From the author's INTRODUCTORY NOTE. The sermons here collected are reprinted at the suggestion of several friends who have kindly assumed the trouble, and provided for the expense of their publication in this form. They are a few out of many of like tenor, delivered in the ordinary course of pastoral instruction and with a very simple purpose. Of widely different dates, they have only the logical connection involved in a common aim. Throughout the writer's active ministry it pressed upon him as a weighty obligation to do whatever he might to discover and to illustrate the real historical character and quality of Jesus. Probably what is often called negative in this effort is the chief substance of it. Since light will shine of its own brightness, if unobstructed, it might be enough if we could relieve a great and highly unique personality from the encumbering associations with which the credulity of the ages and misdirected piety have so overloaded it as deeply to conceal its true lineaments, distort its suggestions, and profoundly impair its moral and spiritual effectiveness. The task of rehabilitation must still be a long one, and its results may never be so distinct and definite as one might earnestly desire. But our recent time has made a hopeful beginning, and fidelity in appropriating the results of our best scholarship and candor in uttering them would rapidly promote it. If those who have proposed and furthered the reissue of these discourses are not too much mistaken in their estimate of their possible utility, it will be a profound satisfaction to their author to hope that the efforts of his past days may still, in some very small measure, contribute to the unveiling of the true historical Jesus and the work of making him known to a world which has laboriously worshiped, but has most imperfectly understood, and still less faithfully followed him.