to mankind!--was the
advent of a higher Christianity. [5]

From this dazzling, God-crowned summit, the Naza-
rene stepped suddenly before the people and their schools
of philosophy; Gnostic, Epicurean, and Stoic. He must
stem these rising angry elements, and walk serenely over
their fretted, foaming billows. [10]

Here the cross became the emblem of Jesus' history;
while the central point of his Messianic mission was peace,
good will, love, teaching, and healing.

Clad with divine might, he was ready to stem the tide
of Judaism, and prove his power, derived from Spirit, to [15]
be supreme; lay himself as a lamb upon the altar of
materialism, and therefrom rise to his nativity in Spirit.

The corporeal Jesus bore our infirmities, and through
his stripes we are healed. He was the Way-shower, and
suffered in the flesh, showing mortals how to escape from [20]
the sins of the flesh.

There was no incorporeal Jesus of Nazareth. The
spiritual man, or Christ, was after the similitude of the
Father, without corporeality or finite mind.

Materiality, worldliness, human pride, or self-will, by [25]
demoralizing his motives and Christlikeness, would have
dethroned his power as the Christ.

To carry out his holy purpose, he must be oblivious of
human self.

Of the lineage of David, like him he went forth, simple [30]
as the shepherd boy, to disarm the Goliath. Panoplied
in the strength of an exalted hope, faith, and understand-

[Page 163.]

ing, he sought to conquer the three-in-one of error: the [1]
world, the flesh, and the devil.

Three years he went about doing good. He had for
thirty years been preparing to heal and teach divinely;
but his three-years mission was a marvel of glory: its [5]
chaplet, a grave to mortal sense dishonored--from which
sprang a sublime and everlasting victory!

He who dated time, the Christian era, and spanned
eternity, was the meekest man on earth. He healed
and taught by the wayside, in humble homes: to arrant [10]
hypocrite and to dull disciples he explained the Word
of God, which has since ripened into interpretation
through Science.

His words were articulated in the language of a de-
clining race, and committed to the providence of God. [15]
In no one thing seemed he less human and more divine
than in his unfaltering faith in the immortality of Truth.
Referring to this, he said, "Heaven and earth shall
pass away, but my words shall not pass away!" and
they have not: the