still find their explanations
insufficient to account for the impression which He made upon His
contemporaries and continues to wield to this day, at least renders Him
absolutely unique. Men may disbelieve a great deal; they cannot
disbelieve that this Amazing Personality has a place in the heart of
the world which no other has ever occupied. The alleged imaginary
Ideal has had on earth only one approximate Embodiment. Nay, we are
{200} forced to confess, without the actual Character disclosed from
Nazareth to Calvary, the Ideal would never have been conceived.

IV

Robert Browning has described in his _Christmas Eve_ a certain German
professor lecturing upon the myth of Christ and the sources whence it
is derivable. But as the listeners wait for the inference that faith
in Him should henceforth be discarded, 'he bids us,' says the supposed
narrator of the story, 'when we least expect it take back our faith':

Go home and venerate the myth
I thus have experimented with.
This Man, continue to adore Him
Rather than all who went before Him,
And all who ever followed after.

This is a correct though humorous summary of much prevalent scepticism.
While critics destroy with the one hand, they build up {201} with the
other; while they seem intent on rooting out every remnant of trust in
Christ, they frequently conclude by passionately beseeching us to make
Him our Model and our King, our Pattern and our Guide. If there is
anything which is calculated at once to arouse us who profess and call
ourselves Christians and to make us ashamed, it is that the diligence
with which His Example is followed, the earnestness with which His
words are studied, by some whom we hold to have abandoned the Catholic
Faith, throw into the shade the obedience, the love, the earnestness
which prevail among ourselves. They who follow not with us are casting
out devils in His name. It is with us, they are careful to say, and
not with Him that they are waging war. They may dispute the incidents
of His recorded Life: they may insist on reducing Him to the level of
humanity, but they also insist that in so doing they act according to
His Own {202} Mind, that they refuse, for the very love which they bear
Him, to surround Him with a glory which He would have rejected. Devoid
of the errors which have led astray His successors, exalted far above
the wisest and the best of those who have spoken in His Name, it is the
function of