nity {119} in its purity: we adore
Humanity, but only as manifesting in the Only Begotten Son the glory of
the Eternal Father. Thus we place no garland around the vices of the
human race: thus we abase, and thus we exalt: thus are we humbled to
the dust, thus are we raised to the highest heavens. Apart from
Christ, the magnitude of the creation may well depress and overwhelm:
apart from Christ the human race is morally imperfect instead of being
a fit object of blind adoration. Seeing Christ, we not only feel our
inconceivable nothingness in presence of the Infinite Majesty, but we
stand erect and unpresumptuously say, 'We wonder not that Thou art
mindful of those for whom that Son of Man lived and died, we are in Him
partakers of the Divine Nature. There thou beholdest Thine Own Image.'

Made in the image of God, such is the ideal of Man that comes to us
from the beginning of his history; and such is the ideal {120} that
once, and once only, has been realised. '_Ecce Homo_! Behold the
Man!' said Pontius Pilate, in words more full of significance than he
knew, pointing to the victim of priestly hatred and popular fickleness.
Behold the Man! man as he ought to be, the Image of God. Before that
Divine Humanity we reverently bow, to that Divine Humanity we humbly
consecrate ourselves, in fellowship with It alone we learn and manifest
the true worth and dignity of Man.

One writing frantically to exalt mankind and to depreciate
Christianity, tells us how he sat on a cliff overhanging the seashore
and gazed upon the stars, murmuring, 'O prodigious universe, and O poor
ignorant, that could believe all these were made for him!' but the
sight of a steamship caused him to rejoice at the triumph of Art over
Nature, and to exclaim, 'If man is small in relation to the universe,
he is great in relation to the earth: he abbreviates distance and time,
{121} and brings the nations together.' Then he saw that man is
ordained to master the laws of which he is now the slave; he believed
that if man could understand this mission, a new religion would animate
his life, and, in the strength of this revelation, the writer says that
he sang in ecstasy to the waters and winds and birds and beasts, he
felt a rapture of love for the whole human race, he resolved to preach
the New Gospel far and wide, and proclaim the glorious mission of
mankind.[19]

On the whole the Old Gospel will be found as ennobling, as inspiring,
as practical as