ridiculous; my panegyrics lose all weight, and I produce far less conviction than when I praised within human limitations.  I do not know how my friend will look on this point, (for his judgment on the whole question perplexes me, and the views which I call sober he names prosaic,) but I cannot resist the conviction that universal common-sense would have rejected the teaching of the Eleven with contempt, if they had presented, as the basis of the gospel their personal testimony to the godlike and unapproachable moral absolutism of Jesus.  But even if such a basis was possible to the Eleven, it was impossible to Paul and Silvanus and Timothy and Barnabas and Apollos, and the other successful preachers to the Gentiles.  High moral goodness, within human limitations, was undoubtedly announced as a fact of the life of Jesus; but upon this followed the supernatural claims, and the argument of prophecy; without which my friend desires to build up his view,—­I have thus developed why I think he has no right to claim Catholicity for his judgment.  I have risked to be tedious, because I find that when I speak concisely, I am enormously misapprehended.  I close this topic by observing, that, the great animosity with which my very mild intimations against the popular view have been met from numerous quarters, show me that Christians do not allow this subject to be calmly debated, end have not come to their own conclusion as the result of a calm debate.  And this is amply corroborated by my own consciousness of the past I never dared, nor could have dared, to criticize coolly and simply the pretensions of Jesus to be an absolute model of morality, until I had been delivered from the weight of authority and miracle, oppressing my critical powers.

III.  I have been asserting, that he who believes Jesus to be mere man, ought at once to believe his moral excellence finite and comparable to that of other men; and, that our judgment to this effect cannot be reasonably overborne by the “universal consent” of Christendom.—­Thus far we are dealing a priori, which here fully satisfies me:  in such an argument I need no a posteriori evidence to arrive at my own conclusion.  Nevertheless, I am met by taunts and clamour, which are not meant to be indecent, but which to my feeling are such.  My critics point triumphantly to the four gospels, and demand that I will make a personal attack on a character which they revere, even when they know that I cannot do so without giving great offence.  Now if any one were to call my old schoolmaster, or my old parish priest, a perfect and universal Model, and were to claim that I would entitle him Lord, and think of him as the only true revelation of God; should I not be at liberty to say, without disrespect, that “I most emphatically deprecate such extravagant claims for him”?  Would this justify an outcry, that I will publicly avow what I judge to be his defects of character, and will prove