Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Discourse volume 1.djvu/302

Rh person, were not model-men, but miraculous characters whose relation to God and perfection of life each faithful soul might not share, for it was peculiar to themselves. Their character was not their own work. It was made for them by God, and therefore they could not be objects of imitation. It would be impious madness in the Mussulman or the Jew, to aim at the perfections of the great prophet who stood above him.

Now there is this peculiarity of the greater part of Christians, that while they affirm Jesus to be God, by the divine side, they yet claim him as a model-man, on the human side, and so call him a God-man. About this central figure, the Christian Church is grouped. The fourth Gospel represents him as the Way, the Truth, and the Life, for all men. The churches also assume that he is to be imitated. But they assume this in defiance of logic, for Jesus is represented as born miraculously, endowed with miraculous powers, and separated from all others by his peculiar relation to God, in short, as a God-man. Of course he must be a model only to other God-men, who are born miraculously, endowed and defended as he was; he is no model to men born of flesh and blood, who have none but human powers. But he is the only God-man, and so no model to any one. Still more if the Christian churches view him as the infinite God with all His Infinity, dwelling in the flesh, it is absurd to make him a model for men. But the churches have rarely stopped at an absurdity. They “call things that are not as if they were.” Yet since the life of Jesus appears so entirely human in his friendships, sorrows, love, prayer, temptation, triumph, and death, and the Apostles now and then represent him as the great example—the churches could not forbear making him the model-man. Hence the homilies of the Preacher; the disquisition of the Schoolmen; the glorifying treatise of the Mystic; the painting of the Artist, giving us his Triumph, Transfiguration, Farewell Meeting, and Crucifixion—all aim to bring the Great Exemplar distinctly before human consciousness, in the most prominent