in fulfilment.

of a race to produce Him; of the expectation of the nations dimly seeing a future Redeemer; of a Jesus in prophecy and line of prophets, workers of marvels, poets; of the gathering of the ages into the fulness of time, of the nations into the unity of government, and then of His coming, the God of ages, the King of nations -the gift which the bending heavens dropped into Mary's bosom, the renewal of all things below.

There is nothing that we claim for Jesus Christ

that He has not claimed for Himself, and His testi- He is His own witness. mony is true. He has established a character before the world in which a most conspicuous trait is truthfulness. Who has so much as accused Christ of being an impostor? "For this was I born, for this

came I into the world, that I might bear testimony The truth-teller of the to the truth" (John xviii. 37). Here and there ages.

this claim of Christ of being a truth-teller has been denied, but only by some delirious atheist who thus utters his own condemnation. "Never did man speak like this man" (John vii. 46), is the spontaneous judgment of humanity upon Christ.

But also, "His word was with power" (Luke iv. 32). He showed Himself the Master of nature at the same time that He claimed a hearing as a messenger from God. "This beginning of miracles did Jesus at Cana of Galilee, and He manifested His glory, and His disciples believed in Him" (John ii. II). He stills the storm, He walks on the water, He vanishes out of sight, He reappears from empty space. "Receive thy sight," He says (Luke xviii. 42), and a man born blind is made to see, and this is part of His sermon. He groans and lifts His eyes to Heaven, and a dumb man speaks, and this accredits His message; such events were the universal accompaniments of His teachings. "Young

His truthfulness authenticated by miracles.

of His resurrection.

man, I say to thee, arise (Luke vii. 14), and the The supreme evidence dead body became alive, sat up and began to speak: and upon such evidences of His power Jesus addressed the people. "Lazarus, come forth!” (John xi. 43); who could resist Christ preaching at the grave of Lazarus? Only the malicious and the perverse. Then they slew Him. He was dead and buried, His followers scattered, His career ruined. And again He is alive. He is seen, touched, heard, lived with by all His old associates and followers to the number of five hundred, teaching a doctrine which is the very perfection and fulfilment of what He had taught before. From all this we know with absolute certainty that Christ's testimony of Himself, as well as of everything else, is true. "Master," said Nicodemus, "we know that Thou art a teacher come from God, for no man could do the works which Thou dost, unless God were with him" (John iii. 2). Now, what is Christ according to His own testiHow Jesus testifies to mony? He is God. To His own disciples He said: "Have I been so long a time with you and you have not known Me? He that seeth Me seeth the Father" (John xiv. 9).

His own divinity.

A mystic certainty.

And He insisted: "Believe you not that I am in the Father and the Father in Me? Otherwise believe for the very works' sake" (John xiv. 11, 12). This was an appeal to a sense of Christ's divinity bestowed by Him upon all who ever came near Him, vague or distinct in proportion to the intelligence and good will of its recipients. Lacordaire calls this "a mystic certainty," which viewed in its interior manifestations we shall consider more fully before concluding. "That all should honor the Son even as they honor the Father" (John v. 23) was Christ's precept, and the worship of Jehovah insensibly passed into that of the Messias,

faith.

absorbing it totally in the hearts of Christ's disciples. It was indeed only by degrees that this domi- Peter's profession of nated the Apostles. "Thou art Christ, the Son of the living God" (Matt. xvi. 16), the first proclamation of the Apostolic faith, was made by Peter; and "Flesh and blood hath not revealed this to thee, but My Father" (Matt. xvi. 17), was our Lord's acceptance of it. It made its final conquest after the Resurrection, when Thomas solemnly exclaimed: That of Thomas. "My Lord and my God!" (John xx. 28)-his reluctant mind, compelled by the testimony of his senses, seeing and touching the risen body of his Master. Our Saviour's acceptance of these divine titles" Because thou hast seen, Thomas, thou hast believed. Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed" (John xx. 29)-is most conclusive of His doctrine. He accepts Thomas's profession of faith, adopts it, anticipates its use by others as the formula of a belief in their case unsupported by sensible contact with His bodily existence.

The result of Christ's teaching was the unanimous

conviction of His followers that He was divine. The The unanimous faith

Gospel and Epistles of St. John, the latest of the of His followers. Apostolic writers, are conclusive of this. As to the public attitude of the Society which appeared in the world as the Christian Church, St. Paul's teaching is full, is variously expressed, and is all summarized by such words as these: "Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God" (Phil. ii. 6); and again: "For in Him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily" (Col. ii. 9).

Is it realized how difficult it must have been to teach honest Hebrews, who loathed idolatry above every evil, that a man of their nation and like them

Apostolic faith in the
Incarnation.

selves was Jehovah come in the flesh? Jesus did The significance of the it, though not by the immediate promulgation of the great doctrine, which would have shocked them. But first He secured a place as Master by the testimony of John the Baptist, and then by His astounding miracles, and always by the impress of His resistless love and wisdom. Afterwards He allowed His divinity to be taught by His works, by His character, previously or in conjunction with His own explicit claim to be divine.

The spontaneous and official accusation of the Jews.

The enemies of Jesus were no less impressed with His claim to be God than were His friends. "They sought the more to kill Him because He said that God was His Father, making Himself equal to God" (John v. 18). In fact, when His credentials as a prophet had been fairly presented, He was as ready to claim divine honors from the Jewish conspirators as from His own disciples. When they quoted Abraham against Him, He said: He said: "Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham was made I am" (John viii. 58)-that expression I am being the traditional synonym of the Deity among the Jews. They took up stones therefore to cast at Him" (John x. 31), because, as they said, "Being a man, thou makest Thyself God" (John x. 33). And this was the condemnation of the Council against Him, that they had heard His claim of divinity from His own mouth, and needed no witnesses to convict Him of it.

"I AM THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD."

If Jesus Christ was a chosen messenger of God, Summary of the argu- as all admit, He was, Ist, a good man; 2d, a truthful man; 3d, an enlightened man. But He believed that He was God. Hence He was God. For it is

ment.

evidently impossible, without supposing lunacy, for

a man to be deceived about such a stupendous thing as to whether He is God or not.

There are many who admit Christ as a great Can Christ have been leader, but deny to Him the divine attributes. John a great and good man, and nothing more? Stuart Mill has somewhere said that he knows no Letter canon of conduct before any act than that the inan who is about to do it should ask himself whether Jesus Christ would approve of it, or the contrary; and yet Mill was almost an atheist. Such men are numerous, and the deists among them freely admit that Christ was God's foremost champion, His best accredited messenger, the true leader of the human race. Now, what we say to these persons is, that if they are right, then Christ must be God, otherwise God is the author of idolatry, for Christ won divine worship from the beginning.

The relation of
Christ's mission to an

The mission of Christ to the world is the most distinctively moral and religious intervention of an overruling Providence in the affairs of humanity overruling Providence which ever took place. But its characteristic is the claim of divinity on Christ's part, and the recognition of that claim on the part of His followers. If He be not divine, actually God, then the Supreme Ruler of men's souls has failed both in His messenger and His message, and failed fatally. Christ was sent to eradicate idolatry, which had grown to be the deepest-seated evil of humanity, and to establish impregnably the very opposite, the knowledge His mission against and worship of the true God. The lightest belief idolatry could not in Divine Providence identifies its rulings in this sense with Christ and His mission-and they resulted in universal Christ-worship. God must have foreseen. that men would finally come to adore Jesus more universally than ever they had adored their idols. The

have ended in a new form of idolatry.