this very hour, and there is not one shred of evidence, beyond a mistaken prejudice, which goes to show that our religion had any other origin than that. We may now enter on the further inquiry whether Christianity, meaning thereby the religion personally professed and practised by Jesus of Nazara, was a sacerdotal or sacrificial system in the sense already explained. Such an inquiry necessarily resolves itself into this further one, namely, whether there is any reliable evidence that the founder of the Christian religion was himself a priest, taught a sacerdotal doctrine, or exercised any sacerdotal functions. Though he died a comparatively young man, if we may believe the gospel narrative, which makes him to have lived either to thirty-one or thirty-three years, though Irenaeus emphatically asserts that he lived to fifty years, we may most assuredly proclaim him a priest in the sense of elder, or leader of men. One whom schools of thought, represented by men so opposed as Mill, Renan, Matthew Arnold, Spinoza, Goethe, Napoleon and Rousseau, conspired to honour must have been indeed a "king of men". But this is not what is meant by the question. By priest we mean here what the ecclesiastic means, namely, one who is set apart by the act of God, signified by some external rite or ceremony, whereby power is conferred to perform certain definite functions impossible to the ordinary man. He alone, in virtue of his consecration, can mediate between man and the Deity, can propitiate him for the sins of men, can forgive those sins, and mechanically communicate holiness by the adoption of a definite ceremony and the pronouncement of a precise formula. Nay, in virtue of his peculiar status, the priest is able to superinduce a physical sanctity in solid and liquid substances, like bread and wine, and quite independently of his own belief, or the belief of the bystanders, or even the recipients, cause those substances to be no longer what to every conceivable physical test they still continue to be, but the body and blood of a man who lived more than 1800 years ago. In a word, a ritual may be described as "a system of consecrated charms or spells, and the priest is the great magician who dispenses them".[5]