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direct to the primary source of information, that is, the utterances themselves. These, however, have to be taken subject to the observations made in the preceding chapter.
We refuse to believe that there was nothing in Jesus to distinguish him from a simple child, a visionary of God, or a dreamer of fanciful dreams of a future kingdom of heaven. We likewise refuse to credit that his kingdom of God had anything in common with a poor-house, a leper asylum, or a general infirmary or dispensary, or that it was intended to be a great social revolution aiming at the overthrow of authority, the humiliation of rank and a universal equalising of status. It does not seem reasonable to us to hold that a simple day-dreamer, with no definite notions on certain important problems of life, e.g., the immortality of the soul, could ever succeed in holding his own against powerful controversialists. We may clothe our visionary in all the most glorious raiment of elegant words and captivating phrases, we may endow him with as idyllic and gentle a nature as we like, we may even impart to him a look of that ineffable sweetness with which a certain kind of high-flown but meaningless literature endeavours to keep the intellectual eye from prying into its empty conceptions, we may do all this, yet we shall never discover him transformed into a Jesus, a Buddha, or a Zoroaster. For they were all men of greatness, though not free from delusions, nor perfect in wisdom or action. Their dreaming was serious and purposeful, just as their madness was methodical, We cannot, indeed, afford to follow them blindly; but neither can we call
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