ld be weary of hearing him continually called 'The Just.'"

"However." rejoined Fellowes, "I am weary of hearing Christ so
perpetually called our example. As Mr. Newman says, he cannot, except
in a very modified sense, be such. 'His garments will not fit us.'"

"Did you ever hear," said I. "that fathers and mothers ought to set
an example to their children?"

"Certainly."

"Yet surely not in all things can they be such. Their garments surely
will not fit their children."

"No." said Harrington; "those of the father at all events will not,
if they are girls, nor of the mother, if they are boys. Fellowes, I
think you had better say nothing on this subject. If men of fifty
can, in all essential points, be beautiful examples to girls of
ten,--in gentleness, in patience, in humility, in kindness, and
so forth,--and all the more impressively for the wide interval between
them, why, I suppose Jesus Christ may be as much to his disciples."

"But, again," urged Fellowes to me, "you, like so many men, seem to
lay such stress on the superiority of the morality of the New Testament.
I cannot see it. I confess, with Mr. Foxton and many more, that it
seems to me that it has not such a very great advantage over that
of many heathen moralists who have said the same things,--Plato,
for example."

I replied, that, of course, it would be of no avail to affirm in
general (what I was yet convinced was true), that the New Testament
inculcated a system of ethics much more just and comprehensive than
any other volume in the world. I told him, however, that I thought
he would not deny that its manner of conveying ethical truth was unique;
that it not only contained more admirable and varied summaries of duty
than any other book whatever, but that we should seek in vain in any
other for such a profusion of just maxims and weighty sentiments,
expressed with such comprehensive brevity, or illustrated with so
much beauty and pathos. I remarked that, if he would be pleased to
do as I had once done,--compile a selection of the principal precepts
and maxims from the most admirable ethical works of antiquity (those
of Aristotle, for example), and compare them with two or three of the
summaries of similar precepts in the New Testament,--he would at once
feel how much more vivid, touching, animated, and even comprehensive,
was the Scriptural expression of the same truths. But I further observed,
that, even to obtain the means of such comparison,