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 heav enly 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

never ventured anything for man or God. And the pure humanity of Jesus is the talisman by which he shall keep off the dangers that are threatening his name and fame. Isolated from humanity as God or demi-god or wonder-worker or the one perfect man, he will dwindle more and more, and shine with dimmer light. But set him frankly among men, and the fierce light that beats upon him there will but the more reveal the greatness of his mind, the goodness of his heart, the splendor of his soul. The greatest of his fellow-men,—such is the modesty of greatness, — shall hail him as a greater than themselves. The kindest and the best shall find in him a blessing on their good endeavor, a summons to the ardors and the satisfactions of an endless quest.

VII.

THE FUTURE LIFE.

BEGINNING, as we have done heretofore, with the first Christian times, we find that the Unitarians of those times that is, the first disciples of Jesus were Jews; and, as Jews, their doctrine of a future life was that of a physical resurrection from the dead. This was a doctrine which the Jews had only recently acquired. The first hint of it in the Old Testament is in the Book of Daniel,' one of the last books admitted into the Old Testament canon for the good reason that it was one of the last written; for, while it is given out as a book written six centuries before Christ, it was actually written in the year 162 B.C., or very near that year on one side or the other. Always famous borrowers, the Jews had borrowed this doctrine from their Persian conquerors. There are texts in the Old Testament before that in 'Daniel' which have been forced to yield a similar meaning, but a competent criticism sets them all aside as accidental resemblances or metaphorical allusions. Before borrowing the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, the Jews had their doctrine of Sheol, which hardly could be called a doctrine of a future life. It was not a doctrine peculiar to the Jews, but the common property of the

Semitic peoples,- the doctrine of a miserable pit or underworld in which the ghosts of men endured a dull, half-conscious life in death, utterly joyless and forlorn, having no beauty that any one should desire it. It would seem that it should have been an easy matter to develop this doctrine into something better, especially as the Jews had originally had the advantage of a lively contact with the Egyptians, with whom a future life was as real as the present, organized as completely as their own dynasties, with judges passing upon every man's earthly conduct and apportioning his due reward, with sanctions appealing to men's constant hope and fear. That the Hebrews of the Exodus, spoiling the Egyptians, left this treasure behind as if it were the merest dross, while they took along the rite of circumcision, is evidence of their carnal mind. Nevertheless, it was from Egypt that the Jews first got a real doctrine of immortality, not, however, until a thousand years after the Exodus. You will find this doctrine in 'The Wisdom of Solomon,' a book not included in the Jewish canon nor in any Protestant canon on a level with the Old Testament and New. It is one of the books of the Apocrypha, unfortunately one the date of which is hard to fix, the critics varying from 200 B.C. to 50 A.D. If the earlier date, that of Professor Toy, is the true one, this real doctrine of immortality antedates the resurrection doctrine of 'Daniel.' I say it came from Egypt, and by this I mean something more than that The Wisdom of Solomon' was written by some Alexandrian Jew. It was, and by one strongly subject to Greek influ