Jesus said unto them, "They that are whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. ... For I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." [Footnote 100] [Footnote 100: Matthew ix. 12, 13.] What is the signification of this sublime fact; what the meaning in Jesus of this union, this harmony of severity and of love, of saint-like holiness and of human sympathy? It is Heaven's revelation of the nature of Jesus him-self, of the God-man. {252} God, he made himself man. God is his father, men are his brethren. He is pure and holy like God: He is accessible and sensible to all that man feels. Thus the vital principles of the Christian faith, the divine and the human nature united in Jesus, start to evidence, in his sentiments and language respecting the relations between God and man. The dogma is the foundation of the principles. Another fact is not less significant. At the same time that the divine and mysterious character of Jesus Christ appears in the Gospel, his acts and his words have a character essentially simple and practical. He pursues no learned object, no scientific plan; He develops no system; his object is something infinitely grander than the triumph of any logical abstraction: it is to pervade the human soul, to establish himself in it--to save it. He speaks the language--He appeals to the ideas most calculated to ensure Him success. {253} Sometimes He addresses himself to the task of inspiring in men the most poignant disquietude as to their future destiny, if they violate the laws of God; at other times He causes to shine before their eyes the realisation of the most magnificent hopes, if with sincerity they persist in faith. He knows the generation that He is addressing; He knows human nature in its universality, and what it will be in future generations: his object is to produce upon it an effect at once positive, general, durable; He chooses the ideas, He employs the images suitable to his design for the regeneration and the salvation of all. God's Ambassador is the most penetrating and able of human moralists. More than once, the attempt has been made to find Him at fault, to detect in his language exaggerations, contradictions, incoherencies irreconcilable with his divine authority. Surprise, for instance, has been expressed, that He should have one day said, according to St. Matthew: "He that is not with me is against me; and he that gathereth not with me scattereth abroad;" [Footnote 101] and that He should another day, according to St. Mark, have used the expression, "For he that is not against us is on our part." [Footnote 102] [Footnote 101: Matthew xii. 30.] [Footnote 102: Mark ix. 40.] {254} These two passages have been characterised as furnishing "two rules of proselytism entirely opposed to each other, and as involving a contradiction growing out of some impassioned struggle." [Footnote 103] [Footnote 103: Vie de Jesus, par M. Renan, p. 229.]