Divisiou jij.^;x.^, 
 S«etion 
 
JUL 1^1924 
 THE STORY VA 
 
 OF THE 
 
 EESUEEECTION OF CHEIST 
 
 TOLD ONCE MORE 
 
 WITH 
 
 REMARKS UPON THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST 
 AND THE HISTORICAL CLAIMS OF THE FOUR GOSPELS 
 
 BY 
 
 WILLIAM H. FUKNESS D.D. 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
 
 1885 
 
Copyright, 1884, by J. B, Lippincott & Co. 
 
TO 
 
 MY BROTHERS 
 
 IN 
 
 THE MINISTRY OF THE CHRISTIAN FAITH 
 THESE PAGES 
 
 RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED. 
 
THE STOHY OF THE RESURRECTION 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 It is now more than fifty years ago that, in 
 reading the accounts of the most extraordinary 
 Event in the history of Christ, the Event upon 
 which the Apostles laid the greatest stress, the 
 corner-stone of primitive Christianity : the Re- 
 appearance of Christ alive after death, it came 
 to me that what the guard at the Sepulchre 
 mistook for a figure alighting from heaven, and 
 the women believed to be an angel, was no 
 other than Jesus himself 
 
 What suggested this thought was a particular 
 in the Story, slight indeed, but it struck me as 
 very significant : the special mention of Peter in 
 the message sent to the disciples by the sup- 
 posed angel, " Go tell his disciples and Peter 
 that Jesus is risen." I seemed to hear the voice 
 
 of Jesus in this singling out of that disciple, 
 1* 6 
 
6 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 whose last act had been to swear that he did 
 not know him. Although thus shamefully dis- 
 owned by his cowardly friend, Jesus made haste 
 to assure him that the past was not remem- 
 bered against him, that he was not disowned 
 in return as he might well fear that he would 
 be. To the fact that Jesus had risen, no angel 
 could testify so impressively, it seemed to me, 
 as this message to Peter, in such keeping is it 
 with the greatness of mind that characterized 
 Jesus. 
 
 Once possessed with the idea that it was not 
 an angel but Jesus himself whom the guard and 
 the women saw, I seemed to have found the key 
 which oj^ened the whole Story to the light, the 
 light of Truth and I^ature illumining it to its 
 minutest details, all unconsciously, on the part 
 of the narrators. As I read it now, overflowing 
 as it is with evidence of its truth which no one 
 thought of furnishing, it seems to have written 
 itself. 
 
 The more I have pondered it, the more deeply 
 have I been impressed by its wonderful internal 
 evidence. If the actual Ee-appearance of Jesus 
 alive in the flesh to Mary is not proved, then 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 7 
 
 nothing in the Gospels is proved, nothing in 
 all the world. All is an illusion. 
 
 From time to time, in various publications, I 
 have told the Story as I read it. I am going to 
 tell it once more, not only because there are cer- 
 tain new lights to throw upon it, but mainly be- 
 cause I cannot resist its inexhaustible attraction. 
 Is it only a fancy that I am gratifying ? or is it a 
 conviction of truth ? 
 
 There are certain preliminary considerations 
 to be attended to. 
 
 1. I assume the entire honesty of the narra- 
 tors. That they may have been mistaken as to 
 what was seen and heard, I readily concede. 
 But that they meant to deceive, or to tell what 
 they did not believe to be true, I find no shadow 
 of a reason for suspecting. 
 
 2. It is equally certain that between the four 
 different accounts of the first Appearance of 
 Jesus there is no collusion. Their glaring dis- 
 crepancies show on the very face of them that 
 they are four independent reports. 
 
 3. Although I consider it very remarkable 
 
8 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 that Jesus is never described as appearing in 
 the glory with which I cannot but think he 
 would have been represented as arrayed, were 
 his re-appearances the creations of the imagi- 
 nation inspired by the love of the marvellous, I 
 am free to say that I do not find in the accounts 
 of the subsequent appearances of the risen 
 Christ, the same striking evidence of truth that 
 I find in the accounts of his first appearance. 
 This first appearance, however, being estab- 
 lished, a presumption is created in favor of the 
 truth of the after-appearances. 
 
 4. Believing in the actual Resurrection of 
 Christ, I freely admit that questions may be asked 
 which I cannot answer. But what one thing is 
 there in nature, which, even when set forth in 
 the full blaze of the most advanced Science, does 
 not suggest questions for which we have no solu- 
 tion? Have we got so far in understanding 
 everything that we have a right to make it the 
 condition of our acceptance of any extraordinary 
 fact, however well attested, that it shall leave 
 nothing unexplained? Where was Jesus after 
 death when he did not appear to his disciples ? 
 What was the mode of his existence then? I 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 9 
 
 cannot even conjecture. Wliat finally became 
 of him ? The common belief is that he ascended 
 visibly into the sky. But there is not in the 
 four Gospels a word that necessitates this idea. 
 !N'either in the first Gospel, nor in the fourth, 
 and these happen to be the only ones ascribed 
 to personal disciples of Christ, is anything said 
 of a final disappearance. The second Gospel, 
 in the closing verses, which, by the way, are of 
 questionable genuineness, states briefly that 
 Jesus was received up into heaven, and sate at 
 the right hand of God. Such was evidently the 
 belief. We are not required to understand this 
 brief statement as meaning to say that he was 
 seen taken up into the sky and seated at the 
 right hand of God. The third Gospel says that 
 he " led his disciples out as far as Bethany, and 
 he lifted up his hands and blest them, and while 
 he blest them, he was parted from them, and 
 carried up into heaven.'^ In the book of the 
 Acts we read that " a cloud hid him from sight, 
 and he was taken up into heaven.^' ^N'either of 
 these accounts necessarily signifies that he as- 
 cended visibly. When he disappeared the nat- 
 ural conclusion was that he had gone to heaven. 
 
10 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 The language of these histories on this point 
 is significant. It tells us what was believed. 
 But there is not a word going to show that they 
 undertake to localize the place of the departed. 
 They state only a popular belief. 
 
 5. Whatever difficulties are involved in any 
 event, however extraordinary it may be, we are 
 bound to accept it, when it rests upon irrefraga- 
 ble evidence. Such is the case with the Resur- 
 rection of Christ. I cannot tell what his con- 
 dition was after he rose from the dead, or where 
 he was when not seen, or whither he went. It 
 is an article of the popular creed, by the way, 
 that he descended into hell. It has no founda- 
 tion in the Gospels. If I were under the neces- 
 sity of believing either that he ascended or de- 
 scended, I should rather incline to think that he 
 went down to save the lost ; it would be much 
 more like him than to go up into heaven to be 
 seated on a throne with a crown of gold upon 
 his head. The crown of thorns becomes him 
 better. But be that as it may, that he re-ap- 
 peared alive after death, and was seen and 
 spoken with, the evidence has put it out of my 
 power to doubt. To borrow words ascribed to 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 11 
 
 an eminent scientist in relation to some new 
 phenomenon, "I do not say it is possible, I say 
 it is true." 
 
 And now, as I relate what took place, on the 
 early morning of the third day after the cruci- 
 fixion of Jesus, in the garden where his body 
 has been buried, it will be seen with what in- 
 imitable signatures of truth the original narra- 
 tives are written all over, not by mortal hand, 
 but by truth and nature. 
 
 I introduce here the passages in the Gospels 
 from which the Story is gathered : 
 
 Matthew xxviii, 1-10. 
 
 In the end of the sabbath, as it began to dawn 
 toward the first day of the week, came Mary 
 Magdalene and the other Mary to see the sepul- 
 chre. 
 
 And, behold, there was a great earthquake : 
 for the angel of the Lord descended from 
 heaven, and came and rolled back the stone 
 from the door, and sat upon it. 
 
12 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 His countenance was like lightning, and his 
 raiment white as snow : 
 
 And for fear of him the keepers did shake, 
 and became as dead men. 
 
 And the angel answered and said nnto the 
 women. Fear not ye ; for I know that ye seek 
 Jesus, who was crucified. 
 
 He is not here : for he is risen, as he said. 
 Come, see the place where the Lord lay. 
 
 And go quickly, and tell his disciples that he 
 is risen from the dead; and, behold, he goeth 
 before you into Galilee ; there shall ye see him : 
 lo, I have told you. 
 
 And they departed quickly from the sepul- 
 chre with fear and great joy; and did run to 
 bring his disciples word. 
 
 And as they went to tell his disciples, behold, 
 
 Jesus met them, saying. All hail. And they 
 
 came and held him by the feet, and worshipped 
 
 him. 
 
 Mark xvi, 1-10. 
 
 And when the sabbath was past, Mary Mag- 
 dalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Sa- 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 13 
 
 lome, had bought sweet spices, that they might 
 come and anoint him. 
 
 And very early in the morning the first day 
 of the week, they came unto the sepulchre at 
 the rising of the sun. 
 
 And they said among themselves, Who shall 
 roll us away the stone from the door of the sep- 
 ulchre ? 
 
 And when they looked, they saw that the 
 stone was rolled away : for it was very great. 
 
 And entering into the sepulchre, they saw a 
 young man sitting on the right side, clothed in 
 a long white garment ; and they were affrighted. 
 
 And he saith unto them. Be not affrighted : 
 Ye seek Jesus of l!Tazareth, who was crucified : 
 he is risen; he is not here: behold the place 
 where they laid him. 
 
 But go your way, tell his disciples and Peter 
 that he goeth before you into Galilee: there 
 shall ye see him, as he said unto you. 
 
 And they went out quickly, and fled from the 
 sepulchre ; for they trembled and were amazed : 
 
14 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 neither said they any thing to any man ; for they 
 were afraid. 
 
 JSTow when Jesus was risen early the first day 
 of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magda- 
 lene, out of whom he had cast seven devils. 
 
 And she went and told them that had heen 
 with him, as they mourned and wept. 
 
 Luke xxiv, 1-12. 
 
 Now upon the first day of the week, very 
 early in the morning, they came unto the sep- 
 ulchre, bringing the spices which they had pre- 
 pared, and certain others with them. 
 
 And they found the stone rolled away from 
 the sepulchre. 
 
 And they entered in, and found not the body 
 of the Lord Jesus. 
 
 And it came to pass, as they were much per- 
 plexed thereabout, behold, two men stood by 
 them in shining garments : 
 
 And as they were afraid, and bowed down 
 their faces to the earth, they said unto them, 
 Why seek ye the living among the dead ? 
 
THE STOEY OF THE EESUERECTION. 15 
 
 He is not here, but is risen : remember how 
 he spake unto you when he was yet in Galilee, 
 
 Saying, The Son of man must be delivered 
 into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, 
 and the third day rise again. 
 
 And they remembered his words, 
 
 And returned from the sepulchre, and told all 
 these things unto the eleven, and to all the rest. 
 
 It was Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and 
 Mary the mother of James, and other women 
 that were with them, who told these things unto 
 the apostles. 
 
 And their words seemed to them as idle tales, 
 and they believed them not. 
 
 Then arose Peter, and ran unto the sepul- 
 chre; and stooping down, he beheld the linen 
 clothes laid by themselves, and departed, won- 
 dering in himself at that which was come to 
 pass. 
 
 John XX, 1-18. 
 
 The first day of the week cometh Mary Mag- 
 dalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the 
 
16 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from 
 the sepulchre. 
 
 Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon 
 Peter, and to the other disciple, whom Jesus 
 loved, and saith unto them. They have taken 
 away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we 
 know not where they have laid him. 
 
 Peter therefore went forth, and that other dis- 
 ciple, and came to the sepulchre. 
 
 So they ran both together : and the other dis- 
 ciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the 
 sepulchre. 
 
 And he stooping down, and looking in, saw 
 the linen clothes lying ; yet went he not in. 
 
 Then cometh Simon Peter following him, 
 and went into the sepulchre, and seeth the linen 
 clothes lie. 
 
 And the napkin, that was about his head, not 
 lying with the linen clothes, but wrapped to- 
 gether in a place by itself. 
 
 Then went in also that other disciple, which 
 came first to the sepulchre, and he saw, and be- 
 lieved. 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 17 
 
 For as yet they knew not the scripture, that 
 he must rise again from the dead. 
 
 Then the disciples went away again unto their 
 own home. 
 
 But Mary stood without at the sepulchre 
 weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, 
 and looked into the sepulchre, 
 
 And seeth two angels in white sitting, the one 
 at the head, and the other at the feet, where the 
 body of Jesus had lain. 
 
 And they say unto her, Woman, why weepest 
 thou ? She saith unto them, Because they have 
 taken away my Lord, and I know not where 
 they have laid him. 
 
 And when she had thus said, she turned her- 
 self back, and saw Jesus standing, and knew not 
 that it was Jesus. 
 
 Jesus saith unto her. Woman, why weepest 
 
 thou? whom seekest thou? She, supposing him 
 
 to be the gardener, saith unto him. Sir, if thou 
 
 have borne him hence, tell me where thou hast 
 
 laid him, and I will take him away. 
 2* 
 
18 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 Jesus saith unto lier, Mary. She turned her- 
 self, and saith unto him, Rabboni ; which is to 
 say. Master. 
 
 Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not ; for I am 
 not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my 
 brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto 
 my Father, and your Father; and to my God, 
 and your God. 
 
 Mary Magdalene came and told the disciples 
 that she had seen the Lord, and that he had 
 spoken these things unto her. 
 
 It was on the sixth day of the week, the day 
 before the Jewish Sabbath, that the crucifixion 
 of Jesus took place. Towards the close of the 
 clay, certain friends of his, not of the number of 
 his personal disciples, with the permission of the 
 Roman governor, took down the body from the 
 Cross, and, wrapping it, according to Jewish 
 custom, in a white shroud of linen, laid it in a 
 new tomb, in which no one had been laid be- 
 fore, in a neighboring garden. 
 
 The sun of that darkened day of blood set and 
 the night passed, and the sun rose again, and the 
 
THE STORY OF THE EESUERECTION. 19 
 
 Sabbath stillness of the seventh day rested over 
 the sepulchre, and the garden, and the city. 
 
 The disciples of the Crucified, plunged in de- 
 spair, mourned, and wept. Overwhelmed by the 
 one inexorable fact that he was dead, for whom 
 they had forsaken their homes, and from whom 
 they had fondly expected to receive a hundred- 
 fold in return, they were lost in thick darkness. 
 What heart had they to turn for light to the 
 future, or to the past? He whom they had 
 looked up to as about to appear in all the mag- 
 nificence of the Messiah and to make them 
 judges in Israel, had suddenly vanished, covered 
 with public shame, — dead, buried. What cared 
 they, — it could only aggravate the anguish of 
 their ruined hopes, — to recall anything he had 
 specially said or promised ? The great Promise, 
 upon which they had been depending so im- 
 plicitly, lay crushed in the sepulchre. All was 
 over. There was nothing left for them but to 
 go heart-broken home to Galilee. Only some 
 women, who had come with Jesus to the great 
 city, agreed to go early the next morning to his 
 tomb and pay a last poor tribute of afl:ection to 
 the dead. 
 
20 THE STOEY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 While the disciples were thus stunned, stupe- 
 fied by grief, the Priests, having compassed the 
 destruction of Jesus, as they believed, under 
 every circumstance of shame and horror, exulted 
 in their triumph. 'Now they breathed freely. The 
 man who had been such a terror to them, whose 
 bold speech had lashed them into a frenzy of 
 fear and hatred, was no more. They trusted 
 that they had heard the last of him. To make 
 all sure, however, and that there might be no 
 possibility of any further imposture, they ob- 
 tained from Pilate a guard to keep watch at the 
 tomb. Certain things said by Jesus, as we may 
 suppose, had come to their ears, through Judas 
 possibly, — he had sold himself to them; — or, as 
 Jesus had been rumored to have called the dead 
 to life, and as they regarded him as one of the 
 pretended Messiahs likely to appear at that time 
 of excited popular expectation, they naturally 
 conceived the suspicion that his adherents might 
 plot some further imposition, — steal the body, 
 and then give out that he had come to life. So 
 they took the precaution of having the sepulchre 
 watched. 
 
 Thus the Sabbath passed undisturbed by the 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 21 
 
 tumultuous crowds that had gathered around 
 the man from Galilee wherever and whenever 
 he appeared in public. 
 
 But, as the morning of the first day of the 
 week was breaking, what strange story was that 
 which came startling the Chief Priests? Into 
 the city and to the house of the High Priest 
 rushed the guard who had been stationed at the 
 tomb, with ^vild, afirighted looks, in breathless 
 accents declaring that there had been a great 
 earthquake, and that the stone that closed the 
 tomb had been rolled away by a figure that 
 came down from heaven with eyes like light- 
 ning and raiment white as snow. 
 
 I pause here for a moment over this report 
 of the guard. Strauss rejects the whole story 
 of a watch set over the sepulchre as a fabrica- 
 tion designed to help prove the Eesurrection of 
 Jesus. 
 
 That there may be mistakes, great mistakes, 
 indeed, and exaggerations in the Gospels, I con- 
 cede. It would be strange if there were not, 
 since events so exciting as those are which they 
 record could hardly fail to excite the imagina- 
 tion and interfere with the power of accurate 
 
22 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 observation. Indeed, mistakes and exaggerations 
 are not only to be looked for, they are important 
 witnesses to the substantial truth of the narra- 
 tive. When extraordinary events occur, they 
 are always accompanied by false rumors and ex- 
 aggerated statements. But the obviously artless 
 character of the Gospels forbids us to charge 
 them with such deliberate fabrications as Strauss 
 and E,enan do not hesitate to attribute to them. 
 
 Was the story told by the watch invented in 
 order to help prove the Eesurrection of Jesus ? 
 It makes no mention of him. It does not say 
 that any one was seen to come from the tomb. 
 Thus at the very point at which it should fulfil 
 the purpose for which it is alleged that it was 
 invented, it falls silent and entirely fails. If in- 
 vented to support the Eesurrection of Jesus, it 
 should have made the guard report that some 
 one entered the sepulchre or came out of it. As 
 it is, if invented with a fraudulent design, it 
 would really seem to have been fabricated in 
 the interest of the Priests rather than of the 
 disciples of Jesus. It certainly gave plausibility 
 to the explanation which the Priests found of 
 the affair, an explanation so plausible that it 
 long gained currency among the Jews. 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 23 
 
 The report of the guard evidently struck the 
 Priests as monstrous and incredible. Had it 
 been ever so convincing of the fact that Jesus 
 had returned to life, they would not have cred- 
 ited it. They had gone too far ; they were com- 
 mitted to the denial of its truth. As it was, the 
 men who told this strange story were plainly 
 under the exaggerating influence of mortal ter- 
 ror. Their looks, their accents, and the story 
 itself bore every mark of extreme fright. Had 
 there been "a great earthquake," it would surely 
 have been felt in the city. The natural and 
 strong suspicion was that a trick had been 
 played upon these men. Holding Jesus to be 
 an impostor, hav'ng no faith in him, or in his 
 adherents, the Priests soon found a solution of 
 the matter : There had been, a plot to steal the 
 body, and the watch had been scared away that 
 it might be carried off, and it could be given out 
 that Jesus had come to life again. The guard, 
 the Priests had no doubt, had fallen asleep. 
 They may have done so, but it does not seem to 
 me likely. Ignorant and superstitious, as they, 
 doubtless, were, they were discharging the un- 
 accustomed office of watching by night, at a 
 
24 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 grave, and at the grave of a man rumored to 
 have possessed mysterious powers; there was 
 everything to keep them awake. To the Priests 
 it seemed certain that the men must have slum- 
 bered, and that a trick had been played upon 
 them to scare them away from the spot. 
 
 Such was the Priests' solution of what had 
 occurred. And this, substantially, was the story 
 which they bribed the guard to tell, promising 
 them immunity from punishment for sleeping 
 on their watch, a promise which the Priests were 
 confident they could fulfil, as they would make 
 no complaint of the men to Pilate, and it was 
 not a military duty the men had been set to dis- 
 charge, nor had their alleged negligence had 
 any result of any consequence in the eyes of the 
 Roman authorities. Of course they were not 
 required to say that they had been frightened 
 away from the sepulchre. Strauss says it is in- 
 credible that the Sanhedrim should all agree to 
 induce the guard to tell a falsehood. And it 
 certainly is incredible. But it was not what 
 the Priests regarded as a falsehood, but what, 
 from their point of view, they honestly believed 
 to be the truth, that they are reported to have 
 urged the men to tell. 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 25 
 
 The question now comes : What was it that 
 actually happened at the sepulchre ? Something 
 must have occurred to terrify the guard and 
 cause them to flee from the spot with such an 
 extraordinary storj^ 
 
 One circumstance, which the guard reported, 
 we may credit without hesitation, namely, that 
 the stone was removed from the sepulchre. So 
 it was found by the women who came to the 
 spot shortly afterwards. 
 
 As for the rest, the report of the guard be- 
 trays the magnifying influence of extreme terror. 
 When men are frightened out of their senses, 
 imagination rules the hour, and the simplest in- 
 cidents are exaggerated into preternatural phe- 
 nomena. Had there been a great earthquake, 
 the women, who were on their way to the place, 
 would have felt it, and so would the Priests in 
 the neighboring city. But neither of these ap- 
 pear to have been aware of it. 
 
 It is worthy of note that the flrst particular 
 that is mentioned is the earthquake. This it 
 was that threw the guard into a paroxysm of 
 affi'ight. At that dark, still, lonely hour, as the 
 guard naturally would be standing, sitting, or 
 
26 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 reclining, with their backs to the tomb, watching 
 the approaches to the spot, they as naturally 
 would be greatly startled by even a slight, sudden 
 agitation of the ground. It could seem to them 
 nothing less than the shock of an earthquake. I 
 cannot avoid the conclusion that this jarring of 
 the ground was caused by the removal of the 
 stone.* The stone, used as a rude door to the 
 sepulchre, was, I imagine, more or less of a slab- 
 like description. As it fell away from its place, 
 it caused a more or less violent concussion of the 
 ground. If the stone were removed by some one 
 standing outside of the tomb, he would have 
 been seen by the guard, before the stone fell 
 down. I believe, therefore, it was pushed away 
 from within the sepulchre, which, obviously, could 
 be done far more easily than it could be moved 
 from without. The guard, startled by the jar 
 thus caused, turned instinctively to the sepul- 
 
 * Dr. K. von Eritsch, of Halle, expresses the opinion that 
 the causes of earthquakes are often much slighter than is 
 commonly supposed, and supports it by facts. He states that 
 quite feeble forces may produce agitations of the ground 
 that will be felt at considerable distances. — Popular Science 
 Monthly^ No. 1, vol. xxi, p. 144. 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 27 
 
 chre. And tliere! a figure all in white appeared! 
 The apparition, caught sight of as suddenly as 
 the agitation of the earth was felt, completed 
 their fright, and was nothing less, to eyes dilated 
 by mortal terror, than a preternatural figure sud- 
 denly descended from heaven. "What else could 
 it be but Jesus himself in his long, white shroud? 
 
 As it was Jesus who removed the stone, we 
 see why the earthquake is first mentioned. The 
 jarring of the earth was felt before the figure 
 appeared. Had the stone been moved by any 
 one outside of the sepulchre, he would have been 
 seen before the earthquake was felt, and then, 
 it may be a question whether the guard would 
 have felt the jarring of the ground caused by the 
 stone, and then too there would have been no 
 mention of an earthquake. As it was, it was 
 the fright, caused by the agitation of the ground, 
 that invested the figure that appeared with un- 
 earthly attributes. 
 
 The guard reported that the figure from 
 heaven, having removed the stone, ''•sat upon 
 iC If, instead of an angel, it was Jesus who 
 removed the stone, to seat himself was a natural 
 position after the confinement in the sepul- 
 
28 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 chre and the exertion of pushing away the 
 stone. 
 
 The marvels that attended his previous career 
 are marked by a severe simplicity strikingly in 
 contrast with the exaggerations of fictions born 
 of the imagination. There was nothing done 
 by him merely to gratify the love of the wonder- 
 ful. There never was any more power put forth 
 than was absolutely necessary. When he recalled 
 to life the young daughter of Jairus, she was not at 
 once restored to perfect strength, as would have 
 been represented were the story the creation of 
 the imagination, which, once under the influ- 
 ence of the passion for the wonderful, scorns all 
 limitations. Jesus directed that food should 
 immediately be given her. Lazarus also needed 
 instant assistance. Once, when the case of a 
 blind man appealed to his compassion, as the 
 man's infirmity prevented his being influenced 
 by the commanding eye and air of Jesus, the 
 restoration of his sight was, at the first word of 
 Jesus, only partial. He was able to distinguish 
 men, only by their walking, from trees. Then, 
 as is related, Jesus spat on the ground and made 
 clay with his saliva and applied it to the eyes of 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 29 
 
 the blind man, not because there was any medi- 
 cinal virtue in the application, but because it 
 established a communication between the will 
 of Jesus and the faith of the man which it stim- 
 ulated into sanative action. Again, the demo- 
 niac of Gadara did not at once become sane at 
 the bidding of Jesus. He became calm, but he 
 still had the insane idea that a troop of foul 
 spirits had possession of him, and he wanted 
 ocular proof that they had left him; hence his 
 insane request that the spirits should be sent 
 into the swine. We read that at I^azareth, where 
 he was brought up, Jesus did not many mighty 
 works, " because of their unbelief" Had not 
 faith been an essential factor in the marvels that 
 he wrought, the unbelief of the JSTazarenes was a 
 reason why he should, not w^hy he should not, 
 have done mighty works there. But, faith being 
 indispensable, he could work no wonders in a 
 community that looked with contempt, born of 
 familiarity, upon the son of the carpenter Jo- 
 seph. They could not believe that he w^as, or 
 could do, anything extraordinary. 
 
 That Jesus, then, should rest after the exer- 
 tion of pushing away the stone from the sepul- 
 8* 
 
30 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 chre is a supposition not so fanciful as it may at 
 first sight seem ; it is thus in keeping with other 
 incidents of the history. 
 
 About the same hour on that eventful morn- 
 ing that this extraordinary report was made to 
 the Priests, intelligence of a like startling char- 
 acter broke with like suddenness upon the dis- 
 ciples of Jesus. 
 
 Mary of Magdalene came running, breathless 
 with alarm, to Peter and John, telling, in hur- 
 ried accents, how she and some others had gone 
 out very early, before daybreak, to the sepulchre, 
 taking spices with them to lay out the body of 
 Jesus with more care and decency than the hur- 
 ried burial on the eve of the Sabbath had al- 
 lowed, and how, when they came in sight of 
 the tomb, it was open ! — the stone was removed ! 
 — the tomb had been rifled ! — the body was 
 gone ! 
 
 This last particular, Mary's hasty inference 
 from the fact that the tomb was open, shows that 
 no shadow of a suspicion had crossed her mind 
 that Jesus had risen. Her one engrossing thought 
 was that he was lying dead, the victim of the bit- 
 terest hatred ; and she rushed to the conclusion 
 
THE STOKY OF THE RESURRECTION. 31 
 
 that Ms cruel enemies had pursued him even in 
 death, and violated the sanctity of the grave, not 
 suffering his poor mangled remains to rest in 
 peace where friendly hands had laid them. 
 
 At this strange report, Peter and John, fol- 
 lowed by Mary, ran to the sepulchre to see if it 
 were indeed so. 
 
 Hardly had they gone, when the women, 
 whom Mary had left at the sepulchre, came 
 rushing in, in a transport of wonder and joy, 
 telling that, after she left them, they went into 
 the tomb, and there, to their unutterable amaze- 
 ment, was "a young man in a long white gar- 
 menC^ So he appeared to them at first sight. 
 But when he spoke to them, and showed that 
 he knew what they came for, to see the dead 
 body of Jesus, and told them it was not there, 
 that he had risen, and when he bade them go 
 and tell his disciples and Peter that Jesus was 
 living again, they bowed down before him with 
 wonder and great joy, believing him to be no 
 less than an angel from heaven. 
 
 Who could this person in "a loiig white gar- 
 menf' be but Jesus, wrapt in his shroud, who, 
 upon becoming aware of the approach of the 
 
32 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 women, had, after the departure of the guard, 
 retired into the tomb, not being prepared then 
 to make himself known ? 
 
 That it was he and no other is indicated by 
 one of those slight microscopic particulars that 
 reveal the inimitable hand of truth.* 
 
 One of the Gospels states that the women 
 found two angels in the sepulchre. ISTow if it 
 was Jesus whom they saw and who spoke to 
 them, then he must have taken off the white 
 linen that had been wrapt around his head, and 
 it lay apart, near where his head had rested. 
 
 * " When there is a detail of many minute particulars, and 
 when to these we apply a close, and, as it may be said, micro- 
 scopic examination, the contrast between truth and fiction 
 will generally be very striking. Something like this is the 
 difference between the works of nature and art. An arti- 
 ficial flower may be so skilfully made as at first sight to 
 deceive the eye, even of a botanist ; but Avhen that and a 
 natural flower are both exposed to the solar microscope, we 
 at once perceive the contrast. The petals of the natural 
 flower, when viewed with the microscope, appear more deli- 
 cately veined even than when viewed by the naked eye, 
 while those of the artificial flower look like coarse canvas." 
 — Miscellaneous Re^nains frovi the Cotmyiowplace Book of 
 Richard Whately, D.D. London, 1865. 
 
THE STOKY OF THE RESUKRECTION. 33 
 
 This white cloth it was, that one or more of the 
 women, with eyes dilated with overwhelming 
 amazement, mistook, in the dim light of the 
 sepulchre, for another angel in white. "Objects 
 imperfectly seen," as Dr. Johnson has remarked, 
 " take form from the imagination." 
 
 Had there really been two angels in the sep- 
 ulchre, would not the one who spoke have 
 spoken for the other and said, " Lo ! we have 
 told you," and not " Lo ! / have told you," as 
 is reported ? 
 
 The first and second Gospels vary but very 
 slightly in their reports of what the person, 
 whom the women found in the sepulchre, said 
 to them. The third Gospel reports him as say- 
 ing further, ''Remember how he spake unto you 
 when he teas yet in Galilee, saying, The Son of 
 man must he delivered into the hands of sinfid men 
 and be crucified, and the third day rise again. And 
 they remembered his wordsJ^ As there is nothing 
 in the Gospels that evinces any studied accuracy 
 of statement, that these words are not found in 
 the other Gospels is no decisive evidence that 
 they were not uttered. Suppose the person in 
 the sepulchre was Jesus himself, he might, nat- 
 
34 THE STOEY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 urally enough, remind the women of what he 
 had once said. But as he desired them to go 
 away and to go ^^ quickly," and therefore would 
 not be likely to delay them, save by the brief- 
 est word or two, my own impression is that, 
 upon being told that Jesus had risen, one or 
 more of the women, before they reached the 
 city, suddenly recollected that Jesus had said 
 that he would rise again, and then when they 
 told his disciples that he had risen, and the 
 startling intelligence was received as an ' idle 
 tale/ they reminded the disciples of what Jesus 
 had once said, that he would rise again, and, in 
 their hurry and eagerness, they told all in a 
 breath, what the alleged angel said and what 
 they remembered that Jesus had said, mixing 
 the words of the angels that they had heard, and 
 the saying of Jesus that they recollected, so that 
 the latter became mixed up with the former, 
 and all together were understood by some to 
 have been said by the supposed angel. 
 
 Upon the departure of the women, Jesus 
 quitted the sepulchre. There was no one there, 
 when, shortly after, Peter and John reached the 
 place. 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 35 
 
 The women had hardly ended their wonderful 
 story, when Peter and John returned to the city 
 and mournfully reported that they had found 
 it even so as Mary had said: the sepulchre 
 was empty, the body was not there. They had 
 seen no angels. The only strange thing was 
 that the grave-clothes were still there, part in 
 one place, part in another, a circumstance easily 
 accounted for upon the supposition that it was 
 Jesus himself whom the women had seen. He 
 did not put off all the grave-clothes at once, and 
 consequently they were not left lying all to- 
 gether. His body, I imagine, had been placed 
 with his head farthest into the interior of the 
 tomb. When he awoke to life, he divested him- 
 self first, as I have just had occasion to note, of 
 the cloth that was wound around his head,* and 
 it lay by itself, apart from the remainder of the 
 shroud, which was not put off until after an in- 
 terval. 
 
 What other clothes Jesus found, we can only 
 
 * That it was the custom to wind a separate piece of cloth 
 around the head of the dead appears from the account of the 
 Kaising of Lazarus, whose face it is said '■'■was hound about 
 with a napkin." 
 
36 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 conjecture. The loose, flowing garments of those 
 times needed no special fitting. It may be that 
 the gardener, or some of the persons who had 
 assisted at the burial of Jesus, had provided 
 themselves for that office with garments, which, 
 becoming ceremonially unclean b}^ contact with 
 a dead body, and unfit to be worn on the Sab- 
 bath then at hand, were left in the sepulchre or 
 near it. Or, did the watch, in their hasty flight, 
 leave some garments behind them ? But this is, 
 perhaps, inquiring too curiously, where all must 
 needs be conjecture. 
 
 When Peter and John left the place, they said 
 nothing to Mary. Their silence intimated as 
 plainly as any words that they had found it as 
 she had said. The body was not there. 
 
 They left her standing at the entrance of the 
 tomb weeping. She stooped down and looked 
 into it. As Peter and John had been surprised 
 at finding the grave-clothes, part in one place 
 and part in another, so Mar}^, who had not 
 so near a view of them as they had, caught 
 sight but only dimly, through her tears and the 
 darkness of the sepulchre, of two white objects. 
 They surprised her, but before she had time to 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 37 
 
 make out what they were, there came a voice 
 asking why she wept. Knowing not, for an in- 
 stant, whence it came, she answered it, but be- 
 fore she finished speaking, she became aware of 
 some one approaching behind her. She turned 
 only partly round, and saw through her tear- 
 bedimmed eyes a man whom she took for the 
 gardener. I think her impression at that in- 
 stant was, and it was correct, that it was he who 
 had just asked her why she was weeping, for, 
 upon his repeating the question, and not hav- 
 ing heard her answer, adding (how naturally !) a 
 further question, " Whom are you seeking?^' she 
 replied as if she thought that he must have 
 beard what she had just said. She begged him, 
 if he had removed the body, to tell her where it 
 was. Whereupon this person, whom, supposing 
 him to be the gardener, she only glanced at 
 through eyes suffused with tears, called her by 
 name, " Mary !" Then she "- turned herself" 
 round, — there was that in the simple utterance 
 of her name that went like lightning to her in- 
 most soul, transporting her out of herself. No 
 voice but one could have so thrilled her whole 
 
 being. She gazed at him as if she would look 
 
 4 
 
38 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 him through and through, — the whole life of her 
 in her eyes. It was He ! It was the adored Mas- 
 ter himself! She gasped out, "Rahboni!" and 
 threw herself at his feet, grasping them in a 
 convulsive, rapturous embrace. 
 
 It was not until she returned to the city and 
 heard that the other women had seen, as they 
 declared, two angels in the sepulchre, that, with 
 characteristic pirecipitancy, she rushed to the 
 confident conclusion that she too had seen those 
 angels, that the two white appearances that she 
 caught sight of when she stooped down and 
 looked into the sepulchre, and did not know 
 what to make of at the time, were those very 
 angels whom the other women had seen, and that 
 they it was who put to her that first question 
 which came she knew not at the moment w^hence, 
 although at the time she did not dream of their 
 being angels, for she turned her back upon them 
 to talk with a common man. I:Tever would she 
 have done so, had she then thought that there 
 were angels in the sepulchre. 
 
 And here I pause over the perfect simplicity, 
 I might almost say, the homeliness, of this most 
 wonderful Event, the Re-appearance of Jesus 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 39 
 
 alive to Mary. There was no sudden apparition, 
 no sudden vanishing. He stood before her in 
 the simple garb of an ordinary man. She saw 
 him before she recognized him. She clasped his 
 knees and knew that it was he, in flesh and blood. 
 
 "We have seen how, in the case of the guard 
 and of the women, imagination was on the alert 
 to glorify the simplest things and transfigure 
 them with its exaggerating accidents. Mary was 
 as ready as they to become the dupe of the coin- 
 age of her brain, as is evident from her rushing 
 to the belief that the white objects that she 
 dimly caught sight of in the sepulchre were 
 angels. ISTever would she have represented so 
 great a personage as the Messiah was held to be, 
 as returning from the invisible world of the dead 
 in so humble a form that she mistook him for a 
 gardener, had her imagination, quick as it was, 
 had the slightest opportunity to act. Her recog- 
 nition of him in this lowly garb was too instan- 
 taneous, too overwhelming. At the very in- 
 stant that she was weeping over him as dead, 
 he stands directly before her, calls her by name, 
 and she falls at his feet. 
 
 Eead any accounts, such as the Roman Cath- 
 
40 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 olic Church abounds in, of alleo;ed visions of the 
 Virgin or of this or that saint. Are not those 
 apparitions always arrayed in the glorified cos- 
 tume of preconceived ideas of visitants from the 
 world of spirits, decorated with the symbols of 
 the Church ? And thus, in depicting this very 
 event of the Resurrection, Art portrays Christ as 
 ascending from the sepulchre radiating light, and 
 surrounded by clouds of glory. And thus also, 
 were the Grospel narratives pure fabrications, the 
 offspring of the love of the marvellous, would 
 they have represented his Re-appearance alive. 
 
 There is a peculiarity in the account of Mary's 
 recognition of Jesus which strikes me as not 
 without significance. I have remarked upon it 
 before. I cannot refrain from a notice of it here. 
 I refer to her exclamation, "Rabboni!" Why 
 was this Hebrew word preserved ? It is per- 
 fectly translatable, and is immediately trans- 
 lated. There must have been a reason for it. 
 And the reason was, I conceive, that this iden- 
 tical articulation, being the only audible sign of 
 her overpowering transport, bursting involun- 
 tarily from her inmost heart, had an emphasis, a 
 world of feeling in it, which no word of a for- 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 41 
 
 eign tongue could convey. Any other word 
 would have sounded cold and expressionless, 
 wholly unequal to the occasion. This original 
 exclamation is like the "• Et tu, Brute P' of Ceesar, 
 which Shakespeare, with the intuition of genius, 
 does not translate. 
 
 There are other instances in the Gospels, in 
 which the very words uttered are preserved, and 
 for similar reasons. " Taliiha citmiF'^ said Jesus 
 to the child that, at this command, instantly 
 awoke to life. '•' Ephphatha P'' was his word in 
 restoring a blind man to sight. These words 
 are immediately translated, but, followed as they 
 were by the most wonderful effects, they sounded 
 in the ears of those present like powerful magical 
 formulas. They had a ring of power which 
 could belong to no other articulations. Those 
 who heard them and witnessed the effects that 
 followed upon their utterance must needs report 
 the identical words that came from the lips of 
 Jesus. So the Apostle Paul uses, more than 
 once, the word ^' Abba," as in Rom. viii, 15, 
 " We have received the spirit of adoption, 
 whereby we cry, Abba, Father !" No word of 
 any other language, though it had precisely the 
 
42 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 same meaning, could have for the Apostle the 
 tender, endearing significance of this brief word 
 in his mother tongue. 
 
 Upon recognizing Jesus, Mary, as we have 
 seen, held him by his feet. She clung to them 
 as if she would never let him go; so we may 
 infer from what he is reported to have said to 
 her : " Touch me not ^ for I have not yet ascended to 
 my Father ; hut go to my brothers and tell them I 
 ascend unto my Father and their Father, and to my 
 God and their God.''^ 
 
 It seems to be thought that there is some 
 mysterious meaning in these words of his, as if 
 they forbade Mary to come near him, or so 
 much as to touch him. But as she afterwards, 
 in all probability, appealed to the fact of having 
 held him by his feet, and as this fact was dwelt 
 upon as proof positive of the sense of touch that 
 it was no spectre that she had seen, but real 
 flesh and blood, may we not surmise that this 
 circumstance has caused what Jesus said to 
 Mary to be reported, not in his exact words, but 
 in the form in which we now have them, and 
 that what he said, and all that he meant to say, 
 was that she was not to stop to embrace him 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 43 
 
 then, — there would be other opportunities of 
 seeing^ him, — she was to 2:0 and tell his brothers 
 that he was still living and about to go to his 
 Father and theirs ? 
 
 It is not necessary to understand from his 
 manner of expressing himself on this occasion 
 that he intended to say that he was about to go 
 up literally into the sky. It was his purpose to 
 tell, not how he was going, but only that he was 
 about to go to the Father, and he used the pop- 
 ular mode of speaking in which departure from 
 the present state of being is described. 
 
 The passage in the fourth Gospel which re- 
 lates the first appearance of Jesus tells how John 
 outran Peter and waited for him at the sepul- 
 chre. This minuteness of detail respecting the 
 movements of Peter and John on that occasion 
 is readily explained when we take the narrative 
 as coming directly from John himself, upon 
 whose mind the slightest incidents of that event- 
 ful morning were stamped indelibly. It is not 
 necessary, however, to suppose that he wrote it 
 with his own hand. I do not think that he did. 
 Throughout all the Gospels, the disciples are 
 
44 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 always spoken of in the third person. This is 
 one great reason why I incHne to believe that 
 the Gospels, composed of records previously 
 existing from the earliest time, had for their au- 
 thors, persons outside of the circle of the imme- 
 diate disciples of Christ, persons who were either 
 eye and ear witnesses of the things they relate, 
 or obtained their information, as Luke states 
 (Luke i, 1), from "eye-witnesses and ministers 
 of the word." Cultivated writers, like Julius 
 Caesar, for example, may write about themselves 
 in the third person. But this is an art of liter- 
 ary composition quite beyond such unlettered 
 men as the first disciples were. The opinion 
 which I entertain, for my own satisfaction, con- 
 cerning the fourth Gospel is, that it is the work 
 of a highly spiritually-minded friend of John's, 
 much younger than he, who held John in the 
 greatest veneration, and obtained from him the 
 materials of this Gospel, not always restricting 
 himself closely to John's communications, but 
 sometimes amplifying them to bring out more 
 fully what he conceived to be their meaning,* 
 
 * A striking instance of the freedom with which the author 
 of the fourth Gospel introduces his own comments and ampli- 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 45 
 
 but still confining himself substantially to what 
 he received from the venerable Apostle, and 
 very closely in the case of facts, and ending by 
 giving the whole credit of his work to John, not 
 to obtain for it an authority which it would not 
 otherwise possess, but because he felt he had 
 derived it all from his aged friend. 
 
 Certain discrepancies with the Story of the 
 first Ee-appearance of Christ, as it has now been 
 told, remain to be noticed. They are found in 
 the first Gospel. 
 
 While the three other Gospels agree in stating 
 that the stone was removed from the sepulchre 
 before the women reached the place, the first 
 Gospel gives us to understand that the women 
 were present when the stone was rolled away. 
 
 The apparent contradiction vanishes when we 
 consider how natural it is, when anything ex- 
 
 fications may be found in John iii, 11-21, incl. In the im- 
 mortal chapters of this Gospel, beginning with the fourteenth 
 and ending with the seventeenth, I recognize, not the precise 
 words of Christ, but the inspiration of his Spirit, which, in 
 its expression, is colored and freely amplified in passing 
 through a mind eminently fitted to receive it. 
 
46 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 traordinary happens, for the first excited reporters 
 of it, in the eager and hurried state of mind 
 which it causes, to crowd together all the most 
 wonderful particulars without regard to the order 
 of time, so that things are represented as occur- 
 ring coincidently that occurred successively and 
 at intervals. The story, as it is told in the first 
 Gospel, is an instance of this precipitation. It 
 reads like a first oral report written down. The 
 chief startling incidents are told all at once, in a 
 breath. 
 
 Thus viewed, the credibility of what is related 
 to have taken place is not impaired, it is cor- 
 roborated, as there is undesignedly exhibited the 
 excited state of mind which the extraordinary 
 event related must have produced. 
 
 Again. The first Gospel states that Jesus first 
 appeared to all the women who went together to 
 the sepulchre, and who, it says, met him as they 
 were returning to the city. We need have no 
 hesitation in pronouncing this a mistake, since 
 it is easy to see how naturally it was fallen into. 
 As Mary and the women all went together to 
 the sepulchre, and as all but Mar}^ rushed back, 
 declaring that Jesus was alive, and were quickly 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 47 
 
 followed by Mary affirming that she had seen 
 him and held him by his feet, could anything 
 be more natural than that, in the intense excite- 
 ment of the hour, the impression should be re- 
 ceived by some that all the women had seen him 
 and held him by his feet ? 
 
 In the foregoing exposition of the Accounts 
 of the Re-appearance of Christ alive in the gar- 
 den where his body had been laid, I am not 
 aware of having had recourse, for the sake of 
 harmonising them, to any forced or far-fetched 
 considerations. I have sought to read them by 
 the light of familiar principles and well-known 
 experiences of our nature. 
 
 That the dead body of Christ had disappeared, 
 that a living person was found there, in and near 
 the sepulchre, and that that person was no other 
 than Jesus, I hold to be established by evidence 
 hardly less extraordinary than the great Event 
 itself. It is evidence entirely undesigned, evi- 
 dence that he was seen by a number of persons 
 without being recognized, and seen by the 
 woman, to whom he made himself known be- 
 fore she recognized him; the evidence, not of 
 
48 THE STOEY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 men, but of God himself speaking through the 
 natural emotions of the persons present on the 
 spot, all unconsciously on their part. Stronger 
 evidence I can neither desire nor imagine. 
 
 Holding: the Eesurrection of Christ to be an 
 actual fact, must we pronounce it a miracle ? A 
 miracle it is in the original sense of the word, 
 which is simply " a wonder." It is a great mir- 
 acle in this understanding of the term. But 
 was it a miracle in the popular sense ? Was it 
 an event out of the established course of na- 
 ture ? As, with all our boasted knowledge, we 
 are acquainted only with the surfaces of things, 
 and cannot pretend to know all the ways of na- 
 ture, what authority have we for pronouncing it 
 a miracle in the sense of a violation of those 
 ways? Are we not rather bound to conclude 
 that it took place in perfect consistency with the 
 Divine ways, in obedience to some law of nature 
 unknown ? And yet not unknown. Has not 
 Christ himself, in the mighty power which he 
 ascribed to Faith in terms the most emphatic, 
 revealed the law, of the operation of which, the 
 marvels that he wrought and his own return to 
 
THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 49 
 
 life after death are decisive instances : the law of 
 the supremacy of Spirit over Matter? Accept- 
 ing this view of the case, we can hardly fail to 
 see that all the ado that has been made about 
 miracles is out of place. On that score, we have 
 afflicted our souls in vain. 
 
 Living, dying, and rising from the dead in 
 profoundest harmony with the Divine Will and 
 order, through a faith, identified with his inmost 
 personal consciousness, in the Infinite One dwell- 
 ing in him, and in all things, animate and in- 
 animate, Christ is our fullest Revelation of God, 
 and of the Divine life in the soul of man. 
 
 His Resurrection was justified by the power 
 with which it wrought. To change those poor 
 men, who first put faith in him, into saints and 
 martyrs, through whom the world was to be 
 revolutionised, it was worth while for the great- 
 est of the sons of men to awake from the deep 
 slumber of death, and show himself to them and 
 inspire them with a faith in things unseen such 
 as was never felt before. Had he not done so, 
 his memory would have faded away from the 
 world into an insubstantial dream of the Past, 
 
50 THE STORY OF THE RESURRECTION. 
 
 casting no light of sanctity upon the Present, nor 
 of hope upon the Future. His disciples would 
 have gone mourning back to their boats and 
 nets on the Sea of Galilee. But as it was, as- 
 sured beyond the shadow of a misgiving that he 
 who had been all in all to them, for whom they 
 had forsaken all else, was still living, with a 
 courage that princes and all the powers of 
 Church and State could not daunt, those humble 
 men went forth and published their faith in the 
 Risen Christ, sealing that faith with their blood. 
 This was the one Fact, upon the truth of which 
 they staked life and all that makes life dear : 
 that Christ had risen from the dead, and was 
 still living. "If," said the Pharisee, who was 
 early converted to their faith, and who became 
 the foremost of them, "if thou shalt confess with 
 thy mouth," that is, speak boldly out and at the 
 peril of thy life avow thy faith in Christ as a 
 man from God, " and shalt believe in thine heart 
 that God hath raised him from the dead, thou 
 shalt be saved," — saved from the fear of man 
 and the fear of death. And this is salvation in 
 the fullest sense of the word. 
 
 But it was not only at the first, in one gener- 
 
THE STORY OF THE EESURRECTION. 51 
 
 ation only, that the fact of the Kesurrection of 
 Christ was of this vital importance. Its power 
 was not then exhausted. Never has it been of 
 deeper interest than at this hour, when Science 
 has become invested, in the popular mind, with 
 extraordinary authority, and would fain bring 
 the world to the worship of matter and uncon- 
 scious physical force. Thank Heaven for him 
 who appeared in all the might of the Spirit, for 
 " the power of his Resurrection," the crowning 
 evidence of the supremacy of mind over matter ! 
 
REMARKS 
 
 UPON 
 
 THE OHARAOTEE OF OHEIST 
 
 AND 
 
 THE HISTORICAL CLAIMS OF THE 
 FOUR GOSPELS. 
 
EEMARKS. 
 
 In the preceding pages I have told again the 
 Story of the First Re-appearance of Christ after 
 death. I do not know that the same view of it 
 has ever been taken by any one else. I have no 
 expectation that it will meet with any extensive 
 acceptance. It is the exceeding interest of the 
 Story that has moved me to this repetition. I 
 am betraying perhaps the infirmity of Age. As 
 in our first childhood we love to hear, so in our 
 second, we love to tell, the same stories over and 
 over again. 
 
 THE DECLINE OF FAITH. 
 
 If, in regard to studies of this class, there is, 
 
 among the liberally disposed, one characteristic 
 
 of the present time more marked than another, 
 
 it is the Decline of Faith, not only in the great 
 
 Christian fact of the Eesurrection of Christ, but 
 
 55 
 
56 THE CHAEACTER OF CHRIST. 
 
 in the historical authority of the Gospels alto- 
 gether. 
 
 Theodore Parker — all honor to his memory! 
 — said long ago in his first and chief work, "A 
 Discourse of Religion,'^ a work that has had great 
 influence in setting the present fashion of think- 
 ing, that we have no warrant for the truth of any 
 incident related in the Gospels beyond the fact 
 that Jesus was persecuted and suffered a violent 
 death, which, although Mr Parker says it lay 
 in the nature of the case, would now in these 
 sceptical times, I suspect, be called in question, 
 were there not on record the explicit testimony 
 of the Roman historian to the crucifixion of 
 Christ. 
 
 That faith in historical Christianity is on the 
 decline among us needs no special proof. The 
 fact is patent. It is in all the air. The appear- 
 ance of a denomination called Free Religionists 
 is evidence sufficient. Those, who are ranked 
 under this title, are understood to relinquish the 
 Christian name, and to hold that, for the superi- 
 ority claimed for Christianity over all other re- 
 ligions, there is no historical foundation, that it 
 has the same legendary origin with the other re- 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH. 57 
 
 ligions that have sprung up in the far East. As 
 historical records, the Gospels are accounted of 
 very little value. Having thus fallen, histori- 
 cally, into disrepute, regarded as collections of 
 mere fables or myths, they are ceasing to be 
 studied, or even referred to, apart from their 
 moral precepts, with any particular interest. 
 
 As such ways of thinking are becoming com- 
 mon, I cannot but see and lament that the true 
 character and contents of these Writinscs are 
 very imperfectly understood. Even Mr Parker, 
 who pronounced so decisively upon their credi- 
 bility, does not seem to have given them any 
 thorough study. Why should he, if he believed 
 them to be fables ? In the work already referred 
 to, he says that Christ taught the reprobation of 
 the majority of mankind, and, in proof thereof, 
 refers to the passage in the Sermon on the 
 Mount, which says that " broad is the way that 
 leads to destruction, etc.," a simple picture of 
 human life, not first given by Christ, equivalent 
 to, " Folly leads to ruin and has her thousands 
 to follow her, while the way of Wisdom is nar- 
 row, and only the few pursue it," a saying all 
 but proverbial. Again, Mr Parker objects, if 
 
58 THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 
 
 my memory serves me, that Christ promised his 
 disciples, when they should be arraigned before 
 magistrates, miraculous assistance. The lan- 
 guage of Christ does not necessarily bear any 
 such construction. He simply assured them, 
 that, when they found themselves in that posi- 
 tion, it would he given them, — a form of speaking 
 synonymous with, they would he able, — to speak 
 and bear themselves as they should ; with the 
 occasion would come the true spirit to meet it. 
 Once, some time before his death, my venerated 
 friend, Waldo Emerson, was telling me of the 
 fidelity of a man who had been long in his ser- 
 vice. I quoted, partly to myself, " Whosoever 
 would he great, let him serve.''' " Wlio said that?" 
 exclaimed my friend : " say it again." While he 
 betrayed his lack of familiarity with the ISTew 
 Testament, he was struck, as he well might be, 
 with the wisdom of a saying that fell from the 
 lips of Jesus by the wayside, in familiar inter- 
 course with a little company of poor fishermen ; 
 a saying identical with that, but of far deeper 
 significance, which the father of modern philos- 
 ophy is renowned for announcing from his li- 
 brary : "To command I^ature, you must obey 
 
THE DECLINE OF FAITH. 59 
 
 her." The comparison, by the way, suggests 
 the contrast. How great the difference between 
 the two ! The poor peasant of Judea exempli- 
 fied in life and in death the grander truth that 
 he uttered. The philosopher, with all his learn- 
 ing, failed, in the lower domain of physical 
 science, to be true to his own precept. 
 
 To return. It seems to me sometimes as if 
 to the wisest and most enlightened the Gospels 
 are sealed books. How indeed can it be other- 
 wise ? For long years they have been read dili- 
 gently enough. Heaven knows ! but always by 
 the light of the theological systems, in the inter- 
 est of which they have been interpreted so long 
 that it is all but impossible to dissociate their 
 phraseology from the dogmatic "hoar of ages" 
 which cleaves to it. 
 
 When here among us, in N'ew England, the 
 heavy fetters of the old theology began to fall 
 awa}^, and a freer mode of thinking to prevail, 
 it was the aim of the liberal denominations to 
 relieve the Scriptures from orthodox interpre- 
 tations and to show that they give no counte- 
 nance to the old dogmas, to declare, in fine, 
 what they do not mean rather than what they 
 
60 THE CHAEACTER OF CHRIST. 
 
 do. Consequently those who forsook the old 
 faith, could only tell what they did not believe. 
 Beyond that, we had no positive, clearly-defined 
 faith; and so, in the eyes of many, there was 
 but little difference to see to, between the non- 
 orthodox and downright unbelievers. 
 
 I suppose that, in the progress of thought, 
 this state of things had to be. But a conse- 
 quence of it is, that, as the Gospels were no 
 longer believed to be preternaturally inspired, 
 or to sanction the old doctrines, they ceased to be 
 studied with particular interest. It was enough 
 that they were found to be not Calvinistic docu- 
 ments. 
 
 THE EFFECT OF A MISTAKEN THEOLOGY. 
 
 Furthermore, and here is a fact that demands 
 most serious attention : Our Christian Theol- 
 ogy stands insurmountably in the way of a due 
 appreciation of the historical character of the 
 Gospels. 
 
 It is held by all denominations of Christians, 
 orthodox and liberal, without exception, as a 
 fundamental article of the Christian Faith, that 
 the Revelation contained in the Gospels is pre- 
 
THE EFFECT OF A MISTAKEN THEOLOGY. 61 
 
 ternatural, and that only as they are so re- 
 garded have they any special authority, it being 
 affirmed as a first principle of our Theology that 
 only by miracles, that is, only by suspensions of 
 the established laws of nature, can a Revelation 
 be proved to come from God. 
 
 'Now if he, of whom the Gospels tell us, has 
 really brought to mankind a Divine Revelation, 
 then must all that he said and did be of supreme 
 interest to all who are seeking to learn the 
 Divine ways. A Revelation from the Author 
 of all things must harmonize with and illumine 
 all else that has come from the same Source, 
 and prove our greatest guiding light in the study 
 of nature. "What is the end and aim of natural 
 science but the discovery of the Ultimate Power, 
 a seeking after God through the study of his 
 ways? 
 
 But when Christ is represented, in his being, 
 or only in his working, as above nature, he is 
 put outside of nature, and consequently outside 
 of the sphere of scientific inquiry. And it may 
 be said, as it has been said by the most eminent 
 student of nature in our day, that Science has 
 nothing to do with him. Accordingly, left to 
 
62 THE EFFECT OF A MISTAKEN THEOLOGY. 
 
 itself, what else is to be expected but just what 
 we see : Science making, indeed, wonderful dis- 
 coveries and inventions, employing forces of 
 the nature of which it has no idea, but finding 
 nothing to believe in, nothing to appeal to our 
 deepest sentiments but unintelligent, unconscious 
 matter and blind physical force ? 
 
 It is no wonder that our scientific inquirers, 
 searching in the dark among atoms and monads, 
 and I know not what creations of the scientific 
 imagination, after the Ultimate Cause, can find 
 no Creative Intelligent Power present in the 
 Universe. Laborious and acute as they are, 
 what else can they do, since they get no help 
 from the great light that would guide their in- 
 vestigations ? Sad is it to find that "star-eyed 
 Science" returns from ranging through the Uni- 
 verse to bring us back " a message of despair." 
 It has, however, this great excuse for the pov- 
 erty of its results : it has been warned off* from 
 the quarter whence the guiding light comes. 
 The advocates of Christianity, insisting upon a 
 representation of Christ that puts him beyond 
 the range of inquiry, have virtually forbidden 
 Science to look for aid in this direction. A 
 
THE EFFECT OF A MISTAKEN THEOLOGY. 63 
 
 false theology it is, I repeat, that is responsible 
 for the materialistic modes of thought now so 
 prevalent. 
 
 Supernatural Christ was, taking this word as 
 synonymous with superphysical, but when he is 
 represented as working preternaturally, he is 
 not only outside of the range of Science, but 
 beyond the reach of rational belief. If his works 
 are outside of the natural order of things, how 
 are they to be distinguished from creations of 
 the human imagination, since the demonstration 
 of the truth of any fact consists in its being 
 shown to be, actually or presumably, in har- 
 mony with all else that is known to be true? 
 Omne verum consonat vero. 
 
 As far as the eye has penetrated, there every- 
 where reigns throughout the Universe a con- 
 summate order, which is one grand character- 
 istic of the Creator. The laws of nature, that 
 we talk about, what are they but the Divine 
 ways under another name? To affirm of any 
 event that it is an interruption of the laws of 
 nature is the same as saying that God contra- 
 dicts himself, which is incredible. 
 
 Here we are confronted with the chief ob- 
 
64 THE EFFECT OF A MISTAKEN THEOLOGY. 
 
 stacle to the recognition and treatment of the 
 Gospels as genuine histories. By the insistence 
 of those who profess to believe them, they 
 abound in accounts of so-called miracles. 
 
 In an earlier publication, " Jesus and his Bi- 
 ographers" (1838), taking for granted the uni- 
 versally received theology, I assumed that the 
 miracles were actual suspensions of the laws of 
 nature, and that Christ was specially gifted with 
 preternatural power for the express purpose of 
 proving his Divine authority. And what I 
 chiefly sought to do was to show how fully in 
 accordance with the dignity of his personal char- 
 acter and with the simplicity of nature he is 
 represented as using his peculiar gift. 
 
 I have since been led to the conclusion that 
 the alleged miracles were not miracles in the 
 commonly received sense of the word, but ex- 
 traordinary natural facts, and that there is no 
 reason nor necessity for supposing that Christ 
 had any power to suspend the action of the laws 
 of nature. I find nothing in the Gospels that 
 authorises this supposition. 
 
 The definition of a miracle as a suspension of 
 the laws of nature is of modern origin, unknown 
 
THE EFFECT OF A MISTAKEN THEOLOGY. 65 
 
 to the Scriptures, both Old and N"ew, which I 
 found I had, with all the world, been reading 
 from a mistaken point of view, a point of view 
 based upon the mechanical theory of nature, an 
 offspring of modern Science. Nature being con- 
 ceived of as a vast mechanism, whatever appears 
 to be a departure from its settled order is to be 
 pronounced a miracle, a break in the natural 
 course of things. Such is the common belief. 
 
 JtTot so, not so, did the authors of the Bible 
 look upon the world. The Hebrew word, and 
 the Greek word also, translated in our Scrip- 
 tures "miracle," means simply "sign" or "prod- 
 igy," and all that our English word " miracle" 
 signifies, in its etymological sense, is " a won- 
 der." 
 
 The writers of the Bible saw everywhere, 
 
 not the working of blind physical forces, but 
 
 intelligent, spiritual agencies. It was God who 
 
 did all things, directly, or through the ministry 
 
 of angels or demons. Such is the Bible view 
 
 of the economy of the world, with which there 
 
 were no sio^ns or wonders that were not in har- 
 
 mony, and of which they were not a part. 
 
 Moreover, in respect of the alleged miracles 
 6* 
 
66 THE EFFECT OF A MISTAKEN THEOLOGY. 
 
 in the ITew Testament, I do not find that Jesus 
 ever claimed any preternatural power. He af- 
 firmed, indeed, that the wonders that were wit- 
 nessed were wrought by God, but as emphat- 
 ically did he declare that they were wrought 
 through faith, a natural, spiritual, God-given 
 force, planted deep in human nature. 
 
 The view of the miracles, therefore, which, 
 after all these years, I have come finally to rest 
 in, is, that, marvels as they are, they were facts 
 as natural as the rising and shining of the sun ; 
 and, indeed, of all facts, the most natural, since 
 they occurred in obedience to the highest, or 
 deepest, law of nature, the law of the supremacy 
 of Spirit. 
 
 Were this view of the so-called miraculous 
 relations accepted, the air of incredibility which 
 now invests the Gospels would disappear, and 
 their claim to be treated no longer as fables, 
 but as possibly true histories, would be seen to 
 be not wholly groundless. 
 
 And not only so, upon a careful and candid 
 examination of their contents, it might be dis- 
 covered that the so-called miracles which they 
 relate, instead of being suspensions of natural 
 
THE EFFECT OF A MISTAKEN THEOLOGY. 67 
 
 laws, are revelations thereof, revelations, in 
 fact, of the very highest of the laws of N'ature, 
 the law of the Supremacy of mind over matter. 
 Then, in direct opposition to the representations 
 of Materialism, Christ would be seen to be the 
 Revealer of Spirit, of an immaterial Power as 
 the creative, all-animating Cause and Soul of 
 the physical world. ISTo longer should we find 
 ourselves cabined, cribbed, confined in the midst 
 of a vast machine, worked by brute forces that 
 sweep us away like dust, but in the mansion of 
 an Infinite Spirit of Life, of Wisdom, and of 
 Love, and in as many as are led by the Spirit 
 we should behold beings partaking of the Su- 
 preme nature, and of whose high position and 
 destiny their lofty powers and graces would be 
 more significant than the white robes and wings 
 of angels. 
 
 As I have just said, Christ never pretended to 
 possess any preternatural gift. That his was a 
 finely organized nature, that he was inspired by 
 a peerless religious genius, and was endowed 
 with a keen and searching moral insight, the 
 most orthodox, whatever else and more they 
 believe him to be, will not question. (" Perfect 
 
68 THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 
 
 man" as well as " perfect God" is the language 
 of the old creed.) While he differed from all 
 other men greatly, the difference was not in 
 kind, but in degree. He was no other wise 
 made than all men are. Of all human beings, 
 he was the most human. In him the greatest 
 and best in our nature was most fully devel- 
 oped. 
 
 It is, then, in the completeness of his nature 
 as a human being, not in any superaddition 
 thereto, that his Godlikeness is shown, his Di- 
 vine Sonship. In all the good of every age, in 
 every good deed, we have hints, more or less 
 significant, of the same sacred relationship to 
 the Highest. But in Christ shines the great 
 Revelation, full-orbed, the sun amidst the lesser 
 lights of the firmament. High beyond all stands 
 that wondrous Hebrew youth. In him we have 
 the fullest vision of the Infinite Spirit, the 
 Father. Through him also we behold in all 
 men, by virtue of the nature which they share 
 with him, children of God, — rebellious, lost, chil- 
 dren, but still children of God. 
 
 This Idea of Christ, bringing him within the 
 
THE CHAEACTER OF CHRIST. 69 
 
 embrace of our most sacred sympathies, of our 
 faith and our veneration, creates a new faith 
 in the transcendent possibilities of our nature. 
 Does it not give us, for example, a new sense 
 of the height to which man may rise above Self, 
 as we contemplate Jesus, in the midst of multi- 
 tudes rending the air with their acclamations, 
 and behold him working the greatest marvels, 
 as if, so far as he was concerned, they were the 
 commonest human offices, seeing in them no 
 glory of his own, but only the glory of God in 
 the power of Faith ? 
 
 As he was one with all nature, all nature 
 bears witness to him, and is, in return, illu- 
 mined and consecrated by the light that radi- 
 ates from him up to the throne of God and down 
 to the humblest of mankind, to the meanest 
 creature that breathes. 
 
 If we are ever to have a true philosophy of 
 the Universe and of man's position therein, 
 Christ must be the corner-stone thereof. It can- 
 not be that such a revelation as he is of the 
 Greatest and Best will not shed light far and 
 wide over the whole sphere of human know- 
 
70 THE MYTHICAL THEORY. 
 
 ledge, since the Universe, seen and unseen, is 
 One. Even upon the old orthodox ideas of the 
 Christian Revelation, it has its theology, or phi- 
 losophy of the world. But what a philosophy ! 
 IJ^ot the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
 God shining into the heart from the person of 
 Christ, hut a theology that shows us the Uni- 
 verse reddened by the glare of an ever-burning 
 hell, into which, age after age, are driven by 
 Almighty Wrath, for the sin of their first pro- 
 genitor, myriads of human souls : a sight which 
 high orthodox authorities have taught, enhances 
 the bliss of the saints in heaven. 
 
 THE MYTHICAL THEORY. 
 
 In addition to erroneous views of the nature 
 of Christ and of the marvels related in the Gos- 
 pels, the mythical theory of their origin, with 
 which Strauss has made us familiar, has helped 
 to undermine the faith of many in the historical 
 claims of these "Writings. That theory has been 
 accepted as fully accounting for their existence. 
 
 Strauss does not appear to have taken care to 
 ascertain the real meaning of the Gospels be- 
 fore applying his theory to them. Like all 
 
THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS. 71 
 
 those who deny their historical character, he 
 argues, not against the most rational construc- 
 tion of which they admit, but against the com- 
 monly received mistaken interpretations of them. 
 It was obviously for the interest of his theory, 
 as it is of all theories unfavorable to their his- 
 torical claims, that they should be made to 
 appear as improbable as possible. 
 
 THE DATE OP THE GOSPELS. 
 
 The difficulty of determining the date of the 
 Gospels — the fact that, as scholars affirm, there 
 is no historical evidence of their existence be- 
 fore the second century — has, doubtless, gone far 
 to create unbelief in their value as histories. 
 
 I am at a loss to understand why so much 
 stress is laid upon the external argument for 
 their truth. Unquestionably, it would be inter- 
 esting to know when precisely and by whom 
 they were written ; and were it proved that they 
 were written by the persons whose names they 
 bear, it would help to confirm our faith in them. 
 But even if we had the most satisfactory ex- 
 ternal evidence on this point, there would still 
 remain the question whether their authors were 
 
72 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 not, more or less, mistaken. And this question 
 would depend for settlement upon their intrinsic 
 character and upon no extrinsic considerations. 
 In determining what they are, whether legends 
 or true narratives, it is not necessary that we 
 should know when or by whom they were writ- 
 ten. They are to be interrogated. They must 
 speak for themselves. A lapidary does not need 
 to know the history of a diamond in order to 
 decide whether it be a diamond or not. 
 
 Admitting that there is no historical evidence 
 of their having been in existence before the 
 second century, nevertheless, since in all ages 
 men are prompted, as by an irresistible in- 
 stinct, to express and perpetuate the impression 
 which events at all remarkable make on them, 
 it is, under the circumstances, very unlikely, to 
 say the least, that nothing was put in a written 
 form about Christ until a hundred years after 
 his time. 
 
 We must not forget the vast revolution which 
 the Printing Press has made in the means of 
 publication. In that old time, the manufacture 
 and multiplication of copies of a written work 
 must have proceeded very slowly, and it may 
 
THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS. 73 
 
 have been in existence for a considerable period 
 before it became so multiplied and so widely 
 known as to be said, properly speaking, to be 
 published. Publication now is the work of a 
 day. Then it was the work of years. 
 
 Such being the case, that the Gospels are not 
 mentioned by any writer before the second cen- 
 tury does not preclude the possibility of their 
 being compilations of written narratives that 
 came into existence and had been passing from 
 hand to hand and slowly multiplied long before. 
 The third Gospel (Luke i, 1) states that there 
 were "many" such in circulation before that 
 was written. 
 
 That the Gospels really are of this descrip- 
 tion, mostly compiled of narratives that were in 
 existence at a very early period, is, to my mind, 
 abundantly clear from their internal character. 
 Even considered as legends, they show by their 
 lack of connection, by the difficulty of reducing 
 them to a continuous narrative or to any satis- 
 factory order of time, that they are composed of 
 different pieces put together with no particular 
 care. 
 
 That they are not mere legends, however, or, 
 
 7 
 
74 THE DATE OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 if legendary, only so in a few passages, the whole 
 tenor, of the first three Gospels especially, shows. 
 They bear numerous, inimitable marks of being 
 true histories ; and not only so, but of histories 
 that existed, in some form or other, wellnigh con- 
 temporaneously with the events narrated. They 
 have all the freshness of first reports. They 
 are warm with the life and with the impress of 
 the facts which they relate. So strongly do I 
 find them thus marked, that, for my own part, 
 I need no external evidence to reinforce their 
 credibility. Like all true things, they are their 
 own credentials. 
 
 Alexander the Great, at the tomb of Achilles, 
 wished that he might have such a herald of his 
 exploits as that hero had in Homer. Wisely 
 has it been said, "Do great deeds and they 
 will sing themselves."* Great things, said and 
 done, strike all who hear and behold them, and 
 hearers and beholders there always are, who 
 must publish what they have heard and seen, 
 or die. They are driven by the overpowering 
 force of truth and nature, the inspiration of God, 
 
 * Emerson. 
 
FAMILIARITY WITH THE BIBLE. 75 
 
 to proclaim it in all possible ways. This is what 
 is meant by great deeds singing themselves. 
 
 And this is what the Gospels are most striking 
 instances of. The incidents of the life of Jesus 
 could no more fail to be told by every means 
 then known than the sun could fail to give 
 light. "Written reports of them did not wait 
 to appear till there was a demand for them. 
 They created the demand. As I have paused 
 over the different scenes of that wonderful Life, 
 and have been touched to the heart by the God- 
 like bearing, at once so original and so natural, 
 of this Man of men, it has seemed to me that, 
 if men had held their peace, the very stones in 
 the streets, over which walked those blessed 
 feet, would have cried aloud. But men did not 
 hold their peace. They could not. And conse- 
 quently, by word of mouth and by written 
 words as well, the world instantly began to ring 
 with the immortal Story. 
 
 FAMILIARITY WITH THE BIBLE. 
 
 In addition to the causes, which I have men- 
 tioned, of the Decline of Faith in our Christian 
 Records, there remains one to be briefly no- 
 
76 FAMILIARITY WITH THE BIBLE. 
 
 ticed. We are all conscious of its effect. A 
 common proverb states it. Familiarity with the 
 Bible has bred, not contempt, but indifference 
 and despair of ever finding it interesting. It 
 has fared with it as Hamlet's soliloquy fared 
 with Charles Lamb. He had heard that piece 
 of Shakespeare so often from the mouths of 
 declamatory boys and men, that he could not 
 tell, he said, whether it is good, bad, or indif- 
 ferent. Put into our hands when we were too 
 young to understand them, the Scriptures must 
 needs have become wearisome, associated per- 
 haps with the hard labor of learning to read. 
 We have been required to con them verse by 
 verse, chapter by chapter, as a religious task, 
 sometimes as a punishment, for mischief or filial 
 disobedience. We have got them by heart, but 
 only the words, to which, regardless of their 
 meaning, we have attached a superstitious sanc- 
 tity. How irksome it has all been, who is not 
 ready to confess? Who has not wished that 
 he could read the Bible now for the first time ? 
 Old Thomas Fuller, pious man that he was, able 
 to draw spiritual nourishment from the gene- 
 alogies, and even perhaps, I should not wonder, 
 
THE GREAT LOSS. 77 
 
 " from the unedifjing tenth of Kehemiah," be- 
 trays his weariness of this Bible-reading routine, 
 when he tells us how his conscience pricked 
 him, as he caught himself turning over the leaf 
 to see whether the daily chapter that he was 
 bound to read was long. 
 
 THE GREAT LOSS. 
 
 And yet, after all, the Gospels have been 
 studied and commented upon, letter by letter, 
 laboriously enough. How vast the literature 
 they have created ! The hundred and sixty 
 miles of shelves in the British Museum could 
 hardly contain the volumes that have been 
 written about them. 
 
 But all this labor has been spent, as I have 
 said, mainly in the interest of this or that 
 system of theology, and all upon the fatal as- 
 sumption that these writings are the history of 
 a Life out of the natural order of things. The 
 consequence is that, as the old theology is shorn 
 of its prestige, and the general mind is becoming 
 familiarised with the universality of law, all faith 
 in the historical truth of Christianity is going to 
 
 decay. 
 
 7* 
 
78 THE GREAT LOSS. 
 
 This faith destroyed, — what does it import? 
 I^othing less than this : the loss of the noblest 
 Realised Ideal of human nature that has ever 
 yet appeared in the history of mankind, a loss 
 we can poorly aiford to bear, especially, now 
 when Science, with its powerful instruments, re- 
 vealing to us the awful mystery of Being, and 
 crushing us under a sense of our apparent insig- 
 nificance, in the pride of her dazzling triumphs, 
 is making popular speculations that are at war, 
 I say not, with Christianity, but with all but 
 "the ghost" of a Religion.* In losing Christ, 
 
 * " He tried to give her yet another idea of the size of the 
 Universe. . . . 'There is a size at which dignity begins,' 
 he exclaimed : ' further on, there is a size at which grandeur 
 begins ; further on, there is a size at which solemnity begins ; 
 further on, a size at which awfulness begins ; further on, a 
 size at which ghastliness begins. That size faintly approaches 
 the size of the stellar universe. So am I not right in saying 
 that those who exert their imaginative powers to bury them- 
 selves in the depths of that universe merely strain their fac- 
 ulties to gain a new horror ? ... If you are cheerful, and 
 wish to remain so, leave the study of astronomy alone. Of 
 all sciences, it alone deserves the character of the terrible. 
 Then, if, on the other hand, you are restless, worried by your 
 worldly affairs, and anxious about the future, study astronomy 
 
THE GREAT LOSS. 79 
 
 we lose a priceless pledge of the transcendent 
 powers and destiny of human nature, an all- 
 comforting, all-inspiring Revelation of the Son- 
 ship of man, of the Fatherhood of God, and 
 a great light is extinguished whereby Science 
 might be led from the downward path which it 
 is pursuing up to the life and power of Spirit. 
 This is the unspeakable pity of it. 
 
 It cannot be too deeply impressed upon our 
 minds that it is not the teachings of Christ, 
 taken apart from him, but it is he himself, his 
 perfected personal being, that is the great 
 Revelation, the essential life and power of 
 Christianity. " The highest cannot be expressed 
 in words," but only in Life. Life is the lan- 
 guage in which God communicates with man. 
 
 at once. Your troubles will be reduced amazingly. But your 
 study will reduce them in a singular way, — by reducing the 
 importance of everj^thing. So that the science is still terrible 
 even as a panacea.' " — {Two in a Tower. A Novel, by Thomas 
 Hardy.) If any man be in Christ, there is a new crea- 
 tion. With Christ in the heart, with the faith in God and 
 man that rests on him as on a Rock, the dread Mystery may 
 be affronted with unshaken faith and triumphant hope. 
 
80 THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 
 
 Happy lie who translates it into his own life, 
 be his creed what it may ! 
 
 What exalts Christ, to my mind, high above 
 all other great leaders of mankind, and deepens 
 inexpressibly my sense of his most original per- 
 sonal greatness, is the fact that, not only was he 
 far greater than his word, great as his word was, 
 and of what other can this be said ? but that, so 
 far as human sympathy was concerned, he lived 
 and died Alone, Alone with God. 
 
 Other great leaders have very soon gathered 
 around themselves a greater or less number of 
 adherents, who have caught their spirit, appre- 
 ciated their aims, entered into their work, and, 
 continuing faithful to the end, have been to them 
 a world of encouragement and support. But, 
 from the first to the last, Christ had not a soul 
 on earth that understood his purpose. 
 
 The little company of ignorant men who at- 
 tended him were drawn to him with a force of 
 which neither he nor they were conscious, by 
 his commanding personal qualities expressed in 
 his whole bearing, in every glance of his eye, 
 beaming with kindness, or flashing with indig- 
 
THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 81 
 
 nation, in every accent of his voice, thrilling 
 them with its tone of perfect sincerity. But 
 they were following him with very mercenary 
 views. They were depending upon his making 
 them princes in Israel. The more they felt the 
 power of his character, the more they trusted 
 in him, and the more confident were they that 
 he would fulfil their expectations. The kingdom 
 which they implicitly believed that he would 
 establish was a kingdom of national wealth 
 and splendor. But as to what filled his whole 
 heart, and for which he lived and was to die, 
 they were, as he more than once called them, 
 children. In that regard they were as ignorant 
 as the dumb brute that follows its master. In 
 his extremest agony they fell asleep. And when 
 at last the crisis came, and an awful death con- 
 fronted him, they fled and left him alone with 
 the grim horror. 
 
 I^ot only was he thus without a friend, who, 
 entering into his mind, and understanding his 
 high purpose, could lighten his burden by sharing 
 it, but he was beset at every step by mortal foes, 
 who, urged by bigotry and hate, were bent upon 
 his destruction, accounting it a God-service. 
 
82 THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 
 
 And he, who thus lived and died, solitary and 
 alone among men, to whom he yearned with a 
 brother's heart, was not a person of an austere 
 temperament, such as would be best able to en- 
 dure so lonely a lot. He was distinguished for 
 his tenderness. It is evident from the style of 
 his discourse that he cherished companionship 
 with ligature in its various forms, with the birds 
 of the air and the flowers of the field. So gentle- 
 natured was he that Art, in its endeavor to por- 
 tray him, overlooks his extraordinary strength 
 of character, and depicts him as a person of 
 feminine softness. Oh no, there was nothing 
 repellent in his appearance. When those around 
 him would fain drive children away as intruders 
 into his presence, he was much displeased ; he 
 called the children to him, took them in his 
 arms and pronounced his immortal benediction 
 upon childhood. And children it was who wel- 
 comed him to the great city with their shrill 
 hosannas. Women sat at his feet, ministered 
 to his wants, and poured their fragrant oint- 
 ments on his person in token of their rever- 
 ence, and one wretched creature fell at his feet 
 and covered them with her kisses, and bathed 
 
THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 83 
 
 them with her tears and wiped them with her 
 hair. 
 
 With a heart ever open to all human sorrows 
 and going in his youth straight to a baptism of 
 blood, with no friend in sympathy with what was 
 dearest to him, how profound was the solitude of 
 the soul in which he lived and died ! What ele- 
 vation of mind, nothing less than sublime, does 
 it betoken, that, in the absence of all human 
 sympathy, he bore himself with a fraternal con- 
 sideration for others and a forgetfulness of him- 
 self as habitual and as perfect as if life was for 
 him, from first to last, a triumphal progress, at- 
 tended at every step by the welcoming acclama- 
 tions of a world ! Who shall fathom the great 
 deep of his Faith, of his faith in God, of his faith 
 in man ? Only once, for a passing moment, in 
 his sharpest agony, did his mind misgive him. 
 He might well have feared that he was the dupe 
 of a delusion, that there was no God in heaven 
 to have pity on him, that all truth and virtue had 
 fl.ed the earth, when he stood before Pilate, for- 
 saken by every friend, with the demoniac yell, 
 " Crucify him ! Crucify him !" ringing in his 
 ears, and all that the world accounted respecta- 
 
84 THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. 
 
 ble and religious arrayed against him. "Art 
 thou a king?" asked his judge. "Thou sayest 
 it," he replied, " I am a King. For this end I 
 was born, and for this cause came I into the 
 world, to bear witness to the truth ; and every 
 true man hearkens to my voice." Let the dark- 
 ness, hiding from him both heaven and earth, 
 gather around him as thickly as it might, it 
 could not shake his faith in Truth and in the 
 existence and loyalty of good men and true. 
 
 In contrast with Christ, how poor is the out- 
 come of our vaunted superior enlightenment! 
 How poverty-stricken looks our boasted Science 
 in the appearance, among our so-called most ad- 
 vanced thinkers, of a denomination professing 
 as its distinction, in relation to questions of the 
 deepest interest, an utter inability to affirm or to 
 deny ! "We are measuring the heights, sounding 
 the depths, of the material Universe, and re- 
 ducing its mightiest forces to our daily service, 
 but around the Divine in Mature and in the 
 human soul, clouds and darkness, exhaled from 
 the broad fields of our Science, are gathering 
 thick and fast. 
 
THE GREAT LOSS. 85 
 
 Jesus, alone, and in an ignorant age, affirmed 
 the Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of man. 
 He lived and died, resting in immovable faith on 
 these affirmations. And their truth? — behold the 
 God-given warrant of it in the peerless charac- 
 ter which they fashioned, and in the life which 
 has gone forth therefrom through generations 
 and is still, in countless unacknowledged ways, 
 re-creating the world. Where is the wise ? 
 Where is the scribe ? Where is the disputer of 
 the present age to answer our deepest questions ? 
 Is not God again making foolish the wisdom of 
 this world? Why should we care for proto- 
 plasms and molecules, if all is to end in the 
 annihilation of God and of man ? 
 
 "I'd rather be 
 A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn" 
 
 than have the whole world of things laid bare to 
 me in the light of Science, only to find at last 
 that there is no God in heaven, and no hope for 
 man on this earth, groaning and travailing to- 
 gether in pain as it is. 
 
 The result of what has now been said of Christ, 
 the reason why we cannot afibrd to lose him, but 
 
86 CHRIST FROM A LEGENDARY POINT OF VIEW. 
 
 must cherish him as our dearest treasure, as the 
 cardinal fact in human history, is briefly this : 
 His character, being the creation of a theory of 
 human nature, if you please so to call it, I prefer 
 to say, of an Ideal, which represents man as 
 standing in a relation to the Highest, best sym- 
 bolized, though inadequately, by that of a child 
 to a father, — this Realized Ideal in Christ, ap- 
 pealing directly as it does to the most powerful 
 sentiments of our nature, is an all-sufficient wit- 
 ness to the truth of this Ideal. He was no pre- 
 ternatural apparition. He was no myth. He was 
 a Solid Fact, at once human and divine, in the 
 fullest harmony with the Divine order of the 
 world, a living demonstration of the Sonship of 
 man and the Fatherhood of God. 
 
 CHRIST FROM A LEGENDARY POINT OF VIEW. 
 
 Far otherwise than what I have now represented 
 him must he be conceived of when the accounts of 
 him that have come down to us are treated as mere 
 fables that had their origin years after his time. 
 Then he appears, as M. Eenan says he appeared 
 to him before he went to Syria, as a dim person- 
 age of doubtful existence. JSTo longer revered as 
 
CHRIST FROM A LEGENDARY POINT OF VIEW. 87 
 
 the creative centre of all that is good and hope- 
 ful in our modern life, to be cherished with the 
 deepest reverence and the liveliest faith, he be- 
 comes a vague vision which we must take care 
 that we do not unduly magnify, as he is held re- 
 sponsible for all the errors, and they are many 
 and great, of which he has been the innocent oc- 
 casion, and which have claimed the authority of 
 his name. As well, by the way, may the mag- 
 nificent spectacle of Creation that lies all around 
 us be charged with the monstrous superstitions 
 engendered by the ignorance and fear with which 
 it has been contemplated. 
 
 Although regarded as a legendary personage, 
 he yet may be acknowledged as an eminent moral 
 teacher. But apart from him, his sayings might 
 as well have come down to us anonymously for 
 any peculiar power they possess. It is a mistake, 
 I conceive, to magnify him merely as a moral 
 Instructor, as if this were his chief claim upon 
 our reverence. The Man was a great deal greater 
 than the Speaker. No sounds of the lips, though 
 such as angels use, could express the unsearch- 
 able riches of his faith and truth. It is his per- 
 sonal character, not any novelty of doctrine, but 
 
88 THE GOSPELS, HOW TO BE APPROACHED. 
 
 his very life, poured into every word and work, 
 that has made him great among men beyond 
 compare. He dealt in no hearsays, spoke from no 
 external dictation, but from the profound convic- 
 tions of his own soul, upon which he planted him- 
 self as a king upon his throne, making a crown 
 of thorns outshine all earthly diadems, and "the 
 world come round to him." If the words of 
 Luther were half battles, the words of Christ 
 were victories. In fine, it is the unrivalled force 
 of his character, the divine humanity of his life, 
 God within him, that clothes him with an author- 
 ity before which " the human soul of universal 
 earth" must bow in veneration and love. 
 
 THE GOSPELS, HOW TO BE APPEOACHED. 
 
 It is difficult, I know, to approach the Gospels 
 unbiassed by any theories of belief or unbelief 
 whatever. We look to find in them the confirma- 
 tion of our preconceived ideas ; and what we seek 
 we are pretty sure to find. It is, indeed, quite 
 impossible to read them without some hypothesis, 
 more or less pronounced, of their character and 
 contents, nor is it desirable. In the pursuit 
 of truth in any department of inquiry, previous 
 
THE GOSPELS, HOW TO BE APPROACHED. 89 
 
 suppositions, or divinations, are indispensable. 
 We must have some thread to string our facts 
 upon, some idea to verify. Only we must be on 
 our guard and take great care that our theories 
 do not run away with us, as they are very apt to do, 
 out of sight of everything that contradicts them. 
 
 My own supposition, suggested by certain ob- 
 vious characteristics of these Writings, is simply 
 this : They are neither theological documents 
 nor fabulous compositions, but, substantially, 
 genuine histories, not perfect (what history is ?), 
 but accounts of things that were actually said 
 and done. 
 
 Accordingly, what I have endeavored to keep 
 in view as my sole aim has been to ascertain how 
 much there is in them, which, being consistent 
 in itself, with all the actual and probable circum- 
 stances of the case, and with all that is known to 
 be true, carries in itself the evidence of its truth. 
 
 That no bias of preconceived notions has im- 
 paired the singleness of my purpose, I cannot 
 pretend. It is quite impossible to project one's self 
 out of the sphere of inherited modes of thought, 
 and, without going too far, take the right stand 
 
 beyond the reach of their influence. I have done 
 8^ 
 
90 THE GOSPELS, HOW TO BE APPROACHED. 
 
 what I could to read the Gospels as if they were 
 just put into my hands, excluding from view the 
 peculiar theological and official representations 
 of him whose acts and sayings they record. 
 
 As they abound in references to times, places, 
 and persons, and are obviously and eminently 
 circumstantial, that a faithful and candid exam- 
 ination will make it appear, beyond all question, 
 whether they are true or fabulous, or, if a mix- 
 ture of both, to what extent, I have no doubt. 
 
 This confidence has been amply repaid by 
 signs and marks of an unmistakable signifi- 
 cance, which have disclosed themselves at every 
 step. I make no boastful claim. But I am free 
 to say that many of the inimitable undesigned 
 evidences of truth and nature, which I have in- 
 dicated from time to time in the Gospel narra- 
 tives, have never that I know of been observed 
 before. They would have been found long ago, 
 I doubt not, had they been looked for. Erro- 
 neous ideas of the character of the Gospels, and 
 of him of whom they tell, have prevented a 
 search in the direction that would have led to 
 the discovery of these internal evidences of their 
 truth. 
 
THE GOSPELS READ BETWEEN THE LINES. 91 
 
 That these internal evidences have been so 
 long overlooked, — does it not show how truly 
 undesigned they were? Had they been in- 
 tended to create an air of truth, they would 
 have been made more conspicuous. 
 
 That I have in no instance mistaken fancies 
 for facts, I cannot venture to affirm. Wherever 
 I may have done so, a keener critical faculty 
 than I possess will make it manifest. I am far 
 from thinking that I have left nothing undis- 
 covered in this most interesting field of inquiry. 
 I have hardly gone beyond its borders, but I 
 have gone far enough to be convinced of its 
 inexhaustible richness. 
 
 THE GOSPELS KEAD BETWEEN THE LINES. 
 
 I have said more than once, in previous pub- 
 lications, that, in order to be rightly understood, 
 the Gospels must be read between the lines. In 
 truth they have already been read a great deal 
 in this way; and the diverse interlineal mean- 
 ings that they are made to yield, who can num- 
 ber ? But they have been thus read mostly by 
 the highly colored light of theological dogmas 
 and metaphysical systems founded upon mis- 
 
92 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 
 
 interpretations of the written word. I have en- 
 deavored to discover what is legible between 
 the lines by the pure, white light of the undis- 
 puted truth of nature. What I have thus read, 
 I submit to the judgment of the reader in the 
 following instances. 
 
 The Baptism of Jesus. 
 
 I begin with a passage that I have dwelt upon 
 often before, the passage that relates to the Bap- 
 tism of Jesus. 
 
 It impresses me deeply, in the first place, 
 because I find that it is an account of a great 
 moment, of an era indeed, in his spiritual devel- 
 opment; and then because of the perfect truth 
 to nature, to the laws of the human mind, with 
 which the experience which he then had is de- 
 scribed. 
 
 "When it is stated (in the second Gospel) that, 
 after his baptism, "•immediately the Spirit driveth 
 him into the wilderness,'' I read between the lines 
 that his baptism was no cold formality, but that 
 he was so profoundly moved by it that he could 
 not rest in his old familiar relations. Up to that 
 hour he had lived his ordinary retired life, cher- 
 
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 93 
 
 ishing in the secrecy of his own bosom his 
 high aspirations, meditating the work to which 
 he felt himself ever more and more urgently 
 called. How thoroughly acquainted he was with 
 the spirit of the time, with the corruption and 
 savage bigotry of the ruling classes especially, 
 his subsequent utterances abundantly attest. 
 Consequently he saw with ever-growing clear- 
 ness that it would be certain death if he dared 
 to obey the inward call, and go forth and faith- 
 fully declare the truth concerning God and man 
 then buried out of sight under formalities and 
 traditions which were hardening the heart and 
 perverting the conscience. 
 
 At last the hour came when he could delay 
 no longer. He must obey the sacred impulse of 
 the Spirit. A time of great religious excitement 
 was causing multitudes from far and wide to 
 flock to the Voice and the Baptism in the Desert 
 on the banks of the Jordan. Jesus quitted his 
 home and went with the throng, deliberately 
 and formally, to be cleansed of all hesitation and 
 delay, and to devote himself to a work that had 
 but one end, a violent death. 
 
 It was his first public step, the step that costs, 
 
94 THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 
 
 an act bj which he virtually pronounced sen- 
 tence of death on himself. "With this devotion 
 of himself to the Supreme "Will when it willed 
 for him so appalling a fate, there came a new 
 and overpowering consciousness of the ineffable 
 blessedness of a perfect unity with the Highest 
 and Best. So new and deep was this experience 
 that he could not rest in his old surroundings. 
 He must flee, driven from within, by the Spirit, 
 to the silence and solitude of the Desert, there 
 to ponder his exalted relationship, which was 
 now impressed upon him as never before, and 
 prepare himself for the fatal career in which he 
 had now taken the first irrevocable step. 
 
 Now, as never before, and as it never could 
 have been until he " converted conviction into 
 act," his faith was deepened beyond the possi- 
 bility of being shaken or disobeyed. In the deep 
 peace that overflowed his soul, he had the wit- 
 ness of the Spirit of the Most High that it was 
 no hallucination, but the voice of God in his 
 heart, that he was obeying. 
 
 Bearing in mind this faith which now knew 
 no misgiving, and the power of which his fleeing 
 to the Wilderness reveals, and considering also 
 
THE BAPTISM OF JESUS. 95 
 
 how natural it is for the boldest figures of the 
 imagination, in moments of intense excitement, 
 to rise before the mind as representative of the 
 emotion that overpowers us, we cannot fail to 
 see how true it is to nature that Jesus should 
 describe that new and beatific consciousness of 
 oneness with the All-Perfect as a vision of 
 heaven, as heaven thrown open to him. " The 
 moment," says Emerson, " our discourse is in- 
 flamed with passion or exalted by thought, it 
 clothes itself in images." 
 
 And is it not with equal truth to nature that 
 a dove, the common symbol of love and peace, 
 happening to hover within the rapt vision of 
 Jesus, as he came up out of the water, " in bodily 
 shape" only an ordinary dove, was instantly glo- 
 rified by his raised imagination, and transfigured 
 into a heaven-sent messenger? What is more 
 common, in moments of deep emotion, than for 
 the most familiar incidents and appearances to 
 be invested with the significance of omens or 
 portents ? 
 
 And is it not in accordance with no un- 
 common experience that the words of ancient 
 Scripture, " Thou art my beloved Son, in lohom I 
 
96 IN THE DESERT. 
 
 am well pleased, ^^ coming suddenly, involuntarily, 
 to the mind of Jesus as expressive of his new- 
 born consciousness of the approbation of the 
 Highest, should seem to him as though sounded 
 in his ears by an articulate voice, and should be 
 so described ? 
 
 Does this interpretation of the Baptism of 
 Jesus, which I read, in the very handwriting of 
 truth and nature, between the lines, seem 
 strained ? Ah ! if we had ever had an expe- 
 rience in the remotest degree akin to his at 
 that great moment, these figures of the imagi- 
 nation would be felt to be all inadequate to de- 
 scribe his unutterable peace of mind, the natural 
 accompaniment and consequence of the divine 
 consciousness then created within him. 
 
 In the Desert. 
 
 In the account of what passed in the Wilder- 
 ness in those temptations with which he con- 
 tended, and which, according to the usual modes 
 of thought and speech of that time, are repre- 
 sented as suggested by an evil spirit, — in the 
 repetition of, " If thou be the Son of God,^^ I read 
 between the lines how deeply a new and over- 
 
FIEST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 97 
 
 powering sense of his Divine Sonship had been 
 impressed upon his mind. And in the repeated 
 mention of stones in the same account I read 
 also how, in his self-communings, his thoughts 
 were suggested by surrounding objects, and took 
 shape therefrom. ["• Command these stones to 
 become bread," and " He will give his angels 
 charge concerning thee, . . . lest at any time 
 thou dash thy foot against a stone.'') 
 
 The Gospels tell us only of those things which 
 struck their authors as extraordinary. There are 
 many little particulars which we should like now 
 to know, of which they give us no information, 
 as they were not thought to be worth mentioning. 
 Thus, they have not told us how the experiences 
 of Jesus at his baptism and in the Desert came 
 to be known. That they were told by him to 
 his disciples, I doubt not. 
 
 FIRST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 
 
 The first public appearance of Christ as a 
 
 teacher caused a sudden and great sensation, so 
 
 new and commanding was the air of authority 
 
 with which he bore himself. An insane man, 
 
 who chanced to be present in the synagogue, 
 
 9 
 
98 FIRST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 
 
 supposed, according to the popular belief of the 
 time, to be possessed by an evil spirit, was so 
 excited by the whole appearance and discourse of 
 Jesus that, unable to control himself, and break- 
 ing in upon the decorum of the place, he cried 
 out in the character of the demon by whom he 
 believed himself to be prompted, calling Jesus 
 the Holy one of God. Jesus instantly turned 
 upon the man his word and eye of command, 
 and bade the evil spirit depart. Whereupon the 
 man, under that influence, shrieked out and fell 
 into convulsions, and shortly became calm and 
 composed. The people present could have but 
 one thought: Jesus was a powerful exorcist. 
 From the synagogue Jesus, followed by an ex- 
 cited crowd, as I cannot but imagine, w^ent to 
 Peter's house, whither, doubtless, the rumor of 
 the startling incident in the synagogue preceded 
 him. Peter's mother-in-law was lying ill of a 
 fever. At his appearance at her bedside, at the 
 thrilling touch of his hand, so stimulated by the 
 excitement of the moment were her vital forces, 
 that she threw off her fever and was able to leave 
 her bed and assist in the offices of hospitality. 
 At sundown, when the Sabbath was past, a great 
 
FIRST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 99 
 
 crowd, " the whole city," one Gospel says, were 
 gathered round the house. 
 
 Then we are told that the next morning Jesus 
 " rose a great while before day, and went out, and de- 
 parted into a solitary place, and there prayed.' ' I 
 read between the lines that he was so disturbed 
 by what had happened the day before that he 
 could not sleep, and was again "driven of the 
 Spirit" into solitude, there to prepare himself 
 by meditation and prayer for the unlooked-for 
 turn which things had taken; and when his 
 disciples went in search of him and found him 
 and told him that every one was inquiring for 
 him, in his refusal to return to Capernaum, 
 where such a sensation existed, I read still fur- 
 ther that he had a far higher purpose than the 
 healing of bodily diseases. 
 
 Thus reading this passage, I find myself at a 
 point of view from which all the difficulty about 
 the miracles of Christ vanishes in the flood of new 
 light shed upon those sudden and extraordinary 
 effects which are so named. I see that they 
 never were of his seeking, that he wrought 
 them never for the sake of exhibiting his power, 
 but only as he was moved by compassion, that 
 
100 FIRST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 
 
 they occurred wellmgh involuntarily on his part. 
 He never went out of his way — he rather avoided 
 occasions — for those marvels. He was at times 
 impatient of them, seeing that they fed only a 
 barren wonder. "Except you see signs and 
 wonders," he once exclaimed, "you will not be- 
 lieve." They had not been contemplated by him 
 when, previously to his appearance in public, 
 he had meditated on his future. His thoughts 
 and aspirations had, I repeat, far higher aims 
 than the cure of bodily diseases, even the cure 
 of souls. 
 
 And as these cures were mostly of a descrip- 
 tion susceptible of mental influence, I perceive 
 with equal clearness that they admit of being 
 referred to the unconscious power, the all-sub- 
 duing charm, of the person of Jesus, signified in 
 his whole bearing, in the expression of his coun- 
 tenance, in the thrilling tones of his voice, in the 
 air of authority with which he spoke, and which 
 was born of his profound conviction of truth, 
 and was so striking that it is expressly men- 
 tioned as unlike anything that the people were 
 accustomed to. " He taught as one having author- 
 ity^ and not as the Scribes,^^ — the only passage, I 
 
FIRST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 101 
 
 believe, approaching a description of him in all 
 the Gospels. 
 
 IS'ow, what we have all been taught is, that 
 these remarkable effects were miracles in the 
 sense of suspensions of the laws of nature, 
 which Jesus was expressly empowered to work 
 in order to prove that he was from God. 
 
 They certainly do attest that God was with 
 him. But not because they were departures 
 from the natural course of things, but for the 
 very reverse. They show that, in conformity 
 with the great law, the Divine wa}^, in the 
 spiritual world as in the physical, Jesus com- 
 manded ISTature by obeying her. So true was 
 he, in his whole bearing and being, to the highest 
 and best in human nature, that, without design 
 on his part, and to his own surprise, in the first 
 instance, his simple appearance, the whole air of 
 him, instantly inspired all, whose hearts were not 
 turned into stone by spiritual pride and preju- 
 dice, with a boundless confidence. As the needle 
 turns to the pole, so all that was true in the heart 
 of man turned to him, even as he himself said : 
 " Every true man hearkens to my voice." Even 
 his judge, weak, unprincipled as that magistrate 
 
 9* 
 
102 FIRST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 
 
 was, had that in him which was so touched by 
 the appearance and behavior of Jesus that, call- 
 ing all the people to witness, he cried, " I am 
 guiltless of the blood of this innocent man !" 
 
 When this extraordinary, personal power, na- 
 tive to Christ as a man, is given full weight, it 
 will be seen that there is no need of the supposi- 
 tion that he was preternaturally gifted. It abun- 
 dantly suffices to account for the extraordinary 
 impression that he made. This it was that called 
 forth into all-conquering activity, in the sick and 
 suffering especially, the most powerful principle 
 in the constitution of man. Faith. 
 
 "What is there more natural to man than Faith ? 
 He was created, born, to believe as surely as he 
 was made to see with eyes. The Scripture saith. 
 The just shall live by Faith. In truth, the un- 
 just, we all, live by Faith. Upon what else does 
 the world-embracing system of trade and com- 
 merce rest? It is Faith that is treading the 
 mountains under foot, that summons the light- 
 ning to our service and it obeys. It is Faith that 
 is preparing the highway of the Lord, making 
 the paths straight for civilization and human 
 brotherhood, and for all the o^reat interests of 
 
FIRST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 103 
 
 mankind over all the land and through the deep 
 places of the sea. To Faith we owe all discov- 
 eries, all progress. All things are possible to it, 
 said Jesus. It commands all nature. To this 
 mighty agent directly he ascribed the sudden 
 and extraordinary effects which we call miracles. 
 It restored health to the sick, sight to the blind, 
 life to the dead. 
 
 Between the lines that report the emphatic 
 and unqualified terms in which he described the 
 power of Faith, in his declaration that, when it 
 existed only as a grain of mustard-seed, it could 
 uproot trees and toss mountains into the sea, I 
 read farther, and it breaks upon me as a revela- 
 tion, that, greatly as the people were moved by 
 the wonders wrought, no one was so profoundly 
 impressed by them as Jesus himself. So deep 
 was the impression that they made on him — and 
 herein the peerless strength of his character is 
 seen — that, as unconscious of the power in him 
 which produced them as he was of his breath- 
 ing, so far from feeling one throb of self-elation, 
 he no more thought of taking credit to himself 
 for them, than of priding himself upon the ac- 
 tion of his lungs. They simply brought him a 
 
104 FIRST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 
 
 new and all-inspiring experience, deepening his 
 own faith mightily. The multitudes who wit- 
 nessed them were filled with amazement. In- 
 sensible to their acclamations as though he heard 
 them not, he had a vision of God in that wonder- 
 working Faith, the presence of that Supreme 
 Power, whose ways — the laws of nature we call 
 them — are in the great deep of the human soul 
 as they are everywhere throughout the Universe. 
 It was in the conscious power of his own faith, 
 quickened by what he witnessed, that he de- 
 scribed faith in the strongest possible language. 
 His own faith became one with his personal 
 consciousness. Accordingly, he is never repre- 
 sented as appealing to any power external to 
 himself. He uttered no adjurations. On no 
 occasions did he speak in a more commanding 
 tone of personal authority than when he healed 
 the sick and summoned the dead back to life. 
 
 It is most interesting to note that his personal 
 consciousness was not lost in the consciousness 
 of the power of God within, but was rendered 
 all the deeper by being identified therewith. He 
 did not lose himself, he found himself, in God. 
 When at last he cried, " Not my will, hut thine, he 
 
FIRST APPEARANCE IN PUBLIC. 105 
 
 doner the apparent surrender of his own will 
 was, in truth, the exaltation of it into perfect 
 unity with the Divine Will. 
 
 Young and without any previous similar ex- 
 periences, upon his first appearance in public, 
 incidents, wholly unlooked for, occurred which 
 called forth the wildest demonstrations of popu- 
 lar favor, and he instantly became the object of 
 all men's wonder. The rumor of his acts and 
 words ran far and wide, losing, w^e may be sure, 
 nothing of the marvellous as it spread. Crowds 
 flocked to him from all quarters. At one time, 
 we are told, there was such "a coming and 
 going" that he and those who attended him had 
 not time " so much as to eat." Again the multi- 
 tude was so great that they trampled upon one 
 another. He had to keep a boat in waiting upon 
 the shore of the Galilean lake, where he first 
 appeared, that he might escape the press of the 
 multitude. The whole country, wild with the 
 sensation he was causing, heaved under his steps. 
 He saw deranged minds, through the confidence 
 reposed in him, restored to sanity, and withered 
 limbs, and limbs swollen with leprosy, and sight- 
 less eyes, recover their soundness. 
 
106 THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST. 
 
 How could it be otherwise with him than I 
 have said ? Such an extraordinary state of things 
 must have affected him deeply, — how deeply, 
 we discover, I repeat, as we read between the 
 lines that report the unqualified language in 
 which he spoke of Faith. 
 
 His own faith in Faith being quickened, as I 
 have described, there was created in him such a 
 consciousness of power as only such a person, 
 with such an extraordinary experience, could 
 have. It was, I conceive, in the unparalleled 
 energy of this faith that he called back the dead 
 to life and awoke himself from the deep slumber. 
 
 It is comparatively easy to appreciate the great- 
 ness of mind which the last hours of his life illus- 
 trate, and which has transfigured the vile Cross 
 into our most sacred symbol. But, in truth, the 
 very beginning of his public life, when, in his 
 youth and inexperience, he was confronted with 
 such startling and unexpected incidents, mani- 
 fests no less impressively the same Grodlike char- 
 acter. He was alike unmoved by the horrors of 
 a lonely and terrible death and by the blandish- 
 ments of the most enthusiastic popular favor. 
 The acclamations of multitudes made no impres- 
 
THE GREATNESS OF CHRIST. 107 
 
 sion on him. They passed by him as the idle wind. 
 He was as deaf to those seducing voices at the first 
 as he was to the imprecations of his priestly per- 
 secutors at the last. Both the one and the other 
 serve only to illustrate his utter unconsciousness 
 of the severe ordeal to which he w^as subjected. 
 They illumined, but they could not embarrass, his 
 perfect self-possession. As in the storm on the 
 lake, he was alike unmoved by the wild war of 
 the elements and by its sudden cessation, so that 
 his terrified disciples rushed to the belief that 
 there was an understanding between him and 
 the winds and waves, and that they subsided at 
 his rebuke, so always, from the first to the last, 
 he shows a royal authority over the most trying 
 circumstances, making them his obedient min- 
 isters, which if we fail to be struck with, it is 
 because it was as naturally and uniformly sus- 
 tained as if it were the merest matter of course, 
 and nothing else were possible. We are insen- 
 sible to it even as he himself was unconscious of 
 it. JtTot until we recollect his temptations in the 
 wilderness at the first and his agony in the gar- 
 den at the last, are we made to see how entirely 
 native to him his greatness was, and how the 
 
108 JESUS AND HIS MOTHER. 
 
 regal dignity of his mind was due to no phleg- 
 matic insensibility, but to a character no less 
 tender than strong. 
 
 On the Lake. 
 
 Where it is related that he was in a vessel on 
 the lake, and that he was asleep, and that there 
 were other boats out on the lake at the same 
 time, we may read between the lines that, ex- 
 hausted by the fatigue which drove him there to 
 escape the crowds, he had instantly fallen asleep, 
 and that, when he left the land, those other 
 boats had pushed off, filled with people deter- 
 mined not to lose sight of him. These particu- 
 lars are not mentioned, but are they not just as 
 legible as the written characters ? 
 
 Jesus and his Mother. 
 
 On a certain occasion, when Jesus was sur- 
 rounded by a large crowd in a state of great 
 excitement caused by a sudden cure that had 
 just been wrought, and certain Pharisees pres- 
 ent, stung to madness by hearing the people 
 pronounce this base Galilean the son of David ! 
 the Messiah ! charged him with being in league 
 
JESUS AND HIS MOTHER. 109 
 
 with the very devil of devils, upon some one's 
 calling out to him that his mother was there 
 wanting to speak with him, he exclaimed, " Who 
 is my mother f^ an exclamation apparently so 
 unfilial that M. Renan infers from it that he 
 was wanting in natural affection, — He ! he who, 
 in the sharp agony of a terrible death, forgot 
 himself in solicitude for her who bore him ! 
 
 [That divinely human incident, by the way, 
 at the Crucifixion M. Renan regards as a fabri- 
 cation designed to intimate what a favorite of 
 Jesus John was. This way of disposing of 
 whatever in the history happens to strike us as 
 unlikely is very easy, but, as I have said, the 
 perfectly artless character of the Gospels per- 
 emptorily forbids recourse to any such sus- 
 picions. To return :] 
 
 Between the lines I read that his mother, 
 alarmed at the stir which her son was causing, and 
 fearing, from the malignant things said against 
 him, that he would get himself into trouble, had 
 come to persuade him to go home with her. 
 
 I read further that, shocked to the last degree 
 
 at the depravity of ascribing to the devil an act 
 
 of humanity, he was so carried away by his in- 
 10 
 
110 JESUS AND HIS MOTHER. 
 
 dignation in exposing the base charge, that it 
 was not in human nature to regard the abrupt 
 introduction, even of his dearest personal ties, 
 otherwise than as an intolerable intrusion. I 
 read in his exclamation, not that he loved his 
 mother less than he should, but that he loved 
 God and truth the most. We can love no mor- 
 tal friend truly until we love God supremely. 
 
 In the third Gospel, where the same occurrence 
 is related, there is nothing said of the mother 
 of Jesus' wanting to see him, but it is written 
 that a woman in the crowd cried aloud, '' Blessed 
 is she who bore thee, and the breast that gave thee 
 nourishment." Between the lines I read that it 
 was hearing the mother of Jesus mentioned (as 
 stated in the first Gospel) that suggested this 
 woman's exclamation. And I read also in his 
 reply to her, '^Blessed are they who hear the word 
 of God and keep it," the same state of mind that 
 a moment before led him to exclaim, " Who is 
 my mother?" Any allusions to himself or to 
 his private relations he could not then bear, so 
 absorbed was he in exposing the blasphemy of 
 attributing to an evil spirit the manifest work 
 of God. Such allusions, diverting attention from 
 
JESUS AND THE KICH YOUTH. Ill 
 
 the truths that he was then declaring, and that 
 filled his whole mind, he felt to be ill-timed, 
 utterly out of place. 
 
 When the scene ended by his pointing to his 
 disciples, and saying, '' Behold my mother and 
 my brothers ! Whosoever will do the will of my 
 Father in heaven, the same is my mother, and 
 sister, and brother," — in this introduction of the 
 sisterly relation is there not visible between the 
 lines a reference to the woman who had just 
 broken forth in blessing his mother? Do I fancy, 
 or do I not read, that the woman, with the char- 
 acteristic disposition of her sex, took his reply, 
 " Blessed are they who hear the w^ord of God and 
 keep it," although expressed in general terms, 
 directly to herself, as a personal rebuff, as if he 
 had said, " Blessed art thou if thou hear the word 
 of Grod and keep it," and that it was because he 
 saw her and marked her discomfiture, or felt 
 that she was wounded, that he introduced the 
 sisterly allusion ? 
 
 Jesus and the Rich Youth. 
 
 The narrative of the rich young man who 
 came to Jesus, asking what he should do to in- 
 
112 JESUS AND THE RICH YOUTH. 
 
 herit eternal life, abounds in exquisite touches, 
 written between the lines, not by the hand of 
 man, but by truth and nature. 
 
 To perceive the full significance of this pas- 
 sage, we must keep distinctly in mind the wide 
 difference between Christ's idea of the King- 
 dom of Heaven, and the idea that his disciples 
 had of it. To them it was a kingdom like all 
 other kingdoms, only far excelling all others 
 in wealth and power. To him it was the reign 
 of Truth and Eighteousness, which could be es- 
 tablished, such were the corruptions of the world, 
 such the savage passions that bore sway, only 
 through the fire and blood of merciless perse- 
 cutions. E'o one could engage in its service, who 
 was not prepared to give up everything for its 
 sake. 
 
 The appearance of the rich youth was so pre- 
 possessing that it is said, in the simple style 
 of the Gospels, that " Jesus loved him.'' His re- 
 spectful address, " Good Master!" uttered in no 
 hollow, conventional tone, but with that air of 
 earnest sincerity that carries with it a certain 
 authority, prompted Jesus to repel the winning 
 flattery, to disclaim the title of " Good," and to 
 
JESUS AND THE RICH YOUTH. 113 
 
 remind the youth that only to One did that title 
 apply. 
 
 In answer to the question put to him, Jesus 
 bade the young man keep the Commandments. 
 " I have always kept them ; what more am I to 
 do ?" was the further inquiry. " If thou wilt be 
 perfect/' said Jesus, " dispose of your riches, 
 give them to the poor, and come with me." 
 
 It has been inferred from these words that 
 Jesus required a vow of perpetual poverty as 
 an essential condition of Christian discipleship. 
 But he spoke for the hour. Now that he has not 
 lived and died wholly in vain, the world is so far 
 advanced, that wealth may be made a powerful 
 means of aiding in the establishment of the Di- 
 vine Kingdom. But at such a time as that in 
 which Christ lived, no wiser counsel could be 
 given than he gave to any one who proposed to 
 devote himself to the advancement of Truth and 
 Right ; for the certain loss, not of property only, 
 but of life would be incurred in that service. 
 Upon no other condition at that time could the 
 true Kingdom of God come. 
 
 The young man, accustomed to a life of luxury, 
 
 was utterly unequal to so great a sacrifice. Give 
 10* 
 
114 JESUS AND THE RICH YOUTH. 
 
 up all his riches ! it was impossible. He had 
 come running to Jesus with all the ardent con- 
 fidence of youth, unconscious of ever having 
 transgressed the law, ready, he flattered himself, 
 to do whatever might be required of him for the 
 sake of the life eternal. He turned crestfallen 
 and went slowly away. 
 
 And then broke from the lips of Jesus the 
 exclamation, " How hardly shall they who have 
 riches enter into the Kingdom of GodT^ As if 
 he had said, " Since this young man, blameless 
 of any transgression, lovable as he is, cannot 
 resign his riches for the Kingdom of Heaven's 
 sake, no rich man can. A camel can pass 
 through the eye of a needle sooner." 
 
 Jesus is greatly misunderstood when he is 
 here taken to the letter. He spoke as he was 
 moved. He was touched to the heart by the 
 case of this interesting youth. It was deep feel- 
 ing to which he thus gave expression ; and deep 
 feeling never limits itself to measured terms. It 
 never stops to make exceptions, or to qualify 
 its utterances. IN'ot the absolute impossibility, 
 but the extreme difficulty, of the entrance of the 
 rich into the Kingdom of God, that is, into the 
 
JESUS AND THE RICH YOUTH. 115 
 
 self-sacrificing service of Truth at that hour, is 
 the lesson we are to learn from these words of 
 Christ's. 
 
 At this exclamation of his, his disciples were 
 exceedingly astonished, as well they might be, see- 
 ing what their views were, and they cried, " Who 
 then can be saved ?" " To enter the Kingdom of 
 Heaven" and '' to be saved" were, in their minds, 
 equivalent expressions. And salvation meant with 
 them, first of all, salvation from poverty; it was 
 to be made rich. They were, of course, amazed 
 above measure at this declaration of their Mas- 
 ter's. If the rich could not enter the glorious 
 kingdom, could not be saved, such was their 
 thought, how could there be any saved ? Simple- 
 minded men that they were ! How transparently 
 did they betray the childish dreams they were 
 cherishing ! Fixing his eyes upon them (with a 
 look which they never forgot, — it is expressly 
 recorded in two of the Gospels, — as if he were 
 reading all that was in their hearts, and saw the 
 whole extent of their delusion), well did he call 
 them " Children," and, in answer to their looks 
 and exclamations of wonder, assure them that it 
 might be impossible to them that there should be 
 
116 JESUS AND HIS DISCIPLES. 
 
 any salvation without rich men, but that it was 
 possible with God. 
 
 Wisely did he forbear, for their sakes, to go 
 any further. Time and the progress of events, 
 he well knew, would enlighten them, and bring 
 them riches surpassing far their present worldly 
 expectations. Any further explanation, at that 
 moment, they could not bear. It would have 
 been sure to shock them and peril their fidelity 
 to the Truth. 
 
 Reading on between the lines, we have a still 
 fuller revelation of their hopes, when Peter, ever 
 forward to take the lead and speak for the 
 others, thinking it high time to come to an un- 
 derstanding, immediately inquired, " What are 
 we going to have, we who have left all and fol- 
 lowed thee ?" " Verily, I say unto you,'' answered 
 their Master, " there is no man who has left house, 
 or parents, or brothers, or sisters, or loife, or children, 
 for the Kingdom of God's sake, who will not receive 
 manifold more in this present time, and in the world 
 to come life everlasting." An eternal truth. An 
 emphatic announcement of the law of compensa- 
 tion. Whatever a man sacrifices for God and the 
 Right, Truth will do manifold more for him than 
 
JESUS AND HIS DISCIPLES. 117 
 
 he can do for the Truth. That will reward him 
 in full measure, pressed down and running over. 
 
 The disciples of Jesus, however, could not 
 then have caught so much as an inkling of his 
 meaning. Of '^ the peace and joy in believing" 
 which they afterwards came to know, they had 
 as yet no experience. They were confidently 
 expecting to be rewarded for their devotion to 
 their Master with riches and honors. They had 
 no thought of the possibility of any different com- 
 pensation. Accordingly, in the first Gospel we 
 find Jesus reported as saying, not what he said, 
 but what, in their simplicity, they honestly be- 
 lieved that he meant, namely, that they should 
 ^^ sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of 
 Israeli With their expectations, they could put 
 no other construction upon ^'the manifold more" 
 which he promised, a construction which I can- 
 not for a moment imagine that he dreamed of 
 authorising. It contradicts the whole tenor of 
 his teaching, the whole spirit of his life. And, 
 besides, it is directly at variance with the warn- 
 ing that he immediately gave them, that though 
 they were the first they might be the last. 
 
 Since Peter and his fellow-disciples, as may be 
 
118 JESUS AND HIS DISCIPLES. 
 
 read between the lines, were flattering them- 
 selves with the expectation that as they were the 
 first to follow Christ, they would have an advan- 
 tage over those who came after them, he went 
 on to say that many, who were first, would be 
 last, and the last would be first. And in illus- 
 tration of this saying he told the story of the 
 owner of a vineyard, who went out at different 
 hours of the day to hire laborers, and at the end 
 of the day paid those whom he had engaged at 
 the eleventh hour equally with the first ; a para- 
 ble that has been held to teach the efficacy of a 
 death-bed repentance. It has no such reference. 
 The eleventh hour laborers had not refused to 
 work before. They had had no opportunity. No 
 man had hired them. What the story was in- 
 tended to teach is that those who should, in the 
 Providence of Heaven, come late into the service 
 of the Divine Kingdom, would share in the 
 rewards of that service equally with those who 
 came earlier. Had the disciples perceived the 
 drift of the parable, they would not have ex- 
 pected a reward for being the first. 
 
 Let us pause here to observe with what fidelity 
 to nature the spiritual growth of the personal 
 
JESUS AND HIS DISCIPLES. 119 
 
 disciples of Christ went on. Much of what he 
 said, they scarcely, if at all, understood. It was 
 utterly irreconcilable with all their fondly cher- 
 ished views. It found no place in minds full of 
 very different things. Nevertheless, his personal 
 influence, acting upon them every instant, un- 
 consciously on his part and on theirs, through 
 every glance of his eye and every tone of his 
 voice, was steadily creating in them a growing 
 trust, a respect that deepened into awe, and they 
 learned to confide in him more than in them- 
 selves. In contradiction of a common proverb, 
 the more familiar and intimate their intercourse 
 with him, the profounder grew their rever- 
 ence. But the more they trusted in him, the 
 more passionately did they cherish their Mes- 
 sianic visions. Thus the tares and the wheat 
 grew together in their minds, and for a while, 
 instead of cither's choking the other, they pro- 
 moted each the other's growth. As their worldly 
 hopes grew, so grew the faith of his disciples in 
 Christ. It became necessary for their sakes, as 
 he is recorded to have told them, that he should 
 leave them, that the right spirit might gain the 
 ascendency. Although they never formally re- 
 
120 JESUS AT BETHANY. 
 
 nounced their Jewish expectations, and though 
 to the last they looked for their Master to come 
 again and reign in great glory, yet the vision re- 
 treated into the background, and the vile Cross 
 became more glorious in their eyes than any 
 throne. The wheat outgrew the tares. 
 
 Jesus at Bethany. 
 
 What a truth to nature, what a depth of 
 pathos, do we miss when we read only what is 
 written, and discern not what is legible between 
 the lines in the account of what passed in the 
 house of Simon at Bethany, where Mary, in 
 token of her reverence, poured the precious oint- 
 ment on the head of Jesus ! 
 
 There may seem at first sight an inconsistency 
 between his ready acceptance of that costly act 
 of personal homage and his disclaiming expres- 
 sions of personal respect as he did, once, when, 
 as we have seen, he was accosted by the title of 
 " Good Master," and again when a woman broke 
 forth in a benediction on his mother. But all 
 appearance of inconsistency vanishes when we 
 note the peculiar circumstances of the occasion 
 in Simon's house. 
 
JESUS AT BETHANY. 121 
 
 The incident at Bethany occurred only a short 
 time before the death of Jesus, when the black 
 shadow of his awful fate was upon him. Aware 
 that his powerful enemies were busy conspiring 
 against him and that he might be arrested at 
 any moment and dragged away to death, was 
 it not in exquisite accord with human nature 
 that he should be struck by the connection 
 of this act of Mary with his near death? The 
 perfume of the ointment, associated by the cus- 
 tom of his people with the offices for the dead, 
 filled his sense with the odor of death and of 
 the grave. Had a thought of the construction 
 which he put upon this act of hers crossed the 
 mind of Mary, how would she have shrunk from 
 thus hastening to discharge so painful an office ! 
 She thought only of doing him honor. It was 
 because she did not dream of what she was 
 doing that he was so struck with the connec- 
 tion of her act with his near death, that he 
 declared it would be told all the world over. 
 She was performing a more sacred office than 
 she knew. She was embalming him. "Dis- 
 turb her not!" he exclaimed. 
 
 As he had lived, so was he about to die for 
 11 
 
122 AT THE LAST SUPPER. 
 
 the poor, for the poor of all ages and all climes. 
 But, at that moment, the claims of the poor 
 were to be set aside. A purpose of affection, 
 sacred in itself, and doubly sacred in that it was 
 undesignedly a solemn funeral office, was not to 
 be frustrated. The poor could always be min- 
 istered to; but the fragrance, that then filled 
 one humble dwelling, was to fill all the world, 
 and the pathos of that act of Mary, that never 
 could be repeated, was to touch the hearts of 
 generations of men. 
 
 At the Last Sujyper. 
 
 In the thirteenth chapter of the fourth Gospel 
 it is written that Jesus ^' rose from supper, and laid 
 aside his garments, and took a toivel, and girded him- 
 self. After that he j^oiired water into a hasin,^^ etc. 
 Here is a detail of apparently insignificant par- 
 ticulars, curiously minute. "We read between 
 the lines that the wonder of what followed began 
 with his rising from the table. All eyes were 
 instantly turned to him. "What is he going 
 to do ?" was written on every face. Every move- 
 ment that he made, increasing the wonder and 
 curiosity with which it was watched, stamped 
 
AT THE LAST SUPPER. 123 
 
 itself on the minds of all present as an insepa- 
 rable part of the menial office which he ended 
 with discharging, and at which all but one 
 were struck dumb. 
 
 Upon the same memorable evening, how 
 manifest, as we read on between the lines, is 
 the reluctance with which he discloses his know- 
 ledge of the meditated treachery of one of their 
 number ! That their faith in him might not be 
 shaken, that they might know that he was not 
 going to be taken by surprise, that he was pre- 
 pared for what was to befall, he deemed it neces- 
 sary that he should tell them that there was a 
 traitor among them. Twice he alluded to it, 
 more pointedly the second time than the first. 
 At last, in agitation and distress of mind, he 
 said outright that one of them was about to 
 prove false to him. He mentioned no name. 
 Only in a whisper to John, who leaned on his 
 bosom, did he point out the traitor, but not 
 then by name, but by a sign, lest the others, 
 who were watching him, might catch the name 
 from the motion of his lips. 
 
 Again. What a world of faith and reverence 
 is revealed in the cry, '■''Lord, is it J.?" that broke 
 
124 THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 
 
 forth all around the table, when he made this 
 communication ! Innocent of any thought of 
 treachery as all but one of them were conscious 
 of being, their instant conviction was that their 
 Master knew them better than they knew them- 
 selves, and that they might be guilty of the 
 black crime sooner than he could bring against 
 them a groundless accusation. 
 
 The Raising of Lazarus. 
 
 In the narrative of the Raising of Lazarus, 
 there is nothing said of the immediate effect of 
 the wonder upon the spectators. But when it 
 is stated that at the appearance of the man 
 alive at the entrance of the sepulchre, Jesus 
 said, " Loosen him, that he may walk," we read 
 between the lines that all present were stand- 
 ing, transfixed with amazement, motionless as 
 statues, staring with eyes starting from their 
 sockets at the blindfolded apparition staggering 
 in the voluminous folds of the shroud, till Jesus 
 broke the spell by bidding them go to the assist- 
 ance of his risen friend. 
 
 In the same wonderful narrative, wonderful 
 not only for the extraordinary event which it 
 
THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 125 
 
 relates, but for the inimitable marks of truth 
 and of nature with which it is inlaid, when it is 
 said that Jesus called with a loud voice to the 
 dead man to come forth, I read as plainly as if 
 it were written in visible characters, that Jesus 
 called thus aloud in perfect faith, that is, he 
 called with a loud voice, believing, knowing, 
 that the dead would hear him. 
 
 As in death all signs of life cognizable to our 
 limited vision, which perceives only the surfaces 
 of things, disappear, we rashly assume that death 
 is absolute extinction. But w^e do not know 
 either what death is or life, or to what extent 
 the one is affected by the other. Neither do we 
 know what hidden sympathies there may be be- 
 tween the living and the dead, especially when 
 the living and the dead are bound together by 
 the ties of such a friendship as united Jesus and 
 Lazarus. 
 
 Were we only penetrated with a due sense of 
 our very limited knowledge, we might be ready 
 to confess that death is an unsolved secret, and 
 be in no haste to pronounce incredible the in- 
 stances of the dead recalled to life recorded in 
 
 the Gospels. We might be induced to ponder 
 11* 
 
126 THE RAISING OF LAZARUS. 
 
 them thoughtfully. We could hardly fall to be 
 impressed by the simple, direct manner of Jesus 
 in working these wonders, in consummate har- 
 mony as it is with the perfect dignity of his 
 character, and with the inimitable simplicity of 
 nature as well. 
 
 I cannot but think that, if the story of the 
 Raising of Lazarus were a fiction, the creation 
 of the love of the wonderful, he who recalled the 
 dead to life would hardly have been represented 
 as requiring the aid of human hands to remove 
 the stone from the sepulchre, nor would the dead 
 man have been described as instantly needing 
 assistance upon his appearance alive. 
 
 Duly appreciating the internal evidences of 
 the truth of these narratives of the dead restored 
 to life by Christ, we might obtain some insight 
 into what death is, and accept these facts as de- 
 cisive proof that there is a life hidden in the 
 mortal body, which that mysterious change can- 
 not harm, and which, under the conditions that 
 existed in the cases recorded in the Gospels, can, 
 for a period more or less limited, regain its com- 
 mand over the body and revive it. 
 
 The notices of the sisters of Lazarus, Martha 
 
MARTHA AND MARY. 127 
 
 and Mary, in the narrative of their brother's 
 restoration, are wonderfully in harmony with 
 what is related of them elsewhere in the Gospels. 
 They are nowhere described. It is nowhere 
 said what manner of persons they were. Only 
 one or two slight incidents, in which they are 
 the actors, are related. And yet, reading be- 
 tween the lines, we get from those incidents 
 ideas of the respective characters of these two 
 women as distinct as if we were personally ac- 
 quainted with them. 
 
 And here I must repeat what I have said 
 about them more than once before. The interest 
 of the subject is my apology. 
 
 Martha was the first to go and meet Jesus 
 when she heard he was coming, because, " cum- 
 bered with much serving," she was in that part 
 of the house where the intelligence of his ap- 
 proach would be first received. Mary was in a 
 retired room indulging her grief, as her charac- 
 teristic sensibility prompted, and the custom of 
 the time allowed. Martha could not have for- 
 gotten her sister, but she neither went nor sent 
 to let Mary know that Jesus was at hand. She 
 started ofi* by herself to meet him. And it is so 
 
128 MARTHA AND MARY. 
 
 in character with the jealousy of her sister shown 
 on the only other occasion in which she appears 
 in the history, that we may naturally surmise 
 that she went off by herself without a word to 
 her sister, whose reverence for Jesus she well 
 knew, that she might have him all to herself 
 without Mary by. When Jesus was with them 
 and Mary was present, conversing with him as 
 Martha could not, the practical, matter-of-fact 
 character of Martha authorises the suspicion that 
 she had an uncomfortable feeling of inferiority, 
 especially if she were the elder. Whether older 
 than Mary or not, she was probably accustomed, 
 by virtue of her practical temperament, and 
 Mary's indifference to household cares, to take 
 the lead in domestic concerns, and, therefore, 
 it was not agreeable to her, especially when 
 guests were in the house, to appear to occupy 
 a subordinate position. She had not liked to 
 see Mary sitting still at the feet of Jesus while 
 she had her hands full of work, preparing, as 
 he told her, more than enough, for the table. I 
 suppose if Mary had been bidden by Jesus to 
 help Martha, Martha would only have found her 
 in the way. 
 
MARTHA. 129 
 
 When Martha met Jesus, how plainly is it writ 
 between the lines that she was wholly unable to 
 sustain any conversation with him ! Everything 
 he said staggered her. She could not take in 
 what he said. "When he told her her brother 
 would rise again, she shrank from the idea, and 
 sought relief from so great a thought in her tra- 
 ditional faith in the final resurrection. And when 
 he went on to say (in those profoundly significant 
 words) that he was the resurrection and the life, 
 and, virtually, that her brother, though dead, yet 
 having had faith in him, still lived, and that she 
 herself, living and believing in him, would never 
 die, and then demanded of her whether she be- 
 lieved this, again, confounded by the new, great 
 thoughts that he presented, she took refuge in a 
 general confession of faith in him as the Mes- 
 siah, — and retreated. Do we not read, though 
 it is not written in so many words, that he 
 startled and overpowered her? He was too 
 much for her. She could not talk with him. 
 She left his presence, and went and told Mary 
 that Jesus had come, and that she was wanted. 
 Mary would understand him, she could not. So 
 she was forced to feel; and the virtual confes- 
 
130 MARTHA AND MARY. 
 
 sion of her incompetency which she had to make 
 in having to call Mary, could not, chagrined 
 as she was, he uttered aloud. And therefore 
 it was that she spoke to Mary " secretly, ^^ in a 
 whisper. 
 
 Again we read Martha's nature in the objec- 
 tion she interposed to the removal of the stone 
 from the tomb, — as if Jesus did not know what 
 he was doing. Mary's silence speaks, and tells 
 us more significantly than any words what man- 
 ner of person she was. 
 
 iN'ever, in any work of fiction, with strokes so 
 few and delicate, has personal character been so 
 exquisitely and yet incidentally portrayed. In 
 the same way the distinctive features of Peter 
 and Pilate are rendered as recognizable as those 
 of familiar personal acquaintances. 
 
 The friendship subsisting between Jesus and 
 the family of Lazarus is a fact of no slight in- 
 terest, bearing witness as it does to the large and 
 liberal spirit of Jesus. Devoted heart and soul 
 to his great work, naturally eager as he must 
 have been to obtain fellow-workers, he was no 
 zealot, insisting upon adhesion to himself as the 
 indispensable condition of his personal friend- 
 
THE SILENCE OF JESUS. 131 
 
 ship. He warned all who would join him to 
 count the cost. He had friends, it appears, in 
 private life who took no public part with him. 
 He was not blind to the fact that it was not given 
 to every one to share in his labors and sacrifices. 
 
 The Silence of Jesus. 
 
 In the silence which Jesus preserved when 
 arraigned before the Roman governor, and the 
 Priests were clamoring for his crucifixion, when 
 not a word of fear, not an ejaculation for mercy, 
 not a syllable of self-exculpation was breathed 
 from his lips, — in his demeanor in those awful 
 circumstances I read a great deal more than a 
 lamb-like submission to slaughter. I behold a 
 conscious rectitude, a pride of virtue, a royal 
 greatness of mind, with which the annals of 
 mankind may be challenged to produce a par- 
 allel. 
 
 Alone, with not a soul in all the world that un- 
 derstood him, defamed, ridiculed, denounced as 
 the enemy of God and of man, with savage big- 
 otry and hate raging against him, he stood there, 
 wrapt around in the robes of angelic innocence 
 and truth. He could not descend to bandy words 
 
132 
 
 with those, whom if words could have moved 
 from their fell purpose, those words had al- 
 ready been uttered. Whatever he could have 
 said then would only exasperate their malice. 
 His blood was the only answer that remained to 
 be given to their calumnies, and that answer 
 centuries were to accept as his triumphant vin- 
 dication. For that supreme moment, silent com- 
 munion with himself and with the Infinite Father 
 was alone fitted. 
 
 Oh, it is not for any words that he spoke, sur- 
 passingly wise as these are, it is for his bearing, 
 more divinely glorious than any aureole could 
 symbolize, then, and always, that we are moved 
 to exclaim, in revering admiration, " Truly, this 
 is the Son of God !" 
 
 Baptism and the Lord^s Supper. 
 
 Reading always, not only what is written, but 
 what is plainly legible between the lines, we 
 gather from the Gospels that Christ instituted 
 no peculiar forms of doctrine or of observance, 
 neither a creed nor a ritual. 
 
 We have, it is true, our so-called Christian 
 Institutions, accepted as resting upon his ex- 
 
BAPTISM. 133 
 
 plicit authority by all denominations, except the 
 Friends : Baptism and the Lord's Supper. 
 
 Baptism was a rite familiar to the countrymen 
 of Jesus before he appeared. He observed it him- 
 self, but he never baptised any one (John iv, 2). 
 Had he designed it to be what it is now accounted, 
 a necessary, initiatory ceremony, it is incredible 
 that there should be no mention of any such pur- 
 pose either in the third or the fourth Gospel, and 
 that in the first and second Gospels he is said only 
 once in each to have enjoined its observance, 
 and that briefly and at the very last. His disci- 
 ples baptised, but it does not appear that it was 
 in obedience to any injunction of his. In the 
 particular instructions (Matth. x,) which he gave 
 them when he sent them forth to herald the glad 
 tidings, there is no word about Baptism. 
 
 These things being considered, it is much more 
 probable that the command to baptise, recorded 
 only once in the final verses of Matthew and 
 Mark, crept into the text from the margin of 
 some early copy of those Gospels, than that it 
 should have been really given by Christ. 
 
 It should be remembered that before the manu- 
 facture of copies of the Gospel narratives passed 
 
 12 
 
134 BAPTISM. 
 
 into the hands of professional and paid tran- 
 scribers, the first copies that were made were made 
 in all probability by individuals for themselves or 
 for their friends (as Luke wrote his Gospel for 
 his friend Theophilus), not mechanically, but with 
 the liveliest interest in their contents, prompt- 
 ing them occasionally to put a word or two, here 
 and there, in the margin, by way of comment or 
 explanation; and then, when other copies were 
 made from theirs, these marginal notes would be 
 apt to be transferred into the text, with no ill de- 
 sign, but under the impression that they belonged 
 there and had been omitted through carelessness. 
 This is one of the ways in which Biblical critics 
 account for certain probable corruptions of the 
 text. Indeed, the last twelve verses of the sec- 
 ond Gospel, which include the mention of Bap- 
 tism, are of doubtful genuineness, and they are 
 so indicated in the Revised Version of the E"ew 
 Testament. 
 
 If, however, Christ enjoined Baptism, it may 
 be questioned whether, in the passages where 
 alone it is mentioned, he is to be taken to the 
 letter, or figuratively, that is, as he used the 
 word when he said he had a baptism to suffer, 
 
BAPTISM. 135 
 
 and again, when he asked James and John if 
 they were prepared, with him, for the same bap- 
 tism. It was in the same figurative sense that his 
 Precursor, the Baptist, used the word when he 
 said to the people that he baptised them with 
 water, but that there was one coming mightier 
 than he, who would baptise them with the holy 
 spirit and with fire. Water, that cleanses only 
 outwardly, was the symbol of the Baptist's influ- 
 ence. But the power of him who was about to 
 appear would be signified by more searching 
 elements, spirit and fire. [It is impossible to 
 convey in any one English word the full mean- 
 ing of the Greek word izveuim^ here translated 
 S'pirii. It is expressive of the power as well as 
 of the subtil ty of Air. In one and the same 
 verse (John iii, 8) it is translated both wind and 
 spirit : ^' The wind bloweth where it listeth . . . 
 so is every one that is born of the spiriC'} The 
 Baptist, who held Jesus in the deepest rever- 
 ence, as appears from his not thinking himself 
 worthy to baptise him, spoke, I doubt not, from 
 personal experience when he said that Jesus 
 would baptise with the spirit and with fire. To 
 Jesus, I believe, he referred when he spoke of 
 
136 THE lord's supper. 
 
 him who was coming. He had felt the power of 
 Jesus. In previous communings with his great 
 kinsman he had experience of a spiritual and 
 kindling baptism. Such and no outward rite 
 was the Baptism that Jesus sent forth his Apos- 
 tles to administer. Certain it is that Paul did 
 not consider himself required to baptise with 
 water, although commissioned directly by Christ 
 himself. He thanked God that he had baptised 
 only two or three persons in Corinth (1 Cor. 
 
 i, 17). 
 
 Of the Lord's Supper so called, no mention 
 is made in the fourth Gospel; and this Gospel 
 is ascribed to the beloved disciple. In the first 
 and second Gospels, there is not a syllable inti- 
 mating a thought on Christ's part of instituting 
 a commemorative rite. In Luke only we have 
 the words, '-^Do this in remembrance of me,'' Were 
 the observance of the essential importance as- 
 cribed to it, it is not credible that so slight a 
 ground should exist for it. Considering the 
 silence of the other Gospels on this point, and 
 how needless any express injunction to a special 
 remembrance of him was subsequently proved 
 to be, since a commemorative observance sprang 
 
137 
 
 up by the pure force of nature, of itself, as it 
 were, and took form from the striking incident 
 of his last supper with his disciples, we may well 
 conclude that, arising so naturally, it was taken 
 for granted that the observance must have been 
 expressly enjoined by Christ; and thus the words 
 in Luke, written first, probably, in the margin 
 of some copy, passed into the text of subsequent 
 MSS. 
 
 After the disappearance of their Master, when- 
 ever the disciples met to eat and drink together, 
 they could not fail to recall those remarkable 
 words of his about the bread and wine on the 
 occasion of their last meal with him. Thus, 
 not by convention nor by formal institution, but 
 like all observances that have life in them, " out 
 from the heart of N^ature" sprang our Memorial 
 Service. 
 
 So, in the same way, the first day of the week 
 grew to be commemorative of the greatest event 
 in the history of Christ, his Eesurrection, and 
 became a formal service, instituted by I^ature, 
 and entitled the Master's or Lord's day. 
 
 Jesus himself, I conceive, had as little thought 
 
 of instituting the Lord's Supper as he had of 
 12* 
 
138 
 
 making the first day of the week a day to be set 
 apart and formally observed. The occasion of his 
 last supper with his humble friends was an occa- 
 sion of the deepest emotion to him. He knew 
 that it was the last. His awful fate was on the 
 eve of its consummation. Images of the near 
 horror rose w^ith appalling effect before his mind. 
 So vividly did the broken bread and the flowing 
 red wine call up before him his lacerated body 
 and streaming blood, that the signs vanished 
 from his sight before the things signified, and, 
 shocked to the last degree, he exclaimed, " It is 
 my body !" " It is my blood !" He could not 
 drink of the wine, nor eat of the bread. It 
 would be drinking his own blood, eating his 
 own fiesh. His was no state of mind for the 
 institution of a formal ceremony. 
 
 I am misunderstood if it is inferred from what 
 I say that I would abolish our Christian Com- 
 memorative Service. On the contrary, I would 
 have it seen that it rests, not on the ground of 
 formal institution, but upon the strongest pos- 
 sible ground of I^Tature. 
 
 As to the manner in which, and the frequency 
 with which, it should be kept, these are open 
 
JESUS INSTITUTED NO FORMS. 139 
 
 questions to be decided by the spirit of the time. 
 It appears that at the first, the disciples made 
 every occasion when they met to eat and drink 
 together, commemorative of their last supper 
 with him. 
 
 As he instituted no set forms, it is equally 
 important to observe, neither did he forbid any. 
 He neither commanded nor forbade his disciples 
 to baptise. If at any time the observance of 
 a baptismal form tends to deepen the sense of 
 personal duty, then is Baptism a Christian ob- 
 servance. 
 
 Religious institutions, creeds, and ceremonials, 
 mankind always have had, and always will have, 
 so long as a sense of religion is an essential ele- 
 ment of human nature. If there are any wear- 
 ing the human shape who acknowledge no 
 Power above them, and are conscious of no sen- 
 timent of religious faith or fear, they are, as 
 Hume long ago said, on a level with the brutes. 
 The philosophers of our day, who are sounding 
 the deeps of human knowledge and who seem to 
 imagine that they have struck bottom, no less 
 than the most devout of worshippers, would fain 
 
140 CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 have, as it now appears, their ceremonials and 
 commemorative services, rivalling the Roman 
 Catholic Church in the multitude of their Saints' 
 days. 
 
 Since these things are so, since such is the 
 constitution of man, and there will forever be 
 forms of religion, it may be said that Christ 
 left all such things to take care of themselves. 
 He neither created nor forbade any peculiar 
 religious institutions. It was no purpose of his 
 to do away with such as existed. 
 
 A Religion, however, sprang from him, no 
 creation of the wisdom of man, but rooted deep 
 in nature, born of God. Its conception was im- 
 maculate. It is clothed with the highest possible 
 authority. It is not a form, but a life, a spirit, a 
 spirit of Love, of Liberty, of Power. Countless 
 are the errors that have usurped its name and 
 clogged its progress. But it lives, pure and un- 
 defiled, in Christ, its most luminous illustration. 
 He came, as he said, not to destroy, but to fulfil, 
 not to build a new religion upon the destruction 
 of the old, but to breathe into the existing re- 
 ligion of his country and through that into all 
 the world the spirit of his own broad humanity. 
 
CHRISTIANITY. 141 
 
 He threw the whole power of his great life and 
 death into the supreme love of the Highest and 
 Best and the fraternal love of man. Wherever 
 these are the all-commanding affections, he the 
 outward forms of Religion what they may, 
 Christ and Christianity do not condemn those 
 forms. Baptism, the Lord's Supper, and what- 
 ever ohservances minister to enlarge the heart 
 towards God and man, are all Christian institu- 
 tions. 
 
 Forms of theology and worship that educate 
 the highest and best in our nature will be as 
 diverse as the minds of men. When all are 
 striving to give expression to one and the same 
 religious sense, and by expressing to strengthen 
 it, such are the constitutional differences among 
 men, they must needs adopt different modes 
 of thought and worship. Were it otherwise, 
 it would not be in harmony with the infinite 
 variety so dear to the Creator. 
 
 There is then the peace and joy of a divine 
 charity in the faith in which we may rest, that 
 the various forms of religion do all at least keep 
 the religious sentiment alive. But there is a 
 deeper peace still, a greater joy in the faith that 
 
142 NO CLAIM OF NOVELTY. 
 
 there is a power in the world, the spirit, of which 
 Christ is our divinest symbol, ever present as 
 the oxygen of the atmosphere, which is pene- 
 trating and moulding them all in various de- 
 grees, and that every religion outside of Chris- 
 tendom as well as within its pale has its saints. 
 The growing intercourse of Christian and non- 
 Christian peoples, which there is now so much 
 to facilitate, the treaties made between them in 
 the interests of civilisation, abolishing slavery, 
 for example, bear witness to the spirit of Christ, 
 breathing a deeper life into the world. 
 
 It is only when creeds and rituals are exalted 
 above the two great Commandments, or put on 
 a level with them, that Christ condemns them. 
 Then we hear his voice reiterating the ancient 
 immortal word, " I will have humanity and not 
 sacrifice." 
 
 I HAVE given in the preceding pages some 
 instances of the way in which the Gospel narra- 
 tives are to be read. I claim no novelty for the 
 method I have observed. They are read in the 
 same way by all who endeavor to read them 
 understandingly and not by rote. 
 
CHRIST PROFOUNDLY HUMAN. 143 
 
 It has been objected that I interpret them arbi- 
 trarily, according to my liking, without reference 
 to any sound principles of criticism. I can only 
 repeat that I am not aware of having resorted to 
 any far-fetched or fanciful suggestions. By the 
 same way that I have followed in exhibiting the 
 truth contained in these Writings, certain pas- 
 sages are found to be legendary, or exaggera- 
 tions of ordinary events, such as, for instance, 
 the story of the !N"ativity, the Transfiguration, and 
 the Storm on the Lake. 
 
 If there is anything peculiar in the expositions 
 which I have given, it is that I bring more fully 
 into view than is commonly done, that Christ 
 was a human being, a man, susceptible of human 
 emotions, actuated by human feelings. This 
 simple fact, when once it is taken fully into 
 account, will make the history as luminous in 
 its self-evidence as the sun, which needs no 
 argument of its reality. 
 
 I do not profess to be able to set forth all the 
 internal evidence, whether of fact or of fable, 
 in the Gospels. That will require a keener eye 
 than mine. But so far as I have come to know 
 their real character, I have found them most 
 
144 THE GOSPELS NATURAL. 
 
 original and wonderful in this, that they are as 
 pure pieces of nature as any things in nature, as 
 natural as the trees and the flowers. They are 
 not a manufacture, but a growth. There breathes 
 through them the same Divine Life that animates 
 the whole creation. 
 
 l^ature abounds in marvels. Among them, I 
 hold the 'New Testament histories to be not the 
 least, marvels of simplicity. It is a great mis- 
 take to think it would have been better had the 
 accounts of Christ been written by educated per- 
 sons. The more simple-natured, the more un- 
 sophisticated their authors, the easier is it to 
 divine what it was that they actually saw and 
 felt. 1^0 arts of literary composition color or 
 refract the pure light of human nature shining 
 through these simple narratives. 
 
 Were they mere human fabrications, they 
 never would admit of being harmonised with 
 the truth of nature. That man can mix artificial 
 flowers with natural ones, — interpolate the crude 
 creations of his ignorant love of the marvellous 
 into the Divine Order of the world, so that no 
 eye shall be able to see the diflPerence between 
 the two, is, to my mind, utterly beyond belief. 
 
CONCLUSION. 145 
 
 Omchsion. 
 
 We must set no limits to the Infinite Grace of 
 God. The prophecy of the Apostle will he ful- 
 filled. As God lives, the time must come when 
 the spirit of Christ shall have suhdued all that is 
 hostile to it, and God will he all in all. l^o eye 
 hath seen, no ear heard, no heart conceived, what 
 is prepared in the counsels of the Infinite Father 
 for his human family, what fuller revelations 
 will he made, what loftier angels will appear 
 with the messages of his Love, and do greater 
 works than yet have been done or imagined. 
 Science, as well as Scripture, inspires the faith 
 that ever higher forms of life and good are to he 
 evolved. 
 
 The time is not yet. Hardly does its coming 
 shine even from afar. Only to the eye of faith 
 is it visible. For the redemption of a world 
 still lying in ignorance and sin, we look to Him 
 who lived and died and rose again from the dead 
 for the re-creation of mankind. Already has 
 his influence been realised in countless redeem- 
 ing agencies. But not only thus indirectly, but 
 
 by his own personal power, shall he yet move the 
 18 
 
146 CONCLUSION. 
 
 world. That power is far from being spent. He 
 shall come again, not visibly to mortal eyes, not 
 in the clouds of heaven, but, emerging from the 
 blinding mists of theological and legendary the- 
 ories, he will come, in the all-subduing power 
 of his personal character, to create a new faith 
 in God and in man. 
 
 In the mean while, everywhere now sectarian 
 distinctions are magnified, and creeds and rituals 
 usurp supremacy, engendering mutual contempt 
 and hatred, and obstructing the genial circulation 
 of the spirit of Christ. The Church, the most 
 venerable for its age, the most imposing for the 
 grandeur of its organization, for the multitudes 
 of its members, and for the illustrious and saintly 
 characters that appear within its pale, takes the 
 lead in exalting forms and traditions above 
 humanity and the love of God, sanctifying the 
 sprinkling of a few drops of water, for example, 
 with an efficacy so sacred that only by the ante- 
 natal administration of the rite of Baptism are 
 unborn babes to be saved from everlasting per- 
 dition. 
 
 In this state of things can we consent to suffer 
 the personality of Christ, at the first so powerful, 
 
CONCLUSION. 147 
 
 to fade away into a fable ? For ages his human 
 person has been all but lost, through the distort- 
 ing medium of dogmas so bewildering to the 
 understanding, so powerless to reach the heart, 
 that, save through the Crucifix and the Madonna 
 with the infant Jesus, hardly a glimpse of his 
 divine humanity could be caught; and the heart 
 has turned to the Virgin Mother to slake its 
 thirst for an object of veneration and trust, 
 that appeals to those sentiments at once the 
 most universal and the most powerful principles 
 of human nature. E"ow that, by the Grace of 
 God, we have been brought to reject as alike ir- 
 rational and unscriptural the metaphysical repre- 
 sentations of Christ which have so long and so 
 widely prevailed, now, in fine, that we see what 
 he was not, shall we be content to rest in this 
 negative conclusion and never care to inquire 
 what he positively was ? Shall we be willing to 
 remain in doubt whether his existence be not lost 
 in a cloud of fable ? 
 
 If there were no other inducement, simple cu- 
 riosity, one would think, should prevent us from 
 allowing to pass into neglect and oblivion the 
 memory of one whose appearance in the world 
 
148 CONCLUSION. 
 
 has determined the whole subsequent course of 
 the world's history, and from the date of whose 
 birth the most advanced nations count the years, 
 as if all that preceded that event passed for noth- 
 ing. Surely it could have been no fabulous per- 
 sonage — or all that is, is a delusion — whose pres- 
 ence in the world has had these consequences, 
 no ordinary man, the representation of whom as 
 no less a person than Almighty God himself has 
 been and still is received as credible. 
 
 But the endeavor to ascertain who and what 
 Christ was has a far higher motive than the grati- 
 fication of mere curiosity. In the name of all 
 that is just, generous, honorable, for God's sake 
 and for man's, let us not forget the sacred debt 
 that we owe to Christ himself. Before we con- 
 sent that the divine Idea of him shall fade away 
 from the minds of men, now that we are suffi- 
 ciently enlightened to perceive how mournfully 
 his person has for long ages been misunder- 
 stood, we are bound to see to it that justice be 
 done to him. 
 
 When this is done, when he shall be known 
 as he truly was, in the beauty of his Life, as 
 human as it is Godlike, blessed will be the re- 
 
CONCLUSION. 149 
 
 suit. The world shall be like him when it sees 
 him as he is. Revered as the realisation of the 
 highest idea of human nature, the veneration, 
 the faith in God and man, the love, the hope, 
 that he will inspire, will prove to be, far more 
 effectually than they ever yet have been since 
 the Apostolic age, most powerful ministers of 
 Heaven in cleansing and renovating mankind. 
 
 As these sentiments are awakened, as men are 
 brought to see in him the Divinity of the nature 
 which they share with him and to cherish self- 
 respect and the sacred feeling of human respect, 
 the more plainly will it appear that, however 
 numerous and strongly marked are our differ- 
 ences of language, of customs and manners, and 
 of religion, men everywhere, after all, are more 
 alike than different, that their differences strike 
 us as great because they are on the surface, — in 
 fine, that as face answers to face in a mirror, so 
 does the inmost heart of man to man. 
 
 And the means of human intercourse, now in 
 ceaseless and increasing activity, and powerful 
 beyond the dreams of the boldest imagination 
 less than a century ago, are bringing men face 
 to face, every man to see himself in his brother, 
 
150 CONCLUSION. 
 
 and to labor together for the common welfare 
 of mankind. 
 
 As mutual knowledge and respect increase, 
 differences, now unduly magnified, and which 
 only generate ill blood, — all, in short, that is not 
 rooted in truth and nature, will wither away. It 
 will not be plucked up by violence, by hands 
 bathed in blood, as some madly dream, neither 
 will it be out-argued. It will be outgrown. As 
 in the case of the personal disciples of Christ, 
 the wheat. Heaven-sown and fostered by the 
 fruitful influences of Providence and of IN'ature, 
 will choke the tares. 
 
 Of this, the Divine method in the regenera- 
 tion alike of the individual and of the world at 
 large, what an impressive instance have we had 
 in the history, in this country, of the sacred 
 Cause of Justice and Humanity, in which the 
 well-being, not of one race or class, but of all 
 mankind, was involved, as, for thirty years, it 
 was steadily winning its way till the crisis came ! 
 As individuals of different religious names be- 
 came interested in it, how soon were religious 
 differences ignored, and with what mutual con- 
 fidence did believers and unbelievers, so called. 
 
CONCLUSION. 151 
 
 work together as brothers ! Thus it has always 
 been when any great vital issues were in ques- 
 tion, when any deep feeling has stirred the 
 minds of men. At the height of the great 
 plague in the seventeenth century in London, 
 the flood of one common fear submerged all 
 sectarian distinctions, and the people rushed to 
 implore the mercy of Heaven into the churches, 
 regardless of the religious names the churches 
 bore. So here, all thoughts of religious differ- 
 ences were swept away when the Spirit of Free- 
 dom and Humanity began to overflow the land. 
 As it has been, so will it be. All hearts are 
 fashioned alike, and, notwithstanding all differ- 
 ences of forms of faith and worship, all shall 
 become one in Christ. What is the chaff to 
 the wheat ? saith the Lord. 
 

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