ts? In the
days of Israel's adversity, when all the really unquestioned Messianic
prophecies were uttered, the mind of prophet and people turned back to
the golden days of David's glorious reign; and in their intense
patriotism and unfaltering faith in Jehovah, they hoped and _believed_
that he would some day raise up a King of the line and house of David
that would restore the ancient glory of Israel; and so they
prophesied--"the wish being father to the thought." And this is all
there is to Old Testament Messianic prophecy. And a great many of the
most intelligent Jews of the Reformed School of today are beginning to
think the same.

But if there was ever a true prophet of God, a man in whom the God-life
in human form was truly manifest, a man supremely divine,--not by
miraculous generation, but by spiritual union with God, whereby God
indeed became manifest in human flesh,--that man was Jesus of Nazareth.
And as such he becomes the eternal example for all mankind after him.
As a man he justly commands the highest homage that the world can give
to man. But make him God, and the chain that connects him with man is
at once broken. If Jesus was God, and therefore incapable of
temptation or sin, the temptation and triumph in the wilderness becomes
a farce, without any meaning to mankind whatever. But as a mortal man
struggling with and overcoming the strongest temptations of life, it
has infinite significance to all mankind. If he overcame as a man, so
may I. As a god, the sweat of Gethsemane and the agony of the Cross
are but mockery--not equal to a single pin-prick in a whole mortal
life. But as a man, struggling with the last enemy, with eternity
before him, a means of escape at hand, but deliberately devoting his
life and his all in the most excruciatingly torturous manner known to
human ingenuity in cruelty, it becomes a spectacle to command the awe
and admiration of angels.

Jesus is indeed the savior of the world, not by having _redeemed_
mankind with the purchase-price of his own blood; but by his life and
words in teaching men how to live, and by his death how to die, if
necessary, for the right.

I know of no more fitting close to this my view of Jesus, than a
quotation from Ernest Renan's Apostrophe to Jesus. Ernest Renan was
called an infidel because he abandoned the church of his fathers, and
with it the deity of Jesus. But he found in Jesus the supreme model of
all human life, the most perfect