High the source, these downward trending;
That they thus a taste transcending
Of life's fount to saints may bring.
Horum rivo debriatis
Sitis crescat caritatis,
Ut de fonte pietatis
Satiemur plenius.
Horum trabat nos doctrina
Vitiorum de sentinâ,
Sicque ducat ad divina
Ab imo superius.
At their stream inebriated,
Be our love's thirst aggravated,
More completely to be sated
At a holier love's full fount!
May the doctrine they provide us
Draw us from sin's slough beside us,
An to things divine thus guide us,
As from earth we upward mount!
II. The Credibility of the Gospels would never have been denied if it were not for the
philosophical and dogmatic skepticism which desires to get rid of the supernatural and miraculous
at any price. It impresses itself upon men of the highest culture as well as upon the unlearned reader.
The striking testimony of Rousseau is well known and need not be repeated. I will quote only from
two great writers who were by no means biased in favor of orthodoxy. Dr. W. E. Channing, the
distinguished leader of American Unitarianism, says (with reference to the Strauss and Parker
skepticism): "I know no histories to be compared with the Gospels in marks of truth, in pregnancy
of meaning, in quickening power." ... "As to his [Christ’s] biographers, they speak for themselves.
Never were more simple and honest ones. They show us that none in connection with Christ would
give any aid to his conception, for they do not receive it .... The Gospels are to me their own
evidence. They are the simple records of a being who could not have been invented, and the
miraculous and more common parts of his life so hang together, are so permeated by the same
spirit, are so plainly outgoings of one and the same man, that I see not how we can admit one
without the other." See Channing’s Memoir by his nephew, tenth ed., Boston, 1874 Vol. II., pp.
431, 434, 436. The testimony of Goethe will have with many still greater weight. He recognized
in the Gospels the highest manifestation of the Divine which ever appeared in this world, and the
summit of moral culture beyond which the human mind can never rise, however much it may
progress in any other direction. "Ich halte die Evangelien," he says, "für durchaus ächt; denn es
ist in ihnen der Abglanz einer Hoheit wirksam, die von der Person Christi ausging: die ist qöttlicher
Art, wie nur je auf Erden das Göttliche erschienen ist." (Gespräche mit Eckermann, III., 371.)
Shortly before his death he said to the same friend: "Wir wissen gar nicht, was wir Luther’n und
der Reformation zu danken haben. Mag die geistige Cultur immer Fortschreiten, mögen die
Naturwissenschaften in immer breiterer Ausdehnung und Tiefe wachsen und der menschliche Geist
sick erweitern wie er will: über die Hoheit und sittliche Cultur des Christenthums, wie es in denA.D. 1-100.