Let us endeavour, however, to enter more intimately into the thoughts of those who may be called the Neo-Christians, and let us seek for the element of truth, if such there be, that their much-criticised doctrine contains. If Jesus is only a man, they say, he is at least the most extraordinary of men; at one bound, by an intuition at once natural and divine, he discovered the supreme truth necessary to the life of humanity; he is in advance of all times, he spoke not only for his own people, nor for his own century, nor even for a score of centuries; his voice rolled beyond the restricted circle of his auditors, and the twelve apostles, beyond the people of Judea prostrate before him, to us in whose ears it sounds the eternal truth; and it finds us even still attentive, listening, trying to understand it, incapable of finding a substitute for it. “In Jesus,” writes Pastor Bost in his work on “Le Protestantisme libéral,” “the mingling of the human and the divine was accomplished in proportions not seen elsewhere. His relation to God is the normal and typical relation of humanity to the Creator.... Jesus stands forever as the model.” Professor Herman Schultz in a conference in Göttingen, some years ago, also expressed the same idea, that Jesus is really the Messiah, properly so called, in the sense that the Jews attached to that word. He did found the kingdom of God, not it is true by marvellous exploits like those of Moses or of Elias, but by an exploit surpassing theirs, by the sacrifice of love, by the voluntary gift of himself. The apostles and Christians in general did not believe in Jesus because of the miracles he performed: they accepted his miracles owing to their previous faith in him, a faith the true foundation of which lay in Christ’s moral superiority, and that subsists still even if one deny the miracles. Professor Schultz concludes, against Strauss and M. Renan, that “a belief in Christ is wholly independent of the results of a historical criticism of his life.” Every one of the actions attributed to Jesus may be mythical, but there remain to us his words and his thoughts, which find in us an eternal echo. There are things which one discovers once for all, and whosoever has found love has made a discovery that is not illusory nor of brief duration. Is it not just that men should group themselves about him, range themselves under his name? He himself loves to call himself the Son of Man; it is under this title that humanity should revere him. It is not destruction but reconstruction that is the outcome of contemporary biblical exegesis, one of the representatives of English Unitarianism, the Rev. A. Armstrong, said in 1883. It adds to our love of Jesus to recognize in him a brother and to see in the marvellous legends associated with him no more than the symbol of a love more naïve than ours, that namely of his disciples. Proof by miracle is but the ultimate form of a temptation from which humanity should escape.