It was not till February, 1864, that the thought, which I often brooded, was brought into a discussion. While in camp as a missionary chaplain with Longstreet’s corps of the Army of Virginia, near Greenville, East Tennessee, I sketched rudely enough, one snowy day, the outlines of an argument, using it one night, soon after, in a sermon preached in the First Methodist Church, Atlanta, Ga. In the course of years it grew upon me into a series of lectures delivered to senior classes in Emory College. It outgrew the limits of a sermon at Monticello, Ga., August, 1878. My old students and certain life-long friends will pardon this much of personal reminiscence. For reasons connected with them these personal statements are introduced. “No dramatist can draw taller men than himself.” Hugh Miller did not mean that a writer may not describe greater men than himself, but that he cannot invent a character greater than his own. It is as plain as the axiom in physics that water cannot rise above its level. That which is created cannot be greater than that which creates. It is very common for us to write of “taller men” than ourselves; we all do this. When you were but a college-boy you did not, as you will remember, shrink from writing essays upon Cromwell, Washington, Gladstone, Bismarck, and the few such men who have lived. I have known a young man to write fairly well of even Socrates. But he had the cyclopedias. He was not creating--thinking out for himself and of himself--the good and wise old sage. Hugh Miller says, “Dickens knows his place.” The gifted novelist did not attempt great characters. Shakespeare did; he was greater than any character he produced; “taller” than any man he “drew.” When you come to ask whether these four Jews, the evangelists, could have invented the character we know as Jesus you must remember that they had, first of all, in order to do it, to throw themselves outside the sphere of Jewish thought and sentiment. If to them had been granted all personal qualifications the conditions under which they lived made the invention of such a character impossible; they could not breathe the intellectual, social, and moral air in which they lived and do it. For this character, the Jesus of the evangelists, is not in harmony with the essential characteristics of the Jewish race or with the dominant influences of that time; this character antagonizes these characteristics and influences at every point. Granting--and it is admitting an intellectual miracle that staggers credulity--that these men did meet the first condition for the invention of such a character, and overcame, as no other men ever did in any nation or time, the controlling influences under which they lived, let us ask whether, in view of what they reveal in these writings of themselves, they were capable of such an intellectual and spiritual feat as inventing a drama that should give Jesus to the world.