restrain Him, lest He should swoon away or lose His mind from incessant overwork. And yet the only motive and spirit which actuated Him was that of love and goodness to the poor, the distressed, the sick, the forsaken, the despised, the needy, and the unhappy. He came to seek and to save the lost, disconsolate, and self-condemned, and never ceased to call and welcome all the weary and heavy-laden to come to Him that He might give them rest. There is not one work that He ever did, whether toward friend or foe, that was not inbreathed with the spirit of love. Compassion and sympathy and beneficent kindness, even to the laying down of His own life for the good of men, streamed from Him as light from the sun. A goodness so untiring and transcendent, and transfigured withal by a gentleness of majesty that awes into adoration while it blesses, was never seen upon earth except in Him. And it was the same to Jews and Samaritans, Roman soldiers and Judean scribes, the fishermen of Galilee and the Levites about the temple, little children and titled Nicodemuses,-Matthews and Magdalenes and Zaccheuses and harlots and Judases, as well as Peters and Johns and sisters of Bethany and widows of Nain and matrons of Capernaum; yea, even to thieves under the penalties of their crimes. To everything possessing human life, however marred,

sunk, deformed, guilty, or disgraced, His great heart went out with tenderness and with a benignity so dignified and pure as never for an instant to identify Him with the slightest taint of wrong or encouragement to sin.

Notice also His miraculous originality and breadth. In the ordinary course of things a man can never be greater than his age and surroundings enable him to be. Every one depends on what he inherits from his parents, his schooling, his companions, the society in which he lives and thinks, the customs, traditions, poetry, proverbs, history, and spirit of his nation, and especially those moral and intellectual possessions which give the particular type of the people to whom he belongs. There could have been no Socrates or Plato outside of Greece, no Bacon in any other than his own age or without what went before. But this rule is completely reversed and negatived in the case of Jesus. His age and nation. would have made Him an embodiment of Judaism, after the style of Saul of Tarsus before his conversion. Yet this is just what He was not. Born a Jew, brought up a Jew, never breathing any other air than that of Judaism, without culture, reading, travel, or any outward opportunities of intercourse with the world to lift Him above the passions and prejudices of His countrymen and time, He was yet

the least national or local and the broadest and most universal person in history-least the product of His age and most the child of eternity. He neither spoke nor thought nor felt nor acted like a Jew, nor yet like a Gentile, but like Himself alone.*

There is very little originality in this world. Even Goethe said: "If I could enumerate all that I really owe to the great men who have preceded me, and to those of my own day, it would be seen that very little is really my own." The same might be said of all other great human geniuses. But Christ was as original as He was broad. As Liddon states the case, it is not seriously pretended on any side that Jesus was enriched with one single ray of His thought from Athens, from Alexandria, from the mystics of the Ganges or the Indus, from the disciples of Zoroaster or of Confucius. The centurion whose servant He healed, the Greeks whom He met at the instance of Philip, the Syro-phoenician woman, the judge who condemned and the soldiers who crucified Him, are the few Gentiles with whom He had dealings during His earthly life. He mingled neither with great thinkers who could mould educated opinion, nor with men of gentle blood who could give tone to society. Till thirty years of age He was a workman in the shop of a carpenter, living in what

* See Fairbairn's City of God.

might have seemed the depths of mental solitude and social obscurity. It was from a sphere so humble that He suddenly emerged, not to foment a political revolution nor yet to found a local school of evanescent sentiment, but to proclaim an enduring and world-wide kingdom of souls; based upon the culture of a common moral character and upon intellectual submission to a common creed.

The like of this never appeared in this world before or since. The kingdom He proclaimed had nothing in common with the philosophical schools or coteries which grouped themselves around Socrates and other teachers of classic Greece. There was nothing in any of the sects of Judaism that could have suggested such a conception. Each and all of them differed from it, not only in organization and structure, but in range and compass, in life and action, in spirit and aim. Nor could it be traced in outline in the vague yearnings and aspirations after a better time which entered so mysteriously into the popular thought of the heathen world in the Augustan age. It was a complete answer to these aspirations, but they did not originate it, nor could they. The material Utopia to which they pointed did not at all enter into the plan of the Founder of Christianity. Nor was it really the continuation of the announcement of the prophets and John the

Baptist. If prophecy supplied some of the materials Christ employed, His creative thought did not depend upon them.* The world has nothing to match with His Sermon on the Mount or His last farewell discourses. He, and He alone, gave practical and energetic form to the idea of a strictly independent society made up of people of enlightened and purified consciences, cramped by no national or local bounds of privilege, and destined to spread throughout earth and heaven. And the masterful complete

*"If from East to West we ransack the literature and philosophy of the habitable globe, we may here and there cull some memorable aphorisms resembling those we too reverence in our heritage of moral truths, and at epochs separated from each other by thousands of years it is possible to catch now and then a glimpse of those prismatic hues which may be combined into the pure white ray of Christian doctrine. Not only in the doctrines of the later Stoicism, when already through the despairing twilight a luminous haze had been diffused—not only in the open plagiarisms of the Koran, spoiled so often in the plagiarizing—but even centuries before Christ, in the Dialogues of Socrates, in the Republic of Plato, in the Analects of Confucius, in the Laws of Manou, in the Sutras of the Buddhists, in the Vedas of the Brahmans, in the Zend Avesta of the Parsis, in the Pirke Avoth of the rabbins, there are unquestionably precepts which might be combined into a very pure and noble code. Yet what candid reasoner, even were he an unbeliever in Christianity, could dream of comparing any one of these books, or the men who wrote them, or the systems in which they issued, with the Gospels, or with Christianity, or with Christ? . . . To compare any one of these with the humble Carpenter of Nazareth is to match a dim and uncertain twilight with the sun at noon. The least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than these."-Farrar's Witness of History to Christ, pp. 136-142.

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