element of awe and gratitude which fills religion with emotion, and makes it other and greater than morality,—the not ourselves. We did not make the order of conduct, or provide that happiness should belong to it, or dispose our hearts to it. Man's goings are of the Eternal, as Israel said; Eternal, I know that the way of man is not in himself.[1] Neither did we invent Jesus, or make the 'grace and truth' of Jesus, or provide that happiness should belong to feeling them, or dispose our hearts to feel them. No man can come to me, as Jesus said, except the Father which sent me draw him.[2] So the revelation of Jesus Christ in the New Testament is like the revelation of the God of Israel in the Old, in being the revelation of 'the Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' It is like it, and has the same power of religion in it.
Thus, then, did Jesus seek to transform the immense materialising Aberglaube, into which the religion of Israel had fallen, and to spiritualise it at all points; while in his method and secret he supplied a sure basis for practice. But to follow him entirely there was needed an epieikeia, an unfailing sweetness and unerring perception, like his own. It was much if his disciples got firm hold on his method and his secret; and if they transmitted fragments enough of his .lofty spiritualism to make it in the fulness of time discernible, and to make it at once and from the first in a large degree serviceable. Who can read in the Gospels the comments preserved to us, both of disciples and of others, on what he said, and not feel that Jesus must have known, while he nevertheless persevered in saying them, how things like: 'Before Abraham was, I am,'[3] or:
