Let us carefully observe what this great portraiture of Jesus Christ, as it is exhibited in the Gospels, consists of. It is the delineation of a great moral and spiritual character dramatized over a wide sphere of action. This portraiture is not the result of the artificial delineation of a character such as we see very commonly presented to us by historians, and of which we see very numerous examples in Lord Macaulay's History of England. Such characters are the artificial creations of the historian, and exhibit his view of what his heroes actually were. But neither of the authors of the Gospels have once attempted thus to delineate the character of his Master. But the portraiture of Jesus Christ is delineated in the Gospels most clearly and most distinctly. Of what materials then does it consist? Only one answer can be returned. It is the combined result of all the facts, or, as my opponents say, fictions, which compose the Gospels. Now as the existence of this portraiture is not a theory, but a fact, it is plain that it must be accounted for. The assumption that the Gospels are historically true, and that their authors have truly delineated the actions and sayings of one who had an historical existence, is a rational account of its origin. But as these Schools deny their historical character, they are bound to tell us how the portraiture got there. The only answers which they propound are the mythic and Tübingen theories. According to these theories, a good and holy Jew, who had attracted a crowd of enthusiastic and credulous followers, was gradually metamorphosed by them into the divine Christ of the Evangelists. The inventors of the character were impelled by purely spontaneous instincts. They had no intention of conscious deception. They mistook their Master for the Messiah. In the depths of their enthusiastic credulity, they invented multitudes of fictions, and in time mistook them for realities, and innocently ascribed them to Jesus. Development succeeded development. The fruitful mind of the infant Church created myth after myth. Party spirit raged. Compromise followed compromise. Spontaneous impulse by the end of the century had created the materials of our present Gospels. At last three unknown men appeared who arranged these materials into their present form, and produced the Synoptics. Sixty years later, another great unknown arose, whose character must have been a compound of mysticism, enthusiasm, and imposture, and produced the fourth Gospel, which he successfully palmed off on the Church as the work of the Apostle John, some seventy or eighty years after he was silent in the grave. Such is the alternative which modern unbelief presents as a substitute for the historical reality of the portraiture of Jesus Christ as we behold it in the Gospels.