just rejoinder, “[Greek:  oi pleiones kakoi], most men are so wicked that they would hate his purity, despise his wisdom, and as for his majesty, they could not truly see it.  They might indeed admire for a time, but thereafter (if the God allowed it), they would even hunt and persecute and kill him.”  “Kill him!” exclaimed the eager group of listeners; “kill Him? how should they, how could they, how dare they kill God?” “I did not say, kill God,” would have been wise Socrates’s reply, “for God existeth ever:  but men in enmity and envy might even be allowed to kill that human form wherein God walked for an ensample.  That they could, were God’s humility:  that they should, were their own malice:  that they dared, were their own grievous sin and peril of destruction.  Yea,” went on the keen-eyed sage, “men would slay him by some disgraceful death, some lingering, open, and cruel death, even such as the death of slaves!”—­Now slaves, when convicted of capital crime, were always crucified.

Whatever be thought of the genuineness of the anecdote, its uses are the same to us.  Reason might have arrived at the salient points of Christ’s career, and at His crucifixion!

I will add another topic:  How should the God on earth arrive there?  We have shown that His form would probably be such as man’s; but was he to descend bodily from the atmosphere at the age of full-grown perfection, or to rise up out of the ground with earthquakes and fire, or to appear on a sudden in the midst of the market-place, or to come with legions of his heavenly host to visit his Temple?  There was a wiser way than these, more reasonable, probable, and useful.  Man required an exemplar for every stage of his existence up to the perfection of his frame.  The infant, and the child, and the youth, would all desire the human-God to understand their eras; they would all, if generous and such as he would love, long to feel that He has sympathy with them in every early trial, as in every later grief.  Moreover, the God coming down with supernatural glories or terrors would be a needless expense of ostentatious power.  He, whose advent is intended for the encouragement of men to exercise their reason and their conscience; whose exhortation is “he that hath ears to hear, let him hear;” that pure Being, who is the chief preacher of Humility, and the great teacher of man’s responsible condition—­surely, he would hardly come in any way astoundingly miraculous, addressing his advent not to faith, but to sight, and challenging the impossibility of unbelief by a galaxy of spiritual wonders.  Yet, if He is to come at all—­and a word or two of this hereafter—­it must be either in some such strange way; or in the usual human way; or in a just admixture of both.  As the first is needlessly overwhelming to the responsible state of man, so the second is needlessly derogatory to the pure essence of God; and the third idea would seem to be most probable.  Let us guess it out.  Why should not this highest Object of faith and this