the Apostolic age. There is nothing sinful in unavoidable ignorance, nothing incompatible with sinlessness in the natural limitations of humanity; but if, indeed, it could be fairly made out that Jesus Christ was morally defective, then Christianity, as I can see the truth, would perish, for every notion of Incarnation that we can frame requires a perfect congruity of the creature which reveals and the Creator who is revealed any intrusion of wilful sin would destroy the adequacy of the Manhood of Christ to be the Sacrament of Deity, and would incapacitate His life for its sublime purpose of showing forth the Character of God. You will understand, therefore, with what anxiety I review the evidences and seek a decision on this decisive issue.

So I reach my final proposition. The New Testament, read in the light of honest criticism, justifies, so far as documents can justify, the Apostolic doctrine of the sinlessness of Christ. Let me observe that in bringing a human career lived out in the first century to be judged by the moral standard accepted in the twentieth we are applying a test, the most severe imaginable. If we were judging a man, in order to appraise his merits, this test were the unjustest in the world; but in the case of the Son of Man, it is

not so much just as inevitable. He, whom we Christians worship as the Incarnate Creator, must be able to command the homage not of one age only, but of all ages. Let the moral standard of mankind be raised as high as you will, it must never rise above the standard of Christ; nay, His standard must always be the goal towards which the moral effort of the race is moving, and never a single advance in goodness must be unable to find its interpretation and justification in the complete goodness of the Son of Man. Applying, therefore, necessarily our educated twentieth-century consciences to the historic Jesus, is He stripped of His attribute of sinlessness? Rationalists of the baser sort accumulate what they describe as immoral, or contradictory, or unreasonable teachings from the Gospels, but, if you will have the patience to examine their procedure you will find that it violates every accepted canon of sound criticism and cautious interpretation. Fairly examined, honestly interpreted, the teaching of Christ-there can be no doubt about it-commands the deliberate approval of the general conscience of our age. John Stuart Mill uttered the deliberate conviction of the wisest thinkers of our modern world when he wrote that "not even now would it be easy, even for an unbeliever, to

find a better translation of the rule of virtue from the abstract into the concrete, than to endeavour so to live that Christ would approve our life." 1 Thus the Sage of the nineteenth century does homage to the Galilean peasant of the first! But what of Christ Himself? What of Christ's recorded actions? Do they bear out the theory of His sinlessness? I have heard men object against the episodes of the Blasting of the Barren Fig-tree, and of the Destruction of the Gadarene Swine; but then, who will seriously maintain the historical character of either narrative as it stands? does not recognise in those strange stories, so sharply distinguished from the rest of the record, precisely the presence of legendary elements, which, though comparatively slight in extent within the earliest Christian documents, are unquestionably, to some extent, present? Historical criticism, at least, permits us to relieve Jesus Christ from the embarrassing misconceptions of His primitive biographers. Besides those episodes (which are plainly irrelevant), is there anything admittedly historic within the Gospels which implies sinfulness in Jesus Christ? Frankly, I know of nothing. The challenge of the text remains, so far as our knowledge of Christ's life

What critical student of the Gospel

1 Three Essays on Religion, p. 255.

is concerned, triumphantly unanswerable. "Which of you convicteth Me of sin ? If I say truth, why do ye not believe Me?" The inference which the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews draws from the Life of Christ remains still valid and consoling. "For we have not a high priest that cannot be touched with the feeling of our infirmities: but one that hath been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without sin."

I would, however, crave forgiveness for even seeming to suggest that the faith by which Christians have assurance of their Master's right to their worship depends on an appeal to documents, however authoritative and venerable. It is indeed far otherwise. We-if we are Christians in fact as well as in name-not less than the writers of the New Testament, build our fabric of belief on the foundation of experience. Jesus Christ is to us, as to them, an Object of affection, and of the confidence which affection makes possible; we, as they, have carried to Him our secrets of trouble and shame, and we also have found that our trust was not misplaced. We have an interior certitude, phrase it how you will, that we have nothing to fear from the most searching criticism of the historical memorials of our Master's Life; for our knowledge of Him has

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made us secure where His Character is in question. But we cannot offer this kind of security to the men of that outer world which inquires, cavils, denies at the gates of the Church. To them we must perforce offer the humbler but more intelligible evidence of the documents; and we do offer with complete frankness. We accept, nay, we desire the test of historical inquiry. It cannot give us faith: that is always a spiritual achievement; but it can, and it does, disprove the arguments against faith which a reckless scepticism advances and a timorous ignorance allows. We claim that we have a sinless Christ; and an honest examination of the evidences certifies that there is nothing there which contradicts our claim. From that source we seek no more than that negative conclusion; we seek no more, and we require no more. The reasons of the faith by which the negative conclusion of historical inquiry must grow into the positive affirmation of discipleship are of a higher and a firmer kind. The conscience and the heart have their place here as well as the reason; and it is the whole manifold personality which rushes forth in the cry, "Lord, I believe help Thou mine unbelief."