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 Divnity of Christ by Edward Scribner A 
 
 olin 
 
 3 1924 029 375 791 
 
Cornell University 
 Library 
 
 The original of this book is in 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029375791 
 
THE DIVINITY 
 OF CHRIST 
 
 BY 
 
 EDWARD SCRIBNER AMES, Ph. D" 
 
 MINISTER OF THE HYDE PARK CHURCH OF DISCIPLES 
 OF CHBIST; ASSISTANT PEOFESSOB OF PHILOSOPHY 
 IN THE UNIVEBSITY OF CHICAGO; AUTHOB OF THS 
 PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGIOUS EXPEBIENCE ( HOUGHTOK 
 MIFFLIN COMPANY). 
 
 Gbe Betbanp press 
 
 Zbe IRew Cbrtetian Centutg dompatiB 
 
 700 J£. Jfortietb Stceet, 
 
 Chicago 
 
coptbight 1911 
 The New Chbistian Ckktdbt Company. 
 
jforeworD 
 
 The sermons which are here brought 
 together were preached and separately 
 printed at different times during the past 
 seven years. Requests for them continue 
 and have been the occasion of the appear- 
 ance of this little book. Interest in the 
 central theme is increasing as the con- 
 structive tendency of modern thought is 
 more widely understood. It is earnestly 
 hoped that these pages may contribute in 
 some slight measure to the deepening of 
 religious faith in the presence of the full- 
 est knowledge. 
 
 The sympathetic understanding and 
 generous co-operation of the local church 
 through the eleven years of the present 
 pastorate are evidenced by the fact that 
 the church authorizes this publication. 
 Edward Scribner Ames. 
 
 Hyde Park, Chicago. 
 
 November, 1911. 
 
Contents. 
 
 Chaptkr. Page. 
 
 I. The Divinity of Chbist 3 
 
 II. An Empibical View of Jesus 23 
 
 m. Why I Am Not a Unitabian 39 
 
 IV. The Friendship of Jesus 61 
 
 V. The Reincarnation or Chbist - - 79 
 
 VI. Two ob Thbee and Chbist - 101 
 
"I myself;" Jesus answered, ''am the Way, the 
 Truth, and the Life; no one ever comes to the 
 Father except through me. If you had recognized 
 me, you would have known my Father too; for 
 the future, however, you will recognize him; in- 
 deed you have already seen him." 
 
 "Master, show us the Father," said Philip, 
 "and we shall be satisfied." 
 
 "Have I been all this time among you," Jesus 
 said, "and yet you, Philip, have not recognized 
 me? Those who have seen me have seen the 
 Father, so how can you still say, 'Show us the 
 Father?' Do you not believe that I am in union 
 with the Father, and the Father with me? The 
 truths which I tell you are not given on my own 
 authority; but it is the Father who being always 
 in union with me, is doing these things himself. 
 Believe me," he said to them all, "when I say 
 that I am in union with the Father and the 
 Father with me, or else believe me on account of 
 these very things which you see." 
 
 St. John 14:6-11. 
 
I. 
 
 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST. 
 
 "Christianity is founded upon Jesus 
 Christ." It sprang from his personality, de- 
 rived its vital conception from his words 
 and its inspiration from his vision and 
 example. The church arose as the com- 
 pany of those who were won to him, to 
 his ideals and to his way of service toward 
 God and man. The test of loyalty was 
 the disposition to follow him in doing the 
 will of the Father. That was what the 
 word "belief" meant in New Testament 
 times. Belief is conviction which controls 
 action. Therefore to believe in Jesus 
 meant to imitate his example, to enter into 
 sympathy with his purposes, to co-operate 
 with him in establishing the kingdom of 
 heaven on earth. The confession that 
 Jesus is the Son of God was the favorite 
 formula for the expression of this prac- 
 tical faith in him. It signified that his 
 disciples were convinced that he knew and 
 •declared God's will, that his supreme am- 
 
4 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 bition was to do it, and that he could be 
 trusted to lead them in the divine life. 
 His own appeal was ever to the heart and 
 will of his hearers. He sought to enlist 
 them for active service. "Follow me" — 
 not praise me, nor patronize me, nor wor- 
 ship me — was the form of his call, and its 
 illustration was the parable of the Good 
 Samaritan, together with many other para- 
 bles and deeds bearing the same object- 
 lesson of love and devotion. His one un- 
 conditional test of discipleship was the 
 fashioning of daily life, in word and act, 
 by the spiritual standards of the kingdom 
 of heaven. This test was expressed in 
 many ways. It involved the control of 
 appetite, the subordination of pleasure, 
 the denial of the lower self in all its forms. 
 To make that clear Jesus said, "Except a 
 man take up his cross and follow me, he 
 cannot be my disciple." If the hand or 
 eye hindered the attainment of the highest 
 life, it must be cut off or plucked out. The 
 cunning and sensuous things must be sub- 
 jected to the serious, earnest work of 
 righteousness. With reference to other 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 5 
 
 problems of conduct this one test of dis- 
 cipleship became a call to repent, to be: 
 faithful, to bear fruit, or to love one's 
 neighbor. Always it was practical, in- 
 tended to fashion character, to give the 
 right bent to the will. 
 
 Belief in Jesus, in his sonship to God, 
 was just another form of this test. He 
 explicitly declared that the ascription to 
 him of mere titles meant nothing except 
 as they who employed them were trying 
 to live the kind of life he enjoined. He 
 preferred to be acknowledged by deeds 
 rather than by words. Evidently there 
 were people in his day who never under- 
 stood this. They repeated their creed, 
 they declared their belief in his Lordship 
 and yet were disowned by Christ. It is 
 not recorded that they were viciously bad 
 men. They probably were very respect- 
 able, judging by the social and religious 
 standards of their time, but they did not 
 take to heart the teaching of Christ, nor 
 make it the inspiring, energizing law of 
 their lives. No one so excited the burn- 
 ing indignation of Jesus as these pious, 
 
fi THE DJVJJilTT OP CBllIST 
 
 easy-going religionists, who professed 
 faith in him with their lips, biit iri their 
 daily lives denied him by th^Jir complacent 
 self-righteousn6ss arid by their self-de- 
 ceiving orthodoxy. In A vivid, imagina- 
 tive picture Jesus portrayed therri. Some 
 of them were preachers. "Have we not 
 prophesied in thy name?" they said. Sorrie 
 of them were even workers of miracles. 
 "Have we not in thy name cast out devils? 
 and in thy name done many wonderful 
 works?" they said. To them all Jesus re- 
 plied, "I never knew you, depart from me 
 ye that work iniquity. Not everyone that 
 saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into 
 the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth 
 the will of my Father which is in heaven." 
 In the same spirit the apostles of Christ 
 were always anxious concerning the daily 
 lives of their converts. Their loyalty td 
 the Master was measured by their so- 
 briety, chastity, honesty, industry in busi- 
 ness, liberality toward the poof, and in the 
 support of the gospel. Christ was con- 
 fessed or denied in the relations of hus- 
 band and wife, Of parent arid child, df 
 
TBE DIVINITY OF CHRIST T 
 
 master and servant, of friend and neigh- 
 bor. By the whole message and example 
 of Jesus and his apostles, it is made em- 
 phatic that faith is shown more by the 
 care of the hungry and thirsty, of the 
 stranger and naked, of the sick and impris- 
 oned, — that is by a vigorous and abundant 
 life of righteousness, than by any verbal 
 declaration of his divinity. What a man 
 really thinks about Christ is therefore to 
 be judged by his daily life, its tone arid 
 ideals, its degree of generous, whole- 
 hearted devotion to the things which are 
 true and pure and lovely and of good re- 
 port. 
 
 The loss or obscuration of this active, 
 practical element in the conception of 
 Christian faith has led to radically erro- 
 neous estimates of the place g/i the doc- 
 trine of the divinity of Christ. Frequently 
 more concern is shown regarding the theo- 
 retical correctness of a man's ideas about 
 Christ than about the actual influence of 
 Christ in the man's life. It is as though 1 
 one asserted that the main condition of 
 bodily life were to understand the nature 
 
• THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 of food rather than to eat it. To be sure 
 men are constantly investigating their 
 food, as well as their religious faith, and 
 they are justified in doing both with all 
 the aid which experience and science can 
 afford ; but the specialists in dietetics, un- 
 like the theologians, have never yet at- 
 tempted to withhold all food from those 
 who would not or could not accept their 
 definitions of it. The thing of first im 
 portance in religion is to endeavor to live 
 by the truth and the love which Jesus 
 Christ displayed. By means of the deep- 
 ening experience which that involves one 
 grows in knowledge and appreciation of 
 Christ himself. How clearly his own 
 words declare this practical and volitional 
 character of his religion when in answer 
 to those who were raising this very ques- 
 tion as to his nature he said : "If any one 
 has the will to do God's will, he will find 
 out whether my teaching is from God, or 
 whether I speak on my own authority." 
 
 The peculiar position and emphasis 
 which the doctrine of the divinity of Christ 
 has come to have in the whole body of 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 9 
 
 church teaching and practice has not al- 
 ways made obvious what is the central 
 message of Jesus, namely, the Fatherhood 
 of God. Another method of approach 
 might succeed better. Theologians arc 
 constantly plying us with sermons and ar- 
 guments to prove the divinity of Christ, 
 but the great aim of Jesus was to bring 
 men to believe in the justice and mercy 
 and love of God the heavenly Father. It 
 is common to assume the nature of God, 
 and then to show that Jesus Christ is his 
 son, but the opposite course may be more 
 historical, more scriptural and more rea- 
 sonable. The life of Christ is the given 
 factor in the equation, and from it is to be 
 discovered what kind of a being God is. 
 To reverse this statement of the problem 
 fills it with all kinds of impossibilities, for 
 then we demand an explanation of the 
 nature of Christ in terms of the being of 
 God, when it is the fundamental principle 
 of the Christian religion that the revela- 
 tion of God is given through Jesus Christ 
 himself. It is as though a traveler were 
 to come to us from a remote and ideal 
 
10 TBB DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 /country, and in many ways £each us about 
 i£s people, its laws and his father, the king, 
 presenting himself all the while as the 
 best proof and illustration of the things 
 he told. "And," he might say, "those whp 
 believe me and observe my precepts shall 
 surely enter that land some day in great 
 joy and victory ; and moreover, during all 
 their days here they shall be wiser and 
 better, more useful and more contented 
 than by any other way of life." Then sup- 
 pose that, instead of using his words and 
 his beautiful life to fill out in our thought 
 the ever growing conception of that coun- 
 try and its king, and instead of seeking to 
 live in the light of that vision, we should 
 turn about and very ingeniously busy our- 
 selves trying to prove whether the mes- 
 senger really was a true representative of 
 the land from which he came and in very 
 fact the son of the king himself. 
 
 In other words the reasonable and the 
 satisfying thing is to believe, and to act 
 upon the belief, that God is as good and 
 as gracious as Jesus Christ. What a real 
 and vital foundation that gives to our 
 
WE DIVllMTY OP CHRIST 11 
 
 faitfi in £he worlcj and in the cause of 
 righteousness. Thinking men are in real- 
 jty more troubled today about the charac- 
 ter of God than they are about the nature 
 of Jesus. Even Renan and Strauss and 
 pthers who have been counted the enemies 
 of Christianity have paid the highest trib- 
 utes to the moral character, the religious 
 insight and the uplifting influence of 
 Jesus. And in the end their whole con- 
 tention ministers profoundly to faith in 
 God and the world; for if, as they assert, 
 Jesus was a man, to be accounted for by 
 £he natura} processes of his racial inheri- 
 tance and education, sprung in every ele- 
 ment of his being from the bosom of the 
 earth and from the air he breathed, then 
 they have only infinitely enhanced what 
 they call "nature" by attributing to it the 
 production of the personality which they 
 admit he possessed. It is inspiring to be- 
 lieve that those spiritual qualities belong 
 to the world itself. To be convinced that 
 the stars in their courses, and the tides of 
 human history are guided by the same 
 lpye of the truth, tfre same tender concern 
 
12 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 for human souls and the same indignation 
 against all forms of evil and injustice, as 
 are found in the pure heart of Jesus — this 
 is to possess the highest form of religious 
 faith. It teaches patience in the long, 
 fierce conflict with sin. It fills the falter- 
 ing heart with courage. It compensates 
 for the self-denial and humiliation which 
 every man experiences in his pursuit of 
 the true and the good. This conviction 
 that the essential realities for the infinite, 
 eternal God are what they were for Christ 
 himself — what measureless strength it 
 gives to him who consciously devotes him- 
 self to the same ideals, to the service of 
 his fellowman, and to the moral progress 
 and illumination of the race. One who 
 gains this insight into the spiritual qual- 
 ity of the world is armored against all 
 temptations of mere sensuous pleasure, or 
 wealth or popular applause, and against 
 all reverses of fortune. He goes eagerly 
 to his daily task, whatever it may be, if 
 he feels that his purposes and methods 
 make him a co-worker together with God, 
 the God who is truly the Father of Jesus 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 13 
 
 Christ. 
 
 Now it is important to realize how the 
 nature of Christ may be used as the means 
 for understanding God. No one would 
 think of starting from the physical body 
 of Jesus, and yet in the usual arguments 
 for proving that Christ is divine, the phys- • 
 ical processes of conception and birth 
 have great prominence. If Christ's son- 
 ship to God rested upon these things, we 
 would be led to think of God in terms of j 
 the bodily traits of Jesus. It is not many / 
 centuries since something like that was 
 the prevalent idea of God. He was a great 
 being, of gigantic form, seated on a huge 
 throne up in the sky, ruling the universe 
 after the manner of a mighty king. But 
 Jesus himself expressly declared that God 
 is Spirit, and his nearest disciple asserted 
 that God is love. If therefore, the per- 
 sonality of Christ is to be taken in any 
 sense as the revelation of God, it must in 
 all reason be the moral and spiritual na- 
 ture of Jesus. The conspicuous quality 
 of his character was love, and that may 
 serve to illustrate how the life of God 
 
14 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 may be interpreted through Christ. 
 
 Before the time of Jesus the term God 
 signified for the mass of men a local or 
 a national deity. The sympathies and in- 
 terests of Jesus, however, extended far 
 beyond his own race. He entered into 
 the minds of men of other races too and 
 spoke in a new way of "the world" of 
 men and women. Neither did he lack 
 sympathy for any social class. The rich 
 and poor were alike to him. He mingled 
 freely with all sorts of men, sinners and 
 menials, as well as the righteous and the 
 great. More than this, he loved all these 
 races and classes with a wonderful in- 
 tensity. Among their sick and blind and 
 deaf and crippled ones he moved with 
 cheer and blessing. He seemed never an- 
 noyed by their insistence nor resentful at 
 their ingratitude and selfishness. His love 
 even went out to those who stood in his 
 way, opposed his plans, sought his life 
 and at last crucified him like a common 
 thief. It was in that dark hour of human 
 sin and ignorance that the light of Christ's 
 love shone out with revealing glory. 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 15 
 
 There upon the cross they had erected he 
 was solicitous for his enemies, as well as 
 for the gentle mother who had followed 
 him all his days with yearning care. The 
 world never really knew before what love 
 was, and never has since produced a scene 
 of equal power and charm over the human 
 heart. In that hour it was first shown 
 with convincing proof that love could 
 abolish the hatred of races, the pride of 
 social castes, the self-righteousness of vir- 
 tue and overcome the bitterest enmities 
 and cruelties. In that love of Christ men 
 first began to realize the possibility of a 
 universal love for the world on the part 
 of an infinite God. If Jesus, a man of 
 flesh and blood like us, could by an all- 
 inclusive love rise above the distinction? 
 and differences which exist between men, 
 how surely must the Power which gave 
 him being be no respecter of persons, but 
 the tender Keeper of all the children of 
 men. John, the beloved disciple, was 
 quick to draw this inference. He had 
 penetrated deep into the heart of Jesus. 
 He had companied with the Master in 
 
16 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 trials, in temptations, in defeat, in the 
 presence of the multitudes, and in the 
 solitude of the mountains and through it 
 all it was the enveloping love of Christ, a 
 pillar of fire by night and a cloud of glory 
 by day, which led him on. This love re- 
 mained to John the most vivid memory 
 of Jesus forty years after Calvary. It is 
 the key-word of all his records of Christ, 
 and it is the word through which he ex- 
 plains the nature of God. "God is love," 
 he wrote, "and he that dwelleth in love 
 dwelleth in God and God in him." 
 
 It is this spiritual sonship of Jesus to 
 God that is the really important thing. 
 Mere physical sonship, however unique or 
 miraculous, would not be the guarantee 
 of a mind and will in harmony with God. 
 It was the voluntary choice to do his 
 Father's will which really proved Christ 
 to be divine. Nothing but this inner self 
 surrender of every lesser thing in order to 
 give himself wholly to the purposes of the 
 divine will, could surely establish his one- 
 ness with God. And this claim to divinity 
 squares itself with the profoundest con- 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 17 
 
 ceptions of morality and religion. For in 
 a world of truth and goodness, where the 
 name of the Infinite signifies wisdom and 
 love and holy will, any participation in 
 the nature of God must involve the pres- 
 ence of these supreme spiritual qualities. 
 It is in this way that Jesus Christ is 
 recognized as the Son of God, not by acci- 
 dent, nor by the contravention of law, but 
 by the perceptible and conscious unfolding 
 within him of a spirit sublime enough to 
 be the revelation of the spiritual nature of 
 the world. This view gains inspiring con- 
 firmation in the fact that the possession of 
 the divine life is not limited to himself 
 alone, but is the privilege of all men who 
 will enter upon the Christ-like life them- 
 selves. "As many as are led by the Spirit 
 of God, they are the sons of God." "Every 
 one that loveth is born of God." In the 
 sermon on the Mount, Jesus exhorted his 
 hearers to love and to do good that they 
 might be the children of their Father in 
 heaven. In this conception the world pre- 
 sents itself as a spiritual reality of law 
 and order where Christ is exalted by 
 
18 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 nothing arbitrary or capricious, but only 
 by the operation of those eternal forces of 
 righteousness and love, through which he 
 seeks to redeem all mankind. 
 
 The familiar arguments for the divinity 
 of Christ do not produce the same convic- 
 tion they once did. This is not due to loss 
 of appreciation of Christ, for that has 
 grown marvelously in recent years. The 
 inadequacy of those arguments is ac- 
 counted for by the fact that they belong 
 to a different type of thought. They are 
 essentially scholastic and deductive, rather 
 than experimental and ethical. For in- 
 stance, the doctrine of the Trinity rests 
 upon certain metaphysical conceptions of 
 substance and essence, of causation and 
 pure being, terms which have only histori- 
 cal significance for modern minds. The 
 present study of Jesus is psychological 
 and sociological. The inquiry now is not 
 so much how he came into being, but 
 what was his actual life among men, what 
 were his thoughts, his feelings, his voli- 
 tions. Evidences of his nature are sought 
 less among the prophets who preceded 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 19 
 
 him, and more among the saints who have 
 followed him. Things are judged today 
 by their effects rather than by their 
 causes. It is what a man does that de- 
 termines his value, just as it is the action 
 of electricity rather than the means by 
 which it is produced that indicates its 
 nature. The words and deeds and in- 
 fluence of Christ are therefore the subjects 
 of greatest interest in the church today. 
 These are actual facts of history and are 
 accessible to the strictest scientific inves- 
 tigation. They stand upon their own truth 
 and moral power. Never were his say- 
 ings and his work submitted to such close 
 scrutiny as at the present time. Friends 
 and foes have contended over them point 
 by point, and yet they remain before the 
 sharpest criticism, the highest moral 
 teaching and the finest examples of spirit- 
 ual faith and courage which the world has 
 seen. They are therefore norms and stan- 
 dards for our ideas of God, of duty and of 
 destiny. Happy are we to have had that 
 marvelous man born as one of our own 
 race, bone of our bone and flesh of our 
 
20 THE DIVimTY OF CHRIST 
 
 flesh; and happy indeed are we if we be- 
 lieve that God is his Father, full of the 
 same grace and truth. To this historical 
 Jesus, as to the fountain head, men have 
 returned and will return, generation after 
 generation, for ideals, for comfort and for 
 strength. The waters of that fountain 
 never waste away nor lose their power. 
 They have gathered volume as they have 
 run through the centuries until the Chris- 
 tian religion has become a mighty river 
 of life on whose shores are trees of knowl- 
 edge and of manifold blessing for the 
 healing of the nations. And whatever 
 imperfections his church has displayed in 
 her worldly search for power, in her per- 
 secutions of dissenters, or in the unholy 
 wars of her sects, it must ever be re- 
 membered that the most relentless critic 
 of the church is its Founder himself. His 
 warnings and his appeals are ever in the 
 ears and before the eyes of his disciples. 
 His spirit broods over his church, urging 
 it to simpler and more vital faith, to more 
 reliance upon the naked truth in every 
 form, and to more complete devotion to 
 
THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 21 
 
 the care of human souls. 
 
 Is Christ then, divine? As well ask 
 whether Shakespeare is a playwright or 
 Kant a philosopher or Newton a mathe- 
 matician. These men themselves set the 
 standards by which their work is judged. 
 And so of Jesus. He is divine if any be- 
 ing in all the known universe of human 
 history is divine, for he himself has been 
 the bearer of divine life to the world. 
 With increasing faith, based upon grow- 
 ing evidence from his words, his character 
 and his influence, the Christian of today 
 can face all the world of knowledge and 
 experience, and declare concerning Jesus 
 Christ, He that hath seen him hath seen 
 the Father. 
 
 "If Jesus Christ is a man— 
 And only a man, I say 
 That of all mankind I cleave to him, 
 And to him will I cleave alway. 
 
 "If Jesus Christ is a God, — 
 And the only God, — I swear 
 I will follow Him through heaven and hell, 
 The earth, the sea, and the air." 
 
Philip findeth Nathaniel, and saith unto him, 
 "We have found him, of whom Moses in the 
 law, and the prophets, did write, Jesus of 
 Nazareth, the son of Joseph." 
 
 And Nathaniel said unto him, "Can there any 
 good thing come out of Nazareth?" Philip saith 
 unto him, "Come and see." 
 
 St. John 1:45-46. 
 
 Beware of false prophets, which come to you 
 in sheep's clothing, but inwardly they are raven- 
 ing wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. 
 Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of this- 
 tles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth 
 good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth 
 evil fruit. Matthew 7:15-17. 
 
II. 
 
 THE EMPIRICAL VIEW OF JESUS 
 
 I can only suggest in a very summary 
 way, here, what the empirical view of 
 Jesus seems to me to involve. In the 
 first place it means that the biblical rec- 
 ords and the world-view in which he is 
 presented to us are to be taken critically. 
 One often hears arguments about the 
 person and work of Christ in which the 
 major premise is uncritically assumed. 
 That major premise is to the effect that 
 an infallible revelation was given through 
 the inspired prophets of Israel, and 
 through the writers of the New Testa- 
 ment. Then the only problem is to find 
 out what the place of Christ is in this 
 biblical cosmology. 
 
 A still more powerful factor implicit 
 in the major premise of the theo- 
 logians has been the Greek influence 
 which was already at work in the 
 New Testament writers and became domi- 
 nant in the third and fourth centuries. 
 
24 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 Here enters the logos notion and witE it 
 many metaphysical implications. Taking 
 these and related doctrines for granted, 
 it is easy to deduce scriptural and seem- 
 ingly reasonable conclusions respecting 
 the unique character of Jesus and his 
 place in the redemptive system of this 
 world-scheme. But all this biblical tradi- 
 tion and Greek influence are being placed 
 in an ample historical perspective today, 
 affording an interesting illustration of the 
 way in which custom and habit come to 
 be accepted as divine revelations and final 
 truths. Under a critical, comparative ex- 
 amination, the development of the na- 
 tional life of the Jews, with their folk lore 
 and ritual, and the scientific, speculative 
 systems of the Greeks, are not funda- 
 mentally different — though more impor- 
 tant for us — from the development of the 
 ceremonials of the Chinese or of the Aus- 
 tralian or African Blacks. Indeed what 
 happened to the conception of Christ in 
 relation to the old Hebrew and Greek 
 civilizations is constantly illustrated in 
 missionary work in other countries. 
 
THE EMPIRICAL VIEW OF JESUS 25 
 
 Everywhere the story of Jesus is apper- 
 ceived by different races in terms of their 
 history, their heroes and their cere- 
 monials. 
 
 The ritual of the Hebrews was fixed 
 in their nomadic, pastoral period, and 
 therefore Jesus became the Lamb of God, 
 and by His Jewish adherents was re- 
 garded as the great final sacrifice for the 
 sin of the people. Miracles and wonders 
 were familiar to the Hebrew mind, as to 
 all primitive minds, and consequently this 
 teacher and leader was accredited with 
 miracles and wonders. It was commonly 
 believed that the gods took the women of 
 the human race for wives, and it was in- 
 evitable that as Jesus came to be regarded 
 as a great personage, this half divine, half 
 human parentage should be ascribed to 
 him also. That these miracles and this 
 birth should still be regarded by informed 
 men of the present day as actual, literal 
 facts is striking evidence of how much 
 of the primitive age of child wonder and 
 savage credulity still survive in the world. 
 The only reason one is under any obliga- 
 
26 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 tion to treat these things with some con- 
 sideration is that they have involved the 
 profoundest reverence and allegiance of 
 many believers. They did help once per- 
 haps to exalt Christ to a commanding 
 place of leadership and spiritual power. 
 But now they can only be accepted seri- 
 ously for what they have meant in the 
 past. They may still be serviceable in 
 poetry and art and in various types of 
 symbolism, but as literal matters of fact 
 they should be put aside with other child- 
 ish things. This critical, historical pro- 
 cess is showing also that much of our 
 accepted orthodoxy is due to the imposing 
 influence of certain specific causes. Thus 
 our notion of an infallible Bible arose in 
 the seventeenth century and was directly 
 occasioned by the need among Protes- 
 tants for an offset to the infallible author- 
 ity of Rome. It is highly amusing now 
 to see this seventeenth century point of 
 view projected back to the writers of the 
 New Testament themselves and supported 
 by a few texts of scripture. In the same 
 general manner Dante and Milton have 
 
THE EMPIRICAL VIEW OF JESUS 27 
 
 furnished much authentic, first hand, Mew 
 Testament doctrine! They succeeded in 
 filling the popular mind with vivid and 
 compelling imagery for which the accom- 
 modating poetic and figurative speech of 
 the Bible afforded imposing, apostolic 
 texts. 
 
 Now it is my own conviction that the 
 ordinary discussions of the divinity of 
 Christ move blindly in the circles of such 
 world-views developed in primitive myth- 
 ology, in Greek metaphysical speculations, 
 or, it may be, in some form of Darwinism 
 in our own time. The very term "divin- 
 ity" seems to force us to put Christ either 
 on the side of the ancient gods or to insist 
 that he must be merely human and only 
 natural — using "human" and "natural" in 
 contrast to "divine," and therefore in a 
 derogatory way. 
 
 With this very meager generalization, 
 it may be possible to indicate more posi- 
 tively what the empirical view of Christ 
 means. It seems to me that empiricism 
 attaches no validity to the old dualism of 
 the natural and supernatural, the human 
 
28 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 and the divine and that therefore we are 
 not any longer concerned with the "divin- 
 ity" of Christ but rather with his goodness 
 and his worth. 
 
 Empirically, that is, in human experi- 
 ence as we know it and are able to test 
 it, we find that the distinctions between 
 men are those of degree, of quality, and 
 we apply a standard of values to men 
 according to their intellectual, ethical and 
 social functions. Men are great or small, 
 wise or ignorant, good or bad in a sys- 
 tem of experience which is urgent and 
 practical. The old metaphysical concep- 
 tions of personality with their vocabulary 
 of indivisible substance and special en- 
 dowments are passing away. Gods, as 
 well as men, are subject to new tests — 
 tests of an ethical sort. Have they good 
 hearts, good wills, efficient minds? The 
 outward pomp and glory of our earthly 
 kings have departed, and we are also 
 becoming indifferent to the tinsel of the 
 heavenly world. We have little interest 
 in the question whether a being with a 
 double nature such as Christ is often 
 
THE EMPIRICAL VIEW OF JESUS 29 
 
 represented, could suffer to death upon 
 a Roman cross, but we are tremendously 
 concerned as to whether men with one 
 nature like our own can intelligently and 
 disinterestedly labor and serve for the 
 welfare of our kind here and now. So 
 much is this attitude controlling us, that 
 the older conception of Christ, as a being 
 with a uniquely superior endowment, re- 
 pels us from him. If he only acted out on 
 earth the part for which he had been 
 coached in heaven, or if he did a man's 
 task with a god's strength, or if he pos- 
 sessed the equivalent of a magic key to 
 unlock the plain, everyday difficulties 
 which we meet barehanded, then he only 
 makes our despair the deeper ; for he is a 
 constant reminder that we are mocked by 
 a categorical imperative to perform duties 
 too great for us, and to solve problems 
 which to our reason are conundrums, for- 
 ever dark to our natural thought by vir- 
 tue of a double use of words. 
 
 But on the other hand, if fie really was 
 like us, born of two human parents, nur- 
 tured by a good mother, schooled in the 
 
30 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 lore of his people, sensitive to its plaintive, 
 minor note, responsive to the best of the 
 prophetic ideals and the wisdom of the 
 wise men ; able to translate all this into 
 the beatitudes and the story of the prod- 
 igal son and the good Samaritan ; able also 
 to actually practice genuine friendship 
 with Zaccheus and the Samaritan woman 
 and with Judas, and to forgive those who 
 crucified him ; always believing in the- 
 power of love and of his righteous cause ; 
 then he makes our hearts burn within us, 
 he draws us into his fellowship, he affords 
 us courage and faith and redeems us from 
 all sin and weakness. We can then find 
 the inner word of his gospel for an en- 
 lightened age, and can start, at least, on 
 the way toward a new apologetic and a 
 more powerful evangel. We can even use 
 much of the old symbolism, for it is capa- 
 ble of pointing to the living realities of 
 our experience in comparison with which 
 the old things suggested by that symbol- 
 ism were mock-heroic and tawdry. I 
 mean that the cross becomes symbolic of 
 the pain of every earnest soul in the ac- 
 
THE EMPIRICAL VIEW OF JESUS 31 
 
 complishment of duty. The shed blood of 
 Jesus is typical of the price men always 
 pay for the right to think and to feel bet- 
 ter things than the officials of the estab- 
 lished order. That pathetic, bleeding fig- 
 ure of Christ has come to represent for 
 many of us not the weird magic of a dying 
 god's power, but the redeeming quality 
 of the mother's love, the patriot's devo- 
 tion, the modern social worker's sacrifice 
 for his fellows. It was natural that the 
 ancient Jewish Christian should associate 
 the blood of Christ with the blood of the 
 Lamb upon the ancestral altar. It is 
 equally natural and right for us to asso- 
 ciate the blood of Christ with the blood 
 of our great suffering servant of his peo- 
 ple, the martyred Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 But it may be asked, What ontological 
 significance has all this? What is the 
 relation of Christ to the absolute, the 
 world substance, to God? My answer 
 cannot be categorical and yet it must be 
 brief. I will confess bluntly that I have 
 lost interest in ontological questions. I 
 do, however, think it true that the per- 
 
32 THE DITIXITY OF CHRIST 
 
 sonality of Jesus reveals the heart of the 
 world, in some such way as a beautiful 
 oak tree makes known the nature of the 
 soil it grows in. When we see the great 
 oak, we may be sure at least that the soil 
 its deep roots penetrate, is, with the other 
 elements of rain and sun, equal to the pro- 
 duction of that oak. The strength and 
 beauty of that tree are expressions of 
 nature's life. In the same way a noble 
 man is proof that the world, the material, 
 mental, spiritual world, has expressed it- 
 self in him. He is a revelation of the 
 world, of nature, of God. In this way, 
 with his marvelous moral grandeur ana 
 simplicity, Jesus Christ seems to me to be 
 a revelation of the best things we know 
 about the world. 
 
 I realize that some defiant souls, 
 rebelling against the impossible claims 
 the past has made for Christ, deny 
 that he ever lived at all. I am not 
 one of those, but even if he never 
 lived, we have yet to reckon with the ideal 
 which his name suggests. And the ideal 
 is a fact as stubborn and as obvious as a 
 
TEE EMPIRICAL VIEW OF JESUS 33 
 
 flesh and blood existence. If the ideal of 
 Christ has grown up either by imposture 
 or by good intention or by an unconscious 
 idealization of virtue, it is nevertheless 
 among the finest things we possess, and is 
 the product of our own life in any case. 
 I think Christ is a reality of both sorts at 
 once, actual and ideal. I think the evi- 
 dence is sufficient that the man Jesus lived 
 and also that his disciples and the church 
 have idealized him. The idealizing pro- 
 cess is evident in a casual survey of Chris- 
 tian history and especially in Christian 
 art. The early representations of Jesus 
 show him as a shepherd carrying a lamb 
 in his bosom. Then his features become 
 more ascetic and heroic. His eyes seem 
 withdrawn from his immediate surround- 
 ings and take on the distant look of the 
 mystic or the stern appearance of a com- 
 mander or of a judge. All the light of 
 human sympathy seems lost for a time, 
 until in the modern schools he becomes 
 once more, 
 
 "The lover of women and men 
 With a love that puts to shame 
 All passions of human ken." 
 
34 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 In our day when the ideal of social serv- 
 ice is coming to be supreme, we like to 
 believe that we understand Jesus better 
 than any other age has done, not except- 
 ing his own. Therefore, we put great 
 stress upon the social teachings of Jesus 
 and he becomes to our imagination the 
 chief figure in the forefront of our cru- 
 sades against disease, bad tenements, 
 heartless corporations, child-labor and the 
 rest. Luckily we have abundant and 
 familiar texts of scripture to support much 
 of this idealization of Jesus and we have 
 the sense at once of historicity and of 
 ideal values in our Christian message as 
 no other age has had. 
 
 But while it is true, as I see it, that we 
 may generalize somewhat from this em- 
 pirical fact of the historic and ideal Christ 
 to the conclusion that the world has that 
 degree of moral character in it, yet I feel 
 much more certain of the following: 
 namely, that Jesus Christ is a kind of 
 pledge and promise of what other human 
 beings may accomplish. The horticul- 
 turists are proving that the existence of 
 
THE EMPIRICAL VIEW OF JESUS 35 
 
 one beautiful tree may become a pattern 
 after which others may be developed. In 
 some instances they have gained suffi- 
 cient control of the process to reproduce 
 the type in any numbers desired. Some- 
 times, it is true, the individual variation 
 proves to be a freak, sterile and inimitable. 
 It is perhaps late enough in the history 
 of Christianity to conclude that Christ is 
 an imitable type, that his mind and will 
 are increasingly reproduced and that in 
 the far future it may be possible that so- 
 ciety, even in commerce and business, 
 shall be controlled by his will and move 
 in harmony with his purposes. This seems 
 to me the supreme empirical test of Christ. 
 Can his wisdom and his spirit be actual- 
 ized in the world, in a society of men, in 
 a heavenly kingdom of love and peace? 
 If so, then Jesus will be shown to be not 
 an abnormality, but a normal product in 
 our world, and thereby our world itself 
 will be demonstrated to be favorable, yes 
 equal to the creation of a race of Christian 
 men. 
 
 It is important to realize that this state- 
 
36 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 ment transfers the problem from the realm 
 of static things, the things of a hidden 
 past and the alleged realities behind our 
 experience, to dynamic things in the future 
 and to the things implicit in our present 
 experience. The old questions have been, 
 did Christ live with God before the world? 
 Did he come forth from God? Is he the 
 revelation of a God hidden behind the 
 scenes? The new questions are, "Will 
 Christ live in the future? Will he bring 
 a godlike life into the world for all men? 
 Will he build God's kingdom before our 
 eyes? More directly stated, Christ pre- 
 sents a problem not for the intellect alone 
 but primarily for the will. The question 
 is not, what think ye of Christ? But 
 what will you do about Christ's example 
 and ideal of life? It is obligatory upon 
 his followers yet to make the demonstra- 
 tion which shall prove what Christ was. 
 The saying of the writer of Hebrews con- 
 cerning the ancient worthies may include 
 Jesus too. He asserts that it was not 
 possible "that they should reach their full 
 perfection apart from us." If his disciples 
 
THE E2IPIRICAL VIEW OF JESUS 37 
 
 succeed in growing a race of men like him, 
 then Jesus will be proved good. If they 
 cannot do this, then he will be shown to 
 be less than the best for our world where 
 what we need is not sentimental right- 
 eousness, but actual, tangible, testable, 
 workable goodness. 
 
 In accordance with what I have said, 
 I am in favor of changing the wording of 
 the Christian confession in order to re- 
 store the simple, New Testament meaning 
 of it. Instead of asking a candidate, Do 
 you believe that Jesus Christ is the son of 
 God? I would ask him, Are you willing 
 to follow Jesus and to do the utmost 
 within your power to establish his king- 
 dom of love in the world? If he earnestly 
 said, "Yes," I would count him of that 
 splendid company of the elect who venture 
 their lives in a vast moral enterprise, one 
 issue of which may be to prove whether 
 there really is a God in the universe good 
 enough to be called the Father of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the 
 Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal 
 him. Matthew 11:27. 
 
 My aim is that they may be encouraged, and 
 be bound to one another by love, so attaining to 
 the full blessedness of a firm and intelligent con- 
 viction, and to a perfect knowledge of God's secret 
 truths which are embodied in Christ. For all 
 God's treasures of wisdom and knowledge are 
 to be found stored up in Christ. 
 
 Colossians 2:2. 
 
 Dear friends, we are God's children now; what 
 we shall be in the future has not yet been re- 
 vealed. What we do know is that, if it should be 
 revealed, we shall be like Christ. 
 
 / John 3:2. 
 
III. 
 
 WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN. 
 
 The justification for such a personal 
 statement as follows is that I have been 
 asked why I am not a Unitarian. At 
 times it is vigorously asserted that I am 
 one anyhow. I do not deny being a "lib- 
 eral," but I do reserve the privilege of 
 stating what kind of a liberal I am. It 
 is a bad fallacy to assert that all men who 
 are not white are black. Likewise, it is 
 altogether too easy and too narrow a view 
 to conclude that because a man is not a 
 perfectly orthodox Trinitarian evangelical 
 Christian, he must therefore be a Unitar- 
 ian. 
 
 It is true there are many good things 
 about Unitarianism. It is characterized 
 by great intellectual culture, by philan- 
 thropy and patriotism. There is also tol- 
 erance in this fellowship for men of very 
 different theological opinions. Even in its 
 doctrinal contentions, which as a system 
 I cannot accept, there are many admirable 
 elements such as emphasis upon the hu- 
 
40 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 manity of Jesus and upon a reasonable 
 method of biblical study. But as a whole 
 the Unitarian movement is too negative, 
 too much of a protest and therefore too in- 
 dividualistic and too critical. It does not 
 furnish the will the normal motives for 
 action nor supply the emotions sufficient 
 expression. It lacks great constructive, 
 socializing tendencies, as is proved by its 
 failure to gain adherents even among 
 those classes which are rapidly freeing 
 themselves from traditional doctrines and 
 superstitions. 
 
 On account of its critical spirit and the 
 great divergence of doctrine among its 
 representative men, it is not easy to formu- 
 late a statement of views which all Uni- 
 tarians would accept as typical. The po- 
 sitions attributed to them here are those 
 which have impressed me in reading their 
 own writers and in observing the activi- 
 ties of their ministers and churches. My 
 reasons for not being a Unitarian do not, 
 however, spring from my acceptance of 
 the opposite doctrine of Trinitarianism. 
 The study of the history of religion and 
 
WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN 41 
 
 of the social sciences has developed a 
 position different from both of these his- 
 toric contentions. I have a very real en- 
 thusiasm in quoting and adopting a char- 
 acteristic saying of the early leaders of 
 my own denomination: "I am neither a 
 Unitarian nor a Trinitarian but strive to 
 be simply a Christian." The Disciples of 
 Christ have employed this statement to 
 indicate that they were not concerned with 
 the theological questions suggested by 
 these names, but were seeking to devote 
 themselves to practical Christianity in a 
 direct and simple way. They were striv- 
 ing to be guided only by the teachings of 
 the New Testament in which neither of 
 these party names appears. While this 
 naive rejection of the contentions of both 
 schools helped to make emphatic the im- 
 mediate practical message of the Disci- 
 ples, it now happily affords also freedom 
 for the restatement of religious truth in 
 terms of the new way of thinking peculiar 
 to this age of scientific knowledge and 
 social democracy. And this new way of 
 thought is itself concerned primarily with 
 
42 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 practice more than with theory, with life 
 more than with doctrine. It is known in 
 the schools as empiricism, as pragmatism, 
 as humanism. Those who in the sim- 
 plicity of their minds suppose that this 
 interpretation of life and religion is iden- 
 tical with the older "rationalism" or with 
 "scepticism," thereby reveal their ignor- 
 ance of it. And when they suppose it has 
 been abundantly "answered" by the dis- 
 cussions of the older orthodox theolog- 
 ians they are opposing alchemy to chemis- 
 try, and astrology to astronomy. 
 
 My first reason, then, is that I do not 
 accept the point of view which the very 
 name Unitarian implies. It takes one horn 
 of the ancient Greek dilemma that sub- 
 stance must be either one or many, and 
 insists that God is one. We are begin- 
 ning to see that God, like any other re- 
 ality, may be both one and many. In a 
 sense, such mathematical categories are 
 wholly inapplicable. It is a controversy 
 which involves the nature of the divine 
 "personality." For ages it has been dis- 
 cussed in terms of substance, static, fixed, 
 
WHY I AM SOT A UNITARIAN 43 
 
 immobile. But the whole matter appears 
 in a different way when the modern, pre- 
 vailing dynamic view is employed. Now, 
 '"personality" is what it does. It appears 
 under varying aspects from different 
 angles and diverse relations. The hu- 
 man personality itself must be described 
 according to the point of view from which 
 it is regarded. The doctrine that each 
 person is in reality a congeries of many 
 selves, or systems of habits, has the sanc- 
 tion of the highest authority in psychol- 
 ogy. Whatever unity personality possesses 
 is the unity of a system, of an organism, 
 and not the round and solid oneness of an 
 inert mass. So long as one thinks of sub- 
 stance mechanically there is necessarily 
 a sharp opposition between an indivisible 
 unity and that which is constituted of 
 separable parts. But when substance is 
 taken dynamically and organically — the 
 only way in which we can longer think 
 of personality — then it may be both one 
 and many without contradiction, or in- 
 consistency. With the acceptance of this 
 modern conception of personality, we do 
 
44 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 not so much solve the old dilemma. We 
 escape it. It becomes unreal. Therefore 
 the contestants on both sides appear like 
 the warriors in Valhalla, — waging a war- 
 fare which is no longer significant in the 
 present world. 
 
 The second reason why I am not an ad- 
 vocate of Unitarianism is that it presup- 
 poses a dualism between the natural and 
 the supernatural, placing God on the side 
 of the supernatural and man, with all 
 created beings, on the side of the natural. 
 The most significant use of this distinc- 
 tion is its application to the doctrine 
 of Christ. The Unitarian theologians 
 do not all agree in their conception 
 of the distinction, but they all make 
 it in some form. For Channing, who 
 still believed in miracles, Jesus was 
 not coequal with God. Later writers 
 tend more to identify Jesus with the hu- 
 man level, while attributing to him ex- 
 ceptional genius and the distinction of 
 being the world's greatest ethical teacher 
 and example. Throughout the history of 
 the Unitarian heresy, from the days of 
 
WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN 45 
 
 Socinus, it has magnified the contrast be- 
 tween the natural and supernatural, the 
 human and the divine. Orthodox theolog- 
 ians only differed from this position 
 by adding that the natural is evil, and 
 that human nature is burdened with 
 original sin. Hence orthodoxy in- 
 sisted upon the need of a supernat- 
 ural redemption accomplished through 
 a divinely unique Savior. Unitarians have 
 not denied the contrast between the hu- 
 man and the divine but have rejected the 
 notion of the inherent sinfulness of man 
 and consequently have blunted the doct- 
 rine of redemption as a supernatural 
 operation. Their teaching concerning man 
 proceeds in the opposite direction from 
 their doctrine concerning Christ, though 
 both are more or less conscious protests 
 against the views of the orthodox. They 
 insist that Christ has been too much iden- 
 tified with deity; man has been thought 
 too sinful. But like the orthodox, the 
 Unitarians were wrapt in the inexorable 
 logic of a sharp contrast between the di- 
 vine and the human. Christ was one or 
 
46 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 the other. The Trinitarians said, as di- 
 vine, he could save sinful man. As hu- 
 man, he would be impotent to effect the 
 great salvation. The Unitarians said, as 
 human, he could be an example and leader 
 for man. As divine, he would compromise 
 the unity and self-sufficiency of God. The 
 escape from this argument demands a 
 fundamentally different view of the world 
 than the disputants have held. They have 
 both accepted the underlying dualism, and 
 without questioning its validity, have 
 chosen to champion opposite extremes. 
 Now it is precisely this dualism which I 
 do not accept, and when dualism is dis- 
 carded the old contentions lose their 
 meaning. I do not believe there is a 
 natural and a supernatural order, a human 
 and a divine sphere of being. Life is one : 
 its differences are those of degree, of 
 quality. Scientific evolution has contrib- 
 uted endless confirmation to this idea. In 
 its perspective, the various orders of crea- 
 tion form a series, the continuity of which 
 makes any seeming gaps only problems 
 for further investigation under the gen- 
 
WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN 47 
 
 erally established hypothesis. Man stands 
 in organic relation to all the orders be- 
 low him, possessing not only a physical 
 structure fundamentally like that of the 
 earthworm, but a sentiency as well. The 
 intelligence of animals, like their anatomy, 
 is strikingly human. Nothing below him 
 is foreign to man, nor is anything that is 
 above him ! He shares the image and 
 likeness of God. What religion has long 
 asserted, psychology is now demonstrat- 
 ing in reference to this likeness between 
 God and man. For it is becoming clear 
 that man cannot fashion any conception 
 of God except by means of this likeness. 
 If love, wisdom and work, as we know 
 them, mean utterly different things when 
 applied to God then our world is a mad- 
 house, and God is only a greater illusion 
 than ourselves. But when He is con- 
 ceived in terms of this likeness, then He 
 becomes great but not distant, wise but 
 not unknowable, gracious but not without 
 the quality of man's purest love and jus- 
 tice. The most appealing passages of 
 scripture employ this truth. God is the 
 
48 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 Father of man ! Can man believe then 
 that it is sacrilegious to assert that he is 
 of the same nature with God? God is the 
 Friend of man ! Can man have compan- 
 ionship with any being lacking man's 
 quality of heart and will? The issue is 
 crucial in the deepest religious life of our 
 time : either there exists the likeness or 
 there is no God at all. 
 
 Having squarely faced this oneness of 
 man and God, one does not avow Uni- 
 tarianism in accepting the humanity of 
 Jesus, for to say that Christ was a man 
 does not imply the denial of his divinity; 
 and to assert his divinity is not to deny 
 his human parentage. If the natural birth 
 of the average man does not preclude his 
 oneness with God, then neither does the 
 natural birth of Jesus preclude his oneness 
 with God. The greatness of Jesus must 
 be conceived in ethical and spiritual terms, 
 and therefore as something which is not 
 guaranteed by a mysterious birth and is 
 not lessened by an ordinary one. The 
 truest features of the New Testament de- 
 lineation of Jesus are those humanly true 
 
WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN 49 
 
 and elemental experiences which are es- 
 sential to the development of all genuine 
 moral character. No overgrowth of ideal- 
 ization or adoration in the first century 
 was able to obliterate these traces of the 
 spiritual biography of Jesus as it came by 
 tradition from those who knew him per- 
 sonally. The impression is still clear that 
 he was tempted in all points as we are; 
 that he attained great honor because he 
 was humble ; that he was popular because 
 he was kind to the poor ; that he became 
 the "captain of our salvation," because he 
 suffered much and was faithful ; that he 
 attained the full measure of sonship to 
 God because he loved his fellow men and 
 gave himself for them. 
 
 Just here lies a third reason why I do 
 not accept Unitarianism. Like Trinitar- 
 ianism, it has employed an impossible 
 method of interpreting Christ through 
 God. It has been customary in both 
 schools to assume that we must start with 
 the person and character of God and then 
 determine the nature of Christ. Nothing 
 could be more unbiblical, unchristian, or 
 
50 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 unscientific. That is like taking the X of 
 an algebraic equation to determine the 
 given factors. In the Christian system, 
 Christ and human experience are the given 
 factors and God is the X. The contend- 
 ing disputants have started with the un- 
 known quantity and have reached differ- 
 ent conclusions about the given realities. 
 One said the given realities equal X, and 
 the other said they equal X minus. What 
 is there in common with either procedure 
 when one takes the given factors and by 
 means of them reaches a conclusion con- 
 cerning the nature of X? 
 
 The latter is the method of the empirical 
 science of our day which is remaking our 
 world of thought and faith. Empiricism 
 starts with facts, with tangible experi- 
 ences, and cautiously builds upon them. 
 It has great respect for reality, for his- 
 tory, for criticized and classified knowledge. 
 If religion is to be vital and satisfying in 
 this new age, it must also deal with facts 
 of actual experience, discarding supersti- 
 tions, miracles and magic. The facts of 
 the Christian religion center in the moral 
 
WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN 51 
 
 character and teaching of Jesus. The 
 Christian conception of God is of neces- 
 sity a generalization based upon these 
 facts, and upon the accumulating experi- 
 ence of the race as affected by these facts 
 throughout a long history. The life and 
 personality of Christ are vivid and power- 
 ful realities. His words, ideals and sacri- 
 ficial devotion live intimately and pro- 
 ductively in the spiritual depths of man- 
 kind. They are the avenues through 
 which we behold our God. "He that 
 seeth me seeth him that sent me." Christ 
 "is the image of the invisible God," not 
 because this statement occurs in a verse 
 of scripture, but because in making our 
 estimate of God we are compelled by the 
 nature of our minds to employ the best 
 characters we know. The whole discus- 
 sion about the divinity of Christ is usually 
 vitiated by the fallacy of assuming cer- 
 tainty with reference to God, and then 
 arguing whether Christ is of the same 
 nature, whereas all we can legitimately 
 do is to begin with the warm, blood-red 
 spirit of Jesus Christ and ask ourselves 
 
52 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 whether the heart of God is like that. 
 
 The significant thing finally is not 
 so much whether Christ is divine, as 
 whether God is Christlike ! And the 
 only way to determine this is by ask- 
 ing whether Christ is an exception 
 or a normal product in the life of 
 the world. If other lives like his are 
 possible ; if the social order is capable 
 of incarnating his spirit; if a kingdom of 
 Christlike men and women can be built in 
 the world; then we may believe that the 
 heart of the world beats true to the heart 
 of Christ, and that God — the inmost Soul 
 of all — is like the soul of Christ. This is 
 the crux. Men are not cynical about 
 Christ." They do not doubt his goodness. 
 They want their children to know him 
 and they would delight to see his spirit 
 rule the world. There is little if any 
 serious dissent from his ideals. But there 
 is much doubt whether his teachings are 
 practicable ; whether his unselfishness, 
 meekness, and idealism are capable of 
 realization in a universe where power and 
 cunning seem supreme. And unless they 
 
WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN 53 
 
 are possible of attainment there would 
 seem to be only tragic mockery in things 
 and our experience could furnish no evi- 
 dence that there is a God worthy to be 
 called the Father of Jesus Christ. What 
 is needed to create faith in the soul of the 
 modern man is evidence that Christianity 
 is fitted to the task of creating a better 
 moral order, a juster social system. This 
 practical achievement would demonstrate 
 the quality of the world we live in and 
 relieve us of the present difficult task of 
 proving the infinite goodness of God in 
 the face of a seemingly very bad world. 
 
 One further reason why I am not a 
 Unitarian is that religion, like all our life, 
 is so much a matter of appreciation and 
 volition and so little an affair of the in- 
 tellect. It is being discovered that the 
 great religions of the race are not and can- 
 not be primarily matters of the intellect. 
 Religion lives in the realm of the prac- 
 tical life, in the midst of the struggle for 
 existence. It needs the correcting and 
 guiding light of reason, but it does not 
 spring from reason nor depend upon it 
 
54 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 any more than do the marriage customs 
 of the race. Unitarianism was formed and 
 given its bent before the social aspect of 
 man's life was understood, and there are 
 inherent limitations in the individualism 
 and rationalism of the movement which 
 are the survivals of those formative in- 
 fluences. 
 
 On this account it never fully under- 
 stood or appreciated the real strength of 
 the orthodox communions. It was always 
 inclined to view the latter as if they were 
 founded upon their creeds. All members 
 of orthodox churches were judged as if 
 they were expected to understand these 
 creeds and either be able to defend them 
 or candid enough to renounce them. But 
 the great evangelical denominations are 
 not held together by their logic. They 
 are great brotherhoods, fellowships, com- 
 munions. These very words signify their 
 nature. The bonds which unite them are 
 powerful sentiments of affection and duty ; 
 great moral ideals embodied in their lead- 
 ers and in their institutional life ; great 
 unifying activities of benevolence and mis- 
 
WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN 55 
 
 sionary zeal. It is with all the life of 
 religion much as it is with the hymns and 
 the ritual of the churches; it is the emo- 
 tional appeal and the awakening of won- 
 derful moods which make them effective. 
 Such hymns and rites are themselves the 
 product of the heart in moments of in- 
 tense feeling when the tremendous drama 
 of salvation is vividly conceived for the 
 individual or the race. They are set deep 
 in the customs and habitual experiences of 
 the people. They were not consciously 
 and deliberately instituted, and they do 
 not yield quickly to criticism or opposi- 
 tion. If their roots did not go deeper 
 than the clear judgments of the mini, 
 they would perhaps be more amenable to 
 reason but they would also be less signifi- 
 cant. 
 
 In some such way the Unitarians have 
 misunderstood much of the orthodox at- 
 titude toward Christ. He was felt by the 
 early church to have an official and cor- 
 porate significance with reference to the 
 whole race. The sense of solidarity, so 
 intense in the Jewish people, naturally 
 
56 TEE DIVINITY OF CERIBT 
 
 dominated the Christian community. 
 Christ became the expression of this so- 
 cial unity. Loyalty to him in a national 
 and cosmic sense was expressed in the 
 doctrines of his pre-existence, virgin birth 
 and miraculous deeds. The same ten- 
 dency imputed magical efficacy to his 
 death and to his blood. Such supernat- 
 ural qualities were universally ascribed 
 to the heroes of the early ages of the race. 
 They were evidences of loyalty, of affec- 
 tion, of reverence. And the more elab- 
 orate doctrines which came with the later 
 history of the church were still occasioned 
 and permeated by this deep rooted affec- 
 tion and devotion to the Head of the 
 church. 
 
 There has also been in the individual 
 Christian consciousness a parallel develop- 
 ment of the same emotional and practical 
 character. Christian duty and responsi- 
 bility have grown up as the sense of liv- 
 ing communion between Christ and his 
 followers. Under the influence of these 
 prevalent conceptions the sinner is led in- 
 to most vivid experiences in which he has 
 
WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN 57 
 
 visions of Christ and feels certain of the 
 divine presence. Now it has not been 
 sufficiently recognized that psychological- 
 ly such a living companionship is real and 
 invaluable. Christ lives in the Christian's 
 experience as vitally as if he walked by 
 our side. We get comfort, inspiration 
 and guidance through him. To deny this 
 is to deny obvious facts of experience. 
 The denial is intended, doubtless, to apply 
 only to the idea that Christ literally lives 
 in some transcendental existence and yet 
 visits men in strange and unaccountable 
 ways. But in criticizing this transcen- 
 dental view the difficulty has been to al- 
 low proper value and reality to the psy- 
 chical and spiritual experiences them- 
 selves. It is the old warfare between the 
 letter and the spirit, between literalism 
 and symbolism. When the mental pro- 
 cesses involved in fellowship with Christ 
 are better understood they will appear 
 both more natural and more significant. 
 
 What Christ may mean to one, quite 
 aside from any unwarranted mysticism, 
 is illustrated in the following incident 
 
58 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 told me recently by a friend who has 
 grown away from the traditional concep- 
 tions of Christianity. During a severe 
 illness she was cared for in a Catholic 
 hospital. Above her bed hung a crucifix. 
 In her weakness and pain and uncertain- 
 ty of life her eyes rested upon the an- 
 guished face and bleeding form of the 
 Christ. She was surprised at herself that 
 she did not turn away in a kind of horror 
 of it all after the manner of her sophisti- 
 cated moods. But instead she continued 
 to look upon the face and form, and the 
 lips seemed to speak to her heart saying 
 very simply, "I have suffered too." And 
 in that word was a great comfort. 
 
 There is ever this deep and elemental 
 something in the crucified Christ which 
 makes him live and speak to our hearts. 
 He greets us with unexpected appeals. 
 He opens new life before us. He brings 
 comfort and inspiration. He bears away, 
 as it were, the burdens of our sin and 
 makes us whole again. He becomes a 
 living presence, obliterating the centuries 
 and all outward circumstances by the 
 
WHY I AM NOT A UNITARIAN 59 
 
 energy of his deathless love. It is this 
 sense of vital relation with Christ whicn 
 a recent writer holds to be the distinguish- 
 ing essential of orthodox churches. He 
 says, "Here, then, is clearly defined the 
 barrier which separates Unitarians from 
 Christians of other denominations. These 
 have or believe they have vital personal 
 relations with Jesus Christ, who is in the 
 world revealing the Father, and through 
 whom they have access to the Father and 
 receive his life."* 
 
 The personality of Christ is to these 
 churches a fusing, organizing, impelling 
 power. Through it they lay hold of the 
 consciences of men with a firm grip, and 
 they present to the imagination a definite 
 image of divine compassion and sustain- 
 ing companionship. This personality 
 stirs the emotions and stimulates the will 
 as statements of fact and logic cannot do. 
 The strength of the older churches lies in 
 this warmth and depth of the social life, 
 organized in terms of the personality of 
 
 *The Congregationalist, November 13, 1909. 
 
60 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 Christ and directed to the fulfillment of 
 the highest ideals as the expressions of 
 his gracious will. But this religious sym- 
 bolism of Christianity is not dependent 
 upon the theological traditions of the past 
 and in a freed and exalted form may yet 
 become the language of that religion of 
 the spirit which the new science and the 
 new democracy are creating. 
 
Faithful are the wounds of » friend. 
 
 Ointment and perfume rejoice the heart: 
 
 So doth the sweetness of a man's friend that 
 cometh of hearty counsel. 
 
 Thine own friend and thy. father's friend, for- 
 sake not. 
 
 Iron sharpeneth iron; 
 
 So a, man sharpeneth the countenance of his 
 friend. 
 
 A friend loveth at all times, 
 
 And is born as a brother for adversity. 
 
 There is a, friend that sticketh closer than » 
 brother. Proverbs. 
 
 Greater love hath no man than this, that a 
 man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are 
 my friends, if ye do the things which I com- 
 mand you. No longer do I call you servants; 
 for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth ; 
 but I have called you friends, for all things that 
 I heard from my Father I have made known unto 
 you. St. John 15:13, 14, 51. 
 
IV. 
 THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS. 
 
 A notable characteristic of modern re- 
 ligious thought is the growing apprecia- 
 tion of the naturalness of Jesus. More 
 and more he emerges from the mysterious 
 half-lights of earlier credulity and specu- 
 lation into the clear and simple human 
 life of his times and race. Accordingly 
 his words and deeds take on more normal 
 meanings. They get their great power 
 and value less from their eccentric nature 
 and more from the profound way in which 
 they express and clarify the best spirit 
 and ideals of his people. This sense of 
 reality concerning Jesus is strengthened 
 by the direct and unaffected relation 
 which he sustained toward his disciples. 
 He encouraged them to the closest per- 
 sonal companionship. He called them 
 friends, a term which he consciously chose 
 and into which he put the very soul of his 
 gospel. Note the deliberation of his 
 words : "No longer do I call you servants ; 
 
64 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 for the servant knoweth not what his 
 lord doeth; but I have called you friends; 
 for all things that I heard from my Father 
 I have made known unto you." By thai- 
 new and hearty word he revealed the true 
 bond between himself and his followers 
 and the foundation of all genuine fellow- 
 ship. It is therefore of central importance 
 to understand what the friendship of Jesus 
 involves. I shall consider its basis, its 
 authority and its value as a social ideal. 
 Friendship always rests upon some sort 
 of equality. It is essentially a reciprocal 
 relationship. In this respect it stands in 
 sharp contrast to such terms as master 
 and servant, king and subject, priest and 
 people. All these imply a definite and 
 radical inequality. They are mutually ex- 
 clusive and presuppose differences of birth 
 or fortune or endowment. It was just 
 this external sense of difference which 
 Jesus sought to remove, and he indicated 
 this intention by choosing a designation 
 in its very nature antithetic to all class 
 distinctions. The correlative of the word 
 friend is also friend, but the correlative of 
 
TEE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 65 
 
 master is servant, which suggests a totally 
 different sphere of life. Jesus put himself 
 upon the same plane with his followers, 
 both by adapting himself to them and by 
 elevating them so far as possible to his 
 own point of view. 
 
 The proof which he gives of his sincer- 
 ity in calling them friends is further il- 
 lustration of the fact that his friendship 
 requires mutual confidence. The guaran- 
 tee of friendliness is frank, unreserved 
 communication. Secrecy or indirectness 
 is a barrier and menace to good fellow- 
 ship. It belongs to the relation of master 
 and servant. The servant knoweth not 
 what his lord doeth. But Jesus told his 
 disciples everything. His faithful en- 
 deavor had been to make known his whole 
 thought and purpose. He used the method 
 of conversation, of question and answer, 
 to make plain his meaning. His stories 
 were homely and picturesque vehicles for 
 the deepest and most intimate thoughts 
 of his heart. The only hindrance to the 
 complete understanding of Jesus in his 
 cwn day as in this, arose from the dull- 
 
66 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 ness, the blindness, the wickedness of hu- 
 man nature. It is everywhere his desire 
 to be revealed, disclosed, transparent. 
 
 One of the specific doctrines of Jesus 
 which gave support to the sense of equal- 
 ity through which alone friendship could 
 be cultivated was that of the universal 
 fatherhood of God. He himself was the 
 son of God, but so also were his 
 disciples sons of God. In the prayer 
 which he taught them he said, Our 
 Father. There was therefore nothing 
 inconsistent in being friends with them. 
 It was the natural attitude. Their 
 sonship justified the unfailing interest 
 of Christ in all classes of people, and 
 it thrilled all who heard his message 
 with a new sense of self-respect and 
 hope. This doctrine gave a new value 
 to the human soul and explained the zest 
 and seriousness and sympathy with which 
 Jesus companied with them and called 
 them friends. No other motive was needed 
 to account for the interest which he took 
 in people. That alone was sufficient rea- 
 son for his patience and persistence and 
 optimism. 
 
THE FRIENDSHIP OF JE8V8 67 
 
 Another powerful factor in the develop- 
 ment of mutual interest between individ- 
 uals is some common experience, in ideals 
 cherished, work accomplished, loss sus- 
 tained, injustice felt or suffering endured. 
 Jesus saw that his followers and he would 
 be welded together in fiery furnaces and 
 herioc struggles. It would be another 
 test and evidence of their friendship. They 
 would always know that he too had suf- 
 fered for the truth. No man could give 
 greater evidence of his love for them 
 than by the consecration of his whole 
 life even to the point of death. By nothing 
 else has the world been touched and 
 drawn to Christ so much as by the sense 
 of his manifold experience of the common 
 human lot. His hunger, thirst, weariness, 
 toil, tears, temptations, quicken our sym- 
 pathy and devotion. Here at least he was 
 like us. The friendship of such a man 
 is sensitive, resourceful and strong. He 
 can give good counsel, he can uplift the 
 discouraged and forsaken. He can inspire 
 new ambition, and point the way to the 
 things which satisfy and save. 
 
68 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 But when Christ proclaimed himself a 
 friend, what became of his authority? 
 Obviously in giving up the relation of 
 master, he gave up also the kind of au- 
 thority which belongs to it. Friendship 
 excludes the very idea of authority based 
 upon power or magic or secrets. It is 
 incompatible with any external or arbi- 
 trary commands. It retains only the au- 
 thority of the truth, of experience, of that 
 which appeals to the conscience and rea- 
 son. What an emancipation was pro- 
 claimed when Jesus said, Ye shall know 
 the truth and the truth shall make you 
 free ! There is no other spiritual freedom, 
 and this must be won by each individual 
 for himself. Even Jesus himself can exert 
 no real influence over men except through 
 the truth, and indeed through their per- 
 ception of the truth. 
 
 It was this which gave such a wealth of 
 meaning to his declaration: A new com- 
 mandment I give unto you, that ye love 
 one another. That commandment was so 
 new, so unique, that it was in fact some- 
 thing far different from a legal command. 
 
THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 69 
 
 How can anyone love to order? Every 
 true parent knows that his child's affec- 
 tion is not subject to force. The child 
 must be won through appeals to his in- 
 terests, his intelligence, his self-respect. 
 It is in that way alone that the wisest ana 
 greatest of men can permanently control 
 their fellow men. The gospel of friend- 
 ship between God and man was therefore 
 a far higher stage than religion had ever 
 before consciously attained. The law 
 came by Moses, but grace and truth came 
 by Jesus Christ. 
 
 The authority of Jesus is the authority 
 of a discoverer. He gained unusual in- 
 sight into moral and religious truth and 
 lived by it himself. He thought of him- 
 self as subject to the spiritual forces of 
 the world just as others are. His words 
 are more convincing and illuminating than 
 others because they reflect a larger ex- 
 perience and a clearer discernment of the 
 moral order. He urged his hearers to test 
 his way of life for themselves, not to take 
 it upon blind faith. He explicitly told 
 them that his experience could not stand 
 
70 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 in stead of theirs. It could only show the 
 way, and give encouragement. When he 
 sent his disciples out as he had gone, he 
 warned them that they would meet the 
 same difficulties and persecutions. In 
 order to attain what he had attained they 
 would have to pass through the same 
 discipline. He had to win his throne by 
 his cross and they must do the same. If 
 they could be baptized with the same 
 baptism of self-surrender and drink the 
 same cup of suffering they could attain 
 to the same distinction. He won God's 
 love by doing God's will and that way 
 was open to every one. 
 
 Nothing of this spirit is signified by the 
 authority of a king or master. Their rule 
 rests upon the nature of their person, due 
 to their birth or some other accident or 
 favor of fortune. Whether their com- 
 mands are reasonable or capricious has 
 nothing to do with their validity. They 
 claim the sovereign right of arbitrary 
 power. But all this was discarded by 
 Christ the moment he called his disciples 
 friends. It would liberate and elevate the 
 
THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 71 
 
 Christian consciousness if it could aban- 
 don the words king and sovereign. They 
 carry the imagery and implications of 
 worn-out social institutions and of effete 
 forms of thought. They are survivals of 
 outgrown customs and they hang upon 
 the modern spirit like dead weights. More 
 helpful analogies could be found in the 
 spheres of science and of art. Here a 
 man's authority depends upon his achieve- 
 ments. What he says is accepted in so 
 far as it is justified by the known facts 
 and by all reasonable tests. The scientist 
 himself does not originate nor even vali- 
 date the truths with which he deals. At 
 least they do not depend upon him as an 
 individual. They have objective and uni- 
 versal meaning and he himself is as much 
 subject to them as anyone else. The only 
 way in which he can make them truly 
 effective for other persons is by taking 
 those persons into his confidence, by lead- 
 ing them to his own knowledge and in- 
 sight and technical skill. 
 
 Here is found the same kind of re- 
 lationship into which Jesus sought to 
 
72 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 bring his disciples. He awakened them 
 to his own views and ambitions. He 
 gave them eyes to see the foundations 
 of the moral order in the world about 
 them. For example, a man cannot be 
 satisfied in a life of pleasure. The 
 prodigal son, the living counterpart for 
 whom may be seen in any community, 
 is the evidence. Or again, riches are not 
 stable enough to justify one's whole 
 effort ; look at the rich fool ! Or once 
 more a conventional, formal, traditional 
 religion keeps people away from God and 
 true righteousness. The Pharisees of 
 every age are the proof. In the same way 
 every beatitude, and the whole teaching 
 of Jesus grounds itself in experience, in 
 the purpose which it serves, in the trans- 
 formation which it effects in the character 
 of him who follows it. It is on this ac- 
 count that Jesus has eternal value for the 
 religious life. His authority is that of 
 one who has himself found God — found 
 him a father and a companion of earnest 
 souls. Jesus only tells us what he has 
 first learned and proved and what can 
 
THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 73 
 
 be proved over and over again in the life 
 of both his humblest and his greatest dis- 
 ciple. 
 
 The friendship which Jesus taught and 
 saw partially realized among his immedi- 
 ate followers has become more and more 
 a conscious social ideal. It has become 
 a kind of test and standard of progress. 
 The writer of Proverbs seems to have 
 thought the possibilities of friendship very 
 limited. The word with him does not 
 have the steady, habitual meaning of 
 Christian thought. Mere courtiers, or the 
 clientele of a rich man are called friends, 
 and he that maketh many friends of thai, 
 kind "doeth it to his own destruction." In 
 that earlier view it is not thought possi- 
 ble to have many true, genuine friends. It 
 was Jesus who emphasized the possibility 
 and the duty of having multitudes of 
 friends. He enjoined and exemplified a 
 friendship which was not hindered by any 
 external conditions of station or race or 
 occupation. It required only a right dis- 
 position, a disposition of deference and 
 helpfulness, a recognition of the value and 
 
74 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 capacities of human beings. Wherever 
 the sense of spiritual kinship existed or 
 could be cultivated, there was an open 
 way for the kingdom of heaven. 
 
 That Jesus lived by that principle him- 
 self is proved by the sneers of his op- 
 ponents, who called him a friend of tax- 
 gatherers and the godless. If we could 
 appreciate the abhorrence and scorn which 
 was put into those words by the conven- 
 tional people who used them, we would 
 realize the independence and human sym- 
 pathy of Jesus in finding companionship 
 among the ostracized and forlorn. Doubt- 
 less their sincerity as well as their need 
 appealed to him, for in his thought the 
 candid sinner is nearer the kingdom than 
 the pretentious saint. Hypocrisy is the 
 worst enemy of friendship and therefore 
 Jesus denounced it more bitterly than any 
 other sin. But he had some hope of those 
 who knew their faults and made no claim 
 to righteousness. 
 
 Gradually the broad, inclusive love of 
 Jesus has been imitated by his church. 
 Throughout all classes of men there is a 
 
THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 75 
 
 growing sense of a common nature and of 
 reciprocal interests. By slow process it 
 is being made clear that all social insti- 
 tutions must discontinue the master-ser- 
 vant relation and enter into more human 
 and brotherly co-operation. The institu- 
 tion of slavery was doomed when the 
 spirit of the gospel rose to power over 
 the consciences of men. It is true Jesus 
 did not decry the external fact of slavery 
 but he did undermine it and removed all 
 but the name by enjoining kindness on 
 the part of masters and faithfulness on the 
 part of slaves. Imagine the relation be- 
 tween these classes where both were truly 
 Christian ! Gentleness and guidance from 
 the superior, docility and patient toil from 
 the inferior, with a mutual understanding. 
 Is it any wonder that in numerous in- 
 stances the abolition of American slavery 
 made little difference between master and 
 servants because the latter preferred to 
 remain practically the same as they were? 
 It is not, after all, the external relations 
 which determine the value of life but 
 rather the personal and human factors. 
 
76 THE DIVIXITY OF CHRIST 
 
 Without the latter no conditions can be 
 judged by Christian principles. 
 
 Jesus doubtless startled his hearers by 
 the application of this test of friendship 
 to the family, the oldest and most sacred 
 social institution. When someone came 
 and announced that his mother and 
 brothers desired to speak to him, he said, 
 Who is my mother? and who are my 
 brothers? Whosoever shall do the will 
 of my Father which is in heaven, the same 
 is my brother, and sister, and mother. 
 That is to say that the accident of birth 
 cannot determine spiritual relationships. 
 It frequently happens that by difference 
 of temperament or long separation, blood 
 relationship becomes quite meaningless, 
 and it is never of vital import except as 
 it is permeated and idealized by common 
 interests and heart to heart experiences. 
 Unless brothers are also good friends, 
 unless husband and wife, parents and 
 children are also true companions, they 
 miss the richest and the finest joys of the 
 home. They need to devote themselves 
 with the utmost care and patience to the 
 
TEE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 77 
 
 cultivation of mutual friendship, for which 
 nothing is so effective as the simple re- 
 ligion of Jesus. 
 
 Nowhere has the inner and mutual 
 sense of equality and helpfulness been 
 more effective than in modern education. 
 It has entirely changed the attitude of 
 the teacher toward the child. Instead of 
 regarding him as a rebellious nature to 
 be subdued and repressed, the teacher has 
 begun to put herself at his side, as Rous- 
 seau advised. She now studies his in- 
 terests, his talents, his play and his work 
 to know how she can best befriend him in 
 order to guide him. The formal restraints 
 and the dull exercises of older methods 
 have largely given way to natural means. 
 Nothing could better illustrate the spirit 
 of the teacher who rebuked his disciples 
 for ignoring the children and graciously 
 received them into his arms, with bless- 
 ings. 
 
 Other vast fields of human life remained 
 to be brought under the influence of this 
 ideal. It has developed the race problem, 
 which is something far more than a matter 
 
78 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 of political economy or politics. It has 
 precipitated the great social problems of 
 our day. Every move of organized labor 
 and of capital adds proof to the impossi- 
 bility of longer maintaining masters and 
 servants in the industrial life. Their in- 
 terests are one and they will best be pro- 
 moted by friendship, not by enmity. Out 
 in the still larger spheres, the lesson is 
 being learned upon an international scale, 
 and the growing importance of diplomacy 
 and of arbitration point to the better day 
 of peace and national friendship. 
 
 But the greatest changes of all are be- 
 ing wrought by this friendship of Jesus 
 in the lives of his followers and in his 
 church. It has taken a discouraging 
 length of time for Christian people to 
 apply among themselves this central 
 theme of Christ's religion, and they are 
 far from its full realization yet. But grad- 
 ually we are learning how to be friends 
 in local congregations and across denomi- 
 national lines. At last the awful days of 
 religious persecution are past, and it 
 seems impossible that they should ever 
 
THE FRIESDSEIP OF JESUS 79 
 
 return. But Christ prayed for much more 
 than tolerance between his disciples. He 
 prayed for their union and for their or- 
 ganized activity. The simpler views of 
 Jesus and the more practical appreciation 
 of the friendship which he enjoined are 
 now uniting the church and teaching it 
 to minister to the needs of mankind. This 
 unfailing power of Christ has inspired 
 these prophetic lines of Richard Watson 
 Gilder: 
 
 Behold him now where he comes! 
 Xot the Christ of our subtile creeds, 
 But the lord of our hearts, of our homes, 
 Of our hopes, our prayers, our needs; 
 The brother of want and blame, 
 The lover of women and men, 
 With a love that puts to shame 
 All passions of human ken. 
 
 * * * * 
 
 Ah no, thou life of the heart, 
 Never shalt thou depart! 
 Xot till the leaven of God 
 Shall lighten each human clod; 
 Xot till the world shall climb 
 To thy height serene, sublime, 
 Shall the Christ who enters our door 
 Pass to return no more. 
 
Unless a man has the Spirit of Christ, he does 
 not belong to Christ; but if Christ is within you, 
 then, though the body is dead as a consequence 
 of sin, the spirit is full of Life as a consequence 
 of righteousness. 
 
 All who are guided by the Spirit of God are 
 God's sons. Romans 8. 
 
 Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus 
 Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates. 
 
 2 Corinthians 13:5. 
 
V. 
 
 THE REINCARNATION OF 
 CHRIST. 
 
 To the apostle Paul, the presence of 
 Christ in the believer's life, was a demon- 
 strable fact. The great proof of it was 
 the expulsion of the carnal or sinful na- 
 ture. "If Christ is in you, the body is 
 dead," — "body" meaning for him the 
 lower nature in all its forms. Another 
 evidence of Christ being in a man, was 
 the man's willingness to suffer for the 
 same things for which Christ suffered. 
 "We are troubled on every side," he said, 
 "yet not distressed ; we are perplexed, but 
 not in despair; persecuted, but not for- 
 saken ; cast down, but not destroyed ; al- 
 ways bearing about in the body the dy- 
 ing of the Lord Jesus, that the life also 
 of Jesus might be made manifest in our 
 body." It was from the Christ in him 
 that Paul derived strength to do all things. 
 So completely did he feel himself identi- 
 fied with his master that he exclaimed, 
 
82 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 "to me to live is Christ," and again, "I 
 live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me : 
 and the life which I now live in the flesh 
 I live by the faith of the Son of God, who 
 loved me and gave himself for me." There 
 are other similar expressions in Paul's 
 writings concerning the indwelling of God 
 and of the Holy Spirit as well as of Christ. 
 But whatever the phrase, the import is 
 ever the same, that the divine energy 
 takes possession of the believer, guides 
 his will, gives him words to speak and 
 yearns to utter itself fully in his life. 
 
 In order to realize the significance of 
 this language of Paul, it is necessary to 
 take it in connection with the other set 
 of forces which operate in the world. It 
 is not only Christ who may enter into a 
 man. Satan and other evil spirits may 
 do the same. Paul attributes the wicked- 
 ness of people to their being possessed by 
 Satan, just as he explains their goodness 
 by the presence of Christ. He says: "If 
 our gospel be hid, it is hid to them that 
 are lost ; in whom the god of this world 
 hath blinded the minds of them which be- 
 
TEE REINCARNATION OF CHRIST 83 
 
 lieve not." He excuses himself for not 
 visiting the Thessalonians by the fact that 
 once and again Satan hindered him. In 
 his unsuccessful struggle to do the right, 
 he explains it by the presence in him of 
 the carnal mind. "It is no more I that 
 do it, but sin that dwelleth in me." There 
 are many remarks of Paul which show 
 that he had a very vivid belief that the 
 world about him was peopled by good 
 and by bad spirits, which could enter into 
 and possess men and control their acts, 
 "Principalities, powers and rulers of the 
 darkness of this world" are for him evil 
 beings just as real as the devil himself, 
 against whose wiles the Christian is urged 
 to put on the whole armor of God. It was 
 common in the New Testament times to 
 attribute physical disease to demons 
 which entered the body, and Paul speaks 
 of his own physical malady, his "thorn 
 in the flesh'' as a messenger of Satan. It 
 was in order to conquer this ruler of the 
 evil world that it became necessary for 
 Christ to die. But Christ's death did not 
 destroy the evil spirits, it only broke their 
 
84 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 power and made it possible for a man 
 possessed by the good spirit of Christ to 
 attain virtue and eternal life. 
 
 The human heart was thus a battle 
 ground for the possession of which the 
 good and the evil contended. This was 
 no figure of speech for the apostles, but 
 was the statement of actual and tremend- 
 ous realities. The presence of the evil 
 demons was abundantly attested by 
 physical maladies and by all forms of 
 immorality, lying, drunkenness, blas- 
 phemy, covetousness, pride, and love of 
 pleasure. Even Luke, who was a physician, 
 and who would naturally have taken a more 
 scientific view if it had existed at that 
 time, constantly attributed diseases to 
 evil spirits. 
 
 To be possessed by Christ, to have him 
 dwelling in one, meant for St. Paul, the 
 presence of a power stronger than the 
 evil spirits which would bring one safely 
 through every temptation, every loss, 
 every hardship, and enable him at last 
 to meet fearlessly the greatest foe — death 
 itself — and through Christ to rise even 
 
TEE REINCARNATION OF CHRIST 85 
 
 from the grave. The sublime faith of 
 Paul opposed to this encircling host of 
 evil spirits the mightier spirit of Christ. 
 "We are more than conquerors," he ex- 
 claimed, "through him that loved us. For 
 I am persuaded that neither death, nor 
 life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor 
 powers, nor things present, nor things 
 to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any 
 other creature, shall be able to separate 
 us from the love of God, which is in Christ 
 Jesus our Lord." It was in such an age 
 that the miracles, particularly the resur- 
 rection of Christ, made their powerful ap- 
 peal to the imagination. It was a time 
 when every one believed in ghosts, in 
 apparitions, in miracles and wonders. 
 The only way in which good spirits could 
 be shown to be more powerful than evil 
 spirits, was by performing much more 
 astounding miracles. It was perhaps on 
 this account that the resurrection from 
 the dead, which would everywhere be con- 
 sidered the greatest miracle, was made by 
 Paul the central factor in the proof of 
 Christ's divinity. And there is no doubt 
 
86 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 that Paul believed Christ to be divine 
 in a unique sense — a very God indeed, 
 a Spirit which belonged to the upper 
 heaven, far above the evil spirits dwelling 
 in the atmosphere of the earth, and far 
 above the angels and wonderful beings in- 
 habiting the upper air. Christ had mani- 
 fested the mysterious powers of super- 
 natural beings. He had healed diseases 
 and thus shown power over demons, he 
 displayed more than human compassion 
 and knowledge, he was able to become in- 
 visible to the multitude when danger 
 threatened and had suddenly appeared in 
 the midst of his disciples after his death, 
 while they were together behind closed 
 doors, and at last he had risen bodily from 
 the earth into the clouds of heaven, from 
 which St. Paul expected him to return 
 one day with still greater glory. Last of 
 all Christ had appeared to Paul himself 
 upon the Damascus road, converted him, 
 and commissioned him to go as an am- 
 bassador far hence to the Gentiles. 
 
 It was not difficult, therefore, for Paul 
 to believe that Christ could actually come 
 
THE REINCARNATION OF CHRIST 87 
 
 into the hearts of his disciples, shape their 
 desires, mould their wills, and enable them 
 to gain a glorious victory over every form 
 of evil. The means by which Christ could 
 be brought into human beings was by 
 their confessing his all-powerful name. 
 The importance attaching to this name 
 is almost suggestive of magic. "There 
 is no other name given under heaven 
 among men whereby you must be saved." 
 At his name finally, in the last judgment- 
 scene "every knee shall bow and every 
 tongue confess him Lord of all." This 
 confession of the name was connected 
 with faith, and faith often had a mystical 
 meaning for the early church, as though 
 it were a power by which the divine favor 
 could be secured. Abraham's faith had 
 counted to him for righteousness, and it 
 was by faith alone that all men could be 
 justified. By this faith Christ entered into 
 the believer and he became at once super- 
 ior to the evil spirits and to the whole 
 present evil world. This transition from 
 sin and death to righteousness and eternal 
 life, was symbolized, if not finally effected, 
 
88 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 by the immersion of the believer into 
 water as into a grave, and by his arising 
 out of it in the likeness of the resurrection 
 of Christ. Thenceforward he became a 
 new creature, and belonged to the heaven- 
 ly kingdom. 
 
 But this side of Paul's teaching con- 
 cerning the indwelling of Christ in tb« 
 heart of the believer does not exhaust the 
 meaning of that great conception. This 
 is but the form, of which the substance 
 alone has permanent and vital signifi- 
 cance. We may be indifferent to the form 
 except in so far as it enables us to ap- 
 preciate the apostles' meaning. The be- 
 lief in spirits as it existed in Paul's day 
 has largely passed away. Demoniacal 
 possession as the explanation of disease 
 has been discarded, and it is no longer 
 held as the cause of immoral conduct. The 
 air about us is not regarded as the abode 
 of the hosts of Satan, and the forces at 
 war in the soul of man are not personi- 
 fied. We no longer look for the good to 
 triumph in our hearts by mysterious 
 means, and the church instead of advanc- 
 
THE REINCARNATION OF CHRIST 89 
 
 ing miracles as evidences of its claims is 
 curiously enough engaged at times in 
 seeking evidence for the miracles. 
 
 In what sense then do we today believe 
 in the indwelling of Christ? Certainly 
 not in the sense that at conversion by the 
 confession of his name and the exercise 
 of faith the literal spirit or ghost of Jesus 
 enters our bodies to dwell there. But 
 rather do we mean that then we commit 
 ourselves unreservedly to his way of life, 
 we try to possess ourselves of his thoughts, 
 his feelings and his ambitions. We seek 
 to have his mind in us, as Paul puts it, 
 a mind of humility, of love, of self-sacri- 
 fice. In that way it is possible to have 
 the character, the likeness of Christ de- 
 veloped in human hearts. Paul wrote to 
 the Galatians: "My little children, of 
 whom I travail in birth again until Christ 
 be formed in you." 
 
 To have Christ dwelling in the heart 
 means then, beside anything mystical or 
 supernatural, the possession of his will 
 and character in a very matter of fact way. 
 Paul refused to be satisfied with any claim 
 
90 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 to the possession of Christ on the part of 
 those who could not show the evidence in 
 their daily lives. He wrote to the Colos- 
 sians, "If ye then be risen with Christ, seek 
 those things which are above. Lie not to 
 one another. Put on bowels of mercies, 
 kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, 
 longsuffering, forbearing one another, and 
 forgiving one another, if any man have a 
 quarrel against any; and above all put 
 on charity, and let the peace of God rule 
 in your hearts." 
 
 This practical test constitutes the per- 
 manent standard by which all men may 
 judge themselves and one another, and 
 determine whether Christ dwells in them. 
 "Know ye not your own selves, how that 
 Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be re- 
 probates?" The thing by which alone a 
 man may assure himself of the divine 
 presence is not some single religious im- 
 pulse in the past, or obedience to some 
 outward ordinance, but the continual 
 sense of living the best life of which fie is 
 capable. The great denial of Christ is the 
 failure to do one's utmost to live a Christ- 
 
THE REINCARNATION OF CHRIST 91 
 
 like life. In common speech it is the 
 failure to put all one's energy and thought 
 and ideals into each act of life. 
 
 This embodiment or reincarnation of 
 Christ in men, may be freed entirely from 
 the mystical idea that his soul or spirit 
 enters the physical body. It has nothing 
 in common with the belief of Buddhism, 
 for example, which holds that the soul of 
 Buddha enters generation after generation 
 into certain holy men. This belief belongs 
 to an earlier stage of the faith of man- 
 kind, and surrounds itself with all manner 
 of seclusion from the actual life of men. 
 It hides its greatest saints away from the 
 struggle and pain of life. The most iso- 
 lated and mysterious city of the earth was, 
 until recently, the sacred city of Lhasa in the 
 hermit nation of Tibet, in the inner clois- 
 ters of which, living ascetic, contempla- 
 tive life was the highest functionary of the 
 Buddhist faith, believed by his followers to 
 be the reincarnation of the great Buddha, 
 the founder of the religion. Such a re- 
 ligion cannot endure contact with science 
 and with the practical concerns of life. 
 
92 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 But the reincarnation of Christ is the for- 
 mation of a Christ-like character in his 
 disciples, in the midst of all the activities 
 of life, welcoming all knowledge, and all 
 progress as aids in its accomplishment. 
 
 This presence of Christ in the heart re- 
 sults in fresh interest, in growth, in free- 
 dom and in contentment. The new in- 
 terest in life which belongs to Christian 
 experience is expressed in the saying that 
 the believer becomes a "new creature, 
 old things are passed away — Behold all 
 things are new." To come into possession 
 of any other man's mind and habit of ac- 
 tion, to look out upon the world through 
 another's eyes would be certain to give 
 new interest and meaning to everything. 
 That is precisely the experience we have 
 had when we learned to see the world 
 through the mind of a great astronomer, 
 or geologist, or historian, or philosopher, 
 or poet. There is the same novelty when 
 we view things from the standpoint and 
 with the eye of the world's greatest re- 
 ligious genius. When one sees things as 
 Jesus saw them, they get a vital interest 
 
THE REINCARNATION OF CHRIST 93 
 
 through the sense of the values which he 
 attached to them. He saw life in a clearer 
 moral perspective than any one who has 
 ever lived. He put highest in the scale 
 those human beings who were possessed 
 of the unselfish ideals of love and who 
 made all else subordinate to them. In 
 comparison with such, those who devoted 
 themselves chiefly to riches or pleasure 
 or fame stood far below. Again it was 
 not the quantity so much as the quality 
 of a man's virtue which gained his ap- 
 proval. The widow giving her mite for 
 a good cause really did more in his sight" 
 than those who out of their riches gave 
 large sums. Jesus was not affected by 
 the outward appearance which so easily 
 deceived others, and therefore he esti- 
 mated men with a fairness and largeness 
 of vision which often reversed the ordi- 
 nary judgments. Take any one of rrs 
 great ideas such as humility, love, provi- 
 dence or eternity and look at the world 
 through it. It is like looking through' 
 colored lenses. Or better still, it is like 
 using lenses of different convexity. When 
 
04 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 you reverse the opera glass, all the objects 
 about you fall away into surprising dis^ 
 tances. And when you go into a laughing 
 gallery you are amused at the different 
 forms and proportions under which you 
 appear. The qualities of life which Jesus 
 constantly employed have much the same 
 effect in our estimates of character. They 
 bring into the foreground Lazarus in- 
 stead of Dives, the widow with her mite 
 instead of the rich men, the innocent child 
 instead of the selfrighteous Scribe, the 
 obscure publican rather than the Pharisee. 
 Through the eye of Jesus one sees no 
 color lines between races of men. The 
 only distinctions are moral and spiritual. 
 One sees none of the titles and ranks and 
 classes of society except those which are 
 founded upon character. What appeared 
 small and remote before has moved into 
 the foreground and become great. The 
 experience of Christian people has often 
 been of this kind, so that they have given 
 up the baubles of pleasure and selfish ease 
 to work for new values which Christ re- 
 veals. 
 
THE REINCARNATION OF CHRIST 95 
 
 To have Christ in one's heart also in- 
 volves growth. One whose life is all 
 settled so that it involves no problems, 
 no doubts, no aspirations may very well 
 believe that he does not possess Christ. 
 In St. Paul, Christ was an unsettling and 
 disturbing presence, constantly urging 
 him on to larger tasks, exposing him 
 to new dangers, and revealing to him new 
 visions of truth and duty. Christ took 
 him out of Jerusalem into Asia, and from 
 Asia to Europe, from Ephesus to Corinth, 
 and from Corinth to Athens and finally 
 to Rome. He was never suffered to re- 
 main long in a place. That divine unrest, 
 that urgency toward other and larger 
 things in his outward life, was accom- 
 panied by mental unrest and spiritual 
 struggle. He was ever pressing forward 
 toward the mark of his calling, and anx- 
 iously apprehensive lest having saved 
 others he might himself become a cast-a- 
 way. He constantly urged his converts 
 to grow in grace and knowledge, and the 
 ideal which he set before them was noth- 
 ing less than the perfect stature of Christ. 
 
96 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 He rebuked all signs of indolence, and of 
 false contentment. He urged them to 
 study the scriptures, to stimulate one an- 
 other by speech and by noble example, 
 and to be always open minded toward 
 the truth. To suppress the deeper ques- 
 tionings of the soul or to refuse to take 
 up new duties because they were strange 
 or difficult, would have been to quench" 
 the divine spirit within. Paul consoled 
 himself that with new sufferings and new 
 duties came new strength. "My grace is 
 sufficient for thee" was the assurance by 
 which he went bravely forward, running 
 the race with all his might and fighting 
 all manner of foes. 
 
 A third result which comes from the 
 possession of the mind of Christ is free- 
 dom. The Christian is free from all ex- 
 ternal authority. Not even Christ imposes 
 any arbitrary demands upon him. The 
 Christian is not like a boy working a 
 problem in arithmetic and stopping fre- 
 quently to refer to the rule. The true 
 Christian's conscience and will are so per- 
 meated by the spirit of Christ that he 
 
TEE REINCARNATION OF CHRIST 97 
 
 judges for himself whether certain con- 
 duct is right. Jesus did not attempt to 
 lay down specific rules. He only insisted 
 on having the heart right, the disposition 
 pure, and the will responsive to the good. 
 When these conditions were present the 
 individual would not go wrong. 
 
 This freedom of the Christian is likt 
 the freedom of an experienced traveler. 
 He does not have to turn all the while 
 to the maps and directions of a guide book. 
 He moves freely and joyfully among the 
 wonders and upon the highways of the 
 moral life, not because he has discarded 
 the book but because he has its principles 
 in his heart. Or again he is a free citizen 
 of the state, not because he defies the 
 law, but because he fulfills it spontane- 
 ously. To be peaceable, and honest and 
 sober belongs to his plan of life. He does 
 not need to trouble himself about the 
 laws pertaining to these things any more 
 than an educated man needs to study the 
 alphabet or the multiplication table. Even 
 where he meets new experiences and un- 
 dertakes more difficult moral tasks, he pos- 
 
98 TEE DIVINITY OF CllRIHT 
 
 sesses the freedom of the artist who en- 
 joys his work. He exerts himself with 
 a sense of joy and satisfaction, which 
 make him unconscious of fatigue, and 
 which carry him uncomplaining through 
 difficulties and discouragements. Perfect 
 love casts out fear, and a deep trust takes 
 away all anxious thought. 
 
 This freedom from worry is one of the 
 greatest charms of the religious life. It 
 is well illustrated in the life of Brother 
 Lawrence, a monk of the seventeenth 
 century. He went into the monastery to 
 punish himself, to make a strenuous and 
 painful sacrifice of himself to God. "I 
 engaged in a religious life only for the 
 love of God," he says, "and I have en- 
 deavored to act purely for the love of 
 God." "But God disappointed him, for 
 from that time he met with nothing but 
 satisfaction, and passed his life in perfect 
 liberty and continual joy. He had to do 
 work in the kitchen (to which he had a 
 great aversion) but accustomed himself 
 to do everything there for the love of 
 God, and with prayer upon all occasions 
 
THE REINCARNATION OF CHRIST 99 
 
 for his grace to do his work well, and had 
 found everything easy during fifteen years 
 that he had been employed there." 
 
 It is often in what seem to be the most 
 unfavorable circumstances like these that 
 the presence and power of one's religion 
 appears. Tolstoi illustrates this in his 
 novel "War and Peace." The Russian 
 hero, Peter, is immensely rich, but during 
 Napoleon's invasion is taken prisoner and 
 forced on long marches in the retreat of 
 the French. Suffering all forms of un- 
 wonted exposure and privation, he never- 
 theless "appreciated for the first time, be- 
 cause he was deprived of it, the happiness 
 of eating when he was hungry, of drinking 
 when he was thirsty, of sleeping when 
 he was sleepy and of talking when he 
 felt the desire to exchange some words. 
 In it all, he felt a strange moral calm. 
 He learnt that man is meant for happiness, 
 and this happiness is in him, in the satis- 
 faction of the daily needs of existence and 
 that unhappiness is the fatal result, not 
 of our need, but of our abundance. When 
 calm reigned in the camp, and the embers 
 
100 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 paled, and little by little went out, the full 
 moon had reached the zenith. The woods 
 and the fields round about lay clearly 
 visible; and beyond the inundation of light 
 which filled them, the view plunged into 
 the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast 
 his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that 
 hour with myriads of stars. 'All that is 
 mine,' he thought. 'All that is in me, is 
 me ! and that is what they think they have 
 taken prisoner. That is what they have 
 shut up in a cabin.' So he smiled, and 
 turned in to sleep among his comrades." 
 Such experiences as these were familiar 
 to the Apostle Paul. "I have learned" 
 he says, "in whatsoever state I am there- 
 with to be content. I know both how to 
 be abased, and how to abound, every- 
 where and in all things I am instructed 
 both to be full and to be hungry, both to 
 abound and to suffer need. I can do all 
 things through Christ who strengtheneth 
 me." 
 
 The indwelling of Christ, is then, we 
 may conclude, one way of expressing the 
 fact that God is in us, and that he enters 
 
THE REINCARNATION OF CHRWT 101 
 
 more and more fully as we open our hearts 
 to him. The great test of his presence is 
 no strange experience. It is intensely 
 practical. It is the life we live, and it is 
 capable therefore of objective realization 
 by ourselves and others. Among these 
 moral fruits of the spirit abiding in us, 
 are the Christian's interest in life, his 
 sense of its eternal newness, its refresh- 
 ing beauty and its inexhaustible resources. 
 The true Christian is also a growing soul, 
 constantly transformed from glory to 
 glory, ever wrestling, battling and win- 
 ning spiritual victories. And finally the 
 soul possessed by Christ enjoys a freedom 
 and a peace which the world cannot give 
 nor take away, — a serene calm which at- 
 tends his keenest activity and deepest 
 sorrow — a profound sense that all things 
 work together for good to them that love 
 God. 
 
"How our hearts glowed," the disciples said 
 to each other, "while he was talking to us on 
 the road, and when he explained the Scriptures 
 to us!" Then they got up and returned without 
 loss of time to Jerusalem, where they found the 
 eleven and their companions all together, who 
 told them that the Master had. really risen 
 from the grave, and had appeared to Simon. So 
 they related what had happened on their road, 
 and how they had recognized Jesus on his break- 
 ing the bread. While they were still talking 
 about these things, Jesus himself stood among 
 them, and greeted them with his blessing. 
 
 St. Luke 24:32-36. 
 
VI. 
 
 TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST. 
 
 "Where two or three are gathered to- 
 gether in my name, there am I in the 
 midst of them." 
 
 This text has been an inspiration to lit- 
 tle groups of Christians ever since the 
 words were spoken. How many times 
 it has been repeated in a poorly attended 
 prayer-meeting! How often it has been 
 the heartening message of the faithful few 
 who were trying to keep up a mission 
 church, or to preserve the forms of wor- 
 ship in an organization many of whose 
 members had been spiritually frost-bitten ! 
 Do you not recall your experience as a 
 child, when you had been taken to one 
 of the mid-week meetings of the church? 
 As the gray-haired elder prayed, he 
 seemed to repeat the words of this text 
 both as a kind of challenge for their ful- 
 fillment and as an assurance that they 
 were already realized by the actual pres- 
 
104 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 ence of Christ. "Where two or three are 
 gathered together in my name, there am 
 I in the midst of them" — perhaps you cau- 
 tiously looked about over the bowed heads 
 to see if there were really a heavenly 
 presence added to the earnest company. 
 With more maturity you accepted whai. 
 was probably the common view, that 
 Christ was there in a spiritual presence, 
 invisible, yet somehow just separated 
 from sight by the thinnest veil through 
 which, as of old, it would be easy for 
 him to appear to the bodily eye. Or you 
 thought of him as far away in another 
 world, yet able to see and hear and share 
 in all that his loyal disciples experienced. 
 How many full-grown men and women 
 have longed for some certain, tangible 
 evidence of that presence. They have 
 prayed and waited and watched. A few 
 have become ecstatic over a vision of 
 Christ granted them in dreams or in hal- 
 lucinations, but the great majority of nor- 
 mal folk have either given it all up as 
 impossible or have been content with the 
 conviction that since Christ promised it, 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 105 
 
 the promise must be fulfilled, though mor- 
 tals may not know how it is accomplished. 
 I confess that it is with mingled sur- 
 prise and satisfaction that I have found 
 an unexpected truth and reasonableness 
 in these words, when interpreted in terms 
 of our everyday and matter-of-fact ex- 
 periences. Indeed, they express in the 
 simplest way the profound truth that re- 
 ligion lives in the vital association and 
 companionship of those who meet together 
 in the interest of great concerns. Let us 
 begin with plain and homely matters. 
 When two or three people meet, even in 
 the most casual manner, something is 
 sure to happen. Strangers just intro- 
 duced strike fire at once because each finds 
 the other interested in baseball or in poli- 
 tics and discovers that he is on the "right 
 side" in his enthusiasm. Perhaps they 
 have mutual friends, have read the same 
 book, both love music or the drama, or 
 have an interest in aeroplanes or fruit- 
 farms. Any group of Americans are prac- 
 tically certain to warm up with a common 
 emotion over the higher cost of living, or 
 
106 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 the jokes of Mark Twain, or the memory 
 of Abraham Lincoln. Wherever people 
 get together, however slight the occasion, 
 there rises in their midst this common fac- 
 tor, this sense of the things they experi- 
 ence as fellow-travelers in the world. 
 
 One seldom sits down in a street-car, 
 even where the people are the remotest 
 strangers, without feeling a kind of stir- 
 ring of instincts deep in his nature. The 
 occupants of the car look him over, with 
 side-glances or with a stare, according to 
 the kind of people they are, and presently 
 they accept him and settle into seeming 
 indifference to his presence. In a half- 
 hour's ride, in spite of the strangeness and 
 the changes of passengers, there begins to 
 form a kind of coagulation of personalities, 
 a certain sense of a company, of a kind 
 of fellow feeling and kinship. The reality 
 and depth of this mood is proved by any 
 slight incident which gives it definite 
 shape and expression. In case of sudden 
 rain, there is a shifting of seats and per- 
 haps an audible complaint about the 
 weather to which everyone inwardly as- 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 107 
 
 sents, although the regard for "good form" 
 may keep all faces quite rigid and expres- 
 sionless. Or if a coal wagon has broken 
 down on the track, there is soon a craning 
 of necks, a general wave of depression, 
 and a sort of mutual resentment at the 
 wagon, with a corresponding sense of 
 sympathy for all who suffer together the 
 inconvenience and irritation of the delay. 
 If this nascent social attitude can germi- 
 nate under such conditions in so short a 
 time, to what extent may it not develop 
 when noble souls unite their wills in a 
 great service for Christ and the world? It 
 is sometimes a formless and shadowy 
 presence, dissolving with the passing mo- 
 ment, but again it is a presence, majestic, 
 and stable, with a personality dependable 
 and consistent. Where the associations 
 are based upon great concerns and are 
 continued through a long period of time, 
 the common consciousness rises to its 
 most impressive development. It welds 
 together a group of people, — a family, a 
 clan or a race — in devotion to the highest 
 interests. That is the secret of Christian- 
 
108 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 ity. It draws men into great tasks, and 
 by virtue of common interests develops in 
 them a spirit of comradeship, of commun- 
 ion and fellowship. Jesus undoubtedly 
 shared this feeling with his disciples. He 
 felt himself one with them in a simple 
 bond of brotherhood and friendship. After 
 his death he was still with them in spirit 
 His words and his personality lived in 
 their imaginations and in their loyal mem- 
 ories. Where any two or three were to- 
 gether, they talked of him and reminded 
 each other of what he had said, and of 
 how he had lived among them. Their 
 loyalty to him was the strongest bond 
 between them and the strength of that 
 bond was increased by every obstacle 
 they encountered. Their persecutions, 
 imprisonments and chains seemed only to 
 unite them the more closely and to give 
 them a heightened sense of the power and 
 consolation of his spiritual presence. 
 
 Now the laws of the inner life do not 
 change in any radical way from age to 
 age. The psychical experiences are the 
 same for us as they were for the imme- 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 109 
 
 diate disciples of Jesus. The same phe- 
 nomena constitute the essence of religion 
 now as then, and there is the same se- 
 quence in the events of the spiritual world. 
 The central thing emphasized in the 
 text is the fundamental importance of 
 getting together in the interests of great 
 concerns, gathering together in the name 
 of Christ. "In the name of Christ" here 
 means, in the spirit of Christ, or with the 
 mind of Christ. It cannot mean the union 
 of people under the mere literal name of 
 Christ. It is conceivable that persons 
 might unite under his name and share in 
 no way in his spirit. There is still too 
 much of such superstition in the world, 
 too much shouting of Lord ! Lord ! and too 
 little doing of his will. To gather to- 
 gether in the name of Christ must be taken 
 to mean meeting in the interest of such 
 things as belong to his spiritual kingdom, 
 meeting in behalf of justice and mercy 
 and truth. It may be a committee on 
 church finances, or an earnest private con- 
 versation in which the name of Christ 
 is scarcely mentioned at all, yet there 
 
110 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 may be generated that wonderful sense 
 of fellowship in which something more 
 is felt than was present in the sep- 
 arate individuals before they met. The 
 particular things which Christ taught 
 may not be clearly apprehended by 
 the company, but the notion that they 
 are assembled to participate in the 
 great cause with which his name is 
 identified touches each of them, even the 
 least one, with a new importance and 
 value. The plainest little church, of the 
 most ignorant and benighted souls, is 
 somehow transformed by the very fact 
 that they meet under the banner of a 
 mighty cause. They are there thinking, 
 as best they can, of the great theme of 
 the Bible, the redemption of the human 
 race. They feel some share in the vast 
 enterprise and their souls straighten up 
 and expand as they sing: 
 
 "I love thy kingdom, Lord!" 
 
 A new life wells up within them as 
 they consecrate themselves with the 
 words : 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 111 
 
 'Tor her my tears shall fall, 
 For her my prayers ascend; 
 To her my cares and toils be given, 
 Till toils and cares shall end." 
 
 Among the Disciples of Christ alone, 
 there are three or four thousand churches 
 without regular pastors, and yet they 
 meet together every week for a social 
 service and for the observance of the 
 Lord's Supper. The members themselves 
 read the Scriptures, and sing the familiar 
 songs. Some of their number tell per- 
 sonal experiences, confess their own fail- 
 ures, utter their faith, and exhort one an- 
 other to greater endeavor. Then some- 
 one, an older man or one who is a leader 
 because of some talent or education, pre- 
 sides at the communion service. He has 
 come there from his farm or his shop with 
 a sense of responsibility. He is sincerely 
 anxious to honor the service by the best 
 he ca nrender. His personal appearance 
 bears the marks of a thoughtfulness be- 
 yond his daily habit. He is to fulfil a 
 sacred office among his fellows and it ele- 
 vates him by the very power of its asso- 
 
112 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 ciations into a somewhat finer being. 
 Likewise all of the participants grow quiet 
 and subdued as they partake of the em- 
 blems. The smallness, petty jealousies 
 and selfishness of life seem checked and 
 obliterated by memories of Christ, and 
 there rises in their midst something of his 
 spirit of forgiveness and of generous sym- 
 pathy. It is no accident, nor mere con- 
 vention which leads them to sing so often 
 at the close of the service that hymn of 
 fellowship and hope: 
 
 "Blest be the tie that binds 
 Our hearts in Christian love: 
 The fellowship of kindred minds 
 Is like to that above." 
 
 There is no place in the world where 
 this spirit of fellowship is so accessible, 
 so spontaneous and overflowing, as in the 
 life of the churches. Fraternal orders 
 possess a measure of it, and just on that 
 account they persist century after century, 
 but they are a select group, secret and 
 exclusive. It is as if they feared, and no 
 doubt wisely, that publicity and utter de- 
 mocracy would dispel the charm of their 
 association. But the church has such a 
 tenacious coherence that it can withstand 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 113 
 
 any diversity and almost any distraction. 
 Its doors are absolutely open to all 
 comers. Its most sacred ordinances are 
 conducted where any one may see. Men, 
 women and children, saints, sinners and 
 lukewarm souls mingle before her altars 
 and yet her message and her fask create 
 on every occasion some glow of reverence 
 and of fellowship. The church is able to 
 cultivate this attitude literally on the 
 street-corners and among the busy throng. 
 Somehow people do not laugh at the Sal- 
 vation Army. They may not themselves 
 be able to join it or to approve the meth- 
 ods, but there is too much sincerity and 
 earnestness in the Army to allow its street 
 services to become utterly ridiculous. Let 
 us agree then that when people are gath- 
 ered together in the great cause of human 
 redemption something significant is sure 
 to happen. 
 
 Just what happens we may describe 
 still further. There is an increase of per- 
 sonality, an addition of something which 
 was not there before. Emerson called it 
 the Over-Soul, an encircling presence 
 
114 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 which seems to surround and flow be- 
 tween two kindred spirits. This some- 
 thing-plus, which appears when two 
 minds meet, is hinted at in the saying 
 that "two heads are better than one." But 
 it has been pointed out that what Christ 
 says is that two heads are better than 
 two. "There still remain the two," says 
 Stanton Coit, "but a third party — not 
 only a mightier, but one different in gifts 
 and qualities — springs into existence. 
 Wherever there are two together, there 
 are always three, and the third is master, 
 by divine right." It is not to be under- 
 stood that this phenomenon transpires 
 only when just two or three are present, 
 but that this is the lower limit of the ex- 
 perience. That enlargement of horizon, 
 and increment of power which spring 
 from the union of two or three persons in 
 a great task, occurs in still greater meas- 
 ure where there are ten or one hundred. 
 I do not refer merely to the great emo- 
 tional tension which the crowd begets. 
 That, in itself, may become a mere riot of 
 feeling or intoxication of numbers. But 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 115 
 
 in well-ordered and rationally controlled 
 assemblies there is an influence which 
 works also for intellectual quickening and 
 for the refinement of moral insight and 
 achievement. 
 
 In the history of invention and of other 
 scientific achievements a similar value of 
 association is illustrated. The develop- 
 ment of the aeroplane is a familiar illus- 
 tration. The Wright brothers work not 
 only with each other, but they keep in 
 touch with the history of the mechanical 
 devices akin to any parts of the ones they 
 are building, and inform themselves of 
 all similar experiments in the world. 
 Their results, in turn, are appropriated by 
 others also, and at the present time hun- 
 dreds of minds are co-operating more or 
 less consciously and intentionally in the 
 realization of the great end, aerial naviga- 
 tion. The union of these minds creates 
 an atmosphere in which each individual is 
 stimulated, disciplined and guided by an 
 intelligence shared in a measure by all, 
 but which is greater than any single mind. 
 It is the same in moral and spiritual con- 
 
116 TEE DIVINITY OF CERIST 
 
 cerns. They are not diminished by shar- 
 ing them with others. On the contrary, 
 the more they are diffused and shared, the 
 more do they grow and flourish, and the 
 more intense becomes the encompassing 
 medium which they create. 
 
 If the presence of Christ, then, is more 
 real to assembled individuals than it is to 
 isolated persons, — and this is capable of 
 abundant demonstration, — we may still 
 inquire what is the nature of that pres- 
 ence. Must it be supposed that something 
 comes down from above to fulfill the 
 promise of Jesus made to his disciples, or 
 may we believe that what happens is as 
 natural and normal as anything we ex- 
 perience? Is the Christ who dwells in 
 the midst of our fellowship today iden- 
 tical with the Jesus who lived in Nazareth 
 centuries ago? Is he literally a being who 
 ascended bodily into the heavens? Or is 
 he the Holy Spirit who dwells in our 
 midst whenever we bring our minds and 
 hearts into communion with one another 
 and with the purpose and spirit of the 
 historical Jesus? Jesus promised his dis- 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 117 
 
 ciples a Comforter, and that Comforter is 
 represented by the apostles as the Holy 
 Spirit. In many passages in the New 
 Testament there is also the doctrine of the 
 Logos, the Word, which is the inner life 
 of the world and the light of men, "that 
 true Light which lighteth every man that 
 cometh into the world." 
 
 This biblical doctrine of the inner 
 Light is true to the facts of experi- 
 ence. We talk of the crowd-spirit 
 and of group-consciousness. The Group- 
 Spirit is found preeminently in the 
 places of religious work and wor- 
 ship. That Spirit is as real as the Spirit 
 of the market-place, or the Spirit of the 
 Political Party, or the Spirit of Science 
 itself, all of which spirits every one 
 knows to be so real. It is a Spirit which 
 is identified with our most vital and 
 urgent interests. It is not something pe- 
 culiar to a certain age or limited to some 
 arbitrary gift of the deity. It is rather 
 a direct and natural expression of our 
 deepest experiences, of those experiences 
 in which we quicken each other and gen- 
 
118 TEE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 erate through our fellowship, a common 
 consciousness which is somehow larger 
 and wiser and more gracious than any 
 one of us, or than all of us when separate 
 and alone. 
 
 There is no more of mystery here than 
 in our commonest work. When a few of 
 us sit together as a committee of our 
 school or club or business, there is at 
 once a sense of control of all merely indi- 
 vidual judgments. We often record what 
 we call "the sense of the meeting." We 
 almost instinctively put forward our pri- 
 vate thoughts with a sense of their mea- 
 greness. When they occurred to us be- 
 forehand, in solitude, they seemed so 
 adequate and clear. But now our words 
 meet that over-arching personality before 
 whom they must be tested. Or, our 
 scared and frightened little self receives 
 a great expansion and encouragement by 
 the endorsement of the larger social self. 
 Then we rejoice and take courage. It is 
 here also that we feel ourselves to be in 
 most immediate and vital relation with 
 the sources of power. We are face to 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 119 
 
 face with the original fountains of wis- 
 dom and strength. In religious fellow- 
 ship of this kind we are not merely re- 
 peating what some one else has discov- 
 ered, we are not dependent upon any 
 priest or mediator. Ours is then a faith, 
 such as George Eliot describes : 
 
 a faith 
 Taught by no priest, but by our beating hearts: 
 Faith to each other; the fidelity 
 Of men whose pulses leap with kindred fire, 
 Who in the flash of eyes, the clasp of hands, 
 Nay, in the silent bodily presence, feel 
 The mystic stirrings of a common life 
 That makes the many one." 
 
 The same reverence for this capacity of 
 every individual to share in and to con- 
 tribute to the spiritual life is expressed in 
 these lines of Walt Whitman: 
 
 "Painters have painted their swarming groups, 
 
 and the center figure of all, 
 From the head of the center figure spreading a 
 
 nimbus of gold-colored light; 
 But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no bead 
 
 without its nimbus of gold-colored light. 
 From my hand, from the brain of every man and 
 
 woman it streams, effulgently flowing forever. 
 Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, 
 
 that you be my poem. 
 
120 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 I will leave all, and come and make the hymns 
 
 of you. 
 None has understood you, but I understand you; 
 None has done justice to you — you have not done 
 
 justice to yourself; 
 None but has found you imperfect; I only find no 
 
 imperfection in you; 
 None but would subordinate you; I only am he 
 
 who will never consent to subordinate you; 
 I only am he who places over you no master, or 
 
 owner, or better, or God, beyond what awaits 
 
 intrinsically in yourself." 
 
 "From the brain of every man and 
 woman it streams, effulgently flowing 
 forever" — this stream of light flowing 
 from the myriads of heads assembled in 
 the great cause of human welfare, is the 
 spirit of the group. It is the Holy Spirit 
 of our divinest and loftiest companion- 
 ships. We cannot be too reverent toward 
 it. We need constantly its baptism and 
 its communion. And above all, we must 
 accept its instruction and its guidance. 
 To deny or reject this Holy Spirit is the 
 greatest of sins. It is the denial of one's 
 larger self, the rejection of the living 
 oracles of God. 
 
 This comradeship of noble endeavor is 
 the upper realm where Christ meets his 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 121 
 
 disciples most intimately. He appears in 
 such a fellowship when all outer doors are 
 closed. That is the fascination and be- 
 witchment of spiritual enterprises. They 
 accomplish objective and tangible results, 
 but they also bring the sense of divine 
 companionship. They make men con- 
 scious of being co-workers with God. 
 
 It is in this experience that the most 
 convincing evidences of religion live. The 
 adventures of faith confirm the hearts of 
 those engaged in them,, and they bear ir- 
 resistible witness to the world. There is 
 always something lacking in theoretical 
 proofs. They are at best only partial 
 embodiments of the living reality, but the 
 concerted action of Christian men, aglow 
 with the enthusiasm of an unselfish, holy 
 cause possesses the full measure of real- 
 ity. Whenever they meet to counsel for 
 some noble end ; whenever they express 
 in forms of worship the toil and warfare, 
 the tragedy and triumph of man's re- 
 demption, there cluster about them a 
 mighty cloud of witnesses and within 
 their midst rises the majestic and gracious 
 
122 THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST 
 
 figure of Christ. In such moments there 
 is an increment of life, a new measure of 
 comfort and inspiration. 
 
 The great hymns of fellowship and com- 
 munion have their power and meaning in 
 this fact. They proclaim that spiritual 
 comradeship brings strength and succor 
 for every need. Even two or three, welded 
 together in such fellowship, gain thereby 
 that other presence. That is the quicken- 
 ing message which rings in the depths of 
 Clough's great "Hymn of Fellow-help": 
 
 When the enemy is near thee, 
 In our hands we will upbear thee: 
 He shall neither scathe nor scare thee, 
 He shall fly thee and shall fear thee. 
 Call on us! 
 
 Call when all good friends have left thee, 
 Of good sights and sounds bereft thee; 
 Call when hope and heart are sinking, 
 When the brain is sick with thinking: 
 Help, help! 
 
 When the panic comes upon thee, 
 Hope and choice have all foregone thee, 
 Fate and force are closing o'er thee, 
 And but one way stands before thee, 
 Call on us! 
 
TWO OR THREE AND CHRIST 123 
 
 Oh, if thou dost not call, 
 Be but faithful, that is all. 
 Go right on, and close behind thee 
 There shall follow still and find thee 
 Help, sure help.