Moral Glory of Jesus Christ 57 supply. And yet these men, many of them better taught than the Apostles, with the advantage of two or three centuries of Christian thought and study, could not produce a fancy sketch of the Child Jesus without violating our sense of propriety, and shocking our moral sense'. The distance between the Gos pels of the New Testament and the pseudo-gospels is meas ured by the distance between the product of the Spirit of God, and that of the fallen human mind. UN IN SP IRED L IVES OF CHR IST " ” Let us take another illustration. The nineteenth century has been very fruitful in the production of what are commonly called “Lives of Christ.” Contrast with the Gospels four such “Lives,” perhaps the completest and the best, taken alto gether, of those written by English-speaking people—An drews’, Geikie’s, Hanna’s and Edersheim’s. The authors of our Gospels had no models on which to frame their work. The path they trod had never before been pressed by human feet’. The authors of the “Lives” have not only these incom parable narratives as their pattern and the chief source of all their material, but numberless other such “Lives” sug gestive as to form and construction, and the culture and the research of eighteen centuries lying behind them. But would any one venture for a moment to set forth these “Lives” as rivals of our Gospels ? Much information and helpfulness are to be derived from the labors of these Christian scholars, and others who have toiled in the same field; but how far they all fall below the New Testament record it is needless to show. Indeed, all such writings are largely antiquated and scarcely read, though they are quite young in years, so soon does man’s work decay and die. Let the contrast be noted as to size or bulk. Andrews’ book contains 615 pages; Geikie’s over 1,200; Hanna’s over 2,100; Edersheim’s, 1,500 pages. The four combined have no less than 5,490 pages, enough in these busy days to require
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