Editorial April 2, 1904 Issue

"I say unto thee arise"

It is the mission and end of Christian education to bring the spiritual meaning of the great facts of religious history into individual experience, to epitomize and embody in man the providential leadership of mankind. We reach the true interpretation of the life of Jesus only as we come to apprehend that since he lived our life for us, and thereby became our Way-shower, all the supreme events of his history are to be brought within the embrace of our human consciousness until we shall have gained that comprehensiveness and enrichment of experience to which he referred when he prayed, "I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one."

It thus transpires that while the hope and confidence of the believer in historic Christianity may be supported for the most part by his conviction of the truth of the objective works of the Master, the faith of the believer in Christ is grounded in his own subjective experience of these works. The one finds a degree of assurance and satisfaction in the acceptance of the healing of the blind man, or in our Lord's great Easter victory; the other, a peace and joy which passeth knowledge in the achievement of spiritual vision, the conscious resurrection from the domination of materiality, the demonstrable presence of Immanuel.

"Because I live, ye shall live also." "The works that I do, ye shall do also,"—this is the distinctive teaching of Jesus that every temptation, every struggle, every ascension of his earthly career is to be repeated in ours, and Paul's "all things are yours," surely compassed this thought of the rehearsal by each, upon his lesser stage, of every act of the Nazarene's consummate life. The individual Easter call of the Master, "I say unto thee, Arise," takes on a deeper and richer meaning, therefore, as we come to understand that it appoints for each this re-living of the Christ-life, and that his mandatory appeal is addressed to every unit of the human consciousness. Every sense, every faculty, every sentiment, every expression of the individual life shall hear his voice and come forth from its entombment in mortal sense, be emancipated from both its inherited and its acquired fetters of habit, impulse, and tradition, so that man, God's child, may, in every event and in every hour, ascend triumphant with his Lord.

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