grow and take possession of the life of man. One idea, held by very
earnest people, embodied in very faithful and devoted lives, is the
strangeness of religion to the life of man, as if some morning something
dropped out of the sky that had had no place upon our earth before, as
if there came the summons to man to be something entirely different from
what the conditions of his nature prophesied and intended that he
should be. The other idea is that religion comet by the utterance of God
from the heavens, but comes up out of the human life of man; that man is
essentially and intrinsically religious; that he does not become
something else than man when he becomes the servant of Jesus Christ, but
then for the first time he becomes man; that religion is not something
that is fastened upon the outside of his life, but is the awakening of
the truth inside of his life; the Church is but the true fulfilment of
human life and society; heaven is but the New Jerusalem that completes
all the old Jerusalem and Londons and Bostons that have been here upon
our earth. Man, in the fulfilment of his nature by Jesus Christ, is
man--not to be something else, our whole humanity is too dear to us. I
will cling to this humanity of man, for I do love it, and I will know
nothing else. But when man is bidden to look back into his humanity and
see what it means to be a man, that humanity means purity, truthfulness,
earnestness, and faithfulness to that God of which humanity is a part,
that God which manifested that humanity was a part of it, when the
incarnation showed how close the divine and human belonged
together--when man hears that voice, I do not know how he can resist,
why he shall not lift himself up and say, "Now I can be a man, and I can
be man only as I share in and give my obedience to and enter into
communion with the life of God," and say to Christ, to Christ the
revealer of all this, "Here I am, fulfil my manhood."

And do not you see how immediately this sweeps aside, as one gush of the