But the more carefully you examine that character, the more forcibly you will be struck by the fact that this Man, of whom the most special and most distinctive characteristics are absolute truthfulness and absolute humility, speaks throughout with an authority which involves the assumption of a divine nature. This statement does not rest on particular texts open to misconstruction or evasion, but on the tenor of each and every discourse, on His acts not less than His words. He addresses man as man's Master; He speaks as the Son of God, as one with God. This fact is stated in strong, not to say irreverent, terms by the author of "Ecce Homo": "During His whole public life Jesus is distinguished from the other prominent characters of Jewish history by His unbounded personal pretensions." Two writers, differing widely in tone of mind, but alike in depth of thought and earnestness of purpose, prove, were proof needed, that those pretensions are justified by the truth of the Incarnation, and by that alone. (See the Rev. M. F. Sadler, "Immanuel," pp. 264-309; and Mr. Hutton's "Essay on the Incarnation.") You will, in fact, soon find that you have no alternative but either to give up all that has wrought itself into your moral nature, and intwined itself around the fibres of your affections, all your convictions of the moral excellence of Jesus, or to accept Him, even as He presents Himself, the God-man. His enemies felt this. They persecuted Him because He made Himself, as they said truly, equal with God. They crucified Him because He claimed the powers and attributes of the Son of God. Modern sceptics of loftier strain feel this keenly. They might be content to accept Him as a moral teacher; for, in that case, they could deal with Him as their equal by nature, receiving or rejecting His teaching as it might accord or not with their own judgment; if they reject Him it is simply or mainly, as they will tell you, because He claims to be more than man, and, as they well know, to be no less than God. They ask (perhaps you will ask), how did He justify the claim? The answer, of course, involves the whole controversy; but I will once more state my own conviction. If you put yourselves under His teaching, He will not leave you in doubt. You will attain by degrees only to any real appreciation of His human goodness; but together with the growth of that appreciation will dawn upon you the consciousness, ever increasing in clearness and intensity, that in Him you are gazing upon the Incarnate God. You will have a twofold evidence: the evidence of a perfectly logical conviction, founded on sure inferences from sure premises, upon the inseparability of truth and goodness, self-knowledge and perfect wisdom, and the evidence of direct intuition; you will feel yourselves in the presence of God.