"Kings and the beautiful are few, and the God, if he came on earth as an
exemplar, would in shape and station be like the greater number."
"Indeed, Master? then how should he fail of being made a King of men,
for his goodness, and his majesty, and wisdom?" "Alas! my children," was
pure Reason's just rejoinder, "[Greek: oi pleiones kakoi], most men are
so wicked that they would hate his purity, despise his wisdom, and as
for his majesty, they could not truly see it. They might indeed admire
for a time, but thereafter (if the God allowed it), they would even hunt
and persecute and kill him." "Kill him!" exclaimed the eager group of
listeners; "kill Him? how should they, how could they, how dare they
kill God?" "I did not say, kill God," would have been wise Socrates's
reply, "for God existeth ever: but men in enmity and envy might even be
allowed to kill that human form wherein God walked for an ensample. That
they could, were God's humility: that they should, were their own
malice: that they dared, were their own grievous sin and peril of
destruction. Yea," went on the keen-eyed sage, "men would slay him by
some disgraceful death, some lingering, open, and cruel death, even such
as the death of slaves!"--Now slaves, when convicted of capital crime,
were always crucified.

Whatever be thought of the genuineness of the anecdote, its uses are the
same to us. Reason might have arrived at the salient points of Christ's
career, and at His crucifixion!

I will add another topic: How should the God on earth arrive there? We
have shown that His form would probably be such as man's; but was he to
descend bodily from the atmosphere at the age of full-grown perfection,
or to rise up out of the ground with earthquakes and fire, or to appear
on a sudden in the midst of the market-place, or to come with legions of
his heavenly host to visit his Temple? There was a wiser way than these,