The question suppose to commence as to the divine mission of Christ. And the feeble understanding is sure to think this will be proved best by proving the subject of this doubt to have been a miracle-working power. And of all miracles, to have mastered (not merely escaped or evaded) death will be in his opinion the greatest. So that if Christ could be proved to have absolutely conquered death, _i.e._, to have submitted to death, but only to recoil from his power and overthrow it, to have died and subsequently to have risen again, will, _à fortiori_, prove Him to have been sent of God.
Not so. All and every basis of credibility must be laid in the _moral_ nature, where the thing to be believed is important, _i.e._, moral. And I therefore open with this remark absolutely _zermalmende_ to the common intellect: That from a holy faith you may infer a power of resurrection, but not from a power of resurrection fifty times repeated can we infer a holy faith. What in the last result is the thing to be proved? Why, a holy revelation, not of knowledge, but of things practical; of agenda, not scienda. It is essential that this holy should also be _new_, _original_, _revelatum_. Because, else, the divinest things which are _connata_ and have been common to all men, point to no certain author. They belong to the dark foundations of our being, and cannot challenge a trust, faith, or expectation as suspended upon any particular individual man whatever.
Here, then, arises the [Greek: prôtontokinon]. Thick darkness sits on every man's mind as to Christ's revelation. He fancies that it amounts to this: 'Do what is good. Do your duty. Be good.' And with this vague notion of the doctrine, natural is it that he should think it as old as the hills. The first step to a saner view is, to understand--if a man has sense enough to reach so high--that the subtlest discoveries ever made by man, all put together, do not make one wave of that Atlantic as to novelty and originality which lies in the moral scheme of Christianity. I do not mean in the total scheme of Christianity, redemption, etc. No, but in the ethics.
All ethics that ever Greece refined or Rome illustrated, was, and could be, only the same universal system of social ethics--ethics proper and exclusive to man and man _inter se_, with no glimpse of any upward relationship.