But this is not quite all there is to say. It is not possible to teach the new effectively without linking it up with the old. The wholly new is generally not true. New, fresh truth emerges out of ancient experience; it does not drop like a shooting star from the distant skies. The great prophets in all ages have lived close to the people. They have not had their “ear to the ground,” to use a political phrase, but they have understood the human heart. They have lived in the great currents of life. They have heard the going in the mulberry trees, and have felt the breaking forth of the dawning light just because of their double union with men and God.
All sound pedagogy recognizes this principle. The good teacher knits the new material which he wishes learned on to the old and familiar. He takes his student forward by gradual stages, not by leaps and bounds, and he binds the known and unknown together by rational synthesis, not by some strange, foreign, magical glue. The more we wish to belong to the prophet-class and to raise our hearers to new and greater levels of truth and insight, the more we shall strive to understand the truth that has already been revealed, to saturate ourselves with it, to fuse and kindle our lives with those immense realities by which men in past ages have lived and conquered. So, and only so, can we go forward and take others forward with us to new experiences and to new discoveries of the light that never was on sea or land.
Every time the Christmas anniversary returns, the heart renews its youthful joy in the thrilling stories of the nativity. We cannot be too thankful for the inspiration and poetry and imagination which touch and glorify every aspect of our religious faith. Some dull and leaden-minded pedants appear to think that the “real” Christ is the person we get when we take, for the construction of our figure, only those facts about him which can be rationalistically, historically, and critically verified. We are thus reduced to a few religious ideas, a little group of “sayings,” a tiny body of events, which explain none of the immense results that followed. The real Christ, on the contrary, is this rich, wonderful, mysterious, baffling person whose life was vastly greater even than his deeds or his words, who aroused the wonder and imagination of all who came in contact with him, who touched everything with emotion, and fused religion forever with poetry and feeling. He, in a very true sense,
