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moral perfection is meant freedom from conscious sin, some of us have known men and women of whom we think we could affirm so much. Why, then, deny of Jesus what we concede is possible for men as such? We do not deny it. We only say we do not, cannot, know about a thing so secret and obscure. And then, besides, that inexpugnable saying will recur, "Why callest thou me good?" Moreover, moral perfection is much more than doing nothing which is evidently wrong to us. It is doing the rightest possible thing under the circumstances every time. To do this, a man must be much more infallible than the pope pretends to be. For he pretends to be infallible only when speaking ex cathedra, not in the innumerable exigencies of each social and domestic day.

So, then, without appealing to certain passages in the New Testament, which, however consonant with "the second person of the Trinity" do not reflect a perfect human goodness, it is evident that, when our Unitarians of forty years ago affirmed the moral perfection of Jesus, they did so without intellectual seriousness. It is evident that those who still hold to this conception, Unitarians or others, do not suf ficiently consider what they say. For they imply not only the omniscience of Jesus, but their own.

But even if the golden haze with which Martineau invested himself when contending with Newman had made him impervious to Newman's solid shot, even if the moral perfection of Jesus had then been established, whether in the narrower or in the wider and the truer sense, what should we have to say of the

other part of the conception,- the perfect revelation of God in this perfect man? What, if not this? That, however such a conception may have agreed with the pre-scientific thought of God, it has no agreement with the thought of him which science has revealed. The Christ of Arius and the "second person of the Trinity" is the Creator and Sustainer of all worlds. But his attributes cannot be transferred to a man, however perfect, to suit the exigencies of an irrational phrase. Those who delight in this phrase the perfect revelation of God in perfect man do not pretend that the immeasurably great and glorious revelation of modern science is any part of that revelation which we have in the mind and character of the Man of Nazareth. But, surely, it is no little part of God's revelation of himself to us. Surely, a revelation in which this has no part cannot be a perfect one. Nor any more can that which is exclusive of the beseeching beauty of the world, of the great course of history, of the genius of Homer and Shakspere, of Raphael and Rembrandt, of Beethoven and Wagner, of Washington and Lincoln, of the heroism and devotion of innumerable brave and tender men and women who have lived and died for truth and righteousness. Bright is the laurel upon Jesus' brow which once the brier mocked. We would not rob it of one shin

ing leaf. But thousands besides him have done their part, with sea and land, with sun and stars, with history and art, in revealing to us something of the perfection of the Eternal. And when we consider the vastness of his revelation in the order and

the beauty of the world and in the course of history, in the genius of his poets and the goodness of his saints, though we know that this revelation is far from perfect, yet is it so much more perfect than that vouchsafed to us in the mind and heart of Jesus that to speak of this as perfect seems either foolishness or blasphemy. It does not so much bespeak a lively sense of the commanding excellence of Jesus as it bespeaks a strange and miserable indifference. to the boundless majesty of God.

I have dwelt longer on this phase of Unitarian thought than I should have done, if, while less and less attractive for the Unitarian mind, it had not passed over into the keeping of the progressive orthodoxy of our time. But the objections I have urged have naturally appealed to many, and the answer that they make is that the revelation in Jesus is a revelation of the perfect moral, not universal, nature and character of God. The answer does not help. The moral perfection of God is a perfection that expresses his relation to innumerable worlds, incalculable times. To imagine that we have a perfect revelation of it in the provincial life of Jesus, known for a few months only, seen through a mist which no critical splendor can entirely dissipate, is to imagine as irrationally and unworthily as it is possible for men of natural intelligence to do. For God's thoughts are not our thoughts; neither are his ways our ways. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are his thoughts higher than our thoughts, and his ways than our ways.

To-day the pure humanity of Jesus is the prevail

ing doctrine of the Unitarian body. It would be hard to find among us an Arian thinking of Jesus as the creator of all worlds, himself created before time began to be. It would be only less hard to find a true Socinian thinking of Jesus as a human being exalted to the rank of God. But there are not a few who still think of him as a perfect man; and many more who speak of him as such, without thinking much about it. There are also those who think of him as working miracles, not to attest his mission, but from the fulness of his love; and others who accept some of the miracles as facts, but tell us they were as natural as the blowing clover and the falling rain. But the natural thing is the habitual thing, and so we cannot go with these. The laws of Nature are her habitual processes, and that one should be allowed to play fast and loose with these as a reward for keeping the law of righteousness is a doctrine which not even the enthusiastic conviction of Dr. Furness can commend to our intelligence. There are few, if any, who now believe in the miraculous birth of Jesus; and those who believe in his resurrection from the dead wear their belief with such a difference from that of the Unitarian fathers that it is but the shadow of a shade. Maintaining the past rate of progress, before the century completes its round the pure humanity of Jesus will be as generally received among us as the unity of God.

Such a conclusion will not be very different from that held by the first Christian Unitarians in the first decades of the Christian era, before Paul had written, and the first Gospels had assumed their

present form. Those who hold back from it because it implies that Jesus was "a mere man" would do well to consider what a man may be and do before they qualify the noun with any adjective of contempt or disrespect. Such is man's body, such his mind, such his affections, such his conscience, such his sense of infinite and eternal things, that within the scope of his terrestrial and immortal possibility there is room enough for all that Jesus was and did to swing with easy motion, like planets on their heavenly way. Not" a mere man," but a man, and such a man that, when we have torn veil after veil of mythological illusion, and come face to face with him at length, or as nearly as may be, all our minds go out to him in gladsome recognition of his spiritual genius, and all our hearts in loving admiration of his broad humanity, his compassion for the poor and miserable, his demand for inward holiness, as well as outward homage to the moral law. There is nothing in the ultimate Jesus of our critical investigation that need be concealed or that invites the least apology. That he partook of the imperfect notions of his time means that he was not a monster, but a natural man. That he identified his mission with the Messianic office means that he conceived that office so loftily that he could not but identify it with his own spiritual ideal. Where was the mistake, seeing that the conception had always been as plastic as the artist's clay to every prophet's mind? But, if it was a mistake, it was such an one as humanity will cherish when it has forgotten all the millions who have never been mistaken because they

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