impossible to impress upon the practical life of the world, although they
meet with a sort of universal acceptance.

Men agree with them, they re-echo them, they applaud them; they do
everything, in fact, but exhibit them as the moving, inspiring, and
guiding truths of their daily practice.

And among these I fear we must still class that one which is expressed in
the text I have just read, a text which sets forth the fundamental fact
that whatever else Christianity may teach, it teaches as one of its first
and principal lessons that a Christian man has to live in Christ for his
neighbours.

If such a text means anything, it means that Christianity is essentially
a religion of society, that it sets before us social claims as standing
before all other claims; that, starting from the Divine Sacrifice as the
central fact of human life, it was intended to root out of our hearts the
noxious weed of selfishness by the power of the Divine love, and to build
up the organisation of men in their common relationships upon this new
basis.

It may sound somewhat strange to speak at this time of day of what
Christianity is intended to do, rather than what it has done already.

But it is even more strange to read the teaching of the Sermon on the
Mount, and all the other words of the Lord; all the lessons of His life
and His sacrifice; the history of the first generation of Christians; the
descent of the Spirit upon them; and the teaching of the apostolic
brotherhood--to remember that all this is our accepted faith; that it has
been the faith of one generation after another for eighteen hundred