(2) A singular character. More striking than anything Jesus said or did is what He was.  That which He worshipped in the God He trusted, He Himself embodied.  We can estimate His character best, not by trying to inventory its virtues (for a very similar list might be attributed to others of far less moral power) but by feeling the effect He had on those who knew Him.  They are constantly telling us how He amazed them, awed them, and bound them to Himself.  Their superlative tribute to Him is that, holding His own pure and exalted view of God, they felt no incongruity in thinking of Him as beside God on the throne.  It may have been their belief in His Messiahship, accredited by His resurrection and destining Him to come with power and judge the world, that led them to place Him at the right hand of God; but there was the place where He seemed to them to belong.  None have ever conceived God more highly than they who said, “God is love,” and these men set Jesus side by side with God.  The evangelists do not attempt to describe what He was like; they let us hear Him and watch Him, as He lived in the memories of those who had been with Him; and He makes His own impression.  The crowning tribute is that we have no loftier adjective in our vocabulary than “Christlike.”

(3) A singular victory—­a victory over the world and sin and death.

Jesus believed in and proclaimed a new order of things in the world—­the Kingdom of God—­in which His Father’s will should be realized.  It was an order in which men should live in love with one another and with God, in which justice, kindness and faithfulness should prevail in all relationships, and in which all God’s children’s needs should be supplied, their maladies healed, their wrongs righted, their lives made full.  This Kingdom was already in the earth in Himself and in the new life He succeeded in creating in those who followed Him.  It found itself opposed by physical forces that were injurious to humanity; and these He met fearlessly, sleeping in a storm so violent as to terrify His fisherman companions; and, what is more, He commanded these forces for His Father’s purpose in a way that amazed His first followers and is still amazing to us.  The reports of His mighty works have to be carefully scrutinized by historical scholars, and no doubt the historicity of some of them is much more fully attested than that of others; but when every allowance is made for the ideas of a prescientific age in which miracles were relatively frequent, and for the possible growth of the marvellous elements in the tradition, enough remains to show that here was a Personality whose power cannot be limited by our usual standards of human ability.  Judged by past or present conceptions of what is natural, His works were supernatural; He Himself regarded them as the breaking into the world through Him of the new order that was to be.  He discouraged men’s craving for the physically miraculous, and thought