associations.  But let the general tendency once begin to conflict with it, and its inherent weakness in an instant becomes apparent.  We may see this by considering the moral character of Christ, and the sort of weight that is claimed for His example.  This example, so the Christian world teaches, is faultless and infallible; and as long as we believe this, the example has supreme authority.  But apply to this the true Protestant method, and the authority soon shows signs of wavering.  Let us once deny that Christ was more than a faultless man, and we lose by that denial our authority for asserting that he was as much as a faultless man.  Even should it so happen that we do approve entirely of his conduct, it is we who are approving of him, not he who is approving of us.  The old position is reversed:  we become the patrons of our most worthy Judge eternal; and the moral infallibility is transferred from him to ourselves.  In other words, the practical Protestant formula can be nothing more than this.  The Protestant teacher says to us, ’Such a way of life is the best, take my word for it:  and if you want an example, go to that excellent Son of David, who, take my word for it, was the very best of men.’ But even in this case the question arises, how shall the Protestants interpret the character that they praise?  And to this they can never give any satisfactory answer.  What really happens with them is inevitable and obvious.  The character is simply for them a symbol of what each happens to think most admirable; and the identity in all cases of its historical details does not produce an identity as of a single portrait, but an identity as of one frame applied to many.  Mr. Matthew Arnold, for instance, sees in Jesus one sort of man, Father Newman another, Charles Kingsley another, and M. Renan another; and the Imitatio Christi, as understood by these, will be found in each case to mean a very different thing.  The difference between these men, however, will seem almost unanimity, if we compare them with others who, so far as logic and authority go, have just as good a claim on our attention.  There is hardly any conceivable aberration of moral licence that has not, in some quarter or other, embodied itself into a rule of life, and claimed to be the proper outcome of Protestant Christianity.  Nor is this true only of the wilder and more eccentric sects.  It is true of graver and more weighty thinkers also; so much so, that a theological school in Germany has maintained boldly ’that fornication is blameless, and that it is not interdicted by the precepts of the Gospel.’[39]