Jesus, that this is the way in which we become citizens of the unseen world, that the miracle in His case was simply in showing what transpires invisibly in the experience of all? The resurrection may be but one step in that process of evolution by which we realize the highest possibilities of our spiritual nature.

And if we refuse to admit that Jesus made the lame walk, the deaf hear, the blind see, cured the leper, cast out demons, quickened the dead, was himself raised, there still remains the Christ to be accounted for. How shall He be explained? Whence had He his wisdom? his insight into divine things? How was He able to show us the Father as no other has? On the spiritual side who was his father and mother? Beside Him no mention must be made of other masters. In the religious realm He easily ranks them all They are stars, moons, He the Sun of Righteousness. How shall we account for His influence, for the tidal wave He started? a wave which is manifestly destined to roll over the earth. If the signs do not mislead, the empires of Confucius, Gautama and Mohammed will ere long grow pale and disappear before the victorious Christ. Was He simply the product of his age? the result of unaided evolution? Was He a religious genius, and nothing more?

A genius generally comes of some great uplift that carries others along with him. The age of Pericles in Greece, marked by great mental activity, produced many eminent men, Miltiades, Themistocles, Sophocles, Zeuxis, Phidias, Anaxagoras, Zeno, Socrates. The renaissance in Italy gave birth to Dante, and later on to Raphael, Michael Angelo and Columbus. The Elizabethan age in England developed Cecil, Drake, Bacon and Shakespeare. But there was nothing in the condition of Palestine in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius Cæsar to stimulate enterprise or thought. It was a Roman province, governed by Roman procurators and tetrarchs approved by Rome. It was not a period of special religious activity. No prophet had arisen in Israel for generations. All were content with Moses, the prophets, and the traditions of the elders.

True, fifty years before Jesus' birth Hillel had flourished, and later on his son Simeon and grandson Shammai, also Gameliel, all of whom had many disciples. But "the system they taught was that oral tradition, that dull, dead Levitical ritualism at once arrogant and impotent, at once frivolous and unoriginal," 9 which was incapable of creating any popular enthusiasm; and nothing shows that their teachings moulded the thought or stimulated the religious zeal of Jesus or his ancestors.

Nor was Galilee, especially Nazareth, the home of Jesus and his parents, favorable to the development of genius. Galilee without scholarship, and measurably without morals and religion. The parentage of Jesus does not explain Him. His mother was a peasant, and if we may trust tradition, was very young at the time of his birth. She was not a genius, not intellectual, nor spirited, nor spiritual. The mothers of most great men have been great themselves. But Mary was in no wise superior to the average woman of her time and country. She said no grand word, she did no grand act. Joseph, if we adopt the theory of his being the father of Jesus, does not explain Him. He was a carpenter, uneducated, without a particle of brilliancy. He had nothing in the way of genius to transmit to his illustrious son.

Jesus was a Jew, and so had the blood of the prophets in him; but not more than millions of his countrymen of whom the world never heard. His age does not explain Him, nor his parentage. He was not the result of unassisted evolution. How then shall we account for Him? What theory is better than this? God specially endowed him both as to faculty and inspiration, and fitted him for the saving of the world. As He put his finger on nature and added life, where before there had been none, as He touched man's progenitor and imparted something which changed the bestial into the human, so He communicated that to Jesus which raised him so much above his fellows. "Before the majestic presence of Him who said upon the cross' Father, forgive them,' all theories," Says Dr.

Farrar, "Life of Christ."

Hopkins, "of heredity from a parentage merely human, vanish. Whether we consider His power or His character, we are rationally compelled to accept his own account of himself when he says: I am from above. I came out from the Father and am come into the world.' If miracles of creation are permitted, why not this miracle of providence also?

In miracle we find nothing which antagonizes evolution. In the natural God is immanent, in the supernatural, transcendent, but these are not opposed. "It is the same God which worketh all in all" to harmonious issues. When Moses and the prophets, by divine aid, a miracle, saw more light than others and gave it to their countrymen, Jewish ethics and theology were hastened in their development, but no law of nature was broken, more than in the case of a plant which grows faster in the sun than in the shade.

"It seems probable," says Mr. Murphy,10" that the origin of life was due to the direct exertion of the same Creative Power which at the beginning gave origin to the world of matter and force. In the same way the spiritual nature of man has been directly imparted by the Divine Spirit. But these new forces, life and spirit, have been introduced without altering the laws under which the previously existing forces acted, and without breaking the continuity of the formative history of the universe, any more than the continuity of the formative history of a coral reef is broken by the arrival of the first seed which is washed on it by the waves, and gives origin to the vegetation that covers it in after years.

So miracle does not antagonize, abrogate, nor even suspend the laws of nature, nor break the formative moral history of the world. Christ, the greatest miracle, simply added a higher force in the domain of ethics and religion, a force which coalesced with those already existing, a force which has given the world a spiritual impulse and life it would not have gotten through unaided evolution.

Rev. James Eastwood.

10"Scientific Bases of Faith."

ARTICLE XXV.

The Temptations of Christ.1

1 By Dr. Adolf Hausrath, Professor in Ordinary of Theology, at the University of Heidelberg.

(Matthew iv. 1-11.)

THERE are two fundamental principles which constitute the cardinal points of the Christian's religious contemplation of the universe, viz. Faith in God and Faith in the Reality of the Ideal. The devout mind is not to be robbed of the conviction that once, at least, there was a time when purity and the possession of evenly-balanced powers and faculties could be claimed for human nature. Not simply as he is propagated in the natural order, with a mixture of the spiritual and the sensuous, of the higher and the lower; as a being that is continually growing and becoming, ever striving and yet incomplete; not simply as we know man, racked by the force of life's circumstances, chained to this clod of earth, and as a mere fragment of something that is complete; as a being degenerated by the force of habit and perverted through the power of sin; no, but as a man, as a being ought to be that is created in God's image, and is not a caricature of something that is perfect. The desire to find this ideal constitutes nothing less than a profound and painful longing of the human heart. Even the boy faintly discerns the holy and exalted forms of such an ideal, and while eagerly reading his book of heroes, is often led to believe that he has found it. Now in this one, then in that one of his companions, he thinks he has discovered the one who answers to the dream of his child years. But ere long the sorrowful hour of disappointment fails not in coming, the halo that encircled the head of his friend is dissipated, and soon the painful truth becomes apparent that his friend is just as poor and infirm as other mortals.

But after all the voice that is in us will not always remain silent, and no human child is born so poor and infirm that it will not be able to perceive its tones. Indeed, our friendship,

our love, on what else do they live and find nourishment, but on and in the faith that even in this world the ideal can yet be realized. And we are taught by this that the most lamentable degradation of human nature, however proud you may be of that nature, is exhibited, when you have converted yourself to the belief that virtue is only an empty dream, and the picture here presented is only the illusion of inexperienced youth. But where have we found this image most alive? Whither may the voice of the heart, that is so mighty and so holy, guide us? We who are Christians, believe that they point to Jesus of Nazareth, who laid down his life, for the righteousness of many. We have no choice left us in this matter. We must either ignore this voice, or allow it to direct to Christ; for I known not to whom else it can refer. Hence we believe that in Christ the ideal has become a reality.

But that which we seek is not a dead ideal, nor a god enclosed in a phantom body, who has passed through all the conditions of this world, through such a life as ours; but we would rather seek an image that bears a close resemblance to us, that felt and realized as we feel and realize, one that struggled and endured as we struggle and endure, "bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh." Hence it is that Christ stands so near to us, and we can say with the author of Hebrews, "For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities, but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin." And herein lies the power of his example in that he himself realized the very same sufferings on account of which he would comfort us, and that he himself has endured the very same temptations which he bids us resist.

But the things which we call temptations were surely not temptations such as came to Jesus. If our inner life were nothing but a wrestling place of sensual desires, we might say it was a temptation, but really it is nothing less than sin itself. No one will presume to attribute such feelings to the heart of Jesus, nor look on him as a man who, by painful efforts, maintained his virtue. Yet his temptations were not such as seemed