Nor is it merely that we can discern in Christ that close union of
personality with perfection which forms the real distinction
between the classical and romantic movement in life, but the very
basis of his nature was the same as that of the nature of the
artist - an intense and flamelike imagination. He realised in the
entire sphere of human relations that imaginative sympathy which in
the sphere of Art is the sole secret of creation. He understood
the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind, the fierce
misery of those who live for pleasure, the strange poverty of the
rich. Some one wrote to me in trouble, 'When you are not on your
pedestal you are not interesting.' How remote was the writer from
what Matthew Arnold calls 'the Secret of Jesus.' Either would have
taught him that whatever happens to another happens to oneself, and
if you want an inscription to read at dawn and at night-time, and
for pleasure or for pain, write up on the walls of your house in
letters for the sun to gild and the moon to silver, 'Whatever
happens to oneself happens to another.'

Christ's place indeed is with the poets. His whole conception of
Humanity sprang right out of the imagination and can only be
realised by it. What God was to the pantheist, man was to Him. He
was the first to conceive the divided races as a unity. Before his
time there had been gods and men, and, feeling through the
mysticism of sympathy that in himself each had been made incarnate,
he calls himself the Son of the one or the Son of the other,
according to his mood. More than any one else in history he wakes
in us that temper of wonder to which romance always appeals. There
is still something to me almost incredible in the idea of a young
Galilean peasant imagining that he could bear on his own shoulders