so much passion and so little principle, so much sense and so little soul, so much earthiness and so little spirituality, so much desire and so little devotion, that they who look longest at human kind as they seem find it hardest to discover in them aught of the divine. "In this United Kingdom of Great Britain," says Mr. Carlyle,

we have about twenty-seven millions of people, mostly fools," -which is only a blunt way of stating the proposition that men as they are do not to practical observers manifest the divine nature in any excessively luminous way. To see God in Humanity we must either take the race at large in all the length, breadth, depth of its history and experience, or we must take some single individual as a specimen, or, in the third resort, we must construct an ideal man and estimate human nature by him. The first has never been attempted, until recently by Mr. Buckle. The second and third have been undertaken with only partial success. The method of Christendom has been a blending of these last two methods the construction of an ideal person on the basis of a historical character.

The clearest, the noblest, the only universal and self-evident manifestation of Deity must be the revelation of spiritual qualities in a human soul. Our popular speech confesses this. The dictate of conscience we call " the voice of God;" the impulse of a pure affection is "the guidance of Heaven;" the movement of a holy purpose is "a mighty working of the Lord;" the disposition of praise, adoration and worship is "the action of the Holy Spirit.” This revelation of the Divine in eminent virtue needs no outward authentication it is its own proof. No certificate of authority, no mass of credentials adds a feather's weight to your conviction of its truth and power. Learning and philosophy will not help you to understand it. Instead of being authenticated by signs and wonders, it is necessary to authenticate them. It judges opinions, and is not judged by them. Not only does it criticise Faiths, it constructs Faiths, and is no more the last product of Religion than it is Religion's first cause and original fountain. People say they must have the belief before the life-the ideal of Christianity before the actual of Christianity. But then, once at least, life must have preceded belief, else whence could the belief have come? Faith is the child of goodness,—and Love is the source of illumination. They that would know Truth must have the spirit of Truth, which is the Holy Spirit, or the Spirit of Holiness. Every belief expresses a character. Infidel theories come from infidel

lives, and "great hopes belong to great souls." The man who is austere in his disposition and sensual in his appetites is likeliest to be a materialist in his philosophy and a fatalist in his creed. The vindictive nature worships a vindictive Deity and dreams of an endless damnation for the wicked; while the tender hearted, the compassionate, the indulgent find a judgment nowhere, but wash away the very pillars of equity with a flood of sentimental tears. The expansive mind sees beyond the finite creation the infinite God. The understanding that is narrow by constitution or restricted by defects of education will not trust God out of its sight, but must have him close by in special and miraculous providences all the time. The Deity of Epicurus was a wreath of vapor floating in a sea of midsummer glory. The Deity of Plato was the embodiment of all spiritual greatness. The Deity of Jesus was such an Infinite as the heart of Jesus was able to devise. He could not help calling God "Father" whose sentiment towards the Absolute was so filial; he could not help calling man child of God and brother" whose affection was so self-sacrificing and true; he could not help believing in an immortal life whose mortal even here put on its immortality, in whom the corruptible gave place while he was on earth to incorruption of thought and desire. He who used the world so faithfully for spiritual ends can not but have thought that the world was given for such uses; and he who was in heaven" must have deemed heaven the source of strength and joy. Understand the character, and the belief becomes plain. How, indeed, can we guess what Jesus believed, save by conjecturing what Jesus was? They who read as genuine expressions of his thought all the words put into his mouth by the evangelists will find themselves grievously perplexed to reconcile one thing with another. How shall we decide which belief was his and which not-the Divine Benignity, or the Bottomless Pit? the Heavenly Love, or the Abysmal Satan? There is but one test. Which could he have believed? Which faith was in him? Whatever is attributed to him inconsistent with his presumed character is to be set down either as some refuse thought of his age not yet swept away from the outer courts of his intelligence, or as a discoloring prejudice which minds less noble than his own laid over his thought.

To get at the character, then, is to get at the faith. But how shall we get at the character? In the eyes of Christendom Jesus is not a character, and has not a character in the ordinary sense of

the word. He is a mythus, not a man. It is difficult to speak of him as possessing human qualities. So long he has been regarded as God, so long he has been eulogized as a being of absolute perfection, that there is a besetting danger of running into fantastic exaggerations and heaping upon him unconsciously unjustifiable epithets. Horace Bushnell paints a reputation, not a man, and seems only to aim at saying the finest things in the finest way. In fact, to do anything else is reckoned sacrilegious; for this is a sacred and mysterious image, held in as much veneration as the fabled statue of Minerva. The Church guards it jealously against all profanation, and places it apart and aloft in an unapproachable niche in the skies, saying, "It is miraculous. It fell from the clouds; it has mysterious properties; it must not be touched with profane hands, nor criticized by vulgar thoughts." Let us protest against such superstitious prejudices, and claim the right to examine it for ourselves; but its perfections, if it has any, we must allow, notwithstanding the difficulty of proving it to be an authentic bust of a hero deceased.

In the Christian consciousness we have, perhaps, a photographic likeness of the Christ far more true to the original than the rude drawings sketched by his contemporaries. He has written his own gospel for all the world's reading in a sacred and yet most popular language, whose characters are the celestial graces of meekness, humility, resignation, thankfulness, purity, devoutness, compassion, disinterestedness, charity. The Christian life is projected after his type. The saints and martyrs, reformers and regenerators, mystics and philanthropists, are his animated traits. If his biographers had never touched a stylus, his autobiography would still remain to us, and in the consent of all believers we should know essentially what he was, and should feel that, however faint and irresolute the outline might be here and there, however incomplete the details, the grand attributes were fairly presented to us. A few noble men have spoken disparagingly of Jesus as compared with other men they have known or read of. Francis Newman frankly avows his preference for Mr. Fletcher of Madely as seeming to him the more admirable person. Others have measured him unfavorably by Fenelon, or some modern saint. But this is rather an outbreak of impatience with orthodox exaggerations than the calm judgment of unbiassed minds. As a general rule, none but the coarsest rationalists, the number of whom, to say nothing of their character,

is of no great account in or out of Christendom, have ever cast reflections on the moral character of Jesus. The simple Humanitarians have been profoundly reverential towards him. Theodore Parker speaks of him again and again in a way that might satisfy any believer who appreciated qualities, and prized the solid elements of character more than the accidents of rank or the prestige of office. We have ourselves more than once heard Mr. Parker speak of Jesus in tones of the deepest enthusiasm, with trembling voice and moistening eyes; and probably he has done more to impress upon the mind of his generation a conviction of Christ's real greatness than the most eloquent "Orthodox" preacher or writer has done. Could we take the voice of Christendom's extreme "Left" to-day-could we get the judgment of the "infidels," the "come-outers," the Deists," the "socialists," the "unbelievers" of every stamp, we should undoubtedly find Jesus enthroned in the most sacred niche of their reverence, as the representative of their ideal of manliness in its elements.

What shall we make of this universal sentiment of respect, of this universal resemblance of copy, if we do not regard it as the stamp of a very strong personality. There is more agreement in the images of Jesus that hang up in our minds than there is in the likenesses painted by the evangelists. We know him probably simply as a historical character better than they could know him; for we have the advantage of standing at a better focal distance. Small men are best understood by their contemporaries, as a statuette is best appreciated by those who stand nearest it. But as Mt. Blanccan only be seen in its grandeur some sixty miles away, so the great person must be adjusted to the eye of posterity. He grows larger as the generations move away from him and follow the fall of his shadow across the centuries. A great many neighbors, if they catch any glimpse of his greatness, are overpowered and bewildered by it. Not being able to comprehend and analyze the character, to seize its elements or place it in its relations, they simply glorify it in their imaginations, and express their sense of its majesty by a profusion of myths, which transform the mortal shape into some cloudy spectre of the Brocken. The charming legends of the early biographers - the virgin overshadowed and embraced by the Holy Spirit; the midnight birth in the stable near the inn; the angels making the air rustle with the movement of their wings, and the starlight vocal with their songs; the shep

herds startled from their slumbers on the plain by the great blaze of light and the sound of the celestial message; the meteor throwing its trail of splendor over sleeping cities and across leagues of dim and perilous desert; the Magi with their costly robes and jeweled turbans, their stately forms and flowing beards, their troops of sable attendants and their strings of camels bearing wondrous treasures, wending their tedious way from distant Arabia to lay their gifts at the feet of the little child, were enthusiastic attempts to picture a glory which could not be accurately described. It is only as these gorgeous cloud-paintings fade and disappear that the eyes of men are permitted to measure the figure they so fantastically but adoringly misrepresented.

To say that Jesus was a complete and exhaustive expression of human nature in its whole varied and vast possibility of excellence, -to say that he carried every spiritual faculty to its very last point of consummate beauty and power, would be saying a great deal more than he allowed his contemporaries to say in his presence. To say that he introduced into the world an original type of human character, which may well be regarded by us of to-day as the final and perfect type of manliness,-to say that he demonstrated the worth of a new order of capacities, opened for daily use a new magazine of powers, set in action a new class of principles, glorified a new stamp of goodness, established a new classification of virtues, fixed a new standard of duty, and thus inaugurated a new era in the life interior and exterior of the individual, reörganized indirectly the elements of society, reconstructed virtually the constitution of the state, infused a regenerating spirit into the relations which man sustains to man,-to say this is to say no more, perhaps, than is justified by the common sentiment of the Christian world comprehensively taken.

Who can fail to see in Jesus a certain cosmopolitan character, such as marks the man of the world in the highest sense? A child of the East, he has traits that are not Oriental; of Jewish extraction, he is something more than a Jew; a descendant of Abraham, the blood of Abraham is not red in his veins; a pupil of Moses, the laws of Moses fall from him like outworn garments. He takes on the lineaments of every nation, yet is ever himself. He has been Anglicised, Germanized, Italianized, Gallicized, still his personality remains unaffected by change of climate. We have his face in Greek outline, in French, but the soul looks as well out