It becomes increasingly clear, thus, where the real Christian unity is, and where the common grounds of Christian belief must be sought. The real unity of Christians is in their common life, in the common experience, in the possession of the common personal self-revelation of God in Christ, in the inworking of the One Spirit. It is the meaning of this one central Christian experience, which we strive to express in our doctrinal statements. Our _expressions_ must vary; the life, the personal relation to God, is one. The best analogy we have of the case lies in what the same great friend means to different persons. Our creeds are at best poor and partial expressions of the meaning for us of the divine friendship, of God's self-revelation to us. It is, then, precisely in our Christian experience and in that personal relation to God revealed in Christ which makes a man a Christian at all, that all the common grounds of Christian belief lie. The solution of Christian unity here, that is, is not by increasing abstraction, but by frank concreteness; not by false simplicity, but by living fullness; not by relation to propositions, but by relation to facts; not by emphasis on natural religion, but by emphasis on historical religion; not by bringing nature into prominence, but human nature; not by relation to things, but by relation to persons, to the one great world fact, the one person, to Christ. "I am the Way." The Christian faith is faith in a person; the Christian confession of faith is confession of Christ. And if we are really in earnest with this word Christian, we already have our basis of unity in our personal relation to Christ, our common Lord. But that personal relation to God in Christ is always more than a credal statement _can_ express, though we may never cease to attempt such expression; and for the sake of the larger realization, by ourselves and by the church, of the meaning of the personal relation to Christ, we must welcome every honest expression of his Christian life by another. Altogether, we shall at best but dimly shadow forth its full meaning. And such a concrete relation to the personal Christ is a far better test of genuine Christian faith than any creed, whether more or less elaborate, since in the personal relation character inevitably comes out; and any test that allows even for the moment the ignoring of the ethical, cannot remain even intellectually adequate, for Christian doctrine looks always and certainly to life. Even if one is thinking _only_ of the correct intellectual expression of the common Christian life--the maintenance of orthodoxy, so far as that is possible to us--it should be remembered that the most conservative of all influences is love of a person, and, by no means, subscription to a set of propositions. Would Christ so think? Would he so speak?--these are questions far more certain to keep Christian _thinking_ true, than any intellectual test of man's devising.