THE TESTIMONY OF SKEPTICS.
By skeptics we mean those who deny the divinity of our Lord. They reject his claim to be the Son of God and the Saviour of the world. Any admissions that such persons make are of course reluctant and therefore specially significant. If an attorney in a suit can extort a confession favorable to his cause from the opposite party, or from one of his witnesses, he regards it as of great value. It is worth far more than similar testimony from one of his own witnesses. Prominent among those who have written against the doctrines of evangelic Christianity are, Rousseau, Theodore Parker, Strauss, and Renan. And yet here are some of the statements that they have been compelled to make concerning Jesus of Nazareth. Jean Jacques Rousseau eloquently declains: "What prepossession, what blindness, to compare the son of Sophroniscus to the Son of Mary! What an infinite disproportion between them! If the life and death of Socrates were those of a sage, the life and death of Jesus were those of the Son of God. The features of his life are so striking and inimitable, that the inventor would be a more astonishing character than the hero." Theodore Parker declares: "It would have taken a Jesus to forge a Jesus." So impressed with the unsurpassed glory and greatness, the sweetness and beauty, of Christ's character, was the celebrated Mill, that he declared, It is something absolutely unique in the world's history, beyond the power of the evangelists to have imagined, perfect in its truthfulness and devotion, and self-sacrificing love. Among other acknowledgments, Renan affirms: "Before such a demi-god as this, we, in our feebleness, may well fall down and worship; and whatever may be the unlooked for phenomena of the future, Jesus will not be surpassed." And even Strauss, after sweeping away every element of credibility from the records of his life, speaks of the Jesus of history as he in whom the deeper consciousness of humanity, the divine wisdom, first developed itself as a power determining his whole life and being, in whose character were found a charity, a sweetness, and an all-embracing love, which have been as the germ out of which all that we now call humanity has been developed. He remains the highest model of religion within the reach of our thought; and no perfect piety is possible without his presence in the heart. And he adds: "It is more inconceivable that a number of persons should agree to write such a history, than that one should furnish the subject of it. The Jewish authors were incapable of the diction, and strangers to the morality contained in the Gospel." Now, accepting the admission of these eloquent writers, what is the logical conclusion?—Why, either that the greatest and best man that ever lived was an impostor, or that he was, just what he claimed to be, the Son of God and the Saviour of the world. That the one perfect character and life in all the ages of human history should have been found in the person of a Galilean peasant, and be recorded by unlearned fishermen, is a greater marvel than any of the alleged miracles of our Lord. It requires far more credulity to believe that a mere man taught as Jesus taught, lived as Jesus lived, than that he was born of a virgin and rose from the dead. The character of Jesus, so unique and superhuman, the influence of Jesus upon more than sixty generations, the molding power of what he uttered during a ministry of only three years upon the hearts of millions and upon the institutions of the world is utterly inexplicable upon any theory that denies his divinity; and the very vagueness and inconsistency with each other of the creeds of skeptics show that they are all hiding from the light. Errors are multiform like shadows. Truth is clear and luminous like sunshine.—The Occident.