The eternal realities of which the New Testament writers had hold, which filled their souls and made them struggle with words and metaphors to express some glimpse of what they felt, could never be completely represented by any language. Yet we have taken the words of the Scripture and treated them as though they were so many phials of truth in solution. The exquisite flowers of love and [p.28] faith have been crushed and bruised in the mortar of the theologians to produce the infallible dogmas of our orthodoxy. But the inward life does not live upon the abstractions of the theologian any more than our outward life upon the compressed drugs of the chemist, however perfect the process of their making may have been. Cannot we, then, honestly confess that our dogmas are but imperfect human attempts to fathom the deep things of God, symbols that stand for something which transcends them as much as the mother's face surpasses the poor drawing which her child may make of it? Such a drawing can only be understood by the eyes of love, and we need the same spirit to make our dogmas full of meaning. It is not only in intellectual matters that the Church has been insincere. Many who are no thinkers feel that she has not honestly attempted to carry out her own teachings. "Blessed are the gentle," "Blessed are the poor in spirit," are explained in many a commentary, but illustrated by too few lives. Yet the only adequate commentary on the beatitudes is the life of a real follower of Christ. The fact is that many Christians think that by bowing down in worship before Christ they are His followers, forgetting His own test for such: "Why call ye Me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say?" We write of Him, it may be, as Our Lord with capital letters, when He is not our lord at all, nor the master and controller of our lives. [p.29] There is a great deal of false reverence about this lip-worship of phrase and form that actually keeps us from getting as near as we might to the true spirit of followers of Christ. If we are lovers and followers of the truth as Jesus bids us be, we must recognise our kinship and comradeship with all others who sincerely seek the truth, even though they may attack us and fail for the moment to see all the light which may shine in our eyes so clearly: in the mere search after truth their souls are turned towards the light and unconsciously fed and aided by the Source of all truth! Nor must we think of them our blind brothers merely, for they may be fighting a far greater army of foes than we, placed as out-posts of the hosts of God, surrounded by the enemy and overborne themselves for a while, that afterwards the victorious ranks of their comrades may press on over their bodies to conquests of which we have not even dreamed. And how far have we failed in unity with our Master and each other through our not having learnt His lesson of the way of service, of our true relationship to our fellows?