language. One of the commonest sources of bad criticism is the
emphasis on weak points. The really important thing in criticism is
to understand the triumphs of the poet or painter, let us say, whom
we are studying. How came he to achieve poem or picture, so profound
and so true? In what does he differ from other men, that he should
do work so fundamental and so eternal? Lamb's punning jest at
Wordsworth--that Wordsworth was saying he could have written Hamlet,
if he had had the mind--puts the matter directly. What is the mind
that can do such things? The historian will have to ask himself a
similar question about Jesus.

Here we reach a point where caution is necessary. Will the Jesus we
draw be an antiquary's Jesus--an archaic figure, simple and lovable
perhaps, but quaint and old-world--in blunt language, outgrown? A
Galilean peasant, dressed in the garb of his day and place, his mind
fitted out with the current ideas of his contemporaries, elevated,
it may be, but not essentially changed? A dreamer, with the clouds
of the visionaries and apocalyptists ever in his head? When we look
at the ancient world, the great men are not archaic figures. Matthew
Arnold found in Homer something of the clearness and shrewdness of
Voltaire. There is thing archaic about Plato or Virgil or Paul--to
keep abreast of their thinking is no easy task for the strongest of
our brains, so modern, eternal, and original they are. They have
shaped the thinking of the world and are still shaping it. How much
more Jesus of Nazareth! When we make our picture of him, does it
suggest the man who has stirred mankind to its depths, set the world
on fire (Luke 12:49), and played an infinitely larger part in all
the affairs of men than any man we know of in history? Is it a great
figure? Does our emphasis fall on the great features of that
nature--are they within our vision, and in our drawing? Does our
explanation of him really explain him, or leave him more a riddle?
What do we make of his originality? Is it in our picture? What was
it in him that changed Peter and James and John and the rest from
companions into worshippers, that in every age has captured and
controlled the best, the deepest, and tenderest of men? Are we
afraid that our picture will be too modern, too little Jewish? These
are not the real dangers. Again, and again our danger is that we
under-estimate the great men of our race, and we always lose by so
doing. That we should over-esti