This work is a crystallized sample of one sort of Victorian devotion. Beecher, the celebrated and fashionable clergyman, brother of the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, and soon to be enmired in scandal, wrote a book full of miracle, scenery, and sentiment, but discards any systematic theology of the Incarnation; Beecher regards it as insisting too much on the inability of God to suffer, and as being centuries later than the Gospels. This book concentrates on the life and teaching of Jesus; although a second volume was intended and never completed, the culmination with the Sermon on the Mount seems perfectly characteristic, as though nothing were omitted. With an appendix containing Beecher's own compilation of the four Gospels into a single narrative.