The third canon will be:  Ask of what type and of what dimensions the nature must be, that is capable of that experience and of that language.  One of the commonest sources of bad criticism is the emphasis on weak points.  The really important thing in criticism is to understand the triumphs of the poet or painter, let us say, whom we are studying.  How came he to achieve poem or picture, so profound and so true?  In what does he differ from other men, that he should do work so fundamental and so eternal?  Lamb’s punning jest at Wordsworth—­that Wordsworth was saying he could have written Hamlet, if he had had the mind—­puts the matter directly.  What is the mind that can do such things?  The historian will have to ask himself a similar question about Jesus.

Here we reach a point where caution is necessary.  Will the Jesus we draw be an antiquary’s Jesus—­an archaic figure, simple and lovable perhaps, but quaint and old-world—­in blunt language, outgrown?  A Galilean peasant, dressed in the garb of his day and place, his mind fitted out with the current ideas of his contemporaries, elevated, it may be, but not essentially changed?  A dreamer, with the clouds of the visionaries and apocalyptists ever in his head?  When we look at the ancient world, the great men are not archaic figures.  Matthew Arnold found in Homer something of the clearness and shrewdness of Voltaire.  There is thing archaic about Plato or Virgil or Paul—­to keep abreast of their thinking is no easy task for the strongest of our brains, so modern, eternal, and original they are.  They have shaped the thinking of the world and are still shaping it.  How much more Jesus of Nazareth!  When we make our picture of him, does it suggest the man who has stirred mankind to its depths, set the world on fire (Luke 12:49), and played an infinitely larger part in all the affairs of men than any man we know of in history?  Is it a great figure?  Does our emphasis fall on the great features of that nature—­are they within our vision, and in our drawing?  Does our explanation of him really explain him, or leave him more a riddle?  What do we make of his originality?  Is it in our picture?  What was it in him that changed Peter and James and John and the rest from companions into worshippers, that in every age has captured and controlled the best, the deepest, and tenderest of men?  Are we afraid that our picture will be too modern, too little Jewish?  These are not the real dangers.  Again, and again our danger is that we under-estimate the great men of our race, and we always lose by so doing.  That we should over-estimate Jesus is not a real risk; the story of the Church shows that the danger has always been the other way.  But not to under-estimate such a figure is hard.  To see him as he is, calls for all we have of intellect, of tenderness, of love, and of greatness.  It is worth while to try to understand him even if we fail.  God, said St. Bernard, is never sought in vain, even when we do not find Him.  Jesus Christ transcends our categories and classification; we never exhaust him; and one element of Christian happiness is that there is always more in him than we supposed.