Take English Gladstone, of living men. Broad-minded, well-informed, ripe in wisdom, rich in learning, all-accomplished, he is, it may well be supposed, second to no man of our times in greatness of heart and range of sympathies. But he is English; there is much in him that no foreigner can fully understand, and there is much in any foreigner that Gladstone cannot understand. Take one more illustration--the man we call “myriad-minded”--the prince of poets, the king of dramatists, William Shakespeare. He could, I think, put himself into the consciousness of a man of a different nation as fully as any man who ever wrote. He is as nearly as one can be “poet of the human race.” But it is a mere commonplace of literature to say that many of the best thoughts in his great dramas cannot bear translation into foreign tongues; just as the finest oranges that grow, as travelers tell us, a variety grown in Brazil, cannot bear transportation to other countries. If it be said this is a language difficulty, this itself implies the limitation that goes with mere men. But this does not explain the difficulty of translation altogether; it is in the limitations that characterize men. No foreigner can rightly understand Shakespeare, who was English. It has been said by some writer: “Shakespeare dramatized the sixteenth century Englishman.” He wrote of others; he dramatized the Englishman of his time. He knew him. He did not dramatize the sixteenth century man. There is no character who can be at home in every country; who can stand for the race. Still less did he dramatize the nineteenth century man; genius is not equal to such a forecast. For mere men are not only localized in thought, sympathy, and character, by place, they are, if possible, still more limited by time; the influences that went before them and shut them in while they lived. But what do we find when we consider Jesus of Nazareth in respect to time and place, blood and country, education and language? This: we do not at all think of him, though we use the words, as Jesus of Nazareth. We do not think of him as a Jew--as an Asiatic even. The Galilean, the Jew, the Asiatic is lost in the man. Circumstances left no such impress upon Jesus as to localize him--as to limit his sympathy--as to mar in the least his all-round, harmonious, perfect humanity.