[1] In this Lecture are included some paragraphs from a sermon long out of print,The Witness of Scepticism to Christ, preached before the Synod of Lothian and Tweeddale.
[2] G. Lommel,Jesus von Nazareth(quoted in Pfannmüller'sJesus im Urteil der Jahrhunderte).
[3]Appendix XXIII.
[4]Jesus in Modern Criticism.
[5] H. Weinel,Jesus im neunzehnten Jahrhundert.
[6] Quoted in E. Naville,Le Témoignage du Christ.
[7]First and Last Things: a Confession of Faith and Rule of Life.
[8]Appendix XXIV.
[9]Appendix XXV.
[10]Lux Hominum, Preface.
[11]Lux Hominum, p. 84.
[12]The Oriental Christ.
[13]Esoteric Christianity.
[14]Appendix XXVI.
[15] J. Warschauer,The New Evangel.
[16]Appendix XXVII.
[17]Appendix XXVIII.
'I hope no reader imagines me so weak to stand up in defence of real Christianity such as used in primitive times (if we may believe the authors of those ages) to have an influence upon men's beliefs and actions. To offer at the restoring of that would indeed be a wild project: it would be to dig up foundations: to destroy at one blow all the wit and half the learning of the kingdom, to break the entire frame and constitution of things, to ruin trade, extinguish arts and sciences, with the professors of them; in short, to turn our courts, exchanges, and shops into deserts; and would be full as absurd as the proposal of Horace, where he advises the Romans all in a body, to leave their city, and seek a new seat in some remote part of the world, by way of cure for the corruption of their manners.'—DEAN SWIFT,An Argument to Prove that the Abolishing of Christianity in England may, as things now stand, be attended with some Inconveniences.
While the state of our race is such as to need all our mutual devotedness, all our aspiration, all our resources of courage, hope, faith, and good cheer, the disciples of the Christian Creed and Morality are called upon, day by day, to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling and so forth. Such exhortations are too low for even the wavering mood and quacked morality of a time of theological suspense and uncertainty. In the extinction of that suspense and the discrediting of that selfish quacking I see the prospect for future generations of a purer and loftier virtue, and a truer and sweeter heroism than divines who preach such self-seeking can conceive of.'—HARRIET MARTINEAU,Autobiography, vol. ii. p. 461.
'Noble morality is classic morality, the morality of Greece, of Rome, of Renaissance Italy, of ancient India. But Christian morality is slave moralityin excelsis. For the essence of Christian morality is the desire of the individual to be saved: his consciousness of power is so small that he lives in hourly peril of damnation and death and yearns thus for the arms of some saving grace.'—F. Nietzsche, by A. R. Orage, p. 53.
'They [Christians] have never learnt to love, to think, to trust. They have been nursed and bred and swaddled and fed on fear. They are afraid of death: they are afraid of truth: they are afraid of human nature: they are afraid of God.... They deal in a poor kind of old wives' fables, of lackadaisical dreams, of discredited sorcery, and white magic, and call it religion and the holy of holies. They wander about in a sickly soil of intellectual moonshine, where they mistake the dense and sombre shadows for substances. They want to stop the clocks of time that it may never be day, and to hoodwink the eyes of the nations that they may lead the people as so many blind.'—ROBERT BLATCHFORD,Clarion, March 3, 1905.
'In Georgia, indeed, as the Jesuits had found it in South America, the vicinity of a white settlement would have proved the more formidable obstacle to the conversion of the Indian. When Tounchichi was urged to listen to the doctrines of Christianity, he keenly replied, "Why, there are Christians at Savannah! there are Christians at Frederica!" Nor was it without good apparent reason that the poor savage exclaimed, "Christian much drunk! Christian beat men! Christian tell lies! Devil Christian! Me no Christian!"'—SOUTHEY,Life of John Wesley, vol. i. p. 57.
'I was then carried in spirit to the mines where poor oppressed people were digging rich treasures for those called Christians, and heard them blaspheme the name of Christ, at which I was grieved, for to me His name was precious. I was then informed that these heathens were told that those who oppressed them were the followers of Christ, and they said among themselves, "If Christ directed them to use us in this sort, this Christ is a cruel tyrant."'—Journal of John Woolman, p. 264.
'What many upright and ardent souls have rejected is a misconception, a caricature, a subjective Christianity of their own, a traditional delusion, which no more resembles real Christianity than the conventional Christ of the painted church window resembles Jesus Christ of Nazareth. It is true that at this moment the great majority of the people of this country never go to any place of worship, and this is yet more the case on the Continent of Europe. Does it in the least degree indicate that the masses of the European nations have weighed Christianity in the balance and found it wanting? Nothing of the sort. The overwhelming majority of them have not the faintest conception of what Christianity is. I myself have met a great number of so-called "Agnostics" and "Atheists" in our universities, among our working-men, and in society, but I have never yet met one who had rejected the Christianity of Christ.'—HUGH PRICE HUGHES, Preface toEthical Christianity.
'Wheresoever Christianity has breathed it has accelerated the movement of humanity. It has quickened the pulses of life, it has stimulated the incentives of thought, it has turned the passions into peace, it has warmed the heart into brotherhood, it has fanned the imagination into genius, it has freshened the soul into purity. The progress of Christian Europe has been the progress of mind over matter. It has been the progress of intellect over force, of political right over arbitrary power, of human liberty over the chains of slavery, of moral law over social corruption, of order over anarchy, of enlightenment over ignorance, of life over death. As we survey this spectacle of the past, we are impressed that this study of history is the strongest evidence for God. We hear no argument from design but we feel the breath of the Designer. We see the universal life moulding the individual lives, the one Will dominating many wills, the Infinite Wisdom utilising the finite folly, the changeless truth permeating the restless error, the boundless beneficence bringing blessing out of all.... And what shall we say of the future? ... Ours is a position in some respects analogous to that of the mediaeval world: the landmarks of the past are fading, the lights in the future are but dimly seen. Yet it is the study of the landmarks that helps us to wait for the light, and our highest hope is born of memory. In the viewof that retrospect, we cannot long despair. We may have moments of heart-sickness when we look exclusively at the present hour: we may have times of despondency when we measure only what the eye can see. But looking on the accumulated results of bygone ages as they lie open to the gaze of history, the scientific conclusion at which we must arrive is this, that the course of Christianity shall be, or has been, the path of a shining light, shining more and more unto the perfect day.'—G. MATHESON,Growth of the Spirit of Christianity(chap, xxxviii., 'Dawn of a New Day').
'Shadows and figments as they appear to us to be in themselves, these attempts to provide a substitute for Religion are of the highest importance, as showing that men of great powers of mind, who have thoroughly broken loose not only from Christianity but from natural Religion, and in some cases placed themselves in violent antagonism to both, are still unable to divest themselves of the religious sentiment or to appease its craving for satisfaction.
'That the leaders of the anti-theological movement at the present day are immoral, nobody but the most besotted fanatic would insinuate: no candid antagonist would deny that some of them are in every respect the very best of men.... But what is to prevent the withdrawal of the traditional sanction from producing its natural effect upon the morality of the mass of mankind? ... Rate the practical effect of religious beliefs as low and that of social influences as high as you may, there can surely be no doubt that morality has received some support from the authority of an inward monitor regarded as the voice of God....
'The denial of the existence of God and of a future state, in a word, is the dethronement of Conscience: and society will pass, to say the least, through a dangerous interval, before social conscience can fill the vacant throne.'—GOLDWIN SMITH, 'Proposed Substitutes for Religion,'Macmillan's Magazine, vol. xxxvii.
'It no less takes two to deliver the game of Duty from trivial pretence and give it an earnest interest. How can I look up to myself as the higher that reproaches me? issue commands to myself which I dare not disobey? ask forgiveness from myself for sins which myself has committed? surrender to myself with a martyr's sacrifice? and so through all the drama of moral conflict and enthusiasm between myself in a mask and myself inpropria persona? How far are these semblances, these battles in the clouds, to carry their mimicry of reality? Are we toworshipthe self-ideality? toprayto an empty image in the air? to trust in sorrow a creature of thought which is but a phenomenon of sorrow? No, if religious communion is reduced to a monologue, its essence is extinct and its soul is gone. It is a living relation, or it is nothing: a response to the Supreme Reality. And vainly will you search for your spiritual dynamics without the Rock Eternal for your [Greek]pou stô'—JAMES MARTINEAU, Essays iv. 282,Ideal Substitutes for God.
'It is an awful hour—let him who has passed through it say how awful—when life has lost its meaning and seems shrivelled into a span—when the grave appears to be the end of all, human goodness nothing but a name, and the sky above this universe a dead expanse, black with the void from which God himself has disappeared. In that fearful loneliness of spirit ... I know but one way in which a man may come forth from his agony scathless: it is by holding fast to those things which are certain still—the grand, simple landmarks of morality.
'In the darkest hour through which a human soul can pass, whatever else is doubtful, this at least is certain. If there be no God and no future state yet even then it is better to be generous than selfish, better to be chaste than licentious, better to be true than false, better to be brave than to be a coward. Blessed beyond all earthly blessedness is the man who, in the tempestuous darkness of the soul, has dared to hold fast to these venerable landmarks. Thrice blessed is he who, when all is drear and cheerless within and without, when his teachers terrify him and his friends shrink from him, has obstinately clung to moral good. Thrice blessed, because his night shall pass into clear bright day.'—F. W. ROBERTSON,Lectures, Addresses, etc., p. 49.
'Let me say at once that if after the elimination of all untruths from Christianity, we could build a belief in God and Immortality on the residue, we should then have a far more powerful incentive to right conduct than anything that I am about to urge.'—PHILIP VIVIAN,Churches and Modern Thought, p. 323.
'Without prejudice, what would be the effect upon modern civilisation if the Divine Ideal should vanish from modern thought?
'It would be presumptuous to attempt a description, rather because it is so hard to picture ourselves and our outlook deprived of what we have held during thousands of generations, our veryraison d'être, than because we cannot calculate at least a part of what would have to happen. Without pretending to undertake that exercise, it may not be too bold to conclude definitely, what has been suggested argumentatively throughout: namely, that moral goodness, as we trace it in the past, as we enjoy it in the present, as we reckon upon it in the future, would be found undesirable and therefore impracticable. A new "morality" would doubtless take its place and set up a new ideal of goodness; but the former would no more represent the elements we so far call moral than the latter would embody the conceptions we now call good: the more logically the inevitable system were followed up, the more progressively would moral inversion be realised.
'It does not seem credible that the new morality could escape being egoistic and hedonistic, and these principles alone would dictate complete reversal of all our present notions as to what is noble, what is useful, what is good. An egoist hedonism that should not be selfish and sensual is a fondsuperstition; it would have to be both and frankly. All the prophylactic expedients whereby a reciprocal egoism must safeguard its sensuous rights would certainly be there; and they represent in spirit and in practice whatever we have learned to consider execrable. We do not require Professor Haeckel[1] to inform us, with the triumphal rhetoric that accompanies a grand new discovery, of the prudential homicide which is to confer a supreme blessing upon humanity, for it has raged throughout antiquity, and still stalks abroad in daylight wherever the kingdom of men is not also the kingdom of Christ. Ten minutes' thought is sufficient to convince any rational man or woman what must inevitably follow in a world of animal rationalism, where no souls are immortal, where the human will is the supreme will and there is eternal peace in the grave. It could scarcely transpire otherwise than that "euthanasia" should replace care of the chronic sick and indigent aged; that infanticide should be in a large category of circumstances encouraged, and in some compelled; that suicide should offer a rational escape from all serious ills, leaving a door ever hospitably ajar to receive the body bankrupt in its capacity for sensual enjoyment, the only enjoyment henceforth worthy of the name. These are the "virtues" under the new morality; there are other things of which it were not well to speak. Imagination turns its back. In a world that has never been without its gods, among human creatures who have never existed without a conscience, deeds have been done and horrors have been practised through centuries, through ages, that make annals read like ogre-tales and books of travels like the works of morbid novelists; and the worst always goes unrecorded. What then ought we to anticipate for a world yielding obedience to nothing loftierthan the human intellect, seeking no prize obtainable outside the individual life time, logically incapable of any gratification outside the individual body, convinced of nothing save eternal oblivion in the ever-nearing and inevitable grave, and reposed on the calm assurance that "goodness" and "badness," "virtue" and "vice" (whatever these terms may then correspond to) are recompensed, indifferently, by nothing better and nothing worse than physical animal death?'—JASPER B. HUNT, B.D.,Good without God: Is it Possible? p. 51.
[1] SeeThe Wonders of Life, chap. v., popular translation, and other works.
'When we say that God is personal, we do not mean that He is localised by mutually related organs; that He is hampered by the physical conditions of human personality. We mean that He is conscious of distinctness from all other beings, of moral relation to all living things, and of power to control both from without and from within the action of every atom and of every world. This is what we mean by personality in God. It is not a materialistic idea. It is essentially spiritual. It is a breakwater against the destruction of the very thought of God, or the submersion of it in the mere processes of eternal evolution. There is a Pantheism which obliterates every trace of Divine personality, which takes from God consciousness, will, affection, emotion, desire, presiding and over-ruling intelligence. But such Pantheism is better known as Atheism. It destroys the only God who can be a refuge and a strength in time of trouble. It annihilates that mighty conscience which drives the workers of iniquity into darkness and the shadow of death, if possible, to hide themselves. It closes the Divine Ear against the prayer of faith. It abolishes all sympathy, all communion between the Father and the children. It makes God not the world's life, but the world's grave. Therefore, against all such Pantheism our being revolts.'—PETER S. MENZIES,Sermons('Christian Pantheism').
'There is an Old Testament Pantheism speaking unmistakably out of the lips of the Prophets and the Psalmists, ... so interwoven with their deepest thoughts of God, that any hesitation to receive it would have been traced by them most probably to purely heathen conditions of thought, which ascribes to every divinity a limited function, a separate home, and a restricted authority.... But undoubtedly the most unequivocal and outspoken Pantheist in the Bible is St. Paul. He speaks in that character to the Athenians, affirming all men to be the offspring of God, and, as if this were not a sufficiently close bond of affinity, adding, "In Him we live and move and have our being." His Pantheistic eschatology casts a radiance over the valley of the shadow of death, which makes the 15th chapter of 1st Corinthians one of the most precious gifts of Divine inspiration which the holy volume contains. "And when all things shall be subdued unto Him, then shall the Son also Himself be subject unto Him that put all things under Him, that God may be all and all." Nor, if he had wished to administer a daring shock to the ultra-Calvinism of our own Confessional theology, could he have uttered a sentiment more hard to reconcile with any view of the Universe that is not Pantheistic than that contained in the 32nd verse of the present chapter: "For God hath concluded them all in unbelief that He might have mercy upon all." Itis quite clear in the face of all this Scripture evidence that there is a form of Pantheism which is not only innocent, defensible, justifiable, but which we are bound to teach as of the essence of all true theology. Nothing could be more childish than that blind horror of Pantheism which shudders back from it as the most poisonous form of rank infidelity.'—PETER S. MENZIES,Sermons('Christian Pantheism'),
'Pantheism gives noble expression to the truth of God's presence in all things, but it cannot satisfy the religious consciousness: it cannot give it escape from the limitations of the world, or guarantee personal immortality or (what is most important) give any adequate interpretation to sin, or supply any adequate remedy for it.... Christian theology is the harmony of Pantheism and Deism. On the one hand Christianity believes all that the Pantheist believes of God's presence in all things. "In Him," we believe, "we live and move and are; in Him all things have their coherence." All the beauty of the world, all its truths, all its goodness, are but so many modes under which God is manifested, of whose glory Nature is the veil, of whose word it is the expression, whose law and reason it embodies. But God is not exhausted in the world, nor dependent upon it: He exists eternally in His Triune Being, self-sufficing, self-subsistent.... God is not only in Nature as its life, but He transcends it as its Creator, its Lord—in its moral aspect—its Judge. So it is that Christianity enjoys the riches of Pantheism without its inherent weakness on the moral side, without making God dependent on the world, as the world is on God.'—BISHOP GORE,The Incarnation of the Son of God, p. 136.
'The Supreme Power on this petty earth can be nothing else but the Humanity, which, ever since fifty thousand—it may be one hundred and fifty thousand—years has slowly but inevitably conquered for itself the predominance of all living things on this earth, and the mastery of its material resources. It is the collective stream of Civilization, often baffled, constantly misled, grievously sinning against itself from time to time, but in the end victorious; winning certainly no heaven, no millennium of the saints, but gradually over great epochs rising to a better and a better world. This Humanity is not all the human beings that are or have been. It is a living, growing, and permanent Organism in itself, as Spencer and modern philosophy establish. It is the active stream of Human Civilization, from which many drop out into that oblivion and nullity which is the true and only Hell.'—F. HARRISON,Creed of a Lagman, p. 72.
Mr. Frederic Harrison's Creed 'is open to every objection which he so justly brings against what he regards as Mr. Spencer's Creed. These reasons are broad, common, and familiar. So far as I know they never have been, and I do not believe they ever will be, answered. The first objection is that Humanity with a capital H (Mr. Harrison's God) is neither better nor worse fitted to be a God than his Unknowable with a capital U. They are as much alike as six and half-a-dozen. Each is a barren abstraction to which any one an attach any meaning he likes. Humanity, as used by Mr. Harrison, is not an abstract name for those matters in which all human beings as such resemble each other, as, for instance, a human form and articulate speech.... Humanity is a general name for all human beings who, in various ways, have contributed to the improvement of the human race. The Positivist calendar which appropriates every day in the year for the commemoration of one or more of these benefactors of mankind is an attempt to give what a lawyer would call "further and better particulars" of the word. If this, or anything like this, be the meaning of Mr. Harrison's God, I must say that he, she, or it appears to me quite as ill-fitted for worship as the Unknowable. How can a man worship an indefinite number of dead people, most of whom are unknown to him even by name, and many of whose characterswere exceedingly faulty, besides which the facts as to their lives are most imperfectly known? How can he in any way combine these people into a single object of thought? An object of worship must surely have such a degree of unity that it is possible to think about it as distinct from other things, as much unity at least as the English nation, the Roman Catholic Church, the Great Western Railway. No doubt these are abstract terms, but they are concrete enough for practical purposes. Every one understands what is meant when it is asserted that the English nation is at war or at peace; that the Pope is the head of the Roman Catholic Church; that the Great Western Railway has declared a dividend; but what is Humanity? What can any one definitely assert or deny about it? How can any one meaning be affixed to the word so that one person can be said to use it properly and another to abuse it? It seems to me that it is as Unknowable as the Unknowable itself, and just as well, and just as ill, fitted to be an object of worship.'—SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN, 'The Unknowable and Unknown,'Nineteenth Century, June 1884.
'Deism and Pantheism are both so irrational, so utterly inadequate to explain the simplest facts of our moral and spiritual life that neither of them can long hold mankind together. Positivism, which has made a systematic and memorable attempt to fill the gap, itself bears witness to the craving of human nature for some stronger bond than such systems can supply; while its appreciation of the necessity of Religion gives it an importance not possessed by mere Agnosticism. Yet it is impossible to look at an encyclopædic attempt to grasp all knowledge and all history, such as that made by the founder of Positivism, without a deep, oppressive sadness....
'Can men heap fact upon fact and connect science with science in a splendid hierarchy and find no better end than this? Is such a review to come to this, that we must worship either actual humanity with all its meanness and wickedness, or ideal humanity which does not yet exist, and, if this world is all in all, may never come into being? ... For ideal humanity, however moral and enlightened, if unaided by God, as the Posivitist holds, is still earth-bound and sense-bound.... We are told that it is common sense to recognise that much is beyond us. Perfectly true. But it is not common sense to worship an ignorant and weak humanity which certainly made nothing, and has in itself no assuranceof continuance in the future, nay rather, a very clear probability of destruction, if simply left to itself.
'What Positivism surely needs to give it hope and consistency is the doctrine of the Logos, of the Eternal Word and Reason, the Creator, Orderer, and Sustainer of all things, Who has taken a stainless human nature that He might make men capable of all knowledge. This Divine Humanity of the Logos, drawing mankind into Himself, is indeed worthy of all worship. In loving Him, we learn really what it is to "live for others." In looking to Him we cease from selfishness and pride. Such a worship of humanity is not a mere baseless hope, but a reality appearing in the very midst of history, a reality apprehended by Faith indeed, but by a Faith always proving itself to those, and by those, who hold it fast in Love. There is room, then, ample room, and a loud demand for the re-establishment of a Christian Philosophy based upon the Incarnation.'—JOHN WORDSWORTH (Bishop of Salisbury),The One Religion, pp. 307-309.
The invariable laws under which Humanity is placed have received various names at different periods. Destiny, Fate, Necessity, Heaven, Providence, all are so many names of one and the same conception: the laws which man feels himself under, and that without the power of escaping from them. We claim no exemption from the common lot. We only wish to draw out into consciousness the instinctive acceptance of the race, and to modify the spirit in which we regard them. We accept: so have all men. We obey: so have all men. We venerate: so have some in past ages or in other countries. We add but one other term—we love. We would perfect our submission and so reap the full benefits of submission in the improvement of our hearts and tempers. We take in conception the sum of the conditions of existence, and we give them an ideal being and a definite home in space, the second great creation which completes the central one of Humanity. In the bosom of space we place the world, and we conceive of the world and this our Mother Earth as gladly welcomed to that bosom with the simplest and purest love, and we give our love in return.
Thou art folded, thou art lyingIn the light which is undying.
'Thus we complete the Trinity of our religion, Humanity, the World, and Space. So completed we recognise power togive unity and definiteness to our thoughts, purity and warmth to our affections, scope and vigour to our activity. We recognise its powers to regulate our whole being, to give us that which it has so long been the aim of all religion to give—internal union. We recognise its power to raise us above ourselves and by intensifying the action of our unselfish instincts to bear down unto their due subordination our selfishness. We see in it yet unworked treasures. We count not ourselves to have apprehended but we press forward to the prize of our high calling. But even now whilst its full capabilities are unknown to us, before we have apprehended, we find enough in it to guide and strengthen us.'—'The New Religion in its Attitude towards the Old: A Sermon preached at South Field, Wandsworth, Wednesday, 19th Moses 71 (19th January 1859), on the anniversary of the birth of Auguste Comte, 19th January 1798, by RICHARD CONGREVE.' J. Chapman: 8 King William Street, Strand, London.
'We have compared Positivism where it is thought to be strongest with Christianity where it is thought to be weakest. And if the result of the comparison even then has been unfavourable to Positivism, how will the account stand if every element in Christianity be taken into consideration? The religion of humanity seems specially fitted to meet the tastes of that comparatively small and prosperous class who are unwilling to leave the dry bones of Agnosticism wholly unclothed with any living tissue of religious emotion, and who are at the same time fortunate enough to be able to persuade themselves that they are contributing, or may contribute, by their individual efforts to the attainment of some great ideal for mankind. But what has it to say to the more obscure multitude who are absorbed, and wellnigh overwhelmed, in the constant struggle with daily needs and narrow cares, who have but little leisure or inclination to consider the precise rôle they are called on to play in the great drama of "humanity," and who might in any case be puzzled to discover its interest or its importance? Can it assure them that there is no human being so insignificant as not to be of infinite worth in the eyes of Him Who created the Heavens, or so feeble but that his action may have consequence of infinite moment long after this material system shall have crumbled into nothingness? Does it offer consolation to those who are in grief, hope to those whoare bereaved, strength to the weak, forgiveness to the sinful, rest to those who are weary and heavy laden? If not, then whatever be its merits, it is no rival to Christianity. It cannot penetrate or vivify the inmost life of ordinary humanity. There is in it no nourishment for ordinary human souls, no comfort for ordinary human sorrow, no help for ordinary human weakness. Not less than the crudest irreligion does it leave us men divorced from all communion with God, face to face with the unthinking energies of Nature which gave us birth, and into which, if supernatural religion be indeed a dream, we must after a few fruitless struggles be again resolved.'—RIGHT HON. ARTHUR J. BALFOUR,The Religion of Humanity.
'Truly if Humanity has no higher prospects than those which await it from the service of its modern worshippers its prospects are dark indeed. Its "normal state" is a vague and distant future. But better things may yet be hoped for when the true Light from Heaven shall enlighten every man, and the love of goodness shall everywhere come from the love of God, and nobleness of life from the perfect Example of the Lord.'—JOHN TULLOCH, D.D. LL.D.,Modern Theories in Philosophy and Religion, p. 86.
Mr. Frederic Harrison came under the influence of both the Newmans. 'John Henry Newman led me on to his brother Francis, whose beautiful nature and subtle intelligence I now began to value. HisPhases of Faith, The Soul, The Hebrew Monarchydeeply impressed me. I was not prepared either to accept all this heterodoxy nor yet to reject it; and I patiently waited till an answer could be found.'—The Creed of a Layman.
Even Mr. Voysey admits the constraining power of the Cross:
'That is still the noblest, most sublime picture in the whole Bible, where the Christ is hanging on the Cross, and the tears and blood flow trickling down, and the last words heard from His lips are "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." That love and pity will for ever endure as the type and symbol of what is most Divine in the heart of man. Thank God! it has been repeated and repeated in the lives and deaths of millions besides the Christ of Calvary. But wherever found it still claims the admiration, and wins the homage of every human heart, and is the crowning glory of the human race.—C. VOYSEY,Religion for All Mankind, p. 105.