Another lady states her Unitarian position that “Christ was human, we know,--he must also have been more than human, else he could not help us, therefore he was divine; but he could not have been wholly divine, else he could not have been an example for us.” The last assertion is to me untrue. He must be able to help us more, because He is one with the Father, nor is He less our example, but more. He never gave a lower standard than this,--“Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” He surely made God our only example of goodness, to learn and to follow. And we know that we are made in the image of God, because we cannot in our best moments accept any standard but this,--of perfection to be sought after through eternity; the grandeur of our being is that there will always be something beyond for us to seek. Reading “Ecce Homo” for the first time, with a view to studying the “Life of Christ” with a friend. February 6. Reading Renan’s “Life of Jesus.” In the introduction, his objections to the fourth Gospel seem to me to arise from some lack of perception in himself. I cannot find in it the “pretentious, heavy, badly written tirades” to which he alludes. Nor does it seem to me anything against the book that it was written from memory, long after the death of Christ. To apply to so close a friendship as that between Jesus and John the passage, “Our memories are transformed with all the rest; the idea of a person whom we have known changes with us,” seems to me a wholly unsatisfactory and unappreciative way of putting it. If friends, and such friends, do not remember each other as they really are, we lose the idea of personal identity altogether. Yet Renan seems to think that John did write the fourth Gospel, and from the same close kind of intimacy as that which existed between Socrates and Plato. We surely reach the heart of Christ most closely through the words of the beloved disciple,--the stories clustering around the birth of Christ, which Renan dismisses as “legendary,” seem to be so simply on his assertion. Were they so, the character of Jesus, Son of God and Son of Man, remains itself divinely alone in the world’s history. But I cannot see more miracle in the beginning than all the way through. Nor does it seem to me that it would have been more sacrilegious for Him to say “I am God,” which he never did in words affirm, Renan says, than to say, as He did, “I and my Father are one;” “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.” He spoke as the Son of Man, referring also always to His Father, claiming to be, in the closest sense, the Son of God. As a man, He must refer to the God beyond Him, else He could not have made Himself understood by men. For myself, I cannot think of God at all, except as having eternally this human side, by which we human beings, His children, may know Him. There is no unity in the idea of Him without this complexity, which shows Him as Father, Son, and Spirit.