conclusion doubtfully deduced from questionable biographies, but a broad plain inference from the universal history of our race. We may dispute all details; but the grand result is beyond criticism. The world has changed, and that change is historically traceable to Christ. The honour, then, which Christ demands of us, must be in proportion to our estimate of the value of such regeneration. He is not merely a moral reformer, inculcating pure ethics; not merely a religious reformer, clearing away old theological errors, and teaching higher ideas of God. These things He was; but He might, for all we can tell, have been them both as fully, and yet have failed to be what He has actually been to our race. He might have taught the world better ethics and better theology, and yet have failed to infuse into it that new life which has ever since coursed through its arteries and penetrated its minutest veins. What Christ has really done is beyond the kingdom of the intellect and its theologies; nay, even beyond the kingdom of the conscience, and its recognition of duty. His work has been in that of the heart. He has transformed the law into the gospel. He has changed the bondage of the alien for the liberty of the sons of God. He has glorified virtue into holiness, religion into piety, and duty into love. . . . When the fulness of time had come, and the creeds of the world's childhood were worn out, and the restless question was on every lip, "Who will show us any good?" when the whole heart of humanity was sick of its sin, and weary of its wickedness, then God gave to one man, for mankind at large, that same blessed task He gives to many for a few. Christ, the elder Brother of the human family, was the Helper and (in the highest philosophic sense) the Saviour of humanity.'

The following is taken from Geikie's Life and Words of Christ, vol. i. chap. i. 'The life of Jesus Christ must ever remain the noblest and most fruitful study for all men of every age. It is admitted, even by those of other faiths, that He was at once a great Teacher, and a living illustration of the truths He taught. The Mohammedan world give Him the high title of the Masih (Messiah), and set Him above all the prophets. The Jews confess admiration of His character and words, as exhibited in the Gospels. Nor is there any hesitation among the great intellects of different ages, whatever their special position towards Christianity; whether its humble disciples, or openly opposed to it, or carelessly indifferent, or vaguely

latitudinarian. We all know how lowly a reverence is paid to Him in passage after passage by Shakespeare, the greatest intellect known, in its wide, many-sided splendour. Men like Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, Newton, and Milton, set the name of Jesus Christ above every other. To show that no other subject of study can claim an equal interest, Jean Paul Richter tells us that "the life of Christ concerns Him who, being the holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among the holy, lifted with His pierced hand empires off their hinges, and turned the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages.” (Ueber den Gott in der Geschichte und im Leben Sammt. Werke 33, 6.) Spinoza calls Christ the symbol of Divine Wisdom; Kant and Jacobi hold Him up as the symbol of ideal perfection, and Schelling and Hegel as that of the union of the divine and human. "I esteem the Gospels," says Goethe, "to be thoroughly genuine, for there shines forth from them the reflected splendour of a sublimity, proceeding from the Person of Jesus Christ, of so divine a kind as only the Divine could ever have manifested upon earth." (Conversations with Eckermann, III. 371.) "How petty are the books of the philosophers, with all their pomp," says Rousseau, “compared with the Gospels! Can it be that writings at once so sublime and so simple are the work of men? Can He whose life they tell be Himself no more than a mere man? Is there anything in His character of the enthusiast or the ambitious sectary? What sweetness, what purity in His ways, what touching grace in His teachings! What a loftiness in His maxims, what profound wisdom in His words! What presence of mind, what delicacy and aptness in His replies! What an empire over His passions! Where is the man, where is the sage, who knows how to act, to suffer, and to die without weakness and without display? My friend, men do not invent like this; and the facts respecting Socrates, which no one doubts, are not so well attested as those about Jesus Christ. These Jews could never have struck this tone, or thought of this morality; and the Gospel has characteristics of truthfulness so grand, so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that their inventors would be even more wonderful than He whom they portray." "Yes, if the death of Socrates be that of a sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God." (Emile, I. iv. 109, iii.) Thomas Carlyle repeatedly expresses a similar reverence. "Jesus of Nazareth," says he, "our divinest symbol! Higher has the

human thought not yet reached." "A symbol of quite perennial, infinite character, whose significance will ever demand to be anew inquired into, and anew made manifest." (Sartor Resartus, 137, 140.) Dr. Channing, of Boston, the foremost man in his day among American Unitarians, is equally marked in his words. "The character of Jesus," says he, "is wholly inexplicable on human principles." (Channing's Works, one vol., 241.) Matthias Claudius, one of the people's poets of Germany, last century, writes to a friend (Briefe an Andres, Pt. vi. 98): "No one ever thus loved (as Christ did), nor did anything so truly great and good as the Bible tells us of Him ever enter into the heart of man. It is a holy form, which rises before the poor pilgrim like a star in the night, and satisfies his innermost craving, his most secret yearnings and hopes." "Jesus Christ," says the exquisite genius Herder, "is in the noblest and most perfect sense the realized ideal of humanity." (Art. "Herder," Herzog's Encyclopædia, vol. v. 751.) No one will accuse the first Napoleon of being either a pietist or weak-minded. He strode the world in his day like a Colossus, a man of gigantic intellect, however worthless and depraved in moral sense. Conversing one day, at St. Helena, as his custom was, about the great men of antiquity, and comparing himself with them, he suddenly turned round to one of his suite and asked him, "Can you tell me who Jesus Christ was?" The officer owned that he had not yet taken much thought of such things. "Well, then,” said Napoleon, "I will tell you." He then compared Christ with himself, with the heroes of antiquity, and showed how Jesus far surpassed them. "I think I understand somewhat of human nature," he continued, "and I tell you all these were men, and I am a man, but not one is like Him; Jesus Christ was more than man. Alexander, Cæsar, Charlemagne, and myself founded great empires; but upon what did the creation of our genius depend? Upon force. Jesus alone founded His empire upon love, and to this very day millions would die for Him." (Bertrand's Memoirs, Paris, 1844.) "The gospel is no mere book," said he at another time, "but a living creature, with a vigour, a power, which conquers all that opposes it. Here lies the Book of books upon the table (touching it reverently); I do not tire of reading it, and do so daily with equal pleasure. The soul, charmed with the beauty of the gospel, is no longer its own : God possesses it entirely: He directs its thoughts and faculties; it is

His. What a proof of the divinity of Jesus Christ! Yet in this absolute sovereignty He has but one aim,—the spiritual perfection of the individual, the purification of his conscience, his union with what is true, the salvation of his soul. Men wonder at the conquests of Alexander, but here is a Conqueror who draws men to Himself, for their highest good; who unites to Himself, incorporates into Himself, not a nation, but the whole human race!" Among all the biblical critics of Germany, no one has risen with an intellect more piercing, a learning more vast, and a freedom and fearlessness more unquestioned than De Wette. Yet listen to a sentence from the preface to his Commentary on the Book of Revelation, published just before his death in 1849 (De Wette's Offenbach, 3rd Auf. p. vi.): "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, even of those who, in other respects, justly rank as the most zealous and the warmest Christians! Were Christ in deed and in truth our Life, how could such a falling away from Him be possible? Those in whom He lived would witness so mightily for Him, through their whole life, whether spoken, written, or acted, that unbelief would be forced to silence." Nor is the incidental testimony to Christ of those who have openly acknowledged their supreme devotion to Him less striking. There have been martyrs to many creeds, but what religion ever saw an army of martyrs willingly dying for the personal love they bore to the founder of their faith? Yet this has always been the characteristic of the martyrs of Christianity, from the days when, as tradition tells us, Peter was led to crucifixion with the words ever on his lips, "None but Christ, none but Christ;" or when the aged Polycarp,-about to be burned alive in the amphitheatre at Smyrna,-answered the Governor, who sought to make him revile Christ (Eusebius, H. E. Bk. iv. c. 15),-"Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me wrong; and how can I now blaspheme my King who has saved me?" Nearly seventeen hundred years passed from the time when the early confessor died, blessing God that he was counted worthy to have a share in the number of martyrs and in the cup of Christ; and a man of high culture and intellect lies dying, the

native of an island peopled only by outside barbarians in the days of Polycarp. The attendants, watching his last moments, see his lips move, and bending over him, catch the faint sounds, "Jesus, love !— Jesus, love!—the same thing," the last words uttered before he left them. It was the death-bed of Sir James Macintosh. Thus the character of Christ still retains the supreme charm by which it drew towards it the deepest affections of the heart in the earliest age of the Church; and such a character must claim, above all others, our reverent and thoughtful study.'

I find these striking words in Huntington's Christ in the Christian Year, Trinity to Advent, p. 201: There is to be found in that startling disclosure of Christ to Nathanael, an indication of our Lord's divinity. Leave a moment the trite and well-trod method by which it has been so often attempted to force into the understanding the mysterious truths that Christ is God, and try a simpler way. Jesus stands before the world with this stupendous and unanswerable appeal to our trust and adoration as more than man : He alone of all the generations from the creation to this day, He alone of all the millions of minds that have lighted up the world with intelligence, has the direct and inexplicable power of reading all men's hearts and thoughts and hidden experiences, through and through. To each one of us, referring to every passage of our past life, those which we should be most reluctant, or most ashamed, to uncover, He might say just what He said to Nathanael, "When thou wast under the fig-tree I saw thee." The leaders of thought, the masters of men, the philosophers and lawgivers, the inventors and discoverers, have never been equal to this. Genius, learning, wisdom, has never done this. If the most remarkable of them had ever pretended to do it, they would have been set down at once as but miserable conjurors and jugglers, playing on the superstitions of credulous people with the arts of magic. A little of that general acquaintance with the springs and ordinary manner of men's actions which passes under the name of a knowledge of human nature, is all that the acutest and profoundest and shrewdest intellects have attained. It has always easily reached its limits, and in its attempts to present in detail the actions of individuals has utterly failed. But here is a Lord of men's souls who is as deeply and perfectly familiar, at an instant, with the whole inner world and history of every