ee the Christ stand!

What follows in the poem is only the awe, the solemnity of this
discovery which has come not through any processes of reasoning but by a
passionate interpretation of the enthusiasm of love and self-sacrifice
in David's own heart; only this awe, and the seeming extension of his
throbbing emotion and pent knowledge over the face of external nature,
until night passes and with the dawn earth and heaven resume their
wonted ways. The case of Lazarus as studied by Karshish the Arabian
physician results not in a rapturous prophecy like that of David, but in
a stupendous conjecture of the heart which all the scepticism of the
brain of a man of science cannot banish or reduce to insignificance. The
unaccountable fascination of this case of mania, subinduced by epilepsy,
is not to be resisted; Karshish would write, if he could, of more
important matters than the madman of Bethany; he would record his
discoveries in scalp-disease, describe the peculiar qualities of Judea's
gum-tragacanth, and disclose the secret of those virtues derived from
the mottled spiders of the tombs. But the face of Lazarus, patient or
joyous, the strange remoteness in his gaze, his singular valuations of
objects and events, his great ardour, his great calm, his possession of
some secret which gives new meanings to all things, the perfect logic of
his irrationality, his unexampled gentleness and love--these are
memories which the keen-sighted Arabian physician is unable to put by,
so curious, so attaching a potency lies in the person of this man who
holds that he was dead and rose again, Karshish has a certain sense of
shame that he, a man learned in all the wisdom of his day, should be so
deeply moved. And yet how the thought of the secret possessed by this
Judean maniac--it is the secret of Jesus--fills and expands the soul!

The very God! think, Abib: dost thou think?
So, the All-Great were the All-Loving too--
So through the thunder comes a human voice
Saying "O heart I made, a heart beats here!
Face, my hands fashioned, see it in myself!
Thou hast no power nor mayst conceive of mine,
But love I gave thee, with myself to love,
And thou must love me who have died for thee!"

Science has at least something to consider in a thought so strangely
potent.

A nineteenth-century sceptic's exposition of his Christian faith is the
paradoxical subject of _Bishop Blougram's Apology_, and it is one which
a