gentlest, and purest in every woman, in His character. He is emphatically the Son of man.'

Years ago the conservative, or Channing section of the American Unitarians, brought out a periodical called The Monthly Religious Magazine, from vol. 39 of which, p. 89, the following extract is taken : 'Jesus stands supreme and alone amongst men in cherishing, uttering, and living from the calm conviction that He shared the Divine consciousness, that His thought was the Divine thought, and His love the Divine love, and His kingdom the Divine kingdom. Between the human, however exalted, and the Divine, there is a difference, not only of degree, but of kind. The word and the work of man may be very gracious and precious, but it is not the word and the work of God. They shall call His name Emmanuel, which being interpreted, is “God with us." It is one of those descriptive names, like Isaiah, or the "Salvation of Jehovah,” of which the Old Testament is full. Others, before and since, have borne the name; but it has been fulfilled only in Him. In Him was life,-life in this supreme and transcendent sense. The sacred writers never leave out of sight the essentially Divine in the Gospel. They have no story of a man who, in obedience to conscience, and in the strength of the devout sentiment, and in the abundance of a loving heart, and through that grace which is granted unto all, had lifted himself nearer heaven than the rest of the world, and had become the prophet of humanity. Large portions of the Gospel are devoted to the sweet humanities of the Lord's life; but these humanities are all pervaded with Divinity. We enter into no metaphysical discussion of the mystery of the Divine Nature. We recognise no division in the Object of Divine worship. Enough that, in the account of the ministers of the word, the one God over all, the Person of persons, the Father as truly as the Son, the Son as truly as the Father, spake out His loving thought, and poured out His loving Spirit in Mary's blessed child. Whatever else we may be able to gather concerning this Son of Mary from the most ancient records of His life, we gather this. Strangely silent upon many points, and strangely fragmentary, they are eloquent and complete upon this. We are not sure that what we call incompleteness in these priceless histories, may not be best explained as the inevitable overshadowing of all else in the story by that which transcends it all The Gospels seem to be, in some sort, a justifica

tion of a saying current in the Saviour's time: "When the Christ cometh, no man knoweth whence He is.” They have not given the day, the season, nor so much as the year of the Lord's birth. From St. John we learn only by implication that He was born at all. In the present state of inquiry as to the time of the Nativity, the two best authorities are as far apart as autumn and spring, whilst tradition and the poet Milton tell us "twas the winter wild." It has been impossible as yet to make a proper harmony of the Gospels, to arrange the events in the order of time, to determine the length of the Saviour's ministry, or to write a satisfactory Life of Jesus; and, where we crave the brightness of perfect day, we have only patches of light. St. John tells us that only the least part of what the Lord said and did had been set down. And yet they who tell us so little of Christ after the flesh steadily present Him to us in the glory and beauty of the Eternal Spirit, the Father knowing the Son, the Son knowing the Father, all else shut out from direct Divine knowledge, -the Master's word and work, altogether Divine in its source. We may believe them or not; but what they have written they have written, and their writings will, in the long run, be explained by candid readers only in one way. Moreover, we are persuaded that, even though our records should be subjected to a much more searching criticism than the ordeal through which they have already so triumphantly passed, this testimony, concerning the essentially Divine in Jesus, would remain to be a bond of union for all who profess and call themselves Christians, and a rallying word against rationalists and naturalists of every name.'

In the year 1873, the Rev. Dr. George Sexton, who had for many previous years worked among the Secularists, and was accepted by them as one of their most eminent leaders, renounced the Secularist position, and avowed his belief in the Personal Divinity of the Lord Jesus Christ. In the August of the same year, he preached my anniversary sermons at New Swindon, and received the Holy Communion of the Lord's Supper at my hands. Three years after

wards, he delivered two sermons in Augustine Independent Church, Clapham Road, London, of which the Rev. Dr. David Thomas, editor of the Homilist, was then the minister. Those sermons were afterwards published in a little volume, entitled Reasons for renouncing Infidelity, and from that volume I make the following extract, p.

But

35: 'The wide difference between Christianity and all other systems will be seen in the fact that in the whole of the latter there is a possibility of drawing a line of demarcation between the teacher and his teachings. You may remove Socrates from his ethics, Plato from his philosophy, Buddha from his religion, and Mahomet from his so-called revelation, without, in the smallest possible degree, affecting the systems thus severed from their originators. What I mean is that Buddhism and Mahometanism would remain quite as perfect as they are, even though Buddha and Mahomet should be proved never to have existed; just as the writings of Shakespeare would be equally valuable if Shakespeare himself were demonstrated to be, as some maintain he really was, a mythical character. with Christianity it is utterly impossible to adopt this course. If you remove Christ from His religion, you have nothing left. Christianity, in fact, is Christ, not His teachings merely, but Himself. His whole life and being are so thoroughly incorporated with the religion which He taught, that the one has become a part and parcel of the other. The cause of this is to be found in the peculiar character of His teachings, and in that peculiarity He is distinguished from every other man that ever lived in the world's history. Even the Old Testament Prophets, in whose footsteps He might naturally be supposed to some extent to have walked, never issued their mandates in the terms and tones employed by Him. With them, the whole burden of their message was "Thus saith the Lord," but with Christ it was "I say unto you." And this language He employed when sometimes drawing a distinction between His own teaching and the teaching of the past, in a manner that must necessarily have brought upon Himself the charge of blasphemy on the part of His countrymen. For when He said "It hath been said " so and so, "but I say unto you" something different, the "hath been said" referred, not unfrequently, to that very law which was given amid the thunder and smoke of Sinai from God Himself. And here, therefore, He at once, in the plainest terms possible, asserted the power on His own part to repeal the code thus supernaturally given. His whole demeanour was that of a Being whose power was from Himself, and from Himself alone. In the miracles which He wrought, we do not find Him, like the Old Testament worthies, praying to God for help; He performed them from a power which was evidently centred in His own Being. He

does not seem to depend on another, even though that other be God; but to heal diseases, control the forces of nature, and forgive sin equally from Himself. His moral teaching, acknowledged even by sceptics to be the most perfect system of ethics that the world has seen, He lives out in His life; and on no single occasion do we find Him admitting that He falls short of its most perfect principles. He declares that all men are sinners, yet Himself confesses to no sin, but, on the contrary, indirectly repudiates being a sinner. All this is so utterly unlike anything that we find in connection with any other man that the world has seen, that we are at once startled, if not with the supernatural character of the Being here brought before us, at least with the unique nature of His pretensions. In His public teaching, too, He invariably preaches Himself, and declares that the sum and substance of all religion is belief in Him and dependence upon Him. He speaks of Himself as "the Light of the World," "the Bread of Life," "the Living Bread which came down from heaven," the one "Good Shepherd," the very " Door of the Sheepfold," and the only means of approach to God. He claims to raise Himself from death by His own power, to be able to give the living water of the Spirit, and to be "the Resurrection and the Life," and the Judge of the World. He asked men to trust Him as in God, to believe in Him as in God, to honour Him as they honour God. The commandments that He desires men to keep are His own, and He demands that the love bestowed upon Him shall be greater than that given to father, or mother, or husband, or wife, or the nearest and dearest blood relations. He will accept no devotion short of that of the whole heart and soul. To love Him is to love God. And, on one distinct and memorable occasion, He declared that those who had seen Him had seen the Father. Passages proving the truth of these facts might be quoted without end; but they are so familiar to every reader of the Scriptures, that it is unnecessary to extend them. They all go to show, however, that the claims and pretensions here made are perfectly unique; we meet with them nowhere else, we do not expect to find them elsewhere, and should be terribly startled if we came across them in connection with any other being.'

In the first series of Sermons preached in King's Weigh House Chapel, London, by the late Dr. Thomas Binney, who died Feb. 24, 1874, I find the following words, p. 7, as part of a sermon on the text,

'Jesus saith, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me' (John xiv. 6): 'The text, while perfectly of a piece with the characteristic habit of Jesus, in constantly referring to Himself, is in that very particular quite different from anything to be met with in the speech and bearing of any other inspired man. The obtruding personalism, if I may so term it,—the self-assertion, which distinguishes and pervades the discourses of Jesus, is altogether unique. There never was anything like it,— never, before or since. No mere prophet ever spoke in such terms or so frequently about himself. None of the apostles fell into such a habit,—even when they had passed the limits of Judea, to which He was confined, had come into contact with many peoples, and were turning the world upside down. The old prophets shrank into nothingness before God-concealed themselves behind the glory of His name and the import of His message. They spoke of Him and for Him, each seeking to secure attention, not by proclaiming “I say unto you," but by the humbler and more becoming announcement, "Thus saith the Lord." The constant references to Himself which appear in the sayings of Jesus-the "I" and the "Me" as the topic of discourse-is something altogether new. It was not thus with Isaiah, or Ezekiel, or any of their class. It was not thus with Moses, who, though he spoke like a prophet, ruled like a king. In a variety of ways, and on many occasions, Jesus speaks of Himself as none other of the servants of God ever dreamed of speaking. But in such a passage as the one before us, He uses expressions and puts forth claims which are remarkable even in Him. There is here not only the ordinary phenomenon that, as usual, He says something about Himself, but there is the additional circumstance that there is something very extraordinary in what He says. Let us look at it: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me." Every word is emphatic and remarkable. It is not, you observe, "I teach the way; I declare what is true; I reveal or announce the life to come." Not that; but "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life." I am all this, in a sense quite distinct from my prophetic teaching. I, personally, am the way to God. I am myself embodied truth. I have in myself the source and springs of immortal life. That by "the way He means the way to God” is, you perceive, clear from the relation of the last clause of the verse to the

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