thick of a crowd thirsting for his blood, and passes untouched through the midst of them. He flashes himself into the public eye, and as suddenly is extinguished. An impalpable body he has, and yet palpable too on occasion, as when Thomas offers to touch it after the resurrection, though he does not touch it; such a body as those Oriental people could imagine easily enough, if we cannot. There are no sensitive nerves in it. The flesh does not fail: blows do not hurt. There is no tottering under the weight of the cross.

We need look for no Baptism here, for we shall not find it. Why should we? The spirit cannot receive the spirit. The Word cannot be spoken to out the skies. The heavens cannot open to him who "is in heaven." If a voice comes, as once later it does, "it is not for My sake, but for that of the bystanders." John said he saw the spirit "descending and remaining on him." He does not say that he was baptizing Jesus at the time, or that he baptized him at all; baptism was a ceremony of consecration, and the Logos was the source of consecration, not its, object. Find, if you can, any hint of a Temptation here. You may assure yourself in advance that it cannot be found. For a temptation there is no place, either in time, space, or the nature of things. The Lord of Creation cannot be supposed to have had a wrestling-match with Evil. He who threw on a cloak of human disguise, to cover his glory, while he did a particular work on the earth, cannot have had any misgivings in regard to the work he came to do, or any fear of besetting difficulties, or any unwilling'ness to undertake his task allotted.

In what chapter is there an account of the Transfiguration, or an allusion to it? He that "is in heaven," gains no glory at the top of a mountain, to which he does not ascend, but to which he must have come down. He that "was before Abraham," and " one with the Father," could borrow nothing from Moses and Elias. The voice from the cloud would be but a feeble echo of his own consciousness, in the career of Jesus. The Transfiguration is a brilliant crisis of illumination; it would be a condescension, at the best an unveiling of glory on the part of the Christ. With "the world" looking on, it might have been effective; but the world cannot stand on a mountain top.

I repeat a familiar assertion, when I say that the gospel we are reading records no Supper of Communion; no such supper at least as Matthew recounts. A supper is mentioned, but the writer studiously avoids identifying it with the Passover meal. There is no breaking of bread or pouring of wine, for the reason that the Christ is himself depicted as the Lamb who was to be killed and eaten. He could

not sit down to a Passover Supper, himself being the Passover sacrifice. He could not actually break his own body and pour his own blood into a cup. The evangelist's "supper" is put in rather as an emphatic declaration that it was not "the Supper," but a very different meal. It was meant to answer Matthew, rather than to corroborate him. The act of humility connected with it is exquisitely beautiful, but it is less an act of brotherhood than of celestial condescension n; sweet, because done by one so high for these so low.

As we might conjecture, the garden of Gethsemane heard no cry from those lips, and took no tear on its sod from those kindly eyes. His long prayer of intercession finished, the great figure steps over the brook Kedron to the garden, there majestically to await his arrest. No word is spoken: he is hidden in the shadow of his own majesty. Out of this shadow, as the guard approaches, he looms, in his full superangelic proportions, and the armed men, amazed at the apparition, stagger back and fall prostrate to the earth.

Then comes the Trial, during which the Christ wraps himself about in the mantle of his glory, assumes the part of a king, and sets his foot on human empires. His superiority to all magnates is such that he does not think them great enough to despise. They are the mere tools of higher authorites, having no power but such as was "given them from above."

We now approach the final scene. The royal insults are rained upon an unfeeling form; the thorn crown is pressed on an insensible brow; the scourge resounds, but in the air. He majestically moves unflurried through the terrible pageantry of death. We must request the reader who wishes to appreciate the full contrast between the man and the angel, to compare the account of the Crucifixion contained in Matthew xxvii: 33-51 verses, with that given in this gospel, Chapter xix: 16-20, 25-31 and if he can rise from the comparison, feeling that the two biographies describe the same experience of the same person, he must, we venture to think, have a singularly constituted mind. The execution of Jesus is a scene of popular movement, noise, excitement: the passing away of the Logos is without circumstance or incident of note. For Jesus, the cross is an instrument of torture; for the Logos, it is a step to a heavenly throne. One beam supports a man in agony; the other lifts up a seraph before the gaze of the world. Jesus utters ejaculations and prayers; the Logos maintains a profound silence. Where Jesus pushes a shriek into the air, as of one abandoned by heaven and earth, the Logos, calmly looking down from his elevation, sees his mother and the beloved disciple standing near, and with tranquil words commends them one

to the other for life. With a loud cry, Jesus gives up the ghost.. With a quiet remark, "It is finished," the Logos disappears. The death scene of Jesus is as real as the exodus of the Logos is artificial. At the former, the rabble behave as the rabble will at a public execu⚫tion, reveling in the brutality of the hour. At the latter, there is no rabble present. The officials are like so many priests, assisting at a sacrifice. The very soldiers respect the garments of the dying God. I might press the comparison further, but this is enough. I have shown that two distinct beings are portrayed in the gospels, under the name of Jesus Christ; and that each of these beings has a book exclusively devoted to him. One book gives the brief biography of a mortal; the other flashes on us a few glimpses of an immortal, in his passage across the stage. Questions of authenticity, genuineness, authority, I do not raise. A most tempting array of literary considerations I turn away from. I leave a mine of choice criticism unopened, the contents of which would greatly enrich my storehouse of arguments, were I dealing in arguments. But as my purpose has been to make a statement which the simplest might verify and appreciate, I rest the matter for the present, here.

These two opposite delineations cannot stand side by side in any chamber of history. The two portraits of Jesus have sometimes been classed as literary phenomena along with the two portraits of Socrates; the one given by Xenophon the historian, the other painted by Plato the philosopher. But the cases are not at all parallel. Plato and Xenophon both delineate the same individual in two separate, but by no means opposite aspects. Matthew and John do not. delineate the same individual. Their views look in contrary directions. Plato and Xenophon both delineate a man, and their statements complement each other. Matthew and John, on the other hand, neutralize each the other's assertion, for one is contemplating a man, the other an angel; there is no common point to which their lines of vision converge. The comparison fails in another respect. Socrates was not the founder of a religion, or even of a philosophy. We cannot trace from him any such divergent lines of influence as might give to his double personality a broad historical significance. But in the case of Jesus it is history that comes in and accumulates evidence on the double personality, by ploughing the divergent lines clear across a field two thousand years wide. To these two names we trace two distinct religions, two distinct philosophies, two distinct theories of social organization. John and Matthew have each a long train of witnesses, bearing record till now. The New Testament streams have never mingled yet in the course of centuries.

O. B. FROTHINGHAM.

THE WOMEN QUESTION.

'HE passage round the North Pole, and the sphere of woman

THE

have so long baffled explorers and philosophers, that it is evident this work is not given to man to do, or else some added force is needed for its accomplishment.

As the walrus probably knows all about that passage, — and if found it would be of little practical value to man, why waste more thought in that direction? Having sacrificed the John Franklins and the Dr. Kanes to the hard fare, the long nights, the dreary solitude of that region, man would no doubt wisely decide that latitude out of his sphere, were he not blinded by an inordinate curiosity to see the size of the Pole on which the earth revolves; perchance to touch it, and set our planet whirling with such velocity that our days should be like a tale that is told. No doubt the Creator designed the walrus to watch and guard from Yankee interference this pivotal point of our hemisphere, until that period foretold by Alcott the philosopher, when the love element in the race shall be strong enough to melt the polar ices. Sages and philosophers have been equally unsuccessful in their explorations of woman's sphere. There is scarcely any subject on which men have legislated, preached, prophesied, poetized, written, sung, and felt, more than the sphere of woman, and yet they remain as befogged and bewildered as the explorers of the Arctic sea. When philosophers, who think, talk, and write profoundly, wisely and clearly laying down premises, and drawing conclusions that logically flow therefrom on all other subjects, and only when bounding the sphere of woman, are lost in mists, fogs, and quagmires, it is evident that here too is a region which man was never designed to explore. Were it not treason to the powers that be, for a subject to question a ruler; were it not heresy to limit the wisdom of the divinely constituted head of the church, the state, and the home; were it not a new and startling thing, a most audacious liberty, for mortal pen to bound a sphere for man; we might suggest that the field of his labor is already so vast and varied that he may safely leave the North Pole and woman's sphere to Walruses and Women, to describe for themselves. In the June number of The Radical, under the head of "Women in Society," we have, from the hand of an artist, a gorgeous painting, a new gilding and draping of the old idea of woman as the Queen of Society, with the parlor for her throne. This article is one of four sermons given in New York, in which the preacher has so evenly balanced the true and the false, principle and

prejudice, all opposing opinions on this question, in which his ideal woman was so delicately suspended in the air, with no visible means of support, that some of his hearers were left in painful uncertainty whether she would fall into the arms of the old civilization, or the new, or fit only for the companionship of angels, be translated at once into the heavens.

....

Says the writer," Outside the domestic sphere, where woman reigns supreme, there is another sphere where her supremacy is equally admitted. That sphere is society, . . . . the world of fashion, men exist in it as a disfranchised class." Here is progress! Let the daughters of Eve clap their hands, and all be joyful together. Two spheres! Hereafter we shall hear of the spheres of women. A wheel within a wheel; the State and Federal governments in miniature; but whether in the inner or outer circle, there is a Governor or President without a key to the treasury? Ah! there's the rub: what is a woman in either sphere, without money to make her will law; and how can she get it without profitable employment, and a place in the world of work? Labor, independence, and virtue go together.

Woman supreme! while men plan all the houses, run up whole blocks without cellars, thin pipes for water and gas, that rats gnaw through (any way for speculation), keeping these spheres in constant turmoil with necessary repairs, and the Queen on her throne forever moving from place to place, while not one woman in ten thousand has a word to say in planning a house, a door, or a closet, but man regulates everything from a skylight to a cooking stove! With man in every creed and code, represented as the great central power of the universe, the head of the family whom women is bound to "obey," by the marriage ceremony and the interpretations, by cunning priests of Holy Writ; what folly, in view of all this, to talk of woman's supremacy anywhere. As society is primal, and laws, customs, institutions are the outgrowths of its accumulated wisdom or folly, we can only judge of the sovereign of society by the signs on these mile stones of progress. Thus viewed, man, so far from being a "disfranchised class" in this sphere, holds the important position of the tortoise with the world on his back. Let him step aside, the sphere is dashed to atoms; let him stop the supplies, the Queen is a beggar at his feet.

The writer further represents this world of fashion, "woman's world, where her control is omnipotent over both sexes," as ever changing and uncertain, outside the region of law and common sense. But amid all the changes and fluctuations on the surface, this world