began to develop itself in the Church, the doctrine that Jesus himself is God. While men continued to think of God as a spirit, they could not, except by a breach of reason, attribute to him pity, love, or any of the finer human qualities that we call sentiments. He was without form and void, cold and inexorable as law, a shadow, a Ghost. We know the impression that is commonly made by the appearance, or fancied appearance, of a ghost. We feel a shrinking at the thought of it. Its hands, if they touch us, are icy cold. There is no love, no tenderness in it. As it draws near, we shudder, or fly away. It may be the sprite of a dear father gone before, but we look not for a father's fondness in its shadowy form. Hamlet crouches in terror before the ghost, even when he knows it is his father. So, though Jesus and a few like him insist that this Infinite Ghost is the loving Father of all, men, for the most part, think of him with trembling, and are fain to fly in terror from his manifestation. This sensuous nature shrinks affrighted from that shadowy Being, and hastens to clothe him in all hard and cold and unlovely attributes. It will not believe there is any warmth or feeling in him.

To meet this very difficulty the doctrine was developed, in the order of Providence, that God had appeared in the person of the man Jesus-taken upon himself flesh and blood. This was a revelation. It opened a crevice in the hard wall of fate, through which men obtained a glimpse of the heart of God. They saw him gentle and kind and full of unutterable love. Before, when they thought of him as a Spirit, they would as soon think of asking some avenging ghost, haunting the house of its murderer, to forgive the crime, as to ask God to forgive sin; now, as they see him warm with sensuous life, with a human heart beating in his bosom, they pour out before him their penitential tears, confident that he will be moved by their entreaty, and forgive their sins of how deep soever a dye. "The blood of Christ," generous, human blood in the veins of a God, "cleanseth from all sin." That is to say, it assures the soul of pardon, just as the same crimson current, touching with expressive tenderness the face of the Oriental king, assured the fugitive lovers that they would be spared, and acknowledged as children of the royal family. The soul that sees in Jesus its God, has none of the old dread of a Ghost.

To look a little into the reason of this. The effect of thinking of God always as a spirit is to harden and stiffen him into Law, which never bends, but breaks everything that comes in its way. Man perceives enough of this law as it applies to him to fasten upon his soul the consciousness of sin. The law is perfect and demands perfectness; human nature is imperfect and unable to satisfy the demand.

Conscious of this perfect law, and of his own inability to meet its requirements, man is burdened with a sense of his failure, and the curse of the law rests upon him. How shall he be relieved of this burden? How deliver himself from this curse, from the state of inharmony with the perfect Being, and reach the chord which vibrates in unison with the whole? Only apprehending in God as the supreme attribute, LOVE; by recognizing him not merely as a law, an energizing force, a moral essence, but as a merciful, forbearing, loving Being as well; as having, like man, to complement his spiritual nature, the quality of feeling, the sensibility that belongs to the heart.

"The understanding," says Feuerbach, "judges only according to the stringency of law; the heart accommodates itself, in considerate, lenient, relenting. No man is sufficient for the law which moral perfection sets before us; but, for that reason, neither is the law sufficient for man, for the heart. . . . Love is the middle term, the substantial bond, the principle of reconciliation between the perfect and the imperfect, the sinless and sinful being, the universal and the individual, the divine and the human." Love that does this is no mystic, visionary thing, floating in the head of a dreamer, and affirmed, against reason, of an immaterial Being, but real love, such as throbs in human breasts, a love vital, having flesh and blood for its basis and working mightily in the hearts of all the living. That love alone that is born out of human flesh and blood, has absolution for the sins that flesh and blood commit. A being influenced only by moral principles, can never forgive a breach of moral law. He who traverses the law is run over and broken by the law. Unmitigated judgment falls upon the head of the criminal when the judge adheres strictly to the statute and puts no heart, no kindly human blood into his decisions.

Man stands before his Judge and pleads guilty. He feels the sword of the absolute law hanging over him and ready to bury itself in their heart. What recourse has he? None whatever, while he looks on the bloodless side of the Divine character, while he regards God as an immaterial Will, an infinite Thought, a universal Force, a Holy Ghost. But let him see Him as a man, the purest, the gentlest, the best of men; let the humanity, the flesh and blood of Christ appear on the judgment seat, warm with its sensuous life, and beaming with sympathy, and there is a way open to find relief from sin. Heart responds to heart, and love bridges over the gulf that separates man from God. Before this universal solvent, remorse, fear, and all enmities disappear. The Father, touched as a man with the feeling of mortal infirmities, bends pityingly over his child. In the face of the Son, the sinner sees a compassionate, forgiving God. What wonder

then that Christians should say, as they bring up this Being before their minds, his countenance all aglow with tenderest sympathy, "The blood of Christ cleanseth us from all sin." Only a glimmer of the truth at the bottom of this may ever have crossed the mind of the apostle who wrote it, but the truth when it is reached will be found to refer, not to blood poured out in crucifixion by the nails that punctured the hero's hands, or the spear thrust in his side, — that watered the ground and had no more worth,—but to living blood in the person of this man, who was at the same time God, assuring the beholder of the clemency of the being in whom its crimson current flowed so bright and fair.

The deification of Christ was the first great triumph of true religious philosophy. It gave God a heart, without which it were impossible to love him, or to be loved by him. Religion without the idea of a God-man - at least one such is scarcely possible. Prayer to a Law, a Force, an inexorable Will, is as idle as talking to the wind. But a man, raised to the godhead, fills it with all tenderness and pity and love. The mind has placed before it an object which it can fondly worship, hopefully, rationally implead. Thus is it made possible for God to be just, and the justifier of him who sees the Father in the person of one of his sons. It is the sublimer justice that we call mercy, the justice that the heart teaches, the justice we see dispensed in the exuberant life of nature.

But while the apotheosis of one man, pre-eminently worthy, is the grandest triumph theology has yet made, it is but one step toward the true basis of religion. It is not enough to single out a single individual of the race, and make him God; man, as such, should be held divine. The Word is made flesh and dwells among us, not for six months, or a year, or two, or three, but for all time. God becomes man and man becomes God perpetually. The universal man is the divine man. The ALL is God, and while he is Spirit he is Substance too unbending law on one side, and generous, overflowing, pardoning love on the other; as represented by the conscience, the intellect, rigid as the hand of fate; as represented by the heart, considerate, relenting, beneficent.

The blood of Jesus is spilt and gone to dust, and it is only by a constant effort of retrospection that any one is benefited by it. We must bring him back in the flesh before our minds in all the freshness and vigor of his youth, and see God in the living man, or it goes for nothing. There is a certain charm that age throws over things, and distance in time, as in space, has its enchantment, making the past look like a golden age, while its heroes, by a sort of mirage, loom up

as very gods. But human nature was never any better than it is now, and it may well be doubted whether it was ever so good. Of one blood have all nations been made, and, in men of the same high order, God manifests himself in drops not less pure than flushed the face of Jesus. It is safe to say that they who see no signs of God in the persons of the living to-day, would have been equally blind if they had lived at the Christian era, and, with the conservative Jews, would have been gazing back at Moses and the prophets, while the kingliest son of God walked daily before them in the guise of a laborer, talking of his kingdom.

It is the blood of humanity in which God presents to us continually the sensuous, loving side of his own nature. For this it flies to the cheek of modesty when a thought impure or unjust rises in the mind, and warms with interest the countenance of the generous soul when there is work to be done or money to be spent for a noble cause, and floods with sympathy each gentle, feeling face, at recital of any story of suffering or wrong, giving in all the warmth and yearning, in all the leniency and long-suffering of the human heart, an expression of the divine commiseration. When, in the devotion of a man to his friend or his household, when, in the readiness of brother and sister to care and suffer for each other, when, in the love of a mother for her child, we are led to realize that we see, not merely the likeness of God, but God himself, the way in which this Being can forgive sin will not be hard to understand; and the moment we see him thus we shall find ourselves placed en rapport with him, and, as by a new birth, relieved of our burden of sin - in the highly wrought figure of the Apocalypse, "washed and made white in the blood of the Lamb.”

Blood, fresh and flowing in human veins, imparting life and beauty and tenderness to man, is quite another thing from spilt blood, after which the religious world has gone mad. One is the sign and symbol of sweetness, gentleness, love; the other is the token of cruelty and oppression. It requires a long time to harden the sensibilities to the sight of blood poured out, so as not to make the heart sick and keep its sympathetic currents from curdling in the veins; and nothing but the incessant repetition of the thought saves the good people who have it always in mind from being horrified by it. Look at these two pictures, and compare their effect upon you. See that youth, full of life and vigor, warmed and animated by the vital streams that, propelled by his beating heart, rush through innumerable conduits over his form, painting it with such exquisite hues as no artist can ever reach, and making every limb and feature expressive of keen sensibility and a wondrous power of love. It is a goodly sight. It fills

one with satisfaction, with pleas feels like putting into the mout who has seen me, has seen the has plunged a dagger into the he whose pulsations had created su gushing out upon the ground, an puddle! As your eye meets it, lost its power to tell of sympathy no more attractiveness; it is loa it out of your sight.

This is the difference between death; between God revealed in dead and buried with the spilt b in humanity, disclosing the swe character, which has power to cle immortal hope and joy. It is the is the heart of God as well, that imparts the blessedness of abso ceive, is love; the supreme law, fleshless, avenging Ghost that we it is the God whose type, whose is divinest in man; the strength ciation, the love that wells out of

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