to expose their weakness or their absurdities: Jesus Christ never speaks of their vices but in order to point out their remedies. The former were the censurers of human weaknesses; Jesus Christ is their physician: the former gloried in being able to point out vices in others, from which they themselves were not exempted; he never speaks, but with the bitterest sorrow, of faults, from which his own innocence protects him, and even sheds tears over the disorders of an unbelieving city: it is easily seen that the former had no intention to reclaim men, but merely to attract esteem to themselves, by pretending to contemn them; and that the only wish of the latter is to save them, and that he is little affected with their applauses or esteem.
Pursue the whole detail of his manners and of his conduct, and see if any righteous character hath ever appeared on the earth more generally exempted from all the most inseparable weaknesses of humanity. The more narrowly he is examined, the more is his sanctity displayed. His disciples, who have it best in their power to know him, are the most affected with the innocence of his life; and familiarity, so dangerous to the most heroical virtue, serves only in his to discover fresh matter of wonder. He speaks only the language of heaven: he never replies but when his answers may be useful toward the salvation of those who interrogate him. We see not in him those intervals, as I may say, in which the man re-appears; on every occasion he is the messenger of the Most High. The commonest actions are extraordinary in him, through the novelty and the sublimity of the dispositions with which he accompanies them; and, when he eats with the pharisee, he does not appear a man less divine than when he raises up Lazarus. Surely, my brethern, nature alone could never lead human weakness so far; this is not a philosopher who enjoins to others what he doth not himself, it is a righteous character, who, in his own examples, adopts the rules and precepts of his doctrine; and holy must he indeed be, seeing the very disciple who betrayed him, so interested to justify his own perfidy by an exposure of his faults, renders public testimony, however, to his innocence and sanctity: and that the whole challenged malice of his enemies hath never been able to convict him of sin.
Now, I say, that, if Jesus Christ be holy, he is God; and that, whether you should consider the doctrine which he hath taught us with respect to his Father or with respect to men, it is no longer but a mass of equivocations, or qualified blasphemies, if he be only an ordinary man, merely deputed by God for the instruction of men.
I say, whether you should consider it with respect to his Father. In effect, if Jesus Christ be but a simple messenger of the Most High, he comes, then, for the sole purpose of manifesting to idolatrous nations the unity of the Divine essence. But, besides, that his mission principally regards the Jews, who for a long time past, had not returned to idolatry, and, consequently, needed not that God should raise up a prophet to reclaim them from an error of
