The willingness of such a Being to share our nature, to live the life of a peasant, and to face the horrible certainty of execution by torture, in order personally to help those whom he was pleased to call his brethren, is a race-asset which, however masked and overlaid with foreign growths, yet gleams through every covering and suffuses the details of common life with fragrance.
This conspicuously has been a redeeming, or rather a regenerating, agency;—for by filling the soul with love and adoration and fellow-feeling for the Highest, the old cravings have often been almost hypnotically rendered distasteful and repellent, the bondage of sin has been loosened from many a spirit, the lower entangled self has been helped from the slough of despond and raised to the shores of a larger hope, whence it can gradually attain to harmony and peace.
The invitation to the troubled soul—“Come, and find rest”—has reference, not to relief from sin alone, but to all restlessness and lack of trust. The Atonement removes the feeling of dislocation; it induces a tranquil sense of security and harmony,—an assurance of union with the Divine will.
Every form of Christianity aims at salvation for the race and for each individual, both soul and body; but different versions differ as to the means most efficient to this end. Varieties of Christianity can be grouped under the symbolic names, Paul, James, Peter, and John; with the dominating ideas of vicarious sacrifice, human effort, Church ordinance, and loving-kindness, respectively.
In the coldest system of nomenclature these four chief varieties may be styled, _legal_, _ethical_, _ecclesiastical_, and _emotional_, respectively. More favourably regarded, the dominating ideas may be classified thus:—
1. Faith in a divine scheme of redemption.
2. Simple life, social service, honesty, and virtue.
3. Spiritual sustenance by utilisation of means of grace.
4. Obedience, unworldliness, trust, and love.
With the treatment of these great themes, sectarian differences begin: differences which seem beyond our power to reconcile. We need not dwell on the differences, we would rather emphasise the mass of agreement. Probably there is an element of truth in every view that has long been held and found helpful by human beings, however overlaid with superstition it may in some cases have become; and probably also the truth is far from exhausted by any one estimate of the essential feature of a Life which most of us can agree to recognise as a revelation of the high-water-mark of manhood, and a manifestation of the human attributes of God.