How comes it that this Jewish carpenter, with His three years of public life and His cross of shame, fulfils so many ideals and aspirations? He brings in the new age which Virgil and his contemporaries sighed for; He is Plato’s just man; He utters from His own self-consciousness such things as the author of the _Gītā_ imagined an incarnate god would say; He gives Himself up to death, in sheer love, as a sacrifice for sin, thus fulfilling the deepest needs of man, as expressed by the old Hebrew seer; and He is the only human being whom men of every race and clime can heartily admire and unhesitatingly imitate. Nor is this all: many other convergent lines of thought might be suggested, in the light of which Jesus stands out as the ideal of our common humanity and the fountain of the love of God. How is all this to be explained? Wide chasms sever the Hindu sage, the Greek philosopher, the Hebrew prophet and the Roman poet; yet in Jesus their several ideals are reconciled in a loftier unity. Once in the course of the centuries East and West have actually met! Nor was the meeting merely the resolution of antitheses in a wider conception: what the Jew and the Indian, the Greek and the Roman, dreamed of as the unattainable, that Jesus actually accomplished in this work-a-day world of ours, amid storms of the cruellest hatred and calumny.—What is your candid opinion about Him, brother? How are you to solve the problem raised by His life, death and place in history? Can He be better described than in His own words, SON OF MAN and SON OF GOD? Footnote 163: See article _Slavery_ in _Encyclopædia Brittanica_; and _cf._ Gibbon, Chaps. II and XXXVIII; Cunningham, _An Essay on Western Civilization in its Economic Aspects_; Wallon, _Histoire de l’Esclavage dans l’Antiquité_. Footnote 164: Fowler, _The City-State of the Greeks and Romans_; Mahaffy, _Social Life in Greece_, 44; Kidd, _P. W. C._, Chap. VI. Footnote 165: Kidd, _P. W. C._, Chaps. VII to IX. Footnote 166: Kidd, _P. W. C._, 190, 223-4. Footnote 167: Sohm, _The Institutes of Roman Law_; Wallon, _Histoire de l’Esclavage dans l’Antiquité_. Footnote 168: Bury, _History of Greece_, I, 72. Footnote 169: Kidd, _P. W. C._, 223. Footnote 170: Kidd, _P. W. C._, 168. Footnote 171: Kidd, _P. W. C._, 160-172; Seebohm, _The Structure of Greek Tribal Society_, 4, 138. Footnote 172: Sir Robert Giffen, _Address to the Manchester Statistical Society_, 15. Footnote 173: Kidd, _Social Evolution_, Chaps. IV & V. Footnote 174: Tacitus, _Annals_, XV, 44, Church and Brodribb’s translation. Footnote 175: Church and Brodribb’s _Annals_, 374. Footnote 176: For all the facts and the opinions of various scholars, _see_ Hastings, _Dictionary of the Bible_, I, 410-415. Footnote 177: _Matthew_, Chapters 26 & 27. Footnote 178: For the criticism of the Gospels _see_ below, pages 49-50. Footnote 179: _Matt._, 26, 67-68. Footnote 180: