Have I made my meaning clear to you? I do not say, Have I persuaded you that I am right? But have I made you understand that it really is possible for one who has apprehended even imperfectly the illimitable extent of the goodness of Christ and the divine nature of that goodness, to feel heartily and sincerely that, of all things in heaven and earth and in the waters under the earth, the goodness and power and wisdom of God in Christ are the fittest objects for our love, our trust and our reverence, in other words, for our worship? Can you name any fitter object? If you will not worship God in the man Jesus, you will hardly worship Him in Socrates, or Paul, or any other specimen of humanity. Will you then turn to inanimate nature, and worship him in that? Then you will be turning from the higher to the lower conception of God. Before I knew Christ, I might perhaps have worshipped God the Maker, being led to him, so to speak, by the world as Mediator. Inspired by awe for the Creator of so vast and orderly a machine, I might have adored Him as the artificer of the stars and this terrestrial globe. But now, Christ has made this kind of “natural religion” impossible. He, the ideal Man, has revealed to me depths of love, pity, mercy, self-sacrifice, in comparison with which the ocean is but the “water in a bucket,” and the stars of heaven are as “a very little thing.” If therefore I try to conceive of God as alien and apart from Christ, God becomes at once degraded and inferior to man.
How shall I try to express myself more clearly? Let me use words not my own, in which a man of recognized ability once summed up for me my own conceptions; “I see,” he said, “you do not, as most do, worship Christ out of compliment to God; you worship God out of compliment to Christ.” The words then sounded to me a little profane, though they were not meant to be so; but I had to confess that they exactly expressed my meaning. Since then, it has seemed to me that these words were but an incisive way of saying, what every one says and few realize, that Christ is the Mediator between us and God: we worship God the Father because we attribute to Him the character that we adore in God the Son.