to all his admirers that he was a sinner like other men?  Such a demand would be thought, I believe, highly unbecoming and extremely unreasonable.  May not my modesty, or my regard for his memory, or my unwillingness to pain his family, be accepted as sufficient reasons for silence? or would any one scoffingly attribute my reluctance to attack him, to my conscious inability to make good my case against his being “God manifest in the flesh”?  Now what, if one of his admirers had written panegyrical memorials of him; and his character, therein described, was so faultless, that a stranger to him was not able to descry any moral defeat whatever in it?  Is such a stranger bound to believe him to be the Divine Standard of morals, unless he can put his finger on certain passages of the book which imply weaknesses and faults?  And is it insulting a man, to refuse to worship him?  I utterly protest against every such pretence.  As I have an infinitely stronger conviction that Shakespeare was not in intellect Divinely and Unapproachably perfect, than that I can certainly point out in him some definite intellectual defect; as, moreover, I am vastly more sure that Socrates was morally imperfect, than that I am able to censure him rightly; so also, a disputant who concedes to me that Jesus is a mere man, has no right to claim that I will point out some moral flaw in him, or else acknowledge him to be a Unique Unparalleled Divine Soul.  It is true, I do see defects, and very serious ones, in the character of Jesus, as drawn by his disciples; but I cannot admit that my right to disown the pretensions made for him turns on my ability to define his frailties.  As long as (in common with my friend) I regard Jesus as a man, so long I hold with dogmatic and intense conviction the inference that he was morally imperfect, and ought not to be held up as unapproachable in goodness; but I have, in comparison, only a modest belief that I am able to show his points of weakness.

While therefore in obedience to this call, which has risen from many quarters, I think it right not to refuse the odious task pressed upon me,—­I yet protest that my conclusion does not depend upon it.  I might censure Socrates unjustly, or at least without convincing my readers, if I attempted that task; but my failure would not throw a feather’s weight into the argument that Socrates was a Divine Unique and universal Model.  If I write note what is painful to readers, I beg them to remember that I write with much reluctance, and that it is their own fault if they read.

In approaching this subject, the first difficulty is, to know how much of the four gospels to accept as fact.  If we could believe the whole, it would be easier to argue; but my friend Martineau (with me) rejects belief of many parts:  for instance, he has but a very feeble conviction that Jesus ever spoke the discourses attributed to him in John’s gospel.  If therefore I were to found upon these