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realization, serene amid the opposition which stormed about him, is sublime. Suppose that you had been one of his hearers. You see a young man, with the coarse garb, the hard hands, the limited education, the habits and demeanor of a laboring man. Listening, from time to time, to his teachings, his conception of his kingdom gradually forms itself in its grandeur before your mind. You become intensely interested; you admire the grand conception; but you think it a vision too beautiful to be realized, and that it would be fanatical and visionary to attempt or expect it. Especially you wonder that one so uninfluential should offer himself as the king to realize this beautiful conception, and to make his name potent to rule all hearts. But Jesus preaches the prophecy and promise of the kingdom with unwavering assurance that the kingdom is about to come, and will extend till it fills the world. It becomes evident, however, that the people of his day cannot receive his doctrine. Whenever he goes to Jerusalem he is contemptuously rejected by those in authority, who early begin to plot against his life. He is obliged for safety to retire to Galilee, and prosecute his ministry in country places. Even there few receive him, and those from the humbler walks of life. Even his own family think he is quite gone crazy, and come to take him and confine him. At last it becomes evident that he must either abandon his pretensions or suffer an ignominious death. Yet his confidence in his kingdom remains unshaken.

On one occasion, near the close of his life, Jesus asked his disciples: "Who do men say that I am?" They replied that some acknowledged him to be a prophet, some acknowledged him as Elijah, the expected harbinger of the Christ; but, even at that late period in his ministry, they could make no favorable report of any increasing readiness to receive him as the Christ. He then asked: "Who say ye that I am?" Peter said: "Thou art the Christ." Jesus pronounced a blessing on him for recognizing him as the Christ, and immediately uttered that sublime prophecy of

the irresistible prevalence of his kingdom: "Upon this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it." On another occasion, foreseeing that the malignity of the rulers would soon bring him to the cross, he declares that the cross itself shall be the means of his triumph: "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me." Afterwards, in Bethany, just before his arrest, a woman anointed him with a costly perfume. Jesus, while saying that she had anointed him for his burial, yet declares the certain triumph of his kingdom: "Wheresoever this gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world, there shall also this that this woman hath done be told for a memorial of her." This faith in his great idea, declared more confidently when all outward circumstances seemed to demonstrate its futility, and worldly wisdom could only pronounce it proof that he was visionary or insane, is sublime.

It appears, therefore, that the doctrine of his kingdom and the claim for himself to be the Messianic King were central, essential, and persistent in Christ's own conception and preaching of himself and his mission. If this doctrine and claim were not true, then he was either an impostor or a visionary. But in the light of historical criticism, it is conceded that he was not an impostor. Then the only theory which remains possible is that of Renan, that he was a visionary, and his claims for himself the result of illusion. We have, now, a complete alternative. Either Jesus was the Messiah, as he claimed to be, or else he was a visionary, and in all his public life the victim of his own illusions. But the hypothesis that he was a visionary is impossible, for two reasons. First, it is an hypothesis on which a consistent, rational, and satisfactory explanation of the teaching, work, and life of Jesus as an historical personage is impossible. Secondly, because the world owes to him the doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth, with all the truths germinant in it, which from his day till now have been vital forces of human progress; and it is impossible that this grandest,

mightiest, and most beneficent idea which ever was a power in human thought and life, originated in the illusions of a visionary. If this is visionary illusion, then visionary illusion is the grandest, mightiest, and most beneficent reality in human history.

Our position, therefore, is established. The teaching, work, and life of Jesus admit no rational and consistent explanation, except on the supposition that he is the divinely anointed Redeemer of the world, and that his kingdom is from God, and is destined to prevail.

IV. Consider Christ's Doctrine of the Kingdom in Contrast with the History of Human Thought in Heathen Nations before his Coming.

This is necessary to the full force of the preceding arguments. The truths of Christianity have so become the common property of the human mind, the elements of all thinking, the law of all action, the maxims of human rights, the principles of progress, the germinant forces of civilization, that we fail to appreciate the indebtedness of the world to Jesus as their author. We must go back into the darkness, and witness the rising of that Sun. I sometimes think if we did not know Jesus so well, we should know him better.

This, however, is only what is true of all luminaries; the greater the luminary, the more it is lost in the light which it creates. When a candle is lighted, we notice the candle, rather than its light. We admire the brilliancy of the stars; they have light enough to reveal themselves, not to dispel the darkness. When the moon, "sweet regent of the sky," comes up and throws "her silver mantle" over the dark; when the still concave of the firmament seems full of solid effulgence; when every object, silvered on one side, seems to start out of the darkness, and, as you move, shifting the light and shade, to take on fantastic forms, the moon itself is seen, if at all, only as one bright object in the brilliant scene. But when the sun rises, and brings the day, we use the light, but do not look at the sun. So Jesus, the Sun

of Righteousness, is lost in the light which he creates. Modern rationalism uses the very light which Christ has given as an argument against Christianity. It asks: "What need of a supernatural revelation in the midst of all this light?" As if one should ask: "What need of the sun in the daytime, when it is so light?" Heathen philosophers attract admiration to themselves. Like the stars, they have light enough to reveal themselves, not enough to dispel the night.

The point here to be made is that before Christ heathen literature and civilization were destitute of the idea and promise of a kingdom of God on earth, and of the germinant and life-giving thoughts involved in it.

The heathen had not the idea of God as being essentially love; nor of that love as a divine energy in human history, redeeming men from sin; nor of a kingdom of those redeemed from selfishness to faith and love, growing in power and extent, and destined to fill the world; nor of the obligation of men to consecrate themselves in self-devoting love to the service of mankind in seeking first the establishment of this kingdom; nor of the sacredness and worth of the individual man a soul worth more than the world man so priceless that Christ" tasted death for every man"; nor of the consequent doctrines of the equality of men before God, the sacredness of human rights, and the foundation of society and government on justice and right, instead of force.

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They had not the idea of a universal religion. Polytheism is essentially divisive. National gods are embittered with the national enmities. The gods of the hills fight against the gods of the valleys. The religion gives no common ground of unity, no common and supreme god, no common divine law, no common standard of appeal, no fellowship of common faith or hope. The cleavage between the nations cuts through the deepest foundations of thought, feeling, and interest, and leaves them more hopelessly dissevered than ships driven asunder on the ocean; for it cleaves the ocean itself, and leaves them no common element in which to separate.

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They had not the idea of the brotherhood of man, nor of universal philanthropy, definitely proposing the blessedness of mankind as an end. Even Plato teaches that foreigners are natural enemies, and may be conquered and spoiled, if the state has power to do it. Everywhere is the law of might, not the law of love.

Finally, the heathen had not the prophecy nor the promise of a better future for man in the establishment of a universal reign of justice and love. The idea of human progress was not a power in their civilization. Their golden age was in the past.

When we search the history and literature of the heathen world, listening for some word of hope for man, we seem to stand on the shore of the ocean in a stormy night. We hear the sound of a vast activity, but only an activity that is baleful the roar and tumult of the storm, the moaning and hissing of the waves as they break in vain on the relentless rocks, the groaning of an everlasting unrest beneath the impenetrable night.

How, then, is it to be explained that Jesus, this young man who has never learned, comes from his carpenter's shop, and announces at once this grand doctrine of the kingdom of God on earth a conception which answers the questions that had tasked the profoundest minds of the race without result, which comprises a consistent philosophy of human history and destiny-a conception missed by the greatest geniuses of heathen civilization, yet grasped by Jesus at the outset in its simplicity and grandeur, and proclaimed, without emendation or change, without doubt or vacillation, through his entire ministry? The only rational explanation is that he was what he claimed to be-the Messianic King.

V. The Force of the Argument is further enhanced by the Relation of Christ's Teachings to the Previous Literature of the Jews.

Here it is objected, by those who put Jesus on the same

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