s closer, great men become
greater, human life more wonderful as miracle disappears. Woe to you if
you cannot see it!--it is the testing truth of our day.

'And besides--do you suppose that mere violence, mere invective, and
savage mockery ever accomplished anything--nay, what is more to the
point, ever _destroyed_ anything in human history? No--an idea cannot be
killed from without--it can only be supplanted, transformed, by another
idea, and that one of equal virtue and magic. Strange paradox! In the
moral world you cannot pull down except by gentleness--you cannot
revolutionise except by sympathy. Jesus only superseded Judaism by
absorbing and recreating all that was best in it. There are no
inexplicable gaps and breaks in the story of humanity. The religion of
to-day, with all its faults and mistakes, will go on unshaken so long as
there is nothing else of equal loveliness and potency to put in its
place. The Jesus of the churches will remain paramount so long as the
man of to-day imagines himself dispensed by any increase of knowledge
from loving the Jesus of history.

'But _why_? you will ask me. What does the Jesus of history matter to
me?'

And so he was brought to the place of great men in the development of
mankind--to the part played in the human story by those lives in which
men have seen all their noblest thoughts of God, of duty, and of law
embodied, realised before them with a shining and incomparable beauty.

'... You think--because it is becoming plain to the modern eye that the
ignorant love of his first followers wreathed his life in legend, that
therefore you can escape from Jesus of Nazareth, you can put him aside
as though he had never been? Folly! Do what you will, you cannot escape
him. His life and death underlie our institutions as the alphabet
underlies our literature. Just as the lives of Buddha and of Mohammed
are wrought ineffaceably into the civilisation of Africa and Asia, so
the life of Jesus is wrought ineffaceably into the higher civilisation,
the nobler social conceptions of Europe. It is wrought into your being
and into mine. We are what we are to-night, as Englishmen and as
citizens, largely because a Galilean peasant was born and grew to
manhood, and preached, and loved, and died. And you think that a fact so
tremendous can be just scoffed away--that we can get rid of it, and of
our share in it, by a ribald paragraph and a caricature!

'No. Your hatred and your ridicule are po