more that is needed than the God who is found within the universe and within man, that mighty truth which is spoken out in an Eastern scripture: “I established this universe with a portion of Myself, and I remain.” That is one of the new avenues of thought, of escape from the destructive forces of the thought that we are considering. Along another of the great Christian concepts there is much of trouble and of difficulty to-day. I take here, for a moment, one of a series of remarkable articles that appeared in the _Hibbert Journal_ for January last, one perhaps of the finest numbers that have been issued, dealing with this question of the time. One of these articles has a strange title which marks out the crux of many a mind to-day; the title is, “Jesus or Christ?”; not “Jesus Christ,” not “Jesus and Christ,” but “Jesus _or_ Christ?”; natural enough if it were written by a Theosophist, but this is written by a minister of a Christian church, and he confesses, with wonderful candour and boldness, the difficulties that all must face who are dealing on the one side with a spiritual ideal and on the other with a man. He asks whether the claims made are on behalf of a spiritual ideal, to which provisionally the word “Christ” may be applied, or are they predicated of Jesus; he then goes through a number of these difficulties (many of you would do well to read the article at your leisure), pointing out in how many cases in the New Testament you come across limitations, acceptance of the thought of the time, and many other difficulties which clash with the idea that this was Very God of Very God. “No condemnation,” he points out, “in the Sermon on the Mount is passed on the harsh and cruel law of debtor and creditor, nor would efforts for legal reform find any encouragement from the words attributed to the Master here. On non-resistance and oath-taking the rule attributed to Jesus is absolute. Yet, as a whole, Christendom has openly violated it throughout its history.” He then speaks of the view which is taken of man in relation to woman, of the “iniquitous principle of sex-inferiority as against woman,” a principle that “has inflicted infinite suffering on half of the human race.” And so he goes on, taking up point after point, and declaring that this conclusion can no longer be avoided—that to identify Jesus with Christ is to “make God a Being who is omnipotent, yet limited in power; omniscient, yet defective in knowledge; infinitely good, yet One who declines ‘to turn any part of His knowledge as God into science for man.’ … It would be an abuse of language to say that this is a mystery. It is flat contradiction.” Now when a clergyman can write like that in a publication that goes almost exclusively among the educated classes, you can realise how great is the difficulty which is confronting modern thought with regard to the personality of Jesus and the larger revelation of the Christ.