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intercourse which they had with each other. There is confidence, love, tenderness; none of that entire interchange of mind and lighter sentiment which we find among familiars. True, they stand with Him on the common ground of humanity and friendship, but they are conscious all the while of a Divine sphere of being rising above them, and beyond their sight and comprehension, beneath which they are held in mysterious awe. This feeling seems to have grown deeper and stronger after His transfiguration. It was their sense of His power and majesty, always felt, but never understood, which drew them to Him at the first in the bonds of discipleship, made them forsake their business at once and follow Him, and held their minds in daily expectation that, in some way unknown to themselves, He was to break upon the world as the Conqueror of the Roman power. No personal attractions or amiability of deportment could have thus wrought upon the minds of the people; no power of working miracles could have invested an obscure peasant of Galilee in those attributes which so separated Him from all other men as to inspire a reverence and fear more profound and pervading than any inspired by the glare of earthly royalties. The tones of voice in which a man's words are spoken, generally measure the extent and the depth of his moral power and influence. They are the soul of all speech. The grandest speech without them may fall frigid and powerless, whereas truth which had seemed commonplace and worn out, may be so re-inspired with them as not only to become new, but pierce the soul with depths of meaning never before dreamed of, and fill it with tremblings of hope and fear. Tones can neither be assumed nor imitated; nor can they be reported. Their power can only he represented by the effect which they produce. Whitefield's preaching, which so shook the crowds and swayed them, owed its power primarily to the tones that inspired it, for his printed sermons contain nothing but the commonplaces of the received Christianity. We may faintly conceive, but we cannot adequately represent, how truths new-born in such a nature as that of Jesus would be toned and uttered; nay, how the most common and familiar speech of a nature so inspired would vibrate through the hearts of His hearers. If we take into full account this element of moral and spiritual power, we shall be saved a great deal of futile criticism pertaining to the miracles wrought by "the voice of the Son of man." His manner

evidently was simple and undemonstrative, but the tones of His voice searched the very centres of being, melted their frozen springs of life, and set them free. How careful the Evangelists are to preserve the very words He spoke, to which such wonderful effects were traced; rather how the words clung to the memory, and would not go out of it, and, though common words, were untranslateable into any other language! The little girl who had expired, He takes by the hand, with the words, "Talitha cumi," and the little girl came back to life and rose up. To the deaf man He says, 66 Ephatha," and his ears are opened. These were Syriac words; the language spoken by our Saviour in His intercourse with men. They were common words. Why does the Evangelist retain them when writing in Greek? Because, as Dr. Furness has said, "they were severed as by a stroke of lightning from all other words," not merely, however, because the disciples saw the effect which they produced, but because the tones in which they were uttered made them untranslateable; tones which so searched the very life-centres as to touch the fountains of existence, and make them flow with healing power through the physical frame. These tones, not because of their loudness, but because a Divine compassion more pervading and farreaching than ever vibrated in a human voice was thrilling through them, found Lazarus in his death-sleep. Jesus "cried with a loud voice," says the Evangelist; literally, with a great voice, great because of its power to reach the seat of consciousness and make the frozen currents of life to melt and start anew. And in that cry upon the cross, "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani," there seems no other reason for preserving the original words, unless it be that the tones, not the words, shivered through the hearts of the standers-by, and. startled them with thoughts of a suffering that was more than mortal, as if the heart then breaking had drawn into its Divine recesses the woes of a whole race, which found utterance in its expiring wail. With these conceptions of the power and majesty of Jesus, we cannot look with satisfaction, or even patience, on those paintings and engravings designed to represent His person, and which are put into so many picture frames, and so many "Lives of Christ." The features of some of them are feminine, some of them Jewish, all of them the feeble conceptions of artists who ought to keep their poor ideals out of sight. The only portraiture, it seems to us, which any

earnest believer can regard with satisfaction, is the one which dawns upon his rising faith; nor will that satisfy him as anything which he can fix and frame, for it will change as he changes, and as the Christ of consciousness grows into the image and likeness of the living God.'

APPENDIX No. IV.

THE SPIRIT IN WHICH CHRIST'S RELIGION CLAIMS TO BE APPROACHED.

THE Rev. Dr. H. W. Bellows, of New York, whose justly lamented death about two years ago was felt by the 'Liberal Christians' of America to be a national loss, in his Restatements of Christian Doctrine (New York: Appleton & Co.), says: 'The gospel, as a religion, asks from men, who hope to profit by it, the same childlike spirit now it did in the early times. It appeals no more to the inquisitive and speculating, the logical and reasoning faculties, now than then,—not because the finest understandings, the most scientific minds, can refute it, or that it has anything to fear from them, but neither has it anything to hope from them. We make a great mistake when we suppose Christianity to be on trial, or that God has submitted His gospel, any more than His other universal gifts and mercies, to human reason, to decide for or against it. He planted Christianity in the moral world, just as He planted wheat in the natural, to grow, with or against the consent of men; to be a great and unspeakable blessing to those accepting it, to do vast services for society, to cheer and save men. And here it is, doing its work. Sceptics and infidels do nothing to overthrow it: they only overthrow themselves by their assaults. Philosophic believers and learned apologists do nothing to uphold it: they merely satisfy their own minds, and may satisfy the minds of a few others, by their investigations. But we might just as well think the stars shone by the permission of astronomers, or spring came by leave of the almanac, or conjugal and family life existed by social contrivance, or poetry were a trick of fanciful scholars, or truth the result of an agreement among philosophers, as to think

religion, and the Christian religion, a conclusion of learned theologians and writers on evidences, and the best wisdom to which religious thinkers had arrived. Christianity came into the world by nobody's leave, and it stays here by nobody's leave. It sprang up a living fountain, by the Word of God, out of the heart of Christ; and it has flowed on a river by its own Divine affluence, fed from the will and the love and the wisdom of God. There is, indeed, not only no harm, but great good, in examining its origin and early circumstances, the genuineness of its records, the secondary causes of its spread; but all such examinations, when successful and favourable, have been made by men already believers in it-by those who had felt its power and loved its sacred influence. An impartial, unprejudiced explorer of its truth never existed, and never could exist. The man who could say it was a matter of absolute indifference to him whether Christ were an impostor or a prophet, whether the gospel were true or false, would be a man not to be believed, or, at any rate, not to be trusted with such an inquiry. It is impossible, with respect to matters intimately connected with the affections and the moral and spiritual nature, not to have the intellect and the judgment anticipated by the heart and the great instincts. There are glorious prejudices, holy and awful truths, which precede all ratiocinations; and he who pretended to examine into the reality of his own existence without a prejudice in favour of it, or into the reality of right and wrong as fundamental distinctions of the utmost significance, or into the existence of virtue, or the genuineness of Christ's character, or the holiness of God, with the same sort of candour and uncommitted judgment with which he explored the evidences for and against a scientific theory, or a historical hypothesis, or a matter of literary criticism, would be so obviously self-deluded, and out of just relations with himself and truth, that we should at once pronounce his inquiry worthless, and his conclusion vain. It being settled, then, that the great thing the gospel wants, is not our testimony for its sake, but our submission for our own,—not to triumph over our doubts, but over our affections, that it may bless our lives and characters,—you will appreciate the godly jealousy it has of mere curiosity, and criticism, and acumen, and intellectuality, and why it tells us still that we must become like little children, if we would know and feel its power and become heirs

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