The worship of Jesus, it has been said, is the redeeming feature of Christianity. This evidently is the opinion of John Stuart Mill, who writes, confounding, as is usual, Jesus with the Christ: "The most valuable part of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced by holding up in a divine person a standard of excellence and a model for imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever, and can nevermore be lost to humanity. For it is Christ rather than God whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the God incarnate, more than the God of the Jews or of nature, who being idealized has taken so great and salutary a hold on the modern mind;" and more to the same effect, in the essay on Theism. Before Mr. Mill's intellectual eccentricities were as well understood as they are now, this testimony to the humanizing influence of christian, as distinct from philosophical theism, would have possessed great weight. As it is, it only excites our wonder that so keen and inexorable a thinker should so completely lose sight of facts. That Christendom has worshipped the Christ is true. Is it true that it has worshipped Jesus? Again we might say: Yes;--the Jesus who demanded faith in himself as the condition of salvation; the Jesus who depicted the Son of Man, sitting on a throne of judgment, summoning before him all nations, and placing the sheep on his right hand, the goats on his left; the Jesus who threatened everlasting fire, and spoke of the devil and his angels; the Jesus who made the church umpire in matters of faith and works; the Jesus who bade his friends forsake father and mother, brother and sister for his sake. But did Christendom ever deify the man of the Beatitudes, the relator of the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, the friend of publicans and sinners? Is Jesus the central figure in the Nicene, or the Athanasian creed? Is he the God of Calvin, or of Luther, of Augustine, even of Borromeo, or Fénélon? Long before the dogmatical or ecclesiastical system of Christendom was formed, the image of Jesus had faded away from the minds of christians, if it ever was stamped there. That it was ever stamped there is not quite apparent. In the east there exists no trace of it after the apostolic age, or beyond the circle of his personal friends. In the west the personal influence is not distinctly visible at any distance. From the reported heroism of the early christian centuries no solid conclusion can be drawn, for the reason that the reports come from panegyrists like Tertullian, and from a period when the apostolic age had become a tradition. Writers like Neander make the most of a few recorded instances of devotion which distinguished the christians from the pagans about them; and James Martineau uses them as evidence of an original spiritual genius in the young religion. They are indeed beautiful, but they do not refer back