"Whom do men say that I the Son of Man am? But whom say ye that I am? Thou art the Christ, the Son of the Living God."Matt 16: 13, 15, 16. "I am amazed at Christ's purity and holiness and at His infinite beauty. The forms of religion may change, but Christ will grow more and more in the roll of the ages. His character is more wonderful than the greatest miracle."-Browning. "We have come to see that if we will not listen to Jesus Christ in His revelation of the Father, it is not worth while to listen to anybody else. He is the only one who has brought a Gospel worth hearing, and, we may be sure, the only one who has brought the Gospel that can move the hearts of men."-Borden P. Bowne. 'Jesus could not mean so much to the heart, if He were not at the same time a problem to the intellect."-Fairbairn. "Jesus baffles only to allure and allures only to enrich."-L. M. Sweet. "Therefore to Thee it was given Many to save with Thyself. And at the end of the day, O Faithful Shepherd! to come, -Arnold. I. IS HE JESUS OR CHRIST? THE antithesis, Jesus or Christ, originally proposed by Strauss, is just now being revived in some quarters. Those doing so affirm that there is a radical difference between the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history, commonly adding a denial of the deity of our Lord. They declare that the New Testament writings are largely fictions and inventions of hero-worshiping imagination. The miracles and much besides are ruled out by a wave of the hand. That they are really myths, underlies this typical assumption. "It is vain to make them conceivable, as natural events, and quite as impossible to imagine things so unnatural to have really happened, and all narratives of this kind must be considered fictions," says one objector. Nearly fifty years ago Strauss modestly revealed to the world his great discovery that the picture of Jesus as Christ in the Gospels was subjectively wrought by "the instrumentality of the mind, the power of imagination, and nervous excitement." Faith in Jesus, among His disciples, arose, he would confess, as the first effect of what was in Jesus, but popular conceptions soon transferred Him into a temperature in which they could not fail to put forth numerous unhistorical shoots, one ever more miraculous than another, in most luxuriant growth. What is the result? A little group of German radicals, Pfleiderer, Zimmern, Jensen, A. Crews, outHerod Strauss, and confess, one, that "the Christ of the Church has been formed out of those myths and legends which are the common property of religion all over the world, more particularly having their origin in Judaism, Hellenism, Mithraism, the Græco-Egyptian religion, Zoroastrianism, and even Buddhism;" while another descants upon the contribution of Babylonian mythology to the Biblical portrait of Jesus, and still another, as if this were not criticism run mad, soberly declares that "this Jesus has never lived upon the earth, neither has He died, because He is nothing but an Israelitish Gilgamesh legend." Taking courage from these bizarre extravaganzas, even an American writer frankly acknowledges that we have n't the means to draw near enough to the historical Jesus to become acquainted with him, and to determine His rank in the scale of being. We can only guess each for himself as to the moral and spiritual features and stature of Jesus, and, moreover, it is n't important that we should know." Thus Christ did not create the Church, but the Church created Christ. Paul, unknown writers of the fourth Gospel and the epistle to the Hebrews, and even the Synoptists, created out of the colors of a vivid imagination and Oriental myths, the matchless portrait as we have it in the New Testament. The Church has since put on the finishing touches. "Christ can not possibly be identified with Jesus of Nazareth." He is reduced to "a name, a motto, a flag, to which its adherents may rally." Yet by a jugglery of words those who have, perhaps unconsciously, slipped the moorings of their faith and drifted into this theological anarchy, hold inconsistently to the divinity of Jesus and His power to forgive sins, but in the same sense only that they believe in the divinity of man, and the power of man to forgive sins. Now and then one consciously continues the same legerdemain of words. "Do I believe," says Mr. Dole, "in the divinity of Jesus? Yes, surely, in His deity, if you like. But I find the same deity in Isaiah, in Epictetus, in the great and wise Marcus Aurelius. Christ is the name of my better, divine, or ideal self.” By which Mr. Dole proves his own deity. One is reminded of the witty remark of a |