aloof from him or complain that science or philosophy has built a barrier against him. That Christians the world over have lost touch with him in this regard as in others is for the moment nothing to us. We know that they are feeble and fallible like ourselves and that his way of judgement is hard. To keep the balance even, never to allow a secret materialism to be brought into the scale, or a protest to sink into repudiation—this is hard indeed. And we know that a thousand other temptations have beset the Christian during the centuries that have gone by and that, being as he is and just as we are ourselves, he has succumbed to not a few of them. We know all that; but we are seeking to find out what greatness it is that lies behind all the faults and follies, the absurdities, the crimes even, of Christians, and keeps Christianity alive and potent. We begin to see, perhaps, that this greatness is Christ—that it is 'Jesus the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee.' Of this greatness and its character he himself had an unique consciousness which was a most important and most marked element in his difference from the Hebrew prophets before him. He 'spoke with authority and not as the Scribes,' not as those theologians and jurists whose strength rested on tradition and the letter of the past; he spoke, in short, as a prophet. So the people discovered. The voice of the prophets was characteristically authoritative and neither showed respect for tradition nor claimed its support. But the note of the prophets of old was '_Thus saith the Lord_'; and the note of the prophet of Nazareth was '_I say unto you_.' Both came among men with an authority lacking to the followers of tradition; but by the first it was thought of as delegated, in the second it was recognized as inherent. Not, '_the Lord said unto me_,' but '_I say unto you_.' The difference is enormous; it is also profound in significance and implications. It means, to begin with, a different knowledge of God. No longer is God only speaking to his messengers across a dividing space, speaking as a king upon his throne might to a subject at his feet, charging that subject with a mission. The message is no longer carried and reported by a man; it is originated in him and given by him. Jesus is conscious that the life and spirit of God are become his own life and spirit. He knows the indwelling God given to be made man in co-operative union with man, knows him in and through and as himself, the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee. He does not need to refer either to a God, or to a tradition, that is extraneous to himself. Therefore his prophetic authority exceeds not only that of the Scribes but that of all the prophets. It gave this impression to those of his contemporaries who had eyes to see and ears to hear. To such men it gives the same impression now. And if there are Christians who explain the impression and reason from it, erroneously, have we any