First, let us look at his attitude towards the instruments of religion as compared and contrasted with that of other prophets of his race. '_Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth_,'—that is the note of the elder prophets. '_The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath_'—that is his. The prophet of old was contemptuous of institutional and ceremonial religion; he suffered, as we say, from reaction and went to extremes, reprobating the instrument as well as the spirit that misinterpreted and misused it. Jesus taught in the synagogue, cleansed the temple from those who had made the historic house of prayer to be a den of thieves, sent the leper to show himself to the priest, and in general accepted the institutions of religion, and the hierarchical organization, of the place and people that were his own. Yet no man can say he overvalued these. His insistence on the spiritual freedom of man and the pre-eminence of spirit and life was both constant and passionate. The institution he accepted, as he accepted the tools of his carpenter's trade, the food and furniture of life as he found it, the language and the manners of his people. Freedom and unity, love, truth, beauty and holiness, as realities in the life of God and man, for these he pleaded, preached, worked, suffered and died. Yet those other things were not to be despised or left undone. He came and he lived not to destroy but to fulfil. In this he is pre-eminent among, apart from, the religious prophets who went before him. His piercing and balanced judgement was the primary source of Christian sacramentalism. He despised nothing of the earth and the body; he found a place for all in the life of the spirit. He was the first preacher to point to loveliness in the flowers of the field; and for twelve hundred years no other, in any nation or kind of religion, did the like. Then Francis of Assisi, his true follower, sang the Song of the Sun. The long history of Christian sacramentalism spreads out far and deep and gathers up in itself from all quarters the pursuit of beauty is well as the hunger and thirst after righteousness and truth; but its pure source is plain to see in the Gospels. There the fine adjustment of the relation between matter and spirit, life and its organs, is maintained. There the value and the meaning and pertinence of life's own instruments to its user, of the body to the soul, is as clearly insisted on as is the supremacy in both meaning and value of life itself. There is none of the abstract spiritualism that is one of the prophet's most dangerous snares. There is none of the contempt and the blinding reaction which so often disfigure and discredit his utterances. And for this, we who have come fresh from learning our new lesson about the movement of organic life and its difficult striving upon the earth may dare to praise him. It is a beginning for us. Not in this respect, at least, shall we stand aloof from him or complain that science or philosophy has built a barrier against him. That Christians the world over have lost touch with him in this regard as in others is for the moment nothing to us. We know that they are feeble and fallible like ourselves and that his way of judgement is hard. To keep the balance even, never to allow a secret materialism to be brought into the scale, or a protest to sink into repudiation—this is hard indeed. And we know that a thousand other temptations have beset the Christian during the centuries that have gone by and that, being as he is and just as we are ourselves, he has succumbed to not a few of them. We know all that; but we are seeking to find out what greatness it is that lies behind all the faults and follies, the absurdities, the crimes even, of Christians, and keeps Christianity alive and potent. We begin to see, perhaps, that this greatness is Christ—that it is 'Jesus the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee.'