BT 205 . S67 1917 Skrine, John Huntley, 1848- 1923. The survival of Jesus J. THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS a priest’s study in divine telepathy I THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS A Priest’s Study in Divine Telepathy BY v/ JOHN HUNTLEY SKRINE, D.D. AUTHOR OF “CREED AND THE CREEDS” (HAMPTON LECTURES) “PASTOR OVIUM,” “pastor FUTURUS,” ETC. €70) eifu avros It is I myself Quia vivo et vos vivetis ) HODDER & STOUGHTON NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Su/ryuoTcus, Xv^rjTrjrais Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Princeton Theological Seminary Library https://archive.org/details/survivalofjesusp00skri_0 CONTENTS BOOK ONE: THE MAN CHRIST JESUS PART I: QUIA VIVO CHAPTER I PAGE John Desmond’s Quest.17 CHAPTER II What Is Life? What sayest thou that the Son of Man is? . . . . . 25 An answer. ‘He is the Life’.26 What is Life?.30 In Nature.31 In the Church.32 CHAPTER III ‘When Ye Shall Hear of Wars’ The meaning of war.34 The Mutual Sacrifice.36 Transvaluations. 37 The advent of Fact.38 CHAPTER IV The Real Church ‘The waiting at the gate for dreadful news A ‘world’s earthquake’.41 ‘Real’ Churchmanship.43 The suspense of faith.46 CHAPTER V Jesus the Life of Men Theology not ‘as usual’.47 Reality in Theologising.48 vii CONTENTS PAGE Is ‘Life’ a real word?. 49 The Manhood or the Man?.51 A word of a saint.52 The Manhood in the Godhead.53 The Godhead known through the Manhood .... 55 CHAPTER VI A New Science A counsellor.57 The Four Heresies.59 The Old in the New.61 A hard saying.62 The hardy can hear it.62 A certain new science.63 New science, new earth.64 PART II: THE ATONEMENT THROUGH LIFE CHAPTER VII The Lamb of God A Hymn of Hate.67 The Hymn and the Crucifix. 69 What is Atonement?.70 Atonement and Intercession.72 ‘Qui tollis’.72 Sin.73 Creation and Atonement.74 A greater than the Cross.76 The process of the Atonement.78 Birth in Nature and in Grace.79 Birth of soul is as of body.80 The Mutual Sacrifice in Jesus.82 CHAPTER VIII The Telepathies of War A Vision of Angels.84 Reality in Vision.86 Can any good thing come out of-?.88 CONTENTS ix CHAPTER IX The Atonement and Telepathy PAGE The part of telepathy in religion.91 Faith-transference.93 An hypothesis of the process of Atonement.94 This hypothesis is a vera causa .95 Telepathy and the Unity of Man.97 CHAPTER X The Atoner in the Days of His Flesh ‘A little while I am with you.’ i. The Transference of the Thought of Jesus . . . .100 The Thought-reading of Jesus.101 A parallel.103 The Thought-writing of Jesus.104 ii. The Transference of the Will of Jesus.109 The Telepathy of the Passion.116 Quia vivo, et vos vivetis .117 CHAPTER XI The Atonement in the Three Days *A little while and ye shall not see Me.’ Death.121 Hades ‘the Unseen 1 .123 ‘Where wast thou, Brother, those three days?’ . . . .125 Jesus in Hades.126 Whom did Jesus meet in Hades?.128 Words from the Unseen.129 That which can be known of Hades.131 CHAPTER XII Leaves of the Sibyl Communication in cipher.134 Communication or Communion? .138 How I must try to make good that confident word I ventured with Langton, that this new science of Telepathy is going to make things new in theology. Pace to face with that sancta simplicitas of an age that is passing I felt my exhilaration in an impulse of new thought somewhat chastened. Perhaps a Gnostic lecturer expanding in his transcendental theme and suddenly discovering among his audience the calm illumined countenance of some veteran disciple of St. John might have felt rebuked as I. Was my crude ambitious speculation a rough tres¬ passer on sacred reserves ? It may seem so to persons of Langton’s school. For I call up, by the mere name of “telepathic” or “psychical,” associa¬ tions sinister to their mind of thinkings and prac- tisings which are under ban. If rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, they would say, then witchcraft must be rebellion against what is right in faith and practice; that is why a Roman pastor always and an Anglican very often will bid his flock to keep away from “spiritualism”: it is, he tells them, old witchcraft writ long. 90 THE ATONEMENT AND TELEPATHY 91 Well, it is not spiritualism that I want to speak of; but some good pastor will think it is,—unless he gives me time to make myself understood, and persuade him that the thing I ask his attention for might as truthfully be called by the contrasting name of naturalism. So, ending hesitation, I ask my fellow-believer in the Divine Christ to look with me at this class of natural facts, provisionally called Telepathy, or with more accuracy thought-transference, facts that lie on the border of the known and unknown. This need not mean the border of natural and spiri¬ tual, though I do indeed anticipate that the facts will he found to lie upon that line and on either side of it. I am expecting that this may lead us to a conception of how Jesus takes away the sin of the world more illuminative than any of which theology has had the use, and with light enough for us to walk by till some fuller clearness puts this out in turn. The bearing of telepathy upon religion. I The part of want to examine this. Upon all religion, all telepathy doctrine, all churchmanship, in good time, mrcll&10n * if I can; but immediately upon what is first and last and midmost in religion, the bearing of telepathic fact upon the method of salvation, its part in the redemptive plan and process, telepathy as the instru¬ ment by which Jesus of Nazareth gave life to the souls of men, while He was with them in the days of His flesh. 92 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS One can claim for this hypothesis what a while ago would have been denied it, that it is what an hypothesis ought to he if the scientific are to give it a hearing. It is a vera causa . Ho one who need he listened to will, I suppose, at this date reject thought-transference as a fact in the world. The thing which one man thinks or feels or dreams, is able to be thought or felt or dreamt at the same time or in brief sequence by another man separated by even a wide interval of space or by an interval unbridged by any medium of communication as yet discernible. The thing which one man wills is able to get executed by the will of another simi¬ larly out of contact or communication. Once we supposed the few cases observed to be mere coinci¬ dences. Coincidence cannot be the account of incidents which happen by the thousand, have been examined by rigorous method of inductive science, and present themselves with frequency to unprofessional observation in almost any household of the intelligent. Here is a natural fact, well ascertained in gross though not yet in detail. There is a law of nature by which thought in one man becomes thought in another, but a law of which the workings cannot be further formulated at present, though formulation may arrive now at any time. For the present purpose one need not wait for this exacter knowledge of particulars; the large fact serves us. If there is a telepathy for mind and will, how will there not be a telepathy for the soul ? If a thought THE ATONEMENT AND TELEPATHY 93 of mine, grave or trivial, concerning the things of this life makes a friend or a stranger think the same; if a purpose of his sets me on to further it; then as surely if one of us has seen a vision of the holier realities or yielded to the impulse of a beneficence or a venture of faith, the other’s eyes may be opened to the vision or his hand prompted to the deed. This has but to he said to be accepted; who- Faith _ ever admits the transference of mundane transfer- thought and action, concedes a transference of faith, which is but the exercise of the same thought and will upon the same objects, but in relation to a wider and more enduring inter¬ est. He will be ready to believe that Jesus Christ could convey life to the men and women who companied with Him by a faith-transference, a telep¬ athy of spirit. If, in the case of that group of con¬ temporary followers, there was no distance of space between agent and recipient, the action was not the less telepathic. The word imports no doubt the idea of interval, but an interval which need not be measurable by space. It is enough that the bridge of transition be imperceptible; the length of its span is nothing. A thought-transference is a telepathy, if it only cross the breadth of a hearth between one silent sitter and another. Across just such an interval the faith of Jesus transferred itself to a companion. The motions of His all- pure intelligence and all-devoted will, expressed in speech and conduct or even unexpressed, were 94 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS not reabsorbed witbin Him nor exhaled in the air; they went out of Him as virtue, their vibration struck upon souls around Him, and where these were attuned to receive the vibration life started in them at the shock. Here then is the hypothesis I shall put A hypo¬ thesis of forward of the law by which Christ worked the process of Atone¬ ment. an atonement while He was in the flesh. He atoned the men and women who were in His fellowship by the means which alone can take away sin, the impartment of life. This impartment of the spiritual life was, in the method of it, the same operation of creative power as is the propagation of physical life. By living the life of a perfect com¬ munion or self-interchange with God the Creator, Jesus occasioned the thing which only the Creator can cause y the waking of a human soul into the like communion of interchange with the Source of all Being, God. This occasioning of the life of spirit in men is the same operation as the occasioning of the life in a physical organism; for there the parent does not give the life it possesses in itself, but only by a specific energy of that vitality provokes a potential and latent vitality of an existing germ to become actual, to strike root downward and bear fruit upward. The spiritual propagation is doubtless less easy to image distinctly than the fleshly, but an interpretative image is in these days presented for our service in the law of telepathy or thought-transference which is being shadowed THE ATONEMENT AND TELEPATHY 95 out bj research. The motions of the intelligence and the will where they deal with the concerns of time and space do somehow repeat themselves in personalities other than that in which they have originated. My hypothesis then is that the same thing happens when the concerns which occupy the being of a man are not fleshly but spiritual, not temporal but eternal, are not situate in the narrow environment round a mortal organism but in the Marge room” in which the Creator has set the feet of a soul. By the exercise of such a telepathy of the super-sensible, Jesus—not as the Son of God but as the Son of Man and in His human existence — brought about the vital union of His disciples with His Father and their Father; this union was life unto God, and by the life unto God their sins were taken away. Thus I declare the tenet of the Atone¬ ment as my own mind can receive it for a light, my own will embrace it as a power. A light and a power I do find it to be. It is as yet an hypothesis this of mine; hypo but a strong one. For first it is, as I have thesis is a . . , ^ -j- vera causa. claimed, a vera causa . It supposes a cause which is a thing in the world; there is in nature this reality, a man can under certain at present ill-ex¬ plored conditions bring it about that a brother man shall live, in his reflective and active faculties, the same life of a human spirit which the first is living. If the universe is truly one it almost is a postulate of reason that the highest life of human-kind is oper- 96 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS ated by the same machinery that operates the mode of existence next below it in the scale. In the organism of the natural man all the mechanism and vitalism of the animal is taken up and elaborated into the mechanics and vitality of man’s mental organisation, so that the same general laws regulate the new specific functions, and the higher creature has all that the lower has, and also that which is his own. In spiritual man the raising and refining of powers is carried further; the animality and the humanity are there, but they are worked up into spirituality. It is inconceiv¬ able that the subtlest of all the organic laws, this energy of mind at which we aim the word Telepathy should be an exception to the rule, and not accom¬ pany man as an endowment when he crosses the hori¬ zon from the intellectual existence into the spiritual. That becomes only the more incredible when the human nature contemplated is that of Jesus of ISTazareth, for whom the claim is made that He is the Life. For Telepathy, the common telepathy of science, is an energy of life. It is (to give my own assured belief, whether scientists share it or no) a reciprocity of two factors, like every other vital re¬ sponse to environment. A self-interchange takes place between telepathiser and telepathised. To con¬ ceive of the transmitter as only active and the recipi¬ ent as only passive is a vulgar error; mind must meet mind, will energise with will, if a transference is to THE ATONEMENT AND TELEPATHY 97 happen. It may be, and commonly perhaps is, that neither agent is aware of the other; but the new study of the sub-conscious makes it not difficult to imagine that the intercourse can take place without an aware¬ ness of it. If then telepathy itself be human life at its subtlest and nearest to the super-sensible, it is reasonable to expect that the yet more mysterious life comes by that life-process which is nearest to the bound where the hnowable passes into the unknown. Ah, and further yet there is this to say. Of the known telepathy what better account an^the^ can be at present offered than this—that it is of a manifestation of an underlying unity of the race ? When some of the researchers suggest that the psychic communications over wide distances im¬ ply a continuity of substance more ethereal than the ether of physical speculation, they may be right or wrong, but they at least are helping us to imagine this unity by a sensible figure, which one may hope we shall one day transcend. By this figure’s help we imagine how a movement of mental force in one person is echoed in other persons; it is because the mind of the race distributed among its individual members is a continuous unity, and every thrill in it must travel everywhere throughout its area as the water-circle round a stone cast in a pool. We de¬ clare this truth in excelsis when we assert the telep¬ athy of souls. We profess in it that all are one body in Christ, and whether one member suffer or enjoy 98 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS all the members enjoy or suffer with it; we confess, that is, the principle of catholicity and of salvation by the Church, of all that is true in the often mis¬ read maxim Extra ecclesiam nulla solus, CHAPTER X THE ATONER IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH “A little while I am with you.” The hypothesis then has been put forth: Jesus in the days of His flesh made atonement for men, His contemporaries, by the impartment to them of the life nnto God through the medium of a telepathy of spirit. Can the hypothesis so marshal, order, and unify the concrete facts it offers to explain as to make good a standing as a theory ? The concrete facts that can be ranged at all for investigation are those which can be gathered from the Christian documents, and these facts are few, as was likely in a brief narrative of a very brief career. Had the career and its record been long the muster of facts could not have been con¬ siderable, because the events of a life-movement in a soul or between soul and soul cannot be them¬ selves observed. All that can come to view is the accompanying life-movement in the field of the sen¬ sible. This indeed is true, I take it, even of the physical life; but certainly the spiritual movement can transpire only through symptoms, the things men 99 100 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS said and did on the surface of themselves, from which may be inferred a cause below the sur¬ face. These symptoms must be few where the narrative which holds their memory is so brief, so objective, so little analytic, and written down at such a distance from the live moments it records, as is the narrative of Christ’s temporal career. Yet not so very few in proportion to the fulness of the story are the glimpses which can be caught along the story of a power in Jesus to work on other per¬ sons effects which we should now describe as psychic and telepathic. To gather them into some order I will group the indications under the two exhaustive categories of things human, man’s knowing and doing, the transference of thought and the transference of activity. I. The Transference of Thought Thought-transference is a name for communica¬ tion of an idea either from the side of the agent or of the recipient of a motion: there is thought-read¬ ing when the idea is first in one’s neighbour, thought¬ writing when it begins in oneself. The process is the same in both, an interaction of two minds, which may be conscious on the side of agent only or recipient only, or both of them or of neither. The former process is the more easy to study. IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 101 (a) The Thought-reading of Jesus That Jesus did read the unspoken thoughts of men is frequently noted in the tradition; He “per¬ ceived their thoughts/’ “knew their thoughts/’ “knew what was in men/’ “knew who should betray him.” Doubtless this is evidence given by unscien¬ tific observers, not by psychic researchers. But where the unscientific bear witness to occurrences of a kind, which the later science finds to be verifi¬ able fact in its own day, there will be little hesita¬ tion in accepting the early witness. On the same ground, when we can produce instances of thought¬ reading which have the particularity desired by the scientific investigator, as we can on resort to the Fourth Gospel, we shall feel that the present controversy as to the historical value of that docu¬ ment does not put the testimony out of court. When that author describes with precision a case of thought-reading, as in at least two instances he does, we shall say that while the particulars of word or action remain open to doubt, the general fact of the power in Jesus is guaranteed as a trustworthy tradition among his followers. The relater of the scene with Nathanael and that with the Samaritan woman believed, even if he was trusting a vague legend of his church, nay, even if he was writing an imagination of his own, that such incidents could happen to Jesus, as those who had known Him knew. 102 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS The passage with Nathanael is not explicit: for what was it that happened in the two minds when Jesus saw him under the fig-tree which could evoke the “Rabbi, thou art the King of Israel’'' ? But the very want of explicitness in the allusion of Jesus is a note of authenticity in the story. Had it been invention, would not the logic have been more visible, should we not have been clearly told what the glance of Jesus passing by had signified to the man under the fig-tree. The passage at the well of Sychem is one of a perspicuousness to gratify a modern inquirer into these phenomena of mind. The mechanism of the interacting minds lays itself bare to us. “Sir, give me this water . . . that I come not hither to draw.” The woman thinks of the long bearing of the burden from well to cottage door, and the mind of the Rabbi goes that journey with her, enters with her the door, and sees with her the inmate waiting her, the husband. “Go call him and come hither.” Sadly or shamefacedly comes the reply, “I have no husband.” Her mind envisages the man who shares her roof, and reflects the vision on the mind of Jesus. “Thou hast well said, I have no husband;” . . . His eyes peruse her, . . . “for he is not thy husband.” Backward runs her thought up the avenue of her ill life, and the Listen¬ er’s goes with it, and the events are numbered out to Him, as if her face were a dial registering her sin- nings one after one. “Thou hast had . . . five hus- IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 103 bands.” Then she perceives the speaker is a prophet, and against the prophecy which reads her she shuts a window by the prompt diversion to the national religious problem, “Our fathers worshipped in this mountain,” and presently is bidding her friends “come see a man who told me all that ever I did.” Bead thus the tale is a thought-reading of the most familiar character, but I can think only of one instance worthy to serve for comparison in so sacred matter. It is from the story of the woman whom Michelet called “The Christ of France.” Joan is presented to Charles vn. in his Court at Chinon. She impresses him at once by discovering him though disguised among a throng of courtiers, and presently converts him to her project by a thought-reading, which the king long afterwards authenticated in confidence to an intimate. Let me give the incident as I have seen it done in verse. On the A paralielt Maid’s appeal to his faith in God, Charles, troubled by slanders as to the legitimacy of his birth, asks for a sign to confirm her message. Maid, the man Who does not doubt his God may doubt himself. Joan (starting and looking fixedly on him). “May—doubt—himself.” Ah! then I see it, I see. God showed your face; He shows to me your heart. You do mistrust yourself the heir of France. 104 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS Charles. Ha! sayest thou, maiden? Joan {seizing his hand). Stay, and hear me out. Now is it borne in on me like a light. • •••••• Yea, this it was when at the feet of Christ . . . Fallen on His altar stone ... in the lone shrine . . . Under the banner of your fathers’ wars. . . . Say I not true? Yes, yes, in that sharp hour This was your prayer, that of His pity Christ Would ease you of a realm not yours, or else Write you His sure Anointed by a sign Not to be questioned more. Behold! He heard. Behold! His sign am I. Thou art the King. Charles. Maid, I am overborne and borne away By a great wind of wonder. . . . Witness Christ That you have spelt the prayer none knew but He! “Come listen/’ might Charles have said, “to a maiden who has told me the thing I did in my most secret soul; is not this the Messenger of God P (b) The Thought-writing of Jesus But if Jesus was plainly gifted to read the thoughts of men, only less plain was His power to write His own upon the mind of another. Why did the Bap¬ tist hail the young prophet whose walk passed where “John stood and two of his disciples” with that mystic utterance: “Behold the Lamb of God” ? The word has been an enigma to us, so premature a con- IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 105 fession of faith it sounds when the sacrifice of the Christ had not yet dawned on the mind of Israel. To me the enigma is. solved, if I may believe that the sacrifice of the Christ had dawned already on the consciousness of the Messiah Himself, “the glori¬ ous Eremite,” newly come from the spiritual ordeal of the wilderness; that the thought of it, kindled on his inner mind, conveyed itself without to John in some interpreting light of “the gospel of God in the face of Christ Jesus.” I would venture to resolve in the same way an¬ other question in which the same John is con¬ cerned. The vision which followed the baptism of Jesus, was it to Himself only or also, as the Fourth Gospel would inform us, to the Baptist? How har¬ monious with the new teachings of psychology it is to understand that the vision was to Jesus, the reflec¬ tion of it to John. Or the Transfiguration. Let whoever finds him¬ self unable to fit into the framework of a modern conception of the worlds of Nature and of Grace such an episode as the return of the two Great Ones of the past to a part even for a moment on the stage of mortal history, yet who finds himself no less dis¬ satisfied to pronounce the story an allegoric myth of the Law’s supersession by the Gospel; let him recognise in the tale an event more sub¬ stantial, more a fact in history, more charged with reality for men than would be the presence again on earth’s stage of Moses and Elias, though it were 106 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS truly they and they truly should talk with Jesus. For my own self I do think it was they and that the talk did pass: hut let that he for now, since the ground of that belief is another story and not for the telling yet. Give me no more of fact than a happening in the soul of Jesus. Grant me that this midnight on Hermon held a moment in which man’s destiny passed through an ordeal, a moment in which the Son of Man gathered up into His own conscious present being all the past being of the world as it had hitherto fulfilled itself in law¬ giver and prophet, and then carried humanity forward in Himself towards the all-consummating fulfilment of the Christ’s self-devotion, the decease He should accomplish at Jerusalem; grant me that the mountain side was the scene of the first act in the Agony, as the oliveyard and the hillock of the Cross were the second and the last; that here on Hermon as there in Gethsemane and Golgotha, the salvation of human-kind underwent decision in the will of the Saviour, as He should choose or should decline the Sacrifice that saves; —grant me this event in the soul of Christ, and I know what the event was which befell Peter and James and John. It was no illusion flitting across half-awakened eyes. Vision it was, but vision, for them as for Jesus, which was action too! Before the Master’s mind there passed the world’s drama of redemption; the sacrifices of the Law, the devo¬ tions of Prophecy were doing obeisance to the IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 107 offering of the Lamb, the immolation of the Lord’s Christ; of that drama He was alike spectator and actor, in His mind at once and in His will was it enacted. And the Three, they too were spectators and also actors. The Passion with which the Master was travailing was projected from His being on the being of them; it was a reflection as of a pageant on their mind, a stress as of an ordeal on their will; they saw His glory and were glad, the shadow of His doom and shuddered; it was good for them to be there and “let us build-”; nay, they feared as they entered into the cloud; the disciple here was as his Master, he watched the Agony though with how scantly awaked intelligence, he endured it though with a sympathy how infirm. Call the Transfiguration, if you will, a phantasm, a picture painted on a cloud. Be it so for you, if it can be for you no more; and yet believe thus much at least with me, that this picture is the portraiture of our very cause, who are being saved by the sacrifice of the Lamb, if only that mind shall be in us which was in Christ Jesus, if the divine- human drama of a Passion enacted in His soul shall cast its glory and its shadow upon ours in a believ¬ ers’ vision, in a disciple’s love. Must I go on, for completeness’ sake, to note more humble and wayside examples of the reflections thrown from the mind of the prophet of Nazareth upon those of simpler disciples ? Humble ex¬ amples are necessarily little available, because 108 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS they were indistinct and unimportant and therefore escaped record. There occur to one that confes¬ sion made by the multitude, that Jesus “taught with authority and not as the scribes,” which I take to mean more than that the latter taught “out of a book” and Jesus out of His heart: it describes rather that effect of a personality which we call “magnetic.” The officers who would not arrest Him because “never man spake like this man,” were bearing the same testimony. The apostles who followed Him and were afraid when He steadfastly set His face to go to Jerusalem were receiving an impression of something more pene¬ trating than the verbal warnings which the Master had spoken out. These are scanty indications, but in the nature of the case it could hardly be other¬ wise, for scanty too would be the opportunity of a disciple to confess in words his reception of an impulse from the Master received on his secret soul. But this thin illustration by specific instances is much fortified by the large and general observa¬ tion of the kind of persons on whom the person of Jesus most worked effect. To the poor the gos¬ pel was preached, and theirs first was the King¬ dom of Heaven. The poor who were the simple in culture, the fishermen and yeomen, not the doc¬ tor and scribe ; the poor in social status, the pub¬ lican and sinner, not the Pharisee and Sadducee; these poor were the glad hearers of the word. Might one put it in a phrase and say that Christ was sent IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 109 not to the wise and prudent, who walk by reason, but to babes whose light is instinct ? This is what one should expect if the force exerted by the Teacher made appeal rather to the psychic and in¬ tuitional side of human nature, than to the intelli- gential. It would not be the “Intellectuals” who would most readily respond, but those whom we might name the “Instinctives.” It was bound to be so if telepathy worked then as it works now. But these inconclusive evidences of a thought¬ writing are bringing us to the second branch of our matter. The impact on a follower’s conscious¬ ness of the unspoken thought of the Master which could not easily be disclosed by word of mouth might receive expression by act of will. But such a com¬ munication to him from Jesus would be a trans¬ ference not of a thought but an action, and thus we are led straight to the other of our two cate¬ gories; from the knowing of Jesus we turn to the doing. II. The Tkansfekence of Will This power in Jesus to project the action of His will upon those in contact with Him is luminously illustrated in the whole story of the Healing of bodies and the Conversion of souls. No one, I suppose, needs to be satisfied that the cures worked by Jesus were operations of His will upon the will of the patient, for that is the account we should most of us give of the strictly analogous though 110 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS not equal achievements of the modern spiritual healer. It would be tedious to go into this further than to call up a selected example or two. These had better come from cases where the telepathy— action across an interval—is marked in character. The cure of the centurion’s servant and of the Syrophsenician’s daughter are the most obvious, and in these the interest has this complexity, that the will of Jesus transfers itself not to the patient’s will immediately, but through a third person’s will. It was the centurion’s faith, greater than any found in Israel, that saved the servant; it is the heathen mother, whose faith is great enough to win the bread of life for her unconscious child. There is intense suggestiveness in this mediation, but one must not complicate the problem by going aside to pursue it here. For our purpose it is enough that, whether to principal or to second, an energy of will did really pass from the faith in the soul of Jesus to wake a faith in the soul of another, and by that intercourse the cure was done. But it appears that the unconsciousness could some¬ times be in the mind not of the patient but of the agent. When the sick woman in the crowd touches the tassel on the rabbi’s robe and is healed by the act, the faith which makes whole is initiated by the patient, at least so far as is indicated in the story. Jesus at once perceives that virtue has gone out of Him, but the action did not begin with Him. Here again reflections are started in us IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 111 which we must not follow out at this point. What was to be demonstrated was a power in Jesus to evoke by His own act of faith an active faith in another, and this I think has been done very readily; will-transference seems the certain account of the miracles of healing. Well, here we have been forc¬ ing an open door by my argument ; but what can my theory say to the Haisings from death? The child of Jairus, the widow’s son, what will to live could be in them, when life itself was there no more ? Do I know, does any one know at what point life ends when even the physician declares the man dead? Certainly it does not always end when con¬ sciousness is gone, nor sometimes when other func¬ tionings of the organic life have ceased, for even physicians have erred in declaring death. Where is the line, where the bourne from which the traveller cannot return ? Point it out to us, and I may admit that the faith by which the traveller recrossed the bourne was not “the will of the flesh,” and there is more than nature in his return. You will challenge me to explain the tale of Lazarus so. But the tale of Lazarus is a too much disputed history to be a test case for any theory; and also my present pur¬ pose does not require a decision of that point. I am producing evidence that Jesus conveyed physical vitality by the shock of His will evoking the will to live in another. That evidence has been ade¬ quately adduced, if we had only proved the power of Christ to enhance an existent or to fortify a strug- m THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS gling vitality in a sufferer having the faith to be made whole. So mnch surely has been made good. Where I should like to go further in this gen¬ eral direction, if only I shall not weaken my whole case by adducing disputed matters of fact, is the problem of the “Mature Miracles,” that stumbling- block for some who are among our most faithful, and to whom the Healings present no difficulty at all. The Draught of Fishes, the Quelling of the Storm, the Walking on the Sea, the Feeding of the Five Thousand, the Wine of Cana, the Wither¬ ing of the Fig-tree, are occurrences which are not, it is thought, made credible by any known or imaginable laws of human existence, and are there¬ fore not to he accepted by conscientious thinkers un¬ til the external evidence for them is strong enough to enforce that credence. So long as it is more likely that eyewitnesses or historians made a mis¬ take, than that a vast human experience was contra¬ dicted by unprecedented facts in nature, our friends say they can treat the stories only as symbols of spiritual truth, not as history. Well, if and when the evidence is proved worthless, the incidents must become symbols; symbols of a history still that of man’s spirit, not his flesh. That position has not yet been reached; and meanwhile I seem at times to feel the shadow falling on us of a new revela¬ tion of Fact, which will revaluate and transvaluate our hitherto conceptions alike of nature and of super-nature. Am I ready to give any shape to ■IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 113 that coming Fact, or even any substance to its shadow? And if I am not, would it not be best to bold my tongue, even from my own bearing? But no, I cannot quite refrain, while no one over¬ bears me but myself. Think, John Desmond, of the least of the difficulties you have named, the Miraculous Draught. If we claim it for a miracle and not a chance coincidence, what is it we have to accept ? This only, that the presence of a shoal in the water on the ship’s right side was able to impress itself on the psychic consciousness of Jesus. Why should it not ? All things in the world (as the philosophers sometimes remind us) do impress themselves on all things ; every magni¬ tude affects every other at least by physical attrac¬ tion. When the magnitude is not star nor stone but the thing which has “power to say I am I,” when the forces Gravitation and Electricity have been elaborated into Conscience and Volition, then one speculates that the being of the conscious creature may be, not attractive of, but aware of other facts and objects in its world. Potentially it will be aware of all facts and objects whatsoever and wherever. Actually it will be aware of them only with an awareness varying in degree as the presence of the object varies, that is to say, accord¬ ing to the more or less nearness and intensity of the relation in which it stands to the object per¬ ceived. But in explaining this particular incident of the fishermen one need not be purely abstract. 114 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS A concrete example suggests itself to any one who has watched the water-finder and been led to sur¬ mise a physical sensitiveness in the “dowser’s” organism to the presence of water under earth. If that surmise is right, my hypothesis of this sen¬ tience in Jesus of an object beyond the range of known sense-perception is a vera causa . But this opens to me a deep-going vista into the region of human potency upon nature. It does not yet make the multiplication of loaves or the walking on water events credible on their own merits, but it does much to disarm a hostile criticism so far as the critic bases on the a 'priori impossibility of the facts. “Miracles do not happen.” Do they not? Let us grant it you, and then ask, How do you know these things are miraculous ? “Irresponsible fancies,” are they, these of mine? Well, they are fancies certainly. In religion you cannot travel far with matter-of-fact for your only guide. That pedestrian soon reaches the brink of the sensible order, and one can go forward only on the wing. Fancies then; but not so irrespon¬ sible. They may not be called to account by any church authority, but they are answerable most severely to my own soul, for she trusts all the weight of her insignificant private fortune in time and thereafter to this fancy, the scout she sends out through the fog of sensuous blindness to bring in¬ telligence of the world beyond it—a world where she must presently try to live. What in earth or IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 115 in heaven matters to me so much as to know the facts of both these very unequal hemispheres of the full world; and what can I hope to learn of the greater one except its extreme borderland where the seeming-solid flesh melts into spirit across a line which is only ideal? But of this borderland I do have hope to learn something by a method which has found itself to my hand. It is this faculty of my total being to learn of the world beyond our senses by the touch on it of the sense of life in me , by that organ of knowledge which is not an organ of my being but the organism itself of my being—spirit, soul, and body together. With this organ of sentience I make experiment of the insensible reality, the experiment of dis¬ covering whether when I touch that reality I live by the touch. If life comes to me from that which I try to touch in the blind void of the super-sensuous, then it is reality that I have touched. You may call my experiment fancy, but others will call it faith. My own is a better name for it than either; I go on calling it Life. What more? Why, something which is every¬ thing in my contention. It is not Christ’s power of making whole the bodies of men by will-trans¬ ference or of their minds by thought-transference that I am to make good. I was to show that He made atonement for their souls by such a ministry. I was to prove that the faith which made whole their mortal and eternal being was a mind and will 116 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS stirred into an energy of life nnto God, by that energy of life in the mind and will of Jesus, the prophet of Nazareth, not as yet declared to he the Son of God by the rising from the dead. It was right and methodic of me perhaps to set in order as carefully as I could these indications of His faith-transferring power which worked effect upon the mundane thinkings and doings of men, but that study looks almost too plodding an industry as soon as I face the essential problem of the Atone¬ ment for the soul, and seek to find the evidence that this too was the work done by a telepathy of spirit. The Telepathy of the Passion “The Church of God, which He hath purchased with His own blood!” That has been our idea of Atonement: it was wrought by the shedding of blood, the blood of Jesus, by the sacrifice of the death of Christ. We were right and also not right. The shedding of the blood did atone; not however because the blood was shed, but because “the blood is the life.” The sacrifice of the death does save; not however the sacrifice which was a dying on the Cross, but the self-offering which was a living unto God. That life was outpoured, that sacrifice was bound on the altar, before the Roman soldier set up the cross and Pilate wrote on its head, “ Jesus, King of the Jews.” This sacrifice, the obedience of the Son, which was the daily life unto God which IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 117 Jesus lived in His disciples’ sight, this was the sacri¬ fice which atoned for Peter and his brethren, and the women who followed from Galilee. It atoned because like all other thought and act it had power to repeat itself in the consciousness of men and women near enough in range, apt enough in intel¬ ligence, to receive the stroke of a virtue which went out from it, and to respond by a movement of their own. With an impoverished apprehension we commonly have explained the conversion of Christ’s contemporaries and our later selves by the wisdom of the Preacher on the Mount, the power of the Healer, the holy conduct of the Just One. Sermon, miracle, example, are parts and parcels of the facts, pieces of the whole which we can find names for; hut the true fact and the whole fact is the more mystic operation incarnated in these mortal words and deeds, hut also in a flesh less palpable,—the sacrifice of the being of Jesus, which momently He offered to the Father by every thought of His which mirrored the eternal mind, and every act of His in which the Father’s will not His was done. This sacrifice went out in virtue and repeated itself in the souls of those who en¬ circled Jesus and were sensitive to His touch. By this telepathy of spirit the ministry of the Nazarene, not yet revealed as more than Son of Man, wrought the atonement of those who companied with Him in the flesh. Because He lived unto God they Quia vivo, lived also. 118 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS Can one be required to describe in terms of tbe concrete an operation of which the senses, our informants of other fact, cannot take cognisance? ]STo more should be asked than to indicate the points in the earthly story where the secret line of spiritual action catches the light for a moment by embodi¬ ment in some historic incident. Those few moments are enough to substantiate the interpretation of the Christ-act which I am submitting. There are the prophecies which went before; Simeon’s presentiment over the babe in his arms of a sword that should come with him to pierce a mother’s bosom; the Forerunner’s signalling of the Messiah’s entry by the title not of Champion of Israel but of Lamb of God. Then the kingdom is proclaimed from the Mount, but is a kingdom where might is not right, nor is even might, but the weak shall inherit earth. The soldier oath to the Christ of God is drawn from the follower, only that he may learn, soon as it has passed his ardent lips, that it has been sworn not to a conqueror but a martyr king, and that to deprecate the martyrdom is to desert to the enemy, Satan the tempter. His closest comrades ask for posts of honour, are warned that honour is peril; they are schooled enough to dare the cup, though not yet to drink it. Veil by veil the pageant of sacrifice discloses its features of pain and shame. Strength by strength the mag¬ net of the unique personality draws the true fol¬ lower or repels the false. The tragic crisis finds IN THE DAYS OF HIS FLESH 119 the disciple incapable as yet of a fellowship in suf¬ ferings which are not seen for an entry into glory. Death’s curtain falls upon the spectacle and hearts of watchers dead as death within them. It is lifted on the divine issue: behold the Lamb of God that was slain and is alive again: the sacrifice has been answered by the fire; to lose self unto God is to win the self; Jesus died and Jesus lives; because He lives we shall live also. So I read the tale. It is told in many words, line upon growing line, precept upon precept, but one line sums it all. Jesus by self-sacrifice lived the life unto God in sight and touch of His human brothers; the pulses of that life in Him beat upon their soul; that soul awoke at the touch and lived unto Christ and God. The evidences for the law of faith-propagation which I have outlined here are drawn from the experience of men who were Christ’s mortal con¬ temporaries. Surely we men of to-day can find in experiences of our own an evidence to confirm or else confute that testimony. We should know each in himself what it is that makes us Christian, whether it is the tradition written in Bible and embodied in Church institution, or is also and more effectually the Person of the Sacrificed, casting from His sacrifice a vibration on our person which it receives and echoes. Yes, evidence is there indeed, and evidence that most constraineth us. 120 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS But this will be the story not of the Galilean preacher but of Jesus human and glorified. We are drawn to the brink of that mystery, but at the line this seeker will pause and rest. He feels as the adven¬ turer of a great rhymer’s tale when before the threshold of the enterprise he turns to sleep, and dreams of himself as a discoverer, who in the twilight anchors his barque by the coast of promise, and there rocks out the night lapped in a brimming blest expectancy, On that dark shore just seen that it is rich. CHAPTER XI THE ATONEMENT IN THE THREE DATS “A little while and ye shall not see Me.” “All men are mortal .’ 7 That is from the Death' manuals of Deductive Logic, an example of a major premiss in a syllogism. “William Smith is a man 77 ; there is a minor premiss; and the conclusion is logically certain, “William Smith will die . 77 The major premiss is impregnably true, the con¬ clusion is beyond rebutment, but it has taken the war to make us draw it. Till then it was common knowledge that all men die, but not a private con¬ viction that any one in particular, if it was oneself, would die. Distinguished men were reported to us in the newspaper to be dying, or we read there of a young officer killed in India by fever or a hills- man’s bullet, or a letter told us of a friend’s son drowned in a Thames lasher. It was a thing that happens, not a thing that happens to us. Death is no personal concern of ours; how then the things which are behind death, the Resurrection and the Judgment ? 121 122 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS But now . . . What is this chant that comes ring¬ ing down the street ? Vive la—vive la—vive la— Vive la compagnie. It is a company of the Dunminster levy swinging past my door. I stand on the step, and from the athlete striding at the head of his men with the tread of a stag, I catch a salute, which elates me. It is a scholar of mine in college days. “Vive la— Long live the company!” do they sing? Who knows if they will live, this company of a hundred lithe English lads. Hext week they will be at a finishing school on a Surrey heath or Wiltshire down. ISText month (or so they fondly anticipate) they will be in Flanders. The next month—where ? Something of them, not they, will be lying two thousand yards away from a hill-side, innocently festooned here and there with patches of shrub and stacks of firewood, out of which Death, that lay in wait there, has opened her mouth upon them and swallowed them up quick into Hades the Unseen. Ah, then men do really die, for these men die; every day their likes are dying out there; death is what happens to a man. And if death, then that which is “after death/’ which we say is a judg¬ ment, a fortune good or ill according to the sentence dealt to this one or to that. It happens to these ATONEMENT IN THE THREE DAYS 123 lightsome youths, this After-Death. Then it hap¬ pens to me. My heart aches, oh how it aches some¬ times! for the lads in that tramping column; the next moment the pang is on its own account. I shall die; I shall go find a fortune in that Afterwards. What do I believe that fortune will be ? And why do I believe it ? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. At Weimar in the Goethe house, to which Hades “the before it was nationalised my uncle Richard unseen.” was privately admitted, the last of the Goethes, the then owner, showed him among the relics a pencil- sketch left by the poet. A Greek hero in Hades hails a newcomer to the Shades, a greater than himself (but I am not clear as to the name of either), with the greeting inscribed below, “Bist du auch herunter gekommen?” “Art thou also” (one might para¬ phrase) “thou, our great one, become weak as we; art thou become like unto us?” It haunted my uncle, it has haunted me from him. No wonder: it is mortality’s heart-cry out of a deep heart, the soul of one of earth’s strong spirits, long since become “weak as they.” “Weak as we, like unto us.” But they . . . what are they like, and are they indeed weak, they who are there ? Isaiah thought so, and so perhaps thought Goethe, or believed themselves to think, as I would rather interpret the mind whether of 124 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS prophet or of poet. But “Art thou also come down hither?” has for my ear sung itself like a changing chime upon a hell into “He descended into Hades.” Thou also, Thou our greatest, art gone down thither: Thou didst descend into Hell the Hidden, into Hades the Unseen! Thou didst become like unto them who were there before Thee, wert weak as they,—if theirs indeed was weakness. But what Jesus was like when from the Seen He passed into the Unseen, this we know. He was like the man who walked in Galilee and died in Jewry. Hay, He was that Man, the very same; handle Him and see that it is He Himself, none other than Jesus the Son of Mary, nothing less than He, whatever more, unimaginably more, than Jesus, be also here with Him. Jesus went into Hades the Unseen. We say it in our Creed, and of late have been thinking that we ought to unsay it; and since we are afraid to unsay a word which has once been said in a venerated formula, we have disarmed it of meaning; have told our flock that no more is affirmed than the word Hades (the “not seen”) connotes; that Jesus went out of sight; left the body which made Him visible, underwent a real dissolution of flesh and spirit. The mediseval fancy of a “Harrowing of Hell,” must be put away as a childish thing. The Hew Testament’s “Preaching to the spirits in prison” was a pious but unauthorised opinion. ATONEMENT IN THE THREE DAYS 125 This emasculation of a primitive dogma “Where has been theology’s second thought. yy e wast thou, need rest in it no longer. That guess of the those three early Christian that Jesus went and preached days? to the spirits in prison, was a guess but a well- inspired. To me it seems of late an inevitable truth. It could not be otherwise. We know that Jesus was no longer in that mangled body laid in Joseph’s vault (though not all of us remember that we know this when we theologise about the Rising) ; then where was He? In the “other world,” the timeless spaceless world, where eyes could not follow Him; and so we have called it Hades. What was He doing there? He was doing as He had ever done; He was being the Life, making souls to live. The souls of whom? Those who were in that “other world,” all who had once been, and were no longer, in the flesh. They were there already, and now He too was there; He was now with “all the com¬ pany” . . . not yet “of Heaven,” but of Paradise, and of that dim region which is no garden of souls but a wilderness, perchance a waste, of the spirits that departed hence but not “in the Lord.” Yes, in the company of these men. Oh the sudden back¬ ward vista that opens as if by a shaft of illumina¬ tion to my understanding! For at last I see it, the thing I could never see till now: how the his¬ toric Incarnation could profit the souls of the men for whom that history was not history, for whom Jesus had not yet died. Often have I tried to see 126 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS by some optic glass of metaphysic, straining my visual faculty to peer through the illusion of time, cheating myself with the conceit that I was imaging a power in the historic event of the Incarnation to project its force back through the past as well as forward through the future. Phantasmal logic/ vain racking of the mental nerve! And needless wholly. Albs clear as air and plain as earth. What hinders those men of the past, whose human fate had a first brief mortal chapter written without the Christ-tale to illumine it,—what hinders them to re¬ ceive life from Christ as surely as we whose temporal record is now writing itself under the light of the Jesus in record of the Son of Man? They are there Hades. now, there where He is; their human fates no longer miss Him. He is fulfilling in Paradise, by the touch of the Spirit of Jesus the Human upon spirits human, that of them which was left un¬ wrought, remaking that which was made amiss, or that which the Enemy had unmade. Do we tell ourselves, in that unknown Christian’s conjecture, which the sacred record carries down to us, that for two nights and a day Jesus went and “preached to the spirits in prison” ? Why call we them “in prison” ? Is Hades a prison, unless it be for evil¬ doers, reserved in chains under darkness against a judgment? Jesus called the Hades to which He was going, not a prison but a paradise, and the malefac¬ tor was to go with Him there. Then the spirits of men who have passed into Hades, how are they less ATONEMENT IN THE THREE DAYS 12? free of that wider world than our brothers who on sick-bed or on battlefield died yesterday, died and went the same whither as went their forefathers and Father Abraham, and as Jesus the Crucified Him¬ self,—into the Beyond, the land whose name, still as of old, is Hades, the Unseen Country ? And why must the Saviour be preacher to them of the evangel only in those few hours between His dying and His rising? Whatever that Christian thought, we think that Jesus became by death dweller in both the Unseen and the Seen. If we have said of Jesus Christ that He is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, let us dare say it also of the Jesus whom once men knew not to be the Christ. Jesus then who went yesterday into the Unseen is there to-day also and forever. Ah, here has my quest discovered something, or rediscovered. It has found not a new article of the Creed, not an old article reinterpreted as a sym¬ bol, but a credal fact which some of us thought was a pious figment, and the rest could only keep in its place by a nerveless interpretation. After all, the despised and rejected article is true, a simple truth, a pregnant truth. Our Lord Jesus Christ was cruci¬ fied, dead, and buried; yes, but also verily and indeed He descended into Hell the Hidden. He went into Hades the Unseen. My fellows who pronounce the article with me may for a moment fail to find the Hades of the Three Days in my conception of an Unseen World 128 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS where the Christ abides for ever. Let them look at it a few moments more, and they will be able to find their own conception there, though only as one finds a part in a whole. He went into the Unseen. With whom Whom did Jesus meet did He meet there, to whom did He give m Hades. py His conve rse there ? The men of the past, so we all have told ourselves. There, writes one churchman poet, He is “at large among the dead,” He “wakes Abraham to rejoice,” His eye calms “the thronging band of souls,” at His side the companion of His crucifixion “waits on His tri¬ umph.” It is a very great company, a multitude whom no man can number. But are these the whole company whom Jesus meets in the Unseen World, are these all whom there by His being’s touch He redeems from spirit’s death, or in whom He fulfils the life which a mortal accident cut down as a flower or an ungospelled ignorance kept shut in the un¬ opened hud ? The fate of the untaught or the early perishing of our day, the child of the thieves’ quarter or the boy slain in his teens, how is it different from that of the “thronging band,” whom our poet com¬ passionates? If it was here, in Hades, that Jesus brought life to Abraham and the fathers of Israel, or to Dymas the robber, will He do less for one of those soldier lads who drops by a German bullet before his soul has had time to decide its choice for life of the narrow way or the broad? Tell not me ithat this has not been told us, must be left to Heaven’s ATONEMENT IN THE THREE DAYS 129 uncovenanted mercy. No, there are things of his mortal destiny which a man knows without being told: there is a mercy of heaven not revealed in the Bible but in the heart. By that revelation I know thus much, and on the knowledge I would ven¬ ture all I hold dear of here and hereafter: in the Unseen World Jesus works atonement on the still i unatoned. In that large opportunity of time and room, He can touch to fair issue the arrested life and the spoilt; souls broken in this world He can make whole, souls which it left still to be made He can there make perfect. My heart tells me this. Others round me are being told it, so they say, in these days of Words war and death. It is not their heart that from the • Unseen. tells them, as they think, but a more articu¬ late voice; words from some one dear to them who was yesterday here, and to-day is not here but yon¬ der. He speaks to them, they say; speaks words which dictate themselves, write themselves down as from the unseen, unsounding lips; write themselves on the paper of the mortal scribe, with the scribe’s pencil, but not the mind or the will of scribe. He sends messages of how it was with him when he “met a shell,” and after it, how it does not hurt to die, how you do not know you are dead till you try to go on digging in the trench and find you cannot do it now; how death proves not to be death at all, but a fuller life and vigour, how one remembers 130 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS . i* those he knew and whom he loved, loves them still more than ever and receives their love. They say, these friends of mine, that this is what is happen¬ ing to them. They show me the messages written by their own pen, but as something taught them, not by their own self. What do we think of all this, we others to whom these communications do not come ? Some of us call it a folly, some a sin. The first are near-sighted, the last are blind. For myself, I call it neither. To call it not folly but truth I wait till the research into this thing is older; to call it not sin but faith I will not wait a day. For my heart is inditing of the same, or a very like, good matter as these messages of theirs, and I know not if another than itself teaches it this, but I am sure it has not only taught itself. Somehow the thing is wrought between here and yonder. Let that be, however, at least for this now. Let it content me that into that unseen went Jesus, He who said to a man dying at His side, “Thou shalt be with me in the paradise.” Then He is there and mine are there with Him. Ah! remember that, dear mother of sorrow, whereso’er thou art, who art longing to feel the slain boy back again at thy side, but no vision and no message comes to make you sure, and when you call there is none to answer that you can hear—remember that One is there and thine is with Him, and also that One is here, and without Him was nothing made that was made, ATONEMENT IN THE THREE DAYS 131 nor is anything unmade which He has the will to make to be. And He who has willed that there be with Him in the paradise the man slain by vio¬ lence of men, wills that thou also be with Him, thou still on this quiet hearth. Eor He that is yonder is also here. Mother and son, ye are together, on the one side and on the other of that throne which was the Cross. How all this matters to me! Eor now That I, who shall go thither myself, know in some which can measure what it is to be there. It is to he Hade° with Christ, for He is there. Nay, it is to he with Jesus, for Tie went there, the same who died on the Cross and was buried. And this Jesus we somewhat know who and what manner of man He . was. He was life-giver here to whoso would he with Him in a true response of soul. Then He will he life-giver there to those with whom He is, for He is the same there as here. Then it will be well for me yonder, if God shall make my soul alive unto Him; well for me, this war-less scholar here in a minster close—and for any youth of this gallant fighting com¬ pany, whose foot rings under my window in this morning’s air, whose blithe eyes may some morrow be dark under Flanders sod. CHAPTER XII LEAVES OF THE SIBYL Yet no; I will not let it be, as I said I would, even for this now, that matter of the “Scripts,” the question where they come from and what they are,—authentic messages from the departed or only creations of the scribe’s own mind, proving nothing of reality outside that mind. It is a wise curiosity in me to seek at least to harmonise with such other knowledge of the world of things as I seem to be master of, this phenomenon of an auto¬ matic writing, words that write themselves by the hand, but not the mind and will, of a human writer. When our Dean’s niece, that specially sane young woman, of steady nerve and practical in all her ways, feels something rise within her which pushes her to take up a pencil, set its point on a sheet of paper, and there let it travel where it, not she, wills, like a horse on whose neck a lost rider drops the rein; when that pencil marches forward confidently carrying an unguiding hand, some¬ times breaking into a runaway gallop, which makes the rider breathless; when the career comes to a stop as if with exhaustion, and see! the steed has 132 LEAVES OF THE SIBYL 133 known where it was going, though the dizzied horse¬ man did not, for here lies the writing, a clear and grammatical sequence of meaning;—when this thing happens, whose meaning, one asks, is it that lies written there ? What mind composed these sen¬ tences, that of the woman with the pencil or an¬ other? Did this bubble up from the woman’s sub¬ terranean consciousness; or did it come along the earth-floor, a telepathem, call it, from a living mind elsewhere; or did it drop on her from the clouds, a message from a soul discarnate? That is the question the Psychical Society labours to answer. All I myself am sure of is that no one of the three wrote the words. ISTo one. Words cannot be writ¬ ten, because they cannot be thought, by less than two minds. There must be, we are mostly agreed, both a subject and an object to beget a thought. This object cannot really be a thing (though we com¬ monly say so, speaking of the dualism as mind and things) but a person; because nothing really exists in the world except persons, God or some creature of God’s, a personal being, a fragment of the All- Mind; and what we call things are only detailed manifestations of some personality, human or divine. It takes two then to make a thought: dialectic is not only the best way of thinking, it is the only wav. t/ Therefore I have to say, for I can no other, that this script is a register of some act of mental life which the writer has done by a self-interchange 134 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS with a mind not her own. That mind could he either a brother mortal’s, or a brother’s in the spirit world, or, in the case where no created con¬ sciousness can be the co-agent, then the mind of Him who is the Father of all spirits. He is acting upon the woman’s consciousness, subliminal or normal matters little, not through some human personality, but through some fact in Creation, which is every¬ where God’s thought. Which of these three is in any given case the co-agent is the problem of our researchers. The wisest of them assure me that for some proportion of these automatisms neither self-suggestion nor a tele¬ pathic origin in another living mind is admissible, and that they are left to infer that the script is a message from beyond the sense-world. They per¬ suade me, if it is right to be persuaded by another man’s report. What is my own mind’s report to myself ? communi- That report is that these writings are like cation in other thoughts of men, a communication of Cipher. . . ... realities, but a communication which may be conveyed in cipher. I mean this. When I studied recently a series of these writings which some one had printed for the use of persons interested, I had to say to myself, “there is no telep¬ athy, of the living or of the discarnate, here: these are but pious lucubrations of the writers, self-mistaken for inspired; a cynic indeed might suggest that they LEAVES OF THE SIBYL 135 had been printed in the interest of a derisive scep¬ ticism. But also I have studied, through the kind con¬ fidence of friends, some other series. These would chasten the sceptic. Co-operation of a human mind with the writer’s is everywhere suggested by them. For the language is highly idiomatic, and the idiom is not the writer’s own, unless of course we are referred to the subconscious self—that still mythic region where, as a Greek historian might say, that which cannot be scanned cannot be refuted. And the idiom varies in harmony with the change of speaker, when a new communicator announces him¬ self, and varies with a dramatic propriety in cases where we can judge of the appropriateness. This too, perhaps, will be referred to the subconsciousness, which may be a sufficiently good dramatic artist— since we do not know to the contrary. When how¬ ever a speaker, whose personality is known to the reader, but who is unknown in his person or his works to the writer of the scripts, intrudes himself and dictates things which are enigmas in a language utterly like the speech we knew in him, and violently unlike the writer or any one else; or when there arrives upon the sheet through the pencil of a scribe who has no acquaintance at all with the classic lan¬ guages a sentence in Latin or Greek, and scholar’s Greek;—in these circumstances the subliminal con¬ sciousness asks a credit for the authorship which we are not disposed to accord. 136 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS What then ? Are these writings to he accepted as what they purport to be, messages out of the unseen and from the particular persons whose names they bear? That may be not more than the student tells himself, hut more than he is willing to affirm aloud while demonstration tarries. The position in which this observer of the phenomena rests at present is that here is certainly if not communication between the human consciousness and the spiritual, yet com¬ munion . I take a short road to express my meaning. I believe we have here the phenomenon which in other and higher aspects we call Revelation, Inspiration, Prophecy. All these are communions of divine and human; For what is it when God reveals a truth or inspires a prophet? Prophet and poet, as we know, “when God makes music through them/’ can only sound it “by the framework and the chord’ 7 of their personal make; the saint under inspiration must himself breathe-in the truth which the Spirit in¬ breathes; and Revelation, which some dogmatists still try to contrast with discovery, is only able to reveal so much as the recipient is able to discover. The revealing, the unveiling, is a drawing of a cur¬ tain by a human hand guided by a divine. In my own interpretation of religious fact these three are diversely conditioned acts of the life unto God in the sphere of knowledge, acts of self-interchange between the individual and the universal mind. The psychic phenomenon under our study presents us with a LEAVES OF THE SIBYL 137 weak yet not unrecognisable form of the same inter¬ penetration of part and whole. It is a special mode in which the human consciousness obtains contact and relation with reality; the words written are a product, perhaps only a by-product, of this effected relation. A certain attitude of the soul towards real¬ ity is expressed, or it may be only symbolised, as if by what I called a cipher. The essential communi¬ cation is not, or need not be, the ostensible, just as a cipher telegram may carry a message wholly different from the sense it spells out upon the receiving instrument. I frame this supposition upon the character of scripts which friends have shown me. In these I can find much and animated exhortation, little particularity of direction. They have constant reference to an actual situation of the subject, but they rarely or never say, “Do this or do that,” but “Be minded thus or thus,” not “Such is the step to take,” but “Such is the temper in which to act.” They incite to faith, hope and charity; to fearlessness, endurance, serenity, love; they make promise of help and foretell victory. How was not this how the old prophets prophesied? And apostle or evangelist, did they impart to the flock a policy of action or rather encourage a spirit? Christ Himself, did He frame a constitution for His church, or only enounce a principle of the king¬ dom? Well, so, I imagine, the message which comes through in these ambiguous pencilling^ carries in- \ 138 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS formation indeed, but it is a spiritual situation of which it informs us; it lends an impulsion, not how¬ ever to a practical course, but to an ethical temper which shall select a course or maintain it. Such a message has at least the signs of a likeness in source to the messages which come to us through the medium we call prophecy; if the writings of prophet or evangelist are accepted as transcripts of reality, may we not think it possible that writings of humbler scribes may carry a message from the spiritual world ? By what test then shall we prove that the possible is the actual? For me it can be no other test than the experience that the act by which the communi¬ cation is sought and achieved, causes or fails to cause more life in the being of the receiver. If a consultation of the oracular wisdom hoped for from this source has for its result on worker or quester a stronger pulse of venture and firmer sinew of en¬ durance, if it is light to the eye and speed to the foot, then this was a faithful oracle. Here was prophecy, as from a prophet for whom we claim inspiration, a word of the Lord as was his, fainter and of slenderer import, but not less sincere. Whether it is a com¬ munication from any one in the unseen, or cation or from whom in that world, is for another Com ; research than mine to question. But if it munion. # A be not a communication, a communion it is. It is a valid sacrament, and what passes to the com¬ municant is a grace. LEAVES OF THE SIBYL 139 I am much confirmed in this reading of the fact by something I heard only yesterday from an observer who has a wide conversance with these matters. This is that some “writers” find that a diminution in them of the impulsion to write coin¬ cides with an intensifying in the sense of contact with the spiritual, of a more convincing presence of the unseen fact and more urgent action upon the practical life. That is, communication de- $„ y J lif e# comes to us, or fails to come, when we at¬ tempt to live unto them, that' is, to effect the inter¬ change of ourself with the other self which cannot be seen with eye or felt with hand, but which by some intimation we surmise to be there. In this as in all endeavour, “the attempt and not the deed confounds us,” and hope maketh ashamed. If, that is, the at¬ tempted union fails, if the interchange does not happen, and the life does not come, then our surmise was the imagining of a vain thing, the reality is not as we thought. But if the attempt is not without the deed, but brings a union to pass; if when we en¬ deavour to live unto the unseen fact, we find that so endeavouring we do live, then it is the reality that we are touching, and that reality is such as we sur¬ mised it to be, and addressed ourselves to according to that surmise. Do not the men of other sciences make their experiment this way, and this way verify their expectation by the results? Thus then do we believers in the Eternal World make experiment to know if it is there and what like it is, and thus we verify it. We feel after if haply we may find in the invisible one Jesus, Man as we are men, but now with a Manhood that “fills the wide vessel of the universe.” We feel after and we find Him; 198 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS we know it is He because at the touch the fire of life catches in our soul and body; He fills this narrow vessel of my being as He fills the universe; I am alive unto Jesus the Man. “How do I know that I am alive unto Him?” How knows any one that he is alive at all to any thing? What cares any breathing man to answer a questioner who should bid him prove his body to be alive? Yet that question is scarcely less wise than his who asks proof that my soul lives. Life is its own proof to itself, and life is not concerned for any proof to any but to itself. Yet some such proofs there are too, if the idle questioner has a mind to read them. A body can prove its life by moving itself; the soul has movements which can be observed by another. But the man himself who lives, can he find no name for the proof renderable to his own self, by which he knows that he lives unto Jesus, and it is no dream? Yes, one name he can give, the name I have given Life and already. It is the joy of living. Joy is one •i 07, thing with life. Life is none where there is not joy, where life is not neither can there be joy. These are two fronts of one reality, two fronts which it turns to the mind of man, not to God’s mind who made it, and not to the soul even of the man who has it. Ho one should ask me to make that good, for not the most pragmatic physicist denies it of ON THIS WISE SHOWS HE HIMSELF 199 the lowest living thing he studies. Pillar of cloud and pillar of fire that kept Israel’s march from hurt were not more the same than are life and joy. But who has had such joy as the believer in Jesus who died and is alive for ever? From the disciples who “then were glad, seeing the Lord”; from Stephen when “from a happy place God’s glory smote him on the face”; from Paul bidding his converts to rejoice evermore, and again he said, re¬ joice; from those later generations whose brows were sunned with the heathen knew not what good cheer; from these far-off ones down all history till to-day, the mystic gleam which travels the sombre field of time, as a sun-ray from one sees not where, will wander and here and there alight upon a clouded plain,—that gleam of a joy has ever fallen and been ever given hack from the face of men who in the phrase of my loved saint are not “ignorant,” but “know that Jesus is alive.” This our joy, my brothers, is fulfilled, the joy that a Man is born into the world which is both earth and heaven. A Man. In the world eternal and in this world of time Jesus lives. Because He lives, we live also. My mother will say to me: “What you tell us here seems quite true, John: but I think you must be meaning something more than I can quite get hold of—Jesus being present with us, seeing us, 200 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS knowing us, speaking to us—one always did believe in this, surely. How does your way of saying it make any difference ?” I shall say, “It has made a great difference to myself. Hot to what I believe about Jesus, but to the way in which I believe it. Almost it is the difference between having a dream and knowing a reality. For my belief now is that Jesus not only is a Person, but a Person with whom my own per¬ son can have to do, which it cannot unless the other Person is human. Whenever men have had a belief in God they have figured Him as a Person. How could they otherwise, since nothing is real in the world except persons? Hothing else at least is real to us as men; earth and her brute matter are real to us as animals, not as spirits, as those of whom it is not said, that man turneth again to his earth and then all his thoughts perish. This is why men have always figured God as a human person: he could see and hear as a man, and watch over His people, though He neither slumbered nor slept like human watchers; could be angered, could forgive and love as men are angry or are loving. But they figured it only: all was figure not fact. God was not a real Man, though He did certain things which were like things done by men. If one had done a mean thing and confessed it to the Most High, the shame and pain were not as if the confes¬ sion went before a friend of loftier nature, and those eyes of sad reproach clouded at the hearing. If ON THIS WISE SHOWS HE HIMSELF 201 l one had ventured a brave choice, the glory of heart was not as if one had sprung to the side of a heroic father, a worthy comrade for him in arms. But that is how it is in fact between us and a Christ who is Jesus, the Son of Man. Verily ‘near Him is near fire’: fire that scorches up corruption, fire that swells the veins with the heat of love adven¬ turing. Ah, yes, it is so. The difference is between dream and waking fact, between life in a world of shadows that will break, and life in a world actual, imminent, encompassant, urgent, and never to pass away. O dear Mother/’ I shall plead with her, “listen if the difference be not like something I will tell you of, which is of this very season in which your soul and mine are vexed with this whole vexed world of man. “You remember, neither of us can forget ever, one of those Raemaker cartoons we saw together. It was the Kaiser’s waking in the imperial bedcham¬ ber. A valet is calling him; brings him the morning cup. The author of our world-misery is raising from the pillow a face on which a smile of complacency, afterglow of pleasing dreams, is dying, and an affright is dawning there instead. He says to himself, ‘I have just had a delightful dream that the whole thing wasn’t real.’ But the whole guilty thing is real; and to that dread real¬ ness he wakes, to that ghostly merciless presence, that iron face of doom. All yesterday it watched, all night has watched, to-day is closer to him. He THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS 202 is that prisoner of my childhood’s tale, who wakes in the ‘iron shroud/ the cell with nightly narrowing walls, which at the last must meet and grip their victim’s flesh out of being. “Mother, one night I dreamed that picture. I woke, and as it shuddered off my mind, it was as if my eyes too were unclosing to find ‘the whole thing’ is real, but, for this unworthy believer in a Christ who is Jesus, not more real than it is blest. Old words of the faithful in old days sang them¬ selves in my brain. ‘His compassions fail not, they are new every morning’; aye, His compassions, the Man who knows what the passions are of man, once having been of like passions, and can share them, can compassionate indeed. This is my reality, the solid and abiding world which has me for its creature —the world of which the light falls from these brows of tenderness dawning on me through slumber’s dusk, the world of which the air is breath indeed, being, spirit, very air of heaven, spirit divine, all spiritual and yet human all. That air is about my bed and will be about my path; those eyes spy out all my ways, and shine to light my feet in them. “And another charmed word from the poetry of ancient faith floated round me with an enchantment twice-enchanted now. ‘When I wake up,’ my heart whispered me, then hushed, ‘When I wake up, even from a mortal’s slumber, I shall be satisfied with Thy likeness. ... I shall see Thy face, O Master: that vision of Thee shall all fulfil my being.’ ” PART IV: THE DIVINE-HUMAN JESUS CHAPTER XVII THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST Joy then is ours, who have known that a Man is born into the Eternal World, because we know that Jesus is risen. And yet I cannot go on my way rejoicing in this if I am to go on it alone, and not in company with others sharing the joy. Will all the brethren share it? Hot at once, some of them, and I foresee what will hold them hack. They will think—it always has been so—that if we declare the Risen Lord to be a man, Jesus the son of Mary, we shall he denying the belief—than which what else matters ?—that He who rose was the Son of God. They will say this doctrine of mine is not Christianity but an Humanitarianism. What shall I say to keep them with me ? I shall begin with this. AVhen you and I, brother, confess with the mouth that Jesus Christ is God, what is it that we do? We utter certain syllables upon the air, but what more than this happens ? What is it to believe in the heart that Jesus is God? 203 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS 204 Your answer will be as mine, that you cannot tell it in words, because there are no words for the telling of it; yet what one believes in the heart one also knows in the heart, though there only; and you know that to believe this of Jesus is to be in strength and peace and joy of heart. Yes, you say with me that you are sure this belief is true because to hold it ministers life. Well, but part of this life which the belief minis¬ ters is life in the mind of us, is a vital energy of our thought. Thoughts can in some measure be told in words, indeed they cannot be thought at all except by some kind of language. Some words then there must be for this thought which comes to us when we believe in the divinity of Jesus. What words do you find for yours ? The I will tell you the words I find for myself, manner l n confessing Christ to be the Son of God, I Divinity declare my belief that Jesus alone of all men of Christ. p e f ore or s i nce lived a life unto God which was a perfect life. By that I do not mean only that He was without sin, though I declare that also. I mean that the interchange of selfhood between His Human person and God was a perfect interchange: all that Jesus was in His human being was harmon¬ ised with all that the Father is. I see not how there can be expressed in preciser words the entire identity of J esus with God, the truth declared when He said, “I and my Father are one.” Thus then I understand the Godhead of Christ on THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 205 the side of His relation to God the Father. They have the life of each unto each, which is the life of all of the One to all of the Other. This 1 T . 1. In rela- definition of the Divinity of Christ presents tion to the perhaps to the mind of most men a less vivid and easily realised picture of divine fact than does the credal term “God the Son,” which raises a con¬ crete image: hut the claim it makes of a divine posi¬ tion of Jesus in the universe is in truth much more definite than the claim asserted by the image of son- ship ; and it seems also to declare the co-equality with more adequacy than does the figure drawn from human parentage; for to that clings a note of sub¬ ordination and inequality in a son. A perfect life of the One to the Other is no doubt a halting human image for the unimageable reality, but it brings my own mind a little further on the way to truth than does the metaphor from mortal sonship. All that son can be to father is taken up into it, and something is added which is more than son can be. The mutual¬ ity of thought, affection, purpose that is, or that is conceivable, between child and parent is there; but this paternal-filial mutuality has the limitation that there is not equality in it, for one is before and one is after other; and this limitation is transcended by our definition. 206 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS 2 inreia- But the Godhead of Christ on the other tionto side, that of His relation to man, how do I Man ' understand this: how is Jesus now as God to us ? One can say, by help of vagueness and am¬ biguity in the title, that Christ is God; but how do we think of a human personality that has survived death as having the attributes of divinity, and the divinity of very God ? As I found the divinity of Jesus in the perfect¬ ness or absoluteness of Ilis life unto God, so I find The in- it in the infinity or absoluteness of His life msLife unto men. He is able now to give life unto unto men. a n me n. In that is His Godhead. Or, as I ought rather to say, in that is so much of His God¬ head as I, a man, am able to apprehend. Jesus of Hazareth, while in the world of time and space, communicated life to those who proved capable of it within that circle of men and women whom His personality could reach. These were few. But Jesus when He “entered into His glory” could communicate life to every soul receptive of it wherever its station in the time-world or the eternal. He did thus impart life to the group of disciples with whom He had converse in the Forty Hays. He did so in the event which we describe as the Effusion of the Spirit, or with more realism as the Church’s birth into a full-conscious life; in the intercourse to which St. Paul witnessed under the name of the “Spirit of Jesus,” which deterred or prompted the movements of his mission, or of THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 207 “the Lord who stood by him,” with counsel or reas¬ surance at moments of difficulty; and in the inter¬ course which the same Apostle claims in all his epistles to he the universal and necessary experi¬ ence of the believer as a man who is “in Christ,” and in whom Christ is. That claim has been the assertion made in the mouth of all its more vital members at every time by the great society of men and women into which the primitive body of believers has expanded. The humblest of these can profess an experience identical in character, if remote in degree of intensity, with that of an Apostle who trod the roads of Anatolia in the piloting presence of the “Spirit of Jesus,” or of another, who on a morning by the lake re-vowed allegiance to the Master, when that Master’s personality had tran¬ scended time, yet forsook not the old mortal inter¬ course. The Divinity of Jesus as towards mankind is conceived then by me to lie in this universality of His impartment of life to men. A potential univer¬ sality, it is true, not an actualised, though progres¬ sively made actual. To declare this is to declare the person of Jesus to be infinite; and that is to declare Him to be God. As the Creator is infinite and makes all of finite life that is made, so is Jesus the Man. As Man and by a force which is man’s, and can be energised even in the mortal condition of humanity, namely, this force of Life-transference (called in one special direction of it telepathy) Christ 208 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS makes all of spiritual life that is made within the spheres of humanity. That interchange of His person with the person of another by which He made life spring in apostle, prophet, evangelist, or plain Church member is exercised by the same vital contact upon every soul of man in the present or in the future; and, as I ventured to speculate in an earlier page, also upon the souls whose days of the flesh had ended ere His began, yet to whom He can, being infinite, go and preach in that “prison” of an existence from which not yet the Christ had made them free. Infinity of power to make men live, power to redeem from death all men everywhere in all time, power to work that which the Father worketh hitherto, the re-making of man in the image and likeness of God, when some mystic counter-power, sin or the Fall, had marred the image made by the first creative stroke—to find this in the Risen Jesus is to find Him to be as God the Creator is on the side of His Personality turned towards man. That which the Creator does to man is done through Christ and by the Humanity of the human Jesus, and without Him is not anything done that is done. This is to confess Jesus to be divine, and with the divinity which we name when we speak of the God¬ head of the Father. But if I declare Jesus of Nazareth who rose from the dead to be as God in the infinite fulness of His life in God, and as God in the infinitude of His THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 209 power to make men live, wliat does my faith lack, my brother, which your faith has? You ask me, Do I believe in the Son of God? I answer, Who is He, that I may believe in Him? If there is more that you, friend, have come to know of Him, tell it me, that I may know it too. And if it be so that you can add nothing to me, because neither of us nor any other can know That the Christ as He is God, why then let us all which can i i . be known the more try to know oi the Christ that of the Son which can be known and named. The in- of God * visible things of God, said Paul, are known by the things which are seen, the heavenly facts are char¬ actered in earthly fact. Paul thought of Nature— the nature in which as yet Jesus was not a part— as the mirror of divinity, a mirrow how dim, blurred, ruffled, and distorting. But we may see now within that Nature, as in a glass, not dimly but in clearest lineaments, the image of Him who is invisible : we scan the express image of God in the human fact among Nature’s facts, which is Jesus of Nazareth, mortal once and now eternal. Let us search out this which is not of the unsearchable mvsteries. Let us «y learn all that we have not as yet tried our best to learn concerning the Christ, what He is to us, what He does to us as He is a Man; a Man who has entered into Llis glory, but in that glory is no less and for ever Man. “And last He hath appeared unto me also,” murmurs the latest and least believer, “for that THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS 210 which I live is He, when most I know myself to be alive.” If we should never come to learn more than this, - yet even so we should have enough. Is it not so ? For we have peace and joy in believing that Jesus the Man, the slain and glorified, the dweller Peace and . . . joy in be- and worker now both in eternity and m time, thatjesus 1° ever V one us God an( l Man. is God and As God He is infinite in presence, is about our path and about our bed, and spieth out all our ways; as Man He is human in His presence, and draws us with those same bands of love and cords of a man by which mortal soul and soul are knit, so that thought and will of one become thought and will of another, and person has with person the mutual gift of self which makes the life of human¬ kind. The joy of believing this!—that this Presence is divine inasmuch as it is unto all, but human inas¬ much as it is unto each; that about our path and bed and spying all our ways is a Companion, who can bear Himself as a man with a man, whose thoughts can be our thoughts and His ways be as our ways, who can weave my being into one life with Him by threads of the mind of a fibre that can intertwine, and who by strands of purpose that cross and grip can knit my mortal will into one strength with the Eternal’s. The joy of this; ah, and the awe! For we who have thought we could welcome the nearness of the Christ, while we conceived of Him as a Provi- THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 211 dence, can we so welcome Him as a Friend? For is it so with one of ns and some unseen friend, who has been the seen friend in mortal days, that there is only joy and no fear at all, when we think upon the intimacy of one who is of “the company of heaven” ? Do we indeed desire the dead Should still be near us at our side? We rejoice in his counsellings, comfortings, en- couragings; but a compunction shivers through us as we image the friend’s withdrawing eyes when some false step or unworthy mood threatens to separate, like a sin, between us and our soul’s lover. Yes, and so is it with the One Lover of the soul. There may be not the joy of believing in the Risen Christ; but the power of our believing —that is here. For power upon us there is in our forecasting vision of a cloud gathering upon that brow of love; power to forestall the faulty act, to transfigure the un¬ rightful thought. It is the power of the Resurrec¬ tion; the power breathing upon humankind of the Glorified Humanity. Humanity. Nay, that word must be bettered. It has been ready in all mouths, but what has been its strength in any heart ? The Humanity, the Manhood—it is nothing in the world, or nothing that can be known or felt by us. Not the Manhood do I confess, but Jesus, Son of Mary, the Man. 212 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS Therefore “my friend shall look me through and through/’ though I he a breathing, fleshly, sinful son of man, and my friend be a Man, and the very Son of Man. Here is the awe of it, but here also is the joy. Even so come, Lord Jesus, even so. * * * * * “What does my faith lack, my brother, which your faith has?” So I asked a page or two back. This faith But I must be bolder. I must begin to ask, the^e 18 ’ a What does y our faith who believe in Christ deemerby the Son of God lack which mine has, my has veri- g> faith in Jesus the Son of God ? This it lacks fication, which mine does not lack—Verification. I know that my Redeemer liveth, know it. For that Jesus in His Ministry redeemed His disciples, gave them life, atoned them—this is not belief only, it is knowledge. It is the witness of a history, not the conclusion of a philosophy. That Jesus has been redeeming men ever since, this too is knowledge not belief; it is the verified record of the Christian Church to which in “all the days” each story of a Christian’s faith adds its new atom upon the cumulus' of certitude. But of the Son of God as apart from and beyond Jesus what is your knowledge? Is it knowledge, as men speak of knowing? It is indeed already the fruition of your faith; of knowledge it is still but the aspiration and endeavour. And again, as the result of this life-giving which THE DIVINITY OF JESUS CHRIST 213 redeems is a thing verifiable, so too is the process. Faith-transference, telepathy of spirit, is a matter not of speculation but of knowledge. Telepathy is not an hypothesis but a law of nature. Telepathy is an ascertained functioning of human organism by which the higher life-motions, those of mind and will, are operated in the sphere of the sensible. Reason would therefore count on finding presently that the highest life-motions, those of soul, are operated by the same functioning. But experience does not disappoint reason. In the record of the Ministry we have seen Jesus imparting life to his disciples by an action identical with the telepathy which is the discovery of positive science. In the record of the Church we have seen the members of that society propagating and maintaining the faith by an action of the faithful upon their brethren, converts, scholars, children, which is the same in kind as that of Jesus in His Ministry—a life of their own souls lived in contact with other souls and, by the vibration of it received and answered, kindling the like life in them. Because these lived (may we not say in the phrase of Jesus?) those lived also. And yet again. “He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself,” saith John. It is so. The witness that verifies the life received from Jesus, the final witness of it, the irrefragable, is in the self. But not as Son of God in severance from the Son of Mary is the Christ and the life He gives verified in the believer’s self, and made to be 214 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS not belief but knowledge. He knows a life be has nnto One who is in the Unseen, and of tbis life be knows tbe nature: it is a life wbicb is tbe response of bis person to a Personality human as bis own, and having a humanity such as was that of Jesus. What that humanity was is known to him by tbe report of men wdio companied with Him in tbe flesh, and of all disciples in all times since who believed their report, and in their own experience proved it true. Of that humanity the believer discerns the authentic touch in those vital impulsions which, “like a wind bearing health from lands of health,” visit his mortal soul and interpret their immortal source. He has essayed to commune with the Master of whom the prophets have told him, and the communion has come to pass; the Divine Breath has brought him life from a land of life. He had heard of Plim by the hearing of the ear, but now his eye sees Him, beholding by ken of spirit Him that is invisible to sense. I do assure myself that to know Jesus the eternal Son of Man by the life unto Him which is found in vein of the human spirit when it seeks commune with the Spirit of Jesus is not a belief but is a knowledge. Yes, a knowledge even as men call know- There is a w ^ en that which knows is not the soul but science of the sense. Of the souks nature too there is a science; this like the others must be followed. This is the faith in the Son of Man which I hold fast and will not let it go. CHAPTER XVIII THE MAN ATONING MAN “We have found Him of whom Moses in the law and the prophets in the Gospel did write,—Jesus of Hazareth, the Son of Mary.” That is the message with which I can now go to greet any friend who¬ ever has been with me on holy quest of the Christ. Will my Hathanael meet me with his Canthe doubt, “Can ought so good as man’s salva- Manhood tion come out of this insignificance, this atone- Xazareth of our mere humanity? Can the ment? Christ deliver His brethren by the power of a man¬ hood which He shares with the brotherhood, in a measure indeed how unequal but in a character so like? And my friend must be answered as was he with, “Come and see.” Only experience of his own will make him sure that a Man born of Mary, reared in Hazareth, can be the King who redeems Israel from all her sins. Let him draw near, like Philip’s friend, and learn whether a life-current passes to his spirit from the spirit, the human spirit, of a Man, the same with whom Philip and his friend had speech; whether that Man is able to read his 215 216 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS unspoken reasonings under a fig-tree’s skelter, and to send without voice to carry it that Man’s faith into this other’s soul. If he shall find that such a stroke of life does pass to his mortal nature from somewhere in the Unseen, and that the quality of this life and the character of the stroke which carries it are that quality of life which the Jesus of history once communicated, and that manner in which He conveyed it; if light in counsel, strength in decision, cheer in gloom, hardi¬ hood in peril, and sometimes along a bald or shadowed road the surprisal of an inconsequent delight, come to him borne on the breath of tradition, which wafts a memory of Him who taught from Nazareth—then Experience h e w iH believe that the Jesus of history is oflife the Person with whom his own personality received . . must is in the communion which makes to live, answer. qq e will have attained the faith which is made in us when Tradition and Experience with diverse voice declare the self-same truth. He has come, and seen and known. But he knows only for himself. When he shall desire to make the Christ known to another friend, he can only do that which was done to himself, can only draw this new quester with him to come and see if Jesus of Nazareth can be indeed the Christ who shall redeem Israel. But I come back to myself. What have I found in finding that Christ who is God and Man is our redeemer, by the virtue even of His Manhood ? Is it something only for myself, an incommunicable THE MAN ATONING MAN 217 treasure of knowledge, which I cannot share with my brother, which he cannot touch until he dis¬ covers it all afresh for himself? It is this incommunicable thing indeed: that is first and finally what my hid treasure is to me. Nothing profits a man unless he saves his own soul, and that salvation he can impart to no one else. But as it is with life’s less great experiences,— bitterness which is the heart’s own, joy with which stranger intermeddles not,—that the joy or sorrow is the man’s alone, hut his thoughts concerning it can in some degree he laid before his neighbour and be counsel and strength to him in his own war of a life, so it is with the supreme experience. The life unto Christ Jesus can be known only by being lived by who would know it; when he knows it he can tell no one what the actual life in his being is; hut something he can tell of his thoughts about it, of how he came to it, and how it has changed his thinkings and his doings in religion. Now I foresee thoughts, a whole world of thoughts, that will flow to me out of this discovered truth that Jesus the Man by the force of His Manhood is able to make men His brethren live; that a chnstoi- His Manhood makes this life arise in them Aowffrom by operation of a law of fact no different, thiscon- except for the scale of its application, from theMan- that law of nature by which in time and Lood ' space thought and action can transfer themselves from man to man. A whole Christology has come to 218 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS our hand in this discovery, to be unrolled when and how we can. Yes, a whole knowledge of the Christ; no new patch upon the old garment of Christian con¬ fession, hut a vesture woven new and without seam from the top throughout. That is bold language in such as I. Bold to pre¬ sumption if it meant the weaving of a new garment of belief for any but my sole self. That is not pre¬ sumed by me: how should it be? But to reclothe one’s own naked soul with a vesture of personal faith, which shall be seamless, continuous, whole, of one piece, one pattern throughout, that is the very task which Christ’s own parable has set to whoever will be gospelled by Him. That task I must attempt; I am no Christian else. For every Christian must make his own Christology. For this cause came he into the world, however humble an incomer he be. He came to know the Christ; but to know Christ with that of his nature which is thinker, this is to Christologise. But the task is a new one. It is not the quest I set out on when these pages began, saying I would go on search for an answer to the Christ’s demand, Who say ye that I am ? That quest can have indeed no ending, here on the earth-plane nor yet, as I forecast, beyond earth’s horizon. The Vision fleets before our pursuit, like the cloud-bow’s foot before the child in chase of it. The nearer the quester comes, the further off him hovers again the Grail. The search has no ending, but a stage of it may THE MAN ATONING MAN 219 end; and such a goal of a first day’s journey I have reached. For some timid, reverent answer I have been venturing to the “Who sayest thou that I am ?” I say that He whom our creed names Christ and Son of God is also Jesus who was mingup. once a Man, and now and for ever is a Man. I am saying in this that which the theologian who interpreted that creed more fully in the writing- known as the Quicunque has said, that the Christ is God and Man. But I am saying it with an explicitness of meaning which he might own or disown, but which my brethren have not, I think, yet recognised as their own explication of his formula. For I cannot content myself with the language of the Church’s hitherto philosophy to which the Quicunque gave a lead. When our philosophers lay down that the Christ is the union of two Natures in one Person, that He has “taken the Manhood into God,” they leave me not alone untouched in heart but unsatisfied in mind. They seem to me not to have found the truth, but only to be feeling after it, if haply they may find it. For what it is to “take the Manhood into God,” I do not at all conceive, nor am I sure that it can be conceived by any one else as mortal as myself. If there be any real thing which is named by the word Manhood, I am incapable of figuring it, and to me it is no reality. Men I can see, Manhood I cannot. There is, I am sure, a most real event and 220 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS a real fact for which “taking of the Manhood into God” is at present a name we use; it names all our hope in heaven or earth. We must go on using it till we can find or frame a better; but it is needful to remember that it is not a description of the divine-human fact, but only a symbol of it. I am trying to decipher the symbol in such part of it as my apprehension can attain. The whole fact, that assumption of the humanity into the divine, will always be beyond my imagination’s reach so long as I am mortal and as images in the mind can arise only from mortal things. But a part of that whole fact—call it, if you will, an infinitesmal part of the infinite fact—a part of it is not beyond my reach, for mortal things do render me an image of Nota this. A Manhood taken into God may be a “Man- . . hood” word of little meaning to my reason, and of God but a less m J spirit; hut a Man taken into “Man,” God—this is not a word to me but a thing; can be a . . ,, . knowledge m J reason can arise to scan this thing, my and a spirit can spring to be embraced by it. With- power on A A 0 J the soul, in that vast unfeatured glory which breathes up like a luminous cloud before my wistful eyes when they tell me of a Manhood now with God and made one with God, within that glory I see One who is glorious standing there, and the form of Him is like a son of man, but of all sons of men it is like Jesus only, and is in all things like to Him. What there is else of Him there, what the real Reality is which reaches back into the infinite and invisible and pre- THE MAN ATONING MAN 221 sents to a mortal’s gaze, as Jehovah once to Moses, one facet, as it were, of Divinity, the face of Christ Jesus the Man—what the whole Christ is who is more than Jesus, I aspire, but cannot attain, to know. But this face of Jesus Christ, these lineaments of a Man, this I do attain to know. This of the Word of Life we have seen with our eyes, we have looked upon, and our hands have handled once in time through our brethren who knew Him in the flesh. This I have determined with myself to know, because it is knowable of such as I. This my knowl¬ edge I hold fast and will not let it go. No one shall take out of my hand, as one takes from a child’s hand something which concerns him not, this instrument of truth, my vision of Jesus of Nazareth, a Man who lived and died and lives for evermore, and who said on the morrow of His death to them that knew Him on its yesterday, “Behold that it is I myself.” I hold fast then the Vision of the Man Jesus seen in the heart of the “excellent glory” of the Son of God. Yet this Vision, if it is allowed me by my fellows without breach of holy sym- faith in pathies, can it suffice us as a faith ? Man sum - 6 This Human One, viewed as it were in re- cient for lief upon the field of a Divine Reality, can He, my brethren ask, be a saviour of the world; “Can He by Himself, apart from the ‘excellent glory,’ re¬ deem Israel from all his sins ? He can indeed reveal to us the Father by His words and works in the mor- THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS 222 tal existence; He can inform and stimulate our carnal natures by the example of a life tempted but temptation-proof; He can by some mystic action, of which the Cross and Passion was the instrument, achieve our pardon for the sins which lay to our charge and so make a new beginning of right living possible for us. But that we may persevere in right living, nay, even that we may begin, there needs that a power from heaven should both prevent and follow us. The Spirit must be sent. But He proceedeth from the Father and the Son; He cannot proceed from the Man within the Son. You will not bid us think of Jesus, as do certain who hold the Unity of the Divine Being but refuse the Trinity, as one among earth’s saints though the very King of saints, one among heroes of the faith, though a Hero un¬ approached. A saint may by his holy example bet¬ ter his brother man; he cannot deliver his brother or make atonement for him: a hero may fire his comrades by his living virtue, or when dead by the memory of it; he cannot champion them against the mystic enemy of their soul. How then can the Christ atone and save us as He is only Jesus Christ the Man ?” But I have answered this awhile ago. It is if the ° Human Jesus the slain and glorified, finite and hu- infinite S man once > human still but now is also infinite in His humanity. He who before the world began was the Logos or Wisdom is now, even in His Human Person, that which the Wisdom THE MAN ATONING MAN 223 of God is; He reacheth from the one end nnto the other, strongly and also sweetly ordering all things human. In His Manhood He is present to all men everywhere and in all times. This Presence to all is that union of a self with a self by the interchange of forces of their being, which we symbolise by the word “Life.” All men live nnto God, said Jesus or an evangelist for Him: all men now can live unto J esus, for in all places and times He is there to effect with them the vital intercourse, and whoso will apprehend that by which also He is apprehended, can be through that mutual touch born into life. Things beyond sense can be thought of Theonly only by help of figures drawn from things of ^ rd fol \ sense, and this transcendent energy of life I is “Teiep- have imaged to myself by the highest mode athy ' of vital interaction which man has discerned and found a name for. It is doubtless a word of some¬ what low quality, new and of uncertain status in science and literature, and in religion of no position at all; but there is as yet no other. We have to name this as we can, and so we call it Telepathy, Experi¬ ence of the Ear. The word is not only unworthy of the high matter because it lacks high associations; it is also inadequate in logic, failing to touch closely enough the fact, which is not described truly by “Ex¬ perience of the Ear.” Earness or nearness is not of the essence. It is not the distance between the two factors in the action, telepathiser and telepa- thised, that gives the experience its character; what THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS 224 constitutes telepathy is the interaction of the factors across a void. Whether the void between them is measured by leagues or inches, by a segment of the globe or the interval of two sitters on a bench, the passage of force from mind to mind is at present an equal mystery, though the one occurrence is famil¬ iar and the other rare. Accepting then the name with its inadequacies, I use it for lack of an apter to interpret the basal fact in man’s spiritual fate. Man has his life, his life unto God which is his real life, by submitting to the action on him of this law of existence which, in its highest activity on the mortal plane that we are able to verify, we have called telepathy. By telepathy, I mean the same fact on the level of human existence as the fact we name “vitality” on the lowest level of organic existence. The souf lives by the same law as the mollusc, interchange with a world which environs it. The mollusc is a germ floating in a liquid world, the soul is a germ in the creative encompassment of the final Reality. What makes the difference between the lowest and the highest creature is the different measure in breadth and depth and height of the environment with which the creature is able to have relations of self-interchange. Man is capable of a relation to the Whole, he lives, we say, unto God. It is the Christ who enables this relationship, by causing him to attempt and attain a union of his being with the Being of God. He causes this by telepathic action THE MAN ATONING MAN 225 of His human personality. Having in that person¬ ality during the mortal period attained a perfect life unto the Father, He conveys that vital con- Christ dition to the soul of a man, by the same saves us by the teie- functioning of His nature as that by which pa thic thought or purpose is conveyed from one ^atkmof man’s mind and will to those of another, life unto There is in this case not a bare thought- transference but a faith-transference; but faith is only thought and will exercised upon the supreme interest of a soul; the nature of the thing transferred is different, the mode of the transference is the same. Jesus then by His sacri¬ fice of self in the temporal career lived unto God; by the perpetual sacrifice of self maintained “in heav¬ enly places.” He lives now and ever unto God; that activity of His Being, wherever its vibration falls on the being of a man who can respond to it, repeats itself in the man; the man offers to God the like sacrifice of self in his thinkings and purposings as Jesus offered and offers still. In making it he has life. His sins are put away, his separation becomes union, atonement has happened to him, he is re¬ deemed. It is the Man Jesus Christ who has redeemed him; He has released him by His power as Man. But this makes all things new for him who believes it, as it does for this one solitary seeker after the truth of Christ. I cannot patch the old garment of 226 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS my Christian confession with this new truth. Every thread of it must be woven again on the pattern set me by this Vision of the Glorified Manhood, flub™* which not I have overtaken by my pursuit, here dealt b u t which has overtaken me the pursuer, the terms The new garment is for the covering only of its con- 0 £ m gtugie se ]f • it will be a confession of fession. J ° 7 faith uttered to make my own faith better by a better confessing of it, not to alter a brother’s faith or even his confession. Yet somewhere even this may happen to a brother. Nay, it will. But indeed there can be no talk of altering faith, however it be with confession. Faith is my com¬ munion with Christ in God, my life unto the Eternal brought to me by His Son, my Lord. No new dis¬ covery of human fact, such as this telepathy, can affect the law of that communion, it can but pre¬ scribe some revision of the words that interpret it between a man and his fellow; my soul can ascend to God by no other wing of flight than hitherto. The divine word of faith is re-written never, though ever to be re-read by every soul in its turn. That is what has to be done by my soul hence¬ forward; I must read again in a light new-fallen on them the words of eternal life. A quest ends for me, a quest begins. And what a vast of country it will call on me to range! Not one article of our creed but I must halt before it and ask why I, who believe what I do believe of THE MAN ATONING MAN 227 the Man Christ Jesus, accept this word of ancient men, which tells of what He did and suffered and now does. Not a practice or an institution of the Church but I must examine its origin and find whether that origin lies in the Person of this Jesus as He appeared to His Church after His Eesurrec- tion, saying, “It is I Myself.” That is not a quest to be entered on in haste, still less to be followed up with the scant remaining energy of the impulse which has brought me thus far. I will rein in and rest, and prepare with forethought and patience the long and, it may be, not unperilous adventure. ‘H - * & ■3fr •X’ Ah, no. I cannot stop just where I stand. The new scope will seem to myself unreal, a delusive mirage not a prospect of a promised land, unless from the height I have been led to I cast my eye north or south, east or west over the land which I hope is given me, and distinguish yonder or yonder some feature of the new great landscape and the vista up which I must presently steer my course to it, with this secret of mine and its method for a pilot. Yes, before I leave this vantage let me just seize one prospect or another of the land whither I trust to go in to possess it. CHAPTER XIX / A SINGLE BELIEVER’S CREED “But, John,” said my mother when I had read this last section, “before you go on to that look up the vistas of Church questions there is a thing I much wish you would do. I want you to give us a short summary of all you have been saying. You know, when I read the daily papers (now, don’t look offended!) I am so glad of their plan of putting all the war-news short and clear in a quarter column. Then I know how things are going, and I do not have to pick it out for myself from the confusing telegrams. Couldn’t you give us a summary like that, to bring all these many chapters into one little picture where we can take it in at one look? I feel, John, I have been understanding you; but I expect there are plenty of slow thinkers like myself who would be glad if you did this—when you make a book of this.” I reflected, and saw she was right. I said, “Your advice is most good. It has much better authority than the practice of the Press—the practice of the Church. She made a summary of her teachings in a short creed, for just the reason you name, to get 228 A SINGLE BELIEVER’S CREED 229 the whole Gospel under the eye in one picture. Yes, that is what I must do—try to bring my musings on the mystery of how Christ saves the world into the frame of a brief Confession of Faith—my faith, my own personal understanding of divine-human fact, so far as it is not expressed for me already in the language of the common creed of all churchmen.” I have tried, and this is my Confession. I believe with mind and heart and soul that Jesus Christ was and is the Life, and all that is within me shall praise that holy Name. And I believe, with my frail and humble under¬ standing, that He became the life of men in this wise:— That He was the Saviour of the world by making atonement for the sins of men, not in His Passion and death only, but in all the days of His flesh. I believe that He wrought this atonement first by the attainment in Himself of a perfect life unto God through the entire surrender of His being to the Father’s will. That this surrender was consummated by the death on the Cross. And I believe that in the Rising on the third day the God that answereth by fire took part in the sacrifice of the Christ, and made it to be the Mutual Sacrifice which maketh life. 230 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS That hereby it is known assuredly that to lose life for Christ’s sake is to find life, as He found it; and this is the “Power of the Resurrection” which brought life and immortality to light. And this I believe to be the Secret of the World, of that which now is and that which is to come, so far as man can read it yet. And I believe that having attained this perfect life unto God, He communicated it to men through the action of a law of Mature which is also a law of Spirit—the law of faith-transference; which I would rename faith-conference, because in this transfer of the mind of one to other both giver and receiver must act by a self-giving which is mutual of the two. I believe that in the earthly ministry and all the time on earth Jesus of Hazareth conveyed to other men, by this action on them of His person, the life which He had unto the Father. Through an inter¬ change between His soul and theirs they came to have “the mind which was also in Christ Jesus,” and they lived as He unto God. But to give life to the spirit of a man is to make him whole in spirit, and this is to take away his sin, for sin is death. This is, in my frail understanding, the truth of the Atonement—-as Jesus wrought it being yet in the flesh. A SINGLE BELIEVER’S CREED 231 And I believe that He who rose from the dead on the third day was none other than Jesus, whom men had crucified and buried. I believe His word, “Behold that it is I Myself,” and that it was the same Man, Jesus of Nazareth who had walked in Galilee and been slain at J erusalem. I believe that this Man was also God (by what wonder of Being I know not nor can any man; God knoweth); but this of Godhead in Him I seem myself to know, that this Man had through death become Infinite both to know and to do, for that to all men everywhere and always He has become a power to give them the life unto God through life unto Himself. Eor so gave He life after His Passion to Peter and the brethren to whom He showed Himself, and so to Paul and others who knew Him not after the flesh, and so to all souls in all time since who because of their word turned to Him. And I believe He gives this life to men by the same law natural and spiritual as when He taught in Galilee or Jerusalem; the mind that was and is in Christ Jesus towards the Father, that mind can also come to be in whoso of us shall give his thought and will to receive the thought and will of Jesus who gives of them to us. This is to my mortal apprehension the truth of the Atonement as Jesus works it now by the glorified Manhood. This is that which may be known to man 232 THE SURVIVAL OF JESUS of the eternal Sacrifice of the Lamb, and the per¬ petual Intercession. In His Manhood Jesus eternally liveth unto God, and because He lives we live also. And I believe in the Holy Ghost, whose office on earth is to bring men into the bond of life be¬ tween Jesus and their souls. And in the Holy Catholic Church, which is Holy and is Catholic according to the measure of the life unto Christ which the Spirit works in its mem¬ bers, each by each and all in one. And I believe that the pillar and ground of the Catholic Church is the life unto J esus Christ, where¬ by the Church has communion with Him and in Him with her members; and hereby we know if a belief or practice he Catholic truth, by the life it works in Church and members. This is my confession of the faith of Christ as my weak understanding can as yet attain to frame it. Wherein may my brethren’s faith amend or else confirm my own; and may the Holy Spirit of counsel and of strength send to them and me the light in which we shall see light, out of the well of life which is with Christ Jesus our Lord. BOOK TWO THE FORECAST OF A THEOLOGY CHAPTER XX THE PEIEST Feom the retrospect back again to the prospect. “By their fruits shall ye know them” was- said of prophets. It is true and even truer of their prophecy, and only less effectively true of that which is not but only may come to be a prophecy, salvation a man’s thought before he forthtells it. My by life — ia thought shall not be told forth beyond my or in own door until I foresee some fruit of it. p