heaven is to earth, as holiness is to sin and as life to
death.

If he were sinless, he was _absolutely holy_; he was so holy that
his very presence brought out the sin in others. Sinful men and
women fell at his feet and confessed their sins. At sight of him
demons tore their way out of the bodies they possessed and fled as
clouds of darkness before the sun, crying as they fled, "Thou art
the holy one of God--hast thou come to torment us before the time?"
Tormented as they were even then, as sin always is when confronted
by holiness; as vice is before virtue; as a lie is before the truth.

He was sinless.

He was holy.

His sinlessness and holiness cannot be accounted for on natural
grounds.

All his natural ancestry were sinful.

His sinlessness cannot be accounted for unless he were God; for,
sinlessness and holiness come alone from God and, as essential
qualities, take their rise alone in God.

His power over nature proved him God.

His look changed water into wine, his word gave sight to the blind,
healing to the deaf, speech to the dumb. At his word the lame man
leaped as a hart, the leper was cleansed. He said, "Peace, be
still," and the wild tempest of the sea was hushed, and there was a
great calm, a calm like unto the stillness of the unruffled rest of
God.

For two thousand years his regenerative power in a world of sin has
been the proof that he was God.

For two thousand years, in every age, in every clime, among all
classes of men, from the refined infidel to the vilest sinner, from
the cold atheist to the brutal idolater, men have been changed--
transformed. Men who have been the bond slaves of passion, whose
daily lives have been the output of iniquity, whose deeds have been
for destruction, whose words have been poison, and whose inmost
thoughts have been as the vapors of miasma--these all--have been
transformed into fountains of purity, into angels of mercy, or as
illuminated missals have been written full of the name and the glory
of God; men whose every fibre was as the coarse and tangled threads
of a brutal unrefinement have become men whose every line of
character was as the woven gold of Ophir--and the speech that once
smote with discord the ears that heard it has become as the sound of
singing across silent waters and under listening stars. And you ask
these transfigured human beings, as you find them travelling along
the highway of twenty noteful centuries, what it was that so cha