For, be the method as gradual and as tentative as you please, these witnesses, who are, in fact, the only witnesses the world ever has had, or can have, of His inner life and teaching, testify unhesitatingly not only that all true acceptance of Him was, in their judgment, acceptance of Him as God, but that His life and death were penetrated by the consciousness of His own Godhead; and by the deliberate purpose (through whatever unexpected patience of method) of convincing the whole world in the end of His Godhead, and receiving universal belief, and universal worship, as God. Now no one to-day disputes that He was truly man. Is it true that He was very God? It is either true or false. As to the fact there are only the two alternatives. And between the two the gulf is impassable. If it is not false, it is true. If it is not absolutely true, it is absolutely false. According to the faith of the Catholic Church it is absolutely true. According to the highest form of Arianism, not less than according to the barest Socinianism, it is (however you may try to gloss it over) absolutely false. Once more, it is quite beyond our province to marshal or press argumentatively the proofs that He was indeed God. But it is necessary to see with perfect clearness, how the question must have been raised, and being raised must have been answered. The very life of the Church was belief in Him; and she could not remain fundamentally uncertain as to who or what He was in whom she believed. This was the one thing which had never been allowed to those who drew near Christ. All through His ministry those who came near Him, and felt the spell of His presence, His holiness, His power, were undergoing a training and a sifting. Moment by moment, step by step, the accumulating evidence of His transcendently perfect humanity kept forcing more and more upon them all the question which He would never let them escape, the question by which they were to be tested and judged; 'What think ye of Christ?' 'If ye believe not that I am He, ye shall die in your sins.'