"What think ye of Christ? whose son is he?" (Matt. 22:41-46).

      The twofold question of the text, framed by our Lord himself and put to the Pharisees, is the vital, crucial and transcendent question of the Christian religion. The question is definite and personal. "What think ye of Christ?" Everything depends on what we think of him both here and hereafter, for what we think of him will largely determine character, and character determines destiny.

      It is significant that Jesus addressed his supreme question to the thought of the Pharisees. He provokes thought, the deepest and highest, the holiest and the most profound. He challenges the reason. He is the reason of the universe.

      The question enthrones a person. A [506] person who was and is the supreme fact of life, the dominant force of the world. "Christ himself is our song . . . Lullaby and hymn, carol, choral, serenade and love lyric, sonata and symphony, elegy, oratorio and eternal requiem--He is the theme and inspiration of them all."

      But who is Jesus Christ? Whose Son is he? We know what he is. He is a force in the world at this hour, greater than any other. But where shall we go for information concerning him? Where shall we ascertain his origin and history and character? We are directed to the New Testament--to four short records called the Gospels. We are asked to believe that they were faithful historians, writing down what they saw and heard and experienced, and what they received from credible, first-hand witnesses. They were faithful witnesses, sealing their testimony with their blood. They were honest historians with exceptional opportunities and facilities of knowing the truth of the things whereof they wrote.

      Open, now, these biographies, and at once you are introduced to a wonderful being--a person who made marvelous claims for himself. He claimed to come forth from God, to be the Son of God, the only begotten of the Father. He also claimed to be the Son of man. But that title was really his assertion of deity.

      It is constantly assumed by the four Gospels, even as it was by Christ himself, that, though he was born of the Virgin Mary, he was still the Son of God. Our Lord declared his divinity time and again. His enemies accused him of sacrilege so strongly that they wrung from him the well-remembered reply: "Say ye to him whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the world, Thou blasphemer, because I said I am the Son of God?" Again, he declared: "I am the light of the world." "No man cometh unto the Father but by me." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." "I and the Father are one." And he prayed: "Now, O Father, glorify thou me with the glory which I had with thee in the beginning before the world was." These are wondrous claims. What must be thought of the presumption and the vanity of these claims if Jesus was not more than man? And how is it that man's conscience accepts without protest or hesitancy these mighty claims? That question must remain forever an insoluble mystery on any other premise than that Jesus was God manifest in the flesh, in whom dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. There are those who laud Jesus as a good man--the best man, indeed, of all the ages, the flower of our humanity--but deny his claim to be the Son of God. "But to laud Jesus as a great and good man while repudiating his deity, is to involve ourselves in logical contradictions and moral inconsistencies, which it is impossible either to reconcile or understand."

      If Jesus was not what he claimed to be, the Son of God, then he was not

H. O. BREEDEN.

even a good man. For good men do not lie or deceive. In making the stupendous claim of deity, he was one of three things; namely, an impostor, a lunatic or divine. Jesus with calm assurance asserted his pre-existence, his omnipotence and his omnipresence. He claimed power to forgive sins, and even on the cross claimed to be Lord of the realms beyond the grave. How could he make such a claim, knowing it to be false, and yet be a good man? If he was not divine, he was the grandest, guiltiest impostor the world has ever seen. But he verified his claim by giving his life. Men do not die for a falsehood. Only an impostor will assert that Jesus was an impostor.

      Was he a poor, weak-brained fanatic, the subject of a wild delusion? The sanest men of history have all declared that he was the sanest man that ever lived. Who can believe that the stream of civilization, which had its source in him, the power that "lifted the gates of empires off their hinges and turned the stream of centuries out of their channels," emanated from a lunatic? No one but a lunatic will say that he [507] was a lunatic. Then, if he was neither an impostor nor a lunatic, he must have been what he claimed to be, the Christ of God.

      Let us now examine his credentials to sustain his claim. The old argument for the divinity of Jesus was good and, for many minds, quite sufficient; namely, the prophecies perfectly fulfilled in his birth and life and death. To the candid mind, prophecy and history so completely blend and dovetail that the conclusion is irresistible that he was the divine One sent of God.

      The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is another impregnable rock of evidence for his divine origin and nature. If God raised him from the dead because it was "impossible that he should be holden of death," then he was divine and all he said was true. But, passing these now, because they are not required, let us invoke a mightier testimony.

      Jesus sustained his claim of deity by three infallible credentials. First, by what he said: "Never man spake like this man." This was the testimony of his enemies. Yet he wrote no book, invented no tool, discovered no remedy for physical ills, contributed nothing to the sciences of geology or astronomy. He simply talked. He never tried to preserve his wisdom, nor did he ask others to preserve it. But there is no speech like it. It is so simple in phrase that a child need not stumble. It stands alone. And we are not left to report concerning his wisdom. The very words at which men marveled are here in the four Gospels, and men read them now and marvel still. The civilization of successive and ever-advancing centuries has produced no man who spake like this man. Take the first discourse, as we turn the pages of the first Evangelist--the Sermon on the Mount. Is it feeble? Is it tiresome or weak? Does it savor of the age when it was spoken? Is it not as fresh as ever to-day? Is there anything in all literature that can be placed beside it? Does not every line of it bear out his claim to speak in the name of God? Or, take the last discourse in the upper room, beginning, "Let not your hearts be troubled"--where can you find anything in all literature that has been cherished as these words have been cherished, or that have brought such consolation to men of troubled hearts? His sentences are gems; they sparkle. Instance the parable of the lost son. What a masterpiece of composition! What grasping and grouping of detail! What a reading of the human heart! It is a living unit. He was not an expounder. He was a revealer. His teaching was not commentary; it was text. It is not apologetic; it is dogmatic. Nine and forty times in the Evangelist do we read, "I say unto you."

      His teaching does not have to be changed to suit each changing age. It fits every century, the twentieth as well as the first, the first as well as the twentieth. It carries the same attraction to West as to the East, to the East as to the West.

      To-day he is the dominant spirit in all literature. Jesus is back of all thought, the master of all the laws of the universe. Whence his acquaintance with all truth? While a lad of only twelve years of age, his superlative wisdom astounded the learned doctors in the temple. In every point of morals, as in every phase of theology, he is the world's Master at this hour. He beggared the past and bankrupted the future. In the realm of wisdom he had absolutely no competitor. He is peerless. He is so great, so lofty, so solitary in his magnificent repose, that comparison seems mockery. This is the unique glory of the Virgin's son--his aloneness. This is his credential of superhuman wisdom.

      His second infallible credential was what he did--his superhuman power. Jesus was master of earth and sea and air and sky. He is the meeting-place of two worlds--the human and divine. The essence of all being centers in him. Godhood and manhood are forever united. I see him take little children in his arms in Jerusalem, and then I behold him glorified, radiant as the sun on Hermon. I see him ascending the mountain, like a man to be alone with God in prayer, but now 'tis night, and I see him walking upon the waves of the silvery lake to the amazed disciples like a God. I see him again grown weary with fatigue by the heavy burdens of the day, now seeking repose and [508] rest like a man. And "sleep, sweet sleep, tired nature's sweet restorer," is kissing down his eyelids, while he slumbers as a man with his loving disciples in the boat. But, anon, a storm sweeps down upon the treacherous sea, lashing its waves into a wild carnival of fury; the lurid lightnings gleam, the foaming billows roll, and the little frail vessel is tossed like a cockle shell. The disciples, thoroughly alarmed, rush to him, in whom was conscious power, with the terrified cry, "Master, save us, or we perish!" The man of slumber steps forth from his couch, and, brushing the sleep from his eyes, he waves his hand in majesty over the raging sea and shouts like a God, "Peace, be still," and immediately the winds subside, the waves are hushed to slumber; there is a great calm. "What manner of man is this that even the winds and the sea obey him?"

      Again, I see him in Perea, beyond the Jordan, attended by the faithful disciples, where he is preaching and healing the sick. Suddenly, by his strange prescience, his omniscient gaze penetrates the home in Bethany, where he beholds his friend Lazarus in the embrace of death. He announces to his wondering disciples the death of his friend. "Our friend Lazarus sleepeth. I go to wake him out of his sleep." In the Bethany home what anguish, what heart-breaking grief! For four days the devoted sisters watch beside the body of their beloved in silence, waiting for the Saviour's return. But decomposition has set in and they are compelled to lay him away, burying every earthly hope. But at last the Saviour comes, and the sisters run to meet him with the anguished cry, the bitter wail, "Master, if thou hadst been here our brother had not died."

      As a man, Jesus accompanies the sisters to the rock-hewn sepulchre where the body is entombed. As an eternal tribute to his manhood and a touching witness of his love, it is said that "Jesus wept." But, dashing the tears from his manly cheek, he utters a brief prayer and shouts in triumph, "Lazarus, come forth!" And he raises him like a God.

      Again, I see him apprehended, falsely accused and despitefully used as a man, by the hypocritical Jews. He is condemned to death in a mockery of a trial and led to his crucifixion on Calvary as a malefactor. And now I behold his secret friends as they come to beg the body. It is tenderly taken down from the cross and laid in Joseph's new tomb. For three days he is a prisoner of the king of terrors. Death, the mournful conqueror, holds him captive in his dark domain.

      The third infallible credential of Jesus was the life he lived. It consisted of a superhuman character--in what he was. He was absolutely sinless. Sin is so characteristically human that sinlessness must be divine. Pollution touched the hem of his garment again and again, but it left no stain upon his raiment. "Which of you convicteth me of sin?" was his challenge to his enemies. "The prince of this world cometh and hath nothing in me," is his own calm assertion of sinlessness. This differentiates him from the race. But the purest, the saintliest, the most like God have revealed imperfection and confessed it. Christ, on the contrary, claimed a perfectly sinless agreement of his will with the will of the Father. "I do always those things which please him." He places himself before men as the absolute summit of human perfection, the single example, the light of the world. He never repented, for he had nothing to repent of, and he never once asked forgiveness for himself. It is impossible to think of a single excellence of character that does not shine out in his wonderful life. If you take single features separately, you may be able to think of some of earth's great ones whom you could put beside him. But when you take the combination of them all, he stands absolutely alone. [509]

[CCR 506-509]