Do I say, then, that I am equal to Christ?  Or that I shall ever become equal to Christ?  No!  Let me try to make this plain to the child, and then the rest will perhaps understand it.  Here is a great man.  He is a great statesman.  He is a great poet.  He is a great orator.  He is a great philosopher.  He is a great general.  He is Bismarck and Gladstone and Dante and Napoleon and Raphael and Plato all combined in one.  And he has children, and this boy is a statesman, and this boy is a general, and this boy is an orator, and this boy is a poet, and this boy is an artist.  No one of them comprizes all the genius that was in his father, but each one has one quality of that father, and all the boys together reflect their father’s nature.  No, I shall never be equal to Christ.  But according to the measure of my own capacity, I may reflect even here and now something of Christ and be really Christ-like.

Christ is my Master.  I acknowledge no other Master than Him.  I wish to follow where He leads.  I gladly believe whatever He says.  And I have no other ambition—­oh, I wish it were true that I never had any other ambition!—­than to be like Him.  But He is my Master because He bids me follow where He leads, because He gives what I can take, because He promised what He will yet fulfil.  I believe in the divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ.  It is the center of my faith, as He is the center and source of my life.  But I do not believe in the medieval formula that Jesus Christ is God and man mysteriously joined together, because to believe that would be to leave me both without an ideal of man which I might follow, and without a manifestation of God to which I might cling.  In my country home two Christians quarreled.  An atheist went to them and said to one of them, “Your Christ said, ’Forgive all your enemies and love one another.’” “Yes,” he said, “Christ was divine.  He could.  I cannot.”  But there was nothing of moral virtue that God wrought in Christ that He cannot work in you and me if we give Him time enough.  And, on the other hand, this separation of “God” and “man” in Christ denies the real manifestation of God to man.  Jesus called His disciples to watch while He wrestled with agony in Gethsemane, and Dean Alford, speaking on Gethsemane, says this was the manifestation in Christ of human weakness.  No! no!  A thousand times, No!  It is the glorious manifestation of that sympathy in God which wants the sympathy of the feeblest of His followers, as the mother wants the sympathy and love of the babe on her lap.  “Beloved, now are we the sons of God; and it doth not yet appear what we shall be.  Only we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.”  There are two things we do not know.  Genius is always a mystery, spiritual genius the greatest mystery of genius, and Christ the greatest mystery of all.  We do not know what we shall be, any more than one who never had seen a garden could guess what the mold would be when the spring had finished its work.