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[Footnote 6: “An unfortunate reference (Acts xiv. 15), for the apostle’s declaration is, that he and his brethren were of ‘like passions” (James v. 17);–liable to the same imperfections and mutations of thought and feeling as other men, and as the Lystrans supposed their gods to be; while the God proclaimed by him to them is not so. And that God is the God of the Jews as well as of the Christians; for there is but one God. Hallam’s thought is an important and just one, but not developed with his usual nice accuracy.”

For this note, as for much else, I am indebted to my father, whose powers of compressed thought I wish I had inherited.]

[Footnote 7: Abraham “was called the friend of God;” “with him (Moses) will I (Jehovah) speak mouth to mouth, even apparently,”–“as a man to his friend;” David was “a man after mine own heart.”]

“But what is true of Judaism is yet more true of Christianity: ‘matre pulchra filia pulchrior.’ In addition to all the characters of Hebrew Monotheism, there exists in the doctrine of the Cross a peculiar and inexhaustible treasure for the affectionate feelings. The idea of the {Theanthropos}, the God whose goings forth have been from everlasting, yet visible to men for their redemption as an earthly, temporal creature, living, acting, and suffering among themselves, then (which is yet more important) transferring to the unseen place of his spiritual agency the same humanity he wore on earth, so that the lapse of generations can in no way affect the conception of his identity; this is the most powerful thought that ever addressed itself to a human imagination. It is the {pou sto}, which alone was wanted to move the world. Here was solved at once the great problem which so long had distressed the teachers of mankind, how to make virtue the object of passion, and to secure at once the warmest enthusiasm in the heart with the clearest perception of right and wrong in the understanding. The character of the blessed Founder of our faith became an abstract of morality to determine the judgment, while at the same time it remained personal, and liable to love. The written word and established church prevented a degeneration into ungoverned mysticism, but the predominant principle of vital religion always remained that of self-sacrifice to the Saviour. Not only the higher divisions of moral duties, but the simple, primary impulses of benevolence, were subordinated to this new absorbing passion. The world was loved ‘in Christ alone.’ The brethren were members of his mystical body. All the other bonds that had fastened down the spirit of the universe to our narrow round of earth were as nothing in comparison to this golden chain of suffering and self-sacrifice, which at once riveted the heart of man to one who, like himself, was acquainted with grief. Pain is the deepest thing we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any other.”[8]

[Footnote 8: This is the passage referred to in Henry Taylor’s delightful Notes from Life (“Essay on Wisdom”):–

“Fear, indeed, is the mother of foresight: spiritual fear, of a foresight that reaches beyond the grave; temporal fear, of a foresight that falls short; but without fear there is neither the one foresight nor the other; and as pain has been truly said to be ‘the deepest thing in our nature,’ so is it fear that will bring the depths of our nature within our knowledge. A great capacity of suffering belongs to genius; and it has been observed that an alternation of joyfulness and dejection is quite as characteristic of the man of genius as intensity in either kind.” In his Notes from Books, p. 216, he recurs to it:–“‘Pain,’ says a writer whose early death will not prevent his being long remembered, ‘pain is the deepest thing that we have in our nature, and union through pain has always seemed more real and more holy than any other.'”]