one there would be nothing inconsistent with the other; so that there would be nothing incongruous, monstrous, or absurd. The difficulty was that of describing God and man as one united being; acting as such; speaking as such; suffering as such; dying as such—the difficulty of describing the things pertaining to his divine nature as naturally as those pertaining to his human nature; the difficulty of describing this mysterious being performing a miracle as naturally as he performed any other action-making him, if I may so speak—as natural when he stilled the tempest on the sea, or when he raised Lazarus from the grave, as when he broke the bread at the last Passover, or when, in words of sympathy and love, he comforted the weeping sisters of Lazarus: to preserve the individuality, the separate consciousness, the expressions of will, of affection, and of feeling; to describe the actions of the divinity in language appropriate, and the actions of the man in language appropriate; to describe such a mysterious being in language as appropriate when raising the dead as when conversing on ordinary topics of life; when stilling a tempest on the Sea of Galilee by a word as God, and when communing with the two disciples on the way

to Emmaus. Who can describe such a being, in very varied actions in life, and in a great diversity of circumstances, and yet do it so that all shall recognize its fitness ? How could this be done by unlettered fishermen? How could it be done by four or more such fishermen, not acting in concert, and yet drawing out the details of such a life in a manner that would be harmonious, and so that its concinnity would be preserved ?

(4.) It has not been done elsewhere than in the Gospels; not in the poetry of the Greeks; not in the incarnations of Vishnu. As far as the east is from the west are all those representations from what must be the character and the life of an incarnate Deity; and as it may be presumed that in the efforts of these two classes of mind-the Greek and the Hindoo, the first minds of earth—the power of man on that subject was exhausted, it may be affirmed now that it can not be done. Among the Greeks there was no bad passion of men that was not represented as developed in their incarnate deities; among the Hindoos there is nothing absurd, puerile, monstrous, extravagant, wild, improbable, or even wicked, that is not represented in their incarnations of the Deity.

On the question respecting the ability of man to describe, in a proper manner, the actions of an incarnate Deity, we are not left to conjecture, for we actually have two distinct classes of biographers of Jesus—both claiming to describe him as incarnate — that of the Evangelists, and that in the “apocryphal Gospels." No writings in the world are more unlike each other than these; nothing, perhaps, could more clearly demonstrate that there has been a supernatural guidance in portraying the character of Jesus in the Evangelists than a comparison of the one with the other.

One of those “Gospels” relates to the "infancy of Jesus," and the attempt has been made, assuming the fact of his incarnation or his divinity, to describe him when a boy. Of such an attempt, it has been well remarked by Dr. Bushnell (Nature and the Supernatural, p. 280), “If any writer, of almost any age, will undertake to describe not merely a spotless, but a superhuman or celestial childhood, not having the reality before him, he must be somewhat more than human himself if he does not pile together a mass of clumsy exaggera

tions, and draw and overdraw till neither heaven nor earth can find any verisimilitude in the picture.”

These apocryphal Gospels,” it has been well said, “are related to the canonical Gospels as a counterfeit to the genuine coin, or as a revolting caricature to the inimitable original.” According to the representation in those Gospels, even dumb idols, irrational beasts, and senseless trees bow in adoration before the infant Jesus on his journey to Egypt; and after his return, when yet a boy of five or seven years, he changes balls of clay into flying birds for the idle amusement of his playmates, dries up a stream of water by a mere word, transforms his companions into goats, raises the dead to life, makes by miracle a piece of cabinet-work which his father Joseph could not make, and performs all sorts of miraculous cures through a magical influence which proceeds from the very water in which he washed, the towels which he used, and the bed on which he slept.* (5.) But that in which men have failed every

where else has been accomplished in the Gospels. No one can show that, on the supposition that Christ was divineGod as well as man- —there is in his recorded life, in the sentiments which fell from his lips, in the actions which he performed, in the feelings which he manifested, even one thing inconsistent with such a supposition. That he was, as described, a perfect man, we have seen.

The life which he lived was that of a perfect man. The death which he died was that of a perfect man. At the same time, the sentiments which he uttered were such as became God—those profound truths; those perfect rules of morality; those sublime doctrines; those de

* The particulars, with ample illustrations, may be seen in Rud. Hoffman's Leben Jesu nach den Apokryphen, p. 140-236. See Dr. Schaff's Person of Christ, p. 31-33.

scriptions of God; those representations of man; those representations of the future state—the resurrectionthe judgment-heaven and hell. The miracles which he wrought were such as God only can perform, and the language which he used in healing the sick, in opening the eyes of the blind, in stilling the storm, and in raising the dead, is as simple and appropriate as that which he employed in his ordinary intercourse with his disciples and friends. For he is described as uttering those great truths as naturally and as easily as conversing on the ordinary topics of life, and the description of his raising the dead is a description of an act as natural and easy as the most ordinary action of life. We may safely challenge any one who denies the fact of the incarnation to show, on the supposition that there was an incarnation, what there is in the whole of the four Gospels that is inconsistent with such an idea, or that strikes the mind as incongruous on such a supposition. And even with this model before us, let it be attempted again, even by the most cultivated intellect of the world, to represent an incarnate God, and we should have a representation of the gods of Greece and Rome, or the puerilities and absurdities of the Hindoo incarnations, or a very imperfect copy of Jesus of Nazareth.

(6.) How, now, is this to be accounted for? If the case was real, and if there was a real incarnation in the person of Christ, and if these illiterate men were inspired to give a just account of his life, then the whole matter is explained ; if neither of these were true, then the mystery remains as yet unsolved, and will remain unsolved forever.

LECTURE IX.

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION AS ADAPTED TO THE WANTS

OF MAN, AS ILLUSTRATED IN THESE EIGHTEEN HUNDRED YEARS.

AFTER the lapse of eighteen hundred years, in which Christianity has had a fair opportunity, with other religions, to make a trial of what it is, we ought to be able to show that it meets a want in man, and that the manner in which it does this is proof of its divine origin. The argument would be the stronger if it could be shown that other forms of religion have failed to meet this want, and that they, in this respect, leave the race as they find it. The direct argument for the divine origin of Christianity, as derived from this source, would be that God has endowed man with certain wants and necessities as a religious being, and that, in the failure of all other systems, the system which would actually meet those wants must have had its origin in Him who has thus endowed the human soul.

It may be assumed now that the ancient religions of the world did not meet those wants, and that for this reason they have been suffered to die out. The Hebrew religion did not do this; for, although it has remained in the world, and is, in fact, found in almost all nations, it does not so commend itself to mankind as to make them desire to revive it, and to rebuild the Temple; and, but for some purposes which can be best explained on the supposition that the prophecies in the Bible respecting it are to be fulfilled, it would have