out
Him. And though for the present his subject is history, and human
morality as it appears to have been revolutionised and finally fixed by
that history, and not the theology which subsequent in date is yet the
foundation of both, it is difficult to imagine any reader going along
with him and not breaking out at length into the burst, "My Lord and my
God." If it is not so, then the phenomenon is strange indeed; for a
belief below the highest and truest has produced an appreciation, a
reverence, an adoration which the highest belief has only produced in
the choicest examples of those who have had it, and by the side of
which the ordinary exhibitions of the divine history are pale and
feeble. To few, indeed, as it seems to us, has it been given to feel,
and to make others feel, what in all the marvellous complexity of high
and low, and in all the Divine singleness of His goodness and power,
the Son of Man appeared in the days of His flesh. It is not more vivid
or more wonderful than what the Gospels with so much detail tell us of
that awful ministry in real flesh and blood, with a human soul and with
all the reality of man's nature; but most of us, after all, read the
Gospels with sealed and unwondering eyes. But, dwelling on the Manhood,
so as almost to overpower us with the contrast between the distinct and
living truth and the dead and dull familiarity of our thoughts of
routine and custom, he does so in such a way that it is impossible to
doubt, though the word Incarnation never occurs in the volume, that all
the while he has before his thoughts the "taking of the manhood into
God." What is the Gospel picture?

And let us pause once more to consider that which remains
throughout a subject of ever-recurring astonishment, the unbounded
personal pretensions which Christ advances. It is common in human
history to meet with those who claim some superiority over their
fellows. Men assert a pre-eminence over their fellow-citizens or
fellow-countrymen and become rulers of those who at first were
their equals, but they dream of nothing greater than some partial
control over the actions of others for the short space of a
lifetime. Few indeed are those to whom it is given to influence
future ages. Yet some men have appeared who have been "as levers
to uplift the earth and roll it in another course." Homer by
creating literature, Socrates by creating science, Caesar by
carryi