Although the many doctrines built up about the personality of Jesus attribute to him in some peculiar sense the relation of sonship with God, he does not so say of himself, but by every word and work declares a common spiritual fatherhood and human brotherhood. When Nicodemus testified to his superior power, Jesus did not trace its origin to a special interposition of Providence in his birth or life, but he made of general application the law that governed his conception by the emphatic assertion that all men must realize themselves as begotten and born from above before they can understand the forces of the unseen universe within and without. He affirmed the kingdom of God and of heaven to be latent in the life of man, and promised no peace for the soul here or hereafter until its innate capabilities for wisdom, love, and power for good are developed and exercised. His precepts and example would be foolishness and a stumbling-block, his character an unattainable ideal, were it other than the first fruit ripened on the tree of life, the promise of a perfected race. We only apprehend its vital value, as we can trace in our own experience and that of others, the growth and fruition of that seed-principle of Truth around which the New Testament story has been crystallized. This re-conception of the Christ is, like the first one, essentially of the soul and intrinsically immaculate. It then matters little when or by whom the Gospels and Epistles were originally written; for the book as a whole is lifted forever above the level of legend and myth, on the one hand, and that of a merely historical narrative on the other, because the persons and events mentioned and described represent laws and principles permanent in operation, and reveal faculties whose reality and value we are daily called upon to demonstrate. We can, when we so will it, verify, each in his own subjective consciousness, all that the wondrous story of nineteen centuries ago relates as having taken place in the outward objective world of form and phenomena. For unto every "excellent Theophilus," every lover of the good and true, the gospel of the Christ is, through the conscience, reconveyed, even as delivered by those who from the first have been its messengers. The faith of Abraham and law of Moses, the line of patriarch, priest, and prophet, that linked the life of Jesus with that of primitive man, we find repictured in the working of those evolutionary forces that constitute each one of us an epitome of the past, a miniature of society. As children of earth we give due credit to each factor in heredity and environment that makes us what we are as we pass through planes of physical, intellectual, and moral development. But a still higher kingdom of consciousness is at hand, which forces us to feel that as brethren of the Son of Man we are also sons of God.