Conceive--but which of us
can conceive?--His perfect tenderness, patience, sympathy, graciousness,
and grace, combined with perfect strength, stateliness, even awfulness,
when awe was needed. Remember that, if, again, the Gospels are to be
believed. He alone, of all personages of whom history tells us, solved
in His own words and deeds the most difficult paradox of human character-
-to be at once utterly conscious, and yet utterly unconscious, of self;
to combine with perfect self-sacrifice a perfect self-assertion. Whether
or not His being able to do that proved Him to have been that which He
was, the Son of God, it proves Him at least to have been the Son of Man--
the unique and unapproachable ideal of humanity, utterly inspired by the
Holy Spirit of God.
But again: He condescended, in His teaching of old, to the level of
Jewish, knowledge at that time. We may, therefore, believe that He would
condescend to the level of our modern knowledge; and what would that
involve? It would leave Him, however less than Himself, at least master
of all that the human race has thought or discovered in the last eighteen
hundred years.
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