young man of promise, popular with those who knew him, and appearing to enjoy the Divine favor," does not appear. The present writer is "constrained to confess" that, in proportion as he regards Jesus Christ in this light merely, the Life as narrated in the New Testament becomes utterly incomprehensible. Not until he realizes the fundamental fact of the Incarnation does he understand the sense in which Jesus Christ calls himself Son of God and Son of Man. The present writer felt the difficulty of choosing a title for his book. It seemed to him that if the author of Ecce Homo intended to maintain the Godhead of Jesus Christ, it would not be unnatural for him to select the title of Ecce Deus; on this point, however, he was of course not informed, and he adopted the present name because it expresses most concisely the doctrine which is taught in the book. Ecce Deus is not a reply to Ecce Homo. It claims to be an examination of the Life and Doctrine of Jesus Christ conducted on independent ground. ECCE DEUS. CHAPTER I. THE HOLY THING. ANY false Christs have gone out into the world. ΜΑ The Christ that was born in Bethlehem has now to compete with the Christ born in the poet's fancy, carved out of an ideal humanity, or developed out of a benevolent sentiment. The noble, simple Nazarene has been left behind somewhere, probably in the Temple, or has passed through so many guises that the characteristic lineaments have been lost. This circumstance is a significant feature of the spiritual civilization of the day. Deepest and truest among its lessons is the doctrine that men must have a Christ. There has ever been a motion, a gravitation, more or less palpable, towards a man who should be the complement of every other man; and who, by the perfectness of his manhood, should be able to restore and preserve the equipoise which universal consciousness affirms to have been disturbed or lost. The Incarnation is the radical mystery in the life of the Christ accepted by the Church. Without following the theologian into doctrine, we are bound to follow the historian into matters of fact. The historian introduces a man, under the name of Jesus, who was begotten as no other man was ever begotten. He does not represent the usual conditions of human birth, but stands alone among all men. The mysteriousness of his origin, even if it be but a supposition, will supply an easily available test of his entire life and teaching; the man who begins as no other man ever began, must continue as no other man ever continued. In other senses than that of the procreation of human life, there have been miraculous conceptions in every age conceptions by the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost too. Every foremost thought of God among men, every struggle of the soul in the direction in which God is supposed to have gone, has been an effect of divine operation upon the mind. In Jesus Christ alone have we a life which claims to have been produced immediately by a superhuman relation to the human body. Yet, though so produced, "the holy thing born of the Virgin did not collide with the human race as an unexpected antagonistic element, but took his place in the human family by a process which, on one side, was fitted to awaken awe, and on the other, to excite sympathy. The world of the East had been accustomed to what may be termed miraculous conceptions in the intellectual sphere, as the world of the West has since become. Intellectual history presents a succession of births quite, in their degree and according to their nature, as inexplicable as any occurrence that could transpire in the merely material sphere. "The Holy Ghost has come upon, and the power of the Highest has overshadowed," all who have wrought upon the springs of civilization and en |