He is not the only begins with the assertion that "certain great advances have been made in the appreciation of the person" of Jesus. First, as Channing phrased it, "the imitableness of Christ's character." "This, once an exclusive Unitarian possession, is now," says Dr. Gordon, "the common property of all Christians." "The second great gain," he says, "lies in the representative character of Christ, Godward." son of God. The universal sonship of mankind is written in his face. So far we have good Unitarian thinking, and it is interesting to our curiosity to see how by such steps Dr. Gordon can get any nearer to the deity of Jesus and his "social" position in the blessed Trinity. Another great gain, he says, is that "it is now becoming clear that the final meaning of nature and the character of ultimate reality are given through Christ." Nothing could exceed the looseness in the development of this proposition. It is simply monstrous to say that, "by all believers in God in our western world, Christ's intelligence and will have been selected as representing the Supreme Intelligence and will"; and the looseness becomes absurd, if not immoral, when Shelley and Emerson are cited with Wordsworth and Tennyson and Browning as “beholding in nature one vast form of the Eternal Christ." In this connection the scientific arraignment of nature comes up to be judged. Dr. Gordon calls it a "horrible caricature," and tells us that a different view is "beginning to control our thoughts," the view of Professor Drummond, in his "Ascent of Man," that there is in nature a struggle for others," as well as the mere egotistic, selfish struggle for existence. But what is a mere beginning on page 88, on page 92 is a perfect consummation. "Our universe," he says, "is now Christomorphic"; ie, it has the form of Christ's intelligence and love. This upon the strength of a few brave endeavors to withstand the swelling tide of pessimistic science. I have the liveliest sympathy with those endeavors. But I am appalled at Dr. Gordon's putting the goodness and beneficence and tenderness of nature to a vote, and declaring a unanimous affirmative, when Huxley was but one of many 66 who have had the conclusion that the universe is unloving, cruel, anti-ethical, forced upon their minds; and to affirm that the natural order has "the mind of Christ," even if the tide of pessimistic science had been turned back victoriously, is to use the name of Christ so loosely that it becomes a delusion and a snare which every one believing in clear thinking should avoid. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and that, in Dr. Gordon's "three great advances," is his last. The first and second are advances in the Unitarian direction. The imitableness of Christ's character and his representative sonship are Unitarian ideas of such early date that the patent on them has run out. The third of Dr. Gordon's "three great advances" involves so much looseness, vagueness, and assumption that I cannot conceive that it would have value for any one who has a predilection for clear and definite thought. I cannot conceive how Dr. Gordon himself can put it forth as a piece of valid thinking. But, even if it were entirely valid, and the universe were proved to have a loving heart, there would not be the least advance, "not in the estimation of a hair," toward the enormous specialization of Jesus which is the "butt and sea-mark of his utmost sail.” Dr. Gordon is himself of this opinion. Beyond the three advances specified he tells us "all is dark"; and they do not, he says, bring us to any essential difference in Jesus from mankind, “any relationship to the Deity that sets him apart from mankind, any attribute in virtue of which he is the Eternal Son of God." To establish this essential difference, this peculiar relationship, this special attribute, is the main purpose of Dr. Gordon's book. How does he go to work? In the first place, he says that to deny the possible supreme divinity of Jesus means the destruction of all individuality. That may convey no meaning to your minds. The meaning is that, if men are not all alike, if there are innumerable degrees of personality, one may be supremely good; and that one may have been Jesus. I think that we shall none of us object to that. But so far we have only possibility, and a possibility which, if converted into certainty, would not involve the essential difference from mankind, the peculiar relationship to God, the special attribute of eternal sonship, which Dr. Gordon attributes to Jesus, and would fain confirm as his inviolable trust. And, if it did, the deity of Jesus, of which Dr. Gordon freely allows himself to speak, would be almost as remote as ever. But how does he convert his possibility of the unique supremacy of Jesus in the universe of souls into the certainty of this? He shall answer for himself in his own words: "The path to this eternal contrast between Christ and all the other sons of God is his perfect humanity." We have a pure assumption here that perfect humanity dehumanizes. I should consider it much more rational to affirm that the most imperfect humanity does so. But here is a test which, working it either way, would reduce the limits of humanity to those of the Scotch orthodox kirk, "me and Sandy," with a doubt whether Sandy was quite orthodox. When Dr. Soule at Exeter proposed to expel one of the boys because he was the lowest in the class, the boy fell back upon his ounce of mother wit, and said, "If you keep that up, you won't have anybody left." Eliminate Jesus from humanity as the highest of mankind, and you have as good reason for eliminating the next highest, and so on. * Dr. Gordon's supreme divinity of Jesus rests upon his perfect humanity. Here is the elephant, and here are the four tortoises; and what next? What do the four tortoises rest upon? How prove the perfect humanity of Jesus? "The scheme that is to prevail, that is not doomed to a disastrous collision with reality, must grow [it is Dr. Gordon who says so] out of the historic truth." Now, the historic truth concerning Jesus is found in the New Testament. All that is there is not historic truth, but there is no historic truth about Jesus that is not there. Do we find the perfect *This is a homely illustration, but is not homelier, I think, than Dr. Gordon's "grin without a cat," ,"_" the classic illustration of Alice in Wonderland," to express the futility of an exalted moral ideal without the personal Jesus. humanity of Jesus in the New Testament, when we have stripped away what is most obviously the accretion of a credulous imagination? Can we conceive of perfect manhood without that quality of fatherhood from which Jesus drew his image of the Divine Perfection,- without the realization of those glorious passions which are the master passions of the human heart? Moreover, are there not things · written of Jesus which, if they are true, take something from the fulness of his perfection? And one thing is sure,- that Jesus did not consider himself perfect. He said: "Why callest thou me good? There is none good but one, and that is God." Those are as certainly the words of Jesus as any in the New Testament, because they would certainly never have been invented by his admiring followers. They stand so in Mark. In Matthew we can see the endeavor to break their force: "Why speakest thou to me of the good?' It would be strange if the idealizing temper of the apostolic age left anything in the record that could suggest a doubt to that age of the moral perfection of Jesus. Probably it did not, with the exception of the disavowal to which I have referred. But however little the defect, and however beautiful and glorious and tender the positive excellence disclosed, appealing, as Dr. Gordon says we must, to historic truth, I must confess and here I know that I am one of many that I do not find anything in the New Testament to establish, or even to suggest, the essential moral difference of Jesus from the best and greatest of mankind. But that is because moral excellence is never a surprise to me. I expect it, just as I expect the sun to rise, the stars to shine, the springtime or the falling snow to be most fair. I have seen too much of it in history and in my own personal experience to be astounded by its most lovely manifestations. What I am astounded at is that any one imbued with the critical and scientific spirit should find it necessary to isolate Jesus, separating him from the great human order. Seen in the light of critical research, he stands as naturally in the human order as the trees stand in the woods. There are human personalities which are much more baffling than his in their source and stream. The fact is we have discovered what Dr. Gordon's four tortoises the perfect humanity of Jesus-are resting on. It is not on the historic truth of the New Testament. It is on his theological inheritance of the Calvinistic persuasion of human incompetency and depravity. Nowhere is he more eloquent than where he is discarding this persuasion. But it is one thing to intellectually disown a traditional doctrine, and another thing to free one's self from its unconscious working in our thought. The bed-rock of Dr. Gordon's book is his inability to think greatly of mankind, to expect from it a sublime morality. He frees himself in words from the besetting sin only to find his thought enmeshed with it a moment hence. He praises Channing for his lofty affirmation of the dignity of human nature, but he never is possessed by his spirit. If he had been, his work would never have been written. The moral excellence of Jesus never would have suggested his essential difference from the best and wisest of mankind. - To sum up, Dr. Gordon has "three great advances in the appreciation of Jesus, two of which are commonplaces of Unitarian belief,-"the imitableness of Christ's character" and the universal sonship of mankind; while the third,-the heart of nature, the heart of Christ, is too vaguely stated and too loosely reasoned to deserve consideration. Wherefore at this point everything remains for him to do along his special line. First, from the richness of the diversity of human character he infers that one human being may exceed all others, and that Jesus may be this one. Then by the high priori road, with supreme indifference to the New Testament history, he arrives at the perfect humanity of Jesus,a perfection which isolates him from all others, makes him absolutely unique, and not only the peculiar Son of God, but God himself. For the later stages of this journey we have beautiful words, with no corresponding realities of intellectual seriousness. Between the perfect humanity of Jesus and |