304 PRESENT-DAY RATIONALISM 



our sense of its degradation is keenest, that a human 

 brain was behind His forehead and a human heart beating 

 in His breast, and that within the whole creation of God 

 nothing more elevated or more attractive has yet been 

 found than He ? And if it be answered that there was 

 in His nature something exceptional and peculiar, that 

 humanity must not be measured by the stature of Christ, 

 let us remember that it was precisely thus that He wished 

 it to be measured, delighting to call Himself the Son of 

 Man, delighting to call the meanest of mankind His 

 brothers. If some human beings are abject and contempt- 

 ible, if it be incredible to us that they can have any high 

 dignity or destiny, do we regard them from so great a 

 height as Christ ? Are we likely to be more pained by 

 their faults and deficiencies than He was ? Is our standard 

 higher than His? And yet He associated by preference 

 with these meanest of the race ; no contempt for them did 

 He ever express, no suspicion that they might be less dear 

 than the best and wisest to the common Father, no doubt 

 that they were naturally capable of rising to a moral 

 elevation like his own. There is nothing of which a man 

 may be prouder of than this ; it is the most hopeful and 

 redeeming fact in history ; it is precisely what was 

 wanting to raise the love of man as man to enthusiasm. 

 An eternal glory has been shed upon the human race by 

 the love Christ bore to it. And it was because the 

 Edict of Universal Love went forth to men whose hearts 

 were in no cynical mood but possessed with a spirit of 

 devotion to a man, that words which at any other time, 

 however grandly they might sound, would have been but 

 words, penetrated so deeply, and along with the law of 

 love the power of love was given. Therefore also the 

 first Christians were enabled to dispense with philo- 

 sophical phrases, and instead of saying that they loved 



