shuns the dead phrases of the scholar and the pietist, and when he has occasion to cite another authority he rarely brings in an orthodox believer. He turns by preference to those men of imagination, spiritually quick, who from time to time have had glimpses of Jesus as fresh and strange as the vision seen early in the morning by those women, who, through their tears, mistook him for the gardener. Dr. Moffatt appeals to Emerson, to Jefferies, to Renan, Pascal, St. Francis, Blake, Mill, Shorthouse, De Quincey. He rescues Jesus from our own Scribes and Pharisees, and assorts him with men who use words sensitively.
His Jesus differs in important respects from the mystical villager of Mary Austin. Dr. Moffatt has studied the cause through its historical effects, and he does not pretend to divest himself of the impressions derived, for example, from having in his ears the Latin hymns of the Middle Ages. Every man's Jesus to-day is, as a spiritual force, what the "Christian ages" have made him, and his effect upon Renan is as truly an aspect of his personality as his effect upon Matthew. Dr. Moffatt's Jesus is less instinctive than Mary Austin's, more intellectual, more consciously the iconoclast and the moral revolutionary. He aims at a radical and democratic regeneration. He definitely makes light of dietary regulations, Sabbatarianism and all caste feeling. He sweepingly substitutes the spirit and custom of forgiveness and pardon for the custom of judgment and the ancient law of retaliation. He aspires toward a society in which racial prejudice and nationalistic ambition shall disappear in a brotherly comradeship embracing all men who are active for good in the world.
Great experiences like to be met half way. If we
