religion to take a step in
advance incomparably greater than any other in the past, and probably
than _any yet to come_;' and he closes his 'Life of Jesus' with the
remarkable concession: 'Whatever may be the surprises of the future,
_Jesus will never be surpassed_. His worship will grow young without
ceasing; his legend will call forth tears without end; his sufferings
will melt the noblest hearts; all ages will proclaim that among the sons
of men there is none born greater than Jesus.'

The whole range of history and fiction furnishes no parallel to such a
character. There never was anything even approaching to it before or
since, except in faint imitation of his example. It cannot be explained
on purely human principles, nor derived from any intellectual and moral
forces of the age in which he lived. On the contrary, it stands in
marked contrast to the whole surrounding world of Judaism and
heathenism, which present to us the dreary picture of internal decay,
and which actually crumbled into ruin before the new moral creation of
the crucified Jesus of Nazareth. He is the one absolute and
unaccountable exception to the universal experience of mankind. He is
the great central miracle of the whole gospel history, and all his
miracles are but the natural and necessary manifestations of his
miraculous person, performed with the same ease with which we perform
our ordinary daily works.

In vain has infidelity, in ever-changing shapes and forms, assailed the
everlasting foundation of this greatest and sublimest character that
ever blessed or will bless the earth. He arises brighter and stronger
from every fiery ordeal of criticism, and stands out to every beholder
as the greatest benefactor of the race and the only Saviour from sin and
ruin.

Yes! he still lives, the Divine Man and incarnate God, on the ever fresh
and self-authenticating record of the Gospels, in the unbroken history
of eighteen centuries, and in the hearts and lives of the wisest and
best of our race. Jesus Christ is the most certain, the most sacred, and
the most glorious of all facts, arrayed in a beauty and majesty which
throws the 'starry heavens above us and the moral law within us' into
obscurity, and fills us truly with ever-growing reverence and awe. He
shines forth with the self-evidencing light of the noonday sun. He is
too great, too pure, too perfect to have been invented by any sinful and
erring man. His character and claims are confirmed b