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THE MASTER OF THE WORLD

3Sp tlje Same author

Felix Reville Brunot (1820- 1898).
A Civilian in the War for the Union; President of
the First Board of Indian Commissioners. With
Portraits, Illustrations, and a Map. Crown
octavo.
Edward Lincoln Atkinson (1865- 1902).
Crown octavo, with Illustrations.
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
NEW YORK, LONDON, AND BOMBAY

THE
MASTER OF THE WORLD
BY
CHARLES LEWIS SLATTERY
DEAN OF THE CATHEDRAL IN FARIBAULT

h l?„C8

LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK
LONDON AND BOMBAY
1906

CoptRinuT, 1906
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.

The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S. A

PREFACE
THIS book attempts to interpret Jesus Christ in
the light of modern scholarship. The book has
small sympathy with the man who believes in his
Master so timidly that he dare not face hard questions.
And a sympathy even more meagre is accorded to
the man who takes to himself credit because he has
reduced his faith in Christ to the most scant and dreary
necessities. I come back from my study of modern thought
about Christ with a conviction that men are craving
a larger, deeper faith in Him. Those who have thrown
aside all ecclesiastical sanctions have often brought
back a message singularly fresh and invigorating.
The compelling amazement for His inner dignity, thus
shorn of all external authority, seems to bring these
gruff critics to their knees. They come to lay bare
superstitions; again and again they go away devout
worshippers: imbedded even in reckless negations one
finds now and again glowing words of adoration.
That the reader may conveniently judge for himself
I have appended in footnotes fairly full quotations
from all schools of recent scholars.
Though valuing to the full the historic interpreta
tion of Christ, I have tried to avoid the technical Ian-

vi PREFACE
guage in which this interpretation has from time to
time sought expression. Certain great doctrines, like
the Atonement, will be found illustrated all through
the book; but I leave to the reader to construct the
definite news which such fragments may supply. It
has seemed to me that, indispensable as these older
methods are, a somewhat different method might be
advisable. To friends who have helped me in various ways I
acknowledge a grateful debt; especially to a great
scholar whose name deserves a richer setting than
this book can give.
C. L. S.
Faeibauit, Minnesota,
July, 1906.

CONTENTS

Part iFirsft
THE SOURCES
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Problem . .  3
II. Primary Sources  7
III. Secondary Sources  31
IV. The Present Witness  54
V. The Fusion op the Material  71

Part §>*coim
THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST
Introductory. The Method of Description 77
I. His Obedience   80
II. His Self-Knowledge .... .... 91
III. His Selp-Identification with Humanity . . . 103
IV. His Conquest of Temptation  11 1
V. His Patience  121
VI. His Graciousness  129
VII. His Gladness  141
VIII. His Forgiveness  153
IX. His Scorn .  167
vii

vm CONTENTS
chapter page
X. His Compassion  182
XI. His Transforming Power  194
XII. His Deliberate Purpose  205
XIII. His Loneliness  214
XIV. His Failure  226
XV. His Satisfaction  234
XVI. His Beauty  250
XVII. His Vitality  261
XVIII. His Divine Authority  280
Index . .  293

Part JFitgt
THE SOURCES

CHAPTER I
The Problem
EVERY man who knows even a little of Jesus Christ
feels the supreme importance of knowing more.
Nor is it only the Christian man who feels this. That
part of the Christian world which is not quite Chris
tian and which looks on, musing and wondering, longs
for some presentation of Him which will explain and
justify the Christian instinct. More and more in all
branches of knowledge, consciously or unconsciously,
Christ is the absorbing thought. Few scoff; many
adore; nearly all men look up with a challenge: "If
you have news of Him," they cry, "tell us."
Many "Lives of Christ" have been written. Though
the New Testament will always be the sufficient rec
ord of His life, each generation will demand that the
story be told in its own language, translated, as it
were, into the terms of its especial need. The re
telling of the simple facts, explaining the geographical
and the historical setting in the light of fuller know
ledge, will always help earnest people to know more
of Christ, — to many it will be a revelation.
In days like our own when scholars, particularly
in Germany, test every fact before receiving it into
history, the critical study of Christ's life becomes in
dispensable. Harnack, Holtzmann, Wernle, and others

4 THE PROBLEM
are asking persistently, "Who, just who, is the His
torical Christ?" Their answer may be unsatisfactory;
but because they ask the question, Christian scholars
everywhere must be able to give a sane and sound
reply, — satisfying, first, themselves, and then those
who trust in their integrity and ability. Timidity
or sloth rouses suspicion. A positive, enthusiastic,
and learned Christian man who knows the pitfalls —
a man like Dr. Sanday of Oxford — plants faith
with every calm, brave word. The "Critical Life"
is a necessity whenever men stumble over the facts.
There is still another way of presenting the Christ,
and that is by giving an historical account of the con
ception which the Church has had of Him. This is
the Christ of the Creeds, of the Church Councils, of
the conspicuous theologians. As we believe that
Christ has always lived in the Church, so this picture
of the ecclesiastical Christ is essential. The portrait
is not the frank, simple portrait of the Gospels, but
the Man Christ Jesus is the same.1 Dorner's master-
1 Cj. Dr. K. C. Anderson (Hibbert Journal, July, 1906, pp. 853 f .) :
"No biography of Christ in the modern sense is possible, and just
because of that the various Christ-ideals have arisen — the grandest,
noblest thing Christianity has done for the race — and the grandest,
noblest thing about the creation of the ideal is that it is ever expanding
as the soul of man expands. If we had had a full biography of
Jesus this would not have been possible. It is just because the de
tails of the Ufe of Jesus are so meagre that the ideal of the Christ has
grown around it — giving it in the first place a location and a name,
and, in the second place, finding for it new organs of expression in
every age, developing new powers, and assimilating new elements of
human life as that life grows richer and deeper.'' It should be
pointed out that this manifestation of the ideal is the manifestation
of the real Christ — as we are able to understand Him.

THE PROBLEM 5
piece on "The Doctrine of the Person of Christ" is in
a valid sense a Life of Christ.
It would seem perhaps as if such studies did all
that could be done to satisfy legitimately the crav
ing for knowledge of our Lord. I am sure, however,
that there is one other very vital way to present
Christ. It is the most difficult, the most danger
ous. It attempts to gather up all the facts re
corded about Christ, whether by people who lived
in His age or by the generations since; to fuse them;
and thereby to tell somewhat of His personality. It
tries to unify all the records, all the subsequent doc
trines, all the present faith; and, pointing to its own
faltering words of humble, reverent description, it
says, "This is the Person of Christ — so far as I can
understand." It is illusive, like all greatest tasks.
It is obviously beyond any man's skill. But it is
most worth while of all undertakings.
Nor, as I said, is this sort of presentation of Christ
free of peril. If one is afraid to read between the
lines, if one is afraid to use the imagination, if one's
love dare not paint what one feels but cannot fully
explain, one would wisely throw the pen aside with
the first word. The difficulty is that some imagina
tion is not reverent. The sensitive disciple shivers
when a facile person says, "This is what the Saviour
thought when He healed the blind man, — when He
comforted the widow, — when He went out of Jeru
salem to die." Imagination is not the vagary of any
ingenious inventor; it must have a reason, it must
appeal to the man who hears or reads as justified by
well-attested facts. To presume to talk of what

6 THE PROBLEM
Christ thought when no recorded facts imply, even to
the most clever scrutiny, what He thought, is that
sort of irreverence which is first stupid and then gross.
To summon the facts, to put a fact here beside a fact
there, to feel the trend of the character which could
thus express itself, is often to bring to light a trait not
definitely described in any document, and so to reveal
a new fact which all reasonable men must confess to
be, if not certain, at least most probable.
If such a task as this, confessedly hard, comes
close also to danger, its possible compensations are
worth every risk. As no man has ever painted a
Christ which satisfies the heart and mind and soul of
the Christian, so no one ever has described Him as
the best men feel that He is. Probably pictures and
descriptions both will fail till the end. But such
failures must be the most alluring opportunities to
the workman who loves His Master: rather would a
man fail at such high business, if honestly his best,
than do anything else superbly well.
The problem is difficult and is dangerous. There
fore we must first look scrupulously to the facts, to
see how many they are and whence they come.

CHAPTER II
Primary Sources
IN measuring the reasonableness of any assertion,
the authority of a truth-conserving organisation
has great weight. It is not mere piety, but hard-
headedness, therefore, which leads a man, in taking
note of the facts of Christ's life, to put confidence in
the authority of the Christian Church. Nevertheless,
authority, when relied upon exclusively, becomes a
thing of suspicion. It is well, then, at times to ab
stract this authority, so far as one can, and to look
at the facts of Christ's life apart from the institution
which has been chiefly concerned in keeping them.
Legitimate authority has nothing to fear from such a
course; candid investigation can but reinforce its
validity. Though in so brief a book it will be impossible to
enter with thoroughness into a discussion of the
sources, what examination we do make must ask
questions of unprejudiced scholars. For it is well to
remember that some scholars are so influenced by
prejudice in favour of the accepted authorities of the
past that they become only special pleaders, and their
own investigation has no weight. Other scholars
there are, so influenced by prejudice against all older
7

8 PRIMARY SOURCES
conceptions of ancient facts that they gird themselves
for a tilt at the faintest suggestion of a traditionary
view: their investigations are increasingly being dis
counted, and so free a lance as Harnack has startled
them by saying that the traditional is not bound to
make excuses for itself, but may stand confident till
its assailants have proved their case — a feat which
he is less and less inclined to believe that they can
accomplish. The unprejudiced scholar, as you will
suspect, is a rare person. He need not be a heartless
machine weighing evidence; still, for the time being,
he must be able to put his heart, with all its preferences
and loves, aside, and look at all facts coldly, with
longing neither to confirm nor to destroy.
If the reader protest that the scholars who deal with
sources are for the most part prejudiced, one way or
the other, — almost violently prejudiced, — yet he
is forced to use their investigations in making up his
own mind, he is altogether justified. Any full in
vestigation of the work of original scholars to-day
must include men whose minds are almost warped
with prejudice. But their work can still be used
rationally if the reader will do for himself what the
original investigator should have done for him: the
reader must trim off the excrescences of prejudice,
and by an effort of rational imagination discover what
the writer would have said had he been without preju
dice. It is a difficult undertaking, but if one has no
power to do it one can get no valid news from the
ultra-conservative or the ultra-radical, who, in spite
of acumen and industry, practically cease, because
of their prejudice, to be scholars at all.

THE EPISTLES g
The necessarily brief examination of the sources
which follows will hope to be the summary of the
views of unprejudiced scholarship so attained. We
may have reasonable assurance that the facts so won
are fixed; and if, at last, they should be found to agree
with the inherited records and traditions of the Church,
those who depend upon authority will not have studied
in vain: their conviction that the authority of the
Church is reasonable will be strengthened, and they
will know that they live in a house not made with
hands. I. The Epistles
The Sources for Christ's Life which are first in
time are the Epistles of St. Paul. Even radical
critics are essentially unanimous in ascribing Gala
tians, i and 2 Corinthians, and Romans to St. Paul.
This is significant. It makes these documents incon
testable witnesses to facts in Christ's Life within a
few years of His Resurrection. Lightfoot 1 in his
day put these four Epistles in 57 and 58; that is, less
than thirty years after the Resurrection. Professor
Harnack2 and his American pupil, Professor McGiffert,3
working independently, place these Epistles much
earlier, — from about 46 to about 53 ; that is, a
period after Christ's Resurrection ranging from six
teen to twenty-three years. Professor Bacon * falls
back to a date somewhat later, from 50 to 55, but
*" Biblical Essays," p. 222.
2 " Die Chronologie der altchristlichen Litteratur bis Eusebius,"
pp. 233-239. a.d. 52-53, 54-
3" The Apostolic Age," p. 673. A.D. 46 (c)~52, 53.
4 " Introduction to the New Testament," p. 280.

10 PRIMARY SOURCES
still not more than twenty-five years from the Resur
rection. There is ample reason to believe Thessalonians,
Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Philemon cer
tainly the work of St. Paul, according to a sane and
impartial scholarship;1 but the fact that Galatians,
i and 2 Corinthians, and Romans are practically not
even whispered against is sufficiently important to
make us fix attention on them alone. What do these
four Epistles tell us of Christ ?
These letters were written, then, within a genera-
1 Cf. Professor E. D. Burton, "Present Problems of New Testa
ment Study,'' Am. Jour. Theol., April, 1905, p. 217: ''As is well
known, it has gradually come to be recognised that the kind of evi
dence which establishes the genuineness of Galatians, First and Second
Corinthians and Romans exists also in the case of First Thessalo
nians, Philippians, and Philemon. The present attitude of scholar
ship is represented, not by the phrase, 'the four undisputed letters
of Paul,' but rather by the expression, ' the generally accepted letters
of Paul.' . . . Respecting Second Thessalonians, Colossians, and
Ephesians, the situation is somewhat different. The trend of opinion
is very strongly toward the acceptance of Colossians ... as a real
letter of the Apostle himself. . . . That Ephesians is ... a sermon
or theological essay, . . . and that only as such can it be regarded
as a genuine letter of Paul, is now generally admitted. . . The
objection to the acceptance of Second Thessalonians as Paul's, on
the ground that the eschatalogical views embodied in its apocalyptic
section are inconsistent with those expressed in First Thessalonians
is accorded less weight than formerly. The similarity of the Epistle
... to First Thessalonians ... is a phenomenon that doubtless
requires explanation; but it must be doubted whether it is not easier
to account for this than for the creation, with no clearly evident
motive, of an epistle so clearly resembling Paul's in general tone and
style, yet proceeding in fact from another and considerably later
hand."

THE EPISTLES II
tion of our Lord's public ministry. Many who read
them, or heard them read, must have been witnesses
of some of the events of that ministry, — for people
in those days were industrious travellers, and the
Jews were everywhere, not to speak of Romans and
Greeks. Moreover, with the exception of the Epistle
to the Romans, these letters were called forth by par
ticular exigencies in Corinth and Galatia, and do not
pretend to summarise either the facts or the doctrines
of Christianity. Of course, the Epistle to the Romans
is a great doctrinal Epistle; but even here the facts of
Christ's life are taken for granted. The references or
allusions to facts in our Lord's life are purely inci
dental. All are assumed as well known to the reader.
For this reason such allusions and references have
weighty significance: such facts were commonly ac
cepted by people who had a chance to verify them
through living witnesses.
Now what are these facts? He was accepted by
many as the "Messiah" — the title occurs over two
hundred times. He was looked upon as the Son of
God (Gal. iv. 4). He was counted sinless (2 Cor.
v. 21). He was crucified, dead, and buried, and rose
again the third day (1 Cor. xv. 3). His death had
already helped people to be righteous (2 Cor. v. 21).
Then there are minor facts recorded: Christ was "of
the seed of David" (Rom. i. 3) ; He was "poor" (2 Cor.
viii. 9) ; He appeared to St. Peter, among others, after
His Resurrection (1 Cor. xv. 5).
All these details are salient lines toward a por
trait of Christ. But very much more important is
the reflection of Christ in the inner life of the writer.

12 PRIMARY SOURCES
The authors of the Pauline Epistles, of the Johannine
Epistles, of the Epistle to the Hebrews, of St. Peter,
of St. James, and of St. Jude all do one thing of tran
scendent significance which no question of date or
authorship can affect: they all are aglow with the in
fluence of a single personality. And that personality
is Christ. More essential than any fact about Christ is
, Christ himself. From these letters the person of Christ
stands out: one feels His presence there. Does St. Paul
talk of justification by faith? It is because St. Paul has
come to a divine peace through a sublime confidence
that Christ believes in him. Does St. John talk of loving
all men? It is because Christ has filled his heart with
an overwhelming love. Does St. Peter talk of orderly
1 submission to all in authority? It is because Christ has
\ brought unity into his own once confused nature.
Whether much or little is yielded to searching, even
hostile critics of the Epistles, this one fact is ob
trusively plain: a personality of remarkable, of unique
power had grappled the writers to His heart and made
them His. There is grave danger of losing a sane
point of view in discussing the authorship of the
Second Epistle of St. Peter; in determining how far
the Pastoral Epistles have remained St. Paul's, how
far they have grown1 (as our modern hymns grow)
under the devotional and practical use of the Early
1 "This explanation of the nature of the Pastoral Epistles does
not deprive them of their significance, it only changes the character
of that significance. . . . We owe to the two earlier epistles the
preservation of Pauline fragments which will ever remain precious.''
— Von Soden, "History of Early Christian Literature," tr. J. R.
Wilkinson, p. 322.

THE EPISTLES 13
Church; and in all similar contentions. It has been
said that Green would have written a better history
of England had he known less of England and cor
respondingly more of Europe. In the same way New
Testament scholars, conservative and radical, would
often know a truer story of the Epistles if they could
look at them in their wholeness, in their wider rela
tionships, and would let the small critical questions
of exact date and exact authorship melt into their
relatively insignificant places. This is no word in
favour of easy-going methods, or slipshod smoothing
over of difficult details. It is but the warning to put
the big fact in its great place and keep it there. The
tremendous fact of the Epistles is that within a very
short time after the vanishing of Jesus of Nazareth,
letters were written, which we still have, telling by
their unconscious trend how one man of rugged action,
another man with organising ability, still another
with a mystic idealism, and another with the plainest
common sense unadorned by flashes of eloquence, all
were one in the spirit and power of Jesus. It is the
message of Christ to their inner life which with naive
simplicity they put all through their words and be
tween the lines. It is interesting that in the four
Epistles which Renan used to call " incontestables et
incontestees," one can get so vigorous an outline
(sketched in incidentally) of Christ's life. But the
main fact is that Christ Himself is there.
Lest, however, one get the impression that the
witness borne to the details of Christ's life is insig
nificant in the Epistles, let us glance at the witness to
the Resurrection of Jesus in the fifteenth chapter of

14 PRIMARY SOURCES
the first Epistle to the Corinthians. This chapter,
recall, is universally conceded St. Paul's. From the
"great four" Epistles (notably from Galatians) we
learn much of St. Paul's character, — his "straitness,"
his stubborn hold upon what he believes right, his
painstaking corroboration of facts. The introductory
words of this fifteenth chapter are a concise history
of his own investigation of the Resurrection. He was
not content with any subjective assurance. His old
opposition died hard. He proved by objective mar
shalling of witnesses what was presented to him for
belief. He "received" the facts of Christ's life: he
did not deliver them because they appealed to him as
ideally appropriate. He investigated this stupendous
fact of Jesus' Resurrection: Christ was seen by St.
Peter, then by the Twelve, then by five hundred at
once. That, you observe, gives no chance for sub
jective hallucination. More than two hundred and
fifty of these witnesses still lived, and could be asked
for their evidence. Here is a document which Pro
fessor McGiffert says was circulated a little more than
twenty years after Christ's Resurrection. It was
written by a hard-headed practical man (so the letters
show him) in a time when he knew that his word could
readily be tested. If this chapter with the surround
ing material of the "four epistles" alone survived
among the documents of the Apostolic Age, it would
be difficult for a critic of internal evidences to avoid
accepting as an historical fact the Resurrection of
Christ. So the Epistles do give us high assurance of historic
facts in Christ's life. Notwithstanding, their supreme

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 15
value must always be that they are the earliest testi
mony to the power of Christ to influence, transform,
and dominate the inner life of men. They tell us what
no mere history could tell : they make us feel the pres
ence of Christ. II. Tbe Synoptic Gospels
For thirty years — about a generation — the fol
lowers of Christ depended upon oral tradition for the
details of His career. This is natural. In a com
munity to-day, especially if the community includes
no professional literary folk, records of important
local events are seldom made into a history until the
witnesses of those events begin to disappear from the
stage of life. Then some one rises to say, "Before it
is too late we must get from the surviving witnesses
the exact record of this stirring story, and we must
have it recorded in a book." This, natural in our
own day, was inevitable in the first century among an
unlettered following, without our cheap and easy ways
of making permanent records; more especially because
oral tradition was a vastly more accurate source of
information in those days, — when Greek boys some
times learned all of Homer and Hebrew boys some
times could repeat the whole Old Testament Law, —
than it ever can be in our time, when nothing is
remembered which can be marked on a printed page
or hastily scribbled down with a pencil. Moreover, the
constant expectation of Christ's return was an ex
traordinary obstacle to permanent records. The oral
tradition, gathered from Apostolic Sermons, from the
lips of parents, from the testimony of eye-witnesses

1 6 PRIMARY SOURCES
given to curious friends, was the first Gospel, and was
a definite Gospel, needing to be reckoned with, though
unwritten. But the generation was passing. One would expect
the oral tradition to begin, at least, to take written
form. " I do not doubt," says Professor Sanday, in
his last book,1 "that the most active period for the
putting together of material for Gospels was the
decade 60-70 a.d." This is exactly what we should
expect. The first written record, so far as we can trace it,
scholars now practically agree, was the Logia2 of St.
Matthew. The record of the reliable Irenaeus 3 says
that Matthew published his Gospel in Hebrew (Ara
maic) "while Peter and Paul were preaching and
founding the Church in Rome." Modern scholars
are accepting this date (which would be not later than
66 a.d. and might be easily almost a decade earlier),
making the "Gospel," not our Gospel as we have it
to-day, but the Logia, or Sayings, of Christ, in Ara-
1 " The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel," p. 217.
2 Exception is sometimes taken to the title "Logia" (e.g., Dean
J. A. Robinson's "Study of the Gospels," pp. 68 ff.), on the ground
that its use in Papias is descriptive and not specifically by way of a
title. But even so keen an objector as the Dean of Westminster
admits (Op. Cit., p. 92) that in this "lost non-Marcan document"
he finds absolute evidence for but one narrative portion — the healing
of the centurion's servant. He finds "the teaching," which is essen
tially the book, to be "conversational," "succinct," "paradoxical,"
"startling." It is perhaps well to remember that the title "Logia"
is an arbitrary convenience of modern scholarship, but it so simply
and accurately describes the almost certain nature of the lost docu
ment that one is justified in its use.
3 "Adv. Haer." 3:1, 1.

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS

17

maic. This again is natural. The very words of
Christ, recorded in the language in which He spoke
them, would be a most sacred book. It was perhaps
the departure of the authoritative teachers from Jeru
salem, in the troubled years before the siege, that
induced this relatively obscure Apostle to put down
the Logia. In any case the book in its original form
is lost to us; but has become, as we shall see, an
important source for existing narratives.
Scholars are happily agreed upon the next docu
ment; and that is St. Mark. This is the oldest of the
four Gospels, as we now have them, and was written
probably not long before a.d. 70, perhaps as early as
65. The tradition that the author wrote from the
memory of speeches or conversations of St. Peter is
increasingly approved by scholars; and the ordinary
reader, impressed by the quickness and straightness
of the narrative, is convinced that the writer was very
close to an "eye-witness." Less than the other Gos-I
pels is there a purpose in St. Mark; that is, the other)
Gospels aim to reach one kind of readers, or exhibit1
an especial phase of Christ's life: St. Mark gives aj
rapid summary of Christ's deeds, not many of His;
words, with the general purpose of telling men who/
He was.
St. Matthew was written very soon after St. Mark.
Again we find scholars essentially agreed upon the
method of the composition of this book. The original
St. Matthew, it will be recalled, was an Aramaic book,
and consisted of the Lord's Sayings. Various tradi
tions have been sounded, but the theory that is now
practically an assured fact is that a writer in Greek

18 PRIMARY SOURCES
made up our present St. Matthew by combining the
Logia of St. Matthew with the events of St. Mark.
This made a fuller Life — if such a word can be
applied to any of the Gospels. The author also
had a distinct purpose: he wished to show that
our Saviour was the Messiah promised in the Old
Testament. Writing in a time when vivid memo
ries would retain many words and deeds of Christ,
the author might naturally add well-certified words
and facts not recorded in these two "sources."
But the grouping of the Logia in Chapters V-VII,
X, XIII, XVIII, XXIII-XXV,1 as well as the
name2 which tradition has given the book, makes
one feel how near the Gospel is to the Logia in
Aramaic; and the narrative is extremely close to St.
Mark.3

1 The "Formula" is interesting and significant; cf. vii. 28; xix. 1;
xxvi. 1. Also, xi. 1; xiii. 53.
2 Gospel according to St. Matthew.
3 A good many modern scholars are giving our present St. Matthew
a later date than St. Luke. This is partly because St. Matthew's
interest in the "Ecclesia," his emphasis upon the Lord's Supper, his
giving the full formula of Baptism, all tend to show that he was in
sympathy with the ecclesiastical temper which prevailed later in the
century. It has been often noted (e.g., Rev. L. Pullan's "Christian
Tradition," p. 6) that St. Matthew's Gospel is " homiletical " : its use
of the Old Testament made it a favourite in the early ages because it
was especially useful for preachers. The compiler of the First Gospel
has the homiletical instinct: he feels obliged to explain. For this
very reason the modern scholar prefers the literary St. Luke. "The
historian," says the Dean of Westminster ("The Study of the Gos
pels," pp. 101 f.), "will prefer St. Luke, as an accurate writer who
made it his business to collect and sift information. He cannot feel
a like certainty from the historical point of view in dealing with state-

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 19
In St. Luke scholars find a distinctly different tone.
The period of oral tradition is past by some consider
able time. The dedication is highly significant.
Many people, the author says, had undertaken to
write accounts of Christ's Life. He modestly tells
that his qualification was that he had the knowledge
of all the facts of the Life from the first. But the
literary finish of his Gospel, with its rich vocabulary,
joined to the fact that he was St. Paul's intimate
friend (Philem. 24; Col. iv. 14; 2 Tim. iv. 11), make
one feel that he may have been chosen by Church leaders
to do this definite literary task: first, to tell the story
of Christ, and then the story of the spread of His
Gospel (as we have it in the Acts). A very important
fact to bear in mind is that the "witnesses" of Christ's
Life and the immediate disciples of those witnesses
ments which are only attested by the unknown writer of the First
Gospel. He is bound to consider how far they may have been coloured
and modified by his peculiar interest in the Old Testament, and by
his Ufe and surroundings in the Early Christian Church." All this
may be true, but the homiletical instinct is temperamental and is
not "early" or "late." It is practically certain that neither the first
nor the third Evangelist was aware of the other's book. It is some
times urged that St. Luke more accurately represents the divisions
of the "Logia" than St. Matthew. But it is quite as probable that
St. Matthew incorporated the "sayings" with the least possible
change; and St. Luke, having learned when some words were said,
when others, and so on, deliberately broke up the continuous teaching
of the "Logia" into such fragments as the setting of "his thorough
information" required. The question of priority is in any case
unimportant, especially since the mutual ignorance of each other's
books shows that their writing must have been fairly close in time.
Meantime, it seems safer to give our present St. Matthew a slightly
earlier date.

20 PRIMARY SOURCES
(those who knew their testimony by heart) were
widely scattered. Because different men in their
teaching would inevitably lay stress on different parts
of our Lord's utterances or different facts of His Life,
some communities would have unique contributions
to make to any general account. Any traveller, or
missionary, must have felt the need of collecting these
accounts, even if the end of the world seemed quite
near. But after the destruction of Jerusalem — which
seemed to the Jewish Christians the "clap of doom"
— the end seemed less imminent, inasmuch as the
world had not collapsed at once. We can imagine
that when St. Luke went about on his journeys, or
when he talked with the leaders of the Church, prac
tical men with no gift of literary expression urged him
to put into dignified and sufficiently condensed form
all the material that was at hand. This material
evidently included the Logia of St. Matthew and our
Gospel according to St. Mark. But beside this was
a large mass of new material ; the parables, for instance,
many of which are found only in St. Luke. It is
definitely announced in the prologue that many
"Lives" are extant. The prologue also shows the
author a Greek of rhetorical cultivation. Many
passages of the body of the work show how scrupu
lously, in spite of literary taste, he clung to the rough
Aramaic original, which, in such passages, for the
time being, was his "source." He, more nearly than
the other Evangelists, wrote a biography; but in the
use of his material he was painstaking to be exact
rather than polished. It is the most "human" of
the Gospels: details of childhood, of pain, of joy, of

THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS 21
sympathy, have for him an especial force. It was
written, probably, not far from a.d. 80.1
It is quite possible that a scholar, radical or con
servative, might shake his head over this hasty review
of the Synoptic Gospels, and say, here and there,
"Unwarranted assumption." But in general, how
ever details of investigation may fall out, I feel con
vinced that the outline is true. Both the Prologue
of St. Luke and a study of the internal evidences make f
us aware that the three "Synoptics" are "survivals '•
of the fittest" from a rather large literary output, j
Everything points to their being written far from the '
scenes they describe, and this, with the complete
annihilation of great Jewish landmarks in a.d. 70,
gives the accurate details of place and custom (proved
accurate by modern investigation) deep significance.
The writers had seen and heard what they wrote
about, or they had immediate access to eye-witnesses
or "original documents." For our purpose the reader
would be only blinded by a discussion of minute
points. The passages of duplication, where the exact
diction is repeated in two, or perhaps all three, of the
Gospels; the reasons for additions or omissions; the
possibility of later editorship, are all enticing prob
lems. But they are not vital. What we wish to
know, what we must know, is whether the Synoptic
Gospels are trustworthy records of our Saviour's Life.
An impartial scholarship, sufficiently critical to sift
the truth without destroying it, comes back from its
labour with an indomitable "Yes." The Gospel of
1 To this date even Dr. Harnack has now given consent. See
his "Lukas der Arzt" (1906), pp. 108, 115 f.

22 PRIMARY SOURCES
the Infancy as given in St. Luke,1 for example, is
written from the human standpoint rather than the
divine; and in its naive, straightforward simplicity
is far removed from the rather bleak dogmatism of a
later age. It is the dogmatism that has created the
suspicion; and, in some cases, has blinded eyes, other
wise sharp, to the historic sincerity of the Synoptic
narrative. It is the part of good scholarship to find
in these three Gospels ample material to give the
reader a picture of Jesus of Nazareth as He was to
the people of His own day. It is neither blurred nor
over-coloured. Men keenly awake to the necessity
of telling the truth exactly wrote the Synoptic Gospels.
III. The Fourth Gospel
With the Fourth Gospel we enter a new domain.
It unites the characteristics of a "Gospel" with those
of an "Epistle." It is a "Life of Christ," but it is
that Life as it touched the life of the author. It is
1 Professor Ramsay, in his "Was Christ Born in Bethlehem?"
has candidly met the radical critics of this narrative with an exhaus
tive critical examination of several details, such as the Syrian enrol
ment in 8 B.C., and the governorship of Quirinius. In general de
fence of St. Luke's historic veracity, he says: "It is a matter of interest
to observe how slow some very learned New Testament scholars are
to appreciate the principle, which is regarded as fundamental by the
historical and antiquarian students, that no conjecture which is not
founded on clear evidence has any right even to be propounded, if it
contradicts the direct statement of an ancient authority. Much
less ought the ancient authority to be discredited because he dis
agrees with a loose and disputed modern conjecture" (pp. 268, 269).
A priori objections to unique beginnings to a life obviously unique
in its outcome are not soundly critical.

THE FOURTH GOSPEL

23

almost more autobiographical than biographical. The
author began to live the day his old master, John
Baptist, turned him to Christ. The second day of
the narrative is the second day of that new and real
life lived in the presence of Christ. And so on to the
end. The words of Christ have passed through the
nature of the author, but they are only the more real
because perhaps not exactly as Christ spoke them.
Sometimes it is impossible to distinguish the author's
comment from the Saviour's word: even this does not
matter, for one is always coming nearer to the heart
of Christ. The Fourth Gospel is not the work of a
chronicler; it is the culminating expression of a man
who has experienced all the vicissitudes of life, and
whose soul has grasped the divine in the Person of
One Man. The author's personality is lost in the
personality of his Divine Hero.
The battle of criticism 1 has been raging about this
book, largely because until about 170 a.d. it is not
definitely referred to in Christian literature. But
Dr. Sanday, in his great book,2 points out that since
the survivals of Christian literature between a.d. 100
and 170 are exceedingly fragmentary, it is uncrit
ical to base any important matter on the argument
from silence; especially when, even in this little, it .is
quite reasonable to detect allusions in quotations.
Dr. Sanday also wisely reminds us that time is re
quired to give a document sanctity before it is quoted
1 In reviewing the question of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel
I shall touch only upon the most salient features; since a juster and
a clearer verdict may thus be obtained.
2 " The Criticism of the Fourth Gospel," p. 238.

24 PRIMARY SOURCES
as an authority. Moreover, when direct references
to the Fourth Gospel do appear they appear in docu
ments emanating from Vienne,1 Lyons,1 Rome,2 Car
thage,3 Ephesus,4 Antioch,5 Alexandria,6 — all the
strategical points of the Empire. Sound criticism
finding scattered authorities in agreement always
seeks a common archetype in a much earlier day.
The unprejudiced critic would expect to find the
common cause, whence the various traditions sprang,
at least as far back as a.d. ioo, — about the time it
must have been written.7
Of this external evidence, that of Irenaeus is prac
tically sufficient. This writer, Bishop of Lyons, was
in his youth a pupil of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna,
who in turn was a pupil of St. John. Irenaeus, whose
reliability is proverbial among scholars, dwells upon
his memory of Polycarp's conversations about St.
John.8 And Irenaeus is unwavering in his testimony
that the Fourth Gospel is St. John's.9 His prede-
1 Irenaeus. 2 Tatian, Heracleon. 3 Tertullian.
4 Polycrates. 5 Theophilus. 6 Clement.
7 Harnack gives as the date a.d. 8o— iio.
8 "Adv. Haer." Book iii. Ch. xi. Cf. Ch. i. ±.
9 For the attempt to identify the John here referred to with " John
the Elder," see (in support thereof) article by Professor B. W. Bacon,
Hrbbert Journal, April, 1903, pp. 510 ff.; or, more recently, Baron
Von Soden's "Early Christian Literature" (tr. Wilkinson), p. 428.
But it is impossible to yield to this argument. The theory advanced
is that Irenaeus was quoting from Papias and confused the "Johns."
Irenaeus is conceived as knowing of the great Apostle — the leader
of his own home district — only through Papias and a brief con
ference with Polycarp. As Dr. Sanday clearly shows (Op. Cit.,
pp. 60 ff.), Irenaeus must have had many sources of information.
Even Dr. McGiffert is emphatic: "It cannot be supposed," he says,

THE FOURTH GOSPEL

25

cessor in the See of Lyons, Pothinus, was ninety at
his death in a.d. 177, and must have known many of
the early Fathers, and so must have had a fund of
accurate information of Apostolic times.
Moreover, Irenaeus spent, it is believed,1 twenty
years in Rome, a centre to which reports and tradi
tions came from all quarters. But his direct con
nection, through Polycarp, with St. John himself, is
worth everything — even if it were his only source of
information, which it is not. The testimony of Ire
naeus would need insurmountable difficulties to over
throw it. Though it chances to be given eighty
years or so after the writing of the Fourth Gospel, we
must not be blind to his unique opportunities and his
accepted accuracy.
But the main evidence for the authorship must
always rest in the Fourth Gospel itself. The common
method of testing the authorship has become classic.
It asks first whether the author was a Jew; then
whether a Palestinian Jew; then whether an eye
witness; finally, whether he was St. John the Apostle.
The language, full of Hebraisms, the care to give
Aramaic names for men and things, the easy know
ledge of Jewish laws and customs, all mark the author
a Jew. Further, the author has never yet been caught
mistaken in his geography, the one example which
hostile critics have found in the name "Sea of Ti-
"that Irenaeus, who knew Polycarp personally, could commit such a
blunder. He had not merely met Polycarp casually; he was his
pupil, and he must have known of whom he spoke when he referred
to John." ("Apostolic Age," p. 607; also note 3, p. 623.)
1 See Lightfoot's "Ignatius," iii. 402.

26 PRIMARY SOURCES
berias" for "Sea of Galilee," having been turned
to account for the traditional date of authorship;
because though "Sea of Tiberias" was the second-
century name for the lake, the author wrote in a time
when both names were in vogue, therefore in the time
of transition, which must have been — as such things
go — about a.d. ioo. The author, it will be recalled,
uses both names, so definitely marking the transition
period. Other capital arguments are at hand, but
this accurate geographical knowledge is enough to
prove the writer a Palestinian Jew. That the author
was an eye-witness becomes clearer as critics magnify
details. The knowledge of contemporary history is
most delicate, especially in the allusions to Jewish
parties. The vivid references to landmarks in Jeru
salem — a wreck after the year 70 — unnecessary
details in descriptions of the mountain where "there
was much grass," of the fields where the corn was
waving, of the house which was filled with perfume
of ointment — all bespeak the eye-witness.1
But the most convincing evidence of the eye-witness
1 Very interesting witness to this vividness of detail is borne by
Baron von Soden, in his recent book, "The History of Early Chris
tian Literature " (English translation) p. 391: "The touches are often
marvellously delicate. We feel, as it were, the fresh breath of morn
ing as the disciples pass to and fro at the Jordan. The night wind
rustles round the chamber, whither Nicodemus has crept in secret.
The ripening sun of summer shines upon the scene by Jacob's well.
Twilight falls upon the chamber where the Master washes His dis
ciples' feet; and as Judas goes forth there is the darkness of night."
Baron von Soden does not fall in with the tradition, though he is
very close to it. He makes the author a disciple of John the Elder
— who was "the beloved disciple."

THE FOURTH GOSPEL

27

is the clear-cut delineation of subordinate characters.
Philip, Andrew, Mary, and Martha appear incidentally
here and there, but always with the clearest consis
tency. Though it admits of no proof, Dr. Sanday's
explanation of the author's reference to himself as the
disciple whom Jesus loved,1 — whereby the author
unconsciously sank his personality in a title as Christ
sank His in the title, "Son of Man," — appeals strongly
to one's imagination, and, in so far, adds a further
emphasis upon the direct knowledge of the author.
So, at length, we come to the question, Was the
author the Apostle John? Any criticism which ap
peals to the average man as sane brings the authorship
to a narrow circle of possibility: the author was an
immediate follower of St. John, acting as scribe; or
he was an unknown disciple of Christ, too young to be
an Apostle, but always with Him2; or he was the
Apostle John. The tradition is strong in favour of
the authorship of St. John the Apostle: and tra
dition to-day has great weight in the scholars' world.
Moreover, the difficulties of all internal evidence are
1 op. at., p. 79.
2 This would identify the "unknown" with "the disciple whom
Jesus loved." The theory is most completely worked out by Dr.
Hugo Delff ("Das vierte Evangelium wiederhergestellt," and "Neue
Beitrage zur Kritik und Erklarung des vierten E vangeliums ") .
Dr. Sanday's chief criticism of the theory is very strong: in the Synop
tic Gospels St. John and St. Peter are constantly associated as most
intimate friends; in the Fourth Gospel, St. Peter and the beloved
disciple. It is natural to identify these pairs of friends ("Criticism
of the Fourth Gospel," p. 107). It will be noted that theories like
Delff 's and Von Soden's leave the Fourth Gospel as a witness of the
very first importance, — it comes from an eye-witness or a disciple
of an eye-witness.

28 PRIMARY SOURCES
diminished by accepting the Johannine authorship : no
other eye-witness so clearly fills the situation. But, in
any case, the book is testimony of the first order.
The effort to make the Gospel a composite produc
tion never can succeed. It is too strongly marked
with unity. It tells with consistency how Christ came
to His own and was rejected by them. It is a great
tragedy. And it is from one man's point of view —
the point of view of a dearest friend.
The book is best understood when it is called auto
biography. There is distinctly Jewish home memory,
but the author lets you know at once that he is not
at home. He lives where philosophical names are in
vogue. He explains Jewish phrases for his Greek
thinking neighbour. But the significant point is that
though touching upon such a Greek term as 6 Ao'yos,
he never philosophises. The least tendency to meta
physics is at once dissipated by a succeeding flow of
historical narrative. Moreover, the minute details
indicate the vivid memory of an old man. The late
Andrew Peabody, of blessed memory, used to testify,
in this very connection, that in his old age memories
of past scenes came back to him, which in years inter
vening had been quite forgotten; so he used to say
that the minute details of this Gospel were to him
psychological proof that it was written by a very old
man. An old Jew, living in a Greek city, agog with
philosophic ideas, — that is surely quite like the
traditional St. John living in Ephesus.1 Then with
1 1 perhaps ought to mention the assertion credited to Papias
("Expositions," Book II), that "John the Divine and James his
brother were put to death by the Jews." The easiest form of

THE FOURTH GOSPEL 29
the modest keeping his name "out of print," the old
man's weakness conquers now and then and he puts
colour into his anonymity: he knew the High Priest;
he was the first disciple to believe that Jesus had
risen. It is not boasting, though unsympathetic
youth may call it so. Again, the personal feelings
of the author are strongly displayed. There is mani
fest personal interest in Peter; Judas is always named
with bitterness.
An argument which I have never seen set forth has
for me great weight. Our Lord was a statesman.
He founded a kingdom : He meant it to last. To start
this kingdom He chose twelve men as Apostles. They
were picked men. They had special "gifts." Now
a man of such insight and intention, had He been only
an ordinary genius, must have chosen one mind
capable of such development that in time He might
with him have sympathetic intercourse. The fine,
intellectual, spiritual fibre of St. John, as we see him
in this book, Christ must have demanded. If I did
not find somewhere the trace of His choosing an
Apostle who could comprehend the deep things, and
disposing of the difficulty is to make "the Divine" and "his brother"
additions by a later hand, since "the Divine" is, critically, impossible
for Papias. The "John" would then refer easily to the Baptist.
Dr. Sanday, with his accustomed caution and fairness, considers with
deference the assertion, as it stands (Op. Cit., pp. 103 f.; 107 f.;
250ft.); but when Lightfoot and Professor Harnack join in dismissing
it as unhistorical, we cannot allow so slight and doubtful a. passage
to contradict the strong tradition that St. John lived to old age, espe
cially when the tradition is confirmed by Irenaeus who knew the
writings of Papias. See Lightfoot's "Essays on ' Supernatural Reli
gion,'" pp. 211 ff.; and Harnack's " Chronologie," Bd. II. 665 ff.

30 PRIMARY SOURCES
who could directly transmit a conception of Him
adequate to the inspiration of the Church in all ages,
then I should find Christ the Statesman a contradic
tion. There must have been among the disciples of a
Master like Christ at least one man who could under
stand more than the mere events, more even than
the mere words, — there must have been one who
could understand the Life — the Life in its relation
to the world. This man must have been our Lord's
most intimate friend: to him Christ must have poured
out the striving and conquest of His soul, for he must
have been the man who, approximately at least,
knew Him. We have the evidence of the Fourth
Gospel that St. John did thus understand Him, —
not philosophically, but none the less deeply for that
reason. No other, either in tradition or in history,
can be assigned the task. If there are difficulties in
assigning the Gospel to St. John, there are infinite
difficulties in robbing him of the honour of having
written the greatest book ever written by the hand
of man.
In the other Gospels we have information about
Christ which is the most valid history, but we are
not sure that it is written down by those who them
selves saw and heard what they describe. It is prac
tically impossible to doubt that the Fourth Gospel is
written by any other than the Saviour's most intimate
friend, — he who knew Christ not only face to face,
but heart to heart, and soul to soul. It is the crown
ing document of the revelation of the 'personality of
Christ to the world.

CHAPTER III
Secondary Sources
IF the documents of the New Testament had all
perished, we should still have definite knowledge
of Christ. There are other sources of information
about Him of serious importance.
I. Foreign Testimony
Slight as is the reference to our Lord in contemporary
literature outside the Christian writers, it is neverthe
less significant. Josephus in "The Antiquities"1 dis
tinctly refers to Him. Tacitus, the Roman historian,
mentions Him in his "Annals,"2 as also Pliny in one of
his Letters.3 In Suetonius's '* Life of Claudius " i there
is perhaps a reference. The Talmud has constant allu
sions to Him, marked by intense hatred. Though the
writers of the Talmud are uncritical and irresponsible,
their writings have historical value. Christ is called
"That man," "He whom we may not name," "Thefool,"
"Absalom," and other such epithets. All these refer
ences and allusions make clear, from sources foreign to
Christianity, that Christ is an historic character.
1 xx. 9, i; and possibly also xviii. 3, 3. See Hastings's Dictionary
of the Bible, vol. v. p. 472.
2 xv. 44. 3 x. 96. 4 xxv.
31

SECONDARY SOURCES

II. The Fathers

We commonly call the Early Christian writers,
following New Testament times, The Fathers. Their
quotations from the Gospels often help scholars to
fix upon the exact text of the Gospel manuscripts.
But, more than that, fragmentary as their writings
are for the most part, they are the sources from which
the history of the Post-Apostolic Church is made.
This history must often decide the meaning of a Gospel
passage. For example, Professor McGiffert, in his
"Apostolic Age,"1 arguing from the slight emphasis in
the Gospels upon Christ's injunction to perpetuate
the Lord's Supper, thinks it extremely doubtful
whether Christ intended His disciples to continue the
feast as an institution; yet he says plainly2 that "there
can be no doubt that it was everywhere celebrated in
the churches of the apostolic age." The Epistles
assure us of this; and the Apostolic and Post-Apostolic
Fathers confirm it. Condensed documents like the
Gospels get their certain meaning from the contem
porary and subsequent history of which they were
part.3 They were part of a living stream. What men
tried to do in Christ's name is the best evidence of
what Christ commanded. The Fathers show the
established customs of the Christian community.
'pp. 68, 69. 'Ibid., p. 536.
3 Cf. Abbe Alfred Loisy ("The Gospel and the Church," tr. C.
Home, p. 13) : " Christ is inseparable from His work, and the attempt
to define the essence of Christianity according to the pure Gospel of
Jesus apart from tradition cannot suceed ; . . . for the essence of
Christianity must be in the work of Jesus, or nowhere, and would be
vainly sought in scattered fragments of His discourse."

THE FATHERS 33
The tendency grew, — as one sees from even a rapid
reading of the Fathers, — to draw inferences from the
facts of Christ's Life. St. Paul began to explain: it
was inevitable that thinking men should go on ex
plaining. Ignatius devotes himself to passages on
the Virgin-Birth, the pre-existence of Christ, the
Incarnation; Clement of Rome also speaks of pre-
existence and vaguely implies the Trinity; in the
middle of the second century there begins an effort
to describe the relation of the Son to the Father; and:
by the end of the second century Irenaeus and Clement'
of Alexandria have practically founded what we call'
Christian theology, — that is, the deductions from
the facts recorded in the Gospels are being moulded :
into a science.
It was altogether natural that in this process of
thought some of the Fathers should make wild deduc
tions. So the Gnostics, the Ebionites, and many
other exaggerating writers distorted the Gospel story
through neglecting its wholeness by an over-fondness
for a particular part. But even the heresies are in
structive. They show great truths of Christ shorn
of their complementary truths.
Thus the Fathers bear witness to Christ. Their
story confirms the Gospels; and it attempts to trans
late a story which first appealed to the heart into such
terms that it may appeal to the mind.
III. Councils and Creeds
The climax of the work of the Fathers was their
united wisdom as shown in the interpretations of
General Councils, formulated at length into the Creeds.

34 SECONDARY SOURCES
The strife and bitterness of the Councils, the delight
in branding men as heretics, must not blind one to the
profound learning and power of lucid thinking which
the Greek Fathers especially displayed in these de
liberations of the great Councils. Greek thinking
welded to the matchless clearness of the Greek lan
guage gave the opportunity to explain, — as far as
human wit, under divine guidance, can explain, —
the person of Christ in terms of mind. Kattenbusch,1
Harnack,2 and McGiffert,3 would place the original
form of the Apostles' Creed somewhere between a.d ioo
and 175, and agree that it was first set forth in Rome
as the local Baptismal Symbol; from this original form
it grew to our present Apostles' Creed by slow stages.
Whether it was the foundation of the Nicene Creed is an
open question. At any rate, our so-called Nicene Creed
is the Apostles' Creed in, as has been said, "one of its
more florid Oriental forms." The Nicene Creed (a.d.
325-381) was meant to meet the heresies of Arius and
Macedonius. Dr. Sanday in his sane way4 pleads for the
importance of these ancient decisions: "Every word
in them," he says, "represents a battle, or series of
battles, in which the combatants were, many of them,
giants." The strength of the Councils is that they were not
afraid of a paradox. The Godhead is Trinity in Unity;
Christ is human and divine; The Father is greater
than The Son, and The Father and The Son are equal.
It was the genius of the Greek mind which dared to
1 " Das apostolische Symbol." 2 " Das apostolische Glaubensbe-
kenntniss." 3 " The Apostles' Creed."
4 Hastings's Dictionary of the Bible, vol. ii. p. 650.

COUNCILS AND CREEDS

35

go as far as the Truth demanded on any single line,
and to leave ultimate consistency with God. When
the Latin mind at length went into the business of
holding councils it was another story: the petty effort
to describe in hard Latin words what needed delicate
appreciation rather than description marks the dreary
road from the master, Athanasius, to the limited
thinker, Augustine. But, in spite of differences in
perception and capacity, the men who moved Councils
were working out the problem of Christ's personality.
Everything they had in gifts, human or divine, went
out in the effort to understand Him, and to explain
Him to the world. It is crass ignorance of all life to
complain that it is a far cry from the glowing simplicity
of St. Mark to the elaborate and cold diction of the
Creeds. It is exactly the difference between touch
ing, seeing, smelling a flower and reading its technical
description in a botany. The little would-be poet
scorns the botany. The great poet — Tennyson y for
one striking example — takes infinite pains to know
the scientific lore about the beautiful nature which
first he drinks in with his senses and emotions. So
the poet, most sagacious of men, comes to know. He
who would know Christ may expect much help from
a study of Creeds and Councils. They reveal Christ
as He touched the composite mind of the early ages.
IV. Institutions
An institution — if it deserves the name — is a
conserver of principles, traditions, truth. A univer
sity, for example, just in so far as it has a history
1 Life, vol. ii. p. 408.

3 6 SECONDARY SOURCES
behind it, presents to each generation of students
essentially the same ideals. The methods of teaching
may change, the subjects for study may be revolution
ised, but the main characteristics of the graduates of
the university will be the same. Thus one feels the
difference between an Oxford man and a Cambridge
man; or, in our own land, between a Harvard man
and a Yale man. It is a subtle but distinct savour
which the great institution invariably gives to its
children. Knowing the present generation within
the college walls, you know alumni of two or five cen
turies ago. An ancient story has come down through
them to our life to-day.
So the Christian Church, bound together by one fixed
enthusiasm in all ages — an enthusiasm for Christ — is
an eloquent witness to the personality of Christ. A
little later I shall speak of the interior character of
Christians as a demonstration of Christ's character,
but for this chapter I wish to cling to the outward
features of the institution of the Christian Church.
(a) THE sacraments
The Sacraments of Baptism and of the Lord's Supper
are witnesses to the life of Christ. Interpretations
of the meaning of these Sacraments have varied from
age to age. To some extent the mode of their ad
ministration has varied; but there have been at the
basis of both a rite and a form of words which have
been counted essential to their validity. The Bap
tism is to be with water in the Name of the Father
and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. The Lord's
Supper is to be with bread and wine, accompanied

INSTITUTIONS— THE SACRAMENTS 37
with a recitation of the Saviour's words of institution.
The Lord's Supper, especially in its memorial aspect,
is a vivid recalling of a significant event in Christ's
life, and thereby, through the continuing practice of
the Church, has become perhaps the most striking
testimony to the event itself, to the death of Christ
as a love-manifesting and life-producing phenomenon.
For times have been periodically when men did not
study, did not listen to instructions and sermons, were
careless of the Scriptures, ignored all learned writings,
but kept on receiving this Feast instituted by Christ.
In her last story,1 Mrs. Humphrey Ward makes a
character, who is more or less confused by the de
structive criticism, tell her reason for standing fast
by the ancient Sacrament. "It's an Action," the
heroine says, — "not words. . . . Some day we shall
all be tired — shan't we? — of creeds and sermons,
but never of 'This do, in remembrance of Me!'" For
various reasons, all down the years, there have been
periods when men who knew too many things, or
too few, have been "tired of creeds and sermons,"
but still they have been impelled to obey the bid
ding of the outward and visible act of loyalty to the
Christ. Thus the Sacraments have borne a steady witness
to Christ when Gospel records lay hid in libraries
unread, or when men, taking the records out,
scoffed at their validity. The unbroken custom of
definite acts in Christ's name assures us to-day of
the intense reality which started such acts into
history. 1 " Fenwick's Career," Chapter VII.

38 SECONDARY SOURCES
(b) THE MINISTRY
Branches of the Christian Church which can be
called "historic" place emphasis on the historic con
tinuity of the ministry from the beginning. No theory
of the ministry and its functions need be discussed.
The obvious word need only be that an historic, con
tinuous ministry has large value as a witness-bearing
institution. We read that when the Eleven Apostles
sought to fill the vacancy in the "Twelve" caused by
the suicide of Judas, the one qualification in the can
didates was that they must have been eye-witnesses
of the Risen Christ. Clearly, then, we grasp that the
Apostles were to be "witnesses of the Resurrection."
To their successors in office they committed this wit
ness, sealing the truth of their testimony, most often,
by death. The regularly appointed officers to whom
they committed this trust "ordained" others in turn,
committing to them the witness they had received in
their day; and so the chain of testimony was started
and continued. The exact way in which the orders
of the ministry evolved, the names used, the way the
bishops succeeded to the leadership at first exercised
by the Apostles, must not tangle us. The only point
for us now to fix upon is that a regular succession of
duly appointed and accredited officers passed on from
generation to generation the honest witness of the
Apostles to the life of Christ.
Irenaeus died after a.d. 200 — that is 170 years
after Christ's vanishing from earth. In his graphic
way Irenaeus says x that he could point out the exact
1 Letter to Florinus.

INSTITUTIONS— THE MINISTRY

39

spot in Asia Minor where Polycarp talked to him about
interviews which Polycarp held with St. John and
others who had seen Christ. This makes one feel
what the links of living witnesses mean, how they
become independent of any written record, and how
they bear a living share in any estimate of facts.
"These are priceless words," says the candid Har
nack,1 "for they establish a chain of evidence (Jesus,
John, Polycarp, Irenaeus) which is without a parallel
in history."
It will be noted that Polycarp and Irenaeus were
Bishops — officers of the Church pledged to pass on
an accurate account of what they had received. Such
testimony has value when the testimony is given by
private individuals; it has increased weight when
given by officials, appointed, among other reasons,
to keep exactly and to pass on with strictest care what
has been committed to them.
It may fairly be admitted that the officials might
weave certain theories among the received facts, and
in passing forward the facts might add as facts what
were originally only theories. This is quite possible,
and in individual instances doubtless occurred; but
with the ever-widening stream it would be increasingly
difficult to get a general consensus on the theories,
while the facts would have a universality which would
distinguish them from the alloy and accretions. For
this reason, the appeal has been made, from time to
time, to the primitive records and they have corrected
much that is thus proved modern growth; but the
facts of Christ's life have had a singularly uniform
1 Encyclopaedia Britannica, art. "Polycarp."

40 SECONDARY SOURCES
testimony from records and ministry. The ministry
of to-day, with its continuous history reaching back
to the remote past, has therefore independent author
ity in sustaining the accuracy of the events recorded
in the New Testament. (c) SUNDAY
The keeping of Sunday as a day of rest and worship
dates from apostolic times. For a time the Jewish
Christians kept both the Sabbath and Sunday, but by
the end of the first century Sunday was kept exclu
sively. By the beginning of the fourth century the
Church was hallowing Sunday, under definite eccle
siastical law, and Constantine made this Church law
a state law also. It is somewhat difficult to under
stand how enormous a change, for a Jewish mind,
was implied in yielding the Sabbath to any other day
of the week. The disciples, with sacred associations
of Sabbaths spent with Christ, would be as tenacious
as any other Jews in maintaining the preeminence of
the Sabbath. Only an event of overwhelming im
portance could turn them from their sacred traditions
and associations, especially, as we find, by such com
mon and universal consent. The only event which
has ever been suggested as the cause of this change
from the Sabbath to Sunday is the Resurrection on
Sunday of our Lord. That does explain it: nothing
else does.
Therefore, Sunday falls in among the institutions
which bear witness, independent of documents, upon
Christ's Life. It is one of the supreme evidences of
His Resurrection as an historical fact, and further

INSTITUTIONS — SUNDAY 41
testifies to the character of the Risen One, — for even
a Resurrection alone is insufficient to account for a
universal custom, striking at deep-seated convictions
and prejudices: the Resurrection must have been the
Resurrection of One who spoke and lived with power.
(d) THE CHURCH AS AN INTERPRETER OF SCRIPTURES
AND CREEDS
We often hear people say, "The Church teaches
thus- and so." When asked what is meant by the
"Church," or how the Church has taught what it is
alleged to have taught, men give widely different
answers. Some point to the New Testament; some
to the decisions of the Six Ecumenical Councils; some,
to the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds; some, to the
Augsburg Confession; some, to the Decrees of Trent;
some, to the Thirty-nine Articles ; but most men speak
vaguely, attempting to confirm their own convictions
by an appeal to what they, at any rate, wish the
Church to teach. For such a purpose any ancient
Churchman is apt to be sufficient if his dictum is
decidedly approving the quoter's point of view.
The natural and apparently easy solution is to say
that the Church teaches what the original documents
(Holy Scriptures) imply and what the Creeds bring
together as essential inferences from these original
documents. The difficulty, however, is that no form
of words can ever mean quite the same to succeeding
ages. The Scriptures and the Creeds are in constant
need of interpreters. The Church by a divine com
mission is a living organism, not a dead shell to con
tain so-called deposits: Christ promised His followers

42 SECONDARY SOURCES
that the Holy Spirit should guide them into all truth.
The relationship of the Church to the Bible and the
Creeds is therefore a vital one. The good commen
tator feels himself under obligation to know what
leaders of Church thought in all ages have declared
to be the meaning of the text on which he is working.
New discoveries in Palestinian or Egyptian soil, newly
discovered manuscripts of undoubted antiquity, may
discount the interpretation of all of them; but, as a
scientific scholar, he dare not disregard this interpre
tation of the past. It is a necessary contribution to
a sane judgment. This is, within narrower bounds,
true also of the Creeds. Discoveries in astronomy
have entirely changed the conception of the word
"ascended" in the Creed. "The resurrection of the
body" has had a different content in different ages:
in spite of St. Paul's discourse on the spiritual body,
there have been periods when men have been more
orthodox than the orthodox, and have declared that
the Creed means, in the case of our resurrection, a
revivifying of the exact particles of matter which have
gone into the grave. I suppose no intelligent person
believes that to-day. In any case the Creed is not
putting its approval upon any such detail of interpre
tation, but upon the great general principle of the
resurrection of that part of ourselves which causes us
to be known and recognised by our neighbours: God
will give the kind of body that pleases Him in His
own time.1 It is quite certain that, with our fuller
1 It need not be pointed out that our Lord's Resurrection falls
under an entirely different category, since His body "did not see
corruption."

THE CHURCH AS INTERPRETER

43

knowledge of the natural world, with the centuries of
Christian experience, with the memory of saints and
clear thinkers, the Creeds are richer, stored with larger,
more definite meaning than they had for the Chris
tians of the first few centuries. The doctrine of evo
lution alone has made the clause, "Maker of heaven
and earth, And of all things visible and invisible,"
pulsate with a meaning it never could have had for
the Bishops at Nicaea. Dimly still, but with inspiring
flashes, we see the glorious method of the Creating
Father, — creating continuously, never ceasing His
care or (remembering the interpretation through
Christ) His love.
There need never be any consternation at this in
dwelling right of the Church to interpret. By a divine
Providence the times of Ecumenical Councils are
probably past. The Church of to-day is divided and
the pronouncement of the Ecumenical Council is now
replaced by what we may call the common consent
of Christendom. For example, though the fathers
and brethren sixty years ago railed at the theory of
Evolution,1 Christian people everywhere accept it as
a solid witness to the theological doctrine of design:
if an Ecumenical Council could be held to-morrow,
and its members were asked to affirm or reject the
doctrine of evolution, doubtless they would affirm the
"hypothesis" with substantial unanimity; those who
voted against its credibility would be stared at as men
who could not think. People are no longer either
writing or reading books on the Harmonising of Science
1 Cf. "Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley," vol. i. pp. 194 ff.,
for an account of Bishop Wilberforce's strange attacks.

44 SECONDARY SOURCES
and Religion; because the Church, quietly, guided by
the Spirit of God, has gratefully appropriated the
honest temper of scientific investigation as its own.
The Church does speak, not through a definite council,
but through the myriad voices of many children, hap
pily at last agreed upon some change in attitude or
upon some added detail of belief. These changes are
additions, rarely if ever subtractions. It is a mark
of the Church to construct, — howbeit slowly, con
servatively, cautiously.
Lest one feel that this makes the documents of
Christianity — the New Testament and the Creeds —
of unstable value, it is wise to notice that the changes
are slight. The passage referring to the three wit
nesses in St. John's Epistles has been dropped out by
general consent, but the doctrine of the Trinity is not
thereby weakened. Even if the Fathers did refer to
it as a proof text, we no longer are convinced of the
truth by isolated texts: we have higher, firmer ground
for belief in the Trinity, — in the spirit of the
whole New Testament, in the irresistible interpreta
tion of the Early Church. So too, when the content
of the word "ascended" in the Creeds was changed
by the discoveries of Copernicus, sane men saw that
' the detail was too insignificant to notice. The popu
lar language of the day was used to define an event,
whose meaning, to faith and practical life, was not at
,' all impaired.
Our purpose confines us to the facts of Christ's
Life. The Church's authority on the validity of these
facts is a highly important testimony. To men like
Cardinal Newman the Church is infallible, and what

THE CHURCH AS INTERPRETER 45
is set forth by the Church is a closed question. Most
people, whether they admit it or not, whether they
even know it or not, do not accept authority simply
because it is authority; nothing which must pass
through human media is in itself counted infallible.
As some one has pointed out, the dead rich man who
asked Abraham to send infallible witnesses to his
five brethren, still living, was in torment: the cry for
infallibility 1 is from hell. But though men generally
will not accept ipso facto what the Church sets forth,
they will give especial weight to what the Church has
attested.2 The Gospels, the Creeds, have immense
1 Cf. The Bishop of Ripon's "Witness to the Influence of Christ;"
pp. 152 ff. "The wish for certitude may be a very noble or a very
cowardly wish. It may be noble ... if it spring from the passion
ate desire for truth. ... But the wish for certitude is often an un
worthy one; it may spring, not from the imperious love of truth, but
from the ignoble love of ease, or from the cowardly wish to escape
responsibility, and so to shirk one of God's current ways of disci
pline. . . . The unhealthy craving for authority, which in some times
and places has been so frequent, is a symptom of this slothful dis
position and this discreditable timidity. Such a wish can never be
finally satisfied under present conditions. . . . We are surrounded
by mystery, whether we look without us or within. We know only
in part, and certitude therefore, in any absolute or complete sense,
must be looked for only when we reach that realm where we shall
know even as also we are known."
2Cf. Abte Loisy ("The Gospel and the Church," tr. C. Home,
p. 224, p. 217): "The Church does not exact belief in its formulas as
the adequate expression of absolute truth, but presents them as the
least imperfect expression that is morally possible; she demands that
men respect them for their quality, seek the faith in them, and use
them to transmit it. The ecclesiastical formula is the auxiliary of
faith . . . : it cannot be the integral object of that thought, seeing
that object is God Himself, Christ and His Work; each man lays

46 SECONDARY SOURCES
force toward persuading a reasonable man because
the Church from the beginning has given its continuous
authority to them. What changes of interpretation
have come in all the years have been insignificant,
both relatively and absolutely. In the days of coun
cils, one council affirmed what a previous council had
denied. To-day, men, seeming to find difficulties,
groan because the Church does not rise instantly to
omit or deny what seems to them an outworn word
or phrase. The process of adjustment to conditions
must be slower now than in the early time. And
happy for us that it is so. The myriad voices sound
ing from different climes, from separated sections of
Christendom, will bring back at last a vote, and it will
bring a conviction that no council ever had. The
Church, through interpretation of Scripture and Creeds,
stands staunchly as a witness to the recorded events
in Christ's Life. The doubts of one age melt into the
faith of the next; and men rejoice that there has been
no "revision" of the ancient Creeds. They are jus
tified. A good many people are questioning that article
of the Creed which is summed up under the name of
the Virgin Birth. They are wondering if it may not
sometime drop out of the Creed, by the common
consent of the Church. This question needs to be
answered calmly; yet few who touch upon it have
patience. To those who find it a stumbling-block, it
hold of the object as He can with the aid of the formula. . . . Truth
alone is unchangeable, but not its image in our minds. Faith ad
dresses itself to the unchangeable truth, through a formula neces
sarily inadequate."

THE CHURCH AS INTERPRETER 47
needs to be said that their difficulties with the account
in St. Luke are, to a very large extent, academic.
The argument from silence, always weak, is, in such a
subject, superficial to the last degree: therefore the
silence of St. Mark and St. John must not rouse sus
picion. That the Lord should have been called Joseph's
Son is most natural, and the record that He was so
called is witness to the trustworthiness of the docu
ments. Contradictions and inconsistencies are part
of real life: only the theoretic and unreal can smooth
out the wrinkles. In this same way the two sets of
genealogies have an explanation J for their place in
the records. To begin with antecedent improbability
and to argue from it against any well-authenticated
fact in such a unique Life is unscientific, as the impar
tial Huxley has pointed out once for all; and it must
be confessed that antecedent improbability is the main
motive and support of those who argue against the
fact.2 It is both loyalty to Church and loyalty to
1 See Sanday's interesting explanation, article, " Jesus Christ,"
Hastings's Dictionary, vol. ii. p. 645. Ramsay's "Was Christ Born
at Bethlehem?" is perhaps the most important contribution to the
whole subject.
2 See, for example, Professor Schmiedel's article on "Mary," in
the Encyclopedia Biblica. This is a sweeping denial of the whole
incident, but the candid reader is conscious at every turn that history,
Biblical criticism, philosophy, and theology are mercilessly bent to
fit the author's hypothesis. One feels how easily the constructive
critic could use the very same materials, by the very same method,
in defence of the tradition. For example, the heathen tradition that
Virgin Birth is the means of divine contact with humanity might be
interpreted as a necessary idea, relentlessly besieging the human
mind till the necessity was fulfilled in the Incarnation. I have not
spoken of the recently discovered Sinaitic Syriac text which makes

48 SECONDARY SOURCES
reason which makes a man say, without twisting of
words or reservation of thought, "He was born of a
Virgin." On the other hand, it is possible that those who
accept the fact of the Virgin Birth have erred in
giving it a place beyond its divine meaning, and by
making it alone carry the great doctrine of the Incar
nation have aggravated the doubt of those who are
troubled with the accounts as history. In other words,
it may be that the fact has suffered as much from
those who believe it as from those who discredit it.
For it is becoming plain from recent investigation
that the Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Church did not
build their faith in Christ's Divinity upon this detail
of the Incarnation.1 I do not mean that they ignored
it; they simply did not emphasise it, and the greatest
of theologians, St. Paul, did not refer to it,2 though
no one believed more thoroughly in the Divinity of
St. Matt. i. 16 to read: "Joseph, to whom was betrothed Mary the
Virgin, begat Jesus." Even Dr. Schmiedel admits that such a read
ing might come from an Ebionite hand (p. 2963); and one smiles as
one thinks how quickly Dr. Schmiedel would put the reading beneath
his foot if it interfered with his hypothesis. The " Dialogue of Timoth
and Aquila," quoted by Dr. Schmiedel (p. 2961), — from Anecd.
Oxon. Class, ser. 8, 1898, p. 76, — shows clearly that the reading
"Joseph begat Jesus" was not uncommon. But when there was,
as all historians know, an Ebionite party in the church holding such
a "theory," it is not at all difficult to explain how the texts came to
be tampered with. For the use of critical material in defence of the
canonical text see Principal W. F. Adeney's "Virgin Birth and the
Divinity of Christ" (Essays for the Times, No. 11), pp. 22-27.
1 Vide e.g., Justin Martyr, Dialogue, Ixxx.
2 He may perhaps be said to allude to it in such passages as 1 Cor.
xv. 47.

THE CHURCH AS INTERPRETER

49

our Lord. The kernel of the Apostles' Creed, —
known as the Roman Symbol, — when we catch a
glimpse of it in Irenaeas 1 and Tertullian,2 states its
belief "in Christ Jesus his Son, who was born of
Mary the Virgin." The reason for the insertion of
Mary's name was not because she was a Virgin, scholars
agree,3 but because she was a woman: the Creed was
formulated to meet the heresy of those who believed
that our Lord was divine, but was not human. For
the Creed goes on after the word Virgin: was "crucified
under Pontius Pilate and buried." In so very brief a
Creed, to add the word "buried" seems a superfluity,
until you remember that the Saviour's subjection to
human conditions was being denied. This creed,
then, did imply the Virgin Birth, but the accent was
on the humanity, the commonness of it, rather than
on the divinity, the uniqueness. Moreover, when
later the divinity, in the Nicene sense, came in ques
tion, the Apostles' Creed added only "of the Holy
Spirit" after "Christ Jesus"; and the Nicene Symbol,
set forth preeminently to meet any diminution of
our Saviour's divine dignity, contained one clear and
delicate phrase after another asserting this divinity,
but, in its original form, did not even name the Virgin
Mother, and, in its later forms, did not emphasise
further the importance of the Virgin Birth than by
its briefest assertion.
The historic witness to the fact is, in an impartial
effort to grasp the truth, sufficient. Passing over our
1 "Adv. Haer." iii. 4: 2; iii. 16: 5, etc
2"De Virginibus Velandis," 1, etc.
3 Vide McGiffert's "Apostles' Creed," p. 7; pp. 91 ff.

5°

SECONDARY SOURCES

allegiance to the Creeds and weighing all the argu
ments on their own merits, I feel sure that it is more
"scientific" to accept the fact than to reject it; for
the witness of documents like St. Matthew and St.
Luke1 and the Roman Symbol (with the attestation
of the "reliable Irenaeus") is not easily explained
away.2 But the excited outbursts of some, that if you
reject this mode of Incarnation you reject our Lord's
full divinity, is little short of wild. I shall, on a later
page,3 speak of the high significance of this unique
Birth; but even if one could conceive that a document
1 Professor B. W. Bacon, an unfriendly critic, says distinctly:
"No success whatever has attended the many efforts to eliminate the
supernatural birth from the canonical Matthew and Luke as belong
ing to the canonical authors." (Am. Jour. Theol., Jan. 1906, p. 8.)
Professor C. A. Briggs is equally pronounced in this conviction.
(N. A. Review, June, 1906, p. 863.)
2 The testimony of Ignatius at the beginning of the second century
is important because he speaks of the Virgin Birth when attacking
the docetism of his time. "He was," says Ignatius (" Ad. Smyr." I. i.),
"truly born of a virgin, was baptized by John, . . . was truly . . .
nailed [to the cross] for us in His flesh." It will be seen that the
whole emphasis is here on the reality of Christ's humanity; so that
had not the Virgin Birth been an undisputed fact, universally re
ceived, Ignatius would not thus casually have mentioned it. Since
Ignatius, in the spirit of his writings, is close to the point of view of
the Pauline Epistles and the Fourth Gospel, and rather removed
from the Synoptic point of view, his testimony is the more
important. Of course, the fact that the early form of the Apostles' Creed,
known as the Roman Symbol, was set forth to meet docetism gives
an added emphasis to the mention of the Virgin Birth. It was a.
fact which, of itself, could be employed by docetists; and therefore
its acceptance was assured, else no creed set forth for an anti-docetic
purpose would have contained it.
3 Chapter XVII, Section III.

THE CHURCH AS INTERPRETER 51
written by St. John might be found to-morrow which
would disprove the Virgin Birth in toto, yet the faith
of staunch believers in Christ's Divinity would still be
untouched. It is wholly improbable, but it can at
least be imagined as possible, that St. John might
have written down words from the lips of our Lord's
Mother, denying the report as we have it in St.
Luke. Improbable, I say, because St. John would
surely have had opportunity to deny such reports
in his Gospel had he wished so to do 1 : the very
imagining it makes one feel the strength of the his
tory. We may even go so far as to say that it
is historically impossible. But even if it could be
imagined that we might some day hear the startling
news, the Church could recall that, though the fact
had formerly been accepted as historic, the Divinity,
the Character, of Christ had not, in the great authori
tative documents, been built upon it. St. Paul —
the best mind of the Church — and St. John — the
truest heart of the Church — did not build on
1 Even adverse critics admit that the account was current in the
last three decades of the first century. Bacon says that it came from
one of two sources : the Virgin herself, or from a Pauline develop
ment (Am. Jour. Theol., 1906, p. g)e So St. John (or the
author of the Fourth Gospel) must have known it. Ramsay
("Was Christ Born in Bethlehem?") ingeniously works out the
problem, from whom St. Luke received the account. He is sure
that St. Luke implies that he received it from the Virgin (p. 74).
This may have been by oral communication, about 57 or 58 a.d.,
or by talking with some one who had been very intimate with her,
— if so, this "some one" was a. woman: "There is a womanly
spirit in the whole narrative" (p. 88). Ramsay gives excellent
reasons why the Virgin would have been unlikely to make the fact
public earher (p. 76).

5 2 SECONDARY SOURCES
it.1 The Creeds use it as historic, but as an his
toric incident — it is the antiphony to which the
response is, "and was made man." The Church
is stable, abiding by facts, not theories; but even
among facts the Church discriminates. Heresy con
sists in being too orthodox on one detail of the faith,
to the exclusion of other details. To fall into a panic,
to rush to exaggeration, because some men, bearing
the high name of scholars, dare to question this fact,
is, first, unsound churchmanship, and is, afterward,
the best way to perpetuate a warped historical judg
ment in those whom one would convince of the fidelity
of the Gospel narrative.
I am aware that this will seem to be a mere quibble.
If, it may be urged, you deem the historic fact of the
Virgin Birth of Christ established, why do you not
allow men to put any emphasis they please upon it.
There are two excellent reasons. First, theology is
a most delicate historical science. He who is un
willing to distinguish and measure and weigh, with
scrupulous care, has no right to meddle with it. To
over-emphasise an article of belief, because some men
minimise or seek to omit it, is dangerous for men's
acceptance of truth, whether you call it orthodoxy or
fact. Therefore the second reason for exact distinc
tions in the emphasis you shall give to certain facts
is that very many of the doubts and denials of history
may be traced to the wrong emphasis which conven
tional, but unthoughtful, Christians have placed upon
details — all of which are true as facts. The keen
1 This does not mean that they do not allude to it. They never
distinctly refer to it, however.

THE CHURCH AS INTERPRETER 53
outsider feels that something is wrong, exaggerated,
out of place: he may have neither will nor ability to
investigate; so over goes the whole fact, — rejected
because overloaded with meaning.
The Church, by indwelling Light, has borne ample
witness to the Scriptures and the Creed; and the vital
facts of Christ's Life must, to the judicial mind, seem
assured beyond all peradventure. The authority of
the Church, — hard to define, but real, — has added
to the material from which we know the fulness of
our Saviour's Life and Character.

CHAPTER IV
The Present Witness
THE evidence of Christ's character in the records
of the past is abundant, but we know Him also
through present witnesses.
I. The Inheritance of Imitation
I have already referred to the startling links binding
the people who lived in a.d. 200 with the Person of
Christ. Irenaeus was wont to tell how vividly he
remembered the words of Polycarp, as he described
what the Apostle John had told him of Jesus. In the
same way, beginning with Irenaeus, one might select
a comparatively short list of names which would com
plete the chain of witnesses down to our own day.
But all this is outward testimony; and, though im
portant, is not the most important testimony which
this living succession may provide. St. John, for
example, from close companionship with the Lord,
had incorporated into his character characteristics of
Christ. Polycarp, knowing St. John, and finding
Christ in him, caught up the Christ-nature which he
found there, and made it his own. Irenaeus in the
same way found traits which he recognised as Christ's
in his master Polycarp, and straightway built them
54

THE INHERITANCE OF IMITATION 55
into his life. So all down the ages, men have been
receiving from their elders and betters the character of
Christ, preserved in the hearts and lives of His fol
lowers, by a living chain of inheritance. This is the
truest form of Apostolic Succession ; for, though subtle
and difficult to explain, it does make Christ very real
to the men of our generation.1
In a practical way, we are always saying of this
trait and that, as we observe it in a man or a woman,
"That is Christ-like." It is of course possible that
from study of the brief Gospel records one has ab
sorbed the beautiful characteristic; but it is more
usual that one has seen another Christian man or
woman do an act which inspires one, and forces, by a
divine compulsion, unconscious imitation. The an
cient record may confirm the unconscious imitation
and make it a habit. It rarely starts it.
We see the distinction the moment we try to im
agine an unscrupulous merchant who should give a
heathen Chinaman a New Testament. The China
man would be repelled by the giver's character so far
that he would not be impressed by the splendour of
the Life recorded in the book. The Christian Church
takes care to send to un-Christian countries not, first
1 Cf. Dr. A. V. G. Allen's "Christian Institutions," p. 4: "It is a
characteristic of the present age that it finds its surest apology for
the Christian faith, not only in the appeal which that faith still makes
to the soul, but also in the fact that God has never left Himself with
out a witness in the past, that there has been an unbroken succession
of the sons of God in every generation, who have borne witness to
the power of His Word, handing on to those who follow the torch of
light and truth amid the surrounding darkness, until humanity should
step forth into the fuller day."

56 THE PRESENT WITNESS
of all, books, but people — people who have Christ in
them. Then, when the poor sufferer has found out
the skill and care of the Christian physician, or the
sympathy of the Christian clergyman, or the love and
tenderness of the Christian woman — then he begins
to know Christ, and he is glad to read a book which
will describe the history of the Man whose character
has given to these three so-called Christian people
common characteristics as they hover over his pain
and sorrow, and, like angels of mercy, seek to bring
him health and peace.
So, important as outward testimony must always
be for the reasoning soul, the inward, silent testimony
of Christ-like men and women, inheriting Christ
through all the centuries, must be an even greater
bulwark toward a full knowledge of Him. For the
character so displayed gets hold of the heart, and
brings the whole nature of a man to the feet of Christ.
And one more seeks to live as Christ lived, and to copy
the trait so wonderfully preserved in the flesh and
blood of an endless Christianity.
It was, I think, the late Dean Farrar who once
pointed out that this sort of knowledge of Christ is
like the numerous copies of Da Vinci's Last Supper.
Just as the historic Christ is far away and grown dim
and unreal to many men, so the original painting of
the Last Supper on the monastery walls is dim, almost
invisible. But the picture was recognised as great
at once, and men began to copy it. Copies were
scattered over Europe; then copies of these copies
were made. Meantime the original picture faded;
and the fading has continued, till now men can barely

THE IMMEDIATE CHRIST TO-DAY 57
see it. Yet the picture is not gone. Men wishing to
know what Da Vinci did, go from gallery to gallery in
Europe and gaze at copy after copy. No one copy
tells all; but from studying many copies, one gets an
almost complete idea of the original picture. One
painter has caught one virtue of the picture; another,
another; and so on, down the various efforts to re
produce it, — till their sum brings you wonderfully
close to Da Vinci. Thus — we dare to believe — as
we know the living copies of Christ to-day, we see
"broken lights" of Him — one showing an intuition
of sympathy; another, a deft kindness; another, a
magnetic attraction — all fragments — but when
added together they make us almost see Christ. He
is to us no far-off historical person merely; He is right
at hand: He is in the humanity which we know and
love II. The Immediate Christ To-day
I come now to the most vital of all considerations,
Does Christ make Himself known directly to men
to-day? And then there is something further: if
He does make men conscious of Himself as a present
reality, can those men who have the wonderful ex
perience transmute it into valid evidence for men who
have not had anything to correspond with it? The
questions rouse the suspicion of mysticism and make
the practical man feel that there is danger that one
will say what one imagines or only wishes to be so.
Great care is needed to be as simple and honest as
possible. What we know of God in general would, in the first

58 THE PRESENT WITNESS
place, lead us to expect that Christ — God manifest in
the world — should speak directly to the individual
life. We believe, for example, that God made this
world because He wished a larger field for His love.
We know, by our Lord's words, that God wishes us
to be not His servants, but His friends: that implies
that He wishes us to love Him. But St. John tells us
that the only reason we can love God is because God
has first loved us, — not men in the mass, but indi
viduals; for does not the Gospel assure us that not a
sparrow falls to the ground but God cares? Therefore
it cannot be rash to say that God loves the individual
life. The question now arises, how God expresses His
love for the individual. The mechanical Christian
is apt to say that God has sufficiently revealed His
love for the individual by giving him certain outward
tokens. He has given him, for instance, the docu
ment which contains the revelation of our Saviour's
Love; He has given him Church history, which re
cords God's guidance of the race; He has given him
also the pledge of His constant Love in the Christian
Sacraments. That these outward expressions of God's
Love are precious beyond telling we all gladly confess.
The vigorous contention must be that, in so far as
they remain outward symbols only, they do not tell
the whole story.
No child, for example, would say that because his
father fed him and clothed him, therefore his father
loved him. The child takes these outward manifesta
tions of a father's love for granted. Were he asked
why his father loved him, he might instinctively

THE IMMEDIATE CHRIST TO-DAY 59.
recall the sweetness of his father's smile, the tender
ness of his touch, the gentleness of his voice; but he
would probably say that he could not tell why he
believed that his father loved him. He would be sure,
however, that his father did love him. There would
be the feeling of an indescribable something binding
his life to his father's — something so delicate, so
invisible, so intangible, that their lives touched, were
fused, were one life.
Nor need we rely only on the testimony of childhood.
The philosopher says frankly, "There is a region in
life which I cannot describe." Herbert Spencer, one
remembers, calls it the region of the Unknowable; the
sound philosopher of to-day calls it the region of the
appreciable. No one can tell what death is; but if
you have lost your beloved, then you know death.
No one can tell what love is; but when a great-souled
friend comes and pours his life into your life, then you
know love. Love can send out its symbols into space;
but, at the last, love, to be love, must make itself felt.
It must touch the life which it loves; it must enter into
the soul of its beloved and be lost there. Love craves
complete expression.
See, then, to what this brings us. Since God loves
the world, as He certainly does love it, how can we
think of His being content to love it with outward
symbols only? Will He at least not compete with
His human children in trying to pour into their lives
all His life? Will He who was incarnate in Jesus
nineteen centuries ago not be manifest in this same
Jesus to-day? Will not this same Jesus — however
mystically, yet really — appear to men in our age so

60 THE PRESENT WITNESS
that a man here and there shall rise up to say, " I have
seen the love of Christ face to face, and I know by
individual, personal experience that God loves me.
I know the Christ."
But, however logical this may all be, it is still theo
retical. We must find men in our own day who by
definite acts give us reason to believe that they have
really known the present, living Christ. Fortunately
the news of the hour gives us a conspicuous and
convincing example. A college professor, reared from
babyhood in Unitarianism, has recently, to use his
own words, been led to accept Christ. Lest I read
too much into his words, let the words themselves be
quoted: —
"The call of Christ I conceive to be that time in a
man's life when an impulse comes to surrender every
thing for Christ. We all come to a place in our lives
when we feel that there is something lacking in our
life, and Christ speaks to us in that still, small voice,
and if we accept Him, He brings us into the new
life. That is what is meant by hearing the call and
giving ourselves to Christ.
"Personally, I had no expectation that the call of
Christ would come to me. I think most of you here
who know me personally will agree with me that I
was not the man you would have expected to confess
Christ here in this meeting-house. If you will pardon
these personal references, I will give a few reasons
why. I am of New England birth, and a New Eng-
lander is not apt to be carried away by anything
emotional. I am a man of books, of an intellectual
life, associated constantly with students, and such

THE IMMEDIATE CHRIST TO-DAY 6 1
men do not take such steps under enthusiasm. Most
of you are aware of the fact that I was a Unitarian,
and that they are known as a sect which lays more
stress on reason and intellect than on the heart. Who
would have thought that I would have been led to
accept Christ in a revival meeting in a Methodist
church? "By my personal experience I can say that the
way to the cross is through prayer. The first sermon
preached here by Dr. Dawson was one on prayer,
and it was almost by accident that I happened to go.
I only thought of hearing an excellent preacher. I
did not find much I had not thought of before; but I
said, What he says is sensible, and I will try it; and
as I walked down from church that day I prayed that
God would give me the best He had for me. Monday
came, and I gave myself to the ordinary duties of
the week. I did not go to hear Dr. Dawson at once
again. It was not until Thursday night that I came
to this meeting-house; but during that time I continued
this express prayer, and I must admit with a little
more interest than usual. I went to hear Dr. Dawson
again on Friday, Sunday, and Monday, and during
this time I became conscious of a curious change
which was going on in myself, which I did not, and
cannot now, explain. Many things which had been
much to me — indeed, all — had ceased to interest
me. Interest in life began to have a curious dulness
in regard to some things ; I do not mean in the carrying
on of my regular college duties, but in art, literature,
nature, etc. I began to have a greater love for
humanity in general.

62 THE PRESENT WITNESS
"On Thursday night he preached on the Delusions
of this Life; on Friday night he preached on the
Visit of Nicodemus to Jesus by Night; on Sunday
night he preached on the text of the burning bush
and how it was not consumed by the fire; on Monday
night he preached on the Greeks who came saying,
'We would see Jesus,' and he said that they found
not a poet, not a philosopher, not a leader of the
people, but One whose life had been a constant sacri
fice for the salvation of the world. Then it was on
invitation of my friend, Dr. Adams — whom I shall
never forget in that respect — I made the decision to
follow Christ. I said : ' I am a sinner. I am resolved
to surrender and take up the spiritual ministry of
Christ.' The call of the cross is not merely a call to
forgiveness, but a call to love and work for Christ,
He has said: 'Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one
of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it
unto me.'
" I think there is still something for those who come
at the eleventh hour. If we have the spirit and love
of Christ, we will serve Him in every word and act
of our lives." 1
See the full force of this testimony. It is from a
man who has been taught from his boyhood to be
strictly true to facts. Religion has been largely moral
precepts: Christ has been followed as a Great Teacher
who died nineteen centuries ago, and is still dead.
All that a noble father, high character, diligent study
could do to make this outward impersonal system
1 Edward Everett Hale, Jr., Professor of Rhetoric at Union Col
lege, Schenectady.

THE IMMEDIATE CHRIST TO-DAY 63
satisfactory was given. This man of ideals and intel
lect never expected to hear the voice of the living
Christ: yet one day a few weeks ago he heard Him
speak "in that still small voice" of authority. He
heard Him so unmistakably that he turned his whole
life upside down to obey. No one can read the words
of this sincere man, whose business is to weigh words,
without being sure that Christ displays His character
to the men of this generation.
Why have we a right to put confidence in such an
experience? Professor James, in his truly great book
on The Varieties - of Religious Experience, masses a
large number of individual experiences; but, after the
first interest fades, I think one feels a disappointment.
We begin to question the frame of mind, the health,
the normal powers of many of these persons who
testify to vivid experiences with the Divine. We
think that one witness speaks as if he were a fanatic;
another, as if beset with a morbid imagination;
another (someone suggests it) as if he had been an
eater of opium. This recent evidence of which I have
just spoken is clear of all this imputation : it is from
a man singularly normal, practical, rational.
But even then we must seek a universal element in
such an experience. We must find that sane men all
down the ages have had such experiences. Now
there is just one valid way to find out what Christian
experience has been in its historic continuity, and that
is in what we call Christian theology. St. Paul was
sure that he had seen the risen, ascended Christ, and
had heard His voice. His whole life is a consequence
of that wonderful meeting on the Damascus road;

64 THE PRESENT WITNESS
and nothing else can explain his phenomenal career.
St. Augustine wrote: "What is this which flashes in
upon me, and thrills my heart without wounding it?
I tremble and I exult. I tremble, feeling that I am
unlike Him; I exult, feeling that I am like Him."
He has known Christ alive. Or we may think of
Eckhart in the Middle Ages, the greatest of the mys
tics; or, toward our own time, Jeremy Taylor, who
was always speaking of "the practice of the presence
of God." I mention these men as types of the great
procession of theologians. These were all men who
felt intensely, but they were not satisfied with their
individual experience, as it stood isolated in their
lives. Rather they took their experience and placed
it beside that of the rest of the Christian race; then
bringing this experience and theirs together they
ruthlessly cut off everything that was exceptional or
unreal or exaggerated, and so built up what we may
call a norm of Christian experience; so that if a man
feels that his experience is in accordance with this
norm, he may say, " I have scientific demonstration
that my experience is real."
Lest one feel that this puts too much weight upon
the Christian consciousness of recognised theologians,
one would wisely recall the present method of the best
philosophical students. Every philosopher to-day,
be he pagan or Christian, does the same thing. He
dare not weave out of his individual consciousness a
conviction and at once call it truth. He takes it out
into the cold light and lays it side by side with the
philosophical experience of the centuries, and if he
finds that, in spite of times of forgetfulness, the theory

THE IMMEDIATE CHRIST TO-DAY 65
has been coming up age after age, decade after decade,
then he says, " I have in me that which is no mere
theory, something which is truth — something that
will not down, will not die. It is a necessary idea.
It is truth." In the same way exactly, candid history
tells us that any earnest man may expect to know the
living, present Christ.
Now some one will surely say, "This sounds to me
extravagant; I depend upon the witness to the his
toric Christ, but Christ has never manifested Himself
to me, individually, directly, as a living Person, — so
I cannot believe that anyone has really had such a
sublime experience." The answer which theology
gives — our Lord gave it first — is that you get only
as you make your heart ready; you run to the Father
and the Father is coming out to meet you, — but you
must start. Luther had for years been believing in
the forgiveness of sins upon the authority of the
Church; but he was not finding peace in his own life.
So he asked his old friend and confessor what he should
do, and the advice came that he cast aside all outward
forms, all intermediaries, all attempts at penance, and
approach the Divine Person directly. That night
Luther knelt on the flags of his cold cell and opened
his heart to God alone, and that night a Divine Pres
ence came and gave him such peace as he never had
known before. And the next morning, when he heard
the monks saying the Creed — the Creed which he
had been repeating all his life — it seemed as if he
heard for the first time, " I believe in the forgiveness
of sins." One may begin with the individual expe
rience and verify it by the experience of the race; or

66 THE- PRESENT WITNESS
one may begin with the historic experience of great
Christians of the past, and, after years of waiting and
expecting, come at last to a similar experience face
to face.
I see no escape for him who would avoid the in
evitable conclusion. Christ, living, vivid, real, mani
fests Himself to-day to willing hearts. Men of our
own generation have news to tell of His perfect char
acter. It remains to ask in what way such sacred informa
tion may be imparted.
In the first place, it may be given unconsciously.
About ninety years ago there were born in an Oxford
street, within a few weeks of each other, two children.
In that same street they played together; and the
childish friendship blossomed into love, and they were
married. Thereupon they came to our western
America; and in the hardship and joy of that new life
their love daily grew deeper. In the cottage where
they spent their last days the wife sat quietly as an
invalid, but the husband, in spite of his more than
eighty years, was strong and well. He was always
standing guard over her with his love. Then he died,
and she was left alone — without that love which had
meant everything to her all her life. As we gathered
about her, we wondered how that love of eighty years
could be broken. Suddenly we saw her rise, as by a
miracle, from her invalid's chair, and stand by the
door watching those who were carrying out the body
of her beloved. We would not have looked, but we
could not help it. There were no tears on that sweet,

THE IMMEDIATE CHRIST TO-DAY 67
wrinkled face; there was loneliness; but there was
also a glorious confidence written there : it told of such
serene and certain knowledge that we knew instinc
tively that One more than man had told her that her
beloved was safe; and that the love of years gone was
to be her love forever and ever.
Lest it seem as if we imagined this, we wisely fall
back upon an historical parallel. Saul of Tarsus was
standing one day before a fanatic named Stephen,
who was being stoned for his fanaticism. Saul gazed
at him to see the agonised face of a dying fanatic; he
saw, instead, a face as it had been the face of an
angel, — no trace of pain or sorrow, only joy, because
he saw through some invisible medium the face of
One he loved utterly. That dying face haunted Saul
of Tarsus, till at length, on the way to Damascus,
Saul saw Stephen's Friend, and became, through that
beginning, the greatest of Christian disciples. Stephen
intended no testimony; he gave it unconsciously.
Once more, Christian experience may be trans
formed into valid evidence in those intimate moments
when life touches life, when friend touches friend.
" Only — but this is rare —
When a beloved hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another's eyes read clear,
When our world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a lov'd voice caress'd,
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.

68 THE PRESENT WITNESS
The eye sinks inward and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean we say, and what we would we
know,
A man becomes aware of his life's flow,
And hears its winding murmur, and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
" And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth forever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, Rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then ... he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes."1
That is heart speaking to heart; that is deep calling
unto deep; that is friend so near to friend that they
two look upon the experience which is the possession
of one alone, and they take out of it what neither
before had fully dared to believe. It is at such a
time that a man may tell of that holy moment when
he trusts that he knew the living, personal Christ,
— as friend knows friend.
Once Phillips Brooks revealed in a letter what, so
far as his biographer knows, is unique in his friendly
intercourse — a confession of his inmost secrets. "All
experience," Phillips Brooks wrote to his friend,
"comes to be but more and more of pressure of Christ's
life on ours. ... I cannot tell you how personal this
grows to me. He is here. He knows me and I know
1 Matthew Arnold's "Buried Life."

THE IMMEDIATE CHRIST TO-DAY 69
Him. It is no figure of speech. It is the realest
thing in the world." 1 The whole letter but enforces
this conviction. "I have written fully," he says
toward the end, "and will not even read over what I
have written, lest I should be led to repent that I have
written so much about myself. I am not in the habit
of doing so. But your letter moves me, and you will
understand." So far as one knows, it is, outside his
sermons, Brooks's strongest testimony to his direct
and vital Christian experience. Why? He wrote at
a moment when he felt singularly near to his younger
friend: it is all in the sentence, " Your letter moves me,
and you will understand."
One will now naturally ask whether this testimony
must be reserved for such intimate and mystical
moments. Is there no time when one may tell this
experience — : since it is so precious — in public ?
Not in the experience meeting, as it is called, — for,
ordinarily, words spoken there have a professional
sound and do not ring true. There is just one time,
and that is when the Christian preacher goes up into
his pulpit and faces the people: then he alone, of all
people, may tell in public what God has done for his
soul. I have already spoken of Phillips Brooks. His
friends have testified that however intimate the mo
ment he insistently avoided revealing to them, in
private, his inner life by words. His general life, his
spiritual power, convinced them that he had a peculiar
sense of nearness to Christ; they wished to hear him
say so. They might be sitting over the night lamp,
talking of most personal matters, and the friend would
1 Dr. Allen's " Phillips Brooks," vol. ii. p. 871.

70 THE PRESENT WITNESS
say to himself, "In an instant, I shall see his inmost
heart"; and then the door of that heart was closed,
and the friend saw no more. But when this same
Phillips Brooks stood in his pulpit at Trinity Church,
and looked down upon the sea of faces, he told every
secret he had. To be sure, the language was the
conventional language of general statement; but the
man who sat in the last pew, straining forward to
catch every syllable, could but cry to himself, "Ah,
he is telling what Christ does for humanity, but really
— really he is telling what Christ is doing for Phillips
Brooks." Since, by prayer, by personal effort to
approach Him, any minister may come to know that
Christ lives, it is that man's glory — glory greater
than that of poet or of painter — to take that assur
ance, that treasure, so private and personal, and to
give it to men who need it and long for it ; so that they
too may be convinced that there is not merely an
historical Jesus of Nazareth who lived once in Pales
tine, but that there is a living Christ, who is the Christ
of Galilee, ready and eager to meet all who will come
to Him, — in Sacrament, in Service, in private prayer,
in the busy street.
For our purpose now it is sufficient to remember
that there is material in our own day which must be
reckoned with if we wish to know the character of
Christ.

CHAPTER V
The Fusion of the Material
THIS rapid survey of large subjects will give one
an impression of the various lines of testimony
which converge upon the Life and Character of Christ.
In our day, when people are prone rather to ask hard
questions than to seek their answers, it is important
to notice how difficult is any escape from a definite
historical conception of Christ. Our generation is
also given — perhaps over much — to specialisation.
To get, now and then, large views, even if many
details must be passed over for the time being, is
essential for a sane judgment. Difficulties with minor
matters are then no longer allowed to blot out the
majestic picture of Christ's Reality, Influence, and
Power. The study of Christ's Personality in this book will
therefore be based upon the New Testament sources;
not only because they are primitive but because they
best fuse all the information we have of Christ.
From all points of view these ancient records receive
confirmation: first, in themselves, as bearing internal
evidence of trustworthy documents written under a
high sense of responsibility for exact truth; then, by
reason of their acceptance by a life-producing and
71

72 THE FUSION OF THE MATERIAL
life-conserving institution, the Christian Church; and,
finally, by the satisfaction which they give to those
who seem to candid men to be most intimately asso
ciated with the living, present Christ. That the Gos
pels, — to use Coleridge's happy phrase about the
Bible, — "find one" who is evidently living in Christ,
is mighty testimony to the fidelity of their delineation.
The academic person, keen-minded as he may be, is
apt to be only partially furnished, because he lacks
keen-heartedness, niceness of feeling, a sense of quick
intuition. There was a subtle truth hidden in the
familiar saying of one who was possibly the most pro
found theologian of the last century,1 that when he
visited a certain washerwoman, as she stood over her
suds, her radiant, intuitive faith made him feel that
his laboured intellectual methods were inferior. As
Pascal finely said, "The heart has its reasons which
the reason cannot know."2 The man who dissects and
deals with the particular fragment is very apt to
forget the strength of the whole. The Gospels will
stand on critical ground; but they stand preeminently
on the ground of the frank appreciation of those who
feel the truth.
Because a man, after daring to look all facts in the
face, comes back strongly to take a conservative posi
tion, the world sometimes judges him careless of
scholarship. There is a bracing air of adventure in
the man who tears away old confidences and declares
for a new theory. The world of scholars must contain
men of many minds, each fighting for his acquisition.
' Frederick Dennison Maurice.
2 Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas.

THE FUSION OF THE MATERIAL

73

But the scholar, to deserve the name, must be intent
first upon the exact truth. If he sees the truth to be
old-fashioned, if he is forced by his judgment to be
conservative, it is treason to scholarship — to say
no more — if he beats about for a compromise with
this or that radical view. If the radical interpreta
tion is wrong, it is wrong. Half-way to a mistake
never yet, of itself, brought a man to the truth.
Therefore, though the following pages will be built
upon the Four Gospels as we know them to-day, they
will be so not because of any merely outward authority,
but because of the authority which all branches of
thought about Christ give to them. If all that we
know about Christ were to be condensed into the
clearest and fairest form, what could we fix upon but
the words of the Four Evangelists?
The experience of Christian institutions and of Chris
tian individuals will now and again cast illuminating
colour upon certain words and events there recorded;
but the Four Gospels are the essential groundwork
for any scientific attempt to know Christ as He was,
is, and shall be for ever.
How sure we may be of a record of Christ is shown
by the misplaced account of the woman taken in great
sin, which interrupts the narrative in the eighth chap
ter of St. John. It does not belong to St. John's
Gospel. Most ancient manuscripts omit it. Those
which have it vary much from one another in the text.
Once it was attached to St. Luke's Gospel. Some
scholars conjecture that it was written by a Johannine
scholar in the first century. But whatever theory
may be invented to explain it, all scholars decide it

74 THE FUSION OF THE MATERIAL
to be a genuine bit of Christ's biography. Of course
they have certain testimony based on manuscripts
and other external evidence, but the real conviction
comes from the sense that the event is entirely charac
teristic of Christ, and further the event is told in such
a direct, plain way that the record convinces the
reader of its fidelity to truth. It is a fragment alto
gether anonymous, but it is valid, unimpeachable
history. Have we not, therefore, full right to say that we may
turn with confidence to the Four Gospels for clear
information about our Saviour? From them we may
build up a safe description of His true character.

Part §>*C0n&
THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

INTRODUCTORY
The Method of Description
IT may help to guard against misunderstandings, if
a word is recorded here upon the general plan of
this delineation of our Saviour's character. Only
partially may the account follow any chronological
sequence, since the manifestation or development of
certain traits cannot be definitely marked in time.
The aim is not to present a succession of scenes in
Christ's Life, but simply to sketch His character.
Sometimes scenes widely separated in time and place
proclaim the same attribute of His personality. Often
a word from a Parable will throw upon His attitude
toward life a light which no outward act has enshrined
— at least so far as His acts are recorded. The book
is to be in no sense a biography.
Any use of the imagination will, it is hoped, have
been carefully employed. Wherever deductions are
made which are not absolutely inevitable from the
historic records, the principle will be frankly set down
as conjecture — albeit reverent and well-considered.
To avoid timidity, on the one hand, and an unsavoury
rashness, on the other, may bring us to see traits of
our Lord's Life which, if not certainly proved to the
77

78 THE METHOD OF DESCRIPTION
mind, may appeal to the heart, and at that high
tribunal may find full ratification of their fidelity to
truth. In any case irreverent glibness is far from the
thought of these pages, and it is hoped that nowhere
will they convey the merest suspicion of it, even to
the most unsympathetic of readers.
To those who look for constant repetition of dog
matic utterances in conventional form this description
of Christ's character will possibly be disappointing.
Such phraseology will be lacking, not from any dis
respect to the historical and ecclesiastical estimates
of Christ's Personality, but merely from the necessary
purpose of the book itself. Michelangelo was the
more wonderful sculptor because he knew anatomy,
and incorporated what he knew of it in his immortal
art; but he did not carve skeletons. Anyone who,
however humbly, attempts to portray life, must
gladly sit at the feet of those who dissect and define;
but once having learned his lesson, he will have the
"skeleton" hid in his portrayal where those who
know may perceive it; he will not be always vulgarly
rattling it.
It may seem now and again that the character of
Christ is too simply told, as if we should pause to say,
— "Behold His divine nature!" I am sure that the
nature of God whom He came to reveal will be more
exactly manifest if we try to see Him somewhat as the
people of Nazareth and Capernaum saw Him. We
must try to see Him with straight and unembarrassed
gaze. His divine dignity will not suffer if we see Him
as He was — and is.
Meantime, that there be no waiting till the end, let

THE METHOD OF DESCRIPTION 79
it be distinctly understood on the threshold that the
Christ of these chapters is altogether human — human
quite as we are human — and also, at the very same
time, is divine — divine as the Father in heaven is
divine. If language halts in the relation of this august
mystery, there is cause neither for surprise nor for
condemnation.

CHAPTER I
His Obedience
HISTORICALLY the first traits in Christ's char
acter are the traits manifested in the incident
in the Temple at Jerusalem when He was twelve years
old. After the apparently unconscious days of His
babyhood, the silence of thirty years is broken by this
one incident alone. Brief as is its record,1 it is the
only means we have of judging exactly the character
of the growing Jesus; and since "the child is father of
the man," its interpretation is highly significant.
Old, dignified scholars looked, no doubt, with pleased
wonder into the bright young face before them that
spring morning in the Temple. Perhaps they after
ward questioned with one another whether the new
generation were to be of so fine a quality. And we
may rightly believe that it was deeply satisfying to
the Boy Jesus to explain the strivings of His soul
to those who approximately understood, and then to
ask these learned men of long experience certain hard
questions. Such conversation, such asking and an
swering of questions, is always above any exchange
of information. The stimulus of it lies in the con
sciousness of being understood and of understanding,
1 St. Luke ii. 42-51.
80

HIS OBEDIENCE 8 1
— in the consciousness of a golden thread of sympathy
which binds the secret aspirations of different souls
together. There is no need, then, at this point, to
ask whether the Incarnation implied a limited, human
knowledge, or even whether at this time our Lord
was fully conscious of His own personality. We need
only recognise the response which the conversation
in the Temple roused in both Jesus and the doctors.
Upon this scene came suddenly the beautiful Mother,
— hurried, anxious because she had been so very
fearful that harm had befallen her Son ; relieved, over
whelmingly glad, because she had found Him safe.
She could not refrain from a rebuke: "Dear Son," she
cried, "why have you treated us so! We have been
looking for you — and our hearts have been heavy."
The answer is exceedingly simple: "Why did you look
for me?" he said. "Did you not know that I had
work to do — my Father's work?"
What did the mother think? There was no lack of
respect in the frank reply of the Boy. Only there
was a tone in it which was altogether beyond her
comprehension : so she locked the words in her heart —
and waited. But the divine intuition of motherhood
came to her aid ; and to this Son — evidently far, far
beyond her in intelligence and in vision — she gave
the command that He return with her and Joseph to
Nazareth. And He immediately obeyed. He had
tasted the joys of larger intellectual environment; He
knew what it was to return to the narrow life at
Nazareth. Nevertheless He obeyed the constituted
authority of His life.
No scene could better sum up the obedience of

82 HIS OBEDIENCE
Christ's whole career. He obeyed God, and, at the
same moment, evidently with no admission of contra
diction, He obeyed the human governors about His
path. Obedience was so far a leading mark of His
nature that when the Baptist introduced Him to the
world, he proclaimed Him as "the Lamb of God" 1 —
a title which, among other distinctions, must denote
a complete obedience. How evenly and exactly
Christ held the poise of obedience to God directly,
and of obedience to human instruments of the divine
order, is shown by His dictum, "Render to Caesar the
things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that
are God's."2 When He had healed the lepers, He re
quired them to show themselves to the Priests (as
the laws of health required).3 He who worshipped
the Father in secret, in spirit, and in truth, never
neglected the national ordinances of public worship:
on days of prayer He was at the village synagogue;
on great feast-days He was in the Temple at Jerusalem.
Everywhere, always, He obeyed both God and man.
But the climax of His perfect obedience, after the
night when He said, "Not my will, but thine, be
done," i came in the Cross: there He obeyed God by
demonstrating how deep is God's love for man — even
to death ; and there He obeyed man — however mis
taken, prejudiced, wicked — and so submitted to the
network of human laws woven together for His exe
cution. Obedience shines through the whole charac
ter of Christ: "I do always," He said, "those things
that please Him." 5
1 St. John i. 36. 2 St. Matt. xxii. 21. 3 St. Luke xvii. 14.
4 St. Luke xxii. 42. 5 St. John viii. 29.

OBEDIENCE IN NAZARETH 83
It remains only to see the special aspects of this
obedience, and for this purpose the obedience of the
Boy of twelve will tell a thorough story. St. Luke's
brief account gives us clear intimation of the three
aspects which we need to study: "He went down
with them, and came to Nazareth, and was subject
unto them. [They understood not the saying which
he spake unto them:] but his mother kept all these
sayings in her heart."1 This tells (1) of obedience
in Nazareth ; then (2) of obedience to those who did
not understand Him ; and finally (3) of obedience to
God's command for Him in the atmosphere of a blind
human sympathy. I. Obedience in Nazareth
It is difficult to appreciate fully what Nazareth
stands for. One remembers, of course, Nathanael's
astonishment; "Can any good thing come out of
Nazareth?"2 It was a town too mean to be called
1 St. Luke ii. 50, 51.
2 St. John i. 46. The exegesis which would make rl &ya86v equiv
alent to 6 XpioT-6s is ingenious, but is definitely rejected by the great
exegetes, such as Meyer. The attempt to overturn the traditional
idea of Nazareth has failed. Interesting in this connection is Pro
fessor G. A. Smith's description of the place ("Historical Geography
of the Holy Land," pp. 432-5). He shows how the people and traffic
which passed on the highways near by made Nazareth what we call
in America a sort of "junction," — a place where, as we know to-day,
only the most undesirable elements in life lodge, all the rest passing
by. The wide view of the historical sites seen from "the edge of the
basin," as Dr. Smith points out, is most attractive to the modern
mind. But his eloquent passage, where he imagines our Lord
climbing to this ridge, and living again the history of His people, is

84 HIS OBEDIENCE
even provincial, — the type of all that was clownish,
according to the superiority of city-folk. It was a
poor country town of the northern province. It is
the perpetual symbol of narrowness, barrenness,
crudeness. The boy Jesus had seen the noble Temple at Jeru
salem. He knew for a little what it was to be taught
by recognised masters. He knew what it was to feel
life throbbing about Him in its intensity. Had He
been quite as other boys the whole experience would
have kindled a new fire in His soul: in His sensitive
nature how radiant a glow it must have created.
Nevertheless, He left it all, with no word of vain
regret, and went to the plainest, most circumscribed
of villages, — Nazareth.
Incidentally we may glance at the compensations
of life in Nazareth, especially its simplicity. When,
later, our Lord brought men to His obedience, He
chose simple, plain men, and He trained them in the
most severely simple environment. The site of His
school for them was a desert or a desolate hill-side.
And when He sent them forth to teach others He
bade them go with only the barest necessities. It
seems a paradox that character should grow strong
and rich through humble surroundings; but it is
recognised as true by the best schools in England
improbable. For had Jesus been wont to review history in this way
it is strange that we find no evidence of it in His parables or other
discourses. It is highly probable that He climbed the hill and looked
out over the country, but — if we may learn from His parables — ¦
what interested Him were the farmers sowing the seed down in the
valley, or the women grinding the grain at their poor little mills in
the door-yard.

OBEDIENCE 85
and America to-day1 — where the most fortunate
boys are surrounded by a bareness which is almost
grim. The dreams of a boy must be kept, and they
may best be kept in simplicity. If to a boy dreaming
about the stern battles of life you give every whim
a satisfaction, if you surround him with softness and
ease, then you are letting him bask in the courts of
the sumptuous Temple at Jerusalem — you are for
getting that obedience in Nazareth is the means of
developing power. Moreover, it is inspiration for the
youth whose surroundings are, by poverty, necessarily
meagre, and who therefore feels cramped, to remember
that He who became Greatest was obedient to the
humblest home.
II. Obedience to Those who did not Understand Him
In estimating the meaning of Christ's obedience, we
are obliged to recall that a boy of twelve in Palestine
was more mature than a boy of fifteen in our condi
tions. It marked the time when he learned a trade,
was so far released from parental control that he could
no longer be sold as a slave, and was treated more as a
1 It is to be deplored that this simplicity no longer attaches to our
great universities. It was characteristic of them half a century ago,
as the Hon. Joseph H. Choate recently testified, in speaking of his
own life at Harvard from 1848 to 1852: "I don't know how we did
it, but the simplicity of our lives was, I really think, the making of
us. We went to the college pump for our own water. We hved in
the college commons at a dollar and seventy-five cents a week, —
meat one day and pudding the next, — and flourished very bravely
upon it. There was, with it all, a very serious nurture going on all
the time, a wonderful discipline." (Speech at New York Harvard
Club, December 7, 1905.)

86 HIS OBEDIENCE
man than as a child. Remembering all the circum
stances, especially remembering that Christ was enter
ing regions of living which were palpably beyond the
knowledge of the authorities of the Nazareth home,
we might naturally ask if this were not the time to
assert His independence, and to cut Himself loose from
the petty obedience in the hills of Galilee. It is a
question which can easily be asked in our own day
when one distinct theory of education is that "a child
should choose for himself." So we are seeing parental
authority reduced to a minimum and the self-made
choice of children and youth pushed to a maximum.
There is an insidious notion that the character, by
early, unrestrained self-guidance, will be made strong.
The experiment is bearing bitter fruit, and many a
parent discovers too late for what his lax authority
is responsible. But even here we feel that in only the
very rarest instance is the child more intelligently
aware of life than the parent: even remotely it is the
rarest case which becomes the vaguest suggestion of
the disparity between the opening life of Jesus and
the confessedly narrow horizon of His mother and
Joseph. Why then did He submit? Now and then
people have answered that it was to give us an example.
But all right and careful thought about Christ has
rejected any such unreal pose on His part: He was
real to the last degree. There can be but one valid
' reason. Obedience is so imperative a factor in life
that even He could not pass from faultless Boyhood
to perfect Manhood without its full allegiance. His
whole Life declares that there are people to obey in
this world. There are parents, teachers, employers,

OBEDIENCE TO GOD'S COMMAND 87
governors of every sort. Each has his sphere where
he rightly commands, and obedience in that sphere is
essential. Blinking at it, dodging it, may be ex
tremely clever; it is deadly poison to the character.
For it is cheating character of its great tonic, strict
obedience. He who came announcing a kingdom in
which men must become as little children, first incor
porated in His own Life the childlike trait of willing
obedience to constituted authority. And no con
sciousness of superiority over those to whom He gave
obedience, ever, so far as the records show, allowed
Him to swerve from the childlike simplicity of His
loyalty to authority.
III. Obedience to God's Command for Him in the
Atmosphere of a Blind Human Sympathy
With all this obedience to human authority, the
Boy Jesus, we may be sure, never lost for an instant
His sense of obligation to God. If it is assumption to
say this, it is assumption clearly warranted by all that
we know of Him. And another safe conjecture we
may venture: the mother "who kept all these sayings
in her heart," gave Him all the depth of a mother's
sympathy even when her understanding was baffled.
He gave obedience to God as well as to her, and her
love helped Him to keep that highest form of obe
dience to its invariably high level.
One hears of boys who, having dreamed of a life of
self-sacrifice, have gone to their fathers or mothers to
tell them about the chivalrous deeds which they would
like to do, the unselfish hardship which they are willing
to accept; and they are met with amused mockery.

88 HIS OBEDIENCE
There is the gay suggestion that the lad must have
been reading about Bayard, or Hannington, or Damien;
or must have been talking with some strenuous en
thusiast. Does he not know that such lives belong to
poets and missionaries and other slightly deranged
people; as for him, he must be a practical man of the
world — he must be comfortable and prosperous —
and stop this silly dreaming. . . . Could anything be
sadder? Boys now and again hear God calling them,
for example, to the Christian ministry; and mothers
who are timid, and fathers who are worldly, stifle the
obedience. That a somewhat frivolous mother and
a commercial father should not comprehend the Voice
of God speaking to the tender, unspoiled heart of their
son is not surprising. The atrocity of it is that they
should have no awe for it, no sympathy for their boy
so fortunate, so elected of God for a solemn duty.
Do you ask why a life fails to be heroic in spite of
marked capacity? It is because, in a large number
of cases, there has been no sympathy for God-given
tasks when they first wakened a response in the heart
of a boy.
The tribute which the world owes to Mary, the
mother of Jesus, ought to be full of sweet music. If
we marvel at the eighteen years of silence in the home
at Nazareth, we must also marvel that the mother's
sympathy was able to comfort and inspire, where all
was to her an overpowering mystery. In His active
life, there was a time 1 when " His mother and His
brethren" stood on the edge of the crowd, sending
word to Him begging Him to come out to speak to
1 St. Matt. xii. 46-50; St. Mark iii. 31-35; St. Luke viii. 19-21.

OBEDIENGE TO GOD'S COMMAND 89
them. Whether they had news of the plots against
Him and were frightened for His safety; whether the
brethren, with lack of appreciation from a too close
view, thought Him daft and had worked upon the
pride of the mother, and so all were there to ask Him
to "be careful of their reputation"; whether they had
come to ask some question about their common house
hold affairs — a matter of rent, a matter of purchase,
a matter of domestic economy, — we cannot know.
Presumably, His brothers did not at the time believe
on Him, since they did not believe a little later;1 and
tradition has generally interpreted this appeal of " His
mother and His brethren" as an act of meddlesome
interference. In the confusion made in her own
mind by the fame of Jesus, and by the probable criti
cism of her other sons, the mother may naturally
have been dazed. Our Lord's own protest against
checking His discourse in order to go to them marks
His estimate of the importance of His discourse and
the attention of His hearers, and does not in any way
imply that His mother was unsympathetic.
However this may be in the later life, the period
of preparation is marked by two distinct indications
of the mother's sympathy, one at the beginning, one
at the close. When He was twelve, she kept in her
heart "sayings" which she could not understand; and
when — the preparation over and the ministry begun
— He was at a wedding where the wine had been
exhausted, she told the servants, with a trust which
means volumes, to do whatever He told them.2 In
1 St. John vii. 5.
2 St. John ii. 5.

go HIS OBEDIENCE
the light of such trust and sympathy His obedience
to God had developed. That the divine obedience
could keep pace with the human obedience through
all the eighteen quiet years must never be forgotten;
and in that memory must be included the trust of a
mother who did not, so far as we may see, hold him
back from the finest, the hardest, the best. Now
and again the mother instinct, as she saw Him coming
home from some reckless and perilous kindness, must
have foreshadowed something like Calvary : but I think
in those years, when she saw Him daily, she did not
put out even a trembling hand to detain Him. If
later, when He was out in the vicious world, unpro
tected, her hand was at times half raised to hold
Him back, it was not because of less sympathy but
only because of more yearning love.
That Jesus Christ would have been a perfect type
of regal obedience under any circumstances, we who
follow Him feel certain; but it is a study of intense
human interest to discover in what environment that
obedience grew to its complete strength.

CHAPTER II
His Self-Knowledge
THERE was an ancient heresy * that the divine
nature was joined to the human nature of
Jesus when the spirit descended upon Him, at His
Baptism, and was withdrawn just before the Cruci
fixion. Any such limited notion of the union of the
divine and human natures in Christ is impossible if
one depends upon the reliable sources which we have
in the New Testament and in the interpretation of
the Christian Church. From the birth of Jesus He
had both a human nature and a divine nature.2 This
1 Gnosticism, as described by Irenaeus and Theodoret.
2 One must be on one's guard always in speaking of the "two
natures^ of Christ. It is never right, for example, to think that
Christ did certain acts as from His divine nature, and others from
His human nature. Yet sometimes men seek to avoid difficulties by
saying that it was Christ's humanity only which suffered, was tempted,
etc. The divine nature is made to seem a sort of closed casket which
He carried about with Him, and opened when it pleased Him. We
must grasp at the start that He was never more human than when
divine, and never more divine than when most thoroughly identified
with humanity. The problem was fought out (literally) in the early
church, and at the Council of Chalcedon (a.d. 451) it was declared:
"He was . . . one and the same Christ . . . acknowledged to be
in two natures, without confusion, change, division, separation; the
distinction of natures being by no means destroyed by their union;
91

9 2 HIS SELF-KNOWLEDGE
is no less clear in the Gospels of St. Matthew and
St. Luke, where the Infancy is recorded, than in the
Gospel of St. John, where we read,1 " The Word was
made flesh, and dwelt among us." And the Christian
consciousness everywhere and always has clung per
sistently to the feeling of necessity in this idea that
the Baby of Bethlehem, as well as the Ascended
Christ, is both Son of Man and Son of God.
A very absorbing problem is, however, left to us.
When, we may ask, did the Man, Christ Jesus, become
aware of His real nature? Because the answer to
this question throws abundant light upon His char
acter we must grapple with it. It is a subject that
must recur, but we may at least begin to investigate
it here.
There has been the feeling on the part of some that
it militates against the perfection of Christ's divinity
if He were not from what seems unconscious baby
hood fully aware of His divine as well as of His
human nature. This feeling was responsible, in an
but rather the distinction of each nature being preserved and con
curring in one Person and one Existence; not in somewhat that is
parted or divided into two persons; but in one and the same . . ."
Of course the philosophic use of words has somewhat altered, but
this old symbol declares as plainly as possible that we cannot think
of Christ as being sometimes divine and sometimes human; He was
always both.
Cf. Westcott ("Epistle to the Hebrews," p. 66): "The two
Natures were inseparably combined in the unity of His Person. In
all things He acts Personally; and, as far as it is revealed to us, His
greatest works during His earthly life are wrought by the help of the
Father through the energy of a humanity enabled to do all things in
fellowship with God (comp. John xi. 41 f.)."
¦I. 14.

HIS SELF-KNOWLEDGE 93
early age, for the invention of the so-called Apocryphal
gospels. Here we find the little Child Jesus turning
children into lower animals, making clay sparrows to
fly, carrying water in his cloak, or throwing cloths
into a dyer's vat and bringing them out each in the
colour ordered. The miracles themselves are shock
ingly silly or unkind; but quite apart from this, one
who knows the artless historic account of the Child
hood of Jesus is disturbed by the thought that this
period should have had any miracles at all. The
truth of it is that such an idea sacrifices the humanity.
There must be found a way by which1 the Christian
consciousness may be assured that He who was alto
gether divine never for one instant ceased to be
human. We are in very deep waters, but it behooves
us not to sink in them. Will it not help if we
remember that a characteristic of divinity is sta
bility, changelessness ; and that a characteristic of hu
manity is growth; and then to turn to that part
of the brief record in St. Luke which says,1 "Jesus
increased in wisdom"? May we not say then with
confidence that Jesus gradually became aware of
His real personality; that is, among other ways of
growth He had the human development of His
knowledge of the unchanging divine nature which
was in Him?
In a subject so difficult we must cling cautiously to
our sources; and for this purpose I select (1) His
visit to the Temple when He was twelve years old,
(2) His Baptism, (3) His Temptation, and then, in
general, (4) His Public Career. I believe that in each
1 St. Luke ii. 52.

94 HIS SELF-KNOWLEDGE
one of these we shall find a gradually clearer know
ledge of Himself.
I. His Visit to the Temple when He was Twelve
Years Old
Principal Faimairn, one of the wisest of theologians,
tersely says 1 that the student of Christ must call the
new science of psychology to his aid.2 Nowhere may
we more wisely do this than in the study of our Lord's
growth in self-knowledge. We do not need President
Stanley Hall's great book 3 to assure us that the years
when boyhood merges into manhood are years of be
guiling visions for every open-minded youth. Then
it is borne in upon a boy, in part at least, what he is.
The fables of childhood fall away, and he discovers
many of the laws of his natural life. There is a
tenderness, an openness to fine influences, a sense of
God, a will to reach up to Him, a feeling of depen
dence upon Him, which are unique in the course of
human life. Boys, we know, sometimes try to fight
off the influx of these new emotions. They are per
plexed, for this great vision of their origin and their
destiny, this tenderness taking hold of their sometimes
rough boy-nature, seems unnatural, sentimental. When
the beautiful or the lovable draws tears to their eyes,
and the deep feelings surge in their hearts, they steel
1 "The Philosophy of the Christian Rehgion," p. 381.
2 Cf. Archbishop Temple ("Memoirs," vol. ii. p. 517): "Our
theology has been cast in the scholastic mode, i.e., all based on Logic.
We are in need of and we are being gradually forced into a theology
based on psychology."
3 "Adolescence."

HIS VISIT TO THE TEMPLE 95
themselves and try to appear hard when their inmost
lives are melting for very tenderness. It is wholly
inadequate, as President Hall amply demonstrates, to
look upon this upheaval as a mere physical change:
it is spiritual, it goes to the depths of life. And the
Christian Church knows it well, and therefore comes
to the youth at this crisis with the invitation to Con
firmation: a definite act may then seal these high
aspirations, these deep convictions, and make them a
permanent possession.
Now is it not wise to remember that in the more
advanced Oriental country, the boy Jesus, upon His
visit to Jerusalem, was entering upon this great period
of opening visions? Had He been only like any other
clean-hearted boy, and nothing else, He would have
been stirred as never before by all that was religious
and generous.
And beside this, there is one other fact which,
though a mere possibility, must be reckoned with.
May it not have been the habit of careful Jewish
fathers, as it is the habit of conscientious Christian
fathers to-day,1 to take their sons into their confi
dence at this crisis, and to tell them in sacred, solemn
words how life goes on from generation to generation,
so that no sordid thought of so holy a subject may
touch their minds? And if this was so, is it a rash
flight of the imagination to think that this was the
time when Joseph would have told his sacred Charge
that he was not His father? If Joseph explained it
all as far as he could on that pilgrimage to Jerusalem,
1 See H. D. Sedgwick's "A Gap in Education " Atlantic Monthly,
Jan. 1901, pp. 68 ff.

96 HIS SELF-KNOWLEDGE
if to the Boy Jesus the words came as the verification
of increasing intimations that though He was like
other boys He was also different, then what a new
meaning is revealed in His reply to His mother's
rebuke in the Temple. Had she not wished Him to
know? And now that He knew positively, would she
not have Him serve His Father — stay for a little
in His House — do His work?
Though such an exegesis may help to emphasise
the almost certain meaning of this time for the Boy
Jesus, the meaning itself is not changed by its rejec
tion. As a human being He would necessarily have
shared the awakening to consciousness of power which
then comes to every normal, unspoiled life. Other
boys begin to get an intimation of what they are in
body, mind, and soul; may we not think that this
unique Boy began to know who He was then, and
with that amazing knowledge set His boy's face to the
final purpose of His life — to work out His Father's
Will? If He grew in knowledge, — and we know that
He did so grow, — we find the first stage of His
growth here, — so far as our records give us light.
II. His Baptism
Still proceeding with scrupulous care, let us examine
the baptism of Christ, with the single purpose of dis
covering what it can tell of His self-knowledge. It
will be impossible to make certain that the self-
knowledge there displayed was a recent development ;
but it is evident in any case, I think, that the know
ledge was then borne in upon Him with an intenser
conviction.

HIS BAPTISM 97
We must first picture the scene. John the Baptist
was surrounded by a crowd of penitent people be
wailing their sins; the stern preacher was exhorting
them, and doubtless their very faces told eloquently
their own self-conviction of a crooked past. Jesus
came among them, and going up to the Baptist asked
to be baptised. Instantly John drew back: "I have
need," he cried, "to be baptised of thee; and comest
thou to me?" 1 The one reason John had given for
baptism was sin: here was One who did not need it,
for He had no sin. That our Lord had at this time
reached a consciousness of His freedom from sin, is
clear from His reply: "Suffer it now." I shall later
return to this event to show what it tells of His iden
tification with humanity. Just now I point out only
this: under the utmost publicity Christ acknowledged
that He had no consciousness of sin. It may safely
be thought that as He watched the lives of His family
and fellow-townspeople in Nazareth He would have
marked how they all seemed to be inevitably drawn
to sin, and we may wisely believe that the difference
between Himself and them would gradually impress
itself upon Him; but in this glare of a public act,
under the Baptist's protest, it would seem likely that
He was completely aware of the difference. He knew
Himself to be sinless.2
1 St. Matt. iii. 14. I am aware of the attempt to make this an
interpolation; but see Sanday's article " Jesus Christ," in Hastings'
Bible Dictionary, p. 611.
2 From time to time the attempt is made to show that Christ was
not sinless. But such attempts must always fail, because, at the
very least, Christ must be included among the saints; and it is psycho
logically proved that saintliness is invariably sensitive to sin. Speak-

98 HIS SELF-KNOWLEDGE
It was at this time that He was conscious of the
Father's approval in a unique way, for He saw a sign
and heard a Voice, "This is my beloved Son in whom
I am well pleased." J That John also saw and heard
we know by his own testimony,2 but this is not impor-
ing of some of these questioned acts of Christ, Dr. D. W. Forrest says
("The Authority of Christ," p. 20): "What alone is the final justifica
tion of such an act? It is that such a one as He should have
performed it without subsequent regret." And again (p. 21) : "There
fore, when you have one like Christ who had the highest conception
of God and holy love, who gave to the idea of man's obedience and
consecration its last expression, and who Himself lived in the constant
sense of the Father's presence; one, moreover, who had the keenest
sense of what was due to men, of the need of charity and forbearance
toward the sinful; then, even if conceivably He had been swept by
righteous indignation beyond what was justifiable, one thing is cer
tain, — He would have realized the fact afterwards. In His calmer
hours it would have risen up to judge and abase Him." Dr. Forrest
also weighs the certainty of the record of such consciousness of mis
doing, had there been any. "The Apostles," he says (pp. 25-27)
. . . had lived in the closest intimacy with Him for many months,
they had seen Him in every situation which could test His patience,
temper, and unselfishness. They had more opportunities of truly
knowing Him for what He was than Boswell had of knowing John
son. ... If Jesus had been conscious in the faintest degree of such
shortcoming, that consciousness must inevitably have found expres
sion daily in a thousand ways, not merely in direct confession, but
in His attitude towards them, and in the tone of His references to the
Father and His own relation to Him. The Apostles had no such
recollections of Him. The claim they made for Him was the claim
which, from the nature of their communion with Him, they had good
reason to know He made for Himself. . . . When He chose the
Twelve that 'they might be with Him,' . . . He provided for us the
guarantee of His moral personality which a historical Christianity
requires." 1 St. Mark i. 11; St. Matt. iii. 17; St. Luke iii. 22.
2 St. John i. 32.

THE TEMPTATION 99
tant for our purpose now. We need only notice that
Christ was aware even more fully of His divine nature,
and had, evidently as never before, the consciousness
of His Father's approval. That He withdrew at once
to the wilderness to be alone shows plainly, among
other things, how overpowering were His emotions.
Is it presumptuous to believe that He was conscious
as never before who He was?
III. The Temptation
Now let us merely glance at the Temptation. It
has very large revelations in store for us, but we may
say here with safety that at this time Christ first
became fully aware of His unlimited power over the
laws of nature. He had been for a long time lost in
the absorption of thought and devotion. He was
acknowledging His divinity to Himself; and then His
humanity asserted itself: He was hungry. There was
nothing at hand wherewith to satisfy such hunger.
He saw the round stones of the desert, so much like
the Hebrew loaf. Why could He not use His divine
power and turn them to bread? He could! We need
go no farther. Certainly a large significance of these
days in the desert of temptation attaches to this
sudden awakening of the powers which His divine
nature involved. To be, as no other, Son of God; to
be sinless; to be approved by the Father; — yes, all
this the records tell that He had known. And now
it was sweeping over Him, — dare we not say it? —
what awful power, capable of destruction or of benefi
cence, was locked in His life. As a lion, loosed from
his cage, admitted free and unrestrained among the

ioo HIS SELF-KNOWLEDGE
feeble animals of life, trembles with the consciousness
of his might, so Christ, in the turmoil of the world at
last, was aware of the inexhaustible strength at His
command. IV. His Public Career
After this Christ's knowledge of Himself is like a
broad river, and we can no longer, except very gen
erally, trace its growth. The interest now is centred
upon the growth of His disciples' understanding of
Him. We may, however, pause a moment to notice
how deep and full His self-consciousness was all through
His public ministry. To trace any growth in His own
consciousness after the choice of His disciples is im
possible because it is clear that until St. Peter's Con
fession He refrained as far as possible from public
declarations of His character, that the disciples might
discover it gradually for themselves. So words taken
at random will suffice to show how entirely sure He
was of Himself. "Which of you convicteth me of
sin?"1 was His challenge to the Pharisees2; and toward
the end He said to His disciples, "The ruler of this
world cometh and hath nothing in me";3 that is, He
is found sinless. But these are negative. Think of
His positive declarations: "I am the light of the
world";4 "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no
man cometh unto the Father but by me";5 "I pro
ceeded forth and came from God";6 "Ye are from
1 St. John viii. 46.
2 The exegesis which would limit this challenge to patriotic
loyalty, is ingenious, but finical and unreal.
3 St. John xix. 30. 4 St. John viii. 12. ' Ibid. xiv. 6.
8 Ibid. viii. 42; xvi. 28.

HIS PUBLIC CAREER 101
beneath; I am from above";1 "He that loveth
father or mother more than me, is not worthy of
me";2 "If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth
as a branch, and is withered";3 "If a man love me,
he will keep my words: and my Father will love
him, and we will come unto him, and make an abode
with him";4 "He that hath seen me hath seen the
Father."5 It will be observed that these passages all empha
sise our Lord's consciousness of His divine nature.
It is exactly as important to quote passages which
show His abiding consciousness of His human nature;
and I shall do this in another connection. Meantime,
in general, we may recall that our Saviour constantly
referred to Himself as "the Son of Man." It will for
our purpose at this time suffice if we notice that He
came to a full knowledge of His united character of
divine and human natures as men have always come
to a knowledge of whatever is in them. That is, the
eternal nature which lay hid in His life from the be
ginning, day by day unfolded in His growing know
ledge, till at length He knew Himself completely as He
was. There is still a difference between Him and other
men even in this, in that whereas He came to a com
plete knowledge of Himself, most men, though ac
quiring such self-knowledge by degrees, attain in the
end only a feeble insight into their real natures, and
only the very greatest men appreciate even approxi
mately the power of the humanity which God has
1 St. John viii. 23. 2 St. Matt. *. 37.
3 St. John xv. 6. * St. John xiv. 23.
5 St. John xiv. 9.

102 HIS SELF-KNOWLEDGE
bestowed upon them. Jesus Christ, having mounted
by the human stages of self-consciousness, at last
knew perfectly His whole character. Had Socrates
seen Christ's day, he would have found at last One
who perfectly fulfilled his chief precept, " Know thy
self."

CHAPTER III
His Self-Identification with Humanity
HORACE BUSHNELL, in a book which in its day
made an epoch in theological thought,1 has a
brilliant chapter under the title, "The Character of
Jesus Forbids His Possible Classification with Men."
This chapter must always remain one of the famous
expositions of our Lord's divinity; but the heading of
the chapter is untrue: Christ must be classed among
men. He who was Son of God, also was completely
Son of Man. And the inspiration of the truth is that
He Himself insisted on being identified with humanity.
From this consideration I eliminate, for the present,
the thought that by the Incarnation itself He was
forced to be identified with humanity: I shall try to
show how at three times (to speak of no more) He
voluntarily identified Himself with conditions that
we call peculiarly human: with sin, with sorrow, with
pain. I. With Sin
When the Baptist protested against baptising Christ,
our Lord said, "Suffer it now: for thus it becometh us
to fulfil all righteousness.2 Various interpretations are
i " Nature and the Supernatural." s St. Matt. iii. 15.
103

104 HIS SELF-IDENTIFICATION
inevitable. A common one, which says that the act
had no reality for Christ, but was merely an example,
must be rejected instantly: it does violence to Christ's
invariable sincerity. There is only one interpretation
which can satisfy. John's baptism was distinctly for
sinners; Jesus was not a sinner; yet He said that it
was His duty to be baptised. What can it mean but
that He, as part of humanity, felt, sinless as He was,
responsible for the sin of Humanity? In other words,
the sinless Man was not to be what we call an indi
vidual, sharply cut asunder from the rest of the race,
rejoicing in His perfection, while all other men had
blundered and failed. The most conscientious people
of His day had been obedient to John's Baptism; of
course they needed the confession and the cleansing.
He would identify Himself with them; He, recognising
Himself as inseparable from humanity, would bring
His perfect Manhood to the test necessary for all
others ; for so, being a sharer with them of all burdens,
He knew the Baptism even for Him to be necessary.
It is an act typical of our Saviour's whole life. "He
came unto His own":1 He came to identify Himself
completely with the humanity which He was destined
to save. On the threshold of His public life He made
it plain that though He individually had no mistakes
to lament, He was ready to be held responsible for
the mistakes of humanity. There was no way of
separating His humanity from the humanity of others,
any more than a drop of water in the ocean can dare
call itself an individual in the myriad waters of the
sea. So it became Him "to fulfil all righteousness."
1 St. John i. 1 1 .

WITH SIN 105
This is one of the high notes in the endless song of
our Redemption, and we may see, in passing, what a
sublime suggestion it has for our own living. The
inspiration melts into a solemn duty. As Christ
sinless felt His responsibility for all the humanity of
which His perfect humanity was part, so we (who
perhaps think ourselves fairly good) have definite and
real responsibility for the rest of the world. It is a
great paradox that each man is responsible for his own
soul and is, at the same time, his brother's keeper.
In one sense a man is as good as he is individually;
in another, and very exact, sense, he is no better than
the humanity of his neighbourhood, his state, his
nation. It takes rough lessons to teach us that no
man lives to himself. A man commits murder or
steals, and we say that this is nothing to us; but
when the train of events so started comes toppling
into our happiness, we discover that the crime of
another is something to us after all. So when next
we get down on our knees of a Sunday morning and
say the General Confession, we are thinking of others
as well as ourselves. We are no longer individuals ; we
link our lives to the people all about us, in church and
out of it, and we are pleading that humanity — our
humanity — may be rid of this abominable habit of
wrong-doing with all its attendant misery and distress.
The ardent follower of Christ is prone to claim for
Him divinity at the expense of humanity. If He
himself was distinct in the maintenance of His divinity,
He was no less distinct in insisting that He be counted
as a man. We can better appreciate what this tells
of His character if we remember how we, who are

106 HIS SELF-IDENTIFICATION
only human, are content, when it is possible, to be
partakers exclusively of the upper layers of humanity.
If a man has money we wonder why he does not give
it to make the community wiser and more comfortable.
If a man or a woman is delightful to know, we wonder
why this man or this woman does not cofne and take
us for friends. If a man knows how to cure disease,
we claim his skill as our property, and we say that
he must come to us at noon or at midnight — when
ever we need his power. This may all be granted;
but if it is rational to claim for the individual the
prosperity of the community, it is just as rational to
claim for him its misery and sin. If he lives on its
success, he must carry its failure. For the failure,
as well as the success, is his. Because it belongs to
humanity, he will be in-human if he is not brave enough
to bear the blame for it. He who was Son of God —
perfect, sinless — went down into the cleansing waters
of the Jordan that He might take upon His innocent
shoulders the sin of the humanity from which He did
not shrink, with which He was willing to be completely
identified. Is it strange that a career so begun, ended
on a felon's cross? II. With Sorrow
Now let us think of sorrow. Here, too, we must be
sure that the sorrow which we select was by our Lord
voluntarily assumed, not thrust upon Him. The
distinction, if delicate, is real. There was one moment
in His Life which perfectly illustrates what I mean;
that was when He wept at the grave of Lazarus.1
1 St. John xi. 35.

WITH SORROW 107
All the circumstances point to the fact that He had
decided upon the ultimate outcome, and was sure of
His power to accomplish it: He had told the disciples
that Lazarus's sickness and death were to be the
occasion of making manifest God's glory and increasing
their belief.1 While still outside Bethany He was met
by the sisters, followed by their mourning friends2;
and together they all went to the tomb. In a moment
Christ was to recall Larazus to life; does it not seem
that such knowledge of this immediate joy for Himself
and His friends would preclude any grief on His part?
But the narrative is emphatic: when He saw Mary
weeping, and the friends also weeping, "He groaned3
in the spirit," "Hewas troubled," "He wept."4 Why
was this grief? I shall have something to say later
of His sympathy, but something deeper than sym
pathy was here. I shall also speak of His inevitable
humanness: it might be possible to ascribe something
to the physical exhaustion of the weeks and months
of intense strain, and therein to find cause for nervous
ness; but the account is too strong to intimate mere
nervousness, — He inwardly groaned, He was troubled,
He wept. It is right to point out that, as psychologists
tell us, intense moments of joy and pain have no time
in them: one may suffer in an hour the agony of years.
Christ, we might think, would, of course, know this,
as His dear friends showed the horror of their suffering.
1 St. John xi. 4, 15. 2 Ibid. 30, 31.
3 The Greek implies a strong element of indignation against
" the Jews," who were making a brave show of their wailing; but
this was part of His sorrow, — viz., that the grief of the sisters was
attended by a heartless comfort.
4 Ibid. 33, 35.

108 HIS SELF-IDENTIFICATION
Certainly, He who knew the human heart as no other
ever knew it, would know that; but still He had
persistently kept before Himself the turning of the
sorrow into joy. What then can His evident grief
mean? One thing only I am sure: He was entering
really, vitally, into the sorrow of humanity.
Dare we not say that those shrieks and tears of His
friends were for Him, the groaning and wailing at all
the open graves, from the beginning to the end of time;
and the sorrow of this humanity was His. What a
heavenly glimpse we get of this Man who wept with
those that wept: it was no soft-hearted sympathy,
no comforting demonstration, but the intensest asso
ciation of ownership in the sorrow. For, at a time
when He saw the immediate end of a certain sorrow,
He entered into the depths of that sorrow and made
it all His own.
It reminds one how one feels sometimes when a
child goes by, sobbing; one knows that in a few steps
the tears will be dried, and the child will be smiling
as if nothing had gone amiss; but if one is honestly
human, those sobs will cut sharp into the heart. What
if they do last but the twinkling of an eye! They are
real: they sound the profound note of the sorrow that
is part of our human heritage. Jesus Christ had sor
rows of His own; but He also voluntarily identified
Himself with the great world-sorrow which catches
at the heart-strings of all humanity.
III. With Pain
The keenness of physical pain has always seemed a
peculiarly human mark. One detail from the Day

WITH PAIN 109
of the Cross will suffice to show how Jesus Christ
voluntarily identified Himself with the pain of the
world. It is perhaps the climax of the voluntariness
of the whole Passion. Judas within and the Phari
sees without, had been drawing the net of destruction
close about Him; and the people's loyalty had been
fading away. But there had been ample chance to
withdraw from Jerusalem. His stay had been volun
tary. And when the officers had come with swords
and staves to take Him, He had told them plainly
that even then He could call such a force that the
whole world would flee before Him. He had gone to
His trial voluntarily. Then through the whole of that
dreadful Friday He had made all who had seen Him
aware that He was the Powerful Man among all who
had insulted and despised Him: His superiority had
been expressed neither by defiance nor by carelessness,
but by the willingness of His surrender. At last He
was about to be nailed to the Cross. The Roman
soldiers were affected by His presence; their hardness
was softened; they offered Him "wine mingled with
myrrh" — which would deaden the pain. "But he
received it not."1 He would not let the pain be dead
ened: He would bear it all. Voluntarily, then, He
accepted the physical pain of humanity.
From that moment physical pain has had a meaning.
It is bound up with the life and history of humanity;
The ascetic courts it; the worldling tries to ignore it.
The Son of God neither courts nor ignores it, but vol
untarily accepts its sharpness, when in plain, straight
human fashion He finds it right across His path.
1 St. Mark xv. 23.

no HIS SELF-IDENTIFICATION
Moralists are beginning to cry that the boasted anaes
thetic is not an unmixed blessing, for it too readily
delivers the body from pain. There is a mystery and
a help in pain which the possible escape from it begins
to demonstrate, so that even the unthoughtful are now
fain to believe what men like Erskine x and Hinton 2
have long ago explained.
We must remember how the great Thomas Arnold
as he lay dying, with the terrors of Angina Pectoris
taking hold of his life, thanked God that he who had
lived painlessly was suffering the intensest pain at
last. That thanksgiving came not from any stoical
hardness, but from the depths of Christian sensitive
ness and tenderness.
Christ suffered physical pain, one must believe, of
necessity, in the ordinary course of His humanity.
But because once at least He refused to have the pain
that came to Him in any way minimized, we know
that He seized upon this means still further to identify
Himself with the humanity whose very dregs of woe
were altogether His.3
1 "Brazen Serpent." 2 "Mystery of Pain."
3 The possibility of Christ's identifying Himself with the limita
tions of human knowledge is discussed in Chapter XV.

CHAPTER IV
His Conquest of Temptation
THE author of the Epistle to the Hebrews con
denses the story of Christ's contest with tempta
tion into one glowing sentence: "He was in all points
tempted like as we are, yet without sin."1 It is of
first importance to believe that Christ was really
tempted. A good many people feel that because He
did not yield to temptation, He therefore could not
yield to it. They look upon His temptations as a
sort of dramatic experience to teach us how, in an
outward fashion, we ought to meet our temptations;
but they suppose that there was no struggle in His
heart. It was, they think, a mere formality, like a
wave of the hand. This rather common interpreta
tion is a wild distortion of the plain fact. If it was
not possible for Jesus to have committed sin at any
moment of His career, He was not a man. Because
He was a man, His sinlessness came from no safe and
easy impeccability, but it came from a savage battle,
involving excruciating agony.
I. The Greatness of His Temptations
It may be assumed, I think, that if our Lord's
divine nature helped Him to conquer His temptations,
1 Hebrews iv. 15.
in

112 HIS CONQUEST OF TEMPTATION
the very power that lay within this divine nature in
tensified also the temptations themselves. Therefore
the human nature of Christ had from His divine nature
no more help than was needed to cancel the enormous
enlargement of the possibilities of sin. So the hu
manity of Christ had as real a battle as the humanity
of any man can have. He who was human and divine
had not an easier struggle than we; it was harder,
more intense.
One must speak with extreme caution, but I feel
convinced that what we call lower instincts make their
appeal to the saintly quite as they do to the vicious.
A sterner will, occupation with higher thoughts, a
series of victories rather than a series of defeats,
account for the difference in result. Good, firmly
formed habits may then dull the appeal; but one may
suspect that to the finest as to the crudest nature
the appeal does come at some time, and the struggle
to overcome is no less fierce for the man who perpet
ually succeeds than for the man who perpetually fails;
that is, at first. For it is an axiom that each succeed
ing victory is a little easier to win; each succeeding
defeat is a little more quickly inflicted.
So when scholars find in Christ's Temptation in the
Wilderness the invitation to satisfy carnal appetites,
typified in the beckoning to turn stones into bread,
they are doubtless justified. He who was tempted in
all points like as we are must have met the whole
range of appeals which come to men. The error arises
from dwelling appreciably on these lower instincts,
because the temptations that come only to" a richly
endowed character are so much more beguiling, and

GREATNESS OF HIS TEMPTATIONS 113
so much more difficult to thwart. In passing over
the more ordinary temptations that besiege our flesh,
I shall not therefore be forgetting them ; I shall merely
allow them to be absorbed in the unique temptations
which came nearest to Christ's susceptibilities. For
our purpose now the Temptation in the Wilderness
will give us all the needed details.
The first note struck by the Temptation is in the
"if" of the first and second parts. "// thou art the
Son of God, command that these stones be made
bread." 1 ..." If thou art the Son of God cast thy
self down." 2 This is clearly an invitation to demand
of God a test. It is practically doubt of God's veracity.
For expand the evil argument, and see what it becomes :
"You believe that you are the Son of God: very well,
— what proof have you of it? Do you think inspiring
thoughts enough? If God is your Father is it not
strange that He should allow you to be hungry? If
God is your Father would He not save you from a
law of destruction inevitable for one merely human?"
The hunger for bread may have been sharp ; the hunger
for the outward verification of an indwelling assur
ance was sharper. The invitation was to doubt God's
inmost revelation on the threshold of His career. As
the Pharisees besought Him for a sign, so He was
tempted to ask a sign of His Father. It is the temp
tation of doubt.
If, in an ordinary friendship — if any friendship
can be called ordinary — one grows sceptical of a
friend's devotion, then one knows the agony of the
temptation to give the friend some test to verify to
1 St. Matt. iv. 3. 2 Ibid. 6.

114 HIS CONQUEST OF TEMPTATION
oneself what never ought to have been put in question.
The old ballad tells a searching story when it relates
how a knight declared to his beloved that his love
was strong as death, and the poor girl, seeking to prove
his word, threw her glove into the lion-pit and com
manded him to pick, it up from among the raging
lions. That the lover, obeying the command, straight
way ceased to love the woman who could ask such a
verification of his word, is what one would expect. It
is not possible to describe the full enormity of this
doubt, but one readily feels it all. We get a more
intimate application of it if we recall certain persons
who say with vehemence, " If God loves me, He will
spare my dear one lying at the point of death." And
we can doubtless remember cases where the apparently
unanswered prayer has turned the mourner into a
hard, bitter unbeliever. A sign was asked, and no
sign was given. So all the revelations of God's love
were cast aside as rubbish.
This temptation of Christ to put God to the test
must have required all His strength to meet; but an
even harder temptation followed. This was the sug
gestion to do His work in the worldly way. The
temptation to cast Himself from the Temple pinnacle,
and the temptation to receive the kingdoms of the
world by falling down and worshipping the devil, are
so closely akin that we may think of them together.
What certainly most appealed to Jesus was to bring
the world to His Father's obedience. The heavenly
way to obedience is by love; the worldly way is by
force. We know that He chose the way of love.
When He first went to Jerusalem, the shop-keeper

GREATNESS OF HIS TEMPTATIONS 115
probably bustled by Him intent only on his petty
trade, never giving Him so much as a glance of rever
ent respect. The pious old man on the Temple steps
probably gave not even a look. Only very gradually
was He to persuade men to come into His difficult and
beautiful kingdom. They would be more often scan
dalised by His demands than drawn by His promises.
It was a long, painful course that He must go. But
what might have been! A great personal sensation
at the start — to be dashed down the precipice and
to rise from the ragged rocks far below radiantly
safe — what would that not do to commend Him to
the people? Who would dare to stand out against
Him? And the implements and weapons of the world
were right at hand. How easily He might be another
Alexander, — only infinitely more successful. Was
that not the real way to bring the children of men to
the obedience of the Father in heaven? You do not
grasp the acuteness of the temptation till you see its
altruistic incentive. He was not tempted to use tools
less than the best for His own sake; it was for the
world's sake. These tools of the world could work
quickly, — and Love always longs to work quickly
for the beloved.
We know now that the slow, toilsome path, with its
sorrow and desertion and seeming failure, was the
perfect way to do a task of the magnitude of our
Saviour's. But we know it because He has demon
strated it. It does not need much imagination to
recognise that this was a temptation among the high
peaks and among the clouds: few come even approx
imately to such heights; no one else whatever can

116 HIS CONQUEST OF TEMPTATION
have the same problem. There is a glimpse of it
when a father for love of his child would lead him
through the shaded groves, whereas the straight and
proper road for that dear child lies across the burning
desert. This father may have grown to a commanding
character by poverty and blows and incessant toil:
he yearns to spare his son the same rough path. He
would make it music and roses all the way. But he
knows that his boy shall by this softness miss the
strength of manhood. Yet it is hard to watch the
battle — the wounds, the defeats. If the father calls
a halt in his dream of luxurious generalship, if he
allows his child to go the flinty road which he travelled
to his strength, then that father will have conquered
his temptation — in the spirit of Christ.
II. His Temptation Continuous
It is necessary to notice that Christ's temptation
was not ended with one short victory at the opening
of His public life. These temptations, and more,
showed their hideous faces again and again. We may
rightly believe that this temptation in the wilderness
was preeminently the temptation of His life.1 But
like a general who has defeated a stubborn foe, He
kept up the pursuit of this fleeing enemy to the end.
There was never a reverse, but He never relaxed in
His watchfulness.
A very remarkable example of a later form of the
temptation came just before His Transfiguration,
when Peter rebuked Him for announcing that He
1 However the details and events may be interpreted as the record
of a subjective process, the reality of it all belongs to this time.

HIS TEMPTATION CONTINUOUS 117
must be rejected by the authorities and then be put
to death. It was love, in one of His dearest friends,
that faced Him: "Be it far from thee, Lord!" cried
the affectionate, impetuous disciple; "this shall never
be unto thee."1 It was not the appeal to spare His
own pain which sounded in that protest: it was the
agony which His cruel death would bring to all who
were dearest to Him. It was the old temptation of
the wilderness in a more concrete form. The fire of
His answer shows how real the temptation was to
Him, for He said to Peter, "Get thee behind me,
Satan: for thou mindest not the things of God, but
the things of men."2 He evidently summoned His
whole strength to keep straight to His hard course,
— harder now than ever because He was reading the
sorrow of it all in the eyes and voice of one He loved.
Pass over the months, and think of the black night
in Gethsemane. Whether it is possible that to such
a character as our Lord's the thought of flight from
Jerusalem in the earlier days of the week could have
suggested itself, we need not weigh. That night in
Gethsemane must have been a night of temptation
as well as of agony; or, more accurately, the deepest
part of the agony must have been that any tempta
tion should appeal to Him, as He faced the consum
mation of His purpose. What can it mean but the
temptation to escape the horror when He prayed,
"Father, all things are possible unto thee; remove
this cup from me."3 The only escape He sought was
by His Father's permission; but the prayer implies a
' St. Matt. xvi. 22. 2St. Mark viii. 33.
3 St. Mark xiv. 36.

118 HIS CONQUEST OF TEMPTATION
temptation, because He at once hurls back the thought:
"Howbeit," He prayed, "not what I will, but what
thou wilt."1 In a flash, He had met the temptation:
but what an agony of suspense must have come in
that instant when the question was opened. When a
little later the soldiers took Him, He said that He could
even then bring more than twelve legions of angels to
His aid 2 by a prayer to His Father. We must be
extremely careful, but is it not reasonable to think
that this way of deliverance had been one of His temp
tations that dark night? Here again you feel how
immeasurably His divine nature enlarged the scope
of His temptation. To have such unlimited power,
and to meet villany with the poor weapons of the
weakest of men!
Not even here, however, did the temptations of
this tempted Man cease. On the cross, He cried,
"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"3
Did the pain and the weariness for one awful moment
tempt Him to doubt His Father's love? We may
only ask the question; and then repeat, "He was
tempted in all points like as we are." Was He hurling
back the tempting voice to the very end! Does it
not certainly seem so?
III. His Risk of Yielding
I spoke in the beginning of this chapter of the
reality of Christ's temptations: there was a real risk
of His falling into sin. Until we appreciate how vivid
a possibility this was we fail not only to see Christ's
1 St. Mark xiv. 36. 2 St. Matt. xxvi. 53.
3 St. Mark xv. 34.

HIS RISK OF YIELDING

119

humanity, we fail also to see the massive heroism of
His life. There is abundant evidence that He was
conscious of this terrible risk, and that the tragedy
of it hung always over His happiness.
We feel it first in His eagerness to get away to quiet
places for prayer. Sometimes He spent the whole
night in prayer. There is here surely more than the
mere joy of communion with the Father. The prayers
in Gethsemane demonstrate that He was wont to pray
for strength. The intense longing to be away from
the people and to get solitude for the hours of prayer
show in earlier days the same craving evidently.
And we must believe that Jesus prayed His own
prayer with His disciples: "Lead us not into tempta
tion, but deliver us from evil."
In the High-Priestly Prayer He says, "I glorified
thee on the earth, having accomplished the work
which thou hast given me to do." 1 Does that not
imply, among other things, a thanksgiving that He
had been able to maintain His sinlessness against
very imminent risk of failure? As a man stands
among high mountains on a clear day and feels him
self part of the great nature God has made, so our
Lord must have felt the awe and the danger of His
own majesty — our little risks of failure vanish into
nothingness when we contemplate all that was at
stake in the maintenance of His perfection. God
gave Him a white soul, and thus far He had kept it
unspotted from the world.
But, after this, another day was to pass. There
was yet risk. He had heard the taunts, "Save thy-
1 St. John xvii. 4.

120 HIS CONQUEST OF TEMPTATION
self and come down from the Cross";1 "Let Christ,
the King of Israel, now come down from the cross,
that we may see and believe." 2 He had cried His
despair, "My God, why hast thou forsaken me?"3
Was the battle still raging? We dare not say. But
at the last He cried, " It is finished!"4 From His lips
we cannot believe them simply the words of a tired
humanity going into peace. May we not think that
the words were the last shout of the Victor. Temp
tations had surged about Him to the last. The
powers of heaven and earth were at His command,
to misuse as well as to use. In the growing weakness
of the last moments the temptation may have come
to yield even then. Then the cry! The end was
near. Not one stain on the sinless soul! God's
Perfect Man, through all tribulation was perfect still!
" It is finished." JSt. Mark xv. 30. 2 Ibid. 32.
3 Ibid. 34. 4 St. John xix. 30.

CHAPTER V
His Patience
IN the anti-slavery days there was an American
reformer who, if vulgar, was forceful. He foresaw
the inevitable advent of justice and right, but the
slowness of their coming irritated his nervous energy.
"God," he said, "is not in a hurry; but I am." As
we reflect upon the history of the world, we must
always be impressed by the wonderful patience of
God. And as we think of men's ambitions for them
selves or for others, we must decide that impatience
is a trait of even the best of humanity. Therefore,
when we meditate upon the Patience of Christ we
catch a distinct note of His divinity.
It is easy to mark instances of Christ's Patience at
every turn, but there are three examples of supreme
interest: His own Preparation; His Training of the
Twelve; His Waiting for the Cross.
I. His Preparation
It is trite to exclaim upon the thirty years of our
Lord's Preparation, when the Public Life was to be,
at the longest estimate, not more than three years.
Eighteen of these years, at least, the records show,

122 HIS PATIENCE
were years of conscious preparation.1 At twelve He
was ready to talk with learned men about high and
deep subjects. Must not His sensitive nature have
felt already the hollowness of the social life about
Him, the sin, the selfish exclusiveness, the awful lack
of sympathy for the outcast? Must He not already
have felt that men did not give His Father a real
reverence, since they were so mightily concerned about
bits of ceremonial, about the borders of their cloaks,
about greetings in the markets; and so very careless
of mercy, pity, and love? Why, at twenty, did He
not come forth to denounce the hypocrite, and to
proclaim His new order of love and joy? The human
ity in Him must have tingled to be leading the forces
of right and kindness; but He waited, waited. It is
futile to ask why He waited so long. Did the respon
sibility of the Nazareth household devolve upon Him,
and did He refuse to desert those who looked to Him
for help, till He had fulfilled every obligation to them?
Or, did He feel His own need of the long years of
preparation? Of course, there can be no answer. Of
one thing only we may be sure: His waiting proclaims
His divine patience.
Now think of it. What promising life to-day could
feel its unique power in early boyhood, could feel the
1 Cf. Charles Moinet ("The Consciousness of Jesus," p. 22):
"To look upon His first thirty years as isolated from His pubhc
ministry and as pervaded by a different purpose is a great mistake.
It was a time of preparation for what followed, and stood in the
closest connection with it. But for it His ministry could not have
been what it was. His whole life was of one piece, inspired by one
design, contemplating from the beginning what stood accomplished
at the end."

HIS PREPARATION

123

thrill of public talk, could feel the throb of what we
call the world, and then could withdraw to some
quiet Nazareth, to receive there its dull training, and
to wait? There is a lesson here which we in America
need most to learn. We are anxious to be started on
our careers, whether insignificant or conspicuous, as
early as possible. The preparation is apt to be so
viciously condensed that it can hardly be called a
preparation at all. Nor does the fault lie with the
youth alone. Some great educators are urging that,
to accomplish anything, a man must be started in his
vocation in the early twenties at latest. This may be
true of business; but one is apt to forget that the
early years in business are a sort of apprenticeship, a
school of exact science of a high order. Most business
men who seem to start in life young do not begin to
form independent judgments and assume responsi
bilities of commerce till they have been drilled relent
lessly in subordinate posts. We must beware of false
estimates therefore. There is, nevertheless, the ten
dency in America to begin active life with insecure
preparation, especially in what we call the professions,
— teaching, medicine, the law, the ministry. In the
fine arts, too, we are slowly learning that genius
without training is tinsel; and that genius with train
ing, after long years, is greatness.
There is one noteworthy difficulty in long prepara
tions. Those with patience to endure them are
prone never to begin the life-task. Mandell Creighton,
historian and bishop, was gathering the materials for
his history, and was always delaying the writing, till
he was made literary executor of an extremely learned

124

HIS PATIENCE

man. Creighton went through the voluminous papers
of his friend to find almost endless notes — the prep
arations for the truly great books this man was plan
ning to write — but out of them all, Creighton could
find material for only one short article on Wyclif.
So Creighton himself, taking warning, fell to writing.1
In such connection, a very much greater name than
Creighton's thrusts itself upon the memory: Lord
Acton was, at his death, the most learned man in
Europe, but the books he was amply fitted to write
he never dared to begin.
That Christ's long preparation melted suddenly
into the most vigorous public life which the world
ever can know, is high demonstration of the thorough
ness of His patience.
1 1 . The Training of the Twelve
All the records make it plain that from the beginning
of our Lord's Ministry His chief work was the training
of twelve men, whom we call Apostles. With incisive
command He bade these men "follow Him." This
meant more than to be His friends, more than to be
advocates of His principles in their communities.
They were to "be with Him,"2 and so be taught both
by listening to His systematic instruction, and by
watching His deeds; most of all, they were to live in
the atmosphere of His life, and so to be permeated
with His continuous influence. After general in
structions to crowds of people, He separated the
Twelve from the crowds, and asked if they understood.
By interchange of question and answer, He made
1 Life and Letters, vol. i. p. 190. 2 St. Mark iii. 14.

THE TRAINING OF THE TWELVE 125
clear His teaching to them.1 For deeper moments,
such as the Transfiguration, the raising of Jaiirus's
daughter, and the Agony in Gethsemane, He selected
the most receptive of the Twelve — Peter, James,
and John. And judging from results we may believe
that to "the beloved disciple" He told the deepest
messages of all. But none were slighted. It was for
this whole school of twelve men that He rejoiced to
do the miracle in Bethany, that they might believe
when their faith should be put to the test.2 It was
for them all that He especially prayed on the last
night ; 3 and it was they who were meant when He
said, "For their sakes I sanctify myself."4
It is quite clear, is it not, what it meant to Him to
have these men understand? They were to carry
His influence into the world. He himself was to
write, so far as we know, not a line. Through them,
the Gospel of His Life was to be made known. If
they had failed, so far as events can show, His mission
to the world would have failed also. We must recog
nise what was at stake.
Remember all this, and then study the records
which show how He taught them day by day. He
did not force His claims upon them: rather He re
frained from telling them who He was, that they
might feel His divine presence by an inward conviction.
Long months passed before He asked them who they
thought He was;5 and because the Transfiguration
immediately followed St. Peter's confession, we know
1 St. Matt. xiii. 34. 2 St. John xi. 15.
3 St. John xvii. 9. 4 Ibid. 19.
5 St. Mark viii. 29.

126 HIS PATIENCE
what it meant to Him to have even one of them
say that he understood. Immediately after this, He
began to prepare them for His death.1 He told them
again and again;2 but of course their idea of a tem
poral kingdom could be replaced by the idea of the
real, spiritual kingdom only by the slowest degrees.
How could an ordinary man, even the greatest, have
had such patience! It is impossible: even the greatest
would have been frantic. Such patience is divine.
Nor can we forget the signs of density and crude-
ness which this little school displayed under the Divine
Teacher. Peter was constantly offering suggestions,3
or even rebuking His Master.* James and John,
within a few days of the end, so little understood the
spiritual nature of the Saviour's rule, that they asked
for thrones at His side.5 Then one betrayed Him;
another denied Him; and all fled from Him in His
greatest need.6 After the denial by Peter, "the Lord
turned, and looked upon Peter,"7 Because Peter did
not in hard grief slay himself, but could find tears, we
know that this look must have been a look of trust
even then. The disciples knew not what they had
learned, but Christ gave the sign that He was con
fident that they should know it all after His resurrec
tion. That is patience exalted upon the throne of
thrones. If the years of His own preparation show a patience
beyond what we can imagine in any youth similarly
1 St. Mark viii. 31.
2 St. Mark ix. 31; x. 33. St. Luke xvii. 25.
3 St. Mark ix. 5. 4 St. Mark viii. 32, 33. 5 St. Mark x. 37.
6 St. Mark xiv. 50. 7 St. Luke xxii. 61.

HIS WAITING FOR THE CROSS 127
endowed, the years wherein He trained the messengers
of His Life show a patience altogether beyond the
bounds of human comprehension. It is necessary,
perhaps, to remind oneself that this patience was not
easier for Him than it would have been for us: the
resources at His command made such patience harder
to sustain, and therefore more marvellous.
III. His Waiting for the Cross
Whatever degree of foreknowledge Christ's humanity
may have permitted or precluded, it is certain that
very early in His ministry He looked forward to His
Cross. I have already referred to the times when He
warned His disciples of His bitter trial. Quite apart
from any help from His divine nature, His acute
human instincts must have read "the signs of the
time." The political forces (represented by Herod
Antipas) and the religious forces (represented by the
Pharisees) were violently arrayed against Him. Be
side this, He saw in the Baptist's fate a foreshadowing
of His own ; 1 and He more than once announced that
it was the mark of a true prophet to be persecuted.2
The eagerness of the common people to make Him a
revolutionary leader, of course, with each manifesta
tion, brought the inevitable conflict nearer. His face
was very early set to go up to Jesuralem.
It was not simply death to which He looked forward.
It was death surrounded by betrayal, ingratitude,
shame, insult, cruelty, prolonged pain both physical
and mental. We call Stevenson a hero, in spite of
1 St. Mark ix. 12.
2 St. Matt. v. 12; xxiii. 34, 37.

128 HIS PATIENCE
some very unpleasant traits, because he worked year
after year while waiting to die; but his death was only
God's gift of rest and peace, and had no shadow of
shame in it. We must think of the criminal in the
cell looking forward to the months of waiting before
the rope is thrown about his neck: no tiniest weapon
can be left with him, else in the desperation of waiting,
he will kill himself. Christ, perfect as He was, died
the death of a criminal, as a criminal duly convicted;
and to a nature, infinitely sensitive by all its endow
ments, the horror of the Cross must have been more
torturing than to the guiltiest felon, with all his re
morse. Yet, behold the patience of these weeks of waiting.
He was constantly commanding those cured by His
miracles not to tell of His power, lest the crisis be
precipitated before He had finished His work. Again
and again He withdrew from the crowds lest they
attempt to force Him to a political leadership. He
was repeatedly escaping from the authorities, so put
ting off the day. "My time is not yet come," He
said.1 So, day by day, He held back with a firm hand
the agonising end. With calm deliberation He settled,
not His own affairs, but the affairs of the world; and,
when all was quite ready, He faced the shame. Then ;
but not one moment before. That is patience supreme.
1 St. John vii. 6.

CHAPTER VI
His Graciousness
COURTESY is a word which has grown in meaning.
There have been Chesterfields in certain ages
when soft manners were divorced from any nice sense
of honour. These men, it has been well said, had all
the luxuries belonging to the character of gentlemen,
though destitute of the necessities. To-day no sane
critic would dare to identify the gentleman with the
mere man of fashion. Taken all in all, the name
of gentleman has come to represent the highest type
of character which any age or nation can conceive.
It strikes deep into the fibre of life. We can no
longer contrast the gentleman and the man: unless
the man is also the gentleman, his manhood is
lacking in strength — it may be boisterous, stirring,
successful; it is not ultimately manly, it is not really
strong. Because the word courtesy stands for nothing arti
ficial or secondary, but is the inevitable mark of any
rounded life, we must study Christ's character with
reference to it. Because He grew up among people
who, in ordinary circumstances, have not much oppor
tunity to cultivate what we call manners, and because
He chose for His closest friends men who evidently
129

130 HIS GRACIOUSNESS
were deficient in the discriminations of what we call
etiquette, we sometimes are told that probably Jesus,
perfect as He was, shared the social limitations of His
environment. Before going into detail, it is wise to
seek a general answer from the great gentleman of the
New Testament — the man who wrote the exquisite
letter to Philemon — St. Paul. In the Epistle to the
Romans St. Paul exhorts his Roman friends to be
gentlemen: "Let every one of us," he urges, "please
his neighbour for his good." Then he gives a supreme
reason: "For even Christ," he adds, "pleased not
himself."1 One could hardly hope to find a more
concise and comprehensive definition of courtesy.
Courtesy, we meditate, is pleasing others for their
good — no superficial bandying of compliment —
something honest, helping, unselfish. "Even Christ
pleased not Himself": even Christ was not content
to have merely the stern virtues, — He was gentle,
He was gracious.
This testimony from St. Paul is important. For
St. Paul understood the distinctions of fine manners,
and at the same time was sweepingly democratic.
The socialist, the man who tries to value man for his
ultimate manhood, is to-day very apt to defend the
crudeness of the unwashed, as if there were virtue in
it. And often one meets a sentence like this: "When
the king is to be rebuked you must not ask that task
of the courtier prelate, but must call in some rough,
rude man of the people, some man like Elijah the
Tishbite, or John the Baptist, or Jesus of Nazareth."2
1 Romans xv. 3.
2 Dr. A. S. Crapsey's "Religion and Politics," p. 230.

HIS GRACIOUSNESS 13 1
You have but to think how Elijah or John the
Baptist would have talked with Nicodemus, to under
stand that our Lord's speech and ways were radically
different from theirs. Because Christ made judg
ment, mercy, and faith supreme,1 and made all
other qualities subordinate when He was building
up His kingdom, He did not neglect subordinate
qualities — as most reformers sprung from the people
are apt to do. The radical does well to remember
that courtesy is not the exclusive mark of those
with advantages. Many of the most vulgar boors
in history were bred in noble households and had
an inheritance of gentle ancestors, besides; on the
other hand, some of the most chivalrous of the
world's great men have come from the roughest
surroundings. Courtesy, therefore, cannot be derived
from any outward conventionality. That St. Paul
— with His accurate discernment — felt it to be an
element in Christ's character is the best testimony
that our Lord extracted from His poverty and
humble home those qualities which men are prone to
attach to the worldly, the fortunate, or such as live in
palaces. But we need not depend on the word of St. Paul
alone, significant as that is; for the history of Christ
is full of material to display His courtesy. One might
speak of words and events at very great length, and
always be adding new elements to demonstrate how
marvellous was His gentleness. I may select only
one or two scenes from His life to illustrate the sub
stance of it. 1 St. Matt, xxiii. 23.

132 HIS GRACIOUSNESS
I. His Willingness to See the Point of View of Others
The first element in Christ's character which makes
Him forever the perfect type of gentleman is that He
was willing to look at the world from others' point of
view. There are many illustrations of this x : one in
stance must suffice. One Sabbath day He had healed
a man whose hand was withered.2 The Scribes and
Pharisees were standing about in angry silence, watch
ing Him. The record then proceeds: "Jesus knew
their thoughts."3 One might say, "Why, of course —
His supernatural knowledge would so inform Him,
— what merit of courtesy is in that ?" The exact line
where Christ's human nature was allowed to be dom
inated by His divine is not easy to discover; 4 but, for
our purpose now, it is indifferent whether we affirm or
deny that to know the thoughts of these scowling
enemies required any conscious effort on His part.
Most often it is not difficult, so far as intelligence goes,
for any average man to know what those about him
are thinking: the real difficulty lies in the will. The
boor does not care what his friends and neighbours
think; the gentleman is accustomed to observe; he
makes it his business to see. Should he say what he
supposes a harmless word, and should that word hurt
some one, he notes instantly the faintest of shadows
crossing the face of his victim. He knows what his
word has done; stops short; changes the subject; and
1 St. Mark ii. 8; St. Luke vii. 39, 40; etc.
2 St. Luke vi. 6-10. 3 Ibid. 8.
4 This is inaccurate language, but will convey a meaning; see
note, pp. 91 f.

HIS RESPECT FOR ALL MEN

*33

brings quickly a smile of joy to the troubled eyes.
That is not necessarily a matter for supernatural
insight. It is the willingness to see what any ordinary
mortal can see if he will.
The excuse is often made for blunderers that they
are stupid. They are rarely merely stupid. Most
stupidity is only dense self-centredness, — a snug
content with one's own point of view, and a deter
mination not to look at anything from anyone else's
standpoint. Carlyle was not dull but simply a boor
when he referred to the author of "The Christian Year"
as "some little ape called Keble";1 it was the will that
was frail. On the other hand, when Mill lost the first
volume of "The French Revolution "and came to tell
Carlyle so, he sat for three hours trying to talk of other
subjects. When he had gone, Carlyle said to his
wife, "Well, Mill, poor fellow, is very miserable; we
must try to keep from him how serious this loss is to
us."2 That was the heroic will to see Mill's misery
rather than his own. That day the burly Carlyle was
a gentleman. Christ did not always give joy; His word, His act,
sometimes gave pain — but He never gave pain ruth
lessly. Stern duty, never carelessness, lay at the root
of it. He always "knew men's thoughts."
1 1 . His Respect for All Men
Further, Christ knew no such thing as classes in
society. Simon Peter, the blundering fisherman, felt
that our Lord was giving to him as unreservedly of His
1 Carlyle's "Life in London," vol. ii. p. 267.
2 " Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle," note 4.

134 HIS GRACIOUSNESS
best as He gave to the cultivated Nicodemus.1 There
was condescension as little in one case as in the other.
There was the same dignity, eagerness to serve, for-
getfulness of self, before one as before the other.
Nothing else could explain the transformation of Simon
the Rustic into St. Peter — the social equal of all the
Nicodemuses who ever have lived, to say the very
least. And it was all done in the space of three years.
It was possible because our divine and perfect Master
never patronised His disciples2: He treated them as
friends. So there was no cringing on their part,
though reverence there was in abundance. He was
above all their friend, even their brother.
Nothing more sharply separates the real gentleman
from his imitation than this democratic spirit. "An
aristocracy," it has been admirably said, "leaves only
a restricted sphere for good manners. Outside the
group to which he belongs the gentleman is compelled
by imperious custom to play the part of a superior
being. It has always been distasteful and humiliating
to him. It is only an essentially vulgar nature," con
cludes this critic, "that can really be pleased with the
servility of others. An ideal democracy is a society
in which good manners are universal. . . . It is based
on the worth and dignity of the common man." 3
The man who is entirely a gentleman is the only
person with whom all classes of society can be com
fortable. The present Bishop of London is a great
favourite in the drawing-rooms of the West End of
London. But if possible the torn and weary of the
1 i Peter i. 17. 2 St. John xv. 15.
3 Dr. S. M. Crothers's "The Gentle Reader," p. 225.

HIS RESPECT FOR CONVENTIONALITIES 135
East End like him even better. One less a gentleman
than he, with all the pomp which England gives to a
Bishop, would unconsciously have made them feel
that he was of different clay. Worse still, he himself
might have felt it. By a profound sincerity, he has,
in his Master's way, made them know that he is their
brother. It is perhaps the highest contribution which
Christianity has made to courtesy, that no courtesy
can now be called genuine which has not this Christian
equality within it. It is never a levelling down. The
gentleman does not descend. By a gracious act of
faith he assumes — daring assumption always — that
all men are gentlemen, and therefore at least his equals.
It makes one recall the words of Jesus: " I call you not
servants . . . but I have called you friends; for all
things that I have heard of my Father I have made
known unto you."1
III. His Respect for Conventionalities
Because Christ condemned the Pharisees for their
attention to minute observances,2 people have some
times inferred that He scorned all conventionalities,
either in society or in religion. But even in this
excessive devotion to detail, Jesus condemned not
the scrupulous care for little things, but simply the
fact that the doing of them had crowded out the doing
of essentials.3 He even warned His disciples against
the bad taste of these would-be leaders of the people,
— their making broad phylacteries, their enlarging the
borders of their garments, their keenness for chief
1 St. John xv. 15. 2 St. Matt, xxiii. 13 ff.
3 St. Matt, xxiii. 23, 25.

136 HIS GRACIOUSNESS
places at a feast, and for the conspicuous seats in the
synagogue, their pompous eagerness for titles in public.1
These warnings alone show Christ to have been any
thing but careless of the conventionalities of life. So
far from protesting against them, He even endorsed
the innocent social ways of the people, evidently
because they make the machinery of life move a little
more smoothly and leave place for higher matters; or
because, through concessions to innocent customs
already established, they become the medium for the
expression of unselfishness and love. Only to the
self-centred, conceited man do they seem silly, or
unnecessary, or a nuisance. If they are innocent and
reduce the friction of life, the courteous man will
conform to them and not draw people's attention to
his obstinacy. So Christ taught; so, above all, He
lived from day to day. So it came about that the
carping critics whispered, "Behold a gluttonous man
and a winebibber!"2
One catches the note of His obedience to innocent
conventionalities in all His acts. As He met the
Roman centurion, as He sat at table in the house of
His friend,3 as He went up to the Temple, as He en
tered the village synagogue, He regarded the current
manners and customs as careful people had set the
standard for them. But in nothing is His submission
more clearly shown than at the marriage at Cana.4
1 St. Matt, xxiii. 5-7. 2 St. Matt. xi. 19.
3 St. Luke xi. 38 is not an exception, since the washing was not
for cleanliness, but simply 1 frivolous bit of religious ceremonialism
which Christ wished to discountenance. Cf. St. Matt. xv. 20.
4 St. John ii. 1-11.

HIS KINDNESS 137
The wine had run short. The news came to our
Lord's ear. He knew, of course, the Oriental disgrace
that attaches to even seeming lack of hospitality: his
host could not satisfactorily explain such short
sightedness or penurious measurement of his guests'
appetite. That Christ, to relieve this embarrassment
and misery, performed His first miracle, shows suc
cinctly His estimate of social conventionalities. For
His miracles were performed invariably to teach some
transcendent truth or to help people in dire need; in
no single case were they for personal wonder-working
or for trivial ends. Who can imagine an Elijah or a
John the Baptist interposing at such a moment with
even the feeblest of human aid? Either would have
delivered a homily on the wickedness of drinking wine,
or on the futility of any social usages. Christ not only
conformed, but with all His power helped to maintain
the honour of His host as the habits of the day pre
scribed. It is part of our Saviour's humility that He
conformed to the manners of His people, and so,
again, proclaimed the completeness of His courtesy.
IV. His Kindness
Since courtesy has to do with the interior of living,
and not merely with the externals, it must come sooner
or later to kindness. Two scenes in Christ's life
amply declare the tenderness of His courtesy.
One day the Scribes and Pharisees brought to Jesus
a poor woman who was a notorious sinner.1 They
pushed her before them, and cried out to Him her
1 St. John viii. 3. Though the passage does not belong to St.
John's Gospel, it is certainly historic. Vide supra, pp. 73 f. note.

138 HIS GRACIOUSNESS
shame. They declared that Moses commanded such
to be stoned, and then asked Him for His verdict.
The account then proceeds: "Jesus stooped down, and
with His finger wrote on the ground.1" But since they
continued to besiege Him with questions, He lifted
up Himself, and told them that he who was without
sin among them might cast the first stone. "And
again," says the record, "He stooped down, and with
His finger wrote on the ground."2 This writing on
the ground has always perplexed commentators; but
the simplest explanation is best. What could it have
meant but that He in His infinite kindness wished to
draw from that frail and sinful woman the cruel staring
of her accusers, most of all to avoid adding Himself
to her awful shame by studying her guilty eyes? How
useless it is to speculate what He wrote. It may have
been anything or only meaningless lines; but in any
case the woman was having a respite. The eyes that
had burned the red shame on her cheeks were turned
to His letters in the sand. How delicate, how merci
ful, how masterful was that divine kindness.
Then one must also remember that other day when
a woman in her gratitude broke a box of ointment and
poured it over His head.3 It was exceedingly costly:
it told how lavishly grateful she was for all that He
had done for her. The Twelve, sitting apart, whis
pered together indignantly over the waste: it ought
to have been sold, and the money given to the poor,
— one of them said it quite aloud. Think of the loyal
woman's confusion. Had she done wrong? Had she
been wasteful? Then Jesus interposed with His kind-
1 St. John viii. 6. 2 St. John viii. 8. 3 St. Mark xiv. 3.

HIS KINDNESS

J39

ness. He explained how inexpressibly grateful the
offering was to Him : His suffering and death were only
a few days off, and He needed comfort, sympathy,
just as poor hungry people needed bread. The poor
should be remembered; and He was very grateful that
among the poor He had not been forgotten. She had
given Him the help, the sympathy that He needed to
face His last hard week: He, and His friends for all
time, would never cease to thank her. How the
trembling, frightened woman must have exulted in
that appreciation. It was the essence of perfect kind
ness; for with all its comfort to the generous woman,
it did not unduly embarrass the thrifty, awkward,
well-meaning disciples.
We shudder to think how many clumsy clergymen
in such a case would have read the generous woman
a long sermon on the use of money, on the dangers of
waste, — all parcelled out into divisions and sub
divisions. The woman would have been horribly
confused and humiliated. Her true purpose would
have been totally misinterpreted. And the conscien
tious purveyor of sacred truths would be congratu
lating himself how brave he had been to speak out.
Plainly, he would have been selfishly unkind, and
nothing else; insisting on such blind self-complacency
as to ignore the truth concealed in a generous act.
For kindness is not lying, as some people seem to
think it. It is truth all fused with love.1 Love
1 Cf. "The Creed of Christ" (anonymous, 1905), pp. 204 f.: "The
tirielKeia, or 'sweet reasonableness' of Christ, to which one of the
most gifted of modern critics has called our attention, pervaded all
the strata of His being, and is in a sense the secret of his many-sided-

140 HIS GRACIOUSNESS
catches up the deed and understands its true meaning,
— so kind words are the result. Unkindness is preju
dice fused with selfishness. Selfishness examines the
deed, understands not a thread of it, and blurts out
its ignorant rebuke. Our Lord was chary with re
bukes; true, He lashed the Scribes and Pharisees, but
only when every kindness had been exhausted. His
rebukes were for stubborn opposition only. For all
weakness, for mistakes, for ill-judged words and deeds,
for all intended goodness however feeble, — for all
these He had only kindness, ranging all the way from
forgiveness to the most gracious appreciation.
The courtesy of Christ made Him willing to look at
the world as others saw it, to blot artificial class dis
tinctions from His mind, to observe ordinary con
ventionalities of civilisation, and it made Him un
speakably kind. To the chance passer-by the outward
symbol of a character all ablaze with a consuming love
was the graciousness of Christ.
ness, for it enabled each of the noble qualities of His nature to reach
its maximum of development without interfering with the develop
ment of any of the others, — each in turn being so gracious (one
might almost say) that, however vigorous might be its own growth,
it could not allow itself to overshadow its neighbors or otherwise
aggrandize itself at their expense. It is owing to the all-pervading
presence of this subtle virtue that in Christ, alone among men, we
have faith without dogmatism, enthusiasm without fanaticism,
strength without violence, idealism without visionariness, naturalness
without materialism, freedom without license, self-sacrifice without
asceticism, purity without austerity, saintliness without morbidity, a
light which was too strong to dazzle, a fire which was too intense to
flame. The inward harmony of his nature was, in fine, perfect."
("The most gifted of modern critics" is, of course, Matthew Arnold;
see "Literature and Dogma," p. 139.)

CHAPTER VII
His Gladness
A GOOD many years ago it was common for
severe persons to point out that Christ never
smiled, never laughed. There is record, the argument
ran, that He wept, but there is no record of any mirth.
Further, it was said, there is no trace of humour in any
of His recorded words: they are all equally solemn,
almost to tears. Therefore Christ — was the con
clusion — never made merry and was glad.
It is significant that Christ's perpetual solemnity is
no longer emphasised. There is a feeling that such
emphasis has given people wrong ideas of Christ. It
has given them the impression that He who was divine
was not quite human ; was unnatural ; and so not only
dropped from His own Life what seems an innocent
and essential part of living, but also disapproved it in
others. Thus the natural gaiety and joy of life came
at one time to be classed almost among the sins.
Many a man has looked up to the austere Master, and
by these descriptions has found Him so far removed
from human sympathy that until some hard sorrow
smote him he dared not seek the friendship of Jesus.
Seventy-five years ago a radical theologian 1 ventured
1 W. E. Channing, Works, p. 577.
141

142 HIS GLADNESS
the assertion that "religion is not at variance with
occasional mirth"; the very guardedness of the words
shows how unusual they must then have sounded.
To-day, I fancy, people think of Christ's ordinary
mood as not solemn, but optimistic, serene, self-
possessed.1 There is a distinct feeling that the thought
of His invariable sadness has done harm, and so has
misrepresented His real character. Has not the time
come to ask boldly whether among the traits of His
perfection we must not include something more than
even optimism, serenity, self-possession: may He not
have been light-hearted?
This leads us at once to inquire why it is that the
writers of the Gospels should have omitted mention
of such light-heartedness if it really existed in our
Lord's nature. Two possible reasons suggest them
selves immediately. First, it must be remembered
that those who wrote the accounts of Christ's life had
to choose from a great store of facts and words. Writ-
1 This trait in Christ's character is receiving increasing emphasis
in our day. Perhaps it is one of the contributions which the present
age is making towards understanding Him. Cf., e.g., Wernle's
"Beginnings of Christianity" (tr. Bienemann), vol. i. pp. 104-5:
"The next characteristic of the piety of Jesus is a combination of
opposites which is quite peculiar to it — the union of the blithesome-
ness and innocence of childhood with the courage and the serious
earnestness of manhood. ... It is probably impossible for any one
to form a conception of the childlike gladness of Jesus. His life was
passed in sunshine and in joy, in childlike trust toward God, in glad
exultation over Nature and good men. . . . All moody and self-
tormenting thoughts, all carking cares, everything done under com
pulsion, all unnatural excitation of one's feelings, is entirely alien to
Him. He possessed the full freedom and freshness of an entirely
unspoilt and simple and great soul that rested in God's love."

HIS GLADNESS 143
ten as these books certainly were by the inspiration
of the Spirit, they were nevertheless written by simple-
hearted men, who exercised, of necessity, the choice
of what should be said, what omitted. Then, in the
second place, it would be reasonable for them to omit
all mention of those more intimate and careless mo
ments when Jesus sat among His friends, and putting
aside, for the time, His greatest work, entered into
their simple joys. It is natural that they should
omit such accounts for lack of space or time to tell
them. It is natural that they should omit them, also,
because these writers were of that simplest class of
men who ordinarily cannot see as much of greatness
or divinity in what is merry and glad as in what is
gloomy or sorrowful. One suspects that they might
have feared that it would be misunderstood if they
told of the sympathy with which the Saviour, in His
divine love, entered into their trivial joys. At any
rate, the same class of people to-day, in telling of one
whom they revere, are wont to pass over such mention
as unimportant when compared with the serious
achievements of life. So perhaps they are, but they
are not denied because unrecorded. The candid
scholar would expect no record of the gladness of Christ
from the plain and serious writers of the Four Gospels.
Another objection that must be met is the impres
sion that there is no trace of humour in Christ's re
corded words. This, however, is an assumption far
from proved. Nothing changes so radically, from
generation to generation, as the point of view in
human beings from which this or that aspect of life
seems humorous. As we turn the leaves of some

144 HIS GLADNESS
light-hearted writer who among Greeks or Romans
centuries ago attempted to cheer his fellows with
pleasant mirth, we find little or nothing wherewith
to make merry. It all sounds commonplace or serious;
yet we may have ample evidence that the words ex
cited the eager merriment of the people for whom they
were written. There are even humorous words and
phrases in the century just past that have lost their
pristine joy, and have passed into the solemn vocabu
lary of every-day living. There are not many people
to whom the ordinary page of Charles Lamb appeals
as it appealed to people of Lamb's day. Remember
ing all these things, it is not strange that if there were
humour lurking in the recorded words of Christ, we,
after nearly nineteen hundred years, should not be able
to discover it. It would not be surprising if for the
people who heard the words there were infinite humour
here and there in those solemn and scathing invectives
against the Pharisees.1 It is, one suspects, because
the solemnity, humour, and pathos are so richly
mingled in this Philippic, that one always reads it
with such keen valuation. Must the people not have
laughed outright as they heard of the fussy people
who cautiously strain out gnats — and then serenely
swallow camels? 2 There is the same possible sug
gestion in such broad contrasts as that about the
camel which can go through the tiny eye of a needle 3
as easily as a rich man can enter the kingdom of
heaven.4 It was no less solemn because tinged with
1 St. Matt, xxiii. 2 Ibid. 24.
3 The best exegesis seems to make this a literal needle and not the
famous "little gate." 4 St. Mark x. 25.

HIS GLADNESS 145
that delicate touch which we call humour. The pom
pous Pharisee going up to the Temple to thank God
that he was so unlike other men 1 probably caused a
smile to light up the faces of those who first heard
the parable. So we may dare to believe from an
investigation of Christ's words that there were
many times when He was merry and glad in the
same simple way in which His followers to-day believe
that they have a religious right to express the same
gladness. But should all this fail to convince one of the pos
sibility, let the greatest of the parables be recalled, —
the Parable of the Prodigal Son. The Elder Son
there remonstrates with the father for ordering a feast
because his poor renegade brother has returned.
Now recall the father's reply: "It was meet," he said,
"that we should make merry and be glad."2 By no
possible interpretation can this father be anyone else
than our Father in heaven — He whose character
Jesus came to declare by His own Life. The Master
who said that of the father of the Prodigal Son had
surely a place for light-heartedness in His own perfec
tion, — all the elder brothers of theology to the con
trary notwithstanding. So far as the New Testament
can show, it does seem as if we should have to admit
that our Lord was not one whit more the Man of
Sorrows than He was the Man of Infinite Natural
Joy- Now that our records, to say the least, allow us to
put the question, we may ask what valid reasons there
are for believing in the gladness of Christ.
'St. Luke xviii. 9-14. 2St. Luke xv. 32.

146 HIS GLADNESS
I. The Demand of Christ's Humanity
The first reason lies in the demand of our Lord's
humanity. We are obliged constantly to remind
ourselves that He who was divine was absolutely
human. He was not only a man, but a great man;
and however else He must be classed, He must be
classed among great men. As we gaze up and down
the lists of great men through the ages, we find certain
common characteristics in the greatest of them, by
which we say that such and such traits belong to a
great man. As we study these traits which thus seem
to belong to the life of great men, we feel that they
must have had some place in the life of the Great Man
of all time. For He gathered up the richest parts of
all human living, and put the stamp of His perfection
upon them : He gathered up the greatnesses of humanity
and offered them to God. Remembering this, and
casting one's thought over the lives of great men,
and recalling such diverse characters as Socrates and
Luther and Lincoln — men living under different
conditions and in widely separated ages, but all con
fessedly great — we at once feel the power which
light-heartedness plays in the most profound, the most
serious, the greatest living. Let it be only a sugges
tion that the Greatest Man must have had such gifts
of light-heartedness as the great men of the ages have
had, what possibilities are at once imagined for the
Saviour's seasons of being glad in the human way of
making merry. We think at once of the brief account
of His going with His mother and His friends to the
marriage at Cana; we think of those peaceful, intimate

DEMAND OF CHRIST'S HUMANITY 147
days at Bethany with Lazarus, Mary, and Martha.
We ask whether these were not seasons when the over
whelming cares of His mission to the world were, in
their more solemn aspect, laid aside, that He might
be light-hearted with the nature and the humanity
which He loved and with which He sympathised
completely. Nor may we forget that light-heartedness in great
men has made possible for them a greater degree of
seriousness, because it has made them normal, and,
in the finest sense, human. There are two classes of
people who are wholly unfitted for the serious business
of life. The first class is never able to rise above its
trifling; it turns the whole world into one vast jest,
and refuses to do or say or think anything that can
receive any valuable interpretation. We all know
what stumbling-blocks such persons are in the path
of any worthy endeavour. The second class of people
unfitted for serious living are those who are perpetually
solemn, who are as gloomy and perplexed when they
have lost a button as when they learn that a dear
friend has been proved a thief. They refuse to recog
nise that some inconveniences in life are so petty
that they had best be met with a smile, and then
forgotten; so that when the real sorrows come they
may loom up in their just proportions and be met
with the bravery which they require. The man who I
looks out upon all the varied experiences of life with!
the same invariable seriousness is abnormal. He;
cannot recognise the due proportion of things ; he does
not know life ; he is useless either for an emergency or <
for steady effort. To be greatly serious, human

148 HIS GLADNESS
experience teaches us, a man must know how to be
light-hearted. We may well doubt whether the con
stantly serious Savonarola could have endured the
almost crushing opposition of wordly and papal power,
the isolation of the Wartburg, and the fierce trial at
Worms, had he been called upon to do the work of
Luther. The man who could face, seemingly alone,
both empire and church, and say, "So help me God,
— I can do nothing else," had steadied his nerves, in
days or hours not long before, by being, like a trusting
child, light-hearted. So, too, we may wonder who
but Abraham Lincoln with his divine gift of light-
heartedness could have faced the fiery responsibility
that cast itself upon the president in the darkest days
of our national history. The man who could write
the Second Inaugural Address, who could feel as his
own the sorrow of a nation, was also the man who
could be merry as only great men know how to be
merry. So, we reflect, he won the power to accept
from God the freshness and the courage to meet the
awful responsibilities that confronted him.
Now must not He who performed the great task of
the world have deigned to receive from His humanity
any help it had to give? In the week of His Passion
it could have been no accident, no mere convenience,
that led Him out of the city each night and brought
Him to the home at Bethany. As He received at the
door the smile of greeting He must have eased His
heart of its intolerable burden of suspense. We
cannot think of His being boisterous at any time,
because of the poise of His qualities; but we may
think of Him, even then, as becoming light-hearted

CONSECRATION OF HUMAN QUALITIES 149
— somewhat as He had been as a boy years before in
the simple home at Nazareth. It is altogether legiti
mate to believe that these hours, or even moments, of
gladness at Bethany fortified His strength to meet
the storm in Jerusalem at the last.
II. The Demand for Christ to Consecrate All Human
Qualities to God
Since Jesus Christ has through the medium of a
human body lived a perfect life, it has been impossible
for any rational man to call the body evil. Yet the
tendency to dualism seems ineradicable. From the
beginning till now men have arisen to separate some
necessary and natural human traits from any divinely
implanted instinct, and have denied any possible way
of serving God by their exercise. One of these traits
is gladness, light-heartedness. But if we give gladness
its true place in life, it then becomes part of religion.
Such an attitude consecrates our joy to God. We are
His, not only when we are solemn, but also when we
are merry. Is it not natural to think that Christ
who brought humanity into the heart of God led the
way in this consecration of the lighter moods of man
kind? Because most of us are fortunate enough to have a
Puritan strain in our inheritance, we are also unfor
tunate enough to inherit a dread of allowing light-
heartedness a place in religion. A distinguished
religious leader decided not to say Grace at his table
because just before and just after Grace the members
of the family were laughing and talking of all the
trivial commonplaces of existence. He therefore felt

150 HIS GLADNESS
it a sort of sacrilege to select such a moment to thank
God for His goodness. The heresy of the dualism
here is evident: it is to declare that the common joys
do not belong to God. What if there be laughter
before the serious moment of remembrance, and
laughter afterward, is it not reasonable to believe that
this upward glance of the soul is as acceptable to God
as is the smile of the child when, in his absorbing play,
he suddenly glances up to his mother whom he loves,
and, smiling for one instant into her eyes, declares
thereby the depth of his love? Surely God is not
dragged down in our hearts' devotion; rather, by this
act, the trivial joys of life are exalted to a plane where
they also can be offered to God.
[ There is an instinct, growing more insistent, that
i we recognise Christ as the Man of Light-heartedness as
: well as the Man of Sorrow, because, in His perfection,
He must have given all life, whether in shadow or in
'¦ sunshine, to His Father.
III. The Demand of Christ's Human Sympathy
It is necessary to rememBer that Christ entered into
the lives about Him with a sympathy which radiated
in every direction. Because men crave sympathy
most in hard sorrow, the records dwell on the sym
pathy of Christ given to pain, grief, and honest peni
tence. Psychology is teaching us to observe that
there are two chief avenues to the appreciation and
understanding of the human heart : one is through the
great sorrows, the other is through the smaller joys.
Therefore it is that he who is light-hearted has ad
mission to many a life whose secrets are barred to all

CHRIST'S HUMAN SYMPATHY

ISI

others. The cold dignity which by its presence chills
the laughter of companions — as the freezing north
wind puts to silence the gaiety of the mountain brook
— keeps the man who possesses it from entering some
of the deepest parts of humanity. Sympathy for
light-heartedness — rejoicing with those who rejoice
— causes all life that is natural and wholesome to
open many a beautiful secret. We cannot imagine
that the innocent laughter of children or of men ceased
as our Master crossed the threshold. His sympathy
was complete. Probably everyone has known the
unnaturally solemn person, who, when youthful mem
bers of a household begin their mirth, withdraws to
a dark corner, from which, after a bit of innocent
laughter, there comes now and again a melancholy
sigh. Each sigh makes the sunshine for the glad ones
a little dull; and the links of sympathy which have
bound them together appreciably loosen their hold.
There is the consciousness that there is someone under
that roof who does not quite sympathise with the
whole goodness of humanity. Such reflections con
vince the follower of Christ that a Master who did all
right acts to identify Himself with humanity, not only
wept at the tomb of Lazarus, but certainly at the
table of that Bethany home, when all was serene and
glad, returned each eager smile, and responded in
stantly to each musical note of a blithesome humanity.
One of the most devout men America has produced,1
whose experience was constantly deepening through
fourscore and ten years, and whose communion with
God seemed to his friends singularly close and real,
1 The late Thomas M. Clark, Bishop of Rhode Island.

152 HIS GLADNESS
dropped the remark one day that he thought men
would be surprised, on coming at last into the more
conscious presence of God in another world, to dis
cover that their Almighty Father is genial. Dare we
not believe that the trait of light-heartedness, which
a Christian consciousness is more and more finding in
Jesus, is not more a trait of His humanity than of His
divinity? 1
1Cf. W. Bousset's "Jesus" (tr. Janet P. Trevelyan) pp. 27 ff.:
" Even when we compare Jesus with the prophets of the Old Testa
ment, the same difference becomes apparent. . . . Where among
those dark, tremendous personages do we find features so sunny, or
so purely human, as with Jesus? Where do we read of a prophet
who called the children to him in the street and fondled them ? Jesus'
heart warmed to the children, to the sunshine in their eyes and the
magic of the spring in their hearts, no less than to the birds of the air
and the flowers of the field; He loved to go down into the quiet and
happiness of the people's homes; He would let Martha go busily about
her household work while Mary sat listening at His feet, and He re
joiced with the joyous at weddings and festivals. . . . Hence the
charm of infinite wealth and infinite many-sidedness encircles Him.
. . . Yet we must not forget that both sides of the character of Jesus
were fused in one. However ordinary the circumstances, Jesus
Himself never is ordinary. Like the sun, which sheds its gentle
warmth upon the earth, and yet remains the sun, clothed in unique
beauty, overwhelming force, and raging heat, the least part of which
would suffice to consume the life it created, so does Jesus appear
among His surroundings .''

CHAPTER VIII
His Forgiveness
FORGIVENESS has often been called "Christ's
most striking innovation in morality." He found
the world saying relentlessly, "An eye for an eye, a
tooth for a tooth." Jew, Greek, and Roman, alike,
cherished what was called righteous resentment, and
awaited opportunity for revenge. Even the amiable
Cicero so gloated over the death of an enemy1 that he
dated a letter "the 560th day after the battle" in
which this enemy was killed. The pagan boast was
that one had done one's friends as much good as one
had harmed one's enemies. It was the badge of a
manly character. This ideal, in spite of such lapses
as duelling, has been completely overturned by the
Christian law of forgiveness. He is said to show signs
of being a Christian who, in difficult circumstances,
freely forgives an offender.
What Christ taught about forgiveness would seem
exaggerated if we did not have in His own acts the
vivid illustration of His precepts.
To St. Peter's question, " How oft shall my brother
sin against me, and I forgive him? until seven times?"
He replied, "I say not unto thee, until seven times:
1 Clodias, killed in the battle of Bovillae.
i53

154 HIS FORGIVENESS
but, until seventy times seven."1 That means un
limited forgiveness. In the Sermon on the Mount
He gave details: "Love your enemies, bless them that
curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray
for them which despitefully use you, and persecute
you."2 Earnest men, feeling the transcendent diffi
culties of forgiving certain injuries, have tried to find
here Oriental hyperbole; but however a comparison
of passages may aid them, they are met at last with
the insuperable obstacle, — the Lord Himself forgave
in just this sweeping way.
It is to the acts of Christ, therefore, rather than to
His precepts, that we must turn. Thus we shall best
see what forgiveness contributed to His character.
Some of these acts of forgiveness are largely personal,
touching sins affecting almost exclusively the indi
vidual, Christ Jesus. Others are toward sins against
the world, against God, so that His forgiveness of
these sins implies an authority more than human.
It is impossible to say that one set of forgivenesses
is human, the other set divine; for both alike declare
the perfection of His humanity and the tender mercy
of God. I. His Forgiveness of Personal Injury
Personal injuries are inflicted by three classes of
people, — by friends, by careless bystanders, and by
deliberate enemies. The records contain striking
instances of our Lord's forgiving all such offenders.
i. The friends of Christ were preeminently the
Twelve. His gentle forgiveness of all their jarring
'St. Matt, xviii. 21, 22. 2 St. Matt. v. 44, 45.

FORGIVENESS OF PERSONAL INJURY 155
words, when one remembers the sensitiveness of Christ,
is noteworthy. It is hard, because of the natural
indignation of the Evangelists (which to a degree
colours their narrative), to discover exactly Christ's
attitude to Judas: but the exceedingly forbearing
answer 1 when Judas suggested that Mary's ointment
should have been sold for the poor, indicates the
affectionate consideration which He had for the traitor
even then — when the betrayal was very near. To
any other the vulgarity of James and John, asking
for thrones in His kingdom, would have been nervously
irritating.2 He did not rebuke them; but explained
carefully why He could not so reward their love. At
an earlier time, when all the disciples had been talking
among themselves who should be greatest, He had
merely taken a child, and had given him as a type of
true greatness.3 And how, with no least trace of
bitterness, His heart yearned toward them all is shown
by His great prayer uttered just as they were going
forth to betray, to deny, to desert Him, and, like
cowards, to leave Him alone.4
The most conspicuous example of Christ's forgive
ness of a friend is His treatment of Simon Peter.
Peter's crudities 5 were evidently blotted out by His
intense loyalty to his Lord. But to have a friend so
profuse in his protests of loyalty — he had said that
he was willing to die with Him — and then to have
that friend not only desert, but grossly deny all friend
ship, — that is straining forgiveness to its limit.
1 St. John xii. 7 and 8. 2 St. Mark x. 37.
3 St. Mark ix. 34. 4 St. John xvii.
5 St. Mark viii. 31; ix. 5; etc.

156 HIS FORGIVENESS
Jesus was alone, insulted, despised; Peter loved Him
still, — why then did he not stand by Him in His
greatest need? Had he any special loyalty to the
High Priest? Was he too proud to associate with the
poor Galilean? Had Jesus slighted him? Not one
of these reasons appealed to him. Peter's love was
absorbed by fear of his own petty safety: he might be
involved in the same condemnation. To know that
a dear friend had denied ever knowing Him — and
then to forgive instantly — that was the meaning of
Christ's turning and looking upon Peter1: that simple
motion told Peter that even a sin so great as his was
not treasured up against him. The proof for this lies
not only in Peter's tears, but also in the meeting one
morning by the lake after the Resurrection.2 There
the Saviour called three times upon St. Peter to tell
Him that he loved Him. At the last, the account
reads, "Peter was grieved because He said unto him
the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto
Him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest
that I love thee."3 Christ did know that Peter loved
Him through all inconsistencies and denials. The
insult, the treachery, the disloyalty were as a flash;
the love was eternal. For that love's sake Christ
forgave Peter all.
It is important to see that Christ's forgiveness in
this respect is purely rational. To forgive the injury
1 St. Luke xxii. 61.
2 St. John xxi. For assurance that this chapter is St. John's, see
Lightfoot's "Biblical Essays," pp. 194 ff.; and for recent confirma
tion of it, Dr. Sanday's "Criticism of the Fourth Gospel," p. 63,
pp. 81 f. 3 St. John xxi. 13.

FORGIVENESS OF PERSONAL INJURY 157
of a friend seems like yielding honour to indolence or
callous good nature. Most men like to display what
they call dignity, reserve, self-respect: this is the
secret which made the gentleman of one hundred
years ago feel that he must fight a duel with a dear
friend who had insulted him. The only rational way
to meet the injuries of a friend is to account all he does
in the light of his love. It is at any rate the Christian
way to meet such injuries; and that means quick
forgiveness. 2. There was a second class of people who, in Christ's
career, needed forgiveness. They were neither friends
nor enemies, they were curious about Him when He
was near, but quickly forgot Him, — they were simply
the people who chanced to be standing by as He went
on His way through life. These people sent out
against His peace many irritations, which were almost
anonymous. It was the offence of the crowds.
People came running about Christ; they gasped
their vulgar wonderment ; and then ran down the street
to gossip about Him, to misinterpret Him, and then
to forget Him. When the vigorous hostile leaders
gave out their plots, these indifferent souls threw in
the weight of whatever influence they had, not be
cause they were His enemies, but because they wished
to be on the side of the authorities. They helped to
bring Jesus to His death, but they were only as bits
of paper in the wind, blown hither and yon by every
gust. They were the same people who, with crazed
enthusiasm, would, a little before, have made Him
king. They were in danger of bringing on the crisis
before our Lord had completed His mission. What

158 HIS FORGIVENESS
was His attitude toward this offensive mob? Is it
not all summed up by His lament over the city, "O
Jerusalem, Jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, and
stoneth them that are sent unto her! how often would
I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen
gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would
not!"1 There was neither grudge nor prejudice. He
scarcely so much as forgave, because the tone is one
of infinite pity, rather than forgiveness; He walked
always so far above them that their offences gave no
personal sting.
Besides this general attitude of the crowds we may
note two specific insults from this class. A Pharisee
named Simon had invited Christ to dine with him.2
The motive for the invitation is not recorded, but the
context implies that Simon was merely anxious to see
the famous Rabbi. Clearly he did not treat our
Saviour as a friend, or even as an honoured guest; for
he offered Christ none of the usual civilities incumbent
upon a courteous host. Most men would have counted
the omission a towering insult: for it indicated that
the guest was there only to be stared at and investi
gated. It was not hostility, but indifference. When
the penitent woman came in and anointed His feet
with ointment, tears, and kisses, Simon was clearly
shocked. Our Lord saw this, and with a gentle
ness that still clings to the words, contrasted the
kindness of the woman with Simon's neglect. There
'St. Matt, xxiii. 37: "Jerusalem," here, must be interpreted as
the victim of the "Scribes and Pharisees," not the Scribes and
Pharisees themselves.
2 St. Luke vii. 36, 40.

FORGIVENESS OF PERSONAL INJURY 159
is ample evidence that Christ felt the neglect, but
there is not the tiniest trace of resentment. Simon
was to Him one of the indifferent bystanders who did
not comprehend; and Christ forgave him.
One other specific case will be enough. It is the
most gracious of all, because at the time Christ's own
troubles were so thick about Him. Among the mob
which came to arrest Him at Gethsemane was Malchus,
a servant of the High Priest. He was there evidently
not so much from choice as from the command of his
master. He was one "of the crowd." The impetuous
Peter drew his sword and cut off one of this man's ears.
Instantly Christ turned, and, by a touch, healed the
wound.1 To call in His supernatural power at such a
time for a poor bystander shows the fulness of His
forgiveness for the whole class of which Malchus was
a type.
Here again we may see the element of rationality in
Christ's forgiveness. The insults were so nearly
anonymous that His natural dignity could not pay
the least heed to the offender. How difficult such
forgiveness is, however, we all know, for we have all
experienced the sting and hurt of such careless and
stupid injuries, coming upon us from the bystander
and the stranger. Unknown as the man may be,
ignorant as he may be of what he has done, we single
him out for burning thought. When Christ forgave
such people, it was, we may be sure, a test of His
perfection. 3. Christ said to His disciples, "Forgive your ene
mies." It must have sounded unintelligible, impos-
1 St. Luke xxii. 51.

160 HIS FORGIVENESS
sible. An enemy is often a man who would push you
into hell itself with less compunction than he would
kill a fly. How can one be expected to forgive an
offender so venomous as that? The only answer is
that Christ did it.
After Jesus of Nazareth had become famous He
returned to the home of His boyhood. On the Sab
bath His old companions and neighbours gathered in
the synagogue to hear Him. They were vexed, in
dignant, "filled with wrath."1 Naturally His fame,
His power, mocked their provincial obscurity. But
to have a person so familiar to their knowledge say
such high words as Jesus said in the synagogue that
day was beyond endurance. They tried to kill Him:
they were plainly His avowed enemies. Notwith
standing, after an interval, He went again to Naza
reth,2 and again spoke in the synagogue. Certainly
the narrative shows that He yearned to do some great
kindness for those who, in His own town, persisted in
being His foes. At last He gave up the attempt.
" He could there do no mighty work, save that He laid
His hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them."3
That He "marvelled"4 at their stubbornness demon
strates how thoroughly He erased from His mind
their former hostility. He forgave His enemies in
Nazareth. Then there were the bigoted middle-class Pharisees
and the disdainful officialdom, represented by the
Sadducees. The Pharisees began the attack: they
1 St. Luke iv. 28.
2 St. Matt. xiii. 54-58; St. Mark vi. i-6a.
3 St. Mark vi. 5. 4 Ibid. 6.

FORGIVENESS OF PERSONAL INJURY 161
were meanly trying to catch and trip Him in His talk,
because they believed Him a heretic bent on the de
struction of their religious customs. The Sadducees
had political fears, because the populace was in danger
of making Him the centre of an insurrection. So
"politics and religion" — the two bitterest persecu
tors in the world — were rampantly and wantonly
attacking His safety. He saw it all very early, but
note how fully, how kindly, He answered their ques
tions. The invectives, for the most part, were held
back till the very last day of His public ministry.1
At every turn He pleaded, taught, tried to persuade.
This was the continuous act of patient forgiveness
covering the months of His ministry.
At the trial at the end, even the Roman Pilate, used
to stoicism, was amazed by the calmness of Christ.2
This calmness, to amaze a Roman, had in it that
element of forgiveness which creates a serenity alto
gether different from the hard indifference of the best
philosophers. Then came the end. Our Lord was
on His cross. The pain was real pain. His friends
and His mother were overcome with grief. For His
own pain and for the sorrows of His dearest ones, His
enemies were responsible. Did He speak of these
enemies then? Yes. Did He say that He would
forgive all others, but not them? Did He say that
He would forgive them, though His Father would not?
Did He say that because He was Son of God He would
be utterly generous, and so forgive them? We know
that His spirit climbed above all these stages. He
did not so much as stop to say that He forgave them,
1 Tuesday: St. Matt, xxiii. 2 St. Mark xv. 4, 5.

1 62 HIS FORGIVENESS
He — the man Jesus, feeling as a poor mortal the
agony of death — He cried out in prayer to the Father
in heaven, — "Father, forgive them; for they know
not what they do." x
That prayer shows the climax of Christ's forgive
ness. He prayed that even those who had deliberately
marred His happiness should be held in love by the
Father. There is no condition, no limitation. Nor
is this all. His prayer was not merely the expression
of benevolence; it contained a rational explanation.
There is nothing arbitrary about it. These enemies
were to be forgiven because they did not know, did
not understand, — they were really not to blame.
Poor, pitiful men! they thought that He had come to
destroy religion and to ruin His country. The mis
take was horrible, but it was a mistake. Forgiveness
made Him pity His murderers, even while He read
the sorrow, which their guilt had caused, on His mother's
face. That is forgiveness indeed.
II. His Forgiveness of Sin against God
Though the forgiveness of which I have spoken
indicates the character of the man, Jesus of Nazareth,
it also tells an abounding message of the character of
God, whose Life is revealed in the Life of Jesus. But
there are other acts in Christ's Life which more directly
interpret the divine forgiveness.
i. When Jesus knew that a soul was penitent, He
risked all chance of being called a blasphemer, and
pronounced the sins of that person forgiven. When
1 Commentators essentially agree that this could not refer to the
Roman soldiers, but to His real enemies.

FORGIVENESS OF SIN AGAINST GOD 163
Zacchaeus, the flinty, dishonest tax-collector, announced
his intention to be honest, and to restore all ill-won
money, Christ said, "To-day is salvation come to this
house." x That was an assurance of forgiveness.
When the woman, who had once been very bad,
showed her mingled love and sorrow by washing the
Saviour's feet with her tears, Christ said definitely,
" Her sins, which are many, are forgiven." 2 When,
one day, four men brought a man sick of the palsy
into a crowded house, that Jesus might heal him, He
greeted the sick man with the words: "Son, thy sins
are forgiven." 3 The condensed account of the story
says that Jesus said this because He saw the faith of
these men. The way that He saw that faith is every
thing. We may only surmise it ; but we must imagine
something of it. Was the man on the bed a man
whose face told first of a reckless past, and then told
— what many faces tell after long illness — that in
the long watches of the night the soul behind that
face had been drawing nearer and nearer to God, had
been understanding His Love, had been wishing
vaguely, intensely for a means to live another kind of
life than that poor threadbare life of the past? I do
not mean to intimate that anyone might have read
that pathetic, beautiful story; but I feel sure that the
story was there for the eyes of Jesus to read. And so
He said first what the invalid wished more than health
— He said that his past was blotted from the books
of God.
Just one more instance: at the end of all, when Christ
and the thieves were on the crosses at Calvary, He
1 St. Luke xix. g. 2 St. Luke vii. 47. 3 St. Mark ii. 5.

1 64 HIS FORGIVENESS
said to the penitent thief, "To-day shalt thou be with
me in Paradise." J None of these people, so far as we
can tell, had committed any injury to the man Jesus.
When He forgave them, therefore, He spoke for the
Father in heaven. He was forgiving men's sins as
God forgives sins. The condition was the condition
illustrated in the Parable of the Prodigal Son: how
ever wasted, however bad, life might have been, to
turn to go to the Father meant that the Father would
at once turn to greet the penitent with all the tender
ness of a father's love.
2. It is natural to ask what this forgiveness accom
plished in the penitent. No better answer can be
found than in the story of the woman taken in great
sin and brought to Christ for judgment. Her guilt
was certain. If she had been hard and bitter, to stand
in the presence of Jesus must have brought tender and
white desires into her soiled heart. She must have
studied His face to see what such a Man, so unlike
any she had ever seen before, would say of her. To
be condemned by one so considerate, so brilliantly
kind, would be awful. She must have longed for a
new life! At last He said, "I do not condemn thee:
go, and sin no more." 2
Here, I think, we have the indication of what hap
pened to those whom Christ forgave: they had power
"to go, and sin no more." When this woman saw in
the Saviour's face the hideous character of her sin,
because it awakened there such pity, we cannot sup
pose that she stopped to think of the consequences of
her evil past. That the respectable should continue
1 St. Luke xxiii. 43. 2 St. John viii. 11.

FORGIVENESS OF SIN AGAINST GOD 165
to sneer, that they should forbid their children to
touch her, that they should refuse to be in the same
room with her, — all this was then a very small matter,
bitter as it was. What she wished to be rid of, then,
was the sin. She wished the hideous desire to fade
away. She wished the power to resist every tempta
tion. The pity of the Saviour's face, the chance of
gaining His approving smile in the end, — this mem
ory, this ambition, should go with her. That day,
by the Saviour's forgiveness, her sins, which had been
scarlet, became white as snow. We may believe that
Christ's forgiveness did for the souls of Palestine what
His healing touch did for weary bodies : it stopped the
course of sin, as His touch checked disease.
3. A very anxious question is whether Christ placed
any limit to His forgiveness, and thereby, as a conse
quence, to God's forgiveness. He did place such a
limit, in the sin against the Holy Spirit.1 This, He
said, could be forgiven neither in this world nor in the
world to come. What this sin is, we cannot say
definitely; but the Christian consciousness is prac
tically unanimous in ascribing it to such persistent
refusal to yield to God's love, under full and wide
knowledge of that love, that the soul is hardened
beyond any possible change. The best, most loving
appeal has been made and rejected. Nothing more
can be offered. Should this persistent " Prodigal Son"
turn in the last eternity, "the Loving Father" will
surely come to meet him even then. But the horror
of this sin is that by its nature it never can have
the desire or the will to start. By its own self-won
1 St. Matt, xii. 32.

1 66 HIS FORGIVENESS
coldness and hardness it has shut itself out from the
sunshine, from love, from God.
With this exception, the forgiveness of Jesus Christ
on earth gives us the most unbounded hope for the
ultimate plans of God. How far God will come to
meet a returning humanity we know by His Love re
vealed in the Cross.

CHAPTER IX
His Scorn
BECAUSE Christ was the tender physician in the
presence of all degraded people who admitted
the sickness of their souls, because He was patient and
forgiving with many of the worst types of humanity,
there has come to be a feeling that He was always
tenderness, and that the Lamb is the only symbol of
His character. To this end many passages in the
records of His Life are softened, or altogether ex
plained away. Such violence to the documents is not
only unscientific, it is irreverent. We must face the
facts as history records them. He was not always
gentle : He was often fierce as the lightning.
It is quite certain that He had no personal anger;
that is, He did not resent insults or wrongs done to
Him as an individual man. But in so far as opposi
tion to Him kept men from the happy life to which
He tried to lead His people, He did resent men's
opposition. The resentment was official. Moreover,
as we shall see, the resentment was often against those
whom He loved; and, so, though it was, in a real sense,
anger, anger is perhaps not the best word to describe
His attitude. It was never that slow, sullen rage,
which often is suggested by the word "anger"; but
167

1 68 HIS SCORN
was always a quick, fiery intensity, by its very
brilliance and heat calculated to burn the sin to
ashes. For these reasons the best word available is
scorn. In the attempt to disclaim for Christ any wrath
against persons, it has sometimes been argued that
this scorn was for the sin rather than the sinner. The
sophistry of such a distinction was as far as possible
from our Lord's spirit. If sin was disowned by its
victim, Christ counted it separated; but if the sin was
cherished, tolerated, Christ counted it identical with
the sinner. His resentment, His contempt, His anger,
His scorn, was for the concrete, personal sinners of His
day, not merely for any abstracted qualities which
hung about their lives.
People who think that they follow Christ, some
times become insensible to sin through an exaggerated
tenderness for bad people. They reach the depth
described by the Psalmist, "Neither do they abhor
anything that is evil." 1 Because bad men are toler
ated, excused, their villanous influence spreads.
Christ was as a surgeon, cutting evil men out of the
great organism of humanity, to check the process of
death. Because His pity was not soft, but strong,
He was pitiless to the man who barred the progress
of Life to the whole human system. It is possible so
to emasculate Christianity that its neglect to destroy
sin is more than its power to build up righteousness.
The writer who did most to reform English life in the
nineteenth century was not Thomas Carlyle who
wrote violently of sins, but was Charles Dickens who
1 Ps. xxxvi. 4.

HIS SCORN 169
wrote vividly of living, concrete sinners. The school
master Squeers, the nurse Mrs. Gamp, the employer
Mr. Pecksniff, the ruffian Sikes, and a host of other
evil persons were held up for hatred; people came to a
sense of the blackness of the crimes which made human
nature bestial, and public opinion rose to great reform.
Into his open grave in the Abbey the poor threw
flowers continuously for one whole day; because he
had forced men to hate and depose the sinners who
had been allowed to make miserable the weak and
defenceless. Nor, in such connection, can we forget
that superb force for righteousness, Thomas Arnold.
It was said that many an Englishman hurled back
temptation in the thick of public life because he
remembered how as a boy he had seen the face of Dr.
Arnold flash disgust and scorn in the presence of any
person who had done a mean or a low act. The
tempted man's imagination brought to mind how
Dr. Arnold would look upon him, his once loved pupil,
now identified with such sin — he saw again the indig
nant gaze, the anger, and the contempt — and so,
with that memory, he dropped the temptation, he
kept himself unspotted. Surely, we need to remember
that the most gracious Saviour, who had only pity for
Zacchaeus and the Magdalen, had the most burning
scorn for certain types of sinful persons, — the per
sons who drag down humanity, and, so far as they can,
blot out the kingdom of heaven. We need not try to
explain away or even tone down the invectives and
the curses: they are part of His redeeming love for
humanity, and must be studied just as they stand in
the narrative.

170 HIS SCORN
I. Against Tempters
Christ had very evident scorn for those who con
sciously or unconsciously tempted men from the
right. He expressed this scorn not only when people
tried to turn Him from His Messianic duty, but also
when He saw that His earnest followers were being
beguiled from "the way."
i. However we interpret the experience of the
Temptation in the Wilderness, we must feel, from
the description, that Christ repelled with anger any
person who could deliberately tempt Him to swerve
from His God-given task.1 We have definite con
firmation of it in His attitude toward the deliberate
schemes of the Pharisees to trap Him into a false step.
When He was in the synagogue one Sabbath day, the
Pharisees pushed forward a man with a withered
hand; and, with the hope of snaring Him between
legalism and mercy, asked Him whether it was lawful
to heal on the Sabbath.2 Jesus quickly healed the man,
but before He did so He "looked round about on them
with anger." 3 So it was on many occasions.4
But Christ was also seriously indignant at people
who, with no hostile motive, tended to make His
course less straight. When He was speaking to a great
multitude, one day, His mother and His brethren,
unable to get near Him, because of the crowd, sent
word that they wished to see Him. Whatever ex-
1 St. Matt. iv. 10. 2 St. Matt. xii. 10. 3 St. Mark iii. 5.
"E.g., St. Matt. xvi. 1. This "temptation" was to use a miracle
to justify His own individual dignity, — a temptation to which He
never yielded.

AGAINST TEMPTERS 171
planation be given to their message, it is clear that
they used their appeal to family obligations, to divert
Him from His mission. Evidently it was a tempting
appeal. For His words of rejection are sharp and
stern ; He had duties to the larger family of humanity :
"Whosoever shall do the will of God the same is my
brother, and sister, and mother." x Again, when His
very dear friend, Simon Peter, rebuked Him for talking
of a tragic end, — thus intensifying a natural shrink
ing from it in His own heart, — Christ vehemently
turned upon him, saying, "Get thee behind me,
Satan." 2 That is scorn at white heat. He repelled
not only the temptation, but the man who dared to
suggest it.
2. When Christ spoke of those who neither went
into the kingdom themselves, nor suffered those who
were entering to go in, He called such tempters of their
fellows by strong epithets, and uttered His woe against
them.3 He spurned them for their meanness: "Ye
have taken away the key of knowledge," He said, "ye
entered not in yourselves, and them that were entering
ye hindered."4 One wonders if sentences like these
have not some hidden allusion to the fate of His dis
ciple and friend, Judas, whose cupidity was being
appealed to by the high priests; these priests thereby
tempted Judas to his ruin, — Judas, the man who was
so close to the highest and brightest in earth and
heaven. These enemies of light turned the key on
Judas, and shut him out — with themselves.
The purity and splendour of such indignation we
1 St. Mark iii. 35. 2 St. Mark viii. 33.
3 St. Matt, xxiii. 13. * St. Luke xi. 52.

172 HIS SCORN
feel when we see the face of a mother who has dis
covered that to her boy, hitherto unspotted from the
world, some villain is holding out the temptation to
depart from righteousness. There are men who take
a fiendish pleasure in watching the unspoiled life make
its first timid plunge into gross sin. They are the
tempters of innocence. The mother who discovers
that such a malign personality is approaching her
beloved has the right of a tigress to spring upon this
murderer of her child's soul. Tenderness has its
limit : there comes a time for scorn, for hatred. When
the youth sees the horror on his mother's face, he will
know at last how loathsome is his tempter, — and
he will be saved. " It must needs be," said Christ,
"that occasions of stumbling come; but woe to that
man through whom the occasion cometh I1 . . . Bet
ter for him that a great millstone should be hanged
about his neck, and that he should be sunk in the
depth of the sea." 2
II. Against Hypocrites
Christ was especially vigorous in His denunciation
of hypocrites. From various passages, notably the
twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew, it is easy to
discover His definition of hypocrites. They made
strict rules, — and left others to keep them.3 They
were highly scrupulous about their appearance, —
dress, position, titles,4 long prayers,5 payment of
tithes,8 ceremonial,7 subscriptions to memorials,8 —
1 St. Matt, xviii. 7. 2 Ibid. 6. 3 St. Matt, xxiii. 4.
* Ibid. 5. 6, 7. 5 St. Mark xii. 40.
6 St. Matt, xxiii. 23. 7 Ibid. 25. 8 Ibid. 29.

AGAINST HYPOCRITES 173
but quite deficient in humility,1 generosity,2 sincerity,3
judgment, mercy, faith,4 commonsense,5 purity,0 —
that is, in all the interior virtues of life.
While they were setting up such a pretence of piety
they were devouring widows' houses ; 7 and by the
twist of a tradition they snapped their fingers at the
obligation of the Fifth Commandment and left their
aged parents to cold and want.8 They depended so
far upon a dead past that they could not understand
the living Christ. God was to them essentially dead.
They dreaded any present, living manifestation of
His authority whicfV could interfere with their shib
boleths and rules. Above all they were, with all
their "piety," unkind. They were the most unreal
of mortals.
On these people our Saviour poured out the vials of
His wrath. He called them "fools and blind,"8
"blind guides," 10 "unclean,"11 "whited sepulchres,"12
"serpents," "generation of vipers."13 He exposed
them to biting sarcasm as He pictured them standing
up and offering to remove motes from other people's
eyes, — when in their own eyes there were beams.14
And the "woe," "woe," "woe," of His invective falls
with the force and regularity of a bludgeon. If ever
people were cursed, Christ cursed the hypocrites.
The cursing of the promising but fruitless fig-tree 15
removes the last doubt, if any could exist, upon our
1 St. Matt, xxiii. 12. 6 Ibid. 27. " Ibid., 25.
2 Ibid. 13. 7 St. Mark xii. 40. 12 Ibid., 27.
3 Ibid. 16 f. 8 St. Matt. xv. 4-6. 13 Ibid. 33.
4 Ibid. 23. 9 St. Matt, xxiii. 19. " St. Luke vi. 41-42.
5. Ibid. 24. 10 Ibid., 24. 15 St. Mark xi. 14.

174 HIS SCORN
Lord's estimate of the hypocrite. He said quite defi
nitely to such men, "How shall ye escape the judg
ment of hell ?" x
A large share of the disgust roused by the recent
investigations of the great Insurance Companies comes
from the fact that these trustees of enormous funds,
who have been using them for their own crooked and
selfish ends, have been appealing piously to the thrifty
wage-earners of the country so to deposit their savings
that, should death overtake them, their widows and
their orphans might be provided for. "Deny your
selves in the present," is the pathetic cry of the
Insurance tract, "to make safe the future of your fam
ilies." Very proper language, this, had these officers
of insurance companies really cared for working-men,
widows, and orphans; but hideous and contemptible
jargon, if these pleaders turned from their tracts, with
an amused twinkle at their own astuteness, to vote
themselves outrageously high salaries, to pension the
members of their families, to buy up legislators, and
otherwise to contribute to their own wealth and power.
The mere villany is bad enough, — but it is all in
tensified with the rankling remembrance of the
philanthropic pamphlets sent out by these would-
be benefactors of mankind. A villain who is a
hypocrite is an arch-villain. If a man is a plain
straightforward murderer, the world is content with
a legal penalty; but when it is the kiss of a Judas
that starts the crime, the world never forgets. And
no one dare say that the world in such a mood is un
christian. *St. Matt, xxiii. 33.

AGAINST THE HARD-HEARTED 175
III. Against the Hard-hearted
Another class of men upon whom Christ vented His
scorn were the hard-hearted. These too, for the most
part seem to have been Pharisees. They shut their
lives into so hard a case of stubbornness and prejudice
that no truth or persuasion could penetrate to their
hearts. They came then to have what has been called
"the ossified heart."1
The particular form of hard-heartedness on which
Jesus most frequently seemed to dwell is the unwilling
ness to forgive a personal injury. "If ye," He said,
"forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your
Father forgive your trespasses." 2 This very explicit
condemnation He vividly emphasised by the parable
of the servant who, having been released from a large
debt by his employer, turned about and refused to
allow any time to a fellow servant who owed him,
and angrily cast him into prison. The master of the
two servants, hearing of this hard-heartedness, "was
wroth" with the man whom he had just forgiven,
withdrew his kindness, and turned him over "to the
tormentors, till he should pay all that was due." " So,"
concluded Jesus, "shall also my heavenly Father do
unto you, if ye forgive not every one his brother from
your hearts." 3
When the Saviour sent the Twelve out to preach in
the cities and villages, He directed them to treat the
self-complacent people who rejected their message,
with the utmost scorn. "Whosoever," He said,
1 A phrase used by F. W. Robertson. 2 St. Matt. vi. 15.
3 St. Matt, xviii. 23-35.

176 HIS SCORN
"shall not receive you, nor hear your words, as ye go
forth out of that house or that city, shake off the dust
that is under your feet for a testimony against them.1
Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for
the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judg
ment, than for that city." 2 Later, when He Himself
was ignored by certain towns, He uttered His woes
against them: "Woe unto thee, Chorazin! Woe unto
thee, Bethsaida! for if the mighty works had been done
in Tyre and Sidon which have been done in you, they
would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes."
[This demonstrates the flintiness of their hearts. Now
the result:] "Howbeit I say unto you, it shall be more
tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment
than for you." 3 It is difficult to separate such sting
ing sentences from a curse.
This scorn for hard-heartedness is perhaps most
clear in the Fourth Gospel, particularly in the fiery
dialogue between Christ and the prejudiced opponents
which is recorded in the eighth chapter. "Ye are of
your father the devil," He cried, "and the lusts of
your father it is your will to do. . . . He is a liar, and
the father thereof." 4 His vituperation, as well as
His assumption of authority, so incensed them that
they took up stones to kill Him.5 His words must
have been exceedingly bitter.
At last, in the Garden of Gethsemane, they who had
listened gratefully to Him in the Temple, and whose
1 St. Mark vi. n; St. Matt. x. 15; St. Luke ix. 5.
2 St. Matt. x. 15.
3 St. Matt. xi. 21, 22. So also Ibid. 23, 24.
4 St. John viii. 44. 5 Ibid. 59.

AGAINST THE WORLDLY 177
dear ones had possibly been healed by His power,
were among those who came to arrest Him. The
scorn must have been no less intense because subdued.
"Are ye come out," He said, "as against a thief, with
swords and staves to seize me? I was daily with you
in the temple teaching, and ye took me not." x That
scorn evidently had its lightning effect, for even
the Roman soldiers were frightened by the blaze of
it.2 IV. Against the Worldly
A large number of Christ's words indicate His scorn
of those who were altogether worldly,3 or who tried to
be both worldly and religious. " Go and tell that fox,"
was the preface to a message to Herod.4 " Ye cannot
serve God and mammon," 5 He said to the wavering.
With a ringing contempt, He described the people
who could cleverly read the signs of the weather, but
had no eyes for the signs of a great religious oppor
tunity.6 The same quick anger is displayed in the
lesson of the parable of the prosperous farmer who
tore down his barns to build greater, saying cheerfully
to himself, "Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for
many years: take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry."
1 St. Mark xiv. 48, 49. 2 St. John xviii. 6.
3 Cf. Mr. A. C. Benson's "Upton Letters," p. 159: "Mr. Welbore,
as a matter of fact, seems to me really to augur worse for the intro
duction of the kingdom of heaven upon earth than any number of
drunkards and publicans. One feels that the world is so terribly
strong, stronger even than sin." The whole description of "Mr.
Welbore" — the type of the thoroughly worldly man — is an apt
illustration of the insidious peril of worldliness.
4 St. Luke xiii. 32. 6 St. Matt. vi. 24.
8 St. Luke xii. 54-57.

178 HIS SCORN
Then the scorn: God said, "Thou fool, this night is
thy soul required of thee." 1
Christ's scorn for the worldly-minded was also
shown by definite acts. The saving of the Gadarene
demoniacs by destroying a herd of swine belonging to
Gadara,2 receives its clearest explanation when it is
interpreted as an act of scornful censure for a band of
people who cared more for property than for human
souls. The fact that later the citizens of Gadara be
sought him to go away before He blessed any more
suffering friends and relatives, at their petty cost,
shows how much they needed such a judgment.3 But
the most distinct illustration of His scorn of the worldly
is seen in His driving the money-changers out of the
Temple. He upset their tables, and threw down
their chairs. He made a scourge of cords and drove
out the traffickers and their cattle.4 And He cried
after them, "It is written, 'My house shall be a
house of prayer,' — but ye have made it a den of
robbers." 5
Yet we cannot forget that it was the worldly Zac-
chaeus who became His friend, — only Zacchasus first
discarded his worldliness. Christ never tolerated the
worldly spirit.
It must be kept in mind always that the Master who
had moments of such anger and scorn was, notwith
standing, first of all tender, loving. Only the love was
not soft, flabby, but had all the elements of a complete
strength. It was organic. There was justice in it.
1 St. Luke xii. 18-21. 2 St. Luke viii. 32. 3Ibid.,3j.
4 St. John ii. 13. 5 St. Luke xix. 46.

PART OF HIS LOVE 179
The servant who stubbornly laid his lord's talent away
in a napkin was stripped of his little all;1 and the
servant who tried hard and did his best was rewarded.
Just as the merciful schoolmaster detects the hope
lessly bad boy and sends him away from his privileges,
lest, remaining in the school, he drag others down to
his own infamy; so the merciful Christ rejected the
tempter, the hypocrite, the hard-hearted, the worldly,
from His kingdom. One of His parables concluded,
"These mine enemies, which would not that I should
reign over them, bring hither and slay them before
me:" make that as figurative as you must, there will
yet be the illustration of the Saviour's words: "Think
not that I am come to send peace on earth : I came not
to send peace but a sword."2 Some men feeling the
heat of His scorn must have come to a sense of their
condition. For the scorn of a perpetual blusterer
does not hurt ; what does hurt is the scorn of the gentle,
the kind, the loving. Tares and wheat in Christ's
kingdom were allowed to grow together till the har
vest, but there was no ignoring of the tares. And
their fate was made certain, by His words, by His
acts. Jesus Christ was real to the last degree. Because
He longed to give Love to all men, He gave it to the
frailest sinner who would turn to Him even a little.
But for those who steeled themselves against His
influence, and by their traits barred others from His
influence, He had only a consuming indignation. And
thereby His love was not limited, but fulfilled; for it
1 St. Matt. xxv. 26.
2 St. Matt. x. 34.

180 HIS SCORN
passed through these uncompromising natures and
became a burning scorn.1
How far His followers dare discriminate, it is diffi
cult to tell. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition,
the persecution of Salem Witches, tell a various story
of failure. But in every great city human devils are
bartering immortal souls; and to almost every loving
Christian, who is awake, there comes the call, "If
thou hast no sword, sell thy coat and buy one." 2
But it is safer to keep the swords sheathed for the most
part; giving our neighbours only the love when in
doubt, because we cannot see with the certain clear
ness of our Master. We may, alas ! like Peter, cut off
the ear of some Malchus, and need to pray the Saviour
to come and heal the wound. On the other hand, we
can be candid with ourselves, and measure exactly the
» Cf. Dr. D. W. Forrest ("The Authority of Christ," pp. 168 f.):
"When, indeed, we compare that intercession for pardon with these
reiterated 'woes,' no contrast could externally be greater. Yet the
same holy lips spake them both: they were alike the expression of
One who lived in, and reflected, the Father. In this centre He dwelt:
and from it His hfe radiated forth, adapting itself to the manifold
variety of human condition; sometimes gentle with a surpassing
charm, or grave with an exacting demand, or wrapt in a mysterious
aloofness. Not uniformity, but diversity, is its outward character
istic. He represses, encourages, warns, upbraids, consoles; flashes
out the truth now at one angle, now at another; speaks the word
needful for the moment without any qualification, and again utters
its complement with an equal emphasis. Hence the apparent con
tradictions in His sayings are innumerable. . . . Yet they have the
profoundest unity at the heart, and their true meaning can never
be understood till they are interpreted from within. He did not
speak by rule, but according to the dictates of a loving spirit, which
read with unerring insight the necessities of the hour."
2 St, Matt. a. 34; St. Luke xxii. 36.

PART OF HIS LOVE 181
attitude which Christ will have for any of those quali
ties in us which once He faced on earth with terrible
scorn. He was fierce as only the Gentlest can be
fierce. There is no paradox between His forgiveness
and His anger: only completeness, in love.

CHAPTER X
His Compassion
OF the recorded events of Christ's Life about thirty-
five1 indicate supernatural power. We call them
miracles. Some of them, especially the acts of healing,
people imagine can be. explained by some hypnotic
influence more or less natural.2 Others are altogether
beyond all known laws of which we have any intima
tion. Originally the miracles were aids to belief in Christ's
divinity. They were counted as the credentials of
His authority. With the rebirth of Science they
became an increasing stumbling-block to faith. The
facile argument was that a God of Law would not be
revealed in a Man who went about setting laws aside
or breaking them. So even theologians ceased to put
the old emphasis on Miracles: our Lord's credentials
rested, for them, in His words, in His character, in the
1 Bishop Westcott's "Study of the Gospels," Appendix E.
2 Cf. Principal W. Jones-Davies (Hibbert Journal, July, 1906,
p. 934): "Not many years ago all Christ's miracles were regarded by
extreme critics as myths and fabrications. But through the dis
covery of hypnotism and auto-suggestion the greater number of them
have become rationally credible. Is it too much to suggest that, by
further patience in research, laws will be discovered to which other
of the recorded miracles might be referred?"
182

HIS COMPASSION 183
uniqueness of His influence for all generations and
scattered peoples. These theologians ordinarily did
not deny miracles; they simply did not push them to
the place of prominence which they had hitherto occu
pied. Now, with our study of hypnotism, with our
societies for psychological and psychic research, with
our increasing vision of the untrod avenues of science,
with a growing suspicion that medical science is but
beginning, we are prone to say that he is foolhardy
who tries to limit the laws of God to any phenomena
which we ordinarily see and understand. So the
Miracles of the Gospel are no longer disowned by
clever scientists. If the historic evidence is sufficient,
science says, they are not in themselves incredible.1
And theology insists as never before that God is a God
of Law: only because human knowledge and power
are both exceedingly limited, there are certainly laws
which we must call superhuman, and when employed
by one who, though human, is more than human,
these laws must, of necessity, receive the name super
natural. Nothing is gained, however, by a struggle
for or against the term supernatural. The words
natural and supernatural are but signals of our enor
mous egotism. If we understand a law or a process
or a phenomenon we call it natural ; if we do not under
stand it, we call it supernatural. To the man in the
tropics it seems a miracle that water should ever grow
solid enough to be walked upon, the story of it seems
to him supernatural; but once he has been carried to
a northern winter he says that water, so hardened,
seems to him perfectly natural. So the line between
1 "Life and Letters of Thomas H. Huxley," II. pp. 297 ff.

1 84 HIS COMPASSION
natural and supernatural is changed for all of us with
growing experience or modest intuition.1
The miracles of Christ therefore stand or fall upon
the trustworthiness of the Gospel records. As a
scrupulous, unsparing criticism sifts both internal and
external evidence, it becomes harder, day by day, to
impugn the historic evidence for miracles. He is a
belated scholar who allows himself to approach the
subject of miracles with a prejudice against their
credibility; and it must be granted that most of the
attacks have not been in the realm of history, but
simply in the realm of a priori prejudice. To-day
men, rid of this prejudice, are observing in the records
the numerous theories by which contemporary wit
nesses attempted to explain the miracles. Christ's
friends thought His mind affected ; Herod thought Him
John Baptist risen from the dead; the Pharisees thought
Him in league with evil spirits; and when the man
born blind, was made to see, these same Pharisees
tried to make the man say that he had not really been
blind. "Men do not theorise about nothing," said
Alexander Bruce. "When theories arise, something
has occurred that arrests attention and demands
explanation." 2
1 An interesting example of this appears in the account of the
miracles of the middle ages. A critic who investigated them said
that he found one miracle which was credible. That was of a martyr
who, having his tongue cut out, spoke and praised God. It was
counted a miracle, and the critic said that it was well-authenticated.
Then, a few years ago, it was discovered by physiologists that if the
tongue were entirely cut out a man could speak. So people pushed
the line between the natural and the supernatural a little farther up.
2 "With Open Face," p. 34.

HIS COMPASSION 185
So the Miracles are being freed from their old shackles
and stand to-day as a witness to a great trait in the
character of Christ. The question is no longer, "Did
He have such power?" History, taking a silent
science by the hand, says that He did have what we
call supernatural power. The only question, and the
significant question, is, "How did He use it?" We
have already seen that He was repeatedly tempted
to use it for His own comfort or safety; and that He
invariably refused so to use it. He used it always for
others. But He often refused to use it even for others,
— when, for instance, the Pharisees asked Him for a
sign. It is always dangerous to summarise1 under a
general name any great class of acts; but if one were
to select one trait which the Miracles chiefly set forth
in Christ's character, that trait would be compassion.
Compassion for others made Him exert this super
human power at times when its exercise was for Him
self most dangerous; and it was, without doubt, one
of the causes contributing to the crisis which ended in
the Crucifixion.
1 In this classification I make no provision for the so-called miracle
of "the Stater in the Fish's Mouth" (St. Matthew xvii. 24-27).
There seems no sound reason for believing that anything more is
meant than that the fish, being sold, would provide the price of the
tax. The expression — "finding the stater in the fish's mouth" —
would be no stronger than many another common Orientalism.
Moreover, there is no record of a literal fulfilment of the pre
diction; and even if it were fulfilled it would be classed as a case
of prophetic foreknowledge rather than as a case of miraculous
working. Besides all this, that such a miracle would be unique
in our Saviour's career is sufficient ground for accepting the modern
exegesis.

186 HIS COMPASSION
I . His Compassion for Sickness
Of Christ's recorded Miracles, twenty-one were for
the relief of the sick in mind or body. For in what
ever way we explain "possession by demons," such
possession amounted at least to the tortures of cruel
illness. That three fifths of His recorded miracles
had to do with physical suffering is eloquent testimony
to His sympathy with the pain, lassitude, or limita
tions of our common sicknesses. The blind saw; the
deaf heard; those afflicted with chronic or acute dis
ease were well in an instant; the people who seemed
to be in the condition of our insane of to-day became
normal. Sometimes the suffering was intense, some
times it seems to have been more or less unconscious
endurance — as in the case of the man born blind.1
The recorded acts of healing are evidently only a
fraction of this sort of miracles which Jesus performed.
In a career, short at best, in which His chief work was
to organise the world under the conscious constraint
and inspiration of a Father of Love, He turned aside
into every lane and hedgerow to help those in stupour
or pain. And His purpose was so distinctly compas
sionate that He ordinarily warned the healed man to
make no announcement of His act. If these constant
acts of healing brought His fame among simple folk
to such a pitch that they talked wildly of making Him
Caesar, and thus cut short His career; so the precious
time of that short career was given in very large meas
ure to obscure sufferers, — and thus the time for what
seems to us teaching of transcendent importance was
1 St. John ix.

HIS COMPASSION FOR POVERTY 187
crowded to days of flight to the wilderness with the
Twelve, or to night conversations on the mountain.
The heart of Jesus Christ was so filled with compas
sion that no human cry of lack or pain went by His
ear unheeded.

II. His Compassion for Poverty
The Twelve evidently distributed alms to the poor
under the Lord's direction; but the two recorded in
stances when He did a miracle to feed a multitude
show even more clearly His attitude to poverty. How
He would relieve want in order to build up a habit of
self-reliance; how He might, for the same cause, refuse
to help — just as He refused to give a "sign" to the
Pharisees — these and other questions are legitimate
speculations. But the one fact to fix upon here is
that the miracles of feeding the two multitudes show
Christ's compassion for those who had physical hun
ger and were unable to satisfy it. In both cases J
there was evidently not so much lack of forethought
on the part of the people as there was eagerness to
avail themselves of the Master's teaching and His
healing of their sick. In one case the day had worn
to a close; in the second case, three days had passed,
without their having anything to eat. So He said
that He had "compassion on the multitude."2 He
who felt the pangs of hunger in the wilderness after
His long season of spiritual ecstasy gave to the poor
hungry crowds swarming over the wastes His full
1 St. Matt. xiv. 13-23; xv. 32-38.
2 St. Mark vi. 34; viii. 2; St. Matt. xv. 32.

1 88 HIS COMPASSION
sympathy. He did not preach to them of their im
providence; He did not fall in with His disciples' sug
gestion to send them away. He used His supernatural
power, and fed them. So we know to-day His com
passion for the poor and hungry.
III. His Compassion for Sorrow
Three instances are recorded of Christ's raising the
dead: a girl,1 a young man,2 and an intimate friend.3
In none of these cases can we feel that the resurrection
was for the sake of the individual so raised. Our
faith in a progressive future life forbids us to deplore,
for the man himself, the passing of a soul into the other
world. These miracles were evidently miracles of
compassion; but the compassion was for the parents
of the girl; for the mother of the young man; for the
sisters of the dear friend. He who of all men had
most right to philosophise about sorrow and explain
it away, did not so treat it. He must have recognised
that there are moments so black that all words fall
impotent, — so black that God seems to be dead.
Perhaps at other times He restored the dead to their
loved ones; these three cases are sufficient to illustrate
His invariable attitude toward such grief. It not only
brought tender words, tears, groans, — it also brought
the exercise of His heavenly power. He had the very
depths of compassion for the sorrowful.
IV. His Compassion for Discouragement and Fear
It is easy, perhaps, to imagine how one with super
natural power should use it for great illness and for
1 St. Mark v. 22 ff. 2 St. Luke vii. n ff. 3 St. John xi.

HIS COMPASSION FOR FEAR 189
the relief of dense sorrow, but the wonder increases as
the records show that Christ granted His compassion
to commonplace aspects of human trouble.
To the disciples, discouraged over long, unrewarded
toil at their fishing, He twice granted a miraculous
draught of fishes.1 At another time when the disciples
were toiling in rowing, against a strong wind,2 His
loving care and sympathy made Him go out upon the
waves to be near them. When, the wine having given
out, disgrace was imminent upon the host at Cana,
He saved the chagrin and shame by turning water
to wine.3 When the disciples were caught in a sudden
lake storm, and cried out in fear, He stilled the tem
pest at a word.4 Discouragement and fear are not
always dignified — they sometimes make their victims
seem as weak and inefficient as they are miserable.
To such difficulties Christ gave neither indifference
nor harshness; by great supernatural acts of help, He
gave His compassion. V. His Compassion for Doubt
The attitude of so-called religious people toward
doubt is often stern and forbidding. Christ, coming
with the majesty of self-evident authority, neverthe
less deigned to give His followers external helps to
faith. Many of the miracles which seem to have been
primarily for some other purpose included also this
stimulus to firmer faith ; as, for example, when Christ,
having forgiven the paralytic, turned to the scandalised
Scribes, with the remark that He would now heal the
1 St. Luke v. 1-11; St. John xxi. 1-23.
2 St. Mark vi. 48 ff. 3 St. John ii. 1-12. 4 St. Mark iv. 35 ff.

190 HIS COMPASSION
invalid so that all present might know what sort of
strength He had to give.1 As He relieved the man of
his misery He also inspired faith in higher things.
So, too, the raising of Lazarus came at a moment when
the Twelve needed all possible reassurance as they
faced with Him the week of the Passion.
But there are three miracles which stand out as
miracles to help doubt. The Transfiguration came
almost with the first recorded announcement of His
tragic end; and even in the blaze of Transfiguration
light the cruel death in Jerusalem was one of the sub
jects of which the glorious ones talked. That which
was hardest for the Twelve to grasp, the three dearest
friends were helped to understand by seeing in divine
glory Him who was to die like a common thief, — and
the glory and the ignominy were joined in one divine
forecast. The memory of that bright scene was to
help them to escape from the blackness of an awful
doubt.2 The Tuesday before the terrible Friday, the disciples
saw the fig-tree (cursed the day before) withered away.
And Jesus said to them, as they called His attention
to it, "Have faith in God."3 No men's faith was
ever put to such a test as theirs, just as no men ever
had such complete reason for faith. The Lord forti
fied their faith, and gently pushed away the doubts,
at every step.
Finally, the great miracle of all is the Resurrection.
That Christ should rise was inevitable; that He ap
peared "unto many" was part of His gracious compas
sion for the doubts of His disciples and of succeeding
1 St. Mark ii. 10. 2 St. Mark ix. 9, 10, 12. 3 St. Mark xi. 22.

HIS COMPASSION FOR DOUBT 191
generations. He had said, "Because I live, ye shall
live also." x That, with His unquenchable vitality,
ought really to be enough confirmation of our best
hopes. But we all have some of the longing of a
Thomas to prove great assertions. So, having risen,
He appeared to one after another, — to the sceptical
Thomas as to the trusting John. From this aspect
the miracle of the Resurrection becomes the crowning
act of compassion for what is often the wildest form
of agony and despair, — that is, doubt of any reality
beyond the last earthly farewell.
The natural question that must follow any such
reflection is somewhat harrowing: "Why," it may be
asked, "does not God show a like compassion for
various kinds of human trouble to-day?" We look
at the hungry, — and they go unfed. We think of
the ghastly forms in starving India, or wherever else
famine may put its blight. We think of the blind, —
who remain in darkness ; of the mourners, — who
remain bereaved; of the bed-ridden, — who never
take one step. Why such unparalleled privileges, we
echo, for the people of Christ's day?
It is a hard question. On the surface it seems a
crushing objection to the consideration of miracles as
deeds of compassion. But there are two sound an
swers. 1. It is well to recall that all through history there
have been privileged ages. It was a finer thing to
live in Greece in the days of Pericles than in the days
of Demosthenes; or in England under Elizabeth than
1 St. John xiv. 19.

192 HIS COMPASSION
under King John. And not only are there privileged
ages, there are also privileged places. The man who
falls sick of a fever in a tropical wilderness, far from a
skilful hand, dies; the same man, equally ill, in Lon
don is likely to be healed at once by the wise physician.
So Christ's age was the privileged age of history; and
to be near Him was the most privileged of places.
May we not say, then, in a very practical way, that
God has always permitted those to be delivered who
have come into the presence of the power or the skill
which was able to deliver them? The amazing skill
of many a physician and surgeon is Christ's way of
giving help to the suffering to-day, and that help is
often given as freely, as ungrudgingly, as Christ gave
His power to the poor of His own generation.
2. We must say, for God's compassion, that God is
not unjust to other generations because He was
supremely kind to a single generation. There is a
good phrase sometimes used to describe one of God's
laws, — "God's Economy."1 There is economy in
history. The miracles are not repeated because they
are not necessary. In the lifetime of Jesus they served
to tell of God's love; and no one can reasonably doubt
the lesson to-day. Forces of heaven and earth were
used to do what is now beyond our power; and they
were used neither to coerce nor to frighten men; they
were used only to give men confidence in God's com
passion. The Lord Jesus swept the clouds of ex
perience aside for a moment, and men were allowed
to gaze upon the deeper realities. Pain is hard to
1I here use "economy" in the ordinary sense, and not, e.g., in
the sense of Cyril of Alexandria.

HIS COMPASSION FOR US

J93

bear: we all know that. No gracious Jesus is seen on
our streets to bid it begone at a touch; but, — and this
is everything, — the invisible Jesus is right at hand to
say, "Remember my life in Palestine. Remember
my lesson. Behind the pain is love. Not to-day,
but soon, it shall be clear. I will have compassion,
— I have compassion now!" What could be better
than such a blessed assurance? Would we have the
same great powers which Christ used in the control of
any man to-day? Not for an instant! We dread to
have any but an expert touch the great electric mech
anism of modern science; how we should shudder to
have anyone less than the Christ put his hand upon
the hidden forces of awful might which the tenderness
of Christ only could always conserve for help. We
are as sure as we can ever be that the Law of God
contains the heart of compassion: no demonstration
could be clearer. If death comes, we wish to know
that the beloved is happier than here: a Lazarus-like
return for a few years is not in itself a great boon.
Pain, toil, sorrow, doubt, melt into the light of God's
consolation, when we remember how Jesus put His
hand on pain like ours long ago in Palestine. We
know, by such memory, that God's laws are not as an
unpitying machine to grind us to dust and ashes; they
lead at last to such compassion as men once saw in the
miracles of the Man Christ Jesus.

CHAPTER XI
His Transforming Power
TO those who try to reduce the character of Christ
to the ordinary human level there comes one
obstacle which is insuperable, even for the most scep
tical mood. The feeling of a priori necessity may
dispose of all valid evidence for the extraordinary
acts usually classed as miracles; yet there will be one
miracle, — and that the greatest of all, — which no
argument can touch. This is the miracle of the
unique transforming power of Christ's influence.
The evidence for this is not only found in the well-
authenticated records of the past,1 but can be seen in
the flesh and blood of to-day. In the narrowest and
most exact sense this is a miracle for which there can
be scientific proof. With all his enormous conceit
Napoleon felt how tiny his great influence was in
1 Cf. Dr. E. von Dobschutz ("Christian Life in the Primitive
Church," tr. G. Bremner, p. 379): "Neither of them [Stoicism and
Neoplatonism] could enable artisans and old women to lead a truly
philosophical life. Christianity could and did; the apologists point
triumphantly to the realisation of the moral ideal among Christians
of every standing. That was due to the power which issued from
Jesus Christ and actually transformed men. The certainty and
confidence of faith, based on Him . . . begot in Christians a match
less delight in doing good." 194

HIS TRANSFORMING POWER 195
comparison: "I," he said, "can gain but a wavering
influence over the men whose ear and eye I can catch ;
this man, vanished for eighteen hundred years, still
holds the characters of men as in a vice."
We think it wonderful, when we go over a rough
field of stubble in January, that in the early days of
summer this same rough field by the labour of a farmer,
assisted by a kind Providence, will be transformed
into a rich and beautiful garden. We remember the
boast of the Emperor Augustus that he found Rome
brick and he left it marble. The man who made the
journey from the Mississippi to the Pacific fifty years
ago found only "a waste howling wilderness," with
here and there a few roving barbarians; to-day the
same traveller finds great cities as permanently built
as London. All these transformations are won
derful; yet they are insignificant when you compare
them with a man who, having what we call a fixed
character, turns sharply about, and, through a steady
but sure progress, becomes, under the influence of a
Personality, an altogether different man. The power
that can do that is beyond any natural law that we
can comprehend. It is the manifestation of the divine
Love in its most potent influence.
Before I speak of details it is wise to point out that
this transforming power of Christ was deliberately
exercised. There was nothing suggesting the merely
unconscious influence of a holy character. We find
Him passing by the cultivated, the learned, the refined,
the saintly. He chose raw material — material that
seemed hopelessly raw to the candid judges of His day.
Yet to these most inefficient of untrained men He

196 HIS TRANSFORMING POWER
cried, "Ye are the salt of the earth; 1 ... ye are the
light of the world;2 ... ye shall be perfect, as your
heavenly Father is perfect." 3 He consciously moulded
men (who, without Him, would have been nobodies)
into the most influential men whom the world (judging
from existing results) has ever known.4
We can best judge what this transforming power
was by examining two or three examples.
I. The Transformation of Simon Peter
From the Gospel narratives it is fairly clear who
Simon, Andrew's brother, was, before he knew Christ.
It is easy to imagine what sort of man he seemed to his
friends and neighbours. They knew him doubtless
as one easily roused to new enthusiasms, keen for each
new hero in turn, impulsively defending each with
words or blows, — and then forgetting or ignoring
him according to whim or convenience. Perhaps they
called him good-hearted, but they certainly named
him unreliable, shifting, fickle. It is evident that,
from the first, Jesus was drawn to him. He seems to
have caught up Simon's enthusiasm at once and fused
1 St. Matt. v. 13. 2 Ibid. 14. 3 Ibid. 48.
4 Cf. Wernle's "Beginnings of Christianity" (tr. G. A. Biene-
mann), I. p. 107: "Jesus . . . Himself freed and strengthened the
will more than any other in the history of the world. . . . He is able
to demand all, because everything becomes possible through Him.
. . . He enlarges the bounds of that which is possible in the domain
of ethics, just as a discoverer in that of physics. Jesus' disciples were
no heroes. His whole intercourse with them up to the denial of Peter
is proof of that. And yet what a brave company Jesus made of
them — a force strong enough to defy the world."

THE TRANSFORMATION OF SIMON PETER 197
with it His gift of will. For, no sooner had Andrew
presented him to Jesus, than Jesus cried, "Thou art
Simon the Son of John; thou shalt be called Cephas —
the Rock, the Unshakable, the Reliable." 1
How the bystanders must have stared! Doubtless
they would have smiled, had anyone else said such
words; but we know that there was authority in the
word of Christ, and they could only be astonished.
One may suppose that they went home that night to
tell their housemates that One who seemed to know
had proclaimed the most fickle of men to be the most
trustworthy, — and they marvelled how it could be.
Then the transformation began. Many a time the
old character showed its traits, like the fainter and
fainter rumble of the departing storm as the summer
sunshine is driving it away. The audacious remarks
at the announcement of the Passion and at the Trans
figuration; the hot-headed and self-centred denial of
Christ at the trial; the demand to know the duties of
his friend John when he received Christ's resurrection
commission,2 — all these details show to us Simon
rather than Peter. Even later than this, difficulty
sprang up between him and St. Paul3 because he re
treated from the generous, Christlike position toward
Gentile Christians when the narrower party in the
Church waved their protests in his face. But these
instances serve only to show that his transformation
was gradual. Against them must be placed the long
array of instances in which his new character was
manifest, — in which he was no longer Simon, but the
great St. Peter of Christian history. It was he who
1 St. John i. 41. 2 St. John xxi. 3 Gal. ii. 12.

198 HIS TRANSFORMING POWER
first acknowledged Jesus to be the Christ.1 It was he
who on the first Whitsunday spoke so boldly to great
numbers of people that three thousand were, by his
confidence and persuasion, brought to baptism.2 Nor
can we pass over the unvarying tradition that St.
Peter was the organising force of the first days of the
Church. His name has always stood side by side with
St. Paul's as the great human medium through which
the teaching and vitality of Christ were incorporated
into the activity of the world.3 There is more or less
regret on the part of superficial critics that Christianity
became organised into the increasingly definite Church ;
but no one questions that such a development did
take place, and that it began so to develop at the
start. Whether one like the tendency or not, there
was such a tendency, and it became in an incredibly
short time so powerful as a unifying force that even
the worldly Constantine had to make terms with it,
and use its organism to cement his crumbling empire.
The transformed fisherman became a conspicuous
leader in this mighty accomplishment.
1 St. Mark viii. 29.
'' Acts ii. 41. The attempts of men like Von Soden (" History of
Early Christian Literature," p. 220) to discredit this fact show
singularly little grasp. Many of these converts had doubtless
come directly under Christ's influence; and St. Peter's burning
words simply clinched the indefinite longings of their hearts.
3 Cf. Professor C. von Weizsacker ("Apostolic Age," tr. J. Millar,
p. 14): "He [Peter] was unquestionably the first man in the Primi
tive Church. When Paul was converted to Christianity, ... it was
enough for him to meet with Peter. . . . He was anxious to make
the acquaintance of the man in whom he saw the whole of contem
porary Christianity."

THE TRANSFORMATION OF SIMON PETER 199
How far such transforming power is from any other
which history knows can be seen if one imagines a
reformer to-day who would say to himself, "Behold,
I will start a new kingdom on this earth into which
all that is best and wisest shall come; and now, behold,
I shall select some untrained labouring man in the
fields yonder and I shall say, 'To you I entrust the
task of carrying out my most cherished hopes; you
shall be the one on whom I most depend.'" What,
do you think, would become of that "kingdom"?
How could the man be trained de novo for so mam
moth a task? If one can imagine such a transforma
tion one can see what happened when the Saviour
committed the unreliable Simon to become the stead
fast Peter, through whose firmness the Christian
Church was to be started on its triumphant course.
It is perhaps futile to ask how such a transformation
came about. Of course the real explanation lies in
the character of Christ Himself; but there are two
details which can be set forth with certainty. The
first of these is Christ's persistent belief in Peter. He
believed this Simon to have possibilities which would
have been denied by Simon's nearest and dearest,
most of all by Simon himself. Any one who has
known the thrill of having a trusted and loved friend
tell one that he has confidence that such and such a
life is to be one's future, is aware, to some degree, what
must have been Simon's exultation and perplexity.
The joy of having a Master like Christ believe in him
was of itself power to do. It is evidently what St.
Paul meant by his exalted doctrine of justification
by faith — a doctrine which declared that a man

200 HIS TRANSFORMING POWER
could be so believed in by Christ that Christ's belief
in the disciple should become the disciple's belief in
himself. Simon now and then forgot who it was that
he was becoming, and lapsed into the poor being that
he had been. Then — not once, but many times —
the Lord must have "turned and looked upon Peter";
so that Simon knew that he was not Simon, but Peter,
in spite of all. Christ believed • in him through all
his blundering, treachery, cowardice; and Peter, weep
ing, came back to a belief in himself. It was first of
all the compelling belief of the wisest and most loving
of Masters which transformed the character of Simon.
The other obvious element in this transformation
was the grafting of Christ's life into the life of Peter.
Consciously Christ gave His will, His vitality, into the
disciple's weakness; and the strength of Christ became
the strength of Peter. "Abide in me," 2 He said; "I
am the vine, ye are the branches"; 3 " I am come that
ye might have life . . . life more abundantly." 4 It
is, as it were, a chemical change; a new substance is
introduced into the wavering, flimsy character of the
1 Cf. Professor F. G. Peabody's "Jesus Christ and Christian
Character," p. 91 : "When Washington at Valley Forge was reviewing
his tattered troops, he paused before one feeble regiment and said,
'Gentlemen, I have great confidence in the men of Connecticut,' and
the narrator says, 'When I heard that, I clasped my musket to my
breast and said, "Let them come on."'" Professor Peabody quotes
in this connection John Watson ("The Mind of the Master," p. 238) :
"An unwavering and unbounded faith in humanity sustained the
heart [of Jesus] and transformed its objects. . . . With everything
against Him, Jesus treated men as sons of God, and His optimism
has had its vindication."
2 St. John xv. 4. 3 St. John xv. 5. 4 St. John x. 10

TRANSFORMATION OF A SON OF ZEBEDEE 201
follower, and his Master lives in him, and makes him
to will and to do. St. Paul was not mystical, but
scientific and literal, when he said, "I live, yet not I,
but Christ liveth in me." J St. Peter must have said
the same words over and over again. It was the
Christ in him who transformed him.
II. The Transformation of a Son of Zebedee
To one who is confident that John the son of Zebedee
is the author of the Fourth Gospel, there is absorbing
interest in seeing from what source such a transcendent
spiritual genius was evolved. If St. Peter, according
to tradition, is associated with the organisation of
the Church, the name of St. John is bound up with its
spirituality, its emotions, its inmost heart and soul.
There is less and less cause to question this tradition,
as scholars return with their results.2
Since the accounts imply that Zebedee owned his
boat and employed "hired servants,"3 we rightly
infer that the sons of Zebedee were not of what are
sometimes called the masses. Though in the Fourth
Gospel the anonymous disciple (presumably St. John)
is said to be known to the High Priest,4 though the
author seems to have special information about Joseph
of Arimathsea and Nicodemus, members of the San-
hedrin, there is nothing to make us feel that he is a
1 Gal. ii. 20.
2 A book like Von Soden's " History of Early Christian Litera
ture " is more than offset by Sanday's "Criticism of the Fourth Gos
pel." Yet even Von Soden makes the author a close disciple of
"the beloved disciple" — an eye-witness — "John the Elder."
Vide supra, p. 24. 3 St. Mark i. 20. ¦< St. John xviii. 15.

202 HIS TRANSFORMING POWER
member of the aristocracy. It has even been sug
gested that his acquaintance was rather with the house
holds of these officials than with the officials themselves.
Such household acquaintance would sufficiently ex
plain admittance to the High Priest's courtyard and
interest in the Jewish councillors. In any case the
references and allusions in the Gospels do not indicate
that John was what we should call especially cultivated
or refined. There is lack of nicety in his joining with
James in the request for high places in the coming
kingdom ; * moreover, the request makes clear that he
had not yet grasped the nature of that kingdom. If
one had to classify this disciple one would say that
he belonged to the middle class of society, — the class
which has not the poetry and art of the rich, or the
dreams and folk-lore of the poor, but goes daft over
such so-called practical matters as political economy
and arithmetic. In other words, St. John came from
that class of people who are least likely to spiritualise
the hard facts with which they come in contact. Dr.
Johnson was a fair type of the class, when he con
futed Berkeley and idealism by kicking a stone.
Yet our Lord included this disciple among the
three most favoured for His sacred and intimate mo
ments. And, identifying him with the beloved dis
ciple, we must recall that it was he who reclined
next to the Master at the Last Supper. More than all
this we must not forget that at the start the Saviour
gave to James and John the surname Boanerges —
Sons of Thunder.2 Attempts to explain this as a term
of reproach fail, because Christ did not so use sur-
1 St. Mark x. 37. 2 St. Mark iii. 17.

TRANSFORMATION OF HARDENED SINNERS

203

names. It was a pledge and a promise. John could
have been little more than a boy: we may believe that,
to the people who heard, this surname sounded in
appropriate, unnatural. Out of this ruddy youth was
to come inspiration, power, a sound going out to the
ends of the world. It was a prophecy of what he was
to be.
The Gospel of St. John is more than history, not
less. It is poetry, interpretation, life. To the un
imaginative critic, to the critic who has not measured
the transforming power of Christ, it is incomprehen
sible that the John of the Synoptic Gospels could even
after a lapse of sixty or seventy years have written the
Fourth Gospel. Such a critic is apt to dwell on details
of the narrative or of the discourses, worried because
they do not always bear marks of exact literalism.
A profounder story than acts and words of the Lord is
told. The inner life of Christ is told. It is a revela
tion of the Divine and Human Character, — and it
is done by the person who as a young man was eager
for high seats in a literal throne-room. This trans
formation is surely a profound and astonishing miracle.
No one but Christ would or could have seen the latent
power in the young disciple; no other could have
developed it and brought it to its perfection.
III. The Transformation of Hardened Sinners
But a moral change is harder to make, people some
times think, than any other. Executive or intellec
tual development does not perhaps seem unreasonable ;
but when a man has reached, let us say, the age of

204 HIS TRANSFORMING POWER
thirty and has been grossly bad, has acquired fixed
habits of evil life, then to transform that man into a
saint is indeed a miracle. Publicans and harlots were
in Christ's day, as now, types of the worst. Humanity
then, as now, abandoned such as hopeless. Not so
Christ. He was reproached for His kindness toward
these abandoned persons. We know that He changed
such people completely. And He changed them by
the same method used for the transformation of Simon:
He believed in their potential righteousness; and He
gave them His own strength. There must have been
many a Zacchaeus, many and many a Magdalen.
History since has shown the same miracle in the same
Name. Augustine, licentious, ribald, turned, through
Christ, into one of the lights of the world — and the
change was made when human experience says that
habits are fixed. So John Newton, centuries later.
So countless souls in all Christian years have met
Christ in the way, and have turned from blackness to
the whiteness of light and purity. It is still the record
of Christ's transforming power. It is still His supreme
miracle, — the miracle surviving to our own time, and
accomplished in the presence of a Christ who is no less
real because invisible.1
1 The Conversion of St. Paul is perhaps the greatest transforma
tion effected by Christ, since it shows the strength of His personality
working upon that most stubborn of qualities — a matured and
fixed intellectual position. I do not wish to ignore it, but simply to
draw attention to the fact that it was a conversion from wrong to
right, and so may be classed with moral transformations. For one
who believes Christ truly present in the world to-day, there can be
no effort to explain that St. Paul's transformation was subjective.
The Invisible Christ is as objective as possible.

CHAPTER XII
His Deliberate Purpose
IN some critical estimates of our Lord's Life there
has been a tendency to regard His purpose as
gradually changing. His sinless character is recog
nised from the start. Then, as He developed and
manifested His power — which is recognised as unique
— He is thought to have adopted the current Mes
sianic ideal, as the ideal which most nearly corre
sponded to His own intuitions. The critical scholars
of whom I speak, feel that He was at first inclined to
accept the material aspects of this Messiahship, only
gradually rejecting the material Messiahship for the
spiritual. By an ingenious quoting of texts they aim
to show that even to the end Christ felt the charm of
an earthly Messianic kingdom; as when He said at
His trial, " Hereafter shall ye see the Son of Man sitting
on the right hand of power, and coming in the clouds
of heaven." x It is one of the peculiarities of a certain
kind of critical scholarship that it can serenely ignore
or explain away large sections of material — quite as
historically sound as the material used — when that
material is inconvenient for a given theory. Such is
the case here. The words and events showing that
Christ's purpose was definite and unchanged from the
1 St. Matt. xxvi. 64.
205

206 HIS DELIBERATE PURPOSE
beginning of His ministry — not to speak of an earlier
time — melt into the very structure of the records.
It is quite clear that only gradually could Jesus wean
the Twelve and the other disciples from the more or
less carnal views of a Messiahship which was the in
heritance of the most hopeful section of Judaism.
Their view of a new heaven and a new earth was "the
point of contact " at which He could begin to teach
His unique lesson to the world. It is most uncritical
and indiscriminate to confuse His guidance of His
friends ' ideas with the ultimate ideas which evidently
were persistently within His own purpose from the
start. A brilliant scholar has recently summed up
Christ's attitude toward the Messianic idea, in lan
guage which seems to contradict much of his own
contention, but the implication gives a truer point of
view than his thesis: "Thus the Messianic idea," he
says, "was the only possible form in which Jesus could
clothe His inner consciousness, and yet an inadequate
form; it was a necessity, but also a heavy burden
which He bore in silence almost to the end of His life;
it was a conviction which He could never enjoy with
a whole heart." 4 The purpose of Christ was deeper,
always: He used a language to express that purpose
which people could understand. If we change the
beginning of this quotation so that it will read, "The
Messianic idea was the only possible medium through
which Jesus could explain Himself to His age," we
shall have a dictum as keen as it is true.
Let us dare, therefore, to ask what was the deliber
ate purpose of Christ in His mission to the world
1 W. Bousset (tr. J. P. Trevelyan), "Jesus," p. 180.

HE WAS SENT FROM GOD 207
I. He Was Sent from God
It is safe to begin slowly and to note that at the
basis of any purpose which we may discover was
Christ's unvarying certainty that He was sent from
God. Naturally the definite expressions of this cer
tainty are most numerous in the Fourth Gospel, but
the Synoptic Gospels are well equipped with definite
assertions, and moreover their atmosphere is per
vaded with the spirit of this certitude. The Boy of
twelve said that He must be about His Father's busi
ness.1 The climax of the baptism can be interpreted
only as a commission from God.2 The temptation
was met by the confidence that He was not to plan for
Himself, or to draw upon God's protection, but simply
and solely to do what the Father told Him.3 In His
sermon at the Nazareth synagogue, He told His old
friends and neighbours that He was divinely sent to
preach to the poor, to let the captive loose, to heal the
sick; — He was sent from God.4 In the Parable of
the Wicked Husbandmen it is altogether clear that He
is the Beloved Son sent last of all.5 In the discourse
on the True Manna He said, "I came down from
heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of Him
that sent me." a But there is no need to multiply the
evidence. "There is nowhere," says a very fearless
scholar, "any hesitation, or doubt, or development
from presentiments to certainty. ... He acts His
whole life long under the stress of compulsion. He
1 St. Luke ii. 49. 4 St. Luke iv. 16-30.
2 St. Mark i. 11. 6 St. Matt. xxi. 37.
3 St. Matt. iv. 4, 7, 10. 6 St. John vi. 38.

208 HIS DELIBERATE PURPOSE
knows Himself sent, nay, driven by God." s So far,
therefore, there can be no possible dissent from even
the most radical quarter.
II. Though Sent, He was not a Prophet
It would then be natural to say that Christ was a
prophet. But the main characteristic of a prophet is
that he speaks for another. Among the Jewish
prophets there were two distinct attitudes: in one atti
tude they prepared the way of the Lord, — that is,
they felt themselves links in a chain which should
terminate in the clear rule of the Messiah; in the other
attitude they spoke directly for Jehovah, — then
they said with uncompromising sharpness, "Thus
saith the Lord."
Jesus Christ recognised Himself always as one sent
from God; yet He neither looked forward to one higher
than Himself, nor did He utter His Truth in any Name
outside Himself. The vague anticipations of the Mes
sianic idea reached their climax in Him and were lost,
— lost because the highest anticipations were so
totally inadequate for the Person He showed Himself
to be. Further, when He taught He did not even
pause to say, "Thus saith the Father": it was always,
"Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time
. . .; but / say unto You2 . . ."; or, "Verily, verily
I say unto you . . ." He implied that His own
word was absolute. He was not a prophet. He was
one whose authority was in Himself.
1 Wernle (tr. Bienemann), "Beginnings of Christianity," I. p. 45.
2 St. Matt. v. 22, etc.

HE LIVED THE FATHER'S CHARACTER 209

III. He Lived the Father's Character
Who then was Christ? Just at this point it is
unnecessary to go the length of the divine claim; for
it will be wiser, for the sake of clearness, to go slowly.
He knew Himself sent from God, and His mission was
to display to men the Character of God. It was not
so much a matter of teaching as of living: He must
live out in His own character the character of the
Father. St. John's Gospel is filled with this supreme
thought. "I and my Father are one";1 "Hethatseeth
me, seeth Him that sent me"; 2 " If ye had known me,
ye should have known my Father also; and from hence
forth ye know Him and have seen Him";3 'He that
hath seen me hath seen the Father";4 "The Father
that dwelleth in me, He doeth the works";5 "Know
and believe that the Father is in me, and I in Him." 6
The Synoptic Gospels are not without this direct
testimony. In both St. Matthew 7 and St. Luke 8 His
word is recorded: "No man . . . knoweth who the
Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will
reveal Him." When the attractive young man was
rebuked for calling Christ "good," it was not because
he had used an inappropriate title, but because he had
used it lightly without weighing, without knowing, its
content.9 When Christ spoke of casting out devils,
1 x. 30. 3 xiv. 7. E xiv. 10. 7 xi. 27.
2 xii. 45. " xiv. 9. 6 x. 38. 8 x. 22.
9 St. Mark x. 18. The exegesis which would make this a dis
claimer of the right to receive this title does violence to the context,
and can arise (as it has arisen) only from a priori prejudice.

210 HIS DELIBERATE PURPOSE
He declared that He did it "with the finger of God." •
When met with the challenge that God alone can
forgive sins, He sealed His word of forgiveness by a
word of healing.2 But more than any definite words
is the Life itself as recorded in the Gospels, showing
a Man who by His Life revealed the Life of the Father.
IV. His Purpose was to Show God a Father of Love
We are now narrowing the purpose of Christ. He
was sent from God; He pointed to Himself; in Himself
He displayed the Character of the Father. Now what
characteristic of God did He make it His deliberate
purpose to manifest? There can be but one answer.
By His own Life He demonstrated God to be, first of
all and above all, a Father — a Father of Love.
In a general way we may see what contributions had
been made, up to Christ's time, toward a human un
derstanding of God's character. However vaguely,
yet surely, various nations had reached some partial
conceptions of the Being who ruled the Universe. To
the Greeks, He was the Beautiful, the Happy, —
dwelling apart from man's discomfiture. To the
Romans He was the harsh embodiment of Law. To
the Hebrews He was a noble and righteous Task
master, who, though interested in men, was generally
vexed with them and set them impossible duties. To
a world with such ideas of God, Jesus Christ came.
He had one absorbing purpose, — to show men who
God really is. Not by words, but by His own Life,
He was to make clear God's character once for all.
» St. Luke xi. 20. 2 St. Mark ii. 7, 9.

WAS TO SHOW GOD A FATHER OF LOVE 211
He showed God beautiful and happy, as the Greeks
had discovered. He demonstrated that the Romans
were right when they said that He was the Embodi
ment of Law. By His Life, too, He showed that in
saying that God is the Noble, the Righteous One,
His own nation had won the highest truth given
hitherto to the world. But Christ was to declare the
best that could be. Every day He was to prove that
God's chief prerogative is to love men, to sympathise
with them.
We catch the first notes of the purpose when as a
Boy of twelve He returned with His mother and
Joseph to demonstrate a loyal Son's loving obedience
in the Nazareth home; we catch more definite strains
in His resisting the use of any of His unique powers
for Himself, in the temptation; and thereafter He did
nothing but go about doing good, being unspeakably
kind. As He pitied and helped the poor, the sick, the
bad, so He taught men that God pitied and helped and
loved these same desolate souls. We know that the
temptation to depart from this one fixed purpose came
to Him time and again. In His nature He had locked
other attributes of the Father. He once said plainly
that He had it in His power to pray to the Father, and
thereby to receive more than twelve legions of angels.1
He laid aside whatever power was His that He might
cling to that demonstration of the Father's character
whose aspect is supreme. So the Cross came as an
inevitable consequence. In a world as hard and self-
complacent as the world of Christ's day a complete
Love could meet no other reception. And the Cross
1 St. Matt. xxvi. 53.

212 HIS DELIBERATE PURPOSE
was the summit of the demonstration. It was, for
some, ridiculous; for others, blasphemous. The whole
world cried out that it was impossible for the Great
God of the universe to be sorry for the distress of men
— men so small, weak, and unholy. So Christ died
on the Cross, not by accident, not because He became
involved in one chance fray with the authorities after
another; but because He freely chose to do it, because
He accepted all the consequences which His deliberate
purpose demanded.
Incidentally, it is interesting to reflect upon the
meaning which Christ Himself must have put upon
His saying, " He that taketh not his cross, and followeth
after me, is not worthy of me." 1 To the people who
first heard these words they implied doubtless a brave
undertaking of any chance difficulty which might
present itself in the common day. But after the
Crucifixion, after the whole Life of Christ could be
seen in contemplation, they must have meant what
they surely meant to our Lord: they must have meant
the persistent, unflagging pursuit of a hard, definitely
selected duty from the start to the end of life. As
Christ had His duty given Him by His Father, so the
disciples of Christ have their duties given them by
God, and just in proportion as the duty is well accepted
does it lead inevitably to hardness. The man who
enters public life finds that he must give up ideas of
mastery and gird himself to serve even the most soiled
of humanity. Roger Bacon, years ago, aglow with
zest for truth, found that to be the father of modern
science he must spend his best years in prison, insulted,
» St. Matt. x. 38.

WAS TO SHOW GOD A, FATHER OF LOVE 213
persecuted, hated. The mother with dreams of a
"career" gives herself up to the quiet of a home that
she may live only for her children: and when the chil
dren have gone out to the world, strong and brave
through her sacrifice, she is too old, too worn for a
"career." She has taken up her cross: her tears, her
prayers, her love, have made great men and women
for the next generation. To have a deliberate purpose
and to cling to it through storm, through the beckon
ing of sunnier fields, is to follow Christ. For He had
a deliberate purpose and never swerved from it till the
Cross sealed His constancy with the logic of a perfect
victory.

CHAPTER XIII
His Loneliness
ONE of the few sermons likely to survive from the
Nineteenth Century is Robertson's on "The
Loneliness of Christ." J Like Newman's sermon on
"The Parting of Friends," it doubtless gains much of
its power from the deeper personal history of the
preacher. Perhaps it was because Robertson, notably
a Christ-filled man, had so acutely felt the sting of
loneliness in his own spiritual life that he could write
of his Master's loneliness with convincing clearness.
No attempt to sketch Christ's Personality can now go
far without coming to this majestic and tragic trait.
The vigorous Bruce happily calls it "Jesus' Longing
for Apt Disciples," 2 and with all his Scotch pathos he
shows how Christ was always longing for understand
ing friends, but never quite finding them. We can
come most directly to the pith of the matter if we keep
in mind the two truths which these great men have
taught: the isolation of Christ, and its unwilling char
acter. It is scarcely necessary to pause over the thought
that our Saviour was rarely alone physically. From
1 F. W. Robertson's Sermons, vol. i. Sermon XV.
2 A. B. Brace's "With Open Face," Chapter VI.
214

HIS LONELINESS 215
the beginning of His fame to the Crucifixion, He was
constantly pressed upon by great crowds. It was
with evident difficulty that He could secure moments
of solitude. But sometimes it happens that one is
never more alone than in a dense crowd. On a city
street, for example, men and women go thronging past,
each intent upon some special business, ignorant or
careless that anyone who is near can need sympathy
or help. A mother goes by holding a child by the
hand, and the stranger recalls that no longer is such
love as that for him. Strong men go by laughing and
talking in the joy of an evident friendship, and the
stranger recalls that in all that crowded city is no
friend for him.
Loneliness is something quite independent of soli
tude. Often in the solitude we feel ourselves in most
cheerful companionship. The weary traveller making
his solitary journey sees the distant light shining from
the home to which he is going, and though he is out in
the darkness, a solitary stranger under the black sky,
he sings to himself as he thinks of the faces which are
gathered about the distant light, — he feels already
their affection. Solitary he is; but never less alone.
The Christ, who was lonely in the crowds, withdrew
to the solitude — and there in the stillness He was
comforted by communion with the Father.
Yet Christ craved human friendship. The Master
who wished in all things to be identified with humanity '
longed to have that humanity identify itself with Him.
There is a loneliness which cultivates a selfish and
chilling individualism, and thereupon casts its cloak
1 Supra, Chapter III.

216 HIS LONELINESS
about it and proudly walks apart from a jarring hu
manity; but one instantly rejects even a suggestion of
such unfriendliness in Christ. Higher and higher we
see the spirit of Christ climbing, as the Gospel narra
tive progresses, and always more and more unattended.
Yet we know that He yearned to have those who
understood and appreciated close by His side. To a
limited extent we can mark the progress of His lone
liness. I. The Loneliness in His Home
There is a tendency in modern accounts of Christ to
say that He released Himself from the obligations of
the family, even treating the family as an enemy.1
Against this sweeping generalisation must be placed
the long silent years at Nazareth. These years must
have, in any case, one meaning — loyalty to home.
Any man equipped to do such work as His could have
had no other reason (which is at all evident) for re
maining in a narrow provincial town — lost, as we
say, to the world. We must find some other explana
tion for the three or four sentences which have been
lately interpreted as disloyal to family relationships.
In a general way we know that there was a tendency
in Jewish life to magnify the prior claims of domestic
relationships. We sometimes hear men say to-day, " I
am a good husband, a good father; do not ask me to
be a Churchman or a patriot." In other words, duty
to God and duty to fatherland are rejected as unes
sential because duty to family completely fills a man's
1 Cf. Bousset's "Jesus," p. 152; Wernle's "Beginnings of Chris
tianity," vol. i. p. 77; et al.

THE LONELINESS. IN HIS HOME 211]
horizon. Every public servant, attempting to enlist
his fellows in large works, meets the disheartening
complacency of these "good husbands and good
fathers." Scholars tell us that this tendency was
markedly present in the Jewish life of Christ's day.
Remembering this we have ample explanation for
such sentential as these: "Follow me; and leave the
dead to bury their dead";1 "He that loveth father
or mother more than me is not worthy of me";2 "A
man's foes shall be they of his own household." 3
They are battle-cries to complete obligations, wherein
no man rests content with partial duties, however
nobly fulfilled.
Beyond this, it is not only possible, but necessary,
to read in other words of Christ a grievous disappoint
ment in His own home. It was certainly a bitter
experience when His old friends and neighbours "rose
up and cast Him forth," when He preached in the
synagogue at Nazareth: 4 it is not unnatural to think
that relatives more or less near were in that critical
congregation. We know definitely that His brothers
did not believe on Him ; 5 and it is evident that they
were not passive unbelievers, but went to the length
of meddling in His God-given task: then it was that
He said that His true relatives were they who sym
pathized with the message which He was bringing from
the Father.6 With the brothers, at this time of inter
ference, was His mother. I cannot see ground for
thinking that she was ever unsympathetic with Him;
but there is distinct ground for believing that she did
1 St. Matt. viii. 22. 3 Ibid. x. 36. 5 St. John vii. 5.
'Ibid. x. 37 . 4 St. Luke iv. 29. 6 St. Mark iii. 33.

218 HIS LONELINESS
not understand: indeed the narrative of the sym
pathetic Luke says so.1 Her sympathy certainly
deepened His love for her: but her failure to compre
hend His purpose must have been to Him an agony
of loneliness: she, the nearest, dearest, most anxious
to understand, could not be near His real spirit. There
is not harshness, but a groan of unutterable pathos in
His words to her at Cana: "Woman, what have I to
do with thee?" 2 It was the first act that was to
bring Him into such prominence that the Cross was
inevitable: and she, doubtless, was thinking only of
her pride in this uniquely strong Son, who, though
beyond her, was still hers. Very early, we may be
sure, Jesus Christ felt the loneliness of His home, in
spite of the love of His beautiful mother. No one
there, not even she, could be glad when He did His
hardest, most glorious acts.
II. The Loneliness Among His Friends
Not understood in His home, Christ then turned to
His friends. He had twelve friends who were official ;
they seem also to have been nearest to Him in a per
sonal way. The basis for His choice was their child
like spirit, their willingness to be taught and to be led.
It is part of the severity of His experience that the only
persons who were at all willing to yield themselves to
His power were untrained, undisciplined men. Such
men as Nicodemus, Joseph of Arimathaea, Gamaliel,
were perhaps too old to be expected to turn from their
fixed convictions. But we have record that a certain
1 St. Luke ii. 50. 2St. John ii. 4.

THE LONELINESS AMONG HIS FRIENDS 219
rich young ruler came running to Him one day, show
ing, by his acts and words, cultivation, charming
gentleness, and quick intelligence. "Jesus looking
upon him, loved him," and asked him to leave every
thing, and be His follower, His friend.1 Evidently
this was a man of the Gamaliel or Nicodemus type —
and young enough to be moulded by Christ's influence.
Christ's comments on this young man's rejection of
His invitation show how deeply disappointed He was
that He could not have his friendship.2 I would not
imply for a moment that Jesus Christ was not wholly
democratic, and valued men exactly for their charac
ters and not for any superficial pleasantness and
agreeableness. But we must not confuse the Twelve
as Jesus found them with what they were at the end
of His training of them. We know what the sensi
tiveness of Christ was: He felt defects of character as
we can never feel them. The Twelve were simple,
honest, true-hearted. But they had never been taught
to think; they had for a long time no spiritual percep
tion. Many of Christ's most luminous words they
could not understand till months, perhaps years, had
gone by.3 We may rightly imagine how lonely Christ
must have been, when day by day, longing for human
friendship, He could never say the deep things of His
Life without having it seem to the Twelve a "prov
erb," " a hard saying."
Many a man who has reflected upon Christ's Life
must have wished for Him that He might, while
spending His earthly career, have had Saul of Tarsus
for a disciple and friend. What a joy it would have
'St. Mark x. 21. 2 St. Mark x. 23 ff. 3 E.g., St. Mark ix. 32.

220 HIS LONELINESS
been to Him to have had a friend who could have
understood as Saul of Tarsus did understand later,
when "born out of due time." x Saul had gone the
lengths of other masters. He was ready, by knowing
the failures of human systems of reasoning, to absorb
and, in some part at least, to understand the inner
meaning of Christ's teaching. The rich young ruler
had perhaps Saul's intelligence: but he did not have
the childlike affection — the complete heart-surrender
to a leadership, intellectually already approved. We
infer that Palestine did not have a man of trained
mind who was willing to be taught by Christ; else
Christ would have chosen him. The prime necessity
was the docility and straight simplicity of such men
as He did choose to be His disciples. No training, no
intelligence, could take the place of that. Let this be
said as strongly as possible: yet we know that the
Christ who, by the conditions of His time, was limited
to friendship which could not, to any appreciable
degree, understand, was certainly thereby made to
feel the rigid loneliness of His Personality.2
It was only a little way that the sympathy and
understanding of Christ's best friends could penetrate
His unlimited nature. Unguessed ranges of hopes
and designs for them and for the world lay altogether
beyond them. He was thinking always of the ulti-
1 i Cor. xv. 8.
2 Cf. A. B. Bruce, "With Open Face," p. 108: "The ideal disciple
is one who has been prepared for receiving the instruction of a new
master by disappointing trial of other masters. . . . He comes
thoroughly qualified to appreciate the lessons he is to be taught by
knowledge of other doctrines with which he can compare them. . . .
It was for such disciples as he that Jesus craved."

THE LONELINESS OF THE CRISIS 221
mate rule of unselfishness in the world, — and suddenly
He heard His closest friends wrangling about the
worldly rank they might have in a very worldly king
dom. How, in spite of His love, He must have felt
the chasm yawning between Him and them! Or,
again, when in faintest lines He sketched the heroic
end, as magnificent as it was difficult, there was no
word of hushed reverence and admiration — only
easy-going, commonplace protest, and that from
Peter, who seemed to understand most. We must
think of Christ as entering into the willing sacrifice —
planning it and accomplishing it — without the cheer
ing sympathy of His friends. When they gave Him
sympathy, admiration, reverence, they did so for
reasons less than the highest. From beginning to end
He was forced to walk alone in all the higher ranges of
His Life. We know from the records that He craved
human sympathy in every plan — in every detail.
Because Palestine in His day could furnish no friend
at once deep and teachable, it was impossible that He
should have such human sympathy as His love de
manded. Therefore we dare to say that His august
Life was the loneliest of all lives which have been lived
on the earth. III. The Loneliness of the Crisis
When all this is said, it is only plain history to record
that in spite of their slowness and density these twelve
friends were our Lord's high comfort. " I have called
you friends," He said; "for all things that I have heard
from my Father, I have made known unto you." 1
1 St. John xv. 15.

222 HIS LONELINESS
How He relied on their human sympathy and help is
manifest in His eagerness to have them near Him
during the crisis. It was not merely that He was
teaching them; He wished them to "watch with
Him" : * He wished the feeling of their human nearness.
Here was something which did not require from them
intelligence so much as mere clinging love. But the
six or seven days before the end showed a succession
of glaring acts of selfishness on their part. When His
heart was heavy at Bethany2 with the certainty of the
Passion, and when a woman's intuition showed Him,
at great sacrifice, a regal homage of adoration and
sympathy, His friends were coldly critical of the
waste.3 In the Garden of Gethsemane the dearest
three fell asleep when His agony was at its height.4
Passing over betrayal and denial, we need only re
member that every one of these chosen friends forsook
Him and fled at the first note of actual danger.5 It is
unnecessary to remind ourselves that at best they
understood Him only a little : the joy of their com
panionship, because of that little, must have been be
yond estimate. Here then is the mountain-peak of His
loneliness: when He reached the topmost point of life,
He had not even the physical presence of these protest
ing but dimly seeing friends. He was altogether alone.
It was natural that human minds should be far from
Him, but now the human hearts were withdrawn.
• St. Matt. xxvi. 38.
2 Perhaps the sisters at Bethany, with woman's instinct and un
selfishness, came nearer to understanding Him at this time trian
any of the Twelve. 3 St. Mark xiv. 4; St. John xii. 5. '
4 St. Mark xiv. 37, 40. « St. Mark xiv. 50.

THE LONELINESS OF THE CRISIS 223
It is well to note here that it is always a lonely task
to do a new achievement in the world. The explorer
making his solitary journey through a hitherto undis
covered country tells of his nervous fright at every
new sound in the darkness.1 The poet, the genius,
is apt to be a lonely man, because he too is going
through a new country. But the earthly career of
Christ was new in a way in which no other life can be
new. With a new element introduced into humanity
He was marking out an altogether new path. In such
moments of conscious newness and aloneness, we may
surmise that it would have been unspeakable comfort
to put out the hand and to feel some human friend —
anything friendly and familiar, which could have
broken the terrible unfamiliarity of the tragic journey
toward Victory through a Cross. In the blinding
awfulness of that experience the Saviour of men
reached out His hand — and every friend had van
ished. We cannot imagine it — we can only close
our eyes and pray to be delivered from any loneliness
like that.
1 Cf. R. Kipling's "Explorer" in "The Five Nations," pp. 52 ff.:

"I remember lighting fires; I remember sitting by them;
I remember seeing faces, hearing voices through the smoke;
I remember they were fancy — for I threw a stone to try them.
'Something lost behind the Ranges,' was the only word they spoke.
I remember going crazy. I remember that I knew it
When I heard myself hallooing to the funny folk I saw.
Very full of dreams that desert. . . .
God took care to hide that country till He judged His people ready.
Then He chose me for His Whisper, and I've found it, and it's

224 HIS LONELINESS

IV. "And yet . . . not Alone"
The loneliness of Christ was intensified by His fore
seeing the desertion of His friends. "Ye shall be
scattered," He said to them, "every man to his own,
and shall leave me alone." 1 Then He announced the
compensation of His aloneness: "And yet," He added,
" I am not alone, because the Father is with me." 2
When human friendship failed, He fell back upon that
which was highest and best — the friendship of the
Father. One wonders if for even Christ there was the
danger lurking in human friendship, that if human
friends had been more satisfying He had been less
inclined to withdraw to the heights where He could
commune with His Father. It is a startling question,
and had best be met.
We are quite familiar with the compensations of
loneliness in the ordinary levels of human experience.
St. Augustine expressed it finely when he cried, "0
sweet, bitter world, hadst thou been less sweet, how
had I borne thee; hadst thou been less bitter, I had
loved thee too well!" Or, still more finely, when, with
deepest emotion, he said, "Lord, the human heart can
find no peace, till it rests in Thee." 3 The most apt
expression of the compensation in modern literature
is probably in Browning's "Saul." There we see
David groping after human help for his master's com
fort till each human consolation, good to an extent,
proves insufficient. Then David, by the very ex-
1 St. John xvi. 32. 2 Ibid.
3 "Inquietum est cor nostrum, donee requiescat in Te."

" AND YET . . . NOT ALONE" 225
tremity of the occasion and by the depth of his love,
leaps the chasm between things human and things
divine and points Saul to the perfect and complete
Friend, God Incarnate. If a man has sufficiently
profound demands for sympathy and does not have
friends who are too great, he will turn to God with
demands for help hitherto deemed impossible, and he
will find God. We may assume that this is what
Jesus meant when He told His disciples that it was
expedient that He go away:1 they ran the risk of
limiting the divine to His physical presence, and,
so, of losing the perpetual consciousness of God, even
when most alone.
We come back, then, to ask whether God, who gives
ordinary men such hard and effective beckoning to
Himself, gave the same trial, with its attending com
pensation, to His Son. It is well to record that if our
Saviour's trials were greater than ours, the compen
sations were also correspondingly greater. The ques
tion is beyond us; but we may reverently say that it
seems as if the Father had allowed His Messiah to be
in the world without even such a friend as Saul of
Tarsus would have been, that at every step, the Christ,
unsatisfied with human friendships, might turn to
Him, His Father and His God. Perhaps — may we
not say it? — this supreme Man could not otherwise
have won the strength to bring His lonely Life to
victory. And certainly no follower of Christ who is
lonely for legitimate reasons can fail to feel the dig
nity of the association into which his loneliness has
brought him. > St. John xvi. 7.

CHAPTER XIV
His Failure
WHEN people speak of the failure of Christ, they
commonly mean that paradoxical sort of
failure which is the heart of magnificent success. To
the eye of the world Christ's most brilliant success was
the day of His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, — we
know now that it was only the excited cheer of a fickle
populace. To the eye of the world Christ's irreparable
defeat was Good Friday, — we now celebrate Good
Friday as the anniversary of the world's supreme
victory. Christ declared it all when the pitying
women of Jerusalem followed Him with their wails
and their tears: "Weep not for me," He said, "but
weep for yourselves and for your children." x He
knew, — as we know after all the years, — that this
saddest of spectacles was cause for vibrant shouting,
— as men shout when a soldier, against ghastly odds,
turns defeat to decisive victory. Tears were not for
Him on that bravest of days.
One can find no fault with writers and preachers
who dwell on this paradoxical failure in Christ's Life.
Nothing so moves discouraged souls to bear up against
a sea of troubles; and nothing so puts determination
1 St. Luke xxiii. 28.
226

HIS FAILURE TO SAVE HIS NATION 227
into wavering wills. But, after all, this sort of failure
is not failure: it is only a bit of glittering talk so to
name it.
Christ did have in His life failure in an exact sense.
That is, He attempted to do certain deeds, and they
remained unaccomplished. This does not mean that
the failure was His fault : there is no trace of weakness
or yielding even in His defeats. Because our wills
run short, or we commit culpable blunders, most of
our failures ensue ; but we are candidly conscious that,
sin-stained though we are, we sometimes fail through
no fault of our own. A stubborn nature or a stubborn
humanity may baffle our most sustained and unselfish
efforts. Failure very often does not mean dishonour.
It may mean only extremely ill fortune.
It will be enough to show our Lord's courage in
failure if I select two instances of it : His failure to save
His Nation, and His failure to transform Judas into
a hero. I. His Failure to Save His Nation
When we speak of saving a nation, we mean more
than saving the individuals in that nation. Christ
did save many individuals in the Jewish Nation, and
they became the nucleus of the Christian Church.
But a few years after Christ's vanishing from the
earth, the Jewish Nation as a national entity ceased.
The Jewish race is spread over the world, and, in an
astonishing vigour, retains its identity; but there has
never been a Jewish Nation since the fall of Jerusalem
in the year 70.
It is legitimate to point out that Christ's redemptive

228 HIS FAILURE
work has affected every human soul, whether that
soul be conscious of the benefit or not. It is right to
say that the fine qualities of the Jewish Nation were
not lost, but passed out, through Christian universalism,
into the eternal life of humanity. Notwithstanding
both these axioms, it is exactly true to say that the
Jewish Nation — as a Nation — was not saved.
It is important to make sure that Christ really wished
to save the Jewish Nation. This makes us ask whether
He were really a patriot. We know that He loved
humanity, we know that He loved the individual soul.
Did He love His fatherland? The first answer may
rightly be an appeal to history : what, we may ask, has
been the attitude of Christ's most Christlike followers
in all ages toward Nationality? It is safe to say that
the world ascribes most Christlikeness to those leaders
in Christian history who have been patriots as well as
Churchmen. The superiority of the Greek Church
over the Latin can be ascribed in large degree to its
national spirit.1 The greatness of Savonarola lodged
in his fiery love of Florence, and his ability to rouse
the civic conscience. The awakening of Christianity
in the sixteenth century, its demand for a primitive
truthfulness and clearness, its demand that Christ be
first, — all this is bound up with the upspringing of
the National Spirit in Europe. The conspicuous
Christians in those days were the men who fought and
prayed for a "country."
The greatness of modern England may easily be
ascribed to the union of Church and State ; not in any
formal way, but in the hearts of her most influential
1 Dr. A. V. G. Allen's "Christian Institutions," p. 181.

HIS FAILURE TO SAVE HIS NATION 229
sons. It was no accident that the most conspicuous
ecclesiastic of the nineteenth century — Dean Stanley
— was installed in a Church that is the supremely
national building of England: because he aimed to
serve Church and State together, the English people
loved him. And it was no accident that, during the
same nineteenth century, Gladstone, the most con
spicuous English statesman, was known first of all as
a Christian man. In our own time and land we are
even now rejoicing that our President, the Governor
of Missouri, the Mayor of Philadelphia — to name no
others — are effective lovers of country because they
are first of all acknowledged followers of Christ Jesus,
and we feel that their intense patriotism is a shining
token that their Christianity is real. It would be easy
to make a long list; but it is certainly fair to say that
we instinctively ascribe to a Christlike man a strain
of patriotism. What Christ, all along the years, has
inspired men to be, He must have been Himself in
Palestine. But we need not rest here. There is ample evidence
in His own words. The parable of the Wicked Hus
bandmen J is a national parable. When the parable
reads, "But afterward he sent unto them his son,
saying, They will reverence my son," 2 there can be
but one interpretation: God sent Jesus Christ to save
the Jewish Nation. The parable records 3 that the
mission failed: "Therefore say I unto you," concluded
Jesus, "The kingdom of God shall be taken away from
you, and shall be given to a nation bringing forth the
1 St. Matt. xxi. 33-43; St. Mark xii. 1-11; St. Luke xx. 9-18.
2 St. Matt. xxi. 37. 3 Ibid., 39.

23°

HIS FAILURE

fruits thereof." J Not only does Christ somewhat
vaguely announce this part of His mission in a parable,
but He distinctly tells it in His lament over Jerusalem.
We need to remember that Jerusalem was Jewry even
more than Paris now is France, or London is England.
A lament over Jerusalem is therefore a lament for His
nation. "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem," He cried, . . .
"how often would I have gathered thy children to
gether, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under
her wings, and ye would not! Behold your house is
left unto you desolate." 2 No possible reading of those
words can take out of them the fire of patriotism.
The man who said them loved His country, and tried
to save her from ruin.
And He failed. The parable and the lament are by
scholars placed among the words spoken on the last
Tuesday before the Crucifixion, — the last day of His
public ministry. He had other and greater tasks —
for humanity, for individuals — but among them
was this task to save His dear country. You may say
that it must have been clear to Him for months that
the foolish people would not see or understand: "He
came unto His own, and His own received Him not." 3
Let that be as it may; He did not give up saving His
nation till He stood with His back to the wall, meeting
the last deadly thrusts. He did not save His country,
but we can truly say that He gave of His last efforts
for her.
Again, let it be said, the fault was in no sense His.
God forces salvation on neither man nor nation.
1 St. Matt. xxi. 43. 2 Ibid., xxiii. 37, 38.
3 St. John i. 11.

HIS FAILURE TO TRANSFORM JUDAS 231
Jesus Christ gave all, — the Jewish Nation had but to
receive it. She rejected it, — and died.
II. His Failure to Transform Judas into a Hero
One of the most perplexing problems of Christ's
Life must always be His choice of Judas, and His
failure to transform him. The problem is made some
what more difficult because, in the Fourth Gospel
especially, Judas is always mentioned with bitterness;
and this bitterness of the Evangelist is often transferred,
in the reader's imagination, from the ardent author to
Christ Himself. But as one studies the relation of
Jesus to Judas, it becomes increasingly evident that
our Lord regarded him with tenderness to the end.
However we regard the degree of foreknowledge
which the Incarnation involved, Christ must have
seen more and more clearly that Judas was not grow
ing away from the defects of his character, but was
running deeper and deeper risk of failing. It has
recently been pointed out that if Christ were not trying
to save Judas up to the very last, His permitting
Judas to break the paschal bread with the Twelve
either was a sign of His dim discernment of Judas's
plot, or was a dramatic invitation to His own death.1
Obviously, on any grounds — even of the most gen
eral survey of Christ's characteristics — both of these
possibilities must be rejected: one who read human
hearts as Jesus of Nazareth read them certainly knew
the intentions of Judas; and no one has ever yet been
1 Professor F. G. Peabody, " Jesus Christ and Christian Charac
ter," pp. 88-89.

232 HIS FAILURE
rash enough to accuse our Lord of any attempt at
dramatic posing. Nothing is left us, then, but to be
convinced that our Lord did not give Judas up, till,
seeing his nervous glances, his lack of interest in the
sacred Last Supper, He gave the sign that the be
trayal was inevitable.1 Even in the Garden, after the
betrayal, it is with the despair of unrequited love —
but love still — that Jesus utters His amazement at
the form of the betrayal: "Judas — my friend2 —
betrayest thou the Son of Man with a kiss ! " 3 Does
that not imply that though Christ had at the last
moment abandoned Judas to betray Him in some way,
He had vainly hoped that it would be in some franker,
more courageous way? Still the dear Master was
reaching out to save His friend.
Nor was this the end. The tone with which Jesus
spoke His amazement must have had the same healing
in it as was in the look which He gave to Peter after
the denial. Though the sin of Judas had been as scar
let, there was a tone ringing in his ears which told him
that there was for him a love which could make this
sin white as snow. In ways we cannot picture, we
may believe that the effort to save Judas from his
lower self followed him till the agony of desperation
brought him to his miserable end.
However we look upon Christ's persistence in the
face of ultimate failure, a long vista of possibilities
opens before us. We ask whether the Nation, the
individual, thus apparently lost in one dispensation,
1 St. Mark xiv. 20. 2 St. Matt. xxvi. 50.
3 St. Luke xxii. 48.

HIS FAILURE TO TRANSFORM JUDAS 233
will be pursued by a love so lasting that in some future
age, near or far, salvation will come to it. Or, looking
off in another direction, we wonder how we who see,
at best, with indistinctness, ever dare to abandon a
cause or an individual, when the supreme Master of
men worked to the end to save a Jerusalem and a
Judas. And there steals over the discouraged fighter
for truth and right a sense of high company in the
blackness of some disastrous failure ; one has honestly,
with brain and with heart, done one's very best, and
the blindness, the stubbornness, of a surrounding
world has sealed the entire effort with failure — well,
so it was with Christ sometimes! We no longer dare
to limit our undertakings to the tasks which we think
we may reasonably accomplish; as Christ's men we
must do many things which seem impossible, — if
God tells us to put our hand to them. We may fail,
even doing our bravest; but God will care for our
failures, — and as the poet says, " He loves the re
sponsibility."

CHAPTER XV
His Satisfaction
IF the supereminent purpose of Christ brought to
Him difficulties and sorrows which men never
before had known; so this same purpose brought to
Him an unprecedented satisfaction. This purpose I
have defined J as the will to demonstrate to the world
the character of the Father as a God supremely of
Love. As we know that any man's satisfaction lies
in the accomplishing of his purpose (it may be art,
profession, trade), so we know that Christ's satisfac
tion must have been in the force and thoroughness with
which He could live out, among men, the Divine Love.
The material from which He forged that Love; the
way He took to express it; the- ultimate outcome of
its manifestation, — these, it seems to me, are the
chief elements in the satisfaction of Christ.
I. He Gave Himself No Advantage which Other Men
did not have
I have already spoken of the self-identification of
Christ with humanity,2 in accepting the burden of its
sin, sharing the sorrow, and suffering voluntary pain.
i Chapter XII. 2 Chapter III.
234

HE GAVE HIMSELF NO ADVANTAGE

235

In so far, He shrank from none of those aspects of
humanity which impress us as peculiarly human.
There is one further concession to the limitations of
humanity which a complete love seems to demand.
I fancy that the man who tries to bring the comfort
of Christ's Life home to the sufferer is met more often
with doubts about Christ's humanity than with doubts
about His divinity. And the particular place where
people feel the unreality of His humanity is shown in
some such objection as this: "Yes," they say, " I know
His amazing fortitude in trials such as mine, — but
then He had absolute foreknowledge and He saw the
certain outcome as we do not see it. The definite
knowledge of the outcome makes all the difference in
the world; therefore, to think of Him now is not in
spiration, is not comfort." I cannot see how the case
can be put more clearly. It seems to the weary
sufferer as if Christ had an unfair advantage, even
while He stands as our exemplar.
On the other hand, to say that Christ had not fore
knowledge, to say that He was in any way limited to
the ordinary knowledge of His time and nation, is
often interpreted as an affront to His divine char
acter.1 Two things must be said at once. First, if in
1 Cf. A. B. Bruce's "Humiliation of Christ," and Bishop Gore's
"Dissertations" (II. "The Consciousness of Our Lord"). Both
of these books are valuable for their convenient grouping of passages
on this subject from theologians all through history. But to those
who put a high estimate on "the fathers," Bishop Gore's book is,
from his sympathies, especially important. Clinging as he does to
the certainty that Christ's knowledge, power, and majesty were
limited in the Incarnation, he points out that the great fathers (e.g.,
Irenasus, Origen, Athanasius) keep close to the necessary deductions

236 HIS SATISFACTION
any way the setting forward of the exposition of the
Divine Love required an abnegation of the perfection
of the divine knowledge, then its setting aside makes
the Incarnation not less complete but more complete,
not less wonderful, but more wonderful. St. Paul, in
the strength of his power, "determined not to know
anything . . . save Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." 1
The concentration of purpose which could affect even
avenues of information and knowledge is one of the
signs of St. Paul's enormous mental power. If the
purpose is sufficiently important there is a denial of
information and knowledge which is more powerful
than its acceptance. So if Jesus Christ, to show men
the thoroughness of God's Love, laid aside what might
have been His, His love is the more mighty and His
divine authority is the more evident: that first.
Then one other consideration must be weighed. Phi
losophers and theologians talk over-confidently of
God's omniscience. If Love requires it, can we not
from Scripture; but, he adds, as time went on, theologians cutting
loose from Scripture put more and more confidence in their own
speculations, till in the Middle Ages "theology" is quoted before the
facts of the New Testament (Op. Cit., p. 171). That his view does
not contradict Church authority, Dr. Gore shows by an appeal to
the decrees of the Councils, which, he says, give "an increased belief
in the divine Providence which superintended their decisions."
"For," he goes on (p. 212), "while the theological tendencies of the
time were seriously one-sided and set to emphasize the divine at the
expense of the human, the conciliar decisions are deliberately and
perfectly balanced. . . . The churchman who makes a right use of
the Church's decisions . . . will not be in any peril of finding this
his central faith contradicted in the New Testament." (See also
pp. 213 f.)
1 1 Corinthians ii. 2.

HE GAVE HIMSELF NO ADVANTAGE 237
think that the Almighty Father Himself wills not to
know certain details of the life of the humanity upon
which He has bestowed what we are forced to call
freedom of the will ? Logical necessity may compel
one to reduce the region of God's ignorance — if we
may use so bold a term — to a very tiny corner in
each human life. But how much is made clear if we
believe that when one sinner repents part of the joy
which that repentance brings to the Heavenly Father
comes from its surprise. Does one not read it in the
parable of the Prodigal Son? Does one not find it in
the necessary idea (which will not down, in philo
sophical thought) of the freedom of the human will?
God could, we say, have made the world as a machine
of steel, with every part mechanically fitted to its
neighbour: He could have known every act of man to
all eternity. But it is to magnify God's Name to
believe that He wills not to know all.1 He wilfully
shuts out of His knowledge the issue of many a
fierce battle which must rage in the human soul. No
combination of circumstances, no nice adjustment of
motives, can tell the outcome. A man's free soul,
given its independence by the Lord, alone can decide
1 An idea as old as Origen : see his comment on St. Matthew xxiv.
36. That modern philosophy is not averse to this conception one
knows from these careful words by Martineau ("A Study of Re
ligion," vol. ii. p. 263): "Lending us a portion of His causation, He
refrains from covering all with His omniscience. Foreknowledge of
the contingent is not a perfection; and if, rather than have a reign of
universal necessity and stereotyped futurity, He willed, in order to
prepare scope for a gift of moral freedom, to set up a range of alter
native possibilities, He could but render some knowledge condi
tional for the sake of making any righteousness attainable."

238 HIS SATISFACTION
the day. Theologically, therefore, it ill becomes a
reverent thinker to say that the setting aside of any
degree of knowledge is inconsistent with a complete
revelation of God in Christ.
We are now ready to examine the facts.1 There is
certainly no a priori necessity for denying a limitation
of Christ's knowledge : such limitation may reveal new
traits in His character,2 but in no way can it detract
from His honour and authority.3 The most famous
1 Candid orthodox theologians, — such as Church in England
and, recently, Forrest in Scotland, — have frankly said that if we
explain away the recorded words and events which show a limita
tion of Christ's knowledge, we must not complain of Unitarians
when they explain away passages which give indubitable proof of
His consciousness of Divine Sonship. The facts of the Gospels
must be rigorously accepted.
2 Cf. Bishop Gore ("Dissertations," p. 206): "In proportion as
the real human experiences, sufferings, and limitations of Christ
during the period of his humiliation are forgotten and ignored, in
that proportion men will go to seek human sympathy from on
high in some other quasi-deified being. We must recover the
strength which the Christian creed is meant to derive from a Christ
made in all points like unto His brethren, apart from sin. . . .
The minimizing of the meaning of His manhood is (among other
things) largely accountable for the development of an exaggerated
devotion to His Mother and the Saints."
3 The shrinking from this fact is fading away among conservative
theologians. In Liddon's Bampton Lectures (1866) we find the
effort to guard the Divine dignity by isolating the humanity. "His
Single Personality," said Liddon, "has two spheres of existence: in
the one It is all-blessed, undying, and omniscient; in the other, It
meets with pain of mind and body, with actual death, and with a
correspondent liability to a limitation of knowledge " (p. 695) . Thirty-
five years later, Moberly said in his "Atonement and Personality":
"The Incarnate never leaves His Incarnation. God, as man, is
always, in all things, God as man. He no more ceases, at any point,

HE GAVE HIMSELF NO ADVANTAGE 239
instance of His own disclaiming of omniscience is, of
course, His word about His return in glory: "Of that
day," He said, "knoweth no one, not even the angels
in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father." x More
over, His attitude toward Judas can be explained in
no way whatever, unless we believe that Christ did not
know the issue. It is akin to blasphemy to think
that Jesus Christ could have bidden a man to a post
whose acceptance He knew to be destruction. Very
important, too, is that most agonising cry from the
to be God under methods and conditions essentially human, than,
under these essentially human methods and conditions, He at any
point ceases to be God. . . . There are not two existences either of,
or within, the Incarnate, side by side with one another. If it is all
Divine, it is all human too" (p. 97). So, in 1906, Dr. Du Bose
in his "Gospel in the Gospels": " The hesitation and reluctance to see
all God, and highest God, not only in the humanity but in the deepest
human humiliation of Jesus Christ, is part of the disposition to
measure exaltation by outward circumstance and condition instead
of by inward quality and character. We find it impossible to recog
nise or acknowledge God in the highest act of His highest attribute"
(p. 284). Also, again: "Is the act in which love becomes perfect a
contradiction or a compromise of the divine nature? Is God not
God or least God in the moment in which He is most love ? Where
before Christ, . . . was or is love so love, or God so God!" (pp.
272 f.). To this growth in the understanding of Christ's Nature,
Dr. Sanday gives his consent. "I have the impression,' he says
("Expositor," May, 1906, p. 401), in commenting on this very pas
sage from Dr. Du Bose, "that in this respect the moderns have really
improved upon the ancients. . . . That is a kind of boldness that I
do not think we should have found in any of the ancients. And I
cannot help thinking that it is superior to the Kenotic teaching of
many of the moderns. . . . The application of it ... is deeply
impressive." See, also, Dr. Sanday's article "Jesus Christ," in
Hastings's Bible Dictionary, vol. ii. p. 652.
1 St. Mark xiii. 32.

240 HIS SATISFACTION
Cross: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken
me?"1 In that moment the knowledge of the future
was overcast. We cannot comprehend the full mean
ing of the Cross if we do not see the risk of that awful
doubt. All through His career He asked questions, and
often expressed surprise. A nature so transparent
as His could brook nothing for effect. When He
asked questions, He sometimes sought to arouse at
tention; at other times He certainly desired infor
mation, — and received it.
Nor was the Apostolic Age obscure upon the ques
tion. St. Luke says that during the eighteen years
at Nazareth, after the visit to the Temple as a boy of
twelve, He "advanced in wisdom."2 The author
of the Epistle to the Hebrews is emphatic: "We have
not," he says, "a high priest that cannot be touched
with the feeling of our infirmities; but one that hath
been in all points tempted like as we are, yet without
sin.3 . . . Though He was a Son, yet learned He obedi
ence by the things which He suffered." 4
In connection with this thought that Christ volun
tarily ° refused to give Himself an advantage of know
ledge which would have made life easier for Him than
*St. Matthew xxvii. 46. Cf. H. A. W. Meyer, "Matthew" (tr.
Christie), vol. ii. p. 273: "This subjective feeling must not be con
founded with actual objective desertion on the part of God (in opposi
tion to Olshausen and earlier expositors), which in the case of Jesus
would have been a metaphysical and moral impossibility." The
whole comment on this verse is valuable.
2 St. Luke ii. 52.
3 Hebrews iv. 15. " Ibid. v. 8.
5 Cf. Ottley, "Incarnation," ii. 291.

HE GAVE HIMSELF NO ADVANTAGE 241
for the rest of mankind, we must hold ourselves to the
remembrance of how keenly a man who is alert and
pure-hearted sees into the future. So, quite apart
from any unique nature within Him, we must believe
that, by the merely human elements, Christ would
have seen farther than, by the same elements, any
other man could have seen. This, it should be noted,
need not be from any supernatural power, but by
reason of the clearness and integrity of the use of these
human elements. It is startling to think what human
powers, never abused, always studiously cultivated,
must be able to accomplish. And in no field, we may
imagine, would that accomplishment be greater than
in seeing the realities in past, present, and future.
Therefore, we need not be surprised if in the Gospel
records there seem to be few instances when Christ
was not aware of events to come. A humanity such
as His would be far-seeing, in its own right. That
there are any instances of limited knowledge recorded
gives us reason to believe that He worked out His
problem with the same sort of knowledge which lies
within the reach of all other men.
If we accept such a point of view, certain vexing
questions fade from importance. We ask whether
possession by devils is our modern insanity; and then
we go on to ask whether our Lord used the term "pos
session by devils" because He accommodated Himself
to the language of His day, — as we now speak of the
"sunset," — or whether He used it because His human
understanding was limited by the medical theories
then in vogue. So, too, scholars are sure that the
Apostles expected the speedy return of Christ "at the

242 HIS SATISFACTION
end of the world." Whereupon scholars divide: some
saying that the Apostles misinterpreted words of Christ;
others that Christ Himself expected to return during
the lifetime of His disciples.1 The question is in any
case unimportant, because time is altogether relative
and subjective for any man who is roused to profound
realities. To any man who looks at the world from
God's point of view, "a thousand years are but as
yesterday." Besides, our Lord's own definite an
nouncement that He did not know the day, removes
at once all scandal from the discussion.2
1 It is right to note that few (and they iconoclasts) accuse
Christ of such an expectation. Cf. Dean Church (" Life," Evers-
ley ed., p. 319): "It would perplex me much to think that He
was imperfect or ignorant in what He did say, whether we under
stood Him or not."
2 Cf. Liddon's "Bampton Lectures" for 1866, pp. 687 ff. Lid-
don, against his will, is forced by his scholarship. "If," he says
(p. 689), "we should understand that our Lord in His Human Soul
was, at the time of His speaking, actually ignorant of the day of the
last judgment, we should find ourselves sheltered by fathers of un
questioned orthodoxy. St. Irenaeus discovers in our Lord's Human
ignorance a moral argument. ... St. Athanasius insists that the
explanation which he gives, restricting our Lord's ignorance to His
Human Soul, is a matter in which the faithful are well instructed.
He is careful to assert again and again our Lord's omniscience as
God the Word; he attributes Christ's 'ignorance' as Man to the
condescending love by which He willed to be like man in all things,
and compares it to His hunger and thirst. ... St. Cyril of Alexan
dria argues that our Lord's 'ignorance' as Man is in keeping with the
whole economy of the Incarnation. As God, Christ did know the
day of judgment; but it were consistent with the law of self-humilia
tion prescribed by His infinite love that He should assume all the
conditions of real humanity, and therefore, with the rest, a limitation
of knowledge. There would be no reasonable ground for offence at

HE GAVE HIMSELF NO ADVANTAGE

2 43

We return, therefore, from such investigation, with
a fairly clear decision that Christ held this among
the satisfactions of His Life: having undertaken the
consequences of sin, sorrow, and pain, with His
brethren, He relinquished the extraordinary helps
which lay at His hand,1 — as He would not call the
twelve legions of angels, so neither would He draw
upon the stores of divine knowledge. What a new
glory is thrown upon the manifestation of the Di
vine Love in Christ, if we think that, in the living
out of that Love, Christ gave Himself no advantage
which other men did not have. And what a joy it
must have been to Christ that He was able to wave
aside each beckoning to take an easier course than,
in the nature of things, could ever be open to His
followers. He forged the symbols of His Father's
that which was only a consequence of the Divine Incarnation." (See
Iren. adv. Haer. ii. 28, 6; Athan. contr. Arian. Orat. iii. l. 45; Ibid.
c. 43; Ibid. c. 46; Cyril. Alex. Thesaurus, op. tom. v. p. 221.) "No
such limitation," says Liddon (p. 695) "can interfere with the com
pleteness of His redemptive office; but at least it places Him as Man
in a perfect sympathy with the actual conditions of the mental life of
His brethren."
1 If it be objected here that He used miraculous powers, we must
remember that He never used a miracle in His own behalf. His
contemporaries, ipso facto, had advantages over others; He Himself
refused to accept any miraculous advantage, personally. Even His
enemies noted it when they said, "He saved others, Himself He
cannot save." Beyond this, even though He used miracles in dis
playing the Divine Love, we may look upon the miraculous power
as His "gift." Every man has some "gift." Not the "gift," but
the use of it, is the significant note in any life.
This idea is clearly set forth by Gregory of Nyssa ("Against
Apollinarius," 28).

244 HIS SATISFACTION
Love out of the material which humanity had hitherto
called common.1 II. He Felt the Cost of His Love
The pastor of the City Temple in London, tells2
the story of two sisters: one, weak, suffering,
dying; the other, in her strength, living only to take
care of the invalid. As Mr. Campbell visited them,
the watcher at the bedside said to him: "It seems
dreadful to be so helpless, to feel that I can do so little
to assuage this suffering. ... If only I could do
something that hurts — hurts me — I think I should
feel better — to let my love out." It is the same
thought which the great modern poet applies to God : —
"Gladness be with thee, Helper of the World!
I think this is the authentic sign and seal
Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad,
And more glad, until gladness blossoms, bursts
Into a rage to suffer for mankind,
And recommence at sorrow." *
In the same way, again we see a rational element in
the self-imposed flagellations of the mediaeval saints:
longing to show their love to God, they wished to feel
pain; not willing to await it in God's time, they dared
1 Cf. Edward Lincoln Atkinson, "Life," pp. 91, 92. "Where I
love Christ most is on the other side of Calvary; when it was all
hazard and He was man and God because He did so much, dared so
much; gave up His life without counting on any other victory than
the one which would be His when it would be all mankind's."
2 R. J. Campbell, "City Temple Sermons," p. 260.
3 Browning's " Balaustion's Adventure": Works, vol. xi. p. 88.

HE FELT THE COST OF HIS LOVE 245
to invent it. There can be no doubt that he who has
great love counts it a satisfaction if for the sake of the
beloved he may be accounted worthy to suffer.1
This, then, we may be sure was one of the deep
satisfactions of Jesus Christ. We sometimes say that
even had man at every step in the history of the race
done his duty, there would still have been the Incar
nation; only then there could have been no Cross, no
Atonement. It was sin that made the Cross inevi
table. No one can be thankful for such a hideous evil
as sin; but, since it had come, one may be thankful
that it offered to Christ the hard and glorious avenue
of expressing the Divine Love in its most complete
form. Loving men, He could feel, by stinging pain,
the depth of His love.
Among the complex situations of the last few days
of Christ's career, one must not lose sight of a great
alternative which lay in Christ's power; and that an
alternative which with perfect justice He could have
seized. The only hindrance was His Love. We see
that in those days two forces were arrayed one against
the other: on one side, Christ; on the other, the leaders
of the Jewish people. It will be wise, for the time
being, to eliminate any religious or theological signifi
cance from the contest. Christ was doing a work of
immediate mercy and of ultimate beneficence. He
deliberately refused to allow Himself to be made a
political factor in the state. The Jewish authorities,
driven by a blind prejudice and an inveterate fury,
determined to be rid of Him at any cost. They
stooped to all sorts of illegal meanness. Even Pilate,
1 Cf. Acts v. 41.

246 HIS SATISFACTION
willing enough to please them, could find no shred of
justice in their contention. Now think of what might
have been. On that last Tuesday, when the nets were
being drawn more and more closely about His inno
cence, He could have done some marvellous act —
such as He had already performed — and the wavering
mob would have returned to Him its allegiance. The
streets of Jerusalem would have been full of people
screaming their loyalty, trampling down the hostile
priests, bidding the Nazarene lead them on. Or, had
He in His mere human magnetism stood upon the
Temple steps, had He waved His hand over the people,
had He given one majestic command — then what a
scene of mad tumult would have been created in His
favour. We are prone to forget Christ's executive
genius because He used it for spiritual organisation.
Surely army and state never have known such leader
ship as one flash of His eye might have kindled. He
who could found a spiritual kingdom, which, strength
ening through nineteen centuries, promises to dominate
every corner of the earth, could readily have excelled
Alexander and Caesar, in their office, — and that with
out fault. It is right to believe that He would not
yield to carnal weapons because the secure victory of
the spiritual is by spiritual means. But that is sub
ordinate to a motive evidently higher still: to allow
any other course than the brutal, illegal way of the
Cross was to save Himself and to let the rulers of the
Jews perish. Looking at the whole subject as a
political study, we see that either Jesus must die, or
the Jewish leaders. Caiaphas spoke sanely, when he
announced that either Christ or the Jewish people must

THE GLAD SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT 247
perish.1 Christ had justice on His side. He must
die unjustly; or He must bring on a crisis in the Jewish
state, and then His Jewish enemies must die in their
sins.2 The decision was His. For love of those who
had misinterpreted, slandered, hated Him, He gave
Himself up. No man took His Life, He said : He laid
it down of Himself.3 Even if these people had not
received Him, they were still His people. He suffered
in their stead literally.
There is no need to go farther. This certain assur
ance that He had gone to the depth of pain for love of
the world must have been a satisfaction beyond any
measuring. We know it faintly from our own human
loves, which remain uncontent till they have endured
hardness for the sake of the beloved. Jesus Christ has
shown us that God is not outdone by His creatures in
the thoroughness of His love. He, through Christ,
gave to His Love the joy of great pain.4
III. He Had the Glad Sense of Accomplishment
For any man who has lived at all deeply, neither
fame nor wealth can bring much satisfaction. The
only satisfaction with which one can be really happy
is the assurance that one has accomplished something.
However we may interpret Christ's foreknowledge,
it is certain that He knew that His disciples had caught
1 St. John xi. 50.
2 What this probation accomplished is shown by Acts vi. 7: "A
great company of the priests were obedient to the faith." So also
Acts ii. 37, etc. 3 St. John x. 18.
*Cf. Dean Wace's brief but stimulating book, "The Sacrifice of
Christ: Its Vital Reality and Efficacy."

248 HIS SATISFACTION
His message — enough of it, at any rate, to recall and
enforce it under the later guidance of the Spirit. " I
manifested thy Name," He said to His Father, "unto
the men whom thou gavest me out of the world; . . .
and they have kept thy word. Now they know that
all things whatsoever thou hast given me are from
thee. . . . They believed that thou didst send me.
... I am glorified in them: ... as thou didst send
me into the world, even so sent I them into the world.
. . . The glory which thou hast given me, I have
given unto them." x
When He spoke to His disciples of His departure,
He comforted them with the thought that in His
Father's house are many mansions, and that He was
going to prepare a place for them.2 This meant,
among other things, that God's gifts, which are limited
only by our power to receive them, would now be
possible for them — because He had been successful
in His work, — He had made them capable of receiving
the best in all times and places, as God should bestow
it. His final commission to them, just before the
Ascension, rings with the joyful confidence of a certain
future: "Go ye therefore, and make disciples of all the
nations." 3 But even before the Resurrection, while
the work was still unfinished, there was, in spite of
such dark moments as those in Gethsemane and on
the Cross (when He cried out His doubt of God's
presence), an abiding consciousness that He who had
not ceased to look to the Father at each step, should
succeed in His mission to the world. So it is that the
1 St. John xvii 6-22. 2 St. John xiv. 2, 3.
3 St. Matt, xxviii. 19.

THE GLAD SENSE OF ACCOMPLISHMENT 249
author of the Epistle to the Hebrews can say that
Jesus "for the joy that was set before Him endured
the Cross." 1 Having used the materials from which
other men must make life, having felt the cost of an
infinite Love, He had one crowning satisfaction: by
communion with His Father, by His own grasp of
reality, He knew that He was succeeding. With that
assurance, all limitations and all pain were glad aspects
of His love, both for man and for God.

CHAPTER XVI
His Beauty
IN attempting a description of Christ's personality,
we must take account of the efforts, in the course
of history, to reach some conception of His bodily
appearance. In the Gospel narratives there is no
conscious attempt at portraiture; and, so far as one
can tell, the so-called traditional conception — the
long hair, the sad eyes, the parted beard — has no
historic value.1 When men began to paint or draw
His picture, the paintings or the drawings were very
largely reflections of their theology, now pitiful, now
fair, as the artists passed from an emphasis upon the
manhood acquainted with grief to an emphasis upon
His perfect beauty. When traditions did spring up,
especially when it was thought that pictures had been
painted, either by miracle or by the hand of St. Luke,
and that the traditions were based upon such impor
tant "originals," men became largely the slaves of
these traditions, and feared to paint the ideal face
which would have been for them the face of Christ.
So it is that when we come to the great age of painting
in the years before and after Raphael, we find reverent
1 For the growth of these early conceptions see Keim's " Jesus of
Nazara," vol. ii. (tr. E. M. Geldart) pp. 189 ff.
250

HIS BEAUTY 251
attempts to show us Christ, but they all alike lack the
spontaneity, joy, and strength which we are sure
showed in the face of the Saviour. Modern art has
to a degree overcome the bondage to the treacherous
tradition; but what it has gained in freedom, it has
lost in reverence. Any collection of modern pictures
of Christ is hopeless: one is shocked by what seems
almost vulgarity. In all this discouraging estimate
of the contribution of art to the understanding of our
Lord's personality, it is possible to make one or two
exceptions. Da Vinci's sketch of the Christ-head for
his Last Supper, in its dimness, suggests more than
any other old master what we long to find in a picture
of Jesus. And several wonderful qualities in reverent
combination one finds in Mr. La Farge's picture of
Christ and Nicodemus. These two pictures give us a
suggestion of what art may at last be able to accom
plish toward interpreting the Perfect Man to the world.
So we can form no image of the face of Jesus. Very
fortunate for us that we cannot do so, for the greatest
portrait, if of a very great man, is always disappoint
ing. It is fairly easy to get a striking picture of a
frame-maker, a councillor, a cloth merchant, or a
little Spanish princess — provided, of course, a truly
great artist is at hand to paint it. But to paint the
picture of a genius, a commanding spirit, a creating
soul, — that is a different matter! For here there is
an interior life which uses the features of a human
face as a Paganini uses the strings of a violin, — every
instant there is change — joy and pain and triumph
and despair and scorn and pity and strength and love
— chasing one another in quick succession, or melting

255

HIS BEAUTY

together in one flashing glance. Even when people
are not great, but are simply as all the world to you,
you take no especial satisfaction in their pictures.
You know their faces too well to be satisfied with this
fraction of a portrait, which is all that the painter (or
the photographer) can catch.
It needs to be said, too, that what we call the fea
tures — the outlines of the face, the dimensions, and
angles — have singularly little to do with the real face.
We all have seen men whose features are plain to
ugliness turn faces to us, in their moments of exalted
thought and love, which are faces of heavenly beauty.
All that is merely physical fades; and the face trans
figured, spiritualised, shines before us. It is the real,
the abiding face, which can be treasured up in the
memory, but which never can be reduced to line or
colour. Faintly, therefore, but in some sense really, we may
construct for ourselves some conception of the face of
our Master. The Gospel stories give us indications of
His face, all unconsciously; for we catch in the atti
tude of those who surrounded Him the reflection of
His glance. Because in certain instances we know
how men responded, when He spoke no word to them,
we may surmise how He must have looked upon them.
I. His Health
We must speak with extreme caution ; but it is safe
to say that the basic suggestion of the face of our Lord
must have been health. It is quite true that there
have been periods in history when men have thought

HIS HEALTH 253
of Him as always on the verge of illness; and very
often this thought has been incorporated into art.
But there is, a priori, a reason for believing that He
who was whole in spirit was whole also in body. Our
age, especially, is attaching blame to a man who does
not keep robust, or, growing weak, does not win
strength. The same idea, we know, was more or less
prevalent in Christ's day, though in a slightly different
form: "Who did sin," asked the disciples, "this man
or his parents, that he should be born blind?" 1 Highly
significant it is that in the next generation, also, con
spicuous words of Christian teaching read, "Your
body is the temple of the Holy Ghost."2 Robust and
strenuous periods of Christian life would feel it to be
inconsistent with the sinlessness of Christ were He not
the embodiment of health.
This a priori inference is of small value alone. But
it does not stand alone. We must recall the incessant
activity of an ordinary day of Christ's ministry —
His "interviews," His instructions, His healing, His
long journeys — and then, besides these days, we must
think of the nights spent often altogether in prayer.
"His vigour of health," says a man of ruthless reality,
"is proved by the wearing restlessness of His life, and
by the daily expenditure of strength both of body and
of mind, demanded by the stormy importunity of the
mental and physical misery of Israel." 3 How far He
was from nervousness we feel when we read of His
sleeping calmly through the storm on the lake, when
even experienced sailors were frightened.4 That,
1 St. John ix. 1. 2 1 Cor. vi. 19.
3 Keim, "Jesus of Nazara," vol. ii. p. 194. 4 St. Mark iv. 38.

254 HIS BEAUTY
through the hubbub, He could sleep so soundly shows
with what wholesome thoroughness His tired body
could refresh itself. No argument for constitutional
weakness can be made from the rapidity of His death,
after He was nailed to the Cross. Too many possi
bilities beyond our judging might account for it; such,
for example, as fatal injuries inflicted during the
scourging. It is reasonable to think that none but one whole
of body could have worked all day and watched all
night and yet be ready for the most exacting demands
of body, mind, heart, and soul, on the morrow. As
we think of the face of Christ we cannot avoid the
thought that the flush of robust health was there.
II. His Radiance
I have already spoken of Christ's gladness.1 That
gladness, we are sure, must have shone in His face.
His illustrations, dropped in His teaching, show how
the radiance of nature must have been reflected in His
smile. He was as no St. Bernard, dull and heavy of
face, riding over the shining Alps, and seeing nothing
but the neck of his mule. He saw the bright little
flowers in the field, and at once He declared that even
Solomon in all his pomp was not so beautiful.2 He
watched the birds in their careless flittings, mingling
search with song, — and He was glad that God fed
them.3 He talked about children who played in the
market place, piping and dancing, and thereupon
pretending to be doleful — to catch the sympathetic
1 Chapter VII. 2 St. Matt. vi. 28, 29. 3 Ibid. 26.

HIS RADIANCE 255
attention of the bystanders1: we feel at once that He
must have stopped, again and again, to smile down
upon such childish sport. From His teaching we
know that all natural things appealed to Him: vine
yards, fields of grain, the land just ploughed; signs of
fair weather, and foul; men who lived elemental lives,
— vinedressers, fishermen, ploughmen, men seeking
employment, beggars — He had watched them all
and knew their ways. There is no trace of any ac
cumulation of pedantic facts, there is only the glad
absorption of all the simple naturalness and interest
of common life.
St. Paul, it has often been pointed out, has no
figures from the gentler aspects of nature. Creation
groans and travails, but there is no singing of birds,
no peeping of flowers above the grass. There is rather
the noise of the city in his pages; the clatter of traffic,
the tread of soldiers, the shout over athletic victory.
We feel at once that there could have been no such
radiance in St. Paul's face as in the face of our Saviour.
St. Paul felt the evil of the world and he knew that
God is Love, but he did not live in country lanes: he
could not know the sweetness and hope of a country
morning. Jesus Christ had this help which His greatest
Apostle did not have; and a radiance which so per
sistently invaded His happy talk must have written
its beauty in His eyes and in His smile.2
1 St. Matt. xi. 16, 17.
2 For the incidental evidence which this contrast between Christ's
figures and St. Paul's gives as for the independent tradition of the
words of Jesus (against those who would make St. Paul the inventor
of Christianity), see passage from H. Weinel, translated by Professor
Peabody in his "Jesus Christ and Christian Character," p. 61, note.

256 HIS BEAUTY

III. His Gentleness
We know that He who responded to the inanimate
world was equally responsive to the moods of men's
souls. We cannot think of anything resembling hard
ness in the Saviour's face: we feel instinctively that
His face must have caught up and reflected in its
reverent light all the joy and all the sorrow of the
people who passed by. It is not easy to discover the
best word for this characteristic. It is kind, winning,1
charming, magnetic, sensitive; but none of these words
seems to be of itself sufficient. Perhaps if we speak
of the gentleness of His face we shall more nearly ap
proach the intuitive impression which one wishes to
impart. Here again there is no need to rely only on the
Christian instinct. The New Testament gives ample
witness. When the mothers brought their little chil
dren that He should touch them, there is clear evi
dence that these mothers found in His face that which
made them trust to Him what was dearest to them.
But it was no mere touch that He gave them. He
took the little children in His arms; and so, laying His
hands on them, He blessed them.2 One is sure that
as they looked up into His face they fell back into His
arms content. He who had only a moment before
rebuked His disciples had in His face even then the
1 Matthew Arnold ("Literature and Dogma," p. 139) reminds us
that Bossuet spoke of "le debonnaire Jesus," and that Cowper spoke
of His questioning the disciples going to Emmaus "with a kind,
engaging air." Matthew Arnold's own famous description ("sweet
reasonableness") might here be recalled. 2 St. Mark x. 13-16.

HIS GENTLENESS 257
winning tenderness which made timid children trust
Him. How can we interpret the passage otherwise?
Then there is the story of Lazarus. When Martha
had given one look into the face of her Friend, she
cried, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my brother had
not died." l She could not have said that had she
not read in His face the very depths of sympathy: she
saw that He felt what she felt. As they stood about
the grave, a little later, His face was so full of sorrow
that even the Jews said, " Behold how He loved him!" 2
What wonder is it that bad women melted into peni
tence at the sight of His face; the pity for their case
and the horror of their guilt mingled there in an
overwhelming tenderness, which drew them to a new
life. What wonder is it that women followed Him
and ministered unto Him.3 What wonder that at the
last women followed Him weeping on the way to
Calvary; and what a very climax of gentleness must
have suffused His eyes as He turned to bid them not
weep for Him, but for themselves and their children.4
Men in that age were not gracious to women as a rule ;
because women were drawn to Christ, We know that
they saw in His face a benignity and a consideration
which assured them of respect and help. Women and
children have always been more sensitive to the face
and its story than men have been. May we not think
that the Syrophcenician woman kept up her courage
to persist in her plea, notwithstanding Christ's words
of expostulation, because she fastened her eyes on His
face — and she read the gentleness there? 5 At every
'St. John xi. 21. 2 St. John xi. 36. 3 St. Luke viii. 3.
4 St. Luke xxiii. 28. 6 St. Mark vii. 24-40.

258 HIS BEAUTY
turn, as we thread our way through His career, we see
the gentleness of the face of Jesus.
IV. His Commanding Strength
We cannot think of the Saviour's face without feeling
that behind all the radiance and gentleness there was a
perpetual seriousness, — the sort of seriousness that
proclaims, " I care." We must distinguish this from
a usual form of seriousness, which is " anxious for the
morrow," and "is troubled about many things" —
because such seriousness was distinctly condemned
by Christ.1 It certainly was the seriousness which
had thought only for "the one thing needful";2 there
fore implying not trouble, but indomitable strength.
Perhaps, then, it will be wiser if we speak of this serious
ness as the expression of irresistible command, — a
seriousness so intense and vivifying that he who saw
it felt impelled to submit without condition.
Several marked examples survive wherein we feel
convinced that words were reinforced by the expres
sion of the face, since the words alone do not seem
adequate to produce the electric result. To four
fishermen, busy at their work, He said, "Follow me";
instantly they left all and followed Him.3 Passing
by the place of toll He said to the busy collector,
" Follow me," and the collector arose at once and
followed Him.4 To a centurion, wishing a boon, He
seemed so preeminently one to be obeyed, that a
word only would be necessary;6 does this not imply
1 St. Matt. vi. 34; St. Luke x. 41. 2 St. Luke x. 42.
3 St. Mark i. 16-20. 4 St. Mark ii. 14. « St. Luke vii. 7.

HIS COMMANDING STRENGTH 259
that to a soldier He seemed a born commander, with
the presence of a superb general? The Jewish popu
lace, always creatures of outward impressions, could
not have greeted Him as prophet * and Son of David,2
had they not felt the commanding authority of His
presence. Most convincing of all is the overwhelming
effect which His presence had upon the Roman sol
diers 3 who came to arrest Him. They had said that
they were seeking Jesus of Nazareth. And as the
torches flared in His face, He said simply, " I am He."
Whereupon "they went backward and fell to the
ground":3 plainly they saw in His face that which
downed them — a power which told their harsh
strength that they were absolutely at His mercy.
To the men of our Saviour's day His look of command
seemed most potent in that constantly He controlled
the demons which had seized upon unfortunate souls.
However we interpret this possession by demons,
Christ's power over it implies that the treatment used
in its cure was largely one radiating from His com
manding glance. The Gadarene demoniac, "when
he saw Jesus from afar, ran and worshipped him." 4
No painter has ever yet caught even a suggestion of
the more than martial dignity that must have marked the
face of Christ. The Gospel accounts leave us in no doubt
about the dominant strength always residing there.
It is right to say that the analogy of all great souls
1 St. Matt. xxi. 46. 2 St. Matt. xii. 23.
3 St. John xviii. 6. The o-ireipa of v. 3 is clearly the Roman
cohort. See H. A. W. Meyer's "St. John," vol. ii. pp. 307 and 309.
? St. Mark v. 6.

260 HIS BEAUTY
whose faces tell their story would lead us to believe
that these expressions of the face of Christ would be
most often blended. If artists seem to us, in modern
times, to have erred by sacrificing Christ's strength to
His tenderness, we must admit that the artist who
most nearly succeeds at the impossible task is he who
can paint a portrait somewhat as Turner painted land
scapes — suggesting many expressions united in one
great whole. Browning voices a profound instinct
when he says, —
" Tis the weakness in strength that I cry for . . .
In the Godhead! "
In the face of Christ we must think of a harmony of
opposites. To think of Him with Judas, we must see
a face of mingled pity and sternness; to think of Him
with Simon Peter, we must see a face of mingled joy
and disappointment; to think of Him with Nicodemus,
we must see a face of mingled patience and finality.
The portrait which even to one's innermost conscious
ness one dares to paint is of necessity dim. But it is
not the dimness of darkness; it is the dimness of the
light. Even if we go but a little way in such reverent
imagination we are convinced that the face of Jesus
Christ was a face of ineffable beauty.

CHAPTER XVII
His Vitality
IN the Prologue of the Fourth Gospel we read, " In
Him was life." x That part of the serious-minded
world which lies just beyond the conscious influence
of Christianity is more and more inclined to repeat
this ancient sentence. The scientific explorer comes
back, now and again, with a verdict which reduces
the number of the objects that endure. The sun, he
says, is wasting; the mountain brooks will some day be
dry; the hills — primitive types of eternity — will
fade away; the stars must all at last cease to shine.
Then turning to man, the scientist joins the moralist
in the lament that even great men spend but a few
feverish years and then vanish from the sight and the
memory of the world. A very few names from the
myriads of humanity are kept in what we call the lists
of fame; but the world feels faintly, if at all, their
influence. There is one startling exception amid all
this wreckage: Jesus Christ is, to the world, more
alive to-day than when He walked in Palestine. It is
not a theory : the extent of His influence, covering con
tinents and centuries; the intensity of His influence,
inspiring men, in peace and in war, to do consummate
1 St. John i. 4.
261

262 HIS VITALITY
deeds of leadership and sacrifice, — these are facts ;
and it is a purely scientific spirit which records them.
He lived in Judaea; He lives still in all the world. " In
Him was Life."
This characteristic of vitality in Christ needs close
consideration. We can best study it by observing
His conscious appreciation of it, as our records show;
then by a rapid survey of His vitality in history.
Having assured ourselves of the reality of this vital
energy, we may ask one or two profound questions
about its origin and transmission, thus arriving at
some notion of its quality.
I. His Own Consciousness of Vitality
Jesus Christ showed both by His deeds and by His
words that He was fully conscious of unique vitality.
This vitality was within Himself, but He was able to
communicate it to others. When the woman having
the issue of blood touched Him in faith, He at once
"perceived in Himself that the power (proceeding)
from Him had gone forth," and he said, "Who touched
my garments?" x So, in all the miracles where Christ
by touch or other material means effected the cure,
we must believe that the physical contact was the
avenue of His vitality, and was not a mere aid to
faith, for the sake of the recipient. We cannot too
persistently insist upon the reality, necessity, and
economy of Christ's acts: He did nothing for effect.
To the infirm man at the pool of Bethesda, He said,
"Wilt thou be made whole?"2 This seems a super-
1 St. Mark v. 21. 2 St. John v. 6.

HIS OWN CONSCIOUSNESS OF VITALITY 263
fluous question till you imagine that Christ used the
question to force the invalid to look into His eyes;
then, as their eyes met, the man's faith drew from
Christ the vitality for his healing. That this is not
fanciful one may feel from a comparison with the
methods of the Apostles; when, for instance, Peter and
John said to the lame man, " Look on us." J What
more natural than that they had seen the Master use
a similar means?
But the words are even clearer than the deeds.
After this healing of the man at the pool of Bethesda,
the Saviour met His critics with the definite assertion,
"The Son quickeneth whom He will." 2 And then,
immediately, "As the Father hath life in Himself, so
hath He given to the Son to have life in Himself." 3 To
the woman of Samaria at Jacob's well, He said that
He would for the asking give living water, — such
water that it should be a well "springing up unto
eternal life." 4 The discourse in the sixth chapter
of the Fourth Gospel is sometimes weakened because
interpreted as referring only to the Lord's Supper.
Its application covers our Saviour's whble Life in the
world, including incidentally the Lord's Supper.
When therefore He said, "I am the bread of life . . .
which I will give for the life of the world," 5 we would
wisely think of His enormous vitality and His power
to communicate it to men, rather than of any especial
means of that gift. Closely allied with this is the say
ing to Martha, "I am the resurrection and the life;"6
the saying to Philip, "I am the way, and the
1 Acts iii. 4. 3 Ibid. v. 26. 5 St. John vi. 35, 51.
2 St. John v. 21. i Ibid. iv. 14. 6 Ibid. xi. 25.

264 HIS VITALITY
truth, and the life";1 the comforting words to the
Twelve, " Because I live, ye shall live," 2 and " I am
the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me,
and I in him, the same beareth much fruit: for apart
from me ye can do nothing."3 More startling than
all these, however, are the words, "Before Abraham
was, I am." 4 And finally we have the words before
the Ascension, " I am with you alway, even unto the
end of the world." 5
We cannot escape the conviction that the Man who
did these deeds and said these words was conscious of
unique vitality, — vitality so full and rich that He
longed to give it to every man who would receive it.
"I came," said Jesus, "that they may have life, and
may have it abundantly." 6
II. The Witness of History to His Vitality
The plain student of history cannot miss the fact
that when Christ was buried in the new tomb of Joseph
of Arimathaaa, His closest friends were like timid
lambs fleeing before a storm. Within two months
these apparently inefficient men had begun to chahge
the world in Christ's name.7 Knowing Him alive
after death, they lived, they breathed, for one single
purpose, — to speak of Christ, to live the life of Christ,
to be Christ. On each first day s of the week they
broke bread and ate it, they poured out wine and
drank it, in remembrance of Jesus, in faith that their
1 St. John xiv. 6. * Ibid. viii. 58. » Acts ii. 41.
2 Ibid. 19. s St. Matt, xxviii. 20. s Acts xx. 7; etc.
3 St. John xvi. 5. "St. John x. 10.

THE WITNESS OF HISTORY TO HIS VITALITY 265
souls were filled with His Life. Later they were joined
by a scholarly tent-maker named Saul of Tarsus. He
was so aglow with this Master's life that he kept say
ing, "For me life is — Christ!"1 It was a unique
vitality which these once inefficient people took on.
They faced kings. Lions, fire, agony, could not
daunt them. Never had men been so bold, so per
sistent, so full of life. Men great in the world's eye
were all about them; but it is difficult now even to
recall their once resounding names. And after all
the centuries the words of a seemingly obscure John,
Paul, and Peter are quoted even by the children of all
civilised lands. These same words are the goads of
strong men in the thick of struggle and achievement.
And they are the solace of dying eyes. Whence came
this wonderful vitality? History says, "Only from
Christ." History is frank in acknowledging that this
infusion of vitality into weak men, making them
thereby giants of heroism and power, is the most amaz
ing miracle the world ever has known. These men,
filled with the life of the unseen Christ, were uncon
querable. Death had no dominion over them. They
smiled at death, so that for them death ceased to be.
Life was always and always before them.
It is always perilous to generalise; but it surely is
safe to say that all the centuries since Christ have been
Christian centuries. The world has been radically
changed. The men who stand out in the pages of
history as the powers moving forward the destiny of
the world have been men who have acknowledged
Christ morning and night. The great poetry gropes
1 Phil. i. 21; Gal. ii. 20; 2 Cor. xiii. 4; 1 Thess. iii. 8.

266 HIS VITALITY
through all minor strains attempting at last to inter
pret Christ: Christ is behind its inspiration. The in
fluential philosophy, typified by Kant's leadership,
comes back from all theories to stand in reverence
before the moral law of Christ. Music in its immortal
forms of composition moves the spirit of man by such
themes as "The Messiah" and "The Redemption."
Art has studied form and colour in the vain hope of
painting at last a face that shall seem to men some
what like Christ's. And where do we find the source
of the ever-increasing kindness of the world, — the
care for sick and poor and maimed, — the hospitals,
asylums, and the rest? Not from Plato or Marcus
Aurelius. Only from Christ. It is quite beside the
question to point out dark spots in our modern civili
sation. Just as futile is it to mark the slowness of the
world to learn mercy, — for we are often reminded
that the slavery of paganism lasted to an extent till
the nineteenth Christian century. The stubbornness
of the material is no argument against the force which
is always playing upon it. We know that an over
whelming vitality has been at work throughout the
world, accomplishing miracles year by year, — and
the only name for that vitality is Christ.
And what shall we say of our own day? Let me
quote from a tried scholar, an independent and vigor
ous thinker, living at a great centre of learning: "The
man in the market, on the exchange, in the factory,
in the infirmary, by the sick-bed, anywhere, every
where, whose life is possessed and ruled and inspired
by the great truths of religion, is the true measure of
its power. And never at any moment in the whole

THE WITNESS OF HISTORY TO HIS VITALITY 267
history of the Christian faith were there so many men
filled, commanded, guided, by the holier and simpler
truths of our faith. . . . Never was age more marked
by its strong and victorious belief than ours. I know
what I say. The truth of Christ is slowly subduing
the mind of man into itself. Never was His authority
so great as it is now." J This is generalisation, but it is
the generalisation of an expert witness accustomed
to measure words and answer challenges. We may
accept it.
And the world does accept such words. Even those
critics of life who stand aloof from organised Chris
tianity, who carp at doctrine and form, who decline
any share in Christian worship, — even they yield a
reverent acknowledgment to Christ's vital energy
working in the world. They do not quite see why a
trained and delightful man should leave a pleasant
home and go to some Arctic wilderness, with Bible and
medicine case, to tell barbarians, by word and deed,
about the love of Christ; they think the whole pro
ceeding unnatural, unreasonable, unnecessary; but
when they see the once strong man, home on furlough,
worn, old before his day, but radiant, and when they
hear his pathetic, heroic story, — they do not scoff.
They bow their heads, tears fill their eyes, and they
murmur, "Well, I do not understand it; but it is —
Christ!" In the same way we commonly hear a man
1 Principal A. M. Fairbairn, of Oxford, "Religion in History and
in Modern Life," p. 210. Lectures IV., V., and VI. of this volume
are inspiring testimony of the influence of Christ in history, and by
detail and general grasp are a remarkable contribution to the story
of the real results of Christianity.

268 HIS VITALITY
who is disdainful of Church tell his admiration of the
sweet and serious face of some Salvation Army lassie,
who has that hour passed him on the street. He
suspects that this face was once used to sights of sin,
— but now it is all clear and beautiful. And he bows
his head and acknowledges the vital power of Christ.
Men will often say that they have no care for Chris
tianity; but he is a rare talker who will not say a rever
ent word of respect for Christ. The vitality of Christ
is felt even by those who outwardly do not confess His
Name. He is felt to be alive with power, as no other,
whether unseen or seen. It is the endless tribute to
His unique vitality.
III. The Origin of the Elements of this Vitality
We are now ready to ask a significant question:
Was this vitality a new manifestation in humanity,
or was it simply a sort of evolution from existing
elements? It was so radically different from all pre
vious forms of vitality, both in quality and in quantity
— as a candid examination of history must always
show — that there is no possible escape from the
belief that into this vitality there came an element
quite outside of humanity. No combination of exist
ing elements can explain the results which are so
patent to the student of subsequent events. I cannot
see any escape from this conclusion.
The question then asserts itself: Was this foreign
element introduced in a unique way? In other words,
was the birth of Christ different from other births?
The answer of a well-authenticated history is that the

ORIGIN OF ELEMENTS OF THIS VITALITY 269
birth of Christ was unique: "He was conceived by the
Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary." I have already
noted the grounds for trusting the historical sources
which recount the event ; 1 and I have said that the
opposition to the credibility of these sources is mainly
derived from an a priori objection, for quasi-scientific
reasons. For our purposes now we must declare the
fact as a fact historically established: this is at last
the place to speak of its reasonableness.
It may seem strange that in a book on Christ's
Personality one should be reading thus late of His
origin. But it is the natural order. When men, in
their prime, prove their greatness, we at once gather
all their present history, — the history associated
with their accomplishment. It is only after many
years that the student delves into the childhood, the
parentage, the ancestry. So, too, in Christ's life, until
we have seen how wonderful He is, what has been His
interior strength and His unlimited influence, we are
not sufficiently equipped to talk of His origin. It is
not fitting or safe to talk of His origin and parentage
till we have felt (however halting our power to explain)
the full force of His divine personality. Remember
ing this, we may turn back to the years just after His
earthly career. The earlier New Testament writers
said nothing of the Virgin Birth: very possibly they
did not know of it.2 When the sacred story was at last
1 Vide Supra, pp. 46-53.
2Cf. Ramsay, "Was Christ Born in Bethlehem?" p. 88: "It
appears that either the Virgin was still living when Luke was in
Palestine during the years 57 and 58 — which is a quite possible
supposition on the almost universally accepted assumption that she

270 HIS VITALITY
told, it came to the ears of people already convinced
of Christ's unequalled power. There is no doubt that
the New Testament shows an increasing valuation of
Christ's dignity as His invisible presence swayed the
souls of men. St. Peter's sermon at Pentecost x seems
inadequate when we contrast it with the words of St.
Paul and St. John. We have ample reason to believe
that those who knew Christ best were daily amazed
to find how little they knew His real stature. They
went to the depths of their honest hearts to explain
Him. It was when they found themselves baffled at
every turn that the sweet story of the manger at
Bethlehem was given them to help them to understand
at least a little more. The earliest writers recorded
achievements; a later age craved to know somewhat
was quite young when Jesus was born — or Luke had conversed
with some one very intimate with her, who knew her heart and could
give him what was almost as good as first-hand information." Ram
say surmises the Virgin's reasons for not telling her secret earlier,
p. 76. "At Nazareth nothing was generally known. Jesus had
been born far away. His parents brought him to Nazareth after
some time had elapsed. Even after Herod's death his shadow lay
heavy on the land; and the parents, being subjects of his son Antipas,
were not likely to talk to their neighbours about the old king's rela
tions to the child and about the prophecies of Simeon and Anna —
apart from the consideration that the whole subject must have seemed
too sacred for gossip. Mary did not herself comprehend the things
that had occurred. She kept them hid in her heart, and apparently
did not even tell her husband what was in her mind. This child
was not to be an unalloyed delight either to her country or herself;
he was 'set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel, and for a
sign which is spoken against'; and for herself, 'a sword should pierce
through her own soul.' It was a dread and vague future about which
she pondered in the depths of her own mind."
1 Acts ii. 14-40.

ORIGIN OF ELEMENTS OF THIS VITALITY 271
of origins. It is the natural order. We should, I
am sure, stumble less to-day if we reflected, first, upon
all that Christ has done and upon all that He is, and
then, with hearts full of wonder, and then only, turned
to ask how He came to be. We should be less likely
to speak quickly of the a priori impossibility of certain
events.1 In attempting the interpretation of the Virgin Birth
we must mark off one or two explanations which are
not quite satisfactory. In the first place, the Virgin
Birth is not the proof of the Divinity of Christ. His
torically the testimony to Christ's divinity was deep
and wide before men began to talk of the Virgin Birth.
This is not in any way to disparage the fact or the
importance of the incident. Its place is secure. But
it is an incident. It can be imagined that one might
be virgin born and yet not be anything more than
human. It is only because Christ's vitality is in
effect so unique, so superabundant, that the manner
of His origin becomes significant. When one is already
1 1 have already (p. 47) pointed out that though the objection to
the Virgin Birth is usually made in the name of science, it is not
scientists who lead in the attempt to depose the fact. "We know
too little," says Sir Oliver Lodge (Hibbert Journal, Jan. 1906,
p. 327), "to be able to dogmatise on such things: we must observe
and generalise as we can." Bishop Gore has made all readers
familiar with Huxley's famous verdict: "The mysteries of the
Church are child's play as compared with the mysteries of Nature.
. . . Virgin procreation and resuscitation from apparent death
are ordinary phenomena for the naturalist." (Quoted in Bampton
Lectures, Am. Ed. p. 266.) In other words, the trained scientist
has no a priori objection to the Virgin Birth. He merely asks for
the historical evidence.

272 HIS VITALITY
assured of Christ's divinity, then, and not till then,
does the Virgin Birth have a meaning.1
Another interpretation of the Virgin Birth which is
not quite satisfactory is the assertion that it explains
the sinlessness of Christ. This explanation is un
satisfactory, not ipso facto, but because of the way in
which it is generally worked out. The phenomenon
of a sinless man is unique; and one naturally demands
an explanation. People imbued with Manichaean
heresy have argued that humanity through hereditary
sin is essentially bad and that therefore no good can
come out of it; so that to produce a sinless man a
miraculous birth is necessary; and therefore Christ was
born of a virgin mother. But there is an insuperable
1 Cf. Principal W. F. Adeney, "The Virgin Birth and the Divinity
of Christ" (Essays for the Times, No. n): "Neither Mark, John,
Peter, Paul, James, nor the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews,
makes the slightest reference to the manner of our Lord's birth. One
of two conclusions must be deduced from this wholesale silence.
Either these New Testament teachers did not know of the wonder;
or knowing it they did not consider it essential to their message.
There is no possible escape from that dilemma. For if you hold
that they knew it and considered it to be essential, you have to charge
them with gross unfaithfulness, not merely in failing to declare the
whole counsel of God, but in keeping back part of its very essence.
But every one of these New Testament teachers held and taught the
Divinity of Christ. That great truth is wrought into the warp and
woof of the New Testament. You must tear the book to shreds and
scatter the fragments to the four winds if you would get rid of it.
What conclusions must we deduce from this fact? First, the testi
mony of the Divinity of Christ is measurably greater than the evidence
for the Virgin Birth; This is not to discredit the latter idea. . . .
Believing in the far greater wonder of the Incarnation we may be
prepared to admit the minor wonder of the Bethlehem story, though
not otherwise " (pp. 30 f).

ORIGIN OF ELEMENTS OF THIS VITALITY 273
difficulty here: the virgin mother was human. Even
that branch of Christendom which has sought to be
rid of the difficulty by assigning to her in turn a miracu
lous birth has only removed the difficulty one step.
She is still human and in so far is an inheritor of the
evil past. Not so, clearly, can Christ's sinlessness
be explained. He inherited, as a man, through
His human mother, the evil tendencies of the race.
His sinlessness was not of the order of necessity. He
strove for it with such intensity of battle that "His
sweat became as it were great drops of blood." x The
Virgin Birth did not make Him one whit less a man
than He would have been had His birth been after the
ordinary manner. Whatever the difficulties of coping
with sin, He inherited them all as a man through His
virgin mother.
This common method of explaining Christ's sinless
ness through the Virgin Birth is not, however, the only
method possible, by which the Virgin Birth may be
related to His sinlessness. We may think of the
divine element introduced into humanity in the Virgin
Birth as the new force from without, which, though
not lessening the difficulty of the struggle, made the
victory, not necessary, but possible. The humanity
was not pushed aside: it was the same humanity still
in all its completeness and limitation; but into it was
put this hitherto foreign element which we symbolise
under the name of the Virgin Birth. It was the new
force by which humanity in the Person of Jesus was
to conquer sin.
But even here there will be people to rise with the
1 St. Luke xxii. 44.

274 HIS VITALITY
objection that this element of divine force could, to
their minds, be induced entirely by spiritual means,
and so bestowed upon a man born quite in the natural
way. Therefore, ultimately, this explanation of
Christ's sinlessness by the Virgin Birth is not likely to
win many of the doubtful souls who peer into this
mystery. We must go farther.
Let us then come back to the thought of our Sa
viour's unique vitality, — a vitality which not only
marked His career in Palestine, but has been the most
powerful force ever since, throughout the world.
That is the phenomenon which we must explain: it is
not sinlessness; it is a new, overwhelming, controlling
Life. Whence did it come?
Before attemping a categorical answer, we must
observe that this Life has been manifest in the world
not only by a change in spiritual conditions, but by
a change in the material aspect of the world. There
is a material quality resident in this Christ-vitality
which has been moving over the years. This is seen
clearly when one reflects that the effects of Christ's
Vitality are not the possession of those only who
appropriate them by faith. These effects are in some
real way incorporated, objectively, in humanity. We
speak of civilisation as having become Christian.
There are men who say that, though they do not follow
Christ, they will give money and thought to hospitals
and orphanages. But hospitals and orphanages are
effects of nothing else but Christ's Vitality, absorbing
the world. So it is that men to-day, whether Chris
tians or not, are sharing a humanity into which Christ
has brought a new element. Nor is this only an out-

ORIGIN OF ELEMENTS OF THIS VITALITY 275
ward possession. So impartial a judge as Lecky,1 has
abundantly proved that Christianity brought with it
a new power to cope with moral taint. However men
have failed, this power is now in the race; and man,
belonging to the humanity which Christ entered, has
as man a share in this new help toward righteousness.
If he consciously reaches out for it, he is made the
more powerful in his struggle ; if he simply breathes he
is, to some extent even then, partaker of the force.
This new force in Life is then a new material, we
may almost say a new substance, in the world. This,
I maintain, is not theory, but well attested fact, known
to every student of morals and civilisation. Now
what is the origin of this force? Shall we be content
to say that it slipped in unaware, like a thief in the
night? 2 We may say so, if we have no historical
1 "History of European Morals."
9 In no case can we consistently think of Jesus as simply any man,
into whom the Divine came as a sort of tenant. This shallow ex
planation seems to rouse a good deal of thought, ancient and modern,
about Christ. Cf. Professor C. A. Briggs (North American Review,
June, 1906, p. 873) : " Such a merely external union of the Divine Son
with a human individual could not accomplish human salvation, as
the Christian church has always clearly seen. If the Son of God
only inhabited the man Jesus, He might save that man, but how
could He accomplish the salvation of the human race? Such an
inhabitation of the Son of God would not differ in principle from the
indwelling of the divine spirit in a man. The man Jesus would be a
prophet, a hero, a great exemplar, but not the Saviour of mankind."
It is interesting to note that even those who speak disparagingly of
the accomplishment of the church and its interpretation of Christ,
nevertheless look upon Christ as indeed the world's Saviour, not only
potentially but actually. Cf. the startling anonymous book (pub
lished by John Lane, 1905), "The Creed of Christ," pp. 218 ff.

276 HIS VITALITY
evidence for anything more. But we have such his
torical evidence: history says that the supreme mo
ment when this force was added to humanity was
when Jesus Christ was "conceived by the Holy Ghost
and born of the Virgin Mary."
Our age, more than any age before, is ready for this
truth. Our philosophy has passed through various
stages of materialism and pure idealism. Kant is still
the great modern thinker; and his idealism is built
upon the subtle reality of a somewhat 1 in the material
universe. We are beginning to be paradoxical, and
to talk of the spirituality of matter. New physical
discoveries, whether in the electric current or in the
so-called ether, send men to their knees. We are
feeling that there is not matter and spirit, but that
spirit and matter are someway bound together in one
baffling reality. When we find a new force, we seek
to find for it a source both in spirit and in matter.
The Virgin Birth at best can take us only a little way
in the attempt to solve the most stupendous event of
history. Perhaps that is why some evangelists and
apostles, if they knew of the Virgin Birth, did not
think it worth while to speak of it. But, in our day
more than ever, this doctrine of the Virgin Birth is
suggesting — to say the least — how the new divine
Force and Vitality entered humanity. We cannot
imagine any details, but in some material way (let us
say it frankly) the new Creation was consummated.
That which had not been in humanity, and that which
could not evolve itself from humanity, by a divine
Act came into humanity from without. The explana-
1 Ding an Sich.

THE TRANSMISSION OF HIS VITALITY

277

tion may be dim. But it helps a little toward the
appreciation of an event which must of necessity be
past all human discovery. It opens perhaps only a
tiny window, but through it we seem to see how it was
that the Man Christ Jesus could dominate a world
with His Vitality, and how it is that this Vitality
should be never so efficient as to-day. He was Man,
but He was New Man, — a New Creation.
IV. The Transmission of His Vitality
In His last conferences with His disciples the Saviour
said that it was expedient for them that He go away.1
He linked His going with a larger return through the
Holy Spirit. This change was so transcendently
significant that the great-minded St. Paul yearned
toward a full knowledge of it: "That I may know
Him," he said, "and the power of His Resurrection." 2
There is the story here of the transmission of Christ's
Vitality. It seems right to believe from our records that during
His earthly career Christ's Vitality, unique as it was,
was locked within a human individual. He was not
merely an individual, — for no man, strictly speaking,
is merely an individual. But for our sakes He gave
Himself no advantages or privileges which are not
common to humanity. His disciples were strong, in
the light of His physical presence; but when His phys
ical presence was removed they ceased to feel the help
of His Vitality. The great transformation symbolised
by the death and resurrection of Jesus accomplished
1 St. John xvi. 7. 2 Phil. iii. 10.

278 HIS VITALITY
a completer scope for the exercise of this Vitality.
He who had been an individual (if one may speak
roughly) became universalised. They who had de
pended on His physical presence felt His power and
His help never so keenly as after His final vanishing.1
At any moment, in any place, His Vitality now and
henceforth was theirs.2
1 St. Luke xxiv. 52.
2 Dr. D. W. Forrest has recently spoken significantly of the reality
of Christ's presence with the Apostles after His physical departure
(Op. Cit., pp. 357 ff.). "It was not by merely reverting to the past,
but by keeping their eyes open to the present action of their Living
Lord, that the Apostles discovered where His authority lay. . . .
Where His word or example was insufficient for present guidance
they never doubted that fresh light would break for them. . . . And
in taking up this attitude whereby they laid themselves open to the
further truths which God intended to convey, they were vindicated
by the results." Dr. Forrest allies himself with those [like Bishop
Boyd Carpenter, "Introduction to the Scriptures," pp. 48-50] who
discredit any attempt to find in the "unrecorded forty days" after
the Resurrection the commands of Christ for the future. He shows,
with practical conclusiveness, how in such a great question as the
"Gentile problem," the Apostles did not look back to any explicit
command, but felt themselves at the very moment possessed of His
authority. "It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us," they
said. So also again (Op. Cit., p. 350): "Hence it is that Christ
represents the bestowal of the Spirit as ushering in a more blessed
time for the Disciples than they had enjoyed during His outward
companionship with them. The Spirit was not to be a pale substi
tute for Himself, as they had known Him; His coming was Christ's
coming, in the highest sense of the word; it was Christ's own presence
in the ' only mode which could be quite absolutely direct and primary
and real' (Moberly), because the only mode in which He could be
come a vital source of spiritual strength in us, and also adapt Himself
to every variety of our personal necessity amid the ever-changing form
of circumstance. Neither of these functions could be discharged by

THE TRANSMISSION OF HIS VITALITY

279

It is necessary to mark that this universalising of
Christ's Vitality was not at the expense of His hu
manity. Into this element of universal help He had
carried humanity. The Vitality which has been so
obviously flowing from His Life all the decades and
centuries that even the casual thinker recognises its
source, has been coming not from God only, but from
humanity also — the humanity enlarged and renewed
by the Life of Jesus Christ. In so far as Jesus Christ
was a man, just so far did humanity in Him gain an
unprecedented achievement; and the victorious and
still conquering Vitality is, whatever else may be said
of it, the Vitality of a Man.
The Resurrection of Christ was therefore radically
different from any previously hoped-for resurrection.
It was not only a resurrection to life, but it was a
resurrection to this life. All that was human and
that had been associated with Jesus of Nazareth was
accepted as an inalienable possession of that eternal
and universalised Personality, the risen Christ, —
and this same Christ rose to a life among men, among
them to spend and be spent — the leader and central
force of His redeemed race forevermore.
Him in the period of His Incarnation. The sundering of outward
relations, however intimate, had to precede this inward identification
of Christ with the soul of man."

CHAPTER XVIII
His Divine Authority
THE culminating question of Christ's Personality
must always be in what sense He spoke for God.
This is not merely a theological question, of interest
only to those who weigh theories; but is, first of all, a
practical question, of indispensable import to the busy
people who, having met adversity, must find courage
to go forward to new effort. The man of the world
often reads the universe with the subconscious help of
Christianity, and then gaily says that he does not need
Christ to make him an optimist. But the fact is plain
that all so-called natural theology leaves the thought
ful man midway between hope and fear. History has
proved again and again that the natural theologian
must at best develop into something like a Stoic. For
the story of the Creator as we see Him in His creation
is so multiform that even a thoughtful man begs for
an interpreter. The sweet stillness and fragrance of a
June morning proclaim a Supreme Master of Love,
— and the thoughtful man is confident. As the day
wears to evening, thick darkness may cover the coun
try-side and the wind may twine itself into a tornado
and bring destruction to a happy village: all is ruin,
misery, death, — and the thoughtful man wonders
280

HIS DIVINE AUTHORITY 281
whose is the cruel Force which invents such wanton
destruction. So the Stoic speaks, not flippantly, but
with a sad sincerity: —
" This world is very odd we see,
We do not comprehend it;
But in one fact we all agree,
God won't, and we can't, mend it.
" Being common sense, it can't be sin
To take it as I find it;
The pleasure to take pleasure in;
The pain, try not to mind it."1
Now into this world Christ came; and He declared
with a radiant definiteness that the Power beyond and
above and in all things is the Loving Person, God the
Father. The message is so exactly the message that
one wishes to hear, that some men accept the message
as if it were self-sufficient, and they never ask, "By
what authority did Christ give it?" So it is that we
have the strange phenomenon of men who put con
fidence in Christ's exposition of the universe because it
seems to them ideally beautiful; and as for Christ
Himself — well, they say, He was certainly remark
able, but He was not more remarkable than any man
may be. This is to declare that He had uniquely
splendid flights of imagination. . . . But how dare
one be comforted by such thin dreams!
There is ample proof that the thoughtful man,
however removed from orthodoxy, is no longer con-
1 A. H. Clough's "Dipsychus."

282 HIS DIVINE AUTHORITY
tent to base confidence in the Christian message with
out sounding the authority by which Christ gave it.
In answering the question of Christ's authority I shall
therefore endeavour to give the answer which modern
scholarship of an unbiased sort is evidently tending
to give. I. Though Man, Christ is More than Man
"The Divinity of Jesus," says a great English
scientist,1 "is the truth which now requires to be
reperceived, to be illumined afresh by new knowledge,
to be cleansed and revivified by the wholesome flood
of scepticism which has poured over it ; it can be freed
now from all trace of grovelling superstition, and can
be recognised freely and enthusiastically." Certain
phrases in the article in which this sentence is imbedded
might seem to limit the importance of these words;
but nothing can impair their chief interest. This
chief interest is that a conspicuous and highly re
spected representative of scientific thought is awaiting
and expecting clearer evidence of the authority by
which Christ spoke as no other man has spoken.
Let us now turn to a radical German theologian,
who is as lucid as he is free. " It is impossible," says
Professor Wernle,2 "that a time should ever come
for Christianity when any single Christian should
acquire for his fellow-Christians the significance of
Jesus." Dr. Wernle then quotes passages from the
•Sir Oliver Lodge, Hibbert Journal, April, 1906, p. 655.
2 "Beginnings of Christianity" (tr. G. A. Bienemann), vol. i. pp.
38> 39-

THOUGH MAN, CHRIST IS MORE THAN MAN 283
Synoptic Gospels, and continues: "Now it is clear
that a self-consciousness that is more than merely
human speaks from these words. And this is the
mystery of the origin of Christianity. What we need
to do above all is to accept it as a fact — a fact which
demands a patient and reverent hearing." These
words from an ordinary writer would have no especial
meaning. In the able volumes where they stand,
they tell the trend of the most fearless German
thought.1 I cannot refrain from one further quotation in this
connection, and that from an American thinker, Pro
fessor Du Bose. Though what we call an orthodox
theologian, Dr. Du Bose has his windows all open and
1 In speaking of German theological scholarship one can never
forget Professor Harnack. "Again and again," says this great man
("What is Christianity?" tr. T. B. Saunders, pp. 129 ff.), "in the
history of mankind men of God have come forward in the sure con
sciousness of possessing a divine message, and of being compelled,
whether they will or not, to deliver it. But the message has always
happened to be imperfect; in this spot or that defective; . . . and
very often the prophet did not stand the test of being himself an
example of his message. But in this case the message brought was
of the profoundest and most comprehensive character; it went to
the very root of mankind and, although set in the framework of the
Jewish nation, it addressed itself to the whole of humanity — the
message from God the Father. Defective it is not, and its real kernel
may be readily freed from the inevitable husk of contemporary form.
Antiquated it is not, and in life and strength it still triumphs to-day
over all the past. He who delivered it has as yet yielded His place to
no man, and to human life He still to-day gives a meaning and an aim
— He the Son of God." These are such words as the admirers of
Dr. Harnack would expect him to say; but because their reasonable
ness appeals to the man of the world they are highly important in
declaring the direction of present day thought.

284 HIS DIVINE AUTHORITY
knows what thoughtful men everywhere are saying.
This passage, therefore, from his last book tells the
story of one avenue by which honest thinkers are
forced to approach Christ: "How then was the so
unique or exceptional personality of Jesus to be ac
counted for or explained? Was He only a human
individual, exceptionally blessed or graced? Or,
while perfect man, was He, just because perfect man,
something more than man? Perfection is no mark
of our common humanity, and needs a very high
accounting for. So from the beginning begins a ques
tioning which Christianity answers for itself in the
Gospel of the Incarnation." x
It will be seen in all these indications of modern
thought that the conviction of Christ's preeminence
and uniqueness is coming not from theological con
siderations, but from historical comparisons. That
both by character and by influence He should so per
sistently out-top the rest of humanity is immediate
ground for placing Him in a class by Himself. A very
notable man, recently dead, seems at first to be the
most striking figure which his particular craft or pro
fession has produced; but the year is scarcely over
before his name is dropped among the names of his
illustrious fellows of the past, — and a few years may
find him in a very inferior place among them. It is
the perennial superiority of Christ in all ways which
is compelling even unwilling students to declare that
though man, Christ is more than man.
1 "The Gospel in the Gospels," p. 7.

CHRIST IS HIMSELF THE MESSAGE 285
II. The Bearer of a Divine Message, Christ is Himself
the Message
Having felt the unique character and influence of
Christ, the modern student is forced to examine
Christ's message with scrupulous care. The radical
scholar often complains because his bigoted conserva
tive brother would gladly impale him on the horns of
this dilemma: either Christ was the divine Son of God
— or He was a gross impostor. Perhaps the dilemma
is harsh, but it warns the scholar that if he is willing to
say that Christ is perfect in character — or even sur
passes all other men in character — he, as a clear-
minded scholar, must be careful how he tones down
or explains away any words or inferences of Christ
about Himself.
Professor Schmiedel has done the cause of scholar
ship incalculable service by pointing out that of all
the recorded words of Jesus only five brief passages
are absolutely credible. His ground for this astonish
ing verdict is that these five passages are the only
words which can be interpreted as even possibly in
consistent with a record which looks upon our Lord
as divine.1 Strangely enough, Dr. Schmiedel does not
feel the force of two very striking deductions which
must be made from his own observation. The first
deduction is that the Four Gospels, even the Synoptic
Gospels, are so filled with the atmosphere of Christ's
divinity, that they must practically be blotted out to
rid the story of the testimony. The second deduction
1 Encyclopaedia Biblica, p. 1881 — article " Gospels."

286 HIS DIVINE AUTHORITY
is that when writers were so convinced of Christ's
divinity, that page after page breathed adoration,
only the utmost historical trustworthiness could have
impelled them to record what to their simple minds
— as Dr. Schmiedel assures us — must have seemed
inconsistent. But if they were trustworthy in record
ing what might have seemed to be limitations, they
surely were conscientiously exact in recording what
redounded to Christ's dignity and honour. He that
is faithful in little is faithful also in much. There is
no possible escape from the logic of such criticism.
A history which is incontestably valid proclaims that
He who came with the supreme message of God to
man was Himself the message.
With this assurance we pass at once from any region
of argument into a very kingdom of heaven where we
are to feel, as never before, God's reality. It might
have been sufficiently assuring if Christ had explained
to mankind that he could prove to them that the
Power governing the world is altogether beneficent.
"You acknowledge," He might have said, "that I
have no fault — can you not then believe me when I
say that I know that not a sparrow falls to the earth
but God cares?" The authority of that message
would have been exceptionally high, but it would not
have told what we now know of the Love of God.
The words of Christ are precious beyond any telling,
but His inestimable message is Himself.
Here then is the message: God's attitude to men is
the attitude of Jesus Christ to the men and women of
Palestine. God, we say, longed to be with us, — He
loved us enough for that. Nor was it a mere longing,

CHRIST IS HIMSELF THE MESSAGE 287
— He became one with us. He lived our life, — just
as we live it. He had friends, — quite as we have
friends. He met limitations, — as we must meet
them. He had pain, — as we have pain. He had
failure, — as we have failure. He had the agony of
sorrow, — as we have the agony of sorrow. He
loved, — as we love; that is, he loved and was unable
to do what love would do. We are already beyond
any power of coherent thought. All a priori ideas of
God are shattered. We shut our eyes and try to
grasp the message. Sorrow, pain, failure, still are
mysteries — but how the light of heaven shines on
them, with the knowledge that He who allows them
to be, undertook them all in the life of that Jesus from
whom henceforth He nevermore can be separated.
God is one with us. Not Lord, Master, King — but
our Brother — ourselves!
It is the thoroughness of this divine message which
staggers imagination, and makes scholars afraid.
God was not content, having made us, to help us from
a distance. He was not content to say soothing
words, either through His messengers, or directly to
the solitary heart. He was not content merely to
explain and justify the order of His universe. Nothing
could satisfy Him till He had come so close to our
humanity that God and man were one, — till He had
gone to the lowest depth of human experience, till He
had risen to the heights of human experience, till He
had felt on every side — not only as God, but as man
— all the nooks and crannies of human experience, —
till He had made us know by His own touch that God
is our God, — a God who cares for all our joys and

288 HIS DIVINE AUTHORITY
failures and griefs — because as a man He knows how
man feels the sting of defeat and the glory of victory.
This, then, is what the world means, the world which
is so crowded with bitterness beating upon mirth, with
hate besieging even the fastnesses of love, with pain
driving away all comfort : it means Love, ultimate and
final Love, catching up all that is hard and doubtful
and transmuting it at last into joy — Love enthroned
supreme in the heart of the mightiest, God Himself
— Love so real, so deep, that God became Man.1
" I am he that beareth witness of myself," said
Jesus.2 He was His own best argument. "Come
unto me," He said again, "all ye that labour and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 3 In Christ
God gave to the world confidence and peace: history
has been telling us so all down the years. But the
means whereby the world has received this rest is that
in Christ God gave to the world — Himself. So it has
come about that critics of Christianity stand in awe
and reverence before Christ. Men at length released
from the galling chains of a heartless and logical Cal-
1 St. John viii. 18.
2 It is not within the province of this book to show how the Nicene
doctrine of the Trinity guards what are called "necessary ideas" of
theology and philosophy, while seeing in Christ the perfect revelation
of God. The Second Person of the Trinity stands for the eternal
humanity in the Godhead, generated from the Father and coequal
with Him. Patripassianism is dangerous because it goes only part
way. All true thoughts of God must advance side by side without
destroying one another. Historic theology has always carefully
declared that God was incarnate, not in His absolute, triune Being,
but in the Eternal Son. Yet the Incarnation concerns the God
head as a whole. He that hath seen Jesus hath seen the Father.
3 St. Matt. xi. 28.

CHRIST IS HIMSELF THE MESSAGE 289
vinism or a mechanical ecclesiasticism rise to con
demn that Christian interpretation of Christ which
has, perhaps, in their youth, been bound to their souls.
They have, they say, "gone back to Christ" — and oh,
He is, they declare, infinitely beautiful! Straightway
they tear up the creeds and condemn the Church.
Such an iconoclast,1 concealing his name but not his
history,2 has recently written : " It is true that Chris
tianity has, from the beginning of things, had one
good angel, by whose beneficent influence it has again
and again been saved from itself, — the incomparable
personality of Christ."3 And again: "Of the debt
which Christendom owes to the personality of Christ
— the Christ of Gospel story — I need not attempt to
speak. Suffice it to say that from highest to lowest,
from the most heroic to the most homely, all the good
desires and good deeds of Christian men and women
have been due. . . to the personal influence of the
historic Christ, — in other words, to affection for and
trust in the friend and guide and master whom the
Gospel stories taught men, and still teach men, to know
and love." 4 A narrow philosophy of history and a
stupid prejudice against certain aspects of truth may
underlie such iconoclastic "returns to Christ"; but
they are typical of a compelling drift in modern
thought, radical as well as conservative, which com
mands men to find in Christ His own highest authority
and to make Him to be His own clearest message.
!The author of "The Creed of Christ," 1905.
2 "When I was a child I was taught that Christ, etc." Ibid.
p. 159. 3 Ibid. pp. 174 ff. 4 Ibid. p. 202.

290 HIS DIVINE AUTHORITY
III. Christ, Being Divine, Is to Be Interpreted as Man
In spite of the repeated pronouncements, on the
Church's authority, based upon a profound and wide
experience, men are prone to forget or ignore the in
variable humanity of Christ. The most prevalent
error in Christian thought has always been the heresy
which makes the divine Christ only seem to be man.
Everything which He has taught us, by word and by
deed, He translated into human terms. In Him we
see God in humanity. The translation contains no
foreign phrases, yet it is utterly accurate and complete.
With the material of this life He lived out the whole
character of God.
If this seems an unwarranted assertion we must fall
back upon the inner conviction of the most efficient
souls of the ages. I do not say brilliant thinkers, for
thinkers have often done nothing but spin theories.
The man who has accomplished great deeds, and
incidentally has told in whose Name he did them, is
the man whose word really counts. That Name is
the Human God, — with all the philosophical shiver
ing which the title must cause, — who has been the
acknowledged Life of the great doers of deeds.
If one were to dare to predict in what way thoughtful
men would approach the study of Christ's Personality
in years to come, one might wisely say that there is to
be less and less of prepossession as the eye is lifted to
behold Him. Hitherto science has said, "These and
these traits I shall not look for, — they are impossible."
Philosophy has taken up the parable saying, "And
these traits, and these, / shall not look for, — meta-

CHRIST BOTH GOD AND MAN 291
physically they are impossible." And even theology,
a little pale and frightened, has said, "Nothing new
about my Master can be told, — let the book be
closed!" With an increased sense of the mystery of
life, all branches of learning are becoming more humble.
The impossible has too often happened of late to make
a wise man feel secure in setting boundaries. We
have certain luminous and sure outlines of Christ's
Personality; but they are confessedly outlines. He
has, we all know, told us more of man than any other;
and so we say that He is the head and crown of hu
manity. He has, we all know equally well, not only
told us about God as never man has spoken of Him,
but He has shown us in Himself the very soul of God;
and so we say that He is "God of God, Light of Light,
Very God of very God."
We cannot know what news the coming years will
bring, but the trend of modern thought leads us to
believe that there will be less and less inclination to
reduce the Person of Christ to such tame proportions
that the dull and unimaginative man plodding by will
say that he understands Him. Scholarship is daily
becoming bolder. The period of easy sifting, weigh
ing, and trying will be followed by gracious years of
plenty, — when scholarship will dare to believe the
largest, most resplendent. With a mind as much
bent on accuracy as before, scholars will note not only
the realities of earth, but also the realities of heaven.
There will be a passing of that plague of all true scholar
ship, — the desire to even off all the ends of convic
tion and to reduce all intimations to a consistent
whole. Christ we may be sure will never be less to

292

HIS DIVINE AUTHORITY

thought, He must always be more. He will be more,
always more human, and in the light of His human
achievement His little brothers will do deeds hitherto
counted too glorious even for dreams. And He
will be always more divine; so that men seeing, as
never before, the Godliness of God in His loving,
simple peasant life, will rise to sing their trust and
happiness, and then will, like lovers and saints, as in
a frenzy of gratitude, go forth, for His sake, to give
life, death, and joy — if only they may tell another
of their Saviour and their God.

INDEX

INDEX

ACTON, Lord, 124.
Adeney, W. F., 48 n., 272
n.
Allen, A. V. G., 55 n., 68, 69
n., 228 n.
Arnold, Matthew, 67 f., 140
n., 256 n.
Arnold, Thomas, no, 169.
Anderson, K. C., 4 n.
Apocryphal Gospels, 93.
Athanasius, St., 35, 235 n.,
242 n.
Atkinson, E. L., 244 n.
Atonement, Elements in the,
37, 9°, io4 ff-. 109 f., 117 f.,
127 f., 161 f., 165 f., 211 ff.,
222 f., 226, 240, 245 ff.
Agustine, St., 35, 64, 204, 224.
BACON, B. W., 9, 24, 50 n.
Bacon, Roger, 212.
Benson, A. C, 177 n.
Bernard, St., 254.
Bossuet, 256 n.
Bousset, W., 152 »., 206.
Briggs, C. A., 50 «., 275 n.
Brooks, Phillips, 68 ff.
Browning, Robert, 224, 244,
260.
Bruce, A. B., 184, 214, 220 n.,
23S n-
Burton, E. D., 10 n.
Bushnell, Horace, 103.

CAMPBELL, R. J., 244.
Cana, Wedding at, 136 f.,
218.
Carlyle, 133, 168.
Carpenter, W. Boyd, 45 n.,
278 n.
Chalcedon, Council of, 91 n.
Channing, W. E., 141.
Choate, J. H., 85 n.
Church, Authority of, 7, 41, 45,
52 i.
Church, R. W., 238 n., 242 n.
Cicero, 153.
Clark, T. M., 151 f.
Clement of Alexandria, 24, 33.
Clement of Rome, 2,7>-
Clough, A. H.,-281.
Coleridge, S. T., 72.
Councils, General, ^ ff., 41,
236 n.
Cowper, W., 256 n.
Crapsey, A. S., 130.
Creeds, The, 4, 34, 42-44, 49.
"Creed of Christ," Author of
the, 139 f. »., 289.
Creighton, Man dell, 124.
Crothers, S. M., 134.
Cyril of Alexandria, 192 n.,
242 n.
DELFF, H., 27 n.
Dickens, C, 169.
Da Vinci, Leonardo, 251.

29S

296

INDEX

Divinity of Christ, Part II:
Chapters II, X, XII, XVII,
XVIII.
Dobschutz, E. von, 194 n.
Docetism, 49, 50 n., in ff.,
23S, 29°-
Domer, J. A., 4.
Du Bose, W. P., 239 n.,
281 f.
Dualism, 149 f.
EBIONITES, 33, 88.
Eckhart, 64.
Epistles, Facts imbedded in,
n; Importance of, 13.
Erskine, T., no.
Evolution, Theory of, 43 f.
FARRAR, F. W., 56.
Fairbairn, A. M., 94, 267.
Figures of Speech: Christ's
compared with St. Paul's,
255-
Forrest, D. W., 98 n., 180 «.,
278 n.
GLADSTONE, 229.
Gnostics, 33, 90.
Gore, Charles, 235 f. n.,
238 n.
Gospels: Oral, 15; Logia, 16;
St. Mark, 17; St. Matthew,
17 f.; St. Luke, 19 ff.; St.
John, 22 ff.
Greek Church, Superiority of,
over Latin Church, 35, 228.
Green, J. R., 13.
Gregory of Nyssa, 243 n.
HALE, E. E., Jr., Testi
mony of, 60 ff.
Hall, W. Stanley, 94.

Harnack, A., 8, 9, 21 n., 24 n.,
29 »-, 34, 39, 281 n.
Heracleon, 24.
Holtzmann, H., 3.
Hinton, James, no.
Humanity of Christ, Part II:
Chapters III, IV, XV.
Huxley, T. H., 43 »., 47, 183
n., 271 n.
TGNATIUS, 33, 50 n.
-¦-Incarnation, The, 78 f.,
91 ff., 113, 121 f., 152, 162 ff.,
191 ff., 194, 210 ff., 234 ff.,
261 ff., 280 ff., 288 n.
Infallibility, Hunger for, 45.
Ingram, A. F. W., 134 f.
Irenseus, 33, 38, 49, 50, 54,
235 «., 242 n.
JAMES, William, 63.
Jesus Christ, Birth of, 22,
46-52, 268-277; Boyhood of,
81 ff., 94 ff., 121 ff., 216;
Baptism of, 96 ff., 104 f.;
Temptation of, 99 ff., in ff.;
First Miracle of, 89 f.,
137; Training of the Twelve,
by, 100 f., 124 ff.; Confes
sion of, by St. Peter, 125 f.;
Transfiguration of, 190; Cru
cifixion (Cf. Atonement);
Resurrection of, 14, 38, 40,
277 ff.; The Ascension of,
12 f., 57-70.
John, St., the Evangelist, 28 ff.,
201 ff.
John the Presbyter, 24 ft.,
27.
Johnson, Samuel, 202.
Jones-Davies, W., 182 n.
Josephus, 31.

INDEX

297

Judas, 155, 171, 231 ff., 260.
KANT, L, 266, 276.
Kattenbusch, 34.
Keim, T., 251 n., 253.
Kipling, R., 223 n.
LA FARGE, John, 251.
Lamb, C, 144.
Lazarus, Raising of, 106 ff.,
257, 263.
Lecky, W. E. H., 275.
Liddon, H. P., 238 f. n., 242
f. n.
Lightfoot, J. B., 9, 25 n., 29
n., 156 n.
Lincoln, Abraham, 146, 148.
Lodge, Oliver, 271 n., 282.
Logia: see "Gospels."
Loisy, A., 32 n., 45 n.
Luther, 65, 146, 148.
MANICH.EISM, 272.
Marcus Aurelius, 266.
McGiffert, A. C, 9, 32, 34,
49 n.
Martineau, J., 237 n.

NATURES, The two, 91
n., 101, 238 f. n., 242 n.
Nazareth, Rejections at, 160,
217.
Newman, J. H., 44, 214.
Newton, John, 204.
OMNISCIENCE, related to
Love: in Christ, 236;
God's, 237.
Origen, 235 »., 237 n.
Ottley, R. L., 240 n.
PAPIAS, 16 n., 24 n., 28
i.n.
Parousia, 15, 20, 241 f.
Pascal, 72.
Patripassianism, 288 n.
Paul, St., 63, 67, 204 n., 219
f., 225.
Peabody, A. P., 28.
Peabody, F. G., 200 n., 231.
Peter, St., 117, 126, 134, 155 f.,
171, 196 ff., 221, 270.
Philosophy, Historic method
of, 64 f.
Plato, 266.

INDEX

Robertson, F. W., 175, 214.
Robinson, J. A., 16 n., 18
n.

SACRAMENTS, The, 264.
Salvation Army, 268.
Sanday, William, 16, 23 f., 27,
29 «-, 34, 4°, 239 n.
Savonarola, 148, 228.
Schmiedel, P. W., 47 f. «.,
285 f.
Scientific Method in Gospel
Study, 259 f., 271 n., 276.
Sedgwick, H. D., 95 n.
Sermon on the Mount, 154.
Sinlessness of Christ, 97 f.,
104 f., 119 f., 272 ff.,
285.
Smith, G. Adam, 83 n.
Socrates, 146.
Soden, H. von, 12 n., 26, n.,
198 n.
Spencer, H., 59.
Stanley, A. P., 229.
Stephen, St., 67.
Stevenson, R. L., 127.
Suetonius, 31.

TACITUS, 31.
Talmud, The, 31.
Tatian, 24.
Taylor, Jeremy, 64.
Temple, Frederick, 94 n.
Tennyson, 35.
Tertullian, 24, 49.
Theophilus, 24.
Transfiguration, The, 190.
Trinity, Doctrine of the, 33,
44, 288 n.

V

IRGIN BIRTH: Historic
evidence for, 46-53;
Theological interpreta
tion of, 268-277.

WACE, Henry, 247 n.
Washington, 200 n.
Watson, John, 200 n.
Weinel, H, 255 n.
Weizsacker, C. von, 198 n.
Wernle, Paul, 142 n., 196 ».,
207 n., 282 f.
Westcott, B. F., 92 n., 182 n.
Wilberforce, S., 43 n.
Women, Christ's Treatment of,
137 ff

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