heavens, and one Divine soul in
history, in order to correct the aberrations of our individuality, and
unite all mankind into one family of God. Jesus is to be presumed to
be perfect until he is shown to be imperfect. Faith in Jesus, is not
reception of propositions, but reverence for a person; yet this is
_not_ the condition of salvation or essential to the Divine favour.

Such is the scheme, abridged from the ample discussion of my eloquent
friend. In reasoning against it, my arguments will, to a certain
extent, be those of an orthodox Trinitarian;[1] since we might both
maintain that the belief in the absolute divine morality of Jesus is
not tenable, when the belief in _every other_ divine and superhuman
quality is denied. Should I have any "orthodox" reader, my arguments
may shock his feelings less, if he keeps this in view. In fact, the
same action or word in Jesus may be consistent or inconsistent with
moral perfection, according to the previous assumptions concerning his
person.

I. My friend has attributed to me a "prosaic and embittered view of
human nature," apparently because I have a very intense belief of
Man's essential imperfection. To me, I confess, it is almost a first
principle of thought, that as all sorts of perfection coexist in God,
so is no sort of perfection possible to man. I do not know how for
a moment to imagine an Omniscient Being who is not Almighty, or
an Almighty who is not All-Righteous. So neither do I know how to
conceive of Perfect Holiness anywhere but in the Blessed and only
Potentate.

Man is finite and crippled on all sides; and frailty in one kind
causes frailty in another. Deficient power causes deficient knowledge,
deficient knowledge betrays him into false opinion, and entangles him
into false positions. It may be a defect of my imagination, but I do
not feel that it implies any bitterness, that even in the case of
one who abides in primitive lowliness, to attain even negatively an
absolutely pure goodness seems to me impossible; and much more, to
exhaust all goodness, and become a single Model-Man, unparalleled,
incomparable, a standard for all other moral excellence. Especially
I cannot conceive of any human person rising out of obscurity, and
influencing the history of the world, unless there be in him forces
of great intensity, the harmonizing of which is a vast and painful
problem. Every man has to subdue himself first, before he preaches to
his fellows; and he encoun