d
in mind, or absolutely insane.

None of these things can be predicated of Jesus Christ.

On the contrary, he was the most intellectual man the world has ever
known.

Mark how he met the wisdom and the genius of the men who surrounded
him. Again and again they came to him with crafty and perplexing
questions. With a word he solved their problems, flashed truth into
their shame-smitten faces, and silenced them. In all the universe
there is no soul meaner, more contemptible, more cowardly, and
utterly lost to every sense of decent manhood than the man who, for
the sake of entangling a good man in his speech, asks him questions
in public, before an audience ready at every turn to misquote and
misinterpret his slightest utterance; and that is what they did.
They came to him, not with the desire to know the truth, but to
confound him, cast him down and destroy his prestige with the
people. To every question he gave an answer having in it spiritual
truth, but bearing the unmistakable stamp of rare wisdom and
intellectual superiority.

His words, the simple speech he used in the midst of them, or alone
with his disciples, have been the impulse of the mightiest
intellectual activity the world has ever known. Out of his words
have grown systems of theology that may well call for all there is
of brain power and capacity in those who study them. Here are to be
found the keenest speculations and the farthest outreach of
metaphysical suggestion and the most detailed analysis of which the
human mind is capable. Book after book, treatise after treatise,
discourse after discourse, have been produced out of the simplest
and most detached things he said. No man can read his speeches and
not find the mind stimulated, shocked, quickened and impelled
forward even upon the most daring lines of thought.

It would be easy to call the roll of the princes and kings in the
realm of intellect, men whose thoughts burn and flame like great
quenchless lights; men whose minds are the storehouses of knowledge,
and whose utterances by word and pen have moved the quickest and
most forceful lives in the world. It would be easy to call the long
roll of these names shining like stars and constellations in the
firmament of thought--princes and kings of intellect who acknowledge
that Jesus Christ is not only superior to them morally and
spiritually, but intellectually.

What man is there to-day with any degree of mental self-respect who
would dare