who should teach the sacred books to one of the lowest caste. A similar exclusion of the common people appears in the inner mysteries of the religion of Egypt. Plato taught that the knowledge of the one only God is so difficult to be attained that it can be communicated only to those of high intellectual culture. Cicero said: "It is difficult to find that parent of this universe, and when you find him it is wrong (nefas) to make him publicly known." The Roman patricians held that they alone as "families" had Penates or Lares. A plebeian, since he could not found a "family," could have no household gods. In the same spirit the Pharisees in Christ's day said: "This multitude, that knoweth not the law, are accursed." One of the "masters" among the Kabbalistic Jews taught that they who are not sealed as sons of God by circumcision "are not the sons of God but the children of uncleanness. Wherefore it is not lawful to contract familiarity with them or to teach them the words of the law." Another said: "Whosoever instructeth any uncircumcised person, though but in the least precept of the law, doeth the same as if he should destroy the world and deny the name of the Holy Blessed One." We see in contrast the profound significance of the words of Christ, when he presented it as distinctive of Christianity and a decisive evidence that he is the Christ, that "the poor have the gospel preached to them."

Secondly, because the Saviour took human nature in its completeness and harmony he consecrated all that is human. The tendency has been to regard secular life as unconsecrated and profane. When the soul awakes to eternity and its interests, it is not strange that it should turn away from all finite things as trifles. What is time in comparison with eternity? What is man in comparison with God? What is this world in comparison with heaven? Let me refuse earthly enjoyments, let me turn my back on earthly interests as impertinences; let me shut myself up in solitude to thinking of eternity, to prayer and preparation for death and the life beyond. But the human life of Christ rebukes this tendency. It hallows human life itself and all its interests. In him the light of the spiritual and the eternal pours on humanity, not to wither and scorch it, but to beam all over it like the sunshine over the earth, and to warm and quicken it, as sunshine warms and quickens the clodded ground into fruitfulness and beauty.

In a human nature and a human life Jesus exercised the lofty capacities by which man is capable of being rapt in devotion, like the saints that worship before God's throne; by which he is able, like the flaming angelic ministers, to go on divine missions of love to men; like the prophets and apostles, like the reformers and the martyrs, to illuminate the world with God's truth, to be illustrious by heroic deeds and sacrifices, to effect reformations which constitute epochs in history. But he took also all the inferior qualities of human nature, the instinctive propensities which play so beautifully in life, the very weaknesses inseparable from humanity. Joys, tears, work, weariness, compassion, filial and friendly love, pain, death, all qualities of sinless humanity, were his. Thus he has hallowed all that belongs to humanity and to human life. Palestine is called the Holy Land, because there the Saviour lived and died. But what he consecrated and made forever sacred was not the country over which he walked, but rather the human nature and human life in which he lived the perfect man. Thus all which belongs to humanity is hallowed. The thought should inspire and ennoble us every day and in every act. In every condition and act of life a man may be like Jesus. In pain and sorrow he may think, So Jesus suffered and through pain and sorrow revealed at once the perfection of man and the graciousness of God. In work, whether in the shop, or the counting-room, or on the ship's deck, or in the nursery or the kitchen, we may remember that Jesus, who wrought the redemption of the world, labored with his own hands, took little children in his arms and blessed them, cared for his mother, and alike in a childhood of obedience, an early manhood of handicraft, and a public ministry as the spiritual teacher and Saviour of men, he showed forth the ideal perfection of human character, revealed the fact that man in his right moral and spiritual development is in the likeness of God, and that man may be god-like in character and action and realize his highest moral and spiritual development in any sphere and under any conditions of life.1

We are to consider, thirdly, the practical influence of the fact that Christ is the ideal man, realizing in himself man's moral and spiritual perfection.

1 Gregory of Nazianzen says of Jesus: "Perchance he sleeps in order to bless sleep; perchance he is weary in order to sanctify weariness; perchance he weeps to give dignity to tears."

Its first influence must be to reveal to us our imperfection and sin. For in him the law of God is presented in the concrete with the greatest clearness and power.

But in him the law does not come revealing only our sin and condemnation, a power to menace and alarm us and drive us to despair; because in him we see the ideal of the law realized in a human nature. He presents himself as the ideal which we also may realize; he draws us to himself that we may become like him, and brings the glad tidings of God's grace sufficient to receive and to help every sinner who would turn from sin to God and struggle upward to the realization of the ideal of perfected humanity in the life of faith in God and love to God and man. In him are at once our pattern and goal, our inspiration, guidance, and strength. He reveals man to himself while revealing God to man. Beneath man's sensuality, impurity, and worldliness, he reveals the germs and potentialities of spiritual life. Beneath even man's sin, his self-sufficiency, self-will, selfseeking and self-glorifying, he reveals unsuspected capacities for self-sacrificing love, for self-forgetting service of others, for purity and spirituality above the life of sense, for rapt devotion and communion with God, for generous friendship, for childlike simplicity and innocence, for peaceful faith in God, the germs and potentialities of heaven within the life on earth. By his heavenly touch Christ awakens man to the consciousness of his spiritual capacities and relations, and quickens him to look at the things not seen and to live to realize the highest possibilities of his spiritual being.

It may be objected that this view of the life and influence of Jesus is due to Evangelical bias. It may be answered that many writers, who can never be suspected of Evangelical bias, have recognized the fact of the wonderful and unique life and influence of Jesus. Even from the facts which they recognize it seems legitimate and necessary for every theist to infer that they can be accounted for only if Jesus was pre-eminently the revealer of God to men, the revealer of man to himself, and the mediator between God and man, who brings to man the true religion and the true knowledge of God, who is establishing and advancing his true kingdom on the earth, the reign of righteousness and good-will, and in whom God is reconciling the world unto himself.

The following are a few of many testimonies of this kind which might be cited:

GOETHE: "I esteem the gospels as thoroughly genuine; for there shines from them the reflected splendor of a sublimity, proceeding from the person of Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the divine could ever have manifested on earth.”. "Conversations with Eckermann," iii. 371.

LECKY: "The Platonist exhorted men to imitate God, the Stoic, to follow reason, the Christian, to the love of Christ. The later Stoics had often united their notions of excellence in an ideal sage, and Epictetus had even urged his disciples to set before them some man of surpassing excellence and to imagine him continually near them; but the utmost the Stoic ideal could become was a model for imitation, and the admiration it inspired could never deepen into affection. It was reserved for Christianity to present to the world an ideal character, which through all the changes of eighteen centuries, has inspired the hearts of men with an impassioned love, has shown itself capable of acting on all ages, nations, temperaments, and conditions, has not only been the highest pattern of virtue but the strongest incentive to its practice, and has exercised so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists. This has indeed been the well-spring of whatever is best and purest in Christian life. Amid all the sins and failings, amid all the priestcraft and persecution and fanaticism that have defaced the church, it has preserved in the character of its Founder an enduring principle of regeneration.”—“Hist. of European Morals,” vol. ii. p. 9.

THEODORE PARKER: "As Jesus spoke for eternity, his truths ride on the wings of time; as he spoke for man, they are welcome, beautiful, and blessing wherever man is found, and so must be till time and man shall cease."

J. S. MILL: "It is the God incarnate, more than the God of the Jews or of Nature, who, being idealized, has taken so great and salutary a hold on the modern mind. And, whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left, a unique figure, not more unlike all his precursors than all his followers, even those who had the direct benefit of his teaching. About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight, which, if we abandon the idle expectation of finding scientific precision where something very different was aimed at, must place the prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in his inspiration, in the very first rank of men of sublime genius of whom our species can boast. When this pre-eminent genius is combined with the qualities of probably the greatest moral reformer and martyr to that mission who ever existed on earth, religion cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity; nor even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to find a better translation of the rule of vir

tue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavor so to live that Christ would approve our life."-"Three Essays in Religion," pp. 254, 255.

RENAN: "Jesus has founded religion in humanity, as Socrates founded philosophy in it, as Aristotle founded science.... We have not left behind us, nor shall we leave behind, the essential idea that Jesus originated. He has fixed for all time the conception of pure religion. Jesus has founded the absolute religion. . . . Whatever transformations dogma may undergo, Jesus will still be the author of pure sentiment in religion. The Sermon on the Mount will not be superseded. . . . Christianity alone remains in possession of the future. . . . The world will ever be religious, and Christianity, in a large sense, is religion's last word. . . . The foundation of the true religion is his work. After him there is nothing more but to develop and fructify. . . . Let us, then, place the person of Jesus on the highest summit of human grandeur. . . . Marcus Aurelius left behind him delightful books, an execrable son, a transitory world. Jesus remains to humanity an inexhaustible source of moral regenerations. . . . This sublime person, who each day still presides over the destinies of the world, we may call divine, . . . in this sense that Jesus is that individual who has caused his species to make the greatest advance toward the divine. . . . Whatever may be the surprises of the future, Jesus will never be surpassed. His worship will grow young without ceasing; his legend will call forth tears without end; his sufferings will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that among the sons of men there is none born greater than Jesus.” — “The Future of Religion " in "Studies of Religious History and Criticism," Frothingham's Trans., pp. 352, 353, 354, 384; "Life of Jesus," Wilbour's Trans., chap. xxviii. pp. 365, 368, 370, 375, 376.

DE WETTE: "This only I know, that there is salvation in no other name than in the name of Jesus Christ, the crucified; and that nothing loftier offers itself to humanity than the God-manhood realized in him and the kingdom of God which he founded—an idea and problem not yet rightly understood and incorporated into the life."-"Comm. on Rev.," p. vi. third ed.

Author of "SUPERNATURAL RELIGION": "The teaching of Jesus carried morality to the sublimest point attained or even attainable by humanity. The influence of his spiritual religion has been rendered doubly great by the unparalleled purity and elevation of his own character. Surpassing in his sublime simplicity and earnestness the moral grandeur of Châkya-Mouni, and putting to the blush the somewhat sullied, though generally admirable teaching of Socrates and Plato and the whole round of Greek philosophers, he presented the rare spectacle of a life, so far as we can estimate it, uniformly noble and consistent with his own lofty principles, so that the 'Imitation of Christ' has become almost the final word in the preaching of his religion, and must continue to be one of the most powerful elements of its permanence."

MATTHEW ARNOLD: "Try all the ways of righteousness you can think of, and you will find no way that brings you to it except the way of Jesus; but that does bring you to it."