the faith to ignore the opposition of all the world’s wisdom and of all its enthroned power, and to fulfil his task as the woman does who hides her leaven in the meal, content to wait for years, or millenniums, until his truth shall conquer in the realization of God’s will on earth even as it is done in heaven.  It confronts us when we consider that the Man who has shown his brethren what obedience means, who has taught them to pray, who has been for all these centuries the Way, the Truth, the Life, by whom they come to God, habitually claimed without shadow of abashment or slightest hint of conscious presumption, a nature, a relation to God, a freedom from sin, that other men according to the measure of their godliness would shun as blasphemy.  If the personal claim was true, and not the blind pretence of vanity, the Jesus of the gospels is the exception to the uniform fact of human nature, but he is no longer unaccountable; and if his claim was true, his knowledge of the absolute religion, and his choice of the irresistible propaganda, are no less extraordinary, but they are not unaccountable.  Paul, whose life was transformed and his thinking revolutionized by his meeting with the risen Jesus, thought on these things and believed that “the name which, is above every name” was his by right of nature as well as by the reward of obedience (Phil. ii. 5-11).  John, who leaned on Jesus’ breast during his earthly life, and who meditated on the meaning of that life through a ministry of many decades, came to believe that he whom he had seen with his eyes, heard with his ears, handled with his hands, was, indeed, “the Word made flesh” (John i. 14), through whom the very God revealed his love to men.  Through all the perplexities of doubt, amidst all the obscurings of irrelevant speculations, the hearts of men to-day turn to this Jesus of Nazareth as their supreme revelation of God, and find in him “the Master of their thinking and the Lord of their lives.”

“Lord, to whom shall we go?  Thou hast the words of eternal life.  And we have believed and know that thou art the Holy One of God.”

Appendix

Books of Reference on the Life of Jesus

1.  A concise account of the voluminous literature on this subject maybe found at the close of the article JESUS CHRIST by Zockler in Schaff-Herzog, Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge.  Of the earlier of the modern works it is well to mention David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu (2 vols. 1835), in which he sought to reduce all the gospel miracles to myths.  August Neander, Das Leben Jesu Christi, 1837, wrote in opposition to the attitude taken by Strauss.  Both of these works have been translated into English.  Ernst Renan, Vie de Jesus (1863, 16th ed. 1879), translated, The Life of Jesus (1863), is a charming, though often superficial and patronizing, presentation of the subject.  For vivid word pictures of scenes in the life of Jesus