It was in the manifestation of the excellence of this human nature of ours that they believed in Jesus and gradually became His disciples.  Little by little it so commanded them that at last the moment came when it was impossible for them to separate themselves from Him; and one day, when the people were turning away from Him when He was preaching and saying things that it was hard for them to understand, He looked around upon them and said, “Are you going also, will you leave me now?” And then there burst forth from the lips of one of them, the most strong and characteristic act of the little company, those great words that declared how He had become necessary to them:  “Lord, to whom shall we go?  Thou hast the words of eternal life.”  You see the power that Jesus had acquired over these men.  You see the way in which He had taken them absolutely into His dominion, simply because of the manifestation of character and life, simply because He had shown them what man might be and opened the springs of the better life in themselves by the words He had spoken to them.  And then they lived on with Him still, and by and by they had become so convinced by His truth and wisdom, His character had so taken possession of them, that they were ready to believe anything that He said.  One day He lifted up His voice and declared that which had gradually been dawning upon them all the time, that He was more than they were, that He had brought in some mysterious way a divine life into this world and had much to communicate to them.  He told them that He was the Father from whom His life and their life had come.  He told them that He and the Father were one.  He told them, not in theological statement, not as men have worked out since in their desire to know it fully, but in the simple statement of the truth that could be the inspiration of their life, that in His presence there was here the very presence of God among them.  It was not strange to them, though human creatures, though men, that the highest aspiration of their humanity had never thought God so far from this world that it seemed to them strange that there should be in very human presence the divine life here with them.  They could not explain it and did not try to explain it.  Here it was, that which they had seen shadowed in the divinest men whom they had known, that which they had recognized.  Here it was before them in this being who had won such a power over them that they were ready to accept His testimony with regard to Himself.  Oh! my friends, let us not feel that the evidence of our Christian faith fails when it is seen to rest upon the word of Christ Himself.  My neighbor knows more of himself than I know of him.  I know more of myself than any man can know of me, if only I be earnest and sincere.  And that the greatest of men who ever trod this earth should not know more of His nature than any other man should know, and that therefore His word should not be the richest revelation of that which is in His life and makes