judice; fervour, without false unction; pathos, without declamation. In Him we behold fortitude, without rashness; patience, without pusillanimity; firmness, without obstinacy; humility, without meanness; meekness, without apathy; temperance, without austerity. His power was softened by tenderness; His dignity blended with love. He was great, dignified, majestic, authoritative, sovereign; yet, obedient, submissive, lowly, gentle, affable, affectionate, kind. In a word, while His noble character was real, natural, human, it was God-like, incomparable, perfect.

M. Renan's conception of the moral character and teaching of Jesus, although, in some respects, not up to the original, is nevertheless exalted. That he is an ardent admirer of Jesus as a great natural, and an incomparable, but merely human, moral luminary, appears evident from a great variety of passages found in different parts of his work. They together constitute an eloquent tribute to Christ's character as a teacher par excellence of morality, and to the incomparable sublimity of His own moral nature. From some of the best of such passages we select the following :

Speaking of the pure religion Christ had founded, and of the ardent love accorded Him by the first disciples, Renan says "In order to make Himself adored to this degree, He must have been adorable. Love is not enkindled except by an object worthy of it, and we should know nothing of Jesus, if it were not for the passion He inspired in those about Him, which compels us still to affirm that He was great and pure. The faith, the enthusiasm, the constancy of the first Christian generation is not explicable, except by supposing at the origin of the whole movement, a man of surpassing greatness." 1 Again he says:-"He thought

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He was

only of His work, of His race, and of humanity. the first to say, at least by His actions, 'My kingdom is not of this world." Jesus remains an inexhaustible principle of moral regeneration for humanity. The foundation of true

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religion is indeed His work; after Him, all that remains is to develop it and render it fruitful. Christianity has thus become almost a synonym of religion. All that is done outside of it is barren. 1 Never has any one so much as Jesus made the interests of humanity predominate in His life over the littlenesses of self-love." In Him was condensed all that is good and elevated in our nature. Let us place then the person of Jesus, whom legend has deified, at the highest summit of human greatness." From the midst of our uniform mediocrity, there are pillars that rise towards the sky, and bear witness to a nobler destiny; Jesus is the highest of these pillars which show to man whence he comes, and whither he ought to tend.3 Jesus had neither dogma nor system, but a fixed personal resolution, which exceeding in intensity every other created will, directs to this hour the destinies of humanity. This sublime person, who each day still presides over the destiny of the world, we may call divine, not in the sense that Jesus has absorbed all the Divine, but in the sense that Jesus is the one who has caused His fellow-men to make the greatest step towards the divine. 10 A high conception of the Divinity-which He did not owe to Judaism, and which seems to have been in all its parts the creation of His great mind—was in a manner the source of all His power." The Divinity within Him, Renan, rather than "a high conception of it." The latter could never have been the source of the super-human

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power you, in effect, by the language above quoted, ascribe to Him. Renan proceeds :-" Human brotherhood in its widest sense overflows in all His teaching. An absolutely new idea, the idea of a worship founded on purity of heart, and on human brotherhood, through Him entered into the world; and if religion is essential to humanity, He has by this deserved the Divine rank the world has accorded to Him.'

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Of Christ's method of teaching, Renan says :"An exquisite sympathy with nature furnished Him each moment with expressive images. Sometimes a remarkable ingenuity, which we call wit, adorned His aphorisms; at other times, their liveliness consisted in the happy use of popular proverbs. But it was, above all, in parable that the Master excelled. Nothing in Judaism had given Him the model of this delightful style. He created it. His preaching was gentle and pleasing, breathing nature and the perfume of the fields. He loved the flowers, and took from them His most charming lessons. The birds of heaven, the sea, the mountains, furnished in turn the subject of His instructions."

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1 Page 175. Similar testimony to the exalted character and teaching of Christ, I may here remark, is given by one of England's most talented, though strangely eccentric and morally deluded sceptics of the present day-the late J. Stuart Mill. Although the religion of the future, he maintains, must undergo a radical change, the religion of the past, he says, "cannot be said to have made a bad choice in pitching on this man as the ideal representative and guide of humanity." Denying Christ's Divinity, he says, nevertheless, "He was a morally perfect Being. Whatever else may be taken away from us by rational criticism, Christ is still left a unique figure, not more unlike all His precursors than all His followers, even those who had the direct benefit of His personal teaching. It is of no use to say that Christ as exhibited in the Gospels is not historical, and that we know not how much of what is admirable has been superadded by the tradition of His followers. . Who among

His disciples or among their proselytes was capable of inventing the sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining the life and character revealed in the Gospels? Certainly not the fishermen of Galilee; as certainly

Such are some of M. Renan's sentiments in reference to the character and teaching of Jesus as taken from various parts of his work, which concludes in the following glowing and pathetic strain :-"His worship will constantly renew its youth, the tale of His life will cause ceaseless tears, His sufferings will soften the best hearts; all the ages will proclaim that among the sons of men, there is none born who is greater than Jesus."

But although Renan thus graphically delineates the character of Jesus, placing Him upon the highest pinnacle of human greatness and glory, and pronouncing Him worthy of the divine honours the world has accorded Him, he will not allow Him the honour of " Mediator between God and Man," and he denies that He is sinless-"Why should there be a mediator between man and his Father ?" he asks. Why, because man is a trangressor, we may reply-a rebel against the authority of God, and could therefore never hope for a reconciliation between offended justice and himself without such mediation. How could a guilty sinner, as every man who has a conscience must know himself to be; dare to approach an infinitely just and holy God, except through the mediation of a sinless and Divinely accepted person? That we have, according to the Scriptures, a Divinely-appointed Mediator, proves it to have been. indispensable. That our case meets with a favourable hearing at the hands of Divine Justice through such mediation, and that we are accepted, pardoned, and restored to the Divine favour through Christ as our Atonement, Mediator, not St. Paul; still less the early Christian writers, in whom nothing is more evident than hat the good which was in them was all derived from a higher source. . . About the life and sayings of Jesus there is a stamp of personal originality combined with profundity of insight, which must place the Prophet of Nazareth, even in the estimation of those who have no belief in His inspiration, in the very first rank of the men of sublime genius."-Mill's "Essays on Religion.'

and Intercessor, is a mercy for which we ought to render ceaseless thanks, adoration, and praise, to our justly offended, but in Christ graciously reconciled God.

Then farewell

"Woe to the

But "Jesus was not sinless," Renan says. to the world's hopes for the future, we reply. world because of iniquity," is the sentence of Jehovah. Out of Christ as an atonement, God is necessarily “a consuming fire." Such is the character of God's holiness and justice, that He cannot in the nature of things suffer a righteous law emanating from Himself to be violated with impunity. And such is His decree. And such is His decree. Either in our own persons, therefore, or by that of a substitute, the full penalty of the righteous law we have broken must be borne. And it is not, of course, for the wicked violator of the law to say what the penalty should or should not be. That must be left wholly with Him "who has a right to reign," and who is infallible in justice and judgment. This penalty He has fixed. The penalty is "eternal death," or an eternity of suffering, as it is otherwise declared to be, to the guilty creature. But this penalty has been graciously commuted by Him who, according to a plan which He alone could devise, "can be just, and yet the justifier" of the penitent, believing sinner. This sentence, we say, has been commuted, God having declared Himself willing to accept the temporary sufferings and death of a substitute, most graciously and mercifully provided by Himself, and rendered infinitely efficacious by the union of the Infinite with the finite. It is this union alone that accounts for the sufferings of One being accepted as an atonement for the sins of many, and for the substitution of sufferings which were but temporary for those which were to be eternal. It is the infinitude of the Divine coupled with the human, that has stamped the