and grace, combined with perfect strength, stateliness, even awfulness,
when awe was needed. Remember that, if, again, the Gospels are to be
believed. He alone, of all personages of whom history tells us, solved
in His own words and deeds the most difficult paradox of human character-
-to be at once utterly conscious, and yet utterly unconscious, of self;
to combine with perfect self-sacrifice a perfect self-assertion. Whether
or not His being able to do that proved Him to have been that which He
was, the Son of God, it proves Him at least to have been the Son of Man--
the unique and unapproachable ideal of humanity, utterly inspired by the
Holy Spirit of God.

But again: He condescended, in His teaching of old, to the level of
Jewish, knowledge at that time. We may, therefore, believe that He would
condescend to the level of our modern knowledge; and what would that
involve? It would leave Him, however less than Himself, at least master
of all that the human race has thought or discovered in the last eighteen
hundred years. Think of that. And think again, that if He condescended,
as in Judea of old, to employ that knowledge in teaching men--He who knew
what was in man, and needed not that any should bear witness to Him of
man--He would manifest a knowledge of human nature to which that of a
Shakspeare would be purblind and dull; a knowledge of which the Scripture
nobly says that "The Word of God is quick and powerful, and sharper than
any two-edged sword, even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and
of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents
of the heart;" so that all "things are naked and opened unto the eyes of
Him with whom we have to do." And consider that, in the light of that
knowledge, He might adapt himself as perfectly to us of this great city,
as He did to the villagers of Galilee, or to the townsmen of Jerusalem.

Consider, again, that He who spoke as never man yet spake in Jerusalem,