This supreme distinction in the character of Jesus is commonly referred to His Sinlessness. The description is not, however, a very happy one; it is better to state and emphasize the unique supremacy and perfect adequacy of His moral ideal, and then His own perfect fulfilment of that ideal. Both the nature of the claim and the justification of it are contained in one utterance, "My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me." When we acknowledge the moral perfectness of Jesus, we mean that He knew the will of God and that in the doing of it He found His greatest joy and the nourishment of the highest life within Him. His is the only character in history which abides the test of the two commandments which He re-enunciated as the great com mandments of the Law. These ethical principles, which even for those who have the stimulus of His example and the inspiration of His Spirit remain an ideal towards which they flutter, were for Him the sole motives of daily life. They continuously gov erned His relation to God on the one hand and to men on the other; and the death which was the natural and accepted issue of the kind of life He lived in the kind of world that man has made, was but the supreme expression of the twin principles of perfect love to God and perfect love to man. And the man who loves God and man perfectly is the perfect man.
In Fashion as a Man.—Certain words of Peter spoken at the time of Pentecost, "A man approved of God," describe Jesus as He was known and regarded by His contemporaries. He was "found in fashion as a man," that is, in all particulars which pre sented themselves to outward observation He appeared and be haved as one of the human race. He "was made man." The Gos pels leave no room for doubt as to the completeness with which these statements are to be accepted. From them we learn that Jesus passed through the natural stages of development, physical and mental, that He hungered, thirsted, was weary and slept, that He could be surprised and require information, that He suffered pain and died. He not only made no claim to omniscience, He dis tinctly waived it. This is not to deny that He had insight such as no other ever had, into human nature, into the hearts of men and the purposes and methods of God. But there is no reason to suppose that He thought of the earth as other than the centre of the solar system, of any other than David as the author of the Psalms, or did not share the belief of His age that demons were the cause of disease. Indeed, any claim to omniscience would be not only inconsistent with the whole impression created by the Gospels, it could not be reconciled with the cardinal experiences of the Temptation, of Gethsemane and of Calvary. Unless such experiences were to be utterly unreal, Jesus must have entered into them and passed through them under the ordinary limita tions of human knowledge, subject only to such modifications of human knowledge as might be due to prophetic insight or the sure vision of God.
There is still less reason to predicate omnipotence of Jesus. There is no indication that He ever acted independently of God, or as an independent God. Rather does He acknowledge depend ence upon God, by His habit of prayer and in such words as "this kind goeth not forth save by prayer." He even repudiates the ascription to Himself of goodness in the absolute sense in which it belongs to God alone. It is a remarkable testimony to the truly historical character of these Gospels that though they were not finally set down until the Christian Church had begun to look up to the risen Christ as to a Divine Being, the records on the one hand preserve all the evidence of His true humanity and on the other nowhere suggest that He thought of Himself as God.
Confirmations.—We are not left without valuable confirmation of certain aspects of the character of Jesus which have presented themselves in the Gospels. Peter in the Acts describes Him, still in language which falls short of the faith of the later Church, as one whom "God anointed with the Holy Ghost and with power; who went about doing good and healing all that were oppressed by the devil." It must have been out of a wide knowledge of the things said and done by Jesus that Paul drew his conclusions about Him, and the salient features of His character and conduct. He was one who "pleased not himself"; "ye know the grace of the Lord Jesus"; "purity and disinterestedness," these were qualities of His character (2 Cor. xi. 3). "Endurance" and "obedience," "deference and considerateness," these were displayed in His life and conduct. Paul further attests the belief that "he knew no sin," Peter that He "did no sin," the writer to the Hebrews that though tempted at all points like as we are, He was "yet without sin." And however we may account for it, Paul's ethical teaching is in closest harmony with the ethical teaching of Jesus. Both make love the central and sufficient motive of their system : "love is the fulfilling of the law." And in the application of the central principle to the details of conduct there is a startling combination of similarity of result with marked difference of form ; even the "desire not to give needless offence" which is so characteristic of Paul reproduces a feature in the conduct of Jesus. A portrait of the ideal man constructed from the teaching of Jesus would be indeed hard to distinguish from a similar portrait drawn from the materials supplied by St. Paul. Unless we are to postulate two creative minds working on the same subject and independently arriving at practically the same unique result, we must regard Paul as confirming, all the more emphatically because indirectly, the ethical teaching of Jesus as recorded in our Gospels.