Division 'BS2.4-2.I 
 
 Section ,'R9<c 
 
JUN 24 1910 
 
 %/CAL 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth 
 
 in the 
 
 Light of Today 
 
 By 
 
 Elbert 'Russell 
 
 Professor in Earlham College 
 Author of "The Parables of Jestia" 
 
 The John C. Winston Company 
 philadelphia 
 
Copyright, 1909, by 
 The John C Winston Co. 
 
INTRODUCTION. 
 
 The assertion in Hebrews that 
 "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, 
 to-day and forever' is true of his 
 historical character and of his minis- 
 try to the needs of men. Thru the 
 changing centuries he has come, the 
 unchanging Christ, scattering "the 
 charities that soothe, and heal, and 
 bless'' at the feet of men; giving 
 peace to the sin-troubled, purity to 
 the defiled, overcoming power to men 
 fighting feebly against temptation, 
 and an absorbing purpose to aimless 
 lives. 
 
 Yet the history of Christian art 
 and theology shows that each age has, 
 
 8 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 in a sense, a different Christ for its 
 own. Each appreciates him as he 
 ministers to its peculiar needs; each 
 paints him as it sees him thru its own 
 atmosphere, and interprets him in 
 terms of its philosophy. 
 
 This book, like the lecture of which 
 it is an enlargement, is an essay 
 towards the portrait of the twentieth 
 century Christ; an effort to show 
 Jesus in his saving truth and power 
 to those who may be alienated from 
 the Christ of past generations. 
 
 Credit has been given wherever I 
 have consciously used other mens 
 thoughts, but it is impossible even to 
 name the many writers and teachers 
 to whom my thanks are due for help 
 toward an appreciation of Jesus of 
 Nazareth 
 
TABLE OF CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 I. The New Point of View 7 
 
 II. The Religious Genius 12 
 
 III. The Originality of His Methods... 17 
 
 IV. The Reality of Spiritual Conquest. 21 
 V. Kingdoms Founded on the Unseen . . 25 
 
 VI. The Survival of the True 30 
 
 VII. The Universal Family 33 
 
 VIII. The Historical Basis in the Family 
 
 OF Israel 38 
 
 IX. The Ability to Convince 44 
 
 X. The Satisfaction of Permanent 
 
 Human Needs 48 
 
 XI. The Height of the Pedestal 59 
 
 XII. The Measure of a Man 67 
 
 XIII. The Name Above Every Name 74 
 
 XIV. Pitted Against the Rabbis 78 
 
 XV. The Poise of His Character 89 
 
 XVI. His Power to Touch the Conscience. 98 
 XVII. The Cosmic Meaning or His Ch.vr- 
 
 ACTER 102 
 
 XVIII. The Secret of His Powib 107 
 
Jesus of Nazareth 
 
 In the Light of To-day 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE NEW POINT OF VIEW. 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth challenged the 
 men of his time to an opinion about 
 him. Not only by his application of 
 Messianic prophecies to himself and 
 by the implied claims of his triumphal 
 entry, but in express words he pressed 
 upon the people the question, "Whom 
 say ye that I am? What think ye 
 of the Christ?" These questions his 
 contemporaries answered from the 
 standpoint of their age according to 
 their knowledge of Jesus and their 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 attitude toward him. The changes 
 of nineteen centuries, however, make 
 it impossible for us to adopt their 
 answers without criticism or revision. 
 Since the sixteenth century, espe- 
 cially, the knowledge and opinions of 
 the western world have undergone so 
 great changes, that the world we live 
 in is, to our thought, very different 
 from that in which the men of the 
 first century lived. This change, 
 which was most rapid in the last half 
 of the nineteenth centurj'', was pro- 
 duced chiefly by the new historical 
 and scientific spirit and methods, and 
 by the general acceptance of the 
 theory of evolution. Modern his- 
 torical inquiry has given new stand- 
 ards of historical probability and 
 changed the world's judgment in 
 many things as to the course of 
 human events. The new scientific 
 method has not only freed men's 
 
 8 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 minds from the Medieval supersti- 
 tions, but has created a new sense of 
 God's ways in the world and new con- 
 ceptions of the laws of spiritual 
 things. These forces have pro- 
 foundly influenced religious thought. 
 Many religious opinions once unques- 
 tioned are no longer tenable by the 
 modern mind; not so much because 
 men have been convinced by formal 
 argument that they are false, as that 
 they no longer appear true from the 
 new point of view; that they do not 
 fit in with the world of reality as seen 
 in the light of to-day. 
 
 It is in this light that we are led to 
 re-examine the character and claims 
 of Jesus. Let us face the question 
 frankly : The twentieth century man, 
 who is in harmony with the historical 
 and scientific spirit, who thinks in 
 terms of the evolutionary philosophy, 
 who presupposes the commonly 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 accepted results of the historical and 
 literary criticism of the Bible, espe- 
 cially of the Gospels, — what shall he 
 think of Jesus of Nazareth? Let us 
 attempt to form an estimate of his 
 character and importance as a force 
 in history in the same spirit and by 
 the same methods by which we would 
 attempt to estimate the significance 
 of any other historical personage, 
 such as Napoleon or Hannibal, Bud- 
 dha or Mohammed. 
 
 We may not avoid such an inquiry 
 by the plea that we lack special quali- 
 fications as philosophers and critical 
 historians. The common attitude to 
 Jesus of Nazareth must spring from 
 the opinions of common men and 
 women like ourselves, — men and 
 women who are compelled to form 
 the opinions we live by without spec- 
 ial qualifications, philosophical or 
 critical. In fulfilling this duty the 
 
 10 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 specialists in various lines of thought 
 give us indispensable aid, but in the 
 last analysis we cannot escape the 
 responsibility of forming our own 
 opinions as to the attitude we ought 
 to take toward Jesus of Nazareth, 
 and what place we shall give him 
 among the forces to which we open 
 our lives. A proper sense of the 
 limitations of our knowledge will 
 keep us humble and teachable; but 
 the human mind, limited and fallible 
 as it is, is the only knowing and think- 
 ing organ we possess, and we are 
 under obligations to do the best we 
 can with it. After using every 
 means to get at the truth, we honor 
 our Maker best by living up to what 
 the instruments he has given us show 
 us of truth and duty; for we must 
 live by what appears true rather than 
 by what seems to be false. 
 
 11 
 
CHAPTER II. 
 
 THE RELIGIOUS GENIUS. 
 
 According to common classifica- 
 tions of men, we should call Jesus a 
 religious genius. Religious matters 
 were from his early youth his absorb- 
 ing interest; religious perfection was 
 the passion of his life; and the spir- 
 itual relations of men occupied him 
 wholly as a teacher. His earliest 
 recorded utterance shows that even 
 before his maturity he had shown an 
 absorbing interest in matters relig- 
 ious. When, on the occasion of a 
 visit to Jerusalem at twelve years of 
 age, Joseph and Mary, after a long 
 search, found him at last in the tem- 
 
 19 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 pie, he expressed surprise that their 
 previous knowledge of his ways and 
 interests had not led them to seek him 
 first of all in the temple: "Why did 
 ye seek me?" he asked, "Did ye not 
 know that I must be in my Father's 
 house?" 
 
 Jesus urged other men to enter 
 into a relation of perfect obedience 
 with God, but he claimed always to 
 have known this relation himself. 
 He exhorted other men to repent of 
 their sins as the only way to enter 
 the kingdom of God, but no words 
 of repentance ever fell from his own 
 lips. He claimed to live in perfect 
 unity with God. He challenged 
 men to convict him of sin. This 
 claim, however, is not the unique 
 thing about him. It is not unknown 
 for men thru religious fanaticism or 
 insanity to claim to be sinless; but it 
 is difficult to get those who know 
 
 13 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 them best to allow the claim. If no 
 man is a hero to his valet, it is because 
 the valet sees him in those hours when 
 he drops the heroic role. Now and 
 then a man may persuade enthusiastic 
 follovvxrs, who never see him except 
 when he is made up for the character 
 and acting the part, that he is a saint ; 
 but it is more difficult to get his wife, 
 children and servants, who know him 
 M^hen he is off guard, wearied and 
 vexed with trifles, to believe in his 
 perfection. The marvel about Jesus 
 is that they who knew him best are 
 they who published his claim to sin- 
 lessness as true. It was first of all 
 the circle of his closest disciples and 
 immediate family, — those who saw 
 him weary, sleepy, hungry, harassed 
 with life's petty cares, and the victim 
 of petty malice, who believed that he 
 did always the things pleasing to 
 God. 
 
 14 
 
JESUS or NAZARETH 
 
 He saw and interpreted life in 
 terms of spiritual relations. To him 
 the world was the Father's house. 
 In the sunrise and the falling rain, in 
 the springing grass, the glory of the 
 lily and the feeding birds he saw the 
 impartial benevolence of God. To 
 him the whole range and process of 
 life, — sowing and reaping, making of 
 bread and giving of feasts, care of 
 sheep, fishing, trading, travelling, 
 building, and ruling, — was a parable 
 and revelation of the spiritual laws 
 and forces that underlie and give 
 meaning to the visible world. At 
 his baptism he became assured that he 
 was the expepted JNIessiah of the 
 Jews, sent of God to bring deliver- 
 ance to his people and to found the 
 kingdom of God on earth. But he 
 held that the deliverance the nation 
 needed was not political freedom 
 from Rome, nor military mastery 
 
 15 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 over the Gentiles; but to be freed 
 from sin and all selfishness; to be 
 released from greed, bestiality, envy 
 and cruelty; to be made kind and 
 helpful to all men, and trustful and 
 obedient toward God. His task he 
 conceived to be the bringing in of a 
 kingdom that was not outward, but 
 the essence of which was for God's 
 will to be done on earth as it is in 
 heaven. 
 
 16 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 THE ORIGINALITY OF HIS 
 METHODS. 
 
 We have seen something of the 
 originahty of Jesus' character and 
 point of view. They prepare us for 
 the originahty of his methods. At 
 the outset he was confronted with 
 temptations to take an unspiritual 
 view of his work. Popular patriot- 
 ism demanded pohtical independence 
 thru a successful war, and a splendid 
 government like that of David and 
 Solomon. It was expected that the 
 Messiah would bring immunity from 
 toil for daily bread. It is written 
 in the Apocalypse of Baruch that in 
 
 17 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 Messiah's time so great would be the 
 fertility of Palestine's limestone hills 
 that every vine would bear a thousand 
 clusters, and every cluster a thousand 
 grapes, and every grape would yield 
 a keg of wine. The ecclesiastical 
 leaders expected the Messiah to 
 usher in an age of miraculous por- 
 tents to satisfy the people's love of 
 the marvelous and to give proof of 
 his divine appointment. "Signs and 
 bread" was the Jewish equivalent of 
 the demand of the idle Roman popu- 
 lace for "bread and circuses." By 
 feeding and amusing the populace, 
 the "lords of the Gentiles" were 
 enabled to keep their dominion; and 
 if Jesus had yielded to the expecta- 
 tions of his people, if he had turned 
 the stones of Palestine into bread for 
 them, and had entertained them by 
 such marvels as leaping from the roof 
 of the temple into the Kedron valley 
 
 18 
 
JESUS OF NAZAEETH 
 
 and returning unharmed, borne up 
 by angels, they would have been his 
 servants. But Jesus placed no reli- 
 ance on such means. Man he knew 
 to be something other than an animal 
 to be glutted with food, something 
 more than a child to be amused with 
 strange trifles. Nor was Jesus 
 deceived by the lesson that the "king- 
 doms of the world" seemed to teach. 
 Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, 
 Alexander and Caesar had each won 
 world-empire by the sword. To 
 adopt their method seemed the only 
 feasible way to win the world to him- 
 self and God. Before such a temp- 
 tation to sacrifice everything for the 
 sake of easy, immediate, visible 
 results, INIohammed afterwards fell. 
 After he had tried the slow method 
 of teaching the truth as he saw it, 
 for ten years, he gave up reliance on 
 the power of truth and took to the 
 
 19 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 sword. Before this temptation the 
 Medieval Church fell, when it aban- 
 doned the attempt to convince men 
 of the truth of its doctrines by the 
 logic of argument and experience, 
 and resorted to the sword and fagot 
 to win and hold its power. But here 
 Jesus did not fall. His originality 
 lies in his rejection of all outward 
 forces and his reliance on the power 
 of truth and self-sacrificing love to 
 win the world. But was it the origi- 
 nality of inspiration or the eccen- 
 tricity of a madman? 
 
 30 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 THE REALITY OF SPIR- 
 ITUAL CONQUEST. 
 
 In order to judge of the character 
 of Jesus' originality, we must ascer- 
 tain whether it be true to human 
 nature. JModern historical study has 
 enabled us to distinguish between 
 mihtary conquest and spiritual con- 
 quest. Sometimes the two go 
 together, and in such cases it is diffi- 
 cult to distinguish them, but they are 
 not identical and do not necessarily 
 go together. The ancient Assyrians 
 furnish an example of military unac- 
 companied by spiritual conquest. 
 Their military prowess has rarely 
 
 31 
 
JESUS OF NAZAEETH 
 
 been surpassed. During the cen- 
 turies of their power they were uni- 
 formly successful as besiegers and 
 conquerors, but they were unable to 
 reconcile their subjects to their 
 dominion or win them to Assyrian 
 ideals. Whenever an Assyrian king 
 died, the empire dissolved into its con- 
 stituent peoples, and tho for centuries 
 each succeeding monarch was able 
 to defeat the rebels and bring them 
 again under the yoke, they could 
 never assuage the hate of their sub- 
 ject races. They only succeeded in 
 rendering it impotent by deporting 
 and mixing peoples wholesale, so as 
 to kill their national feelings and 
 aspirations. Even then these rem- 
 nants never became loyal to the 
 Assyrian government. Contrast with 
 this, Alexander's conquest of the 
 Persian empire. He not only 
 defeated the orientals in battle, but 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 SO enthused them with loyalty to his 
 own ideals of a world-empire and 
 with love of the Hellenic culture that 
 he represented, that when his Greek 
 troops mutinied and demanded to be 
 led back to Greece, he was able to 
 quell them by the aid of the Persian 
 troops whom he had won to his ideals 
 and inspired with loyalty to his per- 
 son, after he had beaten them in bat- 
 tle. In this case spiritual conquest 
 accompanied military conquest. But 
 history tells us of military con- 
 querors who have in turn been con- 
 quered by the spiritual forces of the 
 defeated race. It is a commonplace 
 of history how the Romans went to 
 school to the Greeks after they had 
 subdued the Hellenic states by force 
 of arms ; how they learned language, 
 philosophy, and art, sitting at the feet 
 of slaves and bowing to the spiritual 
 authority of their subjects. Like- 
 
 23 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 wise when the Germanic tribes had 
 overthrown the Roman empire, so 
 great was their reverence for the 
 rehgion, culture, and ideals of justice 
 of Roman civilization, that they sub- 
 jected themselves to the spiritual 
 power of Rome, binding thereto both 
 mind and conscience for the thou- 
 sand years of the Middle Age. No 
 lesson of history is clearer than that 
 they who take the sword and rely 
 upon it alone, perish by the sword. 
 The only permanent conquests are 
 those made in the realm of the spirit 
 by love, truth or justice; and it was 
 by these, without the confusion and 
 hindrances which armies always intro- 
 duce into the process, that Jesus 
 sought to conquer the world. 
 
 34 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 KINGDOMS FOUNDED ON 
 
 THE UNSEEN. 
 
 The ultimate basis of all social 
 organizations is spiritual. Not only 
 the kingdom of God but the king- 
 doms of the world are within men, 
 resting on inward foundations. It 
 is sometimes asserted that the ulti- 
 mate appeal of government is to mili- 
 tary or other forms of physical force. 
 This is never true. The ultimate 
 appeal of governments is to the 
 loyalty of their citizens, or at least to 
 the loyalty of the military or some 
 other powerful section of the citizen- 
 ship. A few years ago when Russia 
 
 25 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 seemed in the midst of a revolu- 
 tion the crucial question finally be- 
 came whether the army would remain 
 loyal. Because the Cossacks re- 
 mained true to the house of Roman- 
 off, the Russian autocracy remains. 
 Napoleon could conquer Europe 
 with his legions only after he had 
 won them by other than physical 
 force to fight for him. If by the 
 magnetism of his personality and the 
 spell of his genius Napoleon could 
 get a half -million men to follow him 
 even to death, why should it be 
 unthinkable that Jesus should get the 
 world by similar means to become 
 and remain subjects of his kingdom? 
 Such were the foundations Jesus 
 laid for his kingdom, and he would 
 not seek to augment his power, nor 
 risk its stability by assuming the out- 
 ward forms and buttresses of king- 
 ship. In a hereditary monarchy, the 
 
 26 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 hereditary king may be lacking in 
 kingly qualities, so that he needs the 
 paraphernalia of royalty to hide 
 his lack of kingly person and char- 
 acter, and to secure that homage and 
 obedience which men yield to the 
 ideal of order and justice for which 
 the throne and scepter stand, but 
 which his person could not inspire. 
 But the true kingly person does not 
 need such aids and disguises, and so 
 Jesus sought to become king of men, 
 without robe or crown, throne or 
 scepter, by the sheer force of his per- 
 sonality, by the convincing power of 
 his teaching and the winning power 
 of his love. By such means would he 
 win his kingdom and on such a basis 
 let it rest. It was his trust in the suf- 
 ficiency of these that made him seem 
 so utterly careless of the future of 
 his movement. He neglected the 
 ordinary means on which men rely to 
 
 87 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 propagate or buttress a cause. He 
 wrote no book, accumulated no 
 wealth, formed no government, 
 organized no church. He came to 
 cast fire upon the earth and needed 
 nothing more after it had kindled. 
 Against the world's hoary bulwarks 
 of evil he set the blazing passion of 
 his cross, and having seen the flame 
 kindle in his disciples, he went his 
 way sure that he had overcome the 
 world. He planted his kingdom as 
 seed and leaven in the hearts of men, 
 confident of the vital power of its 
 truth and love to grow and fructify 
 in the soil of humanity, assured that 
 it would permeate and transform the 
 world. The power of an idea, or a 
 resolution, or a passion to make his- 
 tory and to change and determine 
 destiny is a commonplace of our 
 thinking to-day, but with Jesus it was 
 the daring of genius, the insight of 
 
 28 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 inspiration. Thus we reach one 
 measure of the greatness of Jesus, as 
 we see how far he surpassed his con- 
 temporaries in insight, and realize 
 how great was the faith required to 
 adopt such a plan in the face of the 
 world's skepticism and hostility; how 
 faring the courage to hold it fast even 
 in the seeming failure of the end. 
 
 89 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 THE SURVIVAL OF THE 
 TRUE. 
 
 Let us now consider Jesus' teach- 
 ing. It was as a teacher that he was 
 most commonly known and it was 
 thru his teaching mainly that he 
 sought to accomplish his work. We 
 may apply to his teaching the test of 
 survival. The doctrine of the sur- 
 vival of the fittest means, in a general 
 way, that the organisms, which are 
 best fitted to meet the conditions 
 imposed upon them by their environ- 
 ment, will survive and perpetuate 
 themselves. In this way survival 
 becomes a test of truth, in so far as 
 so 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 by truth we mean conformity to the 
 conditions under which an organism 
 exists. There are many things, for 
 example, that limit the possibility of 
 growing apple-trees successfully in 
 our country. The varieties that sur- 
 vive are those that are able to with- 
 stand our severe winters, dry sum- 
 mers, and numerous insect pests. 
 Varieties that are not able to resist 
 these successfully die out. Conse- 
 quently the fact that a given variety 
 of apple is successfully grown here 
 is proof of its adjustment to these 
 conditions. The buck's horn, to take 
 another illustration, is a weed that 
 thrives in the clover fields, because of 
 its admirable fitness for life under the 
 conditions found there. It grows 
 about the height of the clover, and 
 springs and seeds as quickly after 
 mowing. Its seed is so near the 
 color, size and weight of the clover- 
 si 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 seed that it is nearly impossible to 
 pick, screen, or blow it out. Turn- 
 ing to forms of human society we 
 may apply the same principles, for 
 forms of human society follow the 
 laws of organic life. That form of 
 human society, whether economic, 
 political, or religious, will last longest 
 and be most vigorous, which is most 
 in accord with the deep and abiding 
 traits of human nature and with the 
 spiritual and moral laws of the world. 
 That organization will be most last- 
 ing which is based on the forces that 
 are most powerful to move and hold 
 men. Consequently we may apply 
 to Jesus' teaching concerning the 
 kingdom of God the test of survival, 
 and by this means determine whether 
 it be true to spiritual realities. 
 
CHAPTER VII. 
 THE UNIVERSAL FAMILY. 
 
 Jesus taught that in the family at 
 
 its best are found the truest relations 
 
 of human beings to each other, — 
 
 truest to their best nature and most 
 
 permanent needs; for when we 
 
 examine his teaching carefully, his 
 
 kingdom of God turns out to be a 
 
 universal family. God stands to its 
 
 members as their Father. Men are 
 
 to act toward God as sons, and 
 
 toward each other as brothers. The 
 
 motives that rule in his kingdom are 
 
 those of the family stript of its 
 
 limitations of kin and blood : perfect 
 
 trust and obedience toward the 
 
 33 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 Father, and unselfish love and help- 
 fulness toward one another; for not 
 competition but self-denying love is 
 the law of family life. The strong 
 brother, if he be a true brother, shares 
 the gains of his superior strength 
 with the weakling; and the principle 
 of self-denial which Jesus made 
 fundamental in his ideal character 
 is the basal law of parenthood. 
 
 To the family, then, — the one 
 human institution which is in any 
 large degree founded on the princi- 
 ples of Jesus' kingdom, — we may 
 apply directly the test of survival, 
 and thus determine in some degree, 
 how far its relations and motives are 
 true to human nature. We find that 
 the family is the fundamental form 
 of all social life and the most endur- 
 ing one. Individualism is never the 
 first condition of life. One is a 
 member of a family first, and 
 
 34 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 becomes a separate individual only by 
 reason of the gifts of the family. 
 Out of it by expansion, as in the 
 patriarchal family and in racial 
 nations and religions, or by covenant 
 or conquest grow the larger organ- 
 izations, such as nations, churches, 
 and economic corporations. These 
 organizations, founded on some 
 other principles than those which 
 regulate the family and hold it 
 together, come and go on the stage 
 of history, but the family remains 
 fundamentally the same. Physical 
 force, law and penalty, individual 
 rights and freedom, or commercial 
 interests have never proven so true to 
 the nature and needs of man as to be 
 able to make the institutions founded 
 on them permanent. Nay, more! 
 Other institutions are able to main- 
 tain themselves while they last largely 
 by the aid of the reserve power of 
 
 35 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 the family motives. A tottering 
 nation seeks to support itself by ap- 
 pealing to its citizens' love of home, 
 and recruits its armies in crises from 
 those to whom patriotism means the 
 defense of hearth and family. The 
 church feels secure as long as its roots 
 are in the home; as long as fathers 
 and mothers are its recruiting agents. 
 It makes its strongest appeals to 
 family interests, when it exhorts a 
 man to be religious in order to pre- 
 serve the family name from disgrace ; 
 in order to be true to parents' hopes 
 or worthy of a woman's love, or pre- 
 pared to meet the loved and lost in the 
 life beyond the grave. On the other 
 hand, that church or nation which at- 
 tacks the family with monastic ideals 
 or communistic practices is doomed 
 early to perish. Judged by its power 
 to survive, the family is truest to the 
 spiritual nature and needs of man. 
 
 36 
 
JESUS OF XAZARETH 
 
 And this fact sets the seal of truth 
 upon Jesus' teaching that the ideal 
 and eternal form of human society 
 will be attained in the relations of a 
 universal family. 
 
 3T 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE HISTORICAL BASIS IN 
 THE FAMILY OF ISRAEL. 
 
 In another way we may apply the 
 test of survival. Ideas and institu- 
 tions are most likely to prove true 
 and lasting which have a definite 
 basis in history. Men cannot go up 
 into the mount of speculation for 
 something entirely new and detached 
 from previous experience, and then 
 bring down such a pattern and make 
 it live and work among men. The 
 best that can be done is to advance a 
 step along the line of past achieve- 
 ments or try on a universal scale 
 something worked out by a small 
 
 38 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 people or in a limited field. The con- 
 stitution of the United States has 
 worked so well because the framers 
 of it kept so closely to the principles 
 and forms developed by the English 
 people in their long progress toward 
 popular government, and found 
 practicable by the colonists in the 
 freer conditions of life in America. 
 It gives confidence, therefore, in the 
 teaching of Jesus, when we find that 
 it rests solidly upon the history and 
 religious development of the Jewish 
 people; that he himself consciously 
 undertook but a larger fulfilment, 
 not a destruction, of that w^hich had 
 gone before. We find that the Jews 
 were in many senses a family nation. 
 More than any other civilized people, 
 unless it be the Chinese, family loy- 
 alty dominated them. Even Solomon 
 could not obliterate their tribal dis- 
 tinctions in the interest of a firmer 
 
 39 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 national organization. Their national 
 consciousness was that they were the 
 children of Abraham and Israel. 
 They thought in the categories of 
 family relations. The suburbs of 
 Jerusalem were her "daughters." A 
 peaceable man was a "son of peace;" 
 a wise man, a "son of wisdom." Jew- 
 ish ethics, as interpreted by their 
 greatest teachers, the prophets, were 
 the virtues and obligations of the 
 family enlarged in scope; and they 
 expressed their religion in the lan- 
 guage of the family. Jehovah was 
 to them the husband or father of the 
 nation. The covenant which w^as the 
 beginning of their religion was the 
 people's betrothal to Jehovah; and 
 their sins were unfaithfulness and 
 adultery toward Him. 
 
 The world's master thinkers and 
 writers are such because in them the 
 truth, worked out in some great epoch 
 
 40 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 of human history, has found perman- 
 ent artistic expression. Thus Homer 
 immortahzed the hfe and spirit of 
 the early Hellenes; Dante expressed 
 in his Divine Comedy the dominating 
 beliefs of the Middle Ages; Shakes- 
 peare became the poet of English 
 Feudalism; and Milton, of the Ren- 
 aissance Puritanism. Thus Goethe's 
 Faust expresses in classic form the 
 noble, but wild unrest of the eigh- 
 teenth century. In like manner 
 Jesus' teaching as to the kingdom of 
 God rests upon the historic basis of 
 Jewish life and ideals. The prin- 
 ciples that held the Jews together he 
 extended to include all men. Altho 
 the Jews would not follow him into 
 this universal fellowship; altho they 
 could not entertain the idea of ad- 
 mitting the hated Gentiles to share 
 the blessings of the family and God 
 of Abraham, think how their limited 
 
 41 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 adoption of the principles of family 
 life among themselves has given per- 
 manency to their race ! One would not 
 expect to find to-day a living member 
 of one of the nations that were 
 neighbors to the ancient Hebrews. 
 Where would one look to-day for an 
 Edomite, Assyrian, or Philistine? 
 Yet you may find on the street to-day 
 in almost any city of the world the 
 hooked nose and olive complexion of 
 the pure-blooded Jew. For two 
 thousand years the Jews have main- 
 tained their numbers and racial 
 identity, without the asylum of a 
 common country, deprived of the 
 protection of a political government, 
 exposed to the religious hate and 
 covetous envy of their Gentile neigh- 
 bors, scattered among nations that 
 have afflicted and robbed them. If 
 their partial realization of the rela- 
 tions and motives which Jesus taught 
 
 4S 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 has thus enabled them to survive, how 
 true must these be to the nature of 
 man, and how much more might we 
 expect the kingdom of Jesus to be 
 eternal! 
 
 43 
 
CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ABILITY TO 
 CONVINCE. 
 
 In a third way we may apply the 
 test of survival to the teaching of 
 Jesus. We may judge of its truth 
 bj^ its ability to stand the test of 
 criticism and win the assent of men. 
 Euclid's geometrical propositions are 
 still held to be true, because his rea- 
 soning and his demonstrations have 
 always convinced men that his propo- 
 sitions are true to the laws of thought 
 and to the relations of objects in 
 space. In a similar way the teach- 
 ing of Jesus has secured the assent 
 of men. This is the element of truth 
 
 44 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 in the Roman Church's test of 
 "universality." It is not a test that 
 can be apphed in any limited fashion. 
 Prophets and geniuses are usually so 
 far in advance of their age that they 
 are but partially recognized as her- 
 alds of truth. Great thinkers and 
 teachers have too often to appeal 
 from the judgment of their own 
 generation to that of generations to 
 come. On the other hand a too lim- 
 ited application of the principle might 
 seem to prove the truth of any system 
 of belief that obtains wide accept- 
 ance, such as Mohammedanism or 
 Medieval demonology. Yet even in 
 such cases as these the principle holds 
 in part, since no conception ever ob- 
 tains wide acceptance among men 
 that does not contain large elements 
 of truth, which, rather than its limita- 
 tions and errors, secure its acceptance. 
 The real value of the test proposed 
 
 45 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 is expressed in Abraham Lincoln's 
 famous saying that it is impossible 
 "to fool all the people all the time." 
 In spite of the fact that Jesus' own 
 generation largely rejected him, he 
 has been able to convince men of all 
 ages who have given his teachings 
 candid thought and have tested it in 
 the laboratory of spiritual experience. 
 This is all the more wonderful since 
 he never formulated his message into 
 a system nor wrote it out in a treatise. 
 He dropped his teaching in discon- 
 nected discourses among the multi- 
 tudes or uttered it in fragmentary 
 form in parables and proverbs, which 
 were preserved only in the recollec- 
 tions of his disciples. Yet in this form 
 it has stood the test of the most care- 
 ful scrutiny for two thousand years; 
 by minds both candid and hostile ; by 
 minds as diverse and keen as the 
 Greeks, Romans, Medieval scholas- 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 tics, and modern scientific scholars. 
 Its truth and convincing power were 
 never better shown than in the fact 
 that to-day the cry of the world's 
 scholarship, understanding as it does, 
 the teaching of Jesus more thor- 
 oughly than any previous age, is 
 "Back to Christ." 
 
 47 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 THE SATISFACTION OF 
 
 PERMANENT HUMAN 
 
 NEEDS, 
 
 Let us apply still another test to 
 the teaching of Jesus, — the satisfac- 
 tion of permanent human needs. Mr. 
 Balfour in his "Foundations of 
 Belief" lays this down as one of the 
 fundamental bases of belief. We be- 
 lieve those things to be true, he main- 
 tains, which in practical life bring us 
 the satisfaction of our needs. In 
 spite of theoretic difficulties we hold 
 fast to those ideas which work in 
 practise; and on the other hand, no 
 theory, however plausible it may be 
 
 48 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 from a speculative point of view, is 
 seriously accepted as true unless 
 those who act upon it find that it 
 brings them into harmonious contact 
 with reality. 
 
 The history of human thought is 
 filled with the names of men who have 
 won distinction by giving clear ex- 
 pression to some phase of truth as it 
 appeared to their own age, but whose 
 opinions have proven false or inade- 
 quate in the experience of succeeding 
 ages. Others there are who have so 
 thoroughly grasped some vital truth 
 and given it so exact a statement that 
 it answers for all ages. To which 
 class does Jesus belong? There are 
 those who assert that the unique value 
 of Jesus' teaching passed away with 
 the progress of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury; that the new thought-world in 
 which we live has out-dated him. The 
 case is stated somewhat in these 
 
 49 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 terms: We live in a world very dif- 
 ferent from that assumed in his 
 teaching. We no longer regard the 
 earth as flat nor as the central body 
 in the universe. We have outgrown 
 the superstitious belief in angels and 
 devils which he shared with his Jew-, 
 ish contemporaries. Jewish Messian- 
 ism with its cataclysmic ideas of 
 history, its crass and artificial notions 
 of spiritual events, its other-worldli- 
 ness and supernaturalism, is a dead 
 system of thought; yet it is the sys- 
 tem which is presupposed in his 
 teaching. Even the Greek philoso- 
 phy in terms of which his followers 
 first interpreted him and his message 
 to the non-Jewish world is no longer 
 regarded as an adequate expression 
 of truth. A new world has dawned 
 upon the minds of men, of which 
 Jesus never thought, much less 
 taught ; and with this new world there 
 
 50 
 
JESUS OF X A Z A R E T H 
 
 has come a host of new problems 
 about which he had nothing to say 
 and in which he can give the world 
 no help. JNIoreover, we are told, it 
 is absurd to think that a peasant of 
 ancient Judea, an unlettered man 
 from one of the least significant pro- 
 vinces of the ancient world should be 
 the ideal person, and the teacher of 
 final truth to the twentieth century. 
 This view demands our careful 
 attention. From its consideration we 
 may, first of all, eliminate the 
 matters of time, place, and size. 
 Truth and character are spiritual 
 realities and therefore not to be 
 measured in terms of space and time, 
 albeit we Americans are sometimes 
 tempted to believe that bigness may 
 make up for deficiencies of character 
 or truth. Whether a hog existed 
 yesterday or two thousand years ago 
 has nothing to do with its hoggish- 
 
 51 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 ness; nor would it change its char- 
 acter for it to be the size of an 
 elephant. Nero is neither more nor 
 less of a tyrannical character because 
 he was tyrant of the Roman world 
 instead of tyrant of Syracuse. The 
 size of a country has nothing to do 
 with the truth of a man's teaching 
 who happens to be born in it. Greece 
 and Holland are not much larger 
 than Judea; yet no one has seen fit 
 to doubt the correctness of Phidias' 
 art nor to discount Grotius' princi- 
 ples of international law because 
 these men lived in time long past or 
 in countries so small. Senor Barbossa 
 of Brazil, in an eloquent plea for the 
 right of small nations to furnish 
 judges for the world's court at the 
 Hague, calls attention to the fact 
 that the greatest lawgivers of the 
 world, Moses and Solon, came from 
 among little peoples. The greatest 
 
 52 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 contributions to the underlying prin- 
 ciples of our civilization have been 
 made by four small countries and 
 mostly in ancient times — Judea, 
 Greece, the city of Rome, and Eng- 
 land. The question of the truth of 
 a man's teaching must be, then, not 
 one of time, place, or size, but one of 
 fact. We must ask, "Did this man 
 tell the world the relations of things 
 as they are? Did he show men the 
 permanent laws and forces of life?'* 
 Some things are true in one genera- 
 tion, which are not true in another, 
 because in the progress of history the 
 facts change. A teacher who calls 
 attention to such things is not a per- 
 manent teacher of men, except as the 
 historian of an order that has passed 
 away. Other things are as perman- 
 ent as the universe itself, and those 
 who discover and proclaim these per- 
 manent realities are teachers of all 
 
 53 
 
JESL'S OF XAZAEETH 
 
 ages. To the latter class belongs 
 Euclid. He set forth the relations of 
 lines and points in space as they are; 
 and until the constitution of the uni- 
 verse changes so that these relations 
 are no longer as he taught them, he 
 will remain the world's final teacher 
 of geometry, as far as his teaching 
 goes. To which class does Jesus be- 
 long ? Did he tell the truths concern- 
 ing man's relations to man and to 
 God as they are ideally and etern- 
 ally? Did he show the unchanging 
 laws and forces of the spiritual life? 
 Have the relations and needs of men 
 so changed in the twentieth centun*- 
 that his teaching is no longer true to 
 the facts nor satisfj-ing to man's 
 spiritual needs? 
 
 It must be recognized at the outset 
 that Jesus did not give teaching 
 about a host of problems which we 
 find of interest. Modem philosophy 
 
 54 
 
JESrS OF NAZARETH 
 
 raises the question of the existence 
 and character of the *'thing-in-itseir' 
 apart from our apprehension of it, 
 Jesus never considered the question. 
 Xone of his recorded utterances dis- 
 cusses problems of Old Testament 
 criticism. He does not tell us the 
 date of Deuteronomy, tlie author of 
 Job, or whether Jonah is a history or 
 a parable. Is a monarchy or a demo- 
 cracy the right form of government ? 
 What proportion of the gains of in- 
 dustry- sliould go to capital and what 
 to labor .^ Are tlie nebular hypo- 
 thesis and theory of organic evolu- 
 tion true? Jesus does not tell us. 
 But while he does not give answers to 
 so majiy of the pn^blems tliat press 
 for solution upon the modern mind, 
 he does, nevertheless, speak of those 
 things that still constitute the great 
 interests and minister to tlie supreme 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 needs of modern life.* If the scholar 
 of the twentieth century may not go 
 to him to solve problems of nature 
 and history, he does still need to 
 learn from him the spirit that should 
 actuate him in his work and deter- 
 mine his attitude to his fellows. Too 
 often the halls of learning resound 
 with acrimonious debates, with sel- 
 fish claims of priority of discovery, 
 and with bitter charges of dishonest 
 methods. Too often we find men 
 pursuing the world's mysteries with 
 irreverent feet, bent on gain or fame, 
 with little thought of the good of 
 men or the praise of God. The world 
 of scholarship has not outgrown the 
 need to sit at Jesus' feet and learn 
 the lessons of unselfish devotion to 
 truth, of humility, and of love. Jesus 
 gave no teaching on the economic 
 
 * Maoh of the rest of thia sectiou was suggested 
 J)y Schmidt, The Prophet of Nazareth, Chapter XIV. 
 
 56 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 laws of wealth and its accumulation; 
 but he does teach the truth which the 
 modern world so sorely needs to 
 know, — that it does not pay to sacri- 
 fice one's higher self to gain even the 
 whole wealth of the world. Jesus 
 does not prescribe one form of gov- 
 ernment as best for men; but he 
 does teach by precept and example 
 that governments must exist for the 
 common good, and that those who 
 rule must serve. Jesus does not give 
 rules for fixing the prices men may 
 charge for the output of the fac- 
 tories ; but he does assert the supreme 
 worth of the men, women and chil- 
 dren who tend the machines. He 
 WTote no treatise, to be sure, on the 
 construction of ships or the operation 
 of a wireless telegraph; but he does 
 tell us what we still need to be 
 taught, that the ship when built must 
 go on errands of mercy, not of de- 
 
 57 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 struction; that the message sent by 
 ^vireless must be a message of justice 
 and love, not one of hate or war. 
 With all modern discoveries and 
 achievements in medicine and sur- 
 gery, — splendid and beneficent as 
 they are, — men have discovered no 
 surgery for a broken heart, no balm 
 for a sin-sick soul, no antidote for 
 sensuality's creeping death other 
 than those taught by the great soul- 
 physician of Nazareth. And while 
 human nature remains what it is and 
 has been since recorded history began, 
 as long as men love and hate, sin and 
 repent, and feel after God, so long 
 will the teaching of Jesus be needed 
 to show them that God Is not far 
 from any and to point out the way to 
 Him. As long as God and the soul 
 endure as they are, so long will Jesus 
 remain the satisfier of the soul's 
 needs, the final spiritual teacher of 
 the world. 
 
 58 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 THE HEIGHT OF THE 
 PEDESTAL. 
 
 Let us now turn from the teach- 
 ing to the personahty of Jesus. 
 Christianity has always made him 
 rather than his teaching alone central 
 in its thought. What value must we 
 attach to his personality as a force in 
 history? Is his teaching incidental to 
 his chara.cter or an essential expres- 
 sion of it? How shall we account for 
 him as a figure and force in history? 
 
 In order to get a true estimate of 
 his personal power, it is needful to 
 distinguish between it and the advan- 
 tage given him by the historical set- 
 
 59 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 ting of his life. Sometimes in 
 approaching a city or park one 
 catches a ghmpse of a statue over- 
 topping the trees or houses. Often 
 it is impossible to tell how tall the 
 figure really is until one can see the 
 pedestal on which it stands; for the 
 apparent height may be due in reality 
 to the height of the pedestal. So in 
 determining the actual greatness of 
 an historic character one must know 
 first of all how much of his ap- 
 parent greatness and power are 
 due to his environment and other 
 favoring circumstances. Attention 
 has already been called to the rela- 
 tive insignificance of the country 
 of Jesus. Judea was lacking in 
 nearly all those resources which 
 enable a people to play an influential 
 part in history. A little backbone of 
 limestone mountains stretching be- 
 tween a harborless coast and an 
 
 60 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 impassable desert, without great 
 rivers, without population sufficient 
 to form a conquering army, without 
 mineral or agricultural resources, its 
 capital a mere mountain fortress "on 
 the road to nowhere," it had little 
 chance to furnish one of its citizens 
 with resources, either militarj'-, politi- 
 cal, or economic, with which to influ- 
 ence the world.* Had Alexander 
 been born in Abyssinia, awaj^ from 
 Greek culture and Philip's phalanx, 
 what likelihood is there that he would 
 be called great? If Napoleon had 
 been a citizen of some petty native 
 province of India at the foot of the 
 Himalayas on the far frontier of the 
 British Empire, how much chance 
 would he have had to play the part 
 he did or any great part in the history 
 of civilization ? Yet in such a despised 
 
 •See G. A. Smith, The Historical Geography of 
 the Holy Land. 
 
 61 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 province on the far frontier of the 
 Roman Empire Jesus was born. 
 What he accomplished was achieved 
 without any of the usual aids to 
 power. He had neither wealth, 
 learning, political organization, nor 
 army with which to impress the world. 
 In outward significance his life was 
 like the mustard seed of his own par- 
 able. An obscure peasant of Gali- 
 lee, — ^regarded as provincial even by 
 his OAvn nation, — he taught a few 
 years, chiefly in the outlying districts 
 of Palestine; gathered a few fisher- 
 folk about him, who dreamed he was 
 the Messiah that so persistently 
 haunted the hopes of this strange 
 people; aroused a transient interest 
 among the Jews by his strange teach- 
 ing and reputed cures; incurred the 
 hate and fear of the rulers and lead- 
 ers by his opposition to the conven- 
 tional religion and by his sporadic 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 popularity, and was put to death in 
 disgraceful fashion by the conniv- 
 ance of Jewish and Roman authori- 
 ties. If such a one made any 
 impression on the world, it was by the 
 sheer force of his personality and by 
 the weight of his teaching. 
 
 There is one scene in his life that 
 makes his independence of circum- 
 stances stand out with peculiar force. 
 It was after the multitudes had 
 turned away from him because he 
 refused to be forced into a jNIessianic 
 revolution just after the feeding of 
 the five thousand near Capernaum. 
 Pie had retired to the neighborhood 
 of Caesarea Philippi with his twelve 
 disciples, tho still uncertain of their 
 loyalty. Here he finally dared ask 
 them whom they believed him to be; 
 and there Peter, for them all, con- 
 fessed they still held him to be the 
 ^Messiah, the Son of the Living 
 
 63 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 God. Hard by where this confession 
 was made, stood the marble temple 
 in honor of Augustus which Herod 
 Philip had erected to his imperial 
 patron.* Well might the provincials 
 of the empire worship the numen of 
 the emperor, for he seemed to them 
 greater than their old national deities 
 had been thought to be. He had the 
 gifts of peace and justice and pros- 
 perity, the power of life and death in 
 his hands. Which of these think j^ou 
 as you watch the scene, is the greater, 
 the more divine: Augustus, the 
 founder of the world-wide empire, 
 with all power in his hands and all 
 things in his gift, the incarnation 
 of the world's ideal of peace, order, 
 and law, whom the provincials wor- 
 ship in the marble temple as the 
 greatest manifestation they know of 
 divine power? Or Jesus of Naza- 
 
 * G. A, Smith, Hist. Geography of the Holy Land. 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 reth, without power of office or place, 
 fleeing from the indifference and 
 hostihty of his own people, alone 
 except for the little band of unlet- 
 tered Galileans who still think him 
 the Messiah of God? Which will be 
 most potent five centuries afterward, 
 the empire of Caesar or the kingdom 
 of Jesus? Certainly there is no 
 promise in the outward circumstances 
 of that scene that Jesus will supplant 
 Caesar on the world's throne. Yet 
 you know, student of history, that 
 when three centuries had passed, cen- 
 turies of struggle even unto blood 
 between the followers of the Christ 
 and the soldiers of Caesar, Constan- 
 tine sat upon the imperial throne with 
 the labarum over him, and that he 
 was placed there by the followers of 
 Jesus. And when five centuries had 
 passed the bishop of Rome exercised 
 in the name of Jesus, the authority 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 of the Caesars after their dominion 
 had perished. What was there in 
 Jesus that, tho dead, he should thus 
 rule the world on the ruins of 
 Caesar's throne! Whatever it was 
 that gave him such power, it was not 
 the pedestal on which he stood. 
 
 66 
 
CHAPTER XII. 
 
 THE MEASURE OF A MAN. 
 
 Next in our endeavor to get a true 
 estimate of Jesus' personality, let us 
 apply to him the measure of a man. 
 When looking at a photograph of an 
 ancient statue, it is difficult to get a 
 correct idea of its size unless one 
 knows the scale and perspective of 
 the picture. It is common in photo- 
 graphing such an object to have a 
 man stand beside it to give a standard 
 of size. Likewise it is hard to get a 
 true scale of measurement for char- 
 acters of history, because they may be 
 magnified or dwarfed by distance, 
 contemporary characters, or by the 
 
 67 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 imagination of succeeding ages. 
 Some men loom large in history for 
 lack of great men near them to reveal 
 their real insignificance. Let us 
 measure the personality of Jesus by 
 placing alongside him two men who 
 were his contemporaries; and, to be 
 absolutely fair, let us take two men 
 who were spiritual giants, of his own 
 nation, and standing one on each side 
 of him in the order of their historical 
 appearance. 
 
 There is first John the Baptist, 
 who, Jesus himself said, was the 
 greatest of all the prophets ; nay even, 
 the greatest of the sons of women up 
 to his own time. John came to a 
 people long without the voice of 
 prophecy, to an age religiously proud 
 and self-satisfied. Yet he stirred 
 the pulses of that crystallized age as 
 Jewry has not been stirred for cen- 
 turies, and convinced the self-right- 
 
 68 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 eous people, confident of their 
 Abrahamic blood, that they must 
 repent of their sins or they would 
 never see the kingdom of God. He 
 brought the masses of the Jews out 
 to the Jordan to his baptism of 
 repentance, and even smoked out the 
 complacent Pharisees with his predic- 
 tions of the fires of judgment, until 
 that "brood of vipers" was ready to 
 flee from the imminent Messianic 
 wrath. The leaders paid him the 
 highest tribute by asking him 
 whether he were not himself the 
 Messiah. He rebuked Herod the 
 tetrarch of Galilee for his adulterous 
 marriage with Herodias, and made 
 him tremble for his throne, fearful 
 lest John should absolve the people 
 from their allegiance. Herod did 
 not feel himself secure until John 
 was in prison, and the ambitious 
 Herodias could net rest until he was 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 dead. His influence was so lasting 
 that twenty-five years after his death 
 there were disciples of John in 
 Ephesus who had not heard of Jesus ; 
 and at the end of the first Christian 
 century the writer of the Fourth Gos- 
 pel found it necessary to deny that 
 John was the Messiah. Yet this 
 stern convicter of hearts acknowl- 
 edged it more fitting that Jesus 
 should baptize him than that he 
 should baptize Jesus, claimed to be 
 unworthy to bear Jesus' sandals, and 
 turned his own disciples to him as the 
 expected Messiah. The influence of 
 Jesus so speedily assimilated John's 
 work and eclipsed him that the world 
 has never realized how great the Bap- 
 tist was. 
 
 On the other side of Jesus is the 
 intense and commanding personality 
 of Saul of Tarsus; a born leader of 
 men, everywhere dividing them into 
 
 70 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 those that followed him with intense 
 loyalty and those who feared him 
 with intense hate. He was too great 
 to remain a consistent Pharisee. He 
 could not look on while men were 
 undermining the religion that to him 
 was the only hope of eternal life and 
 say with the 'laissez-faire" spirit of 
 his master Gamaliel, "If this be of 
 God, we do not want to be found 
 opposing it, and if it be of men it 
 will come to naught anyhow, so that 
 we need not bother about it." He 
 held the clothes of the men who 
 stoned Stephen and plunged at once 
 into a persecution of extermination 
 against Christianity. He was great 
 enough to change his beliefs at the 
 call of truth, and showed in his 
 Christian apostleship the same daunt- 
 less zeal that he had shown in his 
 Pharisaism. He freed the gospel 
 from its Jewish swaddling-clothes 
 71 
 
JESUS or NAZARETH 
 
 and proclaimed it in its freedom and 
 universality. He completely over- 
 shadowed the original twelve apos- 
 tles. He put the impress of his 
 experience and thinking so firmly 
 upon Christian theology that it has 
 been predominantly Pauline to this 
 day. Handicapped by being a 
 despised Jew, and by the doctrine of 
 a crucified Messiah, "to the Jews a 
 stumbling-block and to the Greeks 
 foolishness," he went forth to win the 
 Roman world. It was not among 
 the credulous and unlearned rural 
 populations, and in the frontier 
 provinces, that he sought his fields, 
 but in the very centers of Graeco- 
 Roman civilization. He worked a 
 year in Antioch, three years in Ephe- 
 sus, two years in Corinth, and two in 
 Rome; and by the force of his per- 
 sonality he so planted his gospel in 
 these capitals that the power of the 
 
 79 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 Caesars thru two centuries of perse- 
 cution could not root it up. 
 
 Yet this giant, when he met with 
 the spirit of Jesus, instantly put him- 
 self at his service and asked for 
 orders. Thereafter the superlative 
 Pharisee called himself the chief of 
 sinners, and was proud to sign him- 
 self the slave of Jesus. For him he 
 abandoned all that had been his pride 
 and hope, his consuming passion 
 being henceforth to attain to the goal 
 of the upward calling of God in 
 Christ Jesus. Thus it is that Jesus 
 appears beside his greatest contem- 
 poraries, and like some sun draws the 
 mightiest of them from their courses 
 to revolve as satellites about liim. 
 
 7S 
 
CHAPTER XIII. 
 
 THE NAME ABOVE EVERY 
 NAME. 
 
 Jesus' influence over men consti- 
 tutes another measure of his great- 
 ness. Just as astronomers seek to 
 determine the magnitude of some 
 comet by noting its pull upon the 
 planets and their satellites, so we may- 
 get some idea of the power of Jesus 
 as we observe his influence on those 
 with whom he came in contact. We 
 have already seen his influence on 
 John the Baptist and on Paul. We 
 have also seen how the Twelve clung 
 to the belief that he was the Messiah, 
 when appearances were aU to the con- 
 
 74 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 trary; even tho he had failed to do 
 what they expected of the Messiah; 
 altho his own nation had rejected 
 him; and altho he had told them his 
 career was to end in a disgraceful 
 death which was to their minds no 
 part of the Messiah's destiny. They 
 kept the belief because they could 
 account for his personal power and 
 character on no other supposition 
 than that he was the Messiah. And 
 we note this same tendency in all who 
 came to know Jesus intimately: to 
 feel that nothing short of their 
 greatest word could adequately 
 describe him. To that section of the 
 Jews which shared the Messianic 
 hope, there was no greater word than 
 Messiah, which might be applied to 
 anyone in the likeness of man. But 
 w^hen any of these came to know 
 Jesus they persisted in calling him the 
 Christ even tho at the cost of sufFer- 
 
 75 
 
JESUS OF NAZAEETH 
 
 ing and death. The author of the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews, MTiting to 
 Jews of Sadducean tendencies, to 
 whom the temple cultus with its 
 priesthood was greater than the Mes- 
 sianic hope, describes Jesus by the 
 greatest word they know: Jesus is 
 the great High Priest, and to make it 
 superlative, "the high priest forever 
 after the order of Melchizedek." 
 When the writer of the Fourth Gos- 
 pel wishes to describe Jesus to men 
 of Hellenistic mind, who have specu- 
 lated of possible divine "words" that 
 should reveal the unknown deity, he 
 calls Jesus the "Word" who declares 
 in human flesh the unseen God. 
 When the Nicene fathers undertook 
 to formulate in a phrase what they 
 felt Jesus to be, they knew no name 
 that was adequate, except "the name 
 that is above every name," and so 
 wrote in their creed that he was "very 
 
 76 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 God of very God." Thus we gather 
 from the names they gave him how 
 great was the impression Jesus made 
 on the first generations of his fol- 
 lowers. 
 
 77 
 
CHAPTER XIV. 
 
 PITTED AGAINST THE 
 RABBIS, 
 
 Some impression of the intellectual 
 power of Jesus has been gained 
 from the consideration of the truth 
 and originality of his teaching. 
 Another measure of it is found in 
 the scenes of Tuesday of Passion 
 Week, when he measured wits with 
 the trained minds of the Rabbis. The 
 intellectual power which he displayed 
 was due mainly to his native ability, 
 since he had not the advantage of 
 extensive study in the schools. The 
 Jewish leaders had decided to arrest 
 Jesus, but found an obstacle in the 
 
 78 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 crowds that had saluted him as ISIes- 
 siah during the Triumphal Entry, 
 and which still hung upon his words 
 and were loyal to his person. Till 
 these were alienated from him, to 
 arrest him meant to provoke a riot 
 which would bring down Pilate's 
 legions upon them and mar the feast 
 of the passover with a bloody mas- 
 sacre. So the leaders undertook to 
 discredit Jesus before the crowds, so 
 that the latter would turn away from 
 him and leave them free to dispose 
 of him as they listed. It seemed an 
 easy matter to make this simple- 
 minded provincial say some foolish, 
 blasphemous, or seditious thing. So 
 the contest of wits between Jesus and 
 the best trained minds of Judaism, 
 sharpened by malice, began and con- 
 tinued thruout the day. 
 
 First, they asked him for his 
 authority to teach. It was customary 
 
 79 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 for men, who were deemed compe- 
 tent, to be publicly authorized as 
 rabbis. They expected Jesus to con- 
 fess in confusion that he had never 
 been ordained as a rabbi, and then 
 they would be able to shame the 
 crowds for attaching importance to 
 the mouthings of an unlettered 
 upstart. To their demand for his 
 authority, Jesus replied with a 
 counter-question: Was John the 
 Baptist a prophet of God or no? 
 Now this was not a mere subterfuge. 
 Had they been sincere, it would have 
 put them on the way to the truth 
 about him. But they were not sin- 
 cere, and as they thought it over, they 
 found it was not Jesus but themselves 
 who were embarrassed by their ques- 
 tion. If they should answer that 
 John was a true prophet, then Jesus 
 would remind them that John had 
 called him the Messiah. If on the 
 
 80 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 other hand, they said, what they 
 really believed, that John was not a 
 true prophet, they would discredit 
 themselves with the multitude, for 
 the masses firmly believed that John 
 was sent of God. The result was 
 that these professed oracles and 
 religious leaders of God's chosen 
 people publicly professed that they 
 could not tell whether or no a man 
 like the Baptist spoke by the Spirit 
 of God. 
 
 Then the Pharisees and Herodians 
 came together. They asked Jesus 
 whether it was right to pay tribute to 
 Caesar. If he should answer that it 
 was lawful to pay the tribute, the 
 crowd of Galilean zealots, whose 
 loyalty to Jesus stood in the way of 
 the leaders' purpose, would turn 
 against him; for it was the funda- 
 mental tenet in the zealot platform, 
 that the Jews had no king but 
 
 81 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 Jehovah and were cowards if after 
 God they paid tribute to any man. 
 If, on the other hand, Jesus should 
 say it was wrong to pay the tribute, 
 the Herodians would report to Pilate 
 that the Galilean prophet was stir- 
 ring up sedition, and Pilate would 
 know how to deal effectually with 
 treason against Caesar. It was a 
 dangerous dilemma, and on one horn 
 or the other of it they felt sure Jesus 
 would be caught. In reply he asked 
 them to show him the tribute money, 
 and one of them drew from the 
 bosom of his tunic the denarius bear- 
 ing the name and image of Tiberius. 
 Now the fact that these Pharisees 
 had Caesar's money in their pockets, 
 showed that they had assumed obliga- 
 tions to Caesar and betrayed their 
 hypocrisy. Pretending to have scru- 
 ples against acknowledging the rights 
 of the Gentile government, they 
 
 82 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 nevertheless availed themselves of it 
 whenever it served their selfish 
 interests to do so. They traded with 
 Caesar's money, took advantage of 
 the Roman peace to ply their trades 
 in security, and appealed to the 
 Roman government against injustice 
 on the part of even their own coun- 
 trymen. "Therefore," said Jesus, 
 "since j^ou have thus put yourselves 
 under obligations to Caesar, render 
 to him M'hat is due him in return, and 
 do not at the same time forget to pay 
 what you owe to God for his benefits 
 to you." And thus Jesus escaped the 
 snare by making a clear and simple 
 distinction as to men's duties. 
 
 Next came the Sadducees and 
 sought to show how simple-minded 
 Jesus was for believing in the resur- 
 rection. They cited a case, such as 
 might easily arise under the Pente- 
 teuchal laws, of seven men who had 
 
[JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 had the same wife in succession, and 
 asked him whose wife she would be 
 in the resurrection. Now the chief 
 quahty of the trained mind is its 
 abihty to make fine distinctions. The 
 untrained usually think in masses and 
 extremes. To a child, you must be 
 bad if you are not good; the thing 
 that is not white must be black. It 
 is an evidence of culture when men 
 begin to recognize the infinite grada- 
 tion of grays thru which white shades 
 into black, and to know the varying 
 degrees of goodness and badness that 
 may be mixed in the same character. 
 The difficulty of the Sadducees' ques- 
 tion lay in the ridiculousness of a 
 certain conception of the resurrection 
 life, which seemed to make belief in 
 any kind of resurrection altogether 
 untenable. But Jesus makes the dis- 
 tinction, such as is always harder to 
 make in controversy than when in a 
 
 84 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 judicial frame of mind, between the 
 false assumption and the actual truth. 
 They assumed that the resurrection 
 is a simple resumption of the relations 
 and conditions of this life. This, 
 Jesus tells them, is a mistake. In 
 the future life all will be spiritual; 
 and marriage, which is an institution 
 for replenishing a mortal race, will 
 be no longer needed, "for neither can 
 they die any more." But that there 
 is a real resurrection life Jesus proves 
 to these Sadducees from the only part 
 of the Old Testament which they 
 admit as authoritative, — the Pente- 
 teuch. He meets them on their o^vn 
 ground and shows them that the 
 religious relation to God involves 
 continued life, since "God is not the 
 God of dead men but of living, for 
 all live unto Him." 
 
 After the discomfiture of the Sad- 
 ducees, one of the scribes came, ask- 
 
 85 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 ing which was the greatest command- 
 ment of the law. The trap in the 
 question lay in the fact that accord- 
 ing to the Jewish view all com- 
 mandments of the law were of equal 
 importance. They thought God just 
 as much concerned to have the sac- 
 rificial blood sprinkled on a certain 
 side of the altar as that men should 
 observe justice, mercy, and the love 
 of God. For Jesus to designate one 
 as greater than another would be like 
 calling one book of the Bible more 
 inspired than another. Jesus replied 
 by quoting as the first commandment 
 that passage from Deuteronomy with 
 which the Shema began in the syna- 
 gogue service. The Jews themselves 
 had put it first in their study and 
 recitation of the law in the syna- 
 gogue, since it furnished the motive 
 for the observance of the precepts of 
 the law. Alongside this, as being 
 
 86 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 like it, Jesus put a passage from 
 Leviticus, which includes within its 
 motive all precepts of social right- 
 eousness. The scribe "saved his 
 face" b}^ declaring courteously that 
 Jesus had answered well. 
 
 After the scribe had retired no 
 more questions were asked ; but Jesus 
 adopting their own methods turned 
 upon his questioners. Assuming the 
 Messianic character and Davidic 
 authorship of Psalm 110, as all his 
 hearers did without question, he 
 asked how it was that David called 
 the Messiah "Lord," if he were his 
 son. It was almost unthinkable for 
 a Jewish father to call his son, 
 "Lord." This question they were 
 unwilling or unable to answer, since 
 it led to the conclusion that the INIes- 
 siah was something more than a mere 
 son of David after the flesh, more 
 than merely a political successor. 
 
 87 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 This day of conflict, begun by the 
 leaders in order to discredit Jesus 
 before the multitudes and "take him 
 in his talk," ended with the Rabbis 
 baffled and silenced. Jesus had come 
 off victorious in the dangerous play 
 of words, and with terrific denuncia- 
 tions of their insincerity and spiritual 
 incompetence, he swept them out of 
 the temple and remained undisputed 
 master of the situation. He was an 
 intellectual giant. 
 
CHAPTER XV. 
 
 THE POISE OF HIS CHAR- 
 ACTER. 
 
 The spiritual power of Jesus, 
 which has always been perceived 
 more fully than his intellectual 
 power, is seen best in the poise of his 
 character and in his ability to touch 
 the consciences of men. The effect- 
 iveness of power is determined by its 
 control and application. A powerful 
 engine would soon knock itself to 
 pieces without a governor. Great 
 spiritual power cannot exist except in 
 diffused and self-destructive forms 
 unless accompanied by self-control 
 and concentration. There is a repose 
 
 89 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 in the characters of men that is due 
 to the absence of personal force, but 
 the poise of Jesus' character was due 
 to his self-control. He was complete 
 master of his powers so that he con- 
 centrated his energies effectively on 
 the supreme purposes of his life. 
 
 We find this manifest first, in his 
 physical endurance. It was not the 
 indifference of those incapable of 
 suffering, nor the stoicism of hard- 
 ened natures, but that endurance of 
 pain for higher ends which is the 
 essence of all moral heroism. For 
 evidence of Jesus' physical courage 
 and endurance we turn inevitably to 
 the scene on Golgotha. It is diffi- 
 cult for us to-day to imagine the suf- 
 ferings inflicted by crucifixion. It 
 was a Roman refinement of an 
 Assyrian brutality. The victim was 
 placed so that the agonies of the nail 
 wounds would be freshened by every 
 
 90 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 effort to relieve the tortures of an 
 unendurable position, until at last the 
 victim died of starvation or blood- 
 poisoning. In addition to this Jesus 
 had been scourged before the cruci- 
 fixion and had borne the beam of his 
 cross upon his lacerated back until he 
 fainted under it. Yet thru the long 
 hours upon the cross, his words were 
 almost altogether about his mission 
 or full of solicitude for those about 
 him, — for the soldiers who crucified 
 him, for the robber suffering at his 
 side, and for his mother in her awful 
 bereavement. Only once did a cry 
 of physical pain escape him. Those 
 who know of the torturing thirst that 
 comes from loss of blood to soldiers 
 left wounded on the battle-field, will 
 not marvel as much at Jesus' cry "I 
 thirst," as at the spirit that refused 
 the stupefying drink of myrrh. We 
 of this generation, who shrink so 
 
 91 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 quickly from the post of the foreign 
 missionary and from all other moral 
 enterprizes that involve danger, dis- 
 comfort, or pain ; who take refuge so 
 readily from pain in anesthetics and 
 anodynes, can understand something 
 of the moral power that enabled 
 Jesus to suffer so in silence, "for the 
 joy that was set before him." The 
 Roman centurion who guarded the 
 cross was accustomed to see men 
 suffer and die; to see then endure 
 stoically and die heroically; and yet 
 the spirit with which Jesus bore his 
 fate made the Roman exclaim 
 "Surely this w^as a son of the gods!" 
 There is a yet greater test of a 
 man's power over himself than the 
 endurance of actual pain. In the 
 excitement of battle or the passion of 
 conflict men may face danger easily, 
 tho they are unable to go in cold- 
 blood to certain suffering. The 
 
 92 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 bravest moment in John Bunyan's 
 life was when, crouching in Bedford 
 jail with the threat of the gallows 
 over him, if he did not prove untrue 
 to his calling, and fearing he might 
 disgrace his Master by going to the 
 gallows with white face and tottering 
 knees, he still resolved, if need be, to 
 leap boldly off the ladder with the 
 noose about his neck, "Come heaven, 
 come hell." Jesus' greatest courage 
 was not that shown on Golgotha, but 
 when alone in Gethsemane he faced 
 the cross and still held true to his 
 Father's will; or when a year before 
 the fatal passover he foresaw the 
 awful end, and yet kept on his way, 
 or even when he set out for Jeru- 
 salem, knowing he was on his way to 
 death. The twelve were brave men, 
 as the world accounts bravery, — 
 hard}'' fishermen who often braved 
 the storms of the treacherous lake of 
 
 93 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 Galilee. Their leader, single-handed, 
 attacked a Roman cohort in the gar- 
 den of Gethsemane. But Mark 
 gives us this contrast between Jesus 
 and them: "And they were on the 
 way, going up to Jerusalem; and 
 Jesus was going before them: and 
 they were amazed ; and they that fol- 
 lowed were afraid." 
 
 A greater manifestation of Jesus' 
 power is found in his self-restraint in 
 regard to his ministry.* He believed 
 himself as the Messiah to be pos- 
 sessed of supernatural powers, but 
 he refused of set purpose to employ 
 his powers for personal advantage. 
 He refused to attempt signs from 
 heaven to ease the labor of his mis- 
 sion ; or to work miracles to lift him- 
 self above the common lot; or to 
 invoke as a means of escape from 
 
 * Robinson, Studies in the Character of Christ, 
 Chapter I. 
 
 94 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 suffering the angelic legions which he 
 believed to be at his call in Geth- 
 semane. The same self-restraint 
 shows itself in connection with his 
 work of healing. When he found 
 great multitudes of ailing people; 
 when he found the porches of Beth- 
 esda full of sick-folk, how naturally 
 we expect him to heal them every 
 one. But he resisted the impulse to 
 heal either from love of glory, from 
 weakly sentimentalism, or short- 
 sighted sympathy. He felt the 
 divineness of the natural order ; knew 
 the disciplinary value of pain; and 
 reserved his power for the blessing of 
 men in their highest and completest 
 selves. He never healed except for 
 the good of the afflicted, — the 
 spiritual as well as the physical good. 
 Jesus shows a similar self-restraint 
 in the patience and perseverance with 
 which he pursued his purposes amid 
 
 95 
 
JESUS OF NAZAEETH 
 
 the course of events which he could 
 only partially control. One of the 
 most trying things for men possessed 
 by noble enthusiasms is to have to 
 work with intractable material; to 
 have their plans thwarted by acci- 
 dent; and their purposes delayed 
 equally by cunning malice and ignor- 
 ant good-intent. Yet Jesus aston- 
 ishes us by the equipoise of temper 
 with which he pursues his goal; by 
 the patience with which he awaits his 
 opportunity; by the energy with 
 which he avails himself of every 
 opening, and by the skill with which 
 he turns seeming obstacles to account. 
 He refuses to be hastened until his 
 hour has come. He accepts events 
 as God's ordering. He goes aside 
 for a day's rest, but finding hungry 
 and needy multitudes, makes the day 
 one of his busiest, as he feeds the 
 thousands, soul and body. Opposi- 
 
 96 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 tion drives him from one field only 
 to send him to one more fertile. 
 When the hostility of the Pharisees 
 drives him from Judea, he devotes 
 himself to the training of the twelve ; 
 and the treachery of Judas brings 
 him to the triumphant sacrifice of his 
 cross. 
 
 or 
 
CHAPTER XVI. 
 
 HIS POWER TO TOUCH THE 
 CONSCIENCE. 
 
 Jesus' spiritual power was not only 
 sufficient to keep his own conscience 
 clear, but to quicken the consciences 
 of others. John the Baptist had 
 preached repentance and had been 
 wonderfully successful in piercing 
 the armor of his people's self-com- 
 placency. But when Jesus began to 
 preach the same message, he soon out- 
 stripped John in the numbers he 
 brought to him confessing their sins. 
 Those who have devoted themselves 
 to the task of stirring the feeble 
 moral consciousness of men into a 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 realization of their sinfulness, know 
 what a task it is. But there is a 
 harder task; after men have been led 
 to see themselves in the blaze of 
 divine holiness, and so to know their 
 sinfulness; after they have had their 
 pride broken so that they are ready to 
 confess their weaknesses and sins, 
 then to lift them up in hope and make 
 them believe it is still possible for 
 them to become victorious over sin, 
 and live lives honorable in the sight 
 of men and useful in the service of 
 God, — this is the harder task. Yet 
 this Jesus was strong to do. He 
 made Peter cry out, "Depart from 
 me for I am a sinful man, O Lord"; 
 but he led Peter to forsake all and 
 follow him. Jesus' look broke 
 Peter's heart and sent him out of 
 Caiaphas' palace to weep bitterly; 
 but it also brought him back to Jesus 
 by the Lake of Tiberias with his pro- 
 
 99 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 fession of humble loyalty: "Thou 
 knowest that I love thee." He 
 touched the conscience of the sinful 
 woman so that it burned with her 
 shame; but she came to weep in his 
 presence, and went from him into 
 peace and hope, to sin no more. He 
 had the power to call out the highest 
 in men. His seemingly impossible 
 dreams created a new type of 
 spiritual, altruistic character. He 
 demanded of men that they be per- 
 fect as God is perfect ; that they for- 
 give one another as God forgives 
 the penitent; that they love one 
 another as he loved them; and that 
 they take up the cross of utter self- 
 abnegation and follow him. No 
 other character in history has set 
 before men, in example and precept, 
 so high an ideal of duty; and no 
 other has opened to men such sluices 
 of enabling power. From him there 
 
 100 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 has flowed thru the centuries a 
 steadily widening stream of personal, 
 social, and civic righteousness; 
 because weak, erring, common men 
 and women in response to his 
 demands have come to believe in 
 themselves; because his faith in them 
 has made them worthy of his trust. 
 No other personage has been able to 
 arouse such an unselfish enthusiasm 
 for humanity. Men admire the work 
 of other geniuses, but they do not 
 risk their lives to acquaint savages 
 and aliens with the tragedies of 
 Shakespeare or the philosophy of 
 Plato. Jesus has been able so to 
 enlist the loyalty of men, that the 
 lives of missionaries and reformers 
 and martyrs have been the seed of 
 his church, and so to direct it, that his 
 religion is the religion of humanity. 
 
 101 
 
CHAPTER XVII. 
 
 THE COSMIC MEANING OF 
 HIS CHARACTER. 
 
 Thus far we have been occupied 
 with the effort to ascertain the his- 
 torical greatness of Jesus. We must 
 now try to find an explanation of 
 his character and power adequate to 
 account for his knowledge of truth, 
 the perfection of his character, and 
 the potency of his personal influence. 
 The explanation of history carries 
 us a little way, hut stops short of the 
 goal of our quest. History con- 
 tributes to our understanding of him, 
 when it points us to the unique 
 religious capacity and spiritual 
 
 103 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 passion of the Hebrew race; to the 
 rich heritage of the Old Testament 
 Mterature and institutions that was 
 his; to the pure and tenacious family 
 life of the Jews, which gave content 
 to his teaching; and to the Messianic 
 hope which gave at once the sug- 
 gestion of his mission and the inter- 
 pretative form to his message. It 
 goes further when it calls attention 
 to the pious group of men and women 
 like IMary and Elizabeth, Zachariah 
 and Simeon, from which he sprang; 
 and to the exceptional purity of his 
 character and spirituality of his 
 religious experiences. But all these 
 leave us unsatisfied, and we must 
 turn from history to philosophy, not 
 for the solution of all mysteries, but 
 for an estimate of his cosmic signifi- 
 cance; for such a correlation of Jesus 
 of Nazareth with the thought-world 
 in which we live, as to give the mind 
 
 103 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 a resting-place and bring religious 
 belief into harmony with experience. 
 It is one of the fundamental 
 assumptions of all our thinking that 
 the effect must be included in the 
 cause ; that what is evolved must first 
 be involved; or, to put it in the lan- 
 guage of common-sense, that some- 
 thing cannot be got out of nothing. 
 Whether this conviction be true 
 absolutely, the philosophers may at 
 times dispute, but we cannot think 
 without making such an assumption. 
 When we find a white-petalled water- 
 lily on the surface of a pond, we may 
 trace its stem down till its roots dis- 
 appear in the black ooze at the bot- 
 tom. Now no dexterity of logic can 
 convince us that a white lily can come 
 out of black mud, unless the white- 
 ness of the lily was potentially there 
 to begin with; we insist that the 
 whiteness was there in the seed or in 
 
 104 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 some of the elements out of which it 
 grew, before the whiteness could 
 appear in the flower. Sometime since, 
 application was made for a patent on 
 a process for changing certain ores 
 of antimony into gold. The Patent 
 Office, fearing to become in some 
 degree party to a fraud, sent the 
 formula to the mint to be tried. The 
 answer from the mint was that, if the 
 ores in question were treated by the 
 process described, a small quantity of 
 gold would be obtained, because the 
 ores contained a small percentage of 
 gold. No way is known as yet to get 
 gold in the result, unless it be present 
 in the material used. It was this 
 same line of reasoning that led a 
 prominent English philosopher to say 
 that by no known alchemy can we 
 get golden conduct out of leaden 
 motives. By the same reasoning, 
 whatever appears in the course of the 
 
 105 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 world's evolution must be already- 
 present in the creative evolving 
 causes. If personal intelligence, 
 sinlessness, and love appear in the 
 cosmic process, it means they belong 
 first of all to the Creating Cause of 
 the universe. By no alchemy can 
 Jesus of Nazareth come out of a 
 materialistic or godless universe. 
 
 "A fire-mist and a planet, 
 
 A crystal and a cell; 
 A jelly-fish and a saurian. 
 
 And the caves where the cave-men 
 dwell : — 
 Then a sense of law and beauty, 
 And a face turned from the 
 sod ; — 
 Some call it evolution, 
 And others call it God." 
 
 106 
 
CHAPTER XVIII. 
 
 THE SECRET OF HIS 
 POWER. 
 
 The cosmic significance of Jesus, 
 then, Hes in what he visibly makes 
 known of the Personal Spirit who lies 
 back of the cosmic process. It is 
 also in his relation to the spiritual 
 forces of the world that the secret of 
 his power is to be sought. On a clear 
 summer day one sometimes sees a 
 fleecy cloud not bigger than a hand 
 stand out for a moment from the blue 
 and then vanish into it again.* The 
 evanescent cloud is significant only 
 because it reveals the facts and forces 
 
 •Brierly, Ourselves and the Universe, page 300. 
 107 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 that produced it; because it is a vis- 
 ible indication of the vast flood of 
 waters that hangs otherwise invisible 
 in the air above us; because it shows 
 that the air has reached the point of 
 saturation and is ready to begin the 
 precipitation of cloud or rain. One 
 may see at night upon the city streets 
 a glowing light hanging from a 
 couple of dark wires. Somewhere, 
 unseen by the man on the street, 
 masses of coal are dazzling white in 
 the furnaces and imprisoned steam 
 snarls and hisses in the boilers; but 
 this power of coal and steam flows 
 silent and unseen in the black wires, 
 and only the light reveals its pres- 
 ence. One might easily think the 
 light could be extinguished with the 
 hand, but if he should undertake it he 
 would encounter the vast force which 
 the feeble manifestation of it in the 
 light had not prepared him to expect. 
 
 108 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 So the secret of Jesus' power lies in 
 the spiritual forces that came to vis- 
 ible manifestation in him. His out- 
 ward life gave no indication of the 
 power behind him. When most of 
 his contemporaries saw him, there was 
 "no beauty that they should desire 
 him," no pomp of power that they 
 should fear him. When he became 
 inconvenient to their purposes, they 
 thought it easy to silence him. But 
 his persistent influence and growing 
 power proved a puzzle to Pharisee 
 and Sadducee alike. They put him 
 to death, but his death seemed but to 
 increase his influence. Saul of Tarsus 
 undertook to quench Jesus' move- 
 ment, thinking it would be easy to 
 destroy the despised sect, and then 
 Saul received the spiritual shock that 
 utterly transformed him. The only 
 explanation of what happened to 
 him, he could ever give, was to say 
 
 109 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 that "God was in Christ, reconciling 
 the world to himself." Jesus' most 
 intimate disciples all felt and said, in 
 one way or another, the same thing; 
 that they came nearest God and felt 
 His uplifting power most fully when 
 they were with Jesus ; that to see him 
 was to see the Father; to know him 
 was eternal life. We of the twentieth 
 century may not care to use the words 
 of the first, but in some terms, any 
 adequate explanation of Jesus must 
 be virtually the explanation of his 
 first interpreters; that in him was 
 manifest in terms of human life, the 
 holiness, love, and personal power of 
 the Universal Character we call God ; 
 that thru him the spiritual power of 
 God most eif ectually gripped human 
 history; that to know him in spiritual 
 fellowship is to be placed in the cir- 
 cuit of the world's redemptive forces; 
 is to be driven by the highest motives 
 
 110 
 
JESUS OF NAZARETH 
 
 toward man's highest ideals; is to 
 have life raised to its highest power 
 in coordination with the Infinite 
 Father. 
 
 Ill 
 
Date Due 
 
 ^ 7 ,^ 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library