My friend, I find, rejects Jesus as an authoritative teacher, distinctly denies that the acceptance of Jesus in this character is any condition of salvation and of the divine favour, and treats of my “demand of an oracular Christ,” as inconsistent with my own principles.  But this is mere misconception of what I have said.  I find Jesus himself to set up oracular claims.  I find an assumption of pre-eminence and unapproachable moral wisdom to pervade every discourse from end to end of the gospels.  If I may not believe that Jesus assumed an oracular manner, I do not know what moral peculiarity in him I am permitted to believe.  I do not demand (as my friend seems to think) that he shall be oracular, but in common with all Christendom, I open my eyes and see that he is; and until I had read my friend’s review of my book, I never understood (I suppose through my own prepossessions) that he holds Jesus not to have assumed the oracular style.

If I cut out from the four gospels this peculiarity, I must cut out, not only the claim of Messiahship, which my friend admits to have been made, but nearly every moral discourse and every controversy:  and why? except in order to make good a predetermined belief that Jesus was morally perfect.  What reason can be given me for not believing that Jesus declared:  “If any one deny ME before men, him will I deny before my Father and his angels?” or any of the other texts which couple the favour of God with a submission to such pretensions of Jesus?  I can find no reason whatever for doubting that he preached HIMSELF to his disciples, though in the three first gospels he is rather timid of doing this to the Pharisees and to the nation at large.  I find him uniformly to claim, sometimes in tone, sometimes in distinct words, that we will sit at his feet as little children and learn of him.  I find him ready to answer off-hand, all difficult questions, critical and lawyer-like, as well as moral.  True, it is no tenet of mine that intellectual and literary attainment is essential in an individual person to high spiritual eminence.  True, in another book I have elaborately maintained the contrary.  Yet in that book I have described men’s spiritual progress as often arrested at a certain stage by a want of intellectual development; which surely would indicate that I believed even intellectual blunders and an infinitely perfect exhaustive morality to be incompatible.  But our question here (or at least my question) is not, whether Jesus might misinterpret prophecy, and yet be morally perfect; but whether, after assuming to be an oracular teacher, he can teach some fanatical precepts, and advance dogmatically weak and foolish arguments, without impairing our sense of his absolute moral perfection.