earliest times. The older Theosophies and Philosophies--Gymnosophist and
Cynic, Chaldaic and Pythagorean, Epicurean and Stoic, Platonist and
Eclectic--were all attempts to embody it in teaching, and to carry it out
in life. They saw, indeed, but imperfectly, and their expressions of the
truth are all one-sided and inadequate. But they did see, in direct
antagonism alike to the popular view and to the natural instinct of the
animal man, that what is ordinarily called happiness does not represent
the highest capability in humanity, or meet its indefinite aspirations;
and that in degree as it is consciously made so, life becomes animalised
and degraded. The whole scheme of Judaism, as first promulgated in all
the stern simplicity of its awful Theism, where the Divine is
fundamentally and emphatically represented as the Omnipotent and the
Avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the
man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his
individual happiness--the so-called saving of his own soul--becomes the
aim and aspiration of his life. In one sense the Jew of Moses had no
individual as apart from a national existence. The secret sin of Achan,
the vaunting pride of David, call forth less individual than national
calamity.

At last in the fulness of time there came forth One--whence and how we do
not stop to inquire--who gathered up into Himself all these tangled,
broken, often divergent threads; who gave to this truth, so far as one
very brief human life could give--at once its perfect and exhaustive
doctrinal expression, and its essentially perfect and exhaustive
practical exemplification, by life and by death. Endless controversies
have stormed and are still storming around that name which He so
significantly and emphatically appropriated--the "Son of Man." But from
amid all the controversy that veils it, one fact, clear, sharp, and
unchallenged, stands out as the very life and seal of His human