master while they treated it like children, resting his doctrine on internal evidence while they rested it on miracles; and yet, by his incomparable lucidity and penetrativeness, planting his profound veins of thought in their memory along with their own notions and prepossessions, to come out all mixed up together, but still distinguishable one day and separable;—and leaving his word thus to bear fruit for the future.
Truly, then, some one will exclaim, we may say with the 'Imitation:' Magna ars est scire conversari cum Jesu! And so it is. To extract from his reporters the true Jesus entire, is even impossible; to extract him in considerable part is one of the highest conceivable tasks of criticism. And it is vain to use that favourite argument of popular theology that man could never have been left by Providence in difficulty and obscurity about a matter of so much importance to him. For the cardinal rule of our present inquiry is that rule of Newton's: Hypotheses non fingo; and this argument of popular theology rests on the eternal hypothesis of a magnified and non-natural man at the head of mankind's and the world's affairs. And a further answer is, that, as to the argument itself, even if we allowed the hypothesis, yet the course of things, so far as we can see, is not so; things do not proceed in this fashion. Because a man has frequently to make sea-passages, he is not gifted with an immunity from sea-sickness because a thing is of the highest interest and importance to know, it is not, therefore, easy to know; on the contrary, in general, in proportion to its magnitude it is difficult, and requires time.
But the right commentary on the sentence of the 'Imitation' is given by the 'Imitation' itself in the sentence following: Esto humilis et pacificus, et erit tecum Jesus!
