meanest of the race; no contempt for them did he
ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear than the best
and wisest to the common Father, no doubt that they were naturally
capable of rising to a moral elevation like his own. There is nothing of
which a man may be prouder than of this; it is the most hopeful and
redeeming fact in history; it is precisely what was wanting to raise the
love of man as man to enthusiasm. An eternal glory has been shed upon
the human race by the love Christ bore to it. And it was because the
Edict of Universal Love went forth to men whose hearts were in no
cynical mood but possessed with a spirit of devotion to a man, that
words which at any other time, however grandly they might sound, would
have been but words, penetrated so deeply, and along with the law of
love the power of Jove was given. Therefore also the first Christians
were enabled to dispense with philosophical phrases, and instead of
saying that they loved the ideal of man in man could simply say and feel
that they loved Christ in every man.

We have here the very kernel of the Christian moral scheme. We have
distinctly before us the end Christ proposed to himself, and the means
he considered adequate to the attainment of it. His object was, instead
of drawing up, after the example of previous legislators, a list of
actions prescribed, allowed, and prohibited, to give his disciples a
universal test by which they might discover what it was right and what
it was wrong to do. Now as the difficulty of discovering what is right
arises commonly from the prevalence of self-interest in our minds, and
as we commonly behave rightly to anyone for whom we feel affection or
sympathy, Christ considered that he who could feel sympathy for all
would behave rightly to all. But how to give to the meagre and narrow
hearts of men such enlargement? How to make them capable of a universal
sympathy? Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on
one condition--that they were first bound fast to himself. He stood
forth as the representative of men, he identified himself with the cause
and with the interests of all human beings, he was destined, as he began
before long obscurely to intimate, to lay down his life for them. Few of
us sympathise originally and directly with this devotion; few of us can
perceive in human nature itself any merit sufficient to evoke it. But it
is not so hard to love and venerate him who felt it. So v