No man was ever less of a proselytiser. In his remarkable book _From Authority to Freedom_, in which he tells the story of Charles Hargrove's religious pilgrimage, he seems to be standing aside from all human intervention, watching with patient eyes the action of the Spirit of God on the hearts and consciences of men. And in that little masterpiece of deep thought and beautiful writing, _The Lost Radiance of the Christian Religion_, from which I have made most of the quotations in this chapter, one is conscious throughout of a strong aversion from the field of dogma and controversy, of deliberate determination of the writer to keep himself in the pure region of the spirit. Christianity, he tells us there, has seen many corruptions, but the most serious of all is not to be found in any list of doctrines that have gone wrong: We find it rather in a change of atmosphere, in a loss of brightness and radiant energy, in a tendency to revert in spirit, if not in terminology, to much colder conceptions of God, of man, and of the universe. "As man in his innermost nature is a far higher being than he seems, so the world in its innermost nature is a far nobler fabric than it seems." To discover this man must live in his spirit. "God," said Jesus, "is Spirit," and it is a definition of God which goes behind and beneath all the other names that are applied to Him. The spirit is love; it is peace; it is joy; and perhaps joy most of all. It is a joyous energy, having a centre in the soul of man. It is not a foreign principle which has to be introduced into a man from without; it belongs to the substance and structure of his nature; it needs only to be liberated there; and when once that is done it takes possession of all the forces of his being, repressing nothing, but transfiguring everything, till all his motives and desires are akindle and aglow with the fires and energy of that central flame, with its love, its peace, its joy. A man who sees so deeply into the truth of things, and lives so habitually at the centre of existence, is not likely to display the characteristics of the propagandist. But the work of Dr. Jacks at Manchester College may yet give not only this country but the world--for his students come from many nations--a little band of radiant missionaries whose message will repel none and attract many. BISHOP HENSLEY HENSON