has been much disputed; but those who heard Jesus apply it to Himself did not understand it as meaning the Messiah. What term more fit to give emphasis to the great fact of the humiliation of Christ in His incarnation? Jesus, leaving the glory of the Father, abases Himself, and becomes one of this insignificant yet rebellious race, a minister of God to men like Himself. We know not whether to rank this beautiful humility as a mark of His character or as a means of furthering the kingdom of God. It is essential to the preaching of the kingdom that sin should be denounced without any false tenderness, for sin can never be suffered to enter the kingdom of holiness. Of bold denunciations we have examples; but He who calls Himself the Son of Man deals with sin in a manner altogether new. Holding up the mirror to the sinful, He strikes conviction into hearts that never felt a pang before; but then He is the Son of Man, and with the name of man He takes up the burden of manhood, and even sinners feel before him that he is not merely a judge, but a brother of the tenderest heart and most unfailing sympathy. The co-existence of zeal for holiness and loving indulgence is one more mark of this new kingdom which appears to prove its divine origin by severing it from the usual chain of visible cause and effect. M. Guizot says:

'Nothing strikes me more in the Gospel than this double character of austerity and love, of severe purity and tender sympathy, which constantly appears, which reigns in the actions and words of Jesus Christ in everything that touches the relation of God and mankind. To Jesus Christ the law of God is absolute, sacred; the violation of the law, and sin, are odious to Him; but the sinner himself irresistibly moves Him and attracts Him: "What man of you, having an hundred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it he layeth it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he calleth together his friends and neighbours, saying unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that likewise joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance.' Jesus said unto them, "They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick... For I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repent"t

ance.

'What is the signification of this sublime fact, what the meaning in Jesus of this union, this harmony of severity and of love, of saint-like holiness and of human sympathy? It is Heaven's revelation of the nature of Jesus himself, of the God-man. God, he made himself man. God is his father, men are his brethren. He is pure and holy like

*Luke xv. 4-7.

† Matt. ix. 12, 13.

God;

God; He is accessible and sensible to all that man feels.

Thus the vital principles of the Christian faith, the Divine and the human nature united in Jesus, start to evidence in his sentiments and language respecting the relations between God and man. The dogma is the foundation of the principles.'

This holy tenderness, this loving justice, is an example to all teachers, and was the means by which the true kingdom of God was spread; but it is an example and a means, because it is a revelation of God. So God regards sin and sinners, hating it and loving them, with a hatred that will never approve the evil or confound it with the good, and with a love that is ever ready to take them in and speak to them amnesty and pardon. We believe this of God; we aim at it ourselves, and fall into indulgence of the sin in one place, and repel the sinner with harshness in another. In Christ we have seen it perfectly realised; nowhere else in history shall we find it.

The character of the Lord has undergone a test which no other has had to bear. His avowed aspiration was, beyond measure, great: to lead the Jews into the kingdom promised by the prophets, and to shed abroad to Gentiles, to the ends of the earth, the things which God had prepared for all alike. In order to do this, the ideal of that kingdom was purified and raised. It was to be a kingdom not of pomp but of purity, not of earth but of heaven. Moreover, every step towards that kingdom was associated not alone with the teaching but also with the person of the Preacher. He was the example to imitate; the expositor of the law speaking with authority. His sufferings and death were no private matters, but concerned the welfare of the race. The Apostles are our witnesses of all this. They approached this whole system at first with manifest repugnance. We may well believe that they were men as spiritually-minded, when Christ called them, as were to be found amongst the Jews of their rank, age, and education. Yet it was a visible kingdom that they wanted; and, as for a Messiah who should become their King, by eminence in humility (so to speak), and by love for all souls alike, and by suffering, they not only did not expect such a one, but He inverted all their expectations. For glory, humbleness; for an army, themselves, who never struck but one blow with a sword, and then received rebuke; for a kingdom, judgment at the bar of Cæsar's deputy; for a throne, the cross of death. Their repellant dulness, when these things are first forced on their belief, is pathetic. Nothing of all they tell us of Christ's plan was approved by their prepossessions. They were poor *Meditations on the Essence of Christianity, and on the Religious Questions of the Day,' by M. Guizot, pp. 250-252.

men,

men, but they had a great stake upon the venture they had made; for it is a fearful thing for the good to spend the one life that is given them upon a religious delusion. What do these witnesses hand down to us? Not so much asseverations that Christ was perfectly holy, as a general picture of His life, which makes on all who read it the impression of holiness. What are the chief elements of holiness? Great love, great self-abandonment, avoidance of evil even to the appearance of it, and, above all, a constant sense of dependence on and union with God, and a zeal for the doing of His work. That the Evangelists never put these elements together, but left us to do so for ourselves, adds, if possible, to the weight of their testimony. They do not say, 'Here is a righteous man!' but the facts that pass under their pens produce in generation after generation the impression of complete holiness.)

We do not say that no generation can invent an ideal somewhat higher than itself; but the fate of all human inventions of this sort is, that by-and-by other human inventions surpass them. But what ideal have the eighteen centuries produced which has distracted men's affections from the Christ, and drawn them to some other object? At this moment the person and character of Jesus is an object even of more interest than it has ever been before. And whilst the miracles are denied and the dates of the Gospels disputed, each writer in turn does homage after his fashion to the moral purity and dignity of Christ. Strauss concedes to Him the 'beautiful nature;' Renan calls Him 'demiGod,' whereat M. Lasserre may well ask, 'Is God divided?' Channing, a Unitarian, stands before this unique character, and abstracting his mind from former impressions, tries to see it as a new phenomenon, and feels that he is in presence of one who spake as never man spake before or since. Schenkel and Keim are far from a true conception of Christ: but both admit that history has produced no parallel. Schenkel, whose book is marred by a certain democratic twang, says of Jesus, 'He lived in Galilee, He died in Jerusalem, but He lives for ever in the souls that attain, through His word, to truth, to true piety, and to love.' Keim, a writer of higher strain, and with more of a true historical spirit, admits that here is one whom history cannot explain, and that the person of Jesus is a fact unique in the history of the world.* After all the waves of criticism shall have passed over us, we feel that this will remain, which criticism has not shaken, the admiration for the moral perfection of Jesus the Son of God. The person of Christ, as Schaff has well said, is the miracle of history.' The question about miracles

*Pp. 26, 27, 29, 30, 32, 36.

can

can afford to wait. Men are jealous of interference with the laws of science. Be it so. Science makes the mistake of confounding the new with the impossible. In a world of minerals the first plant would be miraculous; in a world of plants the first moving animal. Did an image of God's perfection make known to men His divine presence in Palestine long ago? Then He, rather than any one act of His, is the miracle which supersedes the laws that govern lower natures. It is hard to believe that Jesus rose from the dead; it is harder to believe that He said with all His heart, I am come to seek and to save that which is lost.' . . . 'Come unto me all that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.' He Himself is more surprising than all that He appears to have wrought of mastery over material laws. End This great controversy, then, is not all matter of regret. There was lurking in the minds of many people a vague belief that if records were ransacked much might be found that had assisted in producing the teaching of the Lord; that He was far beyond all that was before Him, but that much of His teaching was a natural growth, the product of the age, its cultivation, its inherited beliefs. Criticism has said its last word upon the subject, and the impression, brought to the proof, turns out to be unfounded. The more exact the research the more remarkable the contrast between the riches of Christ, His precious doctrine and character, and the sheer bareness, littleness, narrowness, of the Judæan culture out of which He came. Moreover, the true human nature of Christ was somewhat lost sight of in the Church. Gazing up into heaven upon the risen Lord, with the glory of eternity and of the Divine presence about His head, we have a little forgotten that our Master was one who walked through this pilgrimage of life as we are walking, with feet sore with travel, with a heart oppressed by misapprehension. And when truth wanes moral activity declines. We have been forced, by rude shocks no doubt, to look at His true human side again. They say that M. Renan's book has caused a great demand for copies of the Gospels in a country where these were not so accessible as they are to us. We may do well to return to our Gospels, and know in Christ the true human friend and guide, leader, pattern. We should hear His discourses as new teaching, we should watch Him tried with all kinds of hate and stupid misunderstanding, we should stand very near the cross. If suffering is human, if love and pity are human, then His sacred history is intensely human. Nevertheless, when we turn the last page and let our honest conviction speak, we shall find the human has revealed to us the divine, 'Truly this man was the Son of God.'

ART.

ART. V.-A History of Architecture in all Countries from the earliest Times to the present Day. By James Fergusson, F.R.S., M.R.A.S., Fellow Royal Inst. Brit. Architects. In 3 vols. Vol. I. London, 1865.

N the British Museum there is a tomb which was brought

In the British, Museum Minor. The whole is of stone, but

the upper portion is a slavish copy of a wooden prototype. The curvilinear form is com

mon in the slight timber roofs of India. The rafters, the projecting beams of ceiling and floor, the panels, the framing, are all carved in imitation of the wooden original, and have little meaning in the material to which they have been transferred. The structure of the lower part alone is appropriate. The incongruity of the combination arises from the circumstance that the people had been accustomed to enclose their dead in a sarcophagus of wood, which they placed upon a pedestal of stone. As they advanced in wealth and skill they substituted a durable for a fragile sarcophagus; and without the slightest regard to constructive propriety, they copied the primitive details. Traces

of the process are preserved among the buildings of other nations; and it is undoubtedly one of the phases through which architec

ture