experience of God? The old commentator, Bengel, wrote at the
beginning of his book that a man, who is setting out to interpret
Scripture, has to ask "by what right" he does it. What is our right
to an opinion on Jesus Christ?

The third canon will be: Ask of what type and of what dimensions the
nature must be, that is capable of that experience and of that
language. One of the commonest sources of bad criticism is the
emphasis on weak points. The really important thing in criticism is
to understand the triumphs of the poet or painter, let us say, whom
we are studying. How came he to achieve poem or picture, so profound
and so true? In what does he differ from other men, that he should
do work so fundamental and so eternal? Lamb's punning jest at
Wordsworth--that Wordsworth was saying he could have written Hamlet,
if he had had the mind--puts the matter directly. What is the mind
that can do such things? The historian will have to ask himself a
similar question about Jesus.

Here we reach a point where caution is necessary. Will the Jesus we
draw be an antiquary's Jesus--an archaic figure, simple and lovable
perhaps, but quaint and old-world--in blunt language, outgrown? A
Galilean peasant, dressed in the garb of his day and place, his mind
fitted out with the current ideas of his contemporaries, elevated,
it may be, but not essentially changed? A dreamer, with the clouds
of the visionaries and apocalyptists ever in his head? When we look
at the ancient world, the great men are not archaic figures. Matthew
Arnold found in Homer something of the clearness and shrewdness of
Voltaire. There is thing archaic about Plato or Virgil or Paul--to
keep abreast of their thinking is no easy task for the strongest of
our brains, so modern, eternal, and original they are. They have