should eclipse and outlast the monarchy of the Cæsars. Just as little did the disciples of Greek learning, who in that age were found in all the great cities of the East, dream that their language was to be the vehicle of a literature coming from Judea, which was to rival the riches of their own philosophers, and was to ultimately become intelligible and life-giving to a thousand tribes of the children of men, a literature to which all the chief intellectual luminaries of eighteen hundred years should repair, from its founts of holy splendour filling their golden urns. Speaking the tongue of Homer and of Plato the Jewish preachers of a universal Christian redemption, made their way along the undeviating roads by which the Roman legionaries had made straight in the desert a high way for our God." There are no accidents in history. A wondrous time matched and fitted the coming of Him who is the wonder of all time.

66

Standing to-day in His light which streams all around us, we feel that no mortal can with Him compare among the sons of men. He sustains different relations to the Christian spirit from those sustained by the founders of other religions to their disciples. Men who are guilt-smitten and tortured with agony, are quieted and transformed by His Name and Word. Moses never stood, or claimed to stand, on any celestial height. Buddha and Confucius may be ranked with saints and sages, and Mohammed may be deemed a prophet who clearly saw the unity of God, but the world, as it seems to the Christian, has only one Saviour who brings the same hopes, fashions the same characters, commands the same grateful homage among nations as remote from each other as the Greenlanders and the native Australians, the dwellers by the Oregon and the dwellers by the Ganges; as distant in time as those who assembled in an upper room in old Jerusalem from those who sing His praises to-day in stately cathedrals or the barracks of the Salvation Army.

We may say of Him, that He is the strength and substance of the religion bearing His name. We cannot say of Mohammedanism that it is Mohammed, though he is certainly a part of it, the temporary strength, and, as we believe, the ultimate disintegration of it as a system. We cannot say of Buddhism, that it is Gautama Buddha, for not only does that protean faith recognize many Buddhas, but even in the beginning it was "Nirvana and the Law," rather than the gentle saint himself that his loving disciples preached. Hinduism is associated with names of poets, saints, reform

ers,

none of them supreme and all-inclusive. We cannot say of Confucianism that it is Confucius, for the Chinese sage was a scribe and historian of the ancients, a transmitter and not a creator. While he represents China, and is venerated by millions, and while temples are dedicated and sandal wood papers are burnt to him in every Chinese city, he is the symbol rather than the everliving embodiment of the faith which he taught. But in Jesus Christ His followers find the truth personalized, knowing Whom they know God, man, atonement, resurrection, redemption, immortality. Our creed is not merely Christ's sermon and parables, not merely what Jesus said, but also what He was and did. The teaching of Christ which is adequate holds up His radiant person, sets forth His matchless utterances, and relates the story of His life, death, and resurrection: it proclaims what Jesus was, what Jesus said, what Jesus did. In the first we have theology, in the second we have ethics, in the third we have the Gospel, and in all together we have salvation for the individual and for mankind. He is the living embodied truth, the knowledge of Whom is eternal life. Men have formulated masterly statements regarding Him, but He is larger than our creeds, and He has the life-giving quality possessed by no formula however true. Such, according to Christian faith, is the personality Whom I shall endeavor to set forth as the universal Man and Saviour.

.

That Christianity is the World-Religion has been argued in the previous lectures on the various grounds on which thus far we have stood. But now I summon your thought to the claim that Christianity alone presents in its Founder and central Personage the Universal Man and Redeemer, who meets at once the need, the temper, the intellectual and the spiritual demands of all peoples. He rules, as we know, the occidental nations, but He is no more occidental than oriental; the East may claim Him as well as the West. We remember how Keshub Chunder Sen in his lectures rejoiced that Jesus Christ was an Asiatic, that His disciples were Asiatics, that all the agencies primarily employed for the propagation of the Gospel were Asiatic, that "in Christ we see not only the exaltedness of humanity, but also the grandeur of which Asiatic nature is susceptible." And we remember with what beautiful and loving sentences Mozoomdar has pictured the Oriental Christ, the bathing, fasting, praying, teaching, healing, feasting, prophet of Nazareth. When Jesus is received into the heart, He is as much at home in the Universities by the Ganges as in those by Isis and Cam, in the cities by the Indus and the

Nile as in those by the Hudson and the Clyde. We cannot think of a Western Mohammed. We can hardly think of a Western Buddha, but you discover nothing local or provincial about Jesus Christ. It makes not the least difference where men preach His Gospel, to the most cultivated Europeans or the most barbarous Africans, to the thoughtful Hindus or to the North American savages, among the naked Hottentots or among the fur-clad Esquimaux; He finds a true home in the hearts of all who receive Him because He is the Universal Man and even the three hundred names given Him in the Scriptures do not exhaust His million-sided personality.

We know very well that such a strangely complex being as man requires a Saviour and Leader who shall answer to all his intellectual and moral needs. The Teuton requires a captain, a hero, in whom is every quality of heroic manliness and splendid leadership. The Asiatic demands a reasoner, an expounder of abstract truth who can formulate universal principles. Men whose minds are Greek in their intellectual aptitudes cannot be satisfied with a teacher who is not analytic and I may add Socratic, in his methods. And there are poets in the world, in whom imagination is the central light of the soul, who commune with nature because they see in the outer world a reflex both of humanity and of divinity. Furthermore most that is good in human life is found in the family, in society, and the world needs a prophet who shall be familiar and friendly, and sympathetic, who shall bless the little children, and share the wedding feast and stand with tear-wet eyes at the open grave. The most familiar character on the stage of human life is the sufferer, who is conscious of sin and who is smitten with grief, and the perfect Man and the Saviour must meet his innermost need. Christ alone is adequate to all these demands.

As we open the Gospels and read the Words of Jesus therein recorded, we discover in them a body of wisdom the loftiest in spirit, the most astonishing in their completeness and the calmest in their absolute assurance of authority which the world possesses. These words fell from the lips of Jesus, talking with fishermen, soldiers, women, Pharisees; and they seem the natural and easy expressions of one who was Himself greater than what He said, flakes of gold crumbling off from their very richness, sparks struck out by His contacts with men, snowy petals shaken by the breezes of discussion from the blossoming boughs of the tree of life, with a naturalness, and ease like that of a virgin prairie covering itself in May-time with grass

N

and flowers. A lawyer feeling ill-at-ease by the reply of Jesus to his question, put to Him the inquiry, "Who is my neighbour? And instantly came forth from the lips of Christ the parable of the good Samaritan, and all literature furnishes nothing equal to this extemporised allegory by which Jesus rebuked the Pharisaic and cruel hypocrisy of His time and identified His cause with the most gracious humanities of all the future. No Hindu sage or Greek logician or Hebrew prophet could possibly crave anything keener, more searching, more humbling, more inspiring. It illustrates a method of teaching that can never be provincial and can never become obsolete. This is one of those amazing parables by which He, Whois confessedly the greatest of Teachers, brought His message home to the common, the universal mind. Whoever taught like this Man? The simple sublime, picturesque pedagogy of the Gospels has evoked the enthusiasm of the chief instructors of the race.

In our Christian libraries we point to the wealth of sermonic literature which has been worth preserving, and which has been inspired by the Christ, the works of South and Jeremy Taylor, and Bunyan and Whitfield and Chalmers of Robert Hall and Robertson, of Bushnell, and McLaren and Spurgeon, and we say, "from these tomes we will show you miracles of eloquence and wisdom which you cannot rival in the masterpieces of the Senate and the Forum." But we who know the Christ would no more think of comparing the best speeches of Cicero or Burke with the Sermon on the Mount, than we should of comparing the fine jewelry of a King's diadem with the unwasting fires of the Milky Way. The printed sayings of Christ you can read in an hour, and if you ever take pains to go over them thoughtfully at one sitting, you may feel like a man permitted in some ethereal body to step from burning constellation to burning constellation round the whole infinite breadth of the Zodiac.

But, remember that the conversations of Jesus, containing all this wisdom, are not the hard-wrought elaborations which scholars admire in Walter Savage Landor; they are not the reasonings of the philosopher, collating, as Sir William Hamilton did, the opinions of a thousand thinkers in a half score of languages, and slowly digesting the vast materials before offering the laboured result to the criticism of mankind. They were spoken with the familiarity of the breakfast-table and yet with the authority of Mount Sinai. The free utterances of this Nazarene Prophet do not recall the frenzy of Elijah nor the

ardor of Isaiah, who appear to us lifted by a divine breath greater than themselves. Still less do they remind us of the experiences of Mohammed, whose nervous system was overstrained, and whose struggles and agonies were accompanied by delusions of the senses, before he came out into the calm assurance that he was a divine messenger commissioned to utter one specific truth. Nor does Jesus remind us of Buddha, who, after long years of vain search and many agonising disappointments, at last gained the vision by which his life was thereafter attended. There is in Jesus a divine self-contained calmness and sweet authority distinguishing Him from all others. And we find in Him not what we discover in Aristotle and John Stuart Mill, thought and language welded together through disciplined thinking, for Jesus speaks rather with the fine free utterance of the poet whose vision of God is unclouded.

If all men need a perfect teacher, one who has a perfect message which grows not antiquated, where else shall they discover him? Does not Jesus meet the mental and spiritual needs of humanity both by the contents of His disclosure and the method of His speech? Let no one be eager to mention Buddha as a possible rival, for Buddha was blind to that truth which glowed ever in the heart of Christ, the Fatherhood of God. And Jesus not only taught the divine fatherhood, but He made God real to men, not merely by words spoken about God, but by taking the veil, as it were, from the face of the Father and showing us God in Himself. He taught that obedience is the one principle in the universe which makes for life and peace; He taught that men must get into harmony with the moral law. So far as His teaching was ethical, it reached down to the centre of human character, demanding truth in the inner parts, not compromising with any darling sin, as did Mohammed, leaving us satisfied with no fragmentary virtues, as Confucius did; and confessing no agnosticism with regard to the power that rules in Heaven; exalting humility, enthroning meekness, laying its benedictory hand on aspirations after holiness, holding out promises to the merciful; placing a diadem on the spirit of martyrdom, searching out the hiding places of the hypocrite, rebuking the spirit of display in alms-giving and the habit of meaningless repetition in prayer, lifting the earthly life heavenward, teaching a supreme trust in the Father's goodness and personal care, magnifying the duty of brotherly kindness on earth, and yet pointing to rewards and sufferings in the life beyond as supreme objects of human thought and fear.