250 HEREDITY AND CHRISTIAN PROBLEMS 



a miracle as strange as any of those which a too 

 credulous church has woven around His infancy. 

 Amid these and similar historical conditions His 

 days were passed. Could His environment have 

 made Him ? Can it explain Him ? " There was 

 a fine fitness in His being a Jew, a Son of Abra- 

 ham, the Hebrew. The supreme religious person 

 of the race fitly came from its most religious fam- 

 ily. He was the personification of its genius, the 

 heir of its work. It had created the history that 

 made Him possible, the men to whom He was intel- 

 ligible and through whom He could be revealed to 

 the world. But He transcended its powers of pro- 

 duction ; He was more and greater than its native 

 energies could create. The splendid religious 

 genius of Israel had issued in Judaism, and which 

 of its two great parties could produce a Christ ? 

 The Sadducees would not own Him. He be- 

 longed to no ruling family, had no priestly blood 

 in His veins ; was one whose very meddling with 

 religion deserved nothing less than death. And 

 Pharisaism was as incapable of forming Him. . . . 

 It was fundamentally increative, radically infer- 

 tile. . . . All its wisdom is the wisdom of the inter- 

 preter ; all its goodness the goodness of the school. 

 But Jesus is throughout the very antithesis and 

 contradiction of Pharisaism. . . . His historical 



