The biographies which we possess of Jesus were written from thirty to a hundred years after his death. In these records memory and imagination are intimately blended. On the one hand, the power and loftiness of his character and words stamped certain traits unmistakably and indelibly on the minds of his followers. But on the other hand, he was so suggestive and inspiring--there were among his disciples natures so susceptible, responsive, yet untrained, and their community was soon fused in such a contagion of passionate feeling unchecked by reason--that the seeds of his words and acts fruited in a rich growth of imagination, which blent closely with the historic reality. And with the central inspiration of his life there mixed in his followers ideas more or less foreign to him, so that the result in the Gospels is a composite which often defies certainty of analysis. If we read with open mind the Gospel narratives, the foremost, vivid impression we get is of a personage using superhuman power over natural forces for the benefit of mankind. As he is described, Jesus is before all a worker of beneficent miracles. He is a teacher, too, and an unexampled one. But he enforces his teaching by means utterly transcending the credentials of other teachers. He is a tender human friend, but he expresses his friendship by services such as no other friend can render. He allays tempests by a word. He creates bread and wine at will. He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind. He raises the dead. In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power. It is this, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which has distinguished him in the eyes of his worshipers. What is the wisest word about immortality worth--what do we care for what Socrates or Plato said--when here is one who raised Lazarus from the dead and rose himself? What need for any argument or assurance about Providence, when here is one through whom the very order of nature is set aside at the impulse of beneficent love? But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and the growing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led in our time to a different conception. The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life. His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in its interior harmony and its relations with the world about it. _Love your enemies_,--in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement of conduct. _The pure in heart shall see God_,--with that he put in the hands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision. The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chastity, justice, and piety. Jesus sublimated this,--in him chastity becomes purity; in place of justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to a love embracing earth and heaven.