widely diffused school is to separate the _sentiments_ of admiration which the history inspires from the _history_ itself; to sever the _ideas_ of the faith from the _facts_ of the faith, and then to present the _ideas_ thus surviving the dissolvents of criticism, as at once the refutation of the facts and the substitute for them. This may be pretty writing, though false and illogical writing is rarely even _that_; but a little consideration will show that this new starting point is not even a plausible substitute for the old belief. (1) We question simple believers in the first instance. We ask them what is the great religious power in Christianity for themselves, and for others like-minded? What makes people pure, good, self-denying, nurses of the sick, missionaries to the heathen? They will tell us that the power lies, not in any doketic idea of a Christ-life which was never lived, but in "the conviction that that idea was really and perfectly incarnated in an actual career,"[77] of which we have a record literally and absolutely true in all essential particulars. When we turn to the past of the Church, we find that as it is with these persons, so it has ever been with the saints. For instance, we hear St. Paul speaking of his whole life. He tells us that "whether we went out of ourselves it was unto God, or whether we be sober, it is for you;" that is to say, such a life has two aspects, one God-ward, one man-ward. Its God-ward aspect is a noble insanity, its man-ward aspect a noble sanity; the first with its beautiful enthusiasm, the second with its saving common sense. What is the source of this? "_For_ the love of Christ constraineth us,"--forces the whole stream of life to flow between these two banks without the deviations of selfishness--"because we thus judge, that He died for all, that they which live should no longer live unto themselves, but to Him who for their sakes died and rose again."[78] It was the real unselfish life of a real unselfish Man which made such a life as that of St. Paul a possibility. Or we may think of the first beginning of St. John's love for our Lord. When he turned to the past, he remembered one bright day about ten in the morning, when the real Jesus turned to him and to another with a real look, and said with a human voice, "what seek ye?" and then--"come, and ye shall see."[79] It was the real living love that won the only kind of love which could enable the old man to write as he did in this Epistle so many years afterwards--"we love because He first loved us."[80]