"KgivithtffBioki: ¦_ :_
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DIVINITY SCHOOL
TROWBRIDGE LIBRARY

The Rev. OscG^OFMaurer, D. D.
Pa-f^r
First Church, New Haven
1909 - 1943

JESUS IN THE
EXPERIENCE OF MEN

JESUS IN THE
EXPERIENCE OF MEN

T. R. GLOVER « * .
Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge,
and Public Orator in the University.
Author of "The Jesus of History"

ASSOCIATION PRESS
New York: 347 Madison Avenue

Copyright, 1921, by
T. R. Glover

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

INTRODUCTION
One of the parables of Jesus turns on the ferment of
leaven in a mass of meal — a vivid forecast of his own
effect on the minds of men. He found a world full of
established ideas, heirlooms of a great and progressive
past, and the immediate effect of his coming was a
struggle between inheritance and experience. "It was
said to them of old time; but I say unto you." The
minds of most of us are like palimpsests written over and
over again; here the latest notion stands out in the new
est script, but between the letters are to be found traces
of ideas much older, obliterated but legible; there the
old is almost untouched, but the closer observer finds hints
of a "later hand." Every great thinker sets men re
writing these palimpsests, and it is long before it is com
pletely achieved; and often by that time a new story is
being superimposed on the corrected page. Jesus had
the same material to work upon as every great teacher,
and his work was done in the same way, on the same
terms, and with the same result in the clash of old and
new. He has reacted on mankind, as we all know; he has
transformed their ideas, blotted out old preconceptions
and convictions, and through experience brought men to
a new set of principles ; 'but the process has been long and
slow. It is not j.s if men had really known at first what he
meant and what his principles involved or, indeed, guessed
how much his personality was to signify. It is easy to
talk of his disciples taking the Christian message to the
world; but when we begin to consider what this meant,

vi INTRODUCTION
the task which they undertook is progressively realized to
be of the hardest. A man has an entirely new experience,
and he wishes to tell other men of it, but in what lan
guage? If he uses their language, it is inadequate for
the new light and joy he has found; if he uses his own,
recreated by the experience, it will be unintelligible.
The dilemma is real but not final. One mind goes out to
meet another ; the listener can make nothing of the mes
sage, but he sees that there is something to be told;
the bearing, the earnestness, the character of the mes
senger compel attention, and gradually the story is
shared. But it is changed in being communicated. A
poet has an inspiration; but if he is a great poet and
writes great poetry, the eventual poem may be very
different from the initial inspiration, even when it is
full of it and expresses it — "like, but oh! how differ
ent!" The early Christian, in telling his story to the
world, had to translate it; and translation, as all bred on
Greek verse composition know, is a discipline in under
standing; it means long and hard wrestling with the
original, till it yields its real meaning. When the early
Christian began to translate the story of Jesus into
Greek (to say nothing of Latin, Syriac, or Armenian),
he found out the gaps in his knowledge of the Greek
vernacular and in his knowledge of Jesus; and by the
time he had got his message into the new speech, his ex
perience of Jesus was a larger one, and he had to tell of a
greater Christ than he had expected. The leaven had
done more than it seemed to be doing.
In one region and another of experience humanity has
experimented with Jesus, constantly with new and un
expected results ; it has explored him with anxiety ; it has
enjoyed him; and by exploring and enjoying him it has
found more and more in him, and it has grown in the
process.

INTRODUCTION vii
Our task in this volume is primarily historical. We
have to watch the Christian apostle and the Christian
community brought face to face with new issues, in
tellectual, spiritual, and social, and doing their best to
adjust old and new, often with a belief in the perma
nence of the old which experience does not sustain, fre
quently with a good deal of fear which proves not war
ranted. The ancient world had had a long religious
experience; and if some of its standard ideas were as
yet insufficiently examined, some of its gains were real
and permanent. The Christian Gospel had to be re
examined in connection with them all.
The chief questions in religion for that ancient world
were these: — Is God many or one? Is he just?
Can man have peace with God and be sure of it? Is
man's own personality secure, and for how long? We
shall in turn have to discuss these questions and the
older answers to them; to review the belief in spirits,
that heirloom from animistic times, the philosophic
foundation of polytheism; the problem of justice which
haunts Greek thinkers from Theognis to Plato and be
yond, and is the inspiring motive of Jewish apocalyptic;
the conception of religion as safety, and of sacrifice as
the supreme mode of religion, the assurance of God's
acceptance. As all these ideas had been perpetually
readjusted to growing experience of the nature of
morality, a fuller discussion of sin and its forgiveness
will properly follow, and with it a survey of the central
question of the nature of God, and then of the problem
of personal immortality, which occupied antiquity more
and more, and at every stage depended on the conception
of God dominant in the day. Lastly in this connection
we must consider the attempt made, upon the back
ground of these beliefs and of others, to explain the
place of Christ in the universe which he was remodeling.

viii INTRODUCTION
The second part of the book will deal more directly
with the Christian society. There we shall have to re
view the efforts of the Church as it wrestles with its
own problems of existence and effectiveness, as an insti
tution. The personal relations which its members
generally maintained with their Founder have been at
every period decisive for the character of the Church at
large; and we must make some endeavor to determine
these relations, particularly when and where they are
most intense and most controlling.
Finally, there are the broader effects of the ideas of
Jesus upon human progress and the human spirit at
large — sometimes the result of conscious and deliberate
application of his principles to the affairs of men, per
haps as often the unconscious and unrecognized but
none the less real outcome of men's affection for him.
Of course, as Aristotle said of his own Ethics, all this
will be attempted "in outline and not in detail." A
further difficulty will be that in all such study we have
to isolate and to analyze ideas which were operative to
gether and acted and reacted on one another; but that
also is inevitable unless the reader will tolerate some
repetition among the chapters. Finally, writer and
reader here will have different roles; the writer is to be
the historian merely ; it is for the reader to pass upon the
evidence submitted and to be the theologian. In any
case the work, if properly done by both writer and
reader, should result in a new sense of the significance
of Jesus in the experience of men.

CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
Introduction  v
I. The War with the Daemons  1
II. The Problem of Divine Justice  18
III. Saviours and Salvation  35
IV. The Lamb of God  52
V. The Forgiveness of Sin  71
VI. The Revelation of God  92
VII. Immortality  113
VIII. Alpha and Omega  132
IX. The Church Compromising  147
X. The Lordship of Jesus  169
XI. The Friendship of Jesus  182
XII. The Church Triumphant  196
XIII. The Humanizing of Life  211
XIV. The Reconciliation of Freedom and Re
ligion  231

ix

CHAPTER I
THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS

A chance phrase will sometimes open a man's mind to
us and show us a series of thoughts and ideas, of precon
ceptions and presuppositions, which surprise us. We
have known him, intimately, too ; and behind all lay this !
It is with some such feeling that we find a whole world
of strange background to the familiar thinking of St.
Paul. He speaks of the wisdom of God, and then he
adds, "which none of the princes of this world knew;
for, had they known it, they would not have crucified
the, Lord of Glory" (I Cor. 2:8). It was not of Pontius
Pilate and Herod that Paul was speaking, but of beings
far more awful and far more powerful — thrones, domin
ions, principalities and powers, as he calls them else
where, "the world-rulers of this darkness," and at their
head is "the prince of the power of the air."1
There had grown up in Jewish thought a great
scheme of things which embodied a spirit world at war
with God. Satan appears in the Old Testament, first of
all as an accuser, and then as a maker of mischief. In
the period between the main body of the Old Testament
and the beginnings of the New, he had gained a greater
prominence in men's thoughts and was now lord of the
angels that fell, the great enemy of God,* "the Black

'See II Cor. 4:4; Eph. 3:2; Eph. 6:12; Col. 2:30; Gal. 4:3, 9. For princi
palities and powers and thrones, cf. II Enoch (Secrets) 20:1.
2 Cf. Testament of Dan 5, "For I read in a book of Enoch the just, that
the ruler of them is Satan." Cf. II Enoch (Secrets) 18:3. In I Enoch
65:6, the Satans appear in the plural.

2 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
One'". God, with his purposes, and the forces that stand
with him, is confronted by powers of evil, not scattered
and desultory, but organized, ruled, and guided, well
drilled, well led, and not unaware of God's designs.
Again and again, through traitors in God's Kingdom,
they got wind of the plans of God* and anticipated them,
defeated them where they could, and fought a war of
cunning and skill against God.°
The Jews did not stand alone in this conception of the
spirit world. For the primitive peoples of today and for
some who are not so primitive, the whole universe is full
of daemon powers, more real than we can imagine. In an
Indian temple I have seen women undergoing the process
of having devils driven out of them. I have seen men
of education bowing in these temples to avert the anger
of such spirits. To the stranger from the West, with
his modern science, they are nothing. To the ancient
world they were more real than the men and women in
the streets. All the daemons, devils, imps, and bogeys of
popular belief, and all the gods of all the cults and all the
religions were being reduced to one system; all were
necessary in an orderly Cosmos. The later Greek
philosophers explained through daemons the origin of
evil, all the mystery and all the trouble of the world ; and
also the otherwise inexplicable gulf between the ultimate
but unknowable One God and man. Gods lived beyond
the atmosphere; daemons in the air; man on earth. So
there was this daemon world proven; proven by all sick
ness and sin ; proven by long belief, by the old religions ;
proven by the agreement of all mankind; proven by the
assent of the best and most catholic of philosophic

a Barnabas 4:11.
4 Cf . Enoch 16:3; not all the mysteries were known to the Watchers
who fell.
B Cf . H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions, p. 121;
St. Paul and the Last Things, pp. 324, 3?5; Clemen, Primitive Christianity
and Non-Jewish Sources, pp. 83, 110.

THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 3
thinkers. The Jew and the Christian were monotheists,
but they too believed in the existence of daemons; they
were face to face with this awful reality of the daemon
world at war with God. Paul, it is quite clear, shared
that belief, though he did not give to it the importance
that other men gave.
Into that war, however, according to Paul, came a new
force — the son of God, the Lord of Glory.8 He battled
with the powers of evil, and the battle went strangely,
and they trapped him. Pilate and Herod were mere
tools in the hands of these daemon powers, and they cap
tured the Son of God. They crucified the Lord of Gloryi
and inflicted on God the most awful disaster that could
be conceived. Then it turned out, says Paul, that, so
far from defeating God's purposes, with all their skill
and all their cunning, they had only played into the
hands of God. For the defeat of Christ on the cross led
to the Resurrection, to the triumph of God over the
daemon powers, to captor made captive, death conquered,
mankind set free; and all the glorious promises of
spiritual liberty and of peace with God which the Chris
tian world knows, and in which it rejoices.
In Paradise Lost we have this story in its most glori
ous form, but few of us accept it as history. All this
dim world has passed from our minds ; this tale of war in
the spirit sphere is for us the merest mythology — "as
much a dream as Milton's hierarchies," wrote John Keats.'
Yet for St. Paul's contemporaries the permanence of the
daemons was better assured than that of the Lord of
Glory; their part and place in the world was proved and
accepted, his was a doubtful Jewish assertion.'

6 The Lord of Glory is a name of God in I Enoch.
7 Keats, Letter to Reynolds, August 25, 1819.
8 Celsus, about a.d. 178, ridiculed this war of Satan with God; it was
not "holy to suggest that the greatest God had a rival; it was all a mis
understanding (quite in the Christian style) of Heraclitus' doctrine of
strife. Celsus, however, accepted belief in daemons as natural and right.

4 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
Two problems here confront the historian. He has to
explain how this phantasmagoria disappeared, and why,
if this legend of war was the real Christian faith, or
some vital part of it, the Lord of Glory has not gone
with the rest of the dramatis personae. The identifica
tion of the Lord of Glory with the carpenter of Nazareth
was surely the keystone of the Christian faith. If the
one is dismissed as a figure in a fairy tale, what signifi
cance is left to the other? If we abandon Paul's
"mythology" or turn it into "symbol," which is a politer
way of doing the same thing, do we not, by this process
of discarding, rob the Christian tradition and the
Christian faith of its distinctive note and its real value?
If the affirmation of the writer to the Hebrews is to
stand, "Jesus Christ, yesterday and today the same, and
forever"; if the Church is to maintain that he has any
permanence; we shall have to show what has been his
real place in human experience, and to prove that the
teaching of the Church about its Master rests not on
abstract theory or mythology, but has foundations in
what men have actually experienced of him. We shall
have to treat such evidence as the Christian generations
give us, exactly as we do all historical evidence — with
the same sympathy, with the same caution, applying the
same canons of judgment, using the same habits of
doubt, looking in the same spirit of truthfulness for
alternative explanations, careful always to limit our
statements severely by our real knowledge.
The modern psychologist has, we may say, settled a
great many questions suggested by the demonology of
the past. He treats visions and voices, dual personality,
conversion, and so forth, in a way foreign altogether to
Paul's contemporaries, as to modern Roman Catholic, to
Hindu and animist; and his conclusions so far appeal to
the best trained minds as more satisfactory than the

THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 5
ancient explanations. Will he go further and dispose of
our religious experience as he has done of the long-
established belief in daemons, in visions and theophanies ?
After all, the worst he can really do is to drive us to a
closer study of fact, and our best friends can do us no
better service. If he has disposed of the daemons and
demigods, by whom the ancient thinker used to explain
the existence of evil in the world, he has achieved a great
stroke for mankind, it is true, in ridding men of the
most paralyzing terrors it has known ; but he has neither
eliminated evil from the world we know, nor explained
its presence there. A great dissension in Nature re
mains, however we express it or explain it. Carlyle used
to worry over Emerson's inability to see the hand of the
devil in human life. We know Carlyle's vocabulary and
we interpret it; is not (in passing) the same procedure
fair in reading the New Testament and the Christian
Fathers? What lies behind their vocabulary? What
facts of experience do their psychology and their demon
ology indicate? An explanation implies an experience.
Pain is no less uncomfortable physically if we refuse the
view that a daemon causes it, though, of course, a
bacillus may perhaps be more easily treated. There re
mains just as much reality as before about the historical
Jesus, and about the living and present Christ, whether
we accept or reject the theories which the Church has
spun on the subject ; and the same applies to the theories
of the Church's critics. Let us get to history.
II
After quoting the evidence of St. Paul for the wide
spread belief in daemons, it may seem a contradiction to
suggest that in the New Testament the daemons are
already beginning to recede from the first line of

6 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
interest; yet it is true. The writers of the Gospels refer
all sorts of diseases to daemon-possession, as their con
temporaries did. They stood with their neighbors in
psychology, as was natural, and they shared their opin
ions in medicine. But while they keep the old language
and the old beliefs, they are in possession of a principle
which makes these of less consequence. For them the
daemons and gods of polytheism are no longer very
interesting. This is doubly clear. Paul puts it quite
explicitly that they are defeated and are "coming to
naught"; and the chief interest of the early Christian
was manifestly in Jesus. The pagan gods were quickly
disposed of; they were the angels that fell — mere
daemons like the rest. But it was a longer time before
the daemons, and their milder but legitimate descend
ants, the fairies, were definitely expelled for ever from
the sphere of existence; but it was achieved, and by the
New Testament principle of concentrating emphasis on
Jesus Christ.
Thus Tatian, in the second century, proclaims with joy
that "instead of daemons that deceive we have learnt
one Master who deceiveth not." A modern Japanese,
Uchimura, struck the same note; it was joyful news,
"one God and not eight million." Tatian found it an
attraction in Christianity that it is "monarchic" and
"sets man free from ten thousand tyrants." Modern
scholars are only beginning to realize the burden laid on
the human mind by astrology and kindred impostures
that came from the East, and with a jargon of phil
osophy and religion imposed themselves on the Roman
world. Tatian knew it well enough and renounced the
Greeks and their philosophy.' Philosophy had, in fact,
by its surrender to polytheism and popular belief in
daemons, strengthened their hold on men. The Gospel

0 See Tatian, cc. 9, 16, 17.

THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 7
did not in so many words deny their existence, but first
degraded them and broke their hold, and at last anni
hilated them. By so doing it took terror out of men'3
souls, it made obscene and cruel rites needless, and
greatly purified and sweetened life.
It is, however, important to note that there was a
struggle. The Gospel could be made infinitely more
palatable to many minds by bringing it into line with
other religions, by blending with it religious and philo
sophical principles on which they rested, but which were
vitally opposed to Christian history and Christian ideals.
Such combinations appeared to clear up real philosoph
ical difficulties and left men in a congenial atmosphere of
magic and daemonic agencies. It does an historian's
heart good to see the swinging blows with which
Ignatius hammers a contemporary theory (c. A. D. 110)
that made Jesus into a "daemon without a body." It is
worth remembering that the Church always held to the
real humanity of Christ; it was left for the heresies to
spin endless genealogies of figments, metaphors, essences,
and daemons. To some minds fancy always seems more
able than truth to fire the imagination. Today it is hard
for the Western thinker to make anything at all of the
fragments of Gnostic theology and demonology that have
come down to us, or to understand how anybody could
ever have been interested in them. This is in itself an
indication of what the absorbing interest in Jesus has
done; and when one grasps that it stands between us
and systems like the many forms of modern Hinduism
and theosophy, one realizes anew the value of the his
torical Jesus.
At times it might seem as if the early Christian, like
converts from heathenism today, really used the Gospel
as a sort of super-magic. He employed "the Name that
is above every name" to expel devils; and from an ex-

8 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
perience of my own in India I can understand why he
did.10 But that was by the way. What made that name
of value was the Man who bore it, and the supreme inter
est of his character and story, his cross and resurrection,
and yet more his teaching upon God and the intimate
relation with God which was at last the only way of ex
plaining him. If Jesus embodied God, if "God was in
Christ reconciling the world unto himself," if God was
essentially like Jesus, then obviously, however real they
might be, the daemons were irrelevant. As the daemon-
world was at best a theory to explain phenomena possibly
susceptible of other explanations, when Jesus made it
irrelevant it ceased to be of interest and it died. This
is shortening the story but not changing its meaning.
If throughout the Middle Ages and even after the Refor
mation men believed in daemons and witches, as they
did, the liberation of the human mind, which, as we
shall see in a later chapter, belongs to the work of Christ,
steadily drove the superstition into the background
where it gradually died. Jesus is allied with the powers
of the mind, and his Gospel naturally militates against
"imaginations and every high thing that thrusts itself
up," as Paul said. Ill
That Jesus was historical differentiates him at once
from the daemon "Rulers of the World" and their hosts.
They were creatures of the fancy; and he was, in our
ordinary sense of the word, real. They depended on a
theory or a series of theories, and their dispositions and
natures, when they had any, were mere matters of legend
and fairy tale; but there was nothing authoritative,

10 The most splendid illustration of this is the "Breastplate of Patrick,"
which in Mrs. Alexander's verse is in the English Hymnal. The original
and a prose translation are in Whitley Stokes's Tripartite Life of St. Pat
rick, Vol. I, p. 49.

THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 9
nothing final, about them. Indeed there was nothing to
begin on, such as a real person offers. A character guar
anteed by history is something definite to work upon,
however multiple it may be. It is possible to spend one
self with profit in the study of a real man; but if a
daemon or a fairy has any lineaments at all, they are
borrowed; and the peacock's feathers are more interest
ing on the peacock than on the jackdaw, especially when
the jackdaw itself is a fable.
It was, as we have seen, an immense gain that Jesus
was objective, that one could say of him, "This befel him
and that definitely did not." The value of this will be
brought out by even a very short investigation of
Plutarch's method of handling legend or a little talk
with a Hindu defending Hinduism. On the one side
there is nothing but a series of dissolving views; with
Jesus you are on the rock at once and have positive
knowledge. To the troubled in heart it was intense
relief to turn to a real figure with a real experience and
no "perhaps" underlying all. But he is more than his
torically real ; he is real in a deeper sense.
The first three gospels give records of a peculiar inti
macy about his life, his character, his mind and person
ality. They yield a surprising amount of detail, vivid,
various, and true. He can be known well, for while his
sayings are often perplexing and stimulating, as he
meant them to be, his meaning, his general drift, his
fundamental ideas are extraordinarily clear. He has a
reality, an intensity, that makes other men look beg
garly in their outfit, starved in nature and parochial.
Here is a man of genius going quite beyond everyone
else we know of that kind; a man of wide range in ex
perience, of intuition, of acumen and instincf. He knows
what his experience means and he does not miss it. He
sees and feels things with an intensity that we do not

10 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
reach. It is of this type that our greatest teachers are
in every sphere. The tourist, for instance, sees a water
fall, a rock so many feet high with water coming over;
he looks at it, and then takes a newspaper from his
pocket till it is time to go home. Wordsworth sees more
and realizes he is face to face with a great storehouse
of experience: "The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion."
The sound of it rang in his ears; the sight of it stayed
with him, the color, the gleam, the beauty ; he knew they
would, and was (so to speak) too busy to waste any
thing in momentary enjoyment. Jesus, we can guess,
felt Nature — experienced Nature — in a way very similar.
Men miss a great deal of their experience; but he is
clearer-headed than we are. He sees things, grasps
things and realizes them. To take a crucial case, already
referred to, he realized pain. When men drew the great
spiritual teachers of that day, they left out any sugges
tion of their being amenable to pain when they could,
and made them impassive. Jesus' followers drew him on
the cross. Men have always felt, as they got into touch
with Jesus, that here is a man who knows where the
problems hurt. Why does the widow lose her son? He
had lived with a widow and her children, and worked for
her day in and day out, and from her he learnt a tender
ness for all women and all widows. What is the mean
ing of that pain? Or the pain of a prodigal son? That,
too, he has drawn in his parables. He felt it and he
knew it. The problem bore on him and burdened him
and took him to the cross. What, again, is the meaning
of the devilish hardness of the human heart? What in
deed? Four years of war have revealed ugly streaks in
us ; we fancied they were not there ; but he knew. Here,

THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 11
then, was a man who had been bruised and agonized by the
problems that trouble us. He had to wrestle with these
things. He would have no anodyne. He drank the cup
without the anesthetic. He went through it all till he
knew the points that trouble men and women. He knew
exactly where the difficulty comes; and he has found
peace. Matthew Arnold wrote a good deal of theology
which is obsolete, but there are certain things which he
wrote which rise higher than much modern criticism.
"Jesus Christ," he said, "was above his reporters"; but
he said a greater thing still. "Jesus bases himself
always on experience, and never on theory"; and that is
a great truth.
Genius differs from our common endowment perhaps
most in this that it seizes the fact with meaning; and,
that once achieved, all the rest fall into lucidity. For
Jesus experience was nof: sheer sickening pain, for he
understood what to do with it. He penetrated farther
into it than we do. This again is the mark of the genius,
of the poet. Jesus had a hold of the centrality of God
in experience in a way that still surprises us. Call it
genius, insight, intuition — or use the speech of the
Church and say Word, Essence, Homoousios — the fact
we are all trying to express is the intense hold that
Jesus has of the Real ; he knows, where others are guess
ing, and guessing badly.1'
Our age is not the first to discover the value to ordi
nary people of a great man. The names of Socrates and
Zeno haunt the discourses of that day. They and not
the daemons were the moral examples, a significant fact.
"Place before yourself what Socrates or Zeno would have
done in such circumstances," said Epictetus.12 "Though
you are not yet a Socrates, you ought to live as one who

"See p. 110.
"Manual, 33.

12 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
wishes to be a Socrates."18 "Go away to Socrates and see
him . . . and think what a victory he felt he won over
himself."14 Others gave similar advice; "Do everything
as if Epictetus saw."10 And among Romans Cato and
Laelius were recommended. "We ought to choose some
good man," writes Seneca, "and always have him before
our eyes that we may live as if he watched us, and do
everything as if he saw."10 So old and so natural is the
use men make of other men who have been victorious in
life; so much more profitable is history than theory.
The great man is felt not to be an accident, or (to
use a biological term) a "sport," but to be a real and
relevant manifestation of what human nature is. What
is possible for one can be possible under conditions for
another; and then the question rises about the condi
tions, a question difficult enough but soluble somehow,
men feel. And man, by nature built to be moral and to
be religious, built to seek for truth, is driven by his
experience of the "great Man" to look more deeply into
human nature and into its relations with the spiritual
environment, with God. In epitome, all real progress
in religion has been achieved by men who would face
the facts and divined which facts to face; by men who
realized that victory in the sphere of mind and char
acter is the best evidence as to ultimate reality; or,
simply, by men who had good fathers and friends and
knew it, and put them definitely above doubtfully moral
gods and daemons, and slowly rethought their ideas
of God and rebuilt their religious systems on the im
pulse of their experience of human goodness." It is not
necessary here, nor possible, to survey through nineteen

18 Manual, 50.
" Discourses, II, 18, 22.
"Seneca, Ep. 25:5.
ȣ*. 11:8.
1T The last clause epitomizes a good deal of the progress in religion
made by Greece before Plato.

THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 13
centuries how men s experience of Jesus has driven them
into fresh thought on God and man. But to realize how
far ahead of religions based on daemon-theories and
old legends Christianity is, some close study in detail
of its records and its contrasts is invaluable.
To recapitulate, before we pass on, the victory of
Jesus has only been slowly won. Tradition, association,
esthetics, sheer conservatism, and terror have all played
their part in retarding it. There must be daemons, men
felt, or all the world would not say so ; what "everybody"
says, must be true — paraphrasing Stoic doctrine of the
consensus of mankind. But experience of Jesus was a
great corrective. He was very difficult to explain; the
reconciliation of what he said with the teaching of priest
and philosopher and gossip was very hard; but in the
end fact conquers. There he was, historical, true, intel
ligent of his experience, a pioneer in fact and an inter
preter; and there he is still. IV
It is difficult to recall an instance of a great person
ality putting a new truth before the world and passing
away from the life of mankind before the new lesson
was learnt to the very end and transcended. The prophets
pass away; the commentators pa3S, and the doctors —
these last two very quickly. The poets stand far better,
for they take us farther into reality; Jesus best of all,
for he reaches the greatest depths in all he feels and
says. We have not yet exhausted what he has to say; at
times it seems as if we had hardly begun to explore it.
In two ways we realize how far ahead he is of us. When
ever the Church returns to him and begins to take him
seriously, there is always a resurrection, evidence of a
new life; and this could not be if his value were spent.

14 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF, MEN
And, further— for the Church does not always leac} the.
intelligence of mankind — when new light reaches the:
Church from without, again and again it proves that
the new science, or the new scholarship, the new politics
or the new psychology, that seemed "dangerous" to the
Gospel of Christ, is not inimical in the least, has nothing
about it that we could think alien to the spirit of the
Jesus of history. Four years of war have taught us
much evil, but they have at least revealed that Jesus'
conception of man was truer than those estimates com
monly framed by politicians, emperors, war offices, and
journalists. No political society has yet attempted to
organize itself on the basis of the belief that Jesus can
be unreservedly right in his view of man. Our economics
and our nationalism make Jesus inevitable; there is no
getting rid of him till we have transcended him. The
war again raised in millions of homes the question that
Jesus settled. The New Testament speaks of him abolish
ing death and bringing life and immortality to light
(II Tim. 1:10); it suggests that the sting of death is
gone, that the tragedy is all resolved in quiet and content
by his cross and his resurrection. The gulf between
such a view and the sorrow we know in every land of
Europe today measures the distance between us and the
disappearance of Jesus.
But if Jesus is still a great correction to our thought
about men, still more is he to our thought about God.
If a man were to make the experiment for a week, never
in reading, in thought or in speech, to let the name of
God pass without trying to put into it the full meaning
that Jesus gives it, the staggering task would bring
home to him how far Jesus is from being superseded,
how far we are from having exhausted the value of his
message about God. Jesus again will remain till we
have worked out the full value and meaning of what

THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 15
he thinks about ourselves in conjunction with God — a
rather different thing from either taken separately. So
far as I understand the times in which we live, religion
is only possible to the modern man along the lines of
Jesus Christ. For the really educated man of today there
are no other religions. There are people who play at
being Buddhists and Hindus; and we may wonder what
the reflective Buddhist and the reflective Hindu think
about them. All sorts of poses are adopted by men and
women, but serious thinkers do not pose; and any man,
who comes to grips with history and philosophy, knows
that Buddha and Muhammad and the thinkers of Hindu
ism are not for us. It is Jesus or nobody, and we are
still far from grasping the whole significance of what
he has to say. God for Jesus, God in Jesus, is an un
explored treasure still; and for us, apart from Jesus,
God is little better than an abstract noun; and to people
who are serious, abstract nouns are of less and less use.
Let us put it this way. If we spoke straight out, we
should say that God could not do better than follow the
example of Jesus. That means that Jesus fulfils our con
ception of God ;" but that is not all, nor is it enough. He
is constantly enlarging our idea of God, revealing great
tracts of God unsuspected by us. God as interpretable
in and through Jesus is unexhausted. Here lies the ex
planation of the new life that the Church always shows,
when it returns to the historical Jesus and takes him seri
ously. It involves his remaining; and his historicity is
once more our foundation.
So far we have been dealing with the part played by
Jesus in shaping and clearing thought. But thought is
tested in life and conduct. There are about us hundreds
of men and women who have found that in the business
of keeping level with life, in the more desperate business

"This point will be taken up in the next chapter.

16 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
of fighting one's character through to something like
decency, Jesus is still a dependable factor. We are not
dealing with propositions in the air ; we are dealing with
Someone, they tell us, to whom we can go and say, "Come
and help me," and he does. If some psychologists will
not quite let us say that, they must concede that we find
help when we bring him in. It is not clear that the psy
chologists are at the end of their discoveries, and their
disciples often quote them too soon and with too dogmatic
a tone; there are still facts about suggestion to be dis
covered and to be weighed ; and when psychology has said
its last about the facts, it is philosophy that has to bring
in the verdict on the facts. In the meantime it is the
experience of countless souls that where we touch Jesus
we do somehow touch the real. Do we not know men and
women who have been remade by Jesus Christ? In our
own lives, too, we know the help that Jesus has been
and is. It is our experience that we can depend upon
him, that we can utilize him ; and our experience is guar
anteed in measure by the similar experience of others.
Even if this form of expression needs correction, and
granting that our experience, even when so confirmed,
needs examination, we have here a strong presumption
of evidence; we are justified in thinking that truth awaits
us in this direction. If we find help in Jesus it seems
reasonable to maintain that Jesus has not passed away,
and to attribute some large part of his effect to his being
a real historical personality, neither a legend nor a dogma,
but a man.
If he has not passed away, he remains the concern of
all who take life seriously. We shall never understand
the last nineteen centuries, if he and his influence are
unfamiliar or unintelligible to us. We shall not have
our full equipment for facing the future if so great a
Force, intelligible, available and unexhausted, is left by

THE WAR WITH THE DAEMONS 17
us on one side. The progress of the Christian bfe is
marked and measured at every stage by increasing de
pendence on Jesus; Christian and non-Christian, we have
to explain this fact in life. We have to understand Jesus
Christ, unless our universe is to be chaos.

CHAPTER II
THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE
All through Christian history we find an emphasis on
the judgment seat of Christ, an inspiration at once of
terror and of hope, but so far at least, an integral part
of the Christian scheme of things. To the historian it
is plain that the picture of this judgment seat, the "great
white Throne," owes features to older story; and certain
reflections at once occur. Has the judgment seat a legiti
mate place in Christian thought, or is it a survival of
pre-Christian tradition and alien? In other words, is it
a matter of inheritance or does it rest on some real ex
perience? And again, if experience has been used to
point to such a conclusion of human history, is this the
sole and necessary inference of the experience, or is an
other alternative possible? Assuming a "last judgment"
of some sort, what relevance or relation can the historical
carpenter of Nazareth have to it? For it is at least a
remarkable thing that when Christians borrowed from
Jews the idea of a Judgment Day, and developed it along
the lines of the Greek philosophic myths, they transferred
the supreme place to Jesus.
To understand the central idea of a Great Assize,
whether Jewish, Platonic, or Christian, it is well to ex
amine the experience which led men to venture such a
hypothesis. It must be borne in mind that it is not so
much folklore as philosophy that underlies the doctrine,
an attempt to justify the ways of God to men. A3 the
18

THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 19
data in the problem are common, we shall take them as
the Christian had them presented to him.

There are two judgment seats in the New Testament —
Pilate's (Matt. 27:19) and Christ's (II Cor. 5:10)— and
whatever uncertainty there be about the judgment seat
of Christ, there is no mystery, no wonder, no perhaps,
about the judgment seat of Pilate; we are touching fact
there. The story is familiar. The priests have got their
man. One of his followers went back on him and sold
him — a thing that has often happened in the East, and
is not unknown in the West. They took him to Pilate
with an accusation and some sort of evidence. Pilate
was no Roman of the old school; he did not hold with all
the ancient traditions of self-rule and principle; but he
was shrewd and clever, and he saw through the situation.
He knew the priests very well ; he had also heard a little
of the man perhaps — one of those tiresome "kings of the
Jews"; but a glance at the man told him at once that
there was nothing of importance this time. There is no
case; but these people are not in a pleasant mood; and
his record is not strong enough to leave him quite inde
pendent. So the question rises : What is to be done with
this poor creature?
It is a festival, at which the tradition is that a prisoner
shall be released; and there is a notable prisoner in his
hands, a man whom they all know. Barabbas, we are
told, had made an insurrection, and in the course of it
there had been murder. The Fourth Gospel says he was
a brigand. In the nineteenth century there were men
in Greece whom the Turks called brigands, but the Greeks
counted them patriots ; the difference was merely in the
point of view. The Greek people loved them and made

20 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
ballads about them, till the name klepht (thief, in old
Greek) became romantic. Barabbas was probably of this
type. He had defied the law. Yes, but foreigners had
made the law. He had given trouble to the Government,
and the persons killed very likely were Roman soldiers.
According to one gospel (Matthew's) Pilate offers the
crowd the choice of Jesus or Barabbas. The others give
another account of how the alternative was presented.
The talk in the crowd must have been ebb and flow,
somehow so. There are no real grounds, says one man,
for Jesus being put to death. No, but we are in such
a position, that if we free Jesus we kill the patriot.
Some people had thought that Jesus might be the Mes
siah, but he is a hopeless failure. There is no reason
why Jesus should not be released on the merits of the
case, and Barabbas in accordance with custom. Jesus or
Barabbas? Well, we cannot give away Barabbas. But,
after all, it is not really we who condemn either Jesus
or Barabbas to death; we would release both. The re
sponsibility rests with the man who has fastened the
alternative upon us, or it is inherent in the situation.
All we have to do is to decide who has served our people
best. One man calls out for Barabbas, and then every
body shouts "Barabbas!" "And what about Jesus?"
There are people at work among the crowd representing
the priests, and the cry goes up: "Crucify him!" The
only chance to get Barabbas is to have Jesus crucified-
So the cry comes with more volume, and Pilate gives
them Barabbas; and that is the end of Jesus called
Messiah.1 Jesus was condemned because he was unpopular. He
had had a chance of popularity and had missed it. He

1 "Pilate," says a clever Irishman, "was the prototype of all English
officials, with his condescending yet contemptuous manner to natives, hi9
tolerant scorn of their beliefs, and his occasional feeble generosity toward
patriots or prophets." Shane Leslie, The End of a Chapter, p. 160.

THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 21
was unpatriotic. "Render unto Caesar," he said, "the
things that are Caesar's." A very clever answer! But
on the straight issue of Rome or Israel he had floundered.
Barabbas had been definitely patriotic. The teaching of
Jesus was unpractical. It was not going to lighten the
burden of Roman oppression. It was very pretty for an
ideal world, for Utopia, as we say; for Plato's Republic,
as they used to say; very beautiful. But we live in a
real world; and Jesus was unpractical. Unpopular, un
patriotic, unpractical, unintelligible — it is a heavy indict
ment, and the periods in history have been few when it
would not carry condemnation with it.
The suffering of the innocent is no strange thing;
what would war be without it? A certain percentage
of miscarriages is always to be expected of justice.
Again and again in history we see a general collapse of
conscience in government or people, under the influence
of fear of some foreign enemy, or for want of the habit
of facing new ideas in politics or economics, or even in
religion. History is full of such horrors. Nor is it only
the past that knows them. II
After all, the condemnation of Jesus raises the com
mon issue of injustice and wrong. It is the crucial case.
So the question rises, Is the thing going to stay there
or is it not? Is the judgment seat of Pilate the last
word? Our instinct, the instinct of all men, is that
what is wrong cannot be left wrong; it must be set right
somehow. Men have felt there must be a court of appeal
that will put it right.
God's ways, of course, are inscrutable. Children die,
and ships are wrecked; the plain laws of Nature work
out in pain and perplexity ; but there is something worse,

22 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
far worse, which has to be explained in God's manage
ment of the universe. The most tragic thing of all is
man's failure to achieve justice. All society is an en
deavor toward justice, from the first dawn of history,
from the earliest appeal to chief or king for an award
between tribesman and tribesman, from the day when
the people called for the first publication of laws, down
through all the codes — codes of Moses, of Manu, of
Justinian — Magna Charta, Habeas Corpus; has not jus
tice been the common life-nerve of every revolution?
Does it not underlie all the great movements? And yet,
after all these centuries of pain and tragedy, man does
not recognize justice; and even where he does, a whiff
of terror or passion, and he tramples underfoot the very
principle on which he lives, for which he and his fathers
have sacrificed so much. Is it not tragic? For does it
not imply that man, with all his long experience, all his
slowly developed but real sensitiveness, cannot trust him
self against passion?
But does not all society, all real life, rest upon the
distinction between right and wrong being fundamental,
and ever more profoundly real? If experience means
anything, is it not the progressive discovery of the nature
of right and wrong? And to confuse them, is it not the
negation of the very idea of cosmos itself, a flat denial
that there is any reality, any principle, in the universe?
If the universe is rational, the distinction between right
and wrong must be clear, definite, reliable at last, however
long the process of discovery; and those who suffered
to make the discovery ought surely to have the benefit
of it. Otherwise human life is the voyage of a derelict,
without chart or helm, and without port.
God's own character is involved ; for if God can manage
no better thing for such a wonderful spirit as Jesus of
Nazareth than to fumble him into the hands of a con-

THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 23
temptible official like Pilate, to be hustled off to the cross
and to perish as miserably as the man who sold him; if
that is the whole story, the very idea of God becomes
intolerable, and unthinkable. Imagine a God who creates
man to feel exquisitely, who gives him an instinct and
a passion for right and for justice, and then puts him
into a position where all that is best in him is so much
more needless and purposeless torture; where, in propor
tion as he is developed on every side of his nature, he is
mocked the more by pain without meaning,* spiritual pain,
the refined suffering that injustice, triumphant and im
becile, inflicts on the spirit that feels and understands.
If that is the action of God, what is he but the most
devilish of practical jokers — a hideous and hateful tor
mentor? Could there be better advice in that case than
that of Job's wife — "Curse God and die"? But a man
would do well to put his children out of God's reach
first. That men do not kill their children and then them
selves as a general rule, is an indication that men will
not think so ill of the universe, that they will not believe
more than momentarily that right and wrong are negli
gible, that justice is not done. Men, with all history's
records of cruelty and injustice, battling on in a world
where actual and ideal are so far apart, believe that
somehow or other God has still a word to say when man
has done his worst.
Then that scene of Pilate and Jesus is not the end of
the story? That was the great question with mankind.
For centuries men had been thinking and dreaming of
another tribunal. From Homer down to Plato men had
wrestled with the problem of justice. How could Zeus
pretend to rule the universe and look on at what was

' Cf. Letter of Keats (on his voyage to Italy and to death) : "Is there
another life? Shall I awake and find all this a dream? There must be,
we cannot be created for this sort of suffering." To Charles Brown,
September 28, 1820.

24 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
done there? So asked Theognis, neither pietist nor phi
losopher, but a good conservative, shocked by the over
turn of the one society in which he believed. And so
asked, sooner or later, all thinking men. The problem,
somewhere or other, in one form and another, underlies
all the tragedies of the great Greek dramatists. If
Agamemnon is murdered, "the doer must suffer"; and
the righteousness of the universe is proved by the slay
ing of Aegiathus and Clytaemnestra and the acquittal of
Orestes. A generation later, the question is put again
by Euripides, more pungently, and with a closer adher
ence to the facts of life. In his Trojan Women, for in
stance, punishment seems to impend upon the guilty, but
all the time we know, and everybody knows, that Helen
goes unpunished and all the misery and shame fall on
the guiltless; and there is frankly no recompense to the
good who suffer for the sins of others, unless perhaps
Hecuba hits the dim clue to it:
"0 stay of Earth, that hast thy seat on earth,
Whoe'er thou art, ill-guessed and hard to know,
Zeus, whether Nature's law, or mind of man,
To thee I pray ; for on a noiseless path
All mortal things by justice thou dost guide.'"
Then the end of the play comes; her husband is dead,
her sons are dead, her daughters are made human sac
rifices or given as concubines, her little grandson is killed
for policy, and she is led away into slavery; and the ques
tion remains. Law of nature, human intelligence, phys
ical basis of earth — what? — can it be that righteousness
is the norm of all? And Euripides leaves us the ques
tion, heightened, not answered.
Plato had to wrestle with the same problem. Obvious
injustice revolts people; but supposing one could dodge

'Troaitt, 884.

THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 25
its consequences? "Imagine the unjust man to be master
of his craft, seldom making mistakes, and easily correct
ing them; having gifts of money, speech, strength — the
greatest villain bearing the highest character; and at his
side let us place the just in his nobleness and simplicity —
being, not seeming — without name or reward — clothed in
his justice only — the best of men who is thought to be
the worst, and let him die as he has lived — scourged,
racked, bound, his eyes put out, at last impaled — and all
this because he ought to have preferred seeming to be
ing." Men are taught to be righteous for the sake of
the rewards; here the supposed order of things ia re
versed ; and the unrighteous man, rich by dishonesty, can
worship the gods better and will be more loved by them
than the just.* It will not do to quote poets and moral
ists: we all know what convention says (y6po$) ; what
does Nature (<£wis) say? Is the ultimate reality, what
ever it be, moral? Or is the whole idea of morality hallu
cination, or a humbug maintained by people for ulterior
ends? More than once Plato put his reply in the form of
myth, premising that, without pressing details, a man of
sense would say that this, or something like it, must be
near the truth of things. In the Gorgias he describes a
tribunal in the world beyond, where the judge judges
every man as he comes before him, naked soul to naked
soul; the marks of earthly rank are gone, and the judge,
not knowing who this is, looks with piercing eyes upon
the naked soul, and sees this and this and this, and judges
exactly by what he sees. Absolute justice, that is Plato's
profoundest thought upon the world. Justice is for him
the foundation of all existence and its inevitable end.
The Jews had the same idea; but in their pictures the
judge was not a shadowy figure like that of Plato's; he

'Jowett's summary of Rep., 11:360-362; a little abridged.

26 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
would be God or God's anointed. In the centuries that
overlap the life of Jesus they gave much thought to a
last judgment that should put all things right. History
could not be meaningless, they said; it would all come
right; a catastrophic intervention by God would reveal
the moral principle of the universe and establish it for
ever. The heart of man cried out for a judgment of
righteousness and love. The evidence of the highest
instincts of the human heart must count for something.
Absolute justice — but how is one to reach it or to define
it? What shall the standard be? The real interest in
history is to trace the rise of moral sense, the progress
of ethical thinking. Justice, as Plato makes clear,5 is not
so simple a thing as a common sense person might sup
pose; and in fact the ethical standard of mankind has
never been a fixed one. No code, human or divine, ever
gave it finality, whatever commentators may read into
it. Every age, consciously or unconsciously, rethinks the
standards of its predecessors; there is ebb and flow,
progress and relapse. But, if we take history as a whole,
certain things become clear. Whatever relapse a par
ticular community may show, or even mankind together
at any stage, there is a progress which is never lost from
the outward and obvious to the inward and spiritual, to
the larger, the deeper, the more universal. What is more
striking is that in a world, where there is so much to
depress hope, the fact stands out that, once the larger
and deeper conception has become disentangled, whatever
common sense or common terror may do in dark hours,
the greater ideal is never defeated, it wins its way and
it triumphs. History is a witness to God and to God's
rationality, and to man's steady resolve to understand
God and to capture his mind. In Homer the heroes are
on a higher moral plane than the gods, and there they

'Republic, 1:331 F.

THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 27
stay; till, after centuries of thought and suffering and
progress, Plato drew the inference that the Homeric gods
are not gods, and he drew it largely as a result of the
conviction that they fell short in moral sense.
"By all that He requires of me
I know what God Himself must be."
The modern couplet sums up a great deal of history.
God has been interpreted over and over again through
the moral sense of man ; he has revealed himself in man's
experience. (We must be careful not to limit the mean
ing we give to the phrase, but to be sure that we recog
nize that man's experience includes a large number of
elements, all available for his spirit.) Broadly, man's
conception of God and man's ethical standards advance
or recede together.
Now, whether the universe is rational enough to con
firm him or not, it is recognized that, with the coming
of Jesus, the conception of God became enlarged with
new values, and acquired a richness and depth it never
had before.* With this new view of God an inevitable
progress followed in man's ethical ideas, in man's demand
for justice, his insistence that the universe must be rea
sonable and just. Jesus may have been wrong in all this,
and the universe may fall short of what he conceived to
be inevitable from his experience of God. That is not
our present affair; the point is that the progressive illu
mination which life threw, or seemed to throw, upon jus
tice and right, reached a new stage ; the old ideas were re
thought more powerfully than ever; the standards were
advanced with a great sweep forward; more than ever
before was asked of the universe, more was expected
of God.

•With this Chapter VI deals more fully.

28 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
m
The glreat presentment of the results of this line of
thought was given in the picture of the judgment seat
of Christ. It owed something of its thought to Plato;
it owed much of its color to the Jewish writers of apoca
lypses.' Men have to use the language of their day or
to re-create it; and generally the story of a great idea
shows a struggle with language. Sometimes the idea
triumphs ; sometimes the language and its traditions are
too much for it. The Jewish apocalyptic offered the ob
vious language for Christian thought, not the ideal lan
guage. Its pictures were sharp-drawn and crude, and
at the same time they lacked precision.' The catastrophic
end of all things was clumsy and rather improbable;
and the character of God had arbitrary features and
lacked nobility and graciousness ; he was drawn too like
the average man. Christians laid hold of the great scene
of the Judgment Day. Its catastrophic character had an
irresistible appeal to men strained beyond endurance in
their struggle with the actual — with persecution, doubt,
and despair. They varied, as the Jews had varied, in the
detail of the scene; were the wicked to be judged (John
5:29), or all men (1 Pet. 4:5) ? Was the judgment in a
sense accomplished (John 3:18), or was it to come at
the end of the world (Rev. 20:11-14) ? Was God to be
the Judge (Heb. 12:23) or Christ (II Cor. 5:10)?'

7 Close analogies with Matthew. 25 are found in Enoch 14:3; 62:5; 90;
and other such books, but without the firmness and coherence of the gos
pel version, in which, too, there is a development in principle.
8 J. H. Leckie, World to Come, p. 27: "It is an excellent rule to sus
pect all accounts of Jewish doctrine in proportion as they suggest sym
metry, order, and logical coherence."
B Even if we limit ourselves to St. Paul, scholars find it hard to make
a harmony of his teachings; his eschatological views changed with his
spiritual growth and experience. Cf. H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul and
Last Things, pp. 21, 25; Stevens, Theology of N. T.t p. 482; R. H. Charles,
Apocrypha and Pseudonyma, I, 529; J. H. Leckie, World to Come,
p. 181.

THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 29
A sane treatment of apdcalyptic must be on the lines
of our usual treatment of parable and of poetry. A
forced harmony of details makes foolishness of the real
value ; the suggestion of each picture must be seized and
then the analogy must be dropped. At the same time,
we have to recognize the extraordinary poetic value which
the Last Judgment has had, for nothing lends itself to
great poetry that has not some profound truth in it.
To secure the deeper meaning of the Great Day to
come, Dies irae dies ilia, let us go back to the judgment
seat of Pilate. What was most real there? Pilate with
his powers of life and death? the priests? the voice of
the people? the hideousness of human cowardice and
falsity, of mob-psychology? No, there was something
more real. After all, it was not Jesus who was on trial
before Pilate; it was the Jewish religion, it was the
Roman Empire, it was human justice, on trial before
Jesus. Pilate was judged for ever there and then by
Jesus; and so were the priests, and the people who
shouted for Barabbas, some because they wanted him,
and some because they did not like to say anything else ;
and so were all the men and women whose lives were
shaped and determined, as they looked at Jesus on the
Cross that day. That principle always holds. A man
writes himself down when he says he does not like a
great work of art, drama, or music, or picture. We
exhibit our own characters in our judgments of Jesus
Christ; we label ourselves, and, what is more, we give
a turn to our development for good or ill. Pilate and
Caiaphas and the rest had been, like all men, develop
ing character in the ordinary way — by choices, inclina
tions, and fancies, by tacit acceptances of principles of
life. This day suddenly and for ever declared what type
of men they had chosen to be, or had become by that
negligence, which after all is a choice too. And, as al-

30 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
ready suggested, the day confirmed their choices and fixed
their characters ; they accepted themselves more definitely
as they stood. The attitude of every man that day was
partly the outcome of his former life and so revealed it;
but it was also a new self-determination brought abou£
by the contact of the character he had developed with
something wholly new, a new situation, a new type, and
so it became decisive for the future. The day was as
decisive for the other onlookers, for those who wept, for
those who had looked away and would not see, for Simon
the Cyrenian whom (and his sons after him) it brought
into the circle of Jesus' followers. And the day was
decisive for mankind; if it was to be a choice between
Pilate and Jesus, then God's universe must fit and match
one of them, and that one could hardly be Pilate. Pilate's
universe will not do.
The higher ideal prevails. The moral sense of man
kind has moved more and more to the standards of
Jesus, as we can see in men's criticisms of the Church
and of Christian people. "That," says the world, "is not
what you expect of a Christian"; in which is implied
that more is expected of a Christian than of another man.
In other words, the world has curiously slipped into
admitting that the standards of Jesus are at any rate the
highest we have yet reached. Anyone who accepts this,
is logically involved in a far more serious treatment of
sin and in a profounder apprehension of God, a new
study of reality. The world, in its more quiet and candid
moods, when it is not controversial, knows quite well by
now that the character and personality of Jesus are the
ultimate standard. However uncertain about God we
may be, Christian and non-Christian alike, deep in our
hearts, if we put it in plain language, we have a feeling
that if God really is like Jesus Christ, things are all
right. In blunter language, what we really mean is this,

THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 31
that if God will mould himself on the example of Jesus,
then we can trust him. That means that, for everyone
who is dissatisfied with the justice of the world, there
is eventually one court of appeal, the tribunal of Jesus
Christ, that we live in a world where Jesus is the last
word. The early Christians, and not they alone, went further.
They were convinced that Jesus has the last word — a
proposition not so different as it seems at first sight, if
we concede that personality survives death. What is
remarkable, is that Jesus would appear to have shared
this belief, or something very like it, and this without
being absurd or insane. In any case it is strange enough.
For picture the carpenter's shop; a customer drops in
and orders a plough to be made or a yoke,10 and the car
penter agrees to make it. Next day you can see him
busy with it, bending over his bench, wiping the sweat
from his face. You see him on the Galilaean road, dusty
and dirty v ith long travel. You see him sitting by the
roadside with a crowd of his friends, as they hand him
bread and he passes them the salt. You see him drop off
to sleep in a boat with sheer fatigue ; and at last you see
him hanged on a cross. And then, within one generation,
they say the world is going to be judged by that crucified
carpenter. It is incredible; and yet mankind at its
soberest and quietest has age by age said that it cannot
think of anybody else. That is one aspect of Jesus in
the experience of men. IV
That Christians have believed that Jesus would judge
the world in person, does not prove that he will. That
is not, however, our point. We have to learn what they

10 Justin, Dialogus eum Tryphone, 88, p. 316 C, says Jesus made
these.

32 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
have believed and do believe, and why; and the latter
inquiry is the harder and the more profitable. We have
to go further yet, however, and ask what effect the belief
has had in the lives and characters of those who have
held it.
But first we must look a little more closely at the be
lief. It is that we must all, as Paul said (II Cor. 5:10),
be inspected, made manifest, uncovered, before the
judgment seat of Christ. It will be, as Plato put it,
naked soul to naked soul. That has been the Christian
thought; that he knows more about us than we know
ourselves, and far more than some of our intimate friends
know. He knows the temptation; the battle; the half-
victory, which the world calls defeat. We have to remem
ber that, if Jesus is the same yesterday and today and
for ever, the judge pictured by this early Church on that
throne is the same friend who sits, says Paul, on the
right hand of God and makes intercession for us — one
of the most beautiful pictures of the New Testament. It
is here that the simile of the human law court quite
breaks down; the human judge limits his survey. But
Jesus knows the full story; and he sets the same value
on men and women as he did when he was here. In the
stories of the dealings of Jesus with men and women
we read how highly he valued the human soul; and by
the statement that Jesus sits upon that final tribunal is
meant that the human soul is to be judged by him who
is most interested in it and loves it best.
The outcome of this in ordinary life, has been that
with every fresh realization of Jesu3 men have moved
on to a firmer and more searching self-criticism. They
have lived in the presence of the Great White Throne,
and applied its standards all the way through life to
themselves; and we know what great characters they
grew. Lord Morley has spoken of men "fortified by the

THE PROBLEM OF DIVINE JUSTICE 33
training in the habits of individual responsibility which
Protestantism involves."" "Look exactly (ok/m/Jus) how
you walk," wrote Paul (Eph. 5:15). It has been de
scribed as the merit of Calvin's theology that it com
pelled men to contemplate themselves as for ever stand
ing face to face with the sovereign majesty of God."
Lack of the self-criticism which Jesus induces is one of
the reasons for the comparative failure of the Church
today. Further, in proportion as men have seen the histor
ical Jesus oftener and spent more time in his company,
they have been more sympathetic in their criticism of
others. Shallow people are always right; they never
have any difficulty in deciding the issue — I was going to
say on half the evidence, but often they don't want so
much; and their judgments are not generous. The real
Jesus deepens human nature and sweetens it. Where
men have realized the judgment seat of Christ, there has
been a closer attention for unexpected manifestations
of Jesus Christ. The Son of Man, as he said, comes in
an hour when we look not for him. He comes in queer
shapes and forms, in new duties, and, I think, particularly
in the distasteful duty of thinking things over again.
In the picture which Jesus himself draws of the last
judgment, we find that the people on the left hand of
the Judge got there by the simple process of inattention,
by not thinking of things anew and often enough. There
has always been poverty, they said, and thought no more
of it. There has always been injustice; so we let it go.
There has always been ignorance; so we did not trouble
about it. Again and again that scene in King Lear comes
into my mind in this connection. Lear on the heath
realizes what poor houseless wretches have all their lives

11 Compromise, p. 240.
a A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, 303

YALE DIVINITY SCH0O

34 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
through. "Oh ! I have ta'en," he cries, "too little care of
this." The vision of Jesus on the throne makes men
more responsive to truth that comes from the unpopular
and the unpractical. It has meant a greater boldness in
the confession of Christ. Put the issue: Is it the judg
ment seat of Pilate or the judgment seat of Christ that
is final? If it is the judgment seat of Christ, men have
felt secure in the confession of Christ; the growth of
the sense of reality about the triumph of Christ has
reacted upon their loyalty to him and to his teaching —
and this to the great gain of all the world. And what
peace of mind has come with the assurance that the last
word is with Jesus, and that he and his understand one
another, we do not need to read far in Christian literature
to find out. A stanza of Charles Wesley may sum it up :
"Jesus, my all in all thou art,
My rest in toil, my ease in pain;
The medicine of my broken heart,
In war my peace, in loss my gain:
My smile beneath the tyrant's frown,
In shame, my glory and my crown."

CHAPTER III
SAVIOURS AND SALVATION

The curious thing about the title of Saviour is that,
while today it is so natural to use it of Jesus, while it
is the most valued and the most endearing of his names,
it is not often used to describe him in the New Testa
ment. In that collection, the name Saviour is hardly
given to Jesus in the earlier books, and begins to be applied
to him only in those which scholars on other grounds
think later or doubtful.1 Jesus is called Saviour oftener
in II Peter than in any other book. That is the stranger
at first sight, because the words that are associated with
Saviour are not so rare. "Salvation," for instance, is
freely used by St. Paul and by the writer to the Hebrews,
though in the Gospels hardly outside Luke. The verb "to
save" is common throughout, and was used by Jesus him
self. "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that
which was lost." If we ask why the word "Saviour"
should not come so freely as "salvation" and the verb "to
save," it is perhaps because it had to be redeemed from
poorer associations. There are some words of honor
never applied to him. In the New Testament Jesus is
nowhere spoken of as "Benefactor." In those days "Bene
factor" and "Saviour" were royal titles; the Ptolemies
and Seleucids had borne them and had passed.

1 In Luke, John, Acts, Eph., Phil., I John, once each; the name is not
used at all in Matthew, Mark, St. Paul's other larger epistles, Hebrews,
or the Apocalypse. 35

36 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
The name "Saviour," moreover, belonged to competing
religions; there were other gods who were called "sav
iour," gods of a different order. The mystery religions to
which scholars are turning our attention so much (a good
deal more than they need, I sometimes think) offered men
salvation. There are those today who discover in that
offer of salvation a close parallel to the Christian re
ligion. The parallel is by no means so close as is often
imagined.2 It would be an interesting study to trace the reasons
for the adoption of the word "salvation" by the Church
in preference to "the Kingdom of God," which was the
phrase used by Jesus at least at the beginning of his
ministry. One cause for the change would probably be
the transplanting of the Gospel to Gentile ground.
"Messiah" was done into Greek, and became more a per
sonal name than a description. The whole series of con
ceptions bound up with the Messiah and the Kingdom of
God were foreign to the Greek world. The Greeks and
the Hellenized were entitled, if Christian freedom was
anything at all, to choose the vocabulary which best con
veyed to them the fullness of their new experience. The
Jew supposed he knew what Messiah and Kingdom of God
meant, though his interpreters varied so widely that a
stranger could reasonably plead that the terms lacked
definition and did not convey any clear ideas. On the
other hand, the Greek in similar way found more content
in his own coinage of "salvation," though here, too, more
ideas were covered by the term than conduced to clear
thinking. So, while the title "Christ" survived, the
"Kingdom of God" fell into the background ; and, in spite
of efforts being made today to bring it forward again,

* It may be noted that in a very striking passage (Protr., 119) where
Clement of Alexandria uses the Mysteries as simile point by point, his
reference is not to sacraments but to spiritual vision, etc.

SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 37
it is possible to maintain that "salvation" was an expres
sion that could carry a larger burden of Jesus' meaning.
Professor Percy Gardner has suggested that the con
ception of salvation belonged to the religions of men
more contemplative than the Jews.* Whatever its ulti
mate origin in Eastern cults, it was at once available
to convey the deepest ideas current in religion in the
early Roman Empire. It lent itself to Greek individual
ism, which stood on a higher level of intensity than any
thing of the kind generally recognized in Judaism. Jere
miah may have been — most people would concede that he
was — more personal in his religion, in his relation with
his God, than any Greek we can name ; but none the less,
as the history of the doctrine of immortality shows no
less plainly than the civil and political history of almost
any Greek state, the individual meant more to the average
Greek than to the average Jew. What interested the
Greek was not the restoration of a kingdom to a gen
eralized Israel, or anything else in the plural and the
abstract, but the development of his own soul, mind, and
nature to the utmost, and its securing amid all the
changes of worlds and ages. Even those who today
revive the Kingdom of God as a sufficient religious ideal
can only do it by including tacitly the Greek demand for
individual life in the old Hebrew conception, or by letting
go something that the Greeks have gained for mankind.
It is legitimate, indeed inevitable, to hold that Jesus saw
in the individual far more than any apocalyptist of his
people ever dreamed, and that when he used the current
phrase, he did what he had always to do, he used the best
language available, endeavoring as he used it to give it
a newer and more glorious connotation. Most of what he
meant to convey was included in the term salvation.
Here, once more, it was not till the Greek received the

8 Growth of Christianity, p. 128.

38 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
Gospel, that a language was found at all equal to ex
pressing the mind of Jesus.
But we use language at our own peril; and the term
salvation needed revision and purification, and it has had
it. Today it is difficult for anyone not an archaeologist,
and unacquainted with Indian thought, to realize that the
term is susceptible of other than a conventional Christian
meaning. Hence when we are told that Christianity wa3
only one of a number of religions which offered men sal
vation, an idea is often conveyed that the Christian relig
ion hardly differed from the rest. A closer examination of
the meaning of these offers of salvation and the charac
ters of the cults that made them is necessary.
There are, however, some preliminary considerations.
First of all, the documents, on which our knowledge of
those religions depends, haVe to be dated; and a liturgy
is perhaps the hardest of all books to date, in that it is
very generally a mosaic of fragments from older docu
ments and may be endlessly edited and reedited. This
formula or that prayer may be far older than the rest of
the book ; the larger part of the compilation may be good
evidence for the beliefs of an earlier day, or the whole
may be quite modern work, done in an artificially
archaized style. In such literature borrowing is easy
and adaptation is easy, especially before the invention
of printing, when books were still made singly and in
manuscript ; and the easier such operations were for the
priest, the less surely can they be checked by the scholar
hundreds of years later. It is, again, arguable that to
amalgamate features found in different cults and so to
form a common type of mystery religion, and then to
impose this type upon the cults and to assume that they
generally conformed to it, is not legitimate scholarship.
Mr. Edwyn Bevan, in a striking article in the Hibbert
Journal (October, 1912), pointed out that more is talked

SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 39
by moderns about saviour-gods and their deaths and
resurrections than the evidence is readily equal to prov
ing; that they are not at all so plentiful as some people
suppose; that, when some Gnostic sects have them and
others do not, it is not enough for a scholar to label them
Gnostic gods; and that the Gnostic sects which have
saviour-gods may as probably (or under the circum
stances more probably) have borrowed from Christianity
as Christianity from Gnosticism. It is, further, to be
noted that to the end Christian polemic is directed
against the Olympian gods and that allusions to compet
ing sacraments are not so common. Julian the Apostate
prayed with fervor to Athena.
But, if we knew for certain that the Gnostic sects and
the mystery religions had every one a doctrine of salva
tion and even a personal saviour-god, not much is proved.
Salvation is a vague term. It makes all the difference
from what these various cults offered salvation, and to
what, or for what, and by what means. We find that
men's minds in the centuries round the Christian era
were obsessed by astrology4 and other doctrines from
the East; they were full of planets and their influences,
of fate and destiny; and all these things were interwoven
with religion, with belief in immortality, with dread of
the long journey before the soul, if transmigration with
its "sorrowful weary wheel" were true. Men wanted
assurance for their personality, and escape from fate and
destiny," and all the fears of life and death.
It is a curious and interesting thing, that some of the
most beautiful phases of Indian religion in these last
centuries have had the same endeavor, to set men free

* See generally Cumont, Astrology and Religion, and his Oriental Reli
gions in Roman Empire; and P. Wendland's brilliant book, Die hellen-
istische-romische Kultur.
' Cf. H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul and the Mystery Religions, pp. 24,
216; Welland, op. cit., p. 176; Reitzenstein, Hell. Myst. Rellg., p. 38;
Poimandres, p. 103.

40 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
from the chain of act and deed ; free by virtue of a union
with a God who will lift them out of it all, lift them out
of the hands of fate, out of the power of death and re
birth, and set them free from all the play of circum
stance and pain and sorrow. The very striking poems of
Tuka Ram," the Maratha mystic of the same period as
the English Vaughan, haunt the reader. "I know thy
faith," says Tuka, addressing his god, Vitthoba, "I have
grasped thy feet, I will not let them go. I will not take
anything to let them go. I have clung to them so long
that thou wilt find it an old affair and a perplexing one to
get rid of me. Tuka says, I will not let thee go, not if
thou givest me all else." "He fastens us to his waist-
cloth and takes us quickly across the stream of the
world." "I have had enough of running . . . now
take me on thy hip; do not make me walk any more."
Those who have seen the Indian child riding on his
mother's hip, will know what Tuka means, when he says :
"We sit on his hip, hence we have full confidence." Some
of Dr. Nicol Macnicol's verse renderings of Tuka might
be interpolated among Cowper's poems from Madame
Guyon, and not be detected without reference to the
French. But what is "the stream of the world"? In other
poems Tuka speaks of the awful prospect of ceaseless in
carnation that the doctrine of Karma involves; "eight
million times have I to enter the gate of the womb";
and he tells of the desolation that the doctrine makes of
love and friendship, and of the family. He compares
son, brother, father, and wife to logs jammed on a stream
in flood ; the key-log is drawn ; the water rushes over the
land and the logs are scattered and none touches its neigh
bor again; and so it is with all we love in the stream

"Translated in three volumes by Frazer and Marathe. See also a
selection in English verse in Nicol Macnicol's Psalms of Maratha
Saints (1919).

SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 41
of the world, we meet to part for ever, while each pur
sues up and down the weary cycle of eight million lives.
Tuka and other mystics of India believed that from this
a man might be saved by Bhakti, by self -annihilating de
votion to a friendly god.' Karma and Bhakti are the
two poles of Indian religious thought. Vitthoba seemed
to Tuka to promise salvation ; but even if Madame Guyon
and he have some affinity, as all mystics are said to have,
it was not such a salvation as Tuka conceived of, that
William Cowper believed he had lost.
The salvation offered by the mystery cults of the
Roman Empire was of much the same character; it was
escape from death and its concomitants, from reincarna
tion, but not from sin, unless salvation from sin con
tributed to the main purpose. Their moral teaching was
perhaps not negligible, but it was not in the first line.
It was of secondary importance ; and when morality takes
a subordinate place, it may as well be left out. It re
mains a fact that these religions fell far short of the
teaching of^the great philosophers of antiquity.
Into this world, full of moral impulses and moral teach
ing, full of religions that offered salvation, comes a new
religion, which unites the moral and the devotional, which
brings ethics into the very heart of religion and makes
God the center of morality. Those who speak of Chris
tian salvation as if it were merely what was offered by
those old religions — escape from death and fear of death,
or, as if it were some doubtfully moral device invented
by Jesus to tamper with God's moral order — can surely
not have looked far into the mind of Jesus himself. Noth
ing can be less like the meaning of Jesus.
One thing, however, we have to note. The Christian
idea of salvation has never really been a fixed one. It
has always tended to enlarge its scope as men have en-

7 Cf. Nicol Macnicol, Indian Theism, pp. 107 ff.

42 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
tered into the ideas of Jesus ; and that is one of the ways
in which Jesus has asserted himself, and one of the rea
sons why he remains. He keeps opening the eyes of the
Church to larger vision of his meaning and of his
thought. Salvation must have a wide range when it
comes from Jesus. Could he have offered men a salva
tion as pitiful as some of us conceive? His conception
of salvation will be large as his thoughts of men, and
deep and high and wonderful as his thoughts of God;
greater as we grow to understand it.
II
We can begin by asking from what the Christian re
ligion offered men salvation, and offers it still.
First of all we may put fear. It is extraordinary, the
range of fear in human experience. There are physical
fears of pain, sickness, and death, fears that we share
with the animals. There are more human fears like the
fear of bereavement, of which the animal knows a little,
and men and women so much. There are fears of death,
not because it wipes out me, but because it wipes out
someone else.8 A man of fine spirit spoke to me of his
daughter: "I would give anything," he said, "to have it
proved to me that I should see her again." If we refuse
to be overborne by death and add to the range of our
outlook a world beyond the grave, the very addition in
creases the scope of fear and doubt. There rise the
horror, the uncertainty, and the bad dreams of that other
world in which we may find ourselves. The ancient
world was possessed with the fear of daemons; a large

8 To illustrate this, three familiar lines of one of the finest spirits of
antiquity may be quoted — Ceorgics, 2:490:
Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas
Atque metus omnes et inexorabile fatum
Subjecit pedibus strcpitumque Acherontis avari.

SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 43
part of mankind today is haunted with the fear of being
born into this world again. The writer to the Hebrews
speaks of men who all their lives, through fear of death,
were subject to bondage. Fear, then, is obviously the
first thing from which we have to be saved. It is worth
noting that the early Christian gave a large place to
death among the things from which Christ saves. Paul
obviously connected physical death with the coming of
moral evil into the world — a view difficult to the modern
biologist, and not based, so far as we know, on anything
in the teaching of Jesus.9
The Christian brought news to the world that Jesus
lives, and that Jesus has "abolished" death, and brought
life and immortality to light. The ancients thought
meanly of woman ; woman was the weaker vessel, and they
saw with surprise women laying down their lives for
Jesus Christ, without having a Plato to write about them,
as Socrates had. Women and slaves, the cheapest of
human beings, showed no fear of pain and no fear of
death for his sake. We have already considered the
Christian victory over the daemons. Thus the chief fears
of the ancient world were overcome.
But there are other things more insidious than fear;
and here is the profounder and more permanent half of
the early Christian message. "Joy or grief, fear or de
sire, what matters it?" asked Horace," quoting the estab
lished classification of motives. Socrates held that if a
man knew, he would not sin; but even an Ovid could
mend that with his video meliora proboque, deteriora

° It appears to be a Jewish idea. Cf. Schechter, Studies in Judaism,
260. Dr. D. S. Cairns writes to me: "Of course it was a practically
universal Jewish idea, deeply rooted in the O.T. . . . Jesus quite cer
tainly regarded disease as part of the kingdom of evil, and as something
that ought never to have been. There is not the slightest indication
that he thought differently from Paul, and a good deal to indicate that
he agreed with him and all other Jews of his day." I am not sure that
Jesus' acceptance of current ideas can be counted on so certainly.
» Epistles, I, vi, 12; Cf. Virgil, Mn., vi:733; and Plato, Phaedo, 83, B.

44 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
sequor, passion triumphant over knowledge and sweeping
man into evil with open eyes. "What I would not, that I
do," said Paul, carrying the matter a stage further.
Some of the ancients explained sin by making it the out
come of contact or relation with some external thing.
The sounder psychologists saw with Jesus that it comes
from within, but not all of them realized its significance
as an expression of a man's real self. The light that
leads astray is, as Burns said, light from heaven — the
perversion of a gift of God, of the highest of his gifts.
And this is effected by passion, which starts a new group
of fears. In the war many a man was less afraid as to
what the enemy might do than as to what he might him
self do. Fear of moral lapse comes to be in the highest
and ultimate group of fears ; and with it comes the dark
est of all things, despair. Fear, passion, and despair all
/coming from within, there was a place for the Christian
message of a man's salvation from himself. Jesus Christ
can set you free, it ran, from the man within, so that
passion and anger and craving will no longer rule you.
The mystery religions had a cheaper psychology and an
easier, and they did not really touch this region of fear
— a contrast which makes more wonderful the salvation
which Jesus brought.
So far, we have thought of perils round about us, and
of evil within. But God, where does God touch this
story? Paul speaks of the law and its value, but also of
its terror; and as the Greek philosophers traced the
origin of law to nature, he traced it to God; the law was of
God's giving, implanted in man's nature. The Ten Com
mandments are written large in human society. There is
no real human society without them. If we could imagine
God abolished, we should still have to keep the Decalogue
; — "thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal,
thou shalt not kill." But God is more than the law. The

SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 45
Scripture speaks of the wrath of God, not as the heathen
who feared the irritability of his gods, but of a wrath
of God directed against men who broke his law. The
burden of the law on a nature like Paul's was incessant
and it filled life with boding and fear. "Fear hath tor
ment" (I John 4:18).
The object of pagan worship has again and again been
to placate the ill-temper of gods, or, to induce the gods
to go away and leave the worshipper alone. The won-,
derful part of the Christian message was that men were]
given deliverance not by being taken out of the way of the )
wrath of God, but by being brought into the very heart \
of God. There is another phase of this. When Paul wants '
to describe a life that is desperate, he speaks of man
being without hope and without God in the world. With
out God — how like that is to Jesus' picture of the prodi
gal son! He was without his father, as he had wished
to be. He went to a far country to have a good time, as
people call it, and like other people who have a good
time, he went through his money; he came to starvation,
and he was without food, without friends and without his
father. It was no life at all; not natural, but abnormal,
an existence of despair. "This is the condemnation
that . . . men loved darkness rather than light" (John
3:19), as men will whose eyes are in bad condition. The
Christian promise was of deliverance from all this nega
tion of life, from the abnormal, from the unnatural, from
despair; but the Christian "return to Nature" and "life
according to Nature" had a personal center.
Ill
When Jesus tells the story of the prodigal son, he
brings out, with a beauty that grows upon those who
try to understand him, the great surprise that awaited

46 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
the youth on his return. He hoped for food, and perhaps
some clean clothes; but the first thing to which he wa3
restored was his father. He came back like a tramp, and
the first touch of home is his father's kiss on his cheek;
his father's arms round his neck. He was restored to the
best robe, the most splendid entertainment, yes, and
something more ; to sonship, to the real life of the family,
to his father. And in all this, the real restoration was to
his father, and the rest followed. What a picture! The
personal relation lies at the heart of all Jesus' good news.
/ "The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which
/is lost," he said. He enters into the house of the strong
man not to destroy but to reapply what is held there in
bondage. He restores to men their lost vision; he finds
the lost faculty and gives it back; the lost aptitude; the
lost sympathy; the lost intuition. Men have never been
quite able to explain what salvation is. They have al
ways used metaphors. Paul says it is a new creation. A
man is made over again, very much as if God took a man
to pieces and made a new Adam out of him, and put the
new Adam in a new world. The Fourth Gospel sums it
up as being born again. In an ancient poem about spring,
one line runs: "New spring, singing spring, spring the
\ world reborn."11 One would almost think it a description
of what we read in the New Testament.
Century after century we find the Christian Church
speaking in the same way about the gladness of the Holy
Spirit. Some of the words which the ancients used about
the Holy Spirit have gone downhill. I suppose it was
because people could not believe them to be true of the
Holy Spirit and the Christian life ; for the ancient Chris
tians said that the Church was hilarious, that the
Christian spirit is a hilarious spirit, a gay spirit. The

"Pervigilium Veneris, II: "Ver novum, ver jam canorum, ver rem-
tus orbis est."

SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 47
words hardly seem reverent today. But think of the
buoyancy of a life which has been saved in earnest. Some
people do not give its value to "life" as used in the New
Testament; they picture the Christian life as a starved
affair, and think that the Christian can never enjoy any
thing, but that, if he starts to enjoy himself, he is always
told "Don't." Jesus never said that. "I am come that
they might have life, and that they might have it more
overflowingly" — the utmost development of the ideal
and natural life, the real achievement at last of its
promise. In the mind of Jesus it would appear that a man is
above all things saved for God, for in the story of the
prodigal the happiest figure is the father. Salvation is
restoration to God, "peace with God" as Paul calls it
(Rom. 5:1). Here we have once more to give to the name
God the whole connotation that Jesus gave it; salvation
has to be measured by the scale of Jesus' conception of
God. How much, he would suggest, would God imply by
salvation? No mere rescue from an external hell, as
Odysseus escapes from the sea and comes ashore scathed
and stripped, and only just alive, if saved. That is not
how Jesus conceives of God doing things. "Fear not,
little flock; it is your Father's good pleasure to give you
the kingdom."
Salvation, again, in the speech of Jesus, means that the
man saved gains a new sense of the significance of other
men; that he puts a new value on manhood and its
opportunities; that he is captured for all the ideals of
Jesus Christ, as they bear on men, the family, and the
society; that he is found in the service of Jesus Christ
for the ransom of the world, for the setting free of man
kind. That is not a negative idea. It is positive, and the
larger the more we think it out, as large as the measure
of Jesus Christ himself (Eph. 4:13). This is not theory;

48 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
it is the actual experience of the Christian world. We
may fairly allow that Christian experience has given a
very different value to the term "salvation" from what
it had in the mystery religions. IV
The mystery religions gave salvation by ritual and
fasting, by sacred food and mystic drink. When we come
to discuss how Jesus saves men it will be clear at once
to anyone who has studied him, that his way will be
another, and something much more spiritual, and more
intimate. When we ask what it is, difficulties crowd
upon us, so much has been thought and written upon it,
so standardized are many of our ideas. Metaphors from
sacrifice, suggestions from the mystery religions, modes
of thought borrowed from Roman law, have all affected
our ordinary views, till it is difficult now to explain what
Jesus did without a preliminary discussion to make our
explanatory terms themselves intelligible. Today, instead
of using metaphor, we are more apt to ask what happens
in salvation, conversion, or whatever it be called —
psychologically; what passes between Christ, or God, and
the man concerned.
Here, though it may seem to run counter to what has
just been said, an illustration may help. It has the ad
vantages of not being theological, of having no history,
and of being drawn from nature. Some years ago the
cotton crop in Egypt began to fail. The cotton plant was
doing badly; it had a parasite growing upon it. A
botanist was sent out to Egypt, and he embarked on a
series of experiments. He found that, when the cotton
was kept in a certain temperature, the parasitic plant
throve and killed it. As the temperature of the glass
house was raised, the parasite plant drooped, and the

SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 49
cotton throve; and finally the cotton got clear of it. After
a while he was able to tell the cotton-growers what was
wrong; they were irrigating too much; the ground was
cold with water; and when the roots struck down into
the cold earth, the plant was chilled and the parasite
grew. When they changed the irrigation arrangements,
the parasite died, and the cotton plant lived, saved by a
change of temperature.
The curse of human life is the failure to develop. A
man becomes absorbed by this or that, by pleasure, by
business, by vice it may be, or by wholly legitimate in
terests carried out of proportion; and he becomes, as we
say, one-sided. Nothing saves him but a human interest
in a real person ; he falls in love and revises all his stand
ards, and, unconsciously influenced by the woman's love
for him and by his love for her — if she be a woman of
any real worth and capable of helping a man — he de
velops into a new creature, as we casually say. If she
bears him a child, the child lifts husband and wife into
a new atmosphere, alters the temperature of their lives,
and a great deal of selfishness is atrophied by the warmth
and interest that the child makes, as its life and mind
grow and expand ; they live in a region of higher thoughts
and keener hopes and delights. Psychologically, love, in
such a case as this, does for a man what the higher tem
perature did for the Egyptian cotton.
The simplest and most natural explanation of what
Jesus effects comes to us along the same lines. Jesus
changes the spiritual temperature and the parasite sin
dies ; and the natural man13 revives and grows into what
God meant. It has been one of our greatest mistakes to

13 We need not be frightened of the Authorized Version's translation
of an adjective of St. Paul's. Perhaps if we took refuge from a word
of Latin origin in one of Greek, we might say "physical" for Paul's
trvxiMos. Prof. Moffatt says, "unspiritual" (I Cor. 2:14), and "animate" (I
Cor. 15:44). "Natural" is better kept for $(wis and its derivatives.

50 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
think that the Christian virtues are anything but natural;
we have abused the word "natural" and degraded it.
Nature, in its true sense, is the thought of God ; and man
degraded and atrophied by sin is not natural. The
gracious side of human nature (as real every whit as the
ugly) gives us the clue. The beautiful instincts, the
powers of mind and character, make, we feel, the true
man. What Jesus does is to give them a chance to grow.
He has opened the windows of the human heart, or rather
has tempted the human heart to open its own windows,
to the sunshine of God. It would seem as if St. Paul had
anticipated us here, when he says that "God has shined
in our hearts, in the face of Jesus Christ" (II Cor. 4:6).
Those of us who think about germs (and most people
do today), who are interested in hospitals, know that the
air of God and the sunshine of God are two of the most
healing and protecting things the body can have. Jesus
told men, and, what is more, he made men believe, that
what we want is more of God, and not less. The sun
shine of God was let into the human heart by Jesus, and
the real, beautiful human plant began to thrive in that
sunshine, and sin to die. He brought men to the point
where they would be reconciled to God. He did this by
his death on the Cross — that death in which he showed
the real nature of God, and brought men to believe that
God does not leave them and their pain and sin alone,
but identifies himself with man's life. Jesus came into
the world to make people willing to believe that God was
ever so much better than they thought, to offer reconcilia
tion, freedom of mind and heart's-ease.
It is always a person who opens the door to the higher
life for us — wife, child, father, mother, friend. The
great book that inspires us was written by a man or
woman of a great personality. All the best things and
the greatest, the great idea, the new vision, peace of

SAVIOURS AND SALVATION 51
mind, come to us, each of them, through a person; and
salvation in the highest sense came through Jesus.
"Jesus," as Herrmann says,13 "did not write the story of
the Prodigal Son on a sheet of paper for men who knew
nothing of himself." Men looked into their language
and found that he was the only person to whom the name„
salvation in the highest sense came through JesusS
been given to kings ; it has not been given to other gods ;
it has become more and more his own, until today the
word means no one else.

18 Communion with Cod, p. 132.

CHAPTER IV
THE LAMB OF GOD
The death of Jesus has been the subject of more
thought, one may say without exaggeration, than any
thing that has occupied the mind of man. No treatment
of it ever satisfies listener or reader as complete or ade
quate ; the best gives one the sense of having touched, as it
were, the mere hem of the garment. Whenever we look at
him, and think again of his death with any firmness and
reality, most of our previous thought seems to be of little
consequence, and we are left with the feeling of a "great
unexplored world before us, of more beyond. In this it
resembles the great things of Nature, which are never
exhausted, which always have mystery and wonder and
happiness in reserve. A man who supposes that he can
speak with any adequacy of the death of Jesus is simply
not thinking about it at all. But the very difficulty of the
subject and the failure of attempts to deal with it are
compulsive reasons for studying it. It is too central, too
vital, to go unstudied. Better to fail than not to attempt
it, for failure will at least reveal something of the great
ness of the subject.

There are many theories as to the death of Jesus;
and a certain number of them, all ancient and all derived
from metaphor, we may group under three heads. There
are those that turn on sacrifice; and here (on one side of
52

THE LAMB OF GOD 53
it) we may include the theory of substitution. There
are those that rest on conceptions derived from Roman
law — and deal with courts, fines, penalties and satisfac
tion, with "persons" too. There are those, the simplest,
the most readily understood, and in antiquity the most
immediately moving, which are connected with metaphors
of slavery; redemption, ransom, price, and freedom are
the keywords here. None really covers the whole story. A
metaphor like a parable may be expected to light up one
aspect of a subject. To press either beyond the proper
point which it should illuminate, to force meaning from
all its details (or, more often, into them) destroys its
value. People who have no feeling for language take
things literally; the legal mind does it; and both classes
have had a large share in interpreting Christian doctrine.
Where the metaphor is drawn from conceptions that are
fairly stable, the difficulties are less; but there are few
sources of confusion more fatal than the use of language,
which seems to convey a clear idea but is really indefinite.
A wholly unfamiliar expression or illustration challenges
thought; but a familiar phrase, that is not generally
thought out, passes without challenge. The simple trick
of asking a man to write down the figures on the dial of
his watch, may illustrate the point; he thinks he knows
them, but the chances are he makes at least one clear
mistake; the mind usurps the function of the eye and is
wrong. If we are to treat religion as seriously as we do
science or literature or politics, we must be sure of our
terms. Careless language always means loose thinking,
and it suggests unreality which serious people are quick
to feel. Little wonder that men have leaned to the sus
picion that the Christian religion is unreal, when Chris
tian terminology is so often slipshod.
It is not our present affair to pursue inquiry into all
the fields of metaphor where Christians have strayed.

54 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
But sacrifice has been a central thought, and it differs
from most of the other metaphors, notably from those
mentioned above, in having had no secular history. It
has always been a religious term, uniquely associated with
ancient religion through the whole course of its develop
ment; for to many minds in all periods the sacrifice has
been the very center of all religion. This of itself will
explain why the word is so difficult and ambiguous. Re
ligion has changed constantly, and the feelings waked
from age to age by sacrifice have been those which men
are most reluctant to analyze. It is worth noting, how
ever, that the men who did analyze them became the
pioneers in religion.
"The Lamb of God" is a very interesting phrase, and
it has gathered a great mass of associations. It does not
belong to the earliest stratum of the New Testament,
though Paul's "Christ our passover" (I Cor. 5 :7) points
towards it. It is put by the Fourth Gospel in the mouth
of John the Baptist in a sentence that attributes to Jesus
the taking away of the sin of the world. In the Apoca
lypse the visions of the exile are haunted with the Lamb
victorious, the Lamb unlocking the sealed book of God's
purposes, the Lamb surrounded by ten thousand times
ten thousand clad in white, who
"Ascribe their conquest to the Lamb,
Their triumph to his death."
To understand the writer, we must ask how he comes
to interpret life so, and why he links the victory of
Christ with the figure of the sacrificial lamb. For, of
course, it comes from Hebrew ritual, with a memory of
the Passover. Hebrew ritual suggests the symbol; but
why did anyone look for a symbol? What was the ex
perience that sought expression? The Passover lamb
was a symbol of a number of things — of a great escape

THE LAMB OF GOD 55
from bondage to begin ; and its reappearance in the Apo
calypse suggests that the Christian had in his mind the
sense of a great deliverance. It suggests acceptance by
God, and God's care for his own; and these also were in
the thoughts of the great Christian writer. Gradually,
by thinking through his language, his turns of phrase,
and his symbols, we come face to face with a man who
associates a great deal of real experience with Jesus
Christ. But it will not quite do to say that sacrifice is the
natural word to use to unlock the mystery of Jesus. For
today, after nineteen centuries of experience of Jesus,
almost every idea that men then associated with sacrifice
is lost or transformed — a curious commentary on the
notion that the use of the word was obvious. If we are
to understand what the writers of the Bible say about
sacrifice, we have for the time to strip our minds of all
that Jesus has done in reshaping our speech. When I
think now of sacrifice, I see a Hindu temple in the
bright sunlight of a December day, a temple gaudy with
blues and yellows and whites, tawdry and dirty, and
thronged with pilgrims. Here was a sacred tree with
votive rags tied on every bough; on the other side was
a group of priests, naked from the waist up (one of
them telling us he is a B.A. of the University), and near
them was a little goat, a sacrifice, to be given to the god
dess. One of the priests caught it up, held its front
legs back against its sides, put its head in a great wedge ;
and with one slash of a big knife the head was off and
the blood spurted out. When I read in Hebrews that "it
is not possible for the blood of bulls and of goats to take
away sin," I think of Kalighat, and I understand. People
today associate primarily self-sacrifice with "sacrifice";
not so the ancients.
One day in the market of Maymyo, in Upper Burma, an

56 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
American friend and I stood by an old man who was sell
ing tapers of some fragrant kind. The missionary,
knowing well what they were, asked him : "And what are
those for?" He said they were to be given to the god.
"But what does the god do with them?" And the old man
said: "I don't know; we give them to the idol." "I don't
know!" The ancient world, when it crossquestioned it
self, did not know where exactly in religion was the place
of sacrifice. Even of the Hebrews Professor A. B. David
son wrote that "the sacrificial system is left in the Old
Testament without explanation as regards redemptive
relations, except in a general way."1 And to think in a
general way is a most fertile source of error, as the
Greeks have taught us, from Socrates onward.
II
The longer the history of an idea, the less chance there
is that at any moment it will be used clearly. Old
memories and emotions, old associations linger and con
fuse the impression; and where truth of utmost moment
is concerned, an indefinite impression does not much help
thought. A survey of the development of the conception
of sacrifice will put us in a better position to deal with
its use in Christian thinking. Six stages may be noted
for clearness' sake, if it be understood that, while logi
cally they are distinct, chronologically they overlapped in
the most perplexing way.
The first stage, which anthropologists can recapture for
us, is one so old that it appears to antedate private prop
erty2 — a fact of the utmost moment in interpreting the
ideas then associated with sacrifice, for it practically
eliminates the individual from the act. The sacrifice is

1 A. B. Davidson, Theology of the Old Testament, p. 307.
2 W. Robertson Smith, Early Religion of the Semites, p. 395.

THE LAMB OF GOD 57
tribal, and it is a tribal meal, shared by god and men,
eating together3 for the "reinforcement of both divine and
human life."* The victim is an animal, but not substi
tuted, as ancient thinkers later on supposed, for a human
being ; for early man believed in the "full kinship of ani
mals with men."5 A living bond was established between
god and worshippers in this common meal, whose funda
mental idea was sacramental communion.0 The operation
was as physical in the case of the god as of the man.
The god drank the blood of the victim ; that is to say, it
was poured over the stone, which was the god, or (later
on) represented him or was his dwelling (beth-el, I&utvXos.)
"The blood is the life," we read in Deuteronomy (12 :23) ;
and the scene in the Odyssey, where the ghosts crowd
round Odysseus, explains how it is. Such ghosts as he
allows to drink the blood of the sacrificed sheep regain a
fugitive life; "My mother came and drank the dark
blood; and forthwith she knew me and with wailing
spake winged words."7 Before she drank she could neither
recognize her son, nor speak to him. The blood in sac
rifice repaired the waning force and efficiency of the god ;
and when restored he was more likely to give victory, or
crops, or whatever men had felt him to be failing to
manage before. The conception, however strange and
crude in our eyes, was not unnatural for people who did
not yet distinguish clearly between matter and spirit. At
this stage sacrifice is closely akin to magic; and the
borderline between primitive religion and magic is hard
to trace.
In the second stage, men begin to lay more stress on
the mind of their god than on his physical necessities,
and they conceive that the business of sacrifice is to
reconcile their god to them rather than to repair his

'lb. 252. lIb. 257. ' Ib. 124, 365. * Ib. 439. ' Odyssey, xi:152.

58 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
energies.' Sacrifice is a gift to placate an offended god.
The ground of his irritation may be unknown or, if
guessed, may be quite trivial. He has, however, to be
coaxed out of his ill-temper. This type of sacrifice, the
piacular, does not primarily include the idea of sin,' but
it recognizes some mental activity and feeling in the god.
It is said to have had but a small part in the development
of the higher sense of sin that we find in the Old Testa
ment." The "presents," which Genesis says Cain and
Abel offered, have a parallel in the Greek poet: "Gifts
persuade the gods, gifts persuade awful kings."11 Primi
tive law and primitive morality deal almost entirely with
acts, not with motives. It was late in history, and a
great forward step taken, when Draco in Athens dis
tinguished between intentional and accidental homicide.
But this second stage represents a distinct advance in
thinking. The third stage gives us the piacular sacrifice, more
properly so called — the sin-offering, a gift made in
acknowledgment of wrong done by the offerer or by those
whom he represents. What the idea of the wrong is,
depends naturally on the current conceptions of morals;
'imt the introduction of moral ideas into sacrifice marks a
great epoch in human thought. The second and third
stages overlap in history, and they both represent a more
developed and thought-out belief than the first, in the
possibility of god and man being more or less mutually
intelligible. Probably, if heads are counted, these stages
are more important than any of the others; views of
these types meet us all over the world both in antiquity
and today. But the real progress of religion depends on

• Robertson Smith, Early Religion of the Semites, p. 396.
'Ib. p. 401.
"Ib. p. 415.
11 The line is quoted with disapproval by Plato, Rep., Ill, p. 390 E
but he does not say who is the poet. It is referred to by Euripides'
Medea, 964.

THE LAMB OF GOD 59
their being transcended. While it is well said that "the
cultus is the heathen element in Israelite religion,"11 we
must note the desire to be right with God. From now
onward even more clearly than before, all progress de
pended on the growth of the conception of God.
The fourth stage, represented among the Hebrews by
the Prophets, by Plato among the Greeks, shows a start
ling development. "Nothing," wrote Professor Bruce,
"is more remarkable in the prophetic character than an
exquisite sensitiveness to everything savoring of insin
cerity."13 How profound and searching the prophetic mind
was, is not quickly realized, till we grasp how persistent
both in Judaism and outside it were the older views of
sacrifice. In the latter part of the reign of Jeroboam II
(about 760-746 B. C), Amos went to Bethel, and spoke
the mind of Jehovah on what he saw there; Jehovah
cried: "I hate, I despise your feasts; I will not smell in
your solemn assemblies" (Amos 5:21). It is the more
strange, because Amos says no word in condemnation of
the idolatry of Bethel. That was left fo.r Hosea, whose
rendering of Jehovah's feeling about sacrifice was twice
quoted by Jesus: "I will have mercy and not sacrifice"
(Hosea 6:6). Isaiah, speaking for Jehovah, says, "I
delight not in the blood of bulls" (1:11-13). Jeremiah
more sweepingly says that Jehovah had not spoken about
sacrifice at all when he made his famous covenant with
Israel (Jer. 7: 21-22), and he is explicit on the failure of
the religion of Moses ; a new covenant will have to replace
the old, a religion within the heart (31:31). The second
Isaiah (40:16) and some of the Psalmists are as em
phatic (Psalms 40:6; 50:8-14). Whether the Prophets
would have approved of sacrifice if accompanied by
morality and inward religion, is not the issue ; those who

12 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, 422.
"A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, p. 278.

60 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
wish to reconcile their utterances with a pre-critical view
of the Pentateuch, may urge that they would have; but
it is at least clear that for the Prophets sacrifice was
not in the forefront of religion, while for their contem
poraries it was. When a man has once grasped that re
ligion is not ritual but mind, when he is a pioneer in this
belief, it is generally safer to assume that he takes a
bolder view than the temporizing people who endeavor
to reconcile old and new and to minimize contrasts. It
is of interest to note how swiftly the Christian apologists
seized on these passages in the Prophets, how thoroughly
alert they were to their real meaning, and how trench
antly they used them to prove to the Jew that the age
of sacrifices was over, and that there was no compromise
possible any longer on the issue, and, sometimes, that the
whole association of sacrifice with the religion of Jeho
vah had been nothing but a stupid blunder on the part
of Israel."
Plato was as clear as the Prophets that sacrifice was
a mistake in religion, that it rested on a wrong view of
the gods altogether, and that it confused the moral sense.
"Envy," he said, "stands outside the divine choir."1" In
the Laws" he signalizes three great errors among men's
ideas as to the gods: first, the belief that there are no
gods; second, the concession that there are gods, who
have, however, no interest in human affairs; third, the
worst error of all, that there are gods, interested, too, in
man and his doings, but gods who are easily influ
enced by sacrifice. "Quacks and prophets," he says
elsewhere,17 "go to rich men's doors and persuade them
that they have power from the gods, by means of sacri
fices and chants, to cure any wrong deed of their own or

14 Cf. Justin's Trypho; Tertullian, Adv. Jud.; Barnabas.
" Plato, Phaedrus, 247 A.
"Plato, Laws, x:885.
"Plato, Republic, II, 364 A. ff.

THE LAMB OF GOD 61
their ancestors in a course of pleasures and feasts"; for
a human feast with abundant wine accompanied sacrifice
both in Greece and in Palestine. The Greek world re
ceded from the clear thinking of Plato ; the fear of death,
the spell of the past, the charm of ritual religion, were
too strong; but Stoics and Epicureans were alike insistent
that sacrifices served no purpose at all in religion.18
The fifth stage is obvious. In Israel, the priests ad
justed their theory of sacrifice to the teaching of the
Prophets, toning down the words of the bolder thinkers,
as the friends of the obsolete always will. Sacrifice be
came symbolic; it was given a moral connotation which
it had not originally had ; it was by all means to be main
tained, while the prophetic warning to cleanse the heart
was of course important too. The old books were welded
with the new Priestly Code, and the Pentateuch resulted.
In this period, as under the Macedonian dynasty, the
Jews never let history stand between themselves and their
ancestors ;10 their religion was semper eadem. The correct
theory was that sacrifice was ordained, and suggested to
men, directly by God.20 In the reestablished temple at
Jerusalem sacrifice was regularly made till Titus de
stroyed city and temple in A.D. 70; and it is of interest
to note who maintained it. The priestly family of Zadok
gave their name to the Sadducees ; conservative in ritual,
they were conservative in thought, and repudiated mod
ern doctrines of spirit and angel and the soul's eternal
life." At the same time, they compromised in practice and
policy with Hellenism and honestly earned by their teach
ing and their lives the contempt of good Jews. "They
could only persuade the rich," says Josephus.

18 Cf. Seneca, Ep., 95, 47-50.
18 P. Wendland, Hell. Rom. Kultur, pp. 198, 199; Drummond, Philo,
I, p. 242.
20 A. B. Davidson, Theol. O. T., p. 311.
21 Acts 5:17; Josephus, Antt., xviii :1, 4; xiii:10, 6. W. Fairweather, Back
ground of Gospels, 149-153.

62 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
The sixth stage is represented by the religion of the
synagogue." The priesthood of Jerusalem had secured
that sacrifice should only be made in their temple; their
monopoly was secure; but here, as often, the by-products
of success were more important. Jews, scattered over
the world, from Babylon to Italy, unable to maintain the
practice of three pilgrimages a year to Jerusalem (Deut.
12:5-11), had to fall back on their own devices for the
maintenance of their religion and the education of their
children. The synagogue became their center — a meet
ing-house, where a simple form of service grew up, which
needed no priests. A layman could read aloud the law
and the prophets; the psalms were sung; and exhortation
was given by those who seemed able to do it. No wonder
the Sabbath was more observed by the Dispersion than
at Jerusalem.*" How very great an innovation the syna
gogue's religion was, is not easily realized without some
intimate knowledge of ancient conceptions. Vacuam
sedem et inania arcana is the epigram of Tacitus on the
Temple itself — a shrine with nothing in it and mysteries
that were not there. The Judaism of the synagogue
baffied the ancient world — religion with no image of a
god, with no altar, no priest, and no sacrifice, was un
thinkable; but in the synagogue it existed, and from
the synagogue came the three living religions of today.
Titus, with the practical man's failure to grasp what is
alive, destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple deliberately in
order to extinguish Judaism. But Judaism survived the
destruction of the Temple, on which since sacrifice ceased
to be a real part of its religion, it no longer depended.3'

32 On the synagogues, see J. P. Peters, Religion of Hebrews, po. 381-
404; W. Fairweather, Background of the Gospels, pp. 25 ff.; I. Abrahams,
Pharisaism and the Gospels, pp. 1 ff.; Josephus, C. Apion, II, 18; Luke
4:16, 20; Acts 13:15.
" Fairweather, Background, p. 10.
24 It may be added that the Essene sect disapproved of animal sacrifice;
Philo, 2:457; Josephus, Antt., 18:1, 5.

THE LAMB OF GOD 68
To sum up, sacrifice was a language used by all men,
but understood by none; no uniform interpretation could
be given to it. Its meaning varied with men's thought
of God. It depended on use and wont ; it was maintained
most strongly by those who thought least deeply on
religion. The real thinkers saw that it did not touch the
problem of sin at all ; it had no effect on God or gods ; it
could not purify the conscience of man (Heb. 9:9). Sac
rifice depended on the instinct that man must give God
something — a natural outcome of anthropomorphism, the
danger of which Plato saw. The only real value in sacri
fice, whether act or metaphor, lay in the belief that some
how God and man could communicate, could be intelli
gible; but the clearer thinkers knew of better ways by
which God and man touched each other. Sacrifice was
in fact obsolete where real religion was concerned; and
the stronger minds counted it immoral.
Ill
In dealing with the Christian religion, its ideas, and the
expression given to them, the first thing is to learn the
mind of Jesus himself. He was a child of the syna
gogue ; from boyhood he had the custom of going to the
synagogue (Luke 4:16), and he was more at home there
than in the Temple with its grandeurs and its squalors
(Matt. 21:12, 13; Mark 11:15). It would be significant
if he, with his genius in religion, his insight and intui
tion in all that bears on God, went back from the stage of
the synagogue to that of the Temple, if he fell short of
the Prophets. But he does not. He, too, omits sacrifice.
His teaching centers in another conception of God. "Your
heavenly Father" has not to be persuaded by your gifts.
No, it is the other way round ; "It is your Father's good
pleasure to give you the kingdom." All ancient ritual,

64 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
all priestly theory of sacrifice and offering, is more than
ever obsolete when we hear the voice of Jesus. "Your
heavenly Father" has not to be sought : he is seeking you.
The good shepherd goes after the lost sheep : he does not
wait for the lost sheep to find him. The wonder and the
mystery of God is this, that he wants man infinitely more
than man wants him, that he makes the offering to man,
not man to him, that it is man, and not he, who must be
reconciled.25 The whole of the New Testament rings with
that key-note of Jesus. Its writers make no suggestion
that we have to reconcile God to ourselves. "Be ye recon
ciled to God," says Paul (II Cor. 5:20). "We love him
because he first loved us," says John (I John 4:19). "Be
cause he first loves us, afterwards he reconciles us to
himself," wrote Calvin.23 In the atmosphere of such
thoughts there is no place for the blood of bulls and goats,
symbol or not symbol; and historically Jesus has abol
ished sacrifice and banished the ideas that underlie it.
The metaphor of sacrifice is indeed found in the New
Testament. It is used because it is a popular way of
speech, because it is an easy symbol; and yet when one
tries to define the idea of sacrifice and realizes the essence
of Jesus' revelation of God, the more alien the two things
become. The metaphor fails ; the symbol will not do. It
confuses the issues. The expression with which we
started, "the Lamb of God," is peculiarly hard to grasp
with any clear sense of its meaning; it suggests ideas
but it eludes us. If some of us still love the old phrase
ology of sacrifice, it is because it has been filled with new
meaning and has gathered new associations. But the
new meaning is too much for the old words; the new
wine bursts the old skin. The old conception of sacrifice
makes our relation with God, which is so simple and so

25 Contrast Apocalypse of Baruch, 84:10
2? Calvin, Institutes, II, 16:3.

THE LAMB OF GOD 65
beautiful in the teaching of Jesus, indistinct again; it
leaves the morality of the affair uncertain and difficult.
It was never dominant until the adherents of the
mystery religions, the heathen, came into the Church,
and brought, by sheer numbers, a conception to bear on
the teaching of Jesus that was not there at the be
ginning. Then the wholesale adoption of the Old Testa
ment, and the passion for matching everything in the
Old with something in the New, and above all the legalism
brought into the Church by converted Roman lawyers,
changed the general outlook.27 Barnabas had held sacrifice
to have been a mistake from the first; but now the feel
ing that all religion must be in some degree sacrificial
(let us beware, for the moment, of our modern meaning)
begins to gain ground. At the same time current
philosophical accounts of God, Neoplatonic in the main,
were invading the Church, and making God remote and
august as he had never been in the thought of Jesus.
Old and obsolete ideas revived, and with the decline of
the intellectual life of world and Church in the later
Roman Empire there was little power of resistance. The
acceptance of the doctrine of the literal inspiration of
the Old Testament at the Reformation secured the per
sistence of the sacrificial idea as necessary to religion,
till in the nineteenth century anthropology and criticism
threw open the way for clearer thinking, and the general
return to the thoughts of Jesus directed the emphasis
elsewhere. IV
But the New Testament has other accounts of the work
of Jesus. The writer to the Hebrews, quoting the
fortieth Psalm, contrasts two clauses, "sacrifice and offer-

27 On all this, more fully in Chapter X.

66 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
ing and burnt offerings and offering for sin thou wouldest
not . . ." and "then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will" ;
and he insists that the second abrogates the whole scheme
of sacrifices. "By which will," he continues, "we are
sanctified, by the offering of the body of Jesus Christ
once for all" (Heb. 10:5-10). With a clearness and
definition which are not always recognized by his readers,
he sweeps aside metaphor and symbol, and speaks things.
"The law," he says, "had a shadow of good things to
come, and not the exact image of them." One guesses
that in his mind is some memory of Plato's cave with
the men bound there, who see not things, not even models
of them, but the shadows of models, and live prisoners
in a world of shadows. The old law of sacrifice and ritual
offered not even an image of the real; it was at best a
shadow of an image. So he moves away from analogy to
psychology, from the symbol to the person. We must
try to follow him.
Jesus died, he says, to put away sin by the sacrifice of
himself. What did he do ? He identified himself with the
will of God, and by so doing cast such a flood of light on
it as transfigured it. He prayed in Gethsemane what he
taught his disciples to pray: "Thy will be done." That
lies at the heart of all Christian prayer; it is the center
of the Christian life; and, suggests our writer, it is
the center of the life and work of Jesus. He suggests
that, in a wonderful way, a way past our grasp, Jesus
and the will of God are identified, and that everything
which Jesus did is brought about by that identification
of himself with the will of God. There is hardly an
author of the New Testament who has such a haunting
sense of what it cost Jesus — prayer, suffering, tempta
tion, agony, and, as he says, strong crying. We do not
easily grasp the reality and the range of his sacrifice
of himself. "He learnt by what he suffered" (Heb. 5:8),

THE LAMB OF GOD 67
we read, and we think of Greek tragedy and its interpre
tations of suffering, and we remember the width of cul
ture of our author. He has got clear away from the
world of shadows into the region of fact and experience,
into the inner life of Jesus, the very being of God. If
we fail here and do not get things clear, it is because
we are not deep enough, or true enough, or enough Chris
tian, to see and to speak of things like this; but let us
try to see what he means.
When he speaks of the will of God, he means substan
tially what we should call the nature of God. The will
is the expression of the real, the deepest, nature. It is
God at the most definite, the most essential. The writer
suggests, then, that Jesus and the will of God interpret
each other; that in Jesus, in his life and mind and death,
we read the mind and life of God, the will and nature of
God; that in Jesus God is made intelligible to us and
becomes our own, ours because we see and understand.
Roberts Browning says in his Fra Lippo:
"We're made so that we love
First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see."
The interpretation calls our attention to the thing, and
changes our feeling; it ceases to be foreign to us. Men
had known the will of God, as they called it, but they
had not loved it. They saw it from without; they con
ceived of God as a hard, alien, external force, and they
shuddered and shrank from him. They had no point of
approach, and he remained inscrutable; and the very
fact of his being unintelligible made him awful. The
arbitrariness of God haunted their minds with terror; it
was indeed the source of the fear that drove them to
sacrifice beasts to God, yes, and their own children; it
was a thing of horror and pain. But Jesus takes the

68 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
will of God, and interprets it, and makes it, with all its
mystery, a new thing : he brings us to see it in the light
of his own experience. He teaches us to find in God's
nature something akin to his own nature, something,
therefore, that we can accept and trust, and by-and-by
may love. If we may again use Plato's parable of the
cave, Jesus has brought us out in the open air, where
we no longer have to be content with shadows of images,
but we see things in the sunshine of God. We have
our faces turned the other way altogether; we are in
the atmosphere of God; and when your eyes adjust them
selves a little to the new blaze of light, we look more and
more into the reality of things. The writer to the
Hebrews, in a later chapter, puts it that Jesus has
brought us into the very presence of God (10:19, with
9:24). In the ancient religions of sacrifice, men put them
selves right with God by bargain, and gift, by getting
safely away from God, by inducing God to go away from
them, or alternatively, by sharing with God a meal, at
first merely physical and later on magical, which aUowed
the sensation of a semi-physical union with God. Jesus
has done the thing by bringing us nearer than ever
before to God, into the very heart and mind of God. It
makes all life utterly different. It means rethinking all
moral and religious ideas in a full view of God as he is,
and working everything out on the lines of the heavenly
Father's nature as interpreted by Jesus in his life and,
above all, in his death. A new life, a new world, new
men and women, the taking away of sin — all was made
possible by the work of Jesus, by his intense unity with
God, by the evidence of this given to us in his death.
Old modes of religious thought ceased to be possible for
men who had any real experience of Jesus; the tradi
tional paled before the real; the shadows fled.

THE LAMB OF GOD 69
As the death of Jesus grows in significance, men are
driven again and again to ask who he was, that he should
achieve so great a change in the relations of God and
man. The question is a great one; it is not to be solved
till we know in some inward way something of the mys
tery of the identity of his mind with God's mind, till we
realize the outcome of it all in the history of man, and,
above all, till we know for ourselves the love of Jesus.
Men speak easily of the love of Jesus; but we do not
deeply know it. How could we? How far does the un
trained eye see the wonder of anything? How can we,
with our coldness of heart, our hardness and triviality,
understand the love of Jesus? But it touches us, and
it has touched mankind; and it becomes intelligible to
man in that death, in which Jesus identified himself with
the will of God. The love of Jesus and the will of God
lighting each other up — that has been the essence of the
Gospel. A modern German Jew has said that suffering
is a language that everybody understands; the poorest
intellect knows some of its meaning, the highest and
the clearest has still something to learn of it. That is
the language that Jesus used, and we understand him
there without a commentary. Jesus shows us that it is
also the language of God, that suffering is not, as the
ancients alleged, and as some light-hearted moderns also
say, alien to God, but something peculiarly God's own,
that the cross instead of being, as the early anti-Christian
controversialists urged, the very antithesis of God's na
ture, is in the very heart of God somewhere. So God
also becomes intelligible to men in the cross; his will
becomes something we can grasp and understand and
approve, something that we can obey with joy, something
that changes the values of life.
The statement, attributed by the Fourth Gospel to
John the Baptist, that "the Lamb of God taketh away

70 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
the sin of the world" has historically been justified.
There is plenty of sin in the World today; but we have
only to read history to realize the disappearance of a
great deal of sin, public and private. There were forms
of sin, which, as men lived themselves into the meaning
of the death of Jesus, they would have no more. A
society, more and more penetrated by the intelligence of
Jesus, could not endure to have slavery continue; the
atrocious usage of women went; the killing of babies
went ; and many other like things have gone, and the rest
will go.23 For today, where the will of God, as interpreted
by Jesus, is real, where people have come near to Jesus,
they catch his Spirit and see things as he sees them;
they grow conscious of the call to a higher level; they
become sensitive to the suffering of others; they find
themselves involved in a great change of life, a thor
ough rethinking of the principles on which they live — a
change swift, impulsive, and instinctive in some, slow,
deliberate, and carefully thought out in others; but real
in both. It means sin taken out of men's lives, new
principles of living given, and a new motive in life, a
new passion; a new power, a new life — God in short.
It is all associated with the realization of Jesus. What
the old religion, with its clumsy and vague attempts to
reach God, could not do, has been done in human experi
ence by Jesus.
It is not out of the way, then, that the Apocalypse pic
tures the victorious Christ as the Lamb slain, and again
and again associates his victory over sin and evil with
his death, and to his death ascribes the purity and beauty
of all the white-robed souls that he has redeemed.

¦ This matter will be resumed in Chapter XIII.

CHAPTER V
THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN
Luther once said that the forgiveness of sin is nodus
Deo vindice dignus, a knot that it needs a God's help to
unravel. Whether we consider forgiveness as a practical
or as an intellectual problem, he was right. As with
other matters of real import the difficulties only unfold
themselves when we try to solve them ; at the first blush
most things that matter are simpler than we find them
on closer acquaintance. If sin and its forgiveness occupy
a far less place in contemporary thinking than they once
did, it is perhaps as much due to shallowness as to sanity.
To neglect one's bodily health is not much wiser than to
fidget about it; quiet thinking about health or sin never
hurt any man.
The poet of Job was a man who loved this glorious
world —
"The beauty and the wonder and the power,
The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades,
Changes, surprises-1— and God made it all !"
"When the morning stars sang together, and all the
sons of God shouted for joy" (Job 38:7). Three or
four hundred years after him, another poet of his race — a
poet who saw cloudily and in symbol at times, and at
other times with extraordinary vividness — "saw a new
heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the
first earth were passed away . . . and he that sat upon
the throne said, Behold! I make all things new" (Rev.
71

72 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
21:1, 5). Nothing but a new creation would serve; the
world he had known was impossible; let it pass.
The contrast between these two views of the world
sums up a great deal of human experience. With all
its charm and wonder, there is something wrong with
the world, and the deepest and tenderest natures have
felt it most.
"Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest
thought."A close attention to humanity brings the mind at once
to conduct — to conduct as the index of spirit; and men
have been driven in spite of themselves to wrestle with
the problem of evil. I
It would be a long story to trace the growth of the
idea of sin. The records of our race show how, in
thinking of sin, men have steadily shifted from the
external to the internal. In all man's thought upon
life and upon society that transition is to be seen.
More and more stress has been laid upon motive, upon
the reactive effect of action, and upon spirit and its
changes. Morality h|s grown more reflective, and man
more self-conscious and more individual. Taboos live
long, but they too are judged by reason. It has been
a long, slow process; and in the end man acquits the
accident and the external of his sin, and brings himself
in guilty. We watch the man in Plato's Republic wres
tling with the lust of his eyes to gaze greedily on the
bodies of the criminals put to death; the fight is within
him, and in anger at himself he yields to himself.1 In
the Gorgias, as we have seen,2 Plato goes further and
tells us how sin writes itself indelibly upon the soul of

'Republic, IV:439 E, 440 A. 2 Chapter II, p. 25.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 73
the sinner. Still more significant were the contributions
of Hebrew prophets and psalmists to clear thinking upon
sin. If the Greek brought out that the man who sins,
sins against Nature and against his own soul, the Hebrew,
with his clearer conception of God's personality, grasped
a still more central fact. Isaiah's vision of God is imme
diately followed by his confession of sin (Isaiah 6), and
the words of the Psalmist are familiar :
"I know my transgressions :
And my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned." — (Psalm 51 :3, 4)
Commentators with a gust for the obvious like to point
out the exaggeration in this confession, whether the
psalm is David's and refers to Uriah and his wife, or
whether it is a more universal story, the utterance of
an unknown thinker. Exaggeration — but, in the depths
of it, truth.
In the new and strange world that Alexander the
Great made, the supreme teachers of the Greek world
were the Stoics, and their main interest lay in ethics.
Bishop Lightfoot well called their new-coined word Con
science (owo&jo-is) "the crowning triumph of ethical
nomenclature."3 Another great contribution was irpoaipeo-K
(purpose or motive). They recognized motive as the
key to morality, while in the older religions, especially
the Roman, emphasis fell on act. The change is revo
lutionary. In Judaism there is a cleavage; for some
Jews sin assumed a growing importance, while on others,
as we shall see, it sat lightly enough.
It is interesting to reflect on the processes by which
the gains of man's knowledge have been gathered. The
modern is so apt to associate religion with morality, that
it is something of a shock to be told how little priest

• Commentary on Philippians, p. 301.

74 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
and cult and temple contributed to ethical progress,
either in Greece or in Israel. While it may be true, as
Andrew Lang urged, that in no race have religious cere
monies been unaccompanied by moral teaching, still the
priest has rarely been much of a thinker, rarely a pioneer
in ethics ; his business passed into his soul, and his busi
ness lay with old rules, with established forms, with the
practice of older days. Prophet in Israel, philosopher
in Greece, were laymen, men of problems and questions —
spiritual anarchists or spiritual reconstructionists, as
you chose to regard them; men who cared nothing for
settled thought and accepted usage, but who drove hard
at fact, would have principle, and must base all on the
fundamental. But long before the philosophers and the
prophets whose names we know, there were others who
lifted the thinking and feeling of mankind forward,
men who groped their way to truth, vita didicere magis-
tra, felt the pressure of life and built their laws out of
experience. These men, slow-thinking, but very sure,
were the fathers of the philosophers, their brothers and
their best disciples.
But, valid and beyond price as the contributions of
Plato and the Stoics were, and the contributions of
Prophet and Psalmist, a great deal was left to achieve.
They settled a great many points. Sin is violation of
Nature's laws; it is more damaging to the sinner than
to his victim;* it is at last rebellion against God. So
much was gained, and remains gained; Isaiah and Plato
have much to say to the most modern of us; they are
not superseded. But Jesus transformed the whole situa
tion by revealing the character and personality of God
and by bringing into the range of discussion a man's
neighbor and society at large, as the immediate interests
of God. He did this partly by what he said, a great deal

L Plato, Crito, 49.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 75
more by what he was. "To overlook or to underrate the
influence which has been exercised upon moral develop
ment by great personalities has been a too frequent
tendency of philosophical Ethics."5 Personality itself has
again and again been the revelation that has superseded
tradition. The Cross was a stimulus to rethink sin; and
it remains so. The teaching of Jesus made previous
thinkers seem shallow; they had handled far too easily
the relation of man to God; their morality, sound and
true to Nature as far as it went, was not thought out
deeply enough; their psychology — this is a bold thing
to say, when one remembers to whom one is referring —
was not sufficient, too many factors were lost. But the
Cross carried things further; it became in itself the
source of "conviction of sin" ; men by it saw further into
the love of God and into the meaning of their own sin
than ever before. Put into modern terms, clumsy and
ugly enough, sin is the exploitation of man, the using
of the gifts of God against God, the negation of God,
the repudiation in toto of God's love, of the personal,
throbbing, fathomless Fatherhood of that God whom
Jesus revealed. "Sin," as Neville Talbot has put it,
"sin, as the wilful devotion to self of those who are made
for Another and for others, is the central and root
tragedy of life."
If we are to discuss the forgiveness of sin, we have
to be clear with ourselves as to what we mean both by
sin and by forgiveness. If Bernard Shaw tells us bluntly
that there is no forgiveness of sin, while the early creed
will have us say daily : "I believe . . . the forgiveness of
sins," supposing that the playwright and the early the
ologian mean the same thing, it is plain that they are
contradicting each other. That is possibly Mr. Shaw's
intention. The matter is not settled by either of them,

1 Hastings Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 21.

76 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
nor would it be if they agreed or thought they agreed.
What does forgiveness imply? How much of sin can be
forgiven? Do we distinguish between sin and sins?
What should forgiveness effect, then, if we do so dis
tinguish? II
We may begin by considering three aspects of sin
which can be readily recognized. If sin is primarily
a record, can that record be deleted? But it is never
merely a record; there is also what St. Augustine called
"the violence of habit";'' can a habit be "forgiven," or
would it be altered if it were forgiven? In the third
place, apart from the record of a man's sins, and his
habit of sin, a sinful act of his may have contaminated
another man's springs of judgment and conduct ; granted
that his habit of sin may be overcome, that the record of
his own acts may be somehow deleted, how can he have
peace, and how can belief in justice be secure, if the
influence of his act remain operative in the life of an
other? There are at least three problems here, none of
them easy.
First, then, the record. Men are always haunted by
the consciousness that a thing done remains done. How
ever much they repent, however pure and great and
valuable their lives have become — "Well, he was in prison
for forgery, and she did have an illegitimate child ; there
is no getting past that ; those things cannot be undone."
So the commonplace always think, inside the Church and
out of it. So, too, say the religious teachers, the hymn-
writers —

"Augustine, Confessions, viii:5, 12: "Lex enim peccati est violentia consue-
tudinis qua trahitur et tenetur etiam invitus animus, eo merito quo in
earn illabitur."

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 77
"Liber scriptus proferetur."
So, too, the Bible, "The dead were judged out of the
things which were written in the books, according to
their works (Rev. 20:12).' So, too, says conscience.'
Actions, deeds, are done and remain. Memory cannot
abolish itself; remorse is there, furious resentment
against oneself for the folly that led to sin against one
self, that robbed oneself of the clean page and the
pleasure which the clean page means. Remorse is essen
tially self -centered ; it has little relation to others. Where
God comes into the reckoning, there is an added horror, a
sense very native to the human mind that the record has
alienated God. If remorse is impersonal and does not
regard others, this is very personal ; God has been turned
into an enemy. By now, if time makes an interpretation
valid, the Christian Church has said this often enough;
but it is not historically the view of Jesus, it is one of
the ideas he died to abolish.
If the unthinking forgive sin easily, the thoughtful
do not; they reckon hardly with themselves. Even if
"Lhe full and self-consistent concept of sin" implies, as
Dr. Tennant says, knowledge, will, and intention — if
without these, it be not sin — still ignorant acts involve
consequences; ignorance traps a man into disease physi
cally; and morally — ? Greek tragedy shows, painfully
enough, that in a great man's estimate of his record and
of himself, his ignorant action counts. Human law will
not admit the plea of ignorance; Nature's law does not
admit it; will God's law allow it? Does a deep-going
man forgive himself his own ignorance? What right has
he to be ignorant? The child dies, because the mother

'The simile is in Daniel 7:10; and in other apocalyptic books. It
occurred independently to the Greeks, some of whom ridiculed it — Zeus
would not have material for books enough; Euripides, Melanippe, fr.
506, Nauck.
"Cf. Wisdom, 17:11; if the text is right.

78 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
did not know; "I ought to have known," she says, and
she is right; the child was given to her that she might
know for it. But it is an insufficient view of sin that
emphasizes the deed, and it means loss of proportion.
The motive is of more import; it is more real and more
formative. Second we set the "violence of habit." Motive, atti
tude, taste, make instinct, and instinct gives a turn to
habit and that to character. It was remarked in an
tiquity, and Burns among others of modern times has
also remarked, that one effect of sin is a change of char
acter. "Each one of us," said the Hebrew, "has been
the Adam of his own soul.'" "Whatever the mental pic
tures you often make, to that color your mind (Sidvoia)
comes ; the mind is dyed by its pictures," writes Marcus
Aurelius (V:16). And Burns:
"But, oh, it hardens all within
And petrifies the feeling."
R. L. Stevenson in his Christmas sermon spoke of the
danger of defiling the imagination. The New Testament
abounds with similar observations; St. Paul has a series
of metaphors all drawn from the physical senses — "the
heart darkened" (Rom. 1:21) and "darkened in mind"
(Stavota, Eph. 4:18) ; the mind and the conscience stained
(Titus 1:15), and the conscience cauterized (I Tim. 4:2).
Cumulatively the pictures suggest a mind cut off from
reality — all the channels of communication blocked, and
all that is transmitted falsified in the process ; the whole
is summed up in a striking phrase, vovs dSd/a/tos (Rom.
1:28), a mind unfit for its proper functions. "This is
the condemnation," writes John (3:19), "that men love
darkness rather than light." Much has been said and

"Apocalypse of Baruch, 54:19.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 79
written in our days of the subconscious mind and of the
subliminal self, and it is remarked how ideas or at least
impressions can be stored in that subconscious mind,
which are never lost but, after years of utter forgetful
ness, may be somehow flung into the conscious mind,
vivid, horrible, and defiling. There are no "dead selves,"
they are living in death, potent and septic. So far
modern analysis supports the insight of Jesus that from
within comes what defiles a man (Mark 7:15). There
is no horror like that of the mind finding in odd moments
of self-discovery what it has made of itself, learning in
awful revelations what things memory and imagination
can accumulate for its perversion. Bunyan pictures the
Pilgrim in the Valley of the Shadow of Death hearing
fiends whisper blasphemies in his ears and supposing the
voice of evil to be his own thought. If Bunyan says ex
plicitly that the voice came from without, the modern
psychologist is not so certain. It is experience that be
tween impulse and act there is an interval in which in
hibition may be effective, but that with surrender to evil
that interval becomes shorter and shorter. A man may
come at last to be the prey of his own past, a creature
of reflex actions, for which, however, he is himself re
sponsible, even if by now they are involuntary and repul
sive to himself, the regular victim of a habit which he
developed by surrender to it.10 A man is responsible for
what he has made of his own mind and personality; but
the vital question is, What can undo what he has done?
In the third place, sin was long ago compared to disease
by Plato (in the Gorgias). The comparison is illuminat
ing, and it was used in passing by Jesus. But if a man

18 R. L. Stevenson in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde draws the picture of
Jekyll waking and seeing with horror the hand of Edward Hyde on the
bed; "I had gone to bed Henry Jekyll, I had awakened Edward Hyde.
How was this to be explained?" Readers will, perhaps, associate odd
revivals of the forgotten with the moment of waking.

80 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
is to be pitied for a disease from which he suffers, two
questions arise: How did he incur it, and has he trans
mitted it? What are we to make of the effects of our
characters in the lives and minds and personalities of
others? If a man of great gifts neglects or misuses
them as a result of my influence, if he turns them into
instruments of corruption, what becomes of that other
lost soul and its powers, used for evil, even if mine is
recovered for God and man? Forgiveness, if it is to be
real and complete, has surely to cover this third aspect
of sin. Ill
Many methods have been tried to meet the case of
sin. Neglect of it as negligible has been suggested as
if it were as good a course as any. Sir Oliver Lodge
has said, apparently with some satisfaction, that the
modern man has not time to think about his sins.1* If
sin is a serious thing at all, it is a pity the modern man
should be so short of time. Much stress was laid in
antiquity, and some since then, on moral endeavor. The
Stoic sage bade a man examine himself, confess his sins
to his conscience, forgive them, and then do better."
Jewish legalism reached a similar result. But every
thing here depends on a man's conception of God and
of God's standards ; if it is not very high, he may easily
satisfy himself; but if it be a high one, if it be continu
ally expanded with new glimpses of God, then new visions
of duty break in upon him, and he concludes, sometimes
in blank despair: "Not the labors of my hands
Can fulfil Thy law's demands."

" Quoted by Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 130.
"Seneca, De Ira, 3:36, 1-4; Epictetus, D. 3:10.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 81
In any case endeavor in the present could not undo the
past. The Stoic quite frankly despaired of some people.
"Natta," said the young Stoic poet, "is stupid with vice;
his heart is overgrown with fat; he feels no reproach; he
knows not what he is losing."13 "What is to be done,"
asked Epictetus," "if a man be hardened to stone?" In
Judaism Paul shows how despair overtook men who gave
themselves to the endeavor to build up their own right
eousness (Phil. 3:6, 9) and were serious about it — "0
wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this
death?" (Rom. 7:24). Paul also speaks of God "giving
up" men to the reprobate mind (Rom. 1:28) and evil
passions, though this does not necessarily imply finality.
Celsus has little hope of quite mending those who "sin
by nature and sin by habit."15 But can despair be a right
conclusion in God's universe? Here again all turns on
our conception of God. Expiation is another means of
dealing with sin, which depends on the same conception.
It at least contains a recognition of the principle of
justice, and assigns a meaning to punishment. Punish
ment has been held to reveal the nature of what is pun
ished; in this case it is education, and we exclude the
unjust and devilish idea of it as mere vengeance. But
if one is not careful, the very means taken to do away
with sin may strengthen its hold ; expiation may itself be
immoral or not sufficiently moral, at any rate as regards
the chain of influence set in movement by sin, unless God
is really recognized in the whole transaction for what
he is. How can a man make reparation to God, if he
has not a proper recognition of God's nature? Still more,
how can he, if he has ? It was suggested, as we saw, in
Plato's Republic that some people even reckoned on mak-

"Persius 3:32.
"Epiatetus, D., 1:5.
"Origen, c. Celsum, 3:65.

82 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
ing friends of the gods out of the spoils of injustice.
Judaism developed another idea, valid and funda
mental if properly conceived, repentance. "There is
nothing about repentance in Aristotle, not very much in
Plato; more no doubt in the teaching of the Stoics,
though the proud self-sufficiency of that school hardly
favors a penitential attitude of mind."13 The absence of
any definite and operative conviction of God's personality
probably explains the slight interest of the Greek in re
pentance.17 Among the Jews we find the doctrine taking
different forms. Mr. Claude Montefiore, in his book
Pharisaism and St. Paul, explains the standpoint of the
Rabbinic Jew, using documents of a rather later date
than Paul's period, but assuring us that we may safely
use them to reconstruct Paul's milieu.11' A few quota
tions will make it plain. Rabbinic Judaism was "a happy,
spiritual and even ardent religion" of the "healthy-
minded" (p. 48). "The Rabbinic Jew . . . took a prac
tical view of the situation" (p. 40) ; "the law had been
given for life . . . [It] is not in one sense too hard for
him. There is no commandment which he cannot fulfil
more or less" (p. 41). "Yes, God ... is very angry,"
but "let a man repent but a very little and God will for
give very much" (p. 42). "The average and decent-
living Israelite would inherit the world to come, would
be 'saved'" (p. 35). "God's love for Israel, his love of
the repentant sinner, his inveterate tendency to forgive
ness," together with the merits of the patriarchs," would

" Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 129.
17 Perhaps it is not fanciful to see in the Greek term for sin (ApapWa,
"missing" the mark) another suggestion of this idea that sin hardly con
cerns God.
" Confirmation is to be found in some of the Apocalyptic books. Cf.
R. H. Charles, Apocalypse of Baruch, p. 81 ff.
"Compare a beautiful passage in Wisdom 11:23-26.
"Cf. Apocalypse of Baruch, 84:10. "Pray . . . that the Mighty
One may be reconciled to you and that He may not reckon the multitude
of your sins, but remember the rectitude of your others." Cf. ib. 14:7,
12, "a store of works."

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 83
amply make up for their own individual deficiencies.
Their religion was therefore happy and hopeful" (p. 36).
"Salvation was the privilege of every Israelite, who,
believing in God and in his law, tried to do his best and
was sorry for his failures and lapses" (pp. 77, 78). The
God of the Rabbis was "very personal and childlike. He
did not care for system and theories, but he was always
there when wanted" (p. 95) j21 his people, too, had "little
philosophy" (p. 79).
There was another type of Judaism which has histori
cally had more influence, the Judaism of the Dispersion,
of men battling more nakedly with the world, with pagan
ism, and with the higher thought of the Greeks. Mr.
Montefiore finds it "inferior" (p. 93), "more anxious and
pessimistic, more sombre and perplexed" (p. 114). It
had suffered from contact with the Greek spirit, and
"began to invent theories and justifications of its reli
gion instead of accepting it as a delightful matter of
course" (p. 96). "Directly you have to justify a thing,
it becomes a little external. ... If you accept ... as a
matter of course, you love it without asking why" (p. 99).
So the Jew of the Dispersion was "more theoretic and
systematic, but his outlook on life was less accurate and
less sensible" (p. 96).
I have given Mr. Montefiore's own words, because I
do not wish to misrepresent, and because he is the expert
and I am not. But the impression they leave on my
mind is not quite what he intends. The naivete of the
Rabbinic Jew does not seem to me a higher thing than
the more difficult and reflective religion of the Dispersion.
It is too like the common sense and the simplicity which
we find in other fields and there recognize to be the result
of mere inattention. Paul's religion was, as Mr. Monte-

21 See Oesterley and Box, Religion and Worship of the Synagogue, pp.
391-403, on the Day of Atonement.

84 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
fiore says, quite different from that which he describes;
but surely it was not of a lower type, unless the philos
opher, who aims with Plato at the "contemplation of all
time and of all existence,"22 is inferior to the man who
has not begun to think or who has abruptly dropped the
habit. Things are not simple in God's universe. To be
unconscious of difficulties is not to be above them. If
this is to defy the common sense of the "man in the
street," I cannot help it. In any case, Rabbinic Judaism
did not, historically, capture the world; it did not hold
the reflective Jews of the Dispersion; and the reason is
not far to seek — it managed everything too easily, "healed
the hurt of the daughter of my people lightly, saying,
Peace, peace; when there is no peace."23
IV
Jesus is reported by the Fourth Gospel to have said
that the Holy Spirit would convince the world of sin
(16:9). Rabbinic Judaism did no such thing. Super
stitious and magical as they largely were, the mystery-
cults of the heathen were nearer the truth about sin.
Jesus with the Rabbis emphasized repentance, but he
touched nothing that he did not deepen. He gave men a
new clue to the force and meaning of sin; he brought
them to a new sense of repentance. Repentance, as
Luther saw when he began in earnest the study of
Greek, means above all things "rethinking." A man must
have some idea of what his sin means to God, of what
it means in the human milieu. In order to do this, he
must have some conviction of God. The knowledge of
God will be more fully dealt with in the next chapter. It
is enough here to recall how Jesus re-created the very
idea of God for men, and this made possible a real re-

22 Republic, VI:486 a.
2S Jeremiah 6:14. 8:11.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 85
thinking of life and conduct. The cross gave men a new
object-lesson in the nature of sin and the outcome of it,
showed it in its hideousness, for the cruel, vulgar, and
negative thing it is. Some realization of God, his law,
his nature, has always been the prelude of repentance
properly so named, though it is also true that penitence
in its fullness is a Christian grace, which grows by
knowledge of Jesus.
But our problem is the work of Jesus in dealing with
sin, and we shall do best to follow the lines laid down
already. How has Jesus affected the mind of mankind
with regard to the record, the habit, and the influence
of sin?
First, once more, the record. Something is needed, as
the writer to the Hebrews says, that "will clean your
conscience." It is conscience that makes cowards of us
all; if conscience blushes, Tertullian said, prayer blushes
too.2* There is no coming to God, if conscience -says we
shall not be welcome. It is a question of balance, or
perspective, as we like to put it. There stands the record ;
we conclude that it is intolerable to God, that it alienates
God. Jesus distinguishes ; he brought out the hatef ulness
of sin to God, he never minimized it, his Passion empha
sized it; but he put in the center of his teaching his
conviction that sin does not alienate God from the child
whom he loves. As we have seen already,25 Jesus always
takes the line that the Father wants his son above all
things. The prodigal wastes the old man's substance in
the strange land; but it is not the substance (nor an
I.O.U. for it) that the old man wants; he wants his boy,
because he is his boy and needs a father's care and love.
Jesus never suggests that he is effecting any change in
moral law, any dislocation, legal fiction, or dodge of any
kind. His emphasis is not on acts done, on guilt or on

24 Tertullian, De exhort, castitatis, 10. » Chapter IV, p. 64.

86 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
penalty incurred; it is not on law, nor on God's majesty
and the vindication of majesty and law; he does not
deny or in reality obscure these things, but for him the
matter of first significance is the love of God.
The record remains, but the sting is taken out of it;
the forgiven son leaves off thinking of his record,23 he
is more impressed by his father's feeling for him, and
if he thinks of the record, it becomes itself of new value
for it enhances the wonder of his reception. "To anyone
who really experiences it," says Herrmann,27 "forgiveness
comes not as a matter of course, but as an astounding
revelation of love." (The contrast here with the ideas
of the Rabbinic Jew as set forth by his advocate is
patent, and it is significant). Christ, as Zwingli saw,
sets men free from the sense of condemnation by reveal
ing not only the divine justice and horror of sin, but
also the divine mercy and love; he removes the barrier
which prevents God and man from falling into each
other's arms.23 The barrier is of man's building, the
honest structure that conscience builds as a prison about
him; but conscience too needs educating and pitches the
love of God too low. Jesus changes that; he is himself
/""the guarantee for God, the pledge of God's love. The
\ consequence is a great change of mind in the man. He
,1 moves over to God's point of view. He no longer wishes
li to escape the consequences of his actions. If the Father
I of Jesus makes a law, the man will now wish at all costs
to maintain it, he will cooperate to the extent of wishing
to bear the penalty that his Father thinks helpful to
him and to others. But is this forgiveness? If the
penalty is still to be borne? But what is the penalty, when

M Cf . Luther : "If thou wilt confess sin, then have a care that thou
lookest and thinkest far more on thy future life than on thy past life."
Herrmann, Communion of Christian with God, p. 255.
" Herrmann, ib., p. 251.
" See A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, pp. 289-290.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 87
once there is reconciliation? Is it a punishment if you
wish it? Let him do what he will! The crop sown
has to be reaped; but Another will help in the reaping;
and it is something to work along with such a Friend even
in so painful and humiliating a task. And it is man's
experience that in this work, as in all work done for God
and with God, the great Friend does the larger part.
If Jesus is right about God, punishment is not vindictive ;
it is remedial,28 and justice is love. "Though he slay me,
yet will I trust in him."30 When one grasps the inward
ness of Christian thought and experience here, the lan
guage used so often in the past about one's own righteous
ness being filthy rags3' becomes quickly intelligible; Zin-
zendorf, following Paul and John, is right, when we un
derstand what he means :
"Jesu, thy blood and righteousness
My beauty are, my glorious dress ;
'Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed,
With joy shall I lift up my head."
We may very well use other words and other symbols ; but
he too has caught the truth. The cross has lit up the real
nature of God ; the love that chose it becomes the supreme
thing; the record is not ignored, but its paralyzing effect
is gone; the conscience is set free to enjoy God and all
his dealings. Rothe, as rendered by John Wesley, sums
up the experience :
"0 love, thou bottomless abyss!
My sins are swallowed up in thee;
Covered is my unrighteousness,
Nor spot of guilt remains in me,
While Jesu's blood through earth and skies
Mercy, free boundless mercy, cries."

29 Cf. Clement of Alexandria, Strom., 6:6, 46: "The punishments of
God are saving and educative"; referring to the punishment of the dead.
MJob 13:15 (A. V.). S1 Cf . Isaiah 64:6 (A.V.).

88 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
Secondly, the power of sin. During the long Euro
pean war, and especially towards its end, all the world
realized, as Napoleon had said, that morale is everything.
Spirit is the source of victory. Jesus, as we have seen,
floods the human soul with an intense conviction of the
love of God; and the man shouts in sheer joy: "I can
do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me"
(Phil. 4: 13). This has been put in a variety of ways, all
pointing to the same experience. Dr. Chalmers spoke of
"the expulsive power of a new affection," an illustration
from human life which goes a long way. "Every one who
knows what it is to be forgiven," wrote Dr. Denney,
"knows also that forgiveness is the greatest regenerative
force in the life of man."82 "The spirit of life in Christ,"
said Paul (and we had better take pains to give the real
value to the words he chose), "set me free from the law
of sin and death" (Rom. 8:2). Charles Wesley says the
same, as forcibly :
"He breaks the power of cancelled sin,
He sets the prisoner free."
St. Augustine gives a further hint. We love more, he
says, a possession that we have lost and found again than
if we had never lost it.33 A new tie of common experi
ence binds the good shepherd to the sheep he has found,
and would bind the sheep to the shepherd if sheep were
susceptible of such feelings. Men transcend sheep here ;
memory gives a new motive, and the common experi
ence of which Christ and the soul share the secret has a
power of transmuting the minus to a plus, with a force
that overcomes the reflex of habit. As for the subliminal
self and its power of storing dead selves with their hor
rible reminders and influences, the Author of the sub-

33 Denney, Christian Doctrine of Reconciliation, p. 6.
83 Augustine, Confessions, VIII:3, 7.

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 89
liminal self may be trusted to purify that self also; for
the idea that God leaves things half done has never
found acceptance with real thinkers. Christ will descend
into that hell at least, whatever we say about the Apostles'
Creed; and when he has made it full of himself, what
it throws up into the conscious may be trusted to be
sweet and wholesome. Human love has this effect —
changing the innermost character and instincts and stor
ing impulses for good.
All this, be it noted, is not conjecture ; it is the experi
ence men have had of Jesus, interpreted soberly, if joy
fully, in language as near the fact as they could bring
it. If the language has the surge and swing about it of
"joy unspeakable and full of glory," that is always the
mark of real experience, new and startling; and it con
firms the Christian story, that men should find it un
speakable. Historically, men have found the power of
habit overcome and the nature transformed by Jesus
Christ — instinct and impulse as much changed as mind
and heart, a rebirth of the whole being. What forgive
ness could be without this, it is hard to see; it must be
this, or it is nothing; and Christian experience is solid
on the reality of this change.
In the third place, the influence of sin upon others —
in some ways the hardest aspect of the matter. A man
submits himself to Christ, is reborn, remade, or what
ever our phrase be to describe the amazing extent of
the change ; but the woman he seduced, or the son whom
he tainted with low moral standards, what of them?
Can he
"Let the wretch go festering through Florence,"
and be at peace with God? The act is beyond recall; the
innocent suffer or are defiled; how can there be "peace

90 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
with God," would it not be damnable insensibility?
There are two lines of reply. It is a consideration to be
remembered, that a man is responsible for his influence,
but not wholly for another's reception of it. The great
quack of the last days of the French monarchy took in
all sorts of persons, but, as Carlyle points out, Cagliostro
failed with thoroughly honest people. If the woman or
the son, whom we have imagined, had been thoroughly
sound, the bad influence would have been turned aside.
The man is responsible for the effects of his influence,
which are serious enough, but not for another man or
woman's self-determination. The other person is never
merely wax; he, too, or she, has a responsibility. But,
put things at the very worst, the problem will be best
decided by reference to the Christian experience of
Jesus. "It is simply not true," says Dr. D. S. Cairns,
"to speak of the irreparable past, and not well to dwell
upon it. Go deeper and take God into account. It is
part of his omnipotence that he can retrieve it. The
story is not finished yet. Those who believe in God
believe in a retrieving future." Thus it all comes back
once again to that conviction of God which Jesus has
brought into human experience. Jesus was after all the
friend of men, clear-sighted beyond the best of us; was
he going to leave men unhealed just when the healing
mattered most to themselves and to others? To think so
is to miss the reality of his nature.
Finally, we have to remember that the holiness, which
Jesus gives to character, is not a negative thing of taboos,
"a fugitive and cloistered virtue," in Milton's fine phrase,
that "slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland
is to be run for, not without dust and heat." He has
given us another conception of holiness, as a positive
and redemptive thing that seeks the contact of sinful men,
that faces dust and heat, temptation, agony, and the cross

THE FORGIVENESS OF SIN 91
itself — something functional and reproductive, no "trea
sure in a napkin" buried and sterile, but seed sown and
growing and bearing a hundredfold, the most prolific and
living thing imaginable. To venture on a modern simile,
it is more like chlorine than blotting-paper.
It is thus that Jesus has dealt with sin. He gave it an
importance it had never had before; he brought out its
meaning; he got it into the light of God's face. But he
also brought men to look on God's face. "We have peace
with God," says Paul (Rom. 5:1) ; it is historically true,
and the way of it and the results of it deserve attention.
The man who is at peace with God is no longer resentful
of God's action, whatever form it take. He no longer
tries to protect himself against God. As in a human
friendship a man drops habits of criticism and self-pro
tection, and absorbs his friend, so the man "at peace
with God" opens his heart, consciously and, perhaps still
more, unconsciously to God. It is not till then that God's
personality can make itself felt.
The result in the growth of mind and character cannot
be hid. Of such growth the Christian Church can show
abundant evidence, both in individuals and in the society
they make. So that we are justified in concluding that
there has been some real and effective treatment of sin,
that men have been set free from it, and have a new life
in God — in short, that Jesus has reconciled men to God,
that he has solved the problem of forgiveness, and that
the solution is "the love of God which is in Christ Jesus
our Lord" (Rom. 8:39).

CHAPTER VI
THE REVELATION OF GOD
Tantum Deus cognoscitur quantum diligitur.
— Bernard of Clairvaux.
In the long history of religion with all its cross-cur
rents and backwaters, the windings of the stream, and
the great barren expanses of shale and sand where no
water is, it is possible with care to mark a direction and
a progress. Certain things emerge from close study
which it is impossible to mistake and which gain signifi
cance as we reflect upon them.
Man, it has been said, is incurably religious, and the
explanation is given by Plato — "the unexamined life is
not livable for a human being."1 He is bound by some
thing implanted in him to reflect upon his experience,
and, while thought does not add to his experience, it so
brings out the meaning of it, as to make it a new thing
and to prepare the way for fresh discovery. The past
becomes the present and points to the future — is the
future, one might almost say, so truly
"Old experience doth attain
To something of prophetic strain."

Four tendencies may be remarked in the development
of religion, not all equally strong in every race but all in
some degree potent.
1 Apology, 38 A. 92

THE REVELATION OF GOD 93
First of all, man is driven to unify his experience. We
talk of people thinking in compartments, but it is impos
sible to do it for very long; either the thought or the
compartments must go, and with mankind at large it is
thought that triumphs. Plato's ideal of "the contempla
tion of all time and all existence"2 owes to him a magni
ficent phrasing ; the ideal was latent in every living mind
from the beginning — a vague date, I know, but no other is
available. Probably all the great strides in thought have
been connected with the unification of experience. A dis
covery or even a suggestion that reduces our categories,
that simplifies our thinking, is always hailed as a step for
ward ; if it prove valid, it will never be really lost. The
greatest truths are those that achieve this for us most
effectively, and over the largest range.
Secondly, however picturesque in long retrospect the
vague cults and fears of animism may seem, animism
has never given a secure foothold to thinking man. The
Olympian gods of Greece were bound to overcome their
predecessors. Mankind tacitly held that there is nothing
in the universe greater than personality; the word is of
the most modern, the faith very ancient. Men gave their
gods personality; or, rather, they found themselves un
able to think of their gods as less than personal. To
recognize the gods as possessed of feeling, intellect, and
character was a step forward — a necessary step; and
where it was not taken there was no progress. Perhaps
the chief value of this step forward was that it made
another inevitable — to the unity of the godhead. The
unthinking in Greece held for ever to vague animistic
conceptions, to demons; and there was periodic reaction
to them. The separate gods long held the field, but the
thinkers saw beyond them. Israel and Greece took dif
ferent roads at this point; Greece reached the unity of

'Republic, VI:486 A.

94 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
God more decisively than his personality ; Israel, by some
happy instinct or thanks to prophetic genius, grasped
and kept the personality of the one God, and there lay
the key to the future.
A third tendency is toward the supremacy of moral
law. One of the great struggles in the fifth century
B.C., the most brilliant age of Greece, was to decide
whether morality were custom or nature, vopm or tfrvais.
The word used for law suggested custom as the basis of
morality, but experience was stronger than etymology.
Human life was not a mere succcession of accidents, more
or less regulated by tacit conventions; there was (in our
modern sense — one cannot now escape the word) law in
it, something underlying it, valid, potent, not to be
escaped. If reproduction was a natural human instinct,
some kind of morality was another; as real and eventu
ally as imperious. Society rested on something deeper
than conventions; if men were to be men in any true
sense, theft, adultery, and murder, to name only the most
obvious things, were intolerable; they ruined any real
human life, they must be a denial of something natural,
a refusal of the order of the universe. A long while
before Plato made all this clear, men brought to bear
upon the gods their conviction of the supremacy of
righteousness. Zeus, as ^Eschylus saw, stands for law,
inevitable, universal, and intelligible to man. "If gods
do deeds of shame, the less gods they," says one of
Euripides' characters. These two great poets do but
sum up and bring to expression what had long been
working in the Greek mind and what was to discredit
their pantheon. The Hebrew moved, perhaps more con
spicuously but hardly more certainly, in the same direc
tion. Righteousness becomes the central conception for
all true thought upon man's life and upon the being of
God.

THE REVELATION OF GOD 95
In the fourth place, man came to realize intensively
the significance of his own personality. A large part of
Greek history may be summed up as a series of experi
ments, by which the individual secures recognition of
himself. Politically it became more and more obvious
how much he meant; Greek history was made and unmade
in a degree beyond anything we know in the West by
men amazingly, even desperately, individual and unmis
takable. Greek philosophy is the outcome of the indi
vidual man's determination to do his own thinking him
self, and be done with his neighbor and his grandfather.
In religion it is the same. The Greek made up his mind
that he must be immortal." It is this glorious assertion
of personality, with the glad acceptance of the duties
that go with it, that made the Greek the world's teacher.
Strange as it seems, he had to teach the Hebrew the doc
trine of personal immortality.
These four tendencies are to be traced through the
history of all religion. They have their fates, of course ;
here one is over-emphasized and another lost. But a
survey of the whole field confirms us in the conviction
not only of their validity but of their vitality. Where
one or other of these tendencies is repressed, religion
suffers. Men's convictions as to the nature of God control
the fates of races and empires ; they are the most potent
things mankind has. A doctrine of God that ignores his
unity, his personality, or my personality, or the right
eousness that must govern us both, leads to disaster. Any
doctrine, further, that suggests contempt or even inatten
tion towards any real feature in God or man, fails to
endure, or, if it endures, the human race suffers for it.
My personality includes feeling and reason, the instinct
for wife and child and state, an imperious demand for

3 Plutarch, who sometimes hits off (or borrows) a good phrase, says,
"The hope of immortality and the passion to be is of all our loves oldest
and greatest." (Non Swwiter, 1104 c).

96 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
an ever larger life, for a richer development of nature
and character — that is what the Greek teaches us, and
we know by now that he is right ; and any religion which
denies me any of these claims will produce a poorer type
of mankind, a lie of some sort, and not the true thing.
And further, before we pass on, when the modern man
— at his simplest, as we may lightly say — is overheard
asking: "How can I be right with God?" the question
embodies the four great tendencies we have been dis
cussing; it recognizes God and his ego as paramount,
acting together in a single sphere, and both recognizing
Right as their common ground. History itself is a record
of man's endeavor to "get right with God," to find out
God's meaning for human life and to adjust society to it.*
II
But, as Plato says, "the Father and Maker of this
whole it is hard to find, and when one has found him to
declare him to all is impossible." 3 That a sense of
strangeness and foreignness lies like a fog across the
entrance of the divine country, a certain wonder whether
a mere man has any business there, an unreality about
it all, is the moving confession of a modern thinker.3
God is so manifold that it is hard to be sure that one has
the whole of him. His ideas man only slowly gathers;
some easily, as those about gravitation and by and by
those about fire, and later and with less ease those about
germs (let us say) and electricity; but his more funda
mental thoughts are more deeply hidden and only to be

4 The influence of the Stoic "Law of Nature" on the development of
Roman law is only one obvious illustration.
'Timaeus, 29 C. ; cf. Clem. Alex. Protr. 68, and Celsus, Orig, c.
Cels. 7:42, who quote the passage from very different angles and in
very different tempers.
4 Phillips Brooks, The Light of the World, p. 6.

THE REVELATION OF GOD 97
reached by longer and more painful experience and
thought more long and painful still.' And man is im
patient of the lingering processes of thought. The phil
osophers are so slow, and life so short; one must have
an effective relation with God, and there are other
teachers who do not for ever tell us to wait and see;
they act and achieve — at least they say so. A great
cleavage comes in men's progress; these go to the right,
moving slowly and stumblingly, checking their move
ments and their discoveries, halting and retracing their
steps again and again; those go gaily and confidently to
the left, happy in their freedom from doubt, happy in
their activity and their sensations; and mankind is
indebted to both — though to which the more, we may
not so readily agree.
Must we know God before we can have relations with
Godhead? The Graeco-Roman world was divided on this
question. The philosophers were uncertain and slow,
not clear about God's personality, stronger on his unity,
far from precise about our consciousness of relation with
him. "He is not far from any one of you," they said;
they even spoke of a holy spirit within you ;3 but then it
was not clear once more, whether they meant spirit or
breath, a divine indwelling in the soul, or a divine crea
tion of the soul from some fragment of itself (divinae
particulam aurae).' There was, they said, a great Some
thing beyond, the soul of the world (anima mundi) per
haps, or Something further away still, "beyond being."10
But how is one to have contact with that? In him we
live and move and have our being ; his laws condition our
life:

7 Hence perhaps the famous saying of Heraclitus (c. 600 B.C.) that "a
hidden harmony is better than one obvious."
» So Seneca, Ep. 41, 1 : Sacer intra nos spiritus sedet.
•Horace, Satires, 2:2, 79; cf. Epictetus, D„ 2:8: » i iwiun-aaiia el Toii 8env.
'"Celsus ap. Origen, c. Cels., 7:45.

98 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
"Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient Heavens, through Thee, are
fresh and strong."
For Wordsworth's Ode to Duty is own brother to the
Hymn of Cleanthes — but younger and more poet-souled.
But there were those who were not philosophers, who
resented for one thing the philosophic air ("How blest
are we that are not simple men"), who were more in a
hurry for peace of mind, who tired quickly of the abstract
and who resented the infinite distance that philosophy
put between them and their hopes, between them and God.
The story of the recrudescence of cult and ritual, of
superstition and magic, in the Roman Empire is a pain
ful chapter in the history of mankind. But behind it all
lay instincts that the philosophers had been forgetting.
They were content with a soul, which, while they called
it "a particle of God," was really no more than a little
parcel of elements to be untied one day and scattered
among the larger masses of those elements in the uni
verse — in plain terms, it would be lost." They empha
sized the ego and forgot him ; they urged on him infinite
grandeur and failed to see that he had any needs or
cravings at all, or suggested that if he had, he might
better suppress them. The religious temperament was
not to be satisfied so, and it became engaged in a vigorous
conflict with philosophy — a battle for the reality, the im
mortality of the soul, for the nearness of God to man,
for the conviction that intimate relation between God
and the soul is the essence and heart of life. It was in
vain that philosophy showed how near God comes to men
in knowledge and in understanding, how the divine
knowledge and the human hold converse. Men were in
a hurry; they grew tired of thinking; they must feel.

" Seneca, Consolation (end).

THE REVELATION OF GOD 99
The common man's hurry is the quack's opportunity.
Hence came, as we have seen, the sects that promised
speedy peace with heaven, certainty, security and enjoy
ment, rapt moments and the most delicious sensations
of union with gods, and light upon immortality. Intui
tion and initiation were the watchwords. Religion was
dissipated in an emotionalism that lost all sense of defini
tion; nothing was clear, all was vague. There were (and
are) those whose teaching is that that is ideal religion;
but something was lost, when reason abdicated — the
stern morality of the Stoic went, the clear vision of
Plato, the very sense of truth.12
From the struggle certain results emerge. A faraway
God will not do; any tampering with the reality of the
soul is fatal; emotion is no guide to truth; religion
without morality, morality without religion, neither will
satisfy the stern and loving nature of man.
' III
The Jew in the Roman Empire had after all a richer
heritage in religion than the Greek. Before the days
of the great prophets Israel had been clear about the per
sonality of Jehovah. It was a gain that the syncretism,
that made one Zeus of many and, by keeping all the
legends of the many, made the one polygamous and non-
moral generally, had no parallel in Israel's experience.
Slowly, led by prophet and psalmist, Israel concentrated
mind and heart on one God, "the God of the whole earth,"
the God of Nature, the God of history; and a monothe
ism grew up that was passionate.
"The lord descended from above
and bowed the heavens hie;
UP. Wendland, Hell. Rom. Kultur, p. 168, sums up this general move
ment as "Theosophy for the cultured, superstition the vulgar's daily bread."

100 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
And underneath his feet he cast
the darkenes of the skie ;
On Cherubs and on Cherubins
ful royally he rode,
And on the wings of al the windes
came flying al abroad.
So the Elizabethan Puritan rendered the eighteenth
Psalm. The hundred and fourth Psalm, the thirty-eighth
chapter of Job, show alike with what feeling and poetry
monotheism could clothe itself, and how Nature in its
beauty becomes a revelation of God. The visions of
Isaiah and the other great prophets all associate the One
God with righteousness, terrible and overpowering, but
eminently just and reasonable. If prayer is the final
test of any real monotheism,13 Hebrew religion alone in
antiquity could stand it. The unity of all experience,
the personality of the One God, the universal scope of
righteousness, are the glorious contribution of Israel to
the religion of mankind. Very curiously, personal im
mortality was only a later conviction, but in time it was
achieved. It is too late to quarrel with the forgotten scholars
who organized the canon of the Old Testament, and per
haps needless, for their spiritual and their literary
instincts were generally sound. The apocryphal and
pseudonymous books of the last three centuries B.C. have
neither the religious nor the literary value of the earlier
prophets. But a great deal is lost for the student of reli
gion who neglects them. The Jew in those difficult cen
turies was in the most painful contact with new situa
tions and the new ideas that they involve. He had
reached the conception of Jehovah being the God of the
whole earth; but, influenced by Greek and perhaps other
thinkers, he was not quite so easy about his own rela-

" So J. H. Moulton, Treasure of the Magi, p. 101.

THE REVELATION OF GOD 101
tions with Jehovah. He recognized, more than ever
before, the mind of Jehovah in the course of history ; but
Jehovah more and more seemed to work from a distance,
to keep aloof from the world he controlled; it might be
by angels," it might be by his wisdom,13 or by the Torah
(his law) that he managed the affairs of men, but he in
his holiness was out of their touch, almost out of their
ken; even his name was not to be spoken.13 The Sep
tuagint shows the feeling of the age in toning down the
grosser anthropomorphisms of the Hebrew bible." It
was with cowering awe that later Judaism regarded him
— even angels "could not behold his face by reason of the
magnificence and glory" (1 Enoch 14:21) ; but with out
bursts of extraordinary assurance. The present was
abominable ; the position of the nation went from bad to
worse; so Jewish thinkers ranged into the future. In
the apocalyptic books we have their philosophy of his
tory, their conviction that fundamental Justice is the
secret of the universe, that present wrong will yet, by
God's providence, issue somehow in future right. Despite
a more or less Eastern dualism that begins to haunt their
minds, they are so far influenced by the Greek concep
tion of the unity of existence, reinforcing prophetic
teaching. Their God is not quite the God of the prophets ;
he is eloquent, finicking, and imperial, he depends on
Greek rhetoric as well as on spiritual truth and intuition ;
and, while he is universal, "hating nothing that he has
made,"13 he has a marked weakness for his own tribe.
And yet this God achieves some things beyond the vision
of the greater prophets; he is much more interested in

14 It is pointed out that this idea is already in Ezekiel, but see Daniel
and the Book of Jubilees for a furthur development of it. Also R. H.
Charles, Enoch, index s.v. Angels.
"Drummond, Philo, 2, pp. 214 ff.; cf. II Enoch (Secrets), 30:8: "On
the sixth day I commanded my Wisdom to make man of seven substances."
"A. B. Bruce, Apologetics, p. 286.
"W. Fairweather, The Background of the Gospels, p. 329.
"Wisdom 11:24.

102 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
the individual — "the souls of the righteous are in the
hand of God,"1' and he will keep them and give them
another life, a better life, with not only the conscious
ness of the victory of right but ocular evidence of it. A
last judgment, resurrection, immortality, a Messianic
intervention — the ideas are never far away in this period.
Naturally they are never very distinct; men's guesses
and intuitions wavered; but Jehovah would overcome
Satan, and the pious believer was safe in entrusting him
self to God. In this period of depressed national life,
there thus rises a developed conception of personal reli
gion, which can be traced back to the individualism of
Jeremiah.20 When we compare the development of religion in Israel
with the course it took in the Graeco-Roman world, it
seems a fair conclusion from the experience of Israel
that more is gained in the quest of the knowledge of God
along the line of thought and intellect than by the line
of cult and emotion. Emotion has its place; it may be
doubtfully true that some experience of facts is only
reached by means of emotion; but emotion seems a nor
mal concomitant of the deepest experiences. Thus emo
tion has to be crossexamined, its evidence has to be
checked, and its data corrected. Every man is born a
metaphysician, and knows that emotion and intuition are
amenable to the court of experience and that experience
can only be interpreted by reason ; though not every man
will take the trouble to carry the process through. The
Jew, if Mr. Montefiore's picture of him is true, grew
tired of thinking out his religion and took it for granted.
Meantime the Graeco-Roman world, depressed by long
wars and ruined by the loss of freedom, was in a hurry
for spiritual peace; it swung off from the philosophic

18 Wisdom 3:1.
20 J. P. Peters, Religion of the Hebrews, p. 441.

THE REVELATION OF GOD 103
school to the shrine, and before long it compelled the
philosophers also to come and make their peace with the
gods of taboo and magic. IV
Into such a world came Jesus, a re-creating force. He
brought a new conception of God, which on examination
we find to comprise all the gains made by all the world
through centuries of experience. The four great features,
which we have noticed in the development of religious
thought, are to be found in his teaching — one world, One
God and that God personal, righteousness, and the per
sonality of man. But the difference with him lies in the
value he gives to personality. Personal as the Hebrew
prophets had made God, none of them dreamed of a God
so intensely real, so boundlessly personal, so amazingly
akin to man. The boldness and the sweep of Jesus here
outrun description. The corollaries of his belief in God's
personality are an entire transformation of the idea of
righteousness and a new emphasis on the significance of
the human soul, that, next to his belief in God, has been
the most powerful thing in history.
Plato had recognized the natural affinity of God and
man, their mutual intelligibility ; man, he said, was made
by nature to be intimate with God (oUaws e^av ¦n-pb's rbv
6e6v); but Plato never came near such a sense as Jesus
had of God's kinship, interest, and nearness. Jesus pic
tures a God who loves and who enjoys the world he has
made, down to the last little sparrow in a nestful, who
thinks in terms of color and life and movement, and
who above all else loves and enjoys the nature of man,
sees through man's limitations his worth and grandeur,
and cannot do without him. What teacher ever gave
God so thorough and so puissant a personality? He will

104 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
have no God remote if just, still less a God beyond being:
he pictures a God involved in all the tragedy of all the
world, who takes and keeps the most resolute and self-
sacrificing initiative, a God of energy and hope. He pic
tures God as the good shepherd, who seeks the lost sheep
and who finds it and puts it on his shoulders with joy —
God as rejoicing with all his friends in heaven over one
sinner that repents — an emphasis beyond all others on
man's personality.21 Other teachers more than half hinted
failure in God, his world a mistake, to be made over
again, the larger part of the men (for whom he was sup
posed to care) utter fiascos, mere fuel for the flames of
hell and nothing more to be made of them. Not so Jesus ;
he saw better and read the triumph of God; the leaven
leavens the meal; the seed brings forth a hundredfold;
the lost sheep is found; the lost son comes home, drawn
by his Father's invincible and irresistible love. God
never made the wondrous human soul to be "cask as rub
bish to the void." Fecisti nos ad te, said Augustine,
"Thou hast made us for thyself"; and he learnt it from
Jesus, who saw that God will have us, that he breaks
down the obstacles between man and himself, and when
man is angry with him or suspicious of him reconciles
him to himself. Jesus "passed by the grand classical
speech of religion, which was fast becoming a dead
language to the living world . . . and took up the father
and mother tongue, the dialect of the human heart, and
at his summons and by the transfiguring power of his
personality, the name of Father became pure and great
enough to describe the inmost nature of the Eternal
One." a
Men believed the message of Jesus. He gave it partly
31 Cf. Phillips Brooks, The Light of the World, p. 333. "The summons
of God for men to join Him in His joy appears to open a new region of
motive." 33 D. S. Cairns, Christianity and the Modern World, p. 52.

THE REVELATION OF GOD 105
in words — but such words! Words of genius full of the
life and spirit of a most vital and energizing personality.
The words had his life, his fire, his depth, and his happi
ness in them, and they were irresistible. He spoke in
pictures, far more illuminating than definitions. More
still, Jesus brought home to men his conviction of God
by what he was. There is no describing personality;
you have to touch it to know it. Genius and talent are
extraordinarily alike, except that they are utterly differ
ent. "There's very little difference between one man and
another," said a working man to Professor William
James; "but," he added, "what there is, is very im
portant." Genius gets outside our categories and defies
even our powers of quotation and misquotation; it will
not be hackneyed. Jesus is clear away beyond all our
teachers. His personality leaps from the Greek text,
and the Elizabethan English, despite our familiarity with
them, and is alive again and charms men still into half-
believing what he says, and wholly venturing upon it and
finding it true.
Do men find it true? Can we use the experience of
the Christian Church, if we can recapture it, to deter
mine the truth of what he said? Let us go back a little.
Let us recall the four points on which we find that man
has been insisting through all his religious history. If
there is not something fundamental about them, some
thing in a deep sense true, then it is hard to find any
meaning at all in the experience of mankind. We find,
however, that not one of them is lost sight of without
some tragic decline in the people who lose it, church or
no church, some failure to keep abreast of the deep
realities, some abandonment of what is essential in human
nature. But where men have taken Jesus at the foot of
the letter and treated him so seriously as to risk life and
the soul on his veracity, we find, as the Fourth Gospel

106 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
put it, "life and life more abundantly." The test will be
what Jesus has made of life, and we shall draw our evi
dence not from people officially wearing his uniform, as
it were, and using his name, but from people who throw
in their lot with him and face Gethsemane and Calvary
with him. For we must remember that many ships will
float in fair weather, but the storm shows their quality.
How has the teaching of Jesus weathered the centuries?
Aristotle once said that in the Greek mysteries men
and women were "put into a certain frame of mind," and
"had feelings." A modern Anglican writer has on these
grounds compared them with the sacraments. But the
Christian has historicaUy learnt to be independent of his
feelings, as Bunyan did in Bedford Jail. He has some
how gained an assurance, beyond feeling,23 that his
Heavenly Father is the real figure in the story, whatever
the story was — privation, prison, martyrdom, or what
not, and he knows that he has "peace with God." If the
next step is crucifixion, he will, in the splendid sugges
tion of Jesus, bring a cross with him — a magnificent
extension of the principle of going an extra mile when
requisitioned. Life has become full in every detail with
God, rich and gracious and great.24 There is union with
God, but not the static union conceived of in Greek mys
teries, but a union whose business it is
"To read what is yet unread
In the manuscripts of God,"
to hold communion with the Heavenly Father along the
line of everything that interests him — a large pro
gramme, larger perhaps than any one before Christ,

28 It is interesting to note the prevalence in the Fourth Gospel, com
monly supposed to be more mystical than the other three, of words that
emphasize thought and intellect rather than feeling; viz., the verb "to
know," the nouns "light" and "truth."
24 A later chapter (XIII) will take up this point.

THE REVELATION OF GOD 107
except Plato perhaps, could have contemplated. Jesus
has historically created this mind in men — a passion to
reach God in all he does, color, movement, life and death,
the sea, the stars, and the human soul.
"The pure in heart shall see God," said Jesus (Matt.
5) ; the impure do not see him; they do not want to see
him, and they are saved from it, though not to their
gain. But men convicted of sin are afraid of God. In
both ways sin has been an obstacle to the knowledge of
God. If, then, we find the Christian with a passion for
God, on God's terms, and with a growing intelligence of
God, it seems reasonable to conclude that, whatever the
process, sin has in him been effectively dealt with. When
we find further that the Christian habitually attempts it
in the belief that Jesus was serious and spoke from
experience when he spoke of God; when we find that he
achieves the impossible, captures historically the Roman
Empire for Christ, wins Europe to a Reformation for
Christ, makes Christ the mainspring of the most momen
tous changes in modern India and China; it again seems
reasonable to conclude that the Christian is in touch
with some real force. Jesus came in an age rather like
our own, an age willing to discuss for ever ; he came with
the power of God and changed the world.
This is to treat Christian experience in a summary
way, but the more closely it is studied, the more it verifies
the teaching of Jesus upon God. When an experiment in
science succeeds, it is fair to hold that the principles to
be tested in it are confirmed — unless there is error some
where, met and frustrated by some accident. But in sci
ence nothing is based on single experiments; a result is
not counted established till it is confirmed by a series of
experiments and by independent observers. The belief
that Jesus has made a real revelation of God rests on the
evidence of lives devoted to testing it in every century

108 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
since Pilate ruled over Judaea, in every continent, and by
men of the most widely different antecedents, in race,
culture, and religion. The Christian life rests on Jesus'
conception of God as relevant, as a father, as ours in
deepest literalness. But, again and again, it must be
remarked that the impulse to put the thing to the test
came and still comes from the personality of Jesus him
self, and from the cross which Jesus chose and in which
he showed men the essential nature of God.
A further point remains. That Jesus has stimulated
men to explore God to his depths and heights, has already
been said; but there is another side to it. God, it is
men's experience, is to be apprehended along the line of
every human faculty, every sensitivness. The author of
every aspect of life will touch the human spirit at every
point. Interests, as the Latin proverb says, pass into
character; a man is developed by what interests and
occupies him. The Christian occupation has been with
God, following the cue and the impulse given by Jesus.
What has been its reaction upon character? Does the
Christian nation (so far as we can judge from the very
partially Christian nations as yet known) recede as a
result of living, as far as it does, on the principles of
Jesus? Men's ideas of God, formulated or not, but acted
upon, have been the most potent factors in the fate of
races and institutions. It may seem abstract, but there
are few things so drastic and operative as an idea. What
have been the effects of the ideas of Jesus upon national
life? That will occupy us in two later chapters, but,
without risking repetition, it will suffice to suggest that
so far the nations that have been most serious in dealing
with the ideas of Jesus have not proved backward in
other ways, whatever the test.
The same holds of individual men and women. Jesus,
beside giving the impulse to explore God, enlarges our

THE REVELATION OF GOD 109
capacities for knowing God. The habit of studying and
assimilating all that we mean by Christ, enlarges a man's
aptitude for capturing that mind of God which Jesus
tempts him to explore. Jesus develops character in
those who follow him, and character is the key to the
discovery of God, as he said. He charms men to forget
themselves in coming with him, and the obedience that
is instinctive becomes illumination. The historical Jesus
whom they follow, they discover — when their attention
is taken from themselves and their own preconceptions
and fixed upon him — to be not the veiling but the unveil
ing of God, and seeing him as he is they grow like him
(I John 3:2). V
So far the effect of Jesus in the experience of men as
the Revealer of God. Out of this experience came the
Christology of the Church. In Christology we begin to
touch the region of theory, but the promise made to the
reader23 that he and not the writer is to be the theologian,
will be kept. All that I now propose is to suggest that
an examination of the titles given to Jesus by the
Church, will show that they are each an attempt to
explain his person from his work, and that taken together
they shed a light on the Church's experience — a light the
more valuable, because here the Church will not be speak
ing directly of that experience for any purpose, but will
reveal it unconsciously.
The names given to Jesus are many and are drawn
from a good many types of thought and analogy. Messiah
is Hebrew; Logos is Greek; Homoousios is another Greek
word, and more philosophical; Photagogos, the Light-
bringer, came from the mysteries.2* But they all point

"In the introduction.
MCf. Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus.

110 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
to the same thing. Whether "anointed" by God, or the
"reason" of God (an idea owing something to the
Stoic "generative reason," Aoyos o-ireppxiTiKos, and "soul
of the universe," anima mundi) Jesus is in either case
recognized as one who has a special right, and even a
commission, to interpret God to men. In other words the
titles speak of the Christian belief that Jesus did bring
a valid and realiable revelation of God to men. Homo-
ousios says the same thing. If God was really, as the
Neo-Platonists said, "beyond being," if he could neither
be apprehended nor set forth, imagined nor grasped by
reason, feeling, or any human faculty; if there was no
link between God and man, then Jesus was as futile in
the long run as any other man. But this the Church
would not believe, and it "denied the antecedent," and
affirmed a real essential link between God and Jesus;
whatever "being" might be, it was not an impassable gulf
between Jesus and God, it was something in which they
were one.27 When then Jesus speaks of what God is, he
is not traveling outside his experience, he is speaking
with knowledge, and in him we can know God. That lies
at the heart of the Church's more philosophical doctrines.
There are simpler and dearer names than Homoousios.
Jesus is Mediator, Paraclete, High Priest, the Beloved,
for the men of the first century — all names that speak
of the real relation which he establishes between God
and men. All the Incarnation doctrines point to the same
conviction that Jesus does reveal God.
If he does not — then it would look as if human experi
ence had very little real value, as if little were to be learnt
from it, whatever clarity and force of mind were brought
to bear upon it. For if Jesus does not reveal God, our

27 If Christ is only Homoiousios, "like in essence," we are really no
nearer to God, the Church taught; "like, but oh! how different" under
lay the Arian view, at its most irenical.

THE REVELATION OF GOD 111
chance of learning of God from souls of less depth and
purity and intensity is small indeed. We shall be driven
back to the vagueness of the later Greek speculation;
nor is that a distant risk. One effect of the discoveries
of natural science, of the progress made in that field, is
to emphasize the grandeur and wonder of the mind (if
we may venture so much) that underlies the creation.
We are liable to lose ourselves in a dim consciousness of
a power that deals with universals at best, a power to be
surmised, not known, of which little can be predicated
beyond ingenuity and efficiency — features more and more
staggering as we track out the laws and forces at work
in the world, and less and less human with every acces
sion to our knowledge. Less and less human (if the
adjective may be allowed) this power becomes, less and
less intelligible to humanity, because ingenuity and effi
ciency do not make character; and in proportion as they
are magnified without the balancing attributes of love
and tenderness, they make their possessor more awful,
awful to the verge of hateful.
But this line of thought ignores the better part of our
experience, and the part which can be more closely and
clearly known and understood. It is the human side of
things which we know; and, just because Jesus shares
that, we can understand him and use him. To clear our
thought and to give us a real base of action, we must
have a firm hold on man's experience; and Jesus gives
us that. Luther put the case strongly, but not too
strongly, when he wrote in his Commentary on Gala
tians (1:3) : "Whensoever thou art occupied in the mat
ter of thy salvation, setting aside all curious speculations
of God's unsearchable majesty, all cogitations of works,
of traditions, of philosophy, yea and of God's law, too,
run straight to the manger and embrace this infant and
the virgin's little babe in thine arms, and behold him as

112 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
he was born, sucking, growing up, conversant among
men, teaching, dying, rising again, ascending up above
all the heavens and having power above all things. By
this means shalt thou be able to shake off all terrors and
errors, like as the sun driveth away the clouds. And
this sight and contemplation will keep thee in the right
way that thou mayest follow whither Christ is gone.""
In his Table-Talk we find the idea again and more than
once : "Begin thou to seek God there, where Christ him
self began"; "He that without danger will know God
and will speculate of him, let him look first into the
Manger, that is let him begin below . . . Afterwards he
will finely learn to know who God is. As then the same
knowledge will not affright, but it will be most sweet,
loving and comfortable. But take good heed (I say) in
any case of high climbing cogitations, to clamber up to
Heaven without this Ladder, namely the Lord Christ in
his humanity."2"
Our danger is the abstract; the Neo-Platonist gloried
in it, but not profitably, for God in his thought became
more and more emptied of all content and sank to being,
as a modern philosopher has said, "the deification of
the word Not." But if it is a real relation which Jesus
establishes between God and men, if Jesus does reveal
God, then, not to go further from the limits of our sub
ject, we are led to a reflection, surely legitimate. If
Jesus is continually enlarging our capacity for God, is
it not a promise of fuller knowledge and clearer vision
— a pledge that some day we shall see him himself as he
is, and give him his own name? So at least one early
Christian writer promises us (Rev. 2:17; 3:12).

MFrom the second edition of the English translation, 1580.
24 Table-Talk, ch. I, p. 17 (folio) ; ch. II, p. 61.

CHAPTER VII
IMMORTALITY I
In the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus are loosely linked
two apocryphal books of very different interest and prob
ably of different age. The first need not detain us; it
is a retelling of the story of the trial and crucifixion of
Jesus with much added detail, detail trivial as the clues
in a dull detective story. To this has been appended, by
the simplest of devices, a work of imagination. Joseph
of Arimatheia tells the chief priests of two men risen
from the dead since the crucifixion; the men are asked
to tell what happened; they "made on their faces the
sign of the cross and said to the chief priests, 'Give us
paper and ink and a pen.' They brought them. And sit
ting down they wrote thus:
" 'Lord Jesus, the resurrection and the life of the world,
give us grace that we may set forth thy resurrection
and the wondrous things which thou hast done in Hades.
We then were in Hades with all them that had fallen
asleep from the beginning. And in the hour of midnight
into those dark places rose as it were the light of the
sun and shone, and we were all enlightened and saw one
another.' "
Abraham and others recognize what is happening:
"This is the light from the great enlightenment," and
Isaiah gently quotes the prophecy he made when alive:
"Land of Zebulon and land of Naphthali, the people that
113

114 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
sitteth in darkness, behold a great light." "An ascetic
from the desert" comes and tells how he has made the
ways of the Son of God straight, and preached repent
ance, and how when he saw the Son of God he said:
"Behold the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the
world," and how he baptized him, and how he has been
sent by him to preach to the dead. Adam and Seth take
part and recall an ancient prophecy of the Son of God
"made man," and patriarchs and prophets rejoiced
greatly. Satan now tells Hades of the deeds and death of Jesus,
and bids prepare to hold him fast; and Hades doubts the
wisdom of Satan's bringing him there. As they talked,
"there was a great voice as thunder that said: 'Open
your gates, ye rulers, and be ye lifted up, ye everlasting
doors, and the King of Glory shall come in.' And Hades,
when he heard, saith to Satan : 'Go forth, if thou canst,
and withstand him.' " The gates are made fast, while
David and Isaiah recall their prophecies of old. The cry
to the gates is repeated, and Hades asks: "Who is this
King of Glory?" The angels of the Lord say: "A Lord
strong and mighty, a Lord mighty in war"; and on the
word, the gates of brass were burst and the iron bars
broken, and all the dead were loosed from their chains,
and the King of Glory came in as a man, and all the dark
places of hell were enlightened. Satan is bound and
delivered to Hades till the Second Coming.
The King of Glory now turns to the dead, slain by the
wood of the tree that Adam touched, and promises by
the wood of the cross to raise them. Adam is filled with
sweetness; prophets and saints break into thanksgiving.
"The Saviour blessed Adam on the brow with the sign
of the cross," prophets, martyrs, and patriarchs too, and
"took them and leapt forth from Hades," and they fol
lowed and sang : "Blessed is he that cometh in the name

IMMORTALITY 115
of the Lord; Alleluia! this is the glory of all the saints."
He brings them to Paradise where they meet Enoch and
Elijah — and "another, a mean man, bearing on his shoul
ders a cross; to whom the holy fathers said: 'Who art
thou that hast the look of a thief and what is the cross
thou bearest on thy shoulders?' " And the penitent thief
tells the beautiful story from St. Luke, and adds how,
when he reached Paradise, " 'when the fiery sword saw
the sign of the cross, it opened to me, and I came in
. . . and when I saw you I came to meet you.' And hear
ing this the saints cried with a loud voice : 'Great is our
Lord and great his might.' All this we two brothers
saw and heard," and they tell how they were sent to
preach the Resurrection, but first with all the dead that
rose were baptized in Jordan. Now they may no longer
stay but depart, and their story ends with the benediction.
The document is dated by some scholars as early as
the second century a.d. ; but, whatever its date, the belief
which it embodies belongs to that century; it is found
in 1 Peter; it keeps recurring through the Fathers; it
is embodied in the Golden Legend; and it was inserted
in the so-called Apostles' Creed about 400 A.D., and it
remains there. In the story of the two brethren it is
told with remarkable feeling, and the great passages
woven in from the Old Testament give it background
and depth, and make it a sort of philosophy of history.
From Clement of Alexandria onward it has been taken
as solving the problem of the destiny of those who never
saw Christ in this world, and further "thus, I think, it
is shown that God is good, and the Lord able to save with
righteousness and equality toward those that turn to him,
whether here, or elsewhere. For not here alone does his
energetic power reach, but it is everywhere/ and always
works."1 'Clem. Alex., Strom., VI :6, 5 47.

116 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
We have, however, to recognize that many "descents
into hell" were told of in classical antiquity — descents
made by Odysseus, by Er the son of Armenios, by .rEneas,
and many more; to the north the Finns tell of Wa'ina-
mo'inen, and eastward are other legends. All these stories
are prompted by the same impulse.
"Strange, is it not? that of the myriads who
Before us pass'd the door of darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the road
Which to discover we must travel too."
It looks as if Man were determined to have some knowl
edge of that road and that goal, when all over the world
we find stories of one traveler who found that bourne
and did return, and with news of import to all who live
and love. It may not seem of much import, but it may
be noted that of all these heroes of discovery, Jesus is
the only one of whom we can be sure that he was his
torical. If the "harrowing of hell" is fiction, it has grown
out of an historical tradition, or it has been attached to it.
II
Historically the belief in immortality has had two bases
in thought. Men have had to explain visions of the dead.
Ancient religion and animistic religion to this day pay
great attention to the reporting of such visions and in
deed to their production. The Lives of many Roman
Catholic saints and nuns, even very modern ones, are
full of such things, incredible and absurd as they are to
people trained to handle evidence with any scientific care.
One Baptist mission on the Congo river lost its most
attractive convert, because, during some native initiation
ceremonies, he saw his dead father and learned from
the dead man's lips that the Christian religion is false — a

IMMORTALITY 117
story which the scientific observer will not at first readily
distinguish from those told at Lourdes and elsewhere in
Catholic regions. But for men no longer at the primitive
point of view, such appearances have ceased to be con
clusive evidence. Do such visions ever really give new
facts, or do they merely emphasize with new force and
color what men have known subconsciously all along?
When we know better how far visions are, and how far
they are not, the product of the brain that records them,
the evidence of visions will begin to have value. But at
present we are only beginning to realize what tricks the
mind plays upon itself, and the part of the physical nature
in suggesting them and joining in the play.
On the other hand, men have based their belief in an
other life on what they have observed of the operations
of moral law. In primitive and even later society, a fron
tier crossed enabled a man to escape the consequences of
criminal acts. Can moral law be evaded by crossing
another frontier? men have asked. Is it conceivable that
death brings Jesus and Judas to one end and one level, that
God in the long run groups them together and is equally
done with both of them? "Conceivable" is the touchstone
here; it comes too near that "consensus" which the Stoics
used to prove the existence of God, the after-life, divina
tion, and other things.
If it is difficult to believe in life beyond the grave, is it
less difficult to disbelieve in it? "Neither with the cursed
things, nor without them," is a man's proverb on women,
quoted by Aristophanes. We may not be able to manage
with this doctrine of immortality, but we cannot manage
without it. With the fullest realization of its difficul
ties — not merely those of the head but those of the heart
too — men and women, grown and deepened, in whose
natures humanity is most thoroughly and essentially
human, have held the faith that God does not play with

118 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
us as children with sand castles, building elaborately and
content to see the waves wash all away,2 playing not with
senseless sand, but with sentient natures like his own.
If he could so play, surely he would be inferior even to
ordinary men, how much more to the best and deepest,
those trained and intelligent natures who have been
taught in the school of love and pain and have learned
there the value of the soul. Ill
If we are to correct our own random impressions of
haste or despair, it must be by watching the movement
of thought over the centuries, and among those peoples
who have shaped the thinking of our modern world.
Accident plays a large part in history, but less than else
where in the progress of thought. We have remarked
already the great tendencies in religion to emphasize the
oneness of all regions of experience, the personality of
God, righteousness, and the personality of the individual
man. The last includes immortality.
Homer's picture of the world beyond is famous, a nerve
less, noiseless existence, existence as it were without life,
in a darkness that allowed only a bare consciousness of
discomfort, without distinctions between good or bad,
brave or coward. Sons-in-law of gods reached Happy
Isles, at some stage in the history of epic poetry; but
the picture of the dead as drawn by Odysseus is cheerless
and hopeless.
With the development of the Greek cities in Asia Minor
in the eighth century B.C. and the simultaneous awaken
ing of the Greek mind all over the world and in every
realm of thought, we find side by side with the great intel
lectual movement, associated with the philosophers and

3 Homer, Iliad, XV:362-364.

IMMORTALITY 119
inquirers of Ionia, another movement chiefly upon Euro
pean soil. The cults of Orpheus and Dionysus, the mys
teries of Eleusis with their teaching of another life, and
of the need of preparation for it, may not have appealed —
did not, so far as we know, appeal — to the circles of Thales
and Heraclitus; but they captured a great constituency
precisely in the period when men began to frame deeper
thoughts and to see things with clearer edges. The Greek
always leaned to a consciousness of his own claims on
society and on Nature ; and, though at this period he still
had a vivid local patriotism, he was beginning to be more
definitely than ever an individual. The emphasis on mys
teries in that age implies the individual conscious of him
self and provident of his own future after death. "Happy
is he that has seen the doing of sacred things, the awful
rites (of Eleusis) ; he that is not initiate and he that has
part therein, have never the same lot, when dead and in
dank darkness below.'" Such language is unmistak
able. On the whole the philosophic mind rejected the cults
along with the myths of the gods and much else; and
the movement of the fifth century, with its thorough
going rationalism and its reference of everything to the
standard of each individual, was not one to reestablish
anything. Two names stand out at this point — names of
representative and formative men — Euripides and Plato.
Euripides combined in a very impressive way two strains
not easily reconciled — he had a mind relentlessly logical,
loyal to the new standards of thought, exigent to the
bitter end for demonstration (his own word) and with
it a faculty for passionate feeling. His insight into the
human heart brings him to the verge of belief in im
mortality; he hovers about the problem — "who knows if
life itself indeed be death?" — but he will not recognize

•Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 474-482.

120 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
the craving of the heart for the object of its love as
evidence. His reason checks his feeling, and he leaves
the question in suspense. We have "no experience of
death," he says,1 and hearsay evidence is guesswork —
"borne upon tales we drift, drift idly." God also for him
is not demonstrated.
Plato, however, does not reject this intuition that there
must be something beyond, though he sees as clearly that
intuition is not demonstration. What he has to say on
immortality he casts in the form of myth — "I do not
mean to affirm that the description which I have given
of the soul and her mansions is exactly true — a man of
sense ought hardly to say that. But I do say that, inas
much as the soul is shown to be immortal, he may ven
ture to think that something of the kind is true. The
venture is a glorious one."5 But Plato strongly puts
forward another doctrine about the soul, which it is said
has an eastern origin — the transmigration of souls, and
he binds it up with immortality. Euripides had known
of this doctrine — it was in the air, for it seems that the
Orphics taught it — tout he would not have to do with it;
it was a fancy without evidence of any kind, and he let
it alone.How far thought and the conditions of national "and
social life react and are each other's product, it is always
hard to say, but a heightened individualism is the mark
of the age of Plato and his successors. The philosophers
who shaped the thinking of later Greece were nearly all
unmarried and childless, many of them foreigners, volun
tary exiles from their native places, some even barbarians,
it would seem — men in short, who lacked many of the
spiritual ties that make us thoroughly human. Their
thought is individualistic — Stoic or Epicurean, Cynic or

4 Euripides, Hippolytus, 191-197.
5 Plato, Phaedo, 114.

IMMORTALITY 121
Sceptic, it is all one. The city-state, shaken and virtually
obsolete amid the great empires, was no longer a religion,
so to speak, but a club, hardly an object of loyalty at all.
If the transmigration of souls was at all widely believed
in Greece — it is hard to say whether it was — it also
worked against the social sense. The old primitive an
cestor-worship, impossible now, had at least held the
family together, as the city cult had held the city. But
the transmigration of souls meant that all family ties
were accidental and transitory — each man for himself, as
he made his next reincarnation, or chose it in some Pla
tonic other world.' Whether the Epicurean offered a
better or a worse prospect in utter resolution into ele
mental atoms, who shall say? Resolution into atoms even
on the showing of the religious might be better than the
ceaseless "sorrowful weary wheel"7 and eternal redying
as someone called it. Even the Stoics were sure neither
of gods nor the soul ; God might be Fate or the Universe
or Nature — it did not matter, such knowledge was need
less." And as for the soul, why fear change into some
thing else which the cosmos needs? passing into "the
dear and the kin, the elements?" You had no son before;
you have none now; are you worse off? they asked. Yes,
one is worse off, for one's soul has grown in insight, in
depth and capacity for God-given joy and service. Tantus
labor non sit cassus!
Immortality had no secure foundation in Greek
thought; and men and women turned to Oriental cults
which offered certainty, to god or goddess as might be,
with whom some kind of sure relation could be estab
lished. There were weak points in the polytheism of
these cults and in their want of connection with either
morals or truth. But, as we have seen in a previous

• Cf. Republic, X, the story of Er, the son of Armenios.
» A phrase on one of the gold tablets found at Petelia.
¦Justin Martyr, Trypho, c. 2.

122 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
chapter, men were in a hurry. Eastern astrology with
its suggestion of a scientific basis, the immemorial an
tiquity, the impressiveness, the very cost and intricacy
of Eastern religions, influenced them; above all, the
assurance that that way lay the saving of the soul. If
the mystery religions of the Roman Empire afford a piti
ful exhibition of the decline of the human mind, it re
mains that they bear witness to man's unconquerable
instinct for immortality. Philosophy had ignored it, and
this was Nature's vengeance for a forgotten truth.
IV
When we turn to the Hebrews, it is quite another story.
The Old Testament, as it is commonly read, is a con
fusion, but historical criticism finds a pathway. It then
appears that there are there two groups of conflicting
ideas, one derived ultimately from ancestor worship, the
other and later from monotheistic belief.* The emphasis
of the great prophets was upon the fact of God; on the
earthward side they rather looked to the nation and its
destiny than dealt with the individual and his hopes and
fears as to another life. They did a great work, for
they drove Israel out of the notion of a local and tribal
god into the awful thought of One God who rules all the
ends of the earth, who taketh up the isles as a very little
thing. There are gleams of recognition of what such
a God means for the individual. The poet, who wrote
Job, "reflects all the darkness of the popular doctrine
and likewise exhibits the actual steps, whereby the human
spirit rose gradually to the apprehension that man's soul
is capable of a divine life beyond the grave." Even in
death he feels it is "still capable of the highest spiritual
activities, though without the body," but he seems not

•Cf. R. H. Charles, Eschatology, p. 52.

IMMORTALITY 123
to hint that this higher life may be endless, natural in
ference as it seems to us from the train of his thought."
The 73rd and 139th Psalms and the inserted 26th chapter
of Isaiah show a later and higher development. But
generally in the Old Testament Sheol is the abode of the
dead, with various modifications, as men's thoughts of
God and the hereafter grew deeper and clearer.
It was at one time a fashion to attribute much of later
Jewish thought on our subject to Persian influence, but
scholars today seem much less ready to assert this.11 It
is rather during the Macedonian period that the great
step forward was taken from One God to his concern
with each man forever. Many notions were afloat as to
the Messiah and his kingdom, the destinies of nations and
of men, and these were held unevenly as thoughts are —
here discarded by the careless, there outgrown by the
profounder spirits, in another region cherished by the
pious as an inheritance side by side with other thoughts
and hopes incompatible with them. The apocalyptic
books, more familiar today than ever before, give, in
their very confusion, a clue to the growth of Jewish
thought down to the times of Jesus and his disciples.
They show how a people deeply harassed by problems of
national history and national future, persecuted by for
eign rulers and abused by native princes, growingly con
scious of the individual and all the ties of love and the
implications of right and wrong, came to cast more and
more on God and his more or less direct action upon the
world. A Davidic king might be raised up to rescue
Israel, or he might not; for the Anointed One is ignored
by some apocalyptic writers, or kept in the background,
while others make him of the highest import and speak

»R. H. Charles, Eschatology, pp. 71, 72.
11 J. H. Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, p. 321, quoting Bousset and
agreeing that Zarathushtra practically is to be struck out of the list of the
prophets who contributed to the growth of Israel's religion.

124 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
of him as preexistent in heavenly state, the companion
of God and the angels, at God's right hand, the super
natural Son of Man.12
The uncertainty about the Messiah is reflected in the
various forecasts given of his kingdom.13 It would be a
supreme triumph of Israel, culminating in an earthly
paradise. Then it became spiritualized in an indefinite
way; the living and the dead were to receive spiritual
bodies. It was transferred to heaven. A great crisis
or catastrophe would inaugurate it; a great last judg
ment in this world, or in another, would bring the end
of all wrong and oppression, the Kingdom of God, the
utter rejection of the Gentile. So much was distantly
in the vein of the Prophets; and then the individual
raised his head, and the whole problem of the future was
changed with the shifting of the emphasis.
Five elements contribute confusion to the pictures of
the future — the Messiah, Israel, and now resurrection
and immortality, and judgment. Resurrection and im
mortality are not the same thing. Who would "rise" was
the question? All Israel?" or the just alone?15 or all
men?13 Or is there no bodily resurrection at all,17 as
men began to surmise under Greek influence in the first
century B.C., and is the true doctrine immortality V At
tention was directed increasingly to rewards and punish
ments, as the ethical interest prevailed over the national,
and by and by reward and punishment were thought of
as eternal. Finally, a new aeon or age without sin be
comes the hope or expectation.

12 Cf. W. Fairweather, Background of Gospels, p. 276.
18 J. H. Leckie, World to Come, p. 30.
14 Enoch, 2:1 f.
"XII Testaments; I Enoch 82-90.
"IV Esdras 7:32 ff-126. "Jubilees.
18 1 Enoch 91-104; Fairweather, Background of Gospels, pp. 283-291. There
were Arab Christians in the third century (Eusebius, Church History, 6:37)
who believed the soul died and decayed with the body and then shared its
resurrection; a curious illustration of an older idea holding out against
the Greek.

IMMORTALITY 125
Thought has moved considerably, and a Messiah and
a Davidic kingdom recede; where they are still kept, the
harmonizing of the outlooks is impossible. In Philo the
Messiah and his kingdom are very far away in the back
ground, if not out of sight.1"
Through all the confusion a clue is found, when we
grasp that God and the soul and immortality are dis
entangling themselves from accidental associations, and
standing more and more in the light as the real things
of experience and of faith. The Jew has come nearer to
the heart of the problem than the Greek.

Jesus drew his disciples from circles where the apoca
lyptic books were read and known, where men thought
in the terms of apocalyptic. He, too, used the language,
but as Plato used the Orphics ; he said less and he meant
more. The apocalyptic writers had wasted themselves on
the circumference, and at the best had a mere confused
mass of broken arcs. He emphasized the center. The
details are nothing and he left them ; but he brought men
face to face with God. His disciples had believed in
God, in the soul, in immortality, in future judgment,
before he called them — believed, as we say, "in a sort of
a way." Afterwards they believed with a new conviction
and a new energy, though some of them were long in
working out (>f the old ideas, and perhaps unconsciously,
when they quoted his teaching, imported more of these
old ideas into that teaching than belonged there. It is
quite clear that Jesus identified himself with the growing
belief in God, the soul, and immortality, and he gave
an immense impetus to it ; he gave it life, in fact.
For the early Christian one argument sufficed for im-

18 Cf. Drummond, Philo, vol. II, 322.

126 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
mortality— Christ is risen. Men had seen him after his
rising, had heard him, had spoken with him, had touched
him. Stoics and Epicureans in Athens laughed when
Paul came to the "rising again of dead men" (Acts
17:32) — educated people did not talk so;13 they laughed
and dismissed the subject, and went away to thresh again
the rotten straw of Zeno and Epicurus, for Athens was a
university city.a
Can we today say with Paul : "But now is Christ risen
from the dead, and become the first fruits of them that
slept" (1 Cor. 15:20), or have we to trim our speech to
come a little nearer Athens? We have to consider the
resurrection of Christ side by side with what we are
coming to know of the facts of psychology, and we have
to be as sure of our psychology as of the Christian story.
We have to consider the tricks the mind plays upon itself
and the part of the physical nature in suggesting them
and joining in the play. We have to ask whether the
disciples were not just at that stage of culture when the
mind fails to realize it is playing such tricks ; and whether
we must say that Christ did not rise from the dead, but
that certain psychopathic temperaments thought he did
and suggested it to others, j, We cannot shirk such ques
tions; and, in the present stage of knowledge, we shall
not get, if we are in a hurry, any very_ encouraging
answer. Sf*"
Guesses have been made at what happened — guesses
conditioned by our very slight knowledge of the soul and
its way; and I shall not add to their number. Instead
of guessing, we note that the group of men whom we
meet in the epistles and the Acts are the same we met in

19 Compare the savage outburst of contempt by Celsus (Origen e. Cels.
2:55). the "distraught women," "humbug," "misled opinion," "fancy"
and ' lying."
31 If I borrow a phrase from The Life of Sterling, I have not forgot
ten Seneca and Epictetus, who, however, took their turn at the straw.

IMMORTALITY 127
the gospels, but in outlook, temper, spirit, and faith they
are changed. That is history, and it must be recognized
and then, if possible, understood. Something has hap
pened; we may recognize so much; and if we are uncer
tain what exactly happened, we may note that it turned
defeat into victory, it put the hope of immortality on a
new footing, and it changed the history of the world.1™
But in any case, Paul put the matter once and for all
when he said: "If in this life only we have hope in
Christ, we are of all men most miserable." We may not
yet be able to solve our difficulties as historians, or to
construct the story of the risen Christ, but one thing is
forever luminously clear — the Christian faith is bound
up with immortality; both stand or fall together.
Here again, if we may use the sort of canon we tried
to apply before, we can say that, if Christian history and
experience go for anything at all in a rational universe,
then they point to some essential truth in the belief in
immortality. Christian history, the experience to be read
in the life of the Christian generations and still verifi
able in life today, emphasizes the significance of Jesus.
All that has past, all that has been done, carries us back
to him, heightens his value, and forces us to ever more
vigorous effort to apprehend him. Immortality for us
depends on the Person of Jesus Christ.
Jesus, it may be said, added little to the ideas of the
apocalyptic writers ; but it would not be very wisely said.
It is always bad criticism to suppose that to the original
mind words mean at all what they do to the quotational
type, to the intelligent echoes. So far we have seen God
and immortality associated, and if now we find them again
associated in the mind of Jesus, it is relevant, and it is
fair, to say that we have a new fact. To judge of his

»This is well worked out by Mr. N. S. Talbot in The Mind of the
Disciples.

128 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
right to an opinion on this matter of immortality, we
have to make sure that we have exhausted the value and
connotation of "God" in his thought and speech, that we
are at his point of view and see God as he sees God, feel
him, understand him, share his life and work as Jesus
does. Such a canon of procedure would be laid down
whatever the historical or literary personality we might
be studying. The word comes from the thought — have
we fathomed the thought of Jesus? The thought comes
out of the experience — how near are we to realizing that?
The experience depends on, as it helps to make, the per
sonality. Are we sure there? We have not under our
hands the whole evidence in the case for immortality,
until we have made better use of the experience, the in
sight and intuition, the personality of Jesus of Nazareth.
If it is the developed and not the immature, the whole
man and not the half man, whose thought and insight
count, whatever the sphere concerned, then surely here
above all we must ask what does our utmost man think?
and why does he think it? and how does he reach
it? It is to be noted that Jesus chiefly speaks of God in
relation to individuals, as if it were in and through such
relations that God is best to be known. The magnificent
pictures of the Old Testament — "Clouds and darkness are
round about him" (Psalm 97:2) ; "The sea is his, and he
made it and his hands formed the dry land" (Psalm
95:4) — such pictures and conceptions Jesus hardly uses.
All his talk, so far as we have it, turns on the significance
of the individual to God, and in this he gives the indi
vidual a new value, associating him with a God so rich
himself in new values. In parable and in direct speech
Jesus brings out the incredible interest of God in the
individual and his love of him. Perhaps the crowning
instance is the conclusion to the parable of the lost sheep,

IMMORTALITY 129
where he borrows or recreates a scene from Job. When
God in Job shows the new-made universe to his friends,
"The morning stars sang together,
And all the sons of God shouted for joy."
In Jesus' story this happened for one sinner who re
pented. Is it credible that the moral being of a solitary
human unit is so full of import for God? Could it be, if
that human unit were as evanescent as the drift of smoke
from a steamer at sea? Is not the bottom knocked out
of all Jesus' teaching, is he not very nearly discredited, if
Pindar is right after all with his thought : "What is any
of us? what not? Children of a day! A dream of a
shadow is man" ? For here is a case, it looks, of "either
. . . or" — one way or the other — the love of God for the
single lonely human soul, or the whole race a dream of a
shadow. A middle path seems hardly possible here.
Is there anything of moment for our purpose in the
fact that, where Jesus Christ has been real for men, they
have instinctively believed in immortality, as if it fol
lowed naturally? In the fact that, where love and loss
together make the instinct and the intuition for immor
tality, men, wherever he is fairly represented to them,
naturally gravitate to Jesus? Anima naturaliter Chris
tiana, in Tertullian's phrase. Is it a vicious circle, or is
it the natural fitness of things?
We have spoken of Jesus as a teacher with a unique
experience of God, but if we submit our minds in all fair
ness to the experience of his personality, live with him, in
him, as Christians have, the matter does not rest there.
He begins to transcend our categories and classifications,
until we have to grapple in earnest with the Christian
conception of incarnation, and the Christian belief that
he not merely gives us the truth about God, but brings
God into our life here and now, and that he is in some

130 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
way the author of a higher life, the Saviour of souls, the
captain of our salvation (Heb. 2:10), in whom God will
sum up all things as the goal of all creation. Our treat
ment of immortality will be conditioned by our Christ
ology. If in the past the conception of God has been the
decisive thing in the belief in immortality, today it is our
conception of Christ that will be the norm of all our
thinking, for on that depends all we think of God. Who
then was Jesus, and what is he? and what his relation to
God? When we have gone so far in Christian experience
as to give him the high place that somehow he has reached
when men have been honest with him, and with them
selves and the handling of life, the discussion of immor
tality will be reopened, but on a higher and happier plane.
The discussion! But life is action, and it is in action
that we test our theories and make our discoveries. On
what are we going to act? On what "vessel," to use
Plato's phrase in this connection,2* are we to voyage
through these strange seas? It may be that Jesus was
wrong, that all the faith and consecration of the Christian
centuries were of all vanities the most utterly vain. It
may be so ; but what is the experience of those who have
been most serious in the matter? "This is the victory
that overcometh the world even our faith" (I John 5 :4) .
Theory or experience, it is the Christian conviction that
Jesus has "brought life and immortality to light" (II
Tim. 1:10). At the heart of it is the experience of
Jesus — "Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?
Tribulation or distress . . . peril or the sword? . . .
Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through him that loved us. For I am persuaded that
neither death, nor life . . . shall be able to separate us
from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord"
(Rom. 8:35-39).

"Phaedo, 85 CD.

IMMORTALITY 131
The world has little more to say than Edward Fitz
gerald drew from Omar, little more than Pindar said — "A
dream of a shadow is man." But the Church has learned
a new song; and, however dark or mysterious the future,
the conviction that Jesus must rule keeps the Church
singing it. "His Kingdom cannot fail;
He rules o'er earth and heaven ;
The keys of death and hell
Are to our Jesus given.
Lift up your heart! lift up your voice!
Rejoice; again I say, Rejoice!"

CHAPTER VIII
ALPHA AND OMEGA
Corde natus ex parentis ante mundi exordium
A et il cognominntus, ipse fons et clausula.
Prudentius, Cath., 9:10.
There was a controversy once, of which we hear little
today, between Supralapsarians and Sublapsarians. It
seems remote enough, this discussion as to whether God's
plan for man's redemption, his device of sending his Son
in the flesh, was conceived by God before the fall of man
or after the fall of man. And yet a good deal is bound
up with it. Did Adam and Eve and the serpent really
disorganize the whole counsel of God for the world for
all time? Had he to alter all his plans, and start afresh
with a sort of second-best, with a patch, shall we say, on
a mistake? Or are we to say with Plato that "God al
ways geometrizes," that his design is thought out, that
he knows what he is going to do and he does it?
Of course, the modern criticism of all such controversy
is a simple one. How can we know what was in the mind
of God round the time of Adam and Eve in the Garden
of Eden — always assuming there was a Garden of Eden
with an Adam and an Eve in it?
We have to accept our age and its modernity. Nothing
is gained by affectation. The rather fabulous "Age of
Faith" is not for us, however much we archaize; our date
is written upon us, and we do better to accept it and be
honest with ourselves. We do not know about the Garden
in Eden. Emphasis on fact, on what we can be sure of,
132

ALPHA AND OMEGA 133
with the refusal of mere supposition, is the great gain
in the modern way of approach in the spheres of science,
history, and religion ; and it comes very close, as we shall
see, to the mind of Jesus of Nazareth.
But very often weakness and strength come from the
same source. There have been men whose weakness was
theory. Our weakness today is to be matter of fact ; it is
a tendency to concentrate on facts, to gather facts, but to
hesitate about using them when they are acquired. That
is a refusal of one of the duties which God has imposed
on the human mind. Facts are to be used. Imagination
is a gift of God, given for a purpose. Our construction
of theory on the basis of fact may be wrong, we are told ;
we have to reckon with that risk. But if we do not try
to coordinate our facts, to reconstruct them, then we are
not using them, and we are wrong again, perhaps more
badly wrong. The great scientific discoveries have been
made by men with the instinct for fact and the genius
for hypothesis; but men who were prepared relentlessly
to sacrifice every theory, however dear, when it failed to
cover the facts. We have to frame theories and to test
them; for it is by this method that we advance knowl
edge. Mere idle spinning of fancies is quite another
thing. Work on the basis of our reconstruction of fact
is one of the surest ways to fresh discoveries. Otherwise
we might as well know nothing.

The early Christian was carried into a whole new world
of fresh experience. There has been nothing like it in
human history. "We were the first that ever burst
Into that silent sea."

134 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
Our English poets have spoken nobly of the joy of that
discovery of the Pacific Ocean; a whole new world un
explored and we the first to reach it! The early Chris
tian had a similar happiness; he was face to face with
new fact and new experience, far beyond anything that
anyone had ever dreamt of. He started from the great
fact of the historic Jesus, from his personality, from the
largeness and variety of his character. To be with Jesus
was revelation. To watch him, to see the movement of
his face, to look at his eyes, to catch his tones, brought
a man in a new way face to face with the real. Anyone
who has been on some mountain with the mists all about
him, the shapes of things all lost or transformed, knows
what it is when the sun comes and the mists go, and you
see the real world in a new light of beauty. There are
friends whose effect on our minds is much the same. The
coming of Jesus, his very person, cleared the mists away ;
and above all, his death lit up the heart of God. The
Pacific beckoned the mariner on to exploration; and the
death of Jesus has called men to explore God; and what
followed his death, the resurrection and all associated
with it, formed another great area of fact that set men
wondering, thinking, forming theories, testing them,
exploring God.
Men had been possessed by the notion of a divided
world, where the ways of foreigners, their thoughts and
their religion, were things apart and irrelevant. Our
religion for us, they said, your religion for you.1 It was
a wrong theory, and it did not bear out even the facts
of the ancient world ; for Alexander the Great had shown
the unity of the world, and the Stoic teaching emphasized
the common humanity of man. But the news of Jesus
Christ spread swiftly over the world; something leapt
from heart to heart, it captured men, and all the invinci-

'Cf. Celsus, ap. Origen c. Cels., 5:25.

ALPHA AND OMEGA 135
ble natural barriers between men turned out to be imag
inary. The great fact was revealed by the spread of the
Gospel into all the world, that man is man, universally
the same; with the same aptitudes, the same nature; the
soul was, as Tertullian said, "naturally Christian," Chris
tian in its inmost essence and nature. The common
passion felt for Jesus the Saviour bound men together as
neither empire nor philosophy had done. That, too, was
a revelation. The call of the Gentile and the response of
the Gentile upset men, staggered them, startled them
into a new recognition of God and of all that is associated
with Jesus.
The new relation with God, of which they had become
conscious in Christ, was another stimulus to thought.
Justified, as Paul said, by believing in Jesus, put right,
readjusted, we have peace with God. With this peace
with God went much else — victory over temptation, itself
a revelation of new fact. The power of temptation de
clined, the interests were changed, when a man found
himself in Christ. He had what today we might call
heightened effectiveness, but what he called the power
of the Holy Ghost. Paul strikes the note, when he says :
"I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."
Further, men had what George Fox later on called "great
openings," new visions of the relations of things, glorious
divination of the purposes of God, of God's methods, of
new forces at work in the world, glimpses of God's de
vices and God's ideas. Men found all these in Christ;
but why?
Long before Plato had said that the unexamined life is
not livable for human beings;* and here was the early
Christian with an extraordinary mass of new experience,
all associated with Jesus of Nazareth. He could not let
it alone ; he must move on to an explanation of Jesus ; and

* Plato, Apol., 38 A.

136 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
many were offered, first and last. The writer of the
Apocalypse, looking before and after, summed up the
story when he called Jesus Alpha and Omega, the begin
ning and the end. I do not know of literary antecedents
for his use of these two letters of the alphabet; but some
times people are original, and not infrequently experience
of Jesus is the secret of their freshness of mind. The
writer coined a phrase and the Christian world ac
cepted it. II
First of all, let us look at Alpha. Nowadays we steal
ideas from scientific books and scientific men, or, to be
more exact, the journalists steal them and we borrow
from the journalists, and at each stage of the process
something is lost. Natural law haunts our minds. Some
of us are possessed by a theory of natural law churning
on for ever and ever and ever, with no heart and little
mind at the back of it, as if evolution evolved itself and
needed neither an intelligence nor a power behind it to
start it or to maintain its process, whatever that may
prove to be. Ancient Greek thinkers, the serious ones,
emphasized God's Providence (irpovota). It was a great
word in those days; it covered the government of the
universe, and there were those who hoped that it covered
the lives of individual men. The keynote of all Jewish
apocalyptic was Providence — perhaps the soundest ele
ment in all that strange literature.3 The Christian, grow
ing up with the idea, and then brought into this new ex
perience of Jesus, was bound to connect the two. God
must have thought about Jesus ahead of the time.* What

•See Wisdom 6:8; 12:8; 14:3; 17:2.
4 Here one Jewish view of the Messiah helped. The Similitudes of
Enoch (I Enoch 48. 2 f) — dated by Dr. Charles, 96-64 B.C., teaches
the Messiah's pre-existence. "Yea, before the sun and the signs were cre
ated, before the stars of the heaven were made, his name was named
before the Lord of Spirits . (6) before the creation of the world."

ALPHA AND OMEGA 137
is the alternative? Can we really picture God in the
style of a celestial Mr. Micawber, "waiting for some
thing to turn up," till, unexpectedly, through the unfor-
seen action, I suppose, of natural laws, Jesus is thrown
up on the surface of things, a happy chance, that enables
some of God's ideas to be fulfilled, a great piece of luck
for God? The thought is impossible; it negates the very
idea of God.
Christians have always been amenable to the ideas of
their times, and this was one bound up with the nature of
God. They were confronted by what we still feel to be
the most wonderful character of history, by the trans
formation of every aspect of life, and by a great move
ment in every people of the world they knew. Small won
der they connected their experience with their conception
of Providence. God must have foreseen it; yes, before
ever he laid the foundation of the world, they said, God
loved Christ (John 17 : 24) . The followers of Jesus felt
they were witnesses of the supreme fulfilment of God's
thought-out ideas for the world. God foreknew, God
purposed and planned the death of Jesus on the Cross.
The New Testament is full of that conviction. It was
no accident, no blunder, no patch on a mistake; it was
the design of God himself. To that the thought of the
early Christian was brought by his experience of Jesus.
A misguided ingenuity set the apologists of the second
century to work upon the Old Testament, to prove by texts
that from the very first God had been telling mankind
in riddles what he would do. Nothing could be more in
genious or more perverse than some of these attempts,
but they bear witness to the conviction that Christ is no
chance item in the world's story.

The Assumption of Moses (dated by Dr. Charles between a.d. 7 and 30)
makes Moses say tbat "the Lord of the world prepared me before the
foundation of the world that I should be the mediator of His cove
nant" (1:14).

138 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
Christian thought went still further. In the Epistle
to the Ephesians (1:4) we read that God chose us also
in Christ before the foundation of the world. The Apoc
alypse speaks of names written from the foundation of
the world in the Book of Life (13:8; 17:8)."
The word in these passages translated "world" does
not mean the earth ; it means the universe, infinite, order
ly, and thought out by God; and Christ, they suggest, is
the deepest, the most essential, expression of the very
being and mind of God; and they conclude, not unreason
ably, that all began with Christ, that Christ is Alpha.
That is not our modern way of thinking. It is well to
face up to a conception of this magnitude, for it is a chal
lenge, and to ask, if not this, then what? Have we the
issue in our minds, are we facing the alternatives? Is
the Church really thinking deeply enough about what is
implied and involved in that historical Jesus, who has
remade the world and has remade us?
That there is in this line of speculation a real danger
of slipping into some form of fatalism or determinism, is
evident. Luther found the corrective of predestinarian
thinking in the very person whose significance has turned
us in this direction. He saw the consequences of over
emphasis, and he said bluntly: "Dispute not in any case
of Predestination. But if thou wilt needs dispute touch
ing the same, then, I truly advise thee to begin first at
the wounds of Christ, as then all that Disputation will
cease and have an end therewith."3 If the impossibility
of Christ being an accident leads us to a strong view of
Providence, the other impossibility, of his being a cog
in the inanimate wheel of things, neither more moral nor

¦ Cf . II Enoch (Secrets) 23:5; "Every soul was created eternally before
the foundation of the world." We have here to remember the Platonic
doctrine of preexistence.
•Luther's Table-Talk, ch. XXXVII, p. 405, in the first English trans
lation (folio) by Henry Bell, a volume with an interesting story of
its own .

ALPHA AND OMEGA 139
less moral than Judas, is quite as unthinkable. The
strong vivid humanity of Jesus is our prime fact; and
in theology, as in all spheres of thought, every deduction
has to be controlled by the facts of which we are certain.
Historically, Jesus has stimulated thought and specula
tion, and has been again and again the corrective that
kept it sane and true. Ill
Let us turn to Omega. If God foreknew Christ, Christ
is the fulfilment of God's ideas for man; the guarantee
that man is not a mistake, a blot on the universe. Paul
once said that "in Jesus is the Yes" (II Cor. 1:19, 20).
Ancient religion was largely negative; the taboo domi
nated it; and on the moral side "Thou shalt not" was the
note; as if to be man, a man must be anything rather
than man, as if the human was all sinful. But Jesus,
as R. L. Stevenson wrote,7 "would not hear of a negative
morality." "Thou shalt not seethe a kid in its mother's
milk"; "Thou shalt not steal" — so ran the old law. "Be
of good courage," said Jesus, "freely ye have received,
freely give ; it is your Father's good pleasure to give you
the kingdom." As for the powers of evil which obsessed
the minds of his contemporaries, while it appears that
Jesus accepted the current belief in their existence and
activity, he laid no stress on them; instead he empha
sized God. Religious teachers have often put temptation
and its dangers in the forefront of their lessons. In the
story of the empty house Jesus shows his mind plainly;
he has not come to reduce human life to vacuity and
nonentity, but to fill it with God, with the great, splendid,
various God whom he knows ; and to prove that, so filled,

7 Christmas Sermon. Contrast Emerson on "the pale negations of Bos
ton Unitarianism."

140 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
it is human nature at last, lovable, living, and delightful.
Men tended to conceive of religion in those days under
one type of life and experience. That habit of mind is
still with us, and militates against religion. Jesus had
the largeness of range that we find in all who enter deeply
into God's thought. He recognizes the variety of human
nature; and his whole attitude is the saying of Yes —
not No — to it in its variety, not to our casual ideas of
it, but to human nature deeply thought out. Man's
nature is in essence quite another thing from the ani
mal's — differentiated from it by memory and reason
developed to a degree not found in the beast, by fore
sight, and above all by a far more highly complicated
social sense, by that vastly greater interdependence of
men on one another which follows from the far larger
variety of types of mind and character and aptitude found
in mankind. To miss this variety has been the great
failure of many leaders who have sought to reconstruct
society and religion; they have endeavored to reduce
mankind to one mould, or they have tried to stereotype
some fugitive phrase of social life. Here Jesus outgoes
them; he sees more clearly and he grasps more firmly
the purpose and mind of God.
The "promises of God," to which Paul says that Jesus
is the Yes, are to be read in this manifold nature of man,
in man's instinct for knowledge, for intelligence, for love,
and for immortality, and for all the variety and fullness
of experience that these mean for all and for each.
Jesus does not miss what Paul sees. He does not pre
scribe religion of one type any more than he prescribes
nature of one type. "Wisdom," he says, "is justified of
aU her children" (Luke 7:35). History has shown us
how the most varied types of nature find themselves in
Jesus and grow in Jesus; the artist, the thinker, the
popular preacher, the statesman, the linguist, the scholar,

ALPHA AND OMEGA 141
the musician, have all found freedom in him.3 Yes, and
what is much more wonderful, husbands and wives, and
fathers and mothers, have found freedom in Jesus. Un
like so many of the great religious teachers, in that
ancient pagan world, in India today and in the Roman
Church, Jesus said Yes to the family with all its many
interests, its unity and diversity, and its freedom." His
conception of God is so large and generous that he makes
religion as free as the freedom of God and as various as
the variety of God. The Church has its periodic fits of
nervousness about new ideas and new energies. It is
amazing to see how loose Jesus sat to many of the things
that the Church has most emphasized. He lived in the
universal, while his followers cling to the local and the
temporal. He has no quarrel with the man who strikes
out a new line or finds a new truth; far from it, there
is no one who would more rejoice in the explorer and the
pioneer. "Flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee,
but my Father which is in heaven" he is reported to
have said to one pioneer spirit (Matt. 16:17).
Religion with Jesus thus escapes the many drawbacks
with which it has to contend elsewhere. His religion is
remarkably free from symbol with all the limitations and
misunderstandings that symbol involves. He spoke of
God naturally and directly, as a modern would speak of
a subject that really interested him to friends whom he
trusted. There is not the rather artificial awe about his
voice when he speaks of God that some teachers have
affected. It is bcause he is more genuine than they and
has a stronger instinct for reality. Religion with him is
spontaneous and natural intercourse with God. Much
ancient religion, and a good deal that goes by the name
today, we can only call taboo.10 Whatever a taboo may
8 More upon this in Chapter XIV. ' And on this in Chapter XIII.
w Dr. Standing, of Madagascar, made a collection of over l,30u taboos
in operation among the Malagasy.

142 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
have been to begin with, it is always outgrown in time,
and when it is not allowed to die it becomes an obstacle
to progress. But Jesus looks forward and not backward,
and in his teaching, faithfully interpreted in the light
of his mind, there is no hint of fear of progress. His
religion is not a matter of tradition, of loyalty and obedi
ence to ancient revelation, nor does it impose a system
that will in time grow old. The religions of his day were
religions of old books; so is Hinduism; so is some
Christianity today. His is the religion of the new song.
Is it fanciful to say that only artists and explorers and
thinkers can ever sing the new song — and people of the
new bfe and the new spirit?
Can one imagine a God who created man with all his
wonderful gifts in order that he might not use them; a
God who would really want what men have made of them
selves in the name of religion? One sees in India men
with the cramped arm above the head — an arm withered
and dry, that will never come down, that will never be of
any use whatever, that will never do anything. I have
seen a man whose left hand had nails ten inches long.
Such self-destruction means the repudiation of a gift of
God. And in the West we sometimes see men with para
lyzed minds calling themselves Christians, as proud of
the withered intellect as the Sannyasi of his ruined arm.
That was never God's idea in giving men minds; and
here also Jesus stood for God's idea. Above all others, he
who sets men free from every kind of paralysis, intellec
tual and spiritual, is Jesus. Christianity is essentially
progressive, or it falls short of the standards of its
Founder, who, as Paul says, wants us to move on to the
perfect man, "to the measure of the stature of the full
ness of Christ." Paul sees a progress that goes far beyond
anything that he can ask or think. Jesus himself is the
pledge of all this progress. There is no one else big

ALPHA AND OMEGA 143
enough or brave enough to face it, or to make us face it.
Think of the eighteen or nineteen centuries of revolution
and change since his day; the people who have been
undismayed through it all have been the men and women
who had the outlook of Jesus and his faith in God. The
dead past might bury its dead; they were the people of
the future; and that is what Christ's people are still.
The "Yes" of Jesus goes, as we have seen, beyond this
life. He is the pledge of an immortality, real, tolerable,
and progressive. Jesus is too real, men have felt, for
God to sweep away and remain God; and he has taught
us to think of God in another way altogether."
IV
Alpha and Omega belonging to the same alphabet ; end
and beginning explain each other, as Aristotle hinted.
God's universe is one. If Jesus Christ is Omega as well
as Alpha, if the experience, in virtue of which men have
moved to this great conception of him is approximately
right, then a light is shed on the whole of God's universe,
and on the whole of God. Jesus becomes the solution of
all the mysteries of the world and of human experience.
He makes things intelbgible; he opens to those who
knock. All the doors are not yet unlocked, but he has
the key; so that, as Dr. Cairns has said, "Here is some
thing that discloses the very soul of things, the nature
of the universe itself; the stars themselves move on the
lines of Jesus." That is a great thought. Virgil drew
a picture of battle, of wounds and death, and then of
the burning of the dead. He describes the solemn ritual,
and the torch set to the pyres; and how the men who
loved them sit by and watch the fires blaze, and the bodies
of their friends perish, watching by the pyres till "dewy

"See Chapter VI.

144 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
night wheels round the sky set with the blazing stars." a
It is a stern picture, that Virgil draws, of the passion
less stars in the quiet heaven, moving on in their beauty
and wonder, irrespective of human hearts that break;
the contrast is so true and so awful. But Jesus gives
us another picture of One who calls the stars by name,
who binds up the broken heart. So the Psalmist had said
(Psalm 147 :3, 4) ; but who could believe it until Jesus
showed men the heart of God? Where Jesus has been
real, the stars and the processes of nature, irrelevant to
us as they seem in certain moods of experience, become
interpreted by the love of God .
The world is full of mystery. Pain comes as a surprise
to every fresh man and woman born into the world. The
world's wrongness and confusion and death, all these
things are, generation by generation, for each of us,
problem and darkness. And there stands a figure who
says, in the words given to him in the Fourth Gospel —
whatever we make of the Fourth Gospel, again and again
it sums up the very gist of the mind of Jesus — "These
things," he says, "have I spoken unto you, that in me
you might have peace. In the universe you will have
trouble. Be of good courage; I have overcome the uni
verse."1' Did he say that? The Christian world, as it
has entered into the Christian experience, echoes the
Apocalypse: "Yes, he did overcome, and blessing and
honor and glory and power be unto him." "We see
Jesus," says the writer to the Hebrews, "made lower than
the angels by the suffering of death"; we see him
"tempted like as we are," but "crowned with glory and
honor." That is the Christian interpretation of Jesus,
the Christian experience of Jesus. In Jesus the promise
is that we shall see the end, which is to explain all the

"Xneid, XI, 182-202,
"John 16:33.

ALPHA AND OMEGA 145
doubt and pain of that beginning with which we have to
wrestle. "Then the end," says Paul (I Cor. 15:24). The end
has never been quite lost sight of by the Church. It
has been the perpetual vision of the Christian .thinker —
a dream that quickened passion and gave new heart to
work. The writer of the Apocalypse sees Babylon fall
and the new Jerusalem come down from heaven "having
the glory of God" ; he sees Death itself cast into the lake
of fire. In the darkest hour of Western history, St.
Augustine wrote of the City of God. Bernard sang of
Jerusalem the Golden in the misery of the Middle Ages :
"Spe modo vivitur, et Sion angitur a Babylone."
There has always been a feeling, a conviction, explicit
or tacit, that the work of Jesus Christ will not be left
half-done; that he is too great to cease to count, or to
cease to be; that his is a spirit that will win through to
triumph, to the full development of human character in
the individual and in the race; that Jesus himself is a
pledge that we can reckon upon the activity of God and
the cooperation of God; that God is no mere spectator
of the idle course of things, but the Architect, the Geo
metrician, who thought all things out, and will carry all
things through; that God will hold on to his own, till
Jesus Christ is indeed Alpha and Omega.
One thing, however, is vital. Alpha and Omega, with
all that we have seen they imply, are names that Christian
faith and Christian intuition have given to a carpenter.
The writer to the Hebrews speaks of "looking away and
fixing the eyes upon Jesus"— keeping full in the fore
front, not a theological figure but the real, one, true,
vivid Jesus; yesterday and today the same, and for ever;
tender, intelligent, sympathetic, wonderful, available.

146 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
He means, what the writer of the Apocalypse means by
Alpha and Omega, that Jesus in glory, whatever that
may prove to be, is to be interpreted by those stories of
his life and death which we know so well in the gospels.

CHAPTER IX
THE CHURCH COMPROMISING I
Of the discoveries made during the war, the most
startling to many people has been the attitude of perhaps
four-fifths of the army — that is, of the British nation —
to the Church and to Christian tradition. "It is awful
to realize that, when one stands up to preach Christ, the
soldier feels that you are defending a whole ruck of
obsolete theories and antiquated muddles." So writes
Mr. Studdert-Kennedy in The Church in the Furnace.
"The man in the street" (to use the unpleasant phrase
of today) is beginning to think and to say what the
educated have felt for a very long time.
If we speak of the Church, "we must admit," wrote
Wellhausen in 1884, "that the nation is more certainly
created by God than is the Church and that he operates
more impressively in the history of peoples than in the
history of the Church. . . . The Church is exposed to
the dangers inherent in an artificial foundation." The
Church had always held the exact opposite; it had been
loud in its insistence that it was independent of the State,
more divine in its origin, more universal in its scope.
Ultramontane and Puritan — it is hard to say which main
tained this view more strongly, the one thinking of a uni
versal Church beyond the Alps, the other of a Church in
heaven. When the war came, the panic haste with which
the churches of this country prostrated themselves to
147

148 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
the Government and flung themselves into a nationalism
little less hysterical than that of the press, was a con
fession that in England at least we believed the nation
to be more certainly created by God than the Church, and
Pope Pius and his successor did not do much better. The
long alliance of English religion with capital, and its
economic orthodoxy, seemed to millions of our fellow
countrymen to prove that the Church was "an artificial
foundation," an organization, superbly sensitive to
finance, and a practical reinforcement of a good many
other organizations, less arrogant in their spiritual
claims, but not more commercial and political in their
outlook. As for the "ruck of obsolete theories," men have always
felt an unreality in church history. Dogma stood for the
unproven, the untrue, the irrelevant. Lessing, in the
eighteenth century, had said that Christianity had been
tried for eighteen centuries, while the religion of Christ
remains to be tried; and Lord Morley says it is "hardly
less true than it was a hundred years ago." ' What has
the Athanasian Creed to do with Jesus of Nazareth?
Does it suggest his language, his attitude to life, his
spirit? Is it not a hideous perversion? Perhaps
Nietzsche was right after all, when he asked: "What did
Christ deny?" and answered: "Everything which today
is called Christian." Such views have long been held;
and when they are so widely held, it is better for the
Church to know it and not to live in a fool's paradise.
Its associations tainted with capitalism, its creeds mere
jargon — what is to help the Church? In one body a
liturgy of Elizabethan English and a ceremony grow
ingly Italianate — in another a service dull, conventional,
and vacuous — both as unreal as they can be; if you are
not, it is asked, a woman or a corpse, what is there for

1 Recollections, I, p. 370.

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 149
you in it all, you the Englishman of today? That is
unfair, it is retorted; think of the energy and goodness
of the clergy. Once again to quote The Church in the
Furnace, Mr. N. S. Talbot this time: "There is great
danger today in the exaltation of religious devotion and
activity over love of the truth. During the last sixty
years so much of the best and most intense achievements,
whether Evangelical or Catholic, have been reared on a
basis of reactionary thought." He adds that the theo
logical colleges represent "a process of half-baking" and
(on a later page) that their pupil is "in danger of being
blinkered all his life." That is just what educated people
complain of; the Church, for all its talk, is not sym
pathetic with progress, is not alert to recognize intel
lectual movement, mistrusts art as much as it does intel
lect, is afraid of science and Socialism, clings to out-of-
date scholarship and pre-Christian psychology, presses
philanthropy without economics and missions without
anthropology. In fact Newman was only a little more
explicit than the rest of them, when he avowed that the
object of himself and his friends was "to hurl back the
aggressive force of the human intellect."
If things are well with the churches, "they will be
full," says Dr. D. S. Cairns, "of the spirit of life, of
adventure, of experiment and adaptability." No one can
say that they are full of these signs of life ; the features
of the Church today are mistrust of its message, fear,
and abject compromise with "the man in the street," a
feeling that his sense must decide upon what the Church
ought to do and to believe. No wonder the Church is
despised. Even a cab-driver expects you to decide where
you wish him to drive you. The man in the street knows
quite well in his heart that the Church ought to have
clearer vision than he.
Summing up all this criticism and confession, we find

150 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
it comes to this. The Church has been criticized for its
methods of organization, for its formulation of its beliefs,
and for its interpretation of Jesus Christ to the world.
These are three great necessary functions of the Church ;
and in each case the criticism touches the Church exactly
where it has failed to represent the living Jesus. He was,
it would seem, not greatly interested in organization, per
haps not at all ; still less could the crucified carpenter be
suspected of launching a society organized to support
privilege and capitalism. He was not bound up with obso
lete views of the world and impossible beliefs, the enemy
of intellectual life ; he was the freshest and keenest spirit
imaginable. So far from representing Jesus to the
world, the Church has made him odious to the intelligent
mind. "Ecrasez I'infame" and "Nous avons chassi ce
Jisus-ChrisV are very illuminating and not improper
comments on one Church's gifts of interpretation, and
they will not be met by pleading the tender piety of
nuns or the happy ignorance of peasants. Lourdes is no
answer to Voltaire. If things are better in England, it
is because English Christendom never quite excommuni
cated John Wesley and Charles Darwin.
II
The Church has had a long history, and when the
worst is said of it, it has kept and cultivated some sort of
relation with the historical Jesus. It has endured per
secution for him, and its attention to him has kept it
alive through all sorts of queer alliances with political
and economic systems, and has set it free again and again
from all kinds of tangles of bad thinking. The weak spot
has been the Church's uncertainty what to make of Jesus.
It has been devoted to him, but never quite convinced
that he was practical, never sure that a great movement

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 151
could be "run" on his lines, on abstract ideas, never really
alive to his genius and his seriousness. The Church has
always been gathered from the world, and has always
shown traces of the pit whence it was digged. A man
does not easily get clear of his background and his up
bringing, nor of the unconscious preconceptions that
come from them and affect every judgment and every
action. Part of the weakness of the Church in England
is due to the fact that it has to draw its recruits from
the English people. It was always so. The early Church
drew from a complicated civilization, with centuries of
thoroughly non-Christian thought filtered deep into every
cultured brain, and many more centuries of primitive
superstition alive in the fancies and feelings of those
who thought slightly or not at all. Englishman, Graeco-
Roman, and Indian must help Christ out with what they
have from their heritage — "bring forth the best robe and
put it on him." And a motley thing they made of it with
"gold and guegaws fetcht from Aaron's old wardrobe or
the Flamen's vestry," * forgetful altogether of his parable
against patches. To win the world for him, they adopted
good ideas from his competitors, which he had refused
outright to do (Luke 4:6-8).
At other times, in shame and penitence the Church has
recognized that to the end discipleship is the condition of
apostleship, and it has returned to the real Jesus and
learned of him, loved him and trusted him, obeyed him
at the foot of the letter, and gained a new lease of life.
And then the old doubt has returned. Is life sufficient
without the help of the dead? "It all depends," as a
woman missionary said to me in North India, "on whether
we believe the Holy Ghost will come up to the scratch."
Jesus undoubtedly believed this ; the Church has not been
so sure. It has believed in the Holy Ghost plus. Jesus

3 Milton, Of Reformation in England, p. 1.

152 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
in Gethsemane faced a risk, and on the cross took it,
which has often been too much for the Church.
The Church was left in the world — a very various, con
fused, and infinitely perplexing world; and the Master
had not settled everything. He had frequently been
unintelligible, as the disciples told him. He was, as a
modern scholar shrewdly remarks, "singularly indifferent
to the danger of being misunderstood.'" Did he ordain
sacraments at all, and if he did, in what sense? Scholars
remark in the synoptic gospels some absence of interest
on his part in sacraments and, indeed, the habit of mind
that does not care for them. Did he "found" a "church,"
and what did he conceive it to be, if he did? What were
its functions, its rights, its charter? Scholars debate
these points, and often decide against ecclesiastical tradi
tion. "The thought of founding a church," says Weinel,
"had been even more absent from Jesus' mind than it
was from Paul's." He must have foreseen some outcome
from the intimacy of his disciples, some eventual tend
ency to organization; did he ignore it, and if so, why?
Because it did not matter? Because he believed that the
Holy Ghost might be trusted to guide them in all the
organization they would need ? Because he believed that
a living faith needs no special methods, that God fulfils
himself in many ways?
Let us leave questions for a while and see what our
records tell us about the earliest Christians and their
attempts to work together. Ill
We may begin with St. Paul, who is our first literary
authority on the Church and its character and purposes.
Putting together what he says and implies, we find that

•J. H. Leckie, The World to Come, p. 23.

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 153
the churches in his day were not, as a rule, composed of
very desirable people ; they lacked refinement and culture.
"The social aspect of a Christian Church," says a great
Scottish divine,* "must have been in many cases very like
that of a small dissenting congregation in an English
town where dissent is feeble." Add to this some of the
features of a church in India or China, gathered from
the heathen. The Corinthian Church3 was full of quar
reling — not merely about belief and practice, but about
more concrete things, which the members took to the law
courts ; and there were worse scandals still. The cheaper
types of Greek, who formed the majority, had all the
defects of the Greek mind, but little, it would seem, of
its grandeur, and the Church bristled with every kind of
wrongheadedness. Its members came from Judaism and
heathenism. There were actual Jews, and Judaizers
as well — perhaps these were the party which so blandly
proclaimed "We are of Christ" ; Christ had not announced
any break with Jewish law, and had thereby set an
example which they at least were upholding. There were
ascetics and vegetarians, following lines of holiness which
the whole world had recognized for centuries as the gist
of all religion. On the other hand, there was a "Spirit"
party, which, it now appears more and more, bore only
too striking a likeness to groups in the mystery religions
of the day — they were what in our times is called "psy
chopathic," subject to trances and visions and ecstatic
speech with "tongues" (tongues unknown to gram
marians or lexicographers, and of no value to anyone) ;
they had revelations, and they prophesied endlessly.
Allied with this party, or perhaps at variance with it,
but certainly akin to it, were the antinomians, set free
from the body, living in the spirit, and therefore free to

* Principal Rainy, The Ancient Catholic Church, p. 29.
¦ On this Church, see Kirsopp Lake, Earlier Epistles of St. Paul,
ch. IV.

154 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
let the body have its pleasures while the soul rose superior
to them — people emancipated from ordinary laws and
conventions. As one comes to understand them, men and
women, there is no wonder that in a city like Corinth
Paul emphasizes that in dress and manners a Christian's
first duty is to be conventional. Theosophy of one kind
and another flourished, and every other kind of crotchet
¦ — baptism for the dead being one of them — in an atmos
phere of sloppy thinking. Magical conceptions of reb
gion were bound to be present in a community gathered
from that world.
With such a medley of religious ideas, there were the
most widely differing traditions of government. A
Church recruited from all the world must expect to have
differences of system and tradition. The Church had
grown up like Jesus himself in the synagogue; and from
the descriptions of the procedure of synagogue worship
which the gospels give us, and those of the early Church,
which we find in St. Paul's epistles, in the teaching of the
Apostles, in Pliny's rescript to Trajan (about A.D. 112),
in Justin (about A.D. 150) and in Tertullian (about A.D.
200), it is clear that the earliest Christians, when they
left the synagogue or were turned out of it, followed in
their new association (it might be more colorless to say,
their new room) the lines along which they had always
been accustomed to worship, and regulated their pro
cedure much as they had always done, adding by the sec
ond century to the books read aloud the "memoirs of the
apostles."* But many beside Jews of the Dispersion,
trained in spiritual worship and used to synagogue con
trol, came into the Church, and they, too, had traditions
and habits. All sorts of systems have been recognized
here and there in the story, and, if in some cases mis
takenly, still variety is proved up to the hilt.

"Justin, First Apology, 61, 62 ff.

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 155
Not to make a long story of it, the government of vil
lage elders has been detected in the Seven, the succession
of the next of kin in the predominance of James in Acts
and of other relatives of Jesus, whose names and strange
story are preserved for us by Eusebius.' The Gentile
sick and burial clubs with their presidents and overseers
are traced in the government of the Church; the word
iiria-Koiros hints as much, and the fact that burial grounds
were the first church property goes a long way to confirm
it. (Ne sint areae! "No burial grounds !" is one of the
first anti-Christian war-cries.) Roman governors could,
and it appears did, allow Christian groups a recognition
as burial clubs, which they could not give on any other
basis of association. Here and there a great man joined
the Christians with his household; he ruled, as he had
done before, in his own familia, and "the church in his
house" would probably obey him as readily as it had done
while they were all pagans ; he would hardly register his
household as a burial club and it was scarcely a syna
gogue. Men who had grown up in the civil service of
Rome, as organized after Vespasian, their minds trained
to think in terms of Roman law and their habits formed
in government offices, however loyally they accepted what
they found in the Church, were bound to modify it.
Their position would count, and their unconscious ways
of thought still more. How much they influenced their
new environment stands out amazingly when we compare
the Church we find in Paul's letters with that in Cyp
rian's, scarcely two centuries later; every fundamental
idea or tradition has vanished or is bewilderingly trans
formed, legalized past belief.
Put the two pictures together — the Corinthian recruits
with their wild religious ideas and plenty of other people
7 Church History, III, 20 ; giving an extract from Hegesippus (whom he
puts in the reign of Hadrian, a.d. 117-138).

156 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
of the kind — and the decent serious men with a turn for
order in procedure and sanity in thinking. Link the un
conventional and the conventional as we have seen them,
and ask who or what is to weld them, who is to rule, or
is the movement to break up? Will the Holy Ghost
suffice? For now the problems of the Church begin.
Danger lay in three directions. The honest group-
leader, Philemon or Titus or Flavius Clemens (the Em
peror Domitian's Christian cousin), found himself con
fronted with prophets, with thinkers, and with men whose
religious ideas all cames from the Greek mysteries. The
types are distinct but not mutually exclusive.
Many great religious movements have seen the prophets
reappear and have owed them great debts. "Built upon
the foundation of the apostles and prophets" says Paul
(Eph. 2:20). Men of insight and fervor and power are
among them ; men, too, with other gifts less valuable but
more immediately noticeable — men ecstatic, fanciful, and
unreliable, creatures of mood and impulse — men of
trances3 and visions, who "speak with tongues." They
have remarkable power over assemblies ; they carry them
away; the mood of the prophet, his frenzy, may sweep
from man to man, may capture the crowd ; reason and its
inhibitions are lost; and there is no telling what the out
come may be.
Paul makes the curious confession that he himself
"speaks with tongues more than them all" (1 Cor. 14:18),
but in the same connection he emphasizes sense and rea
son. "I will pray in the spirit, but I will pray with my
understanding also," and "sing with my understanding."
He will know throughout what he is doing and remain
under the control of reason; he will not lose conscious
ness." What might happen when a prophet was carried
8 Dreams, too; cf. Jude 8; Plato, Timaeus 71, 72, suggests that after
recovery from his sleep or dementia the prophet may be able to explain
the inspired word rationally.

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 157
away by what he called the spirit, Paul shows us in what
cannot be anything but a real incident: "I would have
you know, that no man speaking in the Spirit of God,
says, 'Jesus is accursed'" (I Cor. 12:3). Heathen reli
gion of the day swarmed with men who spoke under
possession of "spirits" and "daemons," as it does still. To
untrained observers the psychopathic temperament is
more than mortal, and the man who has it quickly realizes
to what practical uses he can put it — at ancient Philippi
(Acts 16:16) and in modern Congo. There is at first
sight nothing necessarily heathen about this natural gift,
any more than about astrology or spiritualism. The
Church soon found that some principles of treatment must
be thought out if the prophets were not to kill the religion.
Someone would need the gift of "distinguishing spirits,"
to which Paul alludes (1 Cor. 12 :10) ; "test the spirits,"
wrote John (I John 4:1). "If he ask money," says the
Teaching of the Apostles (xi), "he is a false prophet";
and then with a warning that it is sin beyond forgive
ness to test a prophet speaking in the spirit, it adds:
"But not every one speaking in the spirit is a prophet,
but only if he have the ways of the Lord ; from his ways
shall the false prophet be known, and the prophet." The
explicit reference to the ways and manner and style of
Jesus is significant.10 The book calls the prophets "arch-
priests" (13:3) — a striking name, given in the New
Testament to the Jewish priesthood (and by metaphor to
Jesus) ; it marks the impression made by the prophets,
while the danger is recognized.11

• Cf. H. A. A. Kennedy, St. Paul and Mystery Religions, p. 287; T.
M. Lindsay, Church and Ministry, p. 47; Rufus Jones, Studies in Mysti
cism, p. 12, who remarks that Paul evidently set slight value on mystic
phenomena. John Wesley records their occurrence when he preached;
if Charles preached, they did not occur.
10 Cf. 2 Clement 13:3, on the contrast between Christian preaching and
Christian conduct as a source of Gentile rejection of the Gospel as /i50i»
Tivaxai Tr\twnr. ....
"The emphasis on the prophets points to an early date for this book;
cf. Chapter XIII, p. 233.

158 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
The Church took refuge at last from the prophet in the
president or overseer, the "bishop" as etymology would
call him. Without disputing over the status and so forth
of the bishop, we can admit a certain leading of the Spirit
here. As the native churches of China and India and
other lands largely pagan gain independence, we shall
see strange outcrops of what we, taught by church his
tory, shall recognize as heathenism ; and a sound practical
bit of advice for the moment will be "stick to the mis
sionary," and it will be a parallel (saner, let us hope)
to the emphasis of Ignatius of Antioch on the bishop.
The early Church, perhaps, had suffered too much from
prophets ; but organization was too rigid a Roman trait,
and the reaction to bishop against prophet was carried
too far. "Prophesying," wrote Edwin Hatch,12 "died
when the Catholic Church was formed." It cost the
Church endless schisms through the centuries, not all of
them beneficial. The contest between the Spirit under
control and the Spirit in free play, as it has been called,
still goes on.
The danger to the Church from the thinkers need not
keep us long. All thinkers are dangerous1* — especially
the quick thinkers and the conservative. Men came into
the Church from the philosophic schools and from the
Gnostic groups, and they brought dogmata with them,
fixed ideas which they intended to keep and which they
applied at once. An example will shorten the story. God,
some of them held, and pain are contradictories; God
cannot suffer, a godlike man cannot suffer; "Is Christ
pathetos, susceptible of suffering?" The question comes
already in Luke's time (Acts 26:23; and cf. Luke 24:26).
If Jesus suffered, he could not be Christ, they argued;

a Greek Influence on Christianity, p. 107.
18 AH things are at odds, says Emerson, when God lets a thinker loose in
this planet.

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 159
if he was Chrigtj he did not suffer ; he was Christ ; there
fore he did not suffer, and what suffered was a phantasm.
This was the result of quick thinking with a conservative
hold on an old dogma. This very issue caused the Church
no end of trouble ; and there were many more. Pending
the results of sound Christian thinking, the bishop was
the obvious rule, and then (more soundly) the tradition;
and both expedients land the Church in new dangers of
rigidity. There is always danger in associating religion,
and especially religious thought, with law; law has always
a tendency to stereotype what it touches, and even holi
ness has come under its deadening influence. Prescribed
thinking (if the play on words may be tolerated) is pro
scribed thinking.
Most serious of all, because (apparently) least sus
pected, was the danger from the mystery religions. "The
kingdom of God is not eating and drinking," said Paul
(Rom. 14:17), but he was a Jew, and the finer religious
tempers of the Graeco-Roman world had another experi
ence. They had known contact with gods whom, on
becoming Christians, they had recognized to be daemons
only, but still real and capable of contact with their wor
shippers; and this had been by initiation, by sacrament,
by mystery. The modern anthropologist sees clearly that
they had been relapsing to the level of primitive animists,
weaving religion out of hole-and-corner, taboo, and make-
believe; and he comments on the extraordinary revival
of every kind of old pagan superstition and the invasion
of the Western world by the sham science (astrology in
particular) and sham religion of the Orient, not the
thought of the Orient at its best. But the men of the
day thought they saw further than Paul and the anthro
pologist. They were satisfied that truth can be conveyed
in religious emotion, that feeling may unite you with
God, that the initiated may in trance have the vision of

160 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
God and be an epopt, that the holy fast and the mystic
fare may corporeally make you one with God and trans
form your mortality into immortality. It was an age
when spirit itself was counted matter; and the Stoics,
holding this ultimate identity and having allowed astrol
ogy and divination to be real sciences, ended by conceding
more or less every religion to its adherents. Men and
women came into the Church who thought in the terms of
the old religions. In them they had known spiritual peace
or at least satisfaction ; and they began to interpret their
new Christian experience in the terms of the old. They
came over in such numbers and were admitted so easily,
that at last their conceptions prevailed. And then where
lay the real value of the Christian religion?
Behind the religion of Jesus and the mystery religions
lay totally different principles, and, above all, funda
mentally different conceptions of God. The Father of
Jesus was as unlike a mystery god as could be imagined;
every idea of depth and moral grandeur, of truth and
purity, of love and fatherhood, that we find associated
with God in the teaching of Jesus makes the difference
more impressive. Jesus lived in the open air, thought in
the open air, and the sunshine; these religions were the
affairs of caves," of mummery and pretending and sym
bol, proper to polytheism. "Jesus," says a modern
scholar,13 "nowhere shows the sovereign clarity of his
intelligence more astonishingly and obviously to anyone
who knows anything of antiquity than in that whole pas
sage where he says that nothing from without can either
defile or cleanse a man." The mystery religions were
primarily magical and retrograde, condemned by all the
best minds of Greece ;13 their motive principles were fear
14 The shrines of Mithras were built so as to seem caves.
18 Professor John Macnaughton, of Toronto.
18 Cf. Plato, Republic, II; and the question of Diogenes: "Will Patai-
kion the brigand have a better lot after death than Epameinondas because
he has been initiated?" — Diog. Laert., 6:39.

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 161
and a desire for self-maintenance. The teaching of Jesus,
his insistence on intelligence, was the exact opposite of
the artificial fog, the vanity, and the traditionalism of
these cults. It is the greatest irony of history that in the
terms of these mystery religions the faith of Jesus was
to be interpreted for centuries. It was not till the third
century that the Church succumbed to the attack, and it
was the sixteenth when Christendom threw it off." It
is a measure of the greatness of the Christian religion
that in spite of this inheritance from heathenism, and
much else from the same source, it bred saints and heroes,
martyrs and thinkers, who still caught the spirit of Jesus
and triumphed over the danger that swamped millions
in superstition. IV
The victory of organization and the sacramental inter
pretation of the religion had consequences the most
momentous — though not surprising, when we grasp how
entirely alien the new ideas were to the mind of Jesus,
and how antithetical.
The early Church had been something of a democracy,
made so and kept so by the lay traditions of the syna
gogue and the Greek instinct for individual thought and
action. An official priesthood, charged with the duty wf
administering sacraments like the graded priests of
Mithras, and entrusted with the intellectual responsibility
of deciding the faith of the Church, found its analogue in
the bureaucracy of the Roman Empire; its warrant it
drew from the Old Testament by expedients of interpre
tation that sound scholarship will not allow." It pro-

"See A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, pp. 33, 126,
251, 376.
18 See Lightfoot, Philippians, p. 261 ; and cf. p. 244, for his statement
that there is no sacerdotalism in the N.T.; it came (p. 260) from Gentile
sources in the first instance.

162 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
duced the same effects in the Church that the system did
in the State. Behind both lay the belief that the ordi
nary man cannot be trusted with his own affairs; his
political and his spiritual salvation alike need a higher
intelligence. At the bottom of the new theory of the
Church was the idea that the common man is unequal to
intellectual effort, but can have enough of God without
it; a flat denial of everything Jesus taught. Eventually
the Gospel itself had to be refused to the laity; it would
only confuse them and lead them astray. The priesthood
of all believers which we find in the New Testament, the
equality of all Christians, as all alike sharers in one great
salvation, the insistence on the immediate access of every
soul to God, and on the spiritual character of all real
religion — such fundamental Christian conceptions were
now naturally excluded ex hypothesi; they ran counter
to the religious ideas of the age, and the fact that they
are inherent in Jesus' view of God and essential to it was
ignored and lost. Interpretation could do a great deal
with the allegoric method, with a strong suggestion from
the mysteries, and a public progressively ignorant. The
Government's civil service did a great deal to kill initia
tive — a signal fact to be remembered in explaining the
decline and fall of the Empire; but the civil servants
were not miraculous or magical beings, and before long
the priesthood was both miraculous and magical. No
wonder men were dwarfed; no wonder that in such a
world intelligence declined, and the Northern barbarians
found a debased manhood that could neither think nor
act, a people who in literature were content to copy, in
political life to obey, and to shut their eyes in religion.
Salvation came to be associated more and more auto
matically with the Church and its sacraments; apart
from the Church there was no salvation ; all must be in it
for safety; conviction was of less consequence. Cyprian

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 163
lays down the theory definitely that Noah's ark is a type
of the Church. He compiled a handbook of typology, the
effects of which do not, perhaps, even yet quite all belong
to the past, and this is one of his types. And, unfor
tunately, it was a true one. It rested on what every
body knew perfectly well. Noah's ark contained beasts
clean and unclean, and so did the Church. (A modern
suggestion has been that there was one difference — the
unclean did not go in by sevens into Noah's ark.) What
a contrast between Paul's "elect, called, holy," and Cyp
rian's "clean and unclean"! The persecution of Decius
showed how sound the comparison with the ark was. It
broke suddenly on the world, and, as Professor Gwatkin
used to say, there was a rush to the altars. Christians
made haste to sacrifice to heathen gods, and got certifi
cates from the magistrates to prove they did so. Several
such libelli, as they were called, have been found in
Egypt.1* When the storm abated, the renegades wanted
to come back to the Church, and they were allowed to
come — on terms of penance and at the request of martyrs
who had stood firm. They had to get back into the
Church to escape damnation, and penance was more read
ily intelligible and more definite than repentance; it was
something concrete and external.
There were two reactions from this new theory of the
Church and the practice that it produced. The Church
failed to satisfy the ardent individual religious tempera
ment. The conviction was in the air, the heathen con
viction, that matter is impure, that sense and sex are
unclean ; and there was the object-lesson of the Egyptian
monks of Serapis and many more who renounced sex and
the world. Christian monasticism rose, a protest against
a lax Church, a new and strenuous way of imitating the

"One is printed with a translation in Prof. Milligan's Greek Papyri,
No. 48 (p. 114).

164 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
Christ who came eating and drinking. Simultaneously,
or very little later, rose the distinction between the visi
ble and the invisible Church — between those whose
names are indeed written in heaven and those who are
for the time within the Church on earth. Both reactions
testify to the same feeling of the unreality of the Church.
The sects and movements of the Middle Ages revealed
similarly that the Church was not meeting the needs of
the human mind.20
A great organization, in proportion as it is successful
and means to be more successful, must have practical
men to manage it, whether it is a railway company or a
church; and it tends to choose leaders of the strenuous
successful type, who can speak for it with the Govern
ment and command the support of ordinary people.*1
Ordinary people and the Government alike wish it; both
want things settled. The type is familiar to us, not too
subtle, not too intellectual, not too spiritual, but quick,
drastic, and effective. The last two adjectives, or their
equivalents, come in stories of episcopal elections of the
fourth and fifth centuries; the last bishop was not "a
doing kind of man," the next shall be. So Ambrose and
Synesius are transfigured from laymen to bishops, one a
soldier, the other a philosopher and hunter. The Church
was not always so lucky in its choices. The practical offi
cial always overdoes his simplifications; he will com
promise at the cost of the spiritual issue; he seeks short
cuts, and in the region of the intellect and of spiritual
truth short cuts are peculiarly dangerous. The great

» See A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, p. 207.
11 Von Harnack, Expansion of Christianity II, 130-132, quotes from
Eusebius, Church History, VII, 30, a remarkable (though hostile) account
of a third century bishop, Paul of Antioch, with "the customs and bear
ing of a high state official." When the church deposed him, the Emperor
Aurelian recognized as bishop that one with whom the bishops of Italy
and Rome were in communion — au interesting example of the practical
in church affairs.

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 165
things will not be simplified in that way. Constantine,
for very proper reasons of State, reconciled the Empire
and the Church ; he got control of the Church ; and then,
resolved to have no more divisions in the Church, he sum
moned the bishops to Nicaea in A.D. 325; he sat by and
waited till they, with no pressure from himself, decided
what was Christian faith; and then he intervened as
Emperor — all the world should accept it at once and be
done with heresies and unchristian divisions. The
Church has generally had to pay for its alliances with
governments. "Better bad laws that are fixed," said an Athenian
statesman, "than good ones subject to change";** and
every practical man agrees with Cleon. There is always
a sort of horse-sense about business men, but they some
times fail to realize that the gifts required for a swift
decision in a purchase of barley or indigo are not quite
those required for the discovery of spiritual truth. The
official tries to take the average opinion of today, but it
is generally yesterday's news that he gets; tomorrow is
not practical politics, it can take care of its own affair, as
someone said in another connection. That mistrust of
tomorrow, which so tragically parts fathers and sons, is
still more a mark of bureaucracy. The demand of a
great organization for leaders whom it knows involves
the rule of old men ; the rank and file often do not recog
nize a pioneer until he is left behind. All over the world,
and in every communion, the Church tends to be con
trolled by the established and the practical ; and to these
the spirit of Jesus cannot be congenial. He came to set
fire on earth, to launch divisions, to put a leaven in society
which would never leave it in peace; and the Church
stands for traditional order, a deposit of truth, settled

"" Thucydides, 3:37.

166 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
economics and stable society, for all that old men love and
young men doubt, for reaction and unreality.
"A real belief in Christ, besides answering questions,
starts them."23 One great part of the Church's work has
been to think out Jesus Christ, no easy task. When the
Gospel reached the Greek world, it underwent change,
and necessarily ; for the Greek mind was not the Hebrew.
The hillside is one and the same, but when it was said
that Robert Burns chose his farm as a poet and not as a
farmer, we have a hint of how differently men may
judge; and which is the real, the farmer's Mossgiel or
the poet's? The change that the shift to the Greek
world meant was inevitable, full of risk but not formid
able. The Christian was forced to think out the relations
of Jesus with "all time and all existence." He had to
clear up for himself the bearing of his new experience
of God in Christ upon every problem of thought and con
duct, of society and government. It meant a clearer view
of God and a firmer grasp of Christ — a greater Christ
than men had dreamed, ampler and richer, "very God and
very man."
So much was all to the good. But men grew weary
of heresies, tired of thought. They accepted Greek
philosophy's preconceptions in the Roman Empire with
out that brilliant freedom, that passion for truth, that
we know in Plato. And the Church began to insist on a
"deposit" of truth similarly left by the Apostles.2* The
Christian faith was to be discovered by adjustment; and
when its synods and councils met, they were filled with
officials and old men. How near disaster they could come,
we are reminded in the saying Athanasius contra mun-
dum. The young Athanasius saved the situation at

»N. S. Talbot.
24 The beginning of it in Jude 3; "the faith which was once (Siraf)
delivered to the saints."

THE CHURCH COMPROMISING 167
Nicaea, almost single-handed, and rescued the Church
from a fatal compromise. But what were the credentials
of the bishops to warrant them in settling the Christian
faith? Paul's caustic comment on the small contribution
of professional "pillars" comes to one's mind; "they
added nothing to me" (Gal. 2:6). If the Church is "the
body of Christ," the "body" has too often tried to usurp
the functions of the Head. For a defense men fall back
on "corporate thinking" and "Christian consciousness";
but here let me quote Dr. Tennant: "A common mind is
not only a superfluous conception ... it would seem to
denote the non-existent."
Once framed, there the creed was, to accept and not to
discuss, a good civil servant's rule.25 Government fixes
the rates for parcel post; you pay ninepence for two
pounds, or we do not accept your parcel. There is the
creed; take it as it stands, or — on second thoughts, we
will make you take it. And the hideous story of persecu
tion began, and was justified blasphemously with words
of charm and grace, "Compel them to come in (Luke
14:23). Faith came to mean no longer a personal rela
tion with the Father of Jesus; God, it was held, would
like the civil servant, have nothing to do with a man,
unless he accepted certain Greek speculations, hardened
into Roman law. It was a premium on thoughtlessness;
and ever since the Renaissance and the Reformation
taught men to think again, the old creeds have meant
unceasing difficulties. Not that they do not embody
truth, but they speak a language which for most men is
dead. At Pentecost, we are told, every man heard in his
own tongue ; at Nicaea the language was Greek. Our debt
to the Greek is chiefly the inspiration we gain from his

MCf. W. Cockshott, Pilgrim Fathers, p. 146: "In England ... as
soon as the Reformation movement began to take hold and its tendency
to make people think for themselves was perceived, the press was placed
under censorship."

168 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
insistence on thinking in Greek ; it is a warrant to us to
think in modern English, to do it with the precision of
Socrates and the glow and the faith of Jesus.

Our story has been a melancholy one, because we have
concentrated on one half of it. But the Holy Ghost was
never really extinguished; that Spirit is not easily
quenched (1 Thess. 5:19). The leaven works in the
meal, even if men try to freeze the bubbles. There is
such a thing as Christian instinct and it always responds
to Jesus. The Church and the creeds? Oh! yes! it
accepts them and forgets them, and lives in contact with
the Saviour. This is not the right solution, of course ; it
was a quick cut, and a better path has to be made. The
Church, as a living thing, has always had unsuspected
powers of readjustment without losing its life, and espe
cially the power of absorbing new-found truth without
injury. Council and civil servant, journalist and "man
in the street," kings and emperors, have tried their
hands. "Sire," said Theodore Beza to the King of Na
varre, "it belongs in truth to the Church of God, in the
name of which I speak, to receive blows and not to give
them; but it will please your majesty to remember that
it is an anvil that has worn out many hammers."23 It
will wear out other hammers yet. The Holy Ghost will
never quite come to the level of "the man in the street,"
but he, when he takes time to reflect, will, in the words
of Jesus, "rise and go to his Father" and take the Spirit
of Truth as his guide. The next two chapters will bring
us further into the inner life of the Church, and may help
to explain why, despite its accommodations with the
world, it lives and triumphs.

a"H. M. Baird, Rise of the Huguenots, II, p. 28; Reyburn, Life of
Calvin, p. 297.

CHAPTER X
THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS
One of the regular names that Paul uses for Jesus is
"Lord." Paul's writings are haunted by the word. In
the concordance there are whole columns of it. It was a
high word, meaning the master of the slave, the master
of the family; and it was a name given also to kings and
gods. Jesus is for Paul above all things Lord; and that
he should give him that name is significant. We have
only to think of Paul's Jewish boyhood — of the syna
gogue and the reading of the Old Testament; how at
home he was taught Hebrew; how he read it with his
father, picking out one by one the words in the old char
acter, and how he would come by and by to a word of
four letters, and the boy stumbled, as a boy learning to
read will; he began to spell it, for he knew all the letters.
"No," his father said, "do not say it. That word is not
said. Say Adonai" (the Lord). For centuries the Jew
has never said that name of four letters, JHVH, but
always "the Lord." Where it is set in capitals in our
authorized version, there stands the word that was never
pronounced, and instead of it men read Adonai. But the
time came when Paul gave the name to another; and the
other kept the name for ever. The New Testament is
full of the Lordship of Jesus. Two of its most regular
descriptions of the Christian man, as "slave" and "saint,"
emphasize it still further. As all these names were given
and accepted by members of the Christian community, it
169

170 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
is clear that some considerable experience lies behind
them, if we can only recapture it.

"From henceforth let no man trouble me," wrote Paul
to the Galatians (6:17), "for I bear in my body the
marks of the Lord Jesus." The marks are stigmata. In
the market-place of any town in the province of Galatia,
to which province this letter was sent, any day slaves
could be seen branded with the names of their owners,
with letters or marks burnt into the living flesh, never to
be washed out. Sometimes there were the letters FUG,
which stamped a man as a fugitive slave, a runaway who
had been recaptured and who bore on the side of his
face, burnt in, the letters that told his shame.1 Paul, the
Jew, the thinker, the Roman citizen, says he is a branded
slave — a confession of what we may call the very lowest
depth of Christian ignominy. Men reach it in different
ways. "I submitted," writes John Wesley in his jour
nal, "to be more vile and proclaimed in the highways the
glad tidings of salvation." He had not thought he would
sink to that. The picture, so often seen in galleries, of
St. Sebastian, stripped naked, tied to a tree, and pierced
with arrows, is not a bad parable of Christian service.
When a man has touched bottom in shame and pain, he
can do his work, as he could not, so long as there was
something to which he could cling, some vestige of intel
lectual pride or even intellectual decency, something that
stood between him and criticism. Might he not have been
protected, and saved from some things? No! He is to
be spared nothing; he is to sound the depths. "From

'Herodotus, 2:113, speaks of slaves in Egypt taking on them the
stigmata of "Herakles" to escape from their masters; but I do not think
this is in Paul's mind.

THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 171
henceforth let no man trouble me. I am a branded
slave." Men play with the idea of being captains of their own
souls. Paul was not. He had been ; and then, as he says,
"necessity was laid upon him," and he became a conscript
of Christ. That was nearer the mark than one might
think ; for sometimes in the Roman Empire the conscript
was branded too. The term, "the called," at the begin
ning of some of the epistles, does not mean "invited";
it is nearer the sterner sense of our phrase "called up."
What it has meant, plenty of people know — the ruin of
their affairs, hardship, subjection to an unwelcome con
trol. "I have suffered the loss of all things," says Paul.
The cross was still a scandal, the Christian Church
ignominious, and Jesus himself an unpopular and
despised impostor. The careers men never reach are
sometimes harder to give up than those that they have
achieved. Paul, a man of learning and charm, standing
high among the men of his age and race for character
and attainment in his own religion, a man with great
prospects before him, sees everything swept away; and
he is the slave of Jesus. It was no choice of his own;
none. Men talk today about choosing Christ; but Paul
did not choose him. Jesus chose Paul, got him, and
branded him, so Paul says. Paul's body was covered with
scars, marks of stones, marks of Roman rods. Possibly
some of the men who read this letter at Lystra remem
bered the day when they threw stones at him, and hit
him, and left their marks on him; and Paul says they
are the stigmata of Christ.
It is worth while to note that Paul's metaphors describ
ing Christian duty in terms of debt and slavery and
stewardship, were all previously used by Jesus himself.
If they seem hard to us and unsympathetic, Jesus took
them as not unnatural illustrations, and they recur inde-

172 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
pendently to Paul. There is surprising severity in Jesus'
parables from slavery; and Paul in his turn recognizes
the stern element in the Gospel.
Paul's life shows in three ways at least the effects of
the Lordship of Jesus. In the first place it is a life con
trolled by Jesus. He and his friends think of going into
Mysia, but the Spirit of Jesus will not allow them ; into
the province of Asia, but the Spirit of Jesus forbids
(Acts 16.) ; and then comes the vision of the man of
Macedonia, and with it guidance. The Quakers speak
of a man having a "stop"; and a man knows what his
own "stops" are. Whatever they were in Paul's case, at
one and another point he was "stopped"; and then at
Troas he had "a concern," as the Quakers say, to go to
Macedonia; and in each instance he was right. He was
told at the Damascus gate to go into the city, and it
would be shown to him where he was to go next; it was
to be a life of orders given and obeyed. The Spirit of
Jesus guides and controls the man throughout. It takes
away a great deal of freedom, but it gives something else.
For if the guidance is the guidance of Jesus, the re
sponsibility belongs to Jesus — not to Paul, so long as he
obeys. That is a very great thing indeed. Men criti
cized Paul's message. Very well! "Who art thou," he
says (Rom. 14:4), "that judgest another man's servant?
To his own master he standeth or falleth." And with
one of his familiar tangents of thought, he adds : "Yea,
he shall be holden up." "Let no man trouble me; I am
the branded slave of the Lord Jesus." So he says, find
ing, one guesses, in the thought consolation for messages
rejected. If Jesus tells Paul not to go into the province of Asia,
then Paul is not responsible for Asia. If Jesus sends
him to Macedonia, and he finds himself in prison there,
then that is where Jesus wishes him to be. If he has

THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 173
got his friend Silas into prison too, the responsibility
still rests with Jesus and not with Paul. Tertullian has
the same thought put into military form. He speaks of
the Christian in persecution. God assigns a man to a
certain place in the world, to stay there. For some Chris
tians, Tertullian says, the whole New Testament is
summed up in one text: "When they persecute you in
one city, flee ye to the next." But he was not going to
flee to the next. He draws an illustration from the army.
A soldier goes to battle; he fights; he is wounded; he
falls; he dies. Who willed it? The man who enlisted
him as a soldier. "There you have the will of my God" ;
stay in Carthage! And he stayed himself and was not
martyred.' It is the same story as Paul's, who also uses
the military metaphor. The responsibility rests with
Jesus Christ. What a consolation that can be!
There is another element of consolation. At the end
of his first letter to the Corinthians Paul sets two words
which English people run together. But Anathema and
Maran-atha have nothing to do with each other. The
Greek word is a curse and the Aramaic a blessing. Let
such a man be Anathema! That is a curse. Maran-atha,
our Lord cometh ! That is a blessing. The slave is in a
dreadful position; but the Master is coming, and then
all will be well. Surely that phrase is the echo of Jesus.
How often he spoke of slaves in positions of trust work
ing and waiting for an absent master ! "The lord of that
servant cometh in an hour when he looks not for him."
"Thank God!" says Paul, "Maran-atha, our Lord is com
ing! Then he finds me where he wishes me to be."
II
The word saint has had a curious history. It stands
in a very peculiar position today. We give it to people
'Tertullian, De Fuga, 14.

174 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
whom we admire for gifts of a highly specialized type,
and at the same moment we are apt to suggest that they
are not very fit for this world, to feel that they are a
luxury but not a real help to mankind in any great
emergency, or indeed in the common round. But Paul
uses the word saint in the strangest connection; for he
applies it to the Corinthian Christians at the head of the
epistle in which he describes their character for all time
¦ — "to the sanctified in Christ Jesus, called, and saints."
To understand this, we have to look into the meaning
of the word in Paul's day; and we may find that it has
more meanings than one, and perhaps is changing from
one to another, with uncertain suggestions of both; and
all depends on who uses it. Throughout the Mediter
ranean world there was a series of words in one language
and another representing more or less what, by a term,
borrowed from the South Seas, is called taboo. (In Irish
there is an equivalent term, which nobody thought of till
after the word from the South Seas was established.)
Taboo means, roughly, something reserved for, or con
nected with, a god, in some way or other. Things, places,
or actions may be taboo, and are to be avoided except
under proper conditions, for the god will not suffer them
to be treated lightly. The Latin sacer is one of these
terms. Sacer esto, "let him be dedicated," is a curse,
not a blessing. Virgil's auri sacra fames illustrates the
same sense of the word. A thing may be looked on as
cursed or blessed according to the god to whom it is
sacred. The Hebrew root, q'd'sh (familiar to us in
Kadesh-barnea) is of the same family, and yields a whole
series of words of like connotation. Among the Hebrews
the two notions of holiness and uncleanness are in their
origin practically identical. The Greek word hagios,
which Paul here uses, is by origin of the same class, as
the cognate noun agos reminds us. The "Holy of Holies,"

To the Greek reader, especially if he had Hebrew
memories as Paul had, the words hegiasmenois and
hagiois — "sanctified" and "saints" — would be apt to sug
gest a number of ideas all full of religious history and
suggestion. The people, so termed, were the god's own;
they belonged to him and were set apart for him and for
his uses ; they were sealed, as it were, by him and for him,
and protected by all the sanctity of their god. And, it
should be added, they shared that sanctity and might com
municate it.
All depends on the god and on his character ; and here
the history of the word will help the student. When the
writer known as Peter bids his friends to be "holy in all
conduct of life along the lines of the holy one who called
you" (I Peter 1:15), and cites Leviticus 11:44 as his
warrant, "Ye shall be holy, because I am holy," he intro
duces a great qualification. For the taboo words in
themselves have no moral suggestion whatever. In
Hebrew, the root q'd'sh gives us qddosh = holy; qedesh —
holy place; qedesheh=havlot ; and unless we know some
thing about temples of Southern India today, or of
ancient Corinth or Comana, the association of ideas is
impossible. But in the ancient Semitic world, as in Hindu
ism today, there was nothing odd about it ; the woman was
a "consecrated woman," a "holy woman"; the particular
god or goddess to whom she was dedicated was to be
served in this way. "I am thy servant, and the son of
thine handmaid," is a beautiful saying of a Hebrew
psalmist (Psalm 116 :16) ; but in Tamil today, "son of a
servant of god" is the grossest of insults, for the "serv
ant of god" is a temple harlot (devodasi), and no one
would wish to be her son. J^is^e_character of the god
that is decisive of the nature of his service^

176 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
So Paul's word, with Peter's commentary, may give
us a new conception of the Christian life. The Christian
belongs to Jesus Christ — is taboo to him — is his ; and the
character of Jesus Christ is decisive for the nature of the
Christian's service. "Present your bodies a living sac
rifice, holy, acceptable to God," writes Paul to the Romans
(12:1); and to the Corinthians he varies the phrase:
"Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and
that the Spirit of God dwells in you ? If any man destroys
(or spoils or corrupts) the temple of God, that man shall
God destroy; for the temple of God is holy — which you
are" (1 Cor. 3:16). Here, then, we have sacrifice and
temple; and the priesthood of the ordinary Christian
comes in the Apocalypse — the full series of dedication-
words all linking men to Jesus Christ, and involving his
way of life, not "according to the tradition of men,
according to the elements of the world," but "according
to Christ" (Col. 2:8). The writings of Paul are full of
this twofold suggestion of belonging to Christ and hav
ing a new life in him (Eph. 4:22, 24; Rom. 8:2, 10, 14).
It is worth while to look a little more closely at this
New Testament idea of the Christian being the property
of his God, and at what hagios implies in this case.
"You are Christ's, and Christ is God's" — what does
Christ do with his property, with what is dedicated to
him? The first answer is that he keeps it and protects
it; and here taboo helps us again. In the book entitled
In Old New Zealand, the author tells a curious story of
the power of taboo. A chief's food is taboo — even what
he leaves of it when his meal is over and he goes away.
A case occurred where, on some expedition, a slave found
food and ate it, and then was told it was the chief's. In
a few hours he was dead of terror — not afraid of the
chief's vengeance, but of the inherent awfulness of the
food he had eaten. In Isaiah 65:5 the bystanders are

THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 177
warned not to come near certain pagan rites, lest they
should be "sanctified." So in Ezekiel 44:19 the danger
is mentioned of being "sanctified" by "holy" garments.
Men believed that something of the god passed into what
was holy to him and protected itself. While we put this
down to superstition, we may use the illustration. God,
the Apostle tells us, puts something of himself into and
upon his own, and keeps them safe. "It is God," writes
Paul, "who has also sealed us for himself" (II Cor.
1:22). "You have been sealed with the Holy Spirit of
promise" (Eph. 1:13). In an ancient household, where
locks were clumsy and few, everything that the master
wished to be kept safe from the slaves was sealed up.*
In the Apocalypse we read how the servants of our God
are sealed on the brow (7:3), and with the name of the
Lamb and of his Father (14:1). Thus the Christians
are marked out as God's own — "a holy nation, a people
for his own possession" (I Peter 2 :9).
Throughout the New Testament the thought is empha
sized that God will keep his own. We need only think of
the ancient use of names in magic, to realize what is the
value of "the name above every name" — especially when
we bear it on our -own brows. But the protection of God
goes far beyond the sphere of magic. God always means
for the Christian the loving Father of Jesus Christ; and
God, "for the great love wherewith he loved us," saves
from sin and keeps the Christian holy in Jesus' sense of
the word — "you who are kept (guarded or garrisoned)
in the power of God" (I Peter 1:5). He "is able to
stablish you" (Rom. 16:25), and to "keep you from
stumbling" (Jude 24). There is the further promise of
keeping in martyrdom; for martyrdom was never far

'The signet-ring and its device are discussed by Clement of Alexandria;
for Christians with property must have rings, and of what character should
the devices be? A , dove, suggested Clement, or a ship sailing, not the
face of a heathen god. .

178 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
away from the early Christian — "ye have not yet resisted
unto blood," says the writer to the Hebrews (12:4), with
the thought in his mind that that stage is quite likely to
be reached. "I also will keep thee from the hour of
trial," says the Apocalypse (3:10). Nor is it only in
the martyr's death that he is to be kept. For God, it is
implied, will keep his own as long as he loves them; if
he chose them "before the foundation of the world,"
how long will he wish to keep them afterwards? Will
he tire of them at death? Paul did not think so — "Ye
are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God" (Col.
3:3). Immortality and resurrection are bound up with
the consecrated life. If a man is hagios, he is Christ's
for ever. "Who shall separate us?"
Returing to the idea of the service of the god to whom
man or woman is consecrated, we find this also bound up
with the conception of the Christian hagios. "If a man
purify himself, he shall be a vessel unto honor, sanctified
(hegiasmenon) , meet for the Master's use, prepared unto
every good work" (II Tim. 2:22). The Christian is
"created in Christ Jesus for good works" (Eph. 2:10).
The hagios in the temple was a servant, engaged in work
for the god. So the Christian hagios is not merely kept
as a curiosity laid by, or a fine edition of some rare book,
a thing precious but not very useful; he is for Christ's
use — not a folio, but a pocket edition, in and out of the
pocket and rubbing up against everything in the pocket,
stained, scarred, worn, and showing every sign of close
identification with the owner. Just as such a book is the
intimate thing, and makes the relic of a friend, penciled
and corrected in his own hand, thumbed and personal to
the last, so Paul conceives of the Christian being identi
fied with Jesus Christ in his work, used to the uttermost
and bound up with that service by erery Me of love and
redemption.

THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 179
To sum up, we find surely a richer and stronger con
notation for an abused word — a whole series of deep and
beautiful meanings. The saint is just an ordinary per
son, limited, apt to stumble, fallible, foolish — "nothing"
(I Cor. 1 :28) — but he is dedicated toJesusj3hrM^sj|tIed___
with his name, kept"m his power, identified with him in
the common life that is implied by sympathetic and intel
ligent surrender to his purpose, and (most wonderful of
all) found available by Jesus Christ and used by him in
his work of redemption. And we have to remember that
the word was deliberately used, to describe the experi
ence of the men who used it. Thus it too lights up the
Lordship of Jesus. Ill
Slavery and sanctity are not sources from which we
draw our metaphors today, but the language of the New
Testament writers, when once we study it, is very clear.
They gave to Jesus a place of authority ; if we are to do
so, we must do it as spontaneously and of our experience.
What then is the authority of Jesus ? First let us look
at his intellectual authority. Nothing is omitted in his«
survey. Especially we must note the significance of his
use of human facts — that the crowning thing to prove his
authority is the good news for the miserable. When the
accident of the opening book in the synagogue put into
his hand the passage of Isaiah, the beautiful words about
the healing of the brokenhearted and the good news for
the poor moved Jesus in a way that men remembered.
Jesus always grasped the fact that matters ; there is pro
portion in all his teaching and all his thinking — that in
itself is the stamp of genius in any region of thought.
The modern Jew loves to point out that nearly everything
Jesus said was said by the Rabbis; it is in the Talmud.

180 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
"Yes," said the German scholar Wellhausen, "and how
much else is in the Talmud?" It is all there, good and
bad and trifling; but there is not that indiscriminate
heaping together of things, relevant and irrelevant, in the
words of Jesus. If the Stoics said some things that he
also said, how much they omitted! When we study the
books which Shakespeare read and the plays which he
wrote from them, the striking thing, again and again, is
what he omitted ; and what genius omits is sometimes as
important as what genius puts in. What Jesus omits
counts as well as what he says. How much the great
teachers of the world omit that Jesus keeps ! How little
does their teaching group itself round the real center, as
his thoughts always do !
In the next place there is his moral authority. The
moral insight of Jesus, his sure touch, is one of the
things that constitute his Lordship. As we have seen,
the eventual standard by which men judge their own
lives and the lives of others is his life. But the center of
morals, he has taught us to see, is love; and there is his
authority — in the great loving heart of Jesus. The
authority of parents and friends is just this, that nobody
cares so much for us, no one does so much for us, no one
sees so much in us. Who ever saw so much in men as
Jesus, cared for them more, or did more for them? "We
love him," says the famous disciple, "because he first
loved us." There was no question as to his Lordship
among those who really knew him. Above all, his sense of
God gave him a right to speak. He is the great expert in
life — "The master light of all our seeing — "
the inspirer of right living, the master of consolation;
who "brought life and immortality to light," who "abol
ished death" and gave peace. So the Church has always

THE LORDSHIP OF JESUS 181
judged of him. Ancient times saw men and women die
for him in great numbers. In 1900 the Boxers repeated
in China the great scenes that Decius and Diocletian had
enacted in the Roman Empire, and thousands of Chinese
sealed with their lives their faith that Jesus is Lord.

CHAPTER XI
THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS

Rendel Harris, in his biography of Frank Crossley, tells
a story of Crossley as a magistrate in the police court at
Manchester. Those were the days when English hooli
gans and English Justices of the Peace thought that the
Salvation Army was a mistake ; and they were prosecuting
a Salvation Army sister for obstructing the traffic. Ren
del Harris says it was a particular "broad way" that she
was trying to obstruct, not in their jurisdiction. When it
came to this case, Crossley left the bench and stood in the
dock with the girl until her trial was finished. How elec
tric that movement must have been! Out of this bench
ranged against her — and the stolid respectability of the
middle classes is never more impossible than at that ele
vation — steps the brightest and most charming figure and
associates himself with her, in her business of obstruct
ing a certain broad way, yes! and in the suffering and
shame which she had to undergo for Christ. Paul draws
a closely similar picture out of his own experience. Nero
was already in almost complete possession of his record
for cruelty and infamy ; and Paul, the aged, was brought
alone before him. By accident many of his friends were
not there, and some of them were away by design. Paul
had to face "the lion" alone. But he grows conscious that
he is not alone. Someone is there — and none better; and
the rest of the proceedings, what are they? A sacrament
and a revelation ; and it was worth it.
182

THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 183
It is significant that the Church began with the most
ordinary, and the most delightful, of human experiences.
Jesus chose twelve "that they might be with him." The
Gospel thus starts with friendship, and the Church is
founded in friendship. Jesus was with these men, and
they with him, on the basis of friendship, of the give-
and-take that always exists between friends. Think of the
common life, the rough and the hard together, and Jesus,
the splendid, sympathetic, and intelligent friend all the
way through. We have glimpses of their casual talk,
of the freedom with which they speak to him — another
characteristic of real friendship. They are not on their
guard against him or against themselves, as they lie
under the trees with him and talk on the mountain side ;
it was all so casual and natural. The thoughts of Jesus,
in Charles Lamb's phrase, slid into their minds when they
were imagining no such thing, in a most beautiful and
natural way. They unconsciously came to share his
sanity and his habit of peace; and his repeated "Cour
age!" (BapoKi) became their own mood. He had a genius
for friendship ; and it gave him the power of winning the
love and the passion of men of different types, of captur
ing their imagination and enlisting them to follow out
his ideas. This can hardly be overemphasized. Think of
the names he has for his friends. He calls them "chil
dren" or "boys." As I have been told not to overempha
size this, it is pleasant to find that Clement of Alexandria
seventeen centuries ago noticed the diminutives and
found a special point in these friendly names.1
But, historically, the death upon the cross stamped
Jesus as the friend of men. "The Son of God, who loved
me and gave himself for me," has been the predominant
conception of Jesus from Paul's day onward. The Latin
poet of the Middle Ages, whose verse Dr. Johnson could

1 Clem. Alex., Paedagogos, I, 5, 12-14.

184 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
not read without tears,2 puts the same thought in
music :
"Quaerens me sedisti lassus,
Redemisti crucem passus;
Tantus labor non sit casus!"
"Worthy is the Lamb, for he was slain." His death and
passion, realized in conjunction with his personal interest
in men as individuals, with the sense that no solitary unit
of humanity lies outside his heart — these have won men
for Jesus and have given the motive principle of Christian
life, sheer abandoment of self in gratitude to Jesus.
Here, as elsewhere, we have to interpret Jesus in the
experience of men by the Jesus of history. If Jesus is
"the same yesterday and today and for ever," if that
statement has any real meaning at all, it suggests that he
has still the same aptitude for real friendship — that he
may have his own friendly names for his friends of a
later day than the Boanerges and the Rock and the
Zealot — and that he may even yet enjoy the human sym
pathy that can share little things as well as big, the quaint
as well as the sorrowful, the gay as well as the tragic.
The story in the gospels suggests a great willingness in
Jesus to share life with his friend. If Justin Martyr was
right in saying that Jesus made yokes in his shop — and a
carpenter certainly seems the natural person to make
them — we may surmise that, when Jesus invites a man
to be his yoke-fellow, he knows what he means. We are
told that the ancient yoke was made for a pair of oxen.
Can friendship go further than to ask another out of
sheer intimacy to share one's work, especially when it is
difficult? It is not everybody that a man would ask to
share his cabin in a long and dangerous voyage, or his
work in a difficult milieu in a tropical climate.

3 Mrs. Piozzi, Anecdotes of the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, p. 200.

THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 185
II
St. Paul's letters are not treatises of theology ; not one
of them is a synopsis of Christian doctrine; they are
occasional writings; and the frequent recurrence of a
thought is a sign that it is a fundamental idea with him.
He is peculiarly apt to use verbs and nouns compounded
with the Greek preposition, which means "with" (<rw).
They are rather difficult sometimes to translate into Eng
lish; fellow-worker, fellow-prisoner, fellow-servant, fel
low-traveler — these are some of the nouns he uses for
his friends," and they are easy enough to render; but for
Jesus he has a very similar series of verbs which are
beyond translation without paraphrase. "I am crucified
with Christ" (Gal. 2 :20) ; "becoming conformed with his
death" (Phil. 3 :10) ; "we were buried with Christ" (Rom.
6:4) ; "God made us alive with Christ" (Eph. 2:5) ; "if
we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also
live with Christ" (Rom. 6:8) ; and then, in a great burst,
in one verse of the Romans (8:17), "Fellow-heirs, if we
suffer with him, we shall be glorified with him."
Taken together, they are a brilliant commentary on
that other striking phrase of Paul's (Phil. 3:10), "That
I may know him and the fellowship of his sufferings."
Jesus Christ had to face the cross and death, to go
through all sorts of humiliations and sufferings, and Paul
avows that his great ambition is to be in it with him.
The war gave us many illustrations of that spirit. It is
the spirit which is associated with the word incarnation,
the spirit which made it impossible for God to keep out of
the mess and trouble that we call life. Jesus came into
the thick of it and bore the cross, that accumulation of
shame and anguish and rejection ; and Paul says : "I have
to be in it with him, in the fellowship of his suffering."

• It is a curious thing that he never uses the actual word "friend.'

186 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
That idea haunts him, as can be seen from its frequency
in this small group of epistles. He speaks of the suffer
ings of Christ welling over upon himself (II Cor. 1:5).
He does not want to stand out. Reading the account that
Paul wrote to the Corinthians of what he went through —
shipwreck, stoning, perils of robbers, and so forth, a
modern critic has said that, as a mere feat of physical
endurance, Paul's career was a wonder. In another place
Paul expresses the feeling that, if anything were wanting
in the shame and suffering that Christ bore, he would like
to bear just that; so that, between them, he and his part
ner, his Lord and Saviour, might bear the full tale of
human suffering (Col. 1:24). That is an ambition that
reaches out beyond the range of some of us, a picture of
friendship more intense than some of us know; yet we
find it again and again in the Church. There are people,
who are ready, who are wishful, to endure the very worst
for Christ, to help him, to be with him. I asked a man
in the far south of India what he got out of his missionary
life. He hesitated, and then he said something like this :
"A sense of nearness to the Master." At the heart of the
Gospel is the assurance that Jesus is a person to whom
men can get very near ; they always could, he is so ready,
so easy ; he has such a knowledge of men, and such sym
pathy with men. Ill
The Fourth Gospel often crystallizes in a phrase of
beauty the actual words of Jesus given by its predeces
sors. "I have called you friends," says Jesus; and then
the evangelist, again summing up the whole story, repre
sents him as saying, "All things that I have heard of my
Father I have made known unto you" (John 15 :15). The
essense of friendship is thus represented as fellowship in
ideals and sympathy in thought. To share his mind, to

THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 187
enter into his thoughts, is a part of that friendship with
Jesus to which men are called. It is not a real friendship
that will not go over the whole of the ground with the
friend. Paul puts before us the whole gamut of suffering,
through which Christ went, as an ideal experience for the
Christian ; and that is hard enough. In this Fourth Gos
pel there is the other ideal, which in some ways is even
harder — the spiritual discipline of sounding all the
thoughts of Jesus to the very depths. We are called on
to share to the utmost his full experience of God, to
grasp with him the mind of God, to live with him in the
love of God — as he understood all these things. It is a
call to us to be at once great souls, great hearts, great
minds. Meanwhile we are very like the rest of the world,
common people, commonplace through and through. What
then? Abraham Lincoln once said: "The Lord likes
common people best; that is why he made so many of
them." Nobody believed that common people could be
great, capable of great life and great death and great
thought, till Jesus called them to all this, and they "heard
him gladly," common people as they were. It is what he
makes of his friends that convinces the world that he is
in touch with the real.
Jesus calls on his friends to share his interest in men
and women, and he has the gift of communicating his
capacity of being interested in the most ordinary. When
he promises to make his followers "fishers of men," some
of them think at once of whale fisheries. But an episode
like that, when he saw the crowds as sheep without a
shepherd, as a harvest ready to be reaped, and asked his
disciples to pray the Lord of the Harvest to send laborers
into his harvest, points to more commonplace tasks, to
duties which stir the imagination less and call for more of
purpose. "For us," said John Robinson of Leyden, "to
ask anything at the hands of the Lord, which withal we

188 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
do not offer ourselves ready instruments to effect and to
bring to pass, is to tempt God's power and to abuse his
goodness." Friendship with Jesus has to carry a man to
the point of feeling with Thomas in the Fourth Gospel,
that, if the whole enterprise is a failure, he will "go and
die with him" ; and it involves less tragic ministries. The
friends of Jesus have been equal to both.
It is significant how few names we know in the first cen
tury of the Church, apart from the personal friends whom
Paul mentions in his letters. Legend is busy with the
Apostles, sending Thomas to Malabar,* Mark to Alexan
dria,5 and so forth. History knows less. The Syrian
Church was a very great one, and we have a few pages
each from Ignatius and from Tatian — pages full of char
acter." We know that Tatian made a Syriac harmony of
the gospels in the second century; and we have its out
lines in Arabic. Sooner or later Syrian Christendom
reached Malabar, and Sian-Fu in West China, where the
famous tablet remains to commemorate it. Within the
last ten or fifteen years fresh evidence of unknown activi
ties of that Church appeared from the deserts of Turke
stan in the form of a bilingual New Testament. A few
leaves of Galatians survived, the Syriac version on one
side and an entirely unknown language written in Syriac
character on the other. Who were the missionaries of the

* It is not proved, though it is possible, that the Christians of St.
Thomas, the "Syrians" of India, go back to the first century. Certainly
the so-called cross of St. Thomas on the Mount outside Madras does not
prove it. But there is nothing inherently impossible in the story that
Thomas went to India. For ancient traffic with Malabar, see H. G. Raw-
linson's interesting book, Intercourse between India and the Western
World to the Fall of Rome (1916) and its references to Strabo c. 118
(on the trade about the Christian era and the 120 merchantmen sailing
from Myos Hormos) and Pliny N.H. 6:26 (on the discovery of the mon
soon and its nature about a.d. 45).
5 Eusebius, Church History, II, 16.
•The romantic tale of the letters exchanged by King Abgar of Edessa
and Jesus, and the gnostic Hymn of the Soul are the brightest pages in
early Syrian Christian literature, to which might be added the strange
Acts of Thomas.

THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 189
Syrian Church ?* Alexandria made immense contributions
to Christian thought, but who took the Gospel there? To
sail to Malabar or go overland to China might be roman
tic enough — till one arrived; Alexandria was only in the
way of the most ordinary trade. Christians went, and
their Friend went with them ; they could not help telling
his story; and nameless common men working for Christ
among men as lowly and nameless as themselves laid the
foundations on which rose one of the greatest schools of
Christendom. "I look upon all the world as my parish,"
said John Wesley" in a sentence memorable in the history
of English Christianity; so did these unknown men look
on the world, remembering a recorded saying of their
Friend, and not supposing they were doing anything
remarkable. Others again went westward. Who were the Roman
Christians, who, on the receipt of the news of Paul's com
ing, tramped forty miles south to Apii Forum to meet
him? Were they old friends from Greece and Asia, whose
names, perhaps, are in Romans 16? or were they strang
ers? Who preached Christ to Flavius Clemens and
Flavia, cousins of the Emperor Domitian — Flavia the first
woman to suffer for Christ, whose name we know?" When
Tertullian in a.d. 197 writes : "We are but of yesterday,
and we have filled everything, cities, islands, camp, palace,
forums ... all we have left you is the temples," when
he says that even in Britain there are Christians and
beyond the borders of the Roman Empire, he points to
the results of Christian life and preaching and martyr
dom, but he does not know the names of the men and
women. Nor do we in general know the names of those

7 Von Harnack, Expansion of Christianity, 2:140, points out that the
Syrians were a nation of traders who traveled the world. Syrian ped
lars are not unknown in America yet.
8 Journal (Everyman edition), I, p. 201.
9 See E. G. Hardy, Studies in Roman History (first series), p. 67;
Suetonius, Domitian, 15; Eusebius Church History, III, 18.

190 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
who have revolutionized the thought of India in the nine
teenth century.
The Christian Church has been made by utterly obscure
people — by nasty slaves and washerwomen, said Celsus,
who take women and children into corners of verandahs
and whisper "Only believe!" to them10 — yes! by slaves,
said the Christian apologist, who were burnt alive for it
and in the flames, "torn and bleeding," shouted, "We wor
ship God through Christ."" Jesus has certainly had the
gift of filling the hearts of his friends with a transfigur
ing passion, of communicating to them the instincts and
the power that made his own nature.
The means used have been summed by von Harnack as
"infinite love in ordinary intercourse." Paul sets out his
methods, in writing to the Corinthians (I Cor. 9:16 ff.),
and reduces them to a sentence : "I am made all things to
all men" and "this I do," he adds, "for the gospel's sake."
There are all varieties of human temperament, and the
Christian is called to show an infinite variety. The par
able of the Talents conveys the duty of ingenuity and
alertness of seizing the opportunity when it comes and
of going to meet it.
Wesley tells of an experiment he once made. It was
suggested by someone who believed in calls, that he should
not speak of Christ to anyone unless he was conscious of a
call to speak to that person. So he rode from London to
York, played fair by the experiment, and when he reached
York, realized he had not been conscious of any call at all
and had said no word of Christ to anyone. He writes this
down in his Journal, and his conclusion that it is all a
device of the devil. There comes a man, is his thought;
whether I "feel like" speaking to him or not, the call is
no matter of feeling, it is the outcome of intellectual grip

"Celsus ap. Origen, e. Cels, III, 55.
"Tertullian, Apology, 21.

THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 191
of the two facts, that he needs Christ and Christ needs
him. So the Wesleyan society came into being, and the
Christian Church grew by no other magic. The friends
of Jesus had got his mind, and knew what to do. "He
that hath the word of Jesus," said Ignatius of Antioch,
"can understand his silence."12
"How did Christianity rise and spread among men?"
asks Carlyle; "It arose in the mystic deeps of man's soul;
and was spread by the 'preaching of the word,' by simple,
altogether natural and individual efforts; and flew, like
hallowed fire, from heart to heart, till all were purified
and illuminated by it.""
The personal relation was the heart of it all. "The
Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me";
"Christ sent me ... to preach the gospel" ; "To me who
am less than the least of all saints is this grace given to
preach among the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of
Christ." IV
One point, further, on which the testimony of Chris
tians agree, is the adequacy of Jesus as friend. He under
stood the individual, and had leisure for him; he prayed
for his followers in detail. In the Epistle to the Hebrews
the writer picks out Jesus' gifts of sympathy and intelli
gence; the verb "He is able" rings through it as one
of the great keynotes, introducing point after point.
Tempted himself "he is able to help the tempted." "He
is able to sympathize with our weaknesses"; "able to
understand those who are ignorant and who wander,"
and then, in the great passage a little later: "He is able
to save to the uttermost." That is the great Christian
experience; it is written all through the story of the
a Ignatius, Ephes., 15.
"Carlyle in Signs of the Times.

192 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
Christian Church. "Christ in very deed," said Luther,
"is a lover of those which are in trouble and anguish, in
sin and death, and such a lover as gave himself for us."
Here are a few lines from Livingstone's diary. "That
hymn," he says, "of St. Bernard on the name of Christ,
it pleases me so; it rings in my ears as I wander in the
wide, wide wilderness." That was not a metaphor. He
was tramping, a solitary white man with savages and
heathen, through untracked Africa, a lonely, sick pioneer.
He writes down in his diary in Latin four verses qf that
Jesu dulcis memoria, which about that time Edward Cas-
wall translated into the familiar words : —
"Jesus, the very thought of Thee
With sweetness fills my breast;
But sweeter far Thy face to see,
And in Thy presence rest."
And he goes on to the verse : —
"But what to those who find ? Ah ! this
Nor tongue nor pen can show;
The love of Jesus, what it is
None but His loved ones know.""
Sed quid invenientibus? That is the thing that makes
heroes. A little later he writes (July 5, 1848) how he
preached to those savage followers. He had none around
him but heathen, and he speaks of the awfulness of the
living with them, in the atmosphere of savagery and
superstition, of murder and impurity. He says: "I like
to dwell on the love of the great Mediator, for it always
warms my heart, and I know that the gospel is the power
of God." What a theme to preach to savages! He could
not help it, it was the subject which drew him ; he must

14 Blaikie, Life of Livingstone, ch. IV, p. 54; the date appears to be be.
tween 1843 and 1847. Caswell published his version in 1849, and Ray
Palmer his in 1858. See Julian, Diet, of Hymnology, p. 588.

THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 193
speak about it, and he did. He deeply impressed them.
Sir Harry Johnston, in his Livingstone, says he knows the
talk of black men in camp, the scandal and the slander
that they know or invent, but never about Livingstone."
It was a right instinct that led Livingstone to speak of
the love of the great Mediator, and these men saw it in
his life and checked their tongues. Again, in a still later
passage, he is in a place of difficulty and great danger.
There was a strong probability that, if he took a certain
road openly, as he was going to, he would be killed. He
was used to danger, but this time he wavered as to his
course. Then he wrote in his diary (January 14, 1856) :
"I read that Jesus came and said: 'All power is given
unto me, and lo ! I am with you always, even unto the end
of the world.' It is the word of a gentleman of the most
sacred and strictest honor, and there is an end on 't. I will
not cross furtively by night as I intended."
Once again let us look at the Fourth Gospel. "My peace
I leave with you. My peace I give unto you." (If Jesus
did not say that in so many words, does it not sum up
what he did say? "Fear not, little flock"; "I am with
you"; "Why are ye fearful, 0 ye of little faith?") If
the Fourth Gospel was written later than the others, then
behind the words, as they are crystallized, there is the
added experience of the Christian Church. "My peace I
give unto you." They have had it; they have it still.
Jesus has proved true, and that is why those words can be
written in that Fourth Gospel. So much for the ordinary
life of the tempted, of those in danger and in trouble.
Jesus, they find, is a friend indeed; in his pain, in his
cross, there is peace and comfort for his followers. "Fear
not! I have overcome the universe." "Consolation in
Christ," is one of Paul's great phrases. But the troubles
of this life are not all.
"P. 365.

194 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
"Who shall lay anything to the charge of God's elect?"
asks Paul, with his mind on another tribunal than that of
Nero. "Who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that
died, yea rather, that is risen again, who is even at the
right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us."
Jesus stood beside him when he had to face Nero; and
Paul knows, deep in his heart, that when he stands before
the great white throne there will be One at his side who
will put strength into him there, One to make intercession
for him, who is making it now — a beautiful thought
which we find also in Hebrews and in the Epistle of John :
"He ever liveth to make intercession for us"; "We have
an advocate with the Father." Paul asks, "Who shall
separate us from the love of Christ?" and he surveys first
the things that may meet us in this world, the things that
he has met — tribulation, distress, persecution, anguish,
peril, and sword; and he dismisses them with a sweep;
"In all these things we are more than conquerors through
him that loved us." Then he launches out into the other
world, that world of darkness and daemons. "I am per
suaded," he says, "that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor
things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other
created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of
God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord."1'
The hymn book is a great record of Christian experi
ence, a library of human documents, a selection from the
confessions of men and women of all ages. The New
Song has indeed been sung, and the love of Jesus, and his
sufficiency, has been the keynote. It has not been that
all these people sought him out; again and again, they
have not wanted him ; but by and by he comes into their
lives, and what a difference he makes! St. Augustine

18 Cf. Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, p. 260: "The evidence
of joy . . . who has rendered like Paul?"

THE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS 195
says about his little boy that, before he came, nobody
wanted him; but when he was born they could not help
loving him, and they called him "God-given," Adeodatus."
That is the experience of men with Jesus Christ; they
did not want him, they could do without him; but he
comes into their lives, without waiting to be asked, and
they find, in spite of themselves, that he, too, is God-
given, a Friend they cannot do without. There is no
Christian experience so universal as this, or so individual.

1 17 Augustine, ^Confessions, IV, 2, Ubi proles etiam contra votum nas
citwr; quamvis jam nata cogat se diligi.

CHAPTER XII
THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT

It was Nero, the Christians always said, who started
their persecution, and a famous chapter of Tacitus con
firms them; and in the reign of Domitian (81-96) it
began again, and perhaps on a wider scale. The Govern
ment was going to stamp out in blood a pestilent sect too
long tolerated, but everywhere hated because of its crimes
— a sect, too, that retaliated hatred for hatred and was
the enemy of mankind. So men said.
There was something absurd in this little Jewish sect
aspiring to conquer the world. Its origin was too well
known. Fifty or sixty years before, its founder had been
crucified; the verb had no pathos then, only shame. Its
doctrines were folly. Strange religions had made their
way from the East, and gotten a foothold in Greece and
Italy, especially in Rome where everything gathered that
was shameful among mankind;1 but most of these reli
gions were old, and if they told tales as impossible as the
Christians, the tales had the glamor of antiquity. One
could believe that something might have happened long
ago when the world was young, and far away in countries
so distant and so romantic as to be half fairy land, which
one would never accept if reported yesterday from a
Roman province. But massed against this new supersti
tion were all the religions of all the lands, faiths hoary
'Tacitus, Annals, 15:44. 196

THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 197
with time. Three thousand years ago, said the most
charming of living Greek writers, Delphi had been the
shrine of Apollo; and the place had not lost its glory of
three thousand years. In Egypt were gods older still, as
classical Greece had admitted, gods old as time and more
powerful than time, now capturing more and more of
civilized mankind. In Persia, too, men worshipped Mithras
the sun-god, oldest of gods, and he also was coming West
ward, conquering and to conquer. All these religions
were united, none would exclude the other, and all were
against the new superstition. Nor did they only rest on
ancient legend ; mystic ceremony would reveal the gods in
person to the worshipper. "Gods of the world above, gods
<of the world below, into their presence I came; I wor
shipped there in their sight," writes the wittiest of
Latins.2 In oracle and gift of healing they proved their
power. And a squalid Galilaean peasant was to overcome
them, a man nailed to a cross ! It was not commonsense.
Even the folly and vulgarity of these degenerate days
would never sink so low. No impression could be made on
the old immemorial religion, supported as it was by tra
dition, by the Government, by philosophy. For the philos
ophers, with their mouths full of Plato and Socrates, of
Zeno and Cleanthes, admitted the existence of the gods,
conceded them to a world unequal to conceiving of mono
theism. The finer religious spirits were all against the
Galilaeans; the artistic temperament, the pious mind,
mysticism and imagination, found in legend and cult and
mystery what the Jewish peasants could neither give nor
understand. All was against them, the better elements
unanimous, the vulgar openly hostile, and now the Gov
ernment took action and soon the bad little episode would
be a thing of the past.

» Apuleius of Madaura, Golden Ass, bk. 11, perhaps the fullest certainly
the vividest account of mystery religion, by an adept.

198 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
The struggling and contemptible little Church had
lost its founders, all its best leaders. Peter and Paul had
perished in Nero's reign, a quarter of a century ago ; and
the rest of the Apostles cannot long have survived them.
A race of epigoni, whose names a later age of the Church
let die, had succeeded. The first glow of faith was grow
ing dull and dim. The Church of Corinth, quarrelsome as
ever, became a scandal; and the best in these decades
that the Church could do is the epistle of Clement of
Rome." It was a critical moment for the Church, and the
arch-enemy knew his hour and launched the persecution.
Then from an island of exile an obscure Christian, who
tells us his name was John, and who may be presumed
from his local interests and local knowledge to have come
from western Asia Minor, sends his friends a book — a
book of odds and ends and ectasies and bad grammar.'
It was a book in a bad style — perhaps the worst style in
that age of degenerate literature3 — and full of the old
apocalyptic effects, white horses, times, beasts, dragons,
thunder and lightning and judgment, with Ezekiel's
twenty-seventh chapter rewritten, and little epistles to
the Asian churches, and, to be fair, some very moving
passages of a more original sort. No educated Greek
would have cared to read it through; but perhaps that
was not the writer's object — "wrefit audience let me find
though few." There was still a public for apocalyptic,
who enjoyed cloudy symbolism and confused pictures ; and
his book would certainly appeal to them. But it had, if
one studied it closely, certain definite characteristics;

• His Epistle to the Corinthians may be dated about a.d. 95.
4 Very interesting criticism of the book, its authorship, its style, gram*
mar, etc., by Dionysius of Alexandria is quoted by Eusebius, Church His
tory, VII, 25. He will not allow it to be by the author of the Fourth
Gospel. "The simple verse of Enoch 21:1, is the best short description of all
apocalyptic literature — "And I proceeded to where things were chaotic."
(Dr. Charles's rendering.)

THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 199
when the trumpets and vials and voices were worked
through, several things of importance stood out.
The man had read ancient history, and to some pur
pose. He did not rewrite Ezekiel's chapter for nothing.
Ezekiel had prophesied against Tyre, when Tyre was a
very great place indeed; and Tyre had gone. His mind
ran on Babylon, which had been an even greater state
than Tyre; and Babylon was gone. And his other favor
ite reading had been in books written under Macedonian
kings of Syria, in the days of world-empire of Greek cul
ture; and they had gone.
"Such is the fate of Keasars and of kings !"
But history does not repeat itself without explaining
itself; and it was evident that he was satisfied that he
knew why all these powers were gone.
"After these things," he says, in his casual way — for
with all his emphasis on times, he leaves his readers to
work any symmetry and chronology they can into the
book, and after eighteen centuries they are still busy with
it, finding undoubted references to Armageddon and to
November 11, 1918, no doubt, and much else that is inter
esting — "after these things I saw another angel come
down from heaven having great power; and the earth
was lightened with his glory; and he cried mightily with
a strong voice saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is
fallen!" (18:1). It is very clear that he does not mean
the Babylon that Cyrus took six centuries before. He
describes an enemy he knows, and grasps her spiritual
menace, a power allied with all the evil of the world, with
all the social wrong. Look at the things in which she
trades, rich and varied as the wares of Tyre. "Cinnamon
and odors and ointments and frankincense" — how far she
reaches! For these things came from Arabia and Mala
bar. Gold and silver, pearls and ivory, fabrics and wine

200 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
and wheat — and the list ends with horror — "and slaves
and souls of men" (18:13). The great whore sits with
a cup in her hand, "drunken with the blood of the saints
and the blood of the witnesses of Jesus" (17 : 6), and says
in her heart, "I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall
see no sorrow" (18 :7). And, explicitly, she is "that great
city, which reigneth over the kings of the earth" (17 :18) .
He defines the situation as no Christian writer had
yet done. Paul was a Roman citizen by birth, and as
Luke shows, generally got on very well with the represen
tatives of the Roman Government ; he had no quarrel with
Rome, Rome stood between the world and Antichrist.*
But that was thirty years ago. This man sees another
Rome. There are no more dreams <of peace ; there is no
peace; it is war. Hatred is in every syllable. Rome is
Antichrist, the great enemy of Jesus and of God. But
from ancient history he has learnt one thing; the enemies
of God do not prosper, one after another they fall, Tyre,
Babylon, Antiochus; and one more will fall. In ancient
war defeat meant extinction and subjection; "And after
these things I heard a great voice of much people in
heaven, saying, Alleluia . . . for he hath judged the
great whore . . . and her smoke rose up for ever and
ever" (19 :l-3) ; and after that, "Let us be glad and
rejoice, and give honor to him ; for the marriage of the
Lamb is come, and his wife hath made herself ready
(19:7). It is a book of victory. "I looked, and lo ! a Lamb stood
on the mount Sion, and with him an hundred and forty
and four thousand, having his Father's name written in
their foreheads. And I heard a voice from heaven, as
the voice of many waters and as the voice of a great

•The "withholding" force of II Thess. 2:6 (it is not certain whether the
participle is masculine or neuter) is taken to be Rome (Kennedy, St.
Paul and Last Things, p. 219). This view is held by Tertullian, about 200
A.D.; and the Persian Afrahat who wrote in Syriac in the third century.

THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 201
thunder; and I heard the voice of harpers harping with
their harps : and they sang as it were a new song before
the throne . . . and no man could learn that song but
the hundred and forty and four thousand which were
redeemed from the earth" (14:1-3). We have no statis
tics of the early Church; were there so many Christians
in the world itself in A.D. 90? But he sees further, "a
great multitude which no man could number"; borrow
ing a phrase' he computes it at "ten thousand times ten
thousand and thousands of thousands" — "of all nations,
and kindreds, and peoples, and tongues,3 stood before the
throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes,
and palms in their hands," and "these are they that came
out of the great tribulation, and have washed their robes,
and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" (7 :9-14) .
An exile on Patmos, he sees a despised Church, poor
within and menaced from without ; and he sees this spec
tacle of triumph. He is a dreamer. No, he is practical;
his book is a challenge to the Christian Church, a call to
faith, to courage, to endurance — to martyrdom. Death
is very much the same wherever we meet it; but the
martyr would die alone, hated by his country, insulted —
furiously insulted — in the hour of death. "Here is the
patience of the saints," he says, the patience of the dedi
cated. Set your teeth, he cries, the worst is coming, and
the best; you will be put to death, but you will live and
reign with Christ for ever and ever; and with you all
the people you had to save and did not save, all you longed
for and despaired of, will be Christ's; Alleluia; Babylon
is fallen.
Can we imagine the amusement with which a Greek of

7 Cf. I Enoch 40:1; they are angels or spirits merely in the old book;
men and martyrs in tie new. Perhaps Enoch rests on Daniel 7:10.
8 Jewish Apocalyptic foresaw no blessed resurrection for the Gentile in
the first century B.C., nor m the first century a.d.; R. H. Charles, Escha
tology, pp. 297, 300. The immense impression made on Paul by the call
of the Gentiles should be noted.

202 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
culture or a Roman governor would have glanced at this
motley book ? Bad style and taste, confusion and repeti
tion, he would have noted, and the perennial silly cry oi
the failure and the beaten, "A time will come!"
It did come. II
The Christian Church has through the ages drawn ta
itself the best, the worst, and the middling among man
kind. The Corinthian Church was dependent on the
floating population of a seaport, with a notorious and
abominable temple of Aphrodite. The average man has
always been largely represented in the Church, and per
haps (as suggested in a previous chapter) has had rather
more than his share in the official guidance of the Church.
Every kind of crank and crotchet too has drifted into the
Christian community; sometimes they drift out; often
they develop a certain degree of Christian sense which
neutralizes their queerness ; very often the Church has to
exercise whatever faculty it has of "suffering fools
gladly"; now and then they make imperishable contri
butions to the body. that barely tolerates them.
"Ye see your calling, brethren," writes Paul to Corinth
(I Cor. 1:26 f.), "how that not many wise men after
the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, are called."
Whether he learnt rhetoric or not at Tarsus, he is surely
using one of its figures here, and saying a little less than
he means ; and then he swings into a glorious and famous
passage telling how God uses weak things, base things,
things despised, "yea! and things that are not, to bring
to nought things that are . . . and of him are ye in
Christ Jesus." His prophecy of the Christian future is
more genial than John's; there is less hatred in it, but
not a whit less conviction.
Elsewhere (I Cor. 6 :9, 10) Paul runs over a list of dis
gusting vices, some reprobated, others tolerated, in the

THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 203
Roman Empire, some almost extinct in Christendom but
still to the fore in heathendom; and, winding up that
those addicted to them shall not inherit the Kingdom of
God, he wheels round upon his friends and says bluntly :
"And such were some of you." "Once ye were darkness,"
he writes to others (Eph. 5:8), "but now are ye light in
the Lord." The Church has little to boast about in some
of its material; the miracle has been what has been made
of it.
Jesus Christ drew to himself the "whiter souls," ani-
mae candidiores, who were looking for God in the Roman
Empire, as he has since done elsewhere — men and women
who hated the uncleanness and cruelty of paganism; reli
gious temperaments who wanted God and said so; peo
ple who wandered disappointedly among the cults, who
were weary of daemons and were drawn by the "mon
archic" character of the Christian religion,3 by its pure
morals and the power its adherents found in it to face
martyrdom. "Every man," wrote Tertullian, "who wit
nesses this great endurance, is struck with some misgiv
ing and is set on fire to look into it, to find what is its
cause ; and when he has learnt the truth, he instantly fol
lows it himself as well." That sounds like autobiography.
The philosophic type came, too, led by motives not very
different, and gave the Church Justin Martyr and prob
ably others of the apologists.
Tertullian said that the human soul is in its true
nature Christian — anima naturaliter Christiana, a fine
piece of insight, well phrased. Some of his proofs or illus
trations of his theory are a little quaint; but he was
right — the more right the deeper one goes. As on the
mission field today, there were souls who only wanted
to hear and they would follow Christ — beautiful natures
and the most winning type of convert. Other souls were

•Tatian, cf. p. 6.

204 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
troubled with a conflict of two natures, and were Chris
tian with the one and earthly, sensual or devilish with
the other, capable of acts of high Christian quality, capa
ble of horrible relapse and of apostasy, but still within
the influence of Christ. Human nature is incalculable,
and the envoy of Christ is confronted by perpetual sur
prises, the bitterness of failure when success was assured,
the deep and grateful joy of triumph snatched out of
disaster. For let us once more look at our records. Paul notes,
along with their faults, a number of remarkable good
points about the churches of his converts. They are
living in a new way, or, like new converts in the heathen
world today, more and more toward a new way. They
have great gifts — of real prophecy, of spiritual insight,
of sheer goodness. Even Corinth, a generation later, is
recorded to have had an "insatiable passion for kind
ness."10 They are beginning to overcome differences in
race, education, and tradition — to live together in unity,
to build on one Foundation, to show signs of having
"learned Christ," to "shine as lights in the world." In the
third century and in the fourth there were still martyrs,
and great thinkers, and real saints in the Noah's Ark
Church. And so it is with later centuries. The sixteenth
century, if it gave a Leo X to the world, also gave a
Luther, a Melanchthon, a Calvin, a Knox — men whom we
hear criticized now and then without much real knowl
edge of what they actually were and what they achieved.
The eighteenth century had the Wesleys and Law; and
nearly all, to this day, of our greatest English hymns
come from the eighteenth century.
The plain historical fact is tthat we never can tell when
the Church is going to break out into new life. The won
derful thing about it is, as Paul saw, that it is in a real

10 1 Clement of Rome, ad Cor., 2:2.

THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 205
relation with God in Christ; and when that is the case,
there is always liable to be new light and new truth break
ing out of Zion, as John Robinson of Leyden saw.
Ill
Let us turn to the cardinal services rendered by uhe
Christian Church to religion and to sound thinking.
First of all, then, the Church has (with fluctuations)
appealed to the higher elements in man. It has always
assumed in man much larger capacity for thought and
ideal than its rivals have allowed; it has acted on the
belief that man is made for the Gospel and the Gospel for
man, and it has taught mankind to think. Wyclif was a
rebel against the Church of his day, but he interpreted the
nobler and more permanent conviction of Christendom,
when he maintained that preaching was the best work
that a priest could do, better than praying or ministering
the sacraments." Paul would have stood with him. "Let
Glasgow flourish by the preaching of the word" was an
old Reformation motto, which a mawkish age shortened
and made commonplace.
The Church has always stood for Jesus. With what
ever degree of directness or indirectness, the historical
Jesus has been held up to men. The world has been
familiarized with him — insufficiently, it is true, but his
name and some fragments of his story are more widely
known than those of any other man. The early Church
translated the New Testament into Latin, Syriac, Ethio-
pic, Armenian, and in the fourth century Ulfilas did it into
Gothic.12 The sixteenth century resumed the task and did

11 A. V. G. Allen, Continuity of Christian Thought, p. 252.
a See Sir F. G. Kenyon, Textual Criticism of N. T„ ch. V. The intri
cacy of all Questions relating to early versions itself suggests the wide activ
ities -of early Christians. Cf. also Von Harnack, Mission and Expansion
of Christianity, II p. 145: "Syriac, which had been checked by the prog
ress of Greek, became a civilized and literary tongue, owing to Christian
ity." The same has been said in later days of German and Bengali.

206 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
it into most languages of Europe; the seventeenth did it
into at least one North American speech1' and the eigh
teenth saw it done into Gaelic for the Highlands of Scot
land, as readers of Boswell remember." The nineteenth
century was above all the century of Bible translation;
William Carey alone translated the New Testament into
eighteen languages of the East. Statistics deaden the
imagination at least as often as they quicken it. But all
this work of the study is evidence of the place of Jesus
in the experience of men, of the conviction that he is rele
vant to every man. Bible translation was 'only half the
task ; a printed Bible in a Congo tongue is useless if the
Congo man cannot read. So he is taught to read; and
the proclamation of the historical Jesus and the educa
tion of mankind have gone on together. And song and
art have had their share in both sides of the work.13
Further, there has been a steady emphasis on the
supremacy of Jesus — again the outcome of experience;
and it has worked as a factor for clear thinking in the
Church. Whatever the deadening effect of tradition and
convention, it makes for the development of freedom
when the stress falls steadily on the clearest of all think
ers who have dealt with God. The very wrangling about
creeds, lamented by a certain type of Christian not of
the profoundest, has been itself a necessary stage of
growth and a powerful contribution. If at times theory
about Jesus has bulked larger in some minds than Jesus
himself, still the whole movement of interpretation, the
rise of Christology, has meant thought, and it has directed
thought to Jesus, and in both ways it has helped mankind.
Indeed Christianity involved it and could not have con
tinued without it.

"John Eliot's translation of the New Testament into "the Indian
language" (Massachusetts), published 1661, followed by the Bible in 1663.
"Boswell (ed. Birkbeck Hill) 2:27 ff.
"More on this in Chapters XIII and XIV.

THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 207
In the next place the Church has stood for the love
of God. How mankind has always felt its way toward one
personal God, we have seen. Jesus carried this further,
and by his teaching of the love of God, by the incarna
tion of it in his whole personality, he carried it flamingly
in the general heart of man. Through a series of cata
clysms and earthquakes that have shaken society to its
foundations and made havoc of slighter faiths, the convic
tion of the love of God has persisted in the Church and
still persists. It has never been obscure how hard it is
to reconcile experience with the love of God; the Church
has not had an easy task in maintaining its faith in God,
but historically Jesus has been the ground of belief,
the guarantee of the Unseen.
Once more, and still in the spirit of Jesus, the Church
has stood for the redemption of the world, for the faith
that God plays fair with man. It has believed that in
the long run all the world comes to the judgment seat of
Christ. In this faith, though with long periods of dead-
ness, the Church has made it its business to share Christ
with every man. The vision of the Apocalypse was never
lost; with all its odd features, the Church with some hesi
tation canonized the book, and stuck to it.1' A conviction
of the goodness of God, of the redemption of the whole
race, is a dynamic thing. It brings to a head the feel
ing that righteousness must mark the dealings of God
with man, and gives it a joy and a certainty which have
made the Christian faith a different thing from all the
cults and systems of the world.
The Church has always stood for the significance of
the individual ; it could not well do otherwise when Christ
died for him. Not to repeat what has already been said,
and is to be said in the chapters that follow, but to sum
up : the Church has constantly supplied the leaders in all

"See Moffatt, Literature of N.T., p. 499.

208 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
movements for freedom and the betterment of life — the
leaders, the ideals, and the impulse. If at times it has
also contained the protagonists of reaction and social
paralysis, they have drawn their principles and ideas
from another source than Jesus, as the comparison of his
historical record shows at once. At the worst, there has
always been in the Church an instinct to insist on the
highest standards of morality ; at times with a dead sense
of these being laws imposed from without, the will of
an arbitrary Ruler; more profoundly, with the realiza
tion that the ethics of Jesus are the interpretation of
fundamental human nature and of the purposes of the
redeeming and loving God. It is true that the Church in
both these matters has at times wavered and compro
mised, but on the reality of man's spiritual being it has
never knowingly compromised; it has stood for the truth
of the forgiveness of sins; it has never lowered the flag
on the issue of immortality.
In short, with all its failures, confusions, and omis
sions, it has been the Church of Christ; and one proof
of it is that the Church has achieved new forms from
time to time, at incalculable cost, and been glad to do so,
for the sake of making clearer the mind of its Master.
Jesus was right in his comparison of the Kingdom of
God with leaven. The life within has never left the
Church in what it might call peace and he would call
death; there have been disturbance, upheaval, division;
church history is not pretty reading; the leaven keeps
working. There has been a terrific dead weight of dough
for it to quicken ; but a little fresh warmth from the sun
shine of God in the face of Christ, and the whole mass
heaves together with the pulse of life; the great ideas
revive and Jesus triumphs.

THE CHURCH TRIUMPHANT 209
IV
In a splendid passage, the writer to the Hebrews
(11:22 f.) describes the city of the living God, the
heavenly Jerusalem, the national assembly (ecclesia)
and festival (panegyris) of the first-born, registered citi
zens in heaven, and the spirits of just men made perfect.
Let us put it into prose.
With the generations larger and larger masses of peo
ple have been trained in the ideas of Jesus. Boys and
girls have been taught to love him; and in spite of the
modern inadequacy of the Sunday school, it represents
a high ideal and a fairly solid achievement. Godly men
and women have married and had children, who by Chris
tian training have grown to be the salt of the earth, as
Jesus foretold — workers, heroes, martyrs, covenanters,
scholars, teachers, missionaries — practical saints of
every kind of spiritual and intellectual power, who have
made and are making the world over again. The roll of
the Church is far more wonderful and interesting than
that roll of Israel, which the writer to the Hebrews un
folds; the range is wider, the problems severer, the char
acters more various, more gracious, more spiritual; and
Jesus predicted this too — the least in the Kingdom are
ahead of the greatest of the prophets.
Think of the races conquered or civilized by the
Church — Greece and Rome to begin; think of the salva
tion of Europe when our own kindred, still glorious sav
ages, swept down on the decaying empire; think of the
training of Scotland, the planting of Plymouth, the shap
ing of New England ; think of Madagascar and the Pacific
islands, and savage man made Christian in a prepara
tory way; think of a century's upheaval in Indian reli
gion and Indian ideals of society; think of the martyrs
in China in 1900 — has the Church been, let us say, on

210 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
the whole and with all deductions to be properly made, a
power in the world? and for good? Then add all it has
done in art and song, from "Hail gladdening light"
(oSois '(Mpov) on to Dante and Milton and beyond. Has it
not come reasonably near Paul's conception of a "glorious
church" (Eph. 5:27)?
If the old Greek poet, Simonides, was right in say
ing that "the city teaches the man," is it not possible
that a society like this can teach the man too? A great
world-wide society of men and women, a society of friend
ship," conscious of the redeeming love of God, inspired
by the same passion for one Lord, with every variety of
character and of experience and one experimental knowl
edge at the heart of all — has it not a value in suggesting
to us facts omitted in our survey, ideas imperfectly
weighed, ideals unattempted, a faith in God and man
which the world has always struggled for and only
achieved in Jesus? All the real criticisms made against
the Church touch it where it has in some degree left the
line of Jesus; they are reminders, very salutary, that
"the servant is not above his lord" (John 13:16). Every
one who does nothing to meet these criticisms, to help
the Church to swing right again, is in effect turning his
back on history and on Christ. But our theme is Jesus
in the experience of men ; and I close the chapter with the
submission that the experience of the Church, in her
triumphs and her failures alike, points to the reality and
the permanent significance of Jesus.

" Ut sese invicem diligunt, quoted by Tertullian, is just as true as odium
theologicum.

CHAPTER XIII
THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE
One of the outstanding features of social progress
among mankind has been the progressive development of
the individual. More and more he has concentrated
attention on himself, and while it has not always been
pure gain to society, none the less the gain far outweighs
the loss. In the region of politics the Greek first discov
ered the individual. The Funeral Speech of Pericles, as
recorded by Thucydides, and the arguments of Callicles in
Plato's Gorgias, show the good and the bad side of the
movement. Callicles will hear nothing of law or morality
being founded in nature ; the individual is the real thing,
and nature means
"That they should take who have the power
And he should keep who can."
Pericles' ideal is nobler. The individual shall be his
utmost, shall be developed in every capacity and apti
tude, shall enjoy all the liberty needed to this end, that,
when he has carried nature's gifts to him to their high
est stage, when he has become rich in imagination,
insight, and character, he may consecrate all he is to the
city he loves. The ideal is one which Jesus himself might
have put forward, with two important modifications.
Pericles does not reckon god or gods as a factor, hardly
as an incident, in the story ; the teaching of Jesus makes
God central, the center implied in every radius and in
every smallest or largest arc of the circumference. With
211

212 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
this change, would go another; for the city of Athens he
would put something larger. "'Dear City of Cecrops!'
said he of old," so Marcus Aurelius wrote in his diary
(4:23), "and wilt not thou say, 'Dear City of God'?"
Jesus would have said it, indeed he did say it in his own
vocabulary ; and when he speaks of the Kingdom of God,
it is with the fullest emphasis on the Founder and Maker
of his ideal city or kingdom. "City," the writer to the
Hebrews calls it, a man steeped in Greek ways of thought ;
"Kingdom" was the Hebrew word of Jesus.
It was the boast of Athenians that Athens was the
education of Greece.1 Greece was as truly for a thou
sand years before Christ, and for some hundreds of years
after, the education of the world, and in some degree it
is so still. The great lesson was what Pericles set forth —
that more might be made of man in every way, thinker,
citizen, parent, poet, artist; and the Greek showed how
it might be done. The barbarian and the Greek differed
above all in this, that life with the Greek was better
thought out, better understood, and therefora better
used. About A.D. 178, Celsus, in his attack on Christian
ity, allowed that barbarians — people who were not Greeks,
such as the Egyptians and the Persians, and in a good
temper he might possibly have added the Hebrews — were
able to discover religious truths (dogmata is his word),
but "to judge them, to establish them, to develop for
moral growth what the barbarians have discovered —
that is a task for which the Greeks are fitter."2 It was
very much the idea of Greek Christian thinkers. The
Greek did make more of life and more of man than any
people of antiquity — humanized man, in fact. And if
we say that Jesus carried the process further, it is well
first to see, in outline at least, what the Greeks had done
before him.

'Thucydides, II, 41, 1. ' Ap. Origen, c. Cels., 1:2.

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 213
I
A thousand years, perhaps, before Christ Homer drew
some of the finest pictures of chivalry that the world has
yet had. His imagination sees deep into human charac
ter, and the great fundamental human virtues move him.
He reads the warrior's mind and shows us the hero.
"Friend of my soul!" says Sarpedon, "were it that, once
we two were escaped from this war, we should live for
ever, ageless and immortal, neither would I fight in the
forefront, nor send thee into the battle that gives glory
to men. But now fates of death stand over us, ten thou
sand of them, that mortal man may not flee nor escape;
therefore let us go ; either to another we shall give renown
or he to us."3 When Andromache begs Hector to stay,
not to go to the battle and leave their baby boy an orphan,
"All this," he cries, "is a care to me ; but I have a respect
unto the Trojans and to the long-robed Trojan women."*
alSeopai Tpcja? xal TpwaSas i\Kecrnriir\arws.
That is Greek courage, courage with the eyes open, the
risks well seen and taken; and there is another virtue
there, aidos, self-respect blended with the thought of
others. Aidos carries with it regard for suppliant and
stranger, for the helpless, for the fallen foe — "Not holy
is it to boast over men slain"; it is the sense that there
is a god, and the greatest of all gods, who looks after the
stranger within the gates, the herald from the enemy,
the helpless. It does not always prevail; the Homeric
hero is capable of horrible ruthlessness — "Heaven send
not one of the Trojans escape sheer doom and our hands
— no, not the lad whom his mother carries in her womb !""
But Achilles lets the aged Priam ransom his son's body ;

'Iliad, XII, 322.
4 Iliad, VI, 441.
8 Iliad, VI, 57.

214 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
the scene is one no reader can forget. Athene enjoys the
lies and cunning of Odysseus ; but Achilles cries from his
heart: "Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is he who
hideth one thing in his heart, and speaketh another."3
The simple great natural virtues are all in Homer.
A later day saw the rise of the intellectual virtues — of
the instinct to know, to inquire, to understand, and to
judge — of the courage that will face new ideas and new
ignorance, that will move away from ancient moorings
and explore strange seas of thought — of the feeling that
thought is not luxury or amusement, but duty, man's
supreme task. Here Ionia and Athens led the way.
Later still in the days after Alexander the gentler vir
tues rise. "Mere unmotived kindness," as Mr. Bernard
Bosanquet points out, becomes a spring of action; there
is a new feeling for children and women, for slaves; a
new sense for beauty in flower and tree and murmuring
sound.' Stress is laid by the Stoics on the intrinsic value
of goodness, the importance of will, the inwardness of
true virtue, the examination of conscience, the control
of impulse, the cultivation of God's outlook.
Socrates used to say he was a "citizen of the universe
((coo-ftios). " After Alexander patriotism and parochialism
ran into one another; patriotism had no other meaning.
The world's old divisions were gone; the new kingdoms
were personal domains with no stable frontiers. Race
was more than country, and race itself was of little
account. Alexander had "married Europe to Asia." In
one sense the universe was the only body politic left of
which a man could be a citizen. A subject of Antiochus
or of Ptolemy — or, later on, of Caesar — he could still
boast and believe in the city of Zeus, the universe. The
Stoic was glad to accept this new franchise; he knew no
longer of foreigners or local laws, "man was a sacred

'Iliad, IX, 312. 'Theocritus, Idyll, 1:1.

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 215
thing to man," and men and stars were ruled by one law,
divine, eternal, inevitable, the law of Nature, a law that
knew no outlaw, foreigner or barbarian, one for man and
woman, slave and free. The conception powerfully modi
fied Roman law in the direction of breadth and humanity.
The world's progress had been immense, but it still
had a long way to go. If the Stoic counted "man a sacred
thing to man," the government did not. The citizenship
of the universe was amenable to Aristotle's criticism of
Plato's Republic; relations within it were "rather
watery." Those who talked most of it were men without
children, a class notoriously sagacious without under
standing; and when one remembers that one of their
ideals was "emotionlessness" ("the savage and hard
apathy," Plutarch calls it) , it grows clear that a great
deal of life lay outside the range of the citizen of the uni
verse. Indeed his teachers told him, as a practical meas
ure, to keep within himself, to be limited to "the things in
thine own power," tecum habita — to condole but not to
sympathize; to reckon, if he had a child, that it would
die; to realize that, if he did not love his wife's beauty,
he would not be thrown into emotion and out of balance
by her adultery. "Emotionlessness" was bound to work
out into inhuman insensibility; it was inwardly a selfish
counsel, a counsel of despair, to steel the heart to keep it
from breaking, to keep it equal to work. It was, as some
more human critics felt at the time, in effect an apostasy
from the universe, unbelief. They preached nature and
defied nature. The motive was not the highest, and no
other will avail with mankind in the end.
But, as Dr. Edward Caird pointed out,8 the Stoics
missed the vital fact that man is essentially a develop
ing being, "partly is and wholly hopes to be." There
was not enough experiment about the Stoic; who can

8 Caird, Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers, II, 102.

216 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
master human psychology, who turns his back on woman
and is not interested in children? They made great con
tributions to psychology, but in whole areas of the soul
they had no belief. Nor did they believe so much in per
sonality as to be able to carry it past the dissolution into
atoms. For men who reject immortality, who do not
believe in outcome to their own endeavors to help man
kind forward even on earth, Stoicism is the highest phil
osophy, and a very high one; but it cuts too many ques
tions to do more than contribute to rival creeds. Where
Stoicism failed, the mystery cults were not likely to
succeed. It is the complaint of many that in the European war
civilization failed, and many others hold that it had
already failed in peace. But in the early centuries of our
era, under the best government that the Mediterranean
broadly had ever known, and in peace, civilization rested
normally on atrocities that today are abnormal even in
war. That it grew gentler under the Empire, is a propo
sition hard to maintain in view of the civil wars and reli
gious persecutions of the third century A.D. It had reached
a standstill. In four hundred years the tools show no
improvement; currency and finance decline; government
grows more and more bureaucratic, and apart from the
Christian Church it is difficult to find new ideas anywhere.
II
"The advance of the community depends not merely on
the improvement and elevation of its moral maxims, but
also on the quickening of moral sensibility. The latter
work has mostly been effected, when it has been effected
on a large scale, by teachers of a certain singular personal
quality." So wrote John Morley in 1874,3 and it will
serve as a text for the next stage of our study.
• Compromise, p. 237.

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 217
The rejection of Jesus gives the measure of his age. He
had, like other leaders of men in the field of intellect and
feeling, to develop the spiritual and intellectual qualities
by which he should be understood. Here once more, as
in the case of the knowledge of God, Jesus abolishes
nothing real ; he comes "not to destroy but to fulfil" ; and
the boundless significance of his work lay in uniting all the
virtues, that the common people and the Stoics between
them knew, in a new and intimate relation with religion,
or rather with God, and giving them a new breadth and
freedom and life. The theory on which men do kindness
is one thing, the real reason another ; there are people who
do good by instinct and on impulse and give wrong rea
sons for it — a fact to be remembered when we criticize
Stoic theory; but Jesus gave all virtue a new center and
a new motive ; act and theory jarred no more ; the human
spirit had a charter and an inspiration to be what God
meant it to be.
The fact that he was a carpenter, a poor man, im
pressed men from the beginning. "He took upon him
the form of slave," wrote Paul (Phil. 2:7). "The Lord
ate from a cheap bowl," said Clement of Alexandria," "and
made his disciples lie on the ground, on the grass, and
he washed their feet with a towel about him, the lowly-
minded God and Lord of the universe. He did not bring
a silver footbath from heaven to carry about with him.
He asked the Samaritan woman to give him to drink in
a vessel of clay as she drew from the well." Jesus, writes
Phillips Brooks, "so poor, so radical, so full of the sense
of everything just as it is in God.""
A fictitious Chinaman of our day speaks of him as
"unlettered, untraveled, inexperienced" — a rather aca
demic view of things. Unlettered he was not; he read

"Clem. Alex., Paed., II, 32,
" Light of the World, p. 87.

218 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
the Old Testament in Hebrew, and other books; and he
spoke Aramaic and Greek. A man with two languages,
who at least reads a third, is not quite illiterate. But
inexperienced — what is experience? It depends on a
man's gift of seeing and feeling. Jesus himself speaks
of men seeing but not seeing; more than once he notices
this in men, and with an air of surprise at them. Pales
tine was not a backwater; it was on a trade route; and
if it had been an out-of-the-way place, Burns may suggest
to us what experience a man of genius may gain in a
corner of life. Climate and the habits of the day drove
Jesus outdoors for his education, and it was real. He
knew what it was to work all day, and, on coming home,
to have to face the tragedy of the lost coin, the children
hungry, and the clothes past mending. A man who goes
through sudden popularity, who carries a threatened life,
who lives with a cross before his eyes, may be surmised
to have had experience.
But it is enough to survey his interests. "Suffer little
children to come unto me," is a saying hardly to be par
alleled in ancient literature. How can he who has to teach
mankind go "looking for something to heat the water in
for the baby's bath?" is the question of Epictetus.12 Like
Dr. Johnson, Jesus loved young men, whether like Dr.
Johnson he found them more virtuous than old men, or
(as we did in the European war) saner. The evangelists
emphasize how he spoke with women and took kindnesses
from them. He was not afraid of women, nor ever warned
his followers to keep away from them. He never felt
family life to be a mistake or hinted that marriage was
unclean; and how many religions past and present have
stood for celibacy, and resented God's invention of sex?
The traditional Moses seemed to imply that labor was
God's curse on sin, but no such idea is to be found in the

12 Epictetus, Diotr., 3:22.

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 219
teaching of Jesus. How many of his parables show a
bright interest in human energy, in the mind set to work,
in the tasks of men and women? And not a hint that it is
all a curse! "Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?" he
asked. Is God's man (in other words) or your taboo of
more consequence? "Is not a man better than a sheep?"
(Matt. 12 :12). It is hardly a hundred years since English
law was with great difficulty persuaded to admit this prop
osition, and to leave off hanging a man for stealing a
sheep. If he had lived today, Jesus might have asked
still worse questions.
Jesus had none of the resentment against humanity
which has at times swept over the finer spirits of our
race, a mood to be read in Shakespeare himself. With his
eyes open to human hatefulness, Jesus likes men and
enjoys them. His quick responsiveness to the emotions
of others, to the woman's wit, his pleasure in sharing the
feelings of his friends, his sympathy with "the least of
these, my brethren," his sensitiveness to the unsaid — all
these gifts reveal not only character but faith. A genial
interest in others may be born in a man, and it may
degenerate in various ways; or it may be interwoven
with a deeper insight, and become a great belief in man as
a creation of God, embodying (one may say it) the deepest
thoughts of God, a great deal of God's own nature. That
this is the case with Jesus appears from his acute pleasure
in bird and flower, and his relation of these things to the
mind of God, and from the assurance he gives to his dis
ciples that "ye are of more value than many sparrows."
By a curious chance an inscription has been found, issued
by an ancient food control office, fixing the maximum price
for sparrows, so much for a string of ten, five for a half
of that, and for a quarter of it two.13 Jesus quotes the

18 Deissmann, Light from the Ancient East, p. 271. It belongs to thfc
reign of Diocletian and gives prices of various foods. Sparrows were
cheaper than thrushes and starlings.

220 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
prices and then sets another value, very different, upon
the birds, by sweeping at once into the presence of God;
and then, with the picture of God himself, interested and
delighted in every individual sparrow, with the sparrow
thus raised to the highest point it has ever reached, he
reminds men how much more thought God has put into
them, how much more interesting God finds them, how
much more lovable. He brings out the significance of
man by bringing him into relation with God, and it is
exactly the opposite result he draws from that of civil
servants and statisticians.
To the Inland Revenue Office a man has a certain tax-
paying value, apart from which he seems negligible. To
the census official a man is (let us say) one-forty-millionth
of the United Kingdom. By similar calculation the sta
tistician will bring out that to God a man's significance is

1,500,000,000

of mankind ; and when he has multiplied the denominator
by the (possible) millions of generations of eternity and
again by the number possibly as large of conceivable other
words, he makes the individual an incalculably trivial
item in God's universe. Jesus alters all that by bringing
in the Fatherhood of God. It would probably be impos
sible for even the stupidest civil servant to comfort a
father in the loss of his son by pointing out that he has
lost only .25 of his family, or even less, .125. The boy is
not a fraction but an integer — "John" is a personality not
a decimal. Jesus blots out the humiliating denominator
and leaves the numerator, and by insisting that each man
as a personality is an integer for God, gives a new value
to all human life.

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 221
III
It has been complained that Jesus, with the horrors of
slavery under his eyes, said not a word about it. Of how
little use a discussion of the false economics of slavery
would have been in that generation, may be guessed from
the scant attention paid by our own to the warnings given
us of the disastrous effects of war upon the world's
economics. We were told; but we all knew better, and
were wrong. In the nineteenth century the merchants
of Liverpool gave a gold casket to the Prince Regent for
his endeavors to maintain against Wilberforce and Clark
son and other enthusiasts that essential foundation of
England's commercial prosperity, the slave trade. The
experts were on one side, and on the other the "philan
thropists" and "agitators" ; and "most of what is decently
good in our curious world," says Lord Morley, "has been
done by these two much-abused sets of folk."11 And what
set them to disturb England about mere Negroes? His
torically, it was the assertion by Jesus of the value of the
individual Negro to God — not so much by word spoken,
as by the quieter and more impressive witness of the
cross. Jesus, unable to convince men in any other way,
died for the Negro.
Paul, dealing with the religious ideas, valid enough, of
some of his friends, brings in a final consideration : "De
stroy not him with thy meat for whom Christ died"
(Rom. 14:15). The very phrase chimes through the
Christian centuries. When the new Roman governor of
Cyenaica about a.d. 410 began to oppress the people, the
brilliant and charming Synesius wrote to him in a tone
that he could not mistake; the governor was treating
human beings as if they were cheap, but "man is a thing
of price, for Christ died for him." The scholar Muretu3

" Recollections, II, p. 172.

222 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
in 1554 said the same to the physicians who proposed to
try upon him an experiment, in anima vili: "Vilem ani
mam appellas," came a voice from the bed, "pro qua
Christus non dedignatus est mori?" Kett in rebellion in
Norfolk said it to the court's emissary: "Call not them
villeins for whom Christ died." It has been a charter of
the oppressed through the ages. The mind of Jesus,
exhibited by his death, stands still in marked contrast
with our modern materialistic way of making much of
things and property and little of men. When Mr. Bernard
Shaw flippantly talked of compensating sweated labor
with cheap forecasts of heaven, whatever class of people
he meant to hit, he did not touch the Jesus of Nazareth
and of Calvary. He at least never spoke in that vein;
and, if his followers had, the great world might have
credited them with more sense and less enthusiasm.
The great illustrative fact of heathenism is its cheapen
ing of human life. The last centuries of Indian history
before British rule are a commentary on this;13 the doc
trine of Karma, with its teaching of 8,000,000 rebirths,
so said an Indian official of a Maharaja to me, is one cause
for the carelessness about individual life. And India is
not a land of savages, nor was the Roman Empire. Na
tions are remade less by treaties and Acts of Parliament
and rearrangements of outward things than by deep
regenerations of spirit and desire. Tyndale, the trans
lator of our New Testament in 1526, said in what seems a
very modern tone that, if the King of England did amiss,
it lay in the right of the meanest to tell him he did naught.
England read and revised and re-read his New Testa
ment for a century, and told a king of England that he
did naught — told him in a way intelligible to himself and
to posterity. No wonder the Marquis Wellesley in 1808

15 On this point it is better to take _ the evidence of contemporary and
non-missionary documents than the political propaganda of a certain party
today.

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 223
deprecated the circulation of the Bible in Bengali as dan
gerous "without the safeguard of a commentary" — an
interesting explanation, one notes, of the object of a com
mentary. The Marquis was right; the Bible has made
great upheavals in India18 as it did in the Roman world
and elsewhere. Factory Acts in England began with the
evangelical Lord Shaftesbury, and have a parallel in that
clause in the Code of Justinian which exempts a mima,
who becomes Christian, from being dragged back to the
theater and the life of shame.
An interesting conversation, illuminative for our pres
ent purpose, is to be found in the Life of Henry George
(p. 438) . Henry George was talking with Cardinal Man
ning of their common interests. "I loved the people,"
he said, "and that love brought me to Christ as their best
friend and teacher." "And I loved Christ," said Man
ning, "and so learned to love the people for whom he
died." But, as Dr. Johnson wrote in Goldsmith's Traveller,
"How small of all that human hearts endure
That part which kings or laws can cause or cure!"
Life is not made by the constitution under which we live,
nor by the laws that should control us. It depends far
more on what the Greek calls "the unwritten laws the
breaking of which brings admitted shame." The caustic
English sarcasm, "worse than wicked — vulgar," hits off
what Thucydides meant. How little manners matter and
how much ! George Whitefield, as Dr. Dale once pointed
out, never dreamed of preaching about courtesy and good
manners, but Jesus did preach about them — did it
explicitly and much more implicitly. The "high-minded
man," according to Aristotle,17 "justly despises" others
18 See J. N. Farquhar's fascinating book, Modern Religious Movements
in India.
" Nicomachean Ethics, IV, 8, p. 1124b.

224 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
and is "ashamed of receiving a benefit." Jesus let women
minister to him of their substance, and accepted it as nat
ural and friendly that his disciples should row while he
slept, but there is in every syllable of his teaching, in
every movement of his mind, that recognition of God's
interest in the meanest of men, which is the antithesis of
contempt. The definition of a gentleman as one who
never puts his feelings before the rights of others or his
rights before their feelings, is quite in his vein. The
gravamen of rudeness is its suggestion that the other
man does not matter, and is uninteresting. Jesus made
every man interesting by bringing out that God is inter
ested in him. He himself found something attractive or
of importance in every man; he had a genius for appre
ciation and he conveyed it to those who caught his mind.
If eminent Christians have sometimes lacked it, it has,
perhaps, been because they were too eminent to be quite
Christian. Jesus, however, said plainly : "Let the greater
among you be as the younger," and added, in a sentence
as charming and playful as it was true: "I am among
you as the serving man" (5 cWovSv) (Luke 22 :26, 27) .
Paul, in the same spirit, will have Christians "forbear one
another" and "speak truth in love" (Eph. 4:2, 15) ; but
even he, one feels, fell short of the charm that appears
in Jesus' dealings with men and women. Children went
to him, mothers showed him their babies, all sorts of
people brought him all sorts of troubles and questions;
and he was a man who could be interrupted without explo
sion. He has the secret of charm and he can communicate
it, though how is another question, but it is to those who
believe in him through and through. Any defect of belief
in Jesus shows itself somewhere in unbelief in God or
disbelief in man. The headmaster of one of our great
schools recently wrote, in an essay on education, that "it
is hard to take even the shortest railway journey and keep

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 225
true to the Sermon on the Mount." Perhaps Jesus would
not have pushed people off a tram-platform, which would
seem to indicate that his standards of the relative import
ance of things were different in some way from ours, and
that our life is not yet humanized beyond his ideal.
Clement of Alexandria tells us of vain persons who
held up the example of Jesus as a reason for rejecting
marriage, which "they call mere prostitution and a prac
tice introduced by the devil."13 This was not mere rhetoric.
To primitive thought (and there is still much of it in the
world) there was something supernatural in conception, ,
something demoniacal; some religions dMed it and made i ,l
a sacred ritual of the process of reproduction; some /
repudiated it as polluting. Clement takes another view
of Nature, much more like that of Jesus. Nature made
us to marry, and "the childless man falls short of the per
fection of Nature."1' Men must marry for their country's
sake and for the completeness of the universe;" the mar
ried man exhibits "a certain distant image of the true
Providence."21 The heathen may practice abortion and
expose their children and keep parrots instead, but the
begetting and bringing up of children is a part of the
Christian married life.22 "Who are the two or three
gathering in the name of Christ, among whom the Lord
is in the midst? Does he not mean man, wife, and child
by the three, seeing woman is made to match man by
God ?"23 Tertullian said there would be something shame
less about God calling us sons, if he forbade us to have
sons by taking marriage from us.21 This group of pas
sages from two great Christian thinkers about the year
a.d. 200 is significant enough, more still when we find
18 Stromateis, 3:49.
"Strom., 2:139, 5.
"Strom., 2:140, 1.
» Strom., 7:70, end.
23 Paidagogos, 2:83, 1.
a Strom., 3:68,1.
M Adv. Marcion, 4:17.

226 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
Paul allowing marriage "because of harlotries" (II Cor.
7:1, 2). When one realizes how deeply the ideal of celi
bacy had tainted the spiritual atmosphere, this concep
tion of Christian married life grows more surprising, but
it represents the real teaching of Jesus.
When men challenged Jesus upon the divorce question,
and quoted Moses against him, he threw over Moses.
Moses had an eye on his constituency and compromised
(Mark 10:5). The real issue was the design of God in
making and mating the sexes; did God mean temporary
unions, shorter or longer? Today we hesitate perhaps
in referring matters so abruptly to God, and try the inter
mediate court of Nature ; and Jesus meets us there quite
readily, he has no suspicion of Nature and the facts of the
case are all he wants. As usual, he does not much argue
the matter. He goes to the home for endless illustrations
of spiritual life and he never (like Paul) draws a parable
from the breakdown of marriage (Rom. 7 :2) . How much
home meant to him appears in his tone from time to time
— "the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head" — in
the welcome he gives to children, in his tenderness for
widows and mothers. It is not idly that the friendliest
of modern poets slips into speaking of
"Little children saying grace
In every Christian kind of place."
It is just where one would expect them, and exactly what
they would be doing.
In the Middle Ages — that curious "age of faith" when
men believed furiously in Christ, fought crusades for him
and burned heretics for him, but accepted neither his
teaching nor his spirit as very real or serious — the
Church swung altogether over to celibacy; whatever else
they did, priests might not marry. "I praise marriage,"
said Jerome, "I praise wedlock, but because they bear

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 227
me virgins; I gather from the thorn the rose.25 Luther
brought his generation abruptly back to the ideas of
Jesus, when he shocked it by marrying the ex-nun Kath
arine Bora.2* The modern biologist, with his mind upon
Nature and society, and less interested in church tradi
tion, stands here with Jesus and Luther. "It was one of
the greatest social services of the Reformation that it
broke with the ascetic ideal so far as marriage was con
cerned, and ranked the married life higher than the un
married. . . . The sterility of monks and nuns and
priests for so many centuries turned the laws of heredity
against the moral progress of the race."27 But the home
matters still more than the stock, and children notori
ously grow up better in Christian homes than in Platonic
barracks or convent orphanages — and even in quite ordi
nary homes, as French statesmen have found. What
England owes to the children of ministers and clergy and
even deacons, may be read in part in the Dictionary of
National Biography, a work without much theological
bias. The school owes something to the Christian Church.
By the second century daily reading of the Bible was
inculcated, for the Church quickly realized that the Chris
tian was called to be better educated and more intellectu
ally alert than the heathen — to be more "human." By 1609
common education was a municipal charge in Holland,
for the "Protestants of the Netherlands saw the immense
importance of education to their cause, based as it was on
the study of the Scriptures, and the general education of
the people and the wide diffusion of printed books, espe-
pecially the Bible, had much to do with the reality of the
Dutch Reformation, and with its popular character."23

28 Jerome, Ep., 22:20.
"See further Ch. XIV, p. 244.
27 W. Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis, 167, 174.
MWinnifred Cockshott, The Pilgrim Fathers, p. 114.

228 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
The Pilgrim Fathers, who gave American life its spirit,
took these Dutch ideas with them to New England; and
school and college were among the first concerns of the
Puritans there, as they are still in America. England is
the one Protestant country that has despised education.
John Knox put things on another footing in Scotland a
generation before 1609. It is interesting to find that
today on the Congo at least one great missionary society
will not accept converts into the Church till they can
read; the New Testament, i.e., the historical Jesus, is
the Negro's best safeguard against superstition, his
surest hope of development. And the heathen see what
it means; "The God of the Catholics," the saying goes
at Yakusu, "has no books." How many coUeges, before
and after Harvard, founded in 1636 by men "dreading to
leave an illiterate ministry to the churches," does man
kind owe to Christian emphasis on the development of
the mind?
The date of The Teaching of the Apostles has been dis
puted. Discovered, and printed in 1881, it came as a
shock to those who were not prepared for such startling
simplicity in the early Church, and some prefer to see
in it a fancy sketch of some fourth century heretic.
Sounder opinion confirms an earlier date; perhaps about
a.d. 100 would serve. Here, then, is a short chapter from
this remarkable book. "Everyone that cometh in the
name of the Lord, let him be received ; and then when you
have tested him, you shall know, for you will have sense,
right and left. If he that cometh be on a journey, help
him as much as you can. But he shall not abide with
you more than two or three days, if it be necessary. But
if he will settle with you, if he is a craftsman, let him
work and eat. If he has not a craft, according to your
sense take measures that he shall not live among us idle,
a Christian. If he will not do this, he is a trafficker in

THE HUMANIZING OF LIFE 229
Christ. Beware of such." The early Church has to trans
late Jesus' word, "Give to him that asketh of thee" ; and
realizes that the best gift a man can have given him is a
trade and a chance to work at it. "You will have sense."
Probably the modern could not better the suggestion to
the little community.
Family life, education, trade-teaching — the Church
began as it has gone on with the ideal of helping men.
A "passion for doing good" marked the Corinthian
Church, as we have seen; and there are various ways of
doing good. To feed the hungry, is one; to put him in
the way of feeding others, is a still better. The Christian
was in the world to carry out the ideas of God in their
full compass. Many he took from the common store of
his times, some he discovered for himself; he would
"have sense." He made mistakes, of course; but his
love of Jesus was a steady corrective, for it kept him in
touch with an emancipating spirit, and gave him an in
spiration which has never died.
Stoic cosmopolitanism was eclipsed by Christian. "If
then God," says Peter (Acts 11:17), "gave them the same
gift, who was I to be able to prevent God?" and he jus
tifies the universalism of the Church from its identity of
experience. Jesus was interpreted aright; his thought
of God as center, as God and Father of all, included all
mankind.2* The language of the cross was intelligible to
all men; it had the same revelation, the same charm for
all. By the end of the first century the hymns of the
Apocalypse include all nations and races arid languages
joining in one song, a new song. That song has not
grown old. In Christ there is neither barbarian, Scythian,

M Mr. Montefiore, in Pharisaism and St. Paul, p. 56, in describing Rab
binic Judaism, has a most remarkable sentence: "This indifference, dis
like, contempt, particularism — this ready and not unwilling consignment of
the non-believer and the non-Jew to perdition and gloom — was quite con
sistent with the most passionate religious faith and with the most exqui
site and delicate charity."

230 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
Jew, nor Greek, as Paul said. We should put other race-
names, and it would be equally true. What is more, men
of every race know in their hearts that Jesus Christ is a
closer bond of union than any other. Every Christian
nation by now recognizes that the whole world has to be
won for Christ; missions are in the program of every
church; and in Christ is the hope of the world. Chris
tian experience turns to prophecy; what he has done, he
will do "according to the working whereby he is able even
to subdue all things unto himself" (Phil. 3:21).

CHAPTER XIV
THE RECONCILIATION OF FREEDOM AND
RELIGION
When St. Paul tells us that "Where the spirit of the
Lord is, there is liberty (II Cor. 3:17), he says what is
against traditional etymology. Etymology may tell us
what a word originally meant, and sometimes it still
means the same; but more often a word makes its own
meaning for itself out of the company which it keeps,
and forgets all about its origin. The older etymologists,
however, connected the word "religion" with the verb
that meant to bind, not to loose. Indeed a great anthro
pologist of today, the French Jew, Salomon Reinach, has
defined religion as "a collection of scruples which impede
the free exercise of our faculties." That is a charmingly
simple definition; but it is, perhaps, rather what he
would wish us to think of religion, than anything else.
We must remember that a definition may be a war cry
or a slander, and that we have to look at the man who
makes it and at his purpose as well as at the definition
itself. Other thinkers take a prof ounder view of religion.
"Man," writes Professor Gilbert Murray, "is imprisoned
in the external present; and what we call a man's reli
gion is, to a great extent, the thing that offers him a
secret and permanent means of escape from that prison, a
breaking of the prison walls which leaves him standing,]
of course, still in the present, but in a present so enlarged ;
and enfranchised that it becomes not a prison, but a free j
world." Similarly, Professor Cairns writes : "Religion '
231

232 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
is, fundamentally, on the human side, man's protest and
appeal to the Supreme against the sorrows, indignities,
and sins of this present world. It is the endeavor of
man, through that appeal, to unite himself with the life
of that unseen and ruling world, and so to win the power
from it to dominate and transmute the life of time."
Historically, this is the truer view. Primitive religion,
when it has outlived its time, grows to be very like magic
and is a limitation upon man's mind and action; but in
every really living community thought and religion have
always interacted on each other. How could it be other
wise? In essence the religious life is the deepest life of
all ; for the most fundamental thing in man is his relation
of himself and of all the world to God, so that thought
will be at the very heart of religion.
Yet those who say that religion and thought are antag
onistic, and point to the Christian Church and to other
religions for proof of what they say, have a certain case.
For many men and women realize the need of religion, as
they call it, but want it merely as an anodyne against the
troubles of life, or as a protection against God. They
want "salvation," regarding it as something definite and
precise, a final settlement with God, a discharge of obli
gations, rather than as renewal of relations with an old
friend. Many others mean to base their lives on reli
gion, but resent the labor of thought ; they prefer things
fixed and done with, settled notions, and laws laid down
and needing only to be carried out; they do not count
thought a duty or a necessity. Men ask for a simple
Gospel, "the old, old story," forgetful that the heart of
"the old, old story" is only reached when it is daily a new
surprise, that nothing that is real remains simple very
long. Others lean to ritual on aesthetic grounds or from
sentiment, and a great many through sheer force of habit ;
and some of them, if only there is enough symbol, are not

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 233
very anxious as to what the symbol means — a danger that
seems inseparable from symbolism. But, above all, there
is a class for whom truth is a static thing, something of
which they feel "you know what it is and there it is," as
if "the faith once delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3)
were a set of propositions simple and definite, and life
less as the multiplication table — as if "faith" were not
rather an instinct to explore God, to know the heights
and depths of Christ, to track out the great spiritual pur
pose behind all existence.
There is always disaster where thought and religion are
regarded as antagonistic. It has often happened in the
history of men and nations, that the religious have stood
on one side and the speculative on the other, with a good
deal of mutual contempt, sometimes with hatred. In Eng
land the mood is perhaps less one of hatred than of quiet
contempt; "the Church," someone has said, "is thought
of as feminine ; the world is not as much afraid of it as of
Ramsay Macdonald." Society depends on thought and
movement; if it is not progressive, it declines. The
Roman Empire fell because it became an ideal bureau
cracy; men gave up the hope of new ideas, and even the
very notion that they were desirable; they left their
thinking to be done by civil servants. Freedom is theS
necessary condition of reaching higher stages of life and)
thought ; and if the Church manage to get the reputation
for missing this conception, men turn against it. It is
not in the Christian Church alone, but in other religious
communities, even in a greater degree, that men have
come to believe that, with too close an investigation into
religion and its basis, all confidence in it goes ; that it is
safe, so long as one does not touch it and does not examine
it, but that to ask questions is dangerous to faith. The
prevalence, real or supposed, of this fear among Christian
teachers has provoked the caustic definition of faith as

234 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
"believing what you know to be untrue." We deserve
that taunt when we are shy of thought. That mood is
not faith; it is doubt. In some of the most religious
spirits of antiquity, as of today, and in every religion, we
find that inherent scepticism ; and the honest, the candid,
and the good say: "If that is religion, let us have none
of it." We can have too much of the past, too much even
of our inheritance. "If our duty to the Past is to re
member, our second duty is to forget."1 We need to
forget; we need to have new experience; we have to be
dissatisfied with our range in truth; we have to explore
beyond it. All men who know and love truth, know that;
and what can they think of a Christian Church, where
that spirit is suspect? I
When we ask the mind of Jesus upon the question, he
is, as always, abundantly clear. The sentence, attributed
in the Fourth Gospel (8:32) to Jesus, "The truth shall
set you free," is like other sayings in that book, rather.
an extraordinarily vivid summary of the whole teaching
and spirit of Jesus than an actual quotation. If he did
not say it — well ! he lived it ; his eyes flashed : "The truth
shall make you free." We attribute to Jesus, very un
imaginatively, an omniscience, which takes much of the
meaning out of his whole story. Omniscience may be an
inert thing; the most omniscient people we meet have
often very little mind at all. What we find in the histori
cal Jesus is a much greater thing than omniscience ; it is
that freedom of mind, that activity of intellect, which we
associate with all great characters who launch into the
world ideas that emancipate. Jesus has an infinite capac
ity for interest in things and people, in the human mind
and its relations to God. Interest was with him a habit;

1 J. H. Moulton, The Treasure of the Magi.

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 235
it is clear that he had the gift of instinctive observation,
which Wordsworth describes. He recognized the neces
sity of inquiry, which Nature — or, he would have said,
God — implants in men. He understood the men who ask,
who seek, who knock, and he promised that there will be
answers to questions and opening of doors. In an extra
ordinary phrase, which seems to rest on other optical
theories than ours, he pictured a man's "whole body full
of light." Jesus, who thought in pictures and spoke in
pictures, must have meant more by this than we care
lessly assume as we read it; he must have had some idea
in his mind. "As when the lamp with its flash lightens
thee" are his words (Luke 11 :36) ; and one thinks today
of the "torches" we used in the dark nights of the war;
does he mean a body like some kind of incarnated and per
sonal X-ray, which might light everything up, till the
secrets of things stood out revealed — a personality that
illuminated everything?2 More plainly, he says: "There
is nothing hid that shall not be known" (Luke 8:17).
' "Unto you it is given to know the mysteries of the King
dom of God" (Luke 8:10) — a thought in vivid antithesis
to the cults of mystery and sacrament, which traded in
the unknowable and extolled trance above reason. He
promises that we are to see our way at last through all
the wonders of the whole wide realm of God; and it is
the promise of a thinker who does not use words without
feeling their meaning, who understands the appeal of
God and his ways. It seems fair in view of such sayings
to hold that he recognized the progressive character of
truth; and this is confirmed by his many parables that
turn on growth, on progress and expansion, on life enlarg
ing itself a hundredfold. It is intelligence, after all,
progressive intelligence that gives freedom, and not the

'Cf. John Bailey, Johnson, p. 120: "Johnson never, even in his religion,
left his open eye or his common sense behind him; and common sense
told him what a brighter light concealed from St. Francis."

236 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
acceptance of ignorance, in whatever piety it cloaks itself.
We must remember his independence, his sincerity of
mind; we often miss "the immense amount of real hard
thinking implied in the religious and moral teaching of
Jesus."3 He lived in a world When men were beginning
more and more to look to the past (real or fictitious) for
guidance in religion. All the cults had sacred books, and
many hidden books. He read, but he read "as one having
authority." "It was said to them of old time . . . but
I say unto you," is not the utterance of one in bondage
to quotations or traditions (Matt. 5:35). He criticized
Moses' law — "an eye for an eye" was not right; and he
criticized Moses himself for compromising on a moral
question and permitting what was not in God's law
(Mark 10:5, with Matt. 19:8). When he used scripture,
it was not as his contemporaries did, still less as Christian
apologists of a century later did ; he went to the heart of
it, and took what he found to be true.* He treated reli
gious traditions and usages in the same way; taboos
about food he put aside as irrelevant to a man's real being
(Mark 7:18). It is shrewdly suggested that, if he had
said anything in tune with the growing fancy for asceti
cism, we should have heard of it. His sayings reflect his
mind. He has not the flaws of contemporary style in
speech; he is simple and direct; he uses "the language
actually employed by men," as if he had read and accepted
William Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads (the
edition of 1800) . Imagination, playfulness, and intensity
give life to his words; there is po hint of artifice in
them; they are all nature and truth. It is a dynamic
speech that does things, like Luther's words, that were
called "half-battles." His intolerance of even the half-
false in speech is shown in his refusal of polite compli-

8 Rashdall, Conscience and Christ, p. 78.
4 Cf . Loisy, Ev. Syn., 1:569: "V emancipation de Paul, beaucoup plus
apparente, n itait pas plus rielc."

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 237
ments; he will not have "good Master," and he will limit
affirmation and denial to yes and no.
Such speech comes, and can only come, from a mind of
equal sincerity. He does not use quotations, because he
goes to facts — "Tell John what things ye hear and see"
— and to facts which people can verify. Truth is essen
tially loyalty to the fact, to the actual, to the intelligible
in the fact; there is no copyright in it; and while some
people naively hold that such loyalty narrows range, that
it binds and limits the mind, the great poets confirm the
experience of Jesus that it sets free. Above all his genius
is for the fact with meaning. A man, he suggests, may
gain skill in weather lore by observation and reflection.
Facts are not all of equal significance. Knowledge in
volves scale and perspective, distinction between mosqui
toes and camels, between potherbs and the great cardinal
virtues of faith and mercy — and intelligence, we may add
by way of gloss. Truth is not merely an affair of the
intellect, for it depends, as the intellect does too, on a
man's whole moral being. Jesus stood for honesty, and
for thought and intelligence; and so far as we are loyal
to him, we shall not be in bondage to the second-hand or
cramped by traditions.
On the contrary Jesus makes it clear that he came into
the world to emancipate men — not to make them of one
mind but of many, to launch divisions of thought. Micah's
words will be fulfilled; families will be divided. He
"comes to set fire to the world" (Luke 12:49), as if to
start the forest fire that changes the whole aspect and
character of a countryside. What a picture of himself
he draws creating divisions, unsettling men, driving them
this way and that, inaugurating all the friction and all
the stimulus that comes when men of different minds
handle truth in earnest ! He saw all this, and summed up
the whole story in the parable of the leaven — disturb-

238 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
ance, disorders, bubbles, and broken bubbles. Some people
think the Church's history is a succession of broken bub
bles. Very well, but what makes them, and what breaks
them? What bursts the old wine-skins? What makes
the seed bear thirty-fold? Jesus believes in that fierce,
strenuous, wild, discordant, adventurous creature, life.
"Fear not, little flock," he says, "it is your Father's good
pleasure to give you the kingdom" (Luke 12:32). But
there is more than a hint, in another saying, that you
must be "violent," as the Authorized Version renders it,
a man of drastic mind and forceful action, if you want to
capture it and hold it. "The truth shall make you free" —
dreadfully free! And when he has linked the Kingdom
of God with all this upheaval, he is represented as saying
to us : "My peace I give unto you," and : "Ye shall find
rest unto your souls." Is he contradicting himself ? That
he is right is the verdict of the type that Jesus loves ; it
is to be the life of adventure in a new world, the life of
intellectual battle and spiritual peace, and none better. It
all comes from his central belief in God, God the author
of life, creative, insurgent, upheaving life, and God the
lover of it.
He is in vivid contrast with the world in which he found
himself. The stricter Stoics of that day practically elim
inated God from the world; to the vulgar they left their
own religions as good enough for them, so drawing a fatal
distinction between truth and religion. The adherents
of the mysteries, on the other hand, would not have ques
tions, as we saw, because questions upset faith and strike
at the root of religion ; they would have men stick to what
they were told, hold to what they do not know, to what
they do not understand, to the irrational, to the unex
amined life, to dreams and visions and mystery.
What a contrast Jesus is to the Church today, with its
lethargy, with its fear of new ideas, its clinging to auth-

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 239
ority and the conventional, its mistrust of argument, and
of spiritual appeal! Men have learned to count many of
these things as the characteristics of the Church of
Christ, as if they were not essential unbelief and atheism.
But all that is foreign to the historic Jesus, utterly
repugnant to the very heart of him, as to every man who
really believes in truth. No, the real difficulty has not
been in Jesus; it has been in ourselves. We have been
reluctant to take Jesus seriously; we have not believed
that he means what he says, we have labelled it paradox,
and dismissed it as if that settled the question. We have
not been willing to believe that Jesus and truth will pre
vail, to believe with him that truth is a living thing that
looks after itself, because it belongs to God, because it is
one with God and shares his vitality. We have been
afraid to believe that the Christian Gospel is a thing of
God, and that it has his life and his power of giving life
and transmitting it. II
But there is another side to the story ; for the Church
of Jesus has been again and again the champion and the
exponent of freedom of mind. Paul said: "I will sing in
the spirit, but I will sing with the understanding also."
Understanding was one of the marks of the early Church,
and the awakening of the intellectual life. Lucian, the
great satirist of the second century, has a story about a
false prophet called Alexander, who ran a shrine at
Abonoteichos in Asia Minor, and made a good deal of
money out of it. At a certain stage in the holy rites in
his temple, there was a proclamation: "Epicureans out
side! Christians outside!" The god was good enough for
the heathen; but the Christian was not to be taken in
with a big snake with a mask tied to it; he would see
the string. That is the evidence of a heathen, and the

240 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
story seems to me characteristic of the early Church;
it shows the quickened mind and the new independence.
Beggars and tramps and strolling prophets, as we have
seen,3 infested that Church; but The Teaching of the
Apostles shows how soon the Christian brought sense to
bear on new economic questions. "You will have sense,"
writes the author. The Christian martyr, again, like the
passive resister and the conscientious objector of today,
had the independence of mind to choose to do his own
thinking and not to accept blindfold the opinions dic
tated by the government of the day. Christians carried
that determination to think for themselves to the amphi
theatre, and the leopard, to the stake where they were
burned alive — not one, nor two of them, but dozens — a
course which involved some clearness and independence,
and they achieved it.
We may further note, when we turn to the ordinary
everyday life of those first two centuries, that the Gospel
spread to higher and higher levels of society. It was,
partly, because the people who became Christians got into
the habit of handling fact, as John Wesley's converts
round Bristol left off being dirty, drunken, and stupid,
when the Gospel came to them, and became clean and
quick of mind and enterprising, and then found them
selves well-to-do without expecting it, or, in the first
instance, of seeking it. The Gospel also captured think
ing people ; and one of the features of the second century
is that the Church has more and more of the better minds.
There was more and more theology, and more and more
heresy, which meant that people were thinking, if not
always with the clearness of Jesus, and sometimes too
much under the influence of their non-Christian training.
The heathen temple was almost always a small place, as
it still is, and the Christian church a large one; for the

"Chapter IX, p. 166; Chapter XIII, p. 229.

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 241
temple was a place at which rites were performed, the
Christian church a place where people were taught, and
regularly came to learn to think. That is written all
through the early Church, and it is written in India
today, though, of course, the early Church had neither
the money nor the freedom to build.
As evidence of activity of mind and of sheer originality
in the religious life, we may take the Epistle to the
Hebrews. The writer is a man who attempts a new experi
ment in religion, who does a new thing all against the
world's religious experience. The synagogue had indeed
tentatively led the way, as we have seen, dropping ritual
for the Torah ; but this man goes further. It is hard to
realize today what a pioneer in thought he was, when he
tried the experiment of a religion without priest, altar,
sacrament, or sacrifice, without the Torah, "outside the
camp," outside Israel, and gave up all except Jesus and
the presence of God. The Christian was an innovator, a
revolutionary in thought, in those early days, and he was
generally right. One of the most striking things is how
fundamentally wrong all the thinkers outside the Chris
tian Church had been on monotheism. None of them
believed that ordinary people could take in the idea of
one God only, or would be content with it, if they did
take it in. That was axiomatic even with the Stoic. The
history of Christendom and of Islam has shown exactly
the opposite, and has proved that, for a religion to live
and to be passionate, it must have one God only. So far
from being an idea impossible to take in, it is the idea
that the common man has realized again and again; and
it has been with him a driving force, a passion, and a
source of power. In war, empire, and commerce, no
less than in learning and thought, the monotheist has
triumphed over the polytheist. It means surely that his
religion has given him something real. Judaism was

242 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
monotheistic, but it was a sect; the Christian Church
was universal, and its monotheism conquered the
world. One of the greatest teachers of the early Church,
Clement of Alexandria, maintained the cause of Greek
culture against the "simple Christian." The simple
Christian insisted that faith alone is needed; "only
believe," was his regular quotation. Clement has not
quite our modern word; he calls them "orthodoxasts."
Against these old-style believers, he defends the Chris
tian's right to the utmost of learning that man can have.
If the Law was the schoolmaster that led Israel to Christ,
the schoolmaster of Greece was philosophy; and both
were given by God. How can the Christian but have the
right to study philosophy? Who has abetter right? This
freedom is the mark of the school of Jesus. Wilamowitz-
Moellendorf goes so far as to say that "Christianity over
came the competing religions of the East, because it Hel-
lenized itself more thoroughly than they did."8 By "Hel-
lenizing itself," he means that Christians achieved, more
than the adherents of any other cults, that habit of clear
thinking which is preeminently Greek. This is true;
Jesus pointed that way by word and example. It is a
curiously interesting indication of the affinity of Iclear
thinkers everywhere, a reminder (not unneeded today)
that Jesus was more than a Galilaean peasant at the
apocalyptic point of view. The Christian Church may
have come from the East; but it was less Eastern than
the mystery religions. Indeed the scholar Titius holds
that the Hellenized categories, to which Paul made the
transition possible, express the real meaning of Jesus
better than the apocalyptic forms, which he had himself
to use.7

'Gr. Lit. Gesch, 135.
' I owe this to Dr. D. S. Caims.

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 243
III
To pass on to the age of the Reformation : out of the
Renaissance comes a German scholar, Martin Luther.
Whatever our attitude to some present-day Germans, we
must not forget our debt to Germany four centuries ago,
and often since, or we shall think untruly, without bal
ance and without perspective. What a battle there has
been about the Scripture in our own day, we know very
well. Luther, like other men reborn in that new age,
read the Scripture with new eyes. Here are some of his
conclusions. He denied the Mosaic authorship of part of
the Pentateuch ; he said that Job was an allegory and not
history; he called the book of Jonah childish; he main
tained that the book of Kings was a thousand paces ahead
of Chronicles ; and that the Epistle of James is an "epis
tle of straw"; and of the author of Ecclesiastes he said
that "he has neither boots nor spurs, but rides in his
socks." In his day the interpretation of Scripture was
still conducted by the allegoric method; it was a matter
of hunting for types and cryptic prophecies. Isaac on
the altar was a type of Christ ; so were the 318 servants
of Abraham. Cyprian, in the third century, had laid
down that wherever wine is mentioned in the Old Testa
ment, it is a prophecy of the eucharist, and wherever
water, of baptism. Luther rejects all these ingenuities
as "merely ridiculous and childish fopperies; yea, it is
an apish work in such sort to juggle with Holy Scrip
ture;"8 with which we shall agree. The man is here as
modern as he can be.
He studied Greek: and a new epoch in European
thought began, when he learned that the Greek word
Metanoein means "to think again," and not, as the Latin

8 Table-Talk, Ch. 59 (the 17th century translation).

244 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
said, "to do penance."3 He studied church history; and,
in the words of Principal Lindsay, he was "half exultant
and half terrified at the result of his studies." The
power of the Pope rested on sham history and bogus
documents — on the forged Decretals and on the forged
Donation of Constantine. Other scholars had led the way
here ; but when Luther saw that they were right, scholar
ship was translated into action, and into history.
"Luther's speeches at Leipzig," says Dr. Lindsay, "laid
the foundation of that modern historical criticism of in
stitutions which has gone so far in our days."1" Yes, and
more; the man had entered into the freedom of Christ;
he was not afraid of fact ; he learnt, he thought, and he
saw the relevance of the facts ; and he acted with the free
dom that Jesus had given him. He re-examined the
question of vows and of celibacy; and then he married his
Katharine, and had his little John, and he learned the
beauty and delight and difficulty of family life. He loved
singing and laughter, and little children; and he wrote
Christmas carols, and translated the Bible. The contri
bution of Bible translation to freedom of thought and
education we have already discussed."
Luther struck, as the missionaries today are striking,
a blow for freedom of mind, for the sweeping away of all
superstition, by putting the Bible in the hands of com
mon people and bringing the historical Jesus face to
face with them. How directly Luther approaches the
real! Men talked about visions of angels and of saints.
Luther anticipated modern psychologists in suspecting
such things. Luther said: "If it were in my choice, I
would not wish God to appear to me or to speak to me

• Chapter V. It is an illuminating contrast that Loyola, after trying
Erasmus1 Greek Testament, refused to read it, because it interfered with
"his devotional emotions." Cf. Froude, Erasmus, p. 130.
»T. M. Lindsay, Reformation, I, pp. 235, 239.
» Chapter XII, Chapter XIII, pp. 206, 228. See A. V. G. Allen, Con
tinuity of Christian Faith, p. 275.

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 245
from heaven." No, he would "hold by His common revela
tion to all men in the words and works of Christ."" He
was for no private property in revelation, no spiritual
aristocracy. And further, "No man," he said, "must be
coerced in spiritual matters." That is the voice of free
dom. It is a pity that we do not hear more of it. The
emphasis laid by the religious today on authority and
tradition does not point to freedom. The claim to the
right of private judgment and the great doctrines of
justification by faith and the priesthood of all believers
meant (and still mean) the right of the individual con
science, and its duty, to seek, to find, and to hold truth as
it is enabled by God — the widest of all charters of liberty.
Behind it all is Luther's conviction of the value, the
meaning and force of the crucified Jesus." The Chris
tian religion is based on fact, not fancy, nor even dogma.
It begins with Jesus, working, living, suffering; and the
condition of its progress is never to get far away from
the pierced hands and the crown of thorns. The whole
Reformation movement was an attempt to get nearer to
the mind of Jesus. Monasticism, sacraments, tradition,
the Church — did they bring men nearer to that mind?
That was the test. Positively, the emphasis fell on God
in Christ, on the individual soul, on righteousness as
illuminated and given by Christ. Out of this new appeal
to Jesus came a new world, a new era, a new England.
Out of it, or from nowhere, will come the world we want
to see. We cannot dispense with the historical Jesus
yet; he is our best safeguard against wild thinking,
fancy, theosophy, polytheism, superstition, as he is
against rigidity, dullness, officialism, and oppression — ¦
against Zeitgeist in every form.
There is much cant today about the divisions of Chris
tendom, but it is still true, as Milton said, that "under
« See Herrmann, Communion of Christians with God, pp. 187, 188.
»• See Chapter IV; Chapter VI.

246 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
the fantastic terrors of sect and religion, we wrong the
earnest and zealous thirst after knowledge and under
standing which God hath stirred up."" We must unlearn
some of our talk about "unhappy divisions." Divisions
are only unhappy when tempers are sharp and awkward ;
otherwise, they may be very profitable, and very happy.
The alternative may be spiritual death, as history has
witnessed before now. Public opinion does not neces
sarily mean freedom, it may be the death of liberty, and
only the spirit of Jesus can revive it.

IV

In the nineteenth century the Church had a great
struggle about geology and Genesis. But there were
people who saw that the Church of Christ was based on
something better than Moses' knowledge of the rocks —
on quite another kind of Rock. Jesus himself had con
demned Moses as an opportunist for his compromise on
marriage. If Moses was wrong on divorce, why should
he be right about geology? Which is the worse error?
After that came the higher criticism; and again there
were people who saw that we rest on the living Jesus^
historical and present, and who found it possible, like
the earliest Christians, who had not yet a New Testa
ment, to love and enjoy Jesus and have life in him. Think
of the incalculable gain that followed, the freedom of
mind won for Christian thinkers, the right to believe in
a real Jesus without sacrifice of intellectual honesty.
Through difficulty and pain they found a way out, and
they brought us into freedom. If today we do not trouble
about geology or higher criticism, arid it is rather the

,4Cf. Phillips Brooks, Light of the World, p. 85. In the Puritan cen
tury, "everything was probed to the bottom, all delegated authorities were
questioned. ... It never frightened the Puritan when you bade him
stand still and listen to the speech of God."

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 247
problems of psychology in connection with religion that
perplex us, we surely need not be afraid. Or, again, if
we are told that economic science clashes with what Jesus
said of economics, we shall go and see what Jesus did
say; and perhaps, like the writer of The Teaching of the
Apostles, we shall get some inkling of what he would
say, if he were living in a different order of society from
that of the Roman Empire. The very last thing we
should find would be any insistence on his part that
change was wrong. Mohammed fixed Moslem chronology
irrevocably and disastrously on the basis of an erroneous
astronomy, current in his day; and in that there ia an
illuminating contrast with the historical Jesus. Where
the spirit of Jesus is, there will be liberty and with it a
new spirit of joy and of freedom. We do not go into the
intellectual problems of our day tied and bound, because
Jesus set us free; we know whose we are and whom we
serve; we know the type of mind that he loved, the type
of mind that he gave; and Jesus will be for us, as for
those before us, the Author of Freedom.
But surely we have to go further. The Christian life
is not to be conceived as a long struggle of accommoda
tion with the discoveries which men of science and
scholarship make of God's laws in the world around us
and of God's doings in the past. The follower of Jesus
is called to be a pioneer himself; and it is a common
experience that one great feature of the Christian life is
the constant feeling that there is more beyond. There
is something of the infinite in Jesus; and, as one feels
with every real aspect of nature, we are never done
learning. I have gained more here from the poet
Wordsworth than from anybody. The poet seems a man
with no very symmetrical system of the universe, and
for this reason, he would tell us, that he is always being
surprised by what he thought he knew. Common peo-

248 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
pie know such lots of things ; he knows the waterfall, he
knows the daffodil and the celandine, and knows them
intimately. "Yes," he says, "and then one day the daffodil
spoke a new language and said strange things, that I
had never heard it say before ; so then I knew that I did
not know even it." That is what the poets teach us
about the real; and there is the same quality in Jesus^-
the genius for surprising even his intimates with fresh
wonder. He brings all God's infinite into our business
and bosom. With him we feel that nothing real is alien,
that all is human, and everything is at home with him.
Christians have hesitated about thought, and not been
sure of art ; and, as a result, the philosopher is not always
friendly to the Christian, and the artist still less; but
they would have been at home with our Master. Jesus
gives a "worth-while-ness" to everything. "Your labor is
not in vain in the Lord," Paul says. The labor of poet,
artist, and thinker is to bring truth and beauty into life,
to capture the unrealized. Carlyle said that "all labor is
an appeal from the seen to the unseen." Jesus stands
for the larger life ; he is come that we might range fur
ther into the unseen, into regions yet untrod — that we
"might have life and have it more abundantly," or in mod
ern speech, "more overflowing vitality." Jesus means
exploration of God, the bracing of all the soul's energies
and their development for that splendid task. Thought
is a primary Christian duty; every Christian's duty and
opportunity. How is God to be reached without thought?
or Jesus to be understood?
The very existence of Jesus has been to humanity one
of the greatest stimulants to thoughts; and thus one of
the great factors in developing the human mind. His
personality has been the most baffling problem with
which men have had to wrestle ; it is the key to any true
intelligence of human nature. Historically, one of the

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 249
marks of the early Church was that, though it did not
come from the upper ranks of society and had not the
highest culture, it out-thought the ancient world all
along the line. The man who tries to explain Jesus will
come out of the attempt a greater man than ever he went
in, if he works with any depth and seriousness. It is
hard even yet to predict a date for the achievement of
the task. One may study Christology, and not be much
better, but the intimate knowledge of Jesus is an eman
cipating force, and the effect of consorting with him is
to enlarge the whole nature — sympathy, intelligence,
every faculty — in short to develop a man to his utmost
and to transcend that utmost. The cross remains a chal
lenge to every generation. It raises all the questions as
to pain and death, it brings us face to face with the
necessity of rethinking God. A man awakened to one
set of interests is more apt to understand another, and
there is no end to the activity of growing intelligence.
The redeemed man is always ahead of what he was
before, and the more fully he is remade by Jesus Christ
the more he goes ahead. "Conquering and to conquer"
is a true description of the Christian soldier as well as of
his Leader. He gets the instinct and the inspiration for
growth and progress from Jesus ; and the new man and
the new ideas gravitate to one another. As Dr. Dale
said, "The healthier and nobler forces of the Renaissance
found their natural home and received religious sanction
in Protestantism" — the religion of the rediscovered
Jesus. V
One or two questions remain. There is little about
art in the gospels. One might even say that there is no
indication there that Jesus cared about art; though per
haps it would be truer to say that the people with whom

250 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
he worked did not. We have to remember the background
of Judaism with its hereditary hostility to the paganism
of Greek art. His disciples, indeed, were impressed by
the Temple, which was a new one and not of the best
period; and it may not have been the highest art that
the artists embodied in the stones and the votive offer
ings which the Galilaean peasants admired. But there is
a better way of approaching the matter. Let us look at
the words of Jesus. Think how that man tells a story;
he sees and fells, like a poet; and can we say that art is
alien to him? that the creative spirit, which is the soul
of art, is alien to Jesus, when he can create, as he does,
in the sphere of language? when he taught mankind a
new habit of language altogether? He feels deeply, and
his speech is alive at once with imagination; and that
comes very near the artist's temperament. Jesus is much
more natural15 in his speech than most men, simpler and
deeper, and that is partly why he baffles the literalists so
badly; it takes a poet to understand him.13 The greatest
English poet of the last two hundred years is Words
worth, and he is the man who used the plainest language,
who linked the most commonplace words and the most
original thought, as Euripides did in Greece. Jesus has
the same gift in "touching the common," till the bush in
his story is aflame with God, more than in the legend of
Moses, till the bird in the bush is a source of joy to
God, till the flowers on the tree and on the ground beside
it become an expression of God's own sense of beauty.1'
I can quite believe that the great artists, when they
really see him, move past us, and find themselves at home

ib "Art is perfect when it seems to be nature," said Longinus, ch. 22. _
18 "Not infrequently the first native contributions to a Christian liter
ature take the form of hymns."— World's Missionary Conference, 1910,
Report, vol. II, p. 124.
" A very remarkable expression in the Wisdom of Solomon (13,3) is
worth recalling here. The writer speaks of fire, wind, swift air, circling
stars, raging water, luminaries of heaven; "for the first Author of
beauty created them."

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 251
with him. He, like them, goes beyond us in his intuitions
of God's sense of color and form.
The function of art is the enjoyment and the interpre
tation of the whole of God's infinite life in its whole com
plex of relations. Who has interpreted God and God's
real more gloriously than Jesus? Who has given men
riiore right to enjoy God's gift of beauty, or done more
to develop the faculty of joy which is the means of
apprehending it? Who has given us the warrant to
believe that "man's chief end is to glorify God and to
enjoy him for ever" ? Art, if it is to achieve its supreme
work, in the union of form and freedom, implies the
intensely individual mind at work on the facts of God;
and in religion, as Jesus taught it, law and liberty in
unison are the outstanding features, God and the human
soul busy with each other and in harmony. Dr. For
syth's fine book, Christ upon Parnassus, deals with this
subject. Christianity, he says, in giving to the individual
infinite value, opened a new and infinite field to art, the
field of expression and characteristic, in passion, senti
ment, and affection. The story of the Church is not
without significance in the history of art. As men gain
surer glimpses of the real in Jesus, there are new fields
of art for us. The best interpreter, surely, will be the
great Author of love. Love is the key to art. Goethe
said about Heine, that he had many great gifts, but he
failed for want of love. Jesus, on the contrary, it has
been said, liberated in the world an endless force of love.
In lowlier language, he had the gift of appreciation, and
he communicates it. He teaches men to see the wonder
ful and the beautiful in others, to see and to love the
beautiful in nature, and to go on so doing till all God's
infinite world is their own. Is that alien to art?
A gap frequently felt in the systems of theologians
is due to their failure to allow a place in religion for

252 JESUS IN THE EXPERIENCE OF MEN
humor. Have we ever fully availed ourselves of the
playfulness of Jesus' speech? When he told his fol
lowers that if a man hits them on one cheek, they must
turn the other, did he not know they would laugh — he,
who grew up in the market-place of Nazareth ? When he
said that the distinction between Jew and Gentile was
that the Gentile was always asking, "What shall we eat
and what shall we drink?" was there no play of humor
in that? When he spoke about swallowing a camel, was
there no gleam of playfulness there? I do not believe
that the phrase of Jesus there was just current coin.
At any rate, the people of the day did not take it so, and
I think they would have known their own common phrases,
and would hardly have troubled to record them. They
remembered his ways of speech, because in his playful
ness and charm there was something individual and orig
inal. We are told that the fount of humor is a loving
heart, that sees the incongruity, and smiles and sighs at
the same time. John Bunyan expressed it exactly, when
he said :
"Some things are of that nature as to make
One's fancy checkle while his heart doth ache."
Bunyan's humor had provoked criticism of his Pilgrim,
as he tells us in a later preface:
"And some there be who say he laughs too loud."
There are always people like that in the Church —
dear, earnest, useful people, and so dull; but, when the
Kingdom of Heaven comes, everybody will have sense of
humor, and in every case it will be a gift from the same
Giver. "A real sense of humor," wrote Rendel Harris,
"breaks into flower when we have overcome the world."13

18 Cf . Mr. Clutton Broek's remark that "Christianity has lost its power
of laughter, because it has been merely on the defensive." "The uni
verse," saya another, "means well, when there are such exquisitely funny
things in it."

FREEDOM AND RELIGION 253
And who is he that overcometh the world? It is matter-
of-fact that kills art and kills humor; and it is Jesus,
who gets people out of matter-of-fact, and gives the spirit
of the new life, to which all these things are real and
living, who gives the artist subjects and gives him free
dom, gives him love and humor and happiness, sensitive
ness to the questions and suggestions of Nature, and the
enjoyment of God.
The great thing that Jesus has done, the center of all,
has been to enlarge man's capacity for God. That is the
secret of it. The ideas of little children are very lim
ited. They are not always very ready to recognize the
claims of "gutter children" or outsiders. The story of
home life is the story of the growth of the child and the
training of his capacity for taking the whole world into
his heart ; and Jesus has done that with men and women,
Who are harder to teach than little children. Jesus has,
indeed, given the human heart the capacity for God.
God is comprehended in how many ways, along the line
of every faculty, and of every sensitiveness ? God speaks
to one man in color, to another in sound, to another in
movement, to another in rhy thm, to another in the beauty
of children, to another in the need of the world. Jesus
all through the centuries has been making the human
heart larger, and more human, and more apt to get hold
of God and then to want more of him. He has been, of
all beings, the most intelligent of God, the most sympa
thetic with all God's creatures, the great interpreter, not
only of God, but of everything in which God is interested,
the bird on the wing, the flower in the field. Where the
spirit of the Lord Jesus is, there is liberty.

' iii

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