We find again that, where Jesus Christ is most real, and means most, there we are apt to see the human mind reach a fuller freedom and achieve more.  There is a higher civilization, a greater emphasis on the value of human life and character, and a stronger endeavour for the utmost development of all human material, if we may so call the souls and faculties of men.  Why should there be this correspondence between Jesus of Nazareth and human life?  It is best brought out, when we realize what he has made of Christian society, and contrast it with what the various religions have left or produced in other regions—­the atrophy of human nature.

In fine, there is no figure in human history that signifies more.  Men may love him or hate him, but they do it intensely.  If he was only what some say, he ought to be a mere figure of antiquity by now.  But he is more than that; Jesus is not a dead issue; he has to be reckoned with still; and men who are to treat mankind seriously, must make the intellectual effort to understand the man on whom has been centred more of the interest and the passion of the most serious and the best of mankind than on any other.  The real secret is that human nature is deeply and intensely spiritual, and that Jesus satisfies it at its most spiritual point.

The object before us in these pages is the attempt to know Jesus, if we can, in a more intimate and intelligent way than we have done—­at least, to put before our minds the great problem, Who is this Jesus Christ? and to try to answer it.

One answer to this question is that Jesus was nothing, never was anything, but a myth developed for religious purposes; that he never lived at all.  This view reappears from time to time, but so far it has not appealed to any who take a serious interest in history.  No historian of the least repute has committed himself to the theory.  Desperate attempts have been made to discredit the Christian writers of the first two centuries; it has been emphasized that Jesus is not mentioned in secular writers of the period, and the passage in Tacitus ("Annals”, XV:44) has been explained away as a Christian interpolation, or, more gaily, by reviving the wild notion that Poggio Bracciolini forged the whole of the “Annals”.  But such trifling with history and literature does not serve.  No scholar accepts the theory about Poggio—­and yet if the passage about Christ is to be got rid of, this is the better way of the two; for there is nothing to countenance the view that the chapter is interpolated, or to explain when or by whom it was done—­the wish is father to the thought.  Christians are twice mentioned by Suetonius in dealing with Emperors of the first century, though in one passage the reading “Chrestus” for “Christus” has suggested to some scholars that another man is meant; the confusion was a natural one and is instanced elsewhere, but we need not press the matter.  The argument from silence is generally recognized as an uncertain one.  Sir James Melville,