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 Chu fph's one foundation : Christ and rec 
 
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THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
WORKS BY 
 W. ROBERTSON NICOLL, LL.D. 
 
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 Mystical Expositions with an Essay on Christian Mysti- 
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he Church's One 
 Foundation. Christ 
 
 and Recent Criticism 
 
 By the Rev. W. Robertson Nicoll> 
 
 M.A., LL.D., Editor of " The Expositor," 
 
 " The Expositor's Bible," " The Expositor's 
 
 Greek Testament," etc. 
 
 "There is in the Bible above all the personal Christ,. 
 a Personality which men could not have imagined, 
 a. Personality which must be historical, and which 
 must be Divine. '— Professor Robertson Smith 
 
 POPULAR EDITION 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 A. C. ARMSTRONG AND SON 
 
 3 AND S WEST EIGHTEENTH STREET 
 
 LONDON : HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
 
 1905 
 
TO MY FAITHFUL FRIEND 
 
 IAN MACLAREN 
 
PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 This little book is made up out of articles which have 
 already been published in The British Weekly. They 
 have been carefully revised, and some notes and references 
 have been added. But I have endeavoured to make 
 the book intelligible to the plain man. The questions 
 discussed cannot be left to experts. They concern not 
 merely the health, but the existence of the Church. 
 
 I have to acknowledge gratefully the kind help given 
 by the Rev. David Smith, M.A., of Tulliallan, and also 
 the helpful suggestions of the Bishop of Durham, and 
 Mr. George Augustus Simcox, Fellow of Queen's College, 
 Oxford. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 I. — CHRIST AND THE NEWER CRITICISM 14 
 
 II. — THE MODES OF ACCESS TO CHRIST ... 22 
 
 III. — THE HISTORICAL CHRIST : PRELIMINARY AS- 
 SUMPTIONS . .... 30 
 
 IV. — THE HISTORICAL CHRIST : ECCE BOMO ; ECCE 
 
 DEUS 40 
 
 V. — THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS . ... 49 
 
 VI. — THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD FROM THE 
 
 DEAD 56 
 
 VII. — CHRIST'S TRIUMPHANT CAPTIVES ... 64 
 
 VIII. — THE ARGUMENT FROM THE AUREOLE . . 73 
 
 IX. — THE CHRIST OF DREAM 80 
 
 X. — " KEEP " 87 
 
 6 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 The controversy about Christ is essentially a controversy 
 about facts. Christianity is not a sentiment, not a philo- 
 sophy, not even a theological system, but a historical 
 religion. As Westcott says in his last book, " Christ the 
 Word, the Son of God, is Himself the Gospel. The Incarna- 
 tion, the Nativity, the Transfiguration, the Passion, the 
 Resurrection, the Ascension, are the final and absolute 
 revelation to man of God's nature and will. These facts 
 contain, implicitly under the conditions of earth, all that we 
 can know of self, the world, and God, so far as the know- 
 ledge affects our religious life." Or, as Church puts it : 
 " The Christian Church is the most potent fact in the most 
 important ages of the world's progress. It is an institution 
 like the world itself, which has grown up by its own strength 
 and according to its own principle of life, full of good and 
 evil, having as the law of its fate to be knocked about in the 
 stern development of events, exposed, like human society, 
 to all kinds of vicissitudes and alternations, giving occasion 
 to many a scandal, and shaking the faith and loyalty of many 
 a son, showing in ample measure the wear and tear of its 
 existence, battered, injured, sometimes degenerate, some- 
 times improved in one way or another, since those dim and 
 long-distant days when its course began ; but showing in 
 all these ways what a real thing it is, never in the extremity 
 of storms and ruin, never in the deepest degradation of its 
 unfaithfulness losing hold of its own central unchanging 
 faith, and never in its worst days of decay and corruption 
 losing hold of the power of self-correction and hope of 
 
8 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 recovery. . . . And the Christian Church is founded on a 
 definite historic fact — that Jesus Christ, who was crucified, 
 rose from the dead ; and coming from such an Author, 5 it 
 comes to us, bringing with it the Bible. ... A so-called 
 Christianity, ignoring or playing with Christ's Resurrection, 
 and using the Bible as a sort of Homer, may satisfy a class 
 of clever and cultivated persons. . . . But it is well in so 
 serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion 
 may borrow from Christianity, as it may borrow from Plato, 
 or from Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. But it 
 is not Christianity. ... A Christianity which tells us to 
 think of Christ doing good, but to forget and put out of sight 
 Christ risen from the dead, is not true to life. It is as de- 
 lusive to the conscience and the soul as it is illogical to 
 reason." 
 
 When dealing with criticism, old and new, this is never 
 to be forgotten. The Church cannot without disloyalty and 
 cowardice quarrel with criticism as such. It is not held 
 absolutely to any theory of any book. It asks, and it is 
 entitled to ask, the critic : Do you believe in the Incarnation 
 and the Resurrection of Christ ? If his reply is in the 
 affirmative, his process and results are to be examined 
 earnestly and calmly. If he replies in the negative, he has 
 missed the way, and has put himself outside the Church of 
 Christ. If he refuses to answer, his silence has to be 
 interpreted. 
 
 Certain conclusions about the Gospel have been judged 
 by all who maintain them to be fatal to the historic 
 creed. Some one some day may accept them, and be able 
 to show that his predecessors and their antagonists were 
 illogical, that certain critical views may be held in perfect 
 consistency with a loyal faith in the great revealing acts of 
 God. But he must be prepared to show how this is so, 
 especially at a time when many critics frankly declare that 
 the Incarnation and Resurrection of the Son of God are no 
 longer credible. Every part of the Church Catholic must 
 define its position and defend it. 
 
INTRODUCTION 9 
 
 The issue is old, and must constantly recur. The 
 Protestant Synod of France discussed it most ably at their 
 memorable meeting in 1872. It was the first meeting of 
 the Synod for more than two hundred years. The Court 
 had been silenced by the power of the State. A desire for 
 unshackled freedom had grown up, especially after the fall 
 of the Empire and the rise of the Republic. M. Guizot 
 obtained the permission of M. Thiers to convene a meeting 
 where the limits of Church membership should be decided. 
 In the Temple du Saint Esprit the Synod had to face the 
 question : What is and what is not the Christian religion ? 
 Who are and who are not entitled to call themselves mem- 
 bers of the Christian Church ? The problem was faced with 
 the highest ability, and with perfect honesty. M. Guizot 
 said : " As for me, I am a Christian. I know What my 
 symbol is. There are men sitting by my side who do not 
 accept the Christian religion. They have a sincere belief 
 in God. I have been careful not to deny that these men 
 have a religion. Let them form a Deistical Church : I shall 
 be glad of it ; but assuredly the difference is great between 
 them and Christians." The question then was : Is Deism 
 Christianity ? Should all men who have a belief in God, 
 and a pious feeling towards Him, be regarded as Christians, 
 and be included in one common organisation ? The 
 Liberals neither disguised nor evaded the issue. Their 
 champion said : "In my eyes a man is a Christian who, 
 though a sinner, has a joyous confidence in God." He 
 denied that any specifically Christian belief was necessary 
 to the Christian religion, and laid down the limits of Church 
 association which would make room for every religiously 
 minded Deist. M. Bois, of Montauban, the leader of the 
 Orthodox party, met him squarely by moving that the 
 Synod adopt as its Confession " salvation by faith in Jesus 
 Christ, the only begotten Son of God, who died for our 
 offences, and rose again for our justification. It preserves 
 and maintains as the basis of its teaching, its worship, and 
 its discipline the great Christian facts that are expressed in 
 
io THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 its religious solemnities and its liturgies." The difference 
 between his opponents' creed and his own, he described as 
 a difference between two religions. 
 
 Some attempt was made on the part of the Liberals to 
 show that they interpreted spiritually the Christian facts. 
 The answer was given by M. Dhombres : " Sftiritualiser ce 
 n'est pas vaporiser. When a fact is explained in such a 
 manner as to make it disappear, that process is no longer 
 called the taking a spiritual view of it." Finally M. Bois 
 summed up the issue before the vote : " The question which 
 divides us is this : Is there or is there not — Yes or No — a 
 supernatural revelation of God ? Has God created, loved, 
 and saved us by His Son ? If so, is this compatible with 
 its contradictory ? If Christianity is a supernatural revela- 
 tion of God, it is not the supreme effort of the human reason. 
 There are no shades or degrees here ; the proposition is 
 either wholly true or wholly false." On the whole discus- 
 sion, M. Guizot, who had been present for more than sixty 
 years at many parliamentary struggles in which the first 
 orators of France were engaged, said he had never seen any 
 argument which had a more elevated or a more dignified 
 character, or which was more remarkable for form and 
 substance. The Synod adopted the motion of M. Bois by 
 a majority of sixty-one against forty-five. No one argues 
 against the right of philosophers to affirm that goodness is 
 everything, that miracles are impossible, and that nothing 
 in Jesus Christ has any importance except His moral 
 teaching. 
 
 But Christian believers in revelation are compelled to 
 say that these philosophers are not Christians. If they 
 refuse to do so, they are declaring that in their opinion these 
 beliefs have no supreme importance. To say this is to 
 incur the penalty of extinction. For Christianity dies when 
 it passes altogether into the philosophic region. To believe 
 in the Incarnation and the Resurrection is to put these facts 
 into the foreground. Either they are first or they are 
 nowhere. The man who thinks he can hold them and keep 
 
INTRODUCTION n 
 
 them in the background deceives himself. They are, and 
 they ever must be, first of all. So, then, the battle turns 
 on their truth or falsehood. It does not turn on the in- 
 errancy of the Gospel narrative. It does not turn even on 
 the authorship of the Gospels. Faith is not a belief in a 
 book, but a belief in a living Christ. If there is no living 
 Christ to trust to, Christianity passes into mist and goes 
 down the wind. 
 
 The Christian Church is entitled and bound to take part 
 in the critical and historical study of the New Testament. 
 It has the right, indeed, to disregard flippancy and frivolity. 
 Such criticism as Huxley bestowed on what he was pleased 
 to call " the Gadarene pig affair " may well be ignored. 
 John Morley, in his piece on Voltaire, put the reason as well 
 as it can be put. He says : " The best natures are most 
 violently irritated and outraged by mocking and satiric 
 attack upon the minor details, the accidents, the outside 
 of the objects of faith, when they would have been affected 
 in a very different way by a contrast between the loftiest 
 parts of their own belief and the loftiest parts of some other 
 belief. Many persons who would listen to a grave attack 
 on the consistency, reasonableness, and elevation of the 
 currently ascribed attributes of the Godhead with some- 
 thing of the respect due to the profound solemnity of the 
 subject, would turn with deaf and implacable resentment 
 upon one who would make merry over the swine of Gadara." 
 When Christians are asked to furnish a reply to every fresh 
 assault on the Gospel history, they are entitled to say that 
 if they can establish the great faiths of the historic creed, 
 the critic who denies these, and justifies the denial on the 
 grounds of criticism, must be in error. To establish the 
 sinlessness of Christ' and His Resurrection is virtually to 
 refute many critical arguments. 
 
 Further, in dealing with analysis as applied to the 
 Gospels, we are entitled to ask for the principles on which 
 the so-called historical and literary criticism is carried on. 
 For our part, we have the deepest conviction that until 
 
12 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 the principles of criticism are established by an induc- 
 tion based on the phenomena of literature generally, little 
 that is solid or certain can be established. It is past 
 dispute that English criticism is unable, as a rule, to assign 
 authorship to an anonymous contemporary book. It 
 is unable, as a rule, to distinguish between the work of 
 two collaborators. It is unable, in short, to perform any 
 of these achievements which are believed possible when the 
 Scriptures are handled. We are convinced, further, that 
 the whole history of English literature will show that 
 English criticism was always just as powerless as it is now. 
 There may be probabilities ; but, as a rule, the likely ex- 
 planation is not the true explanation. In other words, the 
 answer to much sceptical criticism is to be found in show- 
 ing, by a catena of instances, that criticism is attempting 
 a task of which it is fundamentally incapable. Christians 
 are also entitled to ask for more agreement between critics 
 of the Gospel history than has yet been reached. In the 
 face of the differences that divide the extreme critics, one 
 may well doubt whether the problem of the composition 
 of the Gospels is soluble. One may be perfectly certain 
 that it has not been solved. 
 
 Again, Christians are entitled to insist upon knowing 
 the presuppositions of their adversaries. To begin the 
 study of the origins of Christianity with a theory about the 
 world and its management which from the first settles 
 arbitrarily the most important questions involved, vitiates 
 the whole process of reasoning. Like the mummers of old, 
 sceptical critics send one before them with a broom to 
 sweep the stage clear of everything for their drama. If 
 we assume at the threshold of Gospel study that everything 
 in the nature of miracle is impossible, then the specific 
 questions are decided before the criticism begins to operate 
 in earnest. The naturalistic critics approach the Christian 
 records with an a priori theory, and impose it upon them, 
 twisting the history into agreement with it, and cutting 
 out what cannot be twisted. For example, the earlier 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 naturalistic critics, Paulus, Eichhorn, and the rest, insisted on 
 giving a non-miraculous interpretation. Strauss perceived 
 the unscientific character of this method, and set out with 
 the mythical hypothesis. Baur set to work with a belief 
 in the all-sufficiency of the Hegelian theory of development 
 through antagonism. He saw tendency everywhere. As 
 Bruce said of his method : " Anything additional, putting 
 more contents into the person and teaching of Jesus than 
 suits the initial stage of development, must be reckoned 
 spurious. If we find Jesus in any of the Gospels claiming 
 to be a superhuman being, such texts may with the utmost 
 confidence be set aside as spurious. Such a thought could 
 not possibly belong to the initial stage, but only to the 
 final, when the human Messiah had developed into a deity, 
 through the love and reverence of his followers." Abbott 
 sets out with the foregone conclusion of the impossibility 
 of miracles. Matthew Arnold says : " Our popular religion 
 at present conceives the birth, ministry, and death of Christ 
 as altogether steeped in prodigy, brimful of miracle, and 
 miracles do not happen." Schmiedel starts with the hypo- 
 thesis of tendencies, and discovers them. He sees Paulinism 
 and Ebionitism in Luke, and opposing tendencies in 
 Matthew (universalism and particularism). Moffatt, who 
 does not clearly define his attitude towards the Incarnation 
 and Resurrection, regards Matthew xxviii. 16-20 as a later 
 appendix on the a priori ground that the following cannot 
 be primitive : (1) Universal mission, (2) The baptismal 
 formula, (3) The Trinitarian formula. The subject might 
 be illustrated indefinitely. In these cases the difference 
 is upon first principles. Those who take the ground that 
 miracles cannot happen need not examine the Gospels 
 in order to reject Christianity, for certainly it is the 
 supernatural character of Christianity that constitutes its 
 differentia, its true and necessary essence. 
 
 These men start the study of the Gospel history with 
 the assumption that God cannot visit and redeem His 
 people. His arm is chained that it cannot save. It is not 
 
14 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 uncharitable or untrue to say that behind this there is often 
 the belief that man needs no redemption, but can save 
 himself. Sin does not need an atonement, remorse is an 
 impure and morbid passion ; a divine intervention for 
 man's recovery is as unnecessary as it is inconceivable. 
 The sense of sin and guilt is absent. The argument for 
 historical Christianity is based upon the fact — a fact attested 
 by the whole history of humanity — that there was need that 
 Christ should come. 
 
 CHRIST AND THE NEWER CRITICISM* 
 
 In his address from the Chair of the Congregational Union, 
 delivered more than thirty years ago, Dr. Dale declared 
 that the controversies on theology had narrowed to one 
 vital question. " If only a theory of inspiration were 
 breaking down, if men were discussing nothing more serious 
 than the precise and minute accuracy of the four Gospels, 
 if we were threatened with nothing more formidable than 
 the demonstration of the historical untrustworthiness of a 
 few chapters here and there in the Old Testament, we might 
 look on calmly and wait for the issue of the conflict with 
 indifference. But it becomes plainer every year that the 
 real questions in debate are far different from these. The 
 storm has moved round the whole horizon, but it is rapidly 
 concentrating its strength and fury above one Sacred Head. 
 
 1 (i) The Encyclopedia Biblica, Vol. II., edited by T. K. Cheyne, 
 D.D., and J. S. Black, LL.D. (A. and C. Black) ; (2) The Historical 
 New Testament, by James Moffatt, D.D. (T. and T. Clark); (3) The 
 Saviour in the Newer Light, by Alexander Robinson, B.D. (Blackwood, 
 1895); (4) The Expositor, April, 1901, Art. II., "Few Things Need- 
 ful," by T. K. Cheyne, D.D. (Hodder and Stoughton) ; (5) The Living 
 Christ and the Four Gospels, by R. W. Dale, LL.D. (Hodder and 
 Stoughton). 
 
CHRIST AND THE NEWER CRITICISM 15 
 
 This then is the real issue of the fight — Is Christendom to 
 believe in Christ any longer or not ? It is a battle in which 
 everything is to be lost or won. It is not a theory of eccle- 
 siastical policy which is in danger, it is not a theological 
 system, it is not a creed, it is not the Old Testament or the 
 New, but the claim of Christ Himself to be the Son of God 
 and the Saviour of mankind." Dr. Dale's words might be 
 used without the change of a letter to describe the situation 
 which is now created. For many years the Church of 
 Christ in this country, and particularly in Scotland, has been 
 agitated by disputes over the Old Testament. They are 
 not over, but the end is in sight. Now the New Testament 
 is once more thrown into the furnace, and with it the Chris- 
 tian religion itself. It was inevitable. We never shared 
 the belief of some amongst our friends in the weight to 
 be attached to the conclusions of Harnack. It seemed 
 tolerably plain that Harnack's words meant less than they 
 were made to mean, and also that his position was un- 
 stable. Now we have in the Encyclopedia Biblica, a 
 thoroughgoing criticism applied to the New Testament, 
 and in The Historical Neiv Testament of Dr. Moffatt there 
 issues from the bosom of an orthodox Church a new claim 
 on the part of advanced criticism for room and verge. It 
 is of no avail to lift up hands in horror. The critics have 
 to be met. If they are not frankly encountered the door of 
 faith will be closed on multitudes. In one sense we take 
 up the discussion with great satisfaction. Now, at last, 
 the very life of the faith has to be fought for, and, as Dr. 
 Dale says : " This is surely enough to stir the Church to 
 vehement enthusiasm and to inspire it with its old heroic 
 energy. It is a controversy not for theologians merely, 
 but for every man who has seen the face of Christ and can 
 bear personal testimony to His power and glory." As Jesus 
 is the Lord and Head of the Church, so He is its Impregnable 
 Rock. But we confess that for personal reasons we have 
 been reluctant to take the field. With two of the writers 
 concerned — Dr. Cheyne and Dr. Bruce — we have had in 
 
i6 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 past days somewhat intimate association, and both the 
 living and the dead have laid the Church of Christ under 
 heavy obligations by their patient toil, their noble, truth- 
 loving spirit, and the light they have cast on many parts 
 of Holy Scripture. We are glad to think that the personal 
 side of the question does not bulk largely, and that it will 
 be unnecessary to burden the discussion with many references 
 to individual writers. Very little that is really new has 
 been said. The old assumptions have been made, and the 
 old results have been reached. Those who have studied 
 Strauss and Baur and Renan, and the literature gathering 
 round these names, will find themselves surprised at very 
 few points. Further, we emphatically desire to disclaim 
 attributing what seem the logical inferences from their 
 statements to scholars who have not accepted these in- 
 ferences, and who may think that the said inferences are 
 not inevitable. In one point, however, we venture to 
 blame them. They know the history of their criticism, 
 what has been its result in the case of their forerunners. 
 They ought, as we humbly think, to have shown how they 
 could conserve the faith after surrendering what they 
 have surrendered. Instances might be multiplied, but we 
 content ourselves with the case of Strauss, who, though 
 not the most agile nor the most learned of the anti-super- 
 naturalists, was by far the ablest, the strongest, the most 
 masterly. When Strauss wrote his first Life of Jesus, he 
 argued that the Gospels were mythical, but seriously and 
 honestly tried to save their ethical spirit, and believed he 
 had succeeded. He was in orders, a preacher of the Gospel, 
 who fully meant to continue in that work. So far from 
 thinking that he had undermined the Christian faith, he 
 believed that he had strengthened it by putting it in a form 
 in which Hegel could approve of it. 1 He was cut to the 
 quick when theologians cast him out, and regarded him as 
 
 1 Strauss studied under Baur at Blaubeuren and Tubingen, and 
 Baur was an ardent Hegelian. His criticism was simply a thorough- 
 going application of Hegelianism to New Testament history. 
 
CHRIST AND THE NEWER CRITICISM 17 
 
 an arch-enemy of the Christian name. The theologians 
 were right in saying that his was not the Christianity of 
 Christ, nor of Paul, nor of the Catholic Church. So it 
 was from the first, and what Straussism came to we know, 
 and shall have occasion in these articles to desciibe. Further, 
 we believe that Straussism, in its latest development, would 
 be the inevitable successor to Christianity, if Christianity 
 could be displaced. It is a large if. But to say that 
 Strauss, when he wrote his first book, saw all that was to 
 come of it, would be unjust in the highest degree. The 
 history of theological controversy ought to have taught us 
 by this time that opponents must be treated not only justly, 
 but mildly ; and that their adherence to Christianity, 
 even if illogical, should be viewed with gladness and with 
 hope. We must refrain from minute points of criticism 
 and content ourselves with giving our readers as best we 
 may an understanding of the points on which the battle 
 must turn. 
 
 Dr. Cheyne's career has been one of the most remark- 
 able on record, but few of his students in the Old Testament 
 could have imagined that he would have attacked with 
 such vigour in his later period the problems of the New 
 Testament. A mind so eager, so acute, so versatile, and so 
 laborious as his must perhaps have felt it a positive necessity 
 to apply to the New Testament the methods he followed in 
 the Old. In this country there has been no Encyclopaedia 
 like the Encyclopedia Biblica. No editor of an Encyclo- 
 paedia in this country has taken quite the same view of his 
 duties as has Dr. Cheyne. Even Robertson Smith, who 
 could be masterly enough, left much of the Encyclopcedia 
 Britannica to be done by contributors who were left to 
 their own discretion. But in the Encyclopcedia Biblica 
 the editor's hand is seen everywhere except in the extra- 
 ordinary articles of Dean Armitage Robinson, which remain 
 an unsolved mystery. Dr. Cheyne acts as he thinks the 
 editors of the Old Testament acted, and has a hand in many 
 contributions which he did not write. He has what to our 
 
18 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 mind is a most objectionable way of mixing up the work 
 of one author with another. For example, he takes Robert- 
 son Smith's fine article on Hebrews in the Encyclopedia 
 Britannica and cuts it up with pieces from von Soden. But 
 if Dr. Cheyne will tell us what reason he has to believe that 
 Robertson Smith changed his views on the subject, we will 
 tell him why we believe he did not change them. Any 
 way, the practice is indefensible. If Robertson Smith was 
 not good enough, let von Soden be substituted, but the 
 mingling of the two serves no purpose save to irritate and 
 to confuse. Dr. Cheyne's method compels us to attach 
 the most serious importance to the treatment of Jesus in 
 this new volume, and he will no doubt accept the full 
 responsibility of the most negative conclusions given in 
 his book. Dr. Schmiedel, who writes upon the " Gospels," 
 confesses that his criticism " may have sometimes seemed 
 to raise a doubt whether any credible elements were to be 
 found in the Gospels at all." To make out that Jesus 
 existed, he resorts to a few statements, such as the fact 
 that the relations of Jesus thought Him mad. But in 
 Dr. Schmiedel's view the main fabric of the Gospels is 
 utterly incredible. 1 The stories of miracle are contemptu- 
 ously rejected, and of course for the Resurrection and the 
 Ascension there is no room at all. In fact, it would not be 
 
 1 §§ I 39 _I 4o]- Only nine " absolute credible passages " ■ (i) Markx. 
 17 f . : "Why callest thou me good? none is good save God only." 
 (2) Matt. xii. 31 f. : that blasphemy against the son of man can be for- 
 given. (3) Mark iii. 21 : that his relations held him to be beside him- 
 self. (4) Mark xiii. 32 : "Of that day and of that hour knoweth no one, 
 not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son but the Father." (5) 
 Mark xv. 34 = Matt, xxvii. 46: "My God, my God, why hast thou 
 forsaken me?" (6) Mark viii. 12: "There shall no sign be given 
 unto this generation "• — a refusal to work miracles. (7) Mark vi. 5 f. : 
 Jesus was able to do no mighty work (save healing a few sick folk) in 
 Nazareth and marvelled at the unbelief of its people. (8) Mark viii. 
 14-21: "Take heed, beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, and of 
 Herod" — an evidence, according to Schmiedel, that "the feeding of 
 the 5000 and the 4000 was not an historical occurrence, but a parable." 
 (9) Matt. xi. 5 = Luke vii. 22 : the answer to the Baptist, where 
 Schmiedel argues that the final clause "counteracts the preceding 
 enumeration," and proves that "Jesus was speaking not of the phy- 
 sically, but of the spiritually blind, lame, leprous, deaf, dead." 
 
CHRIST AND THE NEWER CRITICISM 19 
 
 too much to say that there is a deliberate attempt in this 
 book to obliterate Christ. The existence of Christ as a 
 man is admitted rather than affirmed, but that He was God 
 is distinctly denied. 1 In the article on Faith 2 there is no 
 reference that we can trace to the meaning of faith as the 
 Church understands it, faith in the risen Lord. Dr. Cheyne, 
 writing on John the Baptist, calls him Johanan, and quaintly 
 informs us that " primitive tradition rightly accentuates 
 the inferiority of Johanan to Jesus " ! Judas is another 
 of Dr. Cheyne's subjects, and he argues that the story is 
 unhistorical. Of Dr. Abbott's contribution we say nothing, 
 for his arguments and his attempts at construction are 
 alike familiar ; and of Dr. Bruce's article we shall speak 
 immediately. But it must be pointed out that these derive 
 their main importance from the fact that they are published 
 and endorsed by a dignitary of the Church of England, who 
 has the co-operation of orthodox scholars in all the Churches. 
 Dr. Cheyne must himself feel his position to be very difficult. 
 Dr. Colenso, whom in many ways Dr. Cheyne strongly re- 
 calls, published a hymn-book in 1866 which did not contain 
 the name Jesus or Christ from one end to the other. 
 When challenged on the subject, the Bishop replied, no 
 doubt in perfect good faith, that this was quite unintentional 
 on his part. He had rejected hymn after hymn which 
 contained prayers to Christ which he objected to on Scrip- 
 tural and apostolical grounds. And yet Dr. Colenso used 
 the English liturgy, which is full of prayers to Christ : " O 
 Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, grant 
 us Thy peace," " Christ have mercy upon us," " God the 
 Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy upon us miserable 
 sinners." The question of subscription is very difficult, and 
 we are far from wishing to press it, but to use in Christian 
 worship for the purposes of the common devotional life 
 
 1 § I 39.]- " I n the person of Jesus we have to do with a completely 
 human being, and the divine is to be sought in him only in the form 
 in which it is capable of being found in a man." 
 
 2 By Dr. Cheyne. No notice is taken in the article of the Pauline 
 idea of Faith. 
 
20 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 prayers which employ a doctrine which the offerer of the 
 prayer disclaims elsewhere as unsound, is to turn worship 
 into a mockery. We are glad to point out that in the 
 interesting apologia which Dr. Cheyne published in The 
 Expositor, he says that Jesus knew Himself to be the Saviour 
 of men. " The centre of gravity in theology can never be 
 shifted from the person of Christ. The Jesus whom we 
 call Master is at once the historical Jesus of Nazareth, and 
 that ideal form which becomes more and more glorious as 
 man's mortal capacity increases — the Jesus whom we can 
 imagine moving about our streets comforting those who 
 mourn, healing the morally sick, stirring the consciences of 
 the sluggish, and giving to all who see and hear fresh dis- 
 closures of truth, fresh glimpses of the ideal. Without the 
 historical Christ the ideal Christ could never have beamed 
 upon us." 
 
 It is with the utmost hesitation that we speak of the 
 article on Jesus by the late Dr. A. B. Bruce. The distin- 
 guished author is no longer with us. If he had been living 
 ■one might have spoken freely, for he was always ready to 
 meet any criticism. It may be that he was precluded from 
 referring to subjects dealt with elsewhere, and restricted 
 to write on the life and teaching of Jesus. It is open to 
 any one to say that a believer in the Deity and Resurrection 
 of the Son of God should not have consented to write 
 under restrictions which virtually involved a suppression of 
 his faith. But on this point we pass no judgment. It 
 may be that he wrote his article in one of the times when 
 he suffered from a temporary eclipse, for certainly he had 
 experience of the ups and downs in the fight of faith. But 
 if the article had been unsigned there would have been 
 little difficulty in concluding that the author had aban- 
 doned the supernatural element in the life of Jesus. Canon 
 Cheyne himself writes that the historical student must 
 confess that " the name of the father of Jesus is, to say 
 the least, extremely uncertain " 1 — that is, there is no doubt 
 1 Art. Joseph [in N.T.~\, § 7. 
 
. CHRIST AND THE NEWER CRITICISM 21 
 
 that Jesus was born of an earthly father, but it is very- 
 questionable whether that father's name was Joseph. 
 Dr. Bruce says of the story of the Passion, that, " even in 
 its most historic version, it is not pure truth, but truth 
 mixed with doubtful legend." 1 As to the Resurrection, 
 he thinks that the followers of Jesus believed that He rose 
 again, but he evidently implies his own disbelief. 2 As to 
 miracles, Christ may have worked some remarkable cures, 
 but " the miraculousness of the healing ministry is not 
 the point in question." 3 Those who followed Dr. Bruce's 
 career must have marked with deep regret his gradual 
 descent to naturalism. As long ago as 1863, he edited a 
 translation of Ebrard's Gospel History, a book which, as 
 many of our readers know, is strenuously orthodox and in- 
 teresting to this day for its boldness and ingenuity, though 
 somewhat marred by a spirit of scorn and defiance. In his 
 Training of the Twelve and his Humiliation of Christ he 
 made noble contributions to Christology, but he moved 
 gradually away from the early standpoint. Even in 1886, 
 when he published his work on The Miraculous Element in 
 the Gospels, he showed himself curiously uncertain and in- 
 consistent. He staked everything on the sinlessness of 
 Christ. There was, according to him, but one miracle 
 vitally important to faith, and that was the moral miracle 
 of the sinlessness of the Redeemer. And yet he faltered 
 in the assertion of that great fact. When vindicating 
 Christ from charges against His character, he said : 4 " The 
 most outstanding charge brought against Christ was ex- 
 cessive severity in exposing Pharisaism, but that was a 
 fault which very decidedly leant to virtue's side." He went 
 on, 6 " // not a perfect sun, He [Christ] was the best sun yet 
 vouchsafed to mortals.'" (The italics, of course, are oms.) 
 That is, everything is made to turn on the sinlessness 
 of Jesus, and in the end that sinlessness is left doubtful. 
 Further, in the catechism for children which he appended 
 
 1 Art. Jesus, § 30. 2 § 32. " § 19. 
 
 4 P. 321. 5 P. 328. 
 
22 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 to his book, With Open Face, the one reference that occurs 
 to the Resurrection and the after life is in the last question : 
 " Where is Jesus now ? " to which the answer is : " He 
 is in the House of His Father in heaven, where He is pre- 
 paring a place for all who bear His name and walk in His 
 footsteps." Not one word is said about the Resurrection 
 of our Lord from the dead ; in fact, so far as words go, 
 Dr. Bruce's position is identical with that of Mr. Robinson 
 in his book, The Saviour in the Newer Light, when he says 
 that Jesus " went like all other human spirits that have for 
 this present world died, into regions yet hidden from us, 
 which He in His prophetic insight had looked forward to 
 as other mansions of the Father. That in those mansions 
 His Spirit rose again into active life is the fact on which 
 we must lay hold. How this happened we cannot tell." 
 Yet it would be gravely unjust to assume that Dr. Bruce, 
 who occupied his position as a professor in the Free Church 
 to the last, fully states his belief either in the Encyclopedia 
 Biblica or in the other books to which we have made re- 
 ference. And it ought to be recalled that he criticised Dr. 
 Dale's book on The Living Christ and the Four Gospels, 
 maintaining that Dr. Dale attached too little importance 
 to the historical Jesus Christ. 
 
 We shall now attempt to state as clearly as possible the 
 issues involved for faith in the new criticism thus imperfectly 
 sketched 
 
 II 
 THE MODES OF ACCESS TO CHRIST 
 
 The Church has thought itself able to approach the Lord 
 Jesus Christ in two ways. 
 
 (i) Believers have imagined that they had through the 
 Gospels direct access to the historical Christ. In these 
 histories they have read with love and hope and awe of His 
 
THE MODES OF ACCESS TO CHRIST 23 
 
 sayings, of His mighty works, of His dying, of His rising 
 again the Conqueror of Death, of His ascending to the right 
 hand of God. They have put together the accounts of 
 His doing and dying, His Action and His Passion, and their 
 hearts have burned within them. Does the newer criticism 
 close for us this door of access ? Of course the franker 
 criticism of recent generations closes it almost completely, 
 dissolves it into myth and legend, leaves us with a few 
 uncertain fragments. And this is the method, so far as 
 we can understand it, of Schmiedel and Cheyne. All that 
 remains as historical fact about the life of Jesus, all that we 
 can be sure of in His words, is a very small residuum, while 
 the Gospels as a whole are so untrustworthy that read 
 without guidance they can do little but mislead. The 
 question raised by Dr. Moffatt's discussion is whether we 
 are at any given point in the Gospel history in true 
 communication with Jesus. 1 Others have given us the 
 story as it stands, and they have transfigured it and 
 expanded it, and even transformed it, till no one knows 
 what belonged to the original Christ. They have put 
 into the lips of Christ what their experience of Him had 
 put into their hearts, so that at best we have indirect re- 
 flections of the mind of Christ. A " Church " character is 
 ascribed to what have been supposed the most precious 
 words of Jesus. In this way Christ is merged in the Church. 
 The Church is merged in Christianity, and Christianity in 
 
 1 Hist. N.T., pp. ii, 45, n. 2 : "To realise that the central materials 
 of the gospels were mainly drawn up and collected during the three 
 or four decades which followed the death of Jesus, and that the gospels 
 themselves were not composed until the period 65-105 ; to realise these 
 facts will show — (i.) that the gospels are not purely objective records, 
 no mere chronicles of pure crude fact, or of speeches preserved ver- 
 batim ; (ii.) that they were compiled in and for an age when the church 
 required Christ not as a memory so much as a religious standard, and 
 when it reverenced him as an authority for its ideas and usages ; (iii.) 
 that they reflect current interests and feelings, and are shaped by the 
 experience and for the circumstances of the church ; (iv.) that their 
 conceptions of Christ and Christianity are also moulded to some extent 
 by the activity and expansion of the church between 30 and 60, by its 
 tradition, oral and written, and by its teaching, especially that of Paul 
 
24 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 turn disappears in the higher life of humanity. It is obvious 
 that if this is admitted the conception of a personal relation 
 and a personal debt to the Lord Jesus Christ, in which the 
 essence of Christianity has been supposed to lie, becomes 
 practically impossible. We do not know enough of Christ 
 historically. Our ignorance of His life is too complete for 
 any possible relation to Him, or a profound and passionate 
 sense of gratitude and devotion. It is our personal debt 
 to Christ dying in our stead, the Just for the unjust, the 
 Substitute for His guilty people, that is mainly emphasised 
 in the Epistles. But in the heavy haze that hangs over 
 the Gospels, the uncertainty as to their original content, 
 this feeling must die of starvation. Among writers of the 
 rationalistic school in general we find a deep uncertainty 
 as to the Resurrection of Jesus. And yet it is very much 
 on this point that the discussion turns. Some will tell us 
 that Christ lives and reigns, but when they are closely 
 questioned it turns out that they mean only that He is with 
 the spirits of the blessed, and takes the highest place among 
 them. So, though His personality is not extinct, it belongs 
 to history. It does not belong to life in any other sense 
 than another historical personality. If this is so, Chris- 
 tianity is annihilated at a stroke, for Jesus disappears 
 from it. Indeed, on these principles our Lord has no place 
 in the Gospel at all. Even Harnack — we translate from 
 Das Wesen des Christenthums — in his chapter on Christology, 
 says : " It is no paradox, and neither is it rationalism, but 
 the simple expression of the actual position as it lies before 
 us in the Gospels : not the Son but the Father alone has a 
 place in the Gospel as Jesus proclaimed it." We print this 
 very significant passage in italics, for it cannot be too 
 earnestly pondered. Harnack asserts that Jesus has no 
 place in the Gospel, and what he gives us is not the 
 Christianity of Christ, of which we have heard so much 
 lately, but Christianity without Christ. On the natural- 
 istic constructions of the Gospel the figure of Christ 
 more and more tends to disappear, and He is allowed to 
 
THE MODES OF ACCESS TO CHRIST 25 
 
 pass as one whose historical function has been fulfilled. 
 Dr. Bruce, in his more orthodox days, had something to 
 say of what he called " sentimental naturalism," x that is, 
 the attempt of those who rejected miracle and the super- 
 natural, who denied the deity of the Son of God, to wrap 
 up their denial in sentimental phrases. He mentioned as- 
 members of this school such men as Ewald, Weizsacker, 
 and Keim. We remember very well being greatly per- 
 plexed in our youth by Ewald' s treatment of the Resurrec- 
 tion of Christ. It did not seem easy to say whether Ewald 
 believed in the miracle of the corporeal resurrection, or 
 whether he was covering up a denial in beautiful phrases. 
 Dr. Bruce had no hesitation in giving his opinion. He 
 said that according to Ewald " the resurrection did not, 
 could not take place, but the beautiful dream must be 
 dealt with tenderly, and its reality denied with as much 
 sentiment as if you meant to affirm it." Strauss was very 
 clear on this subject, as on most others which he took up. 
 He said in reference to Ewald's chapter that " his long, 
 inflated rhetoric contained literally no fragment of an idea 
 beyond what had been said by himself in the first Life of 
 Jesus much more clearly, ' though assuredly with far less 
 unction.' " 2 Baur did not discuss the problem at all, but 
 regarded it, as we shall see later on, as insoluble. Strauss 
 himself was in no doubt of its vital importance. He said : 
 " The precepts of Jesus would have been blown away and 
 scattered like leaves by the wind had those leaves not been 
 fastened as with a strong, tangible binding, by a belief in 
 his Resurrection." Of course Strauss did not believe in 
 the miracle of the Resurrection, but he had the eyes to see 
 that without it Christianity was maimed beyond hope of 
 survival. When we deal with the problem of Christ, and 
 especially in dealing with Christian teachers, it seems to 
 us that we are entitled to expect perfect candour on this 
 question, no quibbling with phrases, no talk about the 
 
 1 Humiliation of Christ, p. 210. 
 
 2 Ibid., p. 211. 
 
26 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 resurrection of the spirit, as if the spirit were ever buried, 
 but a plain declaration as to whether or not the writer holds 
 the ancient faith of the Church. Naturalism has much 
 to say against the reality of the crowning miracle : faith 
 has much to say for her Author and Finisher. But there 
 is nothing to be said for those who attempt to evade the 
 problem, to shirk the issue, to confuse their readers as to 
 their own position. 
 
 (2) Another door has been thought open to the faith- 
 ful. 1 It has ever been believed in' the Church of the Re- 
 deemer that there is direct access to Christ for every Christian 
 through the power of the Holy Spirit, that they know Him 
 as those could not know Him whose knowledge was after 
 the flesh. The Church, though it is based on a history, is 
 not content with any history, however sacred and pathetic 
 and inspiring. The Church is not content even with the 
 story of our Lord's earthly life and ministry. Rather it 
 begins anew where this ended. St. Paul delivered first of 
 all that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 
 and that He rose again the third day and began that life 
 the present energies of which are the life of the world to-day. 
 Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now 
 henceforth know we Him so no more. 2 This does not 
 mean that the New Testament history is antiqtiated. 3 It 
 does not mean that the record of the days of the Redeemer's 
 flesh has lost its power. Rather it means that the story 
 retains its power because it is the beginning of a story 
 which shall have no end, because we have now for the old 
 miracles of power and mercy the new miracles of grace that 
 the Holy Ghost is working round us wherever Christ is 
 lifted up. Christ, by virtue of His Death and Resurrection 
 and Ascension to the right hand of God, is accessible to 
 
 1 John xiv. 26, xv. 26, xvi. 13-14. 
 
 J 2 Cor. v. 16. 
 
 3 Bruce, St. Paul's Conception of Christiainty, p. 256 : "To cast a 
 slight on the words and acts spoken and done in that ministry, and on 
 the revelation of a character made thereby, was not, I imagine, in all 
 his thoughts." 
 
THE MODES OF ACCESS TO CHRIST 27 
 
 His people whenever they call upon His name. The anguish 
 of bereavement, the profound stirring of the emotions 
 when we think of the life into which has already passed so 
 much that was very part of our own being, lies in the fact 
 that we are parted, though it is but for a time. " Oh for 
 the touch of a vanished hand, and the sound of a voice that 
 is still ! " It is when men say this in their solitary musings 
 that they wash the gates of death with their tears, and 
 from its silence passionately implore a sign. " So passion- 
 ately and so unavailingly ! For there are times when 
 faith is weak and the heart yearns for knowledge, when 
 it seems to us as if all hopes and fears were bound up around 
 the insupportable longing for one gleam, however brief, 
 of certainty to shine through the darkness." The com- 
 pensation is that we see and hear Jesus, that we can speak 
 to Him and receive His reply, that He will fill our weak 
 and restless hearts, if we ask Him, with His own strength 
 and peace. And so when we know Him in the new order. 
 His earthly history is transfigured and shines before us in 
 a new and glorious certainty. The witnesses are with us. 
 It was at a time when learned men regarded the testimony 
 of the Gospel as whoUy discredited that the evangelical 
 revival broke forth, and new witnesses to the Gospel story 
 rose up and declared it to the world. 1 They knew Christ 
 for themselves, they preached Him in the power of the 
 Holy Ghost sent down from heaven, and as they went 
 forth in soul-seeking love, filled with a passion for Christ, 
 the signs of His presence and activity in the spiritual order 
 put to silence the ignorance of foolish men. " I knew," 
 
 1 In the advertisement prefixed to the ist edition of the Analogy, 
 May, 1736, Butler wrote: "It is come, I know not how, to be taken 
 for granted, by many persons, that Christianity is not so much as a 
 subject of inquiry ; but that it is now, at length, discovered to be 
 fictitious. And accordingly they treat it, as if, in the present age, 
 this were an agreed point among all people of discernment; and 
 nothing remained, but to set it up as a principal subject of mirth and 
 ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for its having so long inter- 
 rupted the pleasures of the world." Then came Whitefield and the 
 Wesleys. 
 
28 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 said Tholuck, speaking of his youth, " an old man strong 
 in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. From that time I knew 
 what the true Being and Becoming for man was, and also 
 that whosoever knew it would have the power of efficacious 
 action." 
 
 (3) It is not possible to separate the two modes of 
 access. The roads to Christ run parallel, and sometimes 
 they seem to be, as it were, one way. Dr. Dale, in his 
 remarkable book, The Living Christ and the Four Gospels, 
 perhaps used some incautious expressions as to our inde- 
 pendence of the Gospel history, but his argument was 
 essentially sound. What he said was briefly this : The 
 vast mass of Christians are unable to follow the argument 
 of scholars about early Christian history. They cannot 
 search through Justin Martyr and Irenaeus and the rest. 
 Nevertheless, their faith is not shaken by the varied assaults 
 on the Christ of history because they know Christ by faith. 
 They know that they have been delivered from this present 
 evil world and translated into the kingdom of God's dear 
 Son. Knowing this, they do not become independent of 
 the Gospel history. They do not set it aside. They do not 
 say that inquiry as to its source and meaning is impiety. 
 At the same time they feel themselves under no call to take 
 part in the battle, for they know past all doubting what is 
 enough for them. They know the actual presence and 
 activity of Christ in their own lives, and knowing this, they 
 know that when criticism has said its last word it will be 
 found that the Gospels have preserved the substance of 
 the earthly history of Christ, and that they have given a 
 true account of it. 
 
 (4) Those who believe that the historical access to Christ 
 is largely closed, and that the spiritual access is a mere 
 dream, are not by any means always willing to discard 
 Christ, and to say that He is nothing in their lives. Nor 
 have we the slightest disposition to drive them into utter 
 unbelief. We had rather take their admissions and seek 
 to lead them forward, to show them that if they believe as 
 
THE MODES OF ACCESS TO CHRIST 29 
 
 much as they do, they must believe more. Those who 
 think that we know very little that we can be sure of about 
 the earthly life of Christ, who reject the story of His miracu- 
 lous work, who believe that His body crumbled into dust 
 beneath the Syrian skies, who even hesitate to say that He 
 was altogether free from sin, are often eager to believe 
 that He is a glorified spirit, whose pure image shines with 
 an undying lustre upon the world. They grant, indeed, 
 that this image is largely the creation of the human mind 
 and heart, that it cannot be verified, that it is not even real, 
 and yet they entertain for it a true affection and reverence. 
 They think that the same lessons can be learned from it 
 whether it is real or whether it is ideal. Even though they 
 think not that Christ created the Church, but that the 
 Church created Christ, they are loth to believe that they 
 have lost Christ. Why, they ask, should not Christ be 
 the centre for the religious emotions of mankind, though 
 He be merely a creation of the thought and conscience of 
 the race ? The strongest expression of this feeling that we 
 can call to mind occurs in the late Mr. Sime's life of Lessing. 
 " Admit," he says, " that the real was very different from 
 the mythical Jesus, that when the last stroke came He 
 fell like other men into a sleep from which there is no 
 awakening, the legend of His love does not on that account 
 lose its charm or its power to win men from a degrading 
 materialism. It is ideally true, whether historically true 
 or not, and is the best witness to the essential goodness of 
 the race that has evolved it." x We are far from treating 
 such expressions with impatience or contempt, but such 
 writers are as much bound to answer men like Strauss and 
 Renan as we are. They have to show, as we have to show 
 against both, that Christ was essentially a noble character. 
 
 1 Cf. T. H. Green's position : " More, probably, than two generations 
 after St. Paul had gone to his rest, there arose a disciple . . . who 
 gave that final spiritual interpretation to the person of Christ, which 
 has for ever taken it out of the region of history and of the doubts that 
 surround all past events, to fix it in the purified conscience as the 
 immanent God " {Works, III., p. 242). 
 
30 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 Strauss became frank enough when he told us that Jesus, 
 as the religious leader, must come to be daily more and 
 more estranged from mankind, as the latter has developed 
 under the influence of the civilising powers of modern 
 times. 1 And again he said that if men would open their 
 eyes and were honest enough to avow what they saw, they 
 would have to acknowledge that the entire activity and 
 aspiration of the higher modern life was based upon views 
 which run directly counter to the mind of Christ. And 
 what are we to say of Renan's picture of Christ's later 
 life as a misery and a lie, 2 and of his request that we should 
 bow before this sinner and his superior Sakya-Mouni as 
 demi-gods ? We hope to deal in succession with the 
 various modes of access to Christ thus described, and to 
 show that the faith of the Church is still built upon a 
 rock, that we know the true Christ — in history and in 
 heaven. 
 
 Ill 
 THE HISTORICAL CHRIST: 
 
 PRELIMINARY ASSUMPTIONS 
 
 We propose to deal in succession with (i) the Historical 
 Christ ; (2) the Risen and Exalted Christ ; (3) the Ideal 
 Christ. Then to sum up the result of the discussions. 
 Before taking up the problem of history it is absolutely 
 
 1 Life of Jesus, III. § 149 : " If we would be candid with ourselves, 
 that which was once sacred history for the Christian believer, is, 
 for the enlightened portion of our contemporaries, only fable." " Not 
 faith alone, science also in its newest development, has found this 
 system unsatisfactory." 
 
 2 Vie de Jesus, V ad fin. : "To conceive the good is not sufficient ; 
 it must be made to succeed. To accomplish this, less pure paths must 
 be followed, etc." XXII. : "Not by any fault of his own his con- 
 science lost somewhat of its original purity. His mission overwhelmed 
 him." XXIII.: "Did he regret his too lofty nature, and, victim of 
 his greatness, mourn that he had not remained a simple artisan ? " 
 
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST 31 
 
 necessary to state the preliminary assumptions upon which 
 the ultimate results of thought and research must in the 
 last issue depend. 
 
 (1) There comes first the question of miracle. If it be 
 assumed in advance that miracles are incredible, then it 
 follows at once that the Gospel history is, as a whole, in- 
 credible. Haeckel, among recent writers, is absolute in 
 his judgment on this point. He does not need to study 
 historical evidence. As a philosopher, he knows that 
 Jesus could not have been born except in the natural way, 
 and the testimony of the Gospels is accordingly to be 
 rejected. The New Testament, at least in all of its parts 
 that cannot be explained on a purely naturalistic basis, 
 is discarded as useless for real history. This is simple 
 enough. It was practically the view of the author of 
 Supernatural Religion, a book which five-and-twenty years 
 ago was thought by many to have destroyed Christianity. 
 The author affirmed that all miracles were incredible, and 
 therefore that no testimony could prove them. Somewhat 
 inconsistently he devoted a considerable part of his book 
 to an attempt to prove that the historical evidence was 
 baseless, putting the composition of the Gospels some- 
 where about 180 a.d. The world has not forgotten the 
 terrible answer which these arguments met with from 
 Bishop Lightfoot. Lightfoot expressed his surprise that the 
 author should have thought it worth his while to go in for 
 a kind of reasoning for which he had so small qualification, 
 when he had already said plainly that even if the earliest 
 asserted origin of the four Gospels could be established 
 upon the most irrefragable grounds, the testimony of their 
 writers would be utterly incompetent to prove the reality 
 of the miraculous. John Morley burst into a very premature 
 song of triumph over the discrediting of Christianity, and 
 in doing so he used words which are still very much 
 worth quoting. He said : " Is Christianity a divine revela- 
 tion supernaturally made, or is it not ? We cannot evade the 
 issue, as so many persons in the present religious anarchy 
 
32 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 attempt to do, by minimising the amount of supernatural 
 element which we may choose to accept. If the preacher 
 of the Sermon on the Mount was more than man, if He was 
 in any sense whatever the bearer of a direct and special 
 mission from the Supreme Being, if the ineffable attraction 
 of His character had its secret in qualities conferred on 
 Him by the Creator for the purposes of impressing men 
 and leading them to loftier moral conceptions, then we are 
 dealing with a supernatural transaction. Many of those 
 who have ceased to accept the inspiration of the Scriptures, 
 or the miracles contained in them, or the dogmas into which 
 the Churches have hardened the words of Christ, still cling 
 to what is, after all, the great central miracle of the entire 
 system, after which all others become easily credible — the 
 mystery of the Incarnation of the Supreme. So, whatever 
 reductions may be made in the amount, the quality of 
 the whole belief seems to all intents and purposes credible." 
 We are not sure that when these words were written Mr. 
 Morley was aware of John Stuart Mill's statement, in his 
 posthumous essay on " Theism," where he touches on the 
 subject of the Christian revelation. Mill confessed that 
 Christ was a historical person, and such an unique figure 
 in history that " even now it would not be easy even for 
 an unbeliever to find a better translation of the rule of 
 virtue from the abstract into the concrete than to endeavour 
 so to live that Christ would approve our life." Nay, more, 
 that " it remains a possibility to the conception of the 
 rational sceptic that Christ actually was what He supposed 
 Himself to be," not God, which, according to Mill, Christ 
 never claimed to be, but " a man charged, with a special, 
 express, and unique commission from God to lead mankind 
 to truth and virtue." We put the last clause into italics. 
 If our readers will carefully compare it with Mr. Morley's 
 words they will be apt to think that the disciple in this case 
 is explicitly refusing to follow his master. Miracle in any 
 form to some is incredible, and with such persons it is useless 
 to argue about the historicity of the Gospels. 
 
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST 33 
 
 But there are many who will not go so far as to reject 
 in advance all conceivable witness and evidence of miracle. 
 Still they approach every story of the kind with an intense 
 suspicion, with an incredulity so strong that hardly any 
 evidence can overcome it. We have already referred to 
 such writers as Ewald, who dislike miracle, but who, from 
 very admiration of the character of Christ, are driven into 
 language which men like Mr. Morley, the author of Super- 
 natural Religion, Renan, and Strauss would say implies a 
 miraculous element, or presses or expands the region of 
 mystery and wonder into the realm of miracle. They do 
 this because they perceive that the only alternative is the 
 alternative adopted by Renan and Strauss, who declare 
 that since the Gospel is not the life of God it was written by 
 deliberate deceivers who have duped the Christian Church. 
 
 In his early book, The Old Testament in the Jewish 
 Church, Robertson Smith, in answer to the objection that 
 the supposed results of historical study were based on the 
 rationalistic assumption that the supernatural is impossible, 
 and that everything in the Bible which asserts the existence 
 of a real personal communication with God and man is 
 unnecessarily untrue, replied very simply. He said that 
 if in the application of his method his hearers found him 
 calling in a rationalistic principle, if they could show that 
 in any step of his argument he assumed the impossibility 
 of the supernatural or rejected plain facts in the interests 
 of rationalistic theories, he would frankly confess he was 
 in the wrong. 1 He further declared that he was sure that 
 the Bible did speak to the heart of man in words that could 
 only come from God — that no historical research could 
 deprive him of this conviction, or make less precious the 
 Divine utterances that spoke straight to the heart, for the 
 language of these words was so clear that no readjustment 
 of their historical setting could conceivably change the 
 substance of them. In his book on The Prophets of Israel 
 he again took up the question of the supernatural, finding 
 t O.T. in Jew. Ch., pp. 27 sq. 
 
 3 
 
34 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 it historical first in the intrinsic character of the scheme 
 of revelation as a whole. He went on : " If the religion 
 of Israel and Christ answers these tests, the miraculous 
 circumstances of its promulgation need not be used as the 
 first proof of its truth, but must rather be regarded as the in- 
 separable accompaniment of a revelation which bears the 
 historical stamp of reality." l The position expressed in 
 the sentence last quoted is that from which we approach 
 the Gospel history. 2 So far from believing that miracles 
 cannot be proved from any testimony, so far from believing 
 that in every case they are to be regarded with suspicion, 
 we maintain that in the case of a Divine revelation miracles 
 are appropriate and fitting. This has been the general 
 feeling of the Church, and has been expressed by her best 
 apologists. 8 They have taken miracle as the fit accom- 
 paniment of a religion that moves and satisfies the souls of 
 men, and that asserts itself to be derived directly from 
 God. It is the assurance to its first teachers that they 
 have not been led by their own dreams, but have been 
 taught by the Lord of Nature. That is, miracle is part of 
 the accompaniment as well as part of the content of a 
 true revelation, its appropriate countersign. Of course those 
 who take this ground do not deny, but rather firmly assert, 
 the steadfast and glorious order of nature. It is against 
 that august and austere order that miracles stand out. 
 But they hold with equal firmness that God has made man 
 for Himself, and that, if He has sent His Son to die for them, 
 the physical order cannot set the rule for the way of grace. 
 If God has relented, nature may relent. They believe 
 
 1 O.T. in Jew Ch. p. 16 (new edition). 
 
 3 " That Christ should have worked miracles does not surprise 
 me. It would have surprised me if He had not " (Dale, Living Christ 
 and Gospels, p. 102). 
 
 3 Bushnell, Nat. and the Sufern., p. 176 : " When we discover the 
 world, or human race, groaning under the penal disorders and bondage 
 of sin, the deliverance of those disorders by a supernatural power in- 
 volves no overturning of the causes at work, or the laws by which they 
 work, but only that these causes are, by their laws, submitted to the 
 will and supernatural action of God, so that He can arrange new con- 
 junctions, and accomplish, in that manner, results of deliverance." 
 
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST 35 
 
 that, if there is a personal God, miracles are possible, and 
 revelation, which is miracle, is also possible. They hold 
 that, if we can know God, we may be able to know His 
 revelation as that which could never have risen in the 
 human mind and heart, though both rise up to meet it, 
 and hold it, and never let it go. " Thou hast the words 
 of eternal life." They are not dismayed when they are 
 told that the Gospel age was the age when legendary stories 
 and superstitions and miraculous pretensions of the most 
 fanciful and grotesque kind abounded. Nay, rather their 
 faith is firmer, for they take these stories and compare them 
 with the Gospel miracles, and they say, How is it that 
 the stories of the New Testament are lofty and tender and 
 beautiful and significant, while the rest are monstrosities ? 
 As one able writer has said, the Jewish tales about the 
 casting out of devils are in themselves a most marvellous 
 contrast to the Gospel miracles. 1 They recognise that 
 belief cannot be forced. It is always possible to doubt 
 historical evidence. It is always possible to say that there 
 may be some way out if we only knew it. But to those 
 who believe in Christ and ponder His character, His teach- 
 ing, the way of His coming to us and going from us, there 
 is a setting for the stories in which they will live safely 
 enough. Further, a revelation can never be anything to 
 sinful dying men if it is not the record of Divine actions 
 as well as Divine thoughts. So we cordially agree with 
 Mr. Morley that, granting the entrance of the Son of God 
 into human history, granting the miracle of the Incarnation 
 of the Supreme, there is little to cause any difficulty. With- 
 out the Incarnation, without the Resurrection, we have 
 no form of religion left to us that will control or serve or 
 comfort mankind. It is the fact of our Lord's deity that 
 gives its meaning to His every action and His every deed. 
 
 1 Cf. story in Bk. of Tobit (vi.-viii.) of expulsion of demon by smoke 
 from the burning heart and liver of fish caught in the Tigris. 
 Apocryphal story of expulsion of Satan in the form of a mad dog 
 from Judas by the Child Jesus {First Infancy). 
 
36 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 (2) In a book like this we cannot go very particularly 
 into minute criticisms. All that can be attempted is to 
 set forth the broad arguments clearly. No one who takes 
 up Schmiedel or Dr. Moffatt will read very far without 
 asking himself, But how does the critic know this ? Upon 
 what principle are certain passages rejected, certain narra- 
 tives denied, certain conclusions drawn as to authorship ? 
 If he finds it laid down that those reported words of Jesus 
 are accurate which could not have proceeded from the 
 unaided imagination of His disciples, he may be inclined 
 to ask, Who is to say what could or could not have pro- 
 ceeded from the imagination of the writers of the Gospels ? 
 He will, in fact, soon come to the conclusion that there 
 are very few real principles in criticism, principles that 
 can be depended upon. Dr. Moffatt, to do him justice, is 
 haunted by a consciousness of this, and the part of his book 
 which has most interested us is the notes in which every 
 now and then he recognises the necessity of some principles 
 to be followed in fixing dates, and settling questions of 
 authorship, and in dealing with the historical foundations 
 of narrative. We have no space to follow him into details, 
 but we are tolerably sure that Dr. Moffatt, on consideration, 
 will see that Canon Gore * and Dr. Driver 2 were right 
 when they said that the Old Testament was produced under 
 very different historical conditions from the New, and that 
 the two cannot be dealt with in the same way. Dr. Moffatt 
 has not been able, through the limits of space, to let us 
 know exactly how much he will allow us still to believe of 
 the New Testament. About the Book of Acts he is suffici- 
 ently frank. He says : 8 "As a historical document not 
 merely for the period 75-100, but even for some points in 
 the age of which it treats, Acts is a most serviceable 
 and invaluable writing. For many parts of the apostolic 
 age the author apparently possessed no resources and had 
 
 1 Lux Mundi, pp. xvii sq., xxix sq., 240 so., 258 sq. 
 3 Introd. to Lit. of O.T., pp. xvii sq. 
 Hist. JV.r.,p.^ig. 
 
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST 37 
 
 access to few traditions. The result is that these parts 
 are omitted, while in elaborating others he seems again 
 to present a record at variance with the traits preserved 
 in St. Paul's epistles. Yet even with the gaps, deviations, 
 and contradictions of this history, it serves often as a 
 useful outline for historical research, providing materials 
 for the reconstruction of events and ideas which otherwise 
 would remain even more dim than they now are." This 
 is the function assigned to the book. But Dr. Moffatt 
 is often at variance not only with orthodox but even 
 with rationalistic critics. He has no doubts and no fears 
 as to his own capacity to instruct them, although he 
 seems to have done his best to restrain the evident 
 contempt in which he holds all conservative critics. The 
 point is, however, that the difference of opinion between 
 free critics themselves shows the want of sound principles 
 for literary and historical criticism Till these are dis- 
 covered — and they cannot be discovered from one literature 
 — much is in the air. No doubt there is a certain unity 
 of opinion amongst the rationalists, but this is largely 
 due to the fact that from their dislike of miracle they are 
 driven to find explanations, and that in the end one ex- 
 planation approves itself as more probable or less desperate 
 than the others. Dr. Moffatt speaks contemptuously of 
 " amateur critics " who find great difficulty in following 
 the conclusions of him and his school. We venture, how- 
 ever, to say with great respect that those who have studied 
 the problems in English literature will be the first to hesitate 
 as to the legitimacy and validity of the methods adopted 
 by many Biblical critics. 
 
 We do not say by any means that these methods are 
 always uncertain. In the case, for example, of the analysis 
 of the Hexateuch, no one who studies the question can be 
 blind to the manner in which different lines of evidence 
 converge. In English literature, we have the striking 
 example of the analysis of the Two Noble Kinsmen and 
 Henry VIII. In his early years, Tennyson dissected these 
 
38 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 plays, and his view of Henry VIII. was worked out in The 
 Gentleman's Magazine, August, 1850, by James Spedding. 
 The results were confirmed by that excellent Shakespearean 
 scholar, Samuel Hickson ; and they have been confirmed 
 later in the publications of the New Shakespeare Society, 
 although we are not certain that the latest editors ac- 
 cept them. But Tennyson was of those who disputed the 
 composite nature of the Iliad, and on such a question his 
 opinion is of the greatest value. Students of English 
 literature are familiar with the admirable labours of Pro- 
 fessor G. C. Macaulay on Beaumont and Fletcher. His 
 results, however, wait confirmation. One of the most 
 controverted questions of English literary history is the 
 authorship of letters published after the death of Lady 
 Mary Wortley Montagu, and professing to be written by 
 her. They were issued by the infamous Cleland, and there 
 are apparently very strong proofs that they are forgeries. 
 In fact, there is a diary in which Lady Mary chronicles all 
 the letters she wrote during her travels, with the initials 
 of those to whom they were addressed, and the published 
 letters contradict this diary in every particular. There 
 are many other points against them to which we cannot 
 refer. Nevertheless, it is now, we believe, the unanimous 
 opinion of those best qualified to judge that they are genuine. 
 The case was argued as well as it could be argued, and for 
 New Testament critics is most instructive. In the forged 
 Shelley letters it would have been very difficult to prove 
 their spuriousness if it had not been that a passage was 
 copiedfrom an article bySir Francis Palgrave in TheQuarterly 
 Review. After examining carefully the Logan-Bruce con- 
 troversy, we have formed a decided opinion on the side of 
 Logan, but very competent scholars still take the other 
 view. In cases of contemporary authorship, it has been 
 found that internal evidence is almost always indecisive. 
 When Charlotte Bronte published Jane Eyre, the general 
 view was that the book was written by a man. Some 
 thought it was written by a woman, and it was also suggested 
 
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST 39 
 
 that a man and a woman had written it together. This 
 last idea made Charlotte Bronte very merry. Similarly, 
 when George Eliot's early books were published there was 
 a like difference of opinion. The most extraordinary fact 
 we know in connection with this subject is that when Ecce 
 Homo was published, Dean Church thought it was written 
 by Cardinal Newman. He wrote his magnificent essay on 
 the book under this conviction. Perhaps no one understood 
 Newman and all the secrets of his style and thought so 
 well as Church ; and yet he fell into this strange blunder. 
 What was criticism able to do in settling the authorship of 
 An Englishwoman's Love Letters, or in separating the work 
 of Besant and Rice ? It is only through narrow limits 
 that the methods which critics have applied so confidently 
 to the charter of the Christian Church can be scientifically 
 used. In fact, there has been no formulation of scientific 
 principles on this subject. The nearest approach we have 
 seen is in the brilliant introduction which Professor J ebb 
 contributes to his edition of Theophrastus. Yet even in 
 this essay there is much that might be questioned by an 
 appeal to the facts of literary history. It is scarcely too 
 much to say that in such matters it is usually the unex- 
 pected that happens to be true. 
 
 Bishop Lightfoot, who is practically ignored by the new 
 critics, but who surpassed them as much in knowledge 
 as he did in judgment, expressed in memorable words his 
 opinion of many German critics. He compared their work 
 to that of the Rabbis of Jewish exegesis. The Rabbis 
 were quite as able, quite as learned, but their work came 
 to nought, even as the work of the many German critics, 
 though minute and searching, failed because it was conceived 
 in a false vein. It may be, said Lightfoot, that " the 
 historical sense of seventeen or eighteen centuries is larger 
 and truer than the crilical insight of a section of men in 
 our late half century." 
 
40 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 IV 
 THE HISTORICAL CHRIST: 
 
 ECCE HOMO ; ECCE DEUS 
 
 For the fountain heads of Christianity the Church has 
 supposed that we are to go direct to the four Gospels. 1 
 Before the historic Jesus Christ can be thoroughly realised 
 His portrait is to be studied in these. Echoes deep and 
 dear come to us from other sources, but we fail in justice 
 to Him and to ourselves unless we turn to these. For it 
 must be remembered that the argument concerning Jesus 
 Christ cannot and must not be left to experts. Every 
 one is called upon to judge : the materials are accessible 
 to all. What the experts possess in addition to what the 
 people possess is comparatively of small account. Experts 
 may wait for the latest paper-covered book from Germany, 
 the book of the future which so impressed the authoress of 
 Robert Elsmere, which is going to make a complete end of 
 historical Christianity. Nothing that the post or newspaper 
 can ever bring us will touch the convictions which the 
 earnest mind may arrive at from the study of the Lord's 
 life in the Gospels. The trouble is that many will not look 
 straight at Jesus Christ. They turn their heads away. 
 Stopford Brooke very rightly points out that Burns, like 
 so many other literary men, deliberately refused to look 
 face to face at the Son of God. The active scepticism of 
 our day has largely gone along with a profound ignorance 
 of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ. We have been 
 told that a company of working men, aliens from the Church 
 and, in the majority of cases, from faith, broke out into 
 rapturous cheers after hearing a vivid presentation of the 
 Christ who wrought out in human life the creed of creeds. 
 What is needed is that we should find out for ourselves in 
 
 1 'Ev oil fyKa0e(erai 6 Xpio-roc (Iren., Adv. Har., III. ii. 8). 
 
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST 41 
 
 patient study the Christ of the Gospels, not the Christ of 
 the Institutes, or the Christ of the Imitation, or the Christ 
 of modern biographies. It should be understood that 
 the utmost wealth of rhetoric employed even by believers 
 to describe Christ serves only to blanch the glowing 
 colour of the original story. In order to penetrate the 
 thoughts of men with the spirit of the life of Christ we need 
 the presentation of the matchless character, so human in 
 its sympathy and so divine in its purity. 1 
 
 (1) First of all we appeal to the unbiassed readers of 
 the Gospel to consider the wonderfulness and originality 
 of the character of Christ. For testimony we shall appeal 
 to men who, whether Christian or not, stood outside the 
 Christian Church. Rousseau says : " The Gospel has marks 
 of truth so great, so striking, so perfectly inimitable, that 
 the inventor of it would be more astonishing than the hero." 
 He adds : "If the life and death of Socrates are those of a 
 sage, the life and death of Jesus are those of a God." John 
 Stuart Mill, whose testimony on such a matter carries the 
 greatest weight, employs the argument from the originality 
 of Christ's character to its historical truth. " Who among 
 the disciples of Jesus, or among their proselytes, was capable 
 of inventing these sayings ascribed to Jesus, or of imagining 
 the life and character revealed in the Gospels ? Certainly 
 not the fishermen of Galilee ; as certainly not St. Paul." 
 He adds, it is " the God Incarnate, more than the God of 
 the Jews or of nature, who, being idealised, has taken so 
 great and salutary a hold on the modern mind." We 
 shall not speak of the preparation in history for Christ's 
 appearing — of how long the sky had whitened before His 
 morning rose. We shall not speak of the long, silent magni- 
 ficence of His beginning from the day when it first dawned 
 on Him that He must be about the things of His Father 
 to His thirtieth year. We need not emphasise what will 
 
 1 " To me the archives are Jesus Christ, the inviolate archives, are 
 His Cross and Death and His Resurrection and the Faith that is 
 through Him " (Ignat., £p. ad Philadetyh., VIII. § 2). 
 
42 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 impress every reader — the marvellousness of the character 
 described, its patience and its zeal, its sweetness and its 
 strength, its tenderness and its sternness, its profound 
 humility and its unparalleled self-assertion, its imperious 
 demand for reverence and for trust. 1 There are two points, 
 however, worth bearing in mind. Let it be observed that 
 the Evangelists have taken this wonderful character inta 
 the business of life. They have shown us how He demeaned 
 Himself under all circumstances, whether blasphemed or 
 adored, whether triumphant or suffering, whether appealing 
 or warning, whether working miracles or receiving cups 
 of cold water. And they have not failed in rendering a 
 true and verifiable image. 2 Further, they have given us 
 the picture of a living personality. Now, as has been 
 pointed out, these are two of the most difficult achievements 
 of literature, which it may safely be said have never been 
 compassed. Idealised characters as described in literature 
 are very vague. The words of Guinevere may be repeated : 
 
 " But, friend, to me 
 He is all fault who hath no fault at all ; 
 For who loves me must have a touch of earth : 
 The low sun makes the colour." 
 
 George Eliot in her last novel, Daniel Deronda, suggests. 
 a parallel between her hero and the Redeemer approaching 
 Israel, and tries to make him an ideal character ; but, as 
 has been said, he is as feeble and colourless a character as- 
 can be, and was well enough described by Mr. Hutton as a 
 " moral mist." Nothing credible, nothing memorable,. 
 
 1 Matthew Arnold says: "Jesus himself, as he appears in the 
 Gospels, and for the very reason that he is so manifestly above the 
 heads of his reporters there, is, in the jargon of modern philosophy, 
 an absolute ; we cannot explain him, cannot get behind him and above 
 him, cannot command him " (Pref. to Pop. Ed. of Lit. and Dog.). 
 
 2 Cf. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, § 120: " Methought I saw with 
 great evidence, from the four Evangelists, the wonderful works of God r 
 in giving Jesus Christ to save us, from his conception and birth, even 
 to his second coming to judgment : methought I was as if I had seen 
 him grow up as from the cradle to the cross ; to which also, when he- 
 came, I saw how gently he gave himself to be hanged and nailed on 
 it for my sins and wicked doing. Also, as I was musing on this his 
 progress, that dropped on my spirit, he was ordained for the slaughter."' 
 
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST 43 
 
 nothing clear is recorded of him. It is true, also, that the 
 lives of the saints are hard to write, for they also are histori- 
 cally ineffective. The divine communion often weakens, 
 the personal and positive element in them, and the self is 
 drowned, and the personality whose assertion is required 
 ere a man can be a force in history disappears. The ex- 
 ceptions to these are the books in which saints have written 
 their own lives and experience. It is almost a law of 
 literature that any portraits of the ideal in the least degree 
 satisfactory are closely transcribed from life, as was, for 
 example, Dinah Morris in Adam Bede. This confirms what 
 has been said. The wonderfulness, the originality of the 
 character described in the Gospels, the minuteness, the 
 freshness, the realisation, the detail of the whole portrait, 
 prove that it is drawn from life. 
 
 (2) Next we must note in a word the strange harmony 
 of the history. Modern critics have largely rejected the 
 Fourth Gospel, and its historical value is lightly esteemed 
 by such critics as we have recently been referring to. But 
 no sense of incongruity has disturbed believers, and in 
 this matter the saints shall judge the critics. Or rather we 
 ought to say the critics, who are men of letters, who know 
 what literature is, and what life is, shall judge the narrow 
 scholars. Of St. John's Gospel it may be said that it 
 gives us not indeed the true Christ merely, for all the Gospels 
 give us the true Christ, but that it gives us the fuller Christ. 
 In that Gospel we find the same infinite mercy, love, 
 and comprehension, the feminine element also in its finest 
 strain — Godhead, manhood, womanhood united in the Re- 
 deemer and Reconciler. Now, when we are told by critics 
 that these Gospels are composed of fragments that 
 have floated together hitherto, nobody exactly knows 
 how, that they are more legendary than historical, that 
 they reflect the consciousness of the time in which they 
 were written, and not the actual truth about Jesus, we can 
 only say that if this be so we are in presence of a stupendous- 
 miracle, a miracle which violates every law of literature 
 
44 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 as students of literature have understood it. On this 
 point Principal Rainy's words cannot be too often quoted : 
 "The man who hides from himself what Christianity and 
 the Christian revelation are takes the parts of it to pieces, 
 and persuades himself that without divine interposition 
 he can account for all the pieces. Here is something from 
 the Jews and something from the Greeks. Here are miracles 
 that may be partly odd natural events, partly nervous 
 impressions, and partly gradually growing legends. Here 
 are books, of which we may say that this element was con- 
 tributed by this party, and the other by that, and the 
 general colouring by people who held partly of both. In 
 such ways as these Christianity is taken down and spread 
 over several centuries. But when your operation is done 
 the living whole draws itself together again, looks you in 
 the face, refuses to be conceived in that manner, reclaims 
 its scattered members from the other centuries to the first, 
 and reasserts itself to be a great burst of coherent life and 
 light centring in Christ. Just so you might take to pieces 
 a living tissue, and say there is here only so much nitrogen, 
 carbon, lime, and so forth ; but the energetic peculiarities 
 of life going on before your eyes would refute you by the 
 palpable presence of a mystery unaccounted for." 
 
 We will give two illustrations from literature sufficient 
 to illustrate the argument. One apologist, who is not only 
 a Christian but an eminent man of letters, takes the story 
 of the Easter walk to Emmaus and points out how the 
 writer rises to the level of perfect equality with the majestic 
 conception of a risen God. He is so much at home with 
 it that he fearlessly follows the minute actions of this ex- 
 alted Being, and endows Him with sentence after sentence 
 not unworthy of those Divine lips. He goes on to say that 
 Shakespeare himself could not have moved on those lofty 
 ranges of imaginative fiction without an occasional break- 
 down, and refers to the comparative failure of the language 
 of the ghost in Hamlet. It falls, he says, on the whole, 
 far short of the lofty and awful conception conveyed by 
 
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST 45 
 
 the words of others who impart to us the impression which 
 the dramatist wishes us to form. Every one knows how 
 in his introduction to The Monastery Sir Walter Scott 
 dwells upon the almost certain breakdown of supernatural 
 machinery in works of fiction. Another eminent writer 
 mentions the fine Easter passage in Faust, where the 
 disciples grieve that their Master is raised to heaven, and 
 that they are left to suffer below. But in the Gospel the 
 disciples suffer only from the news of Christ's death, and 
 the apprehension that the story of His rising is too good to 
 be true. When they know it to be true they are full of 
 joy and triumph. And was it so that these lowly hands 
 wove unaided a story whose unity and magnificence have 
 dazzled the world ? How came it on the theory of un- 
 believing critics that these scraps and tatters somehow 
 came together, and gave us this great result ? To change 
 the figure. What stones the building is made of we can 
 never tell. One thing is certain. Not only does it contain 
 a true history, but it is a house not made with hands. 
 
 (3) Another point is the blending of the Divine and the 
 human that runs through all the story. For Christ, as 
 pictured in the Gospels, is not described as a Shakespeare, 
 or a Newton, or a Mozart of the spiritual world, but as God. 
 And yet He is most Imman, most humble, and the Divinity 
 and humanity, the exaltation and the humiliation, go con- 
 stantly together. It was He who washed the feet that 
 were stabbed by the thorns of life and soiled by its dust, 
 but He did it knowing that He came from God and went to 
 God. He said : " Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are 
 heavy laden, and I will give you rest," and stretched out 
 His arms to receive the worn world. But He, being weary 
 with His journey, sat by the well-side, and was content to 
 be served. When we realise this, His miracles appear in- 
 evitable, for He came not to disturb order but to remove 
 the disorder which moral evil had introduced into the life 
 of humanity. So the world, as it gazes on Him who has 
 renewed the face of the earth, understands that it is the 
 
46 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 gentleness of the Divine will that draws nearer and nearer 
 to the empty sanctuary of the heart in the humanity of 
 the Son of God. The passionate love which this Gospel 
 story kindles when it is fully comprehended is a love that 
 never could be given to any heart that did not come into 
 the closest fellowship with our own. 
 
 (4) In so brief a discussion we can only touch the main 
 points, but the earnest reader of the Gospels cannot fail to 
 observe almost from the beginning of the story the deliberate 
 movement of the Lord's life towards death. In most of 
 the great stories of the world the enduring passages are 
 those which show how the ceaseless call of the eternal 
 world is heard at last and obeyed, heard sometimes when 
 the noise of life is loudest. Our Lord's short life from its 
 earliest moment was touched with the shadow of death, and 
 yet for Him death was not what it was for His brethren. 
 The life was not idyllic, as Renan has painted it. To think 
 of it so is to miss its meaning from the start. Its colour 
 all through is the sacrificial colour, for Christ came not to 
 be the mere Example, but also the Uplifter and the Re- 
 deemer of the world. We mark how as He drew near the 
 close there were outbursts from a profound deep of sorrow. 
 It was not that He had any secret remorse ravaging His 
 heart. There had been no moment of madness in His 
 holy years, no moment that He longed and prayed to pluck 
 from out the past. There had been no moral tragedy, 
 though He had His conflict with the enemy. No, His grief 
 was not for Himself ; it was for us. It was a burden of 
 sympathy. He had come to deal not with our sorrows only, 
 not with our darkness only — He had come to save us from 
 our sins, and all the forces of His nature were strained that 
 He might deliver us. And the load of our guilt, the chas- 
 tisement of our peace, was upon Him all His years. To- 
 wards the end His burden-bearing is made more manifest. 
 The secrets of His heart are more fully disclosed, but all 
 the story is of one piece. 
 
 1 Renan, Vie de Jesus, xix ad fin. 
 
THE HISTORICAL CHRIST 47 
 
 (5) This leads us naturally to say a word of the testimony 
 the Gospel bears to His sinlessness. Unless the story was 
 a true story, how could it have been written ? How could 
 the Sinless have been imagined ? Even to paint the ideal, 
 or what we are content to call the ideal, as we have 
 seen, taxed the greatest minds. But to picture the Sinless 
 needs something more than truth. It needs inspiration, for 
 Christ's disciples who had been with Him in the narrow 
 chamber, in the little boat, who had sat with Him partaking 
 of the same rough fare, who had walked by His side, would 
 not only have detected Him if He had once been selfish 
 or hasty or false, but they would have been sure to mis- 
 understand Him when He was most wise and pure and 
 true. But they had no doubt that His glory was the 
 glory of the Only Begotten, and they succeeded in giving 
 us the figure of the Sinless. The pencil does not swerve ; 
 and yet how inevitable it was that it should swerve had 
 another Hand not held it ! One false note would have 
 destroyed all, but that false note never comes. Christ 
 preached the Sermon on the Mount and He lived it. More 
 important even than the testimony of the disciples is the 
 testimony of Christ Himself. He was born with the Jewish 
 conscience, which had been taught the knowledge of sin 
 which comes from the law, and yet He had no consciousness 
 of sin. He was keenly aware of sin in others, and fiercely 
 scourged the Pharisees for their lack of moral discernment. 1 
 The Pharisee ought to say, " God be merciful to me a 
 sinner," but our Lord never said that, never could have 
 said that. He prayed on the Cross, " Father, forgive 
 them " ; but He never said, " Father, forgive Me." In 
 a word, He had no consciousness of sin. His foes and His 
 friends attested His innocence, and His own attestation 
 is greater. He looked round and said calmly, " Which of 
 you convicteth Me of sin ? " If He was sinless, then we 
 have entered historically the region of miracle, for the 
 
 1 Renan, when asked once what he made of sin, answered airily, 
 " I suppress it." 
 
48 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 moral miracle is as great as any physical miracle can be. 1 
 Admit moral miracle, and you break in pieces what is called 
 the modern view of the world, and make it easy to accept 
 the story of Christ in its natural meaning. As Dr. Bruce 
 himself has said, " with belief in the virgin birth is apt to 
 go belief in the virgin life, as not less than the other a part 
 of the veil that must be taken away that the true Jesus 
 may be seen as He was— a morally defective man, better 
 than most, but not perfectly good." 2 This subject, how- 
 ever, demands fuller discussion, and in our next chapter 
 we shall take up the Sinlessness of Jesus. 
 
 The earnest bewildered inquirer should lay aside every 
 book until he has in some degree mastered the four Gospels. 
 If he is sincere and patient, he will, we believe, see in the 
 end that the history is a true history, and that Christ is 
 the only Saviour. It must be remembered, however, that 
 in every realm the vision is the measure of the man. " For 
 my part," said one to a great critic, " I never could admire 
 Shakespeare." " I admired him" was the critic's laconic 
 comment. In this sphere of religion, humility, and pain, 
 and need, and soul travail, and a pure intent are the 
 indispensable conditions of insight. Even the dimmest 
 realisation of the Christ is the opening of the everlasting 
 doors. " I seem to see a man who walks in uncertainty, 
 a napkin over his eyes. It is loosened little by little, and 
 the instant the handkerchief falls he finds himself in the 
 face of the Sun." There is 
 
 "A deep beneath the deep, 
 
 And a height above the height ; 
 Our hearing is not hearing, 
 And our seeing is not sight." 
 
 1 " A sinless Christ is as great a miracle as a Christ who can walk 
 on the water " (Bruce, Hum. of Chr., p. 208, n. 1). 
 3 Apologet., p. 410. 
 
THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS 49 
 
 [THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS 
 
 In his article on the book, Supernatural Religion, Mr. John 
 Morley intimates that he could say something in disparage- 
 ment of the lofty character of Jesus, but that he does 
 not wish to say it. Why should he shrink ? In writing 
 about Mr. Gladstone, Mr. Morley has not hesitated to 
 point out certain imperfections in his nature and career. 
 Mr. Morley did not shrink because he was then particularly 
 careful of sensitive religious susceptibilities. How much 
 care for them did he show when he descended into the 
 dreary ineptitude — not to use stronger words — of spelling 
 the name of God with a small " g " ? Renan claimed for 
 himself the absolute coldness which proposed as its only 
 object to take note of the most delicate and the most severe 
 shades of truth. Yet when he wrote his Life of Christ for 
 the people, he expunged the frank passages in his famous 
 book, passages such as that in which he argued that Christ 
 countenanced a fictitious resurrection of Lazarus arranged 
 by the sisters. He omitted also what he had said about 
 Christ's devouring fanaticism. These were fit for his 
 scientific readers ; but he was willing to make concession 
 to the preference of the vulgar for a popular hero. So, 
 without in the least changing his real opinion, he indulged 
 the general appetite for a stainless figure, and erased all 
 the traces of fanaticism and finesse. To do that was to 
 forget that, after all, truth is sacredness, and sacredness 
 is truth, and that deception in any and every form can in 
 the end work nothing but evil. Yet we will not bear too 
 hardly on Morley and Renan. What we are convinced 
 lay at the back of their reticence was the feeling that if 
 Christ were once proved to be frail and stained like the 
 rest of us, the glory of the world would be quenched. 
 
 In dealing with the later criticism of Christ and the 
 
50 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 Gospels, we are compelled to say much about Strauss and 
 Renan, simply because they sincerely endeavour to solve 
 the problems which sceptical criticism is so loth to face. 
 To the apparatus of criticism there is practically no addition 
 since their time, none at least of cardinal importance. It 
 would be the merest affectation to say that the new critics 
 are in any way comparable in intellectual strength either 
 to Strauss or Renan. They attempt to dissolve the history 
 by analysis. They take away from us the foundations of 
 faith. When we ask, " What do you give us in room of 
 what you have removed ? " they are silent. They hint at 
 the kind of life of Christ that might be written from the 
 few torn fragments left to them, but they shrink from the 
 task of building again what they think they have shattered, 
 of clothing what they think they have disrobed. But we 
 are entitled to say that, if they deprive humanity of the 
 great and solemn object of its trust, they are bound to tell 
 what they have to place in its stead. Not that we believe 
 they can make any other answer than the answers of Strauss 
 and Renan. There is no rest for them, as we shall see, 
 save what may be found at the bottom of the abyss. 
 
 Was our Lord without sin, as He claimed, as His apostles 
 testified, as His Church has believed ? The record is 
 before us. Where are the traces of sinfulness ? The 
 attempt to impugn His character from the record has so 
 completely broken down that the endeavour is now to 
 show that He Himself acknowledged His sinfulness. One 
 alleged instance, brought forward by Dr. Schmiedel, is 
 Christ's saying to the young ruler : " Why callest thou 
 Me good ? There is none good but One — that is God." 
 Dr. Bruce himself has dealt so admirably with this passage 
 that we cannot do better than reproduce his exegesis. 1 
 " To the seeker after eternal life, who accosted Him as 
 ' Good Master,' He addressed the sharp interrogation, 
 ' Why callest thou Me good ? ' as if to say, ' Make not 
 goodness a matter of compliment ; call no man good till 
 
 1 Afiologet, p. 340. 
 
THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS 51 
 
 you know what goodness is, and whether the person to 
 whom you apply the epithet deserves it.' Yet, while 
 virtually advising this inquirer to suspend his judgment 
 as to the applicability of the epithet ' good ' to Himself, 
 Jesus, we note, invited him to immediate discipleship : 
 ' Go, sell that thou hast, and come, follow Me.' Had he 
 complied with the invitation, he would gradually have 
 learned the nature of true goodness, and that the Master 
 he had chosen as his guide was indeed good." Another 
 of Dr. Schmiedel's few pillars for a scientific Life of Christ 
 is the great saying of Christ, " Whosoever speaketh a word 
 against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him." This 
 he wishes us to take as a case in which Christ suggested 
 that He was not without sin ! We shall again call in Dr. 
 Bruce to make an effective reply. He says that this so- 
 called exposure of the faults of Jesus is but a sorry, pitiful 
 business after all, and that those who practise it are sorely 
 in need of the compassionate regard of Him they criticise, 
 and Who benignantly said, " Whosoever speaketh a word 
 against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him." 
 
 (1) Amongst those who refuse to accept the full catholic 
 doctrine of the person and work of Christ there are few — 
 their number is diminishing — who take up the position that 
 Christ was sinless. Schleiermacher taught that in Christ the 
 ideal of humanity was for the first time realised, although 
 he did not recognise fully the Incarnation of God. Dr. 
 Bruce ranks Martineau after Channing as holding the same 
 view, 1 though we very much doubt whether Martineau, 
 in his later period at least, would have made any such ad- 
 mission. In fact, he has written passages which apparently 
 affirm the imperfection of Christ. We ought to rejoice, 
 however, when such a view is held, however little it may 
 hang together with other parts of the thinker's system. 
 When the sinlessness of Christ is acknowledged, we are no 
 longer disputing about miracle. The region of the miracu- 
 lous has been entered. There is the possibility at least, 
 1 Cf. Seat of Authority , p. 651. 
 
52 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 and the beginning of a true Christian faith. But no one, 
 we may confidently say, will hold long to the belief in the 
 sinlessness of Christ without being compelled to recognise 
 the rest of our Lord's claims. The sinlessness of Christ 
 will not at once prove Divinity. But it will prove credibility, 
 and those who hear the beloved Son cannot misunderstand 
 the meaning and the immensity of His claims. 
 
 (2) There is another school of critics, who admit that 
 Christ was much better than most people, but deny that 
 He was sinless. They know that to affirm sinlessness is 
 to pass from naturalism to supernaturalism. Thus Weiz- 
 sacker, who has had a very great influence on recent criticism 
 in this country, says that Christ's perfection was similar 
 to that of Paul or of another devoted man. Keim is of 
 the same mind, and probably Ewald and Matthew Arnold 
 and Dr. Abbott, though they are so reluctant to attribute 
 fault to Christ that it is difficult to be quite sure of their 
 position. It has to be said, however, that to admit sinful- 
 ness, even in homeopathic measures, is to destroy the 
 Christian redemption. One thing at least is certain, that 
 a sinner cannot save sinners. The Gospel for mankind is 
 not merely a recovery of man from his moral weakness, but 
 a deliverance of man from his guilt. Till the conscious- 
 ness of sin and guilt is present in the heart, much in 
 the revelation of Christ will remain inexplicable. One of 
 Baur's friends and admirers wrote after his death, in words 
 which were meant to be laudatory : " His was a completely 
 objective nature. No trace of personal needs or struggles is 
 discoverable in connection with his investigations of Chris- 
 tianity. The positive beliefs which he had carried with him 
 from the period of youth, he suffered to remain as they 
 were until scientific inquiry had shown them to be unten- 
 able." The key to this lock is the sense of sin ; but Baur 
 was a stranger to the requirements of his own soul, and his 
 need of a Saviour. Once admit a tincture of moral failure in 
 Christ, and Christianity as a religion of redemption is in ruins. 1 
 1 The sense of sin a characteristic of the saints. "[An angry 
 
THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS 53 
 
 (3) Nevertheless, it is true that many people in these days 
 find it easy to accept the belief that Christ was a good 
 man, not a perfect man, but far above the ordinary level 
 of humanity, and admirable in much of His teaching. This 
 we take to be the position of Tolstoy. This school of thinkers 
 holds that what the human race needs principally is teaching, 
 and that by teaching the world may be redeemed, so far as 
 it can be redeemed, perhaps so far as it needs to be re- 
 deemed. Is this position tenable ? Is it possible to allow 
 that Jesus was a good man if His awful claims are denied ? 
 We believe it is not possible, and this is the belief of the 
 more consistent and thoroughly naturalistic critics of Christ. 
 They are compelled, in reading the Gospels, to admit that 
 if Christ is not worthy of the worship of men, He is not 
 worthy of their respect. 
 
 (a) We ask our readers to take, not all the four Gospels, 
 the Synoptics will answer the purpose as well as the fourth 
 Gospel, and apply this argument for themselves. Dr. 
 Knight has done it very practically in a letter to Dr. Mar- 
 tineau, published in his book, Inter Amicos, and we are 
 satisfied to reproduce his argument. It is an argument 
 which the simplest Christian can follow and understand, 
 and, as has been said before, the Christian Church cannot 
 suffer this business to be left to the so-called experts. The 
 claim of Christ is lifelong, unfaltering, calm, and repeated. 
 When it is set aside, the character of the claimant is lost. 
 For example, when Christ read from the roll of Isaiah in 
 the Synagogue of Nazareth, and added : " This day is this 
 Scripture fulfilled in your ears," can we honour Him if He 
 was merely an ordinary Jew ? When, at the close of the 
 Sermon on the Mount, He said that men would call Him 
 Lord, Lord, and that they would say they had done wonders 
 
 brother once assailed Francis of Assisi, pelting him with contumelious 
 epithets — thief, sacrilegious, murderer, incestuous, drunkard, and 
 the like. The saint meekly confessed that it was all true. " All 
 these crimes, and worse than these, I had committed, had not the 
 favour of Heaven preserved me." (Erasm. Exeq. Seraph, apud 
 Collog.). 
 
54 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 in His name, and He would reply, " I never knew you : 
 depart from Me, ye that work iniquity," was He not claiming 
 to be the Master and the Judge of souls ? When He cut 
 into the sacred ties that bind humanity, and said, " If a 
 man come unto Me and hate ->ot his father and mother and 
 wife and children, he cannot be My disciple," can we respect 
 Him if He is speaking as a mere man, as a sinful human 
 being ? Must He not transcend humanity if this word is 
 other than imbecile, arrogant ? When Peter said, " Thou 
 art the Christ, the Son of the Living God," did not Jesus 
 bless the witness-bearer, and tell him that flesh and blood 
 had not revealed the secret ? When He said that if any one 
 should offend one of the little ones who believed in Him, 
 it were better he were drowned in the sea, who was speak- 
 ing ? When He arrogated to Himself the position of Judge 
 of the sinful, entitled to say to the impenitent, " Depart 
 from Me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire," is He speaking 
 as a sinful man, is He speaking as a mere man ? If He is, 
 it is impossible not to say that He is uttering great swelling 
 words of vanity, and by reason of that vanity is lower 
 than the meek and humble saints of God. No, He claimed 
 to be a King, and said that He would give a Kingdom ; 
 and by what right did He claim not only the Throne, but 
 the power to ordain the Throne to His faithful followers ? 
 We need not labour this point. It is so plain that we defy 
 any reader of the Gospels to go through one of them seriously 
 without seeing that even to admit sinfulness in Christ is 
 not to admit a mere tincture of fault, but to admit a 
 character so egregiously vain and self-deluded as to fall 
 much below the average standard. 
 
 (b) But there is more to say. If we deny that Christ 
 was sinless, if we deny that He was the Redeemer of 
 the world, is it possible to evade the ultimate conclusions 
 of Renan and Strauss ? Renan pictures Christ as a serene 
 and simple country prophet in His youth, with a profound 
 apprehension of the Fatherhood of God, nourished on the 
 Messianic dreams of the Old Testament and on the wisdom 
 
THE SINLESSNESS OF JESUS 55 
 
 of Hillel. He describes for us the beauty of His early 
 ministry, and His degeneration when He came to insist 
 on His own claim. " Oh," says the Frenchman, " if He 
 had but died after preaching the only absolute religion by 
 the Well of Samaria ! " But He went on, and had at last 
 to play a part which became so intolerable that He had 
 to die, almost to commit religious suicide, that He might 
 deliver Himself from its fatal necessities ! Weizsacker 
 published in a German review, some twenty years ago, a 
 curiously pathetic paper written by Strauss after the ap- 
 pearance of the first volume of his Life of Jesus. In this 
 he pleaded that he might continue in the service of the 
 church of Wurtemberg. His mythical theory, he admits, 
 cannot be preached before a congregation ; but he can find 
 in some parts of the Gospel the embodiment of ideas in the 
 form of history. Strauss, as we know, lived to condemn 
 Christianity as an utter delusion, to denounce Christ as a 
 deceiver, to deny the existence of a personal God and the 
 immortality of the soul. 
 
 No, Christ was sinless, or He was the grand deceiver 
 of the world. " He is a good man," say some who do not 
 allow His sinlessness ; but they can never hold out against 
 the charge, " Nay, but He deceiveth the people." * Admit 
 His sinlessness, and all the rest goes with it. We hear Him, 
 and obey Him, and believe Him, and know Him to be 
 our Redeemer and our Lord. The imperious and awful 
 confidence with which He speaks fills our hearts with peace. 
 It has been miserably objected that, even if He was sinless, 
 He did nothing for the intellectual or artistic progress of 
 the world. Well, He did not come to be the drawing- 
 master or the scientific tutor of mankind. His name was 
 called Jesus because He was to save His people from their 
 sins, and He has been and is to-day mighty to save — able 
 to save to the uttermost all that come unto God by Him. 
 
 1 The author of Supernatural Religion in the early editions of 
 his book paid a high tribute to the character of Jesus, but afterwards 
 withdrew it. 
 
56 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 Yet art and science and philosophy have received a new 
 life from Him. With the risen Saviour all things rise. 
 Read the Gospels in their natural meaning, and the histori- 
 cal reality of Christ is proved. The Church did not create 
 Him, for it had no colours to paint the picture. No meaner 
 hand than truth could have drawn it. Therefore, in the 
 Gospels we have the story of a true descent of God in the 
 midst of us, and Christ created the Church. There was 
 One other than the rest ; One who was strong among the 
 weak, erect among the fallen, believing among the faithless, 
 clean among the defiled, and living among the dead ; One 
 who, being whole, gave His life for the sick. 
 
 We have next to discuss the Resurrection of our Lord. 
 
 VI 
 
 THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD FROM THE 
 
 DEAD 
 
 When Strauss's first Life of Christ was published, an eminent 
 critic said that his theories would be shattered against 
 such facts as the Resurrection of our Lord and the con- 
 version of St. Paul. So it has turned out. In dealing with 
 the Resurrection of Christ we shall first of all state the 
 meaning of the fact, next adduce its evidences, and in con- 
 clusion examine the explanations of its deniers. Students 
 will see that, in criticising the explanations, we make much 
 use of Strauss's first Life of Jesus. We do so partly because 
 no one can say that Strauss was prejudiced on the side 
 of orthodoxy, but also because he of all those who have 
 measured swords with Christ was the strongest, the ablest, 
 the most candid, the most loyal to the facts as he conceived 
 them. No other sceptical critic can lay claim to a more 
 piercing genius, to a genius which, like a flash, often lightens 
 up in an instant the tangled underwood of thought, and 
 attains its goal at once. 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD 57 
 
 I. — When Jesus died, the spirit which He had commended 
 to the holy hands of the Father was received. The crucified 
 body was laid in the grave. On the third day the grave 
 was left empty — the Redeemer had risen to a new life. 
 
 " One place alone had ceased to hold its prey, 
 
 A form had pressed it ; and was there no more ; 
 The garments of the grave beside it lay, 
 Where once they wrapped Him, on the rocky floor. 
 
 " He only with returning footsteps broke 
 
 The eternal calm wherewith the tomb was bound ; 
 Among the sleeping dead alone He woke, 
 And blessed with outstretched hands the hosts around." 
 
 He was not called back to the life of mortality. His body 
 was transfigured into fresh lustre and beauty. It was the 
 glorified body of the Resurrection. It was the same body 
 that had been committed to the tomb and yet it was not 
 the same, for it was revivified and transformed, and past 
 the dominion of death for ever. In this body He mani- 
 fested Himself to His disciples, and as His body could not 
 live to die, He took leave of the world in the quiet tri- 
 umph of the Ascension. The Resurrection and the Ascension 
 go together. Christ's body, if it had remained on earth, 
 would have been with us still ; but it was expedient for 
 us that He should go away, and a cloud received Him from 
 the sight of the faithful. The two points on which faith 
 must fasten are the empty grave and the ascension of the 
 glorified body into the heavens. To all these there is the 
 unbroken testimony of the New Testament. There is a 
 strange and not quite honest effort on the part of some in 
 these days to accept the Resurrection of Christ in words 
 while actually denying it. But to talk of the resurrection 
 of the spirit is preposterous. The spirit does not die, and 
 therefore cannot rise. What is meant by those who hold 
 such opinions is that the life of Jesus is, like any other life, 
 persistent beyond death ! But that has nothing to do with 
 the resurrection of the' New Testament, and nothing to 
 do with resurrection ' of any kind. The one resurrection of 
 which the New Testament knows, the one resurrection 
 
58 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 that allows to language any meaning, is the resurrection of 
 the body, the resurrection which leaves the grave empty. 
 
 II. — The Resurrection of our Lord from the dead is in 
 a sense the greatest of miracles, and needs to be proved 
 by clear evidence. What happened when Jesus died on 
 the Tree ? Those who slew Him had no doubt. He had 
 been defeated, stricken into powerless silence. What did 
 His disciples think ? Did they understand that His death 
 did not end all, that it was in itself a triumph to be followed 
 by the triumphs of His Resurrection, His Ascension, His 
 Session on the Eternal Throne ? On the contrary, they 
 were weighed down, discomforted, overborne by thoughts 
 of gloom, defeat, and death. They were stupefied and 
 silent mourners, whilst He — the Sword of the Spirit — was 
 quiet in the holy grave. Nothing is more certain than the 
 hopelessness of the disciples, and it is that which gives 
 such extraordinary weight to their witness. The stories 
 of the Gospel cannot here be examined in detail, but no 
 reader can fail to see the moods of the disciples — the be- 
 wilderment, the despair, the dawning bliss, the half -believing 
 rapture ending at last in an undying joy, and coming from 
 the sober certainty that the Lord was risen indeed, and 
 that the whole face of life and death had been changed. 
 Now the question is what took place between the deep 
 depression at the death of Jesus and the triumph that 
 followed ? What was it that made the sheep, so panic- 
 stricken when the Shepherd was smitten on Good Friday, 
 bold as lions on the day of Pentecost ? The answer of the 
 Gospels is that the Resurrection had happened. How can 
 we account for the wave of strength and hope that sud- 
 denly swept over the deeply despondent disciples, and made 
 them the conquerors of the world ? Between the blank 
 despair and the exultant gladness are we to place a delusion, 
 a lie ? 1 No, between them we place the risen Lord, and 
 
 1 " To read the history of the Christian Church without the belief 
 that Christ has been in vital and organic relation with it, seems to me 
 to read it under the impression that a profound illusion can, for cen- 
 turies, exercise more power for good than the truth. ... I cannot 
 
' THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD 59 
 
 nothing but the fact of His triumph will explain how those 
 who had been trying in vain to deaden the agony of dis- 
 appointment were suddenly filled with life and might and 
 courage, realising that when their Master made the step 
 from old things to new. He made it for all His brethren. 
 
 Again, we have the uncontradicted testimony of St. Paul, 
 a testimony which appears the more weighty the longer it 
 is studied. We find the witness in the first extant New 
 Testament writing, the first Epistle to the Thessalonians : 
 " Ye turned to God from idols to serve the living and true 
 God, and to wait for His Son from heaven Whom He raised 
 from the dead, even Jesus." " If we believe that Jesus 
 died and rose again, even so them also that are fallen asleep 
 in Jesus will God bring with Him." They are right who 
 say that the Apostle is appealing to the unquestioned and 
 universal belief of Christians. In 1 Corinthians xv. 5-7 
 St. Paul with calm precision enumerates five appearances 
 of the Lord after His Resurrection. He also reminds the 
 Corinthians of what he had delivered to them first of all, 1 
 throwing back the date of his evidence some years, pro- 
 bably from the year 55 to 51. It is to be noted that, though 
 some in the apostolic age had doubts about the resurrection 
 of Christians, there were apparently none as to the Resur- 
 rection of Christ. 2 Paul made his appeal to a fact which 
 admitted of no denial. He was speaking in the presence 
 of contemporaries who might still be cross-questioned, 
 with whom he had come into the closest relationship, who 
 had the means, and in some cases the will, to criticise him 
 if they saw cause. Further, the Apostle claims to have 
 seen the Lord Himself. " Have not I seen Jesus Christ 
 our Lord ? " " Last of all He was seen of me also as of 
 
 understand the history of the Christian Church at all, if all the fervent 
 trust which has been stirred by faith in the actual inspirations of a 
 nature at once eternal and human, has been lavished on a dream." — 
 Hutton, Theol. Ess., VII. 
 
 1 I.e., taking iv wparois as = i£ apxqs (so Chrysostom ; cf. Euth. 
 Zig.,TovTe(TTi irporcpov, c£ dpxv s > ° T€ «8i8a£a vpas). Otherwise "chiefly" : 
 " Quae maximi momenti sunt, in frimis doceri debent" (Beng.). So 
 Meyer, Findlay. 2 1 Cor. xv. 12-19. 
 
60 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 one born out of due time." He has been talking of the 
 other Apostles as having seen the risen Lord, and Tanks 
 his sight with theirs. In other words, St. Paul's was not 
 a subjective vision ; it was an actual beholding with the 
 bodily eyes. There was no doubt a mystic element in 
 St. sPaul, a perpetual side-door for him into the unseen, a 
 power of detaching himself from all sensible surroundings. 
 But his claim to be an Apostle was not based on these 
 inner secrets of his history, but on the fact that he had seen 
 the Lord, and his whole life had been revolutionised. This 
 is not the place in which to dwell on St. Paul's rich ex- 
 positions and applications of the fact of the Resurrection. 
 They all start from his recognition of Christ as one who 
 had broken through the immemorial law and rule of death. 
 Apart from the Resurrection, St. Paul knew of no Chris- 
 tianity. Baur says the Apostle regards the Resurrection 
 of Jesus as the principal doctrine of the Christian 'faith. 
 " If Christ be not risen," said the' Apostle, " then is our 
 preaching vain, and your faith is also vain." We are 
 dealing, it will be noticed, with an universal conviction, 
 what Strauss himself calls " a world-wide deception." 
 
 III. — Is it possible to explain these facts away ? Baur * 
 declined the attempt. He assumed the faith in the Re- 
 surrection as indisputable, and declined to attempt the 
 tracing of its origins. It is fair to say, with Dr. Bruce, 2 
 that his " reserve may have been due in part to prudential 
 considerations, but it was due also doubtless to a vivid 
 sense of the unsatisfactoriness of all past attempts to account 
 for the belief in Christ's rising from the dead on naturalistic 
 principles." We need not waste time on the hypothesis 
 that the whole matter was a fraudulent conspiracy on the 
 part of Jesus or His disciples, or both combined. 8 Chris- 
 tianity is not founded upon rottenness. What explanation 
 
 1 Kirchengesch. der Drei Erst. Jahrh., p. 40. 
 
 2 A£olog., p. 384. 
 
 3 The Jewish chief priests (Matt, xxviii. 11-15); Reimarus, Wolfenb. 
 Fragm. (das 5te Frag, in Lessing's 4tem Beitr.); the English Deist 
 Woolston (Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour). 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD 61 
 
 does such a supposition give of the bounding and thrilling joy 
 which was the mood of the Church ? " Men of all schools 
 in modern times would be ashamed to identify themselves 
 with so base a suggestion." 1 There are, however, three 
 hypotheses which may be briefly stated and examined. 
 
 (i) It is suggested that Christ was not dead when He 
 was taken from the Cross. He was merely in a swoon 
 caused by pain and exhaustion. From this swoon He 
 wakened, in His grave, and came out and showed Himself 
 to His disciples. 2 This notion, current before Strauss, 
 has had no reputable advocate we know of in recent times 
 except Huxley, who, however great as a man of science, 
 was a child in Biblical criticism. 3 Yet it was elaborately 
 worked out before Strauss 4 gave it its death-blow, and in 
 ways that suggest much to the imagination. It was said, 5 
 for example, that Christ, on first coming out of the tomb, 
 weak and sick, was obliged to remain by the grave, that 
 His wounded body was so sensitive that He could not bear 
 that Mary Magdalene should touch Him (!), that He bor- 
 rowed 1 clothes from the gardener who dwelt near the grave, 
 that as He recovered His strength He ventured upon walks, 
 and that, after long intervals of retirement, He was able 
 to let Thomas touch His wounds. It was imagined that 
 the white-robed messengers of the Resurrection were 
 Essenes, that Christ retired with them to an Essene lodge, 
 and there at last died quietly, with none beside Him that 
 knew His strange 1 and terrible secret. 6 Another writer 7 
 imagined that Christ went on for long silently working for 
 
 1 Bruce, A$olog., p. 385. 
 
 2 Paulus, exeg. Handb., 3, b, S. 785 sqq. ; Leb. yes., I. b, S. 281 
 sqq. : Schuster, in Eichhorn's allg. Bibl., 9, S. 1053. 
 
 3 It is elaborately expounded, though not deliberately adopted, by 
 S. Butler in The Fair Haven. * Leb. Jes., III. IV. § 140. 
 
 5 Vide Strauss, Leb. Jes., III. IV. § 139, S. 612 sq., 618. 
 
 6 Ibid. § 137: "These men seen at the grave may have been 
 the same who met him in the so-called Transfiguration, perhaps 
 Essenes, white being worn by this sect, or whatever else of the like 
 conjectures the antiquated pragmatism of a Bahrdt or Venturini has 
 to offer." 
 
 7 J. A. Brennecke, see Keim, Jesus of Na.za.ra, VI. 328 
 
62 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 the welfare of mankind, but in ways of which we know 
 nothing save in connection with the story of the conversion 
 of St. Paul. Did He perish unknown, perhaps in some 
 journey among the hills, leaving His body to be unburied 
 or buried by strangers ? The answer to this is simple and 
 conclusive. Such a Christ, with unhealed wounds, spectral, 
 feverish, marred, could only have weakened by His resusci- 
 tation the impression He made upon men in life and in 
 death. Such a Jesus could not be the risen Conqueror 
 and the Son of God. Such a Jesus could not be the author 
 of the Resurrection joy and triumph. As Strauss says, 1 
 He " could by no possibility have changed their sorrow 
 into enthusiasm or have lifted their reverence into worship." 
 (2) There is the suggestion of visions. It is argued 
 that the believing company were in a fit state of mind for 
 seeing the dead Christ alive again. 2 Mary Magdalene, sus- 
 ceptible, hysterical, excited, expecting, thought she heard 
 a slight noise, and that He called her " Mary." Or it is 
 suggested that, by brooding on the Scriptures in Galilee, 
 and visiting the old haunts, the disciples gradually got 
 into the state of mind out of which visions spring. The 
 objections are numerous and insuperable. If the repetition 
 of the same delusion in many different minds is possible, 
 it is possible only in an atmosphere of heated and fanatical 
 expectation of a certain event. But we know there was 
 no expectation. We know that in the upper chamber, the 
 doors of which were closed for fear of the Jews, there was 
 nought but sorrow and sighing. Let it be remembered 
 that the disciples thought not only that they saw Christ, 
 but that they conversed with Him, that the interviews 
 were held in various circumstances, and that there were 
 many witnesses. It is admitted by Strauss himself 8 that 
 such a state of mind could only have been developed in a 
 considerable time. But the Gospel narrative begins them 
 
 1 New Life, I. 412. 
 
 2 Renan, Les Aftotres, p. 2 sq. ; S'rauss, Lib. Jes., III. IV. § 140. 
 S. 633 sqq. 3 Strauss, ut suj>ra, S. 639. 
 
THE RESURRECTION OF OUR LORD 63 
 
 in three days, and ends them in little more than a month. 
 Dr. Abbott holds that these visions continued nearly a 
 year. Keim says that time is essential ; but time cannot 
 be given, and he rejects the hypothesis as without any 
 reason. Nor would such subjective and morbid fancies, 
 even if they could be conceived, account for the work and 
 testimony and witness of the disciples on behalf of the 
 risen Lord. Such feverish dreams would have ended in 
 gloom, paralysis, and impotence. As the Christian Church 
 is not built upon rottenness, so it is not built on mist. 
 
 (3) The last theory is that of Keim, and it is instructive 
 as showing the desperate nature of the problem. Keim 1 
 says that the living spirit of Jesus sent telegrams to the 
 disciples, telegrams which gave them a vision bearing the 
 likeness of the body laid in the grave, and still lying there. 
 Well, but if this be so we are back in the world of miracle. 
 This is practically admitted by Keim ; and Pfleiderer, 
 the latest commentator on Strauss, complains that Keim 
 " abandons the basis of strict history in the case of the 
 story of the resurrection of Jesus, and made concessions 
 to supernaturalistic dogma ; as the sequel of which the 
 old doctrine of miracles may be readmitted into Lives of 
 Jesus, as is really the case in the works of Beyschlag and 
 Weiss." 2 It has further been pointed out s that this hypo- 
 thesis really means that Christ deceives His people. He 
 induces the disciples, and therefore the whole Christian 
 Church, to believe a lie. It may well be said that this is 
 a poor foundation, to build Christianity upon a bastard 
 supernatural] sm, as difficult for unbelievers as the true 
 supernaturalism of the New Testament, and by believers 
 to be rejected. We are not quite sure that Dr. Bruce is 
 right in saying that Strauss could not have conceived of 
 such a hypothesis. 4 Strauss took the view that Spinoza 
 
 1 Jesus of Nazara, VI. p. 364. 
 
 2 Introd. to Geo. Eliot's translation oi Led. Jes., 2nd ed. 
 
 3 Bruce, Apolog., p. 393. 
 
 * III. IV. § 140, S. 629 ; Spinoza, Ep. XXIII. ad Henr. Oldenburg, 
 p. 558 sq., ed. Gfrorer. 
 
64 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 also postulated a miracle to explain the belief in the Resur- 
 rection. Further, he had before him the supposition of 
 Weisse that the departed spirit of Jesus really acted on the 
 disciples whom He had left behind. 1 
 
 The more the evidence 5 is examined, the more clearly 
 is the crowning miracle of Christianity established ; and 
 nowadays the tendency on the part of deniers is to attempt 
 no explanation at all, but take refuge in the general asser- 
 tion of the impossibility of the supernatural. But, as 
 has well been said, it is better to believe in the supernatural 
 than to believe in the ridiculous, and that is what it comes 
 to. The Resurrection gives us the risen Lord, and His 
 past and present contact with the souls of men. Mean- 
 while the words of Pressense deserve to be pondered: "The 
 empty tomb of Christ has been the cradle of the Church, 
 and if in this foundation of her faith the Church has been 
 mistaken, she must needs lay herself down by the side of 
 the mortal remains, I say, not of a man, but of a religion." 
 
 VII 
 
 CHRIST'S TRIUMPHANT CAPTIVES 
 
 We come now to discuss the Christ of experience. The 
 experience of Christ's delivering power in the soul is more 
 than sufficient for all who know it. It makes them reason- 
 ably impatient of apologetics. What need have we of 
 any further witness ? They ask that the case should be 
 stopped. But we are writing for shaken and doubting 
 believers, and for those who are not believers at all, for 
 those whose inward experience is insufficient as evidence, 
 and for those who have no experience. Experience, it is 
 often urged, is no argument for the outsider, but if the 
 transforming power of Christ manifests itself in outward 
 action, the outward result can be stated as a proof. The 
 
 1 Die evang. Gesch., 2, § 426 sq. 
 
CHRIST'S TRIUMPHANT CAPTIVES 65 
 
 phenomena of Christianity are not hidden from the world. 
 What passes within the sanctuary of the soul is not wholly 
 concealed. In stating the argument from experience we 
 shall speak of what is manifested first in the conversion of 
 souls and next in their sanctification. 
 
 In one of his raptures St. Paul said : " Thanks be to 
 God, who always leadeth us in triumph in Christ." 1 That 
 is, he conceived of himself as led about by Christ as a great 
 captive overcome, imprisoned, made powerless. The words 
 are translated in the Authorised Version, " Thanks be unto 
 God, who always causeth us to triumph in Christ," and 
 though this is an error in rendering, it is a truth of fact. 
 St. Paul was indeed Christ's captive, but he was more than 
 that. He was Christ's triumphant captive. In the old 
 days of triumphing conquerors the captives were led about 
 with savage, tortured, vengeful hearts. In the Christian 
 captivity it is far otherwise. 2 The triumph of Christ is 
 their triumph, and He would not glory in having captured 
 them if He had not captured heart and soul and will. St. 
 Paul is a captive, a prisoner, a slave of Jesus Christ, but he 
 exults in his bonds, vaunts himself of his fetters, and wears 
 them as proudly and lightly as a girl wears the bracelet 
 which her lover has clasped round her happy arm. St. 
 Paul takes the outstanding place in a long line of triumphant 
 captives stretching on and on to the Coming and the Throne 
 of Christ. It is of these captives and their captivity that 
 we are now to write. 
 
 It is owned that the conversion of St. Paul is one of the 
 principal evidences of the Resurrection and the Kingdom 
 of the Lord Jesus Christ. Exceptional as were its circum- 
 stances, he himself claimed, and claimed rightly, that his 
 
 1 2 Cor. ii. 14. Qpiafxfios : tirihei^is viktjs, 7to\vnr], Ka\ to o-e[ivveo-dai 
 (Suidas). " Latinis triumphari dicuntur, qui victi ducuntur in triumpho. 
 Sic miles quoque qui navavit bonam operam in bello, ducitur in 
 triumpho honoris causa, ut particeps sit suo duci " (Erasm.). Is not 
 this St. Paul's idea ? He was led in triumph as a victor. 
 
 2 Francis of Sales : " In the royal galley of Divine Love there is no 
 force — the rowers are all volunteers." 
 
66 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 conversion was a pattern — in other words, that all con- 
 versions are essentially of the same type. We do not wish 
 to overstate any argument, and will therefore be content 
 with the words of Dr. Edwin Hatch, who was certainly 
 no traditionalist. Dr. Hatch admits, or perhaps we should 
 say contends, that while there are differences in the ac- 
 counts of St. Paul's conversion, these do not constitute a 
 valid argument against the general truth of the narrative. 
 " Against all the difficulties and apparent incredibilities of 
 the narratives there stand out the clear and indisputable 
 facts that the persecutor was suddenly transformed into 
 a believer, and that to his dying day he never ceased to 
 believe and to preach that he had seen Jesus Christ. Nor 
 was it only that he had seen Him ; the Gospel which he 
 preached, as well as the call to preach it, was due to this 
 revelation." Scholars now generally admit that until the 
 moment when God revealed His Son in Paul the persecutor 
 had no suspicion that Christ and His followers were in the 
 right. He knew of the Crucifixion, but to him the Resur- 
 rection was utterly incredible. He always maintained, 
 even in the very passion of his humility, that when he was 
 a blasphemer, a persecutor, an injurer of his Lord, he was 
 not sinning against the light so far as he saw it. 1 His 
 heart, indeed, was tortured by the conviction that neither 
 he nor his people could perfectly fulfil that legal righteous- 
 ness without which it was impossible to attain salvation. 
 But that Christ should deliver him from the curse of the 
 law was the last thought of his mind. It was the actual 
 appearance of Jesus Christ which convinced him that Jesus 
 was risen, and was risen as the Messias and the Son of 
 God. The conviction came to him as with the roar of a 
 cataract, and from that moment all his life was changed. 
 The persecutor became Christ's servant and lover, 2 and died 
 as His martyr. 
 
 Now when we read the long roll of Christ's captives, 
 
 1 'AAXa T]Xerj6rjv, otl ayvomv e7roir]<ra iv anitrria (I Tim. i. 13). 
 
 2 Cf. Ignat. ad Horn. vii. §2:6 efibs cpais earTaiptorai. 
 
CHRIST'S TRIUMPHANT CAPTIVES 67 
 
 we shall see that every conversion has in it the element 
 of change, that life becomes nobly new, that it turns in 
 another direction, that it seeks other ends. 1 We shall also 
 find that in each conversion there is the consciousness of 
 a vision of the Lord Jesus Christ and a revelation of His 
 love, of a love that warms, and draws, and welcomes. We 
 are speaking of conversion as admitted by all Christians, 
 and not raising any question about Christian nurture or 
 the efficacy of sacraments. Take every conversion from 
 Augustine's to Bunyan's, from Bunyan's to Thomas Scott's, 
 from Scott's to the conversion of this morning, and the type 
 is not altered. All are sudden, though not all are felt to 
 be s^udden. Many, indeed, appear to be gentle and gradual, 
 nor is it possible to point to one hour or one place in the 
 history and say : " There and then I was changed." But 
 every Christian recognises that a change did come to pass, 
 that before that change there was alienation from God and 
 Christ, that after that change a new relationship was con- 
 stituted, and another element entered into the life. Nor 
 is the world so blind that it altogether fails to see. 2 It can 
 never realise the truth in the way that the subjects of saving 
 grace realise it, never know what conversion means to 
 those whose souls have suddenly opened, who have seen 
 the light above the brightness of the sun shine upon their 
 way, for whom a new lustre has fallen on river and meadow, 
 on man and woman and child and God. 3 It can never 
 
 1 " This experience has been repeated and testified to by countless 
 millions of civilised men and women in all nations and all degrees of 
 culture. It signifies not whether the conversion be sudden or gradual, 
 though, as a psychological phenomenon, it is more remarkable when 
 sudden and there is no symptom of mental aberration otherwise. . . . 
 In all cases it is not a mere change of belief or opinion : this is by 
 no means the point ; the point is that it is a modification of character, 
 more or less profound" (G. J. Romanes, Thoughts on Religion, 
 pp. 162 sq.). 
 
 s Cf. the influence on Bunyan of the "three or four poor women 
 sitting at a door, in the sun, talking about the things of God" (fir. 
 ■Ab., § 37). 
 
 3 " I was now so taken with the love and mercy of God that I 
 remember I could not tell how to contain till I got home : I thought I 
 could have spoken of his love, and have told of his mercy to me, even 
 
68 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 know all that conversion means to those who have turned 
 their trust and enthusiasm to Christ in heaven, who have 
 fallen in love with immortal goodness, who have risen 
 above the region of ineffectual strife, who have known the 
 emancipating power of their great faith and affection, and 
 to whom the living Christ, the risen Lord, is the great reality. 
 But we may quote one testimony. Mark Rutherford says : 
 " I can assure my incredulous literary friends that years 
 ago it was not uncommon for men and women suddenly 
 to wake to the fact that they had been sinners, and to affirm 
 that henceforth they would keep God's commandments by 
 the help of Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. What is 
 more extraordinary is that they did keep God's command- 
 ments for the rest of their lives." 
 
 Every conversion is like St. Paul's conversion, not an 
 act of violence, but a miracle. We have always felt that 
 Christian apologists have not sufficiently met Hume's 
 argument against miracles. The Resurrection of Christ is 
 as well attested as any miracle can be. And yet if miracles 
 ceased to be wrought, it might by lapse of time cease to be 
 believed. Men might say they could not explain it ; but 
 it happened long ago, and if the facts were known there 
 would certainly be an explanation of some sort. As a 
 matter of fact where the Resurrection of Christ is not be- 
 lieved in, conversion is not believed in. 1 When the Church 
 becomes weak and low, when converts are very rare, when 
 the greater experience of the spiritual life apparently ceases, 
 negative criticism thrives abundantly. It cannot live in 
 a living Church. The venerated Franz Delitzsch has left 
 an unforgettable testimony under this head. He affirms 
 that the degree of grace which attains in the Resurrection 
 of Christ the centre and summit of its realisation, fulfils 
 itself in miracles. " In most cases indeed is the govern- 
 to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me, had they 
 been capable to have understood me" (Bunyan, Gr. Ad., § 92). 
 
 1 " The Old World knew nothing of Conversion ; instead of an 
 Ecce Homo, they had only some Choice of Hercules" (Carlyle, Sari. 
 JZesart., II.). 
 
CHRIST'S TRIUMPHANT CAPTIVES 69 
 
 ment of God like the waters of Siloah, that go softly ; the 
 visible miracles of history are only those flashes from the 
 supernatural activity of God which serve rare and excep- 
 tional ends. But the whole work of grace, whether in the 
 experience of individuals or in the history of mankind, even 
 where it is hidden, is supernatural and therefore miraculous ; 
 because in the midst of this world, lying under the law of 
 sin and death, it aims at establishing a world of righteous- 
 ness and glory." He goes on to give a significant personal 
 testimony : " The subjectivity of science finds a wholesome 
 check in the office of preacher and guardian of souls. Only 
 those of little faith can fancy that such science as this, which, 
 with its fruitless knowledge and washed-out credo, must 
 be dumb beside the bed of death, menaces the existence 
 of the Church. In the Muldenthal I was as a young man 
 a witness of soul struggles and spiritual victories, which 
 rendered distasteful to me for ever the over-estimation of 
 science. Still does my spiritual life find its root in the 
 miraculous soil of that first love which I experienced with 
 Lehmann, Zopffel, Ferdinand Walther, and Burger ; still 
 to me is the reality of miracles sealed by the miracles of 
 grace which I saw with my own eyes in the congregations 
 of this blessed valley. And the faith which I professed in 
 my first sermons, which I could maintain in Mederfrohna 
 and Lunzenau, remains mine to-day, undiminished in 
 strength and immeasurably higher than all earthly know- 
 ledge. Even if in many Biblical questions I have to oppose 
 the traditional opinion, certainly my opposition remains on 
 this side of the gulf, on the side of the theology of the 
 Cross, of grace, of miracles." The historical miracles live 
 in the company of the spiritual miracles, and the super- 
 natural is the native air of Christianity. Our Lord Himself 
 spoke of greater works that were to follow His miracles, 
 of victories in the moral and spiritual order within the soul 
 of man. " We do not want," says one, " the miracles 
 which saints have worked, but the miracle through which 
 the saint himself is made." The belief in the Christ of 
 
70 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 history and the Christ of eternity will cease in the Christian 
 Church when the work of conversion ceases, and, since the 
 gates of hell shall not prevail against the Church, that can 
 never be. 
 
 Christianity is primarily a converting and sanctifying 
 power. Secondarily, and only secondarily, a moral and 
 social lever, an agent in the elevation of society. What 
 Christianity has done for the world has been mediated 
 through Christians from Christ, and therefore comes little 
 within the scope of this argument. To tell what Christianity 
 has done for the world is indeed almost unnecessary. We 
 sympathise deeply with that apologist, 1 weary of apolo- 
 getics, who said that Christianity could afford to stand 
 speechless in the world's judgment hall, knowing that its 
 works bear witness to it that it is of God. Grant that its 
 progress is slow, but remember in the face of what difficulties 
 that progress is made. In the dark face of heathendom 
 missionaries sometimes have lost heart and faith. It was 
 said by one that if Christianity could be combined with 
 polygamy, it would soon be the religion of South Africa. 
 As if Christianity could combine with polygamy and remain 
 Christianity ! There have been cases where missionaries 
 laboured long and effectually in the presence of vast and 
 ordered and ancient systems of thought. They dreamed 
 that there could be a blending of Christianity and other 
 religions, a relinquishment of its main principles, and a 
 consequent progress. But Christianity will not blend, 
 Christianity will not lower its terms, will not abate its 
 claims, and its claims leave nothing out. Christianity 
 begins with the regeneration of the individual, and has no 
 belief in any regeneration of society apart from that. It 
 
 1 " Our Saviour and Lord Jesus Christ, when false witness was borne 
 against him, held his peace, and, when he was accused, answered no- 
 thing ; being persuaded that His whole life and His doings among the 
 Jews were superior to a voice refuting the false witness and to speeches 
 making defence against the accusations. . . . Yea, I make bold to say 
 that the defence which you would have us make, weakens the defence 
 which the facts present and the power of Jesus which is manifest to 
 6uch as do not lack perception " (Orig., C. Cels., Praefat. §§ I, 3). 
 
CHRIST'S TRIUMPHANT CAPTIVES 71 
 
 recognises the deep and fatal wound of humanity. It first 
 
 " Struck its dart 
 At the head of a lie — taught original sin, 
 The corruption of man's heart." 
 
 Christianity is either a religion of redemption or a dead 
 and powerless nothing. 
 
 In this connection it is instructive to read the new 
 books of Zola and Tolstoy. Both are men of world-wide 
 influence, both are men of great gifts, both are often visibly 
 moved by noble impulses, both have set their hearts with 
 passion on the amelioration of the human lot. Zola in 
 his last book, Travail, sets forth his views of the glorious 
 possible future. He founds everything on the infallibility 
 and sufficiency of the human reason. When science has 
 advanced further, work is to be a festival ; neither envy 
 nor hatred is to be left. Every man's happiness is to rest 
 in the happiness of others. There are to be no more armies, 
 no more courts of law, no more prisons. But before the 
 consummation can be reached, the Church of Christ in 
 every form must be destroyed. Deluding dreams of a future 
 life must be banished. Boys and girls are to be educated 
 together, and love alone is to guide them. Marriage must 
 go, and alliances between men and women are to be broken 
 when there is weariness on either side. As this ideal com- 
 munity progresses, the old priest becomes more wretched, 
 and his church still emptier. A very few dull-witted people 
 support it for a time, but they are old and they die out 
 one by one, and the priest contemplates the day when he 
 will see the steeple of his church bursting through the roof 
 of the nave, and crushing the altar of the Divinity. Like 
 the temples of ancient idolatry, the churches must disappear. 
 So it came to pass. One day the old priest was killed at 
 the altar by the falling in of his roof. At this there was 
 the greatest delight in the happy community. " Yet 
 another religion was dead. ... In that delightful garden 
 where slept the dust of a religion of wretchedness and death, 
 one now beheld the growth of human joy, the overflowing 
 
72 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 florescence of light." There is something very awful in 
 the intense malignity with which Zola regards Christianity 
 in every form — something no less awful in his perfect con- 
 fidence that if men and women have only to work two hours 
 a day at pleasant labour, if they have plenty to eat and 
 drink, if they are allowed unlimited liberty in their asso- 
 ciations, there will come universal love and peace to this 
 old world. Tolstoy goes much deeper than that, but he is 
 entirely with Zola in teaching that the Church is the enemy, 
 and that before it can be well with mankind every temple 
 raised for worship by human hands in the name of Christ 
 must be destroyed. He no more than Zola believes in a 
 personal God or in a personal immortality, but unlike Zola 
 he is troubled by doubts as to the perfectibility of society, 
 and unwilling entirely to part with Christ. In the living 
 Christ or in the historical Christ he does not believe, but 
 that some fragments survive from Christ's teaching, frag- 
 ments especially breathing compassion for the poor and 
 denouncing the rule of force in every shape, he still main- 
 tains. And these, he thinks, define the Christian attitude 
 towards life. Tolstoy's views have more influence in this 
 country at present than many may be disposed to imagine. 
 Thus Tolstoy, far rather than Jesus Christ, inspires some 
 of our publicists. But Christians are not specially called 
 upon to refute the dreams of Tolstoy and Zola. Reasonable 
 men of every creed and no creed are well aware that if 
 Zola's ideas were carried out, the world would be turned 
 into a sty. Neither will they be deluded by the notion 
 that maxims, however good, will regenerate. It is Christ 
 who makes all things new. It is in the miracle of conversion 
 that He meets the need of a wounded and weakened 
 humanity which cannot be saved without a supernatural 
 work of renewal. That work of renewal means that the 
 heart is united to Him, knows Him as He was, as He is, as 
 He will be. Christ is not merely the world's most glorious 
 memory. He is also its soul and its salvation. We, too, 
 believe in a Utopia, but it is eternal in the heavens. 
 
THE ARGUMENT FROM THE AUREOLE 73 
 
 VIII 
 THE ARGUMENT FROM THE AUREOLE 
 
 There are many people, far more than is usually supposed, 
 who have gone through the storms of debate and question- 
 ing about Christianity without ever hesitating in their sure 
 belief that Christianity is true. They may not be Christians, 
 but they have known those who are Christians indeed. 
 They have seen the aureole round their heads, and known 
 it as an attestation of Christ. There is in this world the 
 silent and humble apostolate which is in itself a living legible 
 creed, an incessant and persuasive preaching. They picture 
 the saints, said one, with a halo round their heads ; but 
 indeed they had no such thing, for their brows were furrowed 
 with care even as ours are, and their hair grew grey with 
 grief. In the literal sense this is true, but in numberless 
 instances the aureole is visible even to unfaithful eyes, and 
 |s the argument of all arguments for a living Saviour. 1 
 
 The impression made by Christian sanctity on believers 
 is perhaps best illustrated in the instance of the late Mr. 
 Cotter Morison. Mr. Morison was one of the most able 
 and convinced rejectors of Christianity. He published 
 shortly before his death a book called The Service of Man, 
 which was described at the time as " the most powerful 
 attack on Christianity that has been produced in England 
 during this generation." But from the beginning he was 
 impressed by the phenomena of sanctity, and his first and 
 best work was a Life of St. Bernard. We shall explain 
 briefly his admissions and his attempts to counteract the 
 force of these. For brevity's sake we must condense, en- 
 
 1 Cf. Orig, C. Cels., Praefat. § 2: "Jesus is always having false wit- 
 ness borne against Him, and there is never a time when, wickedness 
 being in man, he is not accused ; and He Himself now also holds His 
 peace at these things, and does not answer by voice, but makes His 
 defence in the life of his true disciples, which cries aloud his excellencies 
 and is superior to every kind of false witness. Thus he refutes and 
 overturns the false-witness bearings and accusations." 
 
74 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 deavouring, as far as possible, to keep close to Mr. Morison's 
 words. Mr. Morison says that it is in the action of Christian 
 doctrine on the human spirit that we see its power in 
 the highest and most characteristic form. Its influence on 
 the spiritual side of characters naturally susceptible to 
 its action has been transcendent, overpowering, and un- 
 paralleled. It will be observed that Mr. Morison limits 
 the influence to characters " naturally susceptible." He 
 maintains that the great mass of men have at all times been 
 feebly sensitive to the higher spiritual influences of Chris- 
 tianity, and that the true Christian saint is the rarest pro- 
 duct in every Christian Church. Still, the Christian saint 
 exists, one of the marvels of the mortal world, so lofty, 
 so pure, so attractive that he ravishes men's souls into 
 oblivion of the patent and general fact that he is an ex- 
 ception among thousands or millions of professing Christians. 
 The saints have saved the Churches from neglect and disdain. 
 They have kept alive the hope that all men could be like 
 them. 
 
 But to say this, according to Mr. Morison, would be 
 to say that the highest achievements of the intellect 
 and the imagination were possible to all men, that the 
 schoolboy might become a Newton or a Tennyson. The 
 genuine saint is a moral genius of a peculiar kind ; he is 
 born, not made ; though, like all men of genius, he is sure 
 sooner or later to acquire the best education and that most 
 adapted to his powers. Mr. Morison admits that, though 
 there are saints in other religions, the Christian doctrine has 
 a power of cultivating and developing saintliness which has 
 had no equal in any other creed or philosophy. Still, the 
 blessed saints are artists who work with unearthly colours 
 in the liquid and transparent tints of a loftier sky than 
 any accessible or visible to common mortals. He adduces 
 among other examples that of St. Louis, King of France, 
 insisting on his justice, temperance, and entire self-abnega- 
 tion, but especially on his meekness. " Once in the highest 
 tribunal in France a woman exclaimed to the King, 'Fie, fie! 
 
THE ARGUMENT FROM THE AUREOLE 75 
 
 a fine king of France you are ; much better were it if another 
 were king. You are only the king of the monks and friars, 
 and the wonder is you are not turned out of the kingdom.' 
 The ushers wanted to strike the woman, and expel her from 
 the court. But Louis would not allow it, and said, ' What 
 you say is very true, and I am not worthy to be King. 
 It would have been much better had it pleased God that 
 another had been put in my place, who knew better how 
 to govern the kingdom.' His spirituality was so intensified 
 by his creed that he seems more like one of the angels who 
 bowed before the Great White Throne than a denizen of 
 common earth." Mr. Morison thinks that the notion that 
 the world can ever be a place of peace and virtuous happi- 
 ness is never countenanced in the New Testament, and that 
 the true saints are in the midst of a hostile and evil society, 
 from which they must keep apart ; and if only they are 
 prepared, the sooner they can leave it the better. Here he 
 is mistaken, but he shows a real discernment when he 
 assigns to the saints a power of detachment and recollec- 
 tion, of absolute self-forgetfulness, of profound sincerity, and 
 utter devotion to the Cross, and when he affirms that saints 
 who are the equals of any of the saints of old are still rising 
 in the Christian Church. He mentions among the flowers 
 of exquisite perfume and beauty grown in the garden of 
 the soul, still arresting the attention of an unbelieving 
 world, such women as Sister Agnes Jones, Mother Margaret 
 Hallahan, and Sister Dora Pattison. But he contends that 
 they were simply women of extraordinary genius, the 
 choice products of maligned human nature. He asks, If 
 the saintliness of these holy women depended upon their 
 •creed, why do not the thousands and millions who hold 
 the same creed exhibit a like saintliness ? We might ask : 
 " Why is it that in the soil of other religions and irreligion 
 110 such products are to be found ? " and Mr. Morison 
 makes no attempt to answer the question. All he does is 
 to say that these glorified beings are so lofty that they 
 discourage and repel the ordinary person, who knows that 
 
76 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 he can never reach their altitude of detachment, spirituality, 
 and perfect faith. 
 
 So far as he goes, Mr. Morison has done the Christian 
 cause good service ; and, in fact, his treatment of Christian 
 sanctity is the only part of his book which can now be read. 
 Mr. John Morley is another unbeliever who has made 
 similar admissions. Neither of them has explained how 
 such lives can be accounted for if we reject the explanation 
 of those who lived them. But it must be admitted that 
 among Protestants the argument from the aureole has often 
 been belittled. Those who urge it are reminded that in the 
 New Testament the word saint is applied to all Christians, 
 that no distinction is made between various classes of 
 Christians, that to all the same ideal is the rule and law. 
 Yes, there is nothing more wonderful and gracious than 
 the manner in which St. Paul speaks to his imperfect con- 
 verts. We are overpowered every time we read the great 
 words, "And such were some of you." The apostle has been 
 describing those guilty of the basest crimes, and he goes on : 
 " And such were some of you, but ye are washed, but ye 
 are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord 
 Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." The terrible past 
 was gone — gone so completely that they might hear of it, 
 and speak of it, without shame or tremor. They were 
 loosed from it in the Blood of the Lamb. They had received 
 the true absolution and release, and had been delivered 
 from this present evil world. But if we carefully read the 
 Epistles we shall see that the Ideal is never lowered. These 
 dim, infirm, half-blinded natures were to be conformed to 
 the image of the Son. What has been may be again. There 
 is no miracle of God's grace — and every saint is a miracle 
 of God's grace — that may not be repeated. No saint attains 
 the perfection of Christ, and therefore no saint is the ideal. 
 No saint has risen beyond what is possible for redeemed 
 humanity inhabited by Christ, and therefore no example 
 is for discouragement. On the contrary, every example is 
 for encouragement. The saints are not beings of another 
 
THE ARGUMENT FROM THE AUREOLE 77 
 
 clay for us to envy. No, they are our brothers and sisters, 
 and our own flesh and blood, to whom we may, through 
 God's grace, come nearer and nearer in the Kingdom of 
 Christ. We are named and reckoned as though we had 
 already attained the prize, so that we may hope for great 
 "things and strive earnestly to reach the height of our cha- 
 racter. Surely, in every scheme of education to beat down 
 the ideal is to stunt and discourage growth. No great 
 thing was ever done in the world by over-precise calculation. 
 If the six hundred at Balaclava had thought very much 
 of their chances, we should have missed a page of history. 
 With the saint who has the power of the Spirit of Christ 
 to sustain him no height of moral and spiritual perfection 
 is impossible. 
 
 We Protestants know what Roman Catholics mean by 
 sainthood, though we might be puzzled to give a general 
 definition. It was one of the most evangelical of men 
 who uttered the pungent truth, " If we had more high saints, 
 we should have fewer low sinners." Every Christian 
 preacher is always insisting on the necessity of a lofty 
 Christian character. There is a point at which the Chris- 
 tian character manifests itself to the world. Below that 
 point it does not. It would be very hard to construct an 
 apology for Christianity out of the conduct of average 
 Christians. There are multitudes who are good and lovable, 
 but spiritually commonplace. There are many who are 
 good in a hard, dry way, but not lovable. There are many 
 who are effusive in spiritual things, but who have a poor 
 standard of life. Sometimes they are avaricious and mean, 
 sometimes they are narrow and uncharitable. Sometimes 
 they seem to be without that high sense of honour which 
 often characterises the natural man. What can be said 
 about them is that the eternal life is within them in germ. 
 It has much to fight with, but it will not yield. God has 
 revealed Himself in these still dark and struggling souls. 
 Their faces are set towards Him, and the spark will one day 
 be a great light. To the apostles this distinction seems 
 
78 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 to have been far more important than the distinction 
 between Christians who had visibly risen into a higher 
 Christian life, and those whose Christianity had largely to 
 be taken on trust. So we are inclined to think it is with 
 the saints themselves, and here we are using the word in 
 its modern meaning. For to them pride is the chief of 
 the deadly sins. They have stripped themselves of their 
 self-righteousness. They are clothed with humility. They 
 count not themselves to have attained, and if they have 
 climbed to the summit of the mountain they see the star 
 above it and are filled with the thought that the saintliest 
 saint on earth was never such a saint as they are yonder 
 who are before the throne. 
 
 But for the world there is a real distinction. Many, 
 alas ! have never known a saint, save through books. Mr. 
 Morison thinks that the saint is an exception among thou- 
 sands or millions of professing Christians. But in truth 
 the saints are still to be found, and found often in the 
 lowest spheres. The man is to be deeply pitied who has 
 never known a great saint. The saints do not know their 
 sainthood. They are the humblest of the humble. Often, 
 indeed, they doubt, not Christ indeed, but their own interest 
 in Christ. They shrink from self-display, and oft-times 
 their earthly opportunities seem to be very few. If they 
 were to look at the things which are seen they might be 
 discouraged. They might feel alone ; they might say, We 
 have nothing better than this poor little house in this poor 
 little village, and the chance of wiping some tears from 
 some eyes. They might feel discouraged at the thought 
 of what others have, and of what others can do. The 
 sweet odours of their life may lie quiet and still till, on 
 some day of storm, the flower bells in God's garden are 
 shaken and their fragrance flows forth. Then is known 
 the faith that can live through any trial and be brave 
 through any death. Sometimes in a little hamlet, some- 
 times in a great city, some dear head is laid in the dust, 
 and all the people gather round weeping. Sometimes 
 
THE ARGUMENT FROM THE AUREOLE 79 
 
 there are only one or two to mourn, but these know that 
 the aspect of life and death has been changed for them, 
 and that the personal presence of Christ with a soul is no 
 delusion, no dream. 
 
 For the history of the saints is written in the words, 
 Ye died, and your life is hid with Christ in God. They die 
 to self. They live the unselfish, even the selfless life. They 
 care as little for their own interests as Christ did when in 
 the glory of God He went up to Jerusalem and the Cross. 
 But they lived after death, and their life was hidden. Its 
 unearthly sweetness could not be hidden, and sometimes 
 when the strain came the strength of the life was revealed. 
 Many who were first shall be last and the last first. Every 
 crisis of the Church is a day of the Son of Man, for He 
 makes this saying good. The Church is better loved than 
 it knows. It has secret reserves of strength in the fidelity 
 of souls which the world does not perceive. When the 
 battle is fairly set, the enemy will marvel at the power of 
 the unsubduable Church of Christ. Still, the high spiritual 
 life is for the most part hidden, and even those who live 
 closest to it know that there is a Holy of Holies they may 
 not enter. When the saints speak they always say that the 
 hiding-place of their life is Christ. They will tell you that 
 they knew Christ on the Cross as their sacrifice, that 
 they knew Him next as their loving Friend, that, last of 
 all, they knew the mystery of union with Him. It is on 
 converse with the risen Lord that their life depends. They 
 cannot bear a broken communion. All is dark as the 
 dead of night if Christ is silent or absent. The heart loses 
 its happiness and craves for the lost Presence. Speaking 
 of his own hero St. Bernard, Mr. Morison refers to his 
 unwearied activity of mind, to his marvellous brain, which 
 had grasped and influenced more or less every question 
 and event in Europe for a whole generation, to the tender- 
 ness which moved the multitude of his friends when they 
 lost him to a delirium of grief, to the beautiful faith of his 
 deathbed, when he raised up his " dove-like eyes," and 
 
So THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 said that he wished that God's will might be done. In 
 examining St. Bernard's tomb in the present century the 
 explorers came upon a few poor bones and a little dust 
 wrapped in yellow silk, with the still uneffaced letters 
 which spelt out, " A bundle of myrrh is my Well-beloved 
 unto me." 
 
 " Oh ! faces of the saints ; sweet and firm lips accus- 
 tomed to name the name of God, dear eyes which discern 
 a brother in the poorest creature, hairs blanched by medita- 
 tions on eternity, sacred colours of the soul shining in age 
 and death — blessed are they who have seen you ; more 
 blessed they who have understood and who have received 
 from your transfigured features lessons of wisdom and 
 immortality." 
 
 IX 
 THE CHRIST OF DREAM 
 
 It is told that a sculptor created a marble image and fell 
 in love with it. So potent was his passion that it mastered 
 the cold repose of the stone itself and won a response from 
 its locked lips. A modern commentator has shrewdly 
 remarked that it was a pity the sculptor had not given his 
 heart to a statue from another hand. The love that fell in 
 love with its own creation was not likely to end happily. 
 The significance of the criticism for our present purpose will 
 be seen further on. 
 
 We confess frankly that it is very difficult to discuss 
 seriously and patiently the substitutes that are supplied 
 for the historical Jesus Christ. The same impatience 
 comes over one as he felt in criticising Lucas Malet's story, 
 The Gateless Barrier, which describes in great detail the 
 vehement love of a man for a ghost. All one can say 
 is that such inventions are unconvincing, ridiculous, and 
 
THE CHRIST OF DREAM 81 
 
 supremely tiresome. Nevertheless, we must face our task. 
 No one has laboured more earnestly to provide for men a 
 non-miraculous Christ who will do the work of the super- 
 natural and Divine Christ than Dr. Abbott. We have 
 carefully read over again several of his books : Through 
 Nature to Christ, The Kernel and the Husk, and others. 
 Dr. Abbott says that it is possible to reject the miracles 
 and retain one's faith in the honesty of the whole narrative 
 of the New Testament, and in the historical accuracy 
 (liable, of course, like the accuracy of other histories, to 
 the deductions of criticism) of that part of it which does 
 not deal with miracle. Let any reader try ; let him take 
 the Gospels, the Acts, and the Epistles, and erase from 
 them as incredible everything that affirms miracle. He 
 will find that the narrative of miracle is so welded with 
 facts and words and inferences, that to cut it out is to 
 reduce the whole to a rag-heap. Or, to put it differently, 
 the whole structure falls to pieces, and much of what 
 Dr. Abbott would retain becomes absolutely meaningless. 
 There are few things more baffling than to understand 
 Dr. Abbott's treatment of the Resurrection of our Lord. 
 He tells us that it is quite possible to believe in the objec- 
 tive reality of the spiritual resurrection while rejecting the 
 truth of every narrative of a substantial and visionary 
 resurrection. What is meant by a spiritual resurrection t 
 Dr. Abbott tells us that a spiritual body rises, and then he 
 tells us that this spiritual body is no body. How does he 
 account for the great faith in the Resurrection, for the 
 mighty results of that faith ? He knows that he has to 
 account for them, and he has to suggest that some outward 
 and visible sign of the Resurrection was really given. 
 " Without such spiritual manifestation the spiritual re- 
 surrection and subsequent conversion of the world is almost 
 too great a miracle." Dr. Abbott holds that Jesus appeared 
 to His disciples, and that they saw His form ascending as 
 an unsubstantial apparition. But these events, we suppose, 
 are not miracles. He does his best to explain away^St. Paul, 
 
 *6 
 
82 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 but breaks down before the Apostle's luminous belief in 
 the Resurrection of Christ. " To speak honestly, I must 
 add that even if I found St. Paul had committed himself 
 repeatedly to any theory of material or non-material resur- 
 rection consonant with the feelings of his time, I should 
 not have felt bound to place a belief in a materialistic 
 detail of this kind upon the same high and authoritative 
 level as the belief in the Father, the Son, and the Holy 
 Spirit, or any other general and spiritual articles of faith." 
 This is a word of despair. When reason and evidence fail 
 Dr. Abbott, he casts them away. In no point are the 
 sceptical critics so completely baffled as when they try to 
 get rid of the Resurrection of our Lord. Baur was the 
 wisest ; he left it alone. Frederick Myers in his later days 
 was by no means distinctively Christian, but as a man 
 who knew literature and life he could not but laugh at 
 Renan's absurdities in dealing with this subject. He 
 even doubted whether Renan believed his own theories. 
 " Paley's Evidences is not a subtle book nor a spiritual book, 
 but one wishes that robust Paley with his ' twelve men of 
 known probity ' were alive again to deal with hypotheses 
 like this. The Apostles were not so much like a British 
 jury as Paley imagined them, but they were more like a 
 British jury than like a parcel of hysterical monomaniacs." 
 It would be wiser for Dr. Abbott and his like to admit 
 that the marvels of the New Testament have neither been 
 explained nor explained away. It is not unkind to say 
 that the memories and influences of the fervent Methodism 
 of Dr. Abbott's early years, of the time when, as he tells 
 us, he took a most lively interest in the salvation of his 
 soul, and was familiar with Adam Clarke's commentary 
 and books of evangelical devotion, have kept him in a posi- 
 tion impossible to logic, a position thoroughly subjective 
 and arbitrary. For in the end of the day there are but 
 two alternatives — either accept Christ and the miraculous s 
 or reject Christ and the miraculous. 
 
 Another way of filling the place of the historical Christ 
 
THE CHRIST OF DREAM 83 
 
 is to put a picture of one's own painting into a frame with 
 the name of Jesus upon it, and say, That is Jesus. This 
 is the method of Tolstoy. In the great Russian's hands 
 criticism of the Gospel history becomes amazingly simple. 
 Whatever he does not like there cannot have been said or 
 done by Christ, and therefore it must go out. 1 It is easy 
 to add things that Christ ought to have said and done, and 
 the result is a portrait bearing perhaps a striking resemblance 
 to its author. Then the proper thing to do is to say that 
 the Church has rejected Jesus and to excommunicate the 
 Church ! This kind of business is becoming quite common, 
 the portraits varying as the painters vary. Harnack in 
 his book, What is Christianity ? a volume of extempore 
 lectures reported by a student, has some useful criticisms 
 of Tolstoy, showing that Christ was not an ascetic, and that 
 Christ did not condemn magistrates for inflicting punish- 
 ment, or forbid nations to fight for house or home when 
 they were wantonly attacked. But the criticism, if Tolstoy 
 ever reads it, will not impress him. He will see that 
 Harnack's Christ is constructed essentially on the same 
 principles. Harnack is willing to accept more of Christ's 
 teaching than Tolstoy is, and he does accept more. When- 
 ever the Gospel story begins to conflict with Harnack's 
 theories, he takes the knife to it. 
 
 We have spoken already of such critics as Schmiedel, 
 who do not conceal their conviction that Christ was sinful. 
 If He was sinful then certainly He was no Saviour. What 
 we have to ask is whether He was a saint, whether He 
 stood morally high or low among His fellow- sinners ? The 
 answer cannot be evaded. No criticism, however reckless, 
 can get rid of the facts of His enormous personal claims. 
 If He made these claims as He did, and if the claims were 
 not true, then He cannot rank among those to whom 
 humanity pays its tribute of gratitude and reverence. 
 That question has been settled for ever by Renan, who 
 gives Christ pitying compliments which are worse than 
 1 See How to Read the Gospels in Essays and Letters. 
 
84 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 the deadliest insult. Somehow Schmiedel and others of 
 his school apparently think there can be two Christs — an 
 ideal Christ for the imagination, and a real Christ to be 
 found when the Gospels are reduced to a natural residuum. 
 There can be nothing in common between these two Christs 
 but the name, and all that need be said is that to prevent 
 confusion the ideal should have a name of its own. 
 
 But supposing that all the world dreamed one dream, 
 that all minds fashioned one face fairer than the children 
 of men, that that face were hung up in every home for 
 every one to gaze at, what then ? Would not the race be 
 elevated by its contemplation ? It may be sufficient to 
 reply that no two minds would form the same ideal, that 
 the thought and conscience of the race would not unite in 
 'one centre for their reverence. But even if they did, even 
 if it could be shown that the Church created Christ, it can 
 easily be shown that this creation is no substitute for the 
 Creator. 
 
 (i) Will a man be controlled by his own creation ? 
 Religion is a thing that binds, holds, commands. Jesus 
 was the consummate Flower of humanity. He transcended 
 all conceptions of goodness, but He was besides the Master 
 and the Judge of souls. He brought a sword ; He spoke 
 of cutting off the right hand, of plucking out the right eye, 
 of giving up all for His sake. Will a creation of humanity, 
 however beautiful and artistic, enforce these laws ? Dr. 
 Martineau says : 
 
 " When I am awed and subdued before the grace and 
 grandeur of a moral superior, it is not because he suggests, 
 but because he realises, a higher conception of excellence ; 
 it is as a living agent, as a personal embodiment, of righteous- 
 ness that he wields authority over my conscience. Take 
 away this element, tear the picture out of the volume of 
 true history and cast it to the transient winds of imagina- 
 tion, and all is immediately changed. The image remaining 
 the same I may still admire ; but no longer in grave silence 
 — rather with outspoken praise : of my compunction I 
 
THE CHRIST OF DREAM 85 
 
 am relieved : the strength of resolution is relaxed : the 
 ' lifting power ' of a devout imagination is gone ; and if 
 I have gained any new variety of thought, it is simply 
 added to my culture, but does not transform my life. A 
 conception which reports itself as empty of reality, even if 
 it startles us into a momentary awe, can no more receive 
 our reverent embrace than the shade of a departed ancestor 
 or guide. There is nothing to sustain the worshipful in- 
 fluence of its presence : we cannot venerate our own idea." 
 (2) Christianity would be nothing to us if it did not 
 give us direct communion with Christ, a true intercourse 
 between the soul and God. Are we to be told that 
 
 " Dextrae jungere dextram, 
 Non datur, ac veras audire et reddere voces"? 
 
 Is it enough to keep, like Alexander Severus, a bust of 
 Christ, in a private chapel, " along with Virgil, Orpheus, 
 Abraham, and other persons of the same kind " ? 1 When 
 we think about Christ, is it enough merely to evoke a great 
 memory, as when we think of Plato or Epictetus or Marcus 
 Aurelius ? If that were so, the Christian Church would 
 never have existed. The Gospels, if Christ were in His 
 grave, would be ranked to-day with the Memorabilia and 
 with the Dialogues of Plato, and they might not be ranked 
 so high, for they would be the story of the most tragic of 
 moral delusions. But Christ did not come so much to give 
 a theory of life as to give life itself. He came to be Himself 
 the new Centre for the affections of humanity, the new 
 Foundation for its faith, the Conqueror of its mortality, 
 the Opener of the eternal gates. He was the Resurrection 
 and the Life, not the mere teacher. He came not to develop 
 
 1 Alex. Sever. Imper. (222-35 A.D.). " In his domestic chapel he 
 placed the statues of Abraham, of Orpheus, of Apollonius, and of 
 Christ, as an honour justly due to those respectable sages who had 
 instructed mankind in the various modes of addressing their homage 
 to the supreme and universal Deity" (Gibbon, Decline and Fall, 
 Chap. XVI.). See Lamprid., Vit. Sever. F. W. H. Myers in his 
 essay on Renan makes a curious mistake on this point. 
 
86 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 the race but to recreate it. It is hardly correct to say that 
 He put a fresh force at its centre unless it is understood 
 that He Himself is the force. And the result has been 
 that to-day multitudes have a more exulting faith in His 
 personality, in His presence, in His power, than ever Napo- 
 leon's legions had in his. For the whole Church for nineteen 
 hundred years bears witness that through Him we have 
 access in one Spirit to the Father. By His Incarnation, 
 by the triumph of His perfect righteousness over the power 
 of evil, by His Resurrection and His Ascension, He created 
 a new order into which we may enter, an order which exists 
 independent of our will. Entering into that order we 
 have an immediate, personal, and direct knowledge of the 
 Divine object of faith ; entering that order we receive the 
 beginnings of that communion which will endure through 
 the eternal ages of the life of Christ in God. We obtain 
 a direct vision of the glory of Christ, we know the exceeding 
 greatness of the Divine power which raised up Christ from 
 the dead. We find Christ directly in the pages of the 
 Gospel as the Church will find Him to the end of time, for 
 the Church receives the things of the Spirit of God while 
 outsiders count them foolishness. To deny this is to call 
 the long story of God's grace a dream, and to contest the 
 incontestable sign. 
 
 It has been a great refreshment and reinvigoration of 
 faith to spend so much time as we have done with the great 
 champions of unbelief. Christianity has never appeared 
 more wonderful than in the light cast upon it by those who 
 cannot receive it because they cannot receive the super- 
 natural, and therefore begin with an assumption which 
 makes faith impossible. The recent attacks are in no way 
 formidable, but we have thought it right to notice them 
 simply because the writers, or those who father the writers, 
 are ministers in the Christian Church. The Christian Church 
 which finds room for such teaching will soon discover that 
 her lights and fires are low. But after all, the faith is in 
 
"KEEP" 87 
 
 the hands of the saints. To them it was delivered, and 
 they will keep it. They have entered into the eternal and 
 Divine order, they have obtained redemption, they are 
 justified by faith, they have peace with God through our 
 Lord Jesus Christ. They stand in grace, they abide in 
 Christ, and He abides in them. It is they who can read 
 the New Testament from the inside : it is they alone who 
 can understand it. It is they who will turn the battle at 
 the gate, who will keep the last sanctuary inviolate, and 
 who, keeping that, will surrender nothing that ministers to 
 the Divine life, neither the old means of grace nor the old 
 hope of glory. 
 
 X 
 " KEEP " 
 
 " That good thing which was committed unto thee, keep 
 by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us." Then there is 
 something that Christians must keep. In a great deal of 
 the so-called religious and critical literature of our time, 
 this fact is never recognised. The writers seem to think 
 it is the whole duty of a Christian to give up his beliefs one 
 by one. They promise, indeed, that he shall retain some- 
 thing, but what the something is on which they are to take 
 their stand in the face of all conceivable opposition, they 
 never define. They waken each morning with a creed of 
 fewer articles, and the articles that remain they are ready 
 to surrender to a process of argument that convinces them. 
 It is the duty of every believer to be open to light and 
 truth, but it is clearly his duty to hold to the end against 
 all antagonism the trust which he received at the beginning. 
 Some truths with the Christian are not matter of argument. 
 They were not reached by learning, they were not the prize 
 of the intellect. They were the gift of Eternal Love. No 
 one is a Christian who does not possess these truths — truths 
 
88 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 that are in reality impregnable to all assault that does not 
 weaken the moral nature. Said St. John to a company 
 of believers, none of whom, perhaps, could handle any 
 weapons of argument: " Ye have an unction from the Holy 
 One and ye all know." 1 
 
 Christian teachers have seen an image of the Christian 
 walk through life in the journey of Ezra's men through the 
 desert to the Temple. He gave to their care a treasure of 
 gold and silver and sacrificial vessels, and he charged them, 
 Watch and keep them till ye weigh them at Jerusalem 
 in the chambers of the House of the Lord. The precious 
 treasure entrusted to them may be compared to the Fair 
 Deposit, 2 which is the faith once for all delivered to the 
 saints, embodied and incarnated in Christ, the solemn 
 message of love and peace which is entrusted to the care of 
 every one of Christ's disciples. As a rule, the soul starts on 
 its journey eager, joyful, solicitous, resolute in its purpose 
 to keep watch and ward till the desert is crossed, and the 
 doors of the Temple-home open for the pilgrims. But in 
 these days, and perhaps in all days, it is no easy thing to 
 guard the Fair Deposit. Something is yielded, and no 
 doubt something in the forms which our childhood received 
 may have to be yielded. In many cases the Fair Deposit 
 is encumbered with other things which were the thoughts 
 of men and not the thoughts of God. We are stronger for 
 parting with the first, weaker for parting with the last, 
 even though it seem little that we give away. We rarely 
 find it possible, after having once parted with a Divine 
 truth, to keep the rest intact. There may be an earnest 
 purpose to do so, a real desire to replace with something 
 of a spiritual character what has been lost ; but the down- 
 ward path is easy, and too often that hope to win a purer 
 creed and a higher ideal of life finds itself in the midst of 
 the dissolving views and breaking-up scenery of the ancient 
 
 1 I John ii. 20, R.V. marg. 
 
 ' 2 Tim. i. 14 : rrjv KaiKrjV 7ra^a8rjKrjU, bonum defiositum (Vulg.). 
 
" KEEP " 89 
 
 heaven. It is a happy thing in some ways that the human 
 heart is so illogical. It will entrench itself in positions all 
 the defences of which it has surrendered, and it is a poor 
 business to try to hunt it out of them. And yet it is neces- 
 sary sometimes to do so, for though one may be illogical, 
 the most are not, and unless a certain purity of feeling, a 
 certain tender reverence for the dead safeguards fragments 
 of the Deposit, the day will come when it is all abandoned, 
 and the soul finds itself in the desert stripped and naked. 
 Nor would we deny, but rather earnestly proclaim, that 
 even when all faith is lost, morality often survives it. 
 When the old faith goes there remain often pure character, 
 natural piety, an attempt to replace Christianity with 
 something better, the hope to purify the temple, the frank 
 acknowledgment that certain inborn cravings in the human 
 heart, constant, profound, and inextinguishable, can only 
 be satisfied with religion. We acknowledge all these, but 
 we do not believe that if ever the Fair Deposit is lost the 
 world will be able to keep the ethical gains which Chris- 
 tianity has won for it. It ought never to be forgotten that 
 the movement against the Christian faith which had most 
 success and lasted longest was Voltairism, and that was 
 by the confession of every one the most unspiritual, immoral, 
 and irreligious movement of them all. Mr. Morley himself, 
 who has never concealed the fact that he has struck the 
 tents under which he once found shelter in the land of 
 belief, is as candid as possible on this point. He tells us 
 that the Infamous against which the main assault of French 
 unbelief in the middle of the eighteenth century was di- 
 rected, was simply continence or chastity. Chastity was 
 the mystic key to the Christian holiness. Voltaire and his 
 followers contended that it was no virtue at all, but gene- 
 rally an impediment to free human happiness. " What 
 austerity was to other forward movements licence was to 
 this." All honour to those who vehemently reject its 
 creed, its vile surrender to the flesh, who can enter into the 
 loftiest things of faith, who yearn for, even when they 
 
go THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 abandon, the spiritual treasures of religion. But let us 
 not close our eyes to facts — facts of the past, facts of the 
 present. The abandonment of faith is in many instances 
 a sheer misery. Mr. Lecky, in a fine and memorable 
 passage, has spoken of the period when every landmark is 
 lost to sight and every star is veiled, and the soul seems 
 drifting, helpless and rudderless, before the destroying 
 blast. He speaks of the thrilling pang when cherished 
 dreams are scattered and old creeds abandoned. He does 
 not wonder that men should close their eyes to the unwel- 
 come light and seek a charm in the repose of prejudice. We 
 recognise the truth of the picture in many instances, but 
 there are at least as many when one belief after the other 
 is thrown away with relief and gladness that the old and 
 stern precepts are no longer binding. 
 
 The word " keep " means guard against foes. The 
 antagonists of faith are innumerable. They are always 
 laying siege to the soul. To keep the Fair Deposit, to 
 bring the precious treasure to Jerusalem, means hard 
 fighting, constant watching. The power of evil is always 
 eminent in the midst of us. Against it religion finds that 
 all her efforts have to be kept in perpetual strain. There 
 is the tyranny of the visible, and there is the slowness of 
 our hearts to believe in the unseen. There are the great 
 and rending trials, the long desolations of the spirit that 
 seem to make the love of God impossible, and the Cross of 
 Christ a dream. Above all, there are the fleshly lusts that 
 war against the soul. For all that is in the world, the lust 
 of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, 
 is not of the Father, but is of the world. And though it 
 is true that the world passeth away and the lust thereof, 
 while they that do the will of God abide for ever, yet it is 
 the world that seems often real and stable, and the saints 
 before the Throne invisible or dim. Our foes attack us 
 from ambushes when we least expect them. The great 
 resistance to Christianity of the wisdom of this world goes 
 on, and we are often unable to meet argument by argument, 
 
" KEEP " 91 
 
 and in faithless moments fancy that it will overcome at 
 last the mighty Antagonist whom it has so often undertaken 
 to slay. Are the gates of hell, we ask, to prevail against 
 the Church ? Men mock realities when they imagine that 
 the difficulties of guarding the Deposit are light, when they 
 represent the arguments against supernatural Christianity 
 as intellectually contemptible, when they ignore the fact 
 that all round them are perplexed and distressed souls 
 who are nevertheless pure in intent, who are crying in the 
 darkness, " Help Thou mine unbelief ! " 
 
 All this the Apostle knew. But he does not recognise 
 the keeping of the supernatural faith as possible to Nature. 
 We are to keep the Fair Deposit through the Holy Ghost. 
 It is only through Him that we can receive it. There is 
 no wavering at all in the New Testament on this essential 
 point. The Apostles would not have despised the apologists, 
 but they never for a moment dreamed that the preservation 
 of the Christian faith in this world was to be left to apolo- 
 gists, or indeed to argument of any kind. In their view 
 the keeping of the Christian faith was once for all delivered 
 to the saints, and it was the saints who were to keep it. 
 They would keep it just in proportion as they were saints. 
 Whatever tarnished the sanctity of character weakened the 
 hold of faith. The greatest saint was simply the greatest 
 believer, and sanctification is the work of the Holy Spirit 
 in the soul. So in the end it was the Holy Spirit who was 
 to guard the treasure committed to the holy heart. It 
 is impossible to exaggerate the significance of this fact. 
 Something, no doubt, may be done in theology by those 
 who have not received the supernatural life. Dr. Dale 
 concedes that men without the diviner resources may write 
 histories, contribute to our familiarity with languages, 
 to the formation of texts, although even in these depart- 
 ments the absence of a direct knowledge of the great objects 
 of faith will show itself in conspicuous defects and failures. 
 When it comes to the interpretation of Holy Scripture, it 
 must be said that the Word of God cannot be understood 
 
9Z THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 by those who have no spiritual fellowship with its writers. 
 " To take the New Testament alone, it deals with that 
 Divine order which is revealed only to those who are with 
 Christ and with sorrows, fierce conflicts, hopes, joys, and 
 triumphs which are unknown except to those who have 
 received the life of God. Its great and characteristic words 
 are found elsewhere, but with an inferior meaning. In the 
 New Testament they are charged with new powers, filled 
 with a new wealth, they are transfigured by their new 
 uses. A new life is in them, and they are growing under 
 the very hands of the writers. To know what they stand 
 for we must look at them from within, not from without : 
 we must see for ourselves what the writers saw, or we 
 shall impose upon them an inadequate sense." We shall 
 penetrate to the wonder and depth and triumph of their 
 meaning in proportion as we are filled with the Holy Ghost. 
 So that in order to guard the treasure and bring it to 
 Jerusalem, our supreme business is to live in communion 
 with God. We hope we are wrong, but it seems to us that 
 in these latter days Christian ministers have taken to 
 believing that it is by the use of the grammar and com- 
 mentary that they can understand the New Testament. 
 Nothing is understood in the New Testament without direct 
 spiritual illumination. We hope we are wrong, but it 
 seems to us that many Christians imagine that they can 
 keep the faith of their childhood while neglecting those 
 opportunities of converse with God that must be used if 
 the spiritual life is not to wither away. We enter into 
 direct communion with God when the Holy Ghost interprets 
 to us the things of Christ. We enter into direct communion 
 with God when we continue instant in prayer. No really 
 great theologian, no really great believer has ever lived to 
 whom prayer was not infinitely more important than any 
 mere exercise of the intellect. 
 
 The poverty of modern Christian life will never be cured 
 until a far greater portion of time, until a far greater earnest- 
 ness is put into the hard and happy work of praying. It 
 
" KEEP " 93 
 
 is instructive to read in the Life of Frederick Maurice how 
 he would often be engaged in prayer all the night through ; 
 and if everything were known, it would be found that all 
 Christians who have made a deep mark have sought and 
 found the Lord in a like manner. To live in the atmosphere 
 of prayer is to live in the atmosphere of miracle, in the 
 atmosphere of the New Testament, and it is in this way, 
 and in this way only, that faith in the Divine manifestation 
 is kept alive and burning. When the strength, the joy, 
 the peace, and the power of the Christian Church are un- 
 impaired, it is because her ministers and her people are 
 proving that through Christ we have access in one Spirit 
 to the Father, and confessing that Jesus is Lord in the 
 Holy Ghost. Then there is no complaint of failures to 
 attend Christian worship. There is a longing even on the 
 part of those outside to touch the hands of those who have 
 walked with the Most High. The brethren are able to 
 speak to one another of what the Lord has delivered unto 
 them, of their comprehension of the supernatural revelation. 
 They shine with the Divine splendour which fills each star, 
 one star differing from another in glory. The Holy Ghost 
 comes upon them, and the power of the Highest over- 
 shadows them. So confessing with their mouths the Lord 
 Jesus, and believing in their hearts that God had raised 
 Him from the dead, they are saved. 
 
 In many of us faith is very dim, though not quite 
 quenched. Something has been kept, but is very little, 
 enough for bare existence, not enough for happiness or for 
 power. It may be nearly lost or altogether lost in the study 
 of grammars and dictionaries and books of criticism, in 
 the bitter discussion of ecclesiastical affairs, even in much 
 serving and skilful organising. What right have we to 
 think we can keep it if we do not live in communion with 
 God, His Word, and His saints ? What right have we to 
 think that we can keep it if the heart is suffered to become 
 a high road, trampled by the cares of this life, by the am- 
 bitions of time, by the passion for intellectual distinction ? 
 
94 THE CHURCH'S ONE FOUNDATION 
 
 The saddest thing in all the world is to see the young 
 men, who once were aflame for God, faint and grow weary, 
 perchance utterly fall. Of how many it has to be said in 
 these days that they once burned and shone, and in the 
 end grew cold ! But through the Holy Ghost it is possible 
 to keep the faith, to end in more than the passion of youth, 
 to die testifying, and not, as Voltaire reports of Cavalier, 
 " much failed of his first enthusiasm." It is the duty of 
 spiritual guides to know the difficulties of their time, that 
 they may help others, but for themselves they should seek 
 to die as deaf to the reviling and the mocking around them 
 as Christ was when He sank to His last sleep on the Cross.