perfectings beyond our sight, changing the earth as it is into the earth that is to be. All the realm bequeathed to us between Jesus' goal and his creation of the new humanity, we fill from his life which continually renews and unites us, and from his purpose which guides us. We are servants bidden to wait and watch for our lord; but his way to us is impassable; therefore we go to meet him, and across the flood that bars his progress, we, with labor and long pain, build the road by which the King of Glory shall come in.

V

Now that Jesus' hope is found to be fixed upon a perfected earth, the charges against him of otherworldliness and historic pessimism fall to the ground. They were always evidently contrary to his view of nature and his estimate of man. But from the opposite direction objections arise, only to be merged into his hope.

Perfection, it is urged, is unattainable and undesirable. It would turn to evil if attained. A perfected earth, with all its problems solved, all its ambitions accomplished, with nothing to do except the same old things, nothing left to strive for, to amend, would be a lubber-land, a garden of Eden, a blank, an extinction. But it is a deeper thought that perfection is not static, but dynamic, an energy of holy love that fulfils itself and accomplishes evolving tasks always and from more to more. No lower, idler perfection than this is in Jesus' soul, nor is anything unworthy of this in his hope. Hope does not contradict the energies that form it.

But, it is again objected—and these two objections seem to involve whatever may be challenged from this side-this earth, which Jesus made his goal in what he supposed the fulfilment of God's purpose, is as a spark in the flaming universe, gleaming for a moment and then ashes. What are the traversible miles of its circumference, in spaces which light-years cannot measure! What are the computable millenniums of its possible

habitableness, in eons to which the birth, duration, and death of the star-mist beyond Andromeda are an incident! The expectation of Jesus may seem to disappear with the shriveling up of his cosmology. Is the human spirit, in this instance at its most generous ideal, again overwhelmed by superspatial and supertemporal immensity? Yet in some estimates all bigness sinks into insignificance in comparison with the universe of Jesus' soul. Nor would our astronomy have changed his hope and purpose any more than, upon reflection, it need change. ours, who know the science of which he was ignorant, and are learning the rudiments of the wisdom which he knew. For the work which anyone must do is the work next his hand. If it is an eternal task, it begins and forever continues with the task at hand. The universe beyond this world is not now our field of labor: it becomes so by our work upon this earth. Every faithful man works in the lot assigned to him, or rather, attainable by him, to make that place better, in Jesus' spirit, towards Jesus' goal. Each faithful man works with every other in the works which unite and advance to redeem the earth in Jesus' spirit and to Jesus' goal. And when we feel ourselves transcendent of these limitations, for God hath set not the world only, but eternity in our heart, we may see our earth task flashing its signals beyond the orbit of Mars. They are responsive signals. God's work of redemption is everywhere in his encircling skies, accomplished by those who in every lot attainable by them work together for his Kingdom in the works appointed them. The perfecting of earth is essential and directive in Jesus' work and ours. It is not final. The service of the last and least everywhere is final. The work and the workers beyond us are one with us in his prayer," Thy Kingdom come."

VI

When we ask what detailed contributions Jesus has made to the consciousness and the tasks of our awakening spiritual humanism, the wealth of the answer amazes us. He discovered,

to mention only a part of his discoveries, the child, the woman, the common man, the union of spiritual aims with daily toils, the fundamental answer to the perplexities of human relations. From the God of the social passion down to the place of the sparrow and the grass of the field in the universal order, which is the Father's love, everything that enters man's life or touches it is implicit in Jesus' gospel. Every problem of politics, of industry, of the courses of individual lives, of the unity of lives in the great human brotherhood, depends for the essential of its solution, and therefore for the use and direction of every element in the process of its solution, upon his progressive creation of a new humanity concentrated in the primal devotion to the last and least. The demonstration of this thesis is far beyond the scope of these few reflections. It can be completely established only when the Kingdom of God is come. Yet it is safe to derive our guiding principle, whose proof can be only in its outworking, from the fusion of Jesus' hopes with the works we have to do; especially as that principle has never yet failed to result in deep satisfactions to the man who tests his life's efficiencies by their workings out of character and spirituality, of joy and love, and of the conditions favorable to these things. This effectiveness is the supreme instance of the universal content, the inexhaustibly unfolding applications of simplest principles. Nor is this appreciation lessened by the recognition of the wide realms which Jesus could not enter. The greatness of any thinker is measured by the applicability of his thought to activities which are, by historic necessity, outside his view. The wisdom which meets that test has attained the heart of things. It is a continually evolving and originating power of thought and action in its disciples, and becomes more originative with each successive generation of them.

In our day, as in other epochs of change, mankind has seemed to have come to the parting of the ways, the parting of Jesus' way from ours. Once more many earnest men, with

tender reverence, with stern devotion to the work at hand, bid him farewell. They and the generations after them, they know, can never forget the gentlest, holiest, manliest presence that ever blessed the earth. Sanctifying memories of him will, they gratefully acknowledge, impart inspiration to tasks which, they judge, are not his tasks, and which must be pursued along ways that are not his way. With aching hearts of loneliness we follow the path which now opens to our advance. And before us again we see the guiding presence of our Master. In his leadership we are united into the new humanity continuously created by him, as he leads us, one in heart and purpose, to the neglected, the oppressed, the last and least of his brethren. To the starving, ruined peoples he leads us, and to the waste places of the earth, many of them at our doors; wherever there is ignorance, wherever there is crime, and the publicans and the harlots rise up and follow him; wherever there is poverty that withholds the largest human privilege; wherever a little child of a backward race has denied to it equal and supreme opportunity of all the accumulated excellencies of mankind. It is into a regenerated civilization that we follow him. It were better for a civilization that a millstone were hanged about its neck and that it were drowned in the depth of the sea, than that it should lay a stumbling-block before one of these little ones. Through this earth and beyond it, we his brotherhood, sweeping into our front ranks those who were the neglected and oppressed, follow him, to the spirits in prison, to the innumerable dead of unillumined ages, wherever in his unending path there are blind eyes to be opened, dead souls to rise again, hate to be won to love, lower forms of existence to be led up into his universal human, forms of spiritual life unimaginable to us, to be united in the fellowship of his inexhaustible helpfulness; there is his leading, there is our following, into fulfilments everywhere of the love for which he died.

THE INDIANIZATION OF CHRISTIANITY

ANGUS STEWART WOODBURNE
Kurnool, India

In Christianizing the Hellenic world of the first few Christian centuries, Christianity became pretty largely Hellenized, especially in its apologetic and dogmatic formulas. Fortunately for the Christians of Graeco-Roman culture, those who introduced them to Christianity did not introduce the new faith in the form of creeds and dogmas. The missionaries to that world were men of contagious faith and heroic adventure, whose lives were joined by vital links to Jesus Christ. Their contribution to the Hellenic world was a living religion of redemption, and not a system of theology.

But the Christianity that emerged from the Mediterranean world of the Graeco-Roman age was quite a different religion. Dr. Hatch in his Hibbert Lectures on the influence of Greek ideas on Christianity has lucidly unfolded the tremendous change between the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount and the Christianity of the Nicene Creed. This difference is explicable in terms of the Hellenic social environment into which the new faith came, early in its history. It was only to be expected that the Greeks would interpret Jesus and the religion of Jesus through the media of their current religious and philosophical imagery. And it is to the everlasting credit of the Greek Fathers that their critical work was so constructive that it met the needs of the day. The question remains: Do we do them justice or do we deal justice to the constructive Christian thinking of the subsequent centuries if we attempt to make their formulations normative for all time?

There is always constructive Christian thought in process. It is psychologically necessary that such thinking be in terms of the imagery of the environment, chronological and social.