To have achieved such a result they must have been in breadth, depth, and elevation of intellect capable of thinking out the mighty doctrines that Jesus taught. And this, we may well believe, was the least part of their task. To me it is incredible that these four men could have thought out the teachings of Jesus. For such thinking they lacked all things that history and philosophy show to be necessary for such thinking. Why could not Socrates and Plato, great, learned, wise, and good, to whom came more than glimpses of heavenly truths, think out what the Sermon on the Mount contains? Socrates and Plato, if mere men could do such thinking, ought to have thought out the Sermon on the Mount; for they had every gift that nature could bestow and every opportunity cultured Athens could offer. And they did their best to think out the truths that bind man and God together. They failed; and Plato sighed for the coming of a divine man who would make clear what to him was dark. If Jesus never lived then the four evangelists, or men like them, thought out his wonderful doctrines. It is unthinkable. But theirs was a far harder task than thinking out the truths attributed to Jesus in the gospels; they had also to think out a man who lived up to them. It is easier to write a great speech than to set before the reader a man he knows to be capable of making it; but this is easier than to proclaim a lofty doctrine of morals and show a man as living up to it. Their problem, if they thought it all out, was immeasurably more than the invention of the Sermon on the Mount and of the other discourses that move so easily on the same high plane of thought and spiritual life; it was to invent a life and reveal a life in absolute harmony with these matchless discourses. But Jesus lived the Sermon on the Mount and all else that he ever taught. Not once, in the least particular, in word or deed, does he fail; always he lives up to his teaching; he incarnated his doctrine. No other human being, before or since Jesus, ever lived up to the Sermon on the Mount; the best men and women have only approximated it; and it is the best who have most realized their failure. But Jesus lived his teachings so perfectly that it is only in his life that we truly read their meaning. How shall we measure the capacity of these four, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, for creating this character of Jesus? By the revelations they make in their writings of themselves: their capacity and character. CHAPTER III. MATTHEW, MARK, LUKE, AND JOHN NEITHER GOOD NOR GREAT ENOUGH. How little the evangelists were capable of inventing such a character as the Jesus of the four gospels is made very plain by comparing Jesus and his doctrines with them and their notions.