There is absolutely nothing like it in all Hebrew history that went before him, as there is nothing like it in the history that comes after him. And the conception of Jesus that is given by the brief accounts of the evangelists is so finished, so complete, that the attempts of after times to add to it in the stories of the so-called apocryphal gospels have utterly failed of their design. No marvelous stories, handed down from one generation to another, have in the least added to or taken from the Jesus of the evangelists. What Jesus signified when the gospels were written he has been through the centuries that have followed him. What he was then he is to-day. 7. All myths belong to the infancy, never to the age of any nation. They spring out of the morning mists; they never appear in the light of day. If the story of Jesus had been placed in Chaldea, before the call of Abraham, it also would have belonged to the infancy of a race. To harmonize with the laws that govern the development of myths the story of Jesus should have anticipated the first chapters in Hebrew history; it should have been placed in that uncertain period that includes the dispersion from Armenia, the second cradle of the human race. But the story of Jesus is given to the world, fresh and complete, with not one hint of it in all preceding history, in the last years, the closing days of Hebrew national life in Judea. The story antedates but a little while the destruction of Jerusalem by Vespasian and his Roman legions; when Jesus was born Augustus was emperor; when Jesus entered upon his ministry Tiberius Cæsar was in the fifteenth year of his reign; his lieutenant, Pontius Pilate, governed Judea as a subject province, and his soldiers kept the peace in the holy city. Consider how impossible it is for myths to originate after written history, in the sun-glare of life in a full-grown nation. Even the pretty stories of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table belong to that far-away period in England when there was no written history worth the name, when letters were almost unknown, when all was young and fresh and ignorant, and the fairies still ruled in the forests. Think of a myth starting up to-day in London under the shadow of St. Paul’s and Parliament House. Think of the world in our time talking of “Chinese Gordon” if there had lived no “Chinese Gordon.” If the people who have letters, and write histories, and “turn the world upside-down” with the gospel story, should leave the poor savages of the Congo Valley to themselves, thousands of years from our times Livingstone and Stanley will live in African traditions as godlike men; and so new myths will be born, will grow and fix themselves in the legends of these lands where they have done many wonderful works--but London and New York will breed no myths concerning Livingstone and Stanley. CHAPTER VI. JESUS AND HEBREW HUMAN NATURE.