where a stands for the historical Jesus Christ, and x and y respectively for God and man. But what do we mean by x and y? Let us face our facts. What do we know of man apart from Jesus Christ? Surely it is only in him that we realize man--only in him that we grasp what human depravity really is, the real meaning and implications of human sin. It is those who have lived with Jesus Christ, who are most conscious of sin; and this is no mere morbid imagination or fancy, it rests on a much deeper exploration of human nature than men in general attempt. Not until we know what he is do we see how very little we are, and how far we have gone wrong. It is his power of help and sympathy that teaches us the hardness of our own hearts, our own fundamental want of sympathy. Again, until a man knows Jesus Christ, he has little chance of even guessing the grandeur of which he himself is capable. A man has, as he says, done his best--for years, it may be, of strenuous endeavour; and then comes the new experience of Jesus Christ, and he is lifted high above his record, he gains a new power, a new tenderness, and he does things incredible. We do not know the wrong or the right of which man is capable, till we know Jesus Christ. The y of our equation, then, does not tell us very much. When it comes to the x, is it not very often a mixture--an ill-adjusted mixture--of the Father of Jesus, with the rather negative "beyond all being" of later Greek speculation, and perhaps the Judge of Roman law? The exact proportions in the mixture will vary with the thinker. But, in fact, is it not true now that we really only know God through Jesus? For it is only in and through Jesus that we take the trouble, and have the faith, to explore and test God, to try experiments upon God, to know what he can do and what he will do. It is only in Jesus that the Love of God (in the New Testament sense), is tenable at all. It is evanescent apart from Jesus; it rests on the assurance of his words, his work, his personality. A vague diffused "love of God" for everything in general and nothing in particular, we saw to be a quite different thing from the personal attachment, with which, according to Jesus, God loves the individual man. That is the centre of the Gospel; it is belief in that, which has done everything in a rational world, as we saw at the beginning; and it is a most impossible belief, never long or very actively held apart from Jesus. Only in him can we believe it. Only in him, too, is the new experience of God's forgiveness and redemption possible, in all its fullness and sureness and power. "Dieu me pardonnera," said Heine, "c'est son métier";--but he had not the Christian sense of what it was that God was to forgive. It is only in Jesus that we can live the real life of prayer, in the intimate way of Jesus. All this means that we have to solve our x from Jesus--not to discover him through it. The plain fact is that we actually know Jesus a great deal better than we know