If you will you may give your inquiries wider range. Forget that Jesus was a Jew by blood and birth and training. Try all history; search the records of other nations. Tell me of the sages and reformers--the great and good men of other peoples and countries; of Zoroaster, Confucius, Socrates, Buddha, and the rest; of Moses or any other Jew you could name along with them. Is Jesus only one of them? The best of them perhaps--but only one of them? Read all you may of them as their best friends tell their stories, and you would recoil if some maker of cyclopedias should talk of only adding the name of Jesus. It is not simply that you have heard your mother pray to Jesus; it is not simply the prompting of your “cradle faith.” The reason lies deeper; if to-day for the first time you were to read of the great and holy men of other nations and of Jesus you must think of him, without waiting to reason why, in a place by himself, as a great star shines alone. No light is so splendid but the eye knows the sunlight for what it is. But it is not, as you know, a question as to what the human race in some age could do; it is, what could the Hebrew race do in the age of Cæsar Augustus? For Jesus was of the Hebrew race and of that age. But for the moment forget this limitation of our inquiry and ask, What could that age do? It is like asking, What could the Roman race and civilization do? For the glory of Egypt and Babylon had long departed, and the great Greeks were before the time of Jesus. Roman life then dominated the world, and Roman life did its utmost in producing Julius Cæsar. But there was not in Roman life, tradition, thought, sentiment, one quality or influence of any sort whatsoever that could have any relation to the production of a character like this that the evangelists have given us. But at last we must ask simply this question: What could the Hebrew race in that age do? Only Jewish influences entered into the life of Jesus. There is not in any single thought or word of his so much as an echo of any thing characteristic of other peoples. There is not an undertone in his thoughts from the Greek or Roman masters. He had nothing from other teachers or thinkers. He was only a Jew, never out of Palestine, of a peasant family in Galilee. The Galilean was a narrow, suspicious, and revengeful man; provincial to the last degree; holding fast old ideas and rejecting new ones with little regard to argument or evidence--the “Bourbon” of his time. He was a man of bitterer prejudices than characterized even the men of Judea. But even Galilee had its best and its worse, and Jesus was brought up in a disreputable mountain town. “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” was a common proverb, carrying its own answer and indicating the estimate placed upon the little town by the better people of the country.