I have so far been regarding our Lord Jesus Christ simply as a teacher of religious and ethical truth. I think it is of fundamental importance that we should _begin_ by regarding him in this light. {155} It was in this light that he first presented himself to his fellow-countrymen--even before (in all probability) he claimed to be the fulfiller of the Messianic ideal which had been set before them by the prophets of their race. And I could not, without a vast array of quotation, give you a sufficient impression of the prominence of this aspect of his work and personality among the earlier Greek Fathers. Even after the elaborate doctrines of Catholic Christianity had begun to be developed, it was still primarily as the supremely inspired Teacher that Jesus was most often thought of. When the early Christians thought of him as the incarnate Logos or Reason of God, to teach men divine truth was still looked upon as the supreme function of the Logos and the purpose of his indwelling in the historical Jesus. But from the first Jesus appealed to men as much more than a teacher. It is one of the distinctive peculiarities of religious and ethical knowledge that it is intimately connected with character: religious and moral teaching of the highest kind is in a peculiar degree inseparable from the personality of the teacher. Jesus impressed his contemporaries, and he has impressed successive ages as having not only set before man the highest religious and moral ideal, but as having in a unique manner realized that ideal in his own life. Even the word 'example' {156} does not fully express the impression which he made on his followers, or do justice to the inseparability of his personality from his teaching. In the religious consciousness of Christ men saw realized the ideal relation of man not merely to his fellow-man but also to his heavenly Father. From the first an enthusiastic reverence for its Founder has been an essential part of the Christian Religion amid all the variety of the phases which it has assumed. The doctrine of the Christian Church was in its origin an attempt to express in the philosophical language of the time its sense of this supreme value of Christ for the religious and moral life of man. As to the historical success and the present usefulness of these attempts, I shall have a word to say next time. Meanwhile, I would leave with you this one thought. The claim of Christianity to be the supreme, the universal, in a sense the final Religion, must rest mainly, in the last resort, upon the appeal which Christ and his Religion make to the moral and religious consciousness of the present. LITERATURE See the works mentioned at the end of the next Lecture, to which, as dealing more specially with the subject of Lecture v., may be added Professor Sanday's _Inspiration_, and Professor Wendt's _Revelation and Christianity_. [1] Throughout his writings, but pre-eminently in the _Theoetetus_.