Of this greatness and its character he himself had an unique consciousness which was a most important and most marked element in his difference from the Hebrew prophets before him. He 'spoke with authority and not as the Scribes,' not as those theologians and jurists whose strength rested on tradition and the letter of the past; he spoke, in short, as a prophet. So the people discovered. The voice of the prophets was characteristically authoritative and neither showed respect for tradition nor claimed its support. But the note of the prophets of old was '_Thus saith the Lord_'; and the note of the prophet of Nazareth was '_I say unto you_.' Both came among men with an authority lacking to the followers of tradition; but by the first it was thought of as delegated, in the second it was recognized as inherent. Not, '_the Lord said unto me_,' but '_I say unto you_.' The difference is enormous; it is also profound in significance and implications. It means, to begin with, a different knowledge of God. No longer is God only speaking to his messengers across a dividing space, speaking as a king upon his throne might to a subject at his feet, charging that subject with a mission. The message is no longer carried and reported by a man; it is originated in him and given by him. Jesus is conscious that the life and spirit of God are become his own life and spirit. He knows the indwelling God given to be made man in co-operative union with man, knows him in and through and as himself, the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee. He does not need to refer either to a God, or to a tradition, that is extraneous to himself. Therefore his prophetic authority exceeds not only that of the Scribes but that of all the prophets. It gave this impression to those of his contemporaries who had eyes to see and ears to hear. To such men it gives the same impression now. And if there are Christians who explain the impression and reason from it, erroneously, have we any right to be surprised? Consider the height to which we have been carried and the problems that open up before us as we survey this man. Consider the habits of interpretation most usual among us. Consider the tangibility and conspicuousness of _things_, the intangibility and, to the senses and the mind itself, the elusive mysteries of personality, of nature, of consciousness, even of knowledge and every other manifest activity. We cannot fairly blame Christians for what has been done among them in an attempt to explain and reason about Jesus Christ. The attempt has been honest enough and successful enough to hold the allegiance of thinking men for generations.