know
the Father, save the Son." Moving familiarly as a man among men, Jesus
did not hesitate to offer them forgiveness, health, power, life; and to
offer all these as His own possessions through His peculiar touch with
the Most High--"All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father." In
the words of the late Professor G.W. Knox, "Jesus set forth communion
with God as the most certain fact of man's experience, and in simple
reality made it accessible to everyone."

His consciousness of God was not something wholly new; He was not "a
lonely mountain tarn unvisited by any stream," but received into His
soul the great river of a nation's spiritual life. He was the heir of
the faith of His people, and regarded Himself as completing that which a
long line of predecessors had begun. He did not find it necessary to
invent new terms to express His thought; but as He passed the old words
through the alembic of His mind they came out with new meaning. His
originality consisted in His discriminating appropriation of His
inheritance, and in His using it so that it became alive with new power.
Madame de Stael said that Rousseau "invented nothing, but set everything
on fire." Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with
God, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown
before. The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman Empire,
with a few thousands of proselytes here and there in the larger towns
about the Mediterranean, became in a generation a force which entirely
supplanted the Jewish missionary movement and rapidly spread throughout
the world.

(2) _A singular character._ More striking than anything Jesus said or
did is what He _was_. That which He worshipped in the God He trusted, He
Himself embodied. We can estimate His character best, not by trying to
inventory its virtues (for a very similar list might be attributed to
others of far less moral power) but by feeling the effect He had on
those who knew Him. They are constantly telling us how He amazed them,
awed them, and bound them to Himself. Their superlative tribute to Him
is that, holding His own pure and exalted view of God, they felt no
incongruity in thinking of Him as beside God on the throne. It may have
been their belief in His Messiahship, accredited by His resurrection and
destining Him to come with power and judge the world, that led them to
place Him at the right hand of God; but there was the place where He
seemed to