THE RENASCENCE OF JESUS.• Ma. CAMEIION has written a very
interesting book ; and to make its subject clearer to those who see less accustomed than others to follow aphilosophical discourse (though he has the grace of lucidity in a remarkable degree) he has prefixed an abstract of the argument. Shortly, his problem is to present the person of Jesus in terms that shall be intelligible to the modern mind, which is swayed by what we call the historic method. The principle of this method is the idea of the " immanence " of spirit. This he studies in the expression given to it in modern literature and philosophy, and then suggests the aspect that the Christian creed must present if the mind of to-day is to find in it its highest religious expression. A few'sentences will show what he considers this aspect to be :— " Jesus Christ is no mere personage half-hidden in the mists of long ago, but a personality belonging to the process which includes the centuries, and of which he has been and is, as no one else, the driving and directing force. . . . Neither the messianic nor apoca, lyptie modes of speech are kindred to the modern mind, and indeed one scarcely thinks it possible for the modem mind to think itself back into them and their distant modes of thought.. . . I wish here to suggest that ' grace,' if it could be fully told, is the creative secret of Jesus and the Gospel, of his sonahip and his saviourhood, and is precisely that which the creed of immanence, as it is found in the highest art and thinking of our age, is most concerned to reproduce. . . The emphasis is laid by Jesuit and the New Testament, not on that in him which severs him, but on that which binds him up with others in a single line of rich development. And this is the emphasis that specially obtains in 'grace.' Grace' or 'grace and truth' is the one phrase which ammo t eamesprehend the whole fact and fulnem of the spirit of Jesus, that unique endowment or divinity of life within ham which completed everything it touched so that the whole man in each and all of his activities was absorbed in the twofold ideal task of revelation and redemption."
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