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Such thinkers maintain that Christ is the best the race has to show, and yet affirm that the race is but an insignificant item in the total massiveness of the universe. The Bible establishes the faith of men against skepticism like this by making the Christ-ideal for God himself so attractive and appealing.
The above explanation of the causes for the obscurity which rests upon much of our Lord's life and teaching, may give us ground for hoping that some of those who have failed to feel the force of the external evidences hitherto, may yet be saved, provided they have fully recognised the Christ-ideal and endeavoured to imitate it, although irrespectively of any belief in its historical character.
The Christ of the cross is taught as the truth about God the God who is at once the supremely real and the supremely ideal places his powers at the service of men who would make their Christ-ideal progressively real in themselves.
Paul himself had realised that it was the spiritual value of the Christ-ideal which was the purifier and refresher of our souls, inasmuch as he elsewhere declares that even though he had known Christ Himself after the flesh, he knew Him no more; the spiritual Christ, that is to say the spirit of Christ as recognisable by the spirits of men, was to him all in all.
Surely we can see plainly that it is the beauty of the Christ-ideal which constitutes the working power of Christianity over the hearts and lives of men, leading them to that highest of all worships which consists in imitation. Now the sanction which is given to this ideal by belief in the Divinity of our Lord, raises it at once above all possibility of criticism.
And the time is surely now, for there has arisen a very numerous and increasing class of persons, whose habits of mind unfit them for appreciating the value of vagueness, but who have each one of them a soul which may be lost or saved, and on whose behalf the evidences for the authority whereby the Christ-ideal is sanctioned, should be restored to something like their former sharpness.
Still it must be remembered that excellent critics have found the whole work admirable. Gsell-Fels says: "It is his second Moses; in movement and physique one of the greatest masterpieces; as a Christ-ideal, the heroic conception of a humanist." That last observation is just. We may remember that Vida was composing his Christiad while Frizzi was curling the beard of the Cristo Risorto.
But with reference to the many-sidedness of the Christ-ideal, as having been part of the design of God, and not attainable otherwise than as the creation of destruction as coming out of the waste of time it is clear that the perception of such a design could only be an offspring of modern thought; the conception of such an apparently self-frustrating scheme could only arise in minds which were familiar with the manner in which it is necessary "to hound nature in her wanderings" before her feints can be eluded, and her prevarications brought to book.
While she pondered over it, suddenly like the shining of a great light she understood the truth of "he that loseth his soul shall find it." The Christ-ideal of self-sacrifice meant the highest self-realization. "My cup runneth over, my cup runneth over," sang Lucine in her heart, as she read on and on. "I have been blind but now I see. It has been always true, always, always. My cup runneth over.
The Christ-ideal would have become infinitely more vague, and hence infinitely more universal: but the causes which had thus added to its value would also have destroyed whatever primary evidence was superabundant, and the vagueness which had overspread the ideal would have extended itself in some measure over the evidences which had established its Divine origin.
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