In thus epitomizing the events in the life of Jesus upon which, from his day until now, men have laid such fearful stress, and upon whose acceptance the present life as well as the future of all men has been conditioned, I should be far from doing justice to myself should I fail to point out my own attitude in the matter. I hold it true that the self-evident truth, as well as the wonderful sublimity of Christ's teachings, become apparent upon the study of the same, and are weakened rather than strengthened by insistence upon all that is supernatural, mysterious and inconceivable in the generally accepted account of his life and labor. My mind is freed from the necessity for the mysterious which the Graeco-Jewish people demanded, and which the superstitious people of to-day still demand, and I prefer to let him stand for what he seems to me to be,--_the greatest moralist and teacher of all time_, rather than to surround him with a veil of imagery and with statements so impossible of belief as to make it impossible to accept one part without accepting them all. The Jews already had doctrines of unity of God and love for others; the Grecian philosophy antedated him in insisting upon elevation of life to a higher plane than that of mere gratification of the senses, and everywhere his predecessors and contemporaries could furnish miracles by the hundred, but in force, grandeur and simplicity of his teachings, in his comprehensive humanity, in his directness of appeal, in his condemnations of those who departed from the model which he set, he never has had and probably never will have an equal. In his self-abasement and love for others he was as irresistible as have been these principles in civilizing and, in this sense, christianizing the world. In Jesus' own day there was no hair-splitting theology; devotion, love of fellow-men, charity, repentance, these were all that were needed. But the beautiful simplicity of his teaching was lost with the death of his first disciples. The system was esteemed too simple, too unadorned to appeal to the people used to something quite the contrary. And so Stephen the Martyr, who was of Grecian education, was stoned because he demanded a repudiation of certain Jewish teachings, although the congregation at Antioch adopted his views. Paul the great leader was an epileptic and had frequent fits and visions, and these made a strong impression, not only on himself but on his followers. On the creations of his imagination the doctrine of the resurrection is largely based. He set up the God-man Jesus as the counterpart of the first man Adam, who represented sin and death, and who was to be crucified and born anew in Christ. Between Paul, the great Gentile Christian, and Peter, the Jewish Christian, the church was quickly split into two parties; these two soon subdividing into others, and among them all arose the New Testament literature, whose Alexandrine dialect establishes the influence of Greek education.