would have said to His fellow-sufferer on Calvary: “To-day shalt thou be with me in paradise.” The torture of crucifixion was sufficient to expel the hallucinations of the maddest brain, but the Evangelists show that while faith in His Messiahship was, during His crucifixion, fading even from His disciples, in Himself it was stronger than ever, and at the very last it was communicated to a dying robber, who trusted that He had power to absolve him, and to open to him the gates of a better life. Now, all this surely never could naturally have occurred to Jewish men to conceive, and if their records be only fictions, the devout creations of over fond imaginations, then their legends are miracles themselves. Some one has said that it is possible to find in the Buddhist books a parallel to every incident in the Gospels; if so, these parallels will be found to be very far apart; but to the incident of the Crucifixion there can be no parallel. That one historical event separates not only the two systems of thought and belief, but marks off Christianity from all other religions in the world. Till the crucifixion of Jesus was accomplished, the idea of associating with Deity humiliation, and of conceiving of God as dying the death of a slave upon the cross, would have been regarded as the grossest impiety. The fundamental idea of the Incarnation was not wholly foreign to the mind either of India or of Greece; to the Jew it was not a natural thought, but one so anti-Semitic that Jew and Moslem alike have rejected Christianity because of it;[171] but the incarnation of Deity represented in the Gospels, the humiliation of the Godhead implied in the Crucifixion, is an idea which never could have originated in the mind of either Gentile or Jew. It is one of the things of God which the natural man cannot conceive, a mystery hid from all ages until it was revealed, and apparently, unless we admit the reality of the revelation, we never can account for the faith. The miraculous personality of Christ is thus the outstanding and distinctive feature of the Christian writings. As the mists clear away in the East, Buddha emerges more and more in the stature of a good and great man, but Christ rises upon us as one who cannot be accounted for according to the measure of any man, nor even that of an angel. It is not as a teacher, a guide out of the difficulties of life, that He meets us, but as a Revealer and Saviour. It is thus He has been accepted by His disciples, and upon their faith He has reared His Church. It is thus He conceived of Himself, and His conception is not more astounding than are the simplicity and lowliness and meekness of His character. He is Himself thus the miracle of miracles, wholly inexplicable on any human theory devised to account for Him; and till that one miracle is solved, all questions as to the miracles which are ascribed to Him can afford to wait for their solution.