LECTURE VIII. THE MOTIVE POWER OF CHRISTIANITY. In this our concluding Lecture we have to consider the motive power of Christianity. In the course of our inquiry we have seen that Christianity is not merely a moral law or a system of dogmatic truth, standing as an object of voluntary contemplation over against the conscience and the intellect of man, and throwing upon the human will the whole burden of obedience and reform. It is a religion of redemption, coming to seek and save the lost. It recognizes sin as the supreme evil, and proposes to cure it by regenerating human nature itself, and filling it with the life of God. How does it attempt to accomplish this vast purpose? In undertaking to describe some of the sources of its power, let us carefully distinguish the effect itself from our theory of the effect. It is possible to experience its inward energy, and have one's whole life changed and moulded by its influence, and yet interpret very imperfectly the force by which we have been swayed; and it may well be that it has many paths of approach to the human heart, and that no single experience can exhaust the wealth of its resources. The wind bloweth where it listeth, and we hear the sound of it, but know not whence it comes and whither it goes; so is every one that is born of the Spirit. We know its power; we know that, whereas we were blind, now we see, and that new aspirations, new dispositions, new aims, have captivated our minds; but the process may elude the grasp of our intellect, and we may be unable to tell the true story of that inward change. Still our intellect goes in search of knowledge, and would translate into terms of thought what has come to it in the form of spiritual impression; and thought, however inadequate, helps to retain and keep alive an impression which, if it touched only our emotions, might become evanescent. Bearing this limitation in mind, and remembering also the necessary brevity of a lecture, we may speak of some of the sources of regenerating power in Christianity. THE POWER OF IDEAS. 285 First, then, it cannot be denied that ideas themselves, when embraced with hearty faith, possess a life-giving efficacy, and he who discovers or enforces some great spiritual truth, and makes it a reality within the minds of men, stands in the front rank of the world's benefactors. People sometimes, in their anxiety to do honour to Christ, speak as though it would reduce him to the level of mean and common men to regard him simply as a teacher, though that was his characteristic title when he was on earth. But if he was a solitary explorer in the realms of spirit, as Newton was in the realms of nature, and gathered up into a few grand announcements the partial truths of his predecessors, and if these announcements lived on, and became the bread of life to millions of souls, this alone would suffice to place him on a supreme eminence, and entitle him to the grateful veneration of mankind, even though the truth, when once proclaimed, assumed an independent energy, and took its place, like the law of gravitation, among the inalienable possessions of the world; and if it be said that this view would make him "a mere man," I must confess my inability to attach any precise, and still more any derogatory, meaning to |