things do not comport; it is impossible they should be both true of the same individual. The ground neither of injudicious foreign influence, nor of vanity, nor of deep-laid ambition, nor of enthusiasm, nor of honest mistake, can be taken in this case. The wickedness, or weakness, or both, which these suppositions would involve, are utterly irreconcilable with the acknowledged character of Jesus. None of the principles which are found to account for extravagant claims in the case of other historical personages, nor all of these principles together, are adequate or applicable in His case. But whether unexplained or explained, the fact remains, that Jesus repeatedly expressed a sense of personal perfection and of extraordinary relation to God. He found and felt this, as a fact of His inward nature; He uttered it, as a distinct consciousness. A conviction is founded on evidence, and is reached by a process of reasoning. The foundation may be unsound, the reasoning may be false, and the conviction may be an error; but a consciousness is an immediate and involuntary act, like seeing by the eye, or hearing by the ear. It is its own evidence, and none can be more satisfying, more sure. By the very constitution of the soul, this is the highest proof possible of the reality of that which it presents. We can come only to one conclusion, that the words of Jesus were the faithful and genuine expression of a consciousness which creates an impassable distinction between Him and all men. In that true voice of His soul, there is the strongest evidence of indubitable reality. He spoke what He felt, and He felt what He truly was. His nature was conscious of the profound mystery which belonged to it, and He simply uttered this consciousness; and no apparent inconsistency between what He claimed and what He seemed to be, troubled Him for a moment. A young man who had not long left the carpenter's workshop, who at the moment He spoke was in a condition of poverty, and was associated only with those who were obscure and poor like Himself, calmly declared His sense of perfect faultlessness and of extraordinary relation to God. Is it possible that any candid mind can reflect on the plain facts of this history, and on the principles which lie beneath them, on the seeming of this marvellous life, and on the reality which the seeming does but veil,—ay, often unveil,—and not be filled involuntarily with wonder and with awe ?'

Some years ago, there lived and worked in the town of Newbury

port, Massachusetts, a Unitarian clergyman named the Rev. A. B. Muzzey, a volume of whose discourses, entitled Christ in the Will, the Heart, and the Life, was published in 1861, by Walker & Co., Boston. In that volume there is a sermon on the Known and Unknown Christ, from the words, 'No man knoweth the Son but the Father,' and from which I make the following quotation: 'I ́am not satisfied with that view which makes our Lord only an inspired man. If He was this only, He falls to the level of the ordinary Christian martyr. I think His claims, His language, and His whole life and character, went to draw a line of demarcation between Him and our race. Look at His claims. How continually He contrasts Himself with all others: "Ye are from beneath, I am from above; ye are of this world, I am not of this world." And these distinctions were not confined to the Pharisees, or to Gentiles, or to any other special class. He separates Himself from His very disciples. "I, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet." Was their Lord, the Lord of Life, and Prince of Glory, on a level in any sense with them? Was He, like His disciples, a mortal and comprehensible being? "I am the vine, ye are the branches." And what is the vine but the disseminator of all growth, vigour, life, to each separate branch? Though the vine includes the branches, yet the branches do not include the vine. In one sense, the branches belong, it is true, to the vine; but only as inferior to, and dependent wholly upon it. We see, indeed, that His bosom friends, in their very nearest approach to Him, saw, heard, knew Him not. They only caught glimpses of His interior and true life; and but a ray of sunshine here and there fell on their darkened hearts; a bloom sprang up only in patches of those deep woods; His course flowed on at their side, a lonely river, in dark, irresponsive, unbroken wilds. I remark next, that while He professed Himself of a rank and Personality higher than ours, His direct and His most incidental language alike accord with this claim. "All power is given me in heaven and in earth,”—were these words consistent with any low, rationalistic view of Christ? Nay, they place Him at the summit of all created spiritual elevations; 'below only that omnipotent One, who gave Him this transcendent power. "I have meat to eat that ye know not of." Nor ever would know; for His daily aliment was Divine; He ate honey from the very rock of God. If He opened His lips, the word of God flowed

full and graciously from them. "I am the Resurrection and the Life," this sublime enunciation falls on the earth-bound soul like a stream from the skies; it hovers over and around us, a voice as of the Lord God, heard of old among the trees in Eden, a majestic presence, we cannot dispel. But why multiply these citations? The whole life of Christ is enveloped in the same holy mystery. He dwells constantly in a supernal region, face to face with the living God. Take any one of those sublime utterances: "He that confesseth me before men, him will I also confess before my Father in heaven." "When the Son of man cometh in the glory of the Father with the holy angels." How they lift us at once above earth and its earthiness, and encircle us with an unutterable dignity and majesty! And there is nothing either pompous or strained in the language. In Seneca or Plato, in Moses or Paul, or even in the loved and elevated John, this language would seem presumptuous and arrogant, not to say impious. But in Christ it seems entirely befitting, in harmony with His whole demeanour. There is a vastness in all His conceptions, a grandeur of feeling, a breadth of purpose, which show Him to be truly one with the Father; show it as clearly as the stilling of the waves and the raising of the dead. When He addresses those around Him, He manifests a knowledge of the human heart, which, if it were not so familiar to us, would startle and overwhelm us. He does not speak to the words of men, nor to their acts and professions, but to their most secret motives, thoughts, and feelings. His penetration into character discloses a power like that of the great Searcher of hearts. As we listen to Him, we seem to hear the distant roar of the mighty ocean breaking on some far-off shore. As He pierces in and still in, a light which no darkness can hide,--vain, we feel, are all attempts to deceive that almost omniscient One. The Son knoweth all mortals, but “ no man knoweth the Son." Offices and powers we usually ascribe to God He often takes to Himself, and without the slightest apparent assumption; He calls Himself the "Light of the world;" He speaks of judging the world, of giving everlasting life, and of awarding their opposite conditions to the righteous and the wicked; and that, not as a strange work, but one accordant with His whole conduct, character, and life. He had not our human love of approbation; compare Him in this respect with John, Paul, and the best of mere men. He was not selfish like us, but disinterested like

He

God Himself. His magnanimity is not human, but Divine; His tenderness to the afflicted is like that of the all-pitying Father; and His love of the fallen, the oppressed, the erring and lost, is broad as the globe, and high as heaven. "God," we read in the Scriptures, "is love;" how deep is the well! Verily, without Christ we could not draw its life-giving, never-failing waters. The incomprehensibleness of Christ is seen, furthermore, in His relations to the Holy Spirit. This mighty power I suppose no one professes to have entirely fathomed. We know not whence it cometh, whither it goeth, nor indeed what it is. By its effects we know it exists, and ever operates, and that is all. But Jesus Christ was thoroughly conversant with it. He not only received it from God, but imparted it to others. "The Comforter, whom I will send unto you from the Father." breathed on His disciples and said, "Receive ye the Holy Spirit." This Divine energy dwelt in Him in its fulness; He was saturated with its essence. We may note that as His crucifixion drew near, and especially after His resurrection, the effluence of the Spirit through Him became more and more copious and quickening. His humanity faded away like a vanishing bow, and was lost in His Divinity. So great and overmastering were His communications of the Spirit, that on the wayside, in the garden, in the chamber, or on the seashore, as He drew near and spake, many hearts must have burned within themselves. There was a conscious Divinity in His air and bearing which overpowered the multitude; a word, a look, would sometimes strike them with awe. It was "God," the Ineffable,

the Holy Spirit, “manifest in the flesh.""

The Rev. Dr. Kennedy, in an essay on the Personal Claims asserted by Jesus Christ, and how to account for them, entitled 'Pilate's Question,' says, p. 41: 'The moral representation which Christ gives of Himself throughout His life, is as peculiar as the impression which His words uniformly produce of His conscious personal superhuman greatness. In several writings of His followers He is expressly declared to have been without sin (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. vii. 26; 1 John iii. 5; 1 Pet. ii. 22). But our present argument has only to do with the fact that He asserted His own sinlessness, and acted spiritually on the assumption of His sinlessness. On one occasion we find Him charging the Jews, in very severe language, with being the servants of sin and the children of the devil (John viii. 44), and in

the same breath claiming to be Himself without sin, therefore incapable of saying aught but the truth, and for this reason entitled to be heard and believed; for this seems to be the force of His reasoning in saying, "Because I tell you the truth, ye believe me not. Which of you convinceth me of sin? And if I say the truth, why do ye not believe me?" (John viii. 45, 46). "The proof of the sinlessness of Jesus furnished by this passage," says Meyer, "is purely subjective, so far as it rests on the decided expression of His own moral consciousness in the presence of His enemies; but, at the same time, it is, as such, all the more striking in that the confirmation of His own testimony is added to the testimony of others, and to the necessity of His sinlessness for the work of redemption and for the function of judge." In the conversation recorded in the eighth chapter of St. John, Jesus asserts His absolute separation from the Jews around Him in respect of character: "Ye are from beneath; I am from above ye are of this world; I am not of this world. I said therefore ye shall die in your sins; if ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins. He that sent me is with me: the Father hath not left me alone; for I do always those things that please Him" (vers. 23, 24, 29). More than this Jesus intimated on the same occasion, in words which we can understand better than His hearers did, that on Him, the sinless One, lay the hope of their deliverance from the bondage of their sinfulness: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin. And the servant abideth not in the house for ever: but the Son abideth ever. If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed" (vers. 34–37). At a later period we find Jesus saying, "Hereafter I will not talk much with you for the prince of this world cometh, and hath nothing in me" (John xiv. 30). It is not, however, so much in His express utterances as in His whole manner and spirit that we discern His consciousness of being without sin. He called on men to repent, but we see no sign or trace of repentance in Himself. He said, "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God;" but He, the King, though a man, was consciously not a man that needed a second birth. Even Strauss cannot conceal from himself the fact that the nature of Christ-" unlike those of a Paul, an Augustine, or a Luther, which were purified by means of a struggle and a violent rupture, and retained the scars of it ever after"—was