And it leads us back by this route of the social consciousness, to emphasize in life, and in our theological thinking upon the conditions of entering the kingdom of God, Christ's own insistence upon the two universally human characteristics found in every child--susceptibility and trust, which, voluntarily cherished, become teachableness and belief in love. If God is Father indeed, and we are intended to come to our best in association with him, these qualities must be the most fundamental ones. And they imply no lack of virility, either, for the highest self-assertion, as Professor Everett pointed out in his criticism of Nietzsche, is in complete self-surrender to such a will as God's. "When Jesus said, 'He that loseth his life shall save it,' he said in effect--The self-surrender to which I call you is the truest self-assertion. We find thus in the teachings of Christianity a summons to strength far greater than that implied by the self-assertion which is most characteristic of the teachings of Nietzsche, because it is the assertion of a larger self."[62] Our outlook becomes well-nigh hopeless, when we make our tests of admission to the kingdom so much more exclusive than Christ himself made them. III. ESSENTIAL LIKENESS UNDER VERY DIVERSE FORMS It is particularly important for theology that this conviction of the like-mindedness of men has come from a growing power to discern essential likeness under very diverse forms; for this consideration bears not only on the problem of natural evil, but also on the problem of sin and of the progress of Christianity. We have taken some curiously diverse paths to this understanding of diverse lives. Travels, history, biography, autobiographical fragments, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and--to no small degree--fiction, with its stories of out-of-the-way places and out-of-the-way peoples and of unfamiliar classes,--all have been thoroughfares for the social consciousness here. We are slowly learning to see the likeness under the differences, and so to transcend the differences even between occidental and oriental. All this means much, not only for our practical missionary putting of the truth, but also for our final theological statements. They will inevitably grow simpler, larger, more universally human, and at the same time more deep and solid.