we have been told recently, by more than one of those who profess to have weighed and measured christianity and found it wanting, that religion must rest on reason, based on phenomena of this visible, tangible world in which we are living.

be it so. there is no need for a christian to object. we can meet this challenge as well as any other. we need never be careful about choosing our own battlefield. looking, then, at that world as we see it, laboring heavily along in our own time—as we hear of it through the records of the ages—i must repeat that there is no phenomenon in it comparable for a moment to that of christ’s life and work. the more we canvass and sift and weigh and balance the materials, the more clearly and grandly does his figure rise before us, as the true head of humanity, the perfect ideal, not only of wisdom and tenderness and love, but of courage also, because he was and is the simple truth of god—the expression, at last, in flesh and blood of what he who created us means each one of our race to be.