passion for humanity is the great token of its quickening spirit.
It is the box of ointment, very precious, which has been broken in
society and all Christendom is filled with its perfume. Birth and
death, love and sorrow, achievement and failure, human life and its
immemorial content, the old room and the dear and dreary things in it,
take on new dignity and grace. To detect the new spirit in the old
dwelling is the best and most rewarding of all intuitions. To live in
the human homestead consecrated by the diffusion of Christ's gospel is
to undergo an unconscious conformation to exalted ideals. Because of
our Christian civilization, behind every morning is the Father, who
makes His sun to shine upon the evil and the good, and who sends His
rain upon the just and the unjust. Nature has been lifted into a
servant of the divine beneficence. And man's wild but imperishable
passion for the unseen has been brought to see its last and best self
in the love of Christ. Wherever we look, this gospel is the master
light of all our seeing; and once more, is it not light from heaven?
We know where to look for the belt of Orion, and clear and grand as
the stars that constitute it are the great saving truths which are set
in the human sky. There is nothing arbitrary in this sublime faith,
nothing that does not rise out of the human order, nothing that is a
mere import from the world of fancy or wild belief. The faith is the
translation of fact into thought and speech. The eyes of Christ pass
over and through the order of the universe, and His vision is our
faith. Man is the interpreter of nature; religion is the interpreter
of man; Christianity is the interpreter of religion; and God the
Father is the interpreter of Christianity.