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 carrying civilisation inland from the shores of the Mediterranean, Newton by starting science upon a career of steady progress, may be said to have attained this eminence.  But these men gave a single impact like that which is conceived to have first set the planets in motion; Christ claims to be a perpetual attractive power like the sun which determines their orbit.  They contributed to men some discovery and passed away; Christ’s discovery is himself.  To humanity struggling with its passions and its destiny he says, Cling to me, cling ever closer to me.  If we believe St. John, he represented himself as the Light of the world, as the Shepherd of the souls of men, as the Way to immortality, as the Vine or Life-tree of humanity.  And if we refuse to believe that he used those words, we cannot deny, without rejecting all the evidence before us, that he used words which have substantially the same meaning.  We cannot deny that he commanded men to leave everything