necessarily be some day passed by—that the truth discovered by him is not the whole truth but simply a stage in the infinite progress of the human mind. A _deus dixit_ is comprehensible, or if not comprehensible at least conceivable; but to resuscitate in favour of some mere human being, were it Jesus himself, the _magister dixit_ of the Middle Ages, is a bit of an anachronism. Geometers have always held Euclid in the highest respect, but each of them has done his best to contribute some new theorem to the body of doctrine that he left behind; and is the rule for moral truth not the same as that for mathematical truth? Is it within the compass of one man’s powers to know and to utter all that there is to be known? Is an autocracy the only form of government in the sphere of mind? Liberal Protestants speak to us of the “secret of Jesus”; but there are many secrets in this world, and each of us carries his own; and who shall utter the secret of secrets, the last word, the supreme verity? Nobody in particular, probably; truth is the product of a prodigious co-operation, at which all peoples and all generations must work. The horizon of truth can neither be taken in at a single glance nor contracted; to perceive the whole of it one must move forward incessantly, and at every step a new perspective is laid bare. For humanity, to live is to learn; and before any individual human being can tell us the great secret, he must have lived the life of humanity, the lives of all existing beings and even of all existing things, which seem scarcely to deserve the name of beings; he must have concentrated in himself the universe. There can therefore properly be no religion centred about a man. A man, be he Jesus himself, cannot attach the human spirit to himself as to a fixed point. Liberal Protestants think that they have seen the last of the Strausses and Renans and their destructive criticism, because they have admitted once for all that Jesus was not a god, but criticism will object to them that the non-supernatural Messiah that they cherish is himself a pure figment of the imagination. According to the rationalistic exegesis, the doctrine of Christ, like his life, belongs more or less to the domain of legend. Jesus never so much as conceived an idea of the redemption—the very conception that is which lies at the root of Christianity; he never so much as conceived an idea of the Trinity. If one may rely upon works which stand perhaps shoulder to shoulder with that of Strauss—the works of F. A. Müller, of Professor Weiss, of M. Havet—Jesus was a Jew with the spiritual limitations of a Jew. His dominant idea was that the end of the world was at hand and that on a new-created earth would soon be realized the national kingdom looked for by the Jews in the form of an altogether terrestrial theocracy. The end of the world being near, it was naturally not worth while to set up an establishment on earth for the short time that it was