closely with the historic reality. And with the central inspiration of
his life there mixed in his followers ideas more or less foreign to him,
so that the result in the Gospels is a composite which often defies
certainty of analysis.

If we read with open mind the Gospel narratives, the foremost, vivid
impression we get is of a personage using superhuman power over natural
forces for the benefit of mankind. As he is described, Jesus is before
all a worker of beneficent miracles. He is a teacher, too, and an
unexampled one. But he enforces his teaching by means utterly
transcending the credentials of other teachers. He is a tender human
friend, but he expresses his friendship by services such as no other
friend can render. He allays tempests by a word. He creates bread and
wine at will. He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind. He raises
the dead. In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power. It is
this, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which has
distinguished him in the eyes of his worshipers. What is the wisest word
about immortality worth--what do we care for what Socrates or Plato
said--when here is one who raised Lazarus from the dead and rose himself?
What need for any argument or assurance about Providence, when here is
one through whom the very order of nature is set aside at the impulse of
beneficent love?

But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and the
growing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led in
our time to a different conception.

The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life.
His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in its
interior harmony and its relations with the world about it. _Love your
enemies_,--in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement of
conduct. _The pure in heart shall see God_,--with that he put in the
hands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision.

The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chastity, justice, and
piety. Jesus sublimated this,--in him chastity becomes purity; in place
of justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to a
love embracing earth and heaven.

Jesus taught in parables. A story--an outward, objective fact, something
which the imagination can body forth--often facilitates the impartation
to another mind of a spiritual experience. The soul has no adequate
language of its