ters many a fall and many a wound in winning
his own victory. And as talents are various, so do moral natures vary,
each having its own weak and strong side; and that one man should
grasp into his single self the highest perfection of every moral
kind, is to me at least as incredible as that one should preoccupy
and exhaust all intellectual greatness. I feel the prodigy to be so
peculiar, that I must necessarily wait until it is overwhelmingly
proved, before I admit it. No one can without unreason urge me to
believe, on any but the most irrefutable arguments, that a man, finite
in every other respect, is infinite in moral perfection.

My friend is "at a loss to conceive in what way a superhuman physical
nature could tend in the least degree to render moral perfection more
credible." But I think he will see, that it would entirely obviate the
argument just stated, which, from the known frailty of human nature
in general, deduced the indubitable imperfection of an individual. The
reply is then obvious and decisive: "This individual is _not_ a mere
man; his origin is wholly exceptional; therefore his moral perfection
may be exceptional; your experience of _man's_ weakness goes for
nothing in his case." If I were already convinced that this person was
a great Unique, separated from all other men by an impassable chasm in
regard to his physical origin, I (for one) should be much readier to
believe that he was Unique and Unapproachable in other respects: for
all God's works have an internal harmony. It could not be for nothing
that this exceptional personage was sent into the world. That he was
intended as head of the human race, in one or more senses, would be
a plausible opinion; nor should I feel any incredulous repugnance
against believing his morality to be if not divinely perfect, yet
separated from that of common men so far, that he might be a God to
us, just as every parent is to a young child.

This view seems to my friend a weakness; be it so. I need not press
it. What I do press, is,--whatever _might_ or might _not_ be conceded
concerning one in human form, but of superhuman origin,--at any
rate, one who is conceded to be, out and out, of the same nature as
ourselves, is to be judged of by our experience of that nature, and is
therefore to be _assumed_ to be variously imperfect, however eminent
and admirable in some respects. And no one is to be called an imaginer
of deformity, because he takes for granted that on