I. My friend has attributed to me a “prosaic and embittered view of human nature,” apparently because I have a very intense belief of Man’s essential imperfection.  To me, I confess, it is almost a first principle of thought, that as all sorts of perfection coexist in God, so is no sort of perfection possible to man.  I do not know how for a moment to imagine an Omniscient Being who is not Almighty, or an Almighty who is not All-Righteous.  So neither do I know how to conceive of Perfect Holiness anywhere but in the Blessed and only Potentate.

Man is finite and crippled on all sides; and frailty in one kind causes frailty in another.  Deficient power causes deficient knowledge, deficient knowledge betrays him into false opinion, and entangles him into false positions.  It may be a defect of my imagination, but I do not feel that it implies any bitterness, that even in the case of one who abides in primitive lowliness, to attain even negatively an absolutely pure goodness seems to me impossible; and much more, to exhaust all goodness, and become a single Model-Man, unparalleled, incomparable, a standard for all other moral excellence.  Especially I cannot conceive of any human person rising out of obscurity, and influencing the history of the world, unless there be in him forces of great intensity, the harmonizing of which is a vast and painful problem.  Every man has to subdue himself first, before he preaches to his fellows; and he encounters many a fall and many a wound in winning his own victory.  And as talents are various, so do moral natures vary, each having its own weak and strong side; and that one man should grasp into his single self the highest perfection of every moral kind, is to me at least as incredible as that one should preoccupy and exhaust all intellectual greatness.  I feel the prodigy to be so peculiar, that I must necessarily wait until it is overwhelmingly proved, before I admit it.  No one can without unreason urge me to believe, on any but the most irrefutable arguments, that a man, finite in every other respect, is infinite in moral perfection.

My friend is “at a loss to conceive in what way a superhuman physical nature could tend in the least degree to render moral perfection more credible.”  But I think he will see, that it would entirely obviate the argument just stated, which, from the known frailty of human nature in general, deduced the indubitable imperfection of an individual.  The reply is then obvious and decisive:  “This individual is not a mere man; his origin is wholly exceptional; therefore his moral perfection may be exceptional; your experience of man’s weakness goes for nothing in his case.”  If I were already convinced that this person was a great Unique, separated from all other men by an impassable chasm in regard to his physical origin, I (for one) should be much readier to believe that he was Unique and Unapproachable in other respects:  for all God’s works