adapts itself to rich and poor alike, to the twentieth century as well as to the first; to Occident as well as to the Orient. Truly He knew what was in man!

He had both depth and catholicity of mind. Because of this His thought is ever fresh and new.

"Our little systems have their day;

They have their day and cease to be."

His great truth alone goes on from age to age, unchanging, never dying. What if some sneering Gibbon says he has read suggestions of Christ's sayings far antedating Him! Would we have remembered them had it not been for Jesus?

His intellect seems the more titanic by reason of His small and provincial surroundings. Assyria, Babylon, Greece, Rome, were proud mothers of artists, poets, and philosophers. Could Israel have a standing amidst such renown? Could any good thing come out of Galilee?

The truly great man is the one who can start the channel of thought in some direction not hitherto travelled, who can break up settled ideas and inspire thought where none has been before. Copernicus, Roger Bacon, and Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin are synonymous with revolutionary ideas in their respective realms. There is no question of their originality, of their greatness. But suppose that each of them was master in the realm of all, how gigantic would be the measure of his stature?

Jesus wrote no book, but without written word, His mind has been the inspiration of lives, libraries, schools, colleges, nations, and peoples.

Note a few lines in which the creative power of His mind is evident. Neither He, nor His apostles were musicians, so far as we know, yet He has lent to the power of music a charm which Orpheus' lute never knew. Because of Him, Wagner in his "Parsifal" and Handel and Mendelssohn in their oratorios have made music that thunders to the depth of the human soul.

His fingers were not skilled as were the fingers of Praxiteles and Phidias, yet He was the making of Raphael, Angelo, Murillo, Hoffman, Holman Hunt, and all the great company of the masters of artistry since the days of the Renaissance.

He was no author, yet those who would live in literature must go to school to His poet's mind. His thought lent wings to the themes of Tennyson, Browning, Milton, Dante.

He had seemingly little to do with the politics of His day. He said, "Render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar's and to God the things that are God's." Yet all the hopes of democracy and all the progress of the peoples have largely come through Him. Hugo Grotius, the great champion of international law and of the freedom of the seas, in the seventeenth century was but proposing that the nations should follow Christ rather than Machiavelli. When John Hay as Secretary of State would put American diplomacy in its simplest and

highest terms he said it had but two principles, "The Monroe Doctrine and the Golden Rule." In so far as nations have learned anything of brotherhood and peace, they have gone to school to Jesus. In the midst of the present world darkness Bernard Shaw, speaking as a worldly-wise man says, "Why not give Christianity a trial?" Jesus is the only hope of the world politically.

Was not Washington Gladden pointing to the mighty mentality of Jesus, when in giving the William B. Noble lectures at Harvard, he showed the secret power of Dante, the poet; Michelangelo, the artist; Fichte, the philosopher; Victor Hugo, the man of letters; Richard Wagner, the musician; Ruskin, the preacher-and found that the secret power of each of these varied sons of genius was the spirit that was in Jesus Christ.

Surely, of all earth's intellectual giants, none casts a radiance half so far as does the mentality of the sun of righteousness.

MORAL CHARACTER

Often earth's brainiest thinkers have been sadly defective in character and in conduct. How sweetly Burns could sing, but how despicably low he could sink. England never gave to the world one who could portray more beautiful visions than Byron. But his biographer says of him, " The sense of moral accountability Byron seems never to have had, in regard to anybody or anything, his self-indulgence culminating in an egotism melancholy to behold.

He would go where he pleased, say what he pleased, write as he pleased, do what he pleased, without any constraint, whether in opposition or not to the customs and rules of society, his own welfare or the laws of God."

If the splendid genius Goethe is Germany's glory, there is a spot even on the face of that bright sun. Goethe in his "Wilhelm Meister" could beautifully set on high the doctrine, “With renunciation begins the true life"; in his immortal "Faust" he could show how inevitably he that soweth to the wind shall reap the whirlwind, but how far renunciation and self-control were from the primrose path of his own life!

France seldom brought into the world and Geneva rarely nourished a more brilliant mind than that of Jean Jacques Rousseau, great leader in the intellectual development of the Socialistic and Revolutionary doctrines of a century and a half ago. Men would hail him as Saviour, but what a travesty on the name does the moral blackness of his sensuous life appear!

It was quite otherwise with Jesus. His character is altogether worthy of His mentality. His total unconsciousness of any sin or moral failure in Himself marks Him as unique. Neither Buddha, Confucius, or Mohammed ever made such astounding claim for themselves. "Which of you convicteth

Me of sin?"

None of His contemporaries, even His bitterest enemies, could besmirch His character. Having

heard their evidence and examined the accused, the judge could only say, "I find no fault in Him." Through the ages He stands pure as a sunbeam, white as a lily, spotless as the driven snow.

No wonder Lanier calls Him the crystal Christ. Having reviewed Eschylus, Shakespeare, Milton, and all Earth's great ones, in each he finds some fault, some failure, then he cries:

"But Thee, but Thee, O sovereign Seer of Time,
But Thee, O poets' Poet, Wisdom's Tongue,
But Thee, O man's best Man, O love's best Love,
O perfect life in perfect labour writ,

O all men's Comrade, Servant, King, or Priest,-
What if or yet, what mole, what flaw, what lapse,
What least defect or shadow of defect,

What rumour, tattled by an enemy,
Of inference loose, what lack of grace

Even in torture's grasp, or sleep's, or death's,—
Oh, what amiss may I forgive in Thee,

Jesus, good Paragon, thou Crystal Christ?"

But He had not only moral purpose, but moral courage. He endured even unto the uttermost for the sake of being true to His convictions. Because He was true, on a Cross they slew Him. Knowing that He was true with His dying breath he cried triumphantly, "It is finished." If human ears could but catch heavenly harmonies doubtless would have been heard,

"But faint

As from beyond the limit of the world,
Like the last echo born of a great cry,
Sounds as if some fair city were one voice

Around a king returning from his wars.”