what has just been said with such words as I am the door; by me if any man enter in he shall be saved"; "in none other is there salvation, for neither is there any other name under heaven that is given among men, wherein we must be saved”; and, still more definitely, the familiar words, "he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life"?1 If the value of character, in God's eyes, consists simply in goodness; and if God's test for goodness, both in character and act, is a moral one, and therefore applicable to all men alike, whether they have heard of Christ or not, and whether they have lived before or after his appearance in the world, then does it not follow that God must deny the unique worth of that appearance? If what God requires are the merely "natural" virtues of kindliness, justice and humility, 1 Jn. 109; Acts 412; Jn. 316.

the Incarnation would seem to lose all claim to be considered the turning point in the history of the race, and would become simply one of many stages in the progressive revelation of God's attitude and will to the world.

But the whole argument of the foregoing chapters points to an exactly opposite conclusion. We cannot,

as we have just seen, divide good acts or characters into two distinct classes, those that have a personal relation to Christ and those that have not. But instead of concluding from this, that the personal relation to Christ is necessary for none, we can only conclude that it is necessary for all. Good acts or characters are impossible, if our previous conclusions were right, apart from suffering and atonement. For goodness consists in a personal relation; that relation, once broken, is unattainable without reconciliation; and that reconciliation, consummated, is atonement. Goodness, for the race, is impossible apart from atonement made on behalf of the race, and such atonement must also be atonement made by the race, that is to say, by one who holds a special relation of personal unity both with the race and with God, the source and the law of all goodness. In the person of Jesus Christ we have found this dual relationship with the race and with God. Apart from Christ, therefore, there can be no goodness at all.

What then of the statement that the test of goodness is moral and not religious? This difficulty will be inevitable if we regard Christ as the founder of a religion either as distinct from other religions, or as distinct from systems of morality. But if we take into consideration Christ's own claims and regard him as the universal master, the λóyos or Message of God to all