It is a mistake to suppose that rules for conduct and recommendations of virtue, presented in a correct scientific statement, or in a new rhetorical statement from which old errors are excluded, can have anything like the effect on mankind of old rules and recommendations to which they have been long, accustomed, and with which their feelings and affections have become intertwined. Pedants always suppose that they can, but that this mistake should be so commonly made proves only how many of us have a mixture of the pedant in our composition. A correct scientific statement of rules of virtue has upon the great majority of mankind simply no effect at all. A new rhetorical statement of them, appealing, like the old familiar deliverances of Christianity, to the heart and imagination, can have the effect which those deliverances had, only when they proceed from a religious genius equal to that from which those proceeded. To state the requirement is to declare the impossibility of its being satisfied. The superlative pedantry of Comte is shown in his vainly imagining that he could satisfy it; the comparative pedantry of his disciples is shown by the degree in which they adopt their master’s vain imagination. The really essential ideas of Christianity have a truth, depth, necessity, and scope, far beyond anything that either the adherents of popular Christianity, or its impugners, at present suppose. Jesus himself, as I have remarked elsewhere, is even the better fitted to stand as the central figure of a religion, because his reporters so evidently fail to comprehend him fully and to report him adequately. Being so evidently great and yet so uncomprehended, and being now inevitably so to remain for ever, he thus comes to stand before us as what the philosophers call an _absolute_. We cannot apply to him the tests which we can apply to other phenomena, we cannot get behind him and above him, cannot command him. But even were Jesus less of an _absolute_, less fitted to stand as the central figure of a religion, than he is, even were the constitutive and essential ideas of Christianity less pregnant, profound and far-reaching than they are, still the personage of Jesus, and the Christian rules of conduct and recommendations of virtue, being of that indisputable significance and worth that in any fair view which can be taken of them they are, would have a value and a substantiality for religious purposes which no new constructions can possibly have. No new constructions in religion can now hope to found a common way, hold aloft a common truth, unite men in a common life. And yet how true it is, in regard to mankind, conduct and course, that, as the “Imitation” says so admirably, “Without a way there is no going, without a truth no knowing, without a life no living.” _Sine viâ non itur, sine veritate non cognoscitur, sine vitâ non vivitur._ The way, truth, and life have been found in Christianity, and will not now be found outside of it.