e inspirations
pass to us. Jesus Himself awakens in us a religious response. We
instinctively adore Him, devote our all to Him, trust Him with a
confidence as complete as we repose in God. We are either idolaters, or
Jesus is the unveiling in a human life of the Most High; He is to us God
manifest in the flesh.

And Jesus is also _the revelation of what man may become_. None ever had
a sublimer faith in man than He who dared bid His followers be perfect
as their Father is perfect. He did not close His eyes to men's glaring
unlikeness to God; He said to His auditors, "ye being evil"; He believed
in the necessity of their complete transformation through repentance.
But when He asked them to follow Him, He set no limits to the distance
they would be able to go. He did not warn them that they must stop at
the foot of Calvary, while He climbed to the top; or that they could not
go with Him in His intimacy with the Father. Some Christians, out of
reverence for Jesus, think it necessary to draw a sharp line between Him
and ourselves, and remind us that we cannot overpass it; but He drew no
such line. He believed in the divine possibilities of divinely changed
men. As a matter of fact we find ourselves immeasurably beneath Him,
and, the more we long to be like Him, the greater the distance between
us seems to become. But He is as confident that He can conform us to His
likeness, as that He Himself is at one with His Father.

It is worth emphasizing that this Personality in whom we find the
revelation of God and the ideal of manhood is a figure in history. When
an apostle was speaking of "the one Mediator between God and men," he
laid stress on the fact that He was "Himself _man_." When a distinction
is drawn between the Christ of experience and the Christ of history, we
must not be confused. The content of the name "Jesus" was given once for
all in the impression made by the Man of Nazareth, One made "in all
points" like ourselves. We may understand Him better than those who knew
Him in the flesh; we may see the bearing of His life on many situations
that were entirely beyond even His ken; and so we may have "a larger
Christ," exactly as succeeding generations sometimes form truer
estimates of men than contemporaries; but all that is authentic in our
"larger Christ" was implicit in the Man of Galilee. That to which we
respond as to God is the historic Jesus mirrored in His disciples'
faith. We agree with the eloquent words of