then could He have been, as Renan says, an enthusiast and fanatic, and His disciples still more such ? A stream so pure and so fertile in blessings could not spring from so dark a source. The blessings which proceeded, and still proceed from Him, testify,-Here is the revelation of God, and therefore the light and life of the world. He is the eternal life; we have God in Him. And this is what the Gospels testify of Him.

LECTURE X.

T

THE PERSON OF JESUS CHRIST.

HERE is scarcely any subject of inquiry which lays so great a claim to the reli

gious interest of the present day as the person of Jesus Christ. Nor has any other a right to demand an equal interest; for it is a matter in which Christianity itself, nay, universal history, is involved. It concerns Him who,' as Jean Paul Richter says, being the holiest among the mighty, the mightiest among the holy, lifted with His pierced hand empires off their hinges, and the stream of centuries out of its channel, and still governs the ages.' (1) In our days, indeed, far less interest is felt in dogmatical than in historical inquiries, and yet history is but the vehicle and husk of doctrine. The strife about doctrine has been, in fact, transported into the region of the history of the life of Jesus Christ. And how great are the contrasts presented! As great as the difference between the eternal Son of God and the son of Joseph.

These contrasts are old, though heightened at the present day.

From the very first, Christians have rendered divine honour to Jesus Christ. Even in the New Testament they are designated as those who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus.' (2) And Pliny, in his epistle to the Emperor Trajan, speaks of the hymns which the Christians sang in their assemblies, to Christ as to God. (3) This fact, if we knew nothing else of the teaching of the apostolic church concerning the person of Jesus, would be a sufficient testimony to the divine honour which was rendered to Him. Very early, however, do we meet with a twofold opposition to church doctrine, a Jewish and a heathen one. Jewish error saw in Jesus only the very greatest of the prophets, His superhuman greatness being lost in His real humanity. Heathen error saw in Jesus a superhuman being, who had descended to this earth from higher spheres, but it resolved His historical reality into mere appearance. In the former, history prevails to the disparagement of idea; in the latter, idea to that of history. The Church beheld in Jesus Christ the union of the two, of history and idea, of the divine and human. How, indeed, the two could coalesce into a perfect unity, remained a problem to reason, which never will be able to rise to the full measure of the fact. But how far are we also from so attaining to the fulness of the fact as to leave nothing unknown even in inquiries concerning natural life, so soon as they penetrate beyond the mere surface! The faith and confession of the Church, moreover, are independent of the attempts of human reason to comprehend

and fathom the mystery of the person of Jesus Christ. And in this faith the various churches are unanimous. Dogmatic differences concerning this question are but of slight moment compared to the unanimity of faith. Christians of all churches bow the knee at the name of Jesus.

Rationalism obliterates the divine element in the person of Christ, as well as the supernatural in general. And even when it speaks of a 'heavenly appearance in this sublunary world,' this is but a figure of speech, for in its view He is still only the greatest of moral teachers. But it was soon perceived that the mere moral teacher did not satisfy the requirements of the facts. Christianity is a phenomenon far surpassing the bounds of mere morality. The portrait drawn in the Gospels is far too great to be realized by the wise rabbi of Nazareth; and philosophic speculation sought to grasp the deeper idea of Christianity. But if Rationalism advocated history at the expense of the idea, speculation advocated the idea at the expense of history. Jesus was only a symbol-the symbol perhaps of divine wisdom, according to Spinoza; or of ideal perfection, according to Kant and Jacobi; or of the union of the divine and human, according to Schelling and Hegel. How far Jesus himself approximated to this ideal, for He did not fully attain to it, cannot be said, but is a matter of indifference, as everything depends upon the idea, not upon the fact. But it is vain to persuade us to such a notion; for that which so powerfully enchains us in the Gospels,

which makes such claims to our whole interest, what is it but the historical reality of the person of Jesus? We feel it impossible to stop short at the mere idea, and be contented with it. Strauss attempted, from this philosophical point of view, to get rid of the history altogether. He resolves it almost all into poems, which owed their origin to the poetic spirit of the Christian Church, leaving but a scanty residuum of historical reality. But if the Jesus of the Gospels is the product of the Church, whose product is the Church itself? The small remains of the history of Jesus left to us by Strauss bear no proportion to the effect whose cause they are said to be. Renan, on the other hand, is convinced that the power exercised by this history was too great to allow it to be resolved into myths. His book is, in this respect, a step in advance of that of Strauss. He does homage to the historical reality. The philosophic mind of the German might content itself with abstractions and ideas; the more realistic mind of the Frenchman demanded historical facts. He says, and rightly, that the cause, which lay in the person of Jesus, must correspond to the prodigious effect produced; that Jesus could not have been the mere fiction of His biographers; that the gospel history must, in the main, have been an actual occurrence. By a survey of the country in which its facts took place, the history acquired in his eyes a palpable embodiment. Jesus is, in his eyes, 'a man of enormous proportions.' But he writhes to escape from the admissions which, according to his