^J' Vv... ' ,i,- ■Jf' i '•«>^-"'^-. » PRINCETON, N. J. ''k 4, Shelf Division — y5...4-l ^^ Section #...Vrrr:.'^/...'r/ - Number / i .4 ■ it -■-''*-~~^ -+•■ PASTOR PASTORUM OR THE SCHOOLING OF THE APOSTLES BY OUR LORD. BY Rev. henry LATHAM, M.A. MASTER OF TRINITY HALL, CAMBRIDGE. CAMBRIDGE: DEIGHTON, BELL AND CO. LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS. 1890 PRINTED BY C. J. CLAY M.A. AND SONS AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS PREFACE. OF the general purport of this book, and of what led to the writing, I have said all that is necessary in the Introductory Chapter. The ideas it contains were growing into distinctness during the five and thirty years of my College work, and to many of my old pupils they will offer little that is new. But although the book took its source from teaching ; and instruction — but instruction divorced from examinations — is in some degree my object still, yet it is meant, not so much for professed students, as for that large body of the public, who entertain the desire, happily spreading fast among the young, of understanding with as great exact- ness as possible what it was that Christ visibly effected, and what means He employed in bringing it about. I have avoided all technical terms of Divinity or Philosophy, and where, as in Chapters II. and III., I have been led to touch on theological specu- lations, I have tried to present the matter in as familiar a form as I could. Frequently, I have iv PREFACE. explained in the notes some geographical and other particulars which a large majority among my readers may not require to be told ; in this case I must be pardoned for consulting the interest of the minority. A didactic purpose and a literary one, do not always run readily side by side. A teacher who desires to inculcate certain principles or ideas, is ever on the look out for illustrations and recurs to his topic again and again. So, having, as I thought, certain topics to teach, I have brought them back into view more often than I should have done if I had written solely with a literary view. I have not commonly given accounts of what has been said by others on the points of which I treat, or criticised conclusions different from mine, for I know that this manner of treatment is not in favour with the present generation. I recollect the reason of an undergraduate, in my early days, for preferring the instruction of his private tutor to that officially provided — "The Lecturer tells you that Hermann says it is this, and Wunder says it is that, but Blank (the private tutor) tells you what it is." With the same view of making the book read- able by the general public, I have abstained from PREFACE. V apologising when I have advanced a notion not commonly received. In my first draft I had made such apologies for what I say on the second and third Temptations, on the Mission to the Cities, the Transfiguration,- the Denials of Peter and some minor points — but I afterwards thought it better to leave them out, and to disclaim here once for all, any intention to dogmatize, or to fail in respect toward the weighty authorities with whom I have ventured to disagree. In many cases, however, the views that I have taken rather supplement than supplant those that are commonly received. Writers on Divinity have not so much opposed them, as failed to notice the points on which I dwell. There is however one topic — the parable of the Unjust Steward, on which I find myself at variance with all the writers on the subject I know of, excepting perhaps Calvin, who begins his Comment on Luke xvi. i by saying " The main drift of this parable, is, that we must shew kindness and lenity in dealing with our neighbours." He does not, however, follow up this view as I have done. Though in so difiicult a matter I cannot be confident of being right, yet I do feel convinced, vi PREFACE. that the accepted interpretation of the parable, viz. that it is intended to teach the right use of riches — " the really wise use of mamnion " as Gobel puts it — is wholly inadequate. So simple a moral would have been pointed by a simpler tale. Surely the riches would have been made the giver's own. Moreover the salient point of the outward story, that which first catches atten- tion, always answers in our Lord's parables to a cardinal matter in the interpretation. Here that salient point lies in the words "Take thy bond and sit down quickly and write fifty" and this has but a very oblique bearing on the true use of riches; the distinctive point of the outward parable is the exercise of delegated power, and the spiritual bearing must be in conformity with this. I have everywhere followed the Revised Ver- sion, and I must warn readers that where italics occur in the passages quoted, they are not ini7tey except in passage on p. lOi. They are intro- duced, not to mark words important for my purpose, but simply because they are found in the Revised Version where they indicate, of course, that the corresponding word is wanting in the Greek. For the course of events I have generally follow- ed the Gospel of St Mark up to the time of PREFACE. Vll the feast of Tabernacles ; and after that the Gospel of St John. Of the great historical value of the latter I have, like most biblical students, become more deeply sensible, the more closely I have studied it. Speaking of the absence of miracles wrought in public during the week of the Passion, p. 430, I have not noticed Matt. xxi. 14, because I believe the Evangelist to refer to miracles that had taken place during earlier visits to Jerusalem. It was beyond the scope of my book to discuss the differences of character of the different Gospels. In a few instances I follow an order of events different from that which is most commonly taken. This order I have shewn in a Chronological Appendix, in which I have tabulated the chief events of our Lord's Ministry, taking them month by month from the time of the Baptism to that of the great day of Pentecost. I have made this Appendix more full, in point of reference and arguments in support of the dates, than would have been quite necessary for readers of this book, because I thought it might be made useful gene- rally to students of the Gospel History. I have to thank several persons for their assistance and advice, especially Canon Huxtable, without whose kind encouragement at the out- viil PREFACE. set the book might not have been written. I must note that I have made use of an idea on Luke xii. 49, which I first came upon, many years ago, in a small publication of the Rev. A. H. Wratislaw, then one of the Tutors of Christ's College ; and that I was in like manner set on a track of thought by a sermon on the Temptation, by T. Colani, published at Strasburg in i860. I have acknowledged my obligations to Bishop EUicott's " Historical Lectures," and Edersheim's "Jesus the Messiah." Many members of my own College, and many other friends have assisted me greatly with advice and corrections. Although my book is not written with any thesis about the Gospels to support, still I trust that I have cleared away difficulties here and there, and have shewn, in small matters, how one account undesignedly supports another. If what I have said shall lead to discussion on some of the questions raised, or if I shall induce younger men to apply themselves, in some of those direc- tions towards which I have pointed, to work of a literary kind waiting to be done, I shall not have spent my time and pains without result. Trinity Hall Lodge, May ist, 1890. CONTENTS. CHAPTER L PAGE Introductory i CHAPTER n. Human Freedom 28 CHAPTER HI. Of Revelation 52 CHAPTER IV. Our Lord's use of Signs (i) The attraction of hearers . (2) Selection ..... (3) Preparation .... (4) Setting forth the Kingdojn of God (5) Teaching wrought by Signs (6) Miracles as a practical lesson to the disciples 91 74 n 79 80 82 84 X CONTENTS. CHAPTER V. PAGE The Laws of the working of Signs . . 112 The Temptation to tinii stones into loa7!es . 127 T/ie Temptation on the Moimt . . .134 T/ie Temptation on the Pinnacle of the Temple 139 CHAPTER VI. From the Temptation to the Ministry in Galilee 147 Outset of the work . . . . . .147 CHAPTER VH. The Preaching to the Multitudes . .188 CHAPTER Vni. The Choosing of the Apostles . . .228 CHAPTER IX. The Schooling of the Apostles. The Mission TO the Cities . . . . . .270 CHAPTER X. To those who have is given . . . -311 The Teaching by Parables . . . .311 Resumption of the Narrative .... 328 CONTENTS. XI CHAPTER XL From the Mount to Jerusalem PAGE 349 CHAPTER XH. The Later Lessons .... Different cases receive different treatment Parable of the Unjnst Steward Our Lord refusing to judge Our Lord's action prospective . Christ washing the Apostle^ feet Use of signs in the later Ministry 373 386 398 411 419 425 CHAPTER XHL The Lessons of the Resurrection TJie Ascension 437 457 Chronological Appendix . Index of Texts General Index . 473 491 495 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. In this opening chapter I propose to lay- before the reader the leading ideas which will be developed in the book. This will necessitate some repetition, but many readers want to know at starting whither the author is going to take them, and whether his notions are such that they will care for his company. In the course of lecturing on the Gospels, being myself interested in questions of education, my attention turned to the way in which our Lord taught His disciples. Following the Gospel History with this view, I recognised in the train of circum- stances through which Christ led the disciples, no less than in what He said to them, an assiduous care in training them to acquire certain qualities and habits of mind. I observed also method and uniformity both in what He did and in what He refrained from doing. Certain principles seem to govern His actions and to be observed regularly so far as we can see, but we have no ground for stating L. I 2 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. that our Lord came to resolutions on these points and bound Himself to observe them. A man some- times sees his duty so clearly at one moment that he wishes to make the decision of that moment dominant over his life and he embodies it in a resolve, but we must suppose that Christ at each moment did what was best. So that what I call a Law of His conduct is only a generalization from His biography, and means no more than that, in such and such circumstances He usually acted in such and such ways. I can easily conceive that He might have swerved from these Laws had there been occasion. I have fancied that I got glimpses of the processes by means of which the Apostles of the Gospels — striving among themselves who should be greatest, looking for the restoration of the kingdom to Israel, and dismayed at the apprehen- sion of their Master — were trained to become the Apostles of the Acts, — testifying boldly before rulers and councils, giving the right hand of fellow- ship to one who had not companied with them, and breaking through Jewish prejudices, to own that there were no men made by God who were com- mon or unclean. The shape which much of the outward course of Christ's life took, His choice of Galilee as a scene of action. His withdrawal from crowds and His wanderings in secluded regions were admirably adapted to the educating of the Apostles; while His sending them, two and two. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 3 through the cities was a direct lesson in that self-reliance which reposes on a trust in God. Were not these courses ordered to these ends? The training was wonderfully fitted to bring about the changes which occurred. That this fashioning of the disciples should have been a very principal object with our Lord is easy to conceive. For what, except His fol- lowers, did He leave behind as the visible outcome of His work ? He had founded no institution and had left no writings as a possession for after time. The Apostles were the salt to season and preserve the world, and if they had not savour whence could help be sought ? Is it not then likely that the best means would be employed for choosing and shaping instruments for the work; and can we do better than mark the Divine wisdom so engaged ? On many sides the work of Christ stretches away into infinity. God's purpose in having created the world, and put free intelligences into it, as well as the changes which Christ's death may have wrought in the relation of men's souls to God, belong to that infinite side of things, which we cannot explore. But we can follow the treat- ment by which Christ moulded the disciples, be- cause the changes are not wrought in them by a magical transformation, but come about gradually as the result of what they saw and heard and did. Changes are brought about in the disciples by an education, superhuman indeed in its wisdom, 1 — 2 4 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. superhuman in its insight into the habits of mind which were wanted, and into the modes by which such habits might be fostered, but not superhuman in the means employed. We can analyse the influences which are brought to bear, judge what they were likely to effect, and estimate fairly well what they did effect, because they Avere the same in kind as we now find working in the world. Christ's ways, therefore, in this province of His work fall within the range of our understanding. The learners are taught less by what they are told than by what they see and do. They are trained not only by listening, but by following and — what was above all — by being suffered, as in the mis- sion to the cities of Israel, to take part in their Master's work. They are altered by their companionship with our Lord, insensibly, just as we see the complexion of a man's character alter by his being thrown into the constant society of a stronger nature. But Christ works on them no magical change. Our Lord never transforms men so as to ob- literate their old nature, and substitute a new one; new powers and a new life spring up from contact with Him, but the powers work through the old organs, and the life flows through the old channels; they would not be the same men, or preserve their individual responsibility if it were otherwise. God's grace works with men, it is true, but it uses the organization it finds ; and as much cultivation and INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 5 shaping of the disposition is required in order to turn God's Grace to account, as any other good gift. Christ's particular care to leave the disciples their proper independence is everywhere apparent. They come to Him of their deliberate will. They are not stricken by any over-mastering impression, or led captive by moving words. They are not forced to break with their old selves ; their growth in steadfastness comes of a better knowledge of their Lord, and the more they advance in understanding God's ways and therefore in believing, the stronger are the grounds of assurance which are granted to them ; the more they have, the more is given them; the most attached are granted most. Christ, we find, draws out in His disciples the desired qualities of self-devotion and of healthy trust in God, without effacing the stamp of the individual nature of each man. He cherishes and respects personality. The leader of a sect or school of thought is often inclined to lose thought of the individual in his care for the society which he is establishing, or to expect his pupils to take his own opinions ready made, in a block. He is apt to be impatient if one of them attempts to think for-himself His aim very commonly is *' To make his own the mind of other men," and a pupil who asserts his own personality, and is not content with reflecting his master's, is not of the sort he wants. 6 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. But our Lord was a teacher of a very different kind. He reverenced whatever the learner had in him of his own, and was tender in fostering this native growth. He was glad when His words roused a man into thinking on his own account, even in the way of objection. When the Syro- phoenician woman turns His own saying against Him, with the rejoinder, "Yes Lord, yet the dogs under the table eat of the children's crumbs," He applauds her Faith the more for the independent thought that went with it. Men, in His eyes, were not mere clay in the hands of the potter, matter to be moulded to shape. They were organic beings, each growing from within, with a life of his own — a personal life which was exceedingly precious in His and His Father's eyes — and He would foster this growth so that it might take after the highest type. Neither did He mean that what He told men should only be stored in their memories as in a treasure-house, there to be kept intact. They were to "take heed how they heard." With Christ, the part that the man had to do of himself went for infinitely more than what was done for him by another. If men had the will and the power to turn to their own moral nutriment the mental food which was given them, well and good ; but if His words merely lay in their memories, without affecting them or germinating within them, then they were only as seeds falling on sterile spots. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 7 The training of the disciples was partly prac- tical, turning on what they saw our Lord do and were set or suffered to do themselves, and partly it came from what they heard. I want the reader to go along with me in marking how this training of the Apostles, was adapted to generate the qualities which the circumstances of their situation demanded when Christ left the world ; and it is in the practical part of the work that this is most readily traced. The selection of the Apostles may serve as an instance of what I mean. They were to preach a gospel to the poor — the movement was to spread upward from below. This will be found to be the law of growth of great moral principles which have established their sway among mankind. The Apo- stles therefore were chosen from a class which, though not the poorest, had sympathies with the poor. Again the Apostles were to be witnesses of the resurrection to after times ; it was important, therefore, that they should possess qualities which would make men trust them ; had they been ima- ginative, had they been enthusiasts, this would have been a bar to the accepting of their evidence; but the Apostles were singularly literal-minded men, so little suspecting a metaphorical meaning in their Master's sayings, that when He told them to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees, they thought it meant that, having no bread with them, they would be constrained to eat some not made by 8 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. Jewish hands. We see no exaggeration in them, no wild fervour, nothing that belongs to the religious fanatic. Our Lord never employs the force that such fanaticism affords ; when He meets with what seems the result of emotion, as when the woman breaks out with "Blessed is the womb that bare thee," He always brings back to mind that doing is more than feeling. We shall have to note, moreover, the progressive way in which our Lord taught His followers self- reliance and faith, and the tender care with which He lets His. hold of them go by degrees. Wander- ing along with our Lord, they grow into a capacity for marking greatness, and trusting themselves to a superior nature. When they are sent, two and two, through the cities of Israel, they learn to use respon- sibility, and to feel that His power could still pro- tect them even when He was not by. They lacked nothing then, for Christ provided for them ; but the time should come when they would complete their training and have real work to do, and then they would have to employ all gifts which had fallen to them. For the real conflict, both the purse and the sword are to be taken; prudence and judgment and courage must be brought into play in doing God's work as they are in doing that of every day life. And when Christ leaves the world, the disciples are not for long exposed to the revulsion which the crucifixion would cause. They are not suffered to feel their Master's loss and miss Him all at INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 9 once. They are not left to suppose that He had altogether gone, that His cause had failed and all was over ; so that they had better wake from their delusion and go back, with blighted hope and faith, to Galilee and their boats and nets. Soon comfort came. The work for which they had been trained was still to go on, only not in the way they had expected. Their following Christ was not to be a mere episode in their lives : they had not been wrong in thinking that they should serve Him all their days. Christ is near them still, and they see Him now and again. For forty days or more they felt that He was in their neighbourhood, and might at any time appear; any stranger who accosted them might turn out to be He. Thus they are carried through the time when the effects of shock on their mind and moral nature was most to be feared, and they are brought one step nearer to the power of realising that Christ is with them. After the Ascen- sion, He is withdrawn from the eye of sense alto- gether, His presence will henceforth be purely spiritual, but no sooner do they lose sight of Him in the body than the Comforter comes to their souls. So long as men walked by the guidance of one whom they saw by their side, they would not throw themselves on unseen spiritual aid. The Comforter would not come unless the Lord went away, but as soon as He was gone the comfort came. I now come to the oral teaching. Here we note the same fitness of the means to the end, 10 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. but the purpose in view is a more abstract one: a quality very essential for Christ's purpose is ex- pansiveness. The truths which He revealed and the commandments He gave were to be accepted by different nations, and in various states of society: they belonged therefore to what is primary in the nature of man. It is in this that Christ's doctrine differs from all systems. It does not belong to one age or one nationality but to all. Whether this character of Universality was due to prospective wisdom or to chance, I do not now discuss; I only say that the substance of Christ's teaching is suit- able for men in different conditions ; that the form in which it is put makes this teaching easy for the ignorant to retain ; and that the circumstances which accompanied it were singularly conducive to its spread. Christ arose amongst a nation which was the most strikingly individualised of all peoples, but He transmitted the type of Humanity in its most general form. We mark in Him no trace of one race or of one epoch ; He was emphatically the Son of Man. In all His sayings and doings, our Lord was most careful to leave the individual room to grow. Some of the " negative characteristics " of our Lord's teaching arise out of this universality. If we go to Him looking for a Social system or an Ecclesiastical polity we find nothing of the sort. Humanitarian theorists have turned in disappoint- ment from His word ; but a system suited to our INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. II age must have been unsuited to Gospel times. Christ gave no system for recasting Society by positive Law, and no ecclesiastical Polity, for men could make laws better when the circumstances which called for them arose. He gave no system of philosophy, for such systems are only the ways of looking at some of the enigmas of life, which suit the cast of mind of the nation or the generation which shapes the system. So different nations and generations should be left to make their systems as of old, only a new truth was declared, and a new force was set to work, which systems would hence- forth have to take into account. Again, the next world is what all want to know about. If the founder of a religion would win men's ears, he must set this before them. But, as we cannot conceive a life under conditions wholly different from that we lead, any description must be misleading. False notions besides en- gendering devotees and fanatics, would sap human activity and arrest progress. Hence Christ speaks to the fact of a future existence, but says nothing of the mode. He assures us that eternal life awaits those accounted worthy, but of the nature of this life He says nothing. He gives no details on which imagination can dwell. Farther, Christ leaves no ritual. For a ritual belongs to those outward things which must change; it would in time symbolize a view no longer taken, and if some should still cling to it from the idea 12 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. that it had a magic worth of its own, then it would stand in the way of the truth it was meant to set forth. Laws, Systems, and Ritual, then, were raiment to be changed as times went on; with them there- fore succeeding generations were left to deal. The form must come of man, so to man the shaping of it is left. But Christ gave what was more than raiment and more than form. "The words that I speak unto you," said He, "they are Spirit and they are life." He gave seed thoughts which should lie in men's hearts, and germinate when fit occasion came. These thoughts were clothed in terse sayings, such as a man would carry in his head and dwell on the more because he did not see to the bottom of them all at once. Moreover some of these say- ings, as for instance, "To whomsoever hath shall be given" will startle the hearer as being contrary to what he would expect ; and the more he is per- plexed, the more he is provoked to think, and thereby a greater impression is made. Other truths are wrapped up in parables. The form of the parable, not the matter it conveys, concerns me now. It is a form of speech which imbeds itself deeply in the memories of men and was admirably suited to preserve a genuine record during the time when the Gospel should subsist as an oral tradition. It put what was most important into the shape which made it most easy to recollect. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 1 3 Nothing except proverbs takes hold of men's memories so firmly as tales. The most ancient literary possessions of the world are, probably, certain stories containing a moral. Of course our Lord's teaching in parables answered greater ends than this of making His lessons easy to retain : but this form of teaching agreed wonderfully well with what the circumstances required. Next to tales in respect of being easily remembered, come narratives of detached striking acts. So the materials of the Gospel History, sayings, parables, narratives of signs and wonders, are cast into the forms best calculated for safe transmission through a period of tradition. We find the same suitableness of the form to the needs of the case, in the shape in which the whole Gospel has been delivered to us. I refer to its being narrative instead of didactic, and coming from the Evangelists instead of from Christ. If our Lord had left writings of His own, every letter of them would have been invested with such sanctity that there could have been no indepen- dent investigation of truth. Its place would have been taken by commentatorial works on the de- livered word. When writings are set before us and we are told, "All truth lies there ; look no further;" then our ingenuity is directed to extract diversities of meanings from the given words ; for matter must be set forth in human speech, and human speech conveys different meanings to differently biased minds. 14 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. The Jews regarded their sacred books as the actual words of God; hence came that subserviency to the letter, and that stretching of formulae which brought them to play fast and loose with their consciences. The Scribes looked on their Law as a conveyancer on a deed : they were bound by the letter, and this led them to regard the Almighty as One dealing with men under the terms of a contract. This drew them out of the road which led to a true knowledge of God, and helped to make them "blind leaders of the blind." Our Lord breaks down this slavery to the letter of the Scripture which He found existing, and He is careful not to build up a new bondage to His own words. When matter has come down by oral tradition, men can hardly worship the letter of it. We pos- sess only brief memoirs collected by men, the dates and history of the composition of which are far from certain, so that room is left for criticism and judgment. The revelation of God is, therefore, not so direct that men will be awestricken and shut their minds at the sight of it ; but human intelligence can be brought to bear on the records, whereby their meaning is brought out, and men's intellects are braced by the exploration of lofty regions. Men may without irreverence raise the question, whether the narrator had rightly under- stood Christ's sayings, and properly connected them with the circumstances out of which they arose. Our Lord in Galilee, at any rate, spoke Aramaic, INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 1$ and we have merely the Greek ; we have only frag- ments of His teaching; we possess different ver- sions, agreeing indeed in essentials, but with such differences, that we are forced to admit in the writers a human possibility of error. We have our Lord's words it is true, but not in the order, or in the connection, in which they were spoken. There is not only room for human judgment but a neces- sity for it. Hence the form in which our Lord's utterances have come down to us is suited to the plan which seems to run through all our Lord's teaching; it calls for the free play of the human mind, and leaves room for the admission of a certain choice as to what we accept as revealed truth. It is true that some Divines have endeavoured to do what our Lord was careful not to do — they have, by theories of verbal inspiration, endeavoured to put our Gospels in the position that actual writings of our Lord would have held ; and, so far as they have succeeded, they have brought about the evils which attended the notions of the scribes. But the form in which we have the Gospels does not lend itself to such a theory. If men go wrong in this way they have only themselves to blame. There is another way in which this form of the Gospels answers to the plan of Christ's teaching. He impressed men, above all, by His Personality, and the record of His life is preserved to us in that form which is best adapted to preserve person- l6 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. ality and store it up for the future, viz. the form of memoirs put together by contemporaries, or by those who were familiar with contemporaries. History and literature furnish many instances of men who have made their mark in virtue of a striking />ersona/ity ; whose reputation rests, not on any visible tokens, — not on kingdoms conquered, institutions founded, books written, or inventions perfected or anything else that they did, — but mainly on what they were. Their merely having passed along a course on earth, and lived and talked and acted with others, has left lasting effects on mankind. This may serve to put us in the way of under- standing what was wrought by the Personality of Christ : for our Lord's disciples followed Jesus of Nazareth for this above all, — that he was Jesus of Nazareth. Those of His own time had felt this Personality working on them while they saw Him and listened to Him. It is consistent, then, with what we gather of His prospective care, that He should so provide, that after generations should have as nearly as possible, the same advantages as that with which He lived upon the earth. This is effected by His being presented to them in the Gospels, not as a writer is in his works, not as a lawgiver is in his codes, but as the man Christ Jesus, mixing with men, sharing their feasts, helping their troubles, going journeys with them, and in all these occasions turning their thoughts, gently, with a touch that is INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. I7 scarcely observed, towards that knowledge of God which He came to bring. Which is it that sways us most ^ Is it the teacher who tells us this is the way you are to think, this is what you are to believe and what you are to do ? Or is it the friend who blends his life and heart and mind with ours, with whom we argue and differ, but take something each from the other, which assimilates with what is most our own } Surely we yield more freely to the one who helps to foster our particular personality than to him who would thrust it aside, and replace it by his own. Now Christ, as portrayed in the Gospels, is such a friend. He trusts to men's believing that the Father is in Him, not because He has declared it in set dogmas, but because He has been " so long with them." He is a friend who lifts us out of our common selves, and helps each one of us to find his own truest self: we catch fire from the new light which he kindles in us, and we become conscious of a new force, a spiritual one. When the narrative brings us to the sacrifice on the Cross, we see what the spectators saw, and something more, for we see this new inward force transcending all outward violence. When we turn to the Sufferer on the Cross, we say " after all, the Victory is there." But not only is our Lord's Personality presented to us in the literary form in which it can best be put forth, that of the informal memoir, but we L. 2 1 8 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. are given four such memoirs, each regarding its subject from a different point. We have then four different projections of what we want to con- struct. The help of this is obvious ; and it is worth mentioning that hereby there is more scope for man's mental action than if we had only one Gospel. By diligently comparing and fitting in each with the other, we cultivate our mind's eye to catch the lineaments of Christ's figure. A painter, who has to produce a portrait from four photo- graphs, has a less simple task than if only a single photograph existed ; but his work will be more intellectual ; it will do him more good, and the result will be more of a conception and less of a copy. I believe that the education of man to a know- ledge of God is part of the Divine purpose running through God's ways, and I detect in the narrative form in which our knowledge of Christ has been delivered to us, a wise tenderness for the spiritual freedom of man and a help to keep his faculties alive. I spoke just now of Laws of Christ's conduct. The more we look at Christ's life and teaching as a whole, the more we discern in it the obser- vance of certain Laws, which give it unity and order. When we stand near some large painting, or masterpiece of Art, we are taken up with the portion of it just under our eye ; we scan this or that group and admire its finish and its truth. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. I9 But when we go a little way off, and again look, and give our minds to it, we become aware of a different order of perfections in it, namely those perfections which belong to it as a whole, as the completed conception of a gifted mind. So it is with the Gospel History. While we read chapter by chapter we see what answers to one group in the great picture; but when we have the whole in our mind, we see a consistent purpose holding it all together: we find that our Lord always acts along certain lines, and carries out certain principles. One of these, which lies at the root of His ways of dealing with men, is His carefulness to keep alive in each man the sense of his personal responsibility, and of the dignity of such responsibility. He would seem to say to each man, " It is no small thing to have been entrusted by God with the care of a soul which you may educate for fitness for eternal life." We find in our Lord, indignation, once, at least, even anger^ towards men and their ways, but never contempt or scorn. A man is, merely as a man, entitled to be treated with respect. The enforcing of this on the world is, among all the '* Gesta Christi," perhaps the most noticeable now. The simple fact of His dealing directly with men themselves^ shews that He owned their free agency more or less. If men had been merely puppets moved by strings, Christ could only have 1 Mark iii. 5. 2 — 2 20 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. benefited them by swaying the powers who held these strings, and there would have been no mean- ing in His addressing Himself to the puppets themselves and giving His life for them. Now, if men are free they must be at liberty to go in a direction different from that which is best for them — that is to go wrong ; and so "it must needs be that offences come," and bring suffering in their train. I mention these principles now, because they are the bases of the Laws of which I am going to speak. They will come before us again further on. The marking of uniformities in Christ's conduct, and in His modes of conveying instruction, is serviceable in this way. We perceive the Laws (defined as in p. 2) by regarding Christ's career as a whole ; and in return, the Laws, when perceived, help us to grasp its unity and completeness in a more thorough way; and, besides this, we strengthen our critical faculty, and arm it with a new criterion which may become an effective weapon in argu- ing on questions of internal evidence. For if we find in any newly-discovered fragment, or even in the Gospels themselves, that which runs counter to what we think we have established as a Law, then we have to ask ourselves whether it is likely that the passage is spurious or imperfect or put out of its right place ; or, on the other hand, whether our Law has been framed too narrowly, and ought to be restated or enlarged. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 21 Again, when we find a Law constantly observed, and are sure that the narrative cannot have been written up to the Law, because the narrators knew nothing of such a Law ; then we come on a new variety of internal evidence. If, in matters which only a student would observe, our Lord is found to adhere to certain ways, this favours the view that the materials for the portrait came from life ; for an artist drawing from description or following an idea of his own must have missed these delicate details now and then. This consistency uniformly observed forms a sort of undesigned coincidence ramifying through the mass, and holding it all to- gether. The notion of Laws underlying our Lord's action, and shewing their traces on the surface from time to time, will be best illustrated by an example. I shall take the rules which our Lord observes in the working of Signs and Wonders; and so I must here anticipate something of that, which I shall make the subject of a whole chapter further on. Our Lord is set apart from all other teachers by His use of Signs and Wonders. We shall enquire, how He regarded them ? What use He designed to make of them ? And, what more especially concerns us now, what Laws He observes when He employs them.? These Laws we shall find — wrapped up as it were — in our Lord's answers to the Tempter in the wilderness. The narrative of the Temptation, which seems, at first sight, to be a fragment unconnected with the course of the action of the Gospel History, 22 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. becomes, when the Laws are noted, the key to the interpretation of much. Isolated phenomena fall into system. I will relate the Temptations in the order given by St Luke, and briefly state the Laws indicated in the Tempter's suggestions to- gether with our Lord's replies. L Christ will not turn stones into loaves to appease His hunger in the wilderness. This refusal contains two principles to which our Lord will be found to adhere. (i) He will not use His special powers to pro- vide for His personal wants or for those of His immediate followers. When our Lord provided food for the five thou- sand, the loaves and fishes the Apostles had with them were enough for their own party\ (2) Christ will not provide by miracle what could be provided by human endeavour or human foresight. Our Lord will not even make men better by action on them from without ; He will not change their being by any spiritual action without their cooperation. When the Apostles said " Increase our Faith," He worked no sudden change in them, but He pointed out to them the efficacy of Faith, in order that by longing for it, they might attain to it. II. Christ will not purchase the visible *'king- doms of the world and the glory of them" by ^ St Matth. xiv. 17. INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 23 worshipping Satan — that is to say, He will not do homage to the Spirit of the world to win the world's support. He will not ally Himself with worldly policy. He will not fight the world with its own weapons, and become its master by giving in to its views and its ways. In addressing the people He runs counter to the notions they cherished the most. He would not proclaim Himself as the Messiah, or allow Himself to be made si King though thousands, who were looking for a national de- liverer, would have rallied round Him if He had done so\ He would not conciliate the favour of the great. He would not display His powers, for a matter of wonderment, to satisfy the curiosity of Herod, nor would He use them to repel violence by open force. He would not hearken to the tempta- tion which said, "Use your miraculous powers to establish a visible kingdom upon earth; and when this is done you can frame a perfect form of society by positive Law." HI. Christ will not throw Himself from the pinnacle of the Temple. The Temptation must have been to do this in the sight of the people. Else, why is this pinnacle chosen rather than any other height ? The refusal points to the following important Laws. (i) No miracle is to be worked merely for miracles' sake, apart from an end of benevolence or instruction. ^ John vi. 15. 24 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. What appear to be exceptions to this rule cease to be so when fully considered. The walking on the waters, as we shall see further on, was a step in training the Apostles to realize His nearness to them, when He was not before their eyes. The withering of the fig-tree, which had leaves before its time, but no fruit, was an acted parable bearing on the Jewish people. These are miracles of instruction. We shall find others of the same kind. (2) No miracle is to be worked which should be so overwhelming in point of awfulness, as to terrify men into acceptance, or which should be un- answerably certain, leaving no loop-hole for unbelief. As, in the second Temptation, our Lord refused to allow physical force to be used to bring men to adopt His cause, so here He refitses to employ moral compiilsioit. The miracles only convinced the willing, men might always disbelieve if they would. They might allow the fact of the prodigies, and yet set them down to magic or witchcraft: it was with many an open question whether to ascribe them to God or to Beelzebub, for the latter had, it was supposed, a share of power upon the earth. But one popular criterion there was of the power being God's : in heaven, said the Jews, God reigned supreme and alone. A Sign worked there would carry with it the autograph of God. When Joshua would convince their fathers, he had WTOUght a Sign in heaven ; he had made the sun INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 25 and moon stand still. Let Christ do this and they would believe. No such Sign will Christ work. If the world was to be converted nolens volens it might as well have been peopled from the first by beings incapable of error. If the end of His coming had been to gain ad- herents, His purpose would have been furthered by granting a Sign which would have struck the imagination of the masses ; but to raise a large immediate following was not our Lord's design. He wanted only a few fit spirits as depositaries of His word. He came to educate men to know God and thereby to arrive at the assurance of immortality. The knowledge reached through this education could not be imparted by any mere telling or express communication, but had to be unfolded from within the learner's self. Belief was to grow and not to be imposed. It had two elements, a perception of a Divine agency at work in the world, and a personal trust in Christ who manifested God, — a trust based on something like the devotion of a soldier to his chief That the probability that His mission did really come from God, should be made to exceed by a little the probability that it did not, and that this balance of arguments should lead people to acknowledge Him, was not what Christ had in view. He sought only the homage of free, loving, human hearts. The Laws above mentioned will be found to V 26 INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. regulate the course of our Lord's actions as regards the performance of Signs and Wonders. They are frequently violated in the Apocryphal Gospels, never, I think, in the Canonical ones. There are other Laws which I shall have to trace; one, which is very important, is stated on at least two oc- casions ; I have referred to it as being paradoxical in form, and the more fitted to force itself on men's minds on that account. It is the text, "To whom- soever hath shall be given, and from whomsoever hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." This looks as if it would fall in strangely with the Law of Natural Selection and the Survival of the Fittest, in the organic world. What I believe our Lord to have meant by it will be discussed in its proper place. I shall have also to speak of the pivspective bearing of much that our Lord says and does, and to shew how this gives us a greater assurance of our Lord's being " with us always to the end of the world." Christ seems to me to look over the heads of the generation about Him far into the future; His eye is fixed on the distance, but it does not look out vaguely into space; it is turned in a direction that is precisely determined. He walks with the assured step of one who marches to a goal. But what that goal is He never tells men, and when He designedly keeps men's curiosity unsatisfied, we may conjecture that no answer could be given with- out touching on conditions of spiritual existence INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER. 2/ beyond our ken. There may be such conditions which we could no more conceive than we could imagine space with another dimension, beside length and breadth and height. The history of the Church and of the work- ings of men's minds may disclose the existence of Laws, lying under the events of ages and operating through them, analogous to those laid down by our Lord for his own conduct ; and we may look along the direction in which these Laws point. Some have thought they descried, at the end, a time, in which peace and righteousness should reign over the whole world. But Christ Himself doubted whether He should find faith upon the earth when He came\ However, if He should not, still He will not have failed, we can be sure of this. What He meant to effect, whatever it was, will have come about. Righteous souls may be garnered elsewhere, and this earth may be only a school of life, a training ground for the education and selection (for these two go together) of beings who shall be fitted to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. ^ Luke xviii. 8. CHAPTER II. HUMAN FREEDOM. I HAVE spoken in the foregoing chapter of certain characteristics of our Lord's ways of dealing with men. In considering these ways we find ourselves, at almost every turn, face to face with the great enigmas of life which underlie all Theology. Questions about Divine government and human freedom will, I see, force themselves upon us. It would keep this book more close to its pur- pose, if I could proceed at once with jthe examina- tion of what our Lord says and does, and leave all these difficulties on one side, taking it for granted that all my readers had arrived at their own views about them ; or if I were to refer them to works in which they are formally discussed. But I trust my readers will forgive me, if I suppose that it may be with them as with those I have been used to teach — that is to say, that they will be attracted by these perplexities, and that they will be impatient at being told that just what they want to ask lies outside my province. Many too, I know, would never turn to any of the HUMAN FREEDOM. 29 learned works on these matters, of which I might give them the names. I have resolved, therefore, to deal with these matters once for all, in as familiar a way as I can. I cannot, of course, give my readers solutions of these questions; lean only tell them how I manage to do without a solution myself, and put before them the view of these matters which I hold till I can get a better, so that they may more readily enter into my views of Christ's Laws of action, and understand what I write. The characteristics of our Lord's ways which particularly bring us in contact with these mysteries, and which therefore concern us most now, are (i) His care to keep alive in His hearers their sense of being free and responsible agents; (2) His tolerance of the existence of evil in the world. These questions of free will and the existence of evil have been for ages the battle-ground of divines, and they come before us every day. "Why did not God make every one good ? " is a question which occurs to every intelligent child. He runs to his first teachers with it, and finding himself put off with an answer that is no answer — for a child is quick in detecting this — he gets his first notion that there are matters which even grown-up people know nothing about. So, that I may not serve my readers in this way, I give them all I have myself. I can no more tell them "How" or "Why" God brought about the 30 HUMAN FREEDOM. present state of things, than I can solve the great mystery which is at the bottom of all mysteries : " How, or Why, God and the world ever existed at all ?" But I think I can shew that free agency in men, and the existence of evil, and also a reserve in the revelation of God's ways — a question I shall have to deal with next — are consistent with our situ- ation in this world ; supposing that the mental and spiritual development of God's creatures is the proximate end and aim of the Spiritual Order. Some hypothesis we must make as to a purpose in the world, if we regard it as the work of a mind; and this is the purpose which most seems to fall in with what I observe. Our Lord speaks of Divine action as "The mystery of the kingdom of God V He directs the thoughts of His disciples to these ways by telling them, not what they are, but to what they are like. We shall never, while on earth, perfectly know these ways, but Christ thinks it well for His dis- ciples to strive after this knowledge, and to look for lessons in all they see to help them towards it. Not only does Christ give us what I have called seed-thoughts on these matters, but He puts us in possession of a unique method for leading men towards the truth about them. He takes an in- cident of familiar life, and uses it to set forth spiritual verities. So when we must discourse of these hard matters our safest course is to follow 1 Mark iv. ii. HUMAN FREEDOM. 3 1 our Lord's way. No doubt, He meant to shew us how to teach, as well as to tell us what to teach ; so if we begin with a sort of allegory or parable, we cannot be far wrong in point of form, however feeble and faulty the execution may be. I believe that the relation of a parent to his house- hold affords likeness enough to that of the Father to His world, to be used as the ground of a parable on God's Will and Human Freedom. Let us suppose that the father of a family, a man of strong will, and steadfastly abhorring evil, should conceive the project of forcibly shutting it out from his home. We will suppose the house- hold planted in a spot remote from human inter- course, in some self-supplying island or dale among the hills; and, as I do not mean to touch on physical evil, let us suppose that no external calamity comes nigh the dwelling. Here, let us suppose, the children grow up, uncontaminated by ill, knowing no temptation, reared in love and kindness, treated with such wise and even justice that envy and jealousy find no room to enter. The parent proposes to himself to do away with all temptation, all chance of individual aberration, and to cast his children's character in a perfect mould. He would have them merge themselves in him as much as possible, repeating his thoughts and accepting his views without questioning them, or supposing they could be ques- tioned. All society, all books, but what he approves, 32 HUMAN FREEDOM. are banished from that house, so that no whisper of evil, no pernicious notions can possibly intrude. Evil is by him regarded as a pestilent weed, which only exists, owing to some oversight in the making of the world, for which he is at a loss to account. It is at once to be eradicated whenever it is espied. Let us suppose that all goes well in our ima- gined household — that the children love their father and believe implicitly in him; that they are so happy In their home and home pursuits that they do not look beyond ; and that the healthy labour, which their common wants necessitate, gives room for all their energies. Hence, there is no repining at their narrow sphere, no longing for more stren- uous activity or more varied life. Each does his daily work, and returns to pleasant rest and a happy home, and no more asks himself whether he is happy, than he asks whether the valves of his heart are opening and closing as they should. The father, then, looks around him, and sees his Ideal accomplished. He has a family of which no member does anything but what he approves, or has a thought but what he shares with him ; not one of them sets up an opinion different from what he holds. It never occurs to them to doubt the wisdom of any injunction. Life presents to them no moral difficulties, because, as soon as any question occurs to them, they run with it to their father, and on receiving his reply put aside the HUMAN FREEDOM. 33 matter, as being decided and disposed of for good and all. We might suppose the parent would look around with unalloyed satisfaction. But a moment comes when he finds something wanting. He is not so thoroughly satisfied as he had expected to be with the ideal which he has worked out. Some misgiving obtrudes itself. He asks himself — Is this condition, this merging of my children's wills in mine, what is best for them or what is best for me.-* Is not this goodness of theirs too negative.'* Is it not rather the absence of evil than the presence of good .'' Further he asks, am not / substantially alone } Is not mine the only independent mind in the place, of which all the rest are mere reflections i Am I not intensifying my loneliness and all the moral disadvantages that attach to it, by thus rendering all who surround me merely portions of myself .-* For my children are not separate persons, but bits of 7/ie. Are not whole provinces of moral activity shut out from me, by the very fact of my having everything my own way ? Are there not virtues which require opposition to call them out ? Is it not good to have to ask ourselves whether we are dealing fairly with opponents .'* Is it not good to forgive wrongs ? Is it not good to reach out a helping hand, and lift one who has stumbled, back into his self-respect ? I engage in no struggles. In my world there are no misdoings L. 3 34 HUMAN FREEDOM. to forgive and no misdoers to restore. Have I not closed against myself whole worlds of moral action and of moral life ? Then, as to my children, " Have I not been wrong in supposing that they must be good be- cause they have never done wrong ? They have been so kept from the suggestion of evil that they could hardly help going right. But could they resist temptation if it came } They have never been braced by a struggle with it, nor marked the ill fruits of evil. They take it on trust from me that evil brings sorrow ; but it usually comes in disguise and declares itself harmless, and how should they recognise it if it came ? " So, question after question suggests itself, all destructive of his satis- faction. " Can it be," he says at last, " that I have brought up these children so as to be fit for no world but that which I have carefully constructed for them ^ I used to delight in their goodness ; but since I have suspected it to be mainly in- stinctive— an innocence that is the outcome of ignorance — my satisfaction in it is half gone. At length, he is harassed with the idea that he may have given up his life to a mistake, that what he has done has cramped his own mental and moral expansion, and that the excellence of his blame- less family is only fair-weather goodness after all. He casts about to think why it is that they have "neither savour nor salt," and concludes "What they want is personality — and how should they have HUMAN FREEDOM. 35 got it, living in a household where I have taken care to be all in all?" Then his thoughts run upon cvil^ which he has been at such pains to shut out, closing against it every cranny and chink. ** God," he may say, "has let evil into His world — was I right in keep- ing it forcibly out of mine? May not the resist- ing and assuaging of evil give occasion for good to grow up, and feel its own strength ? Are there not many kinds of goodness, brought out in this way, which we could no more have without evil than we could have light in a picture without shade ? If there is no room for my children to go wrong, what moral significance," he asks, ''is there in saying that they go right?" So he is disheartened with his project, and gives it up. He abandons his isolated way of life, and gives his children freedom. He encourages them to act and judge for themselves. Henceforth they can choose their own books, their own friends their own pursuits, and go forth into life, outside their charmed circle. Of course this involves the giving up of his absolute power ; this is inherent in the nature of things. A man cannot be an autocrat and have free people about him. If he would have inter- course with free intelligences, in order to get the advantages to his own cultivation and expansion of character which spring from such intercourse ; this must be purchased by abdicating some of his 36 HUMAN FREEDOM. powers, or putting them in abeyance. So the parent forbears using his power, in order that his children may learn to be free, and that he may hold communion with free, loving hearts, and en- gage in discussion with unfettered minds. Soon, he finds that he has to encounter oppo- sition. The children are free to go wrong, and wrong some of them will go : evil appears in that household where it was not known. The father sorrows over this, but when he reviews his con- dition he finds that he has a countervailing com- fort ; the good that is left about him is now real good. It is the good of persons who have known and resisted evil. Besides this, there is more life and greater vigour of character in his family, than there was before. They no longer sit with folded hands always waiting for direction ; they have the air of persons who see a purpose before them ; and they move along their way " with the certain step of man." So he concludes that it is better that all should engage in the struggle with evil, even though some should fail, than that they should move along paths ready shaped out for them, shewing a merely mechanical goodness. A great change has come over his life in another respect, he is now no longer alone. Other wills come into contact, sometimes into collision, with his will ; a host of qualities, which had been folded up and laid by for years, come again into use. He is no longer among echoes of himself, but there HUMAN FREEDOM. 37 are real voices in his new world. His views may still prevail, but it must be, not merely because they are his, but because they stand on solid ground. He may still lead in action ; but it must be because he has the leader's strength, because he will venture when others waver, and decide when others doubt. Here we must leave him, and say a word or two before making the obvious application of the parable. We must not press the application too closely or draw conclusions from the mere ma- chinery of the parable : it must not, of course, be supposed that I conceive God to have dealt with man as the father does with his children; that is to say, to have kept him at first in tutelage, and then found it desirable to enfranchise him. The sole object of the story is to familiarise the reader with the need of freedom in moral growth. It shews that for education to be carried out, the luill must be free to act. When we have brought this home to his mind, we shall be the better able " to justify the ways of God to man" in some important par- ticulars. The parable Is designed to apply to the con- dition of men on earth on the supposition, that their education — in the largest sense of the word — is the main work held in view : all depends on the hypothesis that man is placed on earth to develop his powers. The need of freedom for members of the imagined family depends on their being in a 38 HUMAN FREEDOM. state of growth. The parable would not apply to spiritual beings, if we could conceive such, whose qualities and character were unalterable. Perfected beings have done with growth and struggle, and have attained to the highest condition, viz. existence in unison wath God. But for impeifect beings, struggling on to their goal, freedom is required and the opposition of evil is indis- pensable, in order that the moral thews and sinews may harden. Whenever we come upon an objection to the ways of God's ordering of the world, which is put in the form of a question, such as " Why was not the world made in this way or that 1 " we shall find it a good plan, to follow out the line indicated in the complaint, and see what would have come about, supposing that God had made the world in the way which is suggested. From the imaginary case here put, we see to what the common child's question leads us — the question '" Why did not God make all people good and keep them so.?" — If people had been "made good and kept good," that is to say if they had been constructed by God so as always to act as His will prompted, then they would not in the proper sense of the word have been people at all ; they would have been mechanisms worked by God, and so they could not have been "good" in the sense in which we use the word of a man, but only in that in which we apply it to a watch. There HUMAN FREEDOM. 39 could be no moral life without freedom ; there could be no growth of character without tempta- tions and difficulties to overcome; no heroism, no self-denial, no sympathising tenderness, no forgiving love, without suffering or wrongdoing to call them forth. Moreover if not only people on earth, but all created intelligences had, in like manner, been con- strained to respond to every motion of the Divine will, God would have been the one spiritual being in the world and would therefore have been abso- lutely alo7ie. Let us now suppose, and the supposition falls in with what our conscience and the Bible tell us, that in God all goodness dwells. This goodness cannot lie stored away as in a treasure-house, so as to be merely an object of contemplation, it must be active and in operation. This is essential to our idea of goodness, and it agrees with the view of God which Christ presents to us, which is that of a being ever operating. " My Father worketh hitherto," says our Lord, *'and I work." •For good to unfold, and advance toward per- fection in its manifold ways, an arena is wanted. The world we know of affords the arena required ; y in this, God has been working from the first. One kind of His work we can conceive to be the suggesting thoughts to men ; but if it be so, He leaves the will free either to entertain or to reject the suggestions, as we might those of a friend. 40 • HUMAN FREEDOM. That we may not lose ourselves in the immen- sity of God and eternity, we will withdraw our gaze from the rest of the Universe, and fix it on this planet of ours, when organic life first began to appear upon it. The spiritual and material world might, before this, have been going on, each apart, through countless ages; but a moment came when the spiritual and the material were won- drously blended, and life began upon the earth. Different orders of being succeeded each other, and fresh forces came into play. We may suppose that God sympathised with all His creation, and that the qualities that appeared in it reflected some- thing in Himself. God may have rejoiced in seeing the animal creation happy. The animals were in a degree free, but they were not self-con- scious ; they did not know that they were happy, or that they were loved, and God may .have required for the full unfolding of His infinite capacity for sympathy and love, to be in relation with beings who could know Him and love Him, and know that they loved Him. Mr Erskine of Linlathen, in his excellent book on the Spiritual Order, says " Is there not a com- fort in the doctrine of the eternal Sonship, as a deliverance from the thought of a God, whose very nature is Love, dwelling in absolute solitude from all eternity without an object of love.?" We may extend this observation to other qualities besides love, from the exercise of which, a being who is ) HUMAN FREEDOM. 4I alone in the world is necessarily debarred. Is it not likely that a God of mercy, truth and justice would frame a world of beings, in His dealing with whom all these qualities should find scope and exercise.'* Without self-conscious beings having free wills, how could this be done ? Close by the side of this question of free will, lies that of the existence of moral evil, in a world made by a being who, by the hypothesis, is perfectly good. When we supposed the world to be formed for the evolution of moral goodness, we, perhaps without knowing it, introduced the idea of moral evil, implied in that of goodness ; for actual good is evolved in resisting evil and repairing the mis- chief it has done ; indeed many forms of it can no more exist without evil as an antagonist, than a wheel can turn without the friction of the road. Now, as I have said, if men be left free, they must have liberty to go wrong. For if they had been originally made so perfect that they coi^/d not go wrong, this would only mean that they were like watches very excellently fabricated ; they could only move in one particular way, viz. the way in which they had been designed to move by God. Inasmuch as such beings would not be persons, we could not feel gratitude or anger towards them, nor influence them in any way. If men were like this, there could be little or no growth, little or no action of man on man. If, to take another suppo- sition, man had been so made that it would be 42 HUMAN FREEDOM. possible for him to go wrong, but that he had been sedulously kept out of temptation and placed in an abode where innocence reigned undisturbed ; then we come to a case very like that sketched in the foregoing parable. There is a third case possible. God might make men capable of going wrong, but might watch over them and protect them, whether they craved His help or not, whenever temptation approached. This constant supernatural interference would soon have destroyed all self-helpfulness ; men would never have formed habits of avoiding or resisting tem.pta- tion. *' God," the man would say, " will not let me sin — I may go as near to danger as I like, and need take no care of myself, because I am sure of God's protection." We know that a child does not learn to take care of himself, so long as he feels that it is the nurse's business to see that no harm happens to him. We come then to this result. God requires free self-conscious beings, for the full exercise of the moral goodness in Himself and for its de- velopment and manifestation in the world. But He cannot give others freedom, and at the same time provide that they should act only in the way that He approves : because this in itself would be a contradiction, and a contradiction not even Divine power can effect. Hence these free, in- telligent beings must be at liberty to go wrong, and God must, in exchange for having free wills about him, forego part of His absolute prerogative : HUMAN FREEDOM. 43 and so He must allow evil a place in the world because this is involved in the "liberty to go wrong" just spoken of. This brings us to the mystery of the "origin of evil." I shall not lay myself open to the charge made against divines, "That they no sooner de- clare a subject to be a mystery than they set to work to explain it." I can see that if man is to be left free, evil must needs come, and that without evil in the world none of the more masculine virtues can be brought to the birth — that is to say, I see that evil, being in the world, serves to discharge a function — but I do not pre- tend to say how it came. I do not maintain that it came, solely, from man's misuse of his freedom. From what we see in the world arises a fancy that every thing must have its opposite, that light presupposes darkness, and pleasure pain, and so good may presuppose evil ; but this fancy is not substantial enough to build upon. Our Lord's words on the occasions when He deals with evil, are, to my judgment, most easily reconciled with one another, and with the circumstances which call them forth, by supposing Him to recognise a per- sonal spiritual influence, presenting evil thoughts to the minds of men ; the man remaining free to choose whether he will entertain these suggestions or not. I return to my immediate subject — the function that evil performs in the existing moral world. We 44 HUMAN FREEDOM. read In the Book of Genesis that the earth was to bring forth "thorns and thistles," and that man was "to eat bread in the sweat of his brow\" This is the result of a change worked, we are told, " for man's sake." It was indeed for man's sake — though in a different sense — that this was so. He would have remained a very poor creature if the earth had produced just what he wanted, without any labour of his. This illustrates the function of evil in the ordering of the world. Man's qualities, moral and physical, are developed by it. It sub- serves the progress of the human race. We should have less heroism, without cruelty and oppression from without ; and could have no self-restraint, without temptation from within. Piety and love indeed, when they had once come into being, might exist without evil ; we may be- lieve that they satisfy the souls of the saints in heaven ; but among men they commonly owe their birth to a feeling of shelter against evil, and to a sense of pardoned wrong. Another office which evil performs is this. The contention with it helps to bring out the difference between man and man. If any members of the family of my parable had possessed the germs of a strong character, they could hardly have brought fruit to perfection: the conditions of their innocent life tended to uniformity. But as soon as temp- tations came, latent differences would forthwith ^ Gen. iii. i8, 19. HUMAN FREEDOM. 45 appear; the strong would grow stronger and the bad worse. Now there is need of strong men for human progress. They form the steps in the stairway by which the race mounts. If life were smooth and easy, men would, as it were, advance in line, and the stronger men would not so surely come in front of the rest. It is in times of trouble that men are most apt to recognise worth and capacity, and make much of them. So that the trials and difficulties of human life which come of evil, have this good eftect among others, they help to pick out the men who are fitted to be the leaders of human movements and of human thought. It may have struck us as strange that Christ does not deal directly with these perplexing ques- tions which trouble so many minds. We shall see, later on, that His not doing so is quite consistent with the uniform "tenour of His way." But though our Lord does not lay down dogmas on these points, yet His own actions and expressions would, of course, accord with what He knew : if, then, when we hit upon some view of this "riddle of the painful earth," which commends itself to our minds, we find that it clashes with what our Lord does or says, then we may throw it aside at once: and, on the other hand, if we arrive at a way of looking at the matter which seems to harmonise with what falls from Him ; then, we may hope, not indeed that we have found a solution of the riddle, but that our hypothesis will not mislead us, so 4.6 HUMAN FREEDOM. long as wc own it to be an hypothesis, and nothing more. We may be supposed then to have arrived at this position. We assume the existence of a mighty Divine being, in whom all goodness dwells. We suppose that this world is an arena in which a struggle is to be carried on between good and evil by the agency of free intelligent beings ; that by means of this struggle the better natures will be strengthened and developed, and come more and more into action ; we suppose also that God whis- pers counsel and comfort on the side of good. Further than this we need not now go. As regards the presence of evil in the world, there are several sayings of our Lord which might be noted. I must confine myself to one or two of the most important. First let us consider the following passage from St John's Gospel^ : "And as he passed by, he saw a man blind from his birth. And his disciples asked him, say- ing. Rabbi, who did sin, this man, or his parents, that he should be born blind .'' Jesus answered, Neither did this man sin, nor his parents : but that the works of God should be made manifest in him." Here the disciples take it for granted, that the blindness was a punishment for sin, either on the part of the man or his parents. It is our Lord's prac- * John ix. I — 3. HUMAN FREEDOM. 4/ tice — and a practice so uniform that we may call it a Law of proceeding — not to enter into con- troversy about wide-spread mistaken views on merely speculative subjects: He usually gives a hint, and leaves it to work in the hearer's mind. Our Lord's an-swer in this case means, not^ of course, that the man and his parents had never committed sin, but that the blindness was not the result of that sin ; and He passes rapidly on to state His view of one purpose answered by this infliction. In His few words of answer our Lord lets fall one of those hints, seed thoughts, as I have called them, which lie so thickly in the Gospels. Our Lord tells us, that the works of God were to be made manifest by this man's infirmity. A light is thrown by these words on one of the " uses of adversity." Suffering gives room for moral goodness to come into play. The world is full of instances easy enough to note. Does not a sick child in a family educate all around it to tender- ness and self-denial "^ What more touching lesson in patience can be given than the sight of the little sufferer, grieved at nothing so much as the trouble it causes, making the most of every alle- viation, grateful beyond measure for every look or word of love. Rough brothers learn forbear- ance and gentleness ; and to all the household it becomes natural to think of something else before, or at least beside, themselves. Wordsworth tells us of 48 HUMAN FREEDOM. a half-witted boy whose helplessness and simplicity fostered a spirit of kindliness in all the poor of the village, and taught them to respect affliction. Again in the parable of the Prodigal Son, we are taught how there is "a. soul of goodness in things evil." The wickedness of the prodigal is made a means of revealing to him and to all the bystanders the Divine beauty and efficacy of for- giving love. We will now^ turn to the history of the cure of the Daemoniac in the country of the Gadarenes. I take the history in what seems to me the plain literal sense, and I must suppose that our Lord recognised some real evil existence, which had possessed itself of the man, and which, by its presence in him, had unhinged his whole mental or nervous organisation. This ex- istence is separable from him, but it requires, it would seem, some body to inhabit and to work upon. The daemon begs not to be suppressed or annihilated, and our Lord grants his petition and lets him go among the swine. He saves the;;/^;/ — what other evils this daemon may work in the world, so that he lets men go, is no concern of His. The Son of Man is concerned only with lives and souls — not with property in any way. The point for us to note is this : Our Lord does not anniJiilate evil. He does not regard it as an outlawed intruder who had eluded God's notice, 1 St Luke viii. 26; St Mark v. i. HUMAN FREEDOM. 49 and who, as soon as he is discovered, is to be ex- pelled from the universe at once. His Father has suffered evil to be, and He, Christ, follows in His Father's ways : evil may still do its work, only not on men. This evil influence, we must observe, is something external to the man ; it would seem to belong to an order of existences, engaged in working ill as their congenial business ; whispering bad counsel, something in the way that God's Spirit whispers good, only, of course, not in such deep authoritative tones; and, in these cases of possession, it masters the whole being of the sufferer. Why this was allowed to be, is of course a mystery, but yet it is hardly a greater mystery than why evil in its other forms should be allowed to exist, and with- out evil in some shape, as we have seen, this earth would be a very imperfect exercise-ground for mankind. To represent this case to our minds, let us imagine some malignant "germ" that has caused a plague amongst men, and which in time takes a slightly different form, so that it is no longer adapted to human beings, but finds its prey in cattle instead. Then the plague among men is exchanged for a murrain among cattle, which, as a matter of fact, has been known to happen : this answers to the allowing the daemon to go to the swine. Evil is not forcibly exterminated, but it is transferred from man to the lower animals. So our Lord is gentle even with the powers of L. 4 50 HUMAN FREEDOM. evil. They had their function, or they would not have been there, and they were not to be crushed out of existence before the time. If it be, as I have argued, that evil had a function in the world, then we can see why it could not be removed by a universal decree. But a single act of relief might be admissible in order to testify to the presence of an exceptional power; this would not engender in people the habit of helplessly throwing themselves upon God. For instance, Christ cures the son of the centurion merely by speaking the word, but if He had abolished all fevers by one decree, this would have been to disorganise the existing order in the universe. A King going on a royal progress relieves the misery that comes in his way ; his own kindliness, his royal dignity, and the need of impressing on the people that their King de- lights in doing good, and can do it, require him so to do. But a regal donation for the relief of all distress in the kingdom would turn it into a nation of paupers. So our Lord bestows His bounty on those who fall in His way. He who asks, Why did not Christ suppress evil ? may naturally ask also. Why did not Christ sweep away all human error as to the relations of God with man t And why did He not so vouch for the authenticity of His communication that any doubt about it should be impossible "i .Now we believe, that God has revealed Himself to man, HUMAN FREEDOM. $1 and yet has left men in some degree free as to what they will think about Him, and as fully at liberty to examine the credentials of those who have claimed to be His messengers, and to judge of their authenticity, as they would be in a purely human matter. We find, as a matter of fact, that men who have accepted Christ's revelation are not fettered in mind by it ; but are most often enterprising, energetic and bold searchers after truth. I believe that it would have been unfavourable to the pre- servation of this vigour of mind and to the temper which should "try all things and hold fast those which are good," if the full and absolute revelation which some demand had been delivered to man- kind, and all the problems which beset human life had thereby been settled once for all. To the questions " Why we are told what we are told } " " Why we are not told more ? " and " Why doubt and ambiguities are not all cleared away .'' " — we cannot hope to give answeis^ but we may find ways of looking at them which shall help in some degree "To justify the ways of God to man." It will be best to discuss this subject in a separate Chapter. CHAPTER III. OF REVELATION. If I took the word Revelation In Its widest sense I should not attempt to treat of it here, for it would comprise nothing less than God's education of the human race. We talk of Natural Religion and Revealed Religion, but all Religion has in it an element of revelation from God. If God had not provided man with a mind's eye suited to see Him by, and also something that shadowed Him forth which that eye could behold, we could have no religion at all. Of the processes by which belief has come about in men not the least notable is this. Men have recognised in some new tidings what they seemed to have been looking for, without being aware of it. Some new teacher has become the spokesman of thoughts which lay in them, but in a state too vague for utterance. Thus "thoughts out of many hearts may be revealed \" Now it is God who has planted these thoughts in men, and He brings about the occasions which reveal them. 1 Luke ii. 35. OF REVELATION. 53 There arc for man two worlds, that which is without him and that which is within. Some races from temperament or circumstances have been most taken up with the former, with the workings of nature and with active social life ; while others have looked within rather than without ; — their minds have found most congenial play in the con- templation of their own natures, and in brooding over the mystery of how they came to be what they were. Corresponding to these two leading diversi- ties of the human mind, there are two modes by which men are brought to recognise a great spiri- tual agency in the world. The man of Aryan race, the type of the first variety, caught sight of an infinite force underlying all the workings of nature, and so conceived Deities, with a personal will like his own, animating the physical world. For the people of the Semitic race on the other hand, the surpassing wonder was their own selves — their minds turned to contem- plating their own nature. In so doing they noted this ; they found something within them which caused them to be happy when they acted in one way — when they had done a kindness for example — and made them unhappy when they had behaved differently. This was so, even when no one knew of the act, and when they looked to no con- sequences from it. They called such actions right and wrong ; but they asked. Where can this notion of right and wrong come from ? This conscience 54 OF REVELATION. too which witnessed of it — which strove with them just as a friend might, and seemed to be something outside them — Where did that come from ? They were led by this to conceive a spiritual personal Being in the world who had left some trace of him- self in men's hearts, and kept up some communion with them through this voice of conscience. Thus men of different stamps of mind were led along different roads, to the notion of something Divine in the world ; and we may say that God revealed himself to man in these two ways. Now for know- ledge to be sure and solid two elements must go to the making of it. One from outside the learner, and the other supplied by him. This out- side element is in physical science provided by observed fact, and what answers to it in theology is authoritative revelation. Men can never feel fully assured about what is wholly spun out of their own brains, and has no external sign or testi- mony to lend it support. Revelation, in the sense in which I have to do with it just now, means an authoritative communica- tion from the Almighty, vouched by some outward sign, or manifestation. It is with this outward sign, and with the difficulties attending the ways of bringing it about, that I am now chiefly concerned. For the present we will suppose that among the elements of human knowledge are trutlis revealed by God. How is this element of absolutely certain knowledije to be made to fit in with that which is •fc>' OF REVELATION. 55 only matter of opinion or provisionally true? Here we come on the great problem of Revelation. How can the infinite be brought into the same account with the finite ? We know that if we give one term in an algebraical expression an infinite value, all the rest "go for nothing; so likewise do probable judgments vanish in the face of absolute authority. But if Revelation is delivered in sitck a vtode that its declarations admit of no question whatever, then its statements possess absolute cer- tainty. Compared with such certainty all our judgments would be doubtful and dim, like candles in the presence of electric light. Would not this sharp contrast discourage man from using his own powers .-* But is it not by regarding this world as an exercise ground for these same powers that we come most near to understanding it } Is it con- sistent with God's ways, such as we make them out to be, that after giving us faculties which would find their amplest field in the consideration of spiritual problems he should preclude the investi- gation of them by solving them all Himself. Again the truth delivered in any Divine Reve- lation of the problems of the Universe would come into contact with views based on supposed facts drawn from History or Geology, or with truths discovered by the human mind, and difficulties would occur all along the line of demarcation between what was infallible and what was not. For instance, if the history of one nation were 56 OF REVELATION. absolutely revealed, much of that of the nations contiguous would be revealed too; more particu- larly the results of the wars between them : and if isolated facts belonging to science, such as those relating to the formation of our globe, were com- municated on Divine Authority, then systems of Natural Philosophy, starting from these facts as axioms, might claim, upon religious grounds, ac- ceptance for every one of their conclusions. If an independent system essayed to rear its head, it would be crushed by coming into collision with some statement that brooked no question. Such scientific investigation as would be possible could only proceed by deduction from truths authorita- tively delivered. Observation and induction, vv^hich have led up to the knowledge of nature we now possess, would find no place. Man would be dis- couraged from using his own endeavours to under- stand the problems of the universe, and instead of so doing, he would only pray the Almighty to tell him all he wanted to know. These ill effects do not follow in the case of Christ's religion for two reasons. First, because Christ does not reveal what man could find out for himself; and therefore this revelation does not come, so to say, into competition with human investiga- tions. Secondly, because the genuineness of the revelation is not vouched for by evidence which is overwhelming and which finally settles the question ; but is only supported by just enough OF REVELATION. 5/ external testimony to command attentive consi- deration and respect. The evidence that the Sign is of God is not so cogent that there is no escape from it. If it were so, it would silence all dis- cussion about the fact of Revelation having been given in a particular way and would much narrow the area for the exercise of religious thought. Reason may agree to bow to Revelation as being God's declaration ; but she has a right to satisfy herself that it is God's declaration, and she will call in learning and rules of criticism to help her in determining the question. Even when Reason has satisfied herself as to the credentials of this Reve- lation, there comes another question which gives play for human intelligence. It is asked ''What does this Revelation mean ? " Language is the out- come of the human mind, and all statements made in language, this Revelation among the rest, must be subject to the laws of the human understanding. We see then, that both as to its credentials and its meaning Revelation must always be open to question ; and that a man is as much bound to exercise his judgment upon these points as upon the other problems of life. This would seem a very natural state of things, yet it causes dismay to some persons when they first begin to look into these matters for themselves. They had expected, more- over, to find such a balance of evidence on their own side, that no one except from wilfulness and per- versity could decide the other way. Examination 58 OF REVELATION. shews that, regarding the question as one of histori- cal evidence, and putting all prepossessions apart, the two sides are more nearly in a state of equipoise than they had been supposed to be ; and it is remarkable that this kind of equipoise has been maintained, as far as we can make out by history, from the time of the Apostles till now. Arguments and testimony have, from time to time, appeared on one side, and have been answered from the other ; and now and then some discovery has been made turning the balance on this side or that ; but soon some new idea has been started which has put another complexion on the matter. So that positive evidence has never been so complete and decisive on either side as to prevent a man's habits or the bent of his mind from swaying his verdict. When young men first look into these matters for themselves, having heretofore taken certain notions on trust, they are apt to be aghast at the unsettlement, and at the call on them to use their own judgments and make up their minds. Unhap- pily they have often been led to suppose that to hold a particular set of opinions, merely as opinions, without any effect being produced in their character thereby, gives them a claim to some degree of favour in the eyes of the Almighty : while to question these opinions, or to enquire too closely into the grounds on which they rest, is dangerous, and calculated to bring them into disfavour with Him. I cannot stop to combat this notion nov/. OF REVELATION. 59 But whatever the reason may be, the fact is certain, that when persons begin to investigate for them- selves the bases of their belief, they find that many statements which they had regarded as true beyond all question are found to stand on less sure ground than they had thought ; and since they fancy that if the authority of any word of the Bible is shaken they will soon have no standing ground left, they become much disturbed. Then it is that we hear the outcry: "Why i cannot all be made clear? Or, if we cannot be told every thing, why, at any rate, is not that which we are told put so plainly, that there can only be one way of looking at it ? Why were not things so written that one who runs may read ? Why are we not given quite positive assurance of the truth of what is revealed ? Why have we not a Sign in Heaven as the Jews demanded, or, what would suit our times better, an incontestable demonstration of the truth of Christianity ? " " Why, in short," to use the words of the objectors of the last century, " If God desired to make a Revelation to man, did He not write it in the skies ? " To none of these ** Whys " can we supply its proper " Because." We cannot give the reasons of a man's conduct unless we can enter into his mind ; and as we cannot enter into God's mind, we cannot give His reasons for having made the ways of the universe such as we find them. But though we cannot give the enquirer what he 60 OF REVELATION. asks, we can do something to help him all the same. We may be able to shew him that it is better for him only " to know in part ; " and we may also be able to explain to him that a certain fringe of shadow must needs encompass those portions of truth which are revealed ; for if they had clear-cut edges, and hard outlines, when we had to fit them like pieces in a dissected map of human knowledge, we should meet with all those difficulties about a line of demarcation between truth absolute and beliefs of opinion of which I spoke just now. The service of all Revelation is to supply our craving after infinity ; and if our demand to have this infinity presented to us in a finite form — for that is really what we are clamouring for — could be approximately gratified, then we should find that, though a certain portion of the infinite field lying outside human knowledge had been enclosed and added on to our intellectual possessions, still we were as far as ever from having what we wanted : this new possession would have become finite, and what we wanted was the infinite. We should have got a new science in exchange for our old religion, but the craving after infinitude would still remain. The very definiteness introduced into these matters we should find destructive of their fascination for us. To take one point at a time, I will begin with a side of the question which fits on to the subject of the last chapter. These cries after cer- OF REVELATION. 6l titude are, in fact, petitions to be relieved of free will and responsibility in deciding religious matters for ourselves. What the complaints come to is this : Why am not I and every one else compelled to believe certain truths about God's dealings with man wJietJier we tike to do so or not ? The point of the matter lies in these last words. If we had no part of our own to perform in accepting this belief, if it were no more a matter of our own choice and feeling whether or not we admitted the revealed truths, than whether we admitted some indisputable fact in history or some proposition in science ; then this belief would not be religion for us at all, it would be a branch of science and nothing more. It would have no more moral significance than a proposition in Euclid. To admit that a certain system may be built up from premises that are undoubted, is merely a matter of intellect. One man may have a head to follow the steps and another not, but conscience has no part in the matter. It was distinctive of the Son of Man that His Gospel was to be preached to the poor ; and a system which addressed only minds capable of clear reasoning, could not be suited to all man- kind ; in fact, it would necessarily set up a Hier- archy of intellectual culture. So our Lord does not speak to the understandings but to the hearts of his hearers. He deals with his disciples on ^ the supposition, that there was in them a germ 62 OF REVELATION. which would respond to the quickening influences of Kis teaching, and grow into a capacity for eternal life. Just as the dormant seed germi- nates when warmth and moisture reach it, so would what was dormant in their hearts burst into life and growth, when the required vivifying influence was brought to bear. Our spiritual life is made to depend not only on what is delivered to us, but on our seizing on the truth we want, and recognising it as what we are craving after : so that we say, " I have always felt that there was some- thing I was in want of; now I know what it is, and I have it here." The Jews, who would not believe, wanted to be shewn a Sign from Heaven. They said, " Give us a proof which is beyond contradiction, and we will believe," which comes to saying : If we cannot help believing, believe we will. But they did not mean the same thing by the word "believe" as our Lord did. Our Lord did not call on His dis- ciples to accept notions about Him, but to believe ill Him, to trust Him as a child does his parent, or a soldier his commander. What the Jews meant was, that they would give credence to a particular kind of evidence, as to the fact of His being their Messiah. The demand for additional proof is dealt with by our Lord in the parable of Dives and Lazarus. The drift of a parable is usually pointed out in the concluding words ; and the verse " If they believe not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be- OF REVELATION. 6$ lieve though one rose from the deadV' spoken of the rich man's brethren, is, I beheve, the key to one intent of this parable^ The state of mind here pointed at is a common one enough. It is that of the man who is rather uneasy at his own want of belief; but thinks the blame should be laid, not on any defect in himself, but on the want of proper proofs and external light. He thinks that his difficulty comes from the scanty evidence offered him ; he has no idea that what he really wants is a better moral eyesight to see it by. So he begs for a little bit more of proof. If he could only be satisfied, he says, on this point and that, he would believe. But what would his belief be worth ^ Our Lord's answer goes to this: — No amount of external testimony can supply what you want, because the defect is within you. If a man did come to you from the dead, you might be terrified into acquiescence in everything he told you — you would probably be stupefied into the most abject submission — but instead of being elevated into trust in God, you would, very likely, be so cowed and paralysed, as to be incapable of any feeling of a noble or spiritual kind. In the present day people do not ask for Signs from Heaven, or that men should rise from the dead — but the same spirit shews itself in the same •^ Luke xvi. 31. 2 Trench, Parables, 4th Edition, p. 453. "The rebuke of un- belief is the aim and central thought of the parable." 64 OF REVELATION. way. The corresponding demand is, "Give us an undeniable philosophical proof of the truth of Christianity." " Shew us this," say men, "and we will believe." Accept the demonstration of course they must, if it be irrefragable; just as they must accept the truth that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles ; but such acceptance is a mental act of a wholly different order from adopting a religious belief — from feeling for in- stance that " Christ is with us to the end of the world." Much confusion has arisen from this dif- ference not being properly marked. From what I said at first, as to the nature of a revelation it appears that there are two elements in it, one within us and one without us. We must have "ears to hear" when God speaks — a faculty that discerns His voice — and also we must have some outward sign cognisable by human senses, or by such judgments based on experience as we form about historical evidence. I have just shewn that the first requisite is essential for any religious belief, and that it is a quality different from the logical understanding. But when we come to the attestation of the Sign which vouches the revela- tion, then the understanding assumes its ordinary jurisdiction. We are to judge by the common rules of evidence as to the authenticity of this Sign and the genuineness of our information. Reason and instructed judgment are to be used in these matters as in all others, and external evidence is allowed OF REVELATION. 65 its weight by our Lord. When the Baptist sends his disciples to enquire, our Lord works cures before them, and bids them report what they saiv. A man wants some testimony to which he may turn, which is independent of himself. There are times when the surest believers mistrust themselves and their intuitions and ask, " How am I to know that this persuasion of mine is not a creature of my own brain, due to my temperament and mental conformation." " How can I call on other men to accept it?" Men are not left, unaided, to the distress of this kind of doubt. The Apostles were allowed to witness the Transfiguration and the presence of Jesus risen from the dead that doubt might not overcome them in moments of physical weakness or distress of mind. They could always turn to these recollections and say "We know the glory of God ; for we have seen it." We are not to expect that the Sign which attests a Revelation shall be guaranteed by a standing miracle ; because such a standing miracle would be out of harmony with all God's ways as revealed in the Universe. For a standing miracle means that God is always, in one particular direction, visibly displaying the power elsewhere concealed. If such a miracle existed there would be one set of facts in the world not of a piece with the rest. If instead of working the world as He does by self- acting machinery, God were to reserve one depart- ment for His personal management, He might as L. 5 66 OF REVELATION. well interpose in all, and direct all the movements in the world ; in which case, as I said in the last chapter, the world would cease to have any inde- pendent existence, and would become merely a portion of the Divine existence. So when it is demanded "That a revelation should be written in the skies " we may ask, How would you have God's autograph attested .'* The Jews, it will be said, had the visible Shechinah, the light between the horns of the altar; but if it existed now, there would be no proof of its being Divine : it would only be another phenomenon, and science would take cognisance of it. If we had an oracle declaring future events, all human enterprise would perish — for enterprise rests on hope and fear. The Delphic oracles would have paralysed action, if they had been unerring, unambiguous, and easy of access. A series of prophecies, it may be thought, fulfilled from time to time, would serve to authenticate revelation : and this aid is, indeed, admissible in attestation of the Sign we speak of; but it must be subject to the same condition which must attach to all external testimony : it must not be too clear or too strong. Men must always be able to reject it, if they like : either by ascribing the coincidences to chance, by declaring that the prophecy brought about its own fulfilment, or by some similar argument. If we had a series of prophecies all of which, up to the present time, had been fulfilled with due regularity, so that no one OF REVELATION. 6/ could doubt but that the rest would punctually come to pass, human action would be very much paralysed. The miracles of our Lord's life serve us for our " Signs;" and our assurance that they occurred is to be based both on the external evidence, which in this case is the testimony to the authenticity of the record, and on the internal probability, which comes out of the conformity of the miracles with the Laws of Christ's action and the declared purpose of His coming. The miracles could always be referred to Beelzebub in old days, and they can always be disbelieved or explained away now. Since the external evidence is not conclusive on this side or on that, the judgment formed must depend partly on the degree in which the Scriptures establish their own authority ; and this degree depends on the mind and heart which the in- vestigator brings to his work. One critic will see nothing but difficulties. Another will say, Our histories are photographs, imperfect no doubt, but what they shew must have been there when they were taken : we see the main figures under different aspects, but we know them for the same. Some will feel as much convinced, from the character of thought and expression, that certain sayings came from our Lord, as a connoisseur in art might be that a certain picture came from the easel of a great master whose works had been the study of his life. He knows the touch. 5—2 68 OF REVELATION. Christ's great Revelation was not given in a book, not in a history or a treatise, but in a Life and Death. He shewed the world a Man who knew not Self, and He also shewed it the Force that came from God. Men will realize this Revelation in different ways in different ages ; part may come to light at one time, part at another. Sayings which have long lain hardly noticed are one day found to be keys to unlock a treasure, and give insight beyond what we dreamt of But besides this Revelation, per- sonal to individuals, broad Truths are conveyed which we should not otherwise possess. Some of the leading Truths are these. That Jesus came from the Father. That the Father loved men who believed in Him, and owned them as sons, and sent into their hearts^ a filial spirit which should enable them to lay hold more firmly of this Revelation. Christ tells them that He came to manifest God to the world ^ and that, whether they chose to believe it or not, the kingdom of God was drawn nigh to them^ He tells them that to know God is eternal life*, and that they who are counted worthy will attain a resurrection to such a life^. Above all he tells them — and this is the very charter of the Christian Church, without which her Doctrines would be only a set of notions, destitute 1 Galatians iv. 6. ^ John xvii. 6. 3 Luke X. II. * John xvii. 3. 5 Luke XX. 35. OF REVELATION. 69 of real vital power — " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world V There is no clashing with human knowledge here, nothing that can tie the hands of the enquirer. The advance in spiritual knowledge is not brought about, simply by the communication of a new truth from without, which had never been dreamt of before : men feel rather as if they were reminded of something they must once have known. There appears, if I may so say, a tenderness of God in dealing with man, a carefulness so to reveal himself as not to obliterate a man's own personality, but to leave him to feel that any resolution he has reached is his own, arrived at no doubt by listening to God's prompting ; but such prompting does not supersede the action of his proper self No two men repre- sent God to themselves quite in the same way: He was not the same for Peter that He was for John. I believe that a revelation of God is needed for the education of what is highest in man, and for bringing him to the highest point he can reach ; and that God has been always revealing Himself in one way or another. But the revelation of every age must be suited to the character of that age. Man must be educated up to it, or he cannot receive it. Our Lord tells his disciples *' I have yet many things to say unto you but ye cannot bear them nowV' To every generation He says in effect the same. The events related in the Acts, and the labours ^ Matth. xxviii. 20. ^ John xvi. 12. 70 OF REVELATION. which came upon the Apostles fitted them by degrees for fresh revelations. If our Lord had declared to St Peter when he first joined him in Galilee that the Gentiles should have as full a share in Him and in the Kingdom as he would have ; might not he too have turned away ? Or if, as is likely, he had been personally drawn to Christ too powerfully to quit Him, yet such a sudden shock to all his notions might have closed his mind spasmodically against new ideas ? For when a man recoils from a view which unsettles him and turns him giddy, he clutches at his supports with iron grip. Many have been made bigots in this way. Our Lord is careful to avoid for the dis- ciples all turmoil of mind ; the new seed must be left undisturbed that it may take firm root; so that for our Lord to have disordered all St Peter's con- victions by a premature disclosure, would have been contrary to His ways of acting. An age must be ripe for the truth, and the truth must be ripe for the age for one to profit by the other. If the theory of gravitation had appeared ten centuries ago, it would have passed unregarded away, for then, nobody thought the outer world worth scrutiny. On the other hand the neo-Platonic philosophy which once moved masses of men has now become so many words. How then is Christ's revelation to last for all time? It is enabled to do so, because there is life in it and groivtJi along with life; because Christ does OF REVELATION. 7 1 not deliver propositions about God which men are passively to receive once for all, but his sayings fall upon the human heart, and are quickened there, some in one generation and some in an- other: each generation seizes on its proper nutri- ment, and brings- out of His sayings the special truth it wants. St Paul, to recur to the quotation which is, in fact, the burden of this chapter, speaking of the effect produced by the preaching of the word on the hearers says — ''The secret things of their hearts are made manifest\" Christ's words reveal for a man the secrets of his own heart to himself They interpret to him his own confused and dreamy thoughts. This was what drew men so mightily to Him. It was not so much the novelty of what He told them that attracted them, as that they recognised in His teaching old familiar puzzles, which had come and gone through their minds, times without number, only in such shadowy guise that they could not fix and scrutinize them. Christ spake and then men said " This is what has been always troubling us." Here is what we have always been wanting to say, and could not put into plain words — and now these floating impressions of ours are found not to have come by chance but to belong to truths set in our 1 I Cor. xiv. 24. This is commonly referred to a sense of guilt, which is included, no doubt, but the words bear a wider meaning. 72 OF REVELATION. being. God has " sent forth the Spirit of His Son into our hearts crying Abba, Father^" But He would not have done so if we had not had the capacity for being sons, to begin with. We shall see too, when we think of it, that a revelation to men can only come by man, or in a voice or words like those of a man. Man's understanding is fashioned in a certain way; his language is the creature of his understanding ; ideas could not be conveyed to him unless they were clothed in language which he could under- stand ; Revelation therefore must express itself in terms of human notions because they alone can be made intelligible in human speech. If God speaks, He must speak after the fashion of men, or His words will be an unknown tongue. To take an illustration: If a man, owing to something abnormal in his vision, became aware of a new colour, something which had nothing to do with red or yellow or blue ; he could not communicate his new sensation because he could find no pigment which would in any degree represent it, and he could not describe it in words, by likeness to anything in the world. So God can only reveal to man about spiritual existence what man can conceive, that is to say only that to which he finds something analogous in his own being ; for all must be put into that form with which man's understanding can deal ; and the ^ Galatians iv. 6. OF REVELATION. 73 only spiritual creature he can conceive is man; the only ideas he can conceive are human ideas ; his mind must work on the lines along which men's minds move ; the only creature with whom he can sympathise, and whom he can believe to sympathise with him is mmt, and so — since there can be no real teaching without mutual under- standing— by man he must be taught. Christ's revelation meets this need. It was as the Son of Man that Christ declared Himself, and in this character He conveyed to men the germs of all the spiritual enlightenment they can receive. Does not this throw light on the words, " No one knoweth who the Father is save the Son, and he to whom- soever the Son willeth to reveal Him\" and again, " No man cometh to the Father but by me ^ ? " i Luke X. 22. 2 John xiv. 6. CHAPTER IV. OUR lord's use of signs. It has been already observed that there Is one feature of our Lord's way of revealing truths to men which distinguishes Him from all teachers before or since. This is the use of Signs. Miracles may have been attributed to those who have promulgated creeds at various times, but these miracles did not form a constituent part of the teaching ; they were not blended with it as those of our Lord were. They are introduced only to serve for credentials, so that an appeal to them may silence incredulity ; they convey no lesson, they only serve for proof. I hope to shew that it was otherwise with the signs wrought by Christ. My especial concern in this chapter is not with the nature or the credibility of miracles in general, but only with the purposes for which Christ intro- duced them ; and with the questions of how far they were performed with a view to draw men to listen and to set forth God's kingdom, and how far for the purpose of working conviction. In the first OUR lord's use of signs. 75 chapter I have stated certain Laws, which our Lord observed in working Signs. These I shall presently discuss ; but what I am concerned with now is the general question "Why did our Lord work Signs ? " I use the word " Signs " instead of miracles because it is our Lord's own word. The latter expression fastens attention on the wonderment which these deeds raised in men. But our Lord uses the word "Sign," which implies that these acts were tokens of some underlying power which, in these instances, passed into operation in an ex- ceptional way. To our Lord, they of course were not wonders, and He never dwells on their won- drousness. In the accounts of St Matthew, St Mark and St Luke, the word " Signs " is that most commonly employed by our Lord when speaking of His own working of miracles; while in the Gospel of St John, the term "works" is generally found in the like case, though " powers " sometimes takes its place. The expression " Signs and wonders " means, not two separate sorts of works, but signs that make men wonder : it means prodigies, worked to shew a divine commission, taken on the side of the awe they inspire. Our Lord only uses this ex- pression twice — once when He says that false prophets shall come and "shew great signs and wondersV' and again in His answers to the noble- ^ iMark xiii. 22 ; Matth. xxiv. 24. 76 OUR lord's use of signs. man whose son was sick at Capernaum, " Unless ye see signs and wonders ye will not believeV On these occasions the term refers to the popular conception of the form which Divine interposition would take. The expression "signs and wonders" occurs very frequently in the Acts of the Apostles. When, as here, we are in search of the purposes which our Lord had in view, in something that He did, it is of service to ask, " What purpose or pur- poses did it actually fulfil ?" What He did would not be likely to fail in producing the effect in- tended, or to bring about a result not con- templated by Him. So we must try to unravel the complex effects of these signs, and to dis- criminate the several ways in which they worked. Some were witnessed both by the people and by the disciples, and some by the disciples and apostles only. The function of the rniracles may have been different in the different cases. But, besides their effect on the actual witnesses, the record of these mighty doings has had a prodigious effect on generation after generation, from the time when our Lord walked in Galilee to the present day ; and we may suppose that this posthumous effect was included in the Divine design. The character of our Lord's miracles we shall find to be determined by the nature of the work He came to do. The work and miracles were adapted each to the other, and, owing to this, the study of ^ John iv. 48. OUR lord's use of signs. tj the miracles throws a light on His purpose, and the more insight we get into His purpose the more reason we see for the miracles being of the kind they were. We will consider, under different heads, the various functions which Our Lord's miracles ful- filled. That which comes naturally first in order is (i) The attraction of hearers. One effect of signs on the beholders lay on the surface. They awoke attention ; they caused men's eyes to be turned to the Son of Man. Jesus won a mastery over men's souls both by what He did and what He said ; but the doing had to come first, because without this He would not so soon have gained a hearing. From a district of small towns and scattered hamlets a crowd was not drawn together without some cogent influence. It was the rumour of the things "done in Capernaum^" and of other mighty works that caused the crowd to gather, and attracted the multitudes who listened, both in the synagogue and on the Mount. The works of healing would be attractive enough to draw within the reach of our Lord's influence all who were likely to profit, as well as some who were not: while His words and the influence of His presence would attach to Him as true disciples those, and those only, who had "ears to hear:" in this way the crowd would be sifted. ^ Luke vi. 23. 78 OUR lord's use of signs. One of the characteristics of our Lord, which puzzled His followers, and which also strikes us, was His seeming indifference about the number, or the worldly position of His adherents. He does not aim at gaining converts ; when His popularity seems at its height He withdraws from the people. A warrior Messiah, or a prophet seeking to con- vince the world, would have displayed signs suited to attract the blind devotion of the multitude : he would have wanted to prove his pretensions by the striking character of his signs and wonders. Such was the Messiah whom the Jews were led to ex- pect ; in general they imagined no other, and for no other did they care: so we find that it surprised the disciples and the brethren of Jesus, that He should content himself with healing poor sick peo- ple in nooks of Galilee, instead of confounding Herod in Tiberias, or the scribes in Jerusalem. And if we regard our Lord as a leader looking to an immediate purpose and depending for success on His influence with those of His own day, his conduct is indeed inexplicable; but the whole tenour of it falls in well with the view which regards Him as setting afoot a movement which was to go on working to the end of the world. Hurry belongs to the mortal who wants to see the outcome of his work, while eternity is lavish of time\ ^ A friend recalls to me St Augustine's words, '* Deus patiens est quia ceternus." OUR lord's use of signs. 79 We shall see later on that it is foreign to our Lord's ways to inflame the feelings and blind the eyes of men by kindling speech. The overmastering influence of a great leader will " take the prisoned soul " of the people and make it follow his will. But Christ's first care is to leave each man master of his own will — the man who is no longer so, ceases to count as a unit. Just as this is seen in our Lord's teaching, so is it also in the miracles which set that teaching forth — they are not worked in the ways or the place that a Thaumaturge would have chosen — people are not invited to a spectacle — nor are the wonders so overwhelming as to cause a whole population to fall prostrate at our Lord's feet. The rumour of them is sufficient to make those who ''have ears to hear" enquire further and "come and see;" and a further function of " Signs " is then called into play. This function is that they should serve to select from the multitude those fitted to follow our Lord. (2) Selection. I have said in a previous chapter that educa- tion and selection are inseparable. Any process that unfolds the powers which lie within men, emphasizes, so to say, the differences between them. The witnessing of wonders, declared to be wrought by the finger of God, must have stirred So OUR lord's use of signs. men's minds, and so brought about in them a species of education, well calculated to winnow out the chaff from the grain. But the quality, which this kind of education seizes upon and develops, is not intellectual ability, but the capacity for "savouring the things of God." The miracles served as a touchstone for detecting this. Many would look, and wonder, and go their way — they had seen a strange sight, t/mt they would allow, but it did not touch their souls : while to a few others it would seem as if they had lighted on what they had been watching for all their lives. They had always seen dimly that there must be in the world a living power ; not a dead God in the keeping of the scribes, but a living God who should speak m their hearts and to their hearts, and they had found Him now. The minds of those who were worth rousing were put on the alert, and the sense of God's kingdom being near them, the sense that this every day world was His and worked by Him, was expanded within them. (3) Preparation. We have a distinct instance of the use of "Signs" to produce preparation. The seventy were sent working these Signs, " in every city unto which He Himself would come." This preparation would consist, partly, in the drawing out from the mass those who were likely to profit. When our Lord Himself came, these latter would be eager to hear OUR lord's use of signs. 8 1 Him, and the great announcements He made would not strike them as altogether strange. The district over which these messengers were sent probably lay outside the country where our Lord's ministry had been chiefly carried on, and was only visited by Him on this one occasion. This made it the more important that the right men, rightly prepared, should form His audience. His truths were not to fail of taking root, from want of the soil having been loosened beforehand. We shall see, over and over again, how careful our Lord is to prevent the opportunities He gives being lost. He never neglects or underrates the need of properly pre- paring men for receiving new truths : He employs the ordinary means for effecting this, and He would have the Children of Light be as wise in their generation, and as judicious in the use of such means, as the children of this world. Again, the display of the miracles roused some, the Scribes and Pharisees in particular, into active hostility — they watched the Signs to find ground for charges of blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking. Priesthoods, occupied with the externals of their function are aghast at the assertion of a living and working God. The worldly are terrified also and with the terror that awakens fury. These classes answer to those servants in the parable who said, " We will not have this man to reign over us." Whenever a vital religion has been pro- claimed it has found opponents of both characters. L. 6 82 OUR lord's use OF SIGNS. History witnesses to this, from the stoning of the prophets to the assaults on religionists in modern times. The miracles divided men into three great sections : there were those who were for Christ, and those who were against Him, and between these came a body who were not wholly indifferent or unaffected, but who quieted them- selves with saying that such weighty matters were no business of theirs. This breaking up of men into friends and foes was a kind of preparation for the Apostles' work. When men begin to take sides their minds cannot lie torpid : evil passion and selfishness mix with their doings, no doubt ; but in the storm and stress men get to the bottom of their own hearts and find out their true selves ; and men's truest selves were wanted by Christ. So far we have spoken of miracles as means of rousing attention and drawing out from the mass those who had ears to hear. We will now con- sider them as practical illustrations accompanying the preaching, and (4) Setting forth the Kingdom of God. They shew not only how close this Kingdom is to us but they also convey visible lessons, to help men to conceive it aright. We learn from our Lord's own lips that one purpose for which He wrought Signs was to make men sure that the Kingdom of Heaven was come OUR lord's use of signs. 83 upon them. When He was charged with casting out devils through Beelzebub, He says, after dis- posing of the accusation, *' But if I by the finger of God cast out devils, then is the kingdo7n of God coine upon yo2i\^^ Whether Our Lord preached in the villages Himself, or the Apostles or the Seventy, going two by two, did so in His name the burden of their preaching was always the same. They call on men to change to a better mind, and declare that the Kingdom of God is come nigh. The seventy are bid to say to those who rejected them, " How- beit know this that the Kingdom of God is come nigh^" Whether men chose to own it or not, God's Kingdom zvas near them even at their doors. St Mark, at the outset of his history of our Lord's Ministry, tells us'"' " Now after that John was put in prison, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of the kingdom of God, *' And saying, the time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand : repent ye, and believe the gospel." Christ declared that God was working under- neath the ordinary agencies, which seemed to men to be working of themselves. God had been so working all along from the very beginning, but now Christ had come to reveal God — that is to say 1 Matth. xii. 28 ; Luke xi. 20. 2 Luke X. II. 3 Mark i. 14, 15. 6-2 84 OUR lord's use of signs. to make men sensible of the Divine presence and Divine agency in all that went on both within them and without. This revelation He would effect in the ways best adapted to make men understand it. And as the unlearned are most readily taught by what is set before their eyes ; and as the teacher is much helped by having something to shew ; so Christ declares the Kingdom and its nature, not only in parables and discourses, but by practical instances and illustrations as well ; namely by the Signs He wrought. It was as though He had said, '' I have told you that God's power was lying close about you : Behold it operating here." The combination of the word and the Sign, as the two essential elements of the teaching, is expressly put before us in one passage : we read, *'And they went forth, and preached every where, the Lord working with them, and corifirming the word with signs following. Amen\" (5) Teaching wrought by signs. The Signs shew us, not only that the Kingdom is God's, but something also of the nature of that Kingdom as well. Our Lord speaks of the power displayed in miracles as God's power working through Him. It is " by the finger of God " that He casts out devils and the man who is healed is bidden to tell his friends what God has done for him^ ^ Mark xvi. 20. - Mark v. 19. OUR lord's use of signs. 85 Christ nowhere claims the power as His own. It rests in God's hands; but it is granted to His prayer, because His will and God's are one. Moreover the Signs set forth God's love and goodness to men, and thereby they tell us something of His nature. All the Signs worked by our Lord before the people at large, and all the works which the Twelve and the Seventy performed in their mission among the cities of Israel, were works of healing ; with the exception of the two instances of the feeding of the multitudes, which also were works of Divine beneficence. There are other miracles of a different character, as we shall see presently, but those were witnessed either by the disciples only, or by a circle of private friends as at Cana of Galilee. The men of Galilee had hitherto known the Lord as the God of Israel, who was especially con- cerned with the fortunes of their race and nation as a whole ; but now they were told that He was the Father of every person in that nation, and was sent especially to the lost sheep among them. It was this declaration — that of the individual relation of each man to God, and of the preciousness of the very hairs of his head in God's eyes — that constituted, in great part, the comforting nature of the " good tidings of God." The miracles wrought in connection with the preaching could not bring this point very prominently forward : but so far as the miracles bear on the point they are in accord with the teaching. 86 OUR lord's use of signs. They were worked, not upon masses of men at once, but on individuals, and our Lord addresses Himself personally to each particular sufferer, as though his case was considered by itself. I shall soon, for another purpose, notice two miracles recorded by St Mark which afford good instances of our Lord's sympathetic insight into individual cases. He does not, on entering a village, ordain that all the lepers in it shall be cleansed, or all the palsied restored to the use of their limbs. He condescends to take each case by itself. There is hardly a case of healing narrated in St Mark, who, of all our authorities, gives the most detailed account, which does not shew traces of special attention on the part of our Lord to the spiritual and physical features of the particular case. We will take for an instance the cure of the sick of the palsy. The connection ' of what is spiritual with that which is physical is here very strongly marked. Our Lord begins by saying to the man "thy sins be forgiven thee." It is possible that the man's condition may have been due to imprudence or something worse ; the thought of this may have rankled in his mind and the mental trouble may have aggravated the physical infirmity: the great physician cures both together. His restoration seems to come with the sense of pardon, but he does not shew himself aware of his re- covery, until our Lord bids him arise. The shewing that the Divine power worked OUR lord's use of signs. 8/ blessings on men one by one, contained in itself a lesson as to God's infinity ; for a finite being would have been incapable of concerning himself for every unit of the world's population. Any supply of energy, short of an infinite one, would have been exhausted. Hence the notion of God's personal care for each soul is bound up with the conception of His infinity. Christ does not begin with the abstract and say: " God is infinite and therefore He can find room in His heart to love men, every one ;" but He begins with the concrete and says, " God does love you and every one else:" and He leaves it to men to arrive at the truth at the other end of the pro- position : viz. that if God's strength is not lessened by drawing upon it, this can only be because there is no limit to it. From this infinity of God it also follows that the distinction between what we call great occasions and small ones — between oc- casions that we think would justify Divine inter- position and those which would not — may not exist in God's eyes. In the presence of His infinity, the difference between great and small things may disappear ; certainly His measure will be a very different one from ours. This brings us to another point in the use of miracles to illustrate the ways of God's Kingdom : they exemplify the truth that God is no respecter of persons. Neither the persons on whom they are wrought, or before whom they are wrought, obtain 88 OUR lord's use of signs. this privilege by any merit or superiority. Men are not healed because they deserve it. As God sends rain on the just and unjust, so Christ cures the sick who come in His way, rich and poor ahke — the son of the nobleman, and the bhnd beggar ; for our Lord, worldly distinctions do not seem to exist. A man, as man, was of such trans- cendent value in the eyes of the Son of Man that, compared to this, little outer differences were but as the hills and dales of the earth, which scarcely roughen the surface of the globe when seen as a whole. Men, too, are not, except for very special purposes, picked out by Christ to witness the miracles ; any more than they are in God's world to receive special mercies, or the lessons, or the afflictions of life. Those who were passing by saw the Signs, some profited and some did not: Herod and other great men would gladly have witnessed a miracle, but it was not granted them. The Signs wrought by Christ harmonise with His teaching in another way : they never have the air of ostentatiously overriding and superseding Nature. His power, in its tranquil might, proceeded calmly along the homely track of every-day life ; just as if it had always been present ruling quietly in its own domain, and might at any time have interposed without effort, if the Spiritual Order had needed it. A man is healed and an evil spirit is quelled by a word, and a multitude in the desert is supplied with food they do not know OUR lord's use of signs. 89 how, — all proceeds in a calm continuous way. Fresh energy is given to natural powers, and effects are produced of vast magnitude and with astonishing rapidity; but these powers seem to work through the organs and along the channels which nature provides : to our Lord there is one primary source of all life and movement and light and force, and that is God, from Whom all His power comes. He does not call certain visible manifestations nature, and refer others to God, as though nature and God were different powers. The Signs, accordingly, are worked in such a way that it is hard to mark the particular point where what is called the supernatural comes into play — to say, in fact, when nature ends and God begins. The cures, so far as we can trace them, are effected by the renewal of vitality in a disordered organ ; this vitality would seem to proceed from Christ ; just as the power which set life going on earth proceeded from God. *'For as the Father hath life in Himself, so hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself." Here, of course, we pass beyond the realm of the forces we can measure, but this imparted force only restores the organs needed for the cure ; the optic nerve is reinvigorated or the absorbent vessels are stimulated to abnormal action, and the eye be- comes again efficient. The man is not enabled to see without an eye, as was claimed to be done by ^ John V. 26, 90 OUR LORD'S USE OF SIGNS. some workers of miracles in the middle ages ; and there is no miracle in the Gospels like that mentioned in Paley's Evidences, where a man who had only one leg becomes possessed of two. Christ restores organs and withered limbs. He does not dispense with the proper organ or create new ones. St Mark gives us full particulars of two cures, of which we can in some degree trace the process. **And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought. And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking. After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up : and he was restored, and saw every man clearly \" From this it appears that the eye was gradually restored, and our Lord's question shews that He did not expect an instantaneous cure. He speaks as a surgeon might who had performed an operation. He does not take it for granted that the man must have received his sight. He applies His hands, a second time and then the ill-defined dark objects which the man spoke of, become distinct. The other case is that of one who was deaf and had an impediment in his speech. "And he took him aside from the multitude, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and ^ ^lark viii. 23 — 25. OUR lord's use of signs. 91 saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plaint" The restoration of the disabled organs is clearly- indicated here. I have referred to these two cases a few pages back. We now come to — (6) Miracles as a practical lesson to the disciples. So far, we have spoken of miracles as per- formed for the sake of the multitude ; in order to draw them to listen and to sift from among them those fit to become disciples : incidentally too, I have remarked how the " Signs " conveyed in- struction, how they exhibited to the crowd the goodness and the power of God. But there were some miracles, as I have said in the first chapter, which were especially miracles of instruction, and I would say a word or two about those, before I pass on to miracles as means of assurance. These miracles of instruction were, in almost all cases, per- formed when but few of the disciples were by; and they are mostly wrought in the later period of our Lord's Ministry. Among the miracles of this class are. The mi- raculous draughts of fishes, The walking on the sea, The stater in the fish's mouth. The withering of the fig tree, and the Transfiguration. The last named, is not usually classed among miracles 1 Mark vii. 33—35' 92 OUR LORDS USE OF SIGNS. or considered in books which treat of them, but a " Sign " it certainly was and it carries lessons with it which, bit by bit, the world is learning still. That miracles should be employed as a means of impressing truths on the learner, we can well understand. In no way could a great truth be presented so forcibly to the mind as by being clothed in the garb of a miracle. The wondrous circumstances would print themselves on the mind's eye at once and for ever; and as they recurred in lonely hours of thought, something more of their drift and purport would peep out every time. It is characteristic of our Lord's ways, that His teaching yields its fruit gradually; much as a seed-vessel driven by the wind, which scatters the contents, now of one cell, now of another, as it whirls along. I trace in many miracles of instruction, a bearing on the great movement in which St Peter was the chief actor ; namely, the calling of the Gentiles, and the taking from the Jews there- by their exclusive position, as the one people who knew God. Our Lord quietly, and by slow degrees familiarizes St Peter with this idea. He is not suddenly brought face to face with a notion which would cause a violent shock to his mind. With men like the Apostles new ideas want a little ^ time to grow into shape : we know how easily a man is startled into shutting his mind against novelty when it is suddenly presented. St Peter OUR lord's use of signs. 93 could not have been instructed as to God's plans without a long course of explanation which it was not our Lord's way to give : so He lets the lesson lie in St Peter's mind till the circumstances shall come which shall be the key to it. Of what I call miracles of instruction, I propose to consider two briefly, with a view chiefly to illus- trating the way in which the instruction was con- veyed. There is this singularity about the Trans- figuration, that our Lord foretells it, and in most remarkable words. "And he said unto them, Verily I say unto you. That there be some of them that stand here, which shall not taste of death, till they have seen the kingdom of God come with power ^". This promise I understand to mean that some of the Apostles should, even while yet alive on the earth, be vouchsafed a glimpse of another world, and behold Christ in the glorified state which belongs to Him. The expression " in no wise taste of death," which occurs in all three accounts, must mean that they should not only have this ex- perience after passing from this life to another, but even while yet in mortal frame. For six days these words are allowed to work in the minds of the disciples, and then : ^ Luke ix. 27. 94 OUR LORD S USE OF SIGNS. "Jesus taketh with him Peter, and James, and John, and leadeth them up into an high mountain apart by themselves : and he was transfigured before them'." During the six days and on the way up the mountain after they were taken from the rest, Peter, James, and John must have wondered what the " coming of the kingdom of God with power " would be. This prevented their being so stupefied with astonishment as to miss the lesson of the ap- pearance. Here again we note our Lord's mode of preparation for the receiving of truths. I do not discuss the nature of the vision, because I have now only to deal with the matter as to its educational effect. When the Apostles saw the glorified Lord with Moses and Elias — their impression was not fear but joy. — " It is good for us to be here" says St Peter. He thought they had arrived in another world, and he proposes to build tents, as if he had landed in a strange island. He expects to be always there. But what, in the view I am taking is the cardinal point of all, is the voice out of the cloud — "This is my beloved Son, Hear ye Him^y In these last words the old covenant is replaced by the new. Moses representing the Law, and Elias the Prophets 1 Mark ix. 2 — 8. 2 Mark ix. 7. Compare Deuteronomy xviii. 15, " Unto him ye shall hearken." OUR LORD S USE OF SIGNS. 95 — they who had been hitherto the spiritual teachers of men, — stood there to hand over their office to the Son. Their work in nursing the minds of a people set apart as the depositary of the knowledge of God was now at an end ; now Humanity had succeeded to its heritage, and its teacher was to be the Son of Man. A religion which is shaped by the history and the mind of a particular people will be cast in a particular mould : its outward form must be rendered plastic if it is to become Universal. So Moses and Elias the teachers of Israel lay down their functions in the presence of the chosen three, who hear their Master owned as God's own Son, to whom the world is henceforth to listen. And when, many years later, the truth broke upon St Peter so that he said : " Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons : but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him V' then a new light might illumine these recollections, which had been laid by in his mind, and they would draw a fuller meaning from the new idea by which he was impelled ; and he would see how God's purposes, long entertained, work to the surface by degrees. There is one miracle in which I can see no other intent, than that of the instruction of the 1 Acts X. 34, 35. 96 OUR lord's use of signs. disciples and, as it may not come before us again, I will say a few words on it now. The withering of the fig tree was, as I have said in the Introduction, an acted parable : the most circumstantial account is that given by St Mark. "And on the morrow, when they were come from Bethany, he was hungry: and seeing a fig tree afar off having leaves, he came, if haply he might find any thing thereon : and when he came to it, he found nothing but leaves; for the time of figs was not yet. And Jesus answered and said unto it, No man eat fruit of thee hereafter for ever. And his disciples heard it^" Of the next day it is related: "And in the morning, as they passed by, they saw the fig tree dried up from the roots. And Peter calling to remembrance saith unto him, Master, behold, the fig tree which thou cursedst is withered away. And Jesus answering saith unto them, Have faith in God"." When our Lord remarked from a distance one fig tree — probably one out of several, for Bethphage was named from its figs — which alone was in full leaf. He was drawn to it ; whether this was because He saw occasion for impressing a lesson which He had at heart to give, or because He really expected to find refreshment, we cannot decide. The last motive is not excluded, for though the time of figs was not yet, still we are told that in Judaea the fruit of the fig is ripe by the time the leaves have reached ^ Mark xi. 12 — 14. ^ Mark xi. 20 — 23. OUR lord's use of signs. 97 their full size ; and this display of foliage therefore gave prospect of fruit. We must not argue that our Lord would, of his superhuman illumination, have known that the tree was barren, for our Lord never uses this source of knowledge to find out what may be learned by ordinary means. But whether our Lord approached the fig tree with the lesson in His mind or not, the aptness of the circumstance struck Him and the lesson it fur- nished was given on the spot. It was unusual for a tree to have leaves at that early season : by putting them forth, however, it held out hopes of fruit which it disappointed. This presented in a parable the situation of "the Jews' religion \" They made a shew, and contrasted themselves with other nations, they dwelt on the fact that they alone worshipped the true God, and knew and observed His laws — they invited admiration on this ground — but of all this nothing came. So the fig tree seemed to say: "See I am green when other trees are leafless, you may look to me for fruit." It is said that this precocious putting forth of leaves shews that the tree is diseased and should be cut down, in like manner it was time that the Jewish Hierarchy should lose its office. It is to this Hierarchy that the words " No man eat fruit of thee henceforth and for ever" are really spoken. Mankind was no longer to draw its teach- ing from the scribes and priesthood of the Jews. ^ 6 'lovdal'dfjuos, Gal. i. 13. L. 7 98 OUR lord's use of signs. Individual Israelites might of course enlighten the world, as indeed they have done in a most remarkable degree ; but the Jewish nation as a body was no longer to be the one recognised channel of God's communication with mankind. The leading people among them had wrapped them- selves up in self-complacency and self-sufficiency; they had moreover enslaved themselves to the letter of their canonical books and to rabbinical traditions: they were therefore neither ready nor able to ex- pand when expansion was needed. In other words, they were no longer fitted for a living world; which must, of its very nature, grow and change and dis- card all that will not change along with it ; and so like the pretentious tree they were to wither away, and no man henceforth was to eat fruit of them for ever. It would have been long before an Israelite could have brought himself to see this meaning in the words of our Lord ; but St Peter must have thought over this last miracle, all the more from the apparent harshness of our Lord shewn in it — from its being the solitary instance of a final condemnation from His lips — and he must have asked himself; What did it mean ? There are many other miracles in which the in- struction of the Apostles and notably of St Peter seems to be the leading aim. The walking on the water might have taught him how closely failure treads on the heels of impulse : the prophecy, OUR lord's use of signs. 99 *' Before the cock crow thou shalt deny me thrice/' again conveyed this same lesson together with much beside : and the words " Then are the children free," which point the moral of the finding of the stater in the fish's mouth, must have recurred to St Peter when the Church at Jerusalem was de- bating as to how far she could free her Gentile members from the burdens of the Law. Of this I shall speak again. I have adduced sufficient instances to shew what I mean by miracles of instruction and the way in which they worked. Lastly we come to the important subject of (4) Miracles as a means of proof . The signs, worked by our Lord, whatever other functions they fulfilled, had one ofiice which in the eyes of some apologists is so important as to drive all other functions into the back-ground. They are regarded as the main ground of con- viction. The Apostles, it is true, make little appeal to the Signs worked by Christ : this may have been because they worked similar Signs themselves, and knew that their enemies ascribed them to magic. Their favourite arguments were the fulfilment of prophecy and the resurrection of the Lord. The earlier hearers were Jews, and the question with them was, " Did Jesus of Nazareth answer to the prophetic notices of the expected deliverer of their race?" The Jews we hear "were mightily convinced" 7—^ 100 OUR lord's use of signs. by Apollos, not because he declared Christ's works but because he "shewed by the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ \" But in time the early preachers addressed them- selves to the Gentiles. The Jewish notion of the Messiah was strange to hearers, who had never heard of the prophets ; while the idea that God should love the world and reveal Himself to it commended itself to them, and they would expect that such a revelation would be accompanied by manifestations beyond human experience. The consequence was that, after a century or two, less was made of prophecy and more was made of miracles : and if the question "What makes you believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son ot God ? " had then been put to all Christendom, the answer of an overwhelming majority would have been, "Because of the wondrous works which He performed." We shall see, however, that our Lord does not Himself put Signs in the very forefront of His claims to the allegiance of men. He only appeals to them as subsidiary proofs ; on which He would rest His cause when, owing to the situation or the disposition of the hearer, no higher kind of proof was available I It will be asked, "If miracles were only a sub- sidiary ground on which our Lord claimed belief ; What was the primary one .?" We shall see that our ^ Acts xviii. 28. ^ See next chapter. OUR lord's use of signs. ioi Lord's first appeal was Personal ; He claimed men's allegiance from what they had seen of Him and from what they knew. There is a passage in St John's Gospel which brings this very clearly before us. The naturalness of it and its fidelity to character and situation are such, that I am as sure that these words passed between Philip and our Lord, as if they were found in all four of the Gospels, though they only occur in the last. They occur in the final discourse of our Lord when He and the Apostles are on the way to the garden of Gethsemane. Our Lord has said, *'And whither I go, ye know the way. Thomas saith unto him, Lord, we know not whither thou goest ; how know we the way ? Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, and the truth, and the life : no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me, ye would have known my Father also : from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. Philip saith unto him. Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and dost thou not know me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father ; how sayest thou. Shew us the Father? Behevest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me ? the words that I say unto you I speak not from myself: but the Father abiding in me doeth his works. Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father in me : or else believe me for the very works' sake^" * John xiv. 4 — ii. 102 OUR lord's use OF SIGNS. In Philip's words we perceive an assurance of the reasonableness of what he asks, which is most true to the life. He never doubts but that God could be brought before his eyes; — he supposed that the clouds might be rolled away, so as to reveal a form of awful majesty clothed with re- splendent light, and with one glimpse of this he would be content. He thinks that he makes a most moderate request. Our Lord shews a sort of surprise, that after having been so long with them, going in and out among them, they should have missed seeing that God was in Him. It was perhaps this constant companionship that stood in Philip's way ; that what was Divine should have mingled with his daily life was beyond his conception. God, he sup- posed, could only shew Himself in some strange and appalling manner. That God's presence is reflected, in the least broken way, in that course of things which is most normal and most ordinary, was an idea that did not belong to Philip's race or time; but Christ drops a germ from which it should arise. It is the concluding verse of the passage with which I am most concerned — " Believe me that I am in the Father, and the Father y^ in me : or else believe me for the very works' sake^" The first appeal is to that belief, which ought * John xiv. II. OUR lord's use of signs. 103 to have grown up from personal knowledge ; that failing, He points to the works. This belief was of the same order as that which we have in the rectitude of an honoured friend. In knowing a man, we get to a deeper kind of knowledge than we do in knowing an object : all we can tell about V an object is what its properties are, we know nothing about what it is ; but we do get nearer to knowing what a friend isy our souls interpenetrate, as it were, a little. So that if Philip had known our Lord as Peter did, he would, like him, have recognised the " Son of the living God." Sup- posing, however, that he was not sufficiently " finely touched " for such a knowledge, that he judged mainly from his senses, and needed proofs of which they could take cognisance ; then — as an alternative course though a very inferior one — He might believe for the mere Signs' sake. Signs were provided to suit the cases of those who could ^ not believe without them. But while many take it for granted that Christ rested His claims on miracles and worked His Signs to provide Himself with credentials ; others have gone to the other extreme, and have urged that Christ disparaged the belief that was en- gendered by the sight of wonders. No doubt the principle — " Blessed are they that have not seen and yet have believed " runs through all our Lord's teaching, but it was better they should believe from the sight of such Signs as our Lord worked — Signs 104 OUR lord's use of signs. which were not coercive — than not believe at all. Signs, certainly, have led men to believe, when, either from inward or outward causes, they would not have believed without. This effect I regard as a good one, and all good that has ensued from what our Lord did, I believe that He intended to do. The chief texts adduced in disparagement of miracles are : "Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will in no wise believe V and "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign^" If signs and wonders were the appointed means of bringing men to believe, " Why," ask the ob- jectors, ''are those blamed who cannot believe without seeing them } " '^ Our Lord," they say, "here shews that He sets little value on the belief that comes of seeing signs." This is, no doubt, quite true of the sort of belief that comes of the mere assent of a terrified man : but our Lord did not terrify men, and the belief that sprung from seeing His signs involved a will and a disposition to recognize God's hand. I do not believe, however, that the first text really bears on the matter. I think it quite probable 1 John iv. 48. 2 Matth. xii. 39. OUR lord's use of signs. 105 that the stress should be laid on the word see. The nobleman "besought him that he would come down, and heal his son; for he was at the point of death\" He thought that our Lord must go down to Caper- naum with him and work the cure there; he cannot believe that it will be done unless it is wrought before his eyes. When he began to speak he had not the faith of the Roman centurion; he could not suppose that the power of healing could be exercised from afar; but he soon caught this confidence from looking on our Lord. If the text have this sense it does not touch the question before us. The second text refers to a sign from Heaven. It is spoken of those who wanted an overwhelming miracle to be wrought, which should settle the question and compel assent in the unwilling. The generation is not called " evil and adulterous " for seeking after such Signs as our Lord wrought, for crowding to see the cures for instance, but, for challenging Him to produce a Sign of a very different character, a magical one, which, for reasons explained in the last chapter, He would not do. Our Lord Himself on several occasions points 1 John iv. 47. Mr Sanday considers this miracle to be identical with the healing of the centurion's servant, and that the "ye see" is addressed to the elders who stand by. With this I am not prepared to agree. See the Authorship of the Fourth Gospel, W. Sanday, M.A., Macmillau and Co., a well-known and excellent book. io6 OUR lord's use of signs. to another result of His working of Signs. It rendered the rejection of Him a sin ; this was be- cause the will was called into operation to explain these Signs away. The leaders among those ad- verse to Him invented loopholes, such as referring the works to Beelzebub, and those who wanted to escape being convinced availed themselves of them. In this way, the acceptance or non-acceptance of Signs formed a touchstone for discriminating those who virtually said " We will not have this man to reign over us" — a section of people to whom I alluded in the earlier part of the chapter. Men were pardoned the unbelief of blindness and dul- ness, but not the wilful hatred which went out of its way to find grounds for rejection, and which would refer works of pure beneficence to the chief of the devils ; this shewed innate aversion. The follow- ing are passages in point : " Woe unto thee, Chorazin ! woe unto thee, Beth- saida! for if the mighty works had been done in Tyre and Sidon which were done in you, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes \" " He that hateth me hateth my Father also. If I had not done among them the works which none other did, they had not had sin : but now have they both seen and hated both me and my Father ^" Again, it is easier to convey to another by ^ Matth. xi. 21 ; Luke x. 13. ^ John xv. 23, 24. OUR LORD'S USE OF SIGNS. 10/ description an external fact than a personal im- pression : and thus the evidence from Signs is easier to transmit from man to man than that which arises from realising a Personality. Those who followed our Lord were subjugated by His influence; some of us too -may extract from His memoirs a conception of His Personality : but it is only those possessing the gift of seeing the reality in the outline, who can lay hold of this source of belief; while in a miracle, all can perceive credentials given by God. Our Lord's course of proceeding in a very im- portant instance, the occasion on which John the Baptist sends his disciples to Him, is a most in- structive instance of His use of Signs. These Signs furnished the kind of evidence most available in that particular case. When the Baptist is in prison he sends two of his disciples to our Lord with the question, "Art Thou He that cometh, or look we for another^ .'*" Nearly two years had passed since the baptism of our Lord, and it seemed that nothing had been done. He was himself in prison, removed from the presence, and personal influence of our Lord. His recollections of Him were perhaps fading, and his faith growing low. He was then in the position for which the argument from signs is especially suitable — -nothing would help him like facts. He was in the situation in which tens ^ Luke vii. 20. io§ OUR lord's use of signs. of thousands of Christians are still — believing, and yet having misgivings now and then whether what they call their Faith may not be fancy, — longing for something positive to cling to, some support outside themselves. Such support our Lord affords the Baptist ; He puts him as nearly as possible in the position of a witness of the miracles. We read : "In that hour he cured many of diseases and plagues and evil spirits ; and on many that were blind he bestowed sight. And he answered and said unto them. Go your way, and tell John what things ye have seen and heard ; the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good tidings preached to them. And blessed is he, whosoever shall find none occasion of stumbling in me \" We have no other instance in which miracles are wrought in order to assist one who is in doubt. Our Lord does not give a direct answer to the words ''Art thou He that cometh.?" If He had said "I am He" — and yet had not restored the kingdom to Israel as the Baptist expected, He would only have led him into further bewilder- ment. So his disciples take back for sole reply, an account of "what they hear and see." The works are such as our Lord continually performed; but John's disciples are given a special opportunity ^ Luke vii. 21 — 23. OUR LORDS USE OF SIGNS. 109 of witnessing them for their Masters sake. The Baptist is however certified of this ; a great work of God was being carried on in the world, through Him on whom he had seen the Spirit descend when He rose from Jordan \ Of the two grounds, then, on which our Lord claimed men's allegiance — His personal influence and the signs He worked — our Lord rests prefer- ably on the first, but the second has its place and it is an important one. Our Lord is the great physician who deals with all according as the case and the constitution re- quire. In different ages men's minds require dif- ferent kinds of proof I believe that such different kinds are provided — that there is lying ready for each generation and each type of mind the degree of evidence which is good for it and of the kind which it is fitted to assimilate. Miracles are not the sort of evidence most wanted now ; but it was the sort which for many centuries was looked on as the most incontrovertible. It spoke to those who could understand nothing else. It was for many ages what men especially wanted, and there it was to their hand. A future generation may find their main ground of belief in Christ in a realization of His Personality; and they may in this way arrive at that kind of knowledge of Him which our Lord had hoped that Philip might 1 John i. 32, 33. no OUR lord's use of signs. have gained. This we can scarcely obtain without a careful study of our Lord's ways of influencing men. I have not yet spoken of our Lord's miraculous knowledge of events or of His insight into men's hearts. There have been a few persons in the course of the world's history who have, in a wondrous way, discerned the ends towards which events were working ; and others who have divined the thoughts of other men. These gifts in the fullest degree our Lord possessed ; and when He needed stronger illumination for the purpose of His work these faculties were exalted beyond human range. The superhuman supervened, pro- ceeding along the lines of human action ; and this, like the powers whereby His other works were wrought, came from the Father in answer to prayer. By displaying this divining power He converts Nathanael, and He forcibly impresses the woman of Samaria. But effective as the display of this superhuman penetration was for bringing about conviction, it was much more than an evidence of Divine power. The knowledge of this insight of their Master into their hearts played a large part in the Apostles' Schooling. They were habituated by means of it to feel that their hearts were known, and this habit became so much a part of themselves that when Christ had left the world they could realize to themselves that they were under His eye still. This condition of mind was OUR lord's use of signs. Ill required for their special work, and Christ's training was directed to develop it within them as I hope to shew. In the next Chapter I pass to the discussion of the Laws which our Lord appears to follow in His working of Signs: CHAPTER V. THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. I HAVE already, in the introductory Chapter, given my view of the principles which guided our Lord in the exercise of His superhuman powers. He is tempted to employ them when He saw they should not be employed, and the Laws are drawn from His refusals. Consequently they all take the form that, for such and such a purpose, or under such and such circumstances these superhuman powers are not to be employed. I will recapitulate the Laws before stated — (i) Our Lord will not provide by miracle what could be provided by human endeavour or human foresight. He Himself, as far as we can see, never employs superhuman power or illumina- tion to effect what could be arrived at by human effort. THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. II3 (2) Our Lord will not use His special powers to provide for His personal wants or for those of His immediate followers. (3) No miracle is to be worked merely for miracles' sake, apart from an end of benevolence or instruction. (4) No miracle is to be worked to supplement human policy or force — as (for instance) those of Joshua were. (5) No miracle is to be worked which should be overwhelming in point of awfulness so as to terrify men into acceptance, or which should be unanswerably certain, leaving no loophole for un- belief. Before going into particulars about these Laws there is something to be said about the narrative of the Temptation itself, and the form in which it has come down to us. The incident of the Temptation is recorded in all the Gospels except that of St John ; but the account in St Mark's Gospel relates only that our Lord withdrew into the wilderness, and that He was there " forty days tempted of Satan." In the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke we find, with some small variations to be noted presently, what is commonly known as the History of the Tempta- tions of our Lord. L. 114 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. The narratives, taken from the Revised Version, are as follows : "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilder- ness to be tempted of the devil. And when he had fasted forty days and forty nights, he afterward hungered. And the tempter came and said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, command that these stones become bread. But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Then the devil taketh him into the holy city; and he set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and saith unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down : for it is written. He shall give his angels charge concerning thee : And on their hands they shall bear thee up. Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, Again it is written, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. Again, the devil taketh him unto an exceeding high mountain, and sheweth him all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them ; and he said unto him, All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. Then saith Jesus unto him, Get thee hence, Satan : for it is written. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the devil leaveth him; and behold, angels came and ministered unto him^" "And straightway the Spirit driveth him forth into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness forty days tempted of Satan ; and he was with the wild beasts ; and the angels ministered unto him^" ^ Matth. iv. I— II. ^ Mark i. 12, 13. THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. II5 "And Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan, and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness during forty days, being tempted of the devil. And he did eat nothing in those days : and when they were completed, he hungered. And the devil said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, command this stone that it become bread. And Jesus answered unto him. It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone. And he led him up, and shewed him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, To thee will I give all this authority, and the glory of them : for it hath been delivered unto me ; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship before me, it shall all be thine. And Jesus answered and said unto him. It is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve. And he led him to Jerusalem, and set him on the pinnacle of the temple, and said unto him, If thou art the Son of God, cast thyself down from hence : for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, to guard thee : and. On their hands they shall bear thee up. Lest haply thou dash thy foot against a stone. And Jesus answering said unto him, It is said. Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God. And when the devil had completed every temptation, he departed from him for a season \" ^ Luke iv. i — 13. S—2 Il6 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. What we find in St Mark may have been generally known to our Lord's disciples from the earliest period of the ministry. But the account of the Temptations themselves, which we find in St Matthew and St Luke, can only have come from our Lord Himself. Assuming this to be the case, the passage before us is singular in two respects. First, Because the Evangelists have here, and here only, altered the form of what our Lord de- livered, and changed into a narration in the third person what must, in the first instance, have been expressed in the first. Secondly, Because this is the only instance in which our Lord breaks through His reticence as to His own personal history on earth. Here and here only does He give us a glimpse of what had befallen Him or of what had passed within His breast. St Matthew and St Luke differ as to the order of the second and third Temptations. I have adopted that given by St Luke. According to my view, our Lord in the one rejects the use of physical violence and in the other that of moral compulsion. It is more after our Lord's way to proceed from what is concrete to what is abstract, than in the reverse order. I feel strengthened in this view by some of the characteristics of the Gospel of St Matthew, in the form in which it has come down to us. This Evangelist has always tJie Kingdom before his eyes. He would therefore be inclined to account the THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 11/ rejection of "all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them" as the highest possible instance of the renunciation of self; and as he accounted it the most severe of the temptations he would naturally place it last. St Matthew moreover throughout his Gospel often puts together the discourses of our Lord according to their subject- matter, and not in the order in which they were spoken. He would therefore have no scruple about changing the order of the account of the Temptations which may have come before him as a detached document. On the other hand we do not know of any bias of St Luke which should lead him to prefer one order of events to another. Another slight variation may be noticed. St Matthew tells us that He was " led up of the Spirit to be tempted of the devil \" The words imply that He went up with a view of undergoing temptation. But in St Mark and St Luke we have "being- tempted " without any intimation of purpose. Grave difficulties attach to the view that our Lord went into the desert with the set purpose of seeking and confronting temptation. Moreover it is of the essence of temptation that it should come on us unawares. If we know that endeavours are about to be made to persuade us to a particular course, we close our ears to all that pleads for it — being forewarned, we are forearmed ; so that, as 1 Matth. iv. I. Il8 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. regards these words, and indeed throughout the passage, I place more confidence in the version of St Luke than in that of St Matthew, or, to speak more accurately, that of his translator from Hebrew. The words "Get thee hence," at the close of St Matthew's relation of the temptation on the mount, have been supposed to indicate the final banishment of the Tempter, and therefore to shew that this temptation came last. The force of the argument rests on our supposing, as no doubt the author of St Matthew's Gospel did, that the events here related formed three distinct visible scenes, occurring in close succession, towards the end of the forty days. Whereas I hold that we have here a representation of our Lord's inward conflicts, clothed by Him in a garb of outward imagery, that they might be the better understood. If this view be taken, the trials may have gone on simul- taneously throughout the forty days, and may have been so far like our own inward troubles that one harassing perplexity may well have been most pressing at one moment and another at the next. But if these struggles are represented by visible occurrences, these occurrences must necessarily be related one after the other. The words " Get thee hence " might refer not necessarily to a final banishment, but only to the end of one assault. St Luke's version is reconcileable with the view that he understood our Lord to be speak- THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. II9 ing figuratively and personifying the voices that tempted him. It may be asked, "At what period of His ministry did our Lord give the disciples the account of what passed in the desert.'"' We can only guess, but the guess is worth making. We do not know whether the account which we possess was con- tained in what critics call " the original document," on which the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark are supposed to be based. Its omission by St Mark rather favours the supposition that it was not. It may have been, in the first instance, put down in writing by one who heard the recital from our Lord's lips, and may have come into the hands of the evangelists as a separate " parchment V This document might contain no note of the time and place at which our Lord delivered the account — and, in the absence of information on this point, the compiler of the gospel might have made the alteration from the first person to the third, if it had not been made before, and have inserted the account in the place belonging to it in the order of events. I conjecture that the communication was made near the end of the ministry, possibly after the feast of the dedication^ at the time when " He went away again beyond Jordan into the place where John was at the first baptizing; and there he abode'." * 2 Timothy iv. 13. ^ Dec. 20, a.d. 29. ^ John x. 40. 120 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. The place would recall what had happened after He had been " driven " from that spot by the Spirit into the wilderness about two years before. Other considerations also lead me to this con- jecture. It is strange that no allusion is ever made to so important a record : and this would be far more strange if the knowledge had lain in the minds of the Apostles all through the period of our Lord's ministry, than if they had only obtained it when the close was at hand. Moreover, the absence of any account of the circumstances under which the re- lation was made inclines me to think that this must have taken place at a time of which our records are scanty ; and there is no time in the sacred history of which the narrative is less full than the period at which I place the communication, viz., the early spring preceding the Passion of our Lord. There is also this consideration of a different kind. In all education there are two elements, that which is communicated by the teacher ready made, and which the pupil has only to register, and that which the learner elicits by turning over in his mind the matter which gives food for thought. In our Lord's teaching of the disciples the proportion of the latter element to the former steadily in- creases from first to last. At first, sayings are given them to remember; latterly, they receive mysteries on which to meditate. In the Sermon on the Mount men are told plainly what it was THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 121 desirable for them to know ; afterwards, the teach- ing passes through parables and hard sayings up to the mysteries conveyed by the Last Supper. The lessons of the Temptation have the form of the later teaching of our Lord : they contain hard matters and only yield their fruit by being long laid to heart. Not only would the lessons of the Temptation have been more intelligible to the Apostles towards the end of the ministry than at the beginning; but, turning as they do on the use of superhuman powers, they would suit the time when the Apostles were about to exercise similar powers themselves. Now comes the great question of all : In what sense is the narrative to be taken ? Many writers accept it as literal history and suppose the tempter to have appeared in bodily form and to have conveyed our Lord, also in the body, both to the mountain top and the pinnacle of the Temple. Others have regarded it as a vision ; and intermediate views have been adopted by many. On one point fortunately we may be pretty confident. The substance of the history came from our Lord. The most unfavourable critics allow this, from the extreme difficulty of refer- ring it to any other source. It cannot have been introduced in order to make the Gospel fall in with Jewish notions of the Messiah, for there are no traditions that the Messiah should be tempted ; 122 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. and if the passage had been devised by men, the drift of it would have been plainer, and the tempta- tions would have been such as men would feel might have come upon themselves. We have many- accounts, in the legends of the saints, of the sort of trials which present themselves to the imagination of human writers ; and they differ totally from these. I have let fall already a few words shewing in what way I regard the passage. I must now speak more fully on the subject. It may be assumed that, in all our Lord's deal- ings with His disciples, His primary purpose was to do them good. He did not leave behind Him this reference to His sojourn in the wilderness and its momentous results, merely as materials for biographers. The trials which had beset Him would soon beset them also in doing the work He destined for them ; before He left them He would therefore relate in what disguises the temptations had appeared and how they had been repelled. Behind the Apostles, who formed as it were the front rank of His audience, there stretched long files of hearers, — all those to whom His words have since come. At the end of this file we ourselves stand ; and those among us who have special gifts, and are tempted to use them for selfish ends, or for putting a yoke, physical or mental, upon other men, may well take them to heart. My business however now is with the Apostles. It THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 1 23 was likely that our Lord would give them some hint as to the principles on which superhuman power can be safely employed : and it was certain that this lesson would be put by Him in the form which would best convey it, and which would make the most lasting impression. The form then, as well as the matter of the lesson, must be worth studying closely. One reason why this passage has such a power- ful interest for men is that the history is a personal one. Our Lord riveted the most earnest attention of His hearers by speaking to them of Himself; and something of the same effect is felt by readers of the story now. We know how a teacher at once enchains the interest of his class when, leaving things abstract, or what he finds in books, he says, "Now I will tell you something that happened to me;" and we can understand the eagerness with which the Apostles would gather round our Lord, and can imagine how intently they would gaze upon Him, when He told them that He, like them, had been tempted, that He too had fought hard battles and that He would tell them what they were. Another source of interest is that the story deals with inner struggles in a figurative way — the voices are personified and the action is localised. That Satan should have appeared in a bodily form is, to my mind, opposed to the spirituality of all our Lord's teaching. Such an appearance presents endless difficulties, not only physical but 124 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. moral. If our Lord knew the tempter to be Satan, He was as I have said forearmed ; if He did not know him, this introduces other difficulties. He must at any rate have been surprised at meeting a specious sophist in the wilderness. Milton deals with the subject with great skill, from his point of view, in Paradise Regained. Certain points he leaves unexplained, and those I believe to be inexplicable. They are these. I cannot understand that our Lord should suffer Satan to transport Him to the mountain top, or to the pinnacle of the Temple, or that the Evil One should propose to Jesus to fall down and worship him. I can however readily comprehend that our Lord should represent under this imagery and under these personifications what had passed within Himself. He could not indeed bring the lesson home to His hearers in any other way. To have represented mental emotions, to have spoken of the thoughts that had passed through His mind, would have been wholly unsuited to His hearers. We know how difficult it is to keep up an interest in a record of inward struggles and experiences. Men want something to present to their mind's eye, and they soon weary of following an account of what has been going on within a man's heart, void of outward incident. A recital of what had passed in our Lord's mind would have taken no hold of men's fancy and would soon have faded from their thoughts. But the figure of Satan THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 1 25 would catch their eye, the appearance of contest would animate the hearers' interest ; while the survey of the realms of the earth, and the dizzy station on the pinnacle of the Temple, would take possession of men's memories and minds. The Apologue was to Orientals a favourite vehicle for conveying moral lessons ; and we have a familiar instance in English Literature of the attraction of allegory. Would Bunyan's Pilgrinis Progress have possessed itself, as it has done, of the hearts of whole sections of the British race, if, shorn of its human characters and its scenery, it had only analysed and depicted the inward conflicts, the mental vicissitudes and religi- ous difficulties of a sorely-tried Christian youth } The use of the name Satan must be con- sidered. This name, which means the accuser, is only found in the Old Testament in the introduc- tory chapter of the book of Job. The Jews we know had a da^monology of their own. The gods of the heathen they regarded as devils, of whom the Sidonian deity Beelzebub was Prince. Our Lord never countenances these views. I believe that He uses the word Satan in a generic sense to personify evil spiritual influences exercised upon earth. When the Apostles returned safe after being sent through the cities, our Lord regards this as an augury of their success in the great conflict and says that He ''beheld Satan fallen as lightning 126 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. from Heaven \" We have clearly impersonation here. He says also " If Satan hath risen up against himself and is divided V' a. supposition which excludes the idea of an individual being, and agrees with the collective meaning I attribute to the term. When St Peter rebukes our Lord for declaring before His followers that He would be "rejected and killed and after three days rise again," our Lord says "Get thee behind me, Satan." St Peter, by saying of the suffering of which our Lord spake "this shall never be unto theeV' unwittingly had acted as the ally of those who would tempt our Lord from yielding implicitly to His Father's will, and our Lord therefore calls him Satan. On the whole then I lean to the view that the communication, or discourse of our Lord, which has been preserved in the form of the narrative of the Temptation, was delivered by Him in the form of an apologue or species of parable, in which our Lord, after Eastern fashion, introduced Satan as an embodiment of the powers of evil. It must not be supposed that by giving up here the personality of the tempter we are making an abatement of what is superhuman in the Gospel, in order that, in virtue of having so done, we may hope to win this or that section of doubters over to our side — the whole question of evil remains a mystery, and in mystery there can be no degrees. It is of no use endeavouring to make infinity a trifle less infinite. 1 Luke X. 1 8. 2 ^lark iii. 26. ^ Matth. xvi. 22. THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 12/ Whether the word Satan be here used col- lectively or personally is altogether a different question from the existence of intermediate in- telligences, and is quite an open one even for the most orthodox. Temptation to turn stones into loaves. I now come to the Temptations themselves. As these trials were mental, we can only realise them by imagining what, consistently with our his- tory, may have passed in our Lord's mind. What actually did so pass is of course beyond our know- ledge altogether. We are however justified in supposing that, as our Lord was "tempted as man," the thoughts and feelings which actuated Him would be such as men might follow and more or less understand. It would appear that when God lays a work on a man He gives him a general view of the end to be kept in sight, a vehement desire to accomplish it, and a forefeeling of the capacity so to do. But He does not shew him how he is to do it, He does not make the way clear so that he sees his course before him and marks its several stages. If a man were so guided he would not fulfil the conditions of human agency, there would be no room for his own will to act, he would have no responsibility. He would move along a pre-arranged path. God would, in effect, be doing all and he nothing, and 128 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. SO it would come to much the same thing as if the work were done once for all by God's fiat, in- dependently of human action — and this, as we have already seen, is not God's way of governing the world. When St Paul takes his last journey to Jeru- salem, the Spirit, he tells us, " testifieth unto me in every city, saying that bonds and afflictions abide me." That he must go to Jerusalem he knew and to go he was resolved, but what course of conduct he was to adopt or what the result was to be he did not know at all ; afterwards in like manner, he knew that he was to bear witness at Rome, but he had no directions as to what he was to do. It was left to him to act as seemed to him to be the best. This may give us a help towards un- derstanding how it may have been with our Lord, when the mighty charge unto which He was born came home to His mind, and He felt, rising in Him, the wondrous powers given to aid Him in carrying it out. Our Lord when driven by the Spirit into the wilderness would take no thought of food or shelter. The one thing He craved for was to be alone ; He must have solitude, and the wilderness provided that. When He paused and reflected. He could hardly help asking Himself "Is all this real V This light which had shone upon Him — this voice which had come from Heaven, — were they not, possibly, only THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 1 29 something in His own eyes and ears ? A sure test lay ready : when He had heard Himself hailed as the Son of God a conviction had risen in Him that God would give effect to His commands. He had only to try whether this was so and all doubts would be resolved. Perhaps the whisper came " Try this experiment in a very small matter first!' Who could think this apparent caution and prudence came from an ill quarter } Spiritual evil always chooses a trifle, something from which it seems that no harm can possibly come, to win its victim to the first false step. Our Lord was hungry, and loaf-shaped stones were lying all about Him. Why not turn a few actually into the loaves they looked like ? In so doing, how could He possibly be wrong 1 However plausible the appeal of the tempter, it was not entertained. We can conceive that a whole array of objections would arise ; some may have been such as these — This putting of God to trial by a test of my own choosing, that I may determine whether I will believe His words or not: this implying that I will admit His authority if He speaks in one way and not if He speaks in another — Is this befitting one called to a work like this ? Then came another point — He was hungry. As St Mark says nothing about the fasting it will be best not to assume that the fasting was part of our Lord's original purpose ; but as, in the desert of L. 9 130 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. Judea, food could not be got without a journey of some miles, our Lord, whether designedly or not, had put Himself out of the immediate reach of food. Should He remedy this by using the mys- terious power with which He felt He was invested? This power was given Him to forward God's King- dom upon earth — should He use it for Himself? Then the tempter might return to the assault. There are fluxes and refluxes in human feeling; we are always afraid that we have gone too far in one direction, or been too obstinate about our own point ; it strikes us that perhaps we have made more of it than it was worth, and then we listen submissively to the other side. Such a whisper as this may have come — " These powers are given you to enable you to set up God's Kingdom upon earth ; for this you must win adhe- rents. These adherents must be maintained. Your opponents are supported by the great ones of the earth; the God of Heaven has committed to you His powers for the support of yours. This little incident of the loaves only points the way to a much weightier matter ; you must use your special powers to supply your own bodily wants in the coming contest, — why not begin with using them for this purpose now ? " Here we have arrived at the gravest point of the debate — Were these powers really to be used for His bodily wants or not ? As the true conditions of His work rose before Him, the principles grew THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. I31 clearer ; He was to deliver mankind as the Son of Man, He was to work as man, to suffer as man, that suffering men might always look to Him, saying " He was one of us." And how could this be, if His lot was so unlike theirs that He met His own wants by a word of command directly they arose ? How could His followers own the duty of labouring for their daily bread, if stones at a word were turned into loaves for Him ? How could He tell men not to think overmuch of the meat that perisheth, if He had used Divine powers to pro- vide it for Himself as soon as He possessed them ? If He were to be the stay of loving human hearts, He must say to men, "As you live, I live: of all your ills and troubles I claim my part." Our Lord's answer points out the train of thought along which our Lord followed until at length He reached a firm resolve and reduced the Tempter to silence. It will not be irreverent to imagine what might, consistently with what we learn, have been its nature. Man wants no reminding that he lives by bread. There is no fear of his not giving care enough to the needs of his body ; but there is danger lest he should think of nothing but these needs, and starve his soul and become such that eternal life, without a body to care for, would only be a condition of aimless weariness. He resolved therefore to keep His powers apart for spiritual ends. He will work no miracle to shew that He can work a miracle, or 9—2 132 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. to assure either Himself or others that He is the Son of God ; neither will He use this power to provide what others win by toil, or to preserve Himself or His followers from the common ills of human life. There are a few of our Lord's Signs which might, at first sight, look as if in them this principle were not observed. At the marriage of Cana in Galilee, the Sign is worked as an act of kindness to save the host from mortification arising from an accident. I have mentioned, as regards the miracles of the loaves and fishes, that on both occasions the supply which our Lord's own company had with them was sufficient for their immediate wants. The crowds, however, had, by their rapt attention to our Lord, been detained away from their homes and their supplies, and, if they had had to go a distance to buy bread, they would have suffered from taking so long a journey fasting. The case was an excep- tional emergency parallel to that of illness, and our Lord meets it by miraculous means. The miraculous draughts of fishes benefited pro- bably all who were partners in the vessel, but they were not wrought to meet any necessity on the part of our Lord. All night long they had taken nothing ; this scarcity may have been part of the lesson of the miracle, and the great draught is only a bounteous compensation. This is a miracle of instruction, as I said in the last chapter: it tells THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 1 33 men that a turn comes at the moment when they are about to give up, and that the faith which bears up long is rewarded. Moreover, to recur to what I said in the last chapter, St Peter had been told that he was to be henceforth a fisher of men ; and when multitudes, both of Jews and Gentiles, were gathered into the Church in Jerusalem he must have thought of this as answering to the sign. The miracle of the stater in the fish's mouth also requires notice. It is not wrought to obtain the coin, but to keep before Peter's mind that he as well as his Master were the children and not the servants or tributaries of God. From St Peter's answering without hesitation that his master would pay the didrachm, it is clear that there was no difficulty about producing the small sum. He does not speak to our Lord on the matter, but our Lord, directly he enters the house, asks him, " What thinkest thou, Simon ? the kings of the earth, from whom do they receive toll or tribute .-* from their sons, or from strangers \'*" This miracle, as we said in the last chapter, is one of instruction. The payment according to the re- ceived view was the half-shekel that every Israelite had to pay for providing victims for the Temple service. It gave the idea of a tribute to God which stood in the way of the conception of periect son- ship. It implied that Israelites alone had part or lot in the worship of the living God. Our Lord ^ Matth. xvii. 25. 134 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. would have St Peter regard God as the Father of mankind and not only as the Lord and ruler of Israel. The whole point of the lesson lies in the words " then are the children free." These words would be stamped on St Peter's mind by the finding the stater in the fish's mouth ; and they would recur to him and bring their proper lesson with them when the right moment came. The circumstance is not in itself necessarily mira- culous, but it was rendered so in this case by our Lord's foreseeing that the coin would be found ^ in the first fish that came. The Teinptatio7i on the Mount, Next comes a scene in which the Spirit of the World is represented as pointing out all the glories of the empire of the inhabited earth, and offering it to our Lord on the strange condition that He should fall down and worship him. This repre- sents, in plain and very forcible imagery, a spiritual temptation to which those who have laboured to regenerate mankind have fallen victims over and over again. Those who have most nearly attained universal conquest, Mahomet, Zengis, Timour, and many great political leaders as well, have begun with a genuine wish to alleviate the ills of man- kind, of whom eventually they became a scourge. I believe that what our Lord sets before us here is the temptation to aim at visible and com- paratively immediate success, and to bring about THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 1 35 our ideal by using the arts of worldly policy ; which were to be supported in the case before us by superhuman power. We can conceive a Tempter, such as the Satan of Paradise Regained, saying as he does, "Great acts require great means of enterprise," and urging worldly counsels such as these : — "You seek to set up a perfect kingdom upon earth, to minimise evil by wise laws, and to make men love God and serve God out of love. You want success and you want it soon, in order that in your lifetime you may see your plans matured. For this, first of all, you must have at your back not merely disciples who shall listen and meditate, but men who can ad- vance a cause. The uppermost feeling of the people among whom you have come is the desire to be free from Rome. They have drawn from the Scriptures a notion that a Messiah will soon come and restore the kingdom to Israel. With this view, be it right or wrong, you must fall in. You carry with you powers like those wielded by the prophets of old. Proclaim yourself such a Messiah as men expect. Strike to the ground the Roman eagles that are sent against you. Offer to all who fall on your side a paradise of palpable enjoyments such as they can understand. Shew yourself invulnerable, and be everywhere foremost in the fight. Your super- human power will balance the enormous might of Rome. In order to win the empire of the world you 136 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. must employ policy as well as arms. You must ex- cite enthusiasm. You must fascinate crowds by elo- quence and lead them to serve your purpose when they think that you are serving theirs. When you have secured the empire, you can inaugurate a golden reign and call on men to bless your Father who sent you to their aid." If suggestions such as these had been made to our Lord by such a Tempter as Milton imagines, we can see from the reply in our narrative how they would have been met. This kingdom, our Lord would say, so gained might indeed be mine but assuredly it will not be God's ; and my business is not to work for myself but for Him. It was this utter absence of self, in our Lord, which men could not comprehend ; their common standards could not measure Him — they are bewildered by this, and all but the higher sort are put out of touch with Him. The picture which our Lord leaves us of His struggle with the evil suggestions which crowded upon Him teaches many lessons, but the clearest of all are these — If we fight the world with its own weapons we soon put our hands out for using any others than those. If we seek what the world has to give we soon fall down and worship it, without having the least intention of doing any- thing of the kind. But besides giving a lesson for after ages, our Lord here indicates a particular resolve which shaped His action upon earth. It THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 1 3/ was this, — He would not employ His superhuman powers to force men to obey, or even to resist the violence which might be offered Him. He would not use them to assist in setting up the outward fabric of a Kingdom of God : and then, going a little further, He determines not to set up by His own hand any outward fabric of such a Kingdom at all. He was not to be an aspirant for worldly distinction — He was not to be the leader of a cause — He was not to be the founder of a school of philosophy or of any external form of religion at all. He came to do a Work, The Central Work of the History of mankind. He declared God, and declared Himself to be united to God, and that He would be with men for ever until the end of the world. But all that has to do with organisation, outward customs, effective sanctions, or the con- densing of doctrines into the formulae of creeds, belongs to the human side of religion, and men of different climes and ages must shape such matters for themselves. He came, as I have said, only to kindle the fire and to set a new force moving in the world. This Law, — that neither force nor worldly policy should be used to carry ^ out the Work of God, — governs all our Lord's acts. It need hardly be said that there is no miracle of our Lord's recounted in the canonical Scriptures in which violence is either done or repelled. In the apocryphal Gospels we find endless legends of the retribution which our Lord brought on 138 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. those who injured Him, especially in His boyish years. Neither do we ever find that our Lord so dis- plays His signs or shapes His conduct, as to win from the crowd material support for the work He is carrying on. It was never more important for Him to win over the enthusiasm of the people than when He taught in Jerusalem in the week of the Passover : but no public miracle at all is then performed. It must have seemed strange to the disciples that He did not confound Pilate on his judgment seat, or Herod on his throne, but we see that the whole meaning of His coming would have been lost if He had. The disciples however are not left at that time without some indication that His Divine power remained unimpaired — the withering of the fig-tree, and the foretelling to Peter that he should deny Him thrice, shewed them that Jesus was still the Lord. When the Lord in the hands of His enemies turned and looked upon Peter, how striking must have been the contrast between the Kingdoms of the earth and of God ! There is one occasion where our Lord is urged to act in violation of this principle. The sons of Zebedee ask whether they may not call down fire from Heaven on those who would not receive them. "But He turned and rebuked themV Again, if He had come down from the cross when challenged to do so, this principle would have 1 Luke ix. 55. THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. 1 39 been broken through. Those who said " He saved others, Himself He cannot save\" uttered a truth deeper than they dreamed of : it was of the very essence of His mission that He should not use His powers for Himself. In connexion with this it may be noted that when St Peter is delivered from the prison^, and St Paul and Silas at Philippi, these deliverances are represented, not as being worked by St Peter or St Paul, but as being worked for them by the Divine power, without any doing of theirs. The Temptation on the Pinnacle of the Temple. When the temptation to employ open force was repelled, a more insidious one came in its stead. It was to use moral compulsion, and, by the public display of a resistless manifestation, to make doubt and opposition disappear. Our Lord, as I believe, clothes this suggestion in imagery suited to His hearers : He represents Himself as borne to the pinnacle of the Temple and bidden to cast Himself down. Of this pinnacle an account is given by Dr Edersheim : he con- siders it to have overlooked the Court of the Priests. The following extracts are from his account : — " In the next temptation Jesus stands on the watch-post which the white-robed priest has just quitted. In the Priests' Court below Him the morning sacrifice has been offered Now let Him 1 Mark xv. 31. ^ Acts xii. 140 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. descend, Heaven-borne, into the midst of priests and people. What shouts of acclamation would greet His appearance ! What homage of worship would be His' !" This pinnacle, supposing my view to be correct, would offer a fitting scene for the story of this trial, not only as being a giddy height, but be- cause also the spot was a public one, and a crowd of spectators would witness the display. If our Lord had only been tempted to assure Himself of His power by a miracle of adventurous rashness, any precipice would have served as well. The essential force of the temptation lay in the sug- gestion to prostrate men's minds, and to subjugate their wills, by performing before their eyes an appalling act, the superhuman nature of which could not possibly be gainsaid. When we leave the external imagery, and come to the gist of the lesson, we find in it the truth which we have had before us over and over again ^ A man's belief is not his belief and will not be effective for moulding his life unless his mind and his will have some part in the acceptance of it ; and if his own endeavours were to be on a sudden superseded by Divine action, this would be incon- sistent with that studious culture of man's dis- tinctive freedom which runs through the conduct of the world. If will and reason are to be dumb- 1 The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah. Dr. Edersheim, i. p. 304. * See pp. 23, 24, and pp. 57, 58. THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. I4I founded by the interference of absolute power, why should men possess them or care to put them to use ? As a fact, God suggests but does not compel^ and our Lord's signs agree herewith. They em- phasise His lessons, and witness for God to those who have eyes for Him — but men can reject the lesson, signs and all if they please. Let us imagine the form the Tempter's arguments might take in the mouth of one like Milton's Satan : "You wish," he might suggest, "men to believe that your power comes from on high. Leave them no room for doubt. People about you look for a Sign from Heaven, such as Joshua worked in Ajalon, and Isaiah displayed in the days of Heze- kiah. Beelzebub, they think, may work Signs on earth, but Heaven, they own, is God's domain, and what is written in the skies carries God's hand and seal. Shew men these Signs for which they ask, and display your wonders so as to strike men the most. Cures and works of mercy, witnessed by a few score people, create but little stir. Shew something that all Judea, or at least Jerusalem, can behold at once; — great emotions take strongest hold among men in a mass: display a comet or darken the sun; or, to begin with, stand on the pinnacle of the Temple — there is a tradition that there the Messiah should appear' — and in the presence of all the crowd hurl yourself into the Priests' Court below." ^ Dr Edersheim. 142 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. To meet these thoughts suggested by the Tempter, there would rise in our Lord's mind a crowd of arguments : some of these I have already ventured to imagine. If our Lord had displayed a Sign of overwhelming effect, and bidden men deny it if they could, He would have paralysed intel- lectual growth in mankind. Men had been gifted with faculties fitting them to explore and to judge of spiritual things : if these were curtailed of room for exercise, they would languish like limbs disused. Should He bar investigation in one-half of reason's realm ? Should He so appal mankind, as to enforce an involuntary acceptance of His claims ? Would not this be putting fresh fetters on those whom He was come on earth to set free ? Some miracles of a stupendous character are worked by our Lord, no doubt : such are the Transfiguration and the raising of Jairus' -daughter. But, marvellous as these two manifestations were, they were not worked for the mere wonder's sake ; men were not brought together to see them. The wondrousness is an inevitable accompaniment of the declaration of God's Kingdom and the dis- closing of His ways, but it is not the prime motive of the act. There is no display, no appearance of effort. Expectation is not awakened or the imagination aroused by the announcement of a coming prodigy. Neither were these great works wrought to win proselytes : the few who witness them are already convinced of their Master's Divine THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. I43 power; it is not so much a fuller assurance that they derive from them, as a deeper insight into the ways of God. To the three apostles who already best discerned God's ways, God's power is in these manifestations more fully displayed ; no others behold it. Here as everywhere, it is to those who have that more is given. This same Law governs the appearances of the risen Lord. He does not stand forth in triumph and confound disbelief. He had only to shew Himself in the temple and His enemies would have lain at His feet. But men were not to be convinced against their will : all our accounts agree that it was to His apostles only that our Lord appeared. St Peter says to Cornelius and his friends : " Him God raised up the third day, and gave him to be made manifest, not to all the people, but unto witnesses that were chosen before of God, even to us, who did eat and drink with him after he rose from the dead\" This limitation is very carefully maintained. Our Lord never appears in His own form, when there is any chance of His being beheld by others than disciples. In the garden, at the tomb, and on the way to Emmaus, He shews Himself to disciples in a strange shape and is only made known to them for a moment : He was not to be seen and re- cognised by any ordinary passer by. His resur- rection was not to be a subject of popular rumour ^ Acts X. 40, 41. 144 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. or one for the wonderment of the crowd. Some might say, with the men in the parable, " Nay, but if one go to them from the dead\ they will repent," but our Lord is averse to sensational impressions : men had had the option of believing or not, and they had made their choice. When however the apostles are together in their upper chamber and the doors are shut. He appears in His accustomed form, with the print of the nails upon His hands and feet, for there was no need then for disguise. The principle that room is to be left for man's will to act in determining his creed is observed not X only in all the New Testament but throughout the spiritual history of mankind. Towards the close of the third chapter I have remarked on the analogy between an overwhelming manifestation, such as a Sign from Heaven, and a rigorous demonstration that Christ's revelation is of God. Men have at times cried out both for one and the other ; but if what they demand had been given them, the higher knowledge would have been discontinuous, with un- certainty on one side of a line and absolute certainty on the other. There would have been rigid dykes, as of granite, crossing the field of spiritual thought, which would have baulked our progress. The Laws which I have stated concerning Signs are steadily observed throughout the ca- nonical Scriptures, although the writers of the books knew nothing of any such Laws. The 1 Luke xvi. 30, THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. I45 Apocryphal Gospels on the other hand violate these Laws at every turn. This opens out almost a new line of argument on internal evidence. Is not the coincidence strange, supposing that the writers allowed play to their fancies, that all the four Evangelists should have uniformly refrained from introducing any miracle worked merely for miracles' sake ; or any one which served to minister to the bodily wants of the worker ; or which was employed either to enforce submission or to punish hostility ? Is it not also strange that neither in the Gospels nor the Acts have we any instance of any public display of power such as should awe the crowds into belief against their wills ? In this chapter I have considered the series of Temptations, with reference to their bearing on the miracles. I have tried to shew that they supply insight into our Lord's way of solving the problem of introducing the infinite element with- out causing the finite to disappear. But this is only a student view ; and the lesson which the church has always drawn from them is of infinitely greater practical worth. The heads of this lesson are: that the great prizes of life presented them- selves to Jesus as they do to us ; that they glittered in His eyes as they do in ours; that they offered themselves to His grasp as they sometimes do to ours, and were deliberately renounced by Him as hollow, compared with the blessing of knowing and doing the will of God. Without this L. 10 146 THE LAWS OF THE WORKING OF SIGNS. record, could we have conceived our Lord as being *' Man of the substance of His mother born in the world"? Might we not have looked on Jesus Christ as only a manifestation of Deity, clad in outer human guise, but without human affections ; visible indeed to men's eyes, but destitute of a pulse which beats in unison with theirs ? This error would have lodged Christianity in mens' heads instead of in their hearts and would have destroyed its universality and force; and this error, the narrative of the Temptation — whether we regard it as apo- logue or fact— is alike effectual to dispel. CHAPTER VI. FROM THE TEMPTATION TO THE MINISTRY IN GALILEE. Outset of the Work. We now come in sight of that part of our Lord's work which is the special subject of this book. We have been shewn something of what passed in His mind during the days in the desert ; but we are not told what He intended to accomplish or by what practical steps He would proceed. We need not suppose that He came forth from the desert with His plan of action completely prepared. He may not have settled where He should lay the scene of His work or whom He should take for His helpers. All this would grow clear to Him as time went on. But though He may have been waiting for the guidance of inner voice and out- ward circumstance as to the way of executing His charge, yet that He had God's work to do and meant to do it is written unmistakeably in His air. We are shown Him in St John's Gospel on His way to Galilee. A glimpse is given us across His path, and we see Him pass along with the assured tread of one whose part is taken and who knows 10 — 2 148 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. whither His steps lead. On one point touching the form of His work He is already clear. He is not to come as a practical reformer or as a claimant of power; in these characters He would need active human aid, and the Spirit of the World would enter in : but though He is given functions beyond teaching, yet, in order to wear a garb familiar to the people, He will be in their eyes nothing more, at first, than "a teacher come from God^;" His fol- lowers are to be purely disciples and not adherents of any other kind. His concern was not with political or social forms of order, — these must be different in different times and different lands. His province was to waken into activity the capacity for knowing God which was practically dormant in the mass of mankind. Before laying down any plan or organising any society, He passes some months in exploring, so to say, the tempers, and minds and capacities of the different classes of persons in Jerusalem and Galilee. He is in search of the fittest receptacles for the word. He looks into the hearts of the disciples of John, and of those who like Nicodemus were "scribes instructed into the kingdom of heaven." He turns His eye upon Samaritans and peasants of Galilee ; and finally, as we know, decides to choose the quiet Lake shore for the cradle of the Faith. The peasants and fishers whose ways He knew — unsentimental, serviceable men — were taken as witnesses for the ^ John iii. 2. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. I49 new revelation : they offered the new flasks wanted for the new wine. A man who sets about regenerating society commonly begins by remodelling institutions ; he trusts to good institutions to make men good : our Lord, as a Teacher, begins at the other end ; He goes straight to the men themselves and tries to make them better ; better men would bring about better ways of ordering their outward lives ; but each generation must do this for itself. The success of His enterprise did not rest on its immediate acceptance ; and so, He did not aim at drawing mimbers round Him or at gaining influential proselytes or at consolidating a school or a sect. Christ's work was to go on for ever, and mankind would be redeemed equally, whether many followers or few attended Him while on earth. It may be asked "Did our Lord from the first see all that lay before Him } " The conclusion from the facts of the history must be that, unless when it were specially summoned, His divine prescience re- mained in abeyance, and that He, as the Son of Man, was subject to those uncertainties as to the future which attend ordinary human action. He could not have worked together with men, as He did with the Apostles, if He had differed so essen- tially from them as to know perfectly every day what was going to happen on the next : he could not have experienced surprise ; and surprise our Lord certainly shews at the dulness of the disciples 150 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. in catching His meaning : ** He marvelled'^ too at the unbelief of some districts. On occasion we know that He could search men's hearts ; but they did not lie bare to His view. Neither can we suppose that, when He charged men not to publish their cures, He knew that He would be disobeyed ; or that He chose Judas for an Apostle knowing that he would betray Him. The general drift of the purport of His coming, and His insight into it, grew clearer and clearer the nearer He came to the end ; but we have no warrant for supposing that the details of all that would happen on the way lay before Him from the first. He draws His disciples to Him at first with a cheerful hope: but towards the close of His career He has the air of one moving under a load ; and once He gives utterance to what lies at His heart. The words in which He does this throw a light on the question of His purpose and His plan ; they are spoken apparently to St Peter — "I came to cast fire upon the earth; and what will I, if it is already kindled ? But I have a baptism to be baptized with ; and how am I straitened till it be accom- plished!^" It needed one sent from God to kindle this fire, and to bring home to men the truth that His Spirit worked within them to will and to do ; but when the kindling was once effected, the rest might be left to human effort. Men could feed the flame ^ Luke xii. 49, 50. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 151 and men could fan it; and so, following the law we have traced in operation so often, to men the flame was left, for them to feed and fan. "This being done," our Lord might say, " this for which I came, — why do I linger here ? what more do I want ^ " and yet He might add " My whole work is not done: the crowning act remains. Men will never understand my love at all unless I die for them." Until He was baptised with this baptism of suffering, He was like one straitened on every side by an imperious task which claims his every thought. Our Lord's movements from the Temptation on to the Ministry in Galilee are made known to us by the Gospel of St John. Jesus appears on the banks of the Jordan, where John was still baptising his disciples ; He mixes with the throng; the Baptist points Him out to two young men, one of whom, Andrew, brings his brother to visit Him ; the other was probably the Evangelist him- self. Afterwards our Lord Himself finds Philip, and Philip finds Nathanael, and the little party travel on foot to Cana of Galilee. No writer, who did not confine himself to facts about which he was certain, would have given so homely a story of the beginning of so mighty a matter. The Gospel of St John is manifestly written by one who is in the position of a disciple ; he sees everything from the disciple's point of view : what the disciples thought of things that happened 152 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. seems to be always uppermost in his mind. He is not a writer composing a continuous biography of our Lord, but a disciple drawing lessons from particular scenes of his Master's life ; and he no more thinks of considering why our Lord took the course He did, than he would consider why the seasons change. An historian m.ight have looked for reasons why our Lord did not appear in public life in Jerusalem ; but John does not look on the matter with an historian's eye. I will here summarise the occasions on which the disciples are mentioned, in the period of the history embraced in this chapter. We first hear of them in the account of the wedding at Cana. The Evangelist relates that " He manifested forth His glory, and His disciples believed on Him^." Next we find the disciples spoken of, as if they stood in a kind of family relation to Him. " He went down to Capernaum, He, and His mother, and His brethren, and His disciples^T When we come to the account of the cleansing of the Temple, it is point- ed out how that action struck the disciples. They talked it over among themselves ; they recalled the verse in the Psalms, "The zeal of Thine house shall eat me up^" and thought they saw a Messia- nic prophecy fulfilled : we are told too that after our Lord's death they recalled His words about building the Temple in three days. We hear also that they were numerous : " many believed 1 John ii. II. '"* John ii. 12. ^ John ii. 17. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 53 on His name, beholding the signs which He did\" Next comes a fact of great importance ; it is that, though our Lord did not baptise adherents, yet that His disciples did so, and that finally more resorted to them than to the Baptistl A few disciples at- tended our Lord in the journey through Samaria, and to them His first recorded discourse as a teacher is addressed : there is no further mention of them during the period embraced in this chapter. Such is the summary of the matter bearing on my subject ; I proceed to discuss points of interest that arise out of it. The advent of our Lord differed from that of other enlighteners of mankind in one very striking way. He had, in the Baptist, a special forerunner, who gave out, on all occasions, that the final cause of his own preaching was to prepare the way for one greater than himself. Events of national history, themselves part of that wide-spreading "Preparatio Evangelica" which, to my mind, under- lies the history of the world, had raised a ferment in the minds of the inhabitants of Palestine. To this movement the Baptist gave a particular turn. He brought men to desire that the world should become better, and taught them that they must begin by becoming better themselves. Without this preparation, the germs of truth which our Lord scattered would more largely have failed to quicken : the Baptist had broken up the soil to ^ John ii. 23. ^ John iii. 22, iv. 2. 154 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. receive the seed ; his preaching put the people in an attitude of expectancy, and an expectant condition is a receptive one. The Old Testa- ment prophecies had worked to this same end ; they had made expectancy congenial to the nation's mind. The Israelites were like spectators waiting to see a great king come with a procession : the sight of a forerunner sets the crowd astir; and such a forerunner John was, I have observed before, that in carrying out His own work our Lord is careful to use preparation. The disciples are sent "to every place where He Himself would come." Men were not to be repelled from the new movement by reason of its being strange to them.. What this preparation did for the villages of Galilee the Baptist did on a grander scale for all Judaea. We get but a glimpse of the nature of the relation between John and his disciples, and need only notice it briefly. Young men did not, like those who sat at the feet of a Rabbi, resort to him for definite instruction : the disciples of John did not look to be taught interpretations of the Law or of the Prophets, but they looked for a rule of life for themselves and a brighter future for their country or their race — they were ill-satisfied with the present and eagerly turned to one who re- presented both in aspect and in utterance the pro- phets of old. There was one feature in John's ministry, so distinctive that he drew his appellation THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 55 from it. — He caused his disciples to be baptised. The doctrines implied in the rite do not now con- cern me ; to some it symbolised the cleansing from sin, to others the rising into a new life ; but the practical effect of it was to make those who received it feel that they, had, in a way, pledged their al- legiance to John by receiving baptism at his hands : they had assumed a badge, and were bound by ties of personal loyalty to their master and to one another\ But John's disciples were not separated off from the outside mass by baptism alone. To the mind of his countrymen a religion was not a religion at all, unless it included a regimen, unless it parcelled out their days, according to hours of prayer and times of fasting. With such a distinctive rule John pro- vided his followers. He taught them to pray^ he accustomed them to voluntary fasts^; and on some points of ceremonial, such as purification, he may have had tenets of his own''. We will now trace the steps by which our Lord gathers disciples round Him. It is possible that even before our Lord left Galilee He had been the centre of a group of young men who looked up to Him, and the Galileans among John's dis- 1 "I thank God that I baptized none of you save Crispus and Gaius ; lest any man should say that ye were baptized into my name." i Cor. i. 14, 15. This, with the context, illustrates the notion of a personal tie established by baptism. St Paul is combating the charge of establishing a sect of his own. 2 Luke xi. I. ^ Luke v. 33. •* John iii. 25. 156 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. ciples might therefore have heard of Him. It falls in also with this supposition, that our Lord seems to have been already acquainted with Philip of Bethsaida, and to have purposely sought him out. We read — " He findetJi Philip, and saith unto him, Follow me\" Philip hastens to Nathanael^, who came from Cana in Galilee, and tells him that the Messiah has been found in the person of "Jesus the son of Joseph, tJie man from NazaretJi^T The words in italics may imply **of whom we have all heard ; " for Cana was not more than six miles from Nazareth, and Bethsaida was in the same district. The Baptist, we know, regarded Him, when He came to be baptised, as his equal or superior in the favour of God. Five of the Apostles — John, Andrew, Peter, Philip and Nathanael — were drawn to our Lord in the few days spent at Bethabara on His return from the desert ; and probably all these went back with Him to Galilee. Among these five we find traces of a lasting tie. This is worth noting, because such a tie would naturally arise from comradeship in early years, and of this comrade- ship St John's Gospel speaks. These five had gone together from Galilee, in the zeal of their young days, to listen to the strange preacher in the desert of Judaea; they had lived together, faring alike, and baring their hearts each to the other in 1 John i. 43. 2 jf^i^i^ \ ^^ . j^^i, ,, ^ Tov ctTTo 'Hia^apir. John i. 46. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. I 5/ the confidence of youth. We can understand that this would bind men fast together, and that St John writing his Gospel at the end of his life, with pos- sibly St Andrew at his side, should have been mindful of all the circumstances in which these old friends took part, and have gladly taken occasion to mention their names\ Accordingly, we find mention made in the Gospel, without positive occasion, of these Apostles by name. We did not need to know that it was Andrew who said "There is a lad here who hath five barley-loaves and two small fishes^" The Synoptlsts^ all relate the miracle of the feeding of the five thousand, but Andrew is named by St John alone : Philip, an- other of this little company, is close by ; he is ad- dressed by our Lord, and Andrew interposes. We find Philip and Andrew together at a later time. ^ A fragment of a very ancient account of the Canon of the N. Test, has been preserved by Muratori. I will quote the transla- tion of it from Professor Westcott's work. (Prof. Westcott, Gospel of St yohn, p. xxxv.) "The fourth Gospel [was written by] John, one of the disciples (j,.e. Apostles). When his fellow- disciples and bishops urgently pressed {cohortantilms) him, he said, 'Fast with me [from] to-day, for three days, and let us tell one another any revelation which may be made to us, either for or against [the plan of writing] {quid cidqiie fucrit revelatum alter- iitrumy . On the same night it was revealed to Andrew, one of the Apostles, that John should relate all in his own name, and that all should review [his writing]." If we accept this authority, John and Andrew were together in their age as they had been in their youth. Philip also was at Hierapolis not very far off. 2 John vi. 8. ^ i.e. the Evangelists Matthew, Mark, and Luke. 158 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. When the Greeks who came up and worshipped at the feast wished to see Jesus they applied to Phihp^; then we have *' Philip Cometh and telleth Andrew: Andrew cometh, and Philip, and they tell Jesus." St John here seems almost to go out of his way to speak of Andrew. Philip also, who scarcely appears in the Synop- tical Gospels, is mentioned six times by St John; and he is found in company, now with Andrew, now with Nathanael, as if the ties of old com- panionship still held. The particulars we have of Philip are instructive. Our Lord, as we have seen, "found him," which I take to m.ean, not that He merely lighted tipon hiut, but that He sought him. He thought him, therefore, a suitable com- panion for His coming journey to Jerusalem for the Passover. A point of fitness may have been that he knew Greek : his Greek name would not by itself go far to prove this ; but, taking it along with the fact that when the Greeks come up to worship in Jerusalem they address themselves to Philip, it seems likely that he knew their language. Our Lord at the Passover would meet many Israel- ites who talked Greek more readily than Aramaic, and a Greek-speaking follower would be of service ^ John xii. vv. 20 — 22. These Greeks were Hellenists: that is Jews, who from living in Greek cities spoke, Greek instead of Aramaic. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 59 to Him. Again when Philip says, "Lord, shew us the Father and it sufficeth us\" our Lord repHes, Have I been so long\N\\h you and you have not known me? The words "so long" are particularly applicable to Philip, as he had been called a year before the twelve were formed into a body, and may have remained in constant attendance on our Lord when the other disciples quitted Him after the return through Samaria. With Nathanael also there is much interest connected. He, in the last chapter of St John's Gospel, is called Nathanael of Cana of Galilee, and is named among others who are Apostles. He is identified, on good grounds, with the Bartholomew of the Synoptical Gospels^ We mark in Nathanael an aptitude for discerning spiritual greatness ; but, with all this, he held stoutly to old prejudices in which he had been born and bred ; and when Philip comes to him with his tidings, he breaks out with : " Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth V There is no reason to suppose that Nazareth was held generally in bad estimation. Natives of Jeru- salem would look down on all villages in Galilee without distinction, but Nathanael belonged not to Jerusalem but to Cana. Cana and Nazareth were a few miles apart, each being the chief town in its own district ; and the local jealousy and ten- 1 John xiv. 9. ^ Bartholomew — son of Tolmai, so that Nathanael son of Tolmai or (as Dr Edersheim writes it) of Temalgon, would be the full name. l6o THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. dency to mutual disparagement between neighbours, which is not unknown among ourselves, and was rife in those times, will account for Nathanael's words\ It was of no ill augury for his holding fast the Faith when he had found it, that he clung to the old traditionary feeling of his native town. He was not blinded by it; he is ready to "go and see." Here our Lord exercises His singular gift of intro- spection, " Behold," says He, "an Israelite indeed, in whom there is no guile." *' Nathanael saith unto him, Whence knowest thou me? Jesus answered and said unto him, Before Philip called thee, when thou wast under the fig-tree, I saw thee. Nathanael answered him. Rabbi, thou art the Son of God ; thou art King of Israel'." Probably Nathanael recalled what had passed in his mind when he had been under the fig-tree. Perhaps some mystery of existence had then * Tacitus speaking of Lugdunum and Vienna on opposite sides of the Rhone, tells us that they regarded each other with the animosity which "serves as a link between those whom only a river separates" ("unde aemulatio et invidia et uno amne discretis connexum odium"). Tac. Hist. I. c. 65. St Matthew speaks of that "which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene." This prophecy, in the words given, is not found in our canonical books. The Evangelist is supposed to refer to Is. xi. i. The Hebrew word for a Branch, there used, is Natsar. 2 John i. 4S, 49. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. l6l weighed upon his soul, and on coming to Christ he found " the thoughts of his heart revealed^" In our Lord's reply to Nathanael we find His first recorded utterance as a Preacher of the Word ; here He first speaks of Himself as the Son of Man, and here we have the first hint of the Law, "To him who hath shall be given," a law which has been several times before us and will be so again before long. Nathanael had something already ; he was enough in earnest to drop his prejudices; a slight token had enabled him to see in our Lord ''the Son of God, the King of Israel : " he is told that he shall see greater things than these. Jacob had dreamed of old^ that there was a ladder between earth and heaven, by which God's angels went and came ; such a ladder Christ was, and he, the Israelite in whom there was no guile, should see "the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man V So far I have followed the Gospel of St John. The Synoptists afibrd corroborative matter to shew that the little company, which had met at Beth- abara, continued to hang together. (i) In St Mark's^ list of the Apostles— the names "Andrew, Philip, and Bartholomew" form one clause in the enumeration. If we were asked for the names of a society of twelve men whom we knew — they would occur by the tv/os and threes ^ Luke ii. 35. - Genesis xxviii. 12. ^ John i. 51. * Mark iii. 17 — 19. L. II 1 62 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. who were most together. St Peter, whom we may regard here as St Mark's informant, gives the names in little batches. He recalls journeys in the hill country, when the disciples had walked in scattered groups, three or four together. In one of these little knots Andrew, Philip, and Bartholomew may commonly have been found. (2) From the way in which St Matthew's* list is given we may infer something of greater interest still. St Matthew gives the names of the Apostles in pairs: Simon and Andrew, James and John, Philip and Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthew — and so on. Immediately after the list of names we have the sending forth of the Apostles to the cities of Israel. I believe that the Apostles went on this mission in the pairs which are above-named. Why else should the names be coupled together .? The Evangelist had in his eye the party as they had stood listening to their Master's words, with their staves in their hands, ready to start. He recollects their separating — two going one way, and two another, — and therefore, two by two, he puts them down in his list^ It is curious that though St Matthew couples the names, yet he does not say, 1 Matth. X. 2—6. 2 If a party of young men were in the habit of separating for excursions and going two by two, and one of the party were after- wards asked for a list of the company ; it would help his memory to recall them, pair by pair. The Evangelist is going to tell us of our Lord's directions to the twelve about their mission. It then strikes him that he must record their names. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 63 as St Mark and St Luke do, that the Apostles were sent two and two together. The coupling in St Matthew is a kind of coincidence with that express direction which is preserved by St Mark and St Luke. Not only, then, is there probable evidence to shew that, out of the little body of the earliest disciples, three clung together ; but also that two of them — Philip and Bartholomew — formed one of the pairs that went forth declaring to the villages of Galilee that the Kingdom of God was at hand. At all events the Synoptists testify to a special intimacy between two disciples ; and cir- cumstances, which are disclosed by St John alone, shew how this intimacy naturally arose. Thus we have, what is always worth noting, a corroboration by the Synoptists of the narrative of the fourth Evangelist. To return to the history in the Gospel of St John. Our Lord sets out on His return to Galilee, and may have been Nathanael's guest at Cana for the night preceding the wedding. It does not fall within my scope to say more about the miracle than has been said already. The statement important for my purpose is, that our Lord manifested His glory, "and His disciples believed on Him\" The fact that a new teacher worked wonders and drew dis- ciples round him made a stir in the district; and this may throw light upon the passage which follows. ^ John ii. II. II — 2 164 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. *' After this he went down to Capernaum, he, and his mother, and his brethren, and his disciples : and there they abode not many days\" This event leads to no consequences in the history. It would only have been mentioned by one who, having the sequence of occurrences in his head, detailed them all. Still, there must have been some motive for this removal of the whole family to Capernaum. I will hazard a conjecture, which if correct will help to explain the following text which occurs later on : *' And after the two days he went forth from thence into Galilee. For Jesus himself testified, that a prophet hath no honour in his own country. So when he came into Galilee, the Galilaeans received him, having seen all the things that he did in Jerusalem at the feast : for they also went unto the feast ^" Why does the Evangelist say that our Lord was Himself an instance of the rejection of a prophet in his own country, at the very time when he is about to say that the Galileans did receive Him because they had seen what He did at the feast .^ There must have been some previous occasion on which He had not been received. I believe that the last quoted passage, fully expressed, might run thus : " He went forth from thence into Galilee but not to Nazm'eth, for Jesus Himself testified that a prophet hath no honour in his own country," and therefore He passed by Nazareth and went on to 1 John ii. 12. 2 John iv. 43 — 45. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 16$ Cana, a few miles further north. Now, at what time could our Lord have experienced this ill reception.? I find no occasion on which such disparagement of His claims can have been shewn, excepting in the short interval between the miracle at Cana and this with- drawal of the whole family to Capernaum. I would therefore conjecture that on leaving Cana, after the miracle, our Lord had returned with His mother to Nazareth, and that the inhabitants had then in some way shown ill-will\ He probably brought with Him some disciples belonging to Cana — a place of which they were jealous — hailing Him as Rabbi, and proclaiming Him their Master. The people of Nazareth resented this assumption of superiority on the part of a townsman whom they had known from His birth. The whole family are involved in the unpopularity, and remove to Capernaum, to wait the time for going up to the Passover. Though St John makes no mention, in its proper place, of the animosity of the people of Nazareth, yet the recollection of it remains in his mind ; so that, when he says that our Lord went into Galilee on His return from Samaria, this seems to him noticeable, as though it were strange He should go where He had been ill received before ; and he tells us why He is well received on this occasion ; namely, because some had brought back word of His vigorous action in cleansing the ^ The tone of His discourse delivered there, after His visit to Jerusalem, falls in with this view. 1 66 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. Temple. Our Lord does not go to Nazareth, but again makes His stay at Cana. To return to this short stay at Capernaum. The point I am most concerned with is, that it is here that the disciples are first mentioned as attached to our Lord in His movements ; they form, as it were, part of His family. If our Lord had already met with opposition, as I have conjectured, this would have helped to bind the little company closer to- gether. We hear of no preaching or working of Signs during the short stay at Capernaum. We are not positively told that the disciples went with our Lord to Jerusalem^; but I imagine that the five of whom we have read went up to the Passover, though some may have returned to Galilee soon after the feasts The narrative of the cleansing of the Temple shews how burning was our Lord's indignation at practices that degraded men's notions of God. 1 It must be recollected that there is no mention in St John's Gospel of any disciple by name^ after the first chapter, until we come to the sixth. 2 It may be asked, How were the disciples maintained during several weeks at Jerusalem ? Though not of the poorest class they could not have lived long without labour. John may have been spared because James remained to help his father in his work. But if Peter and Andrew had both stayed at Jerusalem through all the early summer, it is hard to see how they, and Peter's wife, could have been supported. I should conjecture therefore that if Peter went to Jerusalem to the first passover, he only made a brief stay. There were, at this time, apparently no contributions such as we hear of afterwards (Luke viii. 3). THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 6/ Personal attacks He bore with meekness, "when He was reviled He reviled not again, when He suffered He threatened not^;" but He gives free vent to a godly wrath when He finds men driving a traffic in holy things. A personal characteristic of our Lord, shewn again and again, comes for the first time before us here: He carried authority in His air, an authority that needed no assertion, but to which men bowed. The owners of the oxen yield without resistance to the determination He shews. It is only the Hierarchy who ask, " What sign shewest thou unto us, seeing that thou doest these things^.''" I need not say that on demand He will work no Sign at all : this is His invariable rule. St John says nothing of the nature of the miracles wrought by our Lord at this time; we only hear that they induced people "to believe in His name^" They may have been chiefly miracles of in- trospection, like the recognition of Peter, the seeing of Nathanael under the fig-tree, and the divining of His mother's meaning when she said " they have no wine;" for St John assiduously keeps before his hearers this insight of our Lord into men's minds. In particular he says, in reference to the disciples who gathered round Him in Judaea, " But Jesus did not trust himself unto them, for that he knew all men, and because he needed not that any one should bear witness concerning man : for he himself knew what was in man^" 1 I Peter ii. 23. ^ John ii. 16. ^ John ii. 23. ^ John ii. 24, 25. l68 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. When our Lord drove out the money-changers and those who sold doves, people thronged to Him in Jerusalem, thinking that the leader whom they sought had come. But these were not disciples after His own heart, not such as should receive the kingdom of God as little children. These were men who had both notions and a purpose of their own ; men who would follow Him as long as He went their way ; and who, when He did not, would "go back and walk no more with Him\" The relation of our Lord to these early Judaean dis- ciples was very different from that in which He stood, either to the five who had gone with Him from Bethabara to Cana and Capernaum, or to those who afterwards thronged to His preaching of the Kingdom of Heaven, To these Judaean dis- ciples our Lord as far as we know delivers no lessons and issues no directions ; we do not hear that they were especially chosen for witnesses of the Signs in Jerusalem, or that they formed an organised body in any way. It seems rather as if a body of men ranged themselves round our Lord and, from their admiration for Him, took the name of His disciples, but did not hold themselves to be under orders, and came and went as they pleased. Our Lord had not yet begun His real Ministry ; He was probing the capacities and natures both of individual men and of different classes in the com- munity, with a view to testing their fitness for taking part in His great work. ^ John vi. 66. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 69 Something inclined Him, we may suppose, to take Galilee for the cradle of the new movement ; and the circumstance that those who first adhered were all Galilseans pointed along the same way. It would appear to be a method of Divine guidance, to speak by a whisper within, and, at the same time, so to order circumstances without, that one should fall in with the other : sometimes this coincidence will be perceived and will strike the beholder with a kind of awe, and sometimes it will operate on him without his being aware. There was much that made Galilee suitable: its position was at once central and retired, and its in- habitants were, according to Josephus, sturdy and independent, and, of course, free from the pedantry of Rabbinical schools. Jerusalem however claimed a trial from our Lord. He desired to know what was passing there in the minds of those who were seek- ing truth. It was possible that a cradle for the infant church might be found among the followers of the Baptist, or among Scribes like Nicodemus. Our Lord gauges the fitness of both these bodies of men. We know what conclusion settled itself in His mind during those early days : He must not put new wine into old bottles. The enlightened party among those in authority were more after the type of Erasmus than of Luther, they lacked force : they had been trained to pick their way through difficulties of interpretation, but not to grasp great principles, still less to act ; and though they divined that there was a truth dawning from afar, 170 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. yet their feeling for it was not so much a passion as a taste. After the discourse with Nicodemus the Evan- gelist returns to narration, and tells us of a visit of our Lord and His disciples to the district where the Baptist was carrying on his work. It may have been that he meant to represent our Lord as turning from Nicodemus to John's dis- ciples ; as if, when He found the former unequal to the need, He would try how the latter might serve. The words are "After these things came Jesus and his disciples into the land of Judaea ; and there he tarried with thern, and baptized. And John also was baptizing in ^non near to Salim, because there was much water there : and they came, and were baptized \" It is not said that our Lord actually went to the spot where John was ; but the narrative favours the view that the two companies were not far from one another. We are told that followers were drawn in large numbers to our Lord and that His disciples baptised them. This adoption of the rite which, though not unknown before, had been brought into special prominence by the Baptist, excited jealousy in John's disciples — "And they came unto John, and said to him, Rabbi, he that was with thee beyond Jordan, to whom thou hast borne witness, behold, the same baptizeth, and all men come to him^" 1 John iii..22, 23. - John iii. 26. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. I7I One reason of the anxiety of the disciples to baptise may possibly have been this ; they saw how that outward rite supplied John's disciples with a badge that marked them out and made one body of them ; they were all bound together to the same master by having received baptism at his hands, — bound together not merely by holding the same opinions and honouring the same man, but by something that had been done, by a work wrought upon tJiem. Some might interpret this "outward and visible sign" in one way and some in another, but all could see the value of such a sign or symbol for giving coherence and permanency to their new community. In the fourth chapter we find that the Pharisees at Jerusalem, — they who constituted the religious world of the place, — had come to the knowledge that the resort to Jesus was greater than that to St John— "When therefore the Lord knew how that the Pharisees had heard that Jesus was making and baptiz- ing more disciples than John (although Jesus himself baptized not, but his disciples), he left Judcea and departed again into Galilee \" I make out St John's meaning to be, that our Lord quitted Judaea because He found Himself thrust into apparent rivalry with John the Baptist. The Judaean disciples wanted a sect of their own; and the Pharisees regarded our Lord's following as ^ John iv. I, 2. 1/2 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. an offshoot from the movement of John, an offshoot which was likely to out-top the parent tree. It seems to me that our Lord was taking a survey of the different religious sections in Judaea and examining their fitness to furnish helpers for His work. Scholars who like Nicodemus were quick to ask " How can these things be .?" were not of the right order for setting a great movement afoot. If men were fully possessed with the momentous nature of God's spiritual working in the world, the idea of this as a fact would take up all their minds leaving no room for the question of mode. If Nicodemus had been capable of seeing how sublime was the future presented to him, he would never have expected to understand how it could come to pass. Next our Lord tried the disciples of John ; these may have been too full of the spirit of partizanship, and too much taken up with questions of purifying and the like, to be fit foster parents for the new Faith. Whatsoever were the cause, in neither of these classes did our Lord find a cradle for the faith. He required men plastic and receptive, capable of devoted self- surrender and possessed of self-transforming and expanding powers. These did not grow freely in the social climate of Judaea ; our Lord's thoughts then, we may suppose, went back to His own people and His own country, and He preached the Kingdom first in Galilee. Our Lord's leaving Judaea was precipitated by THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. I73 the rivalry which was threatening between His adherents and those of John ; more especially as that rivalry was taking the form of a competition in point of numbers. For the spirit which this would engender was to our Lord abhorrent in the extreme. When sect strives with sect, and they would decide the contest for superiority by counting heads, they are both in a way to fall down and worship the Spirit of the world. Our Lord was not founding or setting up a form of religion to which He personally would convert mankind ; but He and His work were part of the subject-matter of all religion — the relations of God to man. The apostles are never encouraged to exult in the number of their converts. Even when they were sent through the cities, on what we might regard as a missionary errand, they are not directed to win men over by strong entreaty — they are not then bidden, as men afterwards were by St Paul, to "be instant in season and out of season^;" they are only to proclaim the Kingdom of God : those who have ears to hear will hear, and the rest will go their way. Any competition with John the Baptist was above all to be shunned. Our Lord and the Baptist were bound together by early ties. Jesus had sought and received Baptism at his hand, and we always see a delicate and unswerving fidelity in His be- haviour towards him. It might be that He was ^ 2 Tim. iv, 2. 174 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. to increase and John was to decrease, but It should not be by any action of His that that change of relative position should be brought about. The Gospel itself, then, discloses grounds for our Lord's sudden departure into Galilee. Thus early, among the hearers of our Lord and the Baptist, appeared an insidious tendency to form parties, a tendency which broke out disastrously in later times; when some said, ''I am of Paul" and others "I am of Apollos\" There is no valid reason for supposing that our Lord left Judaea from fear of persecution. The Pharisees may have been in commotion when they heard that Jesus baptised more disciples than John ; and there may have been some stir in sacer- dotal circles at Jerusalem, but there is no appear- ance of violence having been threatened. Neither do I connect our Lord's journey with the captivity of the Baptist. I believe that John was not thrown into prison till three or four months after this journey through Samaria ; but supposing that the imprisonment had already taken place and it had seemed likely that Herod's jealousy of John would extend to Jesus, our Lord would not have left Judaea, which was not under Herod's jurisdiction, and have gone into Galilee which was so. At any rate our Lord quits Judeea and the Judaean disciples, or all but a few of them, and travels back to Galilee with a little company who 1 I Cor. i. 12. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 75 were bound to Him, and who tended Him, it would seem, with affectionate solicitude\ It does not come into my plan to discuss the discourses of our Lord except so far as they bear on the training of the apostles, and so I pass by the discourse with the woman of Samaria, as I have done that with Nicodemus. I believe that only three or four disciples attended our Lord on His journey : if they had been numerous, they would not all have left Him, wearied and alone at the fountain. But in visiting a strange town in Samaria, it might be unwise to enter with a smaller party than three or four ; so that if the disciples numbered no more than this, we can account for our Lord being left by Himself. This journey through Samaria has an important bearing on my subject. Here, for the first time, we have a conversation of our Lord with His disciples ; and, what is more, we get a glimpse of an office in store for them, of a work that is to give a meaning to their lives. The disciples of the Baptist had been learners and listeners only; but our Lord's disciples were not to be mere passive recipients of teaching. They were to be taught by doing as well as by hearing ; they were to take part with Him in the great work that was to be wrought in the world. They were not servants — " for the servant knoweth ^ John iv. 31. They press Him to take bodily support about which they thought Him careless. This must be an eye-witness's account. 176 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. not what his lord doethV' but they were friends joining in the common cause. We may wonder why no earlier converse of our Lord with His dis- ciples is preserved. Possibly, before this, there were in the company some of those to whom He "did not commit HimselP." While these were present, our Lord may have maintained a reserve, and said nothing bearing on His work which it was important for the Evangelist to record. But, when our Lord set out through the semi-hostile country of Samaria in the midst of the early summer heat, those only fol- lowed who were in earnest, and on whom He could rely. I pass on at once to that address to the disciples to which I have alluded. Our Lord had been cheered by the openness of the Samaritans to the truth. On leaving the town He comes on a scene, than which few are more gladdening — a great ex- panse of corn growing luxuriantly, swaying with the wind and glistening in the sun. We mark that He was always keenly alive to external impression, and in all He saw espied matter that fitted what He taught. Our Lord is struck by the sight, He sees in it something that answers to His thoughts, and which seems to convey a promise which re- joices His soul — not for Himself but for His disciples. The discourse is as follows : "Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh the harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your 1 John XV. 15. 2 John ii. 24. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 77 eyes, and look on the fields, that they are white already unto harvest. He that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal; that he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together. For herein is the saying true. One soweth, and another reapeth. I sent you to reap thatwhereon ye have not laboured : others have laboured, and ye are entered into their labour \" The work before the disciples is only to reap: others had ploughed and sown. Prophets and teachers, and also rulers and judges, all who had helped to bring the Israelites into the condition of being ripe for better things — these past teachers of men, as well as all the impersonal workings of the unseen hand which had smoothed the way — all these answered to the ploughers and sowers of the crop which the apostles were now to reap. This *' Prseparatio Evangelica," so often before us, had been the combined result of many sorts of action, and into the fruits of this labour the disciples were now to enter. They, along with all those who had sowed and tended, should one day rejoice to- gether, when the grain was garnered in heaven, and when those accounted worthy of the Resurrection to Eternal Life should enter on their reward. Gleams of gladness in our Lord's career come rarely, and His joy is always for others' sake. It is not for Himself, not even for the cause that He re- joices— that cause would surely triumph in its own time — but His joy is, that He beholds a successful ^ John iv. 35 — 38. See Chronological Appendix. L. 12 178 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. and glorious career opening before His fellow- labourers, the few friends at His side. On the re- turn of the seventy recorded by St Luke, this same joy for His disciples' sake is especially spoken of. " In that same hour he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit, and said, I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and understanding, and didst reveal them unto babes : yea. Father ; for so it was well-pleasing in thy sight= All things have been delivered unto me of my Father : and no one knoweth who the Son is, save the Father; and who the Father is, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal ^/w\" It would seem that such happiness as our Lord found on earth came from marking the affectionate fidelity of the Apostles and their growth in favour with God. " Ye are they," says He to them, " who have continued with me in my temptations^" and He speaks of the "joy in heaven" and again of the "joy in the presence of the angels of God," ''over one sinner that repenteth^;" every one who turned to Him with a single heart brought Him glad- ness. This joyousness, we may believe, spread a gleam over the life of our Lord and of His disciples, until when near the end the shadow came. The disciples were always slow to under- stand His hints of coming sorrow ; they could not conceive that the spiritual triumph was to be emphasised by being contrasted with bodily 1 Luke X. 21, 22. 2 Luke xxii. 28. ^ Luke xv. 10. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 79 suffering" ; and He had no more the heart to break the whole sad truth to them, than He had to waken the sleepers at Gethsemane. Circum- stances would teach the apostles all the truth in time, just as the sleepers were awaked when the moment came. For reasons given in the chronological appendix I place the return of our Lord through Samaria early in May A.D. 28. Between the return through Samaria and the journey up to 'the feast of the JewsV some months have to be accounted for. St John relates but a single incident, the cure of the nobleman's son at Capernaum, as belonging to this time ; but I would also place here the preaching in the synagogues in Galilee mentioned by St Luke. His words are — " And Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee : and a fame went out concerning him through all the region round about. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified of all ^" This is parallel with St John's statement, before discussed, ''The Galilaeans received Him, having seen all the things that He did at Jerusalem at the feast^" I also refer to this period the preaching in the synagogue at Nazareth. The tone of this discourse as I have already observed (pp. 164, 165) tallies with the notion before advanced of a previous ill ^ John V. I. 2 Luke iv. 14, 15. ^ Jq^^ jy^ ^^^ 12 — 2 l80 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. reception of our Lord at Nazareth. There is no mention of our Lord's mother or brethren, they had left Nazareth (John ii. 12) and we do not hear of their return. At other places in Galilee, our Lord had been received with enthusiasm, but at Naza- reth petty jealousies prevailed. He does not, in this sermon, speak like one returning with renown to a warm welcome in his own town. He has an air of expecting opposition, as if He had met with it before. He condemns the narrow localising spirit of His hearers, and goes so far as to impugn the exclusive claim of the people of Israel to be the recipients of the favour of God. It is to be remarked that no mention is made of disciples being in attendance upon our Lord, from the time of His reaching Galilee by way of Samaria to that of His presenting Himself to the four Apostles by the Lake shore — that is, as I take it, from May to October A.D. 28\ The little com- pany that came through Samaria probably broke up on reaching Galilee. They had their bread to earn and for the most part went back to their callings; while our Lord during the summer of A.D. 28 was preaching in various synagogues, and went, almost ^ If a body of disciples had accompanied our Lord to Nazareth, they would probably have oifered some opposition to the Nazarenes. The absence of all mention of disciples in St Luke, chap. iv. gives reason for supposing that the visit to Nazareth here recorded is not the same with that related in St Matthew and St Mark; for the disciples were then present. See Mark vi. i — 6, Matth. xii. 46. THE OUTSET OF TPIE WORK. l8l unattended, to Jerusalem. The absence of His followers would account for the scantiness of our information as to this period. I suppose that the feast spoken of in St John's Gospel (chap. v. i), took place early in the autumn of the same year A.D. 28. It was, I conceive, about the close of this feast that the Baptist was thrown into prison ; upon this, our Lord returned into Galilee, and His official ministry began\ We cannot suppose Him to have been quite alone at this feast at Jerusalem, because some one must have been there to report w^hat took place. I do not think that John was with our Lord at the feast, because, if he had been so, he could only have been absent from Him a few days before our Lord rejoined him on the Lake shore, and the incidents of this call give the impression that the separation had been of much greater length. I incline to think that our Lord was attended by Philip, who alone, at that time, had received the ^ I incline to the old view which identified this feast with the feast of Tabernacles ; the time suits well with my chronological scheme. This was '"''the feast" of the Jews, it caused great stir. Now Josephus tells us, that Herod put John in prison because men came to him in crowds. This was more likely to happen when men were set free from their work by the holiday than at other times. It is true that in ch. vii. 2, John calls the feast of tabernacles by name. But he is there writing his own account, while here he is only recasting, as I believe, what he has received from an eye- witness. This may account for the difference of expression. Some MSS. but not the weightiest, read ^'- the feast," in John v. i. If this were received it would go far to settle the point. 1 82 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK, order "Follow Me\" If John drew some of his information from Philip, this will help to account for his frequent mention of himl It was on our Lord's visit to this feast that He first incurred the active enmity of the Scribes. It followed from His miracle at the pool of Bethesda, which took place on the Sabbath day. Since the cure was wrought by a word there was no breach of the law ; but " the Jews " (by which word St John indicates the hierarchy) were shocked that He should tell the man to carry his bed on the Sabbath day. " The man went away, and told the Jews that it was Jesus which had made him whole. And for this cause did the Jews persecute Jesus, because he did these things on the sabbath. But Jesus answered them, My Father worketh even until now, and I work. For this cause therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only brake the sabbath, but also called God his own Father, making himself equal with God^" The hostility of the Scribes, we see, is very deadly. The Pharisees are often scandalised at infractions of their sabbath notions, but they do not seek oui Lord's death as the Scribes do. The latter were probably Sadducees, tinged with 1 John i. 43. 2 The historical part of John Chap. 5, w. i — 18 has the air of an account condensed from materials furnished by another. We are told that Philip was bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia. He may there- fore have kept up communication with John at Ephesus. 3 John V. 15 — 18. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 83 western philosophy, and they were actuated by other motives beside zeal for the Law. For one thing, they were in reality made un- easy by our Lord's assertion that a living God was working among them and close by. Ministers of state who have possessed themselves of sovereign power are startled and infuriated if their nominal monarch personally asserts his power : and, some- thing in the same way, a priesthood occupied in promulgating ecclesiastical laws and carrying on the externals of worship were frightened at the announcement that God, instead of leaving matters for them to manage, had Himself come to reign and rule upon the earth. But what was more effective than even spiritual awe was their personal alarm. The dread which one of their body afterwards expressed — " The Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation^ " — was always over their heads. They were a sacerdotal oligarchy trembling for their existence. The people hated the Romans, and the Scribes were bound to stand well with both : an outbreak might bring to an end the figment of ecclesiastical in- dependence which they still possessed. They saw something in our Lord which might lead the people to take Him and make Him a king. The reply, " My Father worketh hitherto and I workV' is characteristic of our Lord's way. He does not meet the charge by contesting the inter- ^ John xi. 48. ^ John v. 17. 184 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. pretation of the Law. He ignores all quibbles of legality and goes to the root of the matter. It is by the working of God that the world is maintained. His Father worketh hitherto, on Sabbath days and all, and He, the Son, follows in His Father's ways. The same test of Sonship — that the child takes after the Father — is applied in the Sermon on the mount. I must notice another verse of this discourse, " I am come in my Father's name, and ye receive me not : if another shall come in his own name, him ye will -received" Our Lord here lays bare the reason why so few would follow Him. He touches the very centre of the matter. To kindle enthusiasm among a mass of men, you must have a person or a name. A cause is best embodied in an actual claimant standing before men's eyes ; but failing this they will often rally to a name that they know. Our Lord used only His Father's name ; this did not move their human sympathies for "The Father" had no personality for them. It was reserved for the Apostles to draw men over to the Faith, and they were given the advantage which Jesus was content to forego. They could put forward a personal claimant for the loyalty of men : they had Christ's story to tell and Christ's name for a watchword and they won men for the kingdom of 1 John V. 43. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. ^ 1 85 God by gaining their homage for the Son of Man. The temporary separation of the Apostles from our Lord during the summer of A.D. 28 may have answered higher ends than merely enabling them to earn their livelihood. It gave them time to think over the events of the last six months. It is a feature of our Lord's way in His course of teaching, not to suffer one set of ideas or in- fluences to be disturbed before they have had time to take root. After a period of stress, or when new impressions had been stamped on the minds of his disciples, He provides for them an interval of calm. When the disciples return exulting from their mission through the cities, He says, " Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while." When crowds thronged them and courted them for access to their Master, He carried them away, that the impressions He wanted to preserve might not be effaced in the turmoil. It may have been in pursuance of this treatment that, after the resurrection, they were sent for a time into Galilee, there to wait and to watch. All teachers know that the time of rest that follows a period in which new matter has been taken into the mind is precious for good mental growth : conceptions then become more clear and complete, and effect a sure lodgement in the mind : but this, like many processes in education, helps to widen the distance between the weak and the strone. For it is only with the more thoughtful that this 1 86 THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. half unconscious brain-process goes on ; the active minded mature their acquirements during rest, while the unthinking let them fade away. It argued well, in consequence, for Peter and Andrew and John, that Christ's influence had lost nothing through (as I believe) weeks of separation, but that as soon as they were called they sprang to their feet at once, — "they straightway left the nets and followed Him\" Reverence for great men whom we have known, and the power of appreciating them, grow during absence. We may have been living so familiarly with one far above the common standard, that we may almost lose thought of his greatness ; the little matters of common life, which come before us every day, take more than their share of notice; and, as regards these, great men and smaller ones must be much alike. But when we are away from our euide, our recollections turn to what is distinctive of him — to the points in which he contrasts with everyday men : what he had in common with such disappears, and our mental portrait preserves what is characteristic, and gives us the individual more forcibly than our nearer view had done. We often first become aware of the true proportions of great- ness, when we look back on it from a little way off. Out of a range of mountains, all, when seen from the valley, appearing much of a height, one is found to vastly out-top the rest when we mount the opposite hill-side. 1 Matth. iv. 20. THE OUTSET OF THE WORK. 1 8/ We may suppose that some process like this was going on in the minds of Peter and Andrew and James and John during that summer spent in their fishers' work by the Sea of Galilee. Our Lord's image would, all the more, be kept alive in their minds because when they chanced to meet their talk would be of Him ; and their Master's form would seem to rise before them when they sat beside one another, with their boats drawn up on the beach. We need not suppose that they saw into their Master's plans, far less into His nature; we do not know that they had heard froin Him about the Kingdom of Heaven which the Baptist had told them was at hand ; but the foundation for Faith was being laid in a capacity for intense personal devotion. First they learnt to love the Master whom they saw by their side ; next, by thinking of Him while He was away, they learned how much they loved Him, and became aware that their affection for Him had in it something different from the common affections they knew. Shortly, as we shall presently see, a sense of shelter and of fostering protection mingled with this love, and grew into a trust, first in the Master who was with them, and afterwards in the Lord in Heaven. It is hardly too much to say that the germ of the new quality, which was to order the world afresh, was planted in men's hearts by the side of the Sea of Galilee in that summer of A.D. 28, and that then Faith — Faith as our Lord speaks of it — dawned upon the world. CHAPTER VII. THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. It was, as I believe, soon after that " feast of the Jews" lately mentioned (pp. i8o and i8i note), that the news of the apprehension of the Baptist by Herod reached our Lord at Jerusalem. At once He enters on His own Great Work^ and I place this advent of our Lord into Galilee at the end of September a.d. 28, but the evidence is insufficient for a positive opinion. My reasons for supposing that John v^^as'not imprisoned till after this feast are as follows. The Synoptists say that after John's imprisonment our Lord came into Galilee preaching the Kingdom. Now when He returned through Samaria He did not begin to preach the Kingdom, and therefore the advent of Mark i. 14 re- fers to some other occasion ; I believe to a subsequent one. In St John's Gospel chaps, iv. and v. we hear nothing of "the Kingdom" and no disciples are mentioned as attending our Lord. I think therefore that the events related in these chapters occurred before the advent into Galilee ; this is one argument for placing this visit to the feast, where I do. Moreover it is hard to find another place for it. The Synoptical narrative is fairly continuous from the advent (Mark i. 14) up to the journey to the Feast of Tabernacles, and there is in it no mention either of a visit to Jerusalem, which must have occupied several days, or of our Lord's quitting His disciples. All proceeds consistently if we suppose, as I have done, that John was put in prison at the time of this feast or THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 1 89 goes straight into Galilee, preaching on the way that the Kingdom of God is come. The reasons for His holding back, came to an end together with the liberty of John. We lose now the guidance of St John, and we pass to the more continuous transcript of events which, the Synoptists give. Up to this time of His advent into Galilee our Lord was in part, as I have said, exploring the con- dition and the tempers of the people in quest of the fittest cradle for the Faith. It may possibly have been that our Lord in His visit to Jerusalem was giving the Holy City a last trial ; but I see no ground to suppose that our Lord ever seriously contemplated any course different from that which He actually took. In any case, this outbreak of soon after. But there is one difficulty about this. Our Lord says of the Baptist John v. 35, " He ivas the lamp that burneth and shineth, and you were willing for a season to rejoice in his light." The use of the imperfect tense is supposed to show that John was in prison when this was said, but surely if it is to be pressed rigorously it would mean that he was dead : for he received his disciples in prison and could give counsel and direction to those without. He did not cease to shine for them. I take these words to mean that he was no longer a light to the Priests and Levites. They had gone to him when he was preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, Matth. iii. 5, and afterwards they had sent to him in Bethany beyond Jordan : he was now in the territory of Herod, and there he was out of sight, and with the Priests and Levites he was out of mind. They could not make him a partisan or an ally and they had given him up. If John was in prison at this time, his imprisonment must have been a recent event, and we should expect our Lord to allude to it when He speaks of him. IQO THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. hostility on the part of the scribes settled the matter: for the kind of mental growth which our Lord wished to bring about in the disciples could not go on in the midst of party warfare. Young men on the watch for attack are not in a state for fertilizing " seed thoughts " or for turning over hard matters in their minds, and care for the state of the recipient characterizes the teaching of Christ. Men are to take heed how they hear, as well as what they hear, and are to reach full growth and shape, not from outward moulding but by living process from within. Our Lord's eye is never off His pupils, and yet visible direction hardly ever appears; He sways them by an insensible touch. A great truth is brought to light by an incident of wonder, a pregnant word is let drop, a hard parable is delivered now and then ; but between whiles the disciples are left to dwell on their own thoughts, as their fishing boat sails along, or as they follow their Master among the northern hills. Our Lord is ever bent on making men thoughtful and on calling out in each the inner life which is proper to the man, and for this, tranquillity, or at least frequent opportunity for quiet communing with their own thoughts, was absolutely required. The antagonism at Jerusalem might have stopped short of violence and yet the wrangling spirit of the place might have had a very evil effect on the disciples. It was above all essential that they should have a single hearted love of truth ; THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. I9I and this can hardly grow up when party is ranged against party and each tries to set the views and statements of the other in the most damaging light, and to dispose his own propositions in polemical order with a strategic view. As soon therefore as the hostility of the scribes was displayed, it became clear that the schooling of the Apostles must be brought about elsewhere than in Judaea. But apart from this, Jerusalem was, for other reasons easy to perceive, ill-suited for the purpose. It was too Academical ; the place was full of Rabbis, round whose feet a circle of pupils sat. Each school adopted its master's dicta with the indiscriminating loyalty of youth ; and the scholars of other teachers, by steadily taking it for granted that Jesus of Nazareth was a teacher like the Rabbis they knew, would have half persuaded His followers that there was something in common between Him and the Doctors who expounded the Law. The Rabbis gave their scholars something to show for their lessons — expositions of the Law and systematic doctrine — and their pupils would have said to the disciples, "Our master gives us this or that; what does your master give you.^" This would have set them looking for what was in- tentionally withheld. Our Lord did not fill them with opinions or directions to be remembered, but He made them what He wanted them to be. To understand how wisely things were ordered, we must give a glance to what would have been 192 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. the result of the most obvious and apparently " the most natural " course. Our Lord's brethren recommended that He should go and show Him- self and teach at Jerusalem. I have shown the ill effects this would have had on the training of the disciples ; I will now say a word on the way in which it would have affected the Church. If Jerusalem had been the seat of teaching, the dis- ciples there, instead of numbering "a hundred and twenty," would have been a large body. Possibly they might have offered armed resistance to the apprehension of our Lord ; and the whole moral of the action would have been lost if they had. But passing this by, if a large body of disciples dwelling at Jerusalem had claimed our Lord as peculiarly their own, the universality of His work would have been obscured. The Church at Jerusalem might have dwelt more on His being their particular Founder and Bishop than on His being the Re- deemer of the World. Again, How would it have been with the authority of the Twelve } Those who had sat at His feet and listened, just as the Apostles had done, might have hesitated when He was gone to acknowledge the Twelve as the founders of the Church ; for the Church, they would have said, began with themselves. More than this, practical evils would have come about ; for these original disciples, regarding themselves as the depositaries of tradition, would have recalled every practice of THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 1 93 their Lord, — for instance the way in which He had given thanks at meat, or ordered service in prayer, as well as His practice as to the Sabbath and fasting, — these would have been passed down as Divinely sanctioned, and the externals of religion would have been stereotyped as thoroughly as though they had been a new Ceremonial Law, like that from which He desired to release man- kind. Moreover the body of believers who had personally known our Lord, would have constituted a kind of ecclesiastical aristocracy ; and distinctions — respect of persons — would have been introduced from the first. What actually happened was far more consistent with the general tenour of Christ's plan so far as we can make it out. The few original disciples at Jerusalem were lost in the crowd who were added to the Church after the day of Pentecost, and the Apostles ruled with unquestioned authority from the first. Galilee we have seen, as a retired spot with an honest-hearted people, was admirably fitted for the scene of the ministry ; but yet it could not be " that a prophet should perish out of Jerusalem," and it was imperative that there the end should come. The Holy City was also fitted, in a very peculiar manner, to be the centre from which the new move- ment was to radiate forth. The Lord's death, the Supreme Event in the history of mankind, was not to take place in a corner. The circumstances of it could not be too notorious or too widely L. 13 194 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. vouched. It was to be made known in East and West to the Hebrew, the Greek, the Roman and to all mankind. Now Jerusalem, both geographically, and as the point to which the Jews of the dispersion bent watchful eyes from many lands, was wondrously adapted to be a centre of diffusion. It was in a very remarkable way a "city set upon a hill." It stood accessible to three continents, at the centre of gravity of the known world, and it was on the watershed of two civilizations : the Aryan and Semitic races and languages and the different modes of thinking which go along with the lan- guages were brought together there. Moreover, owing to the dispersion of the Jews and their custom of visiting Jerusalem at the great feasts when they possibly could, " devout men from every nation under Heaven" were drawn together there from time to time, and a common interest in what concerned "Israel" was spread over the globe. The agency of these festivals con- nected Jerusalem, as by electric threads, with every great city in the inhabited world, and the Israelites who were settled in every large town of the empire afterwards provided nests for the new Faith. The Apostles, as was natural, after the Resur- rection went back to Galilee. It can only have been owing to directions they must have received, that they all returned to Jerusalem for the Ascension. Our Lord then enjoined them to remain and from thence to propagate the Faith. This injunction THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. I95 explains their abandonment of their homes and callings, which is hard to account for otherwise. ^ I now proceed with the history. During this chapter I shall for the most part follow St Mark, who relates the events nearly in the order in which I believe they happened. After a brief notice of John and of the temptation he proceeds thus : " Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand : repent ye, and believe in the gospel \" The Evangelist does not say that our Lord came from Judaea, but He could have come from nowhere else. It would seem that our Lord on arriving in Galilee went at once to the Lake shore and called the two pair of fisher brethren to His side. " And passing along by the sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and Andrew brother of Simon casting a net in the sea : for they were fishers. And Jesus said unto them, Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men. And straightway they left the nets, and followed him. And going on a little farther, he saw James the son of Zebedee, and John his brother, who also were in the boat mending the nets. And straight- way he called them : and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired servants, and went after him^" This passage would offer an opening for criti- cism, if it were not for the light thrown on it by St 1 Mark i. 14, 15. 2 Mark i. 16—20. 13—2 196 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. John's Gospel, by help of which an apparent difficulty is turned into a coincidence. If we did not possess the Gospel of St John, the story of the call of the Apostles would stand thus, It would appear that our Lord came down to the Sea of Galilee, and said to two fishermen — whom, for all we should know to the contrary, He had never seen before, — " Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men." These would seem startling words to hear from a stranger, but the brothers, without asking further, and with- out one consulting the other, at once left their work and followed our Lord. This would be unlikely, but not passing belief; men are mastered in a moment, by personal in- fluence, now and then ; but still the preponderance of probabilities is against the truth of the story. The Evangelist however goes on- to relate that our Lord passes on along the Lake side, and within a few hundred yards comes upon another pair of brothers, also fishermen ; he addresses them nearly in the same terms and they also leave their nets and follow Him. Now this repetition, the critic would say, savours in itself of the Eastern legend. But, what is far more than this, the com- bination of the two improbabilities produces an improbability of a far higher order*. ^ For instance, if the separate probability of each of two events is tV> that of the joint event is xV >< xV or 1^, or there are ninety- nine chances to orie against it. THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 1 9/ The information gained from the Gospel of St John clears the difficulty away. There we find, that these fisher brethren were old disciples of our Lord. It is consistent with the Gospel to suppose that during the summer they had been at their work, nursing the memory of their Master all the time. They now hear that He has come preaching the Kingdom of God in their own land. They are waiting for Him and expecting His call. The two pair of brethren stood in the same relation to Him, consequently they were treated in the same way, and the result was naturally the same. This unhesitating compliance on the part of the brethren, which seems so strange, points to a previous acquaintance with our Lord ; of this acquaintance St John's Gospel speaks, and so St Mark strengthens St John just as St John does St Mark. In the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark, which we suppose to be both based on a primitive document, the story is told without the slightest idea of obviating objection or mistrust. The writers never appear to contemplate readers to whom the fact that Simon and the rest had, before this, been associated with our Lord should be unknown. They took it for granted that this was too notorious to call for mention. But we have another Evangelist, St Luke, a more practised writer, whose design was to present his account in a coherent form. He did not possess 198 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. the Gospel of St John and possibly did not know the particulars of the earlier call of Simon and Andrew and John. It may well have been that he was himself somewhat startled at the abruptness of our Lord's call to the Apostles, and at their unhesitating compliance with it, as related in the primitive docu- ment, and felt that it required to be accounted for : consequently, having the account of the miraculous draught of fishes among the materials he speaks of — an account not contained in the Gospels of St Matthew and St Mark — he finds in this Sign an explanation of the prompt adherence of the pairs of brethren, and he combines the two events. We should gather from him that the Apostles were struck by the miraculous draught of fishes, and that the Lord thereupon invited them to follow and become " fishers of men," but I think it most likely that the call took place as St Matthew and St Mark relate. The circumstantial minuteness of the details in these two Gospels, and the natural- ness of the picture — two brothers are engaged in casting, and the other pair in mending their nets — convinces me that this relation comes originally from one who saw for himself This draught of fishes may have taken place some days after the call of the brethren. For we need not suppose, that, before the Twelve were chosen, those who were called abandoned the craft by which they lived, although they probably resorted to tlieir Master day by day. THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 199 The early miracles were mostly wrought in the sight of the multitude ; they seem meant to show that the Kingdom of God was come ; but this miracle of the draught of fishes was performed when iew but disciples were by. It was a miracle of instruction, it lent great impressiveness to great lessons ; it emphasized in a way never to be for- gotten the call to become " fishers of men," and it gave good augury of success. The thought of this draught must have come back to Peter at many a juncture in his life, a notable one being the morrow of the Feast of Pentecost, when " there were added unto them in that day about 3000 souls\" The Apostles may have learned another lesson from this miracle. All night they had toiled and taken nothing, yet they had not given up in despair but had worked on hard ; the morning brought success beyond all hope. Men, waiting long for the yield of their labour, have found encouragement in calling this to mind. Simon, though thinking there is little hope of taking fish, nevertheless obeys at once. He frankly tells his Master his view of a matter about which he might be supposed to know best, and leaves Him to judge, but he does immediately as his Master bids. Our Lord does not promise him success ; He only tells him to try once more ; and thereupon without a word, wearied and out of heart as he may be supposed to have been by a night of bootless labour, he does what * Acts ii. 41. 200 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. he is told. It is enough for Simon to know that his Master wishes him to " Put out into the deep and let down his nets for a draught\" His cheerful compliance shews a happy disposition and a loyal nature; for if there had been a grain of peevishness or selfishness in him, it would have been likely to be uppermost then. In the last chapter, we saw our Lord exploring the characters of classes of men. His eye is now turned on individuals; He is peering down into His disciples' hearts, taking them unawares, when their every day selves lie uppermost, putting them, by chance as it were, through some little exercise which shall reveal some tendency or some hidden quality ; and to our Lord this incident brought the secret heart of Simon into the light of day. It shewed that he was altogether free from that kind of stubbornness which is born of self-regard, and that he did not attach a sanctity to an opinion or a resolve, merely because it was his. He learnt from this miracle that it was best to trust to Christ. He might say to himself, " I never felt more con- vinced that we should take nothing by letting down the nets, than I did on that morning on the Lake, but I let them down and found I was wrong." A memorable act is not done with, educationally, when it is over. The recollection of it is an atten- dant monitor always pointing the same way ; and so this miracle may have done much towards ac- ^ Luke V. 4. THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 201 customing Peter to look to the Lord's prompting, and to be ready at His word to give up that about which he felt most sure. It may well have helped him to that openness of mind, which stood the Church in good stead, years after at Joppa, when the envoys of Cornelius were knocking at Peter's door. This miracle has been called a miracle of coincidence, meaning that the marvel lay in the passing of the shoal at the moment when the net was cast ; it might not be a miracle at all, because the chances against its being a natural phenomenon, though enormous, are not absolutely infinite. It is not one which would appal ordinary beholders : the boatmen, we may suppose, thought chiefly of securing the fish. Our Lord is now testing the capacity of men for discerning God, and He therefore performs miracles of a less striking order first ; these impress those only who have their eyes open for the manifestation of what is spiritual; and those who are found to possess this " vision and faculty Divine" are afterwards shewn "greater things than these." Simon had no doubt seen our Lord work cures, but this mastery of our Lord over the creation comes more home to him than His power over disease, and his feelings break forth. It is characteristic of him, that what is in him must come out at once ; whether it be an objection that occurs to him, or a motion of indignation or of 202 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. elation, or of the panic to which Orientals are subject — out it must come ; this is the point in which the identity of his character is most visibly- preserved in all our narratives. Here he is mas- tered by the emotions of the moment and must give them outward show ; and along with his gush of feeling comes the sense of his unworthiness, the impression of his being wholly unequal to the duty and position thrust upon him ; an impres- sion not uncommon with men in such junctures; though biographies abundantly show that those who feel it most very often acquit themselves admirably when the trial comes. Touched by this, Simon throws himself at his Master's feet and says, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O LordV We go back now to the course of the narrative in St Mark's Gospel, and there we find that the first thing which struck the hearers of our Lord was the authority with which He spoke. "And they were astonished at his teaching: for he taught them as having authority, and not as the scribes I" We saw in the last chapter, that men bowed to the authority in the air of our Lord when He purged the Temple of Jerusalem : this authority now passed into His words, and it swayed the hearts of men. It is the special instinct of a crowd that it quickly discerns those whom it must hear, and 1 Luke V. 8. 2 ]v^ark i. 22. THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 203 this multitude saw that our Lord had something to tell them and that, not of tradition, but out of His own very self. Here was a genuine authority coming of nature or of God, by the side of which the stated legal authority of the officiating scribes paled away out of sight. In what ways was it, we may ask, that this authority of Christ shone out now, and took such hold of men ? First of all, I would answer, He brought to the birth, within men, thoughts which were lying in embryo in their own hearts. This, which was also Socrates' way, I have spoken of in the Introductory Chapter and once or twice since. Our Lord wakened within men the per- ception of truths which they seemed to have once known and forgotten ; especially that God was the Father, not only of Israel as a nation, but of every particular man in it. The common people had been told by the learned that they were not worth God's notice, and when Christ asserted the dignity of each individual soul they said to themselves " we always thought it must be so ; and so it is." The beatitudes in like manner commended themselves to men's hearts ; they felt that if there was a God in the world, it ought to be as our Lord said it was. Secondly, our Lord not only to/d men that they were the children of God, that they should strive after their Father's likeness, and that they might approach nearer and nearer to being perfect as He is perfect : but, what was more than this, in every 204 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. word He spake, — whether of teaching, or reproof, or expostulation, or in His passing words to those who received His mercies — He treated them as God's children. Man, as man, has in His eyes a right to respect. Anger we find with our Lord often, as also surprise at slowness of heart, indignation at hypocrisy and at the Rabbinical evasions of the Law; but never in our Lord's words or looks do we find personal disdain. Towards no human being does He shew contempt. The scribe would have trodden the rabble out of existence ; but there is no such thing as rabble in our Lord's eyes. The master, in the parable, asks concerning the tree, which is unproductively exhausting the soil, why cumbers it the ground ; but it is not to be rooted up, till all has been tried. There it stands, and mere existence gives it claims, for all that exists is the Father's. This notion, that every thing belonged to God, and was therefore to be reverently re- garded, lay very deep in the hearts of the children of Israel, even the poorest in Galilee ; and when the Lord brought it to light, men listened to Him with breathless respect. V Thirdly. If a scribe spoke to the people, he bethought himself of topics within their compre- hension : he had a double self; one he showed to them and one he kept for his equals : he was afraid of talking over his hearers* heads, so he took them on the side of what he supposed they might un- derstand, of their interests, for example, and spoke THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 205 of the advantages of good repute, or, at the highest, of the blessings which God brought on His servants in this life and hereafter, and of the ill fate which awaited offenders. All this implied, "We who speak to you, of course, have for ourselves higher principles and purer motives than those we have named, but these are quite good enough for you." Now there is nothing that men, young or old, so surely detect, as whether a man serves them with the same thoughts that he gives to himself and his friends. The people, moreover, are always grateful for being supposed capable of higher sentiments than mere hope of gain and fear of loss, and for the appreciation shewn in taking them on higher ground; they seldom fail the speaker who boldly addresses their consciences ; they are eager to justify his trust in them : " He has treated us as men," they say, "and men he shall find we are." Above all they feel the compliment of being not flattered, but supposed reasonable enough to" hear the truth about themselves and shewn their failings ; and we feel sure that men went away from the Sermon on the Mount confident of Christ's respect and regard for them, without His telling them of it in so many words. He talks to them quite naturally of their Father who is also His Father, just as men speak of any common tie : and this took hold of their hearts. Fourthly. We find in the earlier portions of the Sermon on the Mount, which best represent this 206 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. preaching to the multitude^ that our Lord assumes a certain positive authority, by putting His own commands in contrast with the written Law. It had probably been given out by our Lord's opponents that He had come to destroy the Law, and our Lord in this Sermon declares that He is not come to destroy but to fulfil. We shall see the point most clearly, if we understand the word " fulfil," to mean, " carry out into its full completeness." For our Lord does not destroy the Law but he siipej'sedes it by bringing God's ways to light, and merging in this light the previous partial revelations, of which the Mosaic Law was one. A mathematician supersedes the practical rules which the pupil at first employs for solving particular cases of a problem, by giving a complete and general solution of the whole subject. This may illustrate the way in which our Lord merges the particular case of human conduct in a wider rule embracing human dispositions, and which regards, not only what men do, but also what they are, and what they will become. To take another point. Slavery to the letter of a written Law hampered moral and spiritual growth ; it led men to regard authority as the sole test of truth ; it tended to prevent their thinking for 1 By comparing the Sermon on the Mount with the parallel passages in St Luke we find that much of it must have been spoken after the call of the Apostles : this applies particularly to the latter half of the discourse. THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 20/ themselves as our Lord desired them to do. No word of our Lord countenances the idea of verbal inspiration. He treats the Levitiqal Law as sub- ject to criticism and change, He never attributes it to God, but always either to Moses or those of old time, and after quoting it in His sermon and else- where He commonly adds, "But / say unto you" and then delivers His own precept — embracing that of Moses no doubt — but so widely over- stepping it, that it would seem to the people to amount to a repeal. A teaching which claimed authority coordinate with that of Moses might well startle the multitude by its contrast with that of the scribes. It may be asked — " Why, if our Lord desired to free men's minds, did He not declare how far and in what sense their sacred books contained the word of God." We answer, " He would have caused utter bewilderment if He had entered on such a matter at all." The truth may be gathered by observing His practice. He never states abstract principles, but He acts as He deems fit and leaves us to infer His views by marking what He does. He never contests the rules about the Sabbath, but He observes them only in His own way. He does not tell the Jews that their Law is not traced by the finger of God, but He amends and criticizes its provisions as though they were of man. - Let us suppose, for a moment — not of course that He had cried down the Law like one who 208 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. exulted in finding a flaw — but that He had at- tempted to put into men's heads views about it which their minds had not yet shaped themselves to receive; that He had told them, for instance, that laws must be fitted to human needs, and that as these needs vary, laws must vary too, and cannot be the subject of an ordinance unchanging and Divine. Could He, by such explanations, have given His auditors any true view of Divine rule? Would not the Galileans have cried out, "That if the tables of the Law were not graven by God's finger they were nothing at all ? " Nothing, in our Lord's wisdom, strikes me more than His modera- tion with regard to error. What seems false to one man's mind may be true to that of another. When men, as soon as they spy out an error, cry, "Root it up," our Lord seems to answer, "Along with the tares some wheat needs must go." Men are complex beines : and much that is best in them is so inter- twined with habits and association that we cannot sweep away long-standing notions and outward symbols and ceremonies without destroying also what is of the essence. Take away from an Italian woman her belief in the Virgin, or from a Scotch peasant that in the sacred obligation of the Sabbath, and a great deal of what is best in them will go too. Our Lord's way of proceeding is always positive, y^ )[ never merely negative. He leaves the Law, but He sows seed which will grow up and displace the spirit THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 209 of blind subservience to it: just as some particular species in the herbage of a land is often ousted when a more robust one is brought in. The Apostles had, up to the end, many wrong notions, and we may wonder why our Lord did not set them right ; but it would have shaken the whole fabric of their belief if He had so done ; and the sure teaching of circumstances would, as He knew, dissipate the errors in time. So far we have dealt chiefly with the matter of our Lord's teaching of the multitudes, but something must be said about its form. One striking point in our Lord's practice in contrast with that of the scribes, is this. He cites no authorities, all comes from Himself; there is hardly a text of Scripture in the fifth chapter of St Matthew, except those which are quoted in order to be extended or gain- said. The scribes depended on their learning, they overwhelmed men with quotations, they laid text by text, and built up their conclusions upon an array of authorities. Now a preacher, or a teacher of any kind, is sure to lose hold of his audience when he goes away from himself and gives other people's opinions instead of his own. They look to him for guidance ; and when he says, " This is one man's view and that is another's," and not, " This is minel' then they turn from the trumpet of uncertain sound. The multitude suppose that in all questions there is a right and a wrong — just as there is a right and a wrong answer to a sum — and they do not L. 14 210 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. want to know what one authority says or the other, but what they are to accept. Again, rightly to apprehend the form of this dis- course, we must bear in mind that it is not a written collection of precepts, — though St Matthew may have appended some delivered at a later time — and that still less is it a Code of Laws. It is an oral address to a crowd of villagers gathered on the top of the fell. We mark in it the natural rhetoric of earnest speech : the first necessity is always to win men to listen, and thus the speaker at the opening strikes His most impressive chords. Words of blessing fell on the ears of those who were used only to hear of their shortcomings and to be treated as outcasts; and when their attention was caught by the unusual sound and they listened to hear who it was who were blessed, they found it was not the strong and the wealthy and the high spirited— those whom they regarded as having the good things of existence while they themselves had the bad — but the blessed are the poor in spirit, and this Kingdom of Heaven, newly proclaimed, belonged to them. The attention caught by the opening is kept alive by the unexpected nature of the matter. Again, our Lord is at pains so to put what He says that it may not be taken for a fresh body of injunctions added to the Law ; for the people were already, as He said, overburdened with such in- junctions. He puts therefore what He has to say THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 211 into such strong forms, and, by way of example, takes such extreme cases, that it is plain that He is illus- >/ trating a principle and not laying down a literal rule. We have " Ye have heard that it was said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, Resist not him that is evil: but whosoever smiteth thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man would go to law with thee, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go one mile, go with him twain'." He Himself, before the High Priest, does not submit to wrong, without asking in remonstrance " Why smitest thou me .'* " and the most literal minded of our Lord's hearers would not have felt bound to offer his cloke to one who had stolen his coat. The language shews by its very strength that it is figurative. Indeed, a code of Law can hardly be delivered in an address to a multitude. If it is to meet all cases it must be complex, and to the hearer wearisome. If our Lord had delivered a treatise telling men what they were to do in the ordinary occasions of life, the precepts must have been so encumbered by qualifications that all impressive- ness would have been lost. If to the saying "Give to him that asketh of thee" our Lord had appended all the obvious exceptions — such as the cases in which what is asked for would be hurtful — 1 Matt. V. 38—41. 14—2 212 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. the whole force of the passage would have been frittered away. As long as a preacher delivers broad truths, put forcibly, his audience are ready to hear ; but as soon as he begins to qualify his statements and to make exceptions, his hold over his hearers is gone, and they think he is unsaying what he said. Our Lord wished to leave seed thoughts \ying in men's minds. He knew that His words would have to be carried in men's memories for a long while before being written down. They must therefore be clad in the form in which they would last longest and be easiest to carry. He therefore embodied what He wished to have remembered in terse sayings, illustrated by cases which are familiar but extreme. The hearer could carry these sen- tences away, and would ponder on them all the more, because in their literal sense they are startling and impracticable as rules of conduct. I can con- ceive no style better fitted for the purpose which I believe to have been dominant with our Lord, than that employed in the Sermon on the Mount. It seems to me to be part of the strange adapta- tion of circumstances to the needs of the Faith, that what was most vital and most universal was uttered in the Hebrew tongue. This was the language of the comparative infancy of the world ; and there is in the genius of it much — especially its ready lending itself to the form of balanced sentences — which takes hold of the hearts of un- THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 213 tutored men. Such men store their wisdom in saws and proverbs ; and in hke manner the wisdom of the Hebrew is dropped in separate pearls, which can easily be treasured up. When the time came for touching cultured minds, and connected argument was required, Greek forms of thought and speech were needed. Saul was then converted ; and Greek became the language of the Word. Nothing in our Lord's ministry impresses me more than the extraordinary sobriety of the whole movement. We hear nothing of religious transport or ecstatic devotion. People listen in awe to our Lord's preaching as to a communication made from above. Thdy never dare to applaud. He is too much above them for that. Many have since come crying ''Lord, Lord," in different accents, at dif- ferent times ; we have heard of " revivals " among great multitudes, carried headlong by wild excite- ment, and of religious delirium reaching to the borders of mania. All this is in the strongest contrast with the ways of teaching of our Lord, True human freedom was with Him a sacred thing ; what man was made for was that he might be a free spiritual being ; and a man is not free when he is fascinated by fervid oratory and be- comes the blind tool of another, or when he is intoxicated by religious fanaticism and is no longer master of his own mind. Any agencies, therefore, which would impair the health and freedom of a man's will Christ refused to employ. They be- 214 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. longed to that Spirit of the World whose alliance He had refused. One cause of this sobriety of the great movement may be found in the elevation and tone of authority which has just been spoken of as characterizing our Lord. He seemed to move in a plane parallel indeed to that of men, but a little above it. For a speaker to kindle men's passions he must be possessed by the notions and feelings of the time : he and his hearers must have common objects of desire, or a common jealousy of those who possess what they themselves want, they must therefore wear the stamp of a pass- ing and particular phase of mankind. Now it was the distinctive peculiarity of our Lord's Personality that it belongs not more to one time or class than to another. The Son of Man represents Humanity in the abstract, and no party has ever been able to claim Him as their own. In the course of the winter of A.D. 28 — 29, Levi, in the vernacular of Galilee called also Matthew, a toll-taker on the borders of the lake, is summoned to follow our Lord. He justified our Lord's choice in a signal manner, for "he forsook all, and rose up and followed Him." There must have been in this man " a soul of goodness " of rare efficacy in resisting influences to ill. His position must have offered temptation to exaction. This was corrupting, but the steady and persistent effect of feeling himself despised must have been more so even than this. He was hated THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 21 5 not only as the tax-gatherer, but also as having accepted the service of the foreign oppressors of the land. However justly the publican might have striven to act, it would be taken for granted that he was endeavouring to fleece those who came into his hands ; and a man soon becomes what people about him will have it that he is. Now and then, however, in all positions, we come across natures which run counter to the influences around them, or which by a happy chemistry de- compose the evil and turn its elements to good. Everything in the publican's calling fostered the love of gain; and to be able to save enough to give it up and live down ill report was his only hope. But Matthew breaks with his means of subsistence totally and at once. At one word of our Lord he throws all away without a moment's thought, and joins the little band of followers which was bding drawn into closer attendance on our Lord. This man surely had ''salt in himself" St Matthew has left us his Gospel. We learn from this which way his thoughts lean, and we see that he was not of that type of mind most com- monly associated with the idea of the Apostle of a new creed. He was probably not very young and his views were formed and fixed : his national sympathy was intense. God was to him, first of all, the God of Israel, and he regarded our Lord as the Messiah, after the type which Jewish hopes and fancies had fashioned for themselves. In all that 2l6 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. occurred he saw the reproduction of what was narrated in the old books ; and the burden '* Now this was done that the Scripture might be ful- filled " runs through all his writings. Here then, some might say, we have a man chosen as a witness and promulgator of a faith which is to be universal, a man whose sympathies flow only along one narrow channel, and who is wedded to old ways of reading the mind of God. He was however a guileless, God-fearing, high-hearted man ; and it could not but strengthen the cause to have among the Apostles one who could enter into the minds of those who looked for the consolation of Israel in the old Hebrew way. The first function of the Apostles, — one on which I shall soon speak pretty fully — was that they were to bear witness of Christ. This was set forth in that which, so to say, was their charter of incorporation. "Ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem and in all Judaea and Samaria and unto the uttermost parts of the earth V Now the more varied the characters of the witnesses the stronger would be the case when they agreed. Our Lord, then, will have, among His immediate followers, minds of every sort. He does not pick out those only who are most after His own heart, nor does he mould men into one fashion, so that they should think on all points alike. We cannot have freedom amon^ human beings without diver- 1 Acts i. 8. THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 21/ sity. St Matthew, we perhaps say, had old world views ; but it may have been just because of these, that he was the most fit Apostle for the Eastern world. There would be crowds of men whom he would understand and who would understand him, butwhose minds would have been closed to the utter- ances of Paul. The vineyard to which Christ called his labourers was the whole world ; it contained vines of every stock growing on every soil. It was well then, that there should be labourers bred in various schools of husbandry, and that each should work in the fashion in which he felt he could do it best. Another point to be noted about the call of St Matthew is this : The choice of a publican was a practical proof to the other disciples, as it is to the Church for ever, that Christ is in no way a re- specter of persons. The two pairs of brethren who followed our Lord may have been startled at the call of Matthew, for they no doubt looked on publicans as their countrymen did ; and this act of our Lord's taught them, more forcibly than any words could have done, that with Him outward circumstance went for nothing and the inward man was all in all. In this call of Matthew the spirit of universality which belongs to the Christian Church is folded up like the embryo in the seed. Our Lord makes no comment on this call ; nor do we hear of any murmurs from the disciples, who had by this time learned that our Lord was wiser than they, as Peter had found when he let down the net. 2l8 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. Shortly before the call of St Matthew a miracle occurred, the cure of the sick of the palsy, when our Lord's renown was at its height — a miracle at the performance of which " there were Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting by, which were come out of every village of Galilee and Judsea and Jerusalem \" The presence of these strangers bears on what follows. Hitherto we have read of no contest or conflict in Capernaum ; but these Pharisees conceived misgivings about the movement they had come to see. This hostility was very different from that of the Sadducees in Jerusalem, who, regarding the movement as an insane delusion likely to bring things about their ears, set themselves re- morselessly to root it out. But the Pharisees do not seem at first to have borne our Lord any personal hatred, but only to have been un- easy about the new teaching which went too far for them, and did not follow the course which they had expected. The Pharisees, nevertheless, were now on the watch for occasion to find fault. This is not an occupation which brings out the amiable side of men's natures ; and they became still more soured by finding nothing on which to hang a charge ; so that at last they even leagued with the Herodians, their natural opponents, against our Lord. The most popular of all accusations, and one for which ^ Luke V. 17. THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 219 it was easy to find ground, was a breach of the traditionary rules for keeping the Sabbath. The Sabbath was an inestimable Law. It was maintained by Divine sanction at a time when a Law could not be upheld by any other means : it debarred men from " doing what they would with their own " on one day out of seven, so far as re- garded the labour of themselves or of their children, their servants, their ox or their ass. It secured for the race this portion of time against the greed of gain : but all this was done for men, although the Jews had come to look on it as something done by men for God^ and in so doing they made God a taskmaster like the gods of the pagans. Moreover the Sabbath kept alive in each Israelite his self-respect as one of God's people ; however sordid his calling, he put away every seventh day his squalor and his toil and resumed the dignity of Abraham's son. The Sabbath question was the chosen battle-ground of those who reduced all virtues to that literal unquestioning obedience to authoritative records, which was so damaging to moral and spiritual life. Men thought that God's favour was won or His wrath incurred in virtue of acts — such as the keeping within or the over- stepping the limit of the journey allowed on the Sabbath-day — which in themselves had no moral significance at all. Here agfain we see how our Lord deals with views falling short of the truth. The moral creed of His 220 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. countrymen was imperfect ; it unduly exalted and obtruded formal duties, but it was all that they had ; their whole life and that of their nation was moulded by it ; instincts fostered by it had become hereditary, and to break it ruthlessly down would have been to lay waste men's souls. In the instance before us our Lord introduces a freer practice; and trusts to this to give birth in time to more intelligent notions about the Sabbath day. One passage in the history I purposely passed by. I thought that I might have to write of it at such a length as to break the continuity of the narrative, and I therefore kept it for the close of the chapter. The passage in question, which I subjoin, immediately follows the account of the entertainment of our Lord in Matthew's house. " Then come to him the disciples of John, saying, Why do we and the Pharisees fast oft, but thy disciples fast not ? And Jesus said unto them. Can the sons of the bride-chamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken away from them, and then will they fast. And no man putteth a piece of undressed cloth upon an old garment ; for that which should fill it up taketh from the garment, and a worse rent is made. Neither do inert put new wine into old wine-skins : else the skins burst, and the wine is spilled, and the skins perish : but they put new wine into fresh wine-skins, and both are preserved ^" 1 Matth. ix. 14 — 17. I here adopt St Matthew's version in pre- ference to that of St Mark ii. 16 — 22. St Matthew was not likely to THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 221 ThePhariseespractised fasting on the second and fifth days of the week : the same practice was prob- ably followed by the disciples of John ; and if we suppose that Matthew made this feast on one of the fasting days, this would bring the contrast between the ways of John and of Jesus more sharply out. Before examining the charge and the reply, a word must be said on the absence of all distinctive religious observances in the practice of our Lord and His disciples. The Baptist, we know, enjoined stated fasts and taught his people to pray, and above all enforced the initiatory rite from which he drew his name. At a later period our Lord's disciples beg to be taught to pray, "as John also taught his disciples\" In those days people looked to a religion to order the externals of a man's life ; hours of prayer portioned out his day ; and so, even the disciples appear to have felt that with them there was some- thing lacking, and that they were at a disadvantage compared with John's disciples because they were not, through conformity to a special rule, formed into a body and marked with a badge. forget any circumstance of his call, least of all the words then used by our Lord; and the quotation "I will have mercy and not sacrifice" which he alone relates, is exactly in our Lord's manner. The passage printed above differs also from St Mark's version in this, that in the latter the disciples of the Pharisees put the question together with John's disciples. Some disciples of John may have belonged to the Pharisees as their religious party. ^ Luke xi. i. 222 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. It is easy to find reasons why our Lord should have avoided doing what John did. If He had en- joined any system of religious observance, this would have limited the spread of His Kingdom, and have laid on observances in general more stress than He desired. One Law or one ritual would not suit all nations, or all times ; for forms must vary with men's modes of life, and if our Lord had intro- duced a form of worship He would have /^r//- adarised that which, of its very essence, was meant to be universal. John came as a prophet and forerunner, and he set on foot a sect, which was held together and long kept alive by usages of its own ; but the very observances which gave it vitality as a sect prevented its ever becoming anything more than a sect. Our Lord is not found- ing a sect at all ; He is not a missionary making converts. He comes on earth to proclaim that God loves men, and to open a way by which men should "come to the Father." He leaves behind Him men suited to direct a religious movement, but He organises none himself. Whether He drew many round Him or few. His great work for the world would equally be completed on the Cross. He never baptised, never instituted rites, laws or fasts, or stated services of prayer; it is not till He leaves the earth that He enjoins the sacraments of His Church. It was to be left to men to put all into shape, for the outer form belongs to man; and, if He had Himself adopted any particular practice in THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 223 any of the matters above named, men might imagine that this was binding for evermore and had a virtue in itself. We come now to our Lord's plain and practical answer to the particular questions of the Pharisees which have led to these remarks. Fasting comes by nature when a man is sad, and it is in consequence the natural token of sadness : when a man is very sad, for the loss of relations or the like, he loses all inclination for food. But every outward sign that can be displayed at will is liable to abuse, and so men sometimes fasted when they were not really sad, but when it was decorous to appear so. More- over a kind of merit came to be attached to fasting as betokening sorrow for transgressions ; and at last it came to be regarded as a sort of self-punish- ment which it was thought the Almighty would accept in lieu of inflicting punishment Himself Our Lord does not decry stated fasts or any other Jewish practices, they had their uses and they would last their times ; only He points men to the underlying truth which was at the bottom of the ordinance. When our Lord spoke, the children of the bridechamber the companions of the bridegroom's youth, were still with Him, but He and they would soon have to part. Sorrow must needs come upon them for the following reason, if for no other, that man's education cannot be perfect without it. Then indeed would they fast, not because it was enjoined, 224 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. not of any stated precept, but because they wore bereaved of their Lord. Our Lord now turns to a metaphor, It was a familiar one. The lesson it seems to carry is this : our Lord will not meddle with the old form of things, He will not patch up the old tenement in order that the new spirit may make shift to dwell in it. Change with Him is never mechanical, always organic ; it comes, not by alteration in construction, but always purely of growth. He is propagating spiritual truth in the souls of men ; the time is not yet ripe for rites and ordinances and hours of worship. But the days would come when the truth would need a garb — it would have to struggle amongst human institutions, and it must then have outer expression just as other institutions have. This expression men must give, and Christ was careful that, when the time came for this to be done, the right men should be in their place to do it. He takes a second metaphor to set forth the second part of His work : He will have new flasks for the new wine. This new doctrine was not committed either to the disciples of John or even to scribes enlightened about the kingdom of heaven, but to those who, having no preconceptions, re- ceived it as children do their parents' words. This new wine would go on working and would want room to expand. Peter we know expanded with it ; but men whose minds had stiffened into shape under THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 22$ existing systems were like old flasks of skin, so harsh and dry that they would sooner crack than stretch; they were neither plastic nor elastic, and our Lord wanted vessels that should be both the one and the other. These new flasks were now soon to be chosen ; and when this was done the work would enter on a new phase. Up to the time of the call of the Apostles, our Lord's most conspicuous concern is for the multi- tudes. After that call, the Apostles occupy the foreground, and the whole manner of teaching is rather suddenly changed. It is no longer adapted to a congregation of peasants ; parables take the place of plain speech, and instead of everything being done for the learner as before, much is left to be done by him for himself. We mark another change also in the manner. Hitherto there has been no haste, all has proceeded in the most leisurely way; but soon danger will begin to threaten and time to press, and act to follow act in close succession. Following the subject of my book, I have been careful to mark how our Lord from the very first had an eye for characters of the sort He wanted ^ ^ v and how He shaped them, with an unseen hand; but I must not have it supposed, because we see little lasting outcome from the preaching to the multitude, that therefore it was unimportant com- pared with the training of the Apostles. We must not suppose that Christ taught and healed chiefly that the Apostles might listen and learn. L. 15 226 THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. We can discern two kinds of good wrought by our Lord. In preaching to the multitude he was, then and there, bringing God's hght into the souls of men. In choosing and fashioning the disciples, He was providing for the future of His Church. The work which the Apostles should set on foot would spread over the earth and affect all future times, while our Lord could Himself touch but a single generation in a single spot. Those, however, who heard Him, carried to their homes a memory to last their lives ; among them His Personality survived. If, afterwards, troubled questions arose about Him they would put them by, feeling that they had drunk at the source before the stream had got sullied on its way. When our Lord came into villages where He was known, people crowded to him from all sides, and the new delight of communion with God — the assurance that the whisper which told them that God cared for them was a true voice — beamed from the hearers' faces and gladdened the Master's soul. It was during this active ministry of our Lord, that the choice of the Apostles was made and the foundations of their education were laid. The differences in their minds and characters would be brought into prominence by the greater intensity of the lives they afterwards led ; new capacities would peep out among those who, beholding the intense earnestness of our Lord, learned to be in earnest themselves. No defined line was as yet THE PREACHING TO THE MULTITUDES. 22/ drawn between the multitude and the disciples. Those who were of the multitude one day, and chose to follow, might count as disciples on the morrow. Our Lord never wholly loses sight either of the multitude or of the disciples ; but, while the former were His first care in the period em- braced in this chapter, the disciples, and especially the apostles, will be so in that which will come before us in the next \ 1 St Mark distinguishes between these two objects of our Lord's care, the multitude and the disciples. When our Lord after His journey to the North is passing through Galilee we read that "He passed through Galilee, and would not that any man should know it, for he taught His disciples'^ Mark ix. 31. And soon after, when he is beyond Jordan, we have "and multitudes came to- gether unto him again; and, as he was wont, he taught ihem a