upon earth, and that the story of Him is nothing but a mythic fable and a lie. As no one can drop George Washington out of the United States, or Luther out of the Reformation, or Julius Cæsar out of the Roman empire, and explain or maintain the integrity of history, so no man can drop Jesus out of Christianity or out of living place in His time and give any just account of the course and history of this world for the last eighteen hundred years. Jesus did live and do and teach and suffer and triumph precisely as His biographers state that He did, or the records of a thousand years give us but little else than groundless fictions or a series of enigmas which no man can solve, while much of the very best that is now upon earth, and most blessing the race, is utterly inexplicable.*

* "Measure the religious doctrine of Jesus by that of the time and place He lived in, or that of any time and any place-yes, by the doctrine of eternal truth. Consider what a work His words and deeds have wrought in the world. Remember that the greatest minds have seen no farther, and added nothing to the doctrine of religion; that the richest hearts have felt no deeper, and added nothing to the sentiment of religion; have set no loftier aim, no truer method, than His, of perfect love to God and man. Measure Him by the shadow He cast into the world—no, by the light He has shed upon it. Shall we be told such a man never lived-the whole story is a lie? Suppose that Plato and Newton never lived, but who did their wonders and thought their thoughts? It takes a Newton to forge a Newton. What man could have fabricated a Jesus? None but Jesus."—Quoted in Bushnell's Nature and the Supernatural, chap. x.

Even Rousseau says upon this point: "Shall we suppose the evan

Who, then, was Jesus? What was He? What is His story in actual history? It would require volumes to answer these questions fully. I can only glance at the facts in so far as they show what a supernatural, sublime, and divine Being the story of Jesus presents to our contemplation.

He appears in the Record as one of the common people of Galilee, poor, obscure, and straitened in every way, brought up in a humble home in a humble village.* Of the first thirty years of His life we know very little. As a child and youth he did not differ much from any other Jewish child in a humble and pious Jewish household, except that He is spoken of as peculiarly "the holy child."

gelic history a mere fiction? Indeed, my friend, it bears not the marks of fiction; on the contrary, the history of Socrates, which nobody presumes to doubt, is not so well attested as that of Jesus Christ. Such a supposition, in fact, only shifts the difficulty without obviating it. It is more conceivable that a number of persons should agree to write such a history than that one only should furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction and strangers to the morality contained in the Gospels, the marks of whose truth are so striking and inimitable that the inventor would be a more astonishing man than the hero."-Quoted in The Gospel and the Age, P. 78.

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* A humble village indeed, but still how fitting to be the place for the bringing up of such a character as that of Jesus! Renan is here himself the witness, who says: 'If ever the world, still Christian, shall desire to substitute authentic holy places for the mean and apocryphal sanctuaries which were seized upon by the piety of the barbarous ages, it is upon this height of Nazareth that it will build its temple."-Quoted by Uhlhorn.

Educational facilities then were few, narrow, and mostly given to the fostering of Jewish peculiarities and passions, with very little to broaden man or to cultivate the generous and refined humanities. But, even such as they were, Jesus enjoyed them in a very limited degree. His enemies made it a point against Him that He never had any learning.

When about twelve years old He was taken to Jerusalem to attend one of the great Jewish festivals. It was from what He there saw and heard that His inner nature seems to have received its first potent stir. At any rate, there was then and there awakened in Him a clear consciousness of a much nearer standing to His Father in heaven than to His earthly parents, which He expressed in answer to the chidings of His mother, but of which He never spoke again until about eighteen years afterward, when He announced Himself as the divine Christ of sacred prophecy.*

* Dr. Bushnell specially emphasizes these touches with reference to the Saviour's childhood as something altogether extraordinary and quite beyond the reach of man's invention. He says: "Here is given the sketch of a perfect and sacred childhood--not of a simple, lovely, ingenuous, and properly human childhood such as the poets love to sketch, but of a sacred and celestial childhood. In this respect the early character of Jesus is a picture that stands by itself. In no other case that we remember has it ever entered the mind of a biographer, in drawing a character, to represent it as beginning with spotless childhood. The childhood of the great human characters, if given at all, is commonly represented, according to the uniform

During His youth and early manhood He remained subject to His parents at Nazareth, being well esteemed by those who knew Him, and humbly growing in piety and communion with God. He filled a son's duties as any other good man, assisting in His foster-father's handicraft, earning His daily bread by daily toil, and pursuing the same occupation to provide for the ordinary wants of the family after His foster-father's death. He was a regular and reverent attendant at the synagogue, where He heard the prophets read and expounded, joined in the prayers of Israel, and quietly nursed the holy

truth, as being more or less contrary to the manner of their mature age; never as being strictly one with it, except in those cases of inferior eminence where the kind of distinction attained to is that of some mere prodigy, and not a character of greatness in action or of moral excellence. In all the higher ranges of character the excellence portrayed is never the simple unfolding of a harmonious and perfect beauty contained in the germ of childhood, but it is a character formed by the process of rectification, in which many follies are mended and distempers removed; in which confidence is checked by defeat, passion moderated by reason, smartness sobered by experience. . Besides, if any writer of almost any age will undertake to describe not merely a spotless, but a superhuman or celestial childhood, not having the reality before him, he must be somewhat more than human himself if he does not pile together a mass of clumsy exaggerations, and draw and overdraw till neither heaven nor earth can find any verisimilitude in the picture. See what Josephus and the rabbis made of the childhood of Moses, and what work was made of the childhood of Jesus in the apocryphal Gospels. How unlike that holy flower of Paradise in the true Gospels which a few simple touches make to bloom in beautiful self-evidence before us!"-Nature and the Supernatural, ch. x.

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secret of His mysterious nature and sublime mission, until the time came for Him to enter upon the great work for which He came into the world.

This of itself was something superhuman. Conscious of a nature and mission far transcending everything ever possessed by any other man, such patient and long-continued reticence, meekness, and self-suppression with regard to it were wholly different from all ordinary behavior of men.

And this same unprecedented and astonishing meekness was one of His most marked characteristics throughout, showing itself in the way He entered upon His public work, in the manner in which He uniformly conducted Himself in it, and, above all, in the manner in which He bore Himself under the provocations, mistreatment, and persecutions heaped upon Him by His enemies, even to His death on the cross as the victim of their malignities.

Observe also His laborious and self-sacrificing goodness. From the time He began His ministry to the end of it He was continually hurried from scene to scene, His days occupied, His nights invaded. to late hours, even His retirement for devotion besieged, so that it was more than once said of Him that He did not have time to eat, while His friends sometimes thought it would be necessary forcibly to