upon the society of man. This teaching of Plato is in full accord with the whole endeavor of Jesus. That endeavor was to found a Kingdom in which the sovereign influence should be the idea of the Eternal compassionate God, the Infinite Father of Men. He believed that hospitality of mind toward this idea would change the character of the individual man and ultimately the order of human society. So far this hospitality has been wanting on any large and worthy scale; so far it has been the mood only of elect spirits. Even so the result has been impressive; by this path have come the man of God, the prophet, the saint, the goodly fellowship of those who have attained a mind above the world, who have felt that here they were strangers and pilgrims as all their fathers were, that here they had no continuing city, and who sought the city whose builder and maker is God.

The great reforms, the truly effective systems of education, the vital salvations have always thus arisen. The refrain has been:

"Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord; and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. And these words which I command thee this day, shall be upon thine heart: and thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine

house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon thine hand, and they shall be for frontlets between thine eyes. And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thy house, and upon thy gates." 1 What eloquence we have here; let us add, what wisdom, in the system of education outlined. Where shall we look for its equal outside the teachings of Jesus? Induce the human mind early and habitually to entertain the thought of the All-Perfect; in this way there shall arise a generation of children, youth, men and women such as the world has never yet seen. Men are by the law of their being the children of the Infinite; when they awake to this fact and welcome the Ineffable as guest, the soul of man, individual and social, shall indeed be the temple of God.

The immanence of the Absolute Spirit in his universe, is the philosophical doctrine underlying the discussion in this chapter. The doctrine is contained in the great ascription of Isaiah: "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory." 2 Great philosophy and great religion are seldom at variance. The universal presence of the Divine Mind is the warrant for the intelligibility of all worlds; in particular, it is the assurance of the rationality of 1 Deuter. 6:4-9. 2 Is. 6:3.

man's world. The same idea provides society with a ground, not in an aggregation of atoms, but in the Divine world-mind. Its science, art, order, insight, goodness and faith are justified out of the Infinite whose spirit is manifest in them. This idea of a Divine world-mind creates hope in the individual that his desire to transcend his individualism is not vain. His life is in the social mind of his world; it is in the Absolute mind inhabiting all worlds; therefore hospitality is the law of his being, answering to the Eternal Mind, whose inevitable indwelling may be augmented by the invocation and welcome of the free soul of man.

The philosophy that reduces mind to the position and grade of an incident, that elevates to the place of permanence and sole reality the mindless, is in dead opposition to all the highest interests of our human world. Such a philosophy, when in earnest, is a crusade against man, and man's essential life. It can prosper and prevail only where man has lost insight into his own world, only where man has lost faith in the highest attributes of his own being. Again, this philosophy plunges in unrelieved mystery the origin and worth of mind, and the highest products of mind; it becomes the negation of philosophy, the demonstration of the futility of thought. For what is incidental in being can never attain to

the vision of what is essential in being. Once more such a philosophy is the suicide of intellect; conscious impotence becomes misery, misery when continued must find a cure; if the curse is the supposition that thought is other than incidental, the cure is the disregard of the incident. These philosophies antithetic to the fullness of man's world, the greatness of its meanings, charm only for a time; they are cut flowers; they swiftly wither and die.

The philosophy whose insight discovers that mind is Ultimate and Eternal, that discerns that all worlds are built in mind, that they spring from mind, that the special world of man has its being in mind, and cannot be understood apart from the Eternal Mind, alone does justice, alone provides that justice shall one day be done to the sacred interests of our humanity. The universe the bloom of mind; the Infinite Mind in the life and bloom of the universe, the Absolute spirit in all the transformations of finite existence, in life and growth, in decay and death; here is the philosophical insight that accords with Christian faith; here are the philosophy and the religion that promise justice to the fullness and worth of human life.

CHAPTER VI

THE HISTORIC REALITY OF JESUS

I

THE consideration of the historic reality of Jesus raises many questions. Reality has many meanings and lives in an ascending order of meaning, culminating in the sense of the universal and final reality. There is the question of the reality of the objects of sense, the laws of nature as announced by science, the physical world, the universe as a phenomenon in space and time. We inquire again as to the reality of minds other than the mind of the inquirer: the reality of art, of the field of ideas; the reality of the spirit in man and in the universe. The question of reality is our universal and ultimate question; upon our answer will depend the truth or the nothingness of the world in which we live, the ideas we think, the experiences of which we are the subject, and the beliefs and hopes we entertain. The inquiry concerning the historic reality of Jesus is thus a single aspect of a universal human interest.

When we raise the issue of reality we come into the presence of one of the subtlest and most difficult of all our tasks. When instinct and common sense are set aside, and when to replace these