has never felt this need of authority? Who has never longed after sure, definite, irrefutable kuowledge of God and the possibilities of the hereafter! Or who, again, has not been made glad, as though a great hunger had been met, when, as he looked for some religious authority, he has seemed to find it?

We have been speaking of authority in religion. What do we mean? The comparison which people made between Jesus and the scribes illustrates our meaning. Jesus taught, people said, like one having authority, and not as the scribes. Now, it is very significant that the scribes were precisely the people in Jesus' time who thought themselves and were thought by others to have authority. They were the regular, authorized teachers of the traditional religion. They were the men out of all the Hebrew nation who were supposed to rest upon the certain authority of the ancient revelations. And yet, somehow, these scribes, teaching from authority, did not move people. You can seem to hear them expounding their texts. They proved their points, but they did not convince you. They professed to be certain of God, but they did not make God seem real. Some of them reasoned about immortality, but the Sadducees had their doubts just the same. The teaching of the scribes was second-hand. That was the trouble with it. They told you of others long ago who, they said, had seen God; but they had not seen God themselves. And men were dying to know some one who had seen God.

On the contrary, Jesus was the man who had not any traditional authority. He did not depend upon what the ancient books said. He was not a graduate of the regular established divinity schools, where they taught authority. Conservative people were suspicious about him. There were the scribes, they said, who knew all that was needful. And yet people poured out to hear Jesus. Without the ancient books, he laid down the laws of the holy life; and you who listened knew while he spoke that it was the most real life. He spoke of God without demonstration or proof-texts, till he made your nerves tingle with the sense

that God was near. He told of the immortal hope. He did not prove it, he did not go back to the miracles of Elijah for it, that was the way the scribes taught; but it simply grew out of the eternal fact, which you felt as you heard him, that you and he were the children of God, who was God not of death, but of life.

What now gave Jesus this authority? What could he have known of religion which the scribes did not know? Every one is familiar with the artificial answers which have been made to this question. Jesus, it is said, before this life here, had lived in heaven, and therefore brought with him the things of which he taught, or Jesus, it is said, besides being a man, was also God.

On the contrary there was nothing essential which Jesus taught which, in some form, had not been taught by men before. The cardinal ethical principles, the most concise form. of the Golden Rule, the doctrine of self-sacrifice and forgiveness, the reality of God, the secret of peace, the ancient hope of immortality, even his figures and metaphors, were either in the familiar Hebrew books on which Jesus had been brought up or in the thought of his generation. Wonderful as we deem Jesus' teaching, its wonder was not its novelty or originality, but rather its clearness, its vigor, his fresh, strong, spiritual treatment of it. You ask, then, Jesus' authority? Ask rather the authority of that earlier, unknown writer, who first put into words, hundreds of years before, that sublime command,-"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Ask rather how Newton knew the law of gravitation. Because it grew out of the facts and matched the facts, and it had therefore only to be seen to certify itself. So with the Golden Rule. So with all Jesus' teachings. They did not need a voice from the sky or an angel to reveal them.

Jesus, in fact, was like one who stands on a hill while the fog covers the valley. The man on the hill sees sky and sun and distant reaches of view. The men below see nothing but the ground underneath and the fog. There are men in the fog who carry maps and compasses, and profess

They boast of These men in

to tell you where to go. They claim authority for their maps and compasses. They tell you what famous surveyors drew the maps and laid out their roads. the infallible accuracy of their compasses. the fog with the maps are the scribes. They do not profess to tell what they see, but only what some one else saw. Real authority on the contrary is simply light and sight.

You remember the story how, in the famous retreat of the ten thousand Greeks under Xenophon, after the weary march through the wilderness, men in the advance climbed a hill where they first came in sight of the Euxine. You recall the cry that rang out and down through the strag gling columns, "Thalassa! thalassa!" "The sea! the sea!" and the ring of the shout of the men who saw for themselves almost made other men see. Map and compasses, if they had had them, gave way now to the first-hand authority of sight.

This was

There is something more in authority, however, than the sight of the men who stand on the hill. The men struggling in the fog or beating their way through the underbrush could see, too, if they were on the top of the hill. Authority is thus that which makes others see. the secret of Jesus' influence. It was not a man standing on an inaccessible height to tell what he saw of sky and stars to men who had to stay in the dark. It was a man who also brought you up where he stood, and made you see with him. Others had read the Golden Rule: he made it flash before your eyes. Indeed, it was always a surprise to Jesus that every one did not see, too: so far was he from arrogating exceptional authority for himself. This second side of authority- men's apprehension of it is as important as the other. For there certainly would not be any religion or morality either, if, when some one had spoken with authority, saying, "I see," others were not able to answer back, "We see, too." So that, if the authority of Jesus is wonderful, which gets its direct sight of truth, this responsive authority in common men is equally divine, and almost as wonderful, which sees in sympathy, which, when Jesus

says, "Duty," answers, "I ought"; when Jesus affirms God, straightway believes; when Jesus is assured of immortality, hopes with him.

We have been speaking of Jesus all along, because he is illustrative or typical of the kind of authority which we want. Because when you have seen what Jesus' authority was, you can then grapple directly with the authority which modern religion demands. We are making a great mistake, however, if we are singling out religion from all other things as needing authority. The truth is that authority in religion is of the same nature and follows the same principles as in agriculture, chemistry, astronomy, or art. Most men can know little of these subjects for themselves, or at first hand. They cannot be original thinkers or investigators. They have to depend for their ideas upon authority. There are those who collect the authorities in astronomy, for instance, and teach or compile text-books. They need not be astronomers themselves.. They may never have seen a star through a telescope. They may be useful. The scribes were useful. The people who carried the maps of other men's surveying were useful. But the authority of such scribes is second-hand. Suppose, now, a real, living astronomer teaches you; tells you of rings and moons, double stars and nebulæ, which he has watched by the hour; tells you of gigantic distances, and how he has calculated them; tells you of the play of elements - iron and hydrogen in the sun whose flames he has analyzed. Suppose he takes you with him into his observatory, and shows you what he sees. This is authority, equally convincing in astronomy as in religion, equally necessary, too, if you would not only know, but, as we say, realize what you know. This authority has its two sides also: the one, active and persuasive, of the man who lives in the observatory; the other, receptive and responsive, of the ordinary man, who also has it in him to live in an observatory, or else he could know nothing of the subjects which the observatory serves.

One sees now what the only difference is between the

selected men, who furnish authority and set others to seeing, and the ordinary men, who need authority to be made to The difference is only in degree of light, and therefore of sight. To have authority is to have plenty of light. Thus, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, had authority. They had exactly as much authority as they had amount of sight.

see.

Moreover, no man, however great, is the sole authority in his realm of knowledge. Copernicus was great, but he is not adequate. If he had been the only man who had had original sight of the evidence of the earth's motion, if not one else had possessed astronomical genius, we might have distrusted his arguments. But what moves us is the great consensus of authority. All those who know but say the same thing.

Thus everywhere there is a great accumulated mass of authority on farming, on shipping, on all the sciences. It is not infallible. It is not perfectly consistent nor complete. It is not free from errors. There are loose threads yet to be gathered. There are gaps and breaks here and there. Under the most exact science there are necessary assumptions where science touches on the realm of mystery. Nevertheless, essentially, every one who looks for authority finds it. The general principles are sufficiently certain. There is a vast consensus of those who say, "I see." They help you to see. You have not to go in the dark. You cannot believe as you please. Their authority compels you, at least, in certain great general directions.

Now, there was a beautiful old notion about the origin of all this authority. A god had taught it to men, it was said. A god had taught the early men agriculture. A goddess, Ceres, had given them wheat. The beneficent Bacchus had planted the vine. A fostering god presided over their trades. Vulcan had been the first authority in the working of metals. For it was not, in the ancient thought, religion alone which had needed the teaching of God. Invention and handicraft were also the divine inspiration. Everything noble, beautiful, grand, the conception of the temple, and the choice embroidered hangings and carving