“Nothing,” said I, “except to point you to the infinitely different estimates of Christ formed by other men who yet think of historical Christianity much as you do.  How differently do such writers as Mr. Greg and Mr. Parker speak!  How do they almost exhaust the resources of language to express their sentiments of this wonderful character!  As to Mr. Newman’s impression, I do not think it worth an answer.  When a man so far forgets himself as to say what he can hardly help knowing will be unspeakably painful to multitudes of his fellow-creatures, on the strength of boyish impressions,—­not even thinking it worth while to verify those impressions, and see whether, after thirty or forty years, he is not something more than a boy,—­I think it is scarcely worth while to reply.  Christianity is willing to consider the arguments of men, but not the impressions of boys.”

“But we must not be too hard.” said Harrington, “upon Mr. Newman; it is evident, from his Hebrew Monarchy, that, as he takes a benevolent pleasure in defending those whom nobody else will defend,—­in petting Ahab, whom he pronounces rather weak than wicked, and palliating Jezebel, whose character was, it seems, grievously deteriorated by contact with the ’prophets of Jehovah,’—­so he has a chivalrous habit of depressing those who have been particularly the objects of veneration.  Elisha, Samuel, and David are all brought down a great many degrees in the moral scale.  He has simply done the same with Christ.”

“Well,” said Fellowes, “I cannot help agreeing with Mr. Newman in thinking that, when one hears men made the objects of extravagant eulogy, it almost ’tempts one, even though a stranger to their very name, to “pick holes,” as the saying is.’”

“It may be so,” said I; “but it is a tendency against which we should guard.  It would lead us, like him of Athens, to ostracize Aristides:  we should be weary of hearing him continually called ‘The Just.’”

“However.” rejoined Fellowes, “I am weary of hearing Christ so perpetually called our example.  As Mr. Newman says, he cannot, except in a very modified sense, be such.  ‘His garments will not fit us.’”

“Did you ever hear,” said I. “that fathers and mothers ought to set an example to their children?”

“Certainly.”

“Yet surely not in all things can they be such.  Their garments surely will not fit their children.”

“No.” said Harrington; “those of the father at all events will not, if they are girls, nor of the mother, if they are boys.  Fellowes, I think you had better say nothing on this subject.  If men of fifty can, in all essential points, be beautiful examples to girls of ten,—­in gentleness, in patience, in humility, in kindness, and so forth,—­and all the more impressively for the wide interval between them, why, I suppose Jesus Christ may be as much to his disciples.”

“But, again,” urged Fellowes to me, “you, like so many men, seem to lay such stress on the superiority of the morality of the New Testament.  I cannot see it.  I confess, with Mr. Foxton and many more, that it seems to me that it has not such a very great advantage over that of many heathen moralists who have said the same things,—­Plato, for example.”