We can see plainly enough where the drive of selfishness came from, where the passionate fears and angers and hates that mar our world got into the system. What is not so clear and plain is how we came to be possessed of a driving hunger for _goodness_, how we ever got a bent for self-sacrifice, how we derived our disposition for love, how we discovered that it is more blessed to give than to receive. The mystery after all _is_ the mystery of goodness. The gradual growth of a Kingdom of God, in which men live by love and brotherhood, in which they give without expecting returns, in which they decrease that others may increase, and in which their joy is fulfilled in the _spreading_ of joy—that is, after all, the mystery. The coming, into this checkerboard world, of One who practiced love in all the varying issues of life, “Who nailed all flesh to the cross Till self died out in the love of his kind,” and who Himself believed, and taught others to believe, that His Life was a genuine revelation of God and the spiritual realm of reality—there is a mystery. That this Life which was in Him is an actual incursion from a higher, inexhaustible world of Spirit, that we all may partake of it, draw upon it, live in it, and have it live in us, so that in some sense it becomes true that _Christ lives in us_ and we are raised from the dead—that is the mystery. This word “mystery” or “mysteries” did not, however, stand in the thought of the early Christians for something mysterious and inscrutable. It stood rather for some unspeakably precious reality which could be known only by initiation and to the initiate. The “mysteries” of Mithra were forever hidden to those on the outside; to those who formed the inner circle the secret of the real presence of the god was as open and clear as the sunlight under the sky. So, too, with the “mysteries” of the gospel. They could not be conveyed by word of wisdom or by proof of logic. Then, and always, the love of Christ “passes knowledge,” “the peace of God” overtops processes of thought. Love, Grace, Goodness, Godliness, Christlikeness breaking forth in men like us, remains a “mystery”—a thing not “explainable” in terms of empirical causation and not capable of being “known” except to those who see and taste and touch, because they have been “initiated into this Life.” We shall no doubt still puzzle over the dark enigmas of pain and death, of war and its train of woe, but we shall do well to remember that there is a greater mystery than any of these—the mystery of the suffering, yet ever-conquering love of God which no one _knows_ except he who is immersed in it. V “AS ONE HAVING AUTHORITY”