WHAT WAS HE?

OR,

JESUS IN THE LIGHT OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.

INTRODUCTION.

BUT few men have dwelt upon our planet, whose names have been so frequently mentioned, or whose characters have been so lauded, as the name and character of Jesus have been. About three hundred millions of living men and women regard him as their Lord, and speak of him as the Saviour. hymns sung in his honor, in our Christian churches, indicate the popular estimate of him in our own country. In them we find such expressions as these:

"Dearest of all the names above,
My Jesus and my God!” 2
"Jesus, the name high over all
In earth or hell or sky!"

Of him it is affirmed,

66

By his own power were all things made;
By him supported all things stand:
He is the whole creation's head,

And angels fly at his command.”

The

1 Johnson's Physical Atlas gives the number of Christian believ ers on the globe as three hundred and forty millions.

2 Watts's Hymns.

He is dearer to many Christians than even God, and much more highly extolled: :

"Till God in human flesh I see,

My thoughts no comfort find:
The holy, just, and sacred Three
Are terrors to my mind."

Should these be regarded as mere poetic fancies, we have to the same effect the sober language of the evangelical creeds. In the Methodist Discipline we find him styled "the very and eternal God;" and the Athanasian Creed of the Episcopal Church declares him to be perfect God and perfect man. Some Unitarian and Universalist Christians regard him as a super-angelic being, who came from heaven in obedience to the will of God, "to bless men by turning them from their iniquities; " while others merely regard him as the noblest human being that our planet has produced, and a model man for the race. Let us, who believe that reason should be exercised in religion as in business and science, inquire who was Jesus, and what relation he sustains

to us.

That Jesus really existed, the Acts of the Apostles, and those Epistles of Paul that the most sceptical are compelled to acknowledge as genuine, those to the Romans, Corinthians, and Galatians,1-present very strong evidence. Paul, who was born but a few years after Jesus,2 who was educated at

1 Taylor's Diegesis, p. 270; Renan's Apostles, p. 35.

2 The date of the birth of Paul has been placed by critics at from A. D. 1 to A. D. 12: the latter date is probably near the truth. In Acts vii. 58 he is called a young man : if he was twenty then, he was born about A. D. 13.