Bethlehem was doubtless a pure
conjecture, made necessary by those who accepted him as the Messiah of
Hebrew prophecy, to make it correspond with the prophetic declaration
that the Messiah should be born at Bethlehem of Judah. This fully
accounts for the Bethlehem story as the place of his birth. The fact
is they are all purely conjectural, made to fit into some preconceived
notion of his personality or character. We have no reliable account
whatever of his birth or early life.

We now come to consider the man,--yes, the man Christ Jesus. We have
already said he was a Jew and lived and died one, with apparently no
thought or purpose other than to reform and correct the abuses into
which his people had lapsed, and revive and intensify the deep
spiritual and ethical meaning of religion. Born of the most intensely
religious race of all antiquity, he was the most intensely religious of
his race. He perceived a new conception of God, not as the arbitrary
ruler and vindictive judge of his people, but as the universal Father
of all men, not anthropomorphic, but Infinite Spirit, whose greatest
attributes were love, justice, mercy and truth, expressed in the great
term Fatherhood; and that all men are children of the great Father, and
therefore brothers. This expresses his fundamental philosophy and
working basis of life. Upon it he undertook to build up and establish,
not a new system of religion, but a new order of life. The central
idea in this was man's direct relationship to God. In his own life he
embodied a perfect example of his ideal. He thus became not God
incarnate bodily in human flesh, nor the Son of God in any _different_
sense than all are sons of God--except perhaps in degree and not in
kind--but the most complete reflection and interpretation of God in
terms of human life that the world had ever known before his time, has
ever known since, or perhaps ever will know. But this last statement
is saying more than any man can know for certain. We know not what God
may yet have to reveal to mankind, nor how He will reveal it.

His course of life and teaching naturally brought him into direct
conflict with the prevailing order of his time. We need not discuss
that in detail. It soon led to a violent and tragic death, before he
had fairly begun his work. We cannot form any guess what _might have
been_ the result if he had been permitted to live out a normal life and
continue his teaching. He only met t