In Justice, Truth, now understood
For the first time'? -- or `Believe in ME,
Who lived and died, yet essentially
Am Lord of Life'?* Whoever can take
The same to his heart and for mere love's sake
Conceive of the love, -- that man obtains
A new truth; no conviction gains
Of an old one only, made intense
By a fresh appeal to his faded sense."

--
* "Subsists no law of life outside of life."
* * * * *
"The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless he had given the LIFE, too, with the law."
Mrs. Browning's `Aurora Leigh'.
--

If all Christendom could take this remarkable poem of `Christmas Eve'
to its heart, its tolerance, its Catholic spirit, and, more than all,
the fealty it exhibits to the Personality who essentially is
Lord of Life, what a revolution it would undergo! and what a mass
of dogmatic and polemic theology would become utterly obsolete!
The most remarkable thing, perhaps, about the vast body
of Christian theology which has been developed during
the eighteen centuries which have elapsed since Christ
was in the flesh, is, that it is occupied so largely, it might almost
be said, exclusively, with what Christ and his disciples TAUGHT,
and with fierce discussions about the manifold meanings which have been
ingeniously extorted from the imperfect RECORD of what he taught.