As to Jesus, he was the son of Joseph, as much as any man is the son of his father. Leo, the patriarch, published in A. D. 726, an edict prohibiting the worship of images, declaring that Jesus was but a mere man, born of his mother in the common way. It is evident that Jesus was an observant, studious youth, given to devout meditation, and on this account greatly esteemed by the ignorant people around him, and stimulated by this admiration, he became somewhat of a fanatic, but a good one, absorbed in grand and noble thoughts, and fell in with the Jewish notion of the redemption of their race from the enemy, but he took a still higher view, the deliverance of his people from their slavery to rites and ceremonies, from their hypocrisy and wickedness, to a life of purity and uprightness. A noble effort of a noble man, worthy of the world’s profoundest respect and admiration. Not a word was said while he was alive, or until centuries after his death, of his being God, or equal with God, or anything but a great teacher, a noble man, worthy to be styled the son of God, as all good men were and are the sons of God. John Stuart Mill says of him—and his opinion is worth as much as the Pope’s—“A man charged with a special, express and unique commission from God to lead mankind to truth and virtue.” If Jesus was God he must have been conscious of it, and would have shown or disclosed the fact in his life, but nowhere did he do this. He was aware that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country, thus likening himself to a prophet. When in the course of time he was deified, and as they could not do away with God, they made Jesus a part of God, or one of three Gods in one, a medley the most absurd ever attempted by the human mind, and tried to explain it in the Athanasian creed, the most nonsensical puzzle of the world. If the greatest of modern lawyers or scholars should now go into any court on the globe and try to make a statement of a fact in such a jugglery of words and nonsense, he would at once be sent out of court or be committed to a lunatic asylum.