I. Let us first look at the character of Christ as so depicted. I venture to say, in the first place, that it exhibits the most perfect picture of sublime simplicity ever drawn. The Gospels seem very much like notes taken from memory by men who were anxious not to lose some record of One whom they had known and loved. It is impossible to imagine anything more simple or more simply graphic than their style--it is still more impossible to imagine anything more removed from the vulgarity of rhetoric or display or effort at effect, than the character of Jesus Christ. People have spoken as though He had been merely a first-rate political reformer, a demagogue belonging to a type of unusual disinterestedness. Surely His retired, unseen youth, His gentle, quiet manhood, His calm, dignified, unimpassioned words are the very opposite in tone and character to those of the noblest demagogue or the purest political leader that was ever heard of. "He went about doing good," seems almost to record His history. "He was meek and lowly of heart," seems almost to sum up His character. The most untiring energy, the most patient endurance, the most tender and affectionate benevolence strike us in every act and every word of Christ. And yet there was nothing feeble, nothing effeminate, nothing sentimental about Him. Simple as the gentlest child, He was brave as the hardest warrior. Weeping with the tenderness of a woman for the sad and the suffering, He rebuked with inflexible sternness the base, the cruel, and the hypocritical. With the most unsullied purity of thought and life, He had yet a heart of such large and gentle sympathy that the very outcasts of mankind could come to Him for help and counsel, and He never rejected them. He did not shrink from touching the leper, and the leprous sinner went away from Him a new man, with a new heart and a new life. But the covetous, the proud, the treacherous, the actor in religion, were rebuked by Him in words which have made a new language in Christendom; Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, sounding to us no longer as writers of the law, members of a religious body in Palestine, and actors in dramatic performances, but as synonyms for all that is untrue in religion and in life. And there is one thing which signally separates Him as a teacher from all other teachers of religion and morality, viz., that the great lesson was Himself. I must speak further of this presently. What I mean here is, that the biographies, though they give many of His discourses, set before us most of all, not what He said, but what He did; and His actions are to us, and have been in all time, the most impressive lessons ever given to man. Probably all men--even those who do not believe in Him--would confess, that if they could see anyone living just the life which is related to have been the life of Jesus, the man so living would be perfect in all parts, the very ideal of humble-hearted, active-spirited, pure-minded, high-souled humanity.