77:^j:'^^ **^*^*°\*. *"!"'''''' ^"^s. PRINCETON, N. J. Shelf Division-: -\Ij~0) (LXOX^ Section -A >< A \ Number y r' MEMORABILIA OF JESUS THE MEMORABILIA OF JESUS COMMONLY CALLED THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN BY WILLIAM WYNNE PEYTON MINISTER OF FREE ST. LUKE'S, BR0"UGHTY FERRY, N.B, LONDON AND EDINBURGH" ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK I 892 PREFACE. I HAVE titled this Book the Memorabilia of Jesus be- cause it really contains His more memorable thoughts. It is not a history, and it is not a biography ; it has no likeness to the Synoptic monographs. To call it a Gospel does not distinguish it from the tractates of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It contains the say- ings of Jesus, selected from those occasions when He spoke in a higher strain, in which our Author discerned the ultimates and universals of religion. The First Book contains mainly extracts from the disputations in Jerusalem with the cultured society there. The Second Book, from the eleventh chapter, contains the teachings which our Lord gave to the select circle of His own students. We have before us a biographical literature on a novel plan, in which incidents are wholly sub- ordinated to the thoughts which they produced, and a selection of these thoughts are arranged VI PREFACE. in a certain rhythmic relation for didactic pur- poses. It is a work of Art. I could find no name so fitted to express this its distinctive character, as the Memorabilia of Jesus. It might have been titled the Dialogues of Jesus but for the first and nineteenth chapters. Life is the masterword of the Memorabilia, the Eternal, Spiritual, Ideal Life. That the life in the creation, the detailed life in Nature, is the life of Christ, is a keynote of this literature. " He was in the world, and the world was born of Him," who is immanent in it. That this life in Nature is serial with and has its companionship with the Spiritual life must be regarded as the royal truth of our book. " In Him was life, and the life was the light of men," and this light is Mind in man. The general life diffused throughout the creation, specialised in the Mind life of man ; Religiousness, the distinctive contents of Mind in every land ; this religious- ness, specialised in the Christian life, — these make a gradation of truth which can scarcely be said to be naturalised in the Christian world. " He is the Light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world.** Evolution has, in these latter days, affiliated this progression in a scientific kinship, — Light, Life, Mind, Spirit. PREFACE, vii I have therefore taken the assistance of Nature and of Natural Science to develop the truths in the Memorabilia. Very needful this method also. One of the barriers in the way of a proper recognition of the spiritual life in the science of Man is the isolation of it from the large life of Nature. Poetry, philosophy, physics, physiology find their tap root in spirituality ; the main stem forks into the generalised religiousness of all nations, and into the specialisation of Christianity. This unity and bifurcation are finely exhibited in the Memorabilia. Philosophy makes the branches, science is the foliage, poetry the flower, right conduct or righteousness the fruit of this Tree. The Memorabilia is a book for the tract of time in which we are moving. In the Exegesis I have followed mainly Bishop Westcott's luminous and scholarly Notes. I have used the Dialogues of Plato to bring Hebrew and Greek thought into relation ; and it was the fusion of Hebrew and Greek which was one large factor in the creation of the New World, and Plato is the father of the idealism which has given many of the higher and finer elements to the litera- ture of the Christian Age. I have retained in some measure the lecture form viii PREFACE. in which the chapters were originally cast, which, I think, gives some variety to the treatment, though perhaps carrying some repetitions. My thanks are due to Mr. A. Taylor Innes, M.A., Advocate, Edinburgh, for reading some of the proofs. More especially I have to express my thanks to my esteemed friend and mountaineering companion, Mr. James Cunningham, M.A., Broughty Ferry, who has read every line of the proofs, made valuable sug- gestions, and verified some quotations. GOWANBANK, BROUGHTY FeRRY, Forfarshire, 20th April 1892. CONTENTS. CHAP. I. Introductory— Irrelevances of Criticism PAGE I II. Introductory— Characteristics .... 27 III. The Eternal Mind in the World .... 49 John i. 1-13. IV. The Eternal Mind in Human Flesh ... 83 John i, 14-18. V. The Hebrew Contribution 105 John i. 19-51 ; iii. 22-30. VI. Signalling the Higher Natural World . . 139 John ii. i-ii ; iv. 43-54. vn. The Fog Horn and the Storm Signal . . .189 John ii. 13-25. VIII. The Evolution Idea .211 John iii. 1-21. IX. The Subjective 249 John iv. 1-42. X. Mysticism , • 277 John v. XI. Idealities S^S John vi. 1-21. CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE XII. Natural Selection 335 John vi. 22-47, 59-71. XIII. Physiology -355 John vi. 48-58. XIV. A Drama in Seven Acts 381 John vii. XV. Symbolism of Water 403 John i. 31 ; iii. 5 ; iv. 7 ; vii. 37-39. XVI. The Platonic Doctrine of Recollection . . 427 John viii. 12 ff. ; iii. 31-36- XVII. Passiveness 455 John ix. XVIII. The Christ in our Blood . . . . .481 John x. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY— IRRELEVANCES. "^/ the period at which -ive are, and bejore the death of John, soJiie of his disciples zvho appear to have surrounded him, and, as it were, to have monopolised the old age of the last survivor of the Apostles, did they not seek to make ttse of the rich treasure which he had at their disposal? We may suppose so ; we ourselves were fortnerly inclined that way. We think now that it is more probable, that some part of the Gospel which bears the Jtame of John may have been written by him- self or by one of his disciples during his lifetime. But xue persist in believing that John had a manner of his own of telling the life of Jesus, a manner very different from the narratives of Batanea, superior in some respects, and in particular the parts of the life of Jesus which were passed in Jerusalem afforded him more room for development.'''' — Renan. " The object of the Evangelists is not so mtich the historic record of acts as the development of their inmost meaning.^^ — Canon Farrar. CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTORY IRRELEVANCES. I AM not more than half sure that John wrote what I call the Memorabilia of Jesus. I am quite sure that he inspired it, and for all practical purposes is the author of it. I submit no proof either of the sureness or half sureness ; proof surely supremely superfluous at this time of day. In so far as the literature called the Bible is concerned, questions of authenticity must now be regarded as archaic curiosities ; dialectics for the historical faculty. We dont live, the veracities of life are not stimulated, by the verisimilitudes of dates, documents, manu- scripts, names of authors. After the interminable debates on authenticities, the residuum left is still one of doubt and guess. The guess of one scholar is the doubt of another, and the doubt of a third is the faith of a fourth ; and we have even to reckon with fractions of doubts and decimals of guesses in this imbroglio of probabilities and possibilities. The MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. universe plays hide-and-seek with us, and the hide- and-seek of authenticities is played out. The reality that fronts us in these Memorials is untouched by all that has been searched and by all that lies hidden, — the reality of the life to which the literature corresponds. Are the millions to cease living the Christian life till experts have arrived at an unani- mous archaeology for which two thousand years have not as yet been sufficient ? The science of biology has bowled out the batsmen of these archaisms. Here is the Cyclopean problem of this archaeology in its most modern dress, " Could one through an exhaustive examination of human records, helped by modern physiological and mental science, get at the conditions, physical and mental, which govern the greater or less correspondence between human witness and the facts it reports." ^ Where is the human lifetime capable of this Elsmerean examina- tion ? How many human brains are sufficient for it ? Can you reach any conclusion by this Herculean labour? We shall find the true answer in the Johannine problem. Dr. Martineau has just written a book on the " Seat of Authority in Religion," in which he devotes nearly sixty pages of a dcmi -octavo size to an exhaustive examination of the authenticity of this Memorabilia. The Johannine authorship is with him crucial. An affirmative answer to the question, ^ Robert Elsf)ieir, p. 314. INTROD UCTOR Y—IRRELE VANCES. " Was the hand that wrote this book that of John ? " "wins everything at once."^ Having assigned this centrahiess to the theory of the Person of Christ to which the MemorabiHa commits us, he brings us to the conclusion that it was written 140 A.D. The remarkable thing in this enquiry is that Dr. Martineau is quite oblivious that he had a con- temporary in the person of Bishop Lightfoot, who was the most accomplished scholar of our time, who knew every sentence extant of the first three centuries, who read Greek as English, who learnt Coptic and Armenian to be sensitive to the thinking of that far back period, a man of the utmost candour and highest scientific capacity. Lightfoot declared for the authorship of John, and he is not once referred to in Martineau's argument. Martineau is a philosopher and poet and spiritually minded, reminding us very much of the combination of insight and sensibility in Plato. Lightfoot is a scholar, a trained critic of his- toric probabilities and literary niceties, an acute judge of documentary evidence, a picturesque historian, of spiritual vision. In the following quotation you may hear the ring of the critical qualities : — In every one of the writers from Polycarp and Papias to Polycrates, we have observed phenomena which bear witness directly or indirectly and with different degrees ot distinction to its recognition (the recognition of the Fourth Gospel). It is quite possible for critical ingenuity to find 1 Seat of Authority in Religion, p. 190. MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. a reason for discrediting each instance in turn. An ob- jector may urge in one case the writing itself is a forgery \ in a second, that the particular passage is an interpolation ; in a third, that the supposed quotation is the original, and the language of the Evangelists the copy ; in a fourth, that the incident or saying was not deduced from this Gospel but from mere apocryphal work containing a parallel narrative. By a sufficient number of assumptions, which lie beyond the range of verifications^ the evidence may be set aside. But the early existence and recognition of the Fourth Gospel is the one simple postulate which explains all the facts. ^ Now this discussion of authenticity amounts to this : which of these two authorities we are to follow. We have not, not one educated man in ten thousand has, the equipment for an original enquiry. We must submit ourselves to the iron or golden sceptre of authority, Martineau or Lightfoot. There is the seat of authority, and authority means always pre - occupation, that bias which makes the varying species of Christian life, that affinity by which deer herd with deer, and sheep flock with sheep. Martineau is pre-occupied with antipathies to the Divine Personality of Jesus. Light- foot's mental proclivities find no difficulty with that conception. It is a matter of elective affinities. The problem is biological. After you have made the most of the documents, the best of the verifications, you ^ Bishop Lightfoot's Essays on the work entiled Supernatural Re- ligion, pp. 249, 250. INTRODUCTOR Y—IRRELE VANCES. have a thick residuum of uncertainties which, if you touch, rises up as a shaken sediment to darken the whole subject You have a chaotic cockpit of pro- babilities and improbabilities, where the critic with spurs of the latest manufacture, commonly of German steel, silences his opponents, crowing loud for a brief while, when the sparring begins again unending ; antiquarian science gone delirious, and earnestly asking in these days to be relieved by labours which shall be more fruitful. And the Christian life is left unaccounted for and unaccount- able, and it is a fact, the biggest you can look upon, with its worships, its ethics, its institutions, its enthusiasms. The ulterior question remains: what is won by the date of 140 a.d. or lost by the date of 90 A.D. ? To my mind, and on the lines we are thinking just now, nothing is lost or won by the dates how- soever you fix them. Chronology is nowhere. The worship of Jesus was established 140 A.D. The authority of the Johannine Memorabilia established nothing about the Divine Personality of Jesus; it reflects what had been established. The Memora- bilia is only a reflection of that worship, a philosophy of it or the biology of it. Its legiti- macy as literature is attested by this reflection. Reflection is the true function of literature. Litera- ture does not create inspiration and institution, but gives explanation or expression to them. If ME MORA BILIA OF JES US. Martineau proves anything, it is that the Divine Personahty of Jesus is a true human perception by fixing the date at 140 A.D., because that date gives enough time in four generations to have tested the perception and the potency of it in creating a Worship. It makes the MemorabiUa the hterary reply to a verified worship. Worship is the response to a Divine Power press- ing upon men from without and interfused within the faculties of the mind. The wonder of Christ in our world is the worship of Him. The Divinity of Christ is only the doctrinal expression of the worship, and the fitness of this worship is a question of fact. Neither Martineau nor Lightfoot gains anything to the conception of Christ by dates. The mere memory of Jesus as found in His teaching makes the Christian life of Martineau and that restricted species of life which he represents. The impact of Jesus, as an active Spirit, urging on the human spirit to worship, makes the large Christian world which Lightfoot • represents. This is the real difference between Martineau and Lightfoot ; a varying sensibility to the pressure of the unseen Jesus upon their souls ; the historic memory of Jesus in Martineau and the worship- ful sensibility to Him in Lightfoot. To Martineau Christ is a Teacher, dead and gone. To Lightfoot Christ is a Divine Spirit, in communion with men. The problem of Christianity is the problem of the Christian life, and life is not a problem of INTRODUCrOR Y—IRRELE VANCES. literature or history or testimony or philosophy, which can only come after you have got the Life. A human life, of a special type, has been organised by a human reconstruction under a particular influence. That particular stimulus has all along been felt, in varying degrees, to be the Divine Personality of Jesus, as an active pressure upon the human soul. The Memorabilia of John does nothing more than speak and accent and make melodious this fact of the human consciousness. The worship of Jesus as the expression of this conscious- ness is the central controlling phenomenon of the Christian age. No worship is possible except as a responsiveness to an Almighty and Mystic Presence perceived by the human faculty. The Personality of Jesus has been recognised as involved in this solicitous Presence. You can no more dispute the life which the worship of Jesus has organised than you can quarrel with bird life or fish life. Analyse the contents of this life as it has shown itself through these centuries, analyse the hymns, the literature, the poetry, the art, the missionary activity, by which this life has expressed itself, and every- where you will find the heart of it is the Divine Personality of Jesus in accord with the Memorabilia. We have mathematical formulas to explain planetary •motions and calculate eclipses, but the motions do not originate with the formulas. The Divinity of Jesus is discovered in the pressure of Him on our spirits, not ME MORA BILIA OF JES US. in theologies, which are endeavours at expressing the inexpressible and in making religion more systematic than it really is. The life and death, but more especially the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, are in the constitution of this pressure. Whether you fix 90 A.D. or 140 A.D. for the Fourth Gospel, you win or lose nothing for this pressure and the life it has generated ; they only find syntax and grammar in the literature, and life is not constructed by syntax or grammar. Moreover, from the viewpoint of biology, a litera- ture of life is more valuable and accurate in guag- ing its contents and explaining the phenomenon written in the second century. Life has had time to reveal itself, and to be a subject of thought ; thinkers have had time to study it. In the first generation the Christian life may have been what a botanist calls a sport, an unstable variation, to revert back to the type from which it started, and indeed the Christian life was long regarded as only an outburst of Hebraism, and it even looked as if it would not extricate itself from Hebraism. In the second century the Christian life has had time to assert itself, to show its distinctiveness, to establish itself as a species, and be the subject of a literature. To the mind of a biologist the Memorabilia would be more valuable as a veritable account of a life written in the second century, more veracious and more trustworthy. INTRODCUTOR Y—IRRELE VANCES. The myth has been fetched in to discredit the reali- ties of the Christian life. Literature to discredit life ! The literature of a life cannot discredit the life ; literature only shows life. The myth is a species of literature. It is a brilliant millinery of shot silk and tulle, in which the religious idea decks itself out. It does not generate the religious idea, but makes an engraving of it. The Divinity of Christ and the Resurrection have excited a worship, and that worship has organised a life. Not the literature of myth, nor the literature of history, nor the literature of philo- sophy, nor the literature which confuses history with legend, can organise life. Life is not a fraud, nor the evolution of it a forgery. Plato in his metaphysics uses brilliant myths, as the charioteer and his two steeds in Phcedrus, as the underworld and the afterworld of the PJicedo and the Republic. The myths of Plato did not organise Greek thought, nor the myths of Homer organise Greek life. Life is before organisation, and the story of the Resurrection and the vision of the Divinity of Jesus both originated and organised the Christian life. Critical probabilities and historic credibilities, valua- tions of documents, first century witnesses or second century testimony, are nowhere in the structure of the Christian life. Life has an inspiration of its own, whatever it is, or however it originates, by which it lives. If there is no reality inspiring it, but only an illusion, it will blaze up and then die out. The 12 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. Christian life had long ago died, out if the Divinity of Jesus had not been a genuine human perception and the Resurrection a force of fact. Literature could not have kept it alive ; it was bound to have the fate of all phantasms ; they are found out. The Johannine Memorabilia makes life its ruling idea. " These things are written that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that believing ye might have life in his name." One of the larger facts of biology made clear by the Darwinian vision is that organic life becomes more definite as it advances, that the higher organ- isms are distinguished from the lower by a definite- ness of structure and a distinctness of function. The jelly-fish has rudimentary ears, vesicles along its disc, with sand or lime grains in them, which we call otocyst, an obscure organ ; the star-fish has rudimentary eyes, pigment spots at the end of each of its five rays, a nebulous organ ; the lancelet has a rudimentary spine, which we call the notochord, a mere beginning. These obscure organs look forward to the eye of the cuttle-fish and the spine of the salmon. Give the Christian life time, and it becomes definite in its structures and distinct in its functions, and what we see in the Johannine Memorabilia is just this biological definiteness and distinctness, clear, sharp, decided. It is of no consequence whether it was written 90 A.D. or 140 A.D. If the latter date, then we have the literature which pictures the distinctness IN TROD UCrOR Y—IRRELE VANCES. 1 3 up to that period. Whether it would be the expres- sion of a veritable life is a question which time only can decide. Time has decided, and the literature is not dropped, because it remains a genuine expression of the life. The life persists on the terms found in the literature, and the literature lives because the life lives. The literature of a life which does not verify that life soon becomes an unquestioned obso- leteness. If the Christian life as it went on found itself living on phantasms, it had died out. It is more vigorous to-day than ever it was. Robert Elsmere and Roger Wendover, Matthew Arnold and Dr. Martineau, have fallen into a species of Christian life which is not in the long succession of the broad Christian life rolling these centuries, but which has struck out from it, and is a genuine variety, distinguished by the dominance of the in- tellect. They should be content with it, but not charge with mythology or superstition or unveracity what is really of the essence of the Christian enthusi- asm of these centuries. They know that their type of life has not at any time shown the Christian passion, or performed the Christian functions. There is a history in these memorials, brief and disconnected though central. But it- is not historical literature, in the ordinary sense of the phrase. The Personality of Jesus Christ, His death. His resurrec- tion, His disappearance and departure, are the 14 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. centralness in the history. Eight miracles, the consecutive narration of which would take up the space of only one long chapter, about an eighteenth of the book, are on record. The rest are contro- versies with assemblies of people, and conversations with individuals, and particularly with the students of the evangelical college. The historical materials are meagre indeed, but the meagreness instructs us into the quality of the literature. This historical barrenness needs to be emphasised. It is a bio- graphy of Christ's inner thought and emotion as they fell on humanity and touched chords there, and awoke a music in the soul. The Memorabilia embraces three passovers, a period of two years. The materials selected, however, are taken only from nine months of this period ; fifteen months are a blank. The nine months are not consecutive either, intervals and occasions from them are selected. It is a subjective biography. The birth, the baptism, the temptation, the transfiguration, the institution of the supper, the struggle in the garden, the ascension, are not here. You can scarcely call that history which makes such serious omissions. Narrative is shot through and through with idealisms and mysticisms, and with symbolisms of the spiritual, making a half epic and half dramatic literature ; a literary phenomenon, the likeness to which is found in Deuteronomy in the Hebrew literature. The Johannine Memorabilia is not historical INTROD UCTOR Y—IRRELE VANCES. 1 5 literature as is commonly understood, a recital of occurrences, or a portrait of a life lived, a mere biography. It is not literal history in substance or in form or intention. But it is superior history, a biography such as should be written. It takes for granted facts and events which have been widely published, and gives to the biographies of Matthew and Luke the idea and the emotion which inspires the forces of history. It touches the three other biographies only in four points, as we should have expected. It gives the universal ideas and imperial emotions which lay in the soul of Jesus. A recital of occurrences is not history, but a story of moral causations is : what is cosmic in the idea and emotions of Christ may be got here. Too much is made of mere history, what is called history, as if we ever had real history, or that it could be had, which lies as yet in disputabilities of a very questionable kind. Carlyle says of German history of only 600 years back that it is mostly jungle and shaking bog.^ English history of 300 years ago must have been mostly that, when up to within sixty years English- men believed that Cromwell was a quack and Puri- tanism a cant. It is proof of a special inspiration that no history is attempted in a literature which is meant to inspire a life. There is an intrinsic difficulty in reading mere facts. Historical perspective depends upon events ^ Carlyle's Frederick the Great, vol. i. p. loi. People's Edition. 1 6 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. and on the impulse which produced the events, on the sensitiveness of the historian and the skill of his grouping. He must put facts, vision, motive, into perspective, and he must select the facts out of a miscellany ; and he must put his vision into the facts, and feel the impulse that gave them shape. Even just proportion of fact and feeling is not enough ; his vision must be that of an artist. The perspective is not enough. The head will not work without the heart, and the temperature of the heart has to be reckoned with. As Carlyle has said somewhere, no history can be written which is not written by the heart. He says it must be an epic, and a psalm, and a prophecy. " The highest Shakespeare producible is properly the fittest historian procurable." ^ Who is sufficient for these things ? The life of Christ has been an influence on the human soul, and John is in such sympathy with its inner forces that he attempts to reproduce them in literature. These memorials are not a repertory of facts, but the discovery of a spiritual dynamic. John uses a few facts in the life of our Lord to read the idealism and mysticism which lay in His mind, and to show us the symbolisms of nature with which Christ vestured them, and thus to make luminous the life which He excited. Miracles are interesting to him as signals point- ing us to an invisible world where Christ is ; the ' Carlyle's Frederick the Great, vol. i, p. i6. People's Edition. INTR OD UC TOR Y—IRRELE VA NCES. 1 7 symbol is interesting to him because behind it is a spiritual reality ; the dialogues and orations are told because in them Christ revealed His consciousness' of the eternal and the infinite. The superior bio- graphy of Jesus is the biography not of outward incidents but of the inner world which He brought with Him, and which He lodged so affectionately in the souls of men, and which now invests our earthly world. The Memorabilia is the drama of a human ferment which the presence of Jesus has set up. The pro- blem before us is not the continental examination which seeks to discover the greater or less corre- spondence between the human witness and the facts he reports, the physiology and the psychology of the witnessing conditions, the Elsmerean futility of impossible explorations, but the practical corre- spondence between the presence of Jesus and the human ferment. A baker puts yeast into the flour of wheat. The yeast is a plant, microscopic in minuteness ; the plants multiply by fission and they possess the whole lump. The effect is that the chemical composition is rearranged, and what you cannot have digested as flour becomes digestible as bread. It is the same substance but rearranged. Just such has been the presence of Jesus, a ferment to recast human nature and remodel lives, to make our life a peace and a force. The one thing that we need is to get ourselves rearranged. There is no i8 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. dispute that the rearrangement has taken place, and there can be no dispute about the correspondence between the ferment and the rearranged hfe. The question is whether the Hterature is a fair expression, such as is possible to the infirmities of language, of the ferment and the rearrangement ? Which is answered by simply looking round. History is printed in books ; it is a dead thing in libraries and on papyrus ; it lives in souls. A critical examination of historic records is like the beating of dust out of carpets in March, which take to dust and moths again ; parchment and folios fatally hospitable that way. The real historical record is in the souls of the living generations. Few men know the history of their country ; still fewer, not one in ten thousand, could pass an examination in history. History possesses the intellects of only experts and specialists. But the history is not lost, though it is not in the intellect. It enters into the life blood of a nation, an unconscious but potent force. It distils down into the unseen under- currents, in which our true life is. Few Englishmen could be catechised to any purpose in the history of the Reformation, but the Reformation is a living force in the souls of Englishmen. Few Scotchmen could tell you in what county Drumclog is, or the reasons for which Claverhouse had John Brown shot ; but the story of the Covenanters is inwoven into the temper of the nation. Every generation lives by INTR OD UC TOR Y—IRREL E VA NCES. 1 9 the accumulated wealth of its past, but where is the invisible capital banked except in the souls of men ? Certainly not in libraries. History is a living force, not as printed in books, but as printed by a mysterious process in the living tissues of human hearts. It is an arterial circulation, directing the health and destiny of nations. It is never lost. But it does not live in documents. We thus reach what I shall call the biological aspect of the Johannine Memorabilia. It is the problem of a life. John puts this aspect in the foreground of the motives that impelled him to write. He says he had voluminous materials at his command, and that he made a selection from them that men may have Life in the name of Jesus Christ. We are thinking in these days the philosophy of evolution, and we are using the terms which the science of evolution has furnished us. This is our atmosphere. Translate the ideas of John into the terms of biology, and they mean that around him is the environment of the presence of Jesus, and that by the impact of this environment upon him, he had found a new life, and that he is anxious that this investment and its pressures should act upon others, and be a life in them. This life has managed to correlate with itself the various mental structures and heart functions which go to organise life, and the organism is the Christian life. MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. Critics and apologists have failed to ask in these pathless arguments about authorship and authenticity the question of relevancy, What is the argument of the Johannine authenticity good for? What do you want to get at? Literature does not create life ; life creates literature. The Christian life has come into existence ; it exists to this day. Life produces a literature about itself, and the litera- ture is an expression of the life. You surely do not want to disprove the Christian life, which is beyond proof It is a fact. You surely do not want to test the reality of the life by showing that a certain literature about it was written lOO years after it arose. The reality of a life has only one test — its existence. The quality of the life may be inferior, and quality is tested by its capacity for doing work. Even to speak of trustworthy or an untrustworthy life is an irrelevance. A human life which has existed for 2000 years must, in the nature of things, be trust- worthy. If the Christian life is not in dispute, the discussions about authenticity are irrelevances. They are huge misdirections of human energy. The only end they can serve is gymnastics for scholarship ; a scrimmage of literary footballing. This literature proposes to itself the task of giving expression to the origin and forces and facts of the Christian life. The existence of this life is not dis- putable. The only question before us is this. Is the literature true to the life? Does it show us the INTR OD UCTOR Y—IRRELE VANCES. substratum of the life ? Is it one of those melodious expressions which the literary faculty stirred by emotion has given to a life ? The Memorials are not responsible for the life ; the life is sponsor for them. Linnaeus wrote the story of plant life and Cuvier of animal life, and Darwin traced their lineages, but they are not responsible for the life or lineage of plant or animal. The problem before critics and apologists equally is the correspondence between the potences of this life and the analytic portraiture of the potences. Suppose John did not write these reminiscences some one else did it, and they are just as valuable as far as this correspondence is concerned. Suppose they were written in the second century and not the first, they were equally valid for the purpose of tracing the equation between the life and the literature. Suppose John freely translated modes of Christ's thought into Greek forms, it only illustrates the native expansion which the germinal possesses. With the expansion of the life the literature expands ; with the versatilities of life the literature varies. There is a general likeness between the Johannine account of the Christian phenomenon and the Pauline and the Petrine, and variations such as always differentiate the species of a genus. You find fault with the literature ; you say it contains legends. Begin by emending the life, and then the literature will be emended. Propose amend- ments on the worship, the love, the inspirations of MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. the life. Are the Christian inspirations not trust- worthy ? Legends are literature, — folklore, — not the forces and factors of life. You cannot quarrel with the factors and forces of life. When you have abstracted the divinity of Christ, and the resurrection, and the ascension, from the inspiring forces, how much of the human passion called Christian is left ? Modify the life — take away from it the worship of Jesus, abstract from it the freshness which the Resurrection gives, and the environment which the Ascension has provided, and then the literature will be amended in harmony, or it will become obsolete and another literature will embody it. Or better still, bring out a Bible with such emendations as you think it requires, scoring out the legendary, and inspire a Christian life by means of it. But to be quarrelling with a literature which answers with such accuracy to an existing life is a querulousness of an effete criticism. You may as well read a lecture to the moon for reflecting the light of the sun, or to the oak for the shape it takes. This is historical pedantry and critical pedlaring ; documents and quotations and interpolations arc small wares in such hands. The Laws of Plato are accepted by Professor Jowett as genuine on the authority of Aristotle, and Jowett says that, if that dialogue is accepted as genuine, there ought to be no hesitation in receiving as genuine the Sophist and the Statesman} Eminent ^ Jowelt's r/alo, vol. iv. p. 530. IN TROD UCTOR Y—IRRELE VANCES. 23 scholars, however, dispute the genuineness of the three dialogues. But to what purpose ? If these dialogues are expressive pictures of Greek thought and life, and so like what Plato has given us that modern philosophers are divided in their judgment, let us call a halt to this whole style of discussion, except as a literary curiosity. The imitations are as good as the originals, and the originals are no better, but they are genuine reflections of Greek thought, true to it and harmonious with it. The writer and the time are perfectly immaterial. The Socrates of Plato is mainly an ideal character, the authors of the Laws and the Sophist may be fictitious Platos, but the literature is authentic in giving us what Greek thought was in representative men. The reality of the literature consists in its being a just reflection of the thinking of that subtle race. The imitations of Plato, if they are reflections of Greek thought, authenticate Greek life quite as effectively as the originals. If John did not write these memorials, some one did who can so imitate him as to impose upon the judgments of men who lived as close to him in time as Aristotle did to Plato, and the imitation to this day divides the judgment of competent scholars. The imitation, as a literary reflection of the Christian life, is as valuable as any original can be. If it be an adequate exhibition of the forces which created the Christian life — and it must be that at least — it is of no con- 24 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. sequence who wrote it or when it was written. And so far, it tells the same story of forces as Matthew and Paul, and shows the same life work- ing in them and in Athanasius, and Augustine, and St. Bernard, and Luther, and Knox. In the pre- sence of the science of biology these discussions about authorship and chronology are undergraduate dialectics about historical curiosities. When the human life called Christian has found a veritable literature, that literature becomes food for the life. In biological science after life we consider the food that sustains it. Whether a literature is true to a life is tested by its capacity for becoming food. Food does not originate life, but nourishes it, repairing its waste and supplying heat. Life must be a fact before it can get a literature. Before we could have had the Old Testament, Hebrew life must have established itself. Before we could have had the Iliad we must have had Greek life. The Old Testament nourished Hebrew life, and ' the Iliad Greek life. But literature is aliment only when it has the con- stituents for the special life. Between the functions of cattle life and the chemistries of grass there is an affinity, and grass is food for cattle. This mono- graph of Jesus has been the food of that human genus of life we call Christian, and it is so by the heat power it gives to Christian forces. Literature is only one kind of food, but it is nutrition by possessing the INTRO D UCTOR Y—IRRELE VANCES. 25 proper constituents for stimulus and growth. " If ye abide in Me, and My words abide in you " — these are the two kinds of food, words of Christ next to the person of Christ. These memorials had been long ago laid in the underground vaults of forgotten libraries if they had not the indispensables of nutrition, and if there had not been a life to nourish. The problem of these memorials, in the presence of the science of biology, is not authorship or chrono- logy ; indeed no such problem now exists for the Bible literature ; even the growth and later editor- ships and adaptations are not material to the problem. The problem narrows itself into two questions far away from doubts and guesses and likelihoods of criticism. It is, so to speak, a problem which has its analogies with physiology. What are the inspirations of the mind life called Christian ? is the first question, which is answered by a simple analysis of saintly lives. And again, What is the oxygen, the nitrogen, and the carbon in this litera- ture to nourish this mind life ? Dismiss as obsolete questions of genuineness. Demand as present this question of life and its genealogy, and the literature as the reflection and nourishment of this life. All else is antiquarianism for a museum ; palaeontology of fossil forms of thought. We deposit the literature of canonicities into a clean cabinet of antique bones. CHAPTER II. INTRODUCTORY— CHARACTERISTICS. ^'' Ajtd many othe)- signs truly did Jest is in the presence of His dis- ciples which are not wr-itten in this book. But these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God ; and that be- lieving, ye might have Life through His name.'''' — ^JOHN xx. 30, 31. '■^ And whatever debates may arise on other points, it cannot be doubted that the writer of the fourth Gospel has a distinct conception of a spiritual laiv of the life of humanity which found its final realisation in the Incarnation. This conception is therefore his clue in the choice and arrangements of facts." — Westcott. CHAPTER II. INTRODUCTORY CHARACTERISTICS. Criticism has said its noes ; its function is that of the minus quantity in mathematics. It is now the turn of the creative faculty. We address ourselves to the ruling characteristics of the Memorabilia, the nutritious materials. These are idealism, mysticism, and symbolism. You go into an orchid house and see a hundred orchid plants. No two are wholly alike in leaf or flower, but they are like enough in their unlikeness. If you had your eye on them long enough, you could never mistake the orchid character. Each one is a modification of a typical form. There is an inner unity, a type to which you can refer them all, a pattern after which they are sketched. No one has seen this pattern, and this invisible type or archetype is the orchid idea or ideality which is to be found only in God. You see a hundred children. No two children are alike, but there is a common something which we call childhood. 30 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. Childhood is the unseen ideality in which all children are included. " Their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven," is the Hebrew pictorial way of expressing what the Greeks would call the idealism of childhood. There is a variety of human races, but humanity is the idea of them all. The idea is one ; the particulars are many. An ideal universe surrounds us, from which the visible world has its ideas, and the originals of both are in God ; the One in the many ; the Whole in the parts. It is to the Greek mind that we owe this way of looking at things. " The philosopher lives with ideas," says Plato. And our latest science sees the ideal everywhere. " Homology clears away the mist from such terms as the scheme of nature, ideal types, archetypal patterns or ideals, etc. ; for these terms come to express real facts." ^ In this Memorabilia Jesus Christ, who appeared in the flesh, is seen in the ideal universe as the Eternal Mind, from Whom have emanated the thou- sand forms of nature. The human mind is the greatest thing we know. The original of it is seen in Jesus, and the original of Him in the Eternal Mind. The local Jesus, who lived in Palestine, is pictured as the Lord of all time. The Hebrew Christ, who has a nationality in our race, is the Ideal Son of man. His miracles are not mere wonders, but signs or signals pointing to ideas? ^ Darwin on the /'crti/isalion of Orchids, p. 233. INTR OD UC TOR V~ CHA RA C TERIS TICS. 3 1 principles, and truths ; their value lay not in them- selves, but in their look upward to the unseen behind them. The vine is a familiar creeper. The . union of its branches to the stem has its pattern in the union of Christ to the race. There is no fruit -bearing without this attachment of branch to stem, and this law has its archetype in the spiritual world in the communion of souls with Christ by which vital forces are interrelated. I am the Ideal Vine ; I am the truth in the vine, the underlying idea. All through, this element of idealism or first principles pervades the Memorabilia. Philip has seen Christ and found no idealism in the vision, and he is of Greek origin. The glory with which Art invests the head of Christ, the circle of light, is meant for an idealism, some- thing of another world to be interpreted by the lay mind. Christ expected Philip to have seen the Father in Him, the glory of the Father streaming from His words and works. When Christ says. Have I been so long time with you, and hast thou not known me, Philip ? He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father (xiv. 9), — He wants to make Philip an idealist, educated by His presence, and with a remonstrance that he has been a dull scholar. An utterance of Caiaphas, who is a trimming, time- serving politician, is registered, in which he hit upon the principle of vicariousness, as justifying a con- spiracy for murder. This earth of ours is a station 32 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. in a divine country. " In my Father's country are many stations." Death is ideaHsed away, and its grim visage is lost in Hfe. " I am the resurrection, and the Hfe : he that Hveth and beHeveth in me shall never die." Wherever the primary, the ulterior, the essential, the universal, wherever the ideal in any of these forms was made visible in the life of Christ, it is preserved in these Reminiscences. Ex- cept we are alive to this ground note of idealism we will miss the force of much of what we read. Christ is presented to us moving in the kingdom of ideas as His own realm. An ideal universe environs us round, and the mind enters into correspondence with it. Poetry, which is the universal speech of men, is the attempt to bring down this ideal universe to the level of the most ordinary mind. The excellence of mind lies in the perception of principle. Everything practical rests upon a prin- ciple, and to find it gives to action a strength. This perception differences the artisan from the artist. The merely practical man, who may be suc- cessful by virtue of a natural shrewdness, soon finds work a drudgery, except it is bringing him money. But the clerk who, as he enters bills of exchange, sees in them the. laws of commerce or economic truths, is not only on his way to be a banker, but also to have pleasure in banking. The mechanic, who sees laws of motion and of compression and ex- pansion of materials while liandling his engine, is INTROD UCTOR Y— CHAR A CTERISTICS. 33 on the way to be an engineer. Practical men think principles a bore, but it is when the mind is bored by principles that its hidden powers show them- selves. When we feel the bite of ideas, then we can say we know the thrill of being. All capable action is the work of ideas. To be curious to know what lies behind appearances, to arrive at reasons, to pry into meanings, to seek the universal in details, to look on the haze of the horizons and feel that there is something beautiful in the far-away of things, which we only just see — this makes char- acter beautiful, and conduct forceful, and action luminous. Idealisms give force and beauty to this Memorabilia. Eternal life is a ruling phrase here, and eternal life is not longevity ; it is the negation of duration. It is a timeless and spaceless being, a condition in which there is no time to be counted and no space which can be measured. Eternal in life is the epoch of the ideal, an aeon or era of the ideal, as the Greek word rendered eternal means ; an seonian life. Mysticism is another ground-note in this mono- graph. The mystic principle in our nature is that which draws us into ourselves, there to see the image of the universe, there to hear the footfalls of our God. Mysticism hears the blackbird in woodlands within us, sees the clouds as shadow and colour in sceneries of the soul. When you have heard the owl screech- 3 34 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. ing hoo-hoo in the night, and heard a sound be- hind that hooting, making weird the hours, then you have interpreted the speech of the owl. We are microcosms, a Httle universe within the vast encompassing universe, inhabited by God. The mystic feels the stir of God within him, the Holy Spirit dwelling in him, startles with a Christ forming in him. The mystic element in this literature is seen from the beginning. The light of mind is the light of the Christ in us. He is the Tight which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world , and therefore a Christliness is felt in us. Nicodemus, in the choking dulness of his times, had allowed his soul to come up to the surface, but who had interior capaci- ties. Christ digs below the rubbish to find the in- terior, and says, " Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." See what ? Where are the eyes to see with? Where is the kingdom which has to be seen ? Where is the burgess ticket to be found ? It is all within, eyes and kingdom, and burgess-ship, in the arcana of the soul. We are in the silent kingdoms ; a province of theirs is in us, if only the spirit was generated within to see it. Thomas wanted to see and touch Christ's person, and Christ is turning the rationalist into a mystic, to sec without eyes and touch without hands, unlocking the interior of him. The mystic has Christ's cross within himself; the resurrection INTR OD UCTOR Y— CHA RA C TERIS TICS. 35 is a spring morning within him ; the ascension is an ascendency in him. He asks for no evidences ; the credentials are in him. Mysticism is the divine fragment in us, which is sensitive to everything divine, the spirit-self within the sense-self, where as in a tent v/e meet with God and talk with Him, as was done by the mystic Moses. The last blessed- ness is the happiness of the mystic. " Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed." Christ wanted the touch of Mary Magdalene after he had left the world, making Mary Magdalene a mystic. " Touch me not ; for I am not yet ascended to my Father." The direct mystic teaching of this literary master- piece is concentrated in the fourteenth and fifteenth chapters, distilled in such ideas : " I will come to you." " We will come, and make our abode with you." " Abide in me, and I in you." " I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one." To make ourselves conscious of the world within us is imperative upon us. It is the best of us. We are far too conscious of the world without us. It is in thought and passion and vision that we meet with God. It is not our temptation to be too much in these parts. We have to force ourselves into these mystic regions. The quietist is blamed for being too much with himself, but there is not much danger of the ordinary man overdoing quiet- ism. To like our own soul and enjoy the society 36 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. we find there, and to tap the wealth which lies stratified there, is a neglected duty, and the quietists are teaching us our duty. They like the silences of the soul and the stillnesses of nature which speak to the inner silences, and the divine society found in them both, making the soul fragrant of other clim- ates. It is not the extravagance but the essence of religion. " I will come unto you." " He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, houses himself with me, and I with him." My soul, thou art not far from thy Christ. Christ is within thee. In thy breath is the breath of God. See with the eyes of God, glow with the emotions of God, the stir in thy days is from the tides of the Infinite. The tabernacle of God is within thee, and there thou shalt know the Christ that is within thee, there feel the beautiful hope of being, there find that Christ is being formed within thee, the hope of glory. Suchlike is the soliloquy of the mystic. Idealism and mysticism modify each other, and the wholesomeness of this Memorabilia is seen in putting the two elements alongside of each other. The mystic becomes unreal. The idealist corrects him and calls him to the actual. We can idealise as much as we like, but only by starting from the visible and the palpable. The artist becomes sensuous and the mystic calls him back to his true home within the spirit. The basis of Christendom is the sense of Christ within us, and it has even become hcrcditarv. INTRODUCTOR Y— CHAR A CTERISTICS. 37 But Christ is also in the heavens and there are worlds outside of us. A third ground-note of the Memorabilia is the symbolism which pervades it A symbol is a paint- ing from nature, a picture of spiritual ideas and visions. The idealist and the mystic clothe their visions by figures taken from the visible in nature. The outward world is related to the inward world, not by fantasies and accommodations but by the ori- ginal make of them, as holding the same divine ideas in related realms. Matter, life, mind, spirit, unseen worlds, are in one serial line of gradation, con- structed by the same creative thought and emotion. Poesy is the mediator between these realms, and rejoices us by the harmony it makes between sense and spirit, and its instrument is symbolism. The vision of a poet sees the inner unity, and when he re- veals this inner unity we feel the pleasures of poetry. Symbolism is all through the Memorabilia. Jesus is here the poet, calling nature to illumine the super- natural, bringing the outward into a rhythmic relation to the inner. Light, as the imperial principle in nature, is the analogue of the Eternal Mind in Jesus and of the mind region in us, as its fragment. Water, as the kingly agent supreme in the world, is the em- blem of the Holy Spirit, supreme over spirits ; and in its queenly action, sculpturing the earth, is the figure of the human life in us as an imitation of the Divine Spirit. Comprehensive symbols these, ever recur- 38 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. ring in this literature. The Lamb, the dove, the harvest, the bread, the shepherd and sheep, the fragrance of spices, the sown grain, the country and its inns, the vine, and the most original of all symbols, the blood and the water as pictorial of the moral forces in the death of Christ, are other en- gravings in the letterpress. Nature surrenders herself to the spiritual, and is assessed all through her parts in the interests of the spiritual world. Symbolism is the form, hue, and scent in which Nature pictures the infinite viewlessness. Three worlds are ours, the world of faculty within, the visible universe, and the unseennesses which fringe off from the visible, where we see the august First Cause of all things. The senses mediate between the human faculty and Nature ; the imagination or the worshipful in us intercedes with us for God. Nature is religious all through and corresponds with our religiousness, and we correspond with the Eternal Father. Nature provides us with the raw materials of those pictures in the galleries of which we worship God. The metaphysics within us, the poetry in nature, and the worshipful in God, are the sublime concordances of religion. God hides everywhere in the human faculty, and religion is the inexpressible and unexpressed discovery of Him there. God hides everywhere in nature, and symbolism is a picturesque etching of the discovery of Him there. Nature is a transparency through which the unseen universe INT ROD UCTOR Y— CHAR A CTERISTICS. 39 looks in upon us, and the refracted colours of the unseen are the similitudes, allegories, and parables of religion. Symbolism makes nature a sacredness, and be- comes sacramental of the inmost realities of re- ligion. It maps out for us, with colour, great places in the geography of unexplored continents. These three notes of idealism, mysticism, and sym- bolism give to this composition the character of a work of art. The history that is in it is worked up with these elements to produce a half epic, half dramatic literature, a literary phenomenon indeed. And only in this way was a proper biography of Jesus possible. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are artisans of His biogra- phy ; John is the artist. They are well called Syn- optics ; giving us a sort of school synopsis or college syllabus ; materials for an artist. Froude has said, " The poet is the truest historian. Whatever is pro- perly valuable in history the poet gives us, not events and names, but emotion, action, life. . . . Great men, and all men properly so-called, whatever is genuine and natural in them, lie beyond prose, and can oply be really represented by the poet. This is the reason why such men as Alexander, or as Caesar, or as Cromwell, so perplex us in histories, because they and their actions are beyond the scope of the art through which we have looked at them." ^ The aim of the Memorabilia is not information ^ Fronde's Short Studies : Homer, vol. i. pp. 506, 507. 40 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. but impression, and the impression of a singular fact, even the profound intimacy between Christ and the ideal, mystic, and spiritual world, that He is the Son of the Eternal Father as no one else before Him was, and that as such He is the Creator of a life not before found amongst men. It traces the growth and the forms of His consciousness. This o intimacy of Jesus colours the literature from begin- ning to end. And the intended impression is no doubt conveyed, not exactly in the diction which Christ employed when speaking to His untrained students, but in a diction which John later on felt more appropriate. It is visible on the surface that the Memorabilia represents Christ speaking in a style different from that in which He is reported by the Synoptics. This Memorabilia touches the Synoptics only in four places ; it selects the occasions where Christ spoke on other topics ; it gives detailed conversations and condenses long arguments. Have we the very words of Jesus ? Suppose we have not. Does the paper on which the letter is written affect its veracity ? We want ideas, not words. Words are the paper on which ideas write themselves. The ideas translated into an idiom of Greek words are ideas still. For an epic or drama it was even necessary that they should suffer this translation. The thoughts of Christ passed through John's mind as light passes through a prism and is broken INTRODUCTOR Y— CHARA CTERISTICS. 41 up into its colour contents. Prismatic refractions are an analysis of light, but they are all con- tained in the light. The clear light of Christ's mind is seen in colour, now one and now another, in the Memorials before us. The colours were all con- tained in Christ's mind, and they are shown to us in striking combinations. What mind in that age could have originated ideas and emotions such as are here reported, which have not their parallel anywhere ? Who but one inspired by Christ, through whom Christ's thoughts had passed as into a prism, could have written this literature ? Could such thoughts be an invention ? could the situation in which they were spoken be the creation of a novelist ? Has a species of human life been ever created by romancing ? They are no other than the shivered rays in which the light of Christ's mind, as it passed through John, analysed itself Perhaps some of John's thoughts had passed into another mind before they found expression in the Memorabilia, but they have not suffered in the transmission. The Memorabilia does not betray the piecing of different minds. The form of the Memorabilia is much that of a drama ; a tragedy in which human character in good and evil develops round the central figure of Christ, who is Himself under doom ; life in its hate and in its love for the Holy One develops side by side. 42 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. The crucifixion is a shadow which early falls on the drama ; from the fifth chapter the strain and the stress and the shock of death are felt ; the surf of the storm is blown about. It is a tragedy in which all the characters are living persons and not persona- tions, and the scenes are actual and not creations. The action of the drama moves by dialogues. Plato's philosophy is taught in the form of the dialogue, and an imitation of the Socratic dialogue can scarcely fail to be suggested to the reader. In the Greek world, where John was posted, and the Greek atmosphere he had long breathed, he would become familiar with the most familiar literature around him, of Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy, and we may expect to see traces of their influence. The Hebrew, preoccupied with the religious ideas of the Old Testament, could not receive much Hellenic culture, but he is sure to be scratched and grooved all over ; wholly impervious he could not be. And John will have us understand from the beginning that he is giving a strong Greek colouring to Christian thought, and he shows us that he will not be able always to sustain it. For after the first five verses in the Greek strain he has to stop, and interject a bit of narrative. " There was a man sent from God, whose name was John," and then, taking breath, he resumes the subjective. The sorrow of the tragedy, victorious by the resurrection, resembles very much the tragedies of INTRODUCTORY— CHARACTERISTICS. 43 Euripedes, in several of which the chorus strikes an Easter note of triumph — O victory, I revere thy sober power, Guard thou my life, nor ever cease to crown me.^ And this tragedy has the philosopher's prologue of the Logos — "In the beginning was the Eternal Mind ;" and the epilogue of the mystic's blessedness — "Blessed are they who have not seen, and yet have believed." In both the substance and form of the Memorabilia we may see a mixture of the Greek tragedy and the Platonic dialogue, such as a Hebrew genius might attempt in the thick of Hellenic civilisation and feebly succeed in it. It is of the essence of the drama that the persons speak their own character and do their own deeds without the poet painting a life size picture or giv- ing us a theory of the character. The reader does that for himself. No antecedents of Nicodemus are given to us. He puts in three brief appearances on the stage, and we can draw a full length portrait of him. He is a man on whom has fallen the curse of the aristocratic caste and the blight of an arid age. He has become selfish, and perhaps there are some misdeeds on his conscience of ill gotten gains and self-indulgences, and he is trying to preserve the ex- piring embers of the human fires in the ashes. He ^ Last words of Orestes, Iphigenia in Tauris, Phanician Virgins, In a similar strain is the conclusion of Bacchce, Medea, Androtnache, Alcestis. 44 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. improves his opportunity. He has near lost the vision of the spiritual kingdoms. He will soon be asphyxiated, and he escapes in the dead of night from the mephitic vapours. He cannot understand rudimentary truths. But he gets into the society of Christ, and he gets the hopeful truth that sincere souls, though they have gone far wrong, will come right who cleave to the veracities. He first timidly defends innocence in the presence of a formidable conspiracy. Then he comes into the blaze of light and into the mountain air of inspiration and asks for the dead body of Jesus. This is quite dramatic, and every other character who plays a part in the tragedy is dramatised in the same masterly manner. The moral character of Pilate is not sketched, nor the intellectual angle at which he stood towards religious truth. He appears for once in the last critical scene, and we see where he is by the part given him to act. He knows his duty, but he has long been omitting duties which cost him anything. He understands justice and kindness, but not when they clash with personal interests. He knows the facts of spiritual science, but he has been obfuscating himself by questioning and doubting them. The sense of the supernatural can still startle him, but he has been long darkening the eternal visions. He goes in and out of the hall of justice, evading incon- venient facts and trying to reconcile the irreconcilable, and is finally overpowered by self-interest to part IN TR OD UC TOR V— CHA RA C TERIS TICS. 45 company with the Royal Goodness before him. Nothing could be more dramatic. The noblest of our princes in ruin sink, Retire we to our homes and weep our loss, says the chorus in the conclusion of the Hercules of Euripides. The drama and the victorious tragedy, the Socratic dialogue and the idealism of Plato, both %vsiq form to the Memorabilia, The character of John lends itself to these charac- teristics. When we first see him in the training school of Galilee, he is a man with passion as the basis of him, irascible in affection, ambitious, without repose, explosive in collision with untoward incidents, and withal magnetic in emotion, named a Son of Thunder. Up to the crucifixion the vigours of his affectional nature were violences. His resentments are hot enough to ask for fire from heaven to avenge an insult ; he is partisan enough to rebuke a man who did good unauthorised by his college ; he wants a right hand place in the kingdom, and excites the jealousy of his brethren. But the death, resurrection, and glorification of Christ have so sunk into him that passionateness has rapidly become passiveness. He is associated with Peter in the inaugurations of the Christian society, but he does not speak ; no fire is seen, no 46 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. thunder is heard, issuing from him. Peter is the spokesman all through ; John stands by his side, the silent mystic, looking far away into wonderlands. Peter is the body, John the informing spirit ; Peter the granite pillar, John the arch, the spirit that unites the parts into a symmetry. After the fourth chapter of the Acts only once does the name of John appear, and it is only a name. Where is John ? He has gone into silence. He is the still, subjective, mystic heart of the Christian society. They have posted him at Ephesus, but John and Ephesus have scarcely a history, except in the recollections and refractions of the mind of Jesus, which have taken the shape of the Memorabilia and the Epistles of love, in which last the reconciliation of all disputes is found in a theology of love. Peter and Paul they have killed ; John is too ethereal to be killed ; you cannot lay hands on a spirit. Passiveness is an evolution of passion, and the two words of a common origin index the close kinship of the two states. Passion has an openness to out- ward influence, to which it too readily responds in flashes and sallies. When Christ became an impres- sion upon John in the last scenes, the stormy forces were allayed, and a quiet consciousness was generated, in a melodious responsiveness to such an environ- ment. Perhaps no clearer prophecy was spoken of what Christ was to do for the human faculty than this transformation of John's temper from its passion INTROD UCTOR V— CHAR A CTERISTICS. 47 into passiveness. And all so natural. Passion normally develops into a tempered quiet suscepti- bility, when it accepts the finer and higher influences. The warmer passions have the making of genius. A genius for knowledge, for poetry, for heroism, has its beginning in the stormy forces. When passionate natures submit to a higher initiative they become initiatives themselves. A just modern parallel to the evolution of John's character is Wordsworth. In his childhood and youth he flares up rnore than once with a passion which might have been disastrous in its issues. His mother was more anxious about him than any of her children, and she died when he was eight years of age. The poet writes that his mother had seen that he would be remarkable for good or evil. "The cause of this was that I was of a stiff, moody, violent temper." ^ His capacity for a violent response to impressions is seen in his putting himself forward as a leader of the Girondist party in France. He was seasonably and forcibly brought home by his friends^ cutting off his supplies, or he had shared the guillotine fate of that party in May 1793. For years he was afflicted with spasms of the passion which the French Revolution had stirred in him. But the poet after- wards settled down as the calm, mystic genius of Nature, seeing his idealisms in her mirrors, the spirit of Lakelands, the poet of what he himself 1 Knight's Wordsworth, vol. ix. p. 14. 48 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. has phrased, " a wise passiveness." Taking Nature lor his environment, the passionate poet became the idealist, the mystic, and the symboHst of a new age. Taking Christ for his environment, the passionate John became the idealist, the mystic, and the sym- bolist of a new religion. Both have given an originality to literature. The anonymity of the memorials is just like the idyllic quiescences of John's character. How could he obtrude his personality in the silent, mystic world which he pictures ? It would be an unseemly invasion. It had to be veiled somehow. The incognito verifies the Johannine inspiration, if not authorship. CHAPTER III. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. John i. 1-13. "/« the begiwiing %uas the Eternal Mind, and the Mind was with God as Fellow and the Mind %vas God in Essence. In the Eternal Mind all life was comprised, and His life as it appeared in Nature and History was the Light of Men. He is the ideal Light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world. He was in the world, and the world 7vas made by Him.'''' " But amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought abotit, there will reinain the one absolute certainty that man is ever in the presence of an Infitiite and Eternal Energy from which all thittgs proceed." Herbert Spencer. CHAPTE"R III. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. It had been an advantage both to clearness and stimulus if the Greek for Word had been left un- translated, like Jehovah in the Hebrew literature. The Greek is Logos, from which our word logic comes. To render it by Word is to use a meaningless vocable ; no English reader of the Bible can possibly attach an idea to it. It can only be a Sibylline sound, and yet our Revisers have retained this oracular sound. It is to no profit to enter into a discussion about the use of Logos in the schools of Alexandria. It is agreed that the ideas in the familiar Greek word are ideas involved in our English words, reason and speech. A popular equivalent for these ideas is Mind. The Eternal Mind is the adequate equivalent for the original. I qualify Mind by Eternal, as that ad- jective is in the phrase, in the beginning (i. i). In the beginning was the Eternal Mind, and He was with God in companionship and He was God in essence. 52 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. Professor Jowett has said, that " the Divine Mind is the leading religious thought in the later works of Plato. The human mind is a sort of reflection of this." ^ The later Hebrew conception also gives a Divine Companion to the Great First Cause under the figure of Wisdom, who speaks : " I was set up from everlasting, from -the beginning. When He prepared the heavens I was there. When he ap- pointed the foundations of the earth, then I was with Him." ^ The limits of the human mind, in its attempts at reaching the origin of things, is well illustrated in the similarity of Hebrew and Greek conceptions, the recurrence to the same forms of thought, when thinking of the Eternal Origination. Plato unites the ideas of Wisdom and Mind, and says that the " Mighty Infinite " ^ of the universe " may be justly called Wisdom and Mind." ^ The beginning of things is really unthinkable, but some conception is essential to human thought and composure. The idea of a Maker of the universe centres and anchors the mind. Whence we are, and whose we are, who is our Master, and where is our place in the universe, are not quests of curiosity but of practical moment on which our action depends, and the quality of our life. The universe is not lucent, nor we lucid, and ^ Jowctt's Plato, Introduction to Sophist, vol. iv. p. 384. - Proverbs viii. 27-29. ^ Phihbus, Jowett's Plato, vol, iv. p. 72. "* Ibid. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 53 we have the incapacities of the bHnd man, with these questions unanswered. But as the new born babe is received into the embraces of air, Hght, and heat as a loved child of nature, quite as much as in the embraces of a mother's affections, so, as Mind emerges in man, the Infinite Mind receives this prattling image of Himself and whispers into his ear the imperial secret of his whereabouts. Very early, in the very dawn of the human faculty, the inspiration of the Eternal Wisdom shaped this answer. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth ; God created man in His own image. It is a poetic generalisation, a vision into the pro- founds of being. The fire hidden in a flint flashes a mere star-like emission, but it is caught up to flame the night. The genius of Hebrew character, and the trend of Hebrew history are to be found in this clear conception. The Greek genius and the trend of Greek history are also to be found in a meta- physical form of this same conception. " That which is created must of necessity be created by a Cause." ^ " He put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, and framed the universe." " The revised and improved edition of this gener- alisation which has given genius and trend to European history is the ground note of the Johannine Memorabilia, In the beginning was the Eternal Mind, and He was the Fellow of God and He was of the ^ Tiinccus^ Jowett's Plato, vol. iii. p. 612. - Ibid,, p. 614. 54 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. essence of God. And He is identified with Jesus Christ of history. In the Hebrew idea the Creator is a Power, or better, a Collection of Powers, Elohim, and the universe is an expression of forces, and man a bundle of commandments, which is really the scientific con- ception of law, though in no Eastern race has science blossomed. In the Greek idea, the Creator is a Mind, and the universe is an expression of ideas and emotions, which is really the poetic conception, and it put forth its finest blossom in our day in our own Wordsworth. In the wedlock of Hebrew and Greek ideas the Christian conception is born, through the mediation of Jesus, and this is the lucidity of the modern world. Science is born in this wedlock, and is the special property of the Western mind. Plato anticipates from, afar the vision of science, but he is more concerned with the native idea of his race that Mind is before Matter, and science loses itself in wilds and woods except as it takes this priority as a lamp on its path. " All philosophers are agreed that Mind is the King of heaven and earth." ^ Socrates says, I am " in har- mony with the testimony of those who said of old time that Mind rules the universe." " " Now God did not make the soul after the body,"^ is an idea which crops up everywhere in the philosophy of the Greeks. ^ Philebus, Jowett's Plato, vol. iv. p. 69. - Iln'I., \\ 72. •' TimauSy Jowett's Plato, vol. iii. p. 617. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 55 The priority of Mind is the affirmation that pre- faces these Memorials. The marriage of Greek and Hebrew thought by the priesthood of Jesus is the vignette on its titie-page. God as Mind is one dominant note of our author. The Creator can only be discerned as the Mind of the universe by our finding mind in the physics of Nature, and emotion in her life. When the sea rolls its waves into you, telling you a rhythmic story of the deep things which lie in you ; when the moon- light sends its quiet sheen into your soul and calms you ; when the honeysuckle passes a fragrance into your memory and you feel the past of affections which years ago thrilled in you ; — when we feel the spirit interfused in light and water and plant, and the life of Nature is translated into something corresponding within us ; — then we understand the preface to the Memorabilia : In the beginning was the Eternal Mind ; all things were born of Him (i. 3); in Him was the life of the universe (i. 4). Certainly we shall not find the meaning of the Logos in those cloudy theorisings about Emanations into which the Alexandrian school was driven by the coercion of saving the Creator from being the author of evil. No such idea as saving the Creator from the responsibility of evil is even hinted at in the Memo- rabilia. We shall understand the Logos by seeing the Eternal Mind manifesting Himself in the thought and emotion embedded in Nature, which appear in 56 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. all their complexity in man, who is at the top of Nature. Daylight will then scatter the Emanation moonshine. In December 1889, I saw what an observer of sunsets would call a phenomenal afterglow, unusual in idea and feeling. There was a brilliant display of red bars of stratus, and an orange flush of cirrus, and lakes of green haze, but the whole was crossed over by thirteen fan-shaped shadow lines, proceeding from a centre beneath the horizon. The shadow lines may be compared to the spokes of a wheel. They lay across this pageantry of colour, as if to mar it, to tell us not to make too much of the evening effulgences of promise. A fringe of night bounds the day, and ere the ruler of the light dips into the darkness, the night is made to keep a rosy twilight. Light shows its interior splendours in contact with cloud and water dust and dust of glassy crystals, and develops the red end of the spec- trum. Heaven confers with earth in its losses and dependences, and comforts it, and will have us re- member that it has much for us, though the night is coming. But even over the comforts and hopes are shadows, bars sinister, as if it was illegitimate to rejoice too much, or know too much, or hope too much. Modesty and moderation are advised ; the overmuch is not good. The afterglows strike notes of the past and pensivcness in us. Our life rose in love, our birthday is a joy to our parents, re- THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 57 fleeting the joy of God in us ; it will set in the same love. But between the morning and evening there are chequered hours, sins, sorrows, agonies, and though our evenings are full of a hidden light, they are streaked with the sadder memories of the day. As the shadows of the evening fall, there will gleam upon us some brief intimations of the bright interiors of our being ; it will be told us that we shall find our best in our worst. But the beauti- ful vision of God's care and our hopes shall be crossed by those shadow lines which speak of chas- tening and discipline. The shadow line over the luscious afterglow is a minor rhythm of colour. Our hunger for love and more life, for passion and more work, will carry the minor notes of the pain which our character has required, the cross which must be always in the heart, as the Resurrection is streaked with the dark lines of the crucifixion. The afterglow speaks to the pathos of our being, and it strikes these notes because it contains the pathos. It carries the colours of affections in its original structure. The physics of vapour and colour and shadow mingling in a sunset is another version of our emotions, and both are versions of the Eternal Mind. The properties of water and light, the behaviour of colour and shadow, are the domain of physics. We pass from the cold region of physics — the mindless — into the warm latitudes of feeling, because they are adjacent countries, the 58 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. estate of the same Landlord. We pass from the tropics of the human affections into the Eternal Affection, and there find the sanctuary of worship. The picturesqueness of the afterglow reposes in the human affections, and both repose on the Eternal pathos in God. God comes out in light and colour and we see Him, and see the something in ourselves which answers to Him. The raw material of this pathos is the subject of science ; the pathos itself is the matter of our affections ; and when we trace science and feeling up to the Venerable Mystery of all feeling in God, we bring in religion, and there we worship pathetic with the past tenses of time. It is not by going to the meta- physical schools of Alexandria, but into the school of a sunset, that we enter into the sublime meaning of the words : In the beginning was the Eternal Mind ; all things were made by Mind ; He was in the world and the world was made by Him (i. lo). Take a walk along a lakeside. A lake nestles among hills. It has been dug out in a catastrophe that broke two strata, along a weak line of junction, an anticline which has col- lapsed as a geologist would say, and then the broken saddle has been scooped by glaciers of the Ice Age. It receives the streams which issue from the corries, and all the torrents which the rains wash down. The pretty face looks up to Alpine heights. It is like Mary sitting at the THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 59 feet of Jesus, receiving thought and feeling, for canticles of praise and forces of action. As you walk along the lake-side, thinking into its waters a scud of clouds is caught and reflected on the glassy unruffled surface. Look round and there is a huge boulder, which glaciers have transported from a distant rock region ; it is flecked with lichens, and the polypody fern peeps out from every crevice of it, and the bilberry with its blue vase-like fruit is growing on its mossy back. Move on and stop, and the turtle- dove is cooing in the wood, and not far from you is the corncrake, crying crake, crake ; the capercailzie is watching you from the larch bough. A few feet forward, and the veronica on the roadside, and the foxglove on the stony heap, and the grass of Par- nassus in the ditch, are in their best summer dress. A lively waterfall is not far off, and in a bend of the lake you will see the trout leaping out to catch flies, and the moorhen dips down to shun you. A few more steps, and you will see the humble-bee humming to the flowers, who is out in all weathers, and has errands to the clover and to the broom, and to the waterbank at all times. The yellow-hammer will notice you unmoved ; most patient of all birds in his seat, sitting for hours together, and singing love notes in spring, summer, and autumn ; only the winter silences him ; he cannot endure being far from his mate. Reaching an eminence of slabs of schist, and 6o MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. looking to the western sky, you saw the horizon barred from west to south with a mass of immov- able purple, gray clouds, which looked like and immediately suggested a tangled mountain range. The top was rolled and shaped into a series of castles, domes, aiguilles, peaks, crowning and resting on the long cloudy mass.. Above the summit was a clear, white sky, and above this white space of sky were flecks of cloud, as if they formed a cloudy atmosphere over a real mountain country. Below the summit, over the corries and plateaux of the cloudy continent lay a thin vapour of a lighter colour, as if it was a mist covering the lower valleys and spurs of the range, suggesting a real mist, such as we have often seen lying on the lower reaches of a hilly country when the summits are bare against the sky. The simulation of a solid mountain world was perfect. The resemblance of the unsubstantial vapour to the substantial rock is like the resem- blance of the transitory to the eternal, which so often misleads us, till we learn by bitter experience that the transitory is not the eternal, but only the vapour of it. Nature dreams her mountains into clouds ; clouds are the dreams of the mountains. The same Divine Draughtsman drew the lines of both mountain and cloud. Here is a stir of mind dispersed in a mile of country, felt in half an hour. The boulder, the corn- crake, the bee, the cloud are voices, ripples, sentences. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 6i smiles, frowns, into which the Infinite Mind has written Himself. Every section of Nature seems to make a whole, integrates itself The poet and the artist see this integration, and the worshipper who chants the wonders of God. In this dispersal of the Infinite Mind we get our symbolisms of the spiritual world. Here is the wardrobe from which language takes its varied dresses. Every word which expresses a moral or spiritual idea is taken from Nature. All the primitive languages, like Celtic, are pictorial, because their relations to Nature are very fresh. The universe is one large Emblem, made up of a thousand small emblems, which repose on the Uncreate, Unoriginate Mind. Allegories are apparitions of the Mind. The lake, the hill, the wood, the veronica are emblems given to us to read, and when our minds are in com- munion with the Eternal we get the readings. Inwrought into the liveliness of the waterfall, and the bilberry blueness, and the shyness of the waterhen, is the stir of the Eternal Mind. Creation by Mind implies that every detail of it, and the whole in every part of it, are underlaid by thoughts, are costumes of ideas. Beauty is through her, and ethics is through her, and a soul is through her. If we could bloom with the daisy, and muse with the owl ; if we could get the chaffinch to sing into us ; if we could be flower and waterfall ; if we could disperse ourself into the life of air and sky and 62 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. field, — then we would see the beauty in the opening words of the Memorabilia : All things were born of Mind, and without Mind was not anything born (i. 3). Mind was in the world, and the world was made by Him (i. 10). In this way we take abstruseness out of, and put a music into, these simple words. The rust which attacks wheat is a fungus which requires three hosts to entertain it in order to make out its life-cycle. It is a plant of the lowest type, and is known to science as Uredo. It has three distinct forms in the three guest stages of its histor}^ The spores have a resting stage on dried leaves in winter. In spring they develop and produce spores which are not satisfied with their winter quarters ; they must be carried to the barberry, to be en- tertained on its leaves, where they grow into another form and then spore. These spores require another host, and they find their way to the wheat, where they grow into a third form and produce the third kind of spores, which we have seen as patches of orange dust, and which we call rust. From here they find their winter quarters on dried grass. A cryptogamist requires twenty different words to express the spore forms, the plant forms, the bed and the hotels, which this tiny and lowly creature requires, so many ideas arc lodged in the creation of it. Take a stride across the thousand steps from fungus to grass and lily and fir and oak and rose to the seaweed. The seaweed unites both i^lant and THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 6^ animal characteristics, locomotion in the larval stage and fixture in the adult stage. From the border region of the seaweed we go on to the ocean flowers and sea anemones and starfishes and bird and mammal, and we reach the Primates. In the Primates we meet with the subtle phenomenon of humour. In the idea of them we see that sly, slant, shy imitation of us, which is of the nature of humour. They mock us unconsciously. We encounter the mockable element in man, just at the junction where flesh is passing into mind, animality into mentality. If man allows vanity, lust, vulgarity in his nature, he delivers himself to be mocked and monkeyed. Mind when it admits these inferior elements is delivered over to Nature, and Nature has her satirist ready. The monkey is there to explain man to himself, who he is, who only apes reason ; very interesting are the monkey's movements, very vulgar and re- pulsive the man who does not rule himself by the highest. Nature has found her climax in the Mind of Man, which she has been labouring to produce. The word Nature comes from the future participle of the verb to be born. There is a prophecy in every stage of her of something coming which has not come, but which is in her to produce. Instinct is the flower of all life, and it looks mutely up to mind, and when humour appears and mockery in the primates, mind is not far off. Certain minds 64 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. cannot take in the notion of design in Nature, they being overloaded by one set of ideas crowd- ing out every other, a human infirmity. But the look of Nature in her progress upwards to mind is a look of purpose. The purpose of the Eternal Mind is to produce a likeness to Himself as close as parent and child. The Mind — the Eternal Mind — has been aiming at a development of physics and physiology in which will be generated a conscious relation between Him and one of His creatures. Every other relation has been auto- matic. As Mind emerges from the mindlessness of nature, nature fulfils herself. No greater creature than man is possible. The Evolution of. Man into the spiritual kingdoms is now the work of the Eternal Mind. The translation of the spiritual man into his native unseennesses by death is the other work. When we take a good grasp of the thought that we are the summary of the very varied and very ancient life below us, and the hope of a more varied and more ancient life before us, we know the meaning of the words : In the Eternal Mind was the life of the creation, and this life is the light of men (i. 4). We see who we are, and where we are, and what we are to do, and where we are going. It is space and light for us. We hold shares in what afterwards in the Memorabilia is known as Eternal Life. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 65 Light in the Memorabilia is first the symbol of the Eternal Mind, and then of the mind in man which has emerged in nature. Darkness is mind- lessness, the absence of mind. The light of mind now shineth in the darkness of a mindless Nature, and is not obscured or pulled down by it.^ It is a fixed gain in the creation. Mind remains, finding in physics and physiology her birthplace, finding in the Eternal Mind her first and last home- land. At this point our author finds that he has gone far enough in abstraction ; perhaps the Hebrew was going beyond his depth, and losing his foothold. He stops and interjects narrative into his Greek preface, and takes breath ere he resumes. " There wa.s a man sent by God whose name was John " (i. 6). He takes up the Greek strain after a flap of the wing, recovering himself The earliest function which the Mind of man per- forms is Religion. The structure of the stomach performs the function of digestion ; and the structure of the nerves the function of innervation. Mind, faculty, and feeling perform the function of religion. This is one of the largest and clearest facts which has been accented for us with new accents in our day. The most primitive mind as ^ Mark the force of KareXa^eu, verse 5. The Hght shineth in the dark- ness, and the darkness overturns it not. 66 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. it now exists, and the most ancient mind which our records register, are steeped in religion. Religion is the worship of the Eternal Mind by the human mind ; the reference of the human reason to the Eternal Reason, of Whom it is the Image, Who presses upon it, and is seen everywhere. This is the origin of Religion, about which so much is being written nowadays. The Eternal Mind is the true Light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world (i. 9). Man having got light or mind at once worships the Light of lights, the Mind of minds. The human faculty shows this worshipful correspondence, which it opens as soon as it begins its performances in the world. Dr. Turner was a missionary for forty years in Samoa, one of the Polynesian islands, and saw the islanders pass from paganism into Christianity. The islanders had no idols, but their ideas were steeped in religious conceptions. Nature was to them an incarnation of Divine thought, which awed and thrilled them with a sense of God. One family saw the incarnation in a heron, and another in a cuttle- fish, and a third in a rainbow, and these became objects of fear and reverence as manifestations of the Eternal Power over Nature. Turner says, the gods appeared to them " in some visible incarnation." ^ Very ex- quisite this childhood of the race, in which the incipient forms of the Incarnation idea appears. ' Sa/fioa, a hundred years ac^o, by George Turner, LL.U., p. 17. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 67 The capable Polynesian mind placed above these incarnations a Being whose name implies, as Tur- ner says, the Illimitable and Unrestricted/ Mr. Herbert Spencer has been an industrious student of the religions of the world, and his conclusion is, that " extreme attention to religious rites char- acterises the lower types." ^ M. Renouf, reading the monuments of the ancient Egyptians, says, " In studying their religion, we have to deal not with a mere sentiment, but with a vast and complicated system of beliefs and institutions resulting from their view of man's relations to the Unseen." ^ Ewald says of the primitive Hebrew, " Something vast and awful stood over against him and compelled him to give up or dare all things in order to approach it and draw it nearer to himself." Swinging round from the old world to the new, we meet the same phenomenon. M. Reville has given us this conclusion of his studies of the Mexican religions, which in their luxury for human sacrifice exceed in voluptuousness any- thing we know, though the Mexicans and Peruvians were semi-civilised peoples. " Indeed I know not where one could look for so complete a resume of what has constituted in all places, now the smallness and wretchedness, now the grandeur and ^ Samoa, a hundred years ago, p. 52. 2 Ecclesiastical Institutions, p. 20. ^ M. Renouf 's Hibbert Lectures^ p. 26. 68 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. nobleness, of that incomprehensible and irresistible factor of human nature which we call religion." ^ The saturation of the human mind with religious- ness is perfect. The deepest mark on humanity is cut by the religious idea. It is not far from the truth to say that Mind emerges from a religious plasma in Nature itself, or if you like it, a religious plasma constitutes the human faculty. And what is Religion but the sense of God in the soul, the corre- spondence of the mind with the Eternal Mind, the vision of the Light of lights. Religion is the chant of the awe and the beauty, the hope and the thank- fulness which the Mind has felt in the presence of the venerable Mystery Who invests us round. Religion is the ultimate attitude of mind towards the uni- verse, the expression of the sublime purport of being found in God. Sacrifice, prayer, hymn, psalm, have never ceased. In an old book which gives the ideal acts of the ideal humanity in its ideal dawn, Cain and Abel are pictured as bringing each a sacrifice which the conscience of God has inspired. The Eternal Mind is the true Light which light- eneth every man that cometh into the world (i. 9), gives him the light of mind. He is the origin of mind in man. Man is the shining of this Light, and religiousness is the direct product of it. Mr. Herbert Spencer has defined in words terse and true but inadequate in form, the Environment 1 M. Reville's Hibbert Lectures, p. So. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 69 of the Divine Light which awakes reHgiousness. In his last words on reHgion, he says : " But amid the mysteries which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that man is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed."^ The inadequacy of this conception of God consists in its being the conclusion of biological science ; as poetry it is good. Energy m.eans light. Biology maintains that life is higher than energy, that an oak is on a higher plane than light, and a hawk than heat ; protoplasm is more than physics. Mind has appeared in life, and it is still higher ; it is the crown of creation. The human brain is the most complex organ found in the zoological series, and thought which accompanies it is the highest endowment. Therefore the Inscrutable Power visible throughout the universe can be adequately repre- sented only in terms of the highest in nature, which is mind. The one absolute certainty is that man is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Mind, from which all things proceed. And further, as we know Mind only in persons, and personality is the sublime phenomena of Mind, we would get nearer to the mystery of the universe by saying that the one absolute certainty is that man is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Person, from ^ "A Retrospect and Prospect," Nineteenth Centjpy, January 1884, p. 12. 70 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. Whom all things proceed. And once more, love is the highest thing in a person, coming up through lower forms in the energy of heat, and attractions of molecule and affinities of cell, and the differentiation of germ and sperm cells into sex. Glorified sex is Love. Love is glorified energy in the strict scientific sense of the word energy. Therefore we would get still nearer to the heart of the universe by the definition that the one absolute certainty is that man is ever in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Love, from Whom all things proceed. Mr. Spencer has lost the cunning of his right hand in stopping where he has stopped, and his right hand is biology. The late Professor Clifford, with a fine insight, saw mind-stuff as the primitives even of matter. Mind must supply the materials for the justest conception of the Infinite and Eternal, and Love as the highest in the invisibles of mind carries the conception into a higher realm. " Love is a great spirit {halfxwv), and like all spirits he is intermediate between the divine and the mortal."^ " God mingles not with man, but through love all the intercourse and speech (ScdXe/cTos;) of God with man whether awake or asleep is carried on." - ''In the PJicedrus and Symposiiun love and philosophy join hands, and one is an aspect of the other." ^ So the Greek thought, God is Love — so the Hebrew sums ^ Symposium , Jowctt's Plato, vol. ii. p. 203. - Ibid. ^ Jowett's Introdttction to r/uvdnis, vol. ii. p. 77. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 71 Up. Science must come into line with philosophy and religion and give up its conceits about energy. The religions of the world have a divine mission and spiritual functions. The distinction between natural and revealed religion is now nearly broken down. All religions are revelations of God in man and to man. Two facts are the basis of all religion, the sense of God in us, and the sense of a Hereafter. These two forces are seen everywhere, dimmer and clearer, in all the religions of the world, the interpre- tation which lights up the universe for us ; effulgences brighter than the sun ; in which law, truth, duty, and beauty have been -found. Hitherto Christ has been read by the teaching of Paul ; it is the more accessible teaching for us, the lower round of the ladder. When Christ shall have been read by the teaching of the Memorabilia, fresh lights, widening the territories of the religious kingdoms, are obtained. In these remarkable words, He is the true Light which lighteneth every man that cometh into the world, we have the sanction for all the religions of the world. In words as pregnant, He was in the world and the world was made by Him, and the world knew Him not, we have the method of this sanction. The religions of the world are all Christian religions, there is a Christ in them ; but the world is uncon- scious of Him. It has pleased God to leave the Christ unknown till He is historically revealed in 72 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. the flesh. This is the truth in the preface to the Memorabilia, which no attentive reader can miss. The Eternal Mind is informing and had always informed the human mind, has kept the human mind in information of the Eternal, which has organised the religions of the world. Man has not been neglected by God ; human nature has not been a hunting ground for the devil ; the devil is only the scavenger of it. We are assisted into the meaning of the ethnic religions by the teaching elsewhere recorded. A Roman centurion had felt the Person of Jesus, and was a secret believer in Him, unknown to Him. The opportunity of a sorrow comes and he is driven to Christ, to seek resource in Him. Christ saw a faith in him, who belonged to the world outside the Hebrew, which was unknown in the more favoured Hebrew world. He delivers Himself on this occasion of a large truth, imperial in character, and imperialisms are overlooked by the human faculty. He says : Many shall come from the east and west and shall sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.^ To the east of Palestine the meridian lines embrace Assyria, Persia, the Tartaries, India, China. To the west they embrace Greece, Italy, Germany, Britain. When our Lord spoke these words these countries were what wc call Pagan or heathen, though it is time we abandoned words ^ Mall. viii. ii. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 73 which carry associations of human degradation. We should adopt the word ethnic or Gentile for all nations outside the elect Christian world, and the Jew will now be included in the Gentile world. Christ says that spiritual men are to be found in abundance, not merely in exceptions, who are prepared for the spiritual kingdoms by the systems of nature, who will be the equals of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is the way of the Memorabilia to give the rationale, the inner idea, to the synoptic records, and the interior significance of Pagan spirituality is found in the words : That was the true Light, the Light of lights, the Ideal Light, Who lighteneth every man that Cometh into the world. He was in the world, the root of the nations, and the world was made by Him, and the world was unconscious of Him. On another occasion Christ repeats the same idea, neglected by our theology, because it could not be squared with its logic. He is asked a question prompted by a serious curiosity, such as has been always asked by anxious souls walled up into a system : Lord, are there few that be saved ? The Great Teacher answers the perplexity by first insisting on a personal interest in the great salvation, from which the mind slowly expands its acreage of theological dominion. Then He throws down the walls of the system and removes the benevolent doubt : They shall come from the east and from the west and from the north and from the south, and 74 . MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. shall sit down in the kingdom of God. And behold there are last which shall be first.^ This means that the number of the saved is not only large, but is found in all nations. Every religion contributes to swell the number. It is the way of the Memorabilia to show us Christ as the conciliation of opposing systems, and this conciliation is done by the interior truth, that He is the Light which lighteneth every man who cometh into the world. Our traditional theology is just like every other old system. It has done good work, and it requires modification by the admission of those cross-lights which fall upon all knowledge in the course of tw^o or three centuries. When rightly understood it is one road through the spiritual country ; but no country is known by seeing it from one road only. Twenty roads must be taken to know the mountains and glens and lakes and plains of a great country. To men who have been seeing the spiritual country from the one road only, a report from other roads will be not only strange but incredible. The Christian ought to be like a Fellow of the Geographical Society, who entertains travellers over unexplored lands and is interested in their story. But this is just what certain minds will not do, and they are the sources of unhappy controversies. It is a misuse of our theology by so-called orthodox men. The religions of the world are maligned institu- ' Luke xiii. 29. THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 75 tions, maligned by the theology of the church and by the science of our day. The new science of biology might have helped the old science of theology into a finer estimate of religion, but it has repeated in a more vulgar form the calumnies of theology, oblivious of its own art. Biology encounters religion at the summits of life, and sends it downstairs. Re- ligion must be a science ; it is the most persistent factor in the evolution of human life. The theologian is consistent enough in his antipathy to the religions of the world, because he believes in an aboriginal catastrophe which has ruined the race, and cast nine- tenths of mankind in the arms of a semi-omnipotent devilish power, who is the God of this world, and the religions of the world are devil worships. A section of the school of science has revived this belief, and will keep it alive for some time yet, which was fast becom- ing obsolete. Mr. Spencer and Professor Huxley have traced religion to ghosts seen in the dreams of primi- tive men. It is quite a problem, humour perhaps of the ghost and grim sort, this tracing the facts of religion to the sight of ghostlands in the dreams of savages. The two articles of faith which have con- structed the institutions of religion, are the sense of God and the vision of a hereafter beyond the grave. And Spencer tells us these have been vapours of the night, and then have become masterful inspira- tions. This is mind in a fog ; the universe is too big for us, and confounds us. The imagery of 76 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. a dream is a confused reflection and refraction of waking thoughts, worked by a law similar to that of phosphorescence. Light, which has been absorbed in the day and detained in the tissues of some animals, and which is given off at night, is known to science as degraded light, and popularly as phosphorescence, though it has nothing to do with phosphorus. Thought which has left its traces in the brain as it passed through it in the day, appears at night as a network of refractions in the dream. In the language of science a dream is degraded thought. Phosphorescence bids you go back to light to understand it. A dream bids you go back to the day thought. A friend dies, and carries our life with him, and he becomes an emotion within us. God and the universe have taken him ; he is still somewhere, unlost to love. Love in collision with death visioning immortality, and assured that there is a home with God for our friends, is the day meaning of the night phantasy. It is a miscarriage of thought of serious import that men who have made large contributions to the thought of our day should not know the difference between phosphor- escence and light, between the day thought and the night dream. Surely this earth of ours is a solid island moored in the blue inane around us, and we ourselves are authentic messengers in it ; and the history of Moses and David and Paul and Pascal and Livingstone and Shaftesbury is not a THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. Tj mad coil of phantasms. It is a burlesque and a deliquium of all science to be told by philosophers that the large facts of our religious life have their origin in dreamlands and phosphorescences. It is the despair of science, despair up to the lips. Can you do even jerry-building on such foundations? You dont mean that from the cerebral gas of dreams has risen up the stately structure of Christendom. Opium smoking, which organises rare dreams, ought to be tried to produce a new religion. Can a plasma of opium reveries build up a life ? On this theory, the human brain, which is the most finished organ, of intricate traceries and grooves, is a fraud on nature. The human mind, towards which instinct looks up as its crown, turns out to be an imbecility. Evolution stands discredited, and biology is a failure and no science. Industrious and perspicuous thinkers are attempt- ing to make a science of Religion ; biology makes it a science. But they don't see that they employ phrases and words which make it impossible that it could be a science, and this obliviousness is seen in men of the type of Spencer and Huxley, and Andrew Lang. Fish god, bird god, shell worship, plant worship, ancestor worship, magic, necromancy, idolatry, superstition, are a few of the delicate and delicious phrases which are served up in this literature. It is so apparent that these phrases are steeped in as- 78 MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. sociations which suggest a degraded humanity, and in theological circles of a devil-possessed humanity. No science can be made with such a vocabulary. The first question to settle is whether the religion you are making into a science is a legitimate pro- duct of the human faculty or a disease. Are your researches into a wholesomeness or a pathology? A literature which employs such words as bird worship, shell worship, magic, fetichism, can only suggest religion as a chronic diseased secretion of the human brain. I have not seen it hinted that the bird god is a divine ideality seen in the bird by primitive men, which makes the bird a medium of religious feeling. Ancestor worship is the human ideality seen in departed spirits, which makes them a memory of God and of the spiritual world. We are not told that worship is a method of art or language to express the sense of God felt in the soul, and an effort to make it vivid. Words- worth says the celandine is an elf telling tales of the sun, a kindly unassuming spirit ; he sees a spirit in the woods ; the stars have feelings. He says that the dead Lucy Gray is still seen by many upon the wild, that the white doe of Rylstone is the daughter of the Eternal Prime. He says he is a worshipper of Nature. Was Wordsworth a celandine worshipper or a tree worshipper, because he saw the same idea in them as primitive men ? Did Wordsworth deify natural objects ? Deification is another misleading THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 79 word in the study of religion. The vocabulary we are using in the study of the religions of the world would make Wordsworth an idolater, a fetichist, a polytheist, a necromancer. It is a canon of biological science that if you want to under- stand a primitive structure, such as appears in the lower forms of life, you will get its meaning from the higher form. Read the religions of primitive men, the religions of Nature, by the light of Words- worth's worship of nature. You can get no science of religion till you abandon such words as idolatry and define such words as worship. We have even failed to perceive that idolatry is idealatry, that they both mean vision. The vision of an idea of God seen in nature and the admiration of it is idealatry. This admiration put into art is idolatry. Substitute wonder for worship, and idealatry for idolatry, and you will come at science. When bishops and professors of science worship on All Saints' Day, do they wor- ship ancestors, or is All Saints' Day an evolution of ancestor worship ? If so, look with respect on both. Superstition, as the word implies, is a belief stranded into an age with which it is not in perspective, an old belief not in perspective with present attainments, like rudimental organs which have no correlations, but which are very interesting tales of genealogy. A science of religion is only possible when we have recast its entire phraseology and dismissed the associa- tions which cluster round the current vocabulary. 8o MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. One truth which John makes conspicuous in the Memorabilia is that the beliefs, worships, and customs, and laws of men are lights which have come from the Light of lights, which is the Eternal Mind. He is the true Light which lighteneth every man who cometh into the world, and the light is never eclipsed by the darkness. He was in the world, and the world was made by Him. He underlies the universe ; the universe in- heres in Him ; the life of all nature is the stir of God ; the history of all humanity is the history of God ; the religions of the world are the varied endeavours of man seeking after the Eternal Mind, putting into art or syntax his desire after God and his homelands with Him, his admiration and adora- tion of the infinite and the eternal. Two conceptions of God are possible to the mind, and a combination of the two in various proportions has ruled the religions of the world. An analysis of the proportions is an inquiry for the science of religion. God as over the universe. Creator and Governor ; God as in the universe, a Dweller in it, inherent in it, the motion of the air, the thrill of the blackbird, the worship in man. Both con- ceptions are presented in these Memorials of Jesus, God the presiding Head and Over All of the universe ; God the inspiring Heart and the Stir within the universe. He was in the world, the throb and thrill of it. And the world was made by Him, THE ETERNAL MIND IN THE WORLD. 8i the Maker and Owner of it, God immanent and God transcendent. Plato has said, like John, that the origin of wor- ship is in the two facts that the Soul is the Eldest and most Divine of the creation, and that Mind is seen in Nature. Mind, as it appears in man, Plato would call the Soul. The vision of Mind in Nature, and the correspondence of Mind in man with God, excite worship. *' No man can be a true worshipper of the Gods who does not know these two principles, that the Soul is the Eldest of all things which are born . . . and he who has not contemplated the mind of nature which is said to exist in the stars." ^ God as a Power over nature has everywhere excited the loyalty of the human soul. As a Thought in nature, and as a Presence in man. He has been the mystic tumult of the selecter spirits of all races. It is a marvellous phenomenon, this of worship ; the worshipful attitude towards the Infinite before Whom we tremble now and rejoice at another time, Who has inspired psalm and hymn. Who has defined right and wrong, unknown to suns and planets, Who has created art and architecture by which beautiful houses have been provided for this attitude. The existence of God cannot be proved, but we don't want a God Whom we can discuss, but a God Whom we can worship. Worship is the discovery of an August Correspondent. The Being of God is an impossible ^ Lazus, Jowett's Plato, vol, v. p. 541. 6 82 • MEMORABILIA OF JESUS. idea for the intellect. It is unthinkable to thought, unutterable to language. Worship triumphs over the unthinkable and the unutterable, over the im- possibilities of the intellect, and puts us into com- munications with God. Worship is the answer of the human faculty to its native Environment. When a science of religion shall have been made out, it will be found that the evolution of religion has taken the career which is registered in the Memorabilia of John. The Venerable Mystery, the Unthinkable Power, who has excited the worship of the human faculty, is unveiled as the Eternal Father of the Eternal Jesus. In this Reverence, this occult factor is also discovered that there was an uncon- scious worship of Jesus Himself, who lay, as it were, folded up in nature and humanity. This daring conception is the dominant note of the Memorabilia, and it is an authentic audacity, verified by the worship of the modern world, which has been given equally to the Father and the Son. It is the cause, reason, and ground of Christendom. It was involved, as a suspected primordial, in the reverences of the ancient world. CHAPTER IV. THE ETERNAL MIND IN HUMAN FLESH. John i. 14-18. " And the Eternal Mind 7c>as made flesh and dwelt amongst its, and we beheld His splendoiir, the splendour as of the Only Born of the Father, fitll of beanty and truth. " " A^