In the same way we feel that he is entitled to make upon us the most tremendous claims for human service, devotion, and love ever put into words. He says, “If any man will be my disciple, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily, and follow me.” “He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me.” All must be in abeyance to his will. We are to forsake lands, homes, parents, children, wives, all for him. Nothing in the universe must come between him and the loyal, all-sacrificing love of his disciples. He must be first in our hearts; whatever comes between him and our love forfeits all claim upon him. If a mere man made these demands the world would despise him, and the world would be right. But he sets up other claims of a sort no sincere and sane man, who is only a man, can think of for a moment. He claims the right to forgive sins. His critics were right--assuming him to be only a man. “Why does this man thus speak blasphemies? Who can forgive sins but God only?” He not only claims, as no other prophet ever did, to represent the eternal Father, but he claims a perfect knowledge of God that no mere man can claim. “All things are delivered unto me of my Father; and no man knoweth the Son but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him.” The night before he died he said to his disciples: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.” He says in many ways and in many places that he is, in origin and character, more than a man; that he is supernatural. He says, “I and my Father are one.” He says that he is divine--that he is God. If Jesus was only a man such claims cannot be reconciled with his sanity or his sincerity. Augustine was right when he reduced this argument to its last analysis: “_Christus, si non deus, non bonus_”--Christ, if he be not God, is not good. CHAPTER XVI. JESUS THE ONE UNIVERSAL CHARACTER. In considering Jesus as he is now in the world, not in the story of the evangelists and in books simply, but in human life, there are other views to be taken. We can take views only; we cannot see all that they indicate. We must consider more carefully now what we looked at for a moment in the argument that compels us to believe that this character could not have been invented, and that such a personality could not have been a normal outgrowth of Hebrew life: Jesus is a universal character--the one and only universal character that has ever appeared in history, that has ever been described, that has ever had a place in human thought.