But how to give to the meagre and narrow hearts of men such enlargement?  How to make them capable of a universal sympathy?  Christ believed it possible to bind men to their kind, but on one condition—­that they were first bound fast to himself.  He stood forth as the representative of men, he identified himself with the cause and with the interests of all human beings; he was destined, as he began before long obscurely to intimate, to lay down his life for them.  Few of us sympathise originally and directly with this devotion; few of us can perceive in human nature itself any merit sufficient to evoke it.  But it is not so hard to love and venerate him who felt it.  So vast a passion of love, a devotion so comprehensive, elevated, deliberate, and profound, has not elsewhere been in any degree approached save by some of his imitators.  And as love provokes love, many have found it possible to conceive for Christ an attachment the closeness of which no words can describe, a veneration so possessing and absorbing the man within them, that they have said, “I live no more, but Christ lives in me.”

And what, in fact, has been the result, after the utmost and freest abatement for the objections of those who criticise the philosophical theories or the practical effects of Christianity?

But that Christ’s method, when rightly applied, is really of mighty force may be shown by an argument which the severest censor of Christians will hardly refuse to admit.  Compare the ancient with the modern world:  “Look on this picture and on that.”  The broad distinction in the characters of men forces itself into prominence.  Among all the men of the ancient heathen world there were scarcely one or two to whom we might venture to apply the epithet “holy.”  In other words, there were not more than one or two, if any, who, besides being virtuous in their actions, were possessed with an unaffected enthusiasm of goodness, and besides abstaining from vice, regarded even a vicious thought with horror.  Probably no one will deny that in Christian countries this higher-toned goodness, which we call holiness, has existed.  Few will maintain that it has been exceedingly rare.  Perhaps the truth is that there has scarcely been a town in any Christian country since the time of Christ, where a century has passed without exhibiting a character of such elevation that his mere presence has shamed the bad and made the good better, and has been felt at times like the presence of God Himself.  And if this be so, has Christ failed? or can Christianity die?

The principle of feeling and action which Christ implanted in that Divine Society which He founded, or in other words, His morality, had two peculiarities; it sprang, and it must spring still, from what this writer calls all through an “enthusiasm”; and this enthusiasm was kindled and maintained by the influence of a Person.  There can be no goodness without impulses to goodness, any more than these impulses are enough without being directed by truth and reason; but the impulses must come before the guidance, and “Christ’s Theocracy” is described “as a great attempt to set all the virtues of the world on this basis, and to give it a visible centre and fountain.”  He thus describes how personal influence is the great instrument of moral quickening and elevation:—­