g with the purest love to man, free from every sin and error,
innocent and holy, teaching and practising all virtues in perfect
harmony, devoted solely and uniformly to the noblest ends, sealing the
purest life with the sublimest death, and ever acknowledged since as the
one and only perfect model of goodness and holiness! All human greatness
loses on closer inspection; but Christ's character grows more and more
pure, sacred, and lovely, the better we know him.

No biographer, moralist, or artist can be satisfied with any attempt of
his to set it forth. It is felt to be infinitely greater than any
conception or representation of it by the mind, the tongue, and the
pencil of man or angel. We might as well attempt to empty the waters of
the boundless sea into a narrow well, or to portray the splendor of the
risen sun and the starry heavens with ink. No picture of the Saviour,
though drawn by the master hand of a Raphael or Duerer or Rubens--no
epic, though conceived by the genius of a Dante or Milton or Klopstock,
can improve on the artless narrative of the gospel, whose only but
all-powerful charm is truth. In this case certainly truth is stranger
and stronger than fiction, and speaks best itself without comment,
explanation, and eulogy. Here and here alone the highest perfection of
art falls short of the historical fact, and fancy finds no room for
idealizing the real. For here we have the absolute ideal itself in
living reality. It seems to me that this consideration alone should
satisfy the reflecting mind that Christ's character, though truly
natural and human, must be at the same time truly supernatural and
divine.

Even Goethe, the most universal and finished, but at the same time the
most intensely worldly of all modern poets, calls Christ 'the Divine
Man,' the 'Holy One,' and represents him as the pattern and model of
humanity. Thomas Carlyle, the great hero-worshipper, found no equal in
all the range of ancient and modern heroism; he calls his life a
'perfect ideal poem,' and his person 'the greatest of all heroes,' whom
he does not name, leaving 'sacred silence to meditate that sacred
matter.' And Ernest Renan, the celebrated French orientalist and critic,
who views Jesus from the standpoint of a pantheistic naturalism, and
expels all miracles from the gospel history, calls him 'the incomparable
man, to whom the universal conscience has decreed the title of _Son of
God_, and that with justice, since he caused