the object of criminal law the protection of the community and the cure of crime, not the gratification of revenge.

It is this Christ spirit, seeking by a common effort to save society from the ignorance which imperils it, which has created and maintains the public school; has established social settlements; has inspired the better forms of socialism; and has sent thousands of Christian teachers, doctors and preachers to carry into foreign lands and into the poorer portions of our own land, the message of Christ's sermon at Nazareth.

When Jesus breathed upon his disciples and said "Receive ye the Holy Spirit," he did but symbolize that inspiration which, by his teaching, his life, and his unseen but not unrealized companionship, he has been giving throughout the centuries in his loyal friends and followers, and what he then said to the eleven, he has been saying to all who love him and love the truth and life which he has exemplified: "As the Father hath sent me into the world, even so send I you into the world." They who have accepted this commission, though they never knew who gave it to them, they who have accepted

this spirit of love, service and sacrifice, though they knew not whence it came, are his followers. There have been in the church many an ambitious Caiphas and many a greedy Judas who were none of his; and there have been without the church many a repentant and generous Zaccheus who have made him their guest without knowing whom they entertained, and many an heretical Good Samaritan who has manifested by his life the spirit of Jesus though he worshiped not in Jerusalem.

These works of charity have not been prescribed by rule or required by law. They have been a spontaneous activity of an inward spirit. They are an evident fulfillment of Christ's second definition of his mission. To that definition I next direct the reader's attention.

CHAPTER V

I AM COME TO GIVE LIFE

AS FAR back as I can remember I always wished to be a Christian. But I curiously failed to understand what the Christian life is. I thought to be a Christian meant to live in obedience to the laws of God. But when I compared my life with the laws of God as embodied in the Ten Commandments and said to myself what the rich young ruler said to Jesus, "All these things have I kept from my youth up," I had to add this question, “What lack I yet?" From that feeling of lack I could never escape. In fact without knowing it, I was a Jew, not a Christian. Perhaps I should say a Christian Jew. For I found in the teachings of Jesus, as, for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, a higher standard of character than in the Ten Commandments. As I studied not only his teachings but his life, the desire to be like him increased, but the difficulty of conforming my life to this higher

standard also increased. As I look back upon that epoch in my life, it appears to me that I was like a pupil in a sculptor's studio. There was before me the work of a master. I imagined that I was plastic clay and had to model myself into a copy of the orignial. But I found that I was not plastic clay, and however conscientiously I tried to reproduce the original, I always failed.

It was not until at about eighteen years of age came under the influence of Henry Ward Beecher's preaching that I began to understand that Jesus Christ is not a lawgiver but a lifegiver, and that one is not a Christian because he obeys the laws of God, but he obeys the laws of God because he is a Christian. This change in my conception of the Christian life was gradual. I cannot recollect how and when it began, though curiously I can recollect some apparently insignificant incidents which contributed to it. One was a little booklet by Dr. Mahan entitled, if I remember aright, "The FoxHunter," based on the verse in the Song of Songs: "Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines." Another influence was a sentence picked up somewhere in my reading, attributed to Augus

tine: "Please to do right; then do as you please." But the sentence which most clearly gave to me the clew to the true interpretation of the Gospel as interpreted by Jesus Christ in his teaching and by Paul in his Epistles, is the second definition which Jesus Christ gave of his mission: "The thief cometh not but for to steal and to kill and to destroy; I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly."

Religion has often, I think has generally, been a restraint, a hindrance, a prohibition upon life. Such was the religion of the Pharisees in the First Century, of the ascetics in the Middle Ages, of the Puritans in the Seventeenth Century. That notion of religion Jesus repudiated. Whatever lowers vitality, lessens life, narrows it, impoverishes it, by whatever name it is called, whatever authority commands it, is anti-Christian. Christ declared his mission to be to develop life, enlarge its sphere, increase its activities, ennoble its character. The life which he comes to impart transcends all definitions. Paul is not speaking of a future heaven but of a present Christian experience when he says: "Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have