Page:The Archko Volume (1896).djvu/245

Rh. They brought no accession of strength or respectability to his cause. It may seem at first utterly unaccountable on any principle of human policy that he should have mads such a selection, and quite as unaccountable that he himself should have chosen to pass through his ministry under an exterior so exceedingly humble; that he should, in the language of the Apostles, have made himself of no reputation, and to all external appearances taken the form of a slave ; but when we reflect upon it, we find that it was dictated by the highest wisdom. His external humility only puts in strong contrast his moral and spiritual glory. He was really so great that nothing external could add to the grandeur of his character. The fact that, without availing himself of a single external advantage, he established a religion which disappointed the hopes of his own nation and offered no bribe to any of the passions to which the ambitious appeal with so much success — that he told his followers from the first that they were to reap no worldly advantage from their connection with him — that his disciples were utterly destitute of those acquirements by which any cause is usually carried forward — all these things throw the philosophical back upon the only success, the reality of his mission from God, the moral power which truth always carries with it, and those miraculous attestations which are strongest evidence to the unsophisticated mind of man of a mission from the Most High.

"It may at first sight seem strange, when he might