spoke; not merely the active malignity of those who wish their fellow-
creatures to be bad and not good; not merely the bigotry of every sect
and party; but that mere restless love of new excitements, and that dull
fear and suspicion of new truths, and even of old truths in new words,
which beset the uneducated of every rank and class, and in no age more
than in our own? And therefore I must ask, in sober sadness, how long
would His influence last? It lasted, we know, in Judea of old, for some
three years. And then--. But I am not going to say that any such
tragedy is possible now. It would be an insult to Him; an insult to the
gracious influences of His Spirit, the gracious teaching of His Church,
to say that of our generation, however unworthy we may be of our high
calling in Christ. And yet, if He had appeared in any country of
Christendom only four hundred years ago, might He not have endured an
even more dreadful death than that of the cross?

But doubtless, no personal harm would happen to Him here. Only there
might come a day, in which, as in Judea of old, "after He had said these
things, many were offended, and walked no more with Him:" when his
hearers and admirers would grow fewer and more few, some through bigotry,
some through envy, some through fickleness, some through cowardice, till
He was left alone with a little knot of earnest disciples; who might
diminish, alas, but too rapidly, when they found at He, as in Judea of
old, did not intend to become the head of a new sect, and to gratify
their ambition and vanity by making them His delegates. And so the
world, the religious world as well as the rest, might let Him go His way,
and vanish from the eyes and minds of men, leaving behind little more
than a regret that one so gifted and so fascinating should have proved--I
hardly like to say the words, and yet they must be said--so unsafe and so
unsound a teacher.