THE REASONABLENESS OF
THE RELIGION OF JESUS

BY WILLIAM STEPHEN RAINSFORD

I%ETVEf^'
YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

DEPOSITED BY THE
LINONIAN AND BROTHERS LIBRARY

THE REASONABLENESS
OF THE RELIGION OF JESUS

BY

WILLIAM STEPHEN RAINSFORD, D.D.

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
(Che tfibcrfllQc press Cambribge
1913

COPYRIGHT, I9I3, BY WILLIAM STEPHEN RAINSFORD
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published February 1Q13

NOTE
The substance of this volume was first used
as the Baldwin Lectures for 1911 at the Uni
versity of Michigan, under the Baldwin Lec
tureship for the Establishment and Defense
of Christian Truth.

CONTENTS
Introduction  ix
I. The Reasonableness and Necessity of
Growth and Change in Religion . 3
II. Jesus' Doctrine of the Seed : the Method
of Growth and Change .... 33
HI. Jesus' Doctrine of the Seed — Continued 76
IV. The Naturalness and Supernaturalness
of Jesus  114
V. Jesus' Doctrine  162
VI. Jesus' Doctrine of Man's Approach to
God  204

INTRODUCTION
I had the honor of knowing Mr. Baldwin, the
founder of this lectureship. The first object
he had in mind was to aid the religious life
of the students of this university ; and it is
because I hope to be of some small service to
you, young men and women, and not because
I have any hope of adding a worthy volume
to the valuable apologetic library which this
lectureship is, I doubt not, destined in time
to produce, that I, with much hesitation, ven
tured to accept the nomination that the Bishop
of the diocese did me the honor to make.
I never was a scholar. I have read some
what widely. I have seen more of the world,
and of the men and women in it, than most
clergymen. But such powers of memory as I
possessed, always poor, have suffered greatly
in latter years, owing to excessive strain and
ill health. Thus you see I am unusually poorly

x INTRODUCTION
furnished to fill the office of a " learned"
lecturer. Why, then, do I accept? I do so because,
while I have no capacity to aid the scholar,
I hope still to be of some service to those
who, as they are entering on life's more
thoughtful stage, find, as I did myself many
years ago, the foundations on which youth's
rather light-hearted religious structure had
been hastily builded, crumbling away beneath
their feet. The clearest-eyed among us sees
but dimly through life's dark glasses; but
dim as these eyes must be, to those who stead
ily seek for light, gleams do now and then
break through upon our stormy sea. Moments
of what we must deem " insight " are given
us, when all things around and within us are
less opaque. When we travellers, stumbling
along life's hard pathway, are sure that we
see a light, — no wide-shining illumination,
no Bethlehem star even, once again with steady
ray pointing to the manger where wisdom
learned to worship babyhood, but still a light
wide enough and clear enough to help us to

INTRODUCTION xi
order our steps aright — when such visitations
come true, then do we rise and gird up our
loins. New hope, and purpose, and courage,
are ours. We speak to our fellow travellers
to cheer them, or we even sing, as I have
heard tired soldiers sing, as they made long
march in the night.
Well, not to wander too aimlessly and too
long, I have had such experiences. I have
seen the "gleam" and stumblingly have
tried to rise and follow it, and of such times
and efforts I have tried to find some record.
I will try to recall what I saw and felt, in the
hope that it may be of some service to you,
who soon are setting out on the larger, freer
life awaiting those whose college days are over.
In my lectures to you I purpose going over
old ground. Dealing with old questions which
are ever the newest questions of all, — ques
tions that down here, in the shadows and
mists of this world life, can never receive a
full or satisfactory answer. Yet since each
man and woman of us all must, in his heart
of hearts, make some sort of tentative answer

xii INTRODUCTION
to them, must give some reason to his own
soul for the faith or non-faith that is in him, I
venture to offer you the poor best that is mine.
I was brought up to believe that on those
tremendous doctrines which are commonly
known as the fundamentals of our religion,
all should entertain a certainty, should at
least rejoice in a " sure and certain hope." I
cannot claim to have won any such faith.
Such hope as I have is far removed from cer
tainty. Nor do I find, among my fellow pil
grims of the road, that their assurances are
generally of a higher order than my own.
When we can succeed in breaking through
those conventions that so effectively muffle
the voices of our hearts, when we try to say
to each other what we really feel, — really
mean, — at such times Emerson's statement
of our human limitations fits us one and all : —

He by false usage pinned about
No breath within, no passage out,
Cast wishful glances at the stars,
And wishful saw the ocean stream : —

INTRODUCTION xiii
" Merge me in the brute universe,
Or lift to a diviner dream ! "
The divine within us makes surrender to
the brute an ultimate torture. The brute
within us plucks the pinion feather from our
souls' wings as they seek to bear us above the
steaming flats and valleys of sense.
Sometimes we are sure our feet are on the
king's highway, and the first thing we know
we find ourselves fast by the heels in Doubt
ing Castle, and all view of the Delectable
Mountains by the dark enclosing walls cut
off. Such is the experience of the majority of
men who are thoughtful, and who try to do
right. Such has been my experience, at any
rate, and as I speak to you, I shall at least
try not to profess an order of faith I do not
enjoy, or an assurance I do not possess. I
shall try to say what I feel and believe, and no
more. For I have noticed that few things are
more hurtful to the cause of real religion to
day than the habit of exaggeration into which
good people sometimes fall as they seek to aid

xiv INTRODUCTION
the faith of others by grossly overstating
their own.
When circumstances arose which made the
apostles of old look fearfully toward an un
certain and dangerous future, their spokesman
cried, "Lord, to whom shall we go? thou
hast the words of eternal life." Sure it is
that the intervening ages have given no re
sponse to that query — if Jesus cannot help
us, no one else can. It is a matter of history
that Jesus did most wonderfully inspire those
men. It is a matter of fact that he can and
does comfort, guide, and inspire those who
seek him to-day. Of this much I am sure. I
believe it with all my heart. I have seen it
proved, again and again, in the lives of many
people I have been privileged to know inti
mately. So I beg you to come with me and see if
duty's path may not grow plainer to you, and
your life's burden lighter, as you try to set
your will to understand and accept his reason
able service.
W. S. Rainsford.

THE REASONABLENESS
OF THE RELIGION OF JESUS

THE REASONABLENESS
OF THE RELIGION OF JESUS

THE REASONABLENESS AND NECESSITY OP
GROWTH AND CHANGE IN RELIGION
In my trouble I have prepared for the house of the Lord an
hundred thousand talents of gold ; . . . thou mayest add thereto.
— 1 Chron. xxii, 14.
David is delivering his dying charge to Sol
omon his son. David may be considered the
founder of the Israelitish kingdom. Perhaps
it is no unfair historic analogy to call him the
King Alfred of the Jews. The qualities that
have gone to make that imperishable race
great were embodied in David, its first great
king. Great were David's services to the weak
people he championed and led. It is not too
much to say that, if he did not make them a
nation, he saved the nation from merging,
being lost, in the surrounding and conflicting
tribes. By constant warfare he won them free-

4 THE REASONABLENESS OF
dom from enemies — and forced on them a
national unity. The extraordinary and unique
religious genius of that people found in David
one of its earliest and best expressions. With
him the richest religious poetry our race has
produced began to assume those forms which
in the Psalms are immortal. He must have
sung some of the first great religious Jewish
songs, and though we are unable positively to
ascribe to him any of the Psalms as we now
have them, we yet know that his commanding
personality had so stamped itself on the poetic
literature of the race that in after times it was
natural to ascribe to the warrior-poet the best
of them all.
The true poet of an epoch feels and is swayed
by the passions of his time. Those times were
cruel ; there was little pity shown from man to
man. Men were lustful and unscrupulous, and
often cruel, lustful, and unscrupulous was
David the king. Yet, in spite of much wrong
doing, the man was saved by that divine qual
ity, so largely possessed by the great Jews of
that far-away time — his yearning after God.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 5
He may not have penned those deathless
lines — "My soul thirsteth for God, for the
living God: when shall I come and appear
before God?" But doubtless some such long
ing it was that impelled him to build a temple
that should permanently enshrine Jehovah's
worship. Those who are inspired to great aims must
have souls stout enough to endure great dis
appointments. It is not given to the truly
great to have here their heart's desire. So runs
the story of the painful earth, and David's
ambition must be thwarted just when it is
wisest and most far-reaching. His political
insight taught him that the nation he had
organized must have its beliefs and aspira
tions embodied and made visible in a temple.
Such a central meeting-place would cement
the still but partially united tribes; would
tend to educate and purify the religious in
stincts of the people ; would serve as a strong
defence against encroaching idolatries, and at
the same time prove the best possible bulwark
for his throne.

6 THE REASONABLENESS OF
His political as well as his religious genius,
then, urged on the building of the great tem
ple ; and if he may not accomplish the work
he has so nobly planned for, it shall be Solo
mon's first care. " I in my trouble, in times
of war, mid a reign of blood, have ever held
before me the one great aim — such provisions
I have made. I have done what I can. Thou,
0 Solomon, mayest add thereto." The long
past veils from our eyes that golden temple
and its worshipping throngs. What was there
said and sung is but a legend to us. But the
reality and worth of it are unquestionable.
David's foresight and Solomon's magnificence
gave shape and expression to Jewish mono
theism. We owe much to the beauty-loving Greeks ;
we owe much to the law-making Romans ; but
more, far more do we owe to the God-loving
Jews. Vitalized, purified by the God-desire,
round that temple grew a national life whose
persistence is the wonder of all history, suc
cessfully resisting those forces of disintegra
tion that shattered and scattered nations far

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 7
mightier than they. A national poetry grew
up there, far the best religious poetry the
world has ever seen. And a legal code was
given to men, embodying social and religious
ideals immensely in advance of any other we
know of, at least in the Western world. Yes,
the more the religious history of the world
comes to be known, the greater the debt of
mankind to the Jew appears. To him we owe
a literature that still may be said to embody
the wisdom and hopes of our race. It is but a
truism to say that the Jewish religion had in
it the capacity to grow, to change, to adapt
itself. It took in many things from many peo
ples (probably the belief in life for man be
yond the grave, from the Persians). It assim
ilated them, and was not assimilated by them.
It could and did develop into Christianity.
But where lay the secret of this power of
growth and development ? What had this re
ligion, held by these puny tribes, in it that
the religions of far greater and more culti
vated peoples lacked? I think I am right in
pointing out one great vital quality it had that

8 THE REASONABLENESS OF
made it a growing religion, a religion that
from its very nature would voice itself in new
psalms, new poetry, new religious and moral
teachings of preacher prophets, who looked
out keenly on men and the times, and saw,
with a real illumination, what duty for them
selves and for their fellows meant.
That one priceless quality pessessed by Jew
ish monotheism was a steadfast determina
tion to explain life in terms of God. The
God of David and Solomon, the God of the
exiles and of the great Isaiahs, was more than
intensely interested in man's life. He was no
Jupiter, sitting far aloft, moved only to occa
sional interest in the struggling life of men.
He was with his people, cheering, guiding,
chastening, rewarding ; they, as it were, made
visible on earth his will ; their success was his
glory ; their shame and fall involved humilia
tion for him. His word was their law ; his
honor their honor ; he was a God wJw cared.
Of course so exalted a conception of God was
not born in a day. The god of the earliest
days was a narrower, more merely tribal god,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 9
than the god of later enlightened times. Men
never have conceived and never can conceive
of God other than as a mighty man. This is
one of the well-established limitations of hu
man thought, quite as evident in our latest
philosophies as in the discarded ideals of the
great men of long ago.
These Jews were cruel. The race meant
nothing to them ; their tribe everything. The
only god they were therefore capable of wor
shipping was at times cruel and narrow, and
tribal 'like themselves ; was for them and
against all others. Yet steadily, wonderfully,
their idea of God grew in beauty, purity, and
spiritual power, till the merely tribal god
vanished, and in his place we see with wonder
standing the God of the whole earth ; a god
to love as truly as to fear; a god whose high
and holy law reached far above the attain
ments of the best of men. That idea held the
Jew to his best. Did he stray from it for a
time and fall, then some new poet, some new
voice of warning or of prophecy was heard,
and true religion was revived again.

10 THE REASONABLENESS OF
Men's thoughts widen with the process of
the suns, and so widening, first outgrow, and
then cast aside, the older religious ideals that
have been produced by them. This process,
of course, is evident in the history of Jewish
religion. And if the various parts of its
matchless literature, which we call the Old
Testament, were better arranged than they
are at present in the common Bible we read,
this gradual discarding of old ideas, and their
replacement by new, would be much more
evident than it is. Contrasting with the merely
tribal god of the Exodus, let me quote a pas
sage that gives us the God of the later Psalms.
Leave out one or two lines in this marvellous
poem, and not among all the prayers that in
all the ages inspired men have raised to God
can be found anything more exquisite in its
adoration, more beautiful, more inspiring : —
Whither shall I go from thy spirit ? or whither
shall I flee from thy presence ?
If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there : if I
make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.
If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in
the uttermost parts of the sea,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 11
Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right
hand shall hold me.
How precious also are thy thoughts unto me,
O God ! how great is the sum of them !
Search me, O God, and know my heart ; try me,
and know my thoughts :
And see if there be any wicked way in me, and
lead me in the way everlasting.1
It is this unique power of growth, of ex
panding with, and possessing itself of, the
widening views of man, which has made the
Jewish religion immortal. Nor do I believe
that even now its vitality has quite passed
away. Modern Judaism may seem to many
dry and seedless; capable of producing no
new religious ideals, having lost its adapta
bility. But the extraordinary thing about
Judaism is that, speaking generally, it has not
given birth to crude and harmful religious
movements as have other religions. For a
long time its stem may seem dry and lifeless.
It has not at least burst forth into evil flower
and corrupt fruit. We Christians are too
hasty in concluding that that race to whom
1 Ps. cxxxix, 7, 8, 9, 10, 17, 23, 24.

12 THE REASONABLENESS OF
our religious debt is so unspeakably great has
seen its last vision, has given forth its last
message. The path of the religious Jew is not
our path to-day. Christian orthodoxy still
despises him and it. Still, at least, the shadows
of the ignorant animosities of long ago cling
to him. Once he made a fatal mistake, it is
true ; but has Christianity always chosen
rightly? Surely few unprejudiced students of
history would say as much. In the cult of the
Virgin and of the saints, both East and West
have widely departed from the religion of
Jesus and of the earlier day. Nay, surely the
time has come when Protestantism must admit
that in claiming for the Bible inerrancy, and
making that book the sole test of truth, it
has greatly erred.
If, as we must believe, the time approaches
(God in his mercy grant it may come soon)
when all good men everywhere will recognize
the need of subordinating, I do not say elim
inating, all creeds, when good men every
where, feeling their need of God in this world,
shall turn towards good men with outstretched

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 13
hands, may it not then come to pass that the
Jew, to whom above all others religion owes
its greatest debt in the past, may prove cap
able and willing to aid effectively in that
great getting together which the future has
in store for us?
If you have followed me so far, you already
see the point I desire to press on you in these
lectures that I am to deliver. It is this : The
genius and germ of a world religion were
present even in early Judaism, because that
religion was from the beginning committed
to an explanation, first of a small tribe's life,
later of man's life, in terms of God. They
were but men, these Jews, and so their reli
gious vision often grew dim. They were nar
row-minded, — so were all men then, — and
their religion might be narrow; a religion
depended on a law, a priesthood, or a book.
But their monotheism had within it that
which was destined to burst through and
overpass all the temporary barriers that hu
man ignorance employs to dim the light of

14 THE REASONABLENESS OF
God in the soul. It was to prove itself the
mustard seed, least of all seeds, from which
man's highest and purest concepts of God
have sprung. It made God responsible for the
soul of man. It dared to believe that human
life was actually a breath of God in its be
ginning, an honoring and serving of God
in its course, and a returning to God at its
close. Surely this was high thinking, indeed,
for those men of old time. Theirs was a vis
ion far clearer than that given to any other
sons of men. Theirs was a mighty faith; and
bravely and continuously they looked to God,
the God of the life of men, to justify it and
to vindicate them. Surely they did not look
in vain. Their miraculous survival till to-day
is that great faith's best vindication. They
gave to mankind Jesus the Christ, and alone
among the nations of his time they survive
to witness his world-wide victory.
Now it must be apparent that if we can
thus think of our religion, then our thinking
is fully in accord with the thoughts of men
busied in other departments of knowledge and

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 15
speculation. The order of the universe as it is
conceived of to-day is an order of progress
and of growth. If religion is not a settled,
stablished, changeless thing, but a sense of
duty, a vision of the great source of all law
and duty, that changes and grows clearer
from age to age, then religious thinking fits
in admirably with man's modern knowledge
and modern methods of adding to this know
ledge; and the idea that true science and true
religion ever really were or ever can be at war
is demonstrably absurd. Their advocates may
have fought in the past and they may fight in
the future — for the best and most honest-
hearted of us are at times warped and preju
diced; but the spirit of strife helps no man
up the hard high way, by which alone truth
may be won.
If we, then, can but see once for all that
there are not two ways of winning truth or
gaining its great goal, but only one, and that
that way is an old way, literally as old as the
hills, as old as the old world's order, then
surely we have gained something that is well

16 THE REASONABLENESS OF
worth while. At best life is often a lonely
business; but we are less lonely on life's path
way for the knowing that many whom we
have been taught to think of as in " another
camp" than ours are really only in another
regiment of the very same great army, and
are trying to do just what we know we must
keep trying to do, too — namely, add our lit
tle of effort or discovery to what is worthy in
life's slowly growing heap of things that shall
endure. I said just now that this view of religion is
old as the world's order. For what is that or
der? A fire, mist, a planet, granite, chalk,
marl, soil, an age-long process, as the result
of which there at last is spread over the cool
ing surface of our world a thin crust of soil,
on which and by which vegetable, animal, and
then human life may subsist. So to us the
very crust of the earth seems to cry, " Come,
0 man, be a fellow worker with me; for ages
and ages I have been preparing myself for
you. Now, 0 lord of creation, take up bravely
thine own subtler tasks; see what I have done

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 17
to prepare myself for thy lordship. I in my
trouble have so much wrought; thou mayest
add thereto."
As we dip into history it is the same story.
The past takes voice, the forgotten millions
of long ago who have gone the way of " dusty
death" seem to cry, " We fought, we bled, we
died, to win for you the comparative calm and
prosperity of your day. Think of us when you
work and are discouraged. Think of us when
you plan and are baffled. Think of us when
you falter and grow weary. Add thou thereto."
The social spirit makes the same appeal.
The people that have come or are coming to
us come from many different nations of the
earth. They are far from being the least
worthy representatives of those peoples. It
surely takes no small amount of courage and
of energy to break the dear ties of home and
fatherland and adventure into new and strange
circumstances. We loudly praise, we proudly
acknowledge, the heroism of those iron-souled
men and women who first sought our shores.
But we too often fail to recognize the pluck

18 THE REASONABLENESS OF
and self-denial that alone enables the common
emigrant of to-day to break away from a past
he knows and push his lonely fortune among
strange peoples and strange lands.
Believe me, it is not the weaklings of the
world who are adding their bloods to ours, who
are bringing their muscles and their energy
to the solving of our problems and the devel
opment of our state. These are tried sol
diers. They have the signs and scars of life's
battle on them, have these men and women
and little children. Honest, charitable, wise
hosts to these multitudes we are called to be.
Surely to no people did the social spirit ever
more clearly appeal than to us. You are the
children of the emigrant. More than two hun
dred and fifty years ago your fathers began
to come, when nothing but the broad rich
breast of an unexplored continent invited
them ; and since those days that strenuous
hopeful tide has never ceased to flow, and
your comfort and your wealth, your capacity
and education to-day are the fruits and results
of that flowing. Do your part. It is not the

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 19
part your fathers played. The wilderness has
vanished. The savage is now scarcely more than
a name by which lake, river, or mountain is
known. But a vast free country, a highly or
ganized civilization have grown up as if by
magic. A great political democracy here opens
wide its gate of hope and promise to the
world. This is a tremendous thing that we
profess to offer. It is for each of us to try to
make the promise good.
A Croatian peasant had made his way to an
Adriatic port. "Why," said a stranger who
happened to speak his language, — " why are
you leaving your fatherland and going forth
to an alien people, to a land so far across the
sea?" "I go," said he, "to see if there is a
country where there is justice between man
and man." Ah, that is a tremendous thing to
ask of any country, in which poor faulty man,
but half delivered from the power of the beast
within him, lives and rules. Yet such is the
unquenchable and growing sense of righteous
ness in us that we will not be contented with
even the poor Croatian's dream, but we must

20 THE REASONABLENESS OF
add to it the warming touch of brotherly love
that alone makes dear the thought of home
or fatherland. Yes, mankind evidently ex
pects much of us. And it is our high calling,
our deep religious duty not to disappoint man
kind of its hope. But let us not go blindfold
towards the future. To make good, all that is
best in all of us is likely to be taxed to the
very utmost.
The brave pioneers I spoke of, even the
fighting men of '61-65, had a task that was
simplicity itself compared to the task con
fronting us. It is when we are thoughtful,
when we find ourselves sitting down and try
ing to do what Jesus advised men to do, —
count the cost of things, and try our souls
to see if we are ready to play our part, able
with our ten thousand to meet him that com
eth against us with twenty thousand, — it is,
I say, when the healthy mood is on us that
we feel our real resting-place is alone found in
God ; in God and his order ; that good must
win in the end because it is good, and light
overcome the darkness because it is light; that

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 21
greater is He that is with us than all that can
be against us ; that the success of the King
dom of Heaven depends on no movement in
races of men, but on the very nature of things.
It fortifies my soul to know
That though I perish, truth is so ;
That howsoe'er I stray and range,
Whate'er I do, thou dost not change.
I steadier step when I recall
That, though I slip, thou dost not fall.
Yes, God back of the nature of things
makes good. "He that believeth shall not
make haste," says the old Book. And the
man grasping this strong consolation is not
dismayed or disappointed by the slow grinding
of God's grist, nor by the at times impercept
ible progress of what we call civilization. Civ
ilization rises as the coral islands rise, through
dark and unrecorded ages. Gerald Massey, the
poet of Chartist days in England, truly said,
We rise like corals grave by grave
That have a pathway sunward.
Down in the dark sea depths the foundations
of future life and beauty are slowly laid.
Each generation of little toilers lives, builds,

22 THE REASONABLENESS OF
dies, and broad and strong the foundations
are cemented together. Slowly the adamant
building mounts to the upper sunlit waters,
till at last the crispy, creamy spray marks
where they meet the sun. To all the winds
and forces of the upper world the little
builders seem to cry, "For ages and ages in
the darkness we have toiled and died. Now,
add ye to what we have done."
And so the slow-growing debris of ocean
comes " and adds thereto," and the sea birds
come and " add thereto " — and the grasses
and trees come ; and at last comes wandering,
careless man, and takes the sea island for his
home. At first he lives an almost bestial life,
is content merely to exist. The shellfish and
the nut sustain him ; the palm leaf or the
cave give him shelter. But a day dawns when
mysteriously the spirit of the great Whole
takes voice within him ; the spirit that bade
the coral insect toil in the salt, sunless gulfs
of the sea, that made the bird build, and the
grass grow — the same spirit is in him, and in
him finds a voice.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 23
He begins dimly to see something of the
meaning of it all ; the age-long voice of God,
first a blind instinct, then slowly shaping in
the dim recesses of his mind an idea of law.
From the coral beneath his feet, from the
palm tree above his head, from the surf's
thunder on the reef, from the undiscovered
depths of his own soul, the voice comes. " We
in our trouble have done what we could. 0
man, Lord of creation, thou who art the ex
planation and justification of our long tra
vail, add thou thereto." And so for the first
time the song of the world becomes articulate ;
and he — a son of God, for whom all things
have so long waited — gathers his children
round him as life's forces fail him, and says,
" It is worth while ; it is well worth while, my
children. It is for you to carry forward the
cause of good. Painful ages have spent them
selves in preparing the way you are called to
walk in. Lives innumerable struggled and
died to make it smooth. The very soil you live
by is one mighty grave. The very ground you
tread on is holy. See, then, that you play

24 THE REASONABLENESS OF
your part in building the temple of the Lord."
Ah, true it is —
Our lives are beautiful through drudgeries
Of those who gave them time and space to grow
Through generations to the perfect curve.
Our hair has got the gold, because the dust
Of the world's highways often soiled the feet of our
forefathers,
And the blue-veined hands were moulded to their
tenderness of touch
By centuries of labor rude and hard.
As I conclude, let me leave the general as
pect of this question, and come to a personal
view of it. There are few, indeed, of us who,
as we allow our thoughts to search the past,
do not recall, it may be with something of
remorse, yet also with gratitude, the good,
the lovely, the loving we knew long ago. Full
well we know that any good thing there is in
us, any worthy thing we have accomplished,
is greatly due to them: fathers and mothers
and dear friends who did much, and suffered
much, to make us better than we promised to
be — to give us a prospect of truly succeeding
in life. Yes, there are many of you young
people listening to me now who could not

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 25
possibly have hoped to enjoy the opportunities
of a great university had not those who loved
you slaved and denied themselves for long
cruel years, that the splendid chance that now
is yours might be won for you. Ah, the best
of us need sometimes to be reminded of these
commonplaces of home life. Some of us for
get them, or take them as matters of course,
for it is sadly possible to suffer ideals that
kept alive faith and hope and the confidence
in the worth-while of life, in parents whose
circumstances were those of hardship, to
wither away and fail in the children whose
lives are lives of ease. It is the thought of
my own home that makes me speak thus to
you — a home in Ireland, where father and
mother and eight little children lived happily
together on fifteen hundred dollars a year.
Eight mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, and
minds to educate, on that modest sum. If we
had anything nice to eat — or unusually good
to cover us — it was because they denied
themselves. We had beautiful scenery at our
doors, and beautiful flowers in our garden.

26 THE REASONABLENESS OF
My father's roses were famous, and as a treat
I was allowed to help my mother in her gar
den, where, during summer, she was busy
long before my early school hour of seven
o'clock. Brave in spirit but frail in body was
our mother, and pain long and hard claimed
her while we were yet very young. So we
went forth into the wide world each to fight
his way, and realized little, indeed, how great
was our debt to that little vicarage home, or
to those who had made it so soft and warm a
resting-place for the young brood. Ah, and
then — death broke up the circle, and she
who was its central power was gone, and we
could only think of things, and wish we had
but thought them sooner, so that we might
have said them. For it is poor and unsatisfac
tory business to think loving things of those
we owe everything to, and then to lock up
our thoughts in our breasts, so none is the
wiser. Undignified talking this for a univers
ity lecturer, yet, since it is true, though God
knows how small a part of the truth, it shall
stand. Perhaps it may help some here to a

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 27
step they never surely will regret; help you
to cast false shyness and shame aside, and go
to some in whose debt you heavily are, and
do what you can, not to discharge it, — that
cannot be, — but at least to acknowledge it.
Of ourselves we have done very little ; all
intelligent people are beginning to recognize
this. Yet the false, ignorant spirit of conceit
and brag is with us still. " I am what I am
because I won my own success. I won life's
game off my own bat. I have made good."
Words still too common, alas ! The words of
an ignorant and ungrateful fool.
" I know what I know because I studied
long and hard. I have searched and found
what I needed, what I sought." No true
scholar speaks thus. He knows too well that
it is to the study of others, often of forgotten
and unrewarded men, that he owes such little
light of uncertain knowledge as may illumine
the semi-darkness of his mind. "I have what
I have because I earned it. I will do what I
will with my own." Enlightened sense of com-

28 THE REASONABLENESS OF
mon justice is fast hastening to take this last
sort of fool by the throat, and if common
sense cannot teach him his folly and dishon
esty, common law surely will.
We are only dusty soldiers in a great army
on a long, long march; we advance and re
treat, sway onward, bend backward in an age
long struggle ; little coral insects building, in
darkness and storm, the living places of the
far future. We need religion or we shall not
believe in the worth-whileness of it all. And
we, lacking it, will stray from the marching
line to grasp at flowers that wither, or to seize
on dangerous fruits that decay and turn to
dust. And the religion we must have must be
a religion justifying man's life on this earth,
and giving some insight as to earth's meaning.
Here and now it must help us see that good
ness is worth the trouble it costs; that we are
in honor bound to aim for the highest. We
shall not always see this. We may stray from
the marching line, to gather the flowers, to
surfeit ourselves on the fruit; but then such

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 29
excursions are things to blush for, are deser
tions of good comrades, and bring danger to
them and shame to ourselves. I believe such a
reasonable and necessary religion Jesus Christ
brought to men. More than that, I believe
that he is revealing such a religion to us to
day ; that even now he speaks to the toilers,
the truth-seekers, the lovers of good, the piti
ful, the brave, everywhere ; that not only to
those who make a success of their struggle
after better things, but to the vastly larger
number who make what seems a failure of it,
he speaks.
If this is true, how, then, account for the
discouragement and division so evident to-day
in the Christian churches? Discouragement is
surely not generally in the air. In all other de
partments of life there is no lack of buoyancy
and confidence. There is a very general con
sciousness that we are accomplishing some
thing, that we are adding to the achievements
of our fathers, that we are "making good."
Knowledge advances with leaps and bounds.
We are uncovering some of Nature's secrets.

30 THE REASONABLENESS OF
We are using her beneficent resources to over
come or mitigate the pains and penalties she
has for so long laid remorselessly on us. Hope
fully, confidently, we are learning to face our
problems and to prepare for our future.
Can we truthfully claim that this is reli
gion's attitude also ? I fear we cannot ; at least
in so far as the orthodox churches express for
us religion. In the churches a spirit of doubt,
disheartenment, and division is too evident,
and one of its chief causes I hold to be this,
the churches' fear of change. They always
have feared it, and that fear, harmful and
limiting as it has proved in the (shall I call
them?) dormant ages, is doubly so in times
like our own, when a rush of new ideas, a tor
rent of life, sweeps through the veins of man
kind. The churches are dismayed by the
clamorous demands made on them both from
within and from without their borders. They
are in danger of forgetting the very nature
of the truth they only exist to conserve and
reveal, namely, no religion can help or inspire
man when it ceases to explain his life in terms

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 31
of God. It is cold comfort to the scholar to
believe that his forbears worshipped God as
they pursued their studies, but as for him he
must make choice between his studies and his
father's God. The spirit of timidity is the very
last spirit that can accomplish any worthy
thing to-day. Scholarship advances every
where with joy. Its confident joy is its
strength. In all departments of man's search
ing he goes forth bravely to seek the truth,
assured that the truth is a good thing, and
well worth the seeking; that pain and self-
denial are well endured if he but win a tiny
grain of truth, to be reverently added to the
slowly mounting heap of man's acquirement.
The religious searcher after truth, or rather,
I should say, the student who remains in the
pale of orthodoxy, is alone hampered. Voices
that speak with authority, and other voices,
at least as urgent, who have no authorization
at all, alike bid him to be careful. " You may
search where you like," they cry, "but beware
that you only find what we approve (who our
selves have no time or ability to search).

32 THE REASONABLENESS OF
Otherwise you must leave our company ; you
must take your place outside the pale of or
ganized Christianity."
It is all wrong, terribly wrong. Religion
and life are one. There are no two kinds of
truth. There are no two ways of finding
truth. And if in a time when life is changing,
greatly, gloriously, religion hesitates to change
too, then life and religion must, temporarily
at least, take different roads and part company,
and that means the saddening of Hfe and the
withering of religion.
It is, then, to the inevitableness and reason
ableness of change in our religious beliefs, as
in every other department of our lives, that I
am now going to call your attention. Jesus
was a profound believer in change, he himself
proclaimed momentous changes, yet every
thing he taught was rooted in and sprang from
the past. Change, he said, was not necessarily
the destruction of the past, but the fulfilment
of it. The nature of truth everywhere is the
same — it is seed; and seed must die that it
may grow, and change that it may live.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 33

II
JESUS' DOCTRINE OP THE SEED: THE METHOD
OF GROWTH AND CHANGE
Jesus said, " So is the Kingdom of God, as if a man should east
seed into the ground ; . . . and the seed should spring and grow
up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth fruit of
herself." — Mark iv, 26-28.
I said the Jewish religion was an effort to
explain life in terms of God ; life as they saw
it ; to justify life as they knew it. That is what
a real rehgion must ever attempt to do if it
would live at all.
From the nature of things such a religion
is committed to change. Its advocates and de
fenders may forget, and often have forgotten
this, may and often do fiercely deny and re
sent it, but the inevitable fact remains. For
what is life ? Life is an open book in which
each generation of men writes its own story,
and that story is completely different from
all the stories that have preceded it. Life is

34 THE REASONABLENESS OF
a great building, rising as the coral islands
rose — We rise like corals grave by grave
That have a pathway sunward.
Each generation, each race of men adds its
course of stone or brick or perishable rubble
to what other builders have built before it.
The problems of each decade change. If re
ligion only affords answers to the questions
of days gone by, men living in a vital present
will soon cease to question it. So much is
evident, surely.
There are those who are quick to recognize
this need of flexibility in religious formula?,
and at the same time profess themselves dis
tressed at the doubtfulness and uncertainty
that often characterizes the best religious
teaching they have access to. This is not a
reasonable position to take. Real religion,
true to its best ideals, bending all its energy
to illumine and explain life's tragedies and
mysteries, must of necessity halt, hesitate, and
change, just because life halts and changes.
It should be scarcely necessary to do more

THE RELIGION OF JESUS S5
than state this fact, to commend its reason
ableness and necessity ; but surely it is often
quite forgotten by those who should know
better. Consider our own national life — free
beyond compare, unburdened, unsaddened
by the tragic and costly pasts that other na
tions have known. These others may advance
hardily into the future, yet they are encum
bered with debts to be discharged. They are
as men no longer young, seamed and scarred
by wounds that have not only left indelible
marks, but have drained away much of their
vigor and national energy. The mistakes and
sins of other times lie heavily on the freest
of them. But we ! We have only our own
brief problems to solve, our own hastily con
tracted debts to pay, and yet they are quite
sufficient to give us cause for thoughtfulness.
Freest, youngest, richest, strongest of the
nations we are, yet we have our problems,
and they can only be successfully met in a
spirit of confident faith in God and man. In
that faith we may rejoice in our past, glory
in what our forefathers won of freedom and

36 THE REASONABLENESS OF
unity, but we surely cannot continue to grow
or to prosper if our eyes are chiefly directed
to the past. Questions of to-day press on us
that must be answered; duties that must be
done. Do we falter before them because we
cannot be always certain of the best and wisest
thing to do, the straightest course to take?
In these social matters, there is no one author
itative voice to answer oracularly our ques
tion; no one inspired leader to tell us how to
accomplish our duty. No, up and down the
land these things must be debated — in work
shop and in Wall Street ; in university, lec
ture-hall, and labor-union meeting; and in
these, many conclusions are arrived at, many
halting and sometimes conflicting theories ad
vanced. Yet, since we believe that men gen
erally are trying to see straight and do right,
we believe that out of the babel and confusion
a clearer vision of duty, a stride forward in
social progress, will in time be won. So we
do not wait for an infallible leadership, but
follow such light as we have, attempting
bravely to do the thing that comes next to hand.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 37
So much is evidently true of our national
life, and since it is true, we are not at all
dismayed if we see that great human column
of the nation's progress at times sway, at
times seem to stop and crumble away at the
head, as it storms onward on life's battle-field.
"Such is Hfe," we say. Only by struggle,
by fierce contrast and comparison can the
best in ideas or the best in men win out, and
be approved as fittest to last and survive.
Yes, such is life's law of progress, and
truth's law. Such is the law of all brave ad
venture, and of all true discovery, and such
must be religion's law too. To separate reli
gion from these, to demand for it another and
a different order of progress, is fatal to its
vitality, is fatal to its final acceptance by
thinking men. Yet good men are ever forget
ting this, and Jesus sought to remind them
of it when he gave forth his great doctrine
of the Seed.
Jesus as a teacher found himself confronted
by an immense development of religious ideas
that had grown up round the simple and

38 THE REASONABLENESS OF
earlier faith of his race. There was nothing
extraordinary in this ; nay, it was natural and
necessary. Growth and addition are an evi
dence of life. "Add thou thereto" is the
voice of every living faith. It is a truism of
religious history to say that, so soon as in
any religion signs of growth and addition
fail, that religion is decaying, and must soon,
in the nature of things, take its place among
the vast number of forgotten beliefs that
flourished but for a time. These growths are
like the branches of a tree. Some will endure
all stress of storm and sun, be incorporated
in the tree, and Hve in its life so long as the
tree lives ; and some have not enough vitaHty
to endure, but faU or are cut away, and the
tree lives on without them, and is the better
for the parting.
Now a time had arrived in the religious life
of Judaism when these accumulations had to
be dealt with. A house-cleaning of the faith
was due, and Jesus felt that this heavy and
thankless task was laid on him. The life of
the spirit was in Judaism still, but so overlaid

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 39
by the garments men had woven to protect it,
so hidden by the pictures they had painted to
explain it, that garments or pictures were by
the multitude taken for the vital realities
themselves. Jesus constantly proclaims that true religion
is a growing thing. He will give place to no
man in honoring the men by whom the spirit
of the ever-living God spake in the times of
the past ; but he believes that God as truly
speaks to men in his own times as in those
great days of long ago. And more than that,
he believes that God will as truly continue to
speak to men in the times that lie beyond;
that those who come after him will see clearer
lights and do greater deeds than he.1
Jesus is in short an evolutionist. He will
not cast himself loose from the past. He
knows well, he ever insists, that he is what he
is ; he knows what he knows, because of it.
Instinctively he knows that all true develop
ment and progress are out of, and because of,
all that has gone before. He would preserve,
1 See John xiv, 12.

40 THE REASONABLENESS OF
not destroy, those structures, habits, tenden
cies, which have proved themselves to be suit
able and worthy. Again and again he protests
that he is no destroyer, but a constructor.
When he is confronted by his enemies, among
whom are numbered the most religious men
of the time, when they oppose his teaching
and accuse him of heresy, blasphemy, and
treason to the cause of the God of the Jews,
he confounds them by turning to the old writ
ings. The law, the psalms, the prophets, all
in turn he quotes with a profound knowledge,
with a spiritual insight and acumen that are
astounding and convincing. His enemies may
know the letter of religion and of its record ;
its inner, truer meaning Hes open to his mind.
His opponents are often convinced and gener
ally silenced.
Yes, the life of the spirit was in Judaism
still. If it had not been so, then Jesus' pro
clamation and vindication of it against the
ritualists would have quite failed, and his re
ligion would have died with him. As it was,
he saved the precious thing he loved ; he lifted

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 41
it up ; he glorified and enlarged it. It had been
a tribal rehgion ; he made it a religion of the
Western world.
Yet surely Jesus himself was right in his
judgment of what he came to do (though in
after centuries orthodoxy has persistently pro
claimed him mistaken). It was to proclaim a
God and .Father long ago proclaimed, to strip
off the veils and coverings good men had mis
takenly spread over his face, and push aside
the poor daubed pictures they had painted of
him. It was not to destroy the law or the pro
phets, but to fulfil ; not to pull down the Tem
ple, but to tell its meaning; not to proclaim a
new God, but a God long ago known and
worshipped, — the Father, not of some favored
Jews, but of all. His vision of God was his
own, but it was not a complete vision. He
says so. But by its light he could and did
claim to discriminate between what was of
merely temporary and what of permanent
value in the Jewish religion of the day. (Of
other religions he knew nothing.) He made

42 THE REASONABLENESS OF
God nearer, clearer, to simple men. He gave
them a more inspiring view of duty, a calmer
courage, a purer faith. He always appealed to
the divine quality in men. He called on them
to see the light. He told them they had the
power to follow it. He had no quarrel with
authority. The priests and Pharisees sit in
Moses' seat. Their official position he accepts,
for he is a Jew. But their perversion of the
truth they profess to defend he denounces,
for the one aim and end of his life is to be
true, and to speak the truth ; and all things
that hide or distort the truth are not of God,
but of evil.
Thus Jesus went forth upon his lonely way.
He was called a destroyer ; he was in truth an
evolutionist. He courted and met a destroyer's
doom, and died for an everlasting principle.1
1 After delivering these lectures, I read Harnack's Con
stitution and Law of the Church, which has just been given us
in an English translation. To my great satisfaction, I find
that this profound scholar fully upholds and endorses the
view I have ventured to present of Jesus' relation to Judaism.
On page 4 of the Introduction, Harnack says : "The Church
is younger and older than Jesus. It existed in a certain sense
long before him. It was founded by the prophets, in the first

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 43
That principle was the principle of the
seed. Religious truth is a divine seed sown in
human life. There is nothing new or startling
in that, you say; every one admits as much.
But it is not so. So far as I know, or have been
able to learn, Jesus Christ was the first reli
gious teacher so to define truth and man's rela
tion to it. His disciples certainly at first did not
understand the significance of this definition
of his. To his opponents and detractors the
simile itself must have been meaningless, and
his application of it aroused their fear and
wrath. It was a sweetly reasonable doctrine,
but it was also an epoch-making doctrine.
For it asserted not merely that truth (as we
poor men down here get to see it) may grow
and change from age to age, but that by vir
tue of its very nature and environment, it
must so grow and change or speedily die. It
was a definition that struck hard at one of the
most cherished beliefs, not of the Jewish peo
ple alone, but of the whole race. To accept it
place, within Israel, but even at that time it pointed beyond
itself. All subsequent developments are changes of form."

44 THE REASONABLENESS OF
meant that the danger to true religion arises
not only from those who attack its claims
from without, but from those, its would-be,
often honest-minded defenders, who cham
pion its cause from within.
The very zeal of those who defend rehgion
might, in Jesus' view, prove a chief cause of
danger ; might threaten and even destroy the
very precious thing they were fain to defend.
In the very interests of the truth itself, many
such men, in all religions, in all parts of the
world, have been found, who manfully, de
votedly protested against change in the beHef
they loved. Those advocating change were to
them, by that very advocacy, clearly revealed
as enemies of their great cause of truth —
profaners, desecrators of the shrines of the
gods. If circumstances place power in such
men's hands, without question or quarter, they
will unhesitatingly use such power to crush to
the earth these mistaken, nay, wicked advo
cates of what to them is nothing less than a
proclamation of religious anarchy and blas
phemy.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 45
No, Jesus' definition is not so simple as it
sounds. It can be quoted as a justification for
all sorts of religious movements, sane and in
sane. It can be made, and has been made by
the incontinent reformer, to cover and justify
all reformations, even those of the iconoclast ;
to justify every crude and ephemeral heresy,
from early gnosticism to the modern mon
strosities of Mormonism and Christian Science.
I think I am safe in saying that as a whole
the early Christian teachers did not under
stand the vital importance of this aspect of
the Master's teaching. They fought shy of it.
Those who did give prominence to the idea
of development in Christianity, to the seed
principle, as it were, though among them
were the most brilliant minds of the time,
often seem to have got out of touch with the
general life of the Church (perhaps the Church
was not yet ready for their teaching). Men
who are out of touch with the general life of
their time are, from the very nature of the
isolation imposed on them, inclined to over
emphasis, over-statement, of the supremely

46 THE REASONABLENESS OF
good thing they see, and so, like a too heavily
laden branch in a not too fruitful tree, they
fall away, by reason of their own excess of
productiveness, from the parent stem. Such
is the sad history of many a heresy, of many
a reform. The extremist has lost touch with
the main trunk of the tree, which was neces
sary to him, and the semi-barren tree has lost
the fruitful bough, which was a grievous loss
to it.
The forced importance, the wide signifi
cance of this simile of the seed, which Jesus
chooses to explain the nature of his teaching
and the quality and reproductive power of his
word, are only realized as we remember that
this insistence of his on the living, growing,
changing property of truth runs through all
he says, influences all he does. He dwells on
it and enforces it. He is attacked by his ene
mies for proclaiming it, and finally it is the
doctrine that sends him to his cross.
Let me, then, briefly touch on the cause of
this bitterness of opposition to a principle so
reasonable.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 47
Conservatism always makes a good fight
for its own. In such proportion as we value
what we hold, we rally our best forces to de
fend it. Conservatism has proved itself most
stubborn of opponents for this very reason.
It is the high value we attach to our beliefs
that makes us rally to their defence against
any and all who would alter them. In the
hearts of multitudes of men the religious
forms that have surrounded their youth are
associated with what in retrospect seems to
them beautiful and best worth having. It is
the seed sown in youth's springtime, ideas
implanted within us while we are very young,
that root themselves most deeply. They take
up more space within us than we ourselves
are always aware, but they are also apt to lie
more dormant than those ideas we call the
secular. The stress and strain of life is on us.
We are occupied with much serving. We are
forced to activity in many ways, but this is
apt not to be so true in our religious think
ing. No great religious disputes have arisen in

48 THE REASONABLENESS OF
our time — at least none that have called men
to make sacrifices for what they believe, and
so (I am only describing the case of the or
dinary man) the deeply planted ideas of our
earliest days remain pretty much as they were.
Besides, we are forced to such restlessness,
such perpetual effort, in order to hold our own
in many departments of our life, that we find
it pleasant to have a quiet corner in it some
where. And if that corner is a little dusty from
disuse, well, the very dust has a suggestion
of an Old-World perfume, as those lavender-
sprinkled cupboards of our mothers had, where
the most precious household belongings were
laid away from the vulgar eye. " Let us leave
these sacred things alone," we say. " Let us
come to the religion of our forefathers to rest.
There is so much new that we are obhged to
study and use, so much in each department
of life that must be changed, let us forget it
here as long as we may. In social, political,
mercantile, or artistic life, momentous change
is everywhere in the air. Radicalism is forced
on us. Do let us be at least conservative in

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 49
our religion. What is good enough for our
parents is good enough for us."
I am persuaded that this is a more common
attitude than is generally supposed, and of
course it is a very dead-and-alive and very
unreal attitude. It can only result in the slow
dying-out in a man of those deeply important
things within him that he thinks he values
most, but really neglects, till at last of him it
may be true —
Some souls are serfs among the free,
While others nobly thrive ;
They stand just where their fathers stood,
Dead even while they live.
But not to digress too far !
From modern excuses for a do-nothing pol
icy in religious thinking, let me hark back to
the consideration of those circumstances that
made Jesus seem a religious anarchist to the
pious conservatism of his time, and brought
down on him 'the hatred of the rulers of his
people. Why should these people have op
posed him bitterly as they did ? Jesus himself
was ever ready to recognize constituted author-

50 THE REASONABLENESS OF
ity. "The scribes and Pharisees sit in Moses'
seat. Whatsoever they say unto you, do there
fore, but be ye not like to them." This was
ever his attitude to the officers of the national
rehgion as well as those charged with more
secular rule. Thus, again, to the man who
came to be healed he says : " Go show thyself
to the priests and offer the gift that Moses
commanded for a testimony to them " — i.e.
" to prove to them that I am a law-abiding,
God-honoring Jew, intent on obeying the law
as well as the spirit of our country's religion."
This being his attitude, how, then, account
for the furious hatred that was satisfied with
nothing less for him than the doom of the
shameful cross? Were these priests and
scribes, these politico-religious men that were
the party bosses of their day — were they al
together evil ? Were they hardened against
all pity, and hopelessly bad? By no means.
But they were committed, both by their incli
nations and by their interests, to a fixed con
servatism. The history of the Jews' fight for freedom

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 51
since the return from captivity is a great story.
The men who waged that struggle were men
of high purpose, of desperate courage, and of
faith in God. And doubtless these their suc
cessors had possibilities of heroism within
them. They were of the same lump as those
who, so soon after the days of Jesus, called
together for the defence of all they held most
dear the banded force of the little nation.
And then behind the sacred city's wall, and
later from street to street and court to court,
made against the irresistible power and dis
cipline of Rome one of the most hopelessly
heroic defences recorded in history.
These men who opposed Jesus then were
far from being utterly bad men. Yet they
mistook their way. They ruined (as Jesus
foretold they would) their country, and they
did all that evil men might do to quench -the
light of the world. It is a heavy indictment
that history has lodged against them, and yet
they only did what others have done again
and again. They were at least as much the
victims of a mistaken policy as they were the

52 THE REASONABLENESS OF
perpetrators of a crime, and the order we live
under punishes us as promptly for one as for
the other.
As I said, then, before, the very value the
Jews and their leaders attached to the relig
ion, of which they rightly believed themselves
to be the divinely appointed guardians, made
them fanatically opposed to any changes in it
— whether forced on them by foreign powers
from without, or promulgated by unauthorized
and irresponsible teachers, as they believed
them to be, from within.
Then their cause of quarrel with the Lord
was clear — unmistakably clear. They would
willingly die to defend what they thought
was the truth, but what was actually only the
corpse whence truth, the life, had fled. They
were the " stand-patters " of their time.
Jesus was the Radical of his. Jesus stood for
the growth-principle, believed in the certainty
and necessity of development and change in
man's view of God and of his truth. These
others held fast by the sacred deposit the
nation had received. They regarded it as a

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 63
treasure no hands but their own might touch
— an Ark of the Covenant, so many inches
wide, so many long, containing so many sa
cred words and letters of directly revealed
truth ; nay, every letter traced, as their holy
tradition had it, by the finger of God. Theirs
was the mistake, still made by good but mis
guided men to-day, that "the Faith once de
livered to the saints " was only to be expressed
in the dogmas they propounded and defended.
Needless to say, in the formulation of their
theory, these religious conservators ignored
both present facts and past history ; ignored
the fact, which all scholars at that time knew
well, that age by age round that law had
grown up a vast mass of commentary and subtle
explanation that had often, at least in the
popular mind, become confused with the di
vine law itself. Jesus had accurately summed
up the whole religious situation when he said,
" Ye have made the law of God of none effect
through your tradition."
I dwell on this fatal conservatism of the op
ponents of our Lord, not chiefly because it

54 THE REASONABLENESS OF
explains the source of the orthodox hatred he
drew down on himself, but particularly be
cause it furnishes an admirable illustration of
a spirit that always has been and ever will be
active in the mistaken defence of what it
deems to be the truth — "a spirit of irrelig
ious solicitude for God," I would call it.
Some old saint somewhere gave it that name.
It seems to fit the case.
This spirit of irreligious solicitude for God
is not the spirit of one age only, but of all
ages. It has been fatally active not in the his
tory of Christianity alone. Its presence is
evident in the history of all the great religions.
Earlier and purer Mohammedanism has suf
fered, as Judaism suffered, at the hands of its
self-constituted guardians and exponents. A
Mohammedan reformer might also truly say,
" Ye have made God's law of none effect
through your tradition."
Looking back through the dim spectacles
of history on the struggle round the person
and teaching of Jesus, it seems a one-sided
affair. All goodness and beauty on one side;

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 55
all that is vile and vicious on the other. Ig
norant, unhistoric ages have poured their vi
tuperation on the men who prepared the way
for the Cross, and then firmly forced its vic
tim to his inevitable doom. But this was not
Jesus' own view. He was full of mercy and
charity for the generation that rejected and
martyred him. Of priest, Pharisee, scribe, and
multitude it was alike true, " They knew not
what they did " ; and yet their own history
might have enlightened them. Let us look
backward for a moment.
The sacred religion of the Jews had already
survived more than one catastrophe, had come
through more than one tempest, had proved
its possession of a vital power that no con
temporary religion seems to have possessed.
In my first lecture I tried to trace the reason
ableness and necessity of the organic form
which that rehgion took. The Temple, the
one holy place, its priestly order, its rich rit
ual, served as the necessary centre of the na
tion's life, a nation, the special office of which
was to preserve for our race a pure monothe-

56 THE REASONABLENESS OF
ism. Other nations might gather round their
kings and the temples of many gods. The
Jews stood fast round the temple of one God,
which took precedence of the throne of any
Jewish king.
In no land, in no religion, so far as I know,
was there any counterpart to that sacredly
unique building at Jerusalem. The vitality
of this religion was to be subjected to a ter
rible test. There befell it a catastrophe that
swept people and temple away. Conquest, fol
lowed by national transplantation, was a com
mon fate enough in those cruel days of old.
To consolidate their strength, the greater
peoples laid ruthless hands upon the less, who
speedily were henceforth lost to history, they
and their traditions disappearing forever. The
rude Assyrian captain, standing before Jeru
salem's wall, spake no more than the truth
when he said, " Hath any of the gods of the
nations delivered at all his land out of the hand
of the King of Assyria ? Where are the gods
of Hamath and of Arpad ? Where are the gods
of Sepharvaim, Hena, and Ivah ? Have they

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 57
delivered Samaria out of my hand? Who are
they, among all the gods of the countries,
that have delivered their country out of my
hand, that the Lord should dehver Jerusalem
out of my hand?"
Why, indeed, should Judah's case prove dif
ferent from these ? So it seemed, when finally
the conquering horde swept over the land and
the city. The sacred places are desecrated,
every precious and holy thing is carried away.
Quenched is the only light of Israel's God,
and faithful and faithless have perished to
gether. Then a wonderful thing — a thing without
a parallel in all history — comes to pass.
Bereft of all religious opportunity, the great
soul of a Httle people arises, and takes hold on
the skirts of God. Without a temple or an
altar, without a priestly order or any rites of
sacrifice, in a remote and heathen land, the
flame of a true worship of a true God flickers
up in the darkness. In the hearts of brave men
and women, in the voices of faithful preachers
and poets, it was heard. The nation had truly

58 THE REASONABLENESS OF
gone down into its hell, and there it found its
God anew.
And so a national miracle was wrought, and
these Jewish tribes — what was left of them,
unimportant in their hour of prosperity even,
diminished to a mere handful in their hour of
loss — achieved what none of the great peo
ples of the earth ever achieved — a national
resurrection. Needless to say, these returning survivors
of a seventy years' captivity were no common
men, were moved by no commonplace impulse.
They came back wiser and more sober men.
Yes, more than that. They came back with a
larger faith, with a hope that till then had
not (so far as we can learn from their pre-
captivity writings) been any part of their re
ligion — the hope of personal immortality
after death. Their bitter experience had tended
to teach them that God cared, not for the na
tion only as the guardian of his truth, but for
the individual too. They had learned to love
their land, their temple, their law, their priestly
order, and greatly yet they were to fight and

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 59
suffer for these things. But the God who had
led them back cared for something more even
than these. He cared for man. Cut off from
all they had been taught to hold sacred, all that
their divinely given law had insistently pro
claimed necessary, denied priest, sacrifice,
temple, altar, God had not denied himself to
them. He had not turned away his face from
them in their exile. He had hearkened to the
voice of their prayer. Is it too much to say
that, while they were exiles worshipping with
out a temple, the seed of that sublime truth
which in after years was to be voiced by Jesus
the Jew found lodgment in the Jewish na
tion's heart, and dimly the best of them fore
saw a day when the place or mode of man's
worship should matter little, and the spirit of
that worship matter all? when "neither in
Gerzim, nor yet at Jerusalem should men wor
ship the Father, for he is a spirit and seeketh
true worshippers to worship him in spirit and
in truth"?
Had, then, the glorious temple planned by
David, the poet king, andbuilded by Solomon,

60 THE REASONABLENESS OF
quite failed of its purpose ? Surely not. It had,
as it were, anchored the Jewish people during
dark, stormy times. It had enabled the Jew to
resist the disintegrating forces of a period dur
ing which the nations surrounding them seem
one after another to have disappeared. It had
accomplished more. It had helped to foster in
the very heart of the Jew an understanding of
and a love for monotheism, that no national
calamity, not even a national exile among alien
religionists, could overcome or destroy.
The exile, then, had its uses. Its teachings
were never, we may believe, quite lost. But by
the time Jesus came they had in their turn been
overlaid and long forgotten. The inevitable
(shall we call it ?) conservatism of human na
ture had again asserted itself. Very soon it had
built up round the growing seed of the truth
new protecting walls and shields. The divine
deposit of seed that the heathen captivity
could not kill was so precious it must be care
fully guarded in a Pot. Then the pot itself
becomes precious, and naturally so, because
it protects the seed. Presently the seed grows

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 61
and sprouts above the pot, for it has life, it is
seed, gets, in short, too big for the pot. And
what are you going to do about it ?
Ah, this quality of growth is a troublesome
and painful thing — pain and striving, change
and decay it means, but there is no real joy or
power in living without it. We men are ever
making choice between the growing seed and
the containing pot, and as we choose wisely or
ill, we succeed or we fail in life's great task,
to advance or oppose . the Kingdom of God
and of truth.
In the realm of what is called the practical,
the penalties for refusal to acknowledge or
obey the law of change are so severe, are so
immediately operative, that stupidity itself can
not ignore or evade them. A man will insist
on doing business on the old stand where his
father did it before him. His father succeeded
there — he cannot. Business has drifted away
from that quarter. He must follow the drift
or lose his living. Harsh experience ruthlessly
forces change on the most conservative busi
ness or professional man. If he put the pot's

62 THE REASONABLENESS OF
life before the seed's Hfe, he is sooner or later
a failure. The man who will not move on
is lost. And knowing this, we send our boys
to the best schools, colleges, universities, and
insist that those who teach them, or supervise
their studies there, should be men well ac
quainted with the last discoveries of science or
latest conclusions of history. Let me sin against
the law of progress in my business, in my daily
contact with my fellows, and I am so immedi
ately punished that I am not likely quickly to
sin again. In other departments of my Hfe,
though of course the same law holds good, I
may not be so quick to see or prove its opera
tion. If my child is dangerously sick and I
choose a doctor, I will insist that he is a man
whose conservatism has not prevented his giv
ing thorough study to the new and wonderful
medical discoveries of our day. I will not en
dure the idea that, because of any fad of his,
my child should be denied the use of the serum
for diphtheria, for instance, or Pasteur's treat
ment for rabies. But instill other departments
of life, where reality is not so ruthlessly forced

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 63
on me, and where I do not so quickly pay for
my folly, it is just as likely as not that I will
play the fool. I who insist that the pot shall not
be preferred to the seed may be found putting
up, just as the Jews did, a very pretty defence
pro pot, contra seed. I may be ready to notice
and condemn this fatally mistaken tendency in
other men, or in other ages than my own, and
yet range myself with those who are playing
the very same part, advocating the same prin
ciple, in religious, sociological, or ethical mat
ters to-day.
It is an easy matter to condemn those brave
and obstinate Jews of long ago, but few trou
ble themselves to think out the reasons they
had for a choice that to after ages appeared
the wickedest, the most unreasonable that men
could have made. But if it is ever right to
prefer the life of the pot to the Hfe of the
seed it enshields, their choice was not so un
reasonable. Every reform — what . is it but the seed
power triumphing over the pot power f And
no sooner are the shards of the once precious

64 THE REASONABLENESS OF
pot scattered abroad than we set to work to
mould and bake a new pot — larger, more lib
eral in its measure — to contain the expanded
seed. "Now, surely," we say to ourselves, "we
have something so wisely Hberal, so compre
hensive, so purely true, all men can accept it.
The holy seed has become, indeed, a tree. We
admit as much — nay, we glory in it. But see
what we have done. Here is a great hedge we
have planted to protect our tree of truth.
Here is a comprehensive creed we have evolved,
to explain its origin, its nature, and the laws
of its growth. The destructive changes of the
past were necessary. The cruel breakings of
the pots of other ages had to be. But now at
last, see this new scheme, this splendid, all-
containing pot of ours. These views of God,
these definitions of his truth, are so catholic,
so comprehensive, they will surely stand. May
we not now at last hope to enjoy unity and
peace ? All reasonable men cannot hesitate to
accept them. Here at last is a sound credal
platform, wide enough for aU good men to

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 65
stand together on, firmly built and strong
enough to support us all."
So, in all ages, often the wisest and brav
est and best have argued — so they still ar
gue to-day; and yet their conclusions have
proved fallacious, their definitions failed to
define, their comprehensions failed to compre
hend. Like old pots, cracked and useless, they
were fated to be discarded by those who came
after them, men who proved themselves as
truly truth-seekers in their newer day and
generation as these first had been valued for
truth in the times before. For, ah! what is
history? What but the story of the thoughts
of men that widen with the process of the
suns? The reformer often makes the same mistake
as the tyrant. The tyrant consolidates his
power tiU the reformer casts him down. The
reformer sees an evil thing and valiantly
strives to destroy it. On its ruin he builds the
house of his fortune, and that house stands
till the next age finds something false or dan
gerous or inadequate in it, and lo ! a new

66 THE REASONABLENESS OF
reformer arises and casts it down. For sadly
true it is that the reforms of one age may be
come the tyrannies of the next. The much-
lauded Puritan struck bravely at the tyranny
of kings. It was a noble and a timely stroke.
But scarcely had the Stuart's head fallen
before the Puritan yoke lay heavy on free
dom's neck in England. The Puritan, Hke all
Protestants, knew how bravely to protest
against error. He thought he had the truth
and all the truth, and was ready and willing
to give it to men, but to give men liberty as
well as the truth was quite another matter. It
was full time that the pot of sacred monarchy
was broken — and very thoroughly broken it
was; but in a few years the iron pot of Puri
tanism that shattered it had itself, in the in
terests of freedom, truth, and mankind, to be
shattered, too.
Let me add one other historic illustration
of the point I urge. On our Western conti
nent, at about the same time that privilege
and Puritanism were settling their momentous
dispute in England, an extraordinary enter-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 67
prise was attempted by extraordinary men.
" These," as our great historian Parkman elo
quently says, " were no stern exiles seeking
on barbarous shores an asylum for a perse
cuted faith. Rank, wealth, power, and royalty
itself smiled on their enterprise and bade
them Godspeed. Yet, withal, a fervor more
intense, a self-abnegation more complete, a
self-devotion more constant and enduring,
will scarcely find its record on the page of
human history." Unlike as men could be to
the stern and outlawed band that landed at
Plymouth Rock, undoubtedly they were; yet
was their courage as high, their aims not less
noble. They would win the vast and unknown
wilderness of North America, first to God, and
then to France. To do so, they made light of
danger and cheerfully went forth into a wild
erness where often death by famine or by
torture awaited them. Such was Jesuitry at
its best — in 1637. Before the end of that
seventeenth century, the Canadian Jesuit had
become at least as much a politician as a mis
sionary, and in the new world, as in the old,

68 THE REASONABLENESS OF
he was scheming and plotting to fasten the
yoke of civil and religious bondage on men
— was pursuing the path that, spite of splen
did self-sacrifice, has made the very name of
Jesuit hated wherever progress and Hberty are
known. Those men heard the call of God and they
heeded it, and the world still marvels at the
sublime courage of their martyrdom. But
they allowed themselves to be seduced from
the high and narrow way. Irreligious solici
tude for God betrayed them, as so often it
has betrayed the greatest soldiers of the cause.
They came to value the dead pot more than
the living seed ; and thus inevitably it came
about that the cause of the light against the
darkness had to be entrusted to more progress
ive, more enlightened, but perhaps not bet
ter men than they.
" A sower went forth to sow." " The Kins:-
dom of Heaven is seed." "I have many things
to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them
now. When the Spirit of Truth is come, He
will guide you into all truth." " For this cause

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 69
was I born, for this cause came I into the
world, that I should bear witness to the truth.
Every one that is of the truth heareth my
voice." So spake the Son of man. Clear as is
his vision of the truth men need, he claims
for that vision no finality. There are things
he does not know. There are questions he will
not attempt to answer. He has no creed to
offer men. He is a sower sent from God to
sow seed — seed that he is confident will grow
to a vast harvest, will spread as yeast spreads
in the flour.
My friends, these are Christian common
places that need to be repeated to-day. They
have been too often forgotten and ignored.
This Jesus has no sacred vessel ready to con
tain and protect the precious seed of the truth
that he sees and sows. Its life and future de
pend on its own divine vitality and the fitted-
ness of the soil into which it falls. He is no
ecclesiastic. The vision of the truth that he
saw, the things he said about men and about
God, were living seeds, indeed. They fell, they
rooted themselves, they grew to beauty and

70 THE REASONABLENESS OF
to harvest. They affected men profoundly.
They came to be held as God's most precious
gift to man, his child; and since this was
so, human love and faith could do no less
than surround its treasure with the fairest
treasury wealth could supply, or art plan,
and so yet once again, as history repeats
itself, were laid the foundations of the mighty
ecclesiastical structures of the past: some of
them great and old, venerable and beautiful
beyond words to the artist's eye, and some
very modern and absurd ; Roman and Grecian,
Anglican and Presbyterian, and "isms" in
numerable. Pots, pots, and again pots. The old
story of the pot. The best poor human love,
faith, and wit could do, with the things it had
at hand, to deck and preserve the holy seed
it would give, and often did give, its very
life for ; yet one and all of them, the ancient
and beautiful, or modern and grotesque,
doomed in the very nature of things to disuse
and decay.
For each age, God-hungry, turns from the
flesh-pots of its Egypt to the best idea of God

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 71
it can win, and following that idea, so is led
through its own wilderness, follows its own
pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by
night, wrestles with its plagues, beats back its
enemies, and spite of all its losses, struggles,
struggles onward, towards the distant Canaan
where it would be. Each age leaves to the
future the story of its struggle, the precious
symbols of its victories, the battle standards
round which its hopes and beliefs rallied, and
made good their stand.
But old banners that were waved in the
victories of long ago may lead us to defeat
to-day. The brazen serpent that was the sym
bol and guarantee of divine deliverance to
one generation may become the accursed idol
of the next. It is the duty of Moses to hold
it aloft. No less it is the duty of Joshua to
grind it to powder. For, ah ! the ideals of one
generation do often become the idols of the
next — poor plaster casts of God, fit only to
be broken and thrown away.
Do not let me be misunderstood. I am not
denying the need, in their proper place, of

72 THE REASONABLENESS OF
all those religious constructions that grew,
and grow of necessity, round any and all
precious truth-winnings of mankind, useful
and necessary for a time in giving expression
to man's most vital part, his religious instinct;
needful as are all bodies to house temporarily
all souls, but not to be regarded by any means
as complete and final expressions of the soul
of truth they temporarily protect, or of the
divine life they partially express and explain.
No; I would 'but emphasize again the fact
that, while creeds, dogmas, sacred writings,
religious ordinances, etc., may be locally and
temporarily of great importance, they are at
best but pots, whose sole use is to protect the
seed of life; blundering, imperfect attempts
in terms of the finite to explain the Infinite.
They are not, however venerable, of the na
ture of the seed itself. Truth needs them, and
outgrows them; seeking ever newer forms,
which again in their turn must inevitably be
outgrown. We see through a glass darkly; we see in
no other way. We know in part, and the

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 73
wisest and best, not even the Master himself,
have ever known or seen in any other way.
For if there is a God at all, he certainly is In
finite, and we, though we be his real children,
sparks cast forth by the sun of his being,
know ourselves sadly to be finite and limited,
indeed. In Jesus I believe the Infinite drew as near
to man as Infinity might draw to finitude. I
mean by that that our race may never hope
to see any one more full of God, more truly
divine, than was the man, Christ Jesus. And
if this be true, then in Jesus' life and teach
ing and character, seen and studied rationally,
must be found all that manhood in its best
flower can in its present stage of being know
or reveal of God.
I think a study of Jesus leads to such a
conclusion. This undoubtedly was Jesus' own
view of his person and mission. He believed
that the age-long conviction, so firmly em
bedded in his race, was divinely implanted ;
that in the changing phases of its existence
his nation had guarded, held in trust for man-

74 THE REASONABLENESS OF
kind, a revelation of the one true God and
Father of all; that tribal Hfe and tabernacle
worship, and then temple and stateHer ritual,
all expressed God, all were aids — crutches,
as it were, to help lame humanity to God;
that Jewish poets and prophets spake as they
were moved by the same everlasting Holy
Spirit, that more fully, more humanly, more
intimately, spake in him; and that when his
work should have been accomplished, that
same eternal voice would surely continue to
guide into a clearer daylight the steps of men
whose wills were right with God.
In this sense, then, Jesus himself was care
ful not to claim finality for his teaching.
There he differed from other great religious
reformers. He was a sower of seed. He gave
men a living principle, not a golden brick.
Nay, he himself was but a seed cast into the
ground, and his dying was, in his view, neces
sary, "for unless seed fall into the ground and
die, it remaineth alone."
I venture to think that this teaching of
the Son of man has never received, at the

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 75
churches' hands, the recognition its profound
importance deserves. It is the quality of ex-
pansiveness in it, the capacity to change, to
grow with man's growing life, which consti
tutes its profound reasonableness.
Other religions have done vast good for a
time. But they have been locally adapted, and
so, having met the needs of a certain race or
certain epoch only, with that race or epoch
they were doomed to decay. But this Gospel
of the Son of man, this Gospel of the seed,
is an expanding gospel, sure to grow and ad
vance with the life of the race which it both
comforts and explains — sure in time to be
come actually what it claims to be, the religion
of the wide world.

76 THE REASONABLENESS OF

III
jesus' doctrine of the seed (continued)
Jesus said, " So is the Kingdom of God, as if a man should
cast seed into the ground ; . . . and the seed should spring and
grow up, he knoweth not how. For the earth bringeth forth
fruit of herself." — Mark rv, 26-28.
One of the commonest and most misleading
mistakes made by that multitude of good
Christian people, who have had no time or in
clination seriously to study the religion they
heartily accept, is that of supposing that the
Christianity they, without much thought, have
accepted, has come to them practically un
changed from the earliest days, — that the
doctrines they hold were always held by be
lievers — were held as they hold them to-day,
— that in defending these, in protesting against
any change in them, they are standing for
the truth ; and that those who advocate re
statement are bent on destroying the fabric
of the faith. Of course this is far from the

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 77
truth. Practically universal scholarship admits
to-day that orthodox Christianity has under
gone quite extraordinary transformations. I
have pointed out this fact to you before. I
must still at some length insist on it, for
to forget it, to deny it, must lead to endless
confusion, misunderstanding, and error.
As a matter of fact, those who advocate
change are often most truly conservative.
They are seeking only to draw the faith and
hope of their fellows back to those higher
standards, the truer concepts of an earher day
— are actually imitating Jesus himself. For
what did Jesus do? He set himself to rescue
from its mistaken guardians and teachers
the truth his Heavenly Father had given to
men; that revelation had been covered out
of sight, made of none effect through their
added traditions, perverted by their sophistry,
denied and falsified by their custom, till in
their keeping the house of God had indeed
become a den of thieves.
After the Master's death — when Pentecost's
power was on them — the twelve disciples

78 THE REASONABLENESS OF
and their company went everywhere preaching
his word. Signs and wonders were wrought
by them in his name. They literally accom
plished in a day what in all his ministry he
had failed to accomplish. Thousands be
lieved and went forth to life's tasks, rejoicing
in a new hope, where before a little company
had but doubtingly followed.
But this first band of saved and inspired
men had their own work to do. It was to
preach. They were not historians. The needs
of the far future were not visible to them.
The immediate present was their care. They
spoke, they toiled, but they did not write.
They were not fitted for writing.
There were others — their followers — who
had learned at second-hand from them about
Jesus. These naturally began to make some
record of the gospel story, and on their every
page the divine glow of a vital inspiration
forever remains. There were still others, such
as the unknown authors of the Epistle to the
Hebrews, or of the Apocalypse, whose evident
inspiration is of almost as high an order as

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 79
that of their teachers themselves. Who can
deny the height and glory of the spiritual
standard they attain? We know not their
names, yet the very fact that such writings
and several others by unknown hands should
have survived to our time, and should have
won a deserved place in the canon, proves
conclusively how wonderful was the spiritual
life and enthusiasm Jesus breathed into the
hearts of those men who companioned with
him during his ministry, or who came later
under the immediate influence of those who
had done so. The divine glow was, indeed,
wonderful, but it was brief.
There can be no possible doubt in our minds
as to what Jesus' message was as we read the
Synoptic Gospels, or the writings of Paul, or
even as we study the Johannine philosophy
that based itself on that message. Differences
of interpretation are already evident, of course,
even among these earliest witnesses, but only
such differences as witness most naturally to
the spiritual honesty that filled them all.
But soon there was a change, and before

80 THE REASONABLENESS OF
three centuries had passed, change had given
way to transformation. The emphasis was no
longer on what the Master taught. The church
that called itself by his name was feeling its
way toward the assertion of claims that he
denied, and that his apostles abhorred.
He and they had pleaded with men to walk
as children of God. But to walk as children
of God was soon to mean a totally different
thing — namely, to walk in obedience to an
ecclesiastical authority. He had no thought of
creed, but now the greatest metaphysicians of
that or of any age bent their Grecian genius
to the formulating of a vast literature of
dogma, which only the learned could under
stand, "but which all were enjoined to receive.
Next we see arise a Militant Papacy, steadily
replacing the free and simple idealism of
Jesus by its " imperial, ecclesiastical, paternal,
benevolent tyranny." "My kingdom is not of
this world," said the dying Christ. "Nay, but
in thy high name I claim and take the king
doms of this world," cried ever victorious
Rome. And long centuries were to pass be-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 81
fore this falsest of all claims made on behalf
of the Christian religion was, in the name of
the common rights of man, repudiated. Alas !
even yet Rome's fatal insistence on it has
distracted France, and numbs and blights
religious life in Catholic Europe.
No, indeed, the religion that is ours bears
everywhere the marks of inevitable change and
growth ; whether for evil or for good, whether
our judgment approves these changes or no,
let us recognize them. Especially let us, who
are Americans, remember that Protestantism,
in some branch of which most of us have been
brought up, is responsible for its full share
of changes wrought. The fact that it made a
sacred book its oracle, when it refused obed
ience to the Roman primacy, could not save
the Protestant movement from the law of
growth and change. Protestantism had to be.
It was the legitimate child of the Renaissance.
The flush of new light, the tide of new learn
ing that swept over the Western world, re
sulted in the breaking of all manner of sacred
" pots," the bursting of venerable wine-skins.

82 THE REASONABLENESS OF
Protestantism saw clearly enough that the
true throne of the Father God must be the
mind of man; that the final seal of divine au
thority could be nowhere else than in the
mind of man. Protestantism was, on its spir
itual side at least (and it had other sides), the
re-assertion — almost the re-discovery — of
the very core of Jesus' gospel. " Verily I say
to you the hour cometh when neither in this
mountain nor yet at Jerusalem shall ye wor
ship the Father. God is a spirit, and they that
worship him must worship him in spirit and
in truth. For the Father seeketh such to wor
ship him." It therefore put the pope and the
priest in their right place. Temples, to the
Protestant, were but pictures of the temple
of the universe ; sacrifices, but symbols of the
divine order of the world ; priests, but human
tokens of, and witnesses to, what man's life
of glad service was meant to be.
At least logically Protestantism should have
held this ground. But the long custom of the
ages was too much for it. The movement
dared not trust itself to the impulse and direc-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 83
tion of the Divine Spirit. It too sought to
establish a final court of religious appeal other
than Christ had established. Rome had proved
herself self-seeking and false — a blind leader
of the blind. Western civilization turned from
her to the sacred writings, rejected her absolut
ism, and created a new absolutism of the Bible.
It is hard to see what other course the re
formers of the sixteenth century could have
pursued. All Christendom had been trained
|to believe that the Bible was a verbally in
spired book. Those who parted company with
Rome rejected her interpretation of it, de
nounced her for her denial of the book to the
laity, for her sophistifications, misrepresenta
tions, and perversions of its plainest teachings.
But of its value and its authority they were
fully convinced.
Neither had Protestants grasped the mighty
doctrine of the " seed." The law of change,
of expansion, of growth, had been rendered
odious to them, since Rome had abused it to
crush freedom and enslave the human mind.
The one desire of her best leaders was to get

84 THE REASONABLENESS OF
back to where the early Church had been; to
sit at the Master's feet ; to stand, clothed with
Pentecost's persuading, inspiring power, by
his empty grave.
Who to-day shall deny the essential nobil
ity of that ideal? It gave new hope to men
of courage and learning. It consecrated the
cradle of the modern spirit. It baptized science
into the name of Jesus. And yet I think aH
will admit that Protestantism, as a final ex
pression of Christ's rehgion, has failed. It had
its day. It did its work, just as weH, and no
better than have other rehgious movements.
It was the best thing men saw at the time. It
expressed the highest, the truest they knew,
but in its bosom it carried the seeds of its own
decay. The ultimate appeal was to a sacred
book, and a book — no matter how wonderful
— is no hving thing. It can but express the
ideas of the men who wrote it. It must bear
everywhere the marks of human finahty and
limitation. The mind of man refuses to be
bound. It ranges the universe ; lifts itself to
the stars ; is ever hungry for God ; seeks him

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 85
in the present ; hopes for him in the future ;
rightly refuses any creed that binds it to the
past. If he is, he is self-revealing. If we are
his children, then to us he must speak. He
spoke to our fathers, and in his spoken word
to them we rejoice ; but their wanderings are
over — ours are but begun. Their questions
are answered ; ours press sorely on us for an
swer. A God truly to help in time of need
must ever inspire and help that time. A living
age demands a living God, and if it revolts
from the false leadership of a Roman priest
who has proved to reasonable men that he has
made the truth of God of none effect to them
by his traditions, it cannot (let it try never so
patiently) find the satisfaction and guidance
it needs in the pages of a book, however sa
cred, the records of a Hterature, however glori
ous. Here was the Protestant quandary. Rome
had adopted the right idea. Rome had always
set herself to expand; had changed with the
changing times; and had during the dark
centuries been a rallying-point against despair,

86 THE REASONABLENESS OF
and an immense power for good in the world.
She had truly declared that the voice of God
must ever be a living voice — God speaking
through living men. So far, and in principle,
she was evolutionary ; she had the ages on her
side; she was right. Her error lay not in her
theory, but in her practice. Popular Protest
antism confounded these two, and, moved by
a not unreasonable wrath against what Rome
had accomplished, set aside as mistaken both
her theory and her practice. I say moved by
a not unreasonable wrath, for remember, the
Reformation movement in Germany, in Switz
erland, and in England, was largely influenced
by men smarting under a sense of bitter
wrong. The awful Christlessness of Rome's
practice naturally led the revolting people to
abhor and refuse the precepts by which she
had justified it.
Here let me digress for a moment. Mark
you, my friends, this protest against the ways
of Rome is no outworn protest that has lost
its meaning and its vigor because the protesters
who voiced the great revolt of Reformation

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 87
times made many and great mistakes them
selves, and were succeeded by others who added
crime to mistake. No, with new insistence,
backed by new witnesses, it is sure to rise
and rise again. History is opening its half-
forgotten, partially understood page to the
modern scholar, and the verdict of history on
Rome's ways and policies, past and present,
cannot be mistaken, cannot be ignored. Where
she has had power undivided, unchecked, she
has crushed out liberty and truth, she has set
back civilization, she has refused the very
bread of life to her most faithful children.
The awful story of her doings in Spain is yet
but partially known,1 but age-long betrayal
of the great French people is beginning to be
understood in France, though it is not yet
appreciated outside its borders.
1 In 1522, the year in which Luther was summoned to the
Diet of Worms, Ignatius Loyola published the only book he
ever wrote, his Spiritual Exercises. The book was intended as
a devotional guide for those who would enter his order of the
Society of Jesus. In the concluding rules of the exercise,
Loyola says : " Laving aside all private judgment, we ought
to obey in all things the Hierarchical Church ; to praise con
fession, to praise the frequent hearing of the mass, to praise

88 THE REASONABLENESS OF
Rome betrayed, oppressed, and slaughtered,
for five hundred long years, the Puritans of
France, and France was the cradle of Puritan
ism. Three hundred years before English
Wycliffe preached and printed, Puritanism
had its birth in Southern France. Like all
great movements, it had its faults, its excesses,
its limitations. But making full allowance for
them all, Puritanism in France and anywhere
else mightily strove for those invaluable human
rights and duties, in the exercise of which alone
do nations rise to greatness and men ripen to
character. Rome set herself to stamp into the soil
whence it sprang, this most vital seed of pro
gress. She was not strong enough to do it
the religious orders and the vows of religion, to praise the
relics of saints, to praise the fasts and penances, to praise
the buildings and ornaments, always to defend, and never
to impugn, the precepts of the Church, to approve the
constitutions, recommendations, and habits of life of our
superiors, whether praiseworthy or not, for to speak against
them before the lower classes would give rise to mur
murs and scandal, and thus the people would be irritated
against their temporal or spiritual rulers ; to praise scholas
tic theology, to hold that we believe what seems to us white to
be black, if the Hierarchical Church so defines it." This was
Jesuitry, and it ruined Spain.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 89
alone, and cunningly she set herself to wheedle
and seduce the Kings of France to aid in the
crusade. The scattered political units that
were to make the great French nation of the
future had not yet been welded to unity. She
would help the central power to an absolute
dominion, on the condition that Puritan heresy
was utterly destroyed. And so the knife of the
butcher was blessed by the vice-regent of God,
and bloody work began that was to go on,
with slight intermission, for almost five hun
dred years, till the final blow, the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes, feU. If the secular
powers of France sickened, as they often did,
of the job, Rome stood ever ready, lending
her superb ecclesiastical machinery to aid the
crown in the consolidation of its powers ; lift
ing the throne of France to a yet more auto
cratic authority.
This devil's work, as I say, went on for
centuries, while slowly the best life-blood of a
great nation was drained away. Europe, fully
occupied with its own affairs, dominated by
the Papacy, did not interfere. It was easy to

90 THE REASONABLENESS OF
pervert the issue and disarm such weak and
ineffectual sympathy as might arise outside the
French border. So at last Rome was supreme,
the French kings could debauch France and
plunder her at their will ; and Puritanism died
in the breach or at the stake, or went over-seas,
to help make rival nations such as England
and Holland great, and, in time, America free.
Then at last retribution came. Those forces,
making for all that moderation and constitu
tionalism mean, had been forbidden place in
France, and France herself must pay the price.
Innocent and guilty — that is the law — must
suffer together, and red revolution must write,
with dripping finger, on the fairest churches
piety had ever raised to the worship of God,
Christianity's own forgotten motto, that since
1170 had in France been denied and blas
phemed — Liberty, Fraternity, EquaHty. Ah,
yes, and the end is not yet.
These doings of Rome meant a great deal
to the fathers of the Reformation. The mis
take they made was natural, but for Protestant
ism it was a fatal mistake. It rejected Roman

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 91
authority. It denied that any man or group of
men were alone and before all others ordained
and empowered to express and proclaim the
very truth of Eternal God, were his vice-re
gents on earth. It was high time to protest
against the leadership of Rome. Popery had
proved itself a false leader, a blind guide.
The Vatican had failed the cause of truth,
had suppressed and strangled the seed, as
effectually as had the Pharisees and scribes
of our Lord's day. And the crime was of
deeper dye than theirs, for heavily and darkly
her hands were stained with blood. The time
for protest was, indeed, fully come. But it was
a grave mistake for those great protesters to
seek to place the Bible in the Vatican's place.
Once the Protestant leaders had definitely
broken with Rome, they in their turn found
themselves confronted with the age-long prob
lem that no religious organization had ever
solved. They must recast the truth as they
saw it, for the new time ; strip its teachings of
gloss and sophistry, and sow a fresh, pure
seed, give forth fresh, wholesome bread for

92 THE REASONABLENESS OF
the food of man. What Buddhist priest, Jew
ish scribe, Roman council had failed to do,
Protestant synods in their turn must attempt.
They of course failed, but who shall wonder
at their failure. It was failure to recognize and
heartily accept the essential nature of Christ's
doctrine of -the seed — the evolutionary na
ture of the truth.
Protestantism does not need here, or from
me, defence or vindication. What is good in
us, what is of final value in our institutions,
is largely owing to what its great leaders and
martyrs thought, did, and suffered, and we are
not likely to forget it or be ashamed to own
our debt. But to pretend that as a religious
system, acceptable to thoughtful men, it sat
isfies our needs, answers our questions, or pro
mises a reasonable guidance for the future, I
think very few are prepared to do. In our dis
satisfaction with the religious aspects of Pro
testant churches to-day, let us at least ever
keep before our eyes the fact of the greatness
of our debt to that world movement from
which they sprang. Those men of the six-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 93
teenth century relit the torch of truth when it
was well-nigh quenched in the thick darkness.
Where they held their own, first in the school
and university, and then on bloody battle-field,
the seed grew. Liberty and civilization took
root, and the nations prospered. Where they
failed partially, progress was at least retarded,
and came slowly, if it came at all. Where they
were slaughtered, where in tens of thousands
they were burned, as in Spain, darkness and
tyranny took up their abode. Men gave up
hope then, and are giving up God now.
Some who have kindly listened to me so far
may say that I have unduly emphasized man's
religious failure to attain any standard ap
proaching that which Jesus established. Let
me try to make clear that such has not been
my intention. I hold, on the other hand, that
we are all too much incHned to undervalue the
progress that has been made towards his ideal,
in the religious life that has been won ; that
we dwell with too faint a heart on the spec
tacle of moral failure and hesitating advance.

94 THE REASONABLENESS OF
On the whole, man's religious sense grows and
does not decay.
For like a child sent with a flickering light
To find his way across a dusky night,
Man walks the world.
Again and yet again, the lamp must be by gusts of pas
sion slain.
But shall not He that sent him from the door
Relight the lamp once more and yet once more ?
But the path of religious progress is ever
a zigzag path. It has never been in the nature
of a straight line. We are quicker to see our
forefathers' crimes than their virtues, because
our own heightened sense of moral obligation
prevents often a fair comparison between our
moral standards and theirs, while the dimness
and imperfection of our best historic knowledge
prevents our valuing, as we should, the ideals
they strove to attain. Their best may not have
been what seems to us best. What seemed to
them reasonable, the means they took to reach
it, we may think mistaken or immoral. But
surely this is often because we fail to put
ourselves back in those remote times. Had we
been where and what they were, we should

• THE RELIGION OF JESUS 95
have done as they. In all ages since man
became a religious being, he has on the whole
striven to give the best he has to the best he
knows, and I know no better definition of
religion than that.
Of course we must admit that "the best
men knew " often differed not only in degree,
but in kind, from the Gospel of Jesus ; that
its identification with that gospel made Christ's
message temporarily of none effect to man;
nay, that often its mistaken professors used
their perverted Christian ideas to accomplish
ends, to justify means, abhorrent to the Mas
ter. So much is undoubtedly true. Yetsinceinto
the mind of man the seed of the kingdom had
fallen, — fallen, as the great Seedsman said,
often seemingly in vain, fallen on rockand thorn
and highway, yet fallen, too, here and there
on good ground, — through all the changes
and chances of our mortal life, it must ever
somewhere spring. In the wide field of hu
manity it must appear and reappear, for he
who sowed said its destiny was to live and
never altogether to die.

96 THE REASONABLENESS OF .
I am persuaded that we must grasp this
sublime truth to-day if we are to go forth to
life's tasks in a spirit of joy and confidence,
and not of doubt or despair. What warrant
have we for believing that in this, our half-
instructed time, we can know anything approx
imating to all the truth about Jesus or his
nature or his message that is yet to be known ?
Why should we imagine that we can do what
no generation before us has done — free our
selves from our prejudices and our selfish
nesses, and so yield a completely inteUigent
and perfect obedience to the divine Son of
man? To fancy for a moment that such a
service is possible to us would be to convict
ourselves of blindest Phariseeism ; would be to
claim for ourselves a singleness of eye, a pur
ity of vision that no inspired apostle dared to
claim. No ; at best we can but hope, with good
intention, to give to him who is altogether
worthy, who is indeed the incarnation and sum
ming-up of the highest we know, the poor
best that is ours to give.
I have dwelt on the past, because imperfect

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 97
as is our knowledge of it such knowledge
surely tends to comfort and encourage us and
not to depress. If we are uncertain and doubt
ful of many things, the great ones that strove
before us were at least as uncertain, and where
they cast aside all uncertainty, they were often
farthest from the truth. When they were
most positive they were often most wrong.
Yet the sum total of it all makes, and has
made, for good.
It is not so long ago since the fashion of
an hour denounced Christianity, denied the
good of religion, on the ground that many
of the monstrous crimes of the past — its
tyrannies, its blood-shedding — were done in
its name. Historic science to-day admits the
facts, but repudiates the conclusions drawn
from them.
Cruel and tyrannous men there have been,
there will yet be, for human nature rises but
slowly from the original beast. But the gentle
ness, the holiness, the sublime wisdom and
self-sacrifice of the religion of Jesus has in
darkest times modified the beast in man, even

98 THE REASONABLENESS OF
where it has been powerless to eradicate it.
And so to go back to my definition of religion.
So long as even the beast, at times, felt he
should bring the best within him to the best
that was far above him, he was the less a bad
man, the less tyrannous neighbor, for even the
temporary effort.
Jesus set the standard, and to the standard
all good men have repaired and will repair.
Yes ; so far as Christendom's past is visible to
us, we can see its greatest personalities so com
ing. We can sometimes note their mistakes.
We can guess at least at the temporary or
permanent value of the offerings they bring,
the additions they make to the treasure house
of their God.
Even a cursory glance, then, at rehgious
history is enough to make it evident that the
Christian doctrines most of us were brought
up to believe without question have undergone
constant and radical change; that our rehgion
as we received it from our fathers was a very
different thing from the religion Jesus sought
to teach his disciples, and which they in their

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 99
turn sowed among men. When we reject parts
of it, when we try to make our own additions
to it, when we seek to conform it to what
this new day has brought us of truth, we are
only doing what all good men have done be
fore us — we are honoring and not dishonor
ing the gospel we love; we are following our
great Master in the very way he bade us fol
low him; we are doing just what he told us
to do, trusting to the light and help of the
Spirit, whose inspiring guidance he promised
should not fail humanity till the end of the
ages. Now, further, I want to remind you that
this process of growth and change is already
unmistakably present in the earliest years of
the first century. Many learned writers have
pointed this out. I only briefly refer to it as
a quite unanswerable evidence of the accept
ance, sometimes it may be unconscious, by the
greatest of the early Christian teachers, of
Jesus' doctrine of the seed.
Even a casual reader of the Bible cannot
fail to notice the difference between the writ-

100 THE REASONABLENESS OF
ings of Paul and the recorded sayings of Jesus.
Without contradiction we may claim the Apos
tle to the Gentiles as the greatest re-sower of
the seed in the first century. Where did Paul
get his doctrine ? Some have supposed that he
received from the apostles instruction in the
teachings of Jesus, and from these developed
his system. Paul himself denies this. He ex
plicitly disclaims any such proceeding. "I
certify you, brethren, that the gospel which
was preached of me is not after man. For I
neither received it of man, neither was I
taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus
Christ." x So confident was he of his own in
spiration that he even withstood Peter, claim
ing that his own teaching and practice on an
important question was after the mind of
Christ, and that the elder apostle had yielded
sinfully to the legalists. Whether Paul was
right or wrong in his contention is of but
secondary importance. What is of quite first
importance is the ground he took in defending
his position. It was that the gospel was so liv-
1 See Gal. 1, 11 and 12.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 101
ing, so comprehensive that all men seeking the
truth, Gentiles as well as Jews, had in it equal
part. The fact that Jesus himself had confined
his mission to the lost sheep of the house of
Israel does not seem to have caused the Apos
tle to the Gentiles any hesitation in throwing
wide the doors of the early Church to the
world. He was right. He was truly inspired.
But his was the inspiration of a radical, of
an evolutionist.
So in his slowly formulated doctrines of
justification by faith, of sacrifice, and of atone
ment, Paul is bent on welding together rab
binical thinking and Jewish law, in which his
whole mind is steeped, with the teachings of
his new-found Master, to whom his whole
heart is given. Before all things, he is im
pressed with Jesus' attitude to the past. " I am
not come to destroy the law and the prophets,
but to fulfil." And so plainly before him
rises his lifework. What can Paul do better
than explain the old sacrificial system of the
Jews as fulfilled in the dying of the Saviour ?
St. Paul's aim was a true aim. He gave the

102 THE REASONABLENESS OF
best he had to the best he knew, and for long
centuries a great part of Christendom was
destined to take his teachings as the final word.
But new light has come with new times.
Sacrifice, as the law of our universe, means a
wider, deeper, more universal thing to-day than
it ever did before. Atonement, substitution,
justification are no longer the burning ques
tions that once they were, and this lonely little
man, who stamped our religion with his tre
mendous personality, as none but the Master
ever did, cannot help us to-day as that Mas
ter himself can help. So much may be admit
ted, yet never can we over-pay the debt we
owe to St. Paul. The universal law of sacri
fice which Jesus taught and illustrated is, a far
higher law than the Pauline conception of
it, but Paul's genius gave to his own and
to succeeding times the clearest and highest
rendering of that law which men could then
understand. And yet the living seed must in
time outgrow and crack all pots — even the
apostolic pots ; even the Pauline pot.
After Paul's day men went everywhere

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 103
sowing the word, and the seed fell on Grecian
ground, and Grecian* metaphysician and philo
sopher received it gladly. With them, too,
it sprang up and bore fruit. They must give
the best they had to this last, best life that
had come to them. For centuries, then, the
supremest creed-makers who ever lived had
their way. In terms of human reason they set
themselves to explain the Infinite, to justify
the ways of God to men. The task they set
themselves was an impossible task, yet could
they have attempted no other, for for it they
were supremely fitted. Of this much I think
we may be sure ; where they gloriously failed,
none may ever hope to succeed. The great
creed -makers had their day. They spared
neither themselves nor those who differed from
them. They help us to know rather what the
Christianity of the future cannot be than
what it can be.
Then it was the turn of the practical men
of the world to shape the new religion to
practical ends. As Roman power trembled to
its fall, men who had come to regard Roman

104 THE REASONABLENESS OF
law and rule as the world's only safeguards
against anarchy looked on all sides to find some
shelter from the coming storm. The hordes
that threatened from across the frontier had
been largely Christianized ; why was it not then
possible to bind the mistress of the nations
and her younger rebellious children together,
by a kindlier and more enduring tie than any
which Roman despotism had ever conceived
of ? It was a grand dream.
And so arose the idea of the universal Ro
man Church, paramount to all temporal power.
The Lex Romana had held civilization to
gether for so long, men had grown so accus
tomed to one central power, that any division
of ultimate authority seemed well-nigh impos
sible. If under an inferior law, if subject to an
often brutal code, human progress had been so
marked and general peace and prosperity had
proved so stable, to what high ends might not
mankind attain if the vicar of Christ ascended
the throne of the Caesars, and councils of holy
bishops met to decide between nation and na
tion ? Thus came temporal power to the Central

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 105
Roman See — not so much a thing grasped at
by any pontiff as a duty forced on the Church
by the dire needs of a distracted time.
Again good men brought the best they had
to the best they knew. And had they done
otherwise, the dark ages that followed would
probably have been darker than they were.
Let me refer to one movement in those
dark ages that very plainly illustrates the
truth I would press on ypu — the Crusades.
That these caused much blood-shedding can
not be denied. They were of their time, and
the times were superstitious and cruel. The
Sepulchre was sacred. The spirit of him who
rose from it was often denied or unknown.
Yet surely it was better far that the feudal
tyrant should believe that there was some
thing worth dying for besides his ill-gotten
hoard, and that that sacred thing was the
cradle of his religion, than that he should
stay at home, to wage ceaseless war on his
neighbors. Practically the crusader may have been
often little better than a heathen knight who

106 THE REASONABLENESS OF
worshipped his own bloody sword. Yet when
he raised aloft its iron hilt, and on its crude
cross swore the oath that bound him to
long exile and often to death, he was on
the way to be a better man, and he certainly
was destined, though he knew it not, to bring
back to Europe the seeds of enlightenment and
learning. By taking the cross, unwittingly he
accomplished a greater thing than he aimed
at when he would have wrested the Sepulchre
from the Saracen. He brought East and West
together, opened new ways for commerce and
for learning, and incidentally the worst of
his band helped the future by laying down
their lives to uphold the past.
The crusader knew nothing of the spirit of
pity or toleration. We, to whom toleration is
a commonplace, forget how slowly it spread
among men, forget how long and dark were
the ages during which even to the saintly it
was almost unknown. Though he was of his
time and lacked pity, the crusader was often
truly and profoundly religious. Simon de
Montfort, leader of the wholly unjust crusade

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 107
against the French Puritan Albigenses in
1220, is busy slaughtering the heretics, men,
women, and children. Before leading an as
sault on an Albigensian stronghold, he ac
cording to custom will attend mass. As the
mailed knight kneels in prayer, a squire rushes
to his side and hurriedly whispers that a des
perate sortie has been made by the garrison,
and that the immense wooden machinery of
his attack is in imminent danger of total de
struction. He must come at once, or all will
be lost. Still kneeling, unmoved, the iron-
headed man replies, " I cannot come till I have
looked on my Christ." Here is the crusading
spirit, perhaps, at its best. It knows nothing
of pity ; to it toleration is a sin ; but even the
cruel devastator's religion is the giving of the
best he has to the best he knows. His cross
is a sword hilt, but it is a real cross all the
same. Yes; each age marks and moulds the seed
truth as it sees it, marks it after its own like
ness, till to our eyes often all the beauty and
worth of it are lost. But it is not so. For lo,

108 THE REASONABLENESS OF
in some mysterious way the very next age finds
some new expression for it, sees a new hope,
follows a new light. The seed is not dead, but,
as the Master foretold, has been re-sown. The
soil and climate condition the growth of the
seed ; they do not create it. Its innermost life
is a thing apart from them. It uses them rather
than they it. The inner vitality of the God
seed in us all is the insoluble mystery and
glory of life.
It would be interesting and instructive to
follow further this line of thought; to point
out how, in each successive movement of hu
man advance since the days of St. Paul, the
ideals that dominated men, whether intellect
ual or political, profoundly controUed and al
tered their creeds. As, for instance, the grand
dream of the temporal power faded, as success
ive pontiffs proved themselves no better rulers
than the emperors had been, man's irrepress
ible faith again fixes its eye on the throne. In
it surely dwelt something of a divine right, and
the brave souls that rallied to defend its lost
cause, against the rising tide of Puritan de-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 109
mocracy, fought as much for a religious as for
a pohtical faith.
So down to our own time. Many who long
ago cast aside as an ancient fable the belief
in the divine right of kings to rule, still stoutly
hold to their fathers' confidence in the divine
right of priests to mediate : one doctrine as vis
ionary as the other. Both of them are but
shadowy hints of the great truths behind them,
namely, the divine right of man to rule him
self, and his equally divine right to come to
God for himself. At infinite cost these have
been won. But the understanding and appli
cation of them to character and society is not
yet. Meanwhile to each is given as much truth
as he can take — to each age as much light as
it can obey.
Is not the wide air, after the cocoon,
As much God as the moth-soul can receive ?
Doth not God give the child within the womb
Some guess to set him groping for the world,
Some blurred reflection answering his desire ?
We, shut in this blue womb of the doming sky,
Guess and grope dimly for the vast of God,

110 THE REASONABLENESS OF
And, eyeless, through some vague, less perfect sense,
Strive for a sign of what it is to see.
Christ's doctrine, then, as we know and pro
fess it, has not come to us without enduring
many and radical changes, and can only re
main a vital and real thing to us by reason of
more and continuous change. If in the first
instance it was miraculously given (and I do
not say it was, for here I use the word " mir
aculous " in its scientific sense), it certainly
was not miraculously preserved. When Jesus
had spoken of what was to follow his sowing,
he seems carefully to avoid the idea that any
specially miraculous interference was to be ex
pected or desired on that seed's behalf. Some
was to fall on good ground, and greatly suc
ceed. Some was to be almost choked to death
by worldly influences. And yet some more was
quite to fail — evil birds were to carry it away.
Then he adds that its growing depended on
and was nourished by the normal influences
of the earth receiving it : earth, that makes
things grow " we know not how." Such was
the Master's forecast, and has not history ab-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 111
solutely fulfilled it ? Things have but fallen
out as he foreknew. For aU the changes that
have passed on it, his word is still the very
seed of Hfe to us to-day ; our guide to duty-
doing here, our hope for large worthiness else
where. Firmly, reasonably, I think, we may
beheve that more, and not less, of Jesus Christ
is visible to men to-day. We are nearer him,
we see him — not clearly, it is true, but less
indistinctly than those of bygone times. In
spite of all the intervening ages, in spite of all
the inevitable confusions and distortions of
human thinking, though strange claims have
been made for him and terrible deeds done in
his holy name, still the real man, Christ Jesus,
remains " the chief among ten thousand and
the altogether lovely."
Human thought has perhaps concentrated
itself on him, more than on all the other sons of
men put together. Sometimes it has ignored
him, but not for long ; next it has acclaimed
him; but whether from the coverings of ne
glect or the robes of royalty, Jesus emerges
the same : the complete Son of man, who knows

112 THE REASONABLENESS OF
what is in man, and reveals what is in God.
This and nothing less is the historic truth of
the matter. We know nothing in human story
Hke it. It is the real miracle of Jesus.
I have tried to show you that what is handed
forth to us as his doctrine to-day is in large
part not his at all. I have done this not by
seeking to disprove, point by point, those many
orthodox positions on which still totteringly
stand the churches of to-day; but rather by
indicating the long and devious processes by
which religious thought has come down to our
time, processes that from their very nature
make it impossible that Christian truth, as we
have received it, could be undefiled.
A great river may, clear and pure, burst
from its mountain home, but it has a long
journey to make before it gains the sea. On
that journey it loses its first glorious Alpine
rush as it traverses the plain. Other streams
join it and add to its volume. It takes tribute
from the marsh land as well as from the
sunny meadow. After the great city is passed,
its tide is dank and foul. Yet, as Kingsley so

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 113
beautifully sang, there is a very divine quahty
of self -cleansing in the river, and so most
true it is that " it cleanses its stream as it
hurries along to the calling sea."
The river's story is the story of human
Hfe's endeavor. Truth is revealed to man as
the river comes : at times purer than at others;
at times so befouled in flow that it seems to
carry only death on its dark current. Then
once again obeying its law of self-purging, and
almost free from stain and soilure, its mighty
volume brings with it only fertility and joy.
Then truly it seems to be the river that the
writer of the Revelation saw in his immortal
vision : " A river of water of Hfe, clear as
crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God
and of the Lamb."

114 THE REASONABLENESS OF

IV

THE NATURALNESS AND SUPERNATURALNESS
OF JESUS
Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the
works that I do shall he do also ; and greater works than these
shall he do. — John xrv, 12.
I said in my last lecture that what mankind
greatly values it will fiercely guard. This is a
commonplace, of course, yet men have failed
often to make allowance for some results that
have arisen from this most natural human
predisposition. They have been startled and
dismayed when the bars and barriers their
predecessors have painfully built round their
religious treasure houses came tumbling down.
They have then bewailed the loss of what
they most have prized, and fiercely they turn
on the reformers, and believe, as Mary did in
the dim light of that first Easter morning,
that these have taken away their Lord. Relig
ious defences cost the builders much to put

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 115
up. In the nature of things they must cost
something to take down when the time to
take them down arrives.
Supernaturalism is a comprehensive sort of
word, and might perhaps be taken as an explan
ation of much of our religious barrage and de
fence. Even the merest outline of the genesis
and growth of belief in the supernatural is
quite beyond the scope of these modest lec
tures, but I would point to the historic fact
that the great world religions are all alike in
claiming a supernatural origin, and in insist
ing, moreover, that the supernatural quality
is a test of the value of religion. In early
days it could not be otherwise. The world
men lived in was a pretty rough, hard world.
Light and darkness, evil and good, seemed to
carry on an evenly balanced struggle, and
none might confidently foretell the outcome.
" H God is a power of light and goodness,
let him prove himself such. If he cares for
man in his lonely up-hill striving, let him
show some sign of caring. If among earth's
tumultuous voices he speaks, let it be in tones

116 THE REASONABLENESS OF
of compelling power, so that even the doubt
ing and hesitating may be forced to hear and
obey." Naturally, religious passion cried out
for a supernaturally self-reveahng God, and,
ah, which of us does not know well how
deeply, hungrily, in our heart of hearts we
crave still the God who comes to us by way
of" the sign"?
Once the supernaturally revealed God has
spoken, a new reason for the continuous dis
play of the supernatural arises as a matter of
course. What has been communicated is a
matter of life and death in its supreme import
ance. It must be guarded. It must be pre
served. The gift to man is vain if it be not
maintained and continued. So naturally and
very soon something of the mystery and su
pernatural nature of the revelation comes to
be attached to the means that are adopted for
its preservation, and to those chosen as its
appointed guardians. All who know anything
of church history will remember how con
stantly such natural, nay, inevitable, develop
ments have occurred. The teachings of the

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 117
infancy of Jesus, the doctrine of his virgin
birth, and as a logical outwork and defence
of that doctrine, the further development of
it into the quite modern pronouncement of
the Roman Church as to the Immaculate Con
ception of the Virgin Mary herself, ,must at
once come to mind.
To many truly religious and also thoughtful
people such an evolutionary development of
the Word and Seed principle of Jesus seems
most natural, most necessary. Their place,
and it is a large one, is in the great Church
of Rome. There are others who, while they
recognize that this Hne of development may
have been the most natural one for early
Christianity to take, may have indeed been
the only possible development, by no means
admit that they are necessarily bound to ac
cept its conclusions. It belonged to a time
very different from our own. It was based on
views of nature, of history, and of man that
were temporary and misleading. They find
no ground for it in the teachings of Jesus
himself, no trace of it in the undisputed

118 THE REASONABLENESS OF
writings of St. Paul. It outrages their sense
of reason, for to accept its conclusions neces
sarily cuts them off from modern scholarship
and bars them from the ways of modern re
search. If to be a Christian means that a man
must accept and confess what is briefly caUed
the supernatural in the Christian religion,
then Christians they will not, they cannot be.
I need scarcely say, then, that the question
of what is natural and supernatural in the per
son and teaching of Jesus is one of first im
portance to-day. Most of us know we are con
stantly thinking on this question, if we think
on religious matters at all. Here the wisest
are the first to confess a profound ignorance.
They know well that theories commending
themselves to reverent scholarship to-day may
be replaced by newer and more satisfactory
ones to-morrow, as human knowledge pushes
its patient way a little further into the vast
territories of the unknown. Yet dim as is our
light, we cannot stifle enquiry if we would. No
uncertainty in our own conclusions, no differ
ence of opinion among our teachers can pre-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 119
vent our pursuit of the great question for
ourselves. Why must we, it may be asked,
conscious of our pitiful incapacity, insist on
occupying ourselves with this problem which
admittedly is so much too hard for us? Ah, it
is because in our inmost hearts we know that
we want Jesus, and that if we are forced to
give him up, if he, too, like so many beauti
ful visions of the early days, is doomed to fade
away in the stern light of actuality, then with
him goes from us forever what has been most
beautiful and inspiring in human life.
Now the Saviour Jesus presented to most
of you in boyhood was, we must admit, crudely
supernatural. It was his unlikeness to us, not
his unity with us, that was usually insisted
upon. His supernaturalness, not his natural
ness. And now that most educated men can no
longer believe in the supernatural, the Jesus
who to them in their youth was ever presented
clothed in the supernatural is becoming a faded
figure, a less real personality. Whether, we
wish it or not therefore, we must, if we would
hold him fast, ask, How far was the real Jesus

120 THE REASONABLENESS OF
supernatural? Does he claim supernatural
powers? Did the supernatural in his days
mean to men what it has come to mean to-day?
Whether he was supernatural or not, it must
at least be evident to all that before forming
an opinion, before taking sides on this great
question, we owe it to ourselves first of aU to
look frankly, and if we can without bias, at
his person and environment ; at himself, and
his times, and his teaching. Only then may
we hope to form some not altogether mistaken
idea as to what was natural about him, what
maybe accounted for by ordinary human laws,
by circumstances, by the limitations of his
time, that are, or should be, well known and
recognized; and what in his person and his
teachings transcends these.
The supernatural is amoving point. What
is inexplicable to one age is plainly explicable
to the next. I need not argue this, for so much
all will admit. That I should be able to whis
per to my friend one thousand miles away
would have been deemed a stupendous mir
acle less than one hundred years ago. It is not

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 121
so very long since the, to us, common pheno
mena of mesmerism, thought transference, and
second sight led men and women to torture and
death. We forget that while less than four
hundred martyrs suffered death in England,
Scotland, and Ireland during Mary's reign,
over four thousand witches, men, women, and
children, too, were burned and drowned in
Scotland alone during a comparatively short
period. The men who tore Scotland free from
Rome were the chief actors in that grim trag
edy. Puritan bigotry, not Roman intolerance,
was guilty of that insensate folly. In those
times, to deny supernaturalism was to court
death. The Jews beheved that by miracle the cities
of the plain were destroyed. It did not occur,
I fancy, to many pious people who were shocked
at the awful news of Messina's calamity to at
tribute to miracle the earthquake and the tidal
wave which destroyed a quarter of a million
of hves in a few moments.
The reason of this difference is not in the
facts recorded, but in our point of view. The

122 THE REASONABLENESS OF
earthquake and its dreadful results are just as
much part of the natural order under which
we live as is the springing-up in your garden
to-day of the myriads of daffodils and hya
cinths, that so beautifully deck the lawns. The
man of science tells us that the earthquake is
caused by the shrinking of the earth crust.
We ourselves know that given sun, soil, rain,
and seed, and our flower-beds will glow in the
springtime. Yet, as a matter of fact, how the
bulb grows from its rough brown unsightli-
ness to odorous beauty, and how the awful
calamity of the earthquake is prepared, we do
not know. One process is as little understood
by us as the other. Only we do know that
both are according to nature's workings, not
against them — are natural, not supernatural.
Jesus was a Jew. His beliefs were those that
would in the ordinary course of life come to
a profoundly religious Jew. All men of his
race and time believed in the supernatural. So
did he. I think so much is evident to any care
ful reader of his recorded sayings and doings.
But I think also it is no less certain that as his

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 123
brief ministry advanced, he changed, in sev
eral important particulars, his views and his
message. Such passages as, "If I had not come and
spoken unto them, they had not had sin; but
now they have no cloak for their sin";1 and,
" Woe unto thee, Chorazin ! woe unto thee,
Bethsaida! for if the mighty works, which
were done in you, had been done in Tyre and
Sidon, they would have repented long ago in
sackcloth and ashes " 2 seem to me final as to
his profound belief in the value of his own
miracles. On the other hand, signs are not
wanting that towards the end his belief in the
value of his miracles lessened. He is officially
approached by the Pharisees and scribes, who
desire him to show them a sign. "He an
swered and said unto them, When it is even
ing, ye say, It will be fair weather : for the
sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul
weather to-day : for the sky is red and low-
ring. 0 ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face
of the sky ; but can ye not discern the signs of
1 John xv, 22. 2 Matt, xi, 21.

124 THE REASONABLENESS OF
the times? A wicked and adulterous genera
tion seeketh after a sign ; and there shall no
sign be given unto it, but the sign of the pro
phet Jonas." '
Again, Jesus' complaint, addressed to the
multitude who followed him, would seem to
indicate that he placed a very real value on
his own miracles as means to induce faith (if
in this passage the writer of the Fourth Gos
pel has preserved for us a saying nowhere else
recorded ) : "Ye seek me, not because ye saw
the miracles, but because ye did eat of the
loaves, and were filled." 2
I think, then, on the whole, that the modern
theory, commonly advanced, that Jesus at
tached but secondary importance to his mira
cles, is an over-statement of the case. He pro
foundly believed in the supernatural himself.
Why should he not ? Had he not done so he
would have been no real messenger to his time.
The apostles after him believed in the super
natural. No reader of the Acts or the Epistles
can doubt it. The speech of Peter, on the day
1 Matt, xvi, 1-4. 3 John vi, 26.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 125
of Pentecost, whether it is reported accurately
by St. Luke or not, reproduces without doubt
the views of the apostles at that time. The
speaker says: "Jesus of Nazareth, a man ap
proved of God among you by miracles and
wonders and signs, . . . ye . . .' by wicked
hands have crucified and slain." Writing to
the Corinthians, some thirty years later, St.
Paul places in their order of relative value
those who minister in the Church : " God hath
set some in the church, first apostles, second
arily prophets, thirdly teachers, after that mir
acles, then gifts of healings." *
The testimony, then, of miracles was still
highly regarded. Let us recognize this frankly,
and as frankly declare that such belief was
the natural belief of the time, and had no bind
ing power whatever on us. The supernatural
is a movable point.
In this world of ours, man is coming to his
own, but he wins his way slowly. For long
ages he must have held his cave's mouth with
club and stone, against beasts vastly stronger
1 1 Cor. xii, 28.

126 THE REASONABLENESS OF
than himself. His tool-wielding hand must
have served him well ; and when at last he
learned the secret of fire, his victory was as
sured. Even then it was on an unknown and
hostile world he fared forth. How Httle could
he know ; how much less understand ; and
any exercise of power that seemed to him, who
knew nothing as yet of his own powers, far
more than human, was classed as miraculous,
— the working of some superior being, bene
ficent or malevolent, as the case might be.
Experience still supplies us with many things
we cannot understand, but we no longer count
them as supernatural. Few will deny to-day
that back of the phenomena I referred to —
mesmerism, thought transference, clairvoy
ance, etc. — there is something more than fraud.
Prophets there have been (and perhaps are)
who saw, by gifts we cannot gauge, into the
future. Men and women are here to-day whose
hands heal, whose touch removes pain. I had
a friend — a doctor — who practised in the
Northwest years ago when harvesting machin
ery was new, and when a good many accidents

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 127
occurred from its use. Among his neighbors
he found a Swedish farmer whose touch was
of extraordinary power. My friend assured
me that with a few passes he could remove the
most violent pain, and that by his aid, and in
the rough circumstances of the harvest field,
he had performed numerous operations, some
of a grave nature. The man was quite igno
rant, could not write, made no boast of his
powers, and would never receive any compen
sation for what he did. In other times he would
have been worshipped as a saint or burned as
a witch. I stayed more than once in a beautiful sub
urban home of friends of mine in a Southern
city. My hostess, the mother of a large family,
suffered at times excruciatingly from pain in
the temples. She was for years treated by the
ablest medical men in the country, but the
pain would return and in so violent a form
that her reason seemed threatened ; the par
oxysms lasting ten to fifteen days. At last it
was determined to remove the nerve (a very
grave operation, I am told). I personaUy knew

128 THE REASONABLENESS OF
the great physician that advised this operation
as a last resort. Shortly before the day set,
Mrs.  's maid, a colored woman, said to her,
" Why not let the blacksmith of the village
see if he could not help her — he was often
able to take away pain by rubbing.' ' Mrs.  's
family agreed. The man came two or three
times, and till her death, fifteen years later, I
believe Mrs.  had no return of that pain.
Here there are two instances of unaccounted-
for powers which have come under my own ob
servation. To deny such phenomena, to ascribe
.them to fraud, is to be really credulous, reaUy
unscientific. There are many things in this
our brief life that no philosophy yet formu
lated by us accounts for or explains. There
are around and within us constant signs and
evidences of the working of powers we as yet
do not understand. But bit by bit we are com
ing to understand them, coming to find their
true place for them, as piece by piece we are
surely putting together the puzzle of life.
I do not find myself able to believe all the
miracles ascribed to Jesus in the gospels. As

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 129
I have showed you, it is not reasonable to
suppose that we have in those .gospels any
historic or accurate account of what actually
took place. They are not, they do not pretend
to be, history. But I do feel it most natural
to believe that Jesus did work convincing
miracles in order to commend his message,
and far from beheving such miracles to be
impossible, I do not see how one, like the Son
of man, coming at the time he did, and under
the circumstances of that time, could be any
thing else than a miracle worker. Far from
believing such miracles impossible, I think it
more likely that in time to come, miracles
will not offer any real difficulty to the thought
ful, but that our children, or our children's
children, may yet see men on the earth who
are good enough and great enough to work
them. Miracles as Jesus wrought them were alto
gether the most beautiful and natural things
possible. To think of them as breaks in God's
law is illogical and absurd. To think of them
as natural operations, wrought by higher good-

130 THE REASONABLENESS OF
ness and higher power working in completer
harmony with and understanding of the divine
will, seems to me reasonableness itself.
Thus to believe in the resurrection of Jesus
is not to disbelieve in the natural order. If
death is the extinction of life, and resurrection
a new creation of life, resurrection would then
seem incredible. But if death be merely the
shedding of the body by the spirit, the sort
of dying that the seed dies, then resurrection
is the springing of the spirit life from the
body life, and as in seed sowing, every death
is but a resurrection.
We know little about Hfe; it is still a
mystery to us. We ourselves but very partially
understand ourselves. Surely there are powers
latent within us as yet untried, unrecognized.
When Jesus stood among men, there was to
them revealed a new, an unknown type of
man, — one pervious, as man had not yet been
pervious, to the light, knowledge, and power
of God ; one full of the Holy Ghost from
his mother's womb. His was a will at one
with the Father's, a hand clasped in the

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 131
Father's hand. Well might his followers cry,
" What manner of man is this, that even the
winds and the sea obey him?" The ruder
earth forces shape matter after an eternal law.
These forces we ourselves have proved to be
more and more obedient to man, and clearly
we men are called to exercise, in the far future,
a control on such forces, far greater, far more
subtle, than anything we can accomplish to
day. It seems to me, then, far from unreasonable
to believe that Jesus, the uniquely great man,
by reason of his perviousness to God, found
nature, as he found man, plastic to his hand.
Is it not true that we can measure the relat
ive advance each living thing has made in
the scales of being, by its relative perviousness
to influences outside itself? All life as we
know it is veiled from the Infinite Life, and
life may be spoken of as of lowly or high
order, in proportion to the thinness or thick
ness of the material veils enfolding it, hang
ing between it and the Infinite Life.
Here are creatures scarcely alive, we say.

132 THE REASONABLENESS OF
Such life as they have is only apparent to pa
tient study. They seem more vegetable than
animal. They live, but their life draws small
sustenance from our prime necessities of light
and air. From these they are shut in by
twenty thousand feet of sunless sea. The
depths of the ocean veil them from our life-
giving sun. Leaving ages behind us, as we
rise in life's scales, we come on other veiled
lives, but here the coverings are less opaque
and are quickly drawn aside. Still for years
many inches of impervious soil must cut the
locust's larvae off from daylight, and years it
must pass in its dark earth cradle, before it can
spread its wings and sing its brief summer
song. The frosts of many a winter, the rains
of many a spring, and the persuasive warmth
of many a summer day must search for it in
the dark soil, for its veil, too, is thick and
impervious. This is the way of the coral, the
way of the locust, the way of the world. For
how did planetary life come to be at all?
Here science speaks with no uncertain voice.
She claims authority, and, claiming it, she

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 133
makes on us a stupendous demand. She ex
pects us to accept, almost without question,
the truth of a miracle so great that I do not
hesitate to say all the miracles of revelation
are trivial by the side of it. Science teaches
us that all the beauty, music, knowledge that
go to make up what we understand of life
have come out of a swirling, formless hurri
cane of fiery cosmic matter, and nothing else
— out of a chaos so dark and rude, out of a
blast so awful and death-dealing, that not even
to an educated imagination can its fury be
conceivable. In that long aeon of chaos, death
reigned, not life. Chaos seemed to rule, not
order. Then were enthroned powers surely
utterly diabolic. Any sane, overlooking intel
ligence; any man even of genius who from
some distant point of vantage might conceiv
ably have surveyed that chaotic storm, could
have believed nothing less than that he was
hearing and seeing, in its awful confusion and
roaring turmoil, nature's articulated curse. In
vast spaces, uncontrolled and uncontrollable,
the fiery hurricane, with purposeless fury, prom-

134 THE REASONABLENESS OF
ised to rage forever. So ages passed, and were
followed by other ages, and some sort of
comprehensible order grew, till, in the sub
lime language of the Bible, in the centre of
dense vapor earth lifted herself, but she was
" without form and void, and darkness was on
the face of the deep." What had love or wisdom
to do with such a gray, lifeless world as that?
Then other ages passed, and forth from the
ocean depths there came forms of life, grotesque
and awful, that lived but to destroy. Then
other ages passed, and lo ! man at last stood
upon his feet. But what a man ! Is he a man?
If he lifts hands of prayer, they are red with
blood. He is dimly aware of his better self,
if he is aware. He is surely liker far to the
beasts from which he came. Cruel and lustful
is he ; living on earth, far yet from ruling it,
barely holding his own against savage beasts
and threatening hunger, and without love or
faith or much hope — just the blind instinct
to live, keeping him alive. What has love and
wisdom yet to do with such a world, or such
a product of the world?

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 135
I have not time, I need not go on to tell the
oft-told tale of man's later progress, his de
feats, his many shames ; the many far ebbings
in the tide of his advance, the many fair hopes
of men and of nations cast down and betrayed ;
of civilizations at last built up with much toil
and blood, only to crumble into the dust again
and forever to be lost and forgotten. But in
spite of all these tragic and costly changes,
the most careless student can now perceive a
rise in life's scale, a growing towards a fuller
self -consciousness ; a widening of the certainty
of responsibility, a vast increase of the sense
of pity, and a steady determination, even
when storms are at their height, to keep life's
tiller true. Night is not yet passed, nor are the
storms yet over, but who could ever have
dreamed, in those ages so far behind us, who
could have dreamed, that out of such a chaos
should have come forth the miracle, man?
Knowledge is not yet ours. Day may not
yet have dawned, but we are aware of a rose
of coming dawn upon the gray sea, and on our
earth, once without form and void, where un-

136 THE REASONABLENESS OF
disturbed darkness reigned, life's veil is thin
ning fast, and life is pervious to light as none
would have dared to dream of its perviousness
ages ago. Knowledge already is beginning to
murmur a hesitating " amen " to the deep
abiding hopes born of instinct and religion,
and faith ventures to believe and declare that,
as out of that swirling chaos, an order, an
order inconceivable has come, so again out of
what seems to us much confusion and waste
and death, in the mystery of that order, is at
last to emerge a state of being as much com
pleter and fairer than the present as the pre
sent is fairer than the past.
Earth's history is the old story told over and
over again, of Orpheus going even to hell to
claim his bride. Why man needs chaos and hell,
and why by an irresistible divine song-caU he is
ever lifted out of it, who can say ? But man
came from chaos, and what may not yet come
from man?
Surely it is reasonable to believe that back
of all veilings, penetrating at last all veils (for
he has hung them), God our Father lives,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 137
above all, through all, over all from the be
ginning ; that all creation is but the burying-
away of life, the sowing of divine seedbeds.
Whether it be in the ravines of the great sea,
or the gauzy veilings of the silkworm, or the
mysteriously sensitive gray matter of the hu
man brain, all creation is but a temporary
veiling of life from God — a going-forth from
Him, that it may return to Him. " For yet
doth he ever devise means, whereby his ban
ished be not expelled from him " (as the wise
woman said long ago to the mourning king).
His banished ones own instinctively their ban
ishment, and strangely and variously try to
come home. That is the meaning surely of
life's struggle up. So the larvae struggles for a
winged life, and the monkey fought his way
to a man's life, and manhood stretches out
longing, empty arms of prayer and calls upon
his God for a divine life.
God of the granite and the rose,
Soul of the sparrow and the bee,
The mighty tide of being rolls,
Through countless channels, Lord, from Thee.

138 THE REASONABLENESS OF
It springs to life in grass and flowers,
Through every grade of being runs,
While from creation's utmost towers,
Its glory streams in stars and suns.
These are more than dreams. They are
hopes founded by multitudes not only on
growing knowledge and widening experience,
but on a deeper understanding of the uni
versal longings and purposes of mankind.
Jesus was a man supremely pervious to God.
Shelley dreamed a dream long ago — one of
the most beautiful dreams that ever visited a
poet. He said : —
Life like a dome of many-colored glass
Stains the white radiance of Eternity.
He saw the eternal life slowly penetrating
our lower life, shining through it. Wilham
James, in his luminous lecture on Immortahty,
amplifies that thought. The measure of the
scale of living things may be the thickness or
thinness of the veil they present to God's
"white radiance."
Surely of this much we may be sure, that
when we come to study ourselves, we cannot

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 139
but admit that life's veilings have thinned mar
vellously. See man preparing for his moment
ous career ! Nine months of silence, seeing
not, knowing not, yet wonderful things of feet
and hands and brain, of tongue and taste, of
eyes and heart, waiting for a baby's resurrec
tion. Man's first life waiting to issue forth into
the large world — and mark, not ages to wait,
not years, but only nine short months before
he reaches the sunlight; semi-conscious moth
erhood meanwhile playing its mysterious and
as yet but partially understood part.
Then after birth begins the second life of
man. Now the veil is thinner still. Invariable
law and fixed order lay their yoke on the grow
ing thing, yet soft hands and watchful care
attend it, shielding it from danger, saving it
from harm. Ah, how grudgingly love sees life
fare forth ! How yearningly we would save it
all pain and penalty if we might ; take its first
woes on our parent shoulders if we but could !
It may not be. So we set our children to their
childish tasks. We exact obedience and effort,
and insist on responsibility. For we would

140 THE REASONABLENESS OF
make them men, to know manhood's joy and
duties, and in time take up and finish man
hood's tasks. They must finish what we began.
They must succeed where we failed.
Sometimes we think that it is into a cold
and heedless world we usher our children. We
forget that our loving care, our passionate
tenderness are but part and parcel of that
world's order. The world forces and influences
reach them, it is true, but these were meant
to reach them through us. As for nine months
the mother's bosom sheltered man's first Hfe,
so for an indefinitely long term parental love
was ordained to shelter his second. Love, care,
and wisdom tend life as it makes its fateful
entrance. Childhood is pervious to parentage.
What we have won, what we are, in large part
we pass on to our children.
Now what I am trying to make clear to you
is that as our children are pervious to all we
are as their parents, so are we pervious to God.
Our plan of life for our children in the small
is God's plan for all of us his children in the
large. Man is a demigod. He rules by divine

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 141
right this earth which is his kingdom. There
is the unaccountable, there is the semi-mirac-r
ulous within him. Of us poor men even it is
true, " What manner of man is this, that even
the winds and the sea obey him ? " He trans
forms the earth on which he lives. He yokes
to his car earth's forces. More and more he
compels nature to do his bidding, and pro
foundly he changes the face of the world. And
beyond even these powers there belongs to
him the power of choice ; he can sink to the
beast whence he came, or rise by self-mastery
to the heights of genius or of sainthood. He
can turn on or off the light of life, and so make
his soul a holy temple or an unclean pigsty.
It seems to me, the more I think on human
life, that its history has been, and yet shall be,
just one long filling of the splendid promise
and command made and given to Adam in the
legend of Genesis, "Have thou dominion."
Forth from the faultless irresponsibilities of
the garden Hfe man had to pass, that he might
take up the great task of being a man. Noth
ing henceforth comes to him without toil. His

142 THE REASONABLENESS OF
very daily bread shall depend on the sweat of
his brow, but as he fits himself for lordship, lord
ship is given him. The secrets, the beauties,
the powers lying unused and dormant in his
kingdom, are only waiting for his compelling
command. He is the child of all the long past.
In him, and in him alone, can her ages of tra
vail be rewarded. He is both her explanation
and her king. As St. Paul magnificently put
it, " The whole creation groaneth and travail-
eth, . . . waiting for the manifestation of the
sons of God."1
Here at last in little Judea stands the Son
of man. He is fit to be King, and King he
therefore is, for he is supremely pervious to
God. Such was the impression Jesus made on
the ignorant but honest men who companied
with him from the first, and though much
that must have seemed utterly supernatural to
them may to us seem natural, surely our
knowledge of what man can do, and of what
man did do, is so necessarily imperfect that
the time for dogmatizing has not arrived.
1 Romans vm, 19, 22.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 143
Furthermore, those who charge orthodox
religion with alone maintaining, in the face of
scientific evidence to the contrary, an impos
sible doctrine of the supernatural, forget or
ignore the fact that there is everywhere among
plain people a tacit recognition and admission
of the truth of supernaturalism to-day. Such
admission is implied and understood in the
laws of the land. "By act of God," so old
laws still read. And so not the priesthood
alone, but religious and irreligious people
alike, philosophers and teachers, orthodox and
heretic, kings and commoners, all professedly
still beheve in a God who acts on human
affairs, not in one way, but in two different
ways — one an orderly way, acting in and by
the mind and work of man and nature's pro
cesses ; the other, an outside way, an interfer
ing way. God has, of course, in the common
belief, his laws; these are beneficent and work
on the whole for good. But he is not confined
to these, but from time to time can and does,
in response to special prayer and appeal made
to him, sweep down, as it were, from heavenly

144 THE REASONABLENESS OF
calm into the troubled vortex of mundane af
fairs, and, by a sudden exercise of divine en
ergy, reassert his will and indicate his author
ity. This was the old behef of the Jews. All
early religions are full of such a faith and
strong in the assurance of a divine partiality.
In such a belief Moslem, Calvinist, and Cath
olic alike went forth to accomphsh and did
accomplish the greatest tasks of men. Those
were days in which men heartily beheved in
verbal inspiration and communicating voices
from heaven. We who have ceased to believe
in the value of such means of divine leading
have not yet succeeded in replacing them with
more reasonable opinions.
The old is out of date, the new is not yet born.
The form of the old, mummified, dusty
dead remains to trouble us.
One more important point I must raise be
fore I leave this subject. The interfering, the
partial, the supernaturally acting God is still
the God usually given to childhood. And
here we do our children a cruel wrong. At
school, at college, our view of the world and

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 145
its mysteries is pressed on them. At home, if
any religious teaching at all is given, it is too
often of the archaic sort which I have been
describing. It is the impossible and unworthy
religion of the interfering God.
Is it because we have not time ? Is it be
cause we have not wit? Or is it not rather
because, to part with the great patient, partial
Companion of our own youth is so cruelly
hard to us ourselves ? I think this is often the
chief cause of our faithless failure to re-state
fully religious things to our children, or at
least make the best attempt we can to do so.
But oh, my friends, in this matter we must
not weakly sentimentalize. Our children are
born into an age, truth-seeking, truth-honor
ing. The Son of man, whose last appeal rang
forth, " To this end was I born, and for this
cause came I into the world, that I should
bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is
of the truth heareth my voice," can lead and
inspire, as none other has or can, such an age,
and as the supreme witness to the truth and
martyr for the truth, we must present him to

146 THE REASONABLENESS OF
the young of our age. Let us do this, and
they may be trusted to make their way to
Jesus, and that Jesus who has led their fathers
will surely lead them.
I am old enough to remember Professor
W. K. Clifford's exceeding bitter cry after the
lost "companion God" of his youth. "We
have seen the spring sun shine out of an empty
heaven, to light up a soulless earth. We have
felt with utter loneliness that the great Com
panion is dead." Clifford had been taught to
worship the partial, the outside, the interfer
ing, the supernaturally working God. The
spirit of his time seized on him. He must go
forth among the searchers, the discoverers of
his generation. At any cost he must seek the
truth ; and so bravely he went. And the spirit
of new discovery seized on him, as it did on
the choice youth of fifty years ago. Men
called it the scientific spirit. It seized on Clif
ford, as in other times it had seized on John
Huss, Columbus, Michael Angelo, or Sir
Francis Drake, inspiring them to strange and
epoch-making adventure.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 147
Ah, we may go much farther back in our
old world's story, and still we shall find men
breaking away from the dream God of their
youth, sometimes seemingly to lose him for
ever, and sometimes to find a larger, juster,
lovelier God. Our dreams have beautiful
things in them, and because they are dreams,
there mingle with the beautiful distorted and
impossible things as well. Now, two things
have combined to destroy the dream God of
our youth. First, the growth of our moral
consciousness. Our concepts of justice be
tween man and man have changed, have risen.
Our sense of responsibility for men less for
tunate than ourselves has risen. We are on
the side of the weak. We would if we could
apportion life's burdens to the shoulders that
must bear them. The obvious inequalities of
life startle us. The unfairness of its divisions
fills us with, reforming, interfering zeal. iVa-
ture is abominably partial. She pets and
spoils some of her children, while she starves
and stunts others. We see these things clearly,
and more than that, we feel them keenly. In-

148 THE REASONABLENESS OF
stinctively we recognize in these cruelly un
equal conditions a state of things we are im
pelled by all that is highest and worthiest
within us to change, or, so far as we can,
remove altogether.
To the man who tries to find and follow
the truth to-day, this is the task confronting
him. A great task ! A long task ! But he
believes not an impossible one. It is all that
and more. It is a new task. It is the task
of the new creature — the Christian demo
crat. It is not so long since good men, who
bravely and successfully faced their own
tasks, set for themselves a very different aim.
They recognized that they were God's chosen
— nature's (but they would not use that word)
fortunate ones; the Elect, in short. They
were anxious to maintain their superior posi
tion before all other things. They were what
they were by the choice and blessing of a
favoring God. Their prosperity on earth was
a sign of divine approval. Their own future
happiness in heaven was the one first and

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 149
chief object of their search and prayer. So
far are we removed from them, so greatly
does our moral consciousness revolt from
their standards of duty, that we find it hard
at times to believe that they tried, as we are
trying, to follow the example of our Saviour
Christ, and be made Hke unto him. Our moral
consciousness forbids us to entertain their
idea of God.
Secondly, the partial, the outside, the in
terfering God must go before man's widening,
deepening understanding of the universe in
which he finds himself ; of which he is a part,
a product ; not something planted in it, but
something springing out of it, justifying and
explaining it all. In great and small, in high
and low, in far past as well as in vital present,
in all the universe, everywhere and always, is
seen the unfailing working of law and order.
Chance and caprice are shut out. An inter
fering and partial God is unknown. I have
searched many books to find a definition of
our order of law that is at the same time suc
cinct and understandable by ordinary men.

150 THE REASONABLENESS OF
The best I can find is in the writings of a
great Jewish philosopher, Spinoza : —
The providence of God is just the stable order
of the universe, in which reason can find itself more
and more at home, and fashion out of its materials
new instruments for progress and happiness. All
God's laws are inviolably observed. They partake
of the nature of God himself. Being in fact his
nature revealed, they are therefore characterized
by eternal necessity and truth.1
Now I think aU can understand this great
man's statement of the inviolabihty of law,
and I think most will admit its truth, and
if it is true, then you can readily understand
what the supernatural cannot be. The super
natural cannot be a breaking of those very
laws by which Wisdom, Power, Love Eternal
expresses itself. I may not understand those
laws. I may misread them. I may not dis
cover them, and so may make many and sad
mistakes ; men have done so and will yet do
so in days to come. But if there is a God, as
St. Paul believed, " above all and in all," so
1 Professor Robert A. Duff, Political and Ethical Philo
sophy of Spinoza, p. 167.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 151
surely then are his laws the expression of a
divine wisdom, power, and love, and so surely
must they be inviolable. To doubt that is to
court madness.
In the full meaning, therefore, of the term
" supernatural," using it as it should and must
be used, neither Jesus nor his works can be
supernatural. We may not be able to explain
him — we are not able. I do not believe that
any knowledge we have, or for a long time
hence may have, of men or of matter, will
explain Jesus. But this is not to proclaim him
a supernatural, as one outside our universe of
law. Nay, he was part of God's " eternal order
of necessity and truth."
Bearing in mind what I have said about the
supernatural, let us turn to the person of the
Master. The old way of accounting for his
person and birth, the way by which we have,
most of us, been brought up to account for
them, the way commonly caUed " orthodox,"
is no real way at all. Yet it is the way at least
professed to be believed in by most Christians.
It is not the oldest way. It is the way of

152 THE REASONABLENESS OF
the ages after Jesus, not of the times of Jesus.
That he was virgin born, without earthly
father, and not as are other men, is stated in
two of the gospels; and these are not the
earliest compilations. The oldest gospel, Mark,
makes no reference to his birth at aU. Luke
traces his genealogy to Joseph. Jesus himself
never refers to his birth. The apostles never
mention it. It is referred to in no apostolic
epistle. As a dogma it was formally grafted
on Christian behef at the Council of Nice,
325 a.d.
By the fourth century the idea of the vir
gin birth had become the custom of the time.
The Christian religion had made great pro
gress in the East. Egypt was the ancient home
of such beliefs. The East accepted such a
birth as an almost usual thing. The great, the
divine, were so born. Thus it was natural to
think of Jesus as born of a virgin. If the di
vine man, the supreme saviour was to outshine,
out-rank all other men, he too must be virgin
born. So in quite early days, myth gathered
round the Master, good men again brought to

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 153
the best they knew, the best they had, and in
time the anathema of the Church was stamped
on aU who denied what neither Jesus nor his
apostles knew anything about.
To us, who are not quite so densely ignor
ant of biological matters as were the men of
those times, it is of course evident that the
theory they held to could not yield them what
they sought. By eliminating an earthly father,
those good men would fain free their Lord's
nature from all mundane stain, from aU taint
of human sin and error. After the ignorance
of the time, they believed that the positive
quality, the determining factor, in human gen
eration was the male ; the mother was merely
a passive agent. This belief was natural in an
age that gave to women so lowly a place, but
it was inaccurate. They were seeking to do
him honor for whose sake they were prepared
to die, and they did it in the only way they
knew. It was all most natural, but we can
honor Jesus without copying their error or
accepting their impossible theories of biology.
The pot-makers are at work again. Beauti-

154 THE REASONABLENESS OF
ful garments to adorn the son of Mary must
be woven, another treasury built to retain and
protect the living seed of his body. Let us
thankfully accept the precious heritage they
pass down to us. Let us claim the Saviour,
while reverently we lay aside as outworn and
no longer necessary the very old and beauti
ful myth that shadows his cradle. It is unde
niably beautiful, but even so it would rob us
of what is most precious in our Lord. There
is another picture of that cradle. An older
picture and one at least as beautiful. The in
spired unknown who wrote the Epistle to the
Hebrews gives it to us, and it runs : " Where
fore in all things it behoved him to be made
like unto his brethren." J One like us in all
things, one of us he declared himself to be,
and no mistaken adulation of his person must
rob us of his human reality. Unless Jesus was
a man with limited knowledge, with human
attributes and temptations, his life can be for
me no true model, his death no comforting
example to men. J£ he came into our world
i Heb. n, 17.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 155
as no other man came, if his course in that
world was marked by superhuman power over
the forces of nature that confront and oppress
us, then the text I have placed at the head of
this lecture is a misleading delusion : " He
that believeth on me, the works that I do
shall he do also; and greater works than
these shall he do; because I go unto my
Father." To multitudes of faithful people still these
old theories that we were brought up on pre
sent no insurmountable difficulties. Let such
hold to them ; only, as they do so, let them
recognize that these ancient dogmas as to the
method of Jesus' incarnation are not of the
original deposit, but are the growth (the nat
ural and necessary growth, I admit) of a
later time.
Let those, on the other hand, who reject
time-worn tradition remember that no theory
of Jesus' person, because it is more reasonable
than those we reject, can avail to make any
of us like him. To be like him, we must fol
low and obey him, for only in obeying shall

156 THE REASONABLENESS OF
we learn to know his truth or share his
power. In conclusion, I hear some say, "If the
old theories, old beliefs have worked so well,
if you can still say as you do, 'Let those who
believe them retain them,' why do you then
come here disturbing our faith, denying and
destroying our old precious behef s ? "
Let me try and tell you why. There are
multitudes to-day of honest men and women
who have been uplifted and inspired by what
is best in the truth-seeking, truth-loving spirit
of our time. Amid the immense activities of
the age, the bewildering increase of knowledge,
they stand confused. New duties appeal to
them in throngs; ancient wrongs, seeming to
them dreadful, call for reform and removal.
Between their intensified sense of truth, their
deepened consciousness of duty, they are over
whelmed. Such people need a strong, sane,
hopeful, and inspiring leader, and such is
Jesus. Never did any age need his leadership
as our age needs it. And not as guide only,
but as old-fashioned Saviour we need him, for

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 157
sin, in new and beautifully compelling guise,
waylays us still, as it ever has the sons and
daughters of men. No merely scientific spirit
can save us, or can take with us the place of
him. who is called Jesus, "for he shall save bis
people from their sins."
Now orthodoxy agrees to all this, and ap
proves such statements, and then quickly for
gets that if it insist on making the guide and
Saviour a supernatural and half-human being,
then he can no longer be a real guide or a
real Saviour. He fades away from us into the
region of mirage and myth. Orthodox Christ
ianity does actually say, " I am Christianity.
I have built and supported these churches.
I welcome you to them. I offer you this spirit
ual treasure of which I have been appointed
the guardian. I would lead you to the Lord
I love and revere, that you may know the
comfort of his Spirit, the power and peace of
his salvation. The church doors are open to
you. My hand is stretched in welcome. In
the name of my Lord, I invite you, but —
unless you agree with me about the mystery

158 THE REASONABLENESS OF
of his nature, before birth, at birth, and after
birth, you cannot have my Lord at all." Alas,
I am not exaggerating. So far as orthodoxy
is concerned, the echo of an age-old anathema
is in the air, and they who cannot accept the
Son of the virgin, the impossible mythic man ;
they to whom the supernatural is impossible
and repellent, may not have Jesus at all.
Jesus said, and died saying that every one
that was of the Truth heard his voice ; that
every one that sought to do his will, had a
place by right in his company. Orthodoxy
knows better than the Master himself what
he wanted, and so imposes on his would-be
disciples conditions and beliefs he not only
did not formulate, but knew nothing about.
Human nature repeats itself. The very disci
ples, when the Master was not by, did not
hesitate to bar good men from him because
they could not agree with those men. The
disciples, in their own small, prejudiced, and
narrow way, were quite ready to do precisely
what the Pharisees had done in the large,
more authoritative and national way, namely,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 159
bind burdens on men's shoulders — burdens
of custom, tradition, and agreement — till the
very state of affairs Jesus protested against
had again obtained, and good men had made
"the word of God of none effect through
their tradition."
I have been out in the world of to-day, and
I know whereof I speak. I have looked at men
outside our closely drawn sheepfold lines, and
outside those lines I see thousands who should
be inside. These outsiders need, and feel they
need, the efficiency of organized religious life.
They, or the most of them, recognize the need
of organization. Without it nothing can be
stable in our human affairs ; because of it, we
have Christianity. Had not Christianity been
strongly organized in the form of a Church,
during long, ignorant, and doubtful times,
we should not be where we are, or know or
prize what we have, what has been handed
down to us.
The mode of the Church's government
may be a matter of expediency, but the need
of the Church's firm organization is a matter

160 THE REASONABLENESS OF
of prime necessity. If any Church would
stand, it must effectively organize the spirit
ual life of its membership, or all that has been
gained by it for mankind may be scattered
and lost by the vagaries and eccentricities of
individual feeling and action. Multitudes of
good men outside our churches realize all this,
yet they are still outside. 11 they need the
Church, surely the Church needs them. If
they need shepherding, she needs sheep. They
alone can save her from dry rot. They alone
can fill her depleted and undersized ranks, and
make her efficient in her holy war. They are
not inside because they cannot, they beheve,
honestly profess what the Church calls on them
to profess. They profoundly believe they can,
for the present, better serve the truth-loving
Son of man by refusing to say about him and
about his Church what they cannot beheve to
be true. Mistake it not, forget it not, the cru
sading ages are not past and dead. The great
est Crusade that faith, hope, and charity have
ever ventured forth on is but beginning, and
only one man can lead it to a glorious end.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 161
The mass of men are slaves stfll — slaves to
their passions, to their condition, to their pre
judices, to their poverty, to their lot. Mor
ally, socially, economicahy, mentally, the mul
titudes are still in bondage, but a brighter
day is dawning, and a spirit of larger charity
and higher resolve is moving the hearts of
men. Oh, that the old Church would but re
cognize the fatefulness of the hour and place
herself at its head. The crusade is her crusade,
the old, old cause of mankind, and its aim is
not the winning of Christ's birthplace, but
the freeing of his sons.

162 THE REASONABLENESS OF

JESUS DOCTRINE
Never man spake like this man. — John vn, 46.
A further question remains to be answered.
Where did Jesus get his doctrine? Have the
truths he gave to men their sole origin in him?
Was he the first to see and reveal them ? Is
he a teacher, — as the early mystics saw him,
— " without spiritual father or mother, with
out descent, having neither beginning of days
nor end of life," or did he not rather find the
basis of what he gave to men, and often more
than the mere basis, in the continuous revela
tion that had providentially been given to the
Jew from the very beginning of his national
Hfe? Thus to put the question is to answer
it. Jesus' teachings, as they are recorded for
us, are on this point explicit. He built his doc
trine on the past, and he quoted the sacred
writings to prove the righteousness of his ap-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 163
peal. He claimed ever to fulfil, not to destroy,
the best beliefs and hopes that his people in
herited from their lawgivers and their pro
phets. He denounced those inevitable pro
cesses by which the truth given to one age
had been muffled up and distorted by the next,
but ever as he did this, he appealed to the ex
ample of the greatest of those before him — who
had been obliged to make the very same pro
test. When he chooses his text, — challenged
to declare himself in the little society where
he had been brought up, — it is taken from
that great teacher who long before had cried, —
" The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me ; be
cause the Lord hath anointed me to preach good
tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the
brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and the opening of the prison to them that are bound;
to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord." 1
This same mighty voice it was that had
hurled against Jewish formalism the tremen
dous accusation : —
"To what purpose is the multitude of your sac
rifices unto me ? saith the Lord : I am full of the
i Is. lxi, 1, 2.

164 THE REASONABLENESS OF
burnt offerings of rams, and the fat of fed beasts ;
and I delight not in the blood of bullocks, or of
lambs, or of he goats. . . . Bring no more vain
oblations ; incense is an abomination unto me ; the
new moons and sabbaths, the calling of assemblies,
I cannot away with. . . . Your new moons and
your appointed feasts my soul hateth : . . . I am
weary to bear them. And when ye spread forth
your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea,
when ye make many prayers, I will not hear:
your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you
clean." *
No one can read such passages as these and
not recognize in them the very spirit of the
appeal of Jesus. In claiming too, as he did,
the right to push aside some of the legislation
which the nation beheved had Mosaic sanc
tion, he only stood where the great prophets
stood before him.
In his teaching, then, so far as he can, Jesus
takes his texts from the past. He finds the
living seeds still growing in old and weed-
choked fields. He gathers the grain of God
and of truth, and re-sows it. Let me particu
larize : His doctrine of life for man beyond
1 Is. i, 11-16.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 165
the grave was no new doctrine to the later
Jews. Most of them held to it stoutly, though
by legal subtleties they might obscure it.
From these, then, he would rescue it, retain
ing its essential part. Jesus had a new and
confident hold on immortality himself. It
meant all in aH to him, and then as he sowed
it, it became a new and beautiful thing, a liv
ing seed, an inextinguishable hope. In the
dark ages that were soon to fall upon the
world, men would have despaired without it.
In those times it was inevitable that the doc
trine of immortality should assume the crudi
ties that belonged to the times, but its life-
giving power was never lost.
So in his doctrine of Fatherhood : the God
Jesus worshipped was the Father of his child
ren. In emphasizing this again the Master
was but fulfilling what was best in the ancient
belief. Whether he believed that all men are
the children of God does not seem quite clear.
Certainly St. Paul thought that he was justi
fied in drawing such a conclusion from his
teaching, for he based his appeal to the cul-

166 THE REASONABLENESS OF
ture of Greece on a fatherhood that is univer
sal. What is of immediate importance to my ar
gument, however, is that the doctrine of a
divine and universal fatherhood had long be
fore been proclaimed. In Isaiah lxih, the
prophet who has been retelhng the story of
God's patience with his people, claims his
fatherhood for others who were not Jews.
" Doubtless thou art our Father, though Abra
ham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge
us not : thou, 0 Lord, art our Father, our
Redeemer; thy name is from everlasting"
(v. 16). That is to say, thy very everlasting
nature is fatherly.
Finally, to take but one more instance of
many in which Jesus took from the past the
germ of his gospel doctrine, see his teaching
of a coming kingdom of heaven. The doctrine
of immortal hope developed in later Judaism
meant more than a personal hope. It had come
to mean the promise of a higher, holier order
of living, a kingdom of heaven on earth.
In our gospels, Jesus' teaching of the king-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 167
dom is somewhat confusedly set forth. Doubt
less much that he said in regard to it has been
lost, and much more retained that reflects in
its final expression the wishes and standards
of a succeeding age. The Apocalypse furnishes
a striking instance of how soon even the best
men's predictions began to mould and change
the truths Jesus saw. The writer, you remem
ber, in a series of pictures that still grip our
souls, dweUs with a fierce delight on the over
whelming ruin — that the " Lamb " metes out
to those who deny him — when "the great
day of his wrath is come." * " And I saw heaven
opened," he says, " and behold a white horse ;
and he that sat upon him was called Faithful
and True, and in righteousness he doth judge
and make war. His eyes were as a flame of
fire, and on his head were many crowns. . . .
He was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood :
and his name is called The Word of God. And
the armies which were in heaven followed him
upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white
and clean. And out of his mouth goeth a
1 Rev. vi, 17.

168 THE REASONABLENESS OF
sharp sword, that with it he should smite
the nations; and he shall rule them with a
rod of iron : and he treadeth the winepress
of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty
God." 1
Literature knows nothing more sublime.
The inspired writer's passion grips our souls,
and may for a time carry us away. But some
how we feel we have left the Jesus we knew
far behind — the Jesus of Nazareth who was
meek and lowly in heart, who went about do
ing good and healing those that were op
pressed of the devil. This view of the Kingdom
of Heaven is surely very hard to reconcile with
much he taught. A kingdom that " cometh
not with observation," a kingdom that was
"within men," even within his persecutors.
(It was to the Pharisees he said : " The king
dom of God is within you."2) The Patmos
doctrine is surely a glorious harking back to
the older Jewish idea of the, reign of God.
Still, to believe, as the great Jewish teachers
had ever done, in a final victory of God and
1 Rev. xix, 11-15. 2 Luke xvn, 20, 21.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 169
good at all was most certainly a triumph of
faith. And it was from their ancient idea of
that divine kingdom that the Master evolved
his own gentler and more universal doctrine.
He knew what was in man. Had not the best
of men ever and always craved a divine King?
What were all earthly kings and kingdoms, all
efforts made for them, all sacrifices endured
for them, but poor transient attempts to ex
press what some day men hoped to see ? And
the poor sovereignty of the merely human
king remained sacred because it dimly hinted
at a sovereignty far transcending itself. The
deep want of the human heart cries out for a
king. It is the Kingdom of Heaven that I crave.
The broken lights of truth ; the mockeries of
half knowledge; the spotted and stained good
ness of the best of men, — these cannot sat
isfy me : I want God !
Humanity in the mass, the positivist's God,
is but a poor divinity. It is abhorrent to me
to think of man or any multiple of man as the
highest thing in all the universe. The centre
of it all must be something far holier, stronger,

170 THE REASONABLENESS OF
less mutable than myself. In the physical order
I stand alone in my greatness ; yet am I a
thing of but few days, holding life by a frail
thread. I can mould the plastic masses to my
will, I am conscious of dominion ; yet in my
greatness I am most conscious of my weakness
and my loneliness. I want a lord and king. I
cannot worship myself, or any multiple of my
self. The longer I live, the surer I am that all
men are alike in their good quahties and their
bad. The great mass of us average about the
same. Some rise here and there with about
their heads a halo of some great goodness,
some great virtue, some great deed done. But
if you watch and observe, in spite of aU the
pitiful untruth and subterfuge of human bio
graphy, you will see that though acclaims
mount to dizziest height, and humanity cheers
its idol to the point of self-induced hysteria, ,
though the halo-bound head be of gold, the I
feet that support it are of clay. The inspired
visionary lacks poise, steadfast purpose, or
some other necessary quality of greatness.
The practical man who accomplishes great

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 171
tasks has no head of gold, nor are his feet
clay. He marches to his goal with an unfalter
ing stride; but then those purposeful, practical
feet sometimes crush the weaker folk that
come in their way. We need the marching
great men as much as the men of sublime vi
sion ; the puUer-down of strongholds, as much
as the dreamer of fair dreams. The moral
qualities one lacks, the other possesses. But
none possess both or all.
My soul craves something higher, completer
than these — for it is athirst for God ; for
God to forgive me, to cleanse me, to decide
for me, to judge me : ah, to do more ! — to
love me, to love the things in me that were
almost ready to be born, but never saw the
light ; songs fit to be sung, but never put to
earthly music ; to love the innate good in me
that was dwarfed and stunted. My soul is
athirst for God, at the long last to care for
me, to take me at my true value, and to take
me home. Who can tell them? Who describe
them ? But such are the unquenchable long
ings of the human soul, and it was to them

172 THE REASONABLENESS OF
Jesus brought his gospel of salvation, his mes
sage of hope.
God's fatherhood, — that is, a God who
cares, — man's hope beyond death, and the
ultimate victory of goodness and light over
sin : this was the threefold gospel of Jesus.
It was his reply to what men craved in his time,
to what men have craved in all times, to what
we hunger for to-day. There is no substitute
for that gospel, for no other solace has been
found for that craving.
I have tried, very briefly and imperfectly,
then, to show you Jesus as a teacher, coming
after other Jewish teachers, choosing from
their store the best, the most vital messages ;
gathering up their clearest and holiest visions
and repeating them ; filling them with his own
wonderful spiritual power, offering them as
new, and yet as old gifts to men.
But Jesus was more than a teacher. He
claimed to be an example (and that is a claim
none ever made before), an example and an
illustration of how a man should take his true

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 173
and divinely appointed place in the order of
this world, a world wherein was much sin and
suffering, much that was mysterious and baf
fling to faith — if men were to believe that it
was created and maintained by a God who
cared. Jesus' final claim on man's confidence
and behef was this, that he offered himself as
an explanation of the order of the world.
Living, serving, dying, rising, he revealed
God's wfll and law concerning it.
Such was the unique claim of the unique
man. Now, as was altogether natural, this claim
must first be so presented as to win the con
fidence of his own people, the Jews. " I am
not come," says he, " but to the lost sheep of
the house of Israel"; and it was by his example
and in obedience to his command that the first
activities of the early Church were confined to
missionizing in Judea.
As I have pointed out, while he lived, Jesus
based his appeals to his countrymen on the
ancient writings both he and they venerated.

174 THE REASONABLENESS OF
And after he died, in claiming messiahship
for him, his followers of necessity continued
to base their claim on the same sources of au
thority. Could it be proved to them from holy
writ that Jesus was the Messiah they expected,
then their acceptance of him was sure. Fail
ing the establishment of such a claim, his re
jection by them was certain.
If it must be admitted, and I think it must
be admitted, that often the passages quoted
by the apostles and teachers, a report of whose
arguments have been preserved for us in the
New Testament, will not bear the heavy load of
proof that they sought to impose on them, the
custom of the time must be remembered in
their excuse. They but handled the sacred
writings as the best and wisest men of their
day handled them. Gloss and paraphrase were
then the rule. They could only do as they had
been taught. They had seen a great light, a
light falling from inmost heaven on a Hving
man and on an ancient law. They had com-
panied with Jesus, and had not their " hearts
burned within them," as he who spake as never

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 175
man spake, "talked with them by the way and
opened to them the scriptures " ?
As time went on, and a larger missionary
field opened before the Church, her vision
widened, as Jesus had promised it should. Im
pelled by the spirit, Jewish Christianity be
came too great, too universal a thing to remain
the possession of a tribe. Peter's momentous
decision in the matter of the proselyte Cor
nelius first led to the change. The Temple's
door had ever been shut to the outside world,
but now a few men began to dream of a tem
ple not " made with hands," of worshippers
who bowed in spirit and in truth before, not
a golden, but an invisible altar.
Then rose great Paul, a Hebrew of the He
brews, yet deeply touched with the vision of
the wider world ; more fully convinced of the
universal mission of Jesus than were any of
that early band ; and with Paul — as I have
already said — there came a momentous en
largement of Christian doctrine. Paul spoke
and wrote for a wider than a Jewish audience.
It was necessary for him, therefore, to make

176 THE REASONABLENESS OF
an appeal to authorities other than those the
Jews revered. His manner of quotation from
the sacred Scriptures is the manner of his time.
His proof texts do not always prove ; but apart
from the method of the rabbinical school in
which he was trained, and which left its per
manent mark on him, Paul has the grip of a
master on the sacred literature of his people,
and a profoundly sympathetic understander
of the wider world he set himself to win.
Just now I spoke of three great doctrines
drawn by Jesus from the past — restated and
enlarged by him, and given forth as living seed
to men ! God's fatherhood — that is, a God
who cares ; man's hope beyond death, Christ
ian immortality ; and the ultimate victory of
goodness and light over sin — that is, the cer
tainty of the Kingdom of Heaven. To these
Paul added his philosophy of the Master's per
son and sacrifice. By its means he would ex
plain them all.
To attempt even an outline of Paul's philo
sophy would be out of place here. Yet on
one aspect of it I must dwell for a little, for

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 177
it has become part of our belief. I refer to his
theory of the sacrificial value of the life and
death of Jesus. This is really of first import
ance, because it was the earliest effort made
by the Christian mind to bind together the
sacrificial ideas of the Jewish past and the
Christian present. Such an effort was inevita
ble, for Jesus himself had rendered it inevita
ble when he declared that his life was the ful
filling of the divine law, and that law from
beginning to end was sacrificial.
Let it be at once admitted that Paul's theory
of the sacrificial value of the life and death of
Jesus in many ways satisfies us no longer.
The ancient illustrations of the law of sacri
fice, the steaming altar, the transferred guilt,
the atoning blood, the mediating priest are
figures of a remote and barbaric time. They
served well the purpose of the time that pro
duced and ennobled them. They helped men
then to pray and to believe. They represented
as high an ideal of God as men could accept,
but to insist on them now would but push
men towards prayerlessness and despair.

178 THE REASONABLENESS OF
Apart from these temporal and local limita
tions of the mind, Paul had a vision of the
meaning of the life and death of Jesus which
had and has a vital relation to aU life and to
every age, which must survive all the tempor
ary forms in which reverence clothes it, must
outlast all sacred repositories provided for its
safe-keeping. He believed that the sacrifice of
Jesus is the illustration of the one finally true
law of human life in this our world; that in
Jesus the beauty and the reasonableness of
the sacrificial life are revealed ; that in this sense
— and it is the highest and final sense — all
priests and temples and altars are but shad
ows and pictures of that real sacrifice which is
the sacrifice of the life of man. I wiU quote
a passage written towards the close of his life
which embodies the Pauline philosophy — and
is indeed a comprehensive statement of what
the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus came
to mean to him : —
" Not looking each of you to his own things, but
each of you also to the things of others. Have this
mind in you, which was also in Christ Jesus : who,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 179
being in the form of God, counted it not a prize
to be on an equality with God, but emptied him
self, taking the form of a servant, being made in
the likeness of men ; and being found in fashion as
a man, he humbled himself, becoming obedient even
unto death, yea, the death of the cross. Wherefore
also God highly exalted him, and gave unto him
the name which is above every name ; that in the
name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in
heaven and things on earth and things under the
earth, and that every tongue should confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the
Father."1 In these verses St. Paul's meaning at least
is unmistakable. They sum up, too, much of
his maturer teaching. The question which some
of us are in doubt about to-day is, Is it pos
sible to accept a rule of life so difficult, so sim
ple? Surrounded as we are by temptations,
conscious as we are of a pitiful mixture of
motive, is it possible for us in any real sense
to yield practical obedience to these most
searching and comprehensive commands? Look
steadily, says the apostle, with purposefulness,
with honest intention, not on your own affairs
> Phil, n, 4-11, R. V.

180 THE REASONABLENESS OF
only, but on the things of others. Look
as you would look when pursuing your own
interests, wisely, bravely; not merely as you
study a problem, but as you plan an enterprise.
Look on the things of others, and, as you look,
let Christ's very mind be yours ; look as he
looked. The prize of Hfe he could have grasped ;
he sought it not for himself. All the powers
of an extraordinary manhood were his; he
stripped himself of them and voluntarily fore
went his own legitimate advantage. He stooped
to weakness when he need not have stooped.
He was willing to die, and met death in its
most awful shape ; turning to death, agony,
and defeat; choosing these deliberately as his
portion sooner than give up his high purpose
of saving his fellow men. His deliberate mode
of action, ruling all his life and finally con
summated by his death, Paul declares God ac
cepts and crowns, and, so accepting and crown
ing it, declares it to be the one supreme, final,
permanent, and victorious form of life for
ever. This indisputably is St. Paul's meaning.
This is Christianity, and the mind of Christ

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 181
as he understood it, preached it, and died
for it.
Is this mind of Christ possible to us to-day ?
There is very much in the everyday life of us
all which seems, at a superficial glance, to
deny the practicability of living after this high
standard. We need the stimulus of competi
tion. This is not lacking even in our college
days. You are feeling what you believe to be
its legitimate influence now. You are gather
ing the results, in these last few crowded, ex
citing weeks of your university life, of a series
of competitions, in which you have engaged
during all the course of it ; and you feel that
in the stimulus of reasonable competition there
is real good. Yet if you look at this college
life of yours at all searchingly, you are soon
aware that competition forms a very small part
of its life. Its main value lies far away from
mere advantages of competition. Its chief
gains are not to be won in any game of grab.
Rather it is in coming to understand your own
life, winning invaluable opportunities to study
men of like purposes and yet different capaci-

182 THE REASONABLENESS OF
ties from your own, and in the leisurely asso
ciating with so much that is best and stimu
lating in American life and scholarship, that
the main good of it all lies. And as from over
the college walls, in an occasional thoughtful
hour, you look towards the future, you have
felt again that competition as a rule of life
with one's fellow is, after aU, a semi-barbarous
law, and that it bears to the generous spirit
pretty much the same relation that the sting
ing spur does to the thoroughbred's flank.
By itself, it never won a great race yet. The
best blood scarcely acknowledges it.
Thus, as we look within and then without,
we are gradually aware that in a strange and
wonderful way the ideal of self-sacrificing serv
ice is growing on men. When sometimes, dis
heartened and downcast, we seem to see in life
just the same sordidness and cruelty that used
to rule it long ago, we are aware that such a
state of mind is more or less colored by pass
ing mood or feeling, and is not borne out by
fact. The studies of these past years ought to
have done something to convince you that

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 183
there is a tide in the affairs of men, a tide of
pity, an earnest, self-sacrificing interest, that
flows and ebbs not. More thoughtfully, more
considerately, man looks on the life of his fel
low. Our forefathers played the game of grab
so remorselessly, we ourselves are so often
keenly set at it, that a life without strife, an
existence in which competition in a thousand
forms and shapes does not play a prominent
part, is hard, nay, almost impossible for us to
conceive. We are so wedded to ideas of con
tention and competition that any other condi
tions than those springing from these are weU-
nigh inconceivable to us.
And yet his life is poor and narrow, indeed,
who has not been blest by some vision of an
existence in which love casts out strife ; some
limited sphere of life, at least, in which com
petition and strife are not. It is possible for
even a very imperfect character to love some
one with such a love that into his relations with
that person competition and strife cannot enter.
For this loved one we forego our own advantage
with delight. For the sake of such, to suffer is

184 THE REASONABLENESS OF
as natural a thing as to breathe. Further than
this, if we look around us thoughtfully, we
must be aware that man's sphere of love is
ever widening; that widening interests bring
men more and more together. Warmer ties are
gaining strength surely, if slowly. Man is no
longer cut off from man as he used to be. Life
overlaps life. The hard, high waUs of prejudice
and caste, of difference in fortune, and even
in nationhood, no longer serve to separate
men altogether from each other, as they used
to do.
Look backward for the space of a few gen
erations only, and you see the best men, the
wisest, the most cultivated, incomprehensibly
callous to the wants and woes of those near
them, untouched by the feeling of their infirm
ity, unmoved by their bitterest cry. Some two
years ago, I happened to spend two weeks of
spring weather in the ancient city of Nurem
berg. There, little changed by our modern
life, stands that wonderful city. In its courts
and palaces, in its narrow streets and splendid
churches, the very spirit of medievalism seems

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 185
to have found its last retreat. There is scarcely
a finer hall in Europe than that splendid coun
cil chamber in which Nuremberg's great citi
zens, successful merchants, and valiant cap
tains took counsel for peace and for war.
Around that banqueting-hall, blazoned on its
waUs, is the tale of Nuremberg's greatness.
There the great fresco speaks of her past life
and glory, her wealth, her power, her inde
pendence, her artistic genius. And in the most
natural way, mingled with this record, is the
story of her unconscious cruelty, too. The tale
of tortured criminal stands written on the wall
as plainly as the glory of the lordly merchant.
With equal truth they are drawn side by side.
As you stand in the hall, the golden light fall
ing through wide windows, rich in glass, it
is easy to think yourself back in the time when
what was richest, wisest, fairest, bravest, and
best in that central city of Europe met and
feasted where now you stand. But what an
other story is hidden beneath the great stone
floor! Go down a few feet, and there, for your
inspection, open up whole rows of cells. Oh,

186 THE REASONABLENESS OF,
such cells! Noisome, dank, unpenetrated by
a single sun-ray. There in darkness, utter and
profound, men, and women, too, were impris
oned, tortured, put to death; while a foot above
their heads, the solid stone shutting out all
sound of revelry from above or of wail from
• below, the great citizens feasted and drank,
planned wars and discussed commerce.
Could such things be to-day? We smile at
the idea ; it is an insult to imagine it possible.
And yet those men and women that feasted
were not specially bad men and women ; nor
did those poor wretches who suffered beneath
own often to any worse sin than misfortune.
Why has the former state of things passed
away ? I tell you, brothers, there is but one
reason — it is the advance of the tide of " the
mind of Christ." Year by year, it seemed, to
those who watched it, to ebb as often as to
flow. Slowly, very slowly, it rose on the sands,
and as each watcher failed at his post, his tes
timony as to its rising was all too uncertain to
assure him who took his place. But there was
no ebb for all that.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 187
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Gomes silent, flooding in, the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light ;
In front, the sun climbs slow — how slowly !
But westward, look, the land is bright.
It is rising still. I tell you the time will come
— I believe it is near at hand — when it will
be impossible for men and women to live,
as even now they are Hving, in the broad and
beautiful houses of our great cities, surround
ing themselves there with all the rich gifts and
bounty of life, while close to them hundreds
of thousands of their fellow citizens are shut
down within the pestiferous narrowness of the
tenement-house or the sweat-shop. It will be as
impossible for things which exist to-day to con
tinue to exist side by side in our cities and
land as it would be to fill Nuremberg's broad
hall in this twentieth century with feasting cit
izens, while her dungeons beneath were choked
with the victims of her torture. Yes, love is
casting out strife, is taking the bitterness out

188 THE REASONABLENESS OF
of competition. Love recognizes to-day, as she
never did before, misfortune as establishing a
claim on fortune, and sorrow and suffering as
pleas from which an honorable man must never
turn away, if he would hope for the favor, not
only of a merciful God, but of his own justi
fying conscience.
Again I ask, Why is this? It is because the
mind of Christ is increasingly becoming a
power among men. But as I seek to set before
you the reasonableness and certainty and com
ing prevalence of this mind of Christ, I shall
perhaps be accused of sentimentalism. The
plea I make, you say, is sentimental. Is it so ?
I would have you remember that it is not the
voice of religion alone that calls you to-day to
make the mind of Christ a power in your own
Hves and in the world. What science to-day,
in the interest she excites, and in the splendid
triumphs she has won, takes more prominent
place than does physiology in all her branches ?
We might call her the regnant science to-day.
It requires little more than a knowledge of
first principles of physiology to assure our-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 189
selves that this youngest of all the sciences
calls on those who follow her deliberately to
accept self-sacrifice as their law. Somewhat
heady with her own intoxicating success, she
stands before the world to-day. " Listen to
me," she seems to say ; " let me speak. I may
be the youngest in the class, but I have some
thing important to say." And when she does
tell of her own things, with a captivating
vigor of youth and enthusiasm cast around
her, what is the burden of her testimony ? In
voluntary sacrifice in the lowest orders of
life — voluntary sacrifice in the highestforms
of life. This is her testimony, her message,
her gospel. In these highest she calls it altruism.
It is really " the mind of Christ." " You,"
she cries to those who listen to her — " you
are the result of age-long processes of sacri
fice ; fall in with the law that made you what
you are. Let this mind be in you : forego your
own advantage, and, doing so, win your high
est life."
Or listen with me for a moment to another
voice of weight, that in no special sense claims

190 THE REASONABLENESS OF
to be religious. Listen to the voice of history.
This teacher, too, has the confidence of youth,
of youth renewed at least. She teUs us that
we are only beginning to understand how to
place together in their proper order and se
quence the lessons of the past. " In physics,"
she cries, "you have fixed laws, laws by which
you can judge certainly of nature's sequences.
By these the tides rise and fall, the winds come
and go, Hght foUows darkness, and the glory
of the spring the rigor of the winter. To the
aid of these and the conduct of them the will
of man is not necessary. Seed-time and har
vest, day and night, snow and heat, summer
and winter, shall not fail." But in the con
duct of his own affairs, it is vitally necessary
that man take into his consideration the prop
erty and responsibility of his own will. Na
ture mates herself to that wiU. She aids man
so long as he struggles. She is to him a sturdy
helpmeet. She will not live with him, however,
as a sloven. She wiU marry him, but not slave
for him. If he neglect her, she withdraws her
forces, her vital warmth from him. Whether

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 191
it is an individual or a generation of individ
uals, this is true of man's relations to her. She
will give man no assurance of faithfulness on
her part, and permanent support springing
from that faithfulness, if he continue faith
less to her. She will help her mate, man, to
prepare for each generation a more favorable
environment in some respects than the pre
vious generation had. Intellectually, moraUy,
the atmosphere, the environment may be more
favorable. But let that generation, thus kindly
greeted and provided for by nature, fail of its
duty, cease to do its part, be lacking in some
essential requirement, and the higher platform
to which it has been lifted serves but to pre
pare the way for a more disastrous and irre
mediable fall. The comparative study of his
tory makes it abundantly evident to the student
of to-day that each generation can do no more
for its successor than provide it with a stout
platform on which to battle out its own des
tiny, wrestle for its life, prove its own worthi
ness to exist, save its own soul from the death.
At first sight, there seems little that favors

192 THE REASONABLENESS OF
the Christ mind in the conclusions of historic
science. Look a Httle closer and you will see
that this is not so. The very essence of that
mind is willingness, for the good of others, to
forego its own legitimate advantage. When
first a few ignorant and weak men dared to
proclaim such mind as the final type of human
mind, what state of things were they confronted
by ? There was spread all over the known
world a civilization marvellous in its success.
Seemingly it was established forever. It had
founded itself on the ruin of all previous civ
ilizations. It had borrowed from their experi
ences ; it had been warned by their failures.
Its rule seemed as eternal as the hiUs of its
own capital city. And why? Men great and
small, old men and children, had Hved, planned
toiled, fought, and been willing to die for
Rome; and rich in the self-sacrifice of her
children, Rome stood forth steady and strong
beyond compare. She rose, flourished, and
blessed mankind. But Rome grew rich and
wanton; both rich and poor aHke sunk into
selfishness. The poor cried only for bread and

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 193
pleasure, and the rich for pleasure and power ;
and so the crash of it all soon came. For Rome
was but the husk of herself. She had turned
to her muck-heap, and forgotten the glory of
her early crown. The fair became foul, the
wife a wanton, justice was sold, honor fled,
the mind of Christ was openly scoffed at. She
fell and her fall was great. Innocent and guilty
fell together, for the hope of mankind had
been betrayed by Rome. On her wreck and
ruin, after a time of doubt and dismay, larger
foundations of liberty and hope for mankind
arose. For in Frank, Goth, and Visigoth, and
in all the so-called wave of barbarism which
had swept over her, possibilities of higher life
were existent which were no longer possible to
her. On these Christianity took hold. Their
young lives were her new seed-bed.
It is not doubtful that real advance has
been made towards the realization by man of
" the mind of Christ." In regard to its law, we
no longer stand where our forefathers stood.
We may fail sadly still, but we aim at higher
things than they, we judge ourselves by a

194 THE REASONABLENESS OF
higher standard. Our ideals, at least, are less
self-seeking. To prove this would not be dif
ficult, but as time fails me, I must content my
self by merely stating it.
The law of sacrifice explained and illus
trated in his matchless Hfe — sealed by his
lonely dying — is the gift Jesus gave to men.
Jesus of course used the language and similes
he best knew when he taught it. Paul had
other learning than that of Jesus, and looked
forth on an enlarged world. Consequently the
Pauline method and similes are not those Jesus
himself employed. The Christian churches —
as I have repeatedly said to you — still too
often feel themselves obliged to use only
those methods, similes, forms of expression,
that Jesus knew and used, — or Paul or the
early Fathers knew and used, — and have thus
failed to make reasonable and cogent their
appeal to modern times. For instance, science
really is doing far more to commend the law
of sacrifice, the law of the " mind of Christ "
to men to-day, than all its professed followers
and nominal advocates; not always because

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 195
these last are not sincere and intelhgent, but
because the terms they use sound uncouth and
unreal to educated men.
We have not ceased to believe in the ne
cessity of sacrifice. Good men in aU religions,
wise men in aU nations, know well that the
law of sacrifice is a vital and changeless law,
but chnging to the nomenclature of the long
past, seeking to explain the sacrificial life in
terms out of date, the so-caUed Christian sys-'
tem of sacrifice, appears unreal and absurd,
and often unmoral as well. Orthodox termin
ology to-day still is the same as that employed
by good men whose conceptions of sacrifice
found their most natural illustrations in the
shambles, in lowing herds and blood-sprinkled
altars. These to them seemed the natural way
of approach to God.
Such terms as justification, expiation, atone
ment, imputed righteousness, transferred sin
had once for sacrificing men a tremendous
meaning. To use them to-day is but to be
wilder and estrange those who are honestly
seeking to conform their faulty and selfish

196 THE REASONABLENESS OF
lives to self-sacrifice's changeless and univer
sal law. Of that law Jesus' life and dying are
still the supreme illustration, but orthodoxy
now veils from the minds of multitudes the
real significance of both.
As St. Paul handles the law of sacrifice in
the passage I have read to you, it is as fresh
and full of meaning for us to-day as it ever
was. The Saviour, whom St. Paul speaks of as
crowned with everlasting glory, and before
whose august feet all things in heaven and
earth do bow and obey, sits on the throne of
his universe, not by favor, but by right. He
is exalted because he alone has explained and
vindicated its universal law. The whole uni
verse, animate and inanimate, bends in hom
age to him because he has made glorious its
own supreme law — the law of sacrifice and
of service. Through all the dark and vapor
ous gray ages of the past, that law has slowly
worked out its painful processes. It had been
sobbed in the universe, ages before it was
revealed on the cross of Christ. This is the
force of St. Paul's "Wherefore." Who shall

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 197
justify to the universe her sorrow, toil, pain,
dying? Who shall stand and explain her long,
long travail pang? Man, and only man.
Only a Man-Child glorious can pay the poor
earth back for her long-drawn-out travail pang.
Without man nature is inexplicable. And
man stands confused before himself, uncer
tain of whence he came and whither he goes,
incapable of explaining and justifying what
he is, and what he wants to be, till the highest
Man stands before him and says : " I am the
way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh
to the Father but by me. See in me the ex
planation of all that you see, and feel, and
hope for in yourself."
" Therefore God hath highly exalted him."
The life of Christ is the final type, and there
fore no other life can be finally successful.
There can be no two victorious types. The
final life must be the fitted life. The unfitted
must cease to be. The life that lives in its true
relations, — to permit any other life than this
to survive would be to undo what the ages
have been doing ; would be to reverse the law

198 THE REASONABLENESS OF
by which the lower die, that the higher may
flourish. God himself cannot make a world
in which the saurian exists side by side with
man. Saurians are the best possible forms of
life at one stage, yet impossible at the next.
The conditions of the saurian are the condi
tions of the Carboniferous age ; these would
but choke and strangle the man. To persist
in conditions is the meaning of sin. A uni
verse favorable to the highest must of neces
sity be less favorable to that which is not so
high. The mind of Christ and the selfish spirit
of self-seeking cannot finally co-exist. Which
is to be in us, brothers ? After which mind
shall we Hve ?
So let me conclude as I began. AU that
this university stands for, these friendships
made, these halcyon days in which are so de
lightfully mingled the spring and zest of boy
hood, with the growing sense of power that
belongs to early manhood — all can avail you
but little, if the chief value of them you let
slip, if the abiding result of them is not found
with you. That result should be a deeper

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 199
knowledge than is possible to others who have
not had your advantages — a knowledge of
what goes to make manhood worthy and true
living possible. Your outlook on life should
surely be not less sympathetic than that of
other men because of these splendid oppor
tunities that you have enjoyed. It is men the
hour calls for, men who know themselves to
have a mission, and who can and will turn
away from all other prizes to win that one life
prize ; from all other siren voices to listen to
that " one clear call for me." .
Oh, my brothers, you come not here to
complete your life studies, but to fit yourselves
to pursue them- The study you have known
here has, if it be worth anything, cost you
something. The study that awaits you in the
great world will surely cost you more. " Look
not on your own things " — not to your own
aggrandizement, nor the building of your for
tune — but look on men, and you will learn
to know them a little, and, as you know, to
love them more. Pursue pleasure and it will
pall on you. Give your soul up to toil, and

200 THE REASONABLENESS OF
work will become some day unendurable. But
the man who gives out his best to his fellow
man is never utterly cast down or disheart
ened. No numbing cares can quite paralyze
the reverent student of men. Falls and fail
ures he may make ; but from them all, like
the fabled Antaeus of old, he wiU rise re
freshed, for he has touched his fellow. " Look
not on your own things," and you will learn
to love, love with a discriminating hopeful
ness that rises above all disappointments, and
year by year discovers promise of a life that
is worth living.
I have visited all the cities and all the states
in this great land of ours ; but from out them
all, to my mind, one building stands preemi
nently beautiful and eloquent. It is the Me
morial Hall at Harvard. It teUs the story of
a college generation that earnestly looked on
the things of others. It tells the story of brave
deeds following that persistent looking. They
had their hour, those men of fifty years ago,
and they heard their call. A golden haze of
distance already hangs over that past time. It

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 201
seems to us very glorious, but also very sim
ple, very easy. They could not have done
other than they did. Ah, that is how problems
of one age always look to the next. It did not
seem so to them. Partings had to be made,
prejudices met, and deep questionings an
swered ; yet out of them all they passed tri
umphant. They did their duty, suffered and
died, many of them, before they knew they
had won. How ? What mind was theirs in
that momentous hour, in those desperate years
of civil strife ? It was the law of sacrifice, it
was the mind of Christ. The cause was man's,
the end his salvation ; and the means, the only
means, sacrifice. Man never could be, never
can be, saved by any other. If you would
save him, you must die for him.
Have not many of you often looked on the
old war monuments, and wished with all your
hearts that a duty as simple and direct as the
duty of those days was yours to-day? wished
that you, too, could hear a voice that called,
and know it to be divine? But uncertainty sur
rounds you, checks you, benumbs you. It is

202 THE REASONABLENESS OF
hard to find the truth, hard to know what to
do. On sociological questions we are at sea ; on
theological, we are divided ; on political, we
sometimes fiercely differ. We often feel deeply
with Matthew Arnold : —
But now the old is out of date,
The new is not yet born.
Brothers, as your chosen preacher, feeling
the solemnity of this occasion, one that can
not recur in my life or yours again, I caU on
you, by all that is highest and holiest, all that
in your own nature answers and echoes God,
I call on you to put before you, as an end and
object in your life, the knowledge and the ser
vice of men, — not of classmates or of partners
only, but of men unlike yourself, environed
differently, differently endowed. Begin to do
this now, try to do it faithfuHy. More light
and a clearer call shall be yours by and by.
Look earnestly not on your own things, but
on the things of others. Look on man, God's
last and highest work, and in that work you
will learn to see and reverence divine purpose.
Give men your mind, give them your hand,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 203
and you cannot in time withhold your heart.
Know the ignorant, to teach them ; know the
weak, to help them ; those who are out of the
way, to lead them back. Oh, get to know the
boys in the great cities, and share with them
some of those priceless advantages that have
enlarged your life. Know the wounded, to
heal them, the sorrowing to comfort them.
Know the sinful, to forgive and save them.
Only set yourselves by the help of God to this
lifelong purpose, cost what it may. Sacrifice
time, self-interest, ambition, and fortune to it
— set yourselves, I say, to know men; and you
have laid the foundation for a life that can
not fail, and a hope that shall not be disap
pointed.

204 THE REASONABLENESS OF

VI

JESUS' DOCTRINE OF MAN'S APPROACH TO GOD

If thou canst do any thing, have compassion on us, and help us.
Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible
to him that believeth. — Mark ix, 22, 23.
For the sake of clearness, will you pardon
me if I recapitulate a little in this my last ad
dress to you. I have tried to show you that
the message of good news Jesus brought to
men has of necessity undergone many changes
since he delivered it and we in our day re
ceived it. Yet in spite of aU change the vital
germ of it, the all-important part of it, the
seed of it, is unquestionably ours still. We need
it as bread for our own souls, and as hving
seed which we too must sow afresh for the
harvesting of those who come after us.
Our view of the world in which we Hve is not
in many ways the view Jesus, as a Jew, held.
Yet different, profoundly different though
that view be, I have tried to show you that we

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 205
cannot part with Jesus, we need not part with
Jesus, with his hopes, with his standards, with
his doctrine of the nature of man and of God,
or with his teachings as to man's place and
duty in the world.
As I said, before I speak of what Jesus
meant by faith, " man's way of approach to
God," let me for clearness' sake restate briefly
what most thoughtful Christian men would
agree, I think, in believing to be man's place
in the world. This world in which we live and
play our brief part is God's world, created,
guided, upheld, and saved by God. His life is
its life. To beheve this must profoundly in
fluence our ideas as to our place in it and our
duty to it. Resolutely we must lay aside as in
adequate and untrue theories based on the
world's independence of God and opposition to
God. (This, be it remembered, the early Chris
tians were not always successful in doing —
instance the apocalyptic literature of early
times.) Unless we hold this attitude firmly, we
must be prepared to find ourselves in opposi-

206 THE REASONABLENESS OF
tion to the scientific spirit, and to much that
is best in that earnest attitude of reverent re
search — to which our time owes so much.
This modern spirit is, as I have tried to show
you, " of the mind of Christ," and should be
greeted as an ally and not as an opponent.
Christendom as a whole is as yet far from ac
cepting this truth ; not even in theory are we
always prepared to say with Jesus and with
Paul, "We are fellow workers with God."
They long ago saw that this was the real
meaning of man's life on earth, and joy and
confidence came to those much persecuted men
as they declared it. But we are privileged to
see as they could not, that not only were the
followers of Jesus so working, but that all
good men everywhere — and not men only,
but the very nature of things — were working
for the light and against the darkness, for
God and against self-will and evil.
It may surprise you, but it is none the less
true, that in our country and in our times
there is a distinct reaction against these best,
clearest, earliest teachings of Jesus. There is

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 207
a harking-back to the dualism of long ago;
and people who loudly claim to be walking by
the aid of new lights are repeating very old
and very gross errors.
God, they say, is to be found outside ordin
ary physical conditions, rather than in them.
With great variety and confusion of language,
it is declared that only by ignoring, overcom
ing, and denying these, rather than by study
ing and accepting them, can man win his
vision of God. These modern mystics cannot
bring themselves to believe that the earth is
the true field of man's life — as it was of the
Master's life; that it is the garden in which
the gardener walks and talks with God. This
very old misconception of man's relation to
the world has taken, in different ages, varying
forms of expression. To-day, it is taking
newer, but none the less mistaken and hurtful
forms. The Christian Scientist denies stoutly
the reality of his body. He goes a little fur
ther than his forbears of the fourth and fifth
centuries, and says his real life can be won only
by denying the actuality of the material life.

208 THE REASONABLENESS OF
The material universe is to him non-existent.
God is spirit, and is revealed only in the
spiritual. AU material things are but hin
drances and iUusions.
This and some other even cruder forms of
mysticism are all based on the same faulty
conception of God's relation to the universe
and of man's place in it. The mystic religion
ist, the spiritual medium, the half-cheating
clairvoyant, the Christian Scientist healer and
expounder are but separate companies in one
regiment, many hundreds of years old, one
and all of them seeking an outside God, not
the real, reasonable God, ever self -revealing in
the natural order of the universe, and so in
human life. They turn from the Father of
spirits and of men, the God of evolution and
of history, to the God who speaks in "the
sign." The God and Father of Jesus is the God
who owns and sustains the world. He is as
much present here as in heaven. The present
life is God's as truly as the unknown life be
yond the grave. To deny this, to ignore it,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 209
separates the religious faculty from the rest
of man's faculties. It is an effort to live outside
God's chosen environment for man, and pre
cludes his being the one thing he is evidently
called to be, here and now (whatever he may
be called to be or do hereafter), an intelligent
and loving fellow worker with God, under
bodily conditions, in an actual world where
he is limited by time and space.
This world, in the teachings of Jesus, is not
immoral, but as yet unmoral, waiting the seed
of truth; the nature of things not evil, but
potentially good; the animal not opposed to
the divine, but God's animal, awaiting enlight
enment through the divine. Jesus is in his
Father's world, and he knows it. God has al
ways worked in it, and works in it now, and
Jesus, as he lives in it, is continuing his Fa
ther's works, the works he was sent to do. His
life-blood is the very life-blood of the world's
life, is a part of that life, and grows as it
grows. To save that world for its highest needs
and purposes — for this he gladly lays down
his life. Here he leads men. Here he explains

210 THE REASONABLENESS OF
to us men our vocation, our ministry; shows
us, as nobody ever did or could, man's true
place in the world. All things are for man.
When man comes, he comes to control, and
his control is beneficent. His work is to change
the beautiful, savage earth into a beautiful,
fruitful world. He must everywhere play the
god whether he will or not — sometimes, alas,
it is a devil god he plays, but ruler he is ever.
The beautiful legend of Genesis is true to the
core. The world is given to man. In it he but
makes good his divine title ; no one will do his
work for him — not even God. The seas have
their work, the seasons fulfil their destiny.
Forces known and unknown, operative in the
world, are yet all subordinate to man, the
earth's lord ; he is its engineer, its director ; he
the controHer of all its forces. And just as the
wise father wiU leave his son unaided, often,
to work out his boyish tasks, or grapple with
the problems of early manhood, so God will
not put an interfering hand to the great busi
ness. Appalled by its greatness, abashed by
his own mistakes, the tragedies, the disasters

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 211
attending them, again and again man cries for
an interfering grace; but it may not be. Is
it cruel thus to leave him alone? Nay, infinite
wisdom and love knows its necessity. We send
our boys to school, and a hard task it is,
harder for the love that sends them to endure
its part of the task than for the boy so sent;
but the boy's life has to be lived in its own
way, and under its wisely chosen conditions.
The strangeness and the loneliness of school
have to be met, and in conquering these and
reaping the opportunities that go with them,
the lad takes his successful steps towards man
hood. We are in our own small way copying
the great Master all the time, and as we copy
we do well. It is not cruel to leave man to his
tasks alone. Infinite love and wisdom have
proved that long ago, and sorrow, loss, defeat,
pain, and sure death ending it all, these can
not be done away with. At view of them often
we stand doubtful and discouraged. But
heavenly interference we shall never have —
for only thus can we win our mastery.
Let me put it simply by way of illustration.

212 THE REASONABLENESS OF
I have a farm in Connecticut. One day, long
years ago, I noticed a wild bit of land hard
by. It was rough and woody, there was swamp
and marshland too, a spring spread itself into
a little bog ; many thorns and thistles there
were, with a few wild flowers among them.
But a man with will to work and knowledge
how to work came that way, and the swamp
gave place to a spring, the tangled thicket be
came a woodland. Where once the roughest
sort of pasturage lay, a rich field with its
crop of hay and grain arose; and soon a home
stead and garden were there too. This is what
man can do. This is what man was sent to do.
Here is a living picture of man's place in the
world. The thicket was not without a beauty
of its own, but the woodland was better. In
the marsh there was native beauty, but the
clear spring and flowery meadow were better.
The farmhouse and fruitful garden meant a
higher presence and a greater good. All the
possibilities of fruitfulness and of beauty in
home-making were there in the wild neglected
tract. All they wanted was a man to call them

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 213
forth. To this work God ever calls his farmer
children. To push my illustration a little fur
ther, this too makes plain the relationship of
Jesus to the rest of mankind. Christ's place is
inside the race, not outside it ; with us in all
our experiences, not outside our experiences.
He explains to us our own possibilities, re
veals to us our own life ; has only come that
we may have our own life more abundantly
than we have had it before. All the coarser,
earlier elements of the world are in us. In us,
too, waiting for his call and leadership, are
the higher, holier, humaner things waiting to
be born. Even the lower in us is God's lower
waiting God's higher ; not the immoral man,
but the unmoral man. If we will go with him,
follow and obey him in working towards the
higher, we are just hke the farmer at what at
first seemed his unthankful and hopeless task.
If we insist on going back to the days of primi
tive man, we go back to the beasts — and
there is sin; if we obey the spiritual, we rise
to Christ — and there is the divine ; but one
grows out of the other in orderly process. The

214 THE REASONABLENESS OF
spiritual is the evolution of the primitive.
We grow as the world grows from lower to
higher, from slaveship to sonship. Neglect
the farm, and the fields drop back to the
thicket, the spring sinks again into the marsh
land, the weed chokes the garden, the fruit
trees planted with so much care go back to
the crab-tree, and the lower , denizens of the
wild return.
Oh, is it not a reasonable work, a lovely and
a free service ! Let us take his view and follow
him, " fellow workers with God," as Paul
dared to call it long ago, carrying out his pur
poses to a certain and a splendid end. But,
oh, mark me ! There is no mere law in all
this, no mere inevitable good, no unsought
salvation ever won, no mere blind law ever
working, but millions of free, self -determining
wills; not one Christ, but many; not God doing
things for us as though we were parts of a
machine, but God the Father doing things by
us, giving us more power, more knowledge,
more light, more freedom, more responsibility,
as we are fit for them. And the rule, the law,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 215
the way by which we can alone do these things
worth doing is — Faith. Here is the old, old
subject. Is it a reasonable demand ? Can or
dinary men comply with it ? Can all men ex
ercise this working faith ? Of all questions
the thoughtful man is called on to face, there
can, I think, be none more important than
this. There are those — not a few — who tell
us faith is waning. On the other hand, there
are many, at least as competent to form a
judgment, who confidently assert that our age
is preeminently one of faith. Goethe says the
ages of belief are the only fruitful ages, and
history backs his opinion. If faith is slowly
waning from the earth, and the most pro
gressive peoples are learning to live without
it, the fact is one of gravest significance. If,
on the other hand, it is only the antiquated
and infirm forms of faith (her cast-off gar
ments) that are passing, cast aside as things
no longer usable, while the real body and hfe
of faith are quick and vital, then the time is
ripe for new and simpler definitions of what
our honored forbears called " saving faith."

216 THE REASONABLENESS OF
With this last view I am very heartily in
accord, and to-day I wish to insist that faith
as demanded by Jesus Christ never was meant
to be adhesion to any credal statement, but a
vital obedience to and trust in a living man,
who in his person and teaching revealed two
things as they never had been revealed before
— the nature of man and the nature of God.
First of all, I ask you to consider that Jesus
wins from all sorts of people the response of
faith that he desires. The most unpromising
win their way to him and gain his approval.
He expects to find good in men, to find some
thing worth helping and saving in them, and
to find this worthiness in the most unlikely
places. In order to understand what Jesus meant
and what he taught about faith, we must re
fuse to separate his acts and his words. We
must put acts and words together, and then
what he does will illustrate what he says.
Here, I venture to think, Christian men have
very often failed.
We take a word of his — this word faith,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 217
belief ; we find that to those who have it and
exercise it he constantly makes such promises
as these : " AU things are possible to him that
believeth " ; "He that believeth on the Son
hath everlasting life"; "He that believeth
on me, though he were dead, yet shall he
Hve." No words seem too strong when he
seeks to express his fear for those who have
it, and exercise it not : " He that believeth not
shall not see Hfe, but the wrath of God abid-
eth on him " ; and a multitude of similar
passages. We remember these passages, but
we forget the circumstances in which they
were spoken. Did we remember them, the
circumstances would illuminate and make their
meaning plain. These, however, we ignore,
and the unfortunate result arises that, before
we are aware of it, faith seems to become an
unreal, impossible thing, a demand with which
we cannot comply, a possession which but few
have. Thus it fades, and the Christianity of
which it is the root and spirit, fades too.
Notice, then, that from all sorts of people
— the learned and the unlearned, the stranger

218 THE REASONABLENESS OF
of a day and the lifelong friend, the disciple
who clings to him, and the casual visitor who
comes to him only for some one thing, and,
having got it, goes away — from all alike
Jesus demands faith and belief. He will have
no dealings with men without it.
In word or act of Jesus we can find no pre
cedent for the state of things which we have
brought about to-day. We have made faith
seem difficult ; so difficult that multitudes of
our very best men and women turn from the
Church, because in their souls they believe it
is impossible for them to yield to the demand
which the Church makes on them for faith.
They are just as good as the Church people
from whose company they turn ; as kind to
their children, as faithful in their loves and
friendships, as scrupulously honest in their
lives, as fervent in their patriotism, as ready
to serve and suffer for their fellow men. Their
aims are the aims of all good men and women,
and yet they are turning away sadly or indif
ferently from the Church and from Christ.
And why are they doing it ? Because we have

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 219
made his claims on them appear to be claims
with which they cannot in their conscience feel
it is right to comply.
This is nothing less than a perverting of
the known character of Jesus, an unlawful
reversal of his method and unfaithful pre
sentation of his message. So far as we have
achieved this result we have not been faithful
witnesses to God for our own time and gener
ation. I claim not only a word or a text here
and there in the inspired records, but the whole
lifelong conduct of Jesus, in proof of the truth
of what I have said, that when he demanded
faith and behef from men, he demanded some
thing which he thought the everyday man
was able to give.
Let us notice, then, that our Lord came
not to create barriers between God and men,
to thrust man farther from God, to call the
few to their Father. His yoke was easy, his
burden was light, the door of his feast stood
wide open, the wanderers in waysides and
hedges were welcome therein. When he sowed
the seed of the kingdom, the rocky road, the

220 THE REASONABLENESS OF
choking thorn, the barren hillside as well as
the fruitful earth, liberally received the golden
grain. He sought no rare possession Hke gen
ius in man. No; he fastened on some common
gift, the most universal, when he appealed to
faith and belief. This was Jesus' fixed con
viction. Every little child, he said, had faith
naturally within, and could substantiaUy ex
ercise it. In Christ's view to demand faith is
to make no unfairly difficult demand.
Nor can belief be confused with credulity.
This Jesus rebukes again and again. Cred
ulity turns the soul into an ash-heap on which
are cast together all sorts of things good and
bad, and all alike are wasted. Creduhty is
not clear-eyed, but blear-eyed. Credulity abases
judgment. Credulity is a traveller without a
guide, or one with a hundred guides, who is
trying to follow them all in turn. He blunders
round in a circle, makes no progress, and wins
no goal either of character or of attainment.
Nor can faith, as Jesus demands it, be the
development of ourselves at the cost of some
one part of ourselves (though this faUacy has

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 221
been taught again and again), at the cost of
that part of us by which we know and judge
of all other things — our reason. Faith cannot
be created, called out, developed, at the cost
of reason; for to play off our faith against
our reason is to raise a civil war in man, de
structive, fratricidal, and unnatural.
I would like in passing to recall what Lord
Bacon says about this : " It were better," he
says, " to have no opinion at all of God than
such an opinion as is unworthy of him; for
the one is unbehef, the other contumely." He
then goes on to Ulustrate : " Plutarch said weU,
'I would rather a great deal men said there
was no such man as Plutarch at all than that
they should say there was one, Plutarch, who
would eat his own children as soon as born.' "
For this was what the priests of Saturn taught
that Saturn did.
In the Hght, then, of the plain practice of
Jesus as told to us in the EvangeHsts, I think
it is evident that there were three things faith
was not : not difficult or rare, not credulous,
and in no way opposed to reason.

222 THE REASONABLENESS OF
Now see how this wonderful story of the
transfigured Christ coming down from the
mountain to relieve his sorely confused and
beset disciples, and help the father in his mis
ery and the son in his epilepsy, illustrates what
Jesus would have us believe that faith is. No
tice first that here Christ confronts all that is
most hopeless in life. He is face to face with
life's tragedy; for here we see a father's mis
ery, a son's insanity, a disciple's stupidity,
while round the spectacle gathers the helpless,
gaping crowd. A father is crying for help,
such help as love needs for its loved ones. The
cry is the cry of need, of need for another,
for another's pain. Most of us have felt it —
pain so much deeper, sharper, more unbearably
bitter than any pain of our own. It is the cry
of him who has tried all known methods, tested
all panaceas, and won no relief. His long
course of disappointment has robbed him of
all faith. Expectation even is almost dead.
Hear him speak for himself. "If thou canst
do any thing, have pity upon us and help us."
But this is not the only misery that confronts

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 223
the Lord. Here is a son's insanity, the very
quintessence of earthly failure. How weary
we sometimes grow of failure, weary of bear
ing the burden of failure which is the result
of our own miscalculation or sin. But harder
still is it to confront hopefully that heavy
burden of failure which seems to weigh on
the world from no immediate fault of its own
— f aflure the result of some hidden deed, some
forgotten sin of long ago, an hereditary taint
handed down, bringing forth at last its bitter
Dead Sea fruit.
But another failure confronts Jesus here,
a failure more near and intimate. His chosen
disciples, whose great task lies before them as
yet unattempted, they who must minister to
pain, they who, inspired by him, must go forth
to heal earth's failures, seeking to uplift and
inspire those multitudes of men whom it is so
hard permanently to touch, — these men have
fafled in their efforts to help the boy. What
promise is this for the work before them? For
these men must be not only soldiers sharing
the dangers of the field, but while they fight

224 THE REASONABLENESS OF
they must bring succour. They must be invinc
ible veterans fighting with one hand, and
bearing the wounded to shelter with the other.
So we behold our Lord confronted by the
human need of the father's misery, the son's
insanity, and the sad incapacity of earthly
ministry. What does Christ do ? It is all-im
portant that we should know. Something in
all these men, he says, is put there by God, a
quality which lies within them, buried and al
most lost, perhaps, but still resident, responsive
to meet just such occasions as these. The most
real of all human need carries, Christ teaches
us, the cure for its want in its own bosom.
Belief lies almost dead there among those men
because unused for so long. But father and
disciple alike, even in the face of such dif
ficulties, can exercise a trust so vital, so warm,
so strong that not only can they stand up in
it and conquer for themselves, but the influ
ence of their own faith can work the deliver
ance from what seems to be a hopeless failure,
and break the ties that have bound this boy
in darkness from his cradle.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 225
And what is this belief which Jesus demands
and calls into exercise, which he challenges,
and which immediately comes forth in obedi
ence to bis chaUenge ? He does not enter into
disquisition or definition of it. He does not
even say, " Beheve in me." It is just belief in
God, belief that he is good, not bad ; that he
is near, not far ; that he is loving, not indiffer
ent ; that he is aU-powerf ul, not powerless ;
behef that he is the sort of God, in short, that
the distracted father, the imbecile son, and
the despairing disciple reaUy want, if they
wiU but have it so : a God who cares.
Jesus teUs them that they do beheve in
God, that they have always beheved in God,
that it is human instinct to have faith in God.
" Arise and exercise what is your own, and
aU things are possible to him that believeth."
To convince them of the truth of the great
power, of the possibilities of the exercise of
this power within them, Jesus wiU give them
a display of divine power. He cannot repeat
such displays forever : by doing so he would
make them meaningless. He wiU not break in

226 THE REASONABLENESS OF
on his father's laws, — which are the best
laws possible for men, — but he wUl more
fully reveal those laws; and, therefore, he
works what people call a miracle. That does
not mean that he will do a supernatural deed,
but he will more fully explain the natural.
He will not alter by one degree any divine
order, but he wUl give in his own person an
illustration of the beauty of the order. He
will show that it is God's will that misery, in
sanity, stupidity should cease to be, and that
when men are at one with God as he is, these
old oppressions of earth are powerless to re
sist their faithful, God-trusting will. To them,
then, is entrusted a power before which the
long entrenched evils of earth shrivel up and
disappear. We know that as long as this Jesus stood
before men, living the life that inspired them,
doing the deeds that thrilled them, using the
old word faith, belief, and breathing into it
absolutely new meaning, so long did faith to
the apostles mean the exercise of that spirit
ual faculty within them that lived by the life

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 227
of Jesus. They were not believing things about
him. Day by day they were drawing vigor,
vision, and virtue from him. And the reason
why the Gospels are so invaluable to us, and
no criticisms can ever rob them of their value,
lies just here — they give to us, in its simple
beauty, its compelling reasonableness, and its
utter comprehensiveness, this imperishable
picture of the Son of man.
At the bidding of faith man stands forth
transfigured and transfiguring in his power ;
for faith is a vast unused capacity inside all
men. This is the emphasis Christ lays upon
it : " All things are possible to him that be
lieveth." " Look not," he says, " even to me
for immediate deliverance, call not on some
new power, seek not to ally yourself with some
awe-inspiring thing. Can you believe? Be
lieve with only a little belief, come with me
and I will show you. All things are possible
to him that believeth."
When Jesus stands beside us and calls on
us to believe, we sometimes feel that we, too,
can face all the pathos and tragedy of life as

228 THE REASONABLENESS OF
he speaks. Why, then, have we done so little
with this divine endowment? What are we
doing with it ? Casting it into the lumber-
room of unused things, or in some pitiful
way putting it into evidence, as in some
homes they put the family Bible on a table
by itself, where you could write with your
finger on the dusty cover. This, we are told,
is a day in which faith is waning, and yet
we believe in many things, beheve quite as
much as any generation before believed, and
feverishly follow the things we believe. But
the faith of which Christ spoke, misdirected
and misused, shrinks within us. Crowded
out by mean ambition, debased, it loses its
hold. Starved and untended, it seems to fail
us at the supreme hour of need. We do not
take time to believe in God. Perhaps we know
that once we did believe in him, and we think
that our belief is with us still ; but some nights
the wind begins to rise, and we hear the voice
of the coming storm and our unused faith
avails us little.
Ah, some of us have lived in havens land-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 229
locked. Safely anchored we have been by stem
and stern, and no storm test of life has been
possible. We have come to beheve that our
portion in existence must be everlasting seren
ity. But no ; we too must front the stress of
wind and weather, and all we have been and
done must be tested by the winds that blow,
the floods that flow, and the rains that beat
upon the houses of our lives. Friendships only
built on favors accepted ; deeds that look won
derful outside, but are hollow within ; popular
descriptions of us, with which men flatter us,
or tickle our vanity while we know them to
be more than half deceits — what are all of
these worth ? They are only wreckage before
the first rockings of that storm. Yet God for
every soul of man hath prepared that which,
doth he but use it, will bear him to haven and
safety. I have seen an old boat lie on the shore.
Well bunt it had been and well shaped. Its
Hnes are fair and strong. There is its rudder ;
oars and sails lie wrapped beneath its thwarts.
Launch into the wild sea and trust yourself

230 THE REASONABLENESS OF
to it, and quickly it sinks with you into the
salt water. Any child can tell you why. For
years it has lain unused. The suns have smit
ten it and the frosts have cracked it. Its seams
gape, its timbers part. It is fairly shaped ; it
was strongly built. It could once carry fifty.
Now it is only a coffin for one. It has never
been put to sea. It is no more help than a
boat painted on canvas. In the hour of trial
it f afls, as all unused, unexercised things must
fail. So it is with faith. Carefully, wisely,
firmly within us, the quality and capacity of
faith has been builded. It was meant to bear
us through all storms and temptations to a
fairer, farther shore; but laid away, forgot
ten, unused, it moulders, shrinks, and dries up
beyond recovery.
But let us turn and look more deeply into
the nature of faith, see how it comes to be,
and why its exercise is so vital to us. You
judge of a tree by its fruits, not by its leaf or
even by its flower. You judge of any course
of events by its results ; a theory, too, a doc
trine, a philosophy — nay more, any govern-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 231
ment or institution. They must all submit to
the same test. By that they stand or fall. Not
only is there no fairer test, but there is no
other test. This, you say, is sound theory.
Nay, you say it is more than theory — it is
weU-ascertained fact ; for though we may often
deny and forget it, the nature of things
around us never forgets it.
Nature has been working on this line for
ages untold. She accepts and preserves as
her instruments only things that successfully
endure this final test. She has a vast work to
do, carries on innumerable manufactories un
der inconceivably numerous conditions. She
tries all sorts of tools in her vast workshop,
and ever and always casts aside all tools that
break or fail. In the process she piles up
heaps of failures, but the things she finally
arrives at — the good things, the useful things,
beautiful and fitted things — these aU have
stood the test successfully. They are not only
good, but they keep on improving. In this
consists their vital goodness. They are all the
time being tested by competition.

232 THE REASONABLENESS OF
How we hated, as boys, our first competi
tive examinations. How weU we remember the
long breath we drew when we were through
the last of them. And yet, when we left the
examination room, as we thought forever, we
were only entering the larger examination haU
of life. When we left the competition of the
book, study, and paper, we were entering on
a fiercer test of competition still. For compe
tition rules everywhere : in the air and sky, —
yes, far aloft in the ether, — in the dark earth
beneath our feet, in the sunless gulfs of the
sea. Every blade of grass, every ear of corn
holds its own by competition. The multitud
inous things that crawl, that live, that walk,
that swim, that fly — they are aU of them,
little as we notice it, holding their own pain
fully, in circumstances of fierce struggle. And
so it is that from her vast competition halls
nature brings forth not only the good but the
best. Only the best survive, because she ad
mits no favoritism in her vast household.
Her system is absolutely fair. She scorns all
suggestions of "pull." She loves the strong,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 233
the fair, the good, and these at their strongest,
fairest, and best. All lesser goods and fairs
and strongs are ever making way, under her
order, for her best, her fairest, and her
strongest. When we denounce competition we de
nounce a divinely ordained process for weed
ing out the imperfect. Nay, further, we de
nounce the only conceivable process by which
sorrow, pain, imperfection, and at last death
itself, can be done away. Let us gird up the
loins of our minds, face facts, and cease cry
ing for the moon. By competition we are what
we are; by competition our children shall be,
please God, better than we. God's great com
petitive examination board is ever in session,
and through it our nation has been lately
passing, as you well know.
The point I want to make is this: This
faith which Jesus demands of us is a common
possession. It is a religious instinct which even
a child possesses; it is acquired by us all as
all other valuable qualities are, as the result
of a system of competition. The knowledge

234 THE REASONABLENESS OF
of these later times has bidden us hold what
is old with new reverence. The very fact that
it is old carries to the thoughtful mind proof
of its vitality. Its age is the medal on its
breast, telling of the many victories it has
won, the struggles in which it has conquered
things of lesser good than itself. So we value
what is old, and we call it beautiful, for we
know it is the result of actual worth, that no
favoritism of nature has saved it for us. And
this truth teaches us a new respect for the
good things around us and within us. They
are not only ancient ; they are costly, they are
approved, they have won their right to use
and a hearing. And the greatest, the most
lasting, the most universal of these is faith.
But there is a further reason for valuing
faith, another proof of its importance. It is not
sufficient in God's economy that things should
be old ; they must also be adaptable, for no
quality or possession, however venerable, that
lacks this capacity for adaptation can live on ;
or, to go back to what I have said, can keep
improving, can keep on holding its own in

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 235
the competitive examinations of God. And
therefore the proof of the vitality of faith is
the measure and magnitude of its adapta
bility. Adaptability, in this sense, comes to
be a greater sign of vitality than age. And
this adaptabflity is the preeminent quality of
faith. When man's condition was low, his faith
was base-born. It clothed itself in base forms.
When his moral ideas were undeveloped he
clothed his ideas of God with his own imper
fections. When he was cruel, so was his God ;
lustful, so was his God ; jealous and full of
hatred to his enemies, his God was a God of
battles and a jealous God. The reason thought
less people to-day find fault with the Bible is
because the presentations of God which its
pages bring to us do not agree with our pre
sent conceptions of God. If the Bible were
not full of misconceptions, or old and imper
fect conceptions, it could not in any sense be
the Bible at all. It could not be a true history
of man's reaching out in earlier times toward
God. In centuries much later than those
whose record we have in the Bible, you can

236 THE REASONABLENESS OF
note the same process. From Pagan to Puri
tan you follow the idea of God, and God is
chiefly a lawgiver, his chief seat the judgment
seat, his title the Lord of Hosts.
But our faith calls, yearns for something
higher, for a God higher than the lawgiving
God and the ruling God. Yes, for One whose
infinite tenderness and mercy can, as the old
hymn puts it, —
Make the dying bed
Feel soft as downy pillows are.
So in the Bible and, since the Bible was
written, still on in human history, faith gath
ers up all the broken lights that have come
from God, all the thoughts which men have
in their best hours worthily formed of him ;
gathers them from the artist yearning for his
beauty ; from the poet divining his meaning ;
from the philosopher thirsting for his truth ;
yes, from misunderstood heresiarch, reformer,
and martyr. From all religions and all histo
ries, faith gathers them up, and sees in the
teachings of Jesus the explanation and vindi
cation of them all. Old and new, changing

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 237
because it lives, who can fix for it a birth-
date ? Who can set any boundary for its ad
vancing tide? Man's hunger for and appre
ciation of God, — so the Son of man explains
to us the universal instinct. We are not in
venting an explanation of faith. We are face
to face with its actuality. This faith of ours
is as much an evolution as our eyes are, as
our hands are ; and to-day with us it is not
the rudimentary thing it once was, just as our
eyes are not the rudimentary things they were
once, or our hands the rudimentary things the
monkeys once had. Eyes and hands and faith
have aU been developed by ages of painful
use. But I hear some one object, and the ob
jection seems at first both reasonable and
weighty : What proof have you that this faith
— the result of evolution, possessing wonder
ful powers of adaptation — has not, like many .
other old things, fulfilled its purpose, become
no longer useful? Let us consider this a mo
ment. There are things within us that are old,
and have no doubt in the past been adaptable,

238 THE REASONABLENESS OF
but, so far as we can see, are useful no longer.
What distinguishes them ? They are like links
connecting us to the brutishness of the past.
They are marks of a lower order. The scien
tists call them vestigia, for they are carried
around by the living body, but are not fulfill
ing a living function ; are not vitally import
ant to any part of our lives. The proof that
we can do without them is that we do not use
them at all, or use them less and less.
Now faith, I hold, is not one of these. What
is best and highest and most seemly in our
lives is ever dependent on the exercise of the
religious instinct. It would not be hard to
prove that in every department of progress
man fortifies and inspires himself by the use
of this part of himself — the inspirational im
pulse toward the best of which he is cogniz
ant. Scientific progress and scientific men are
commonly supposed to have Httle to do with
faith (a supposition which, by the way, I think
is false), but to-day faith has modified the
whole aspect of science. Contrast the greatest
scientists the past has produced with the pre-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 239
sent scientific men. Consider the wisdom of
Egypt confronting the baffling mysteries of
the universe. Hear the spirit of the past speak
in the motto of the Temple of Isis: "I am
whatever hath been, is, or ever will be, and
my veil hath no man yet lifted." Now hear
the later voice : " Veil after veil have we lifted,
and her face grows more beautiful, august,
and wonderful, with every barrier withdrawn."
But let us contrast religion where faith
dwells and the religion where mere resignation
takes the place of the hope and inspiration
that rightly belongs to faith. For let us not
forget this : Faith is never mere acceptance ;
it is the appreciation of God that yearns and
strives and grows from good to better and
from pure to purer. It is the religious instinct
in exercise.
In reading an interesting book lately, the
tale of a strange life lived in the Far East, —
Colonel Gardiner's "Memoirs," — I came on
this story. Gardiner was staying with a moun
tain chieftain who held sway over a lonely
vaUey on the borders of Thibet. This valley

240 THE REASONABLENESS OF
and all its inhabitants were threatened by the
ruthless incursion of a more powerful chief
tain, of whom all the people lived in dread.
Gardiner's host set himself to procure a pre
sent which, when presented to the tyrant,
would save his people from rapine. An old
fakir lived in a cave at the mouth of the val
ley. For years the old man had lived only to
pray and to share his scanty provision with
travellers poorer than himself. He possessed,
however, an extraordinary ruby, which had
come to him by direct descent, a famfly heir
loom from the time of the great Timour. Gar
diner describes their visit to the old man.
They found him immersed in contemplation,
and the chief told the cause of their visit, the
threatened invasion, the certain ruin to aU his
people, and begged that, in the hope of pro
pitiating the tyrant, the old man would give
to him his one treasure. He listened, said
Gardiner, and then he arose, went to a corner
of the hut and unwound the jewel (which, by
the way, was as safe in his keeping as though
it had been in the Bank of England, for no

THE RELIGION OF JESUS] 241
one in that country would touch the dwelling
of the fakir), unwound the jewel from a bit
of rag, and put it in his visitor's hands, say
ing, " I hope the gift may have the result you
expect." Large money was offered, but this
the old man would not take. " But you may,
if you wiU," he said, " give me a larger allow
ance of corn, for many hungry people pass
this way." Then he asked to be left alone, and
composed himself to prayer again. Here in
this lonely, distant, unknown land, where no
Anglo-Saxon had ever come before, was holi
ness of a pure type, unworldliness complete
in its renunciation, charity as unselfish as that
of the Son of man himself. Yet numberless
such men have for long centuries sat in their
caves or huts, looking over the fair plains and
valleys of those cruel lands. Alas, their holi
ness has not availed in those regions to ad
vance by an inch, so far as we can see, the
cause of life, humanity, and truth. Lust and
cruelty reign supreme. Regions once prosper
ous and happy are desert and soaked in blood.
Man still remains as he has been for centuries,

242 THE REASONABLENESS OF
a ravening wild beast. And why? Because
the progressive power of religion lives in faith
alone, and not in mere unworldliness. No re
nunciation, no unselfish charity, no piety,
nor all these combined, however splendid they
are, can, when faith has fled from them, per
manently uplift mankind.
There is no such thing as heredity in good
ness. Men are like tops often. The top spins
a long time after the string that spun it is
withdrawn, but in time it totters to a fall. So
hereditary goodness stored up will uphold in
dividuals, will for a time even sustain society ;
but take faith away, and though courage still
upholds the brave, and fortitude still supports
the strong of heart, the skies have become gray
over the pilgrim masses of men, their march
ing lines have become broken, and no sweet
singing cheers the march, no heavenly aUies
help them on their way. Such pilgrims wUl
not keep on marching forever, such soldiers
will soon cease to fight ; for even Mr. Great-
heart is himself a pilgrim, without hope of a
celestial city; and Galahad a knight-errant,

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 243
who dares no longer hope for a glimpse of the
white Hght of the Holy Grail.
But let us see how the Church has dealt
with faith. First, let us remember it is not the
policy of the Lord himself to destroy old con
ceptions that are part of man's growing. He re
places them slowly with better ones. And so his
new gospel, as it clashed with time-honored be
liefs, must merge and mingle with them. Man
kind's whole previous conception of God was
as unlike Jesus Christ as it well could be.
When the bochly vision of him passed, the
great doctors and saints of the time soon be
gan to create from his teachings, as they un
derstood them, systems of religion crude in
form and profession, differing radically from
Christ's gospel. It could not be otherwise.
Man's dominating idea of God has been the
God of force. Sheer almightiness was exalted,
— man bidden to bow, — but sheer almighti
ness has no sweet reasonableness. It may com
mand and threaten, but it ever remains a sort
of militant rule of life, a martial law for con
science ; the rigorous control during a crisis,

244 THE REASONABLENESS OF
not the normal condition of a peaceful and pro
gressive life. But since the mere almighty idea
of God of necessity died slowly, ere it passed
there grew from it a whole series of concep
tions of a punishing and damning God. Men
bowed to religious laws as they bowed to na
tional laws. The world owed much to the iron
law of rule, and in the Church, in lesser scale,
came naturally to be reproduced a simUar con
dition. It seemed reasonable for men to de
mand, in the name of God, obedience, accept
ance of certain definite things. They made
pictures of Jesus that were often veriest cari
catures. They baked their truths into hard-and-
fast shape. Things that appeared to be true
about Jesus, men were told they must believe ;
and faith came to be a demand, enforced by
threat, and not the exercise of an instinct.
The movement was inevitable. I have re
ferred to it before. It was the highest sort of
religious movement that the time was capable
of, but none the less it replaced Christ's idea
of faith with a lesser idea. It practically said
that faith was not merely the exercise of the

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 245
religious instinct addressed to its Lord, but
the enforced belief in a complex system of
things. I have dwelt on this devolution of
Christianity just to show that it was a growth
in the opposite direction to Christ's teaching.
As I have said, it had to be. The world of
that day was not capable of evolving or
accepting anything higher. But the truth put
in hard-and-fast shape, or in a word, dogmas,
cannot produce the highest form of Christ's
likeness. Dogmas are poor food for the soul.
The Great Physician knew best, and seeing
far into the future as he did, and knowing
what must be the deepest needs of the present,
as well as of future times, he never once made
a demand on any soul for this lower sort of
faith. Well he knew that belief in the mere
almightiness of God only tends to make strong
natures diabolic ; that repression incites rebel
lion. And so, in not one single authentic in
cident did he so represent his Father or make
claim for himself. Recall one instant, if you
can, where faith, as Jesus demanded it, meant
believing in things. Always and ever, rather,

246 THE REASONABLENESS OF
did faith with him mean behef in the sort of
God that " I reveal to you " ; " he that hath
seen me hath seen the Father."
So much for Christ's demand. How about
the apostles' demand for faith. What did they
mean, for example, by faith as a prerequisite
to baptism ? What was baptism? Was it more
than a common rite to which was given a new
significance, an open confession in the sight
of men of obedience to Jesus, a declaration
that he was the Son of God ; that his cause
was the one to fight for ; his society the divine
and final society ? Those who would be his fol
lowers must be baptized. What was the form
of baptism ? We know that baptism at first
was not administered in any other form but
the name of Jesus. The very early Christ
ians were not even baptized in the name of
the Trinity. This was a later form. Behef in
Jesus was the one thing demanded, and that
without any disquisition on the nature of God
at all.
There is not one single line in all St. Paul's
thirteen letters to lead us to suppose that he

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 247
laid any stress, with the multitude of his con
verts, on mysterious questions of religious
truth ; whether, for instance, Jesus was the son
of Mary alone, or the son of Mary and Joseph.
The subject does not come up with St. Paul.
Nor is there one line to lead us to suppose he
formulated for his converts any doctrine of
the Trinity. Rather, Paul said, as his Master
had said before him, " Jesus stands before you
— do you admire him, can you love him, can
you find it in your hearts to obey him? I
speak to you as the apostle, the messenger to
a despairing world of the visible God in hu
manity. Here at last is rest, pardon, and hope
for men."
But this is not what men are asked to do
to-day. They are confronted with, or think
they are confronted with, certain churchly de
mands. They must stand up to say a creed,
and they are told that that creed is not sim
ply a symbol of their faith, but an accurate
definition of things which they believe to be
utterly beyond human defining. Or, second,
they must submit to the rite of baptism. But

248 THE REASONABLENESS OF
baptism does not seem to them to be quite what
the old rite was. Once it meant danger braved,
and now, too often, they see it degraded till
it is merely a fashionable function. And the
third demand is that they should kneel at the
communion table, where again "believing
things " confronts them. They have some dim
idea of what it meant to kneel with the Lord
of long ago, when the multitude clamored for
him and were plotting his death ; to kneel
around the altars of the early Church when
heathen Rome thundered and the Arena
reeked of blood. But what does this mean to
day ? They are told it expresses a sorrow for
sin which they cannot always honestly call
forth. I might go further, but time forbids me.
Here these three simple acts, these demands
of the Church, are each and all of them made
to rest on a false idea of faith. They are not
made the expression of personal obedience and
reverence for Jesus. They have been perverted
from that. And can we not see that the nat
ural man, the inferior man, often likes this

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 249
system of perversion, that he will readily com
ply with these things ? Cannot any one see
that he does this because he is a lesser man ?
The more scrupulous men, however, — the
men built to a higher order, whose religion
does not mean a bargaining with God, but an
effort to follow God in honesty of soul, —
these greater, larger men cannot accept such
conditions, but ever draw back from them.
They do so, not captiously, but in order that
they may safeguard the very eye of the soul,
the rehgious instinct itself. A faith in things
suits the natural man, alas, too well. He is
ever its defender. But it leaves uncomforted
and unblest men of larger mould.
So, based on this misapprehension of the
meaning of faith, there has grown up a false
idea of the Church. From the Church men
turn away, for she seems to come to them with
intolerable demands. She makes them sus
pect God, not love him. She seems an exact
ing Church, not a giving and freeing Church,
as of old she came in beauty and might to
men. The best and most scrupulous men hold

250 THE REASONABLENESS OF
back from her too often, doubtful of that to
which they are asked to commit themselves.
Could they but realize that religious faith is
only a striving after obedience to Jesus, the
simple, great Jesus Christ of the Gospels; seek
ing to do what he would have us do to make
earth more fit for his divine rule, slowly to
lift life's laws into harmony with love's law!
Let the Church demand these things of men,
and again will men listen to her, and again
will she lead them on in the path of a high
resolve. And though they stagger, painfully
at times, yet will they follow her, for follow
ing her wiU then be following the Son of
man. Faith, then, as Jesus and also his apostles
demanded its exercise, was not believing things
that were hard to believe. It was using a di
vinely implanted instinct, a power and a fac
ulty within us that answers to the presentation
of the living, loving God made visible in Jesus
Christ. When this faith has failed to fasten its
grasp on him, again and again it has created
for itself distorted images, again and again it

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 251
has found itself disastrously following wan
dering fires ; but still it ever contains within
itself power to turn to the true vision and
bow before the supreme beauty, perceiving
the beautiful to be beautiful and the good to
be good, and, therefore, sent from God. From
this the Christian Church started, and to this
the Christian Church must return. This is the
real Church. This is the real Christianity.
This is the Christianity that shook the old
world and lifted it out of its despair. This is
the Christianity that can breathe peace into
the deep unrestfulness of our times. It shows
no defect of nature to refuse to believe in old
things just because they are old. Tradition,
however venerable and weighty, may be rooted
in utter error. It has often been proved to be
so rooted. To find one's self, therefore, in
capable of accepting truths accredited by most
venerable tradition shows no defect of nature.
I repeat ; to refuse to believe things is no sin ;
but to refuse Jesus the faith he demands —
ah, what shall we say of that ?
We are told men take a mass of precious

252 THE REASONABLENESS OF
stuff, and, subjecting it to intolerable heat,
expect at last to see glowing in its centre one
tiny, blood-red drop — the ruby. So in Jesus
there is for man the declaration of his own
preciousness. The ages of human struggle have
not been in vain. The chaos that often seemed
to engulf man's life was only the prelude to
God's cosmos. All the pains and all the strug
gles and all the hopes of the mothers and
fathers of the world were justified when at
last, as the result of all the intolerable heat
and pain of living, there came forth One ut
terly beautiful, completely good, and men
bowed before him and cried, " Behold the Son
of God."
More than once before on earth had burst
forth that ecstatic cry. But when at last his
own lips speak, we hear him say, " The Son
of man." To fafl to see in him a present beauty,
a visible loveliness ; to fail to hear and own
the sway and inspiration of his heavenly music
— this, indeed, is to argue defect and limita
tion; for such failure means, in part at least,
a moral death.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 253
Press faith on men, emphasize it as behev-
ing things, and you have but erected thorny
hedges around the cross of the Christ through
which men must peep, over which, wounded,
they must strain, and after aU only see partial
views and catch distorted outlines of him whom
you would place within. This has been done
again and again ; done with the best intention,
done by those possessed of a passionate love
for him whom they would protect. But the
human hedges, whether erected by friends or
foes, with spiny barrier forbid the child-faith
he so loved to come near him.
I would not be misunderstood. Creeds are
necessary, dogmas in their place essential. I
have said nothing to decry them. Many dog
mas and doctrines have been slowly evolved,
and are the result of much pain, of long and
reverent study, and show a profound insight
into human needs and divine revelation. Thus
thoughtfully, reverently, let us receive these
partial statements of eternal truth, till the
Master open our minds for better and higher
things stiU. Thoughtful men wiU readily admit

254 THE REASONABLENESS OF
that we must have creed in every active rela
tion of life. The merchant has a creed in his
office ; the scientist one in his" laboratory ; the
bricklayer and builder one at his fingers' ends;
and the soldier who charges and dies does so
because he accepts and obeys the soldier's
creed. The creed is a certain accepted thing
on which I, as a man, base my action. The
creed is a working necessity at all times. In
every department of hfe, as much as in the
religious department, "no creed" means pa
ralysis. And still further, I must hold my creed with
other men, and make it a basis of working
with other men. The individualist simply ar
gues himself a fool when he says: "I must
unite with other men to make money, unite to
get learning, unite to produce any valuable
earthly work, or unite to defend anything that
is worth defending. But when it comes to a
question of doing good and developing my
own character, let me alone. Here I will be my
own guide. Here no man shall dictate to me,
aid me, or judge me." He may be perfectly

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 255
inteUigent, may have thought intelligently
along other lines, but along the spiritual line
he is not a thinker : he is talking foolishly.
But what to-day is most important to em
phasize surely is this : all these doctrines, dog
mas, and creeds, however necessary they may
be, are but crutches and walking-sticks, not
hands and feet. They are but a temporary ex
pression of the eternal verity, and as they
change and pass, by their very change are evi
dencing the might of the living truth which,
because it is the everlasting seed, can ever,
must ever, reclothe itself in a series of new
and beautiful bodies, thus protecting its life.
Shortly before he died Tennyson said, " My
most passionate desire is to obtain a clearer
and fuller view of God." So spoke and still
speak the great of the earth. For man cannot
live by bread alone. And if we have learned
in our heart of hearts to want Jesus, nay, if
we have never heard his name and yet have
sought the things he strove for, then some
glorious day he will surely open our eyes to
see the things we cannot see now. The way

256 THE REASONABLENESS OF
shall be open for us, and the lame man shaU
leap as the hart, and the tongue of the dumb
shall sing. The little lame boy needs his crutch
as he limps beside his father ; but when they
both of them come to the stream-side, his father
takes him in his arms and he needs his crutches
no more.
Let me beg, then, your careful considera
tion for the meaning of faith. I insist on it as
of vital importance to-day. Oh, let us search
our hearts so that we may keep alive and in
health this divinely appreciative part of us.
Are we making provision for this part of our
life itself? It is ever the eye of the soul; and
all the spicery of all the Indies, all the glut of
all the seas cannot take its place, cannot satisfy
the soul from which faith is departing.
Be you inside the Church or outside the
Church, I charge you, then, make provision
for this faith that is in you, this religious fac
ulty God has given you, which you hold by
virtue of the painful struggles of the past, and
for the handing down of which to your child
ren you will be held accountable by God.

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 257
Keep the religious instinct alight. Keep single
this divine part. For in each soul of man it is
the Httle window opening to the Everlasting
Day. It is because this wonderful religious in
stinct and aspiration within us Hnks us to
God that faith, and faith only, can transform.
By faith's use it is absolutely true that we are
transformed men. Faith softens us, widens us,
deepens our sympathy. It breathes a peace
over aU life. Why, take it in the lower sphere.
You trust a friend of great resources — you
who are poor and friendless and burdened
with a load you cannot carry. You go to your
friend, you lay your case before him. He
meets you with kindly Hand and eye, and be
fore you know it your burden is roUing from
your shoulders, and you go away from his
house or his office with lighter tread and hope
reborn. Or you trust in some one you love —
your friend, your child — and in the strength
of that trust, no matter how fierce the sun or
how cruel the cold and frost, you find warmth
and shelter. What accomplishes the wonder ?
It is just faith ; faith in what is highest and

258 THE REASONABLENESS OF
best in those you know down here. And so
you go forth to life's inevitable struggles with
a gentler heart. Faith justifies all it does and
sees here by what it believes in beyond. Faith
is intuition triumphing over appearances, " the
substance of things hoped for, the evidence of
things not seen." Put trust in God, the Good
over all, the Worker in all, the Power behind
all, and at last the Judge of all — not the out
side and distant God, but the immanent and
inside God, moving through all men. When
we reach this point, my friends, we hear an
echo of divine harmony, and we know the be
ginnings of a holy peace.
"We know in part — how, then, can we
Make plain each heavenly mystery?
Yet still the Almighty understands
Our human hearts, our human hands,
And, overarching all our creeds,
Gives his wide presence to our needs.
And now I turn specially to you young men
and women who to-day go forth from this
great university into the larger life beyond.
Oh, still it is true, true to-day as it was eigh
teen hundred years ago — "all things are pos-

THE RELIGION OF JESUS 259
sible to him that believeth." Believe in your
friends, believe in your country, in your in
stitutions, in yourself, in your God. Believe
in your dreams,, your best and highest and
holiest dreams. Many things you may have to
give up, but never surrender these. Use the
belief you have, and it will surely grow to
more. Especially, and above all, fix and concen
trate your belief oh Jesus, on the value of the
things he declared valuable; on the sort of
God he believed in, a God like himself. You
are ever choosing things to believe in. You
can and do " will to believe." Will to believe
in him, and in his Father God. His person and
his message have been presented to humanity
as a supernatural revelation that demands man's
reverend obedience because of this very su
pernaturalness. I have tried to commend his
gospel to you on far other grounds.
Neither in the personality of Jesus nor yet
in his teachings is there any break in the order
of the world, which he declared to be a divine
order. He was a Jew; he inherited Jewish

260 THE REASONABLENESS OF
teaching and tradition, a teaching and tradi
tion that gave to our sorrowing world the only
God it can ever worship, a God who cares.
We can all love the beautiful, we can all
praise the strong, but in humanity there is
much that is sordid and mean and small and
of little account, and a real God must be the
God over all, loving all, caring for aU, responsi
ble for all. Humanity, in the mass, can never
and never will worship any God whose tender
mercies are not over all his works.
Such a God Jesus brought to men. Art
never dreamed of such a God till after Jesus
died. Science knows him not to-day. Science
has never found him. Some day it may find
him, but not now. But the hungry heart of
man is a wonderful thing. It dreams great
dreams, ever and anon it sees high visions.
Jesus will yet rule the world because he em
bodies the beliefs and hopes of the world. He
is the product of our order. His doctrines are
but the setting forth of the long-cherished in
stincts of men. He is our King because he is
one of ourselves; no miraculous visitor from

THE RELIGION OF JESUS " 261
another world, but a man, bone of our bone,
flesh of our flesh. In him the hopes and
prayers and beliefs of the dumb millions at
last take voice.
We Christians believe, since the Incarnation
of Jesus, since to us was born a man full of
the Holy Ghost, a brighter light, a clearer vi
sion of God has been given men. Those who
try to follow him, who take him as a master,
and seek to do the deeds he would have them
do, have light given them to live and hope and
work by. They need no oracular authority.
He appointed none. At the same time they
refuse to cut themselves off from the reli
gious world of the past. He did so refuse.
He knew he was what he was because of it;
slowly we are realizing this too. In the heart
of man, long before Jesus' day, was born the
beginning of the great gospel, God's nature
present in human life. This is the supreme
miracle, if you will. Man's life ever moving
upward to greater, higher ends, by process of .
natural law, by exercise of instinctive vision,
or, to use old words, by inspiration of the

262 THE REASONABLENESS OF RELIGION
Holy Ghost. This is the gospel of good news
to men, gloriously reasonable, yet surpassing
all reason. And he who brought it long ago,
still in beauty and holiness and power to help,
stands alone. He transcends all teachers. He
still inspires and sustains the hopes of men.

THE END

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