important change took place in his mode of thinking, speaking, or acting; at least the evidence before us does not enable us to trace any such change.  It is possible, indeed, for students of his life to find details which they may occupy themselves with discussing; they may map out the chronology of it, and devise methods of harmonising the different accounts; but such details are of little importance compared with the one grand question, what was Christ’s plan, and throw scarcely any light upon that question.  What was Christ’s plan is the main question which will be investigated in the present treatise, and that vision of universal monarchy which we have just been considering affords an appropriate introduction to it....

We conclude then, that Christ in describing himself as a king, and at the same time as king of the Kingdom of God—­in other words as a king representing the Majesty of the Invisible King of a theocracy—­claimed the character first of Founder, next of Legislator; thirdly, in a certain high and peculiar sense, of Judge, of a new divine society.

In defining as above the position which Christ assumed, we have not entered into controvertible matter.  We have not rested upon single passages, nor drawn upon the fourth Gospel.  To deny that Christ did undertake to found and to legislate for a new theocratic society, and that he did claim the office of Judge of mankind, is indeed possible, but only to those who altogether deny the credibility of the extant biographies of Christ.  If those biographies be admitted to be generally trustworthy, then Christ undertook to be what we have described; if not, then of course this, but also every other account of him falls to the ground.

We have said that he starts from a low level; and he restricts himself so entirely at the opening to facts which do not involve dispute, that his views of them are necessarily incomplete, and, so to say, provisional and deliberate understatements.  He begins no higher than the beginning of the public ministry, the Baptism, and the Temptation; and his account of these leaves much to say, though it suggests much of what is left unsaid.  But he soon gets to the proper subject of his book—­the absolute uniqueness of Him whose equally unique work has been the Christian Church.  And this uniqueness he finds in the combination of “unbounded personal pretensions,” and the possession, claimed and believed, of boundless power, with an absolutely unearthly use of His pretensions and His power, and with a goodness which has proved to be, and still is, the permanent and ever-flowing source of moral elevation and improvement in the world.  He early comes across the question of miracles, and, as he says, it is impossible to separate the claim to them and the belief in them from the story.  We find Christ, he says, “describing himself as a king, and at the same time as king of the Kingdom of God”; calling forth and founding a new and divine society, and claiming to be, both now and hereafter, the Judge without appeal of all mankind; “he considered, in short, heaven and hell to be in his hands.”  And we find, on the other hand, that as such He has been received.  To such an astonishing chain of phenomena miracles naturally belong:—­