human evidence, for the appeal is on no other ground than to human reason, through evidence from human sources.

As has already been intimated, men being human, it could fully reach their understandings in no other way. The fact that the evidence is human upon which we are to believe or disbelieve in the commission of Christ as divine, is therefore no disparagement to its weight. Christ himself appealed to it as that which proved its divinity. All that we know and can possibly learn as to the earthly or divine must rest upon what can reach us through the avenues to the human intellect. The conceptions which at any time exist in the mind upon which perception can be based, are all that we possess by which to judge of and to accept or reject any new proposition. It is therefore only by this means of reaching the sort of conviction which we denominate truth, that our conclusions as to the divinity of Christ's mission must be reached.

That He lived and taught we must know, for, aside from the narrative of His followers, both those indifferent and those inimical to Him have recorded His existence and teachings. Josephus mentions Him, and Publius Lentulus, a Roman centurion, who happened to be stationed in Jerusalem, wrote to Rome a description of His ways, and even of His personal appearance. The fact of His existence, therefore, and of His teaching, and of the character of His teaching, cannot be denied. He indisputably lived, and, according to testimony of the most diverse kind, He died upon the cross, reviled by His persecutors, and sorrowed over by His friends, as no man before or since. He had lived and taught for years the way of life, which we now find embodied in what is called the gospel. He lived in the broad light of day as men have rarely lived. And in this time no flaw or stain was to be found from the beginning to the end. The evidence of this is more complete than that which any single man can acquire from personal observation of any event. Christ

is seen through the collective testimony of men of the most diverse minds and leanings, throughout His whole career, some of whom wrote of Him after His departure with such diversity, that the aggregate of testimony brings greater conviction than otherwise, because, while differing as to particulars, it never conflicts in essentials, or deviates from presenting the same perfectly majestic presence.

Fanaticism has had no such knowledge, nor ever such life and action. The ancients who had risen above the stature of their compatriots had taught a morality of the reason, but here was one who addressed men, compounded as they are of reason and sentiment, and who taught them that the highest reason in religion leads to the highest law of love. Christ spoke as one having authority to speak, and so conclusively to those who were not looking for an earthly king, that with a revelation of goodness which the world had never seen He carried all before Him in the triumphal advance which ended with His injunction to His disciples to go and teach all nations. None the less, because His example and teachings have been obscured by ceremonial and strife, have they continued to advance and conquer and rule the world to seeming perpetuity. Where would the world morally be now, if at the period of Christ's coming it had not been saved by His message from the condition into which it was plunged? Whence, therefore, one may well ask, could such a change as has overtaken it have come, except from God? Although the world was then, as the event proved, far enough advanced to be receptive of the highest moral law, it would still have gone on regardless of it if Christ had not appeared and shed upon it His enlightenment. That one lowly born and bred and educated should appear and prove himself the master and king of men, swaying a world centuries after His death, is not to be ascribed to any but divine commission.

The existence of God should be manifest through creation.

It should again be manifest through the coming of Christ. Only to him who denies the existence of God, should the mission of Christ be doubtful. If it seem doubtful, then is evidence, which in its cumulative force is equal to that on any other subject, rejected. Assuming the existence of God, and the implied watchfulness over a creation which He has seen fit to make, in no other manner so effectually could a way of life have been shown to men as by the precept and example of one of whom could be said, Ecce Homo. Not less comprehensible is it that the coming of Christ should have been for the salvation of a fragment of the universe, when we reflect that, if it had been within the purpose of the Omnipotent, a Saviour might have lived and died at the same or another time in worlds innumerable, or that the purposes of the Omnipotent, being necessarily as infinite as the universe, of which we see but a part, we, of proved incapacity to understand fully what touches us most nearly, need not explore beyond into the depths of the unfathomable. If it be asked by the materialist, if a divinely authorized earthly dispensation would not, from what has been said, be as much an interference with natural laws as any that can be conceived, the answer is that it has not been here implied that God would never interfere with physical laws, but merely that He would not interfere with them except for good cause. When we see around us a moral world as well as a physical world, we need for comprehension of its existence, as much as for comprehension of the existence of the physical world, to infer the will of the Creator.

At a certain stage of mental development, the depth of whose degradation may be estimated by observation of some still-existing tribes, man was undoubtedly too low in the scale of being to develop the idea of a Maker and Ruler of the Universe. But, with the development of the organ of thought, the brain, came, among other attributes, the birth and growth of

conscience. The first faint glimmerings of the religious sense may have been produced, as Darwin, Spencer, and other writers think, by fear of ghosts, of shadows, and of all the mysteries that haunt the path of the untutored savage, leading to propitiatory sacrifices and rites of all sorts; and the pressure of rude wants may have led to awakening of some perception of mutual dependence, but not, as these authors think, to some experience of sympathy, and thus to the first germs of conscience. These, assuredly, were only adventitious aids to the development of conscience from the first beginnings. Sympathy, with utilitarian basis, might have seemingly gone on forever without producing conscience. In fact, to think of such action, as mutual exchange of offices from necessity, as awakening sympathy, when both motive and action represent barter, is to form a false conception, for if conscience be anything definite it is, at its lowest conceivable point, the reverse of utilitarian.

That Darwin was liable egregiously to err in discussing these questions, which are so foreign to the domain in which he supremely reigned, is proved conclusively by his remark in "The Descent of Man," where he says, "My critics do not define what they mean by remorse, and I can find no definition implying more than an overwhelming sense of repentance."

Yet, even in the ordinary acceptation, these two affections of the mind are regarded as essentially different. Both repentance and remorse, it is true, are fundamentally based upon grief, but whereas the grief of repentance represents to the mind of the sufferer grief capable of being assuaged, because the cause of it is capable of redress, or of expiation by suffering, or both, the grief of remorse offers no such flattering prospect to the mind, for in it the grief is conditioned upon belief in its being beyond the bounds of possible redress or expiation by repentance. Can there be any two affections of the mind more diverse than these, into one of which hope enters,

and in the other of which the grief is so excessive as to be centred less in the idea of the wrong done, than in that of self-condemnation? That remorse may engulf even grief for wrong-doing is proved by the fact that to fiends is imputed in their despair the desire for the perpetration of further evil. What is imputed to these is what the collective soul of mankind is conscious of as representing the final outcome of hopeless repentance. This is what distinguishes remorse from repentance, and makes of it another sentiment and law of conduct. It is the difference in thought and action as inspired by hope, as contrasted with thought and action as inspired by despair.

Dickens evidently had no doubt of the difference between the two passions, for we find him writing, with the instinct of the born psychologist, in the description of the elder Weller's last interview with the Rev. Stiggins:

Mr. Stiggins, encouraged by this sound, which he understood to betoken remorse or repentance, looked about him, rubbed his hands, wept, smiled, wept again, and then, walking softly across the room to a well-remembered shelf in one corner, took down a tumbler, and with great deliberation put four lumps of sugar in it.

Observe that the sound uttered by the elder Weller struck the Rev. Stiggins as indicative of remorse or repentance.

Conscience, even in its lowest estate, is to be regarded as a creation appearing at a certain epoch of man's existence, subject to growth and aberration while constrained along the lines of evolution. To him, therefore, who regards mankind as compounded of moral, intellectual, and physical elements of being, each equally the endowment of the Creator through supreme law, each developing side by side, each ascending from inferior to superior type, it is not incomprehensible that growing religious perception should have instituted false religions, or that a divinely-appointed exemplar should at last have placed the seal upon a world fitted to profit through ages by the presentment of an unattainable ideal of human excellence.