Imago Christi : the example of Jesus Christ

t\hv<ixy of ^he trbeolo^ical ^^minavy

PRINCETON • NEW JERSEY

From the Library of
^enjamin 3reckinricTp:e Warfield

IMAGO CHRISTI

THE EXAMPLE OF JESUS CHRIST,

BY

/

IREV. JAMES STALKER, M. A.,

AUTHOR OF •' THE LIFE OF JESUS CHRIST," '' THE LIFE OF ST. PAUL,

ETC.

Imago diciiur quasi iniitago.

Porphyr. Hor. Od. I. xii.

INTRODUCTION BY REV. WM, M, TAYLOR, D. D., LL. D.

JVew Tork:
A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON

714 BROADWAY.

COPYRIGHT, 18S9.
BY A. C. ARMSTRONG & SON.

INTRODUCTION.

The author of the following volume is one jf
the most eminent of the younger ministers of the
Free Church of Scotland. Educated in his native
land, he spent some time in Germany, prosecuting
there such studies as he judged to be best fitted to
prepare him for his li^e-work in the ministry of
the gospel.

He began his pastoral labors in Kirkcaldy, Fife-
shire, and while there attracted wide attention by
his eloquence as a preacher and his excellence as
an expositor of the Word or God. Two or three
years ago he was called to Free St. ]\Iatthew's
Church, Glasgow, where by all he is "esteemed
very highly in love for his work's sake." He
occupies there a place of commanding influence,
and by his labors among young people and his
active sympathy with evangelistic work, he is prov-
ing himself eminently useful.

All who were present at the Belfast meeting of
the Presbyterian Alliance recognized his ability in
dealing with a difficult subject; and his volumes on

O INTRODUCTION.

the "Life of Christ" and the "Life of St. Paul,"
though issued under the unpretending title of
hand-books, are remarkable for their originality
of method, clearness of style, comprehensiveness
of view, and suggestiveness of matter.

The same qualities are conspicuous in his treat-
ment, in "Imago Christi," of the example of
Christ, a subject which he has handled in a way
entirely his own and in a spirit of devoutest rever-
ence. We commend the work as equally fitted to
be a companion for the closet and a directory for

the life.

WM. M. TAYLOR.
New York, Nov. 23, 1889.

PREFACE.

T F it were permissible, I could truly describe the
^ origin of this book in the very words of
Bunyan :

When at the first I took my pen in hand
Thus for to write, I did not understand
That I at all should make a little book
In such a mode ; nay, I had undertook
To make another ; which, when almost done,
Before I was aware, I this begun.

Whilst writing my Life of Christy and reading
extensively on the subject, the conviction was borne
in upon me that no desideratum more urgently
needs to be supplied in our theology than a work
on the Mind or Teaching of Christ. For several
years I have been working at this task. But, as
I went on, my progress was impeded by the fact
that, especially in the department of ethics, Jesus
seemed to teach as much by His example as by
His words ; whereas it was my intention to derive

8 PREFACE.

His teaching from His words alone. I commenced
accordingly to write a little on His example,
merely for the purpose of clearing the surplus
material out of the way, and without any thought
that it would extend beyond a chapter or two.
But, as I wrote, it grew and grew, till, almost
unawares, the plan of a new book shaped itself
in my mind. Recurring to the quaint and pithy
language of Bunyan, I may say :

Having now my method by the end,

Still, as I pulled, it came ; and so I penned

It down ; until it came at last to be,

For length and breadth, the bigness which you see.

The plan of this book, as it thus, so to speak,
made itself, is — to divide the circle of human life
into segments, each of which represents an extensive
sphere of experience and duty, and then to follow
our Lord through them one after another, in order
to see how He conducted Himself in each and
thereby learn how to conduct ourselves in the
same. It is thus a kind of Christian Ethics with
a practical and devotional aim. By making the
segments smaller, the chapters might easily have
been increased in number ; but perhaps no very
important part of life has been entirely overlooked.

PREFACE.

Each chapter has been written in full view of
the whole of our Lord's behaviour, as far as it
has been recorded, in the department of human
life to which it refers ; and it was at one time
my intention to print in full, from the Gospels,
all the evidence on each head. I soon found,
however, that this would be impracticable, for the
evidence turned out to be far more voluminous
than I had any conception of ; and to print it in
full would have swelled th^ book to double its size.
It has been to me a continual astonishment to find
how abundant are the materials for tracing out our
Lord's example even in what may be considered
the less important parts of life ; and I thankfully
confess that I have derived from this study a new
impression of the wealth which is packed into the
narrow circumference of the Four Gospels. On
the flyleaf of each chapter I have noted a number
of the more important passages ; and this list,
although in no case complete, may serve as a
starting-point to those who may wish to collect
the evidence for themselves.

I am persuaded that there are many at present
in all the churches who are turning earnest eyes
to the Example of Christ, and who desire an

lo PREFACE.

account, derived directly from the records, of how
He lived this earthly life which we are living
now. They have awakened to the value and
solenmnity of time, and feel that the one thing
needful is to fill our few and swiftly passing years
with a life large and useful and ever more abundant.
But it must be a life like Christ's, for His was the
best ; and any life, however filled with excitement
or success, of which He disapproved, would not
seem to them worth living. For such I have
written this guide to the imitation of Christ, and
I send it forth with the earnest hope that they
may be able to find in it, in some degree, the
authentic features of the image of the Son of
man.

Glasgow, Se;ptember 27zd, 1889.

CONTENTS.

CHAPTER PAGE

I. INTRODUCTORY : THOMAS A KE.MPls' IMITATION OF CHRIST 13

11. CHRIST IN THE HOME 35

III. CHRIST IN THE STATE . , , . • . • 55

IV. CHRIST IN THE CHURCH , .71

V. CHRIST AS A FRIEND ,91

VI. CHRIST IN SOCIETY I09

VII. CHRIST AS A MAN OF PRAYER I25

VIII. CHRIST AS A STUDENT OF SCRIPTURE , . , .145

IX. CHRIST AS A WORKER . . . . , . . 165

X. CHRIST AS A SUFFERER 183

XI. CHRIST AS A PHILANTHROPIST 201

XII. CHRIST AS A WINNER OF SOULS ..... 221

XIII. CHRIST AS A PREACHER 24I

XIV. CHRIST AS A TEACHER 26 1

XV. CHRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST , , . . . 281

XVI. CHRIST AS A MAN OF FEELING 299

XVII. CHRIST AS AN INFLUENCE ....... 315

I.

INTRODUCTORY:
THOMAS A KEMPIS' IMITATION OF CHRIS!

But Thomas a Kempis ? — the name had come across her in her
reading, and she felt the satisfaction, which every one knoivs, of gettin?
some ideas to attach to a name that strays solitary in the memory.
She took up the little old clumsy book with some curiosity : it had the
corners turned down in many places, and some hand, now for ever
quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen-and-ink marks, long
since browned by time. Maggie turned from leaf to leaf and read
where the quiet hand pointed. . . .

A strange thrill of awe passed through her ivhile she read, as if she
had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling of
beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor. . . . She
knezej nothing of doctrines and systems — of mysticism or quietism ; but
this voice out of the far-off middle ages zvas the direct co7nmunication
of a human soul's belief and experience^ and came to her as an un-
questioned message.

I sttppose that is the reason why the small oldfashioned book, for
which you need only pay sixpence at a bookstall, works miracles to this
day, turning bitter waters into sweetttess ; while expensive sermons and
treatises, newly issued^ leave all things as they wej-e before. It was
written down by a hand that waited for the hearts prompting; it is
the chronicle of a solita7y, hidden anguish, strtiggle, trust, and triumph
— not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are
treading with bleeding feet on the stones. And so it remains to all time
a lasting record of human needs and human consolations.

George Eliot : The Mill on the Floss.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

THOMAS A KEMPIS' IMITATION OF CHRIST,

NO religious book perhaps, outside the canon of
Scripture, has attained so wide a diffusion
in the Christian Church as the De Iinitatione Christi
of Thomas a Kempis. The only other book which
may possibly compete with it in popularity is the
Pilgrim's Progress. But the hold on Christendom
of the older work is probably more extensive than
even that of Bunyan's masterpiece ; for, whilst the
picture of Giant Pope must be an obstacle to
the access of the Pilgrim to sensitive Catholics,
the Imitation is as much read among Protestants
as in the Church which claims it as its own, and
in the Greek Church it is as popular as in either
of the communions of the West.

I.

To Protestants it has a peculiar interest from
the very fact that it was not written by the pen of
a Protestant. It belongs to the beginning of the

l6 IMAGO CHRISTl.

fifteenth century, and its author flourished a hun-
dred years before Luther. It thus belongs to the
age which must be accounted the darkest in the
whole history of Christianity, when the light of God
was well-nigh extinguished by the errors of men.
Protestants, indeed, hardly think of the century
before the Reformation as a time when Christianity
existed at all ; so vast is the accumulation of
corruptions which meets the eye, that the reli-
gion of Christ almost seems to have disappeared.
But this single book corrects this impression. The
Imitation of Christ is a voice rising out of the
darkness to remind us that the Church of Christ
never ceased to exist, but that God had His witnesses
and Christ His lovers even in the era of deepest
decay.

The Imitation itself, indeed, bears marks of the
evil time in which it arose. There are elements of
superstition in it which the modern mind rejects.
But these relics of a corrupt age only make the
profoundly Christian tone of the whole the more
surprising. It throbs throughout with a devotion
to Christ which will find its way to the hearts of
Christians in every age :

O my beloved Spouse Christ Jesus, most
pure Lover, Ruler of all creation, who will

INTROD UCTOR Y. 17

give me the wings of true liberty to fly and
repose in Thee ?

O Jesus, Brightness of the eternal glory,
Comfort of the pilgrim soul, with Thee are
my lips without a voice, and my very silence
speaks to Thee.

How long delays my Lord His coming ?
Let Him come to me. His poor servant,
and make me glad. Come, come, for with-
out Thee there will be no glad day nor
hour; forThou art my gladness, and without
Thee my table is unspread.

Let others seek, instead of Thee, what-
ever else they please ; nothing else pleases
me, or shall please me, but Thou, my God,
my Hope, my Eternal Salvation.

The book overflows with love to the Saviour
3 expressed in this impassioned strain ; and one very
remarkable thing is that, on the whole, the soul goes
straight to Christ without halting at those means of
grace which were at that time so often substituted
for the Saviour or feeling any need of the inter-
cession of the Virgin or the saints, on which so much
stress is laid in Catholic books of devotion. This

i8 IMAGO CHRIST!.

is the healthiest feature of the whole production and
must be welcome to every one who wishes to believe
that even in that age, when the spirit was buried
beneath the forms of worship, there were many souls
that reached up through all obstacles to contact with
the living Saviour.

II.

Obscure as is the external history of the author
of the Imitation,^ the reader comes to be on the

*"The writer of the Imitatio Christi is not known, and
perhaps never will be known, with absolute certainty. The
dispute about the authorship has filled a hundred volumes, and
is still so undecided that the voice of the sweetest and humblest
of books has come to us mingled, for the last two and a half
centuries, with one of the most bitter and arrogant of literary
controversies. ... Of the nine or ten saints and doctors to
whom at different times the work has been attributed, the
pretensions of three alone can be now said to possess the least
germ of probability. These three are a certain Gersen de
Cabanis, Thomas Hemerken of Kempen, and Jean de Charlier
de Gerson; and the claims of the first of the three . . . may
now be considered to be set at rest.

" The two, then, between whom rests the glory of the author-
ship— though in truth earthly glory was the last thing for which
the author would have wished — are Thovias a Kempis, sub-prior
of the monastery of St. Agnes, in the diocese of Cologne, and
Jean Gerso?i, Chancellor of the University of Paris, and one
of the grandest figures of his time.

" The lives of both these saints of God fell in the same dreary
epoch. It was that ' age of lead and iron,' of political anarchy
and ecclesiastical degradation, of war, famine, misery, agitation.

IN TROD UCTOR Y. 19

most intimate terms with him. He is a mere
shadow to the scientific historian ; but to the devout
student his personaUty is most distinct ; his accent
is separate and easily detected ; and, notwithstanding
the flight and passion of his devotion, there is in
him something homely and kindly that wins our
affection. Above all, we feel, as we open the book,
that we are entering into communion with one who
has found the secret of life. Here is one who, after

corruption, which marked the close of the fourteenth and the
beginning of the fifteenth century. Thomas a Kempis, born in
1379, died at the age of ninety-two ; Gerson, born in 1363, died
at the age of sixty-one. They were thus contemporaries for
forty-five years of their lives. But the destinies of the two men
were utterly different.

" Thomas, the son of an artisan, a quiet recluse, a copier of
manuscripts, was trained at Deventer, and was received into a
monastery in the year 1400 at the age of twenty-one. In that
monastery of St. Agnes — va/de devotus^ libenter solus, nuttquaf?i
otiosus — he spent seventy-one years of perfect calm, unbroken
except by one brief period, in which he fled from his cell rather
than acknowledge an archbishop to whom the Pope had refused
the pallium. This was almost the sole event of a life in which
we are told that it was his chief delight to be alone in angello
cum libcllo.

"Far different from this life, 'in a little corner with a little
book,' was the troubled, prominent, impassioned life of Jean
Gerson, the Doctor Christianissbnus. Rising while yet young
to a leading position, he was appointed Chancellor of the
University of Paris before the age of thirty, and, struggling
against popes and councils, and mobs and kings, became the
stormiest champion of a stormy time. . . . And when all his life
seemed to have culminated in one long faiuire . . . then forced

20 IMAGO CHRISTL

weary wanderings, such as we perhaps are still
entangled in, and many conflicts, such as we may
still be waging, has attained the peace of God ; and
he takes us aside and leads us by the hand to view
the land of rest. This is the enduring charm of
the book. We all carry in our hearts a secret belief
that somewhere in the world there exists a paradise
unvexed with the cares by which we are pursued
and watered by the river of God ; and whenever

to see how utterly little is man even at his greatest, and how
different are the ways of man's nothing-perfectness from those
of God's all-completeness, tjie great Chancellor, who has been
the soul of mighty councils and the terror of contumacious
popes, takes obscure refuge, first in a monastery of Tyrol, after-
wards under the rule of his brother at Lyons, and there, among
the strict and humble Celestine monks, passes his last days in
humility and submission. Far other thoughts than those of his
tumultuous life had been revealed to him as he wandered, in
danger and privation, among the mountains of Bavaria, — or,
rather, those earlier objects had faded from the horizon of his
soul like the burning hues of a stormy sunset; but as, when the
sunset crimson has faded, we see the light of the eternal stars,
so when the painted vapours of earthly ambition had lost their
colouring, Gerson could gaze at last on those ' living sapphires '
which glow in the deep firmament of spiritual hopes. He
had been a leader among the schoolmen, now he cares only for
the simplest truths. He had been a fierce gladiator in the arena
of publicity, now he has passed into the life of holy silence. At
his hottest period of strife he had cried out, * Peace, peace,
I long for peace ; * now at last there has fallen on his soul — not
as the world giveth — that peace that passeth understanding." —
Farrar in Compatiiotis of the Devoid Life.

INTRODUCTORY.

one appears whose air assures us that he has
Hved in that Eden and drunk of that river, we
cannot help welcoming him and listening to his
message.

But where is this happy land ? It is not far
away. It is in ourselves : " The kingdom of God
is within you." Men seek happiness out of them-
selves— in riches or learning or fame, in friendships
and family connections, in talking about others and
hearing news. They roam the world in search of
adventures ; they descend to the bottom of the
sea and tear out the bowels of the earth in pur-
suit of wealth ; they are driven forth by turbulent
passions in search of excitement and novelty ; they
fight with one another, because every one, dis-
satisfied himself, believes that his brother is making
away with his share. But all the time they are
stumbling over their happiness, which lies among
their feet ; they fly to the ends of the earth in
search of it, and lo it is at home.

Whensoever a man desires anything in-
ordinately, he is presently disquieted within
himself. The proud and covetous are
never at rest. The poor and humble in
spirit live in abundance of peace.

2» IMAGO CHRIST/.

We might have much peace, if we would
not busy ourselves with the sayings and
doings of others, and with things which
are no concern of ours.

How can he remain long in peace who
entangles himself with the cares of others ;
who seekj occasions of going abroad, and
is little or seldom inwardly recollected ?

First keep thyself in peace, and then
thou wilt be able to bring others to
peace.

A good peaceable man turns all things
to good. Such an one is conqueror of
himself, and lord of the world, a friend
of Christ, and an heir of heaven.

These counsels sound like many that the world
has heard from others of its teachers. They sound
Hke the doctrines of the Stoic philosophers, which
ended in making self an arrogant little god ; they
sound like the teaching of some in modern times
who, looking on the raising of "the pyramid of their
own being" as the chief end of existence, have
sacrificed to culture the rights of others and the
most sacred obligations of morality. The doctrine

INTRODUCTORY.

that the interior man is the supreme object of care
may turn into a doctrine of arrogant selfishness.
But a Kempis has guarded well against this per-
version. He has no maxims more pungent than
those directed against the undue exaltation of self
When he advises us to turn away from outward
things to seek the true wealth and happiness
within, it is not in ourselves we ^ are to find it,
though it is within ourselves. We have to make
an empty space within, that it may be filled with
God, who is the only true satisfaction of the
soul :

Know that the love of thyself doth
hurt thee more than anything else in
the world.

On this defect, that a man inordinately
loves himself, hangs almost all in thee
that thou hast to root out and overcome ;
and, when this evil has been once con-
quered and brought under, soon will there
be great peace and tranquillity.

Christ will come to thee, holding out
to thee His consolation, if thou prepare
Him a fit dwelling within thee.

Many a visit does He make to the

24 IMAGO CHRISTi.

interior man ; sweet is His communication
with him, delightful His consolation, great
His peace, and His familiarity exceedingly
amazing. Give place, then, for Christ,
and deny entrance to all others.

When thou hast Christ thou art rich,
and He is sufficient for thee. He will
provide for thee and faithfully supply thy
wants in all things, so that thou needest
not trust to men.

"Son," says Christ to us, "leave thy-
^ self, and thou shalt find Me."

III.

The merits of a Kempis are inimitable and
imperishable ; yet the book is not without defects
more or less inseparable from the time and the
circumstances in which it was written.

I. There is a defect of the Imitation which
lies on the surface and has been often pointed
out. Its author was a monk and needed a rule
only for the little, monotonous world of the cloister ;
we live in the freedom and amidst the perils of a
larger world, which needs an example more uni-
versal. To a Kempis and his brethren this world

INTRODUCTORY.

25

was the territory of the Evil One, from which they

had fled ; they wished to have no deahngs with

it and had no hope of making it better. " Thou

oughtest," he says, " to be so far dead to the

affections of men as to wish, as far as thou canst,

to be without any human company." Even life

itself appeared to him an evil : in one of his

gloomiest pages he says expressly, " It is truly a

misery to live upon earth." This happily is not

our creed.

The world is not a blank to us,
Nor blot ; it means intensely, and means good.

To US it is God's world ; and our vocation is to
make God's will be done in all departments of its
life and to make His Word run on all its highways
and bye-ways. Monasticism was a confession on the
part of Christianity of being beaten by the world ;
but to-day Christianity is planting its standard
on every shore and going forth conquering and to
conquer.

2. Another blemish which has been attributed to
it is thus dealt with by Dr. Chalmers in one of his
published Letters : " I have been reading Thomas
a Kempis recently on the Imitation of Jesus Christ
— a very impressive performance. Some would say
of it that it is not enough evangelical. He certainly
does not often affirm, in a direct and ostensible

26 IMAGO CHRIST/.

manner, the righteousness that is by faith. But
he proceeds on this doctrine, and many an incidental
recognition does he bestow upon it ; and I am not
sure but that this implies a stronger and more
habitual settlement of mind respecting it than
when it is thrust forward and repeated, and re-
repeated with a kind of ultra-orthodoxy, as if to
vindicate one's soundness, and acquit oneself of a
kind of exacted homage to the form of sound
words." *

This is both a generous and a just statement of
a Kempis' position ; though a simpler explanation
of it lies in the fact that he lived a hundred
years before the republication, at the Reformation,
of this cardinal doctrine of the Pauline theology.
Rut it is a point of the greatest practical import-
ance to emphasize that in experience the true order
is, that the imitation of Christ should follow the
forgiveness of sins through the blood of His cross.t

3. There is another great Pauline doctrine which
hardly perhaps obtains in a Kempis the prominence
which belongs to it in connexion with his subject.
This is the doctrine of union with Christ, which

* Correspo?idence of Rev. Thofnas Chalme?'s, D.D., p. 81.

t On this point see the singularly lofty and weighty statement
of Martensen, On the Imitation of Christ and Justifying Faith, in
his Christian Ethics, vol. i.

INTR OD UC TOR Y. 27

may be called the other pole of St. Paul's system.
St. Paul's whole teaching revolves between the two
poles of righteousness through the death of Christ
for us and holiness through the life of Christ in
us. The latter truth is not absent from the pages
of the Imitation ; but its importance is not fully
brought out.

For, beautiful as the phrase " the imitation of
Christ " is, it hardly indicates the deepest way in
which Christ's people become like Him. Imitation
is rather an external process : it denotes the taking
of that which is on one and putting it on another
from the outside. But it is not chiefly by such
an external copying that a Christian grows like
Christ, but by an internal union with Him. If
it is by a process of imitation at all, then it is
imitation like that of a child copying its mother.
This is the completest of imitations. The child
reproduces the mother's tones, her gestures, the
smallest peculiarities of her gait and movements,
with an amazing and almost laughable perfection.
But why is the imitation so perfect t It may be
said it is because of the child's innumerable oppor-
tunities of seeing its mother, or because of the
minuteness of a child's observation. But every one
knows that there is more in it than this. The
mother is in her child ; at its birth she communi-

28 IMAGO CHRISTl.

cated her own nature to it ; and it is to the
working in the child of this mysterious influence
that the success of the imitation is due. In Hke
manner we may carefully copy the traits of Christ's
character, looking at Him outside of us, as a
painter looks at his model ; we may do better still —
we may, by prayer and the reading of the Word,
live daily in His company, and receive the impress
of His influence ; but, if our imitation of Him is
to be the deepest and most thorough, something
more is necessary : He must be in us, as the
mother is in her child, having communicated His
own nature to us in the new birth.*

IV.

There is, however, a defect in the Imitation which
the reader of to-day feels more than any of these :
it lacks the historical sense, which is the guide of
the modern mind in every kind of inquiry. Though
the spirit of Christ pervades the book and many
of its chapters are so full of the essence of His
teaching that they might be appended as invaluable
comments to His sayings, yet it presents no clear
historical image of Him.

* " Christ! Vorbild ist mehr als kahles, kaltes Tugendbeispiel,
es ist erwarmende, eiziindende Lebensgemeinschaft." — Kogel,
PredigteUy i. 86.

INTR ODUC TOR Y. 29

This would seem, however, to be the one thing
needful for successful imitation. If we are to try
to be like Christ, we must know what He was like.
No painter could make a satisfactory copy of a
figure of which he had himself only a vague con-
ception. Yet no exact image of Christ will be
found in a Kempis. To him Christ is the union
and sum of all possible excellences ; but he con-
structs Christ out of his own notions of excellence,
instead of going to the records of His life and
painting the portrait with the colours they supply.
He specifies, indeed, certain great features of the
Saviour's history — as, for instance, that in becoming
man He humbled Himself, and therefore we ought
to be humble ; or that He lived a life of suffering,
and therefore we ought to be willing to suffer ; but
he does not get beyond these generalities.

Now, it is possible to construct out of the Gospels
a more lifelike portrait than this. It is possible at
present as it has never been in any former age.
Our century will be remembered in the history of
Christian thought as the first which concentrated
its attention on the details of the Life of Christ.
The works written on this subject in recent times
have been without number, and they have power-
fully affected the mind of the age. The course of
Christ's life on earth has been traced from point

30 IMAGO CHRISTL

to point with indefatigable patience and illustrated
with knowledge from every quarter ; every incident
has been set in the clearest light ; and we are now
able to follow Him as it has never been possible to
do before into every department of life — such as the
family, the state, the Church, the life of* prayer, the
life of friendship, and so on — and to see exactly how
He bore Himself in each. This is the method of
knowing Him which' has been granted to our age ;
and to be content to know Him merely as a vague
image of all possible excellences would be to us
like painting a landscape in the studio from mere
general conceptions of mountains, rivers and fields,
instead of going direct to nature.

Of course it is easy to exaggerate the value of
a method. Infinitely more important always arc
the mind and heart working behind the method.
The glowing love, the soaring reverence, the range
and sublimity of thought in a Kempis, have brought
the object home to him with a closeness and reality
which fill every sympathetic reader with a sacred
envy and will always enchain the Christian heart.*
Yet, though an improved method is not everything,

* In reading the Psalms, who has not coveted the nearness
to God which their authors attained, and the splendid glow oi
feeling which contact with Him produced in them? Who has
not questioned whether he has ever himself penetrated so far

y

INTR OD UCTOR V. 3 1

it is something ; and, if we feel our own devotion
to be cold, and the wing of our thought feeble
in comparison with others, all the more ought we
to grasp at whatever advantage it may be able to
supply. The imitation of Christ is a subject which
is constantly calling for reconsideration ; for the
evolution of history and the progress of knowledge
place people on new points of view in relation to it.
Each generation sees it in its own way, and the last
word on it can never be spoken. The historical
method of handling it is the one which falls in with
those habits of thought which have been worn into
the mind of our age by its vast conquests in other
directions ; and, though it will not make up for the
lack of faith and love, it is a cJiarisma which the
Church is bound to use, and on the use of which
God will bestow His blessing.

V.
It can hardly be said that evangelical thought
has hitherto claimed this subject cordially enough
as its own. The evangelical heart, indeed, has
always been true to it. I have sometimes even
thought that among the causes of the popularity of

into the secret of the Lord? Yet this does not blind us to the
superior freedom and fulness of access to the divine presence
allowed under the New Testament.

32 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

a Kempis' book not the least potent is its mere
name. The Imitation of Christ ! the very sound
of this phrase goes to the heart of every Christian
and sets innumerable things moving and yearning
in the soul. There is a summons in it like a
ravishing voice calling us up sunny heights. It is
the sum of all which in our best moments and
in our deepest heart we desire.

But, whilst to Christian experience the imitation
of Christ has always been inexpressibly precious,
it has held, in evangelical preaching and literature,
on the whole, only an equivocal position. The
Moderatism which in last century nearly extin-
guished the religion of the country made much
of the example of Christ. But it divorced it from
His atonement, and urged men to follow Christ's
example, without first making them acquainted with
Him as the Saviour from sins that are past. The
Evangelicals, in opposition to this, made Christ's
atonement the burden ot their testimony and,
when His example was mentioned, were ever ready
with. Yes, but His death is more important. Thus
it happened that the two parties divided the truth
between them, the example of Christ being the
doctrine of the one and His atoning death that
of the other. In like manner, when Unitarianism
seemed for a time, through the high character

INTR OD UC TOR Y. 33

and splendid eloquence of Channing, to be about
to become a power in the world, it derived nearly
all the attractiveness it ever possessed from the
eulogies in which its preaching abounded of the
pure, lofty and self-sacrificing humanity of Christ.
The evangelical Church answered with demonstra-
tions of His divinity, scriptural and irresistibly
logical no doubt, but not always very captivating.
And thus a division was again allowed to take
place, the humanity of Christ falling to the one
party as its share and His divinity to the other.
It is time to object to these divisions. Both
halves of the truth are ours, and we claim the
whole of it. The death of Christ is ours, and
we rest in it our hopes of acceptance with God
in time and in eternity. This is what we begin
with ; but we do not end with it. We will go on
from His death to Flis life and, with the love
begotten of being redeemed, try to reproduce that
life in our own. In the same way, whilst glorying
in His divinity, we will allow none to rob us of the
attraction and the example of His humanity ; for,
indeed, the perfection of His humanity, with what
this implies as to the value of His testimony about
Himself, is the strongest bulwark of our faith that
He was more than man.

11.

CHRIST IN THE HOME.

Matt. viii. 14, 15, Matt. i.

„ ix. 18-26. ,, ii.

„ xvii. 18. Luke i. 26-56.

xviii. 1-6.

11.

„ xix. 13-15. „ lii. 23-38.
Markjv. 18, 19.

,, xii. 18-25.

Luke vii. 11 -15.

„ xi. 27. 28. Matt. xiii. 55-58.

John viii. i-ii. Luke iv. 16, 22.

„ xix. 25-27. John vi. 42.

Matt. xii. 46-50. Mark iii. 21.

Luke ix. 57-62. John vii. 3-9.

CHAPTER II.
CHRIST IN THE HOME.

I.

" I ^HE institution of the family affords striking
■^ illustrations both of what may be called the
element of necessity and of what may be called the
element of liberty in human life.

There is in it a mysterious element of necessity.
Everyone is born into a particular family, which
has a history and character of its own, formed
before he arrives. He has no choice in the matter;
yet this connection affects all his subsequent life.
He may be born where it is an honour to be
born or, on the contrary, where it is a disgrace.
He may be heir to inspiring memories and refined
habits, or he may have to take up a hereditary
burden of physical and moral disease. A man
has no choice of his own father and mother, his
brothers and sisters, his uncles and cousins ; yet
on these ties, which he can never unlock, may
depend three-fourths of his happiness or misery.

38 IMAGO CHRIST/,

The door-bell rings some night, and, going out,
you see on the doorstep a man who is evidently
a stranger from a strange land. You know nothing
of him ; he is quite outside the circle of your
interest ; he is ten thousand miles away from your
spirit. But, if he can say, " Don't you know me ?
I am your brother," how near he comes — ten
thousand miles at one step ! You and he are
connected with an indissoluble bond ; and this
bond may either be a golden clasp which is an
ornament or an iron clamp which burns and
corrodes your very flesh. This is the element of
necessity in the institution of the family.

Jesus could not touch humanity without being
caught in this fetter of necessity. He entered its
mysterious circle when He was born of a woman.
He became a member of a family which had its
own traditions and its own position in society ;
and He had brothers and sisters.

These circumstances were not without import-
ance to Him. That His mother exercised an
influence upon His growing mind cannot be
doubted. We have not, indeed, the means of
tracing in much detail how this influence acted,
for iQ\v notices of His early years have come
down to us ; but it may be noted as one signifi-
cant fact that Mary's hymn, the so-called Magnificat,

CHRIST IN THE HOME. 39

in which, at her meeting with EHzabeth, she poured
forth the sentiments of her heart, embodies thoughts
which are echoed again and again in the preaching
of Jesus. This production proves her to have been
a woman not only of great grace, but of rare natural
gifts, which had been nourished from God's Word,
till she naturally spoke the very language of the
prophets and the holy women of old. We may
not ascribe too much to her and Joseph, but we
can say that the holy childhood of Jesus was
reared in a home of pious refinement, and that
there were marks of this home on Him after He
left it.

Besides this influence, He was born to a long
pedigree ; and this was not a matter of indiffer-
ence to Him. He was of the seed of David ;
and the Gospel narrative takes pains to trace His
descent in the royal line — a procedure which may
be regarded as an echo of His own feeling.
Noblesse oblige : there is a stimulus to noble action
supplied by noble lineage ; and Milton is not
perhaps overstepping the bounds of legitimate infer-
ence when, in Paradise Regained, he represents the
mind of the youthful Saviour as being stirred to
noble ambition by the memories of His ancestors:

Victorious deeds
Flamed in My heart, heroic acts — one while
To rescue Israel from the Roman yoke ;

40 IMAGO CHRIST/.

Then to subdue and quell o'er all the earth
Brute violence and proud tyrannic power,
Till truth was freed and equity restored.

There can at least be no hesitation in believing
that His royal descent pointed out His way to the
work of the Messiah.

He had, however, also to feel the galling of the
ring of necessity. He bore the reproach of mean
descent ; for, although His remoter ancestry was
noble. His immediate relatives were poor ; and, when
He appeared on the stage of public life, sneering
tongues asked, " Is not this the carpenter's son ? "
His life is the final rebuke to such shallow respect
of persons, and will remain for ever to the despised
and lowly-born a guide to show how, by worth of
character and wealth of service to God and man,
they may shut the mouths of gainsayers and win a
place in the love and honour of the world.

The element of liberty which belongs to human
life is exhibited no less conspicuously than the
element of necessity in the family, and is equally
mysterious. Of his own choice a man enters the
married state and founds a family ; and by this act
of his will the circle is fashioned which in the next
generation will be inclosing other human beings in
the same bonds of relationship into which he has
himself been born.

Of course the nature of the case prevented Jesus

CHRIST IN THE HOME,

from being the founder of a family ; and this has
sometimes been pointed to as a defect in the
example He has left us. We have not, it is said,
His example to follow in the most sacred of all the
relationships of life. Undeniably there seems to be
a certain force in this objection. Yet it is a singular
fact that the greatest of all precepts in regard to
this relationship is taken directly from His example.
The deepest and most sacred word ever uttered on
the subject of marriage is this : " Husbands, love
your wives, even as Christ also loved the Church,
and gave Himself for it ; that He might sanctify
and cleanse it with the washing of water by the
Word, that He might present it to Himself a
glorious Church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any
such thing ; but that it should be holy and without
blemish."*

II.

Jesus honoured the institution of the family all
through His life.

In His day there prevailed in Palestine a shameful
dissolution of the domestic ties. Divorce was rife
and so easily procured that every trifle was made an
excuse for it ; and by the system of Corban children
were actually allowed to compound by a payment to

* Eph. V. 25 ft.

42 IMAGO CHRISTL

the Temple for the neglect of their own parents.
Jesus denounced these abuses with unsparing indig-
nation and sanctioned for all the Christian ages only
that law of marriage which causes it to be entered
on with forethought,* and then, when the relation-
ship has been formed, drains the deepest affections
of the heart into its sacred channel.

His own love of children, and the divine words
He spoke about them, if they cannot be said to have
created the love of parents for their children, have at
all events immensely deepened and refined it. The
love of heathen mothers and fathers for their offspring
is a rude and animal propensity in comparison with
the love for children which reigns in our Christian
homes. He lifted childhood up, as He raised so
many other weak and despised things, and set it in
the midst. If the patter of little feet on the stairs

* •' He who attacks marriage, he who by word or deed sets
himself to undermine this foundation of all moral society, he
must settle the matter with me ; and, if I don't bring him to
reason, then I have nothing to do with him. Marriage is the
beginning and the summit of all civilisation. It makes the
savage mild ; and the most highly cultivated man has no better
means of demonstrating his mildness. Marriage must be
indissoluble ; for it brings so much general happiness, that any
individual case of unhappiness that may be connected with it
cannot come into account. . . . Are we not really married to our
conscience, of which we might often be willing to rid ourselves
because it often annoys us more than any man or woman can
possibly annoy one another? " — Blackie, The Wisdoin of Goethe.

CHRIST IN THE HOME.

43

and the sound of little voices in the house are music
to us, and if the pressure of little fingers and the
touches of little lips can make us thrill with gratitude
and prayer, we owe this sunshine of life to Jesus
Christ. By saying, " Suffer the little children to
come unto Me," He converted the home into a
church, and parents into His ministers ; and it may
be doubted whether He has not by this means won
to Himself as many disciples in the course of the
Christian ages as even by the institution of the
Church itself. Perhaps the lessons of mothers
speaking of Jesus, and the examples of Christian
fathers, have done as much for the success of
Christianity as the sermons of eloquent preachers or
the worship of assembled congregations. Not once
or twice, at all events, has the religion of Christ,
when driven out of the Church, which had been
turned by faithless ministers and worldly members
into a synagogue of Satan, found an asylum in the
home ; and there have been few of the great teachers
of Christendom who have not derived their deepest
convictions from the impressions made by their
earliest domestic environment.

Many of the miracles of Jesus seem to Jiave been
prompted by regard for the affections of the family.
When He healed the Syro-Phoenician's daughter, or
gave the daughter of Jairus back to her mother, or

44 IMAGO CHRIST!.

raised the widow's son at the gate of Nain, or
brought Lazarus from the dead to keep the family
circle at Bethany unbroken, can it be doubted that
the Saviour experienced delight in ministering to
the domestic affections ? He showed how profound
was His appreciation of the depth and intensity
of these affections in the Parable of the Prodigal
Son.

But it was by His own conduct in the family
that He exhibited most fully His respect for this
institution. Though the details of His life in
Mary's home are unknown to us, every indication
shows Him to have been a perfect son.

There is no joy of parents comparable to that of
seeing their child growing' up in wisdom, modesty
and nobility ; and we are told that Jesus grew in
wisdom and stature and in favour with God and
man. If He knew already of the great career
before Him, this did not lift Him above the obedience
of a child ; for, even when He was twelve years of
age, we are told, He went down to Nazareth with
His parents and was subject unto them. It is
generally supposed that soon after this Joseph died,
and on Jesus, as the eldest son, fell the care of
supporting the family. This is uncertain ; but the
very close of His life is marked by an act which
throws the strongest light back on the years of

CHRIST IN THE HOME,

45

which no record has been preserved, for it reveals
how deep and deathless was His affection for His
mother. Whilst hanging on the cross, He saw her
and spoke to her. He was at the time in terrible
agony, every nerve tingling with intolerable pain.
He was at the point of death and anxious no doubt
to turn away from all earthly things and deal with
God alone ; He was bearing the sin of the world,
whose maddening load was crushing His heart ; yet,
amidst it all, He turned His attention to His mother
and to her future, and made provision for her by
asking one of His disciples to take her to his home
and be a son to her in His own stead. And the
disciple He selected for this service was the most
amiable of them all — not Peter the headlong or
Thomas the melancholy, but John, who could talk
with her more tenderly than any other about the
one subject which absorbed them both, and who
was perhaps abler than any of the rest, on account
of the comfort of his worldly condition, to support
Mary without allowing her to feel that she was a
burden.

ni.

Sacred as is the parent's right to the obedience
of the child, there is a term to it. It is the office
of the parent to train the child to independence.

46 IMAGO CHRIST/.

As the schoolmaster's aim ought to be to train his
pupils to a stage where they are able to face the
work of life without any more help from him, so
parents have to recognise that there is a point at
which their commands must cease and their children
be allowed to choose and act for themselves. Love
will not cease ; respect ought not to cease ; but
authority has to cease. Where exactly this point
occurs in a child's life it is difficult to define. It
may not be the same in every case. But in all
cases it is a momentous crisis. Woe to the child
who grasps at this freedom too soon ! This is often
the ruin of the young ; and among the features of the
life of our own time there are none perhaps more
ominous than the widespread disposition among the
young to slip the bridle of authority prematurely
and acknowledge no law except their own will. But
parents also sometimes make the mistake of attempt-
ing to exert their authority too long. A father may
try to keep Lis son under his roof when it would be
better for him to marry and have a house of his
own ; or a mother may interfere in the household
affairs of her married daughter, who would be a

better wife if left to her own resources.

*

* " A child's duty is to obey its parents. It is never said any-
where in the Bible, and never was yet said in any good or wise
book, that a man's or a woman's is. When, precisely, a child

CHRIST IN THE HOME. 47

Mary, the mother of Jesus, erred in this respect.
She attempted again and again to interfere unduly
with His work, even after His public ministry had
commenced. It was her pride in Him that made
her do so at the marriage in Cana of Galilee ; it
was anxiety about His health on other occasions.
She was not the only one who ventured to control
His action in an undue way. But, if anything
could arouse the indignation of Jesus, it was such
interference. It made Him once turn on Peter
with, " Get thee behind Me, Satan ; " and on more
than one occasion it lent an appearance of harshness
even to His behaviour to His mother. The very
intensity of His love to His friends and relatives
made their wishes and appeals sore temptations to
Him, for He would have liked to please them had

becomes a man or a woman, it can no more be said, than when it
should first stand on its legs. But a time assuredly comes when
it should. In great states, children are always trying to remain
children, and the parents wanting to make men and women of
them. In vile states the children are always wanting to be men
and women, and the parents to keep them children. It may be
— and happy the house in which it is so — that the father's at
least equal intellect, and older experience, may remain to the
end of his life a law to his children, not of force, but of perfect
guidance, with perfect love. Rarely it is so ; not often possible.
It is as natural for the old to be prejudiced as for the young to
be presumptuous ; and in the change of centuries, each generation
has something to judge of for itself." — Ruskin, Mornings in
Florence^ vol. iii., p. 72.

48 'IMAGO CHRISTl.

He been able. But, if He had yielded, He would
have been turning away from the task to which
He was pledged ; and therefore He had to rouse
Himself even to indignation to resist temptation.
On no other occasion had His conduct so much
appearance of unfilial harshness as when His
mother and brethren came one day in the midst
of His work desiring to speak with Him, and He
retorted on the person who told Him, " But who
is My mother, and who are My brethren ? " and,
looking round on the disciples seated in front of
Him, added, " Behold, My mother and My brethren !
for whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is
My brother, and sister, and mother." It cannot
be denied that these words have a harsh sound.*
But they are probably to be read with what goes
immediately before them in the Gospel of St. Mark,
where we are told that His friends made an attempt
to lay hold of Him, saying, " He is beside Himself."
So absorbed was Jesus at this period in His work
that He neglected even to eat ; so rapt was He
in the holy passion of saving men that to His rela-
tives it appeared that He had gone mad ; and they

* The very fact, however, that Jesus compared the relation
between Himself and those who do the will of God to the con-
nection between Himself and His mother and brethren implies
that the latter held a high and sacred place in His mind.

CHRIST IN THE HOME. 49

conceived it to be their duty to lay hands on Him
and put Him in restraint. If Mary took part in this
impious procedure, it is no wonder that there should
have fallen on her a heavy rebuke. At all events
she evidently came to Him thinking that He must
at once leave everything and speak to her. But He
had to teach her that there are even higher claims
than those of domestic affection : in doing God's
work He could recognise no authority but God's.
There is a sphere into which even parental
authority may not seek admittance — the sphere of
conscience. Jesus not only kept this sacred for
Himself, but called upon those who followed Him
to do so too. He foresaw how in the progress of
time this would often sever family ties ; and to one
who cherished so high a respect for the home it
must have been a prospect full of pain : " Think
not," He said, " that I am come to send peace on
earth, but a sword. For I am come to set a man
at variance against his father, and the daughter
against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against
her mother-in-law. And a man's foes shall be they
of his own household." This must have been to
Him a terrible prospect ; but He did not shrink
from it ; to Him there were claims higher than
even those of home : " He that loveth father and
mother more than Me is not \vorthy of Me, and he

4

50 IMAGO CHRJSTI.

that loveth son or daughter more than Me is not
vorthy of Me."

This sword still cuts. In heathen countries
where Christianity is being introduced, especially in
countries, like India, where the domestic system
is extensively developed, the chief difficulty in the
way of confessing Christ is the pain of breaking
family connections, and often it is nothing less
than an agony. Even in Christian lands the oppo-
sition of worldly parents to the religious decision
of their children is sometimes very strong, and
occasions extreme perplexity to those who have to
bear this cross. It is always a delicate case, re-
quiring the utmost Christian wisdom and patience ;
but, when the issues are clear to mind and con-
science, there can be no doubt which alternative
is the will of Christ : we must obey God rather than
man.* How happy are they who are in precisely
the opposite case : who know that their full decision

* There is a very important caution hinted at in the words
of Martensen on this subject {Ch^'istian Ethics, vol. ii.) : " What-
ever doubtful and difficult circumstances may hereby arise, and
however mistakenly those members of a family may act, who
are awake to Christian truth, but whose Christianity is often
made an unseemly display of, and whose whole behaviour is one
fret and ferment, still the fact itself, that ordinary and zuorldly
family life is disturbed by the Gospel, is one quite in order, and
in conformity with the divine economy.'"

CHRIST IN THE HOME. 51

for Christ and frank confession of Him would fill
their homes with joy unspeakable !

IV.

In every home, it is said, there is a skeleton in
the cupboard ; that is to say, however great may be
its prosperity and however perfect the appearance
of harmony it presents to the world, there is always,
inside, some friction or fear, or secret, which darkens
the sunshine.

This proverb may be no truer than many other
wide generalisations which need to be qualified
by the acknowledgment of innumerable exceptions.
Yet there is no denying that home has its pains as
well as its pleasures, and the very closeness of the
connection of the members of a family with one
another gives to any who may be so disposed the
chance of wounding the rest. Under the cloak of
relationship torture may be applied with impunity,
which those who inflict it would not dare to apply
to an outsider.

Jesus suffered from this : He had His peculiar
domestic grief. It was that His brethren did not
believe on Him. They could not believe that
He who had grown up with .them as one of
themselves was infinitely greater than they. They
looked with envy on His waxing fame. Whenever

52 IMAGO CHRIST!.

they intervene in His life, it is in a way to
annoy.

How great a grief this must have been to Jesus
will be best understood by those who have suffered
the like themselves. There have been many of
God's saints who have had to stand and testify
alone in ungodly and worldly homes. Many in
such circumstances are suffering an agony of daily
petty martyrdom which may be harder to bear than
public persecution, for which widespread sympathy
is easily aroused. But they know at least that they
have the sympathy of Him who alluded so patheti-
cally to His own experience in the words : " A
prophet is not without honour save in his own
country and in his own house."

How He met His brethren's unbelief — whether
He reasoned and remonstrated with them or was
silent and trusted to the testimony of His life —
we cannot tell. But we may be certain that He
prayed for them without ceasing ; and happily we
know what the issue was.

His brethren, it would appear, continued un-
believing up to the time of His death. But im-
mediately thereafter, in the first chapter of the
Book of Acts, we, find them assembled as believers
with His apostles in Jerusalem."^ This is an

* Acts i. 14.

CHRIST IN THE HOME. 53

extraordinary circumstance ; for at this very time
His cause was, if we may so speak, at the lowest
ebb. Events seemed to have demonstrated that
His pretensions to the Messiahship had been false ;
yet those who had disbelieved in Him at the height
of His fame were found among the believers in
Him when apparently His cause had gone to pieces.
How is this to be accounted for ?

The explanation lies, I believe, in a passage of
First Corinthians, where, in enumerating the appear-
ances of our Lord to different persons after His
resurrection, St. Paul mentions that He appeared to
James.* This was apparently the Lord's brother ;
and, if so, is there not something wonderfully strik-
ing in the fact that one of the first acts of the risen
Saviour was to bring to His unbelieving brother the
evidence which would conquer his unbelief? James,
it may be presumed, would communicate what he
had experienced to the other members of Mary's
family. The result was of the happiest description ;
and two of the brothers, James and Jude, lived to
be the penmen of books of Holy Scripture.

I venture to think that the presence of these
brethren of Jesus among the believers in Him at
such a crisis is even yet one of the strongest proofs

* I Cor. XV. 7.

54 IMAGO CURISTL

of the reality of the resurrection ; but in the mean-
time we will rather think of it as a signal proof
of the unwearied persistence with which He sought
their salvation, and as an example to ourselves to
pray on, hope on, work on for those of our own
flesh and blood who may yet be outside the fold
of Christ.

III.

CHRIST IN THE STATE

Matt. ix. I. Matt. ii.

„ xiii. 54. „ iv. 3-10.

,, xvii. 24-27, ,, ix. 9, 27.

„ XX. 17-19. ,, xxi. I-II.

,, xxiii. 37-39. „ xxii. 15-21.

,, xxvi. 32. ,, xxvi. 47-6S

Luke iv. 16-30. ,, xxvii.

,, xiii. 16; 34, 35. Luke ii. II, 29, 3;

,, xix. 9. ,, xiii. 31-33.

,, xxiii. 7-12.

John vi. 15.
xi. 48.

Matt, xviii. 1-3.

,5 xix. 28.

,, XX. 20-28.
John xviii. 36, 37.

xix. 14, 19, 20.

CHAPTER III.

CHRIST IN THE STATE.

r N the mind of the average Christian of the
^ present day the idea of the state does not
perhaps occupy a prominent position. Many of
his duties appear to him more important than those
he owes as a citizen. He probably considers that
the most important question which can be asked
about him is, What is he in himself, in his secret
soul and inward character ? Next to this in im-
portance he might perhaps consider the question
of what he is as a member of the Church, charged
with sustaining its honour and sharing in its work.
The third place he might give to the question of
what he is in the family, as son, husband, father.
But much less important than any of these would
appear to him the fourth question — what he is as
a citizen of the state.

On the whole, perhaps this is the right way of

58 IMAGO CHRISTI.

judging ; probably it is the Christian way.* But
it is the exact opposite of the view of the whole
ancient world. The great thinkers of Greece, for
example, put the state before the individual, the
home and the Church. To them the supreme
question about every man was, What is he as a
citizen } The chief end of man they believed to
be to make the state great and prosperous, and to
the interests of the state they sacrificed everything
else. Whether the individual was good and happy,
whether the family was pure and harmonious, was
not what they asked first, but whether the state
was strong.

Jesus changed this. He was the discoverer, so
to speak, of the individual. He taught that in
every man there is a soul more precious than the

* The relative importance of these different ways of con-
sidering man affords scope, however, for endless discussion and
difference of opinion. Rothe's ethical speculations were power-
fully influenced by deference to the ancient view of the priority
of the state. Martensen holds that a theory of society must
start from the family. Ritschl and his school have re-emphasized
the ethical and religious importance of the Church. Among
ourselves several causes are contributing at present to give
prominence to the social aspects of religion. It is impossible
to overestimate these, unless they are put above its individual
aspects. I can entertain no doubt that in the mind of Jesus
the individual was the p?ius. Indeed, one of the most decisive
steps forward taken in His moral teaching was the substitution
of the individual as the unit for the nation or the Church.

CHRIST IN THE STATE. 59

whole world, and that the best product of this
world is a good and noble character. Instead of
its being true that individuals do not matter if the
state is strong, the truth is that the state and the
Church and the family are only means for the good
of the individual, and they are tested by the kind
of man they produce * In this, as in many other
respects, Christianity turned the world upside down,
and put the first last and the last first.

But, although the state does not hold the place
in Christian teaching which it held in heathen
philosophy, it would be a great mistake to sup-
pose that to Christianity the state is unimportant.
Though the primary aim of Christ's religion is to
make good men, yet good men ought to be good
citizens.

II.

It is natural to a healthy human being to love
the land of his birth, the scenery on which his
eyes have first rested, and the town in which he
resides ; and it is part of the design of Providence
to utilise these affections for the progress of man
and the embellishment of the earth, which is his
habitation. Every inhabitant of a town ought to

* " The test of every religious, political, or educational system
is the man which it forms." — AmieVs Journal^ vol. i., p. 49.

6o IMAGO CHRISTl.

wish to promote its welfare and adorn it with
beauty ; and there is no feeling more worthy of a
youthful heart than the desire to do something —
by making a wise plan, or writing a good book,
or singing a noble lay, or expunging a national
blot — to add to the fair fame of his native
country.*

Some countries have had an exceptional power
of awakening these sentiments and of binding
their own children to their service. Palestine was
one of these. It was loved with a fervent patriot-
ism. Its charm lay partly in its beauty. It may
have lain partly in its very smallness, for feeling
contracts an impetuous force when confined within
narrow limits, as highland rivers become torrents
in their rocky beds. But it is the memory of great
and unselfish lives lived on its soil that chiefly
excites patriotic sentiment in the inhabitants of any

" I mind it weel, in early date,
When I was beardless, young and blate,
And first could thresh the barn,

* * ♦ *

Ev'n then a wish (I mind its power),
A wish that to my latest hour

Shall strongly heave my breast :
That I for poor auld Scotland's sake
Some usefu' plan or beuk could make

Or sing a sang at least."

Burns.

CHRIST IN THE STATE. 6i

country ; * and Palestine possessed this source of
fascination in unparalleled measure, for its history
was crowded with the most inspiring names.

Jesus felt this spell. Can any one read in His
words the images of natural beauty gathered from
the fields of Galilee without being convinced that
He looked on these landscapes with a loving eye }
The name of the village He was brought up in clings
to Him to this day, for He is still Jesus of Nazareth.
He vindicated Himself for healing a woman on the
Sabbath on the ground that she was a daughter
of Abraham ; and the publicans and sinners were
dear to Him because they were the lost sheep of
the house of Israel. Jerusalem, the capital of the
country, had always laid a strong hold on Jewish
hearts. The bards of the nation used to sing of
it, '' Beautiful for situation is Mount Zion ; " " Let
my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth if I
forget thee, O Jerusalem." But all such tributes of
affection were surpassed by Jesus, when He addressed
it, " O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how often would I have

* Saj's Novalis : "The best of the French monarclis had it for
his purpose to make his subjects so well off that every one of
them should be able on Sundays to have roast fowl to dinner.
Very good. But would not that be a better government under
which the peasant would rather dine on dry bread than under
any other on roast fowl, and, as grace before meat, would give
God thanks that he had been born in such a country ? "

62 IMAGO CHRISTI.

gathered thy children together even as a hen
gathereth her chickens under her wings ! " This
feeling survived even the transformation of the
grave, for, in giving instructions, after He was
risen, to His apostles about the evangelization of
the world, He said, "Begin at Jerusalem." He lived
in the closest sympathy with the great figures of His
country's past and with the work done by them.
Such names as Abraham and Moses, David and
Isaiah, were continually on His lips; and He took up
the tasks which they had left unfinished and carried
them forward to their fulfilment. This is the truest
work of patriotism. Happy is that country whose
best life has been drained into some ideal cause, and
whose greatest names are the names of those who have
lavished their strength on this object. The deeds
and sayings of these heroes ought, next to the Bible,
to be the chief spiritual nourishment of her children ;
and the young ambition of her choicest minds should
be concentrated on watering the seeds which they
sowed and completing the enterprises which they
inaugurated.

ni.

There was one task of patriotism in Christ's day
and country which seemed to lie to the hand of
anyone born with a patriotic spirit. Palestine was
at that time an enslaved country. In fact, it was

CHRIST IN THE STATE. 63

groaning under a double servitude ; for, whilst
several of its provinces were ruled over by the
tyrannical race of the Herods,* the whole country
was subject to the Roman power.

Was it not the duty of Jesus to free His country
from this double tyranny and restore it to indepen-
dence, or even elevate it to a place of sovereignty
among the nations ? Many would have been willing
to welcome a deliverer and to make sacrifices for the
national cause. The whole of the Pharisaic party
was imbued with patriotic sentiment, and a section
of it bore the name of the Zealots, because
they were willing to go all lengths in sacrifice or
daring.t

Jesus seemed to be designated for this very
service. He was directly descended from David
through the royal line. When He was born, wise
men came from the East to Jerusalem inquiring,
" Where is He that is born King of the Jews t "
One of His first disciples,^ on being introduced to
Him, saluted Him as " the King of Israel ;" and, on
the day when He rode in triumph into Jerusalem,

* Herod the Great, the founder of this dynasty, was an
Idumsean, but tried to conciliate the national sentiment by
marrying a Jewish princess.

t One member of this party, Simon Zelotes, joined the
discipleship of Jesus.

I Nathanael.

64 IMAGO CHRISTI.

His adherents called Him by the same name, no
doubt meaning that they expected Him to be
literally the king of the country. These, and man)-
other incidents which they will recall, are indications
that it was His destiny not to be the private man
He was, but to be the head of an emancipated and
glorious state.

Why was this destination not fulfilled ? This is
the most difficult question that can be asked. It
occurs often to every careful reader of the Gospels,
but lands us as often as we ask it in a sea of
mysteries. Did He ever intend to be the king
of His native country } Was Satan appealing to
the favourite fancies of His youth when he showed
Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory
of them .? If the Jewish people, instead of rejecting,
had welcomed Him, what would have happened 1
Would He have set up His throne in Jerusalem
and made the whole world subject to it ? Was it
only when they had made it impossible for Him to
reign over them that He turned aside from what
appeared to be His destiny and limited Himself
to a kingdom not of this world .?

It is impossible to read Christ's life intelligently
without asking such questions as these ; yet it is vain
to ask them, for they cannot be answered. We are
asking what would have been, if something which

CHRIST IN THE STATE. 65

did happen had not happened; and only omniscience
is equal to such a problem.

We may, however, say with certainty that it was
the sin of man which prevented Jesus from ascending
the throne of His father David. His offer of Himself
to be the Messiah of His country was a bond fide
offer. Yet it was made on conditions from which
He could not depart : He could only have been
king of a righteous nation. But the Jews were
thoroughly unrighteous. They once tried to take
Him by force and make Him a king ; but their zeal
was unhallowed, and He could not yield to it.

Then the tide of His life turned and rolled back
upon itself. Instead of the expeller of tyrants, He
became the victim of tyranny. His own nation,
which ought to have raised Him on its shields as
its leader, became His prosecutor at the bar of the
alien government, and He had to stand as a culprit
before both the Roman and the Herod ian rulers
of the land. As a subject of the country, He
yielded with all submissiveness, telling His followers
to put up their swords. And the law-officers of the
state made a malefactor of Him, crucifying Him
between two thieves. His blood fell on the capital
of the country as a deadly curse ; and in less than
half a century after His murder the Jewish state
had disappeared from the face of the earth.

S

66 IMAGO CHRIST!.

It is a terrible commentary on the imperfection
of the state. The state exists for the protection of
life, property, and honour — to be a terror to evil-
doers and a praise to them that do well. Once,
and only once in all history, it had to deal with One
who was perfectly good ; and what it did was to
adjudge Him a place among the very worst of
criminals and put Him to death. If this were a
specimen of the law's habitual action, the state,
instead of being a divine institution, would have to
be pronounced the most monstrous evil with which
the world is cursed. So the victims of its injustice
have sometimes pronounced it ; but happily such
opinions are only the excesses of a few. On the
whole, the laws framed by the state, and the ad-
ministration of them, have been a restraint on sin
and a protection to innocence. Yet the exceptions
in every age have been numerous and sad enough.
Not everything is righteous which the law of the
land sanctions, nor are those all unrighteous whom
the administrators of the law condemn. It is of the
utmost consequence in our day to remember this,
because, in the changed arrangements of the modern
state, we are not only subjects of the government,
but, directly or indirectly, makers and administrators
of the law. Through the exercise of the municipal
and the parliamentary franchises, we have a pait in

CHRIST IN THE STATE. 67

appointing those who make and who administer the
laws, and thus we have our share in the responsi-
bility of bringing up the laws to the standard of the
divine justice and placing the wise and the good
upon the judgment scat.

IV.

The life of Jesus appeared to miscarry. He who
was meant to be a king was held unworthy to live
even as a subject ; instead of inhabiting a palace,
He was consigned to a prison ; instead of being
seated on a throne. He was nailed to a tree.

But, although this was a miscarriage in so far as
it was due to the wicked will of men, it was no mis-
carriage in the wisdom of God. Looked at from
man's side, the death of Christ was the blackest spot
on human history, a mistake and a crime without
parallel ; but, looked at from God's side, it is the
grandest scene in the history of the universe ; for in
it human sin was expiated, the depths of the divine
love were disclosed, and the path of perfection
opened for the children of men. Jesus was never
so completely a king as at the moment when His
claims to kingship were turned into ridicule. It was
in savage jest that the title was put above His cross,
"This is Jesus, the King of the Jews." Pilate wrote

68 IMAGO CHRIST/.

these words in ridicule ; but, when we look back at
them now, do they appear ridiculous ? Do they
not rather shine across the centuries with inextin-
guishable splendour ? In that hour of uttermost
shame He was proving Himself to be the King of
kings and the Lord of lords.

Jesus had all along had a conception of His own
kingship which was distinct, original and often
repeated. He held that to be a true king is to be
the servant of the commonweal, and that he is most
kingly who renders the most valuable services to the
greatest number. He was well aware that this was
not the world's view of kingship, but precisely the
reverse of it. The world's view is that to be a king
is to have multitudes in your service, and the greater
the numbers ministering to his glory or pleasure the
greater is the king. So He said : " The princes of
the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they
that are great exercise authority upon them." " But,"
He added, " it shall not be so among you : but
whosoever will be great among you, let him be your
minister ; and whosoever w^ill be chief among you, let
him be your servant." Such was Christ's conception
of greatness ; and, if it is the true one, He was
never so great as when, by the sacrifice of Himself,
He was conferring on the whole world the blessings
of salvation.

CHRIST IN THE STATE. 69

But this conception of greatness and kingliness
was not meant by Jesus to be applied to His own
conduct alone ; it is of universal application. It is
the Christian standard for the measurement of all
dignities in the state. He is greatest, according to
the mind of Christ, who renders the greatest services
to others.

Alas ! this is as yet but little understood ; it
makes but slow progress in the minds of men.
The old heathen idea is still the governing one
of politics — that to be great is to receive much
service, not to render it. Politics has been a
game of ambition, if not a hunting-ground for
rapacity, rather than a sphere of service. The
aim of the governing classes hitherto has been to
get as much as possible for themselves at the
expense of the governed ; and it has yet to be
seen whether the new governing class is to be
swayed by a better spirit.

Still, the Christian idea is growing in this depart-
ment also of human affairs. The common heart
responds to Christ's teaching, that the kingliest is
he who sacrifices himself most willingly, works the
hardest and achieves the most for the weal of all ;
and, although the quaint old saying of the Psalmist
is still too true, that ** men will praise thee when
thou doest well to thyself," yet the number of those

70 IMAGO CHRIST/.

is daily growing who feel that the greatness of a
ruler is measured, " not by the amount of tribute he
levies on society, but by the greatness of the services
he renders it."

IV
CHRIST IN THE CHURCH

Matt. iii. 13-15. Matt. ix. 10-17.

,, viii. 4. „ xii. 1-14.

„ ix. 35- »t XV. 1-9.

„ xiii. 54. ,, xvi. 6.

,, xxi. 12, 13. ,, xxiii.

Mark iii. 1-6. Luke x. 31, 32.

,, vf 2. John ii. 13-33.

„ xii. 41-44.

Luke ii. 21-24, 39» 4I-49-

,, iv. 16-32, 44.

„ xxii. 53.

John iv. 22. Matt. xxiv. 1-2.

„ V. I. „ xxvi. 17-30.

,, viii. 20. ■ ,, xxviii. 19, 20.

„ X. 22. 23. John xk. 22, 23.

CHAPTER IV.
CHRIST IN THE CHURCH.

T N some respects the Church is a narrower body
^ than even the family ; for one member of a
family may be taken into it and another left out ;
but in other respects it is wider even than the state ;
for members of different nations may be members
of the same Church.

The family and the state are institutions de-
veloped out of human nature by its own inherent
force and according to its own inherent laws ; but
the Church is a divine institution, planted among
men to gather into itself select souls and administer
to them supernatural gifts. It is not, indeed, with-
out a natural root in human nature ; but this root
consists of those feelings in man which make him
aspire to an enjojment and satisfaction which are
not to be found in this world of which he is lord,
but can only be got as the pure gift of Heaven.
Without revelation there is no Church. As the
edifice of the Church rises above the homes of men,

74 IMAGO CHRIST/.

amidst which it is erected, and its spire, like a
finger, points to the sky, so the Church as an
institution is an expression of man's aspirations after
a heavenly life — a life in God and in eternity,
which only the condescending grace of God can
supply.

I.

Jesus was born in a country in which there was
already a true Church, founded on revelation and
administering the grace of God. He was a child
of that nation to which " pertained the adoption and
the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the
law, and the service of God, and the promises." He
was admitted into the fellowship of the Church by
the ordinary gateway of circumcision ; and a {^w
weeks thereafter He was presented in the Temple,
like any other Jewish child, in acknowledgment
that He belonged to the Lord. Thus, before He
was Himself conscious of it. He was, through the
wishes of His earthly parents, shut in by holy rites
within the visible Church of God.

In our day, all Christian parents devote their chil-
dren to God; but too many of them show no dis-
position in maturity to desire for themselves to be
connected with the house of God. Jesus, on the
contrary, as soon as He became fully capable of

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH 75

self-conscious action, adopted the pious wishes
of His parents as His own and developed a pas-
sionate love for the house of God. When His
parents lost Him in Jerusalem at twelve years of
age, they found Him again in the Temple ; and,
when they told Him how long and how widely they
had sought Him, He asked in surprise how they
could have expected Him to be anywhere else than
there.* He was without a doubt a regular fre-
quenter of the synagogue during His silent years
at Nazareth ; and strange it is to think of Him
being preached to Sabbath after Sabbath for so
long.-f

When He quitted the privacy of Nazareth and
began His public work. He was still a regular
frequenter of the synagogue. This was in fact the
centre from which His work developed itself. " He
wrought miracles in the synagogues of Galilee."

* " Wist ye not that I should be in M}^ Father's house ? " So
the Revised Version, correctly.

t What was the man like who did it? Was he a wise man,
who guided the footsteps of the Holy Child into the pastures of
the Word and supplied Him with the language in which His
own thoughts afterwards expressed themselves ? or was he an
embodiment of all that Jesus had afterwards to denounce in
Pharisee and scribe ? No portion of a congregation is more /
awe-inspiring to a minister than the children. Any Sunday •^
there may be sitting before us one who is already revolving
the thoughts which will dominate the future and supersede
our own.

76 IMAGO CHRIST/.

Nor was He neglectful of the other centre of Jewish
worship — the Temple at Jerusalem. He regularly
attended the feasts ; He sat down with His disciples
in Jerusalem to eat the Passover ; and He preached
in the courts of the Temple. Even so secular a
part of divine service as the giving of money He
did not overlook : He sent Peter to fetch out of
the fish's mouth a coin to pay for Him the Temple-
tax ; and He passed a glowing eulogium on the
widow who cast her mite into the Temple collecting-
box.

It is thus evident that Jesus was a passionate
lover of the house of God. He could say with
holy David, " How amiable are Thy tabernacles, O
Lord of hosts ; my soul longeth, yea, even fainteth
for the courts of the Lord. A day in Thy courts
is better than a thousand."

One sometimes hears even professedly religious
people at the present day disparaging public
worship, as if religion might flourish equally well
without it ; and, for trifling reasons or for no reason
at all, they take it upon themselves to withdraw
from the visible Church as something unworthy of
them. This was not the way in which Jesus acted
The Church of Plis day was by no means a pure
one ; and He, if anybody, might have deemed it
unworthy of Him. But He regularly waited on

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH. 77

its ordinances and ardently loved it. There are
few congregations less ideal perhaps than that in
which He worshipped in wicked Nazareth, and i(t\N
sermons are less perfect than those He listened to.
But in that little synagogue He felt Himself made
one with all the piety of the land ; as the Scripture
was read, the great and good of former ages
thronged around Him ; nay, heaven itself was in
that narrow place for Him.

The Church is the window in the house of human
life from which to look out and see heaven ; and it
does not require a very ornamental window to make
the stars visible. The finest name ever given, out-
side the Bible, to the Church Is Bunyan's Palace
Beautiful. Yet the churches which he was ac-
quainted with were only the Baptist meeting-houses
of Bedfordshire ; and in an age of persecution these
were certainly as humble structures as have ever
served for places of worship. No better than barns
they seemed to common eyes ; but in his eyes
each of them was a Palace Beautiful ; because,
when seated on one of its rough benches, he felt
himself in the general assembly and Church of the
firstborn ; and the eye of his imagination, looking
up through the dingy rafters, could descry the
gorgeous roof and shining pinnacles of the Church
universal. It is the sanctified imagination that

78 IMAGO CHRIST!,

invests the Church building, whether it be biick
meeting-house or noble cathedral, with true sub-
limity ; and love to God, whose house it is, can
make the humblest material structure a home of
the spirit.

II.

Although the Church of Christ's day was of
divine origin and He acknowledged it to be the
house of God, it was frightfully full of abuses.
Though an institution comes, from God, man may
add to it that which is his own ; and by degrees the
human addition may become so identified with the
divine institution that both are supposed to be of
a piece and equally divine. The human additions
grow and grow, until it is almost impossible to get at
what is God's through that which is man's. Some
successful souls, indeed, still find their way through
to the reality, as the roots of trees seek their way to
the sustenance of the soil between the crannies of
the opposing rocks ; but multitudes are unable to
find the way, and perish through trying to satisfy
themselves with what is merely human, mistaking it
for what is divine. At last a strong man is raised
up to perceive the difference between the original
structure and the human addition ; and he tears
away the latter, breaking it in pieces, amidst the

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH. 79

wild i)utcries of all the owls and birds of darkness
that have built their nests in it, and discloses once
more the foundation of God. This is the Reformer.

In Christ's day the accumulation of human addi-
tions to the religion which God had instituted had
grown to a head. No one knows how it had begun ;
such things sometimes begin innocently enough. But
it had been immensely developed by a misconcep-
tion which had crept in as to what the worship of
God is. Worship is the means by which the empty
human soul approaches God in order to be filled
with His fulness, and then go away rejoicing, to
live for Him in tlie strength thus received. But
there is always a tendency to look upon it as a
tribute we pay to God, which pleases Him and is
meritoiious on our part. Of course, if it is tribute
paid to Him, the more of it that can be paid the
better ; for the more of it there is, so much the
greater grows the merit of the worshipper. Thus
services are multiplied, new forms are invented,
and the memory of God's grace is lost in the
achievements of human m.erit.

This was what had happened in Palestine.
Religion had become an endless round of services,
which were multiplied till they became a burden
which life was unable to bear. The ministers
of religion heaped them on the people, whose

8o IMAGO CHRISTI.

consciences were so crushed with the sense of
shortcoming that the whole joy of rehgion was
extinguished. Even the ministers of religion them-
selves were not able to perform all the orders they
issued ; and then hypocrisy came in ; for naturally
they were supposed to be doing those things which
they prescribed to others. But they said and did
not ; they bound heavy burdens and grievous to be
borne on other men's shoulders, while they them-
selves would not touch them with one of their
fingers. It was high time for a reformer to appear,
and the work fell to Jesus.

The first outburst of His reformatory zeal was
at the outset of His ministry, when He drove the
buyers and sellers out of the Temple. Their practices
had probably commenced with good intentions : they
sold oxen and doves for sacrifice to the worshippers
from foreign countries, who came in tens of thousands
to Jerusalem at the feast and could not easily bring
these animals with them ; and they exchanged the
coins of Jerusalem for those of foreign countries,
in which the strangers of course had brought their
money. It was a necessary thing ; but it had
grown to be a vast abuse ; for exorbitant prices
were charged for the animals and exorbitant rates of
exchange demanded ; the traffic was carried on with
such din and clamour as to disturb the worship ; and

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH. 8i

it took up SO much room that the Gentiles were
elbowed out of the court of the Temple which be-
longed to them. In short, the house of prayer had
become a den of thieves. Jesus had no doubt noted
the abuse with holy anger many a time when visiting
the Temple at the feasts ; and, when the prophetic
spirit descended on Him and His public ministry
began, it was among His first acts to clear it out of
the house of God. The youthful Prophet, with His
scourge of cords, flaming above the venal crowd, that,
conscious of their sin, fled, amidst tumbling tables
and fleeing animals, from before His holy ire, is a
perfect picture of the Reformer.

It is said that the high-priestly families derived an
income from this unholy traffic, and it is not likely
that they felt very kindly to One who thus invaded
their vested interests. In like manner He aroused
the resentment of the Pharisaic party by turning
into ridicule their long and pretentious prayers and
the trumpets they blew before them when they were
giving alms. He could not but expose these prac-
tices, for the people had learned to revere as the
flower of piety that which was the base weed of
vulgarity and pride. He had to consent to be
frowned upon as a man of sin because He neglected
the fasts and the Sabbatic extravagances which He
knew to be no part of religion ; and still more

6

82 IMAGO CHRIST!,

because He mingled with publicans and sinners,
though He knew this to be the very course of
divine mercy. He was compelled at last to pluck
the cloak of hypocrisy entirely away from the reli-
gious characters of the day and expose them in
their true colours as blind leaders of the blind and
whited sepulchres, which appeared fair outside, but
inwardly were full of dead men's bones.

Thus He cleared away the human additions piled
about the house of God and let the true Temple once
more be seen in its own fair proportions. But He
had to pay the penalty. The priests, the stream of
whose sinful gains He had stopped, and the Pharisees,
whose hypocrisy He had exposed, pursued Him with
hatred that never rested till they saw Him on the
cross. And so, in addition to the name of reformer,
He earned the name of Martyr, and Himself became
the leader of the noble army of martyrs which in a
thin line deploys through the centuries.

Not a few of that army have also been reformers.
They have risen against the abuses of the Church
of their day and perished in the attempt. For the
New Testament Church is no more free t-han was the
Old Testament Church from the danger of being
a scene of abuses. The condition of the Christian
Church at the time of those men of God to whom
we are wont specially to apply the title of the

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH. 83

Reformers was remarkably like the state of the Old
Testament Church in the time of Christ : man's
additions had completely overlaid God's handiwork ;
religion had been transformed from an institution for
the administration of God's grace into a round of
forms and ceremonies for procuring God's favour
by human merit ; and the ministers of religion had
become blind leaders of the blind. By the Reforma
tion God delivered His Church from this state
of things ; and never since, we may hope, has there
been anything like the same need of reform. It
would be vain, however, to suppose that in our time
or in the section of the Church to which we may
belong there are no abuses needing the reformer's
fan. Though we may be insensible of them, this
is no proof that they do not exist ; for the Church
even in its worst days has been unconscious of its
own defects, till the proper man has appeared and
pointed them out ; and in all ages there have been
those who have believed themselves to be doing God
service when resisting the most necessary changes.*

* Schism is the caricature of Reform. But Schismatic is often
merely a nickname given to the true Reformer ; and even real
schism nearly ahvays indicates the need for reform, as Schlcier-
macher has proved in the profound discussion of Church Reform
in his Chrisiliche Sitte. He says :

" Um also nichtigen Versuchen zu vvehren, bedarf es zuvoiderst
der Untervveisung zu richtigem Schriftverstimdnisse, und dann

84 JMAGO CHRIST!.

III.

The name Reformer, where it is truly deserved,
is a great one in the Church ; but to Jesus belongs
one much greater ; for He was the Founder of the
Church.

The old Church in which He was brought up
was ready to vanish away. It had served its day
and was about to be taken down. He Himself
prophesied that of the Temple there would soon not

muss audi immer das Bewusstsein ervveckt werden, dass ein
volliges Verstehen der Schrift nicht anders moglich ist, als auf
dem Wege der gelehiten Bildung. Ware' in beider Hinsicht
immer besser gesorgt gewesen, so wiirden viele Abnormitaten
nicht entstanden sein. Dazu kommt aber noch etvvas anderes.
Es tritt namlich nur zu oft der Fall ein, dass die Ehrfurcht,
welche die Laien haben fiir die Wissenden als solche und fiir die
Kirchenreprasentation als Amt, ganzlich wieder aufgehoben vvird
durch die geringe personliche Ehrfurcht, welche die Mitglieder
der Reprasentation und in welchen sonst das geschichtliche Leben
ist einflossen. Wie sollte auch der Laie beides vereinigen,
auf der einen Seite sich iiber jenen wissen in Beziehung auf
Sittlichkeit und religiose Kraft, und auf der anderen Seite sich
ihrer hoheren Erkenntniss unterordnen. Der geistliche Hoch-
muth wiirde also in den einzelnen nicht entstehen, wenn er nicht
immer Vorschub fande einerseits in der Unvollkommenheit der
Organisation, und andererseits darin, dass nicht Anstalten genug
getroffen tind zur Verbreitung des richtigen Schriftverstandnisses,
und die Menge jencr verkehrten Versuche in unserer Kirche ist
ein sicheres Thermometer fiir den Zustand des ganzen in diescr
Hinsicht. Wir werden auch des Uebels nicht Herr werden, ehe
die Griinde desselben gehoben sind."

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH. 85

be left one stone above another ; He told the woman
of Samaria that the hour was coming when they
would neither in Gerizim nor yet on Mount Zion
worship the Father, but the true worshippers every-
where would worship Him in spirit and in truth ;
and, when He died, the veil of the Temple was rent
in twain from the top to the bottom.

He founded the Church of the New Testament
in His own blood. By the shedding of His blood
He abolished the imperfect relation between God
and men mediated by the blood of bulls and of
goats, and established a new and better relationship.
So He said in instituting the Lord's Supper, " This
is the new covenant in My blood." The new house
of God is illuminated with the perfect revelation
made by Him of the Father ; and in it are adminis-
tered the new and richer blessings purchased by His
life and death.

But in building the new house of God its Founder
did not wholly discard the materials of the old.*

* The apparent contradiction between speaking of Christ both
as the Reformer of the old and the Founder of the new is partly
due to the contradiction, expounded in the preceding chapter,
between the will of God and the will of man. To finite eyes it
cannot but seem that He was striving earnestly for ends which
were not realised, and that the results of His life were different
from His intentions. Besides, old and new are terms which may
both be applicable to the same object at the same time. It is
more orthodox to speak of the Christian Church as the same

86 IMAGO CHRISTI,

He instituted the Lord's Supper in the very elements
with which on the evening of its institution He and
His disciples were celebrating the Passover. The
forms of worship and office-bearers of the Christian
Church bear a close resemblance to those of the
synagogue. Above all, the Scriptures of the Old
Testament, with the figures of their saints and
heroes, form part of the same volume as the
Scriptures of the New.

Jesus Himself did not draw out in detail the
plan of the New Testament Church. He contented
Himself with laying its foundation, which none else
could have done, and sketching the great outlines of
its structure. He entrusted to it His Gospel, with
the sacred charge to preach it to every creature ;
He gave to it the twelve apostles, whose labours and
inspired teachings might serve as the second course
of foundation-stones laid above the foundation
which He had laid Himself; He empowered its
officers to admit to, and exclude from, its fellowship ;
He instituted the sacram.ents of baptism and the
Lord's Supper ; and, above all. He left with His
Church the promise, which is her star of hope in

with that of the Old Testament ; but it is perhaps more scriptural
to speak of it as a new Church. That is to say, orthodoxy
emphasizes the element which is common to both dispensations,
whilst Scripture emphasizes what is distinctive in the new.

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH. 87

every age : " Lo, I am with you always, even to the
end of the world."

This foundation-laying work of Christ was done
once for all and cannot be repeated. Men dream
sometimes of the Christian Church passing away
and something more advanced taking its place. But
*' other foundation can no man lay." Only the
building up of the Church on this foundation is now
left to us. This, however, is part of the same work
and may be done in the same spirit in which He laid
the foundations.

In the first place, those who undertake it require
to see to it that they build straight on the founda-
tion. There is much that passes for Christian work
that will not in the end be acknowledged by Christ,
because it is not building on the foundation which
He has laid. If that new covenant in His blood
be ignored in which He declared His own work to
consist, or if the foundations laid by His apostles in
His name are not recognised, we may build a church
of our own, but He will not recognise our labour.

All who take part in this work ought to build
with His holy ardour. He thought it worth while
to die for the sake of redeeming the souls of men ;
what sacrifices are we prepared to make in contri-
buting to the same end t He gave His life ; will
we give up our ease, our effort, our money .? It was

IMAGO CHRISTl.

because He believed every single soul was more
precious than a world that He died to save the souls
of men. Are they precious in our eyes ? Does
their fate haunt us ? does their sin grieve us ? would
their salvation fill us with aught of the joy that
thrills the angels in heaven when one sinner is
converted ? *

There is needed, however, not only zeal, but con-
secrated originality as well, in building this edifice.
As I said, Jesus did not prescribe the minute details
of the organization of the Church. He largely left
it to human ingenuity to find out how best His
work may be done ; and the Church is only finding
out still. New problems arise for her to solve,
new tasks to be performed, and therefore she needs
inventors and pioneers to devise the plans for her
new enterprises and open up the way to new con-
quests. It is impossible, for example, to measure
the blessing which that man conferred on the

* " Christianity would sacrifice its divinity if it abandoned
its missionary character and became a mere educational institu-
tion. Surely this Article of Conversion is the true articuhis
staiitis aiit cade7itis ecclesicB. When the power of reclaiming the
lost dies out of the Church, it ceases to be the Church. It may
remahi a useful institution, though it is most likely to become
an immoral and mischievous one. Where the power remains,
there, whatever is wanting, it may still be said that 'the taber-
nacle of God is with men.' " — Ecce Homo.

CHRIST IN THE CHURCH.

Church who instituted Sabbath schools. He was
no dignitary of the Church nor perhaps in any way
a remarkable man, except in this — that he saw a
vast work needing to be done and had originality
to discover the best way of doing it. He led the
way into the children's world, and ever since he has
been supplying the best of work for the myriads
of willing reapers who have followed him into that
most attractive portion of the harvest-field. There
are plenty of other tasks awaiting solution from
sanctified Christian genius ; and I know no prize
more to be coveted than that of being the first to
show how Christian thought may exploit some new
mine of spiritual knowledge, or Christian character
rise to a new level of spiritual attainment, or Christian
zeal reach the spiritual wants of some neglected
section of the community.

V.

CHRIST AS A FRIKND

Matt. X. 2-4. Luke viii. 1-3.

»> XI. 7-n. ^^ X. 3S-42.

>. xvii. I, 2. ,, xii. 4.

„ xviii. 6-10. John i. 35-51,

M xxi. 17. ^^ xi.

,, xxvi. 14-16, 37, 38, 40, 50. „ xii. 1-7.

,, xxvii. 3-5, 55-61. . „ xiii. 1-5, 23.

Mark V. 37. ^^ XV. 13-15.

,, xiii. 3, 4. ^^ xix. 27.

I

CHAPTER V.

CHRIST AS A FRIEND.

I.

T has been advanced as an objection to the New
Testament that it never recommends friendship,
and, while supplying rules for the behaviour to one
another of husbands and wives, parents and children,
brothers and sisters, gives none for the intercourse
of friend with friend.*

Various reasons have been suggested to account
for this singular om.ission. But, before entering

* In an argument designed to prove that Christianity is
unfavourable to friendship, the fact might be adduced, that the
best book on the subject is from the pen of a heathen. From the
classical age of English theology we have two treatises on the
subject, one from the Royalist side by Jeremy Taylor, the other
from the Puritan side by Richard Baxter; but neither possesses
the exquisite flavour of Cicero's De Ainicitid. The Lysis of Plato
is interesting, as opening some of the difficulties of the subject,
but it is not an important dialogue. Shakspeare also has dis-
cussed some of the difficulties in Two Noble Kinsmen and Two
Gentlemen of Verona, and he has given the whole subject an
exquisite embodiment in The Mcrdiant of Venice. But the
glory of English literature in this department is /// Mrvinriam.

94 IMAGO CHRISTI.

upon these, it would be well to make sure that the
omission itself is a reality. Is it true that the New
Testament omits all reference to friendship ?

I venture, on the contrary, to affirm that the New
Testament is the classical place for the study of this
subject. The highest of all examples of friendship
is to be found in Jesus ; and His behaviour in this
beautiful relationship is the very mirror in which all
true friendship must see and measure itself.

It is objected, indeed, that this instance is inad-
missible, because Jesus sustained to those who may
be calle d His friends the higher relationship of
Saviour ; and between those standing on such
different levels, It is contended, real friendship was
Impossible.

But He Himself called the Twelve His friends :
'* Henceforth I call you not servants, but friends."
From among the Twelve He made special com-
panions of three — Peter, James and John ; and
of these three John was specially the disciple whom
Jesus loved. We are told that "Jesus loved Martha
and her sister and Lazarus ;" and this notice surely
Implies that He stood in an attitude of peculiar
friendliness towards the members of the family of
Bethany. Merely as the Saviour, He is hardly
to be thought of as loving one of those He has
saved more than another ; He loves them all alike.

CHRIST AS A FRIEND. 95

But in the cases just quoted He showed preferences
for some of His followers over others ; and this
seems to prove that within the wider and higher
relationship between Saviour and saved there was
scope for the strictly human tie of friendship.

II.

Among those who have written on the subject
of friendship it has been discussed whether the best
friend is he who loves most or he who bestows the
greatest benefits.

Much may be said on both sides ; for, on the one
hand, there is an infinite solace in the sincere affec-
tion of even the humblest friend, however unable
he may be to render any material service ; and, on
the other hand, in the perplexities and misfortunes
of life, which coir e to all, it is an unspeakable
advantage to have one with a sound judgment and
a helpful hand, who will interest himself in our
affairs as if they were his own, because he is our
friend. Yet I venture to think that neither of these
is the pearl of friendship ; there is something in it
more valuable than either.

Let any one who has drunk deeply of this well-
spring of happiness look back and ask what has
been the sweetest ingredient in it : let him recall
the friend of his heart, whose image is associated

96 IMAGO CHRISTI.

with the choicest hours of his experience ; and then
let him say what is the secret and the soul of his
satisfaction. If your friendship has been of a high
order, the soul of it is simply the worth of him
you are allowed to call your friend. He is genuine
to the core ; you know him through and through,
and nowhere is there any twist or doubleness or
guile. It may be a false and disappointing world,
but you have known at least one heart that has
never deceived you ; and, amidst much that may
have happened to lower your estimate of mankind,
the image of your friend has enabled you always to
believe in human nature. Surely this is the incom-
parable gain of friendship — fellowship with a simple,
pure and lofty soul.

If it is, what must have been the charm of the
friendship of Jesus ! If even the comparatively
common and imperfect specimens of human nature
we have known can make impressions so delightful,
what must it have been to see closely that heart
which was always beating with the purest love to
God and man, that mind which was a copious and
ever-springing fountain of such thoughts as have
been preserved to us in the Gospels, that character
in which the minutest investigation has never
detected a single spot or wrinkle ! As we read
the records of the great and good, we cannot help

CHRIST AS A FRIEND. 97

sometimes wishing it had been our lot to follow
Plato in his garden, or to hear the table-talk of
Luther, or to sit with Bunyan in the sunshine of the
streets of Bedford, or to listen to Coleridge bodying
forth the golden clouds of his philosophy. But what
would any such privilege have been in comparison
with that of Mary,* who sat at Jesus' feet and heard
His words ; or that of John, who leant on His bosom
and listened to the beating of His heart ?

HI.

If that which has just been mentioned is the
prime excellence of friendship, love holds in it
the second place.

Friendship is not the mere claim which one man
may make on another because he was born in the

* The heathen held woman to be unfit for this relationship,
and too many Christian thinkers have followed in their footsteps,
alleging such pleas as that a woman cannot keep a secret or that
she cannot give counsel in affairs of difficulty. But Jesus " loved
Martha and her sister ; " some of His friends were women. Thus
He vindicated the right of women to this honourable position,
and hundreds of the best and manliest of His servants have
since experienced the solace and strength springing from the
friendship of good women ; and, as one of them (Jeremy Taylor)
has said, " a woman can love as passionately, and converse as
pleasantly, and retain a secret as faithfully, and be useful in her
proper ministries ; and she can die for her friend as well as any
Roman knight."

7

98 IMAGO CHRIST/.

same village or sat on the same bench at school ;
it is not the acquaintance of nei|^hbours who have
learned to like one another by daily gossiping from
door to door, but would, if separated, forget one
another in a month ; it is not the tryst of roysterers,
or the chance acquaintance of fellow-travellers, or
the association of the members of a political party.*
In real friendship there is always the knitting of
soul to soul, the exchange of heart for heart. In
the classical instance of friendship in the Old Testa-
ment, its inception is exquisitely described : " And it
came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking
unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with
the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his
own soul." A union like this is formed not to be
broken, and, if it is broken, it can only be with the
tearing of the flesh and the loss of much blood.

I cannot, however, agree with those who maintain
that true friendship, like wedded love, can have but

Zu trauter Freundschaft ist es nicht genug,
Dass man auf Du und Du ein Glas geleert,
Auf Einer Schulbank bei einander sass,
In Einem Cafe oft zusammentraf,
Sich auf der Strasse hoflich unterhielt,
Im selben Club dieselben Lieder sang,
Als Publicisten Eine Farbe trug,
Auch in der Presse sich einander pries.**

Baggesen, quoted by Miirtensen.

CHRIST AS A FRIEND. 99

one object at a time. One of the finest spirits of
our century, a thinker conversant with all the heights
and depths of man's relationships with man,* has
argued strongly in favour of this position, and he
silences all objectors by replying that, if you think
you have more friends than one, this only proves
that you have not yet found the true one. But this
is to misinterpret the nature of this affection, and
force on it a rule belonging to quite a different
passion. At all events, the example of Christ
appears to support this view, and to prove that in
friendship there may be different degrees, and that
the heart is capable of enjoying several friendships
at the same time.

IV.

The love of friends is an active passion, and
delights in rendering services and bestowing benefits.

So sensible of this were the ancients that, in
discussing the duties of friendship, what they asked
was, not how much one friend ought to do for
another, but where the limit was at which he ought
to stop. They took it for granted that he would
do, suffer and give all he could for his friend's

* RoTHE. See his Ethik, vol. iv., p. 67. Germany is fortunate
in having such examples of friendship among its greatest men as
that of Luther and Melanchthon, and that of Goethe and Schiller

IMAGO CHRIST!,

sake ; and they only prescribed to him to restrain
himself at the point v/here his zeal might clash
with some still higher obligation to his family, his
country or his God. In accordance with this they
represented friendship in art as a young man bare-
headed and rudely attired, to signify activity and
aptness for service. Upon the fringe of his garment
was written Death and Life, as signifying that in
life and death friendship is the same. On his
forehead was inscribed Stnniner and Winter, mean-
ing that in prosperity or adversity friendship knows
no change except in the variety of its services. The
left shoulder and the arm were naked down to the
heart, to which the finger of the right hand pointed
at the words Far and Near, which expressed that
true friendship is not impaired by time or dissolved
by distance.*

Of this feature in the friendships of Jesus it would
be easy to give examples ; but none could be more
striking than His behaviour at the death and re-
surrection of Lazarus. Every step of His on this
occasion is characteristic. His abiding two days
still in the place where He was, after receiving the
news of His friend's death, in order to make the
gift He was about to bestow more valuable ; His

* From Jeremy Taylor's treatise on Friendship

CHRIST AS A FRIEND.

venturing into Judaea in spite of the dangers He
was exposed to and the fears of the Twelve ; His
fanning into flame of Martha's weak faith ; His
secret sending for Mary, that she might not miss
the great spectacle; His sympathy with the emotions
of the scene, so intense that He wept and the spec-
tators exclaimed, " Behold, how He loved him ; "
His preparation of the sisters, by His prayer, for
the shock of seeing their brother emerging from the
sepulchre in his graveclothes ; and then the bene-
faction of his resurrection — all these are traits of a
love that was delicate as a woman's heart, strong
as death and bountiful as heaven.

But friendship can sometimes show its strength
as much by the readiness with which it accepts
benefits as by the freedom with which it gives them.
It proves by this its confidence in the love on the
other side. Jesus gave such a proof of the depth of
His friendship for John when, hanging on the cross,
He asked the beloved disciple to adopt Mary as
his ov/n mother. Never was there a more delicate
expression given to friendship. Jesus did not ask
him if he would ; He took his devotion for granted ;
and this trust was the greatest honour that could
have been conferred on the disciple.

IMAGO CHRISTI.

V.

It is a well-known characteristic of friendship that
friends enjoy being in each other's company and
hearing each other talk, and that they admit one
another to the knowledge of secrets which they
would not reveal to the world at large.

It is the commonest saying abou^two very in-
timate friends, that if you are seeking the one, you
will do best to resort to the abode of the other.
In each other's company they are at peace ; speech
between them is hardly necessary, for they have a
subtler way of divining thought and feeling, and it
is a precious privilege of friends to be silent in each
other's company without awkwardness. Yet, when
the gates of speech are opened, there is an out-
pouring of the mind's wealth such as takes place
in no other circumstances. For nothing needs to be
concealed. The shy thought, which scarcely ventured
to show its face even to its own creator, is tempted
out ; the hardy opinion utters itself without fear ;
confidence is responded to with confidence; like
two coals, burning feebly apart, which, when flung
together, make a merry blaze, so mind and mind
burn as they touch, and emit splendours which
nothing but this contact could evoke. He is ignorant
of one of the most glorious prerogatives of manhood

CHRIST AS A FRIEND. 103

who does not carry, treasured in his mind, the
recollection of such golden hours of the feast of
reason and' the flow of soul.

Jesus expressly chose the Twelve "that they
might be with Him." For three years they were
His constant companions ; and often He would
take them away into uninhabited spots or on
distant journeys for the express purpose of enjoying
with them more uninterrupted intercourse. In the
Gospel of St. John we have notes of these conver-
sations, and from the wide contrast between the
sayings of Jesus in this Gospel and those reported in
the Synoptists, which rather represent His addresses
to the people at large, we may perceive how fully
in these interviews He opened to the Twelve His
secret mind. And the kind of impressions which
they received from these confidences may be learned
from the saying of the two with whom He conversed
on the way to Emmaus : "Did not our heart burn
within us as He talked with us by the way, and as
He opened to us the Scriptures 1 "

The minds of the most favoured apostles especially
carried in subsequent years the priceless memory of
many great hours like this, when, with hearts lost in
wonder, they gazed into the vast and mystic realm
of the thoughts of Christ. And they were vouch-
safed a (qw hours even greater, when He took them

104 IMAGO CHRISTI.

away with Him to pray ; as He did, for instance,
when they beheld His glory in the Holy Mount,
or when He invited them to watch with Him in
Gethsemane. Never surely was He so unmistakably
the human friend as when, on the latter occasion,
He threw Himself on their sympathy, entreating
them to be near Him in His agony.

These scenes excite our wonder that any should
have been admitted so far into His secret life.
Were not these hours of prayer especially too
sacred for any mortal eyes to see .'* That His friends
were admitted to them proves that it is a prerogative
of friendship to be admitted far into the secrets of
religious experience.

It is a truncated and most imperfect friendship
when the gateway of this region is closed ; for it
means that the one friend is excluded from the most
important province of the other's life. Hence it
may be affirmed that friendship in its highest sense
can exist only between Christians;* and even they

* " Ihre hochste Intensitiit hat die Freundschaft als religiose
Freundschaft, als Wahlanziehung der Freunde vermoge der
specifischen Wahlverwandtschaft ihrer religiosen Individuali-
taten. Denn wegen der vvesentlich centralen Stellung der
Frommigkeit im Menschen ist die religiose specifische Sympathie
der Individuen wesentlich specifische Sympathie derselben nach
der Totalitat ihrer sittlichen Individualitat, nach dem ganzen
imersten Kern derselben." — Rothe, ChristUche EtJiik, vol. iv.,
p. 68.

CHRIST AS A FRIEND.

only taste the bloom on this cup when they have
arrived at the stage of free and frequent converse
on those themes which were native to the mouth
of Christ.

VI.

Friendship, like everything else, is tested by
results. If you wish to know the value of any
friendship, you must ask what it has done for you
and what it has made you.

The friendship of Jesus could stand this test.
Look at the Twelve ! Consider what they were
before they knew Him, and think what His influence
made them and what position they occupy now !
They were humble men, some of them, perhaps,
with unusual natural gifts, but rude and undeveloped
everyone. Without Him they would never have
been anything. They would have lived and died in
the obscurity of their peasant occupations and been
laid in unmarked graves by the blue waters of the
Sea of Galilee. They would never have been heard
of twenty miles from home, and would all have
been forgotten in less than a century. But His
intercourse and conversation raised them to a place
among the best and wisest of the sons of men ; and
they now sit on thrones, ruling the modern world
with their ideas and example.

io6 IMAGO CHRIST/.

Our friendships, too, must submit to this test.
There are friendships so called which are like mill-
stones dragging down those who are tied to them
into degradation and shame. But true friendship
purifies and exalts. A friend may be a second
conscience. The consciousness of what he expects
from us may be a spur to high endeavour. The mere
memory that he exists, though it be at a distance,
may stifle unworthy thoughts and prevent unworthy
actions. Even when the fear of facing our own
conscience might not be strong enough to restrain
us from evil, the knowledge that our conduct will
have to encounter his judgment will make the com-
mission of what is base intolerable.

Among the privileges of friendship one of the
most valuable is the right of being told our faults by
our friend. There are ridiculous traits of character
in every man which all eyes see except his own ;
and there are dangers to character which the eye of
a friend can discern long before they are visible to
ourselves. It requires some tact to administer such
reproof, and it requires some grace to take it grate-
fully ; but " faithful are the wounds of a friend," and
there are few gifts of friendship more highly to be
prized than words of wise correction.*

* Cicero adds something more: " Ut igitur et rnoiiere et
moneri proprium est verse amicitiae, et alterum libere i'acere,

CHRIST AS A FRIEND. 107

Whilst, however, we estimate the value of the
friendships we enjoy by their influence on us, it
is no less important to remember that our own
conduct in this relationship has to stand the same
test. Is it good for my friend that I am his
friend ? In the maturity of his fully- formed judg-
ment will he look back on the connection with
approval ? At the judgment-seat and in eternity
will he prize it ? A man will hesitate to answer
these questions ; but surely there is no object
worthier of intense desire and earnest prayer than
that our friendship may never be detrimental to
him we love — that it may never pull him down,
but help to raise and sustain him. Would it not
be a prize better than any earthly distinction, if in

non aspere, alterum patienter accipere, non repugnanter ; sic
habendum est, nullam in amicitiis pestem esse majorem,
quam adulationem, blanditiam, assentationem : multis enim
nominibus est hoc vitium notandum levium hominum atque
fallacium, ad voluntatem loquentium omnia, nihil ad veri-
tatem. Cum autem omnium rerum simulatio vitiosa est (toUit
enim judicium veri idque adulterat), tum amicitiae repugnat
maxime : delet enim veritatem, sine qua nomen amicitiae valere
non potest. Nam cum amicitiae vis sit in eo, ut unus quasi
animus hat ex phiribus, qui id fieri poterit, si ne in uno
quidem quoque unus animus erit idemque semper, sed varius,
commutabihs, multiplex? Quid enim potest esse tarn flexibile
tarn devium, quam animus eius qui ad alterius non modo sensum
ac voluntatem, sed etiam vultum atque nutum convertitur ?" — De
Ainicitid, cap. 25.

io8 IMAGO CHRISTI.

the distant years, when we are old and grey-headed,
or perhaps beneath the sod, there were one or
two who could say, "His influence was a redeeming
element in my life ; he made me believe in goodness
and think highly of human nature ; and I thank
God I ever knew him ?"

There is no way in which we can have any
guarantee of exerting such an influence except by
keeping ourselves in contact with the great source
of good influence. Christ was the friend of Peter
and John and James, of Martha and Mary and
Lazarus, in Palestine long ago. But He is still the
friend of men ; and, if we wish it, He will be ours.
There are those who walk with Him and talk with
Him. They meet Him in the morning when they
awake ; He is with them in the street and at their
work ; they tell Him their secrets and appeal to
Him in every time of need ; they know Him better
than any other friend. And these are they who
have found the secret of existence and keep alive
the faith of mankind in the reality of the life of
Christ.

VI
CHRIST IN SOCIETY

Matt. xi. 16-19. Matt. xxvi. 6-13.

Luke XV. I, 2. Luke vii. 36-50.

,, xix. 5-7. John ii. l-ii.

,, xxiv. 41-43- » X"- i-S-

Luke xi. 37-44- ^^att. xiv. 15-21.

„ xiv. 1-24. „ xxvi. 26-30.

Luke xxiv. 29-31.
John xiii. I-15.

CHAPTER VI.

CHRIST IN SOCIETY.

T3EY0ND the narrow circle of those whom we
-■-^ properly call our friends, there is a large circle
of acquaintances, brought into connection with us in
various ways, which may be designated by the vague
term Society. Our intercourse with those to whom
we are thus related raises questions which are not
free from difficulty, but they receive light from the
study of the conduct of Jesus.

I.

In this relationship there was a remarkable
contrast between our Lord and His forerunner, the
Baptist. John shunned society, living in the desert
far from the abodes of men. His clothing was
unsuited for the house or the town, and he con-
fined himself to the ascetic fare of a hermit. The
Saviour, on the contrary, descended among His
fellowmen. Instead of waiting, like the Baptist,
till people went out to Him, He came to them.

112 IMAGO CHRIST/.

In village and city, in street and market-place, in
synagogue and Temple — wherever two or three
vv^ere gathered together, there was He in the midst
of them, He entered beneath men's roofs, to rejoice
with them when they were rejoicing and to weep
with them when they wept. It is astonishing how
often we read of His being at feasts. He began His
ministry by attending a wedding. Matthew made
Him a feast, and He went and sat down among the
publican's motley guests. He invited Himself to the
house of Zacchseus, another publican. Indeed, His
eating with this class of persons came to be notorious.
But, when people from the other end of the social
scale invited Him, He accepted their hospitality with
equal readiness and sat down as frankly with scribes
and Pharisees as among publicans and sinners. St.
Luke mentions at least three occasions when He
dined with Pharisees. Thus, " the Son of man
came eating and drinking." Indeed, so free was
His conduct in this respect, that sour and narrow-
souled critics were able to call Him a gluttonous
man and a wine-bibber. False as these nicknames
were, they derived a colour of truth from His way of
living ; none would ever have dreamed of applying
them to the Baptist.

This contrast is remarkable between two so
closely associated as John and Jesus. Both were

CHRIST IN SOCIETY.

13

religious teachers, whose disciples imitated them ;
but in this particular their examples led in opposite
directions. The disciples of John fasted, while
Christ's disciples feasted. Could these opposite
courses both be justified ?

The Baptist no doubt had reasons for his con-
duct which satisfied himself There are dangers
in society. The lust of the flesh and the lust of
the eyes and the pride of life are there. Company
is the ruin of many a man and of many a family.
There are social circles in which religion would not
be tolerated, and there are others in which those
who profess it are under sore temptation to hide
their colours. The Baptist felt that these influences
were so predominant in the society of his day thai
neither he nor his followers could bear up against
them. The only alternatives between which they
had to choose were either, on the one hand, to flee
from society and keep their religion pure and entire
or, on the other, to enter it and lose their religion ;
and there could be no doubt which was the path of
duty.* Jesus, on the contrary, could go into society

* John was well aware, however, of the imperfection of his
own standpoint. " He pointed across to the sweetness, freedom
and glory of the new dispensation, as Moses from Pisgah saw
the land of promise." — Schleiermacher, Predigten, vol. iv. In
this volume there are four discourses which maybe called a kind

8

/14 IMAGO CHRISTI.

not only without striking His colours, but for the
purpose of displaying them. So completely was
His religious character the whole of Him, and so
powerful and victorious were His principles, that
there was no fear of any company He might enter
obscuring His testimony for God. And He lent
His followers the same power : He filled them with
an enthusiasm which wrought in them like new
wine ; they moved through the world with the free
and glad bearing of wedding guests ; and therefore
wherever they went they gave the tone to society ;
their enthusiasm was so exuberant that it was fai
more likely to set others on fire than to be
extinguished by worldly influences.

Here we seem to find the true answer to the
perplexing questions often raised as to how far
the people of God ought to venture into society
and take part in its engagements. What is its
effect on your religious life and profession } Does
it silence your testimony .''. does it cool down your
enthusiasm } does it secularise you and render you

of sketch of what has been attempted in this book. They are
entitled —

Christ as a Teacher.

Christ as a Miracle-Worker

Christ in Social Life.

Christ among His disciples.

CHRIST IN SOCIETY.

unfit for prayer ? If so, then you must adopt the
Baptist's line of conduct and keep away from it,
or seek for company in which your principles will
be safe. But there are those who can venture
far into the world and yet everywhere be true to
their Saviour ; they are known as Christians wher-
ever they appear, and people respect their position ;
they would not go anywhere if they knew that theij
mouths were to be stopped on the subjects lying
nearest their hearts ; the energy of Christ in them is
so glowing and victorious a force that they mould the
society in which they are, instead of being moulded
by it. This may be a difficult attainment ; but
there can be no doubt that it is the attitude towards
the world most worthy of Christ's followers and
Hke to His own. ^

II.

It has been mentioned how often He is recorded
to have been present at feasts. This part of His
conduct was of a piece with all the rest ; for
nothing He ever did, however trivial it might seem
to be, was unconnected with the grand mission
upon which He had come to the world. This
mission was to make known the love of Heaven
and to awaken and foster love on earth. He lived
to increase the love of man to God and the love of

ii6 IMAGO CHRIST/.

man to man ; and. nothing which could serve either
of these ends was unimportant in His eyes.

He encouraged hospitality because it promotes
one of these ends : it helps to break down the
obstacles which separate men and to bind them
together in the bonds of goodwill. When men meet
one another, the misconceptions and misunder-
standings which have caused estrangement dissolve
in the light of better acquaintance. How often
we come away from a first conversation with one
against whom we have entertained a prejudice with
the remark that he is not a bad fellow after all ;
and not unfrequently after a social rencontre we
carry away an enthusiastic admiration for a charac-
ter which we have previously considered proud, or
formal, or shallow. Our dislikes and suspicions
breed and grow great at a distance, but they die
at the touch of actual acquaintance.

Jesus did not regard even the courtesies of life
as beneath His notice and encouragement. These
foster respect between man and man, causing
us to think of one another as personalities, not
as things to be neglected or trampled on. Once
He was invited to dine at a house where the host
neglected to show Him the ordinary Oriental
courtesies. The man had no real regard for his
Guest, but invited Him for a selfish purpose of

CHRIST IN SOCIETY. 117

his own. He wished to gratify his curiosity by
examining at leisure one who was the talk of the
country and to honour himself by having the dis-
tinguished man beneath his roof. But he felt it
to be a condescension, and he showed this by
omitting the courtesies which he bestowed on the
guests of his own standing. Jesus felt the slight ;
and, before leaving the table. He exposed Simon's
little and loveless heart, enumerating one by one,*
in tones of scathing indignation, the courtesies he
had grudged Him. He could not enjoy a loveless
feast.

Where, on the contrary, love was. He would
not have it controlled. When, at the feast of
another Simon, His gentle disciple Mary poured
her costly treasure on His head and brought down
on herself the reproaches of narrow hearts that
grudged the extravagance, Jesus defended her
against the pretended champions of the poor and
insisted on love having its way.

It is a violation of the sacrament of hospitality

* "Notanda sunt antitheta in quibus Simoni mulier praefertur :
nempe quod haec lachrymis suis rigavit Christi pedes, et capillis
abstersit, quum ille ne vulgarem quidem aquam dari jussisset :
quod haec non desierit osculari pedes, quum ille ne hospitali
quidem osculo dignatus esset Christum excipere : quod pretiosum
unguentum ilia effuderit in pedes, hie autem ne oleo quidem
caput unxerit." — Calvin, in loc.

Ii8 IMAGO CHRISTI.

when any other motive underlies it but love. Jesus
pointed the finger of condemnation at those who
extend hospitality only to guests who, they hope,
will extend it to them in turn, thus degrading it
to a business transaction. It is, if possible, a
meaner motive still to make it only an opportunity
of selfish display. Cumbrous luxury is the death
of true hospitality. It narrows the scope of it ;
for even the wealthy can indulge but seldom in
such extravagance, and people of humbler means
are not able to face it at all except at the risk
of ruin. This is one of the growing evils of the
present day. With the money spent on a single
tiresome feast, half a dozen simple and frugal
entertainments might be furnished forth, and thus
the scope of hospitality widened.* Instead of

* ** Hospitality is threefold : — for one's family, this is of neces-
sity ; for strangers, this is courtesy ; for the poor, this is charity.

" To keep a disorderly house is the way to keep neither
house nor lands. For whilst they keep the greatest roaring,
their state steals away in the greatest silence. Yet, when many
consume themselves with secret vices, then hospitality bears the
blame ; whereas it is not the meat but the sauce, not the supper
but the gaming after it, doth undo them.

" Measure not the entertainment of a guest by his estate, but
THINE OWN. Because he is a lord forget not that thou art but a
gentleman ; otherwise, if with feasting him thou breakest thyself]
he will not cure thy rupture, and (perchance) may rather deride
than pity thee." — Fuller, The Holy and Profane State.

CHRJST IN SOCIETY. 119

gorging the wealthy, who have too much already,
influential entertainers might occasionally open their
doors to those younger and humbler than themselves,
and parents might assemble often round their tables
suitable company for their children, instead of
driving them to public places to seek occupation
for their hours of leisure. There is a mission of
social kindness still remaining to be opened up
as one of the agencies of Christianity.

III.

Though the encouragement of hospitality, and
through it of love, was one reason for which Jesus
went to the tables of those who invited Him, He
carried there a still higher purpose. When He
went to dine at the house of Zacchaeus, He said,
"To-day is salvation come to this house;" and
salvation came to n any a house when He entered
it. Hospitality affords unrivalled opportunities of
conversation, and Jesus made use of these to speak
words of eternal life. If you carefully examine
His words, you will be surprised to find how
many of them are literally table-talk — words spoken
to His fellow- guests at meals. Some of His most
priceless sayings, which are now the watchwords
of His religion, were uttered in these commonplace
circumstances, such as, " They that are whole have

IMAGO CHRIST T.

no need of a physician, but they that are sick ; "
" The Son of man is come to seek and to save
that which was lost;" and many more.

This is an instance of how Jesus dignified Hfe
and found golden opportunities of doing good in
those elements of it which are often treated as
mere waste. The talk and the hilarity of the
table are a snare. Men of social charm often
use their gift to their own undoing and to the
injury of others. The meeting-place of boon com-
panions is to many the vestibule of ruin. Even
where sociality is not permitted to degenerate into
temptation, the conversation of the table is too
often allowed to lapse into triviality and stupidity;
and the meetings of friends, which might give
intellectual stimulus and kindle noble purpose,
become a weariness and satisfy nobody. It is a
rare gift to be able to lift conversation out of the
ditch and lead it to manly and profitable themes.

There have, however, been servants of God who
in this respect have followed very closely in the
footsteps of their Master. They have made con-
versation a delightful and profitable art ; and to
enjoy their company in the free interchange of social
intercourse has been an education in everything
good and true. A man of note recently deceased,
son of a father still more notable, has left a striking

CHRIST IN SOCIETY. 12 1

picture of the circle of scholars and men of God
who used to be assembled round his father's
hospitable table, and of the wonder and delight
with which he and his brothers, then only children,
used to listen to the discussions and pick up the
crumbs of wisdom.* No parent can do his chil-
dren a better service than by making his house a
resort of the wise and good, in whom the keen
observation of childhood may see examples of
noble manhood and womanhood. " Be not for-
getful," says the Epistle to the Hebrews, " to enter-
tain strangers, for thereby some have entertained
angels unawares ; " on which one of the wise has
thus commented : " By exercising hospitality — by
treating with sympathy and hearty interest those
who are still in many respects strangers to us — by
showing ourselves kindly and opening our houses

*"Here almost every night, for long years, came Professors
Dod and Maclean, and frequently Professors J. W, Alexander,
Joseph Henry, and the older professors. A, Alexander, and
Samuel Miller, President Carnahan, and frequently, when visit-
ing the town. Professors Vethake and Torrey, and Dr. John W.
Yeomans. Thus, at least in the eyes of the young sons gleaming
out from the corners, from the shadows of which they looked on
with breathless interest, this study became the scene of the
most wonderful debates and discourses on the highest themes of
philosophy, science, literature, theology, morals, and politics."
• — Rev. Dr. A. A. Hedge in Pruicetoniana, by Rev. C. A.
Salmond, M.A.

IMAGO CHRIST/.

to them, as circumstances permit and opportunities
offer — it may also happen to us to entertain angels ;
that is, men in whom we must recognise mes-
sengers sent to us from God, or from the world
of mind and ideas, and whose sojourn in our house,
whose conversation, whose influence on our souls,
may bring us a blessing far outweighing all we
can do for them." *

IV.

We have been looking at our Lord as the guest
of others ; but He comes before us in the Gospels
also as Himself an entertainer.

Jesus never, indeed, had a house of His own to
which He could invite people. But on the two
occasions when He fed the five thousand and the
four thousand He acted as entertainer on a colossal
scale.

It was a character in which He was thoroughly
Himself ; for it displayed His consideration for
the common wants of man. Spiritual as He was
and intent on the salvation of the soul, He never
undervalued or overlooked the body. On the
contrary, He recognised on it the stamp and honour
of its Maker, and He knew quite well that it is often

* Martensen, Christian Ethics, vol. iii.

CHRIST IN SOCIETY, 123

only through the body that the soul can be reached.
The great majority of His guests were doubtless
poor, and it gratified His generous heart to confer
a benefit on them. It was, indeed, but common
fare He gave them ; * the table was the ground,
the tablecloth was the green grass, and the
banqueting hall was the open air ; but never did
His guests enjoy a better meal, for love presided
at the table, and it is love that makes an enter-
tainment fine.

As we see Him there, beaming with genial
delight over the vast company, it is impossible not
to think of such words of His as these : " I am
the bread of life ; " " The bread which 1 shall give
is My flesh, which I will give for the life of the
world." In His teaching He delighted to repre-
sent the gospel as a feast, to which He invited all
the sons of men in the beautiful spirit of a royal
host.

But nothing else shows so strikingly how charac-
teristic of Him this spirit was as the fact that
the memorial by which He has chosen to be remem-
bered to all generations is a feast. He might have
selected any one of a hundred other mementoes.
He might, for instance, have instituted among His

* " Barley loaves," the bread of the poor.

124 IMAGO CHRIST!.

followers a periodical fast. But this would have
been a thoroughly unsuitable memorial of Him ;
for His is a gospel of abundance, joy and union.
He chose what was fitting and truly significant ;
and so throughout all ages at the head of His own
table the Saviour sits in the character of Entertainer,
His face radiant with goodwill and His heart over-
flowing with generosity ; and over His head, on the
wall behind where He sits, these words are written,
" This Man receiveth sinners, and eateth with
them."

VII.

CHRIST AS A MAN OF PRAYER

Matt. xi. 25, 26. Matt. xiv. 23.

,, xiv. 19. Mark i. 35.

., xix. 13. ,, xiv. 22, 23.

,, xxi. 12, 13. Luke v. 16.

„. xxvi. 53.

lAike ix. 18. Matt. xxvi. 36-44.

,, xi. I. Luke vi. 12, 13.
John vi. 23.

,, xiv. 16, 17. Luke iii. 21,22.

H xvii. ,, ix. 28, 29,

John xi. 41, 42.

CHAPTER VII.

CHRIST AS A MAN OF PRAYER.

I.

^ I "HP^RE is surely a mystery in the prayers of
-*- Jesus. If, as we believe, He was no less
than God, how could God pray to God, or what
need could there be in His nature for the satisfaction
of which He required to pray ?

It may be a partial answer to this question to say
that all prayer does not consist of petitions arising
from the sense of need. Prayer, indeed, is often
spoken of, especially by those who wish to bring it
into ridicule, as if it consisted of nothing but a series
of demands addressed to God — to give' fine weather,
or to take away disease, or in some other way to
alter our circumstances in accordance with our
wishes. But it is not by those who pray that
prayer is thus spoken of. In the prayers of those
who pray most and best, petitions proper, I venture
to say, occupy only an inconsiderable place. Much
of prayer expresses the fulness of the soul rather

128 IMAGO CHRISTL

than its emptiness. It is the overflow of the cup.
Prayer at its best is, if one may be allowed the
expression, conversation with God, the confidential
talk of a child who tells everything to his father.
There is a remarkable example of this in the
Confessions of St. Augustine. This great book is in
the form of a prayer from beginning to end ; yet
it narrates its author's history and expounds the
most important of his opinions. Evidently the good
man had got into the habit of doing all his deepest
thinking in the form of conversation with God.

If this be what prayer is, it is not difficult to
understand how the Eternal Son should have prayed
to the Eternal Father. Indeed, it is easy to see
that, in this sense, He must have prayed without
ceasing.

But this does not altogether clear up the mystery
of the prayers of Jesus ; for many of them were
undoubtedly expressions of the sense of want. " In
the days of His flesh. He offered up prayers and
supplications with strong crying and tears unto Him
that was able to save Him from death, and was
heard in that He feared." * How can we explain
a statement like this .? There is but one explanation
of it ; and it is His true humanity. It is only by

♦ Heb. V. 7.

CHRIST AS A MAN OF PRAYER. 129

accepting this truth in the fullest sense that we can
understand this aspect of His life. Christ was not
half a God and half a man, but perfectly God and
perfectly man. There are things about Him, and
there are statements of His own, to which justice
cannot be done without categorically calling Him
God. We may hesitate to utter this confession, but
the facts, unless we flinch from them, will compel us
to make it. On the other hand, there are other
things about Him which compel us in the fullest
acceptation of the term to call Him a man ; and we
are not honouring but dishonouring Him if we do
not accept this truth also in all its fulness and in all
its consequences.

He prayed, then, because He was a man. Humanity
even at its best is a feeble and dependent thing ;
it can never be self-sufficient. Even in Him it was
not sufficient for itself, but dependent on God from
day to day ; and He expressed His sense of depend-
ence by praying. Does this not bring Him very
near us .'* Verily He is our brother, bone of our
bone and flesh of our flesh.

But there is another lesson in it, and a graver
one. Although a man, Jesus was a sinless man.
At every stage of development His manhood was
perfect. He had no sinful past to weaken the force
of present effort, ^r^ He needed prayer and resorted

9

130 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

to it continually. What a commentary on our need
of it ! If He needed it, being what He was, how
must we need it, being what we are.

n.

The life of prayer is a secret life, and everyone
who really loves prayer has habits of it known only
to himself Much of the prayerfulness of Jesus
must have lain beyond the observation of even His
disciples, and therefore is altogether unrecorded in
the Gospels. But some of His habits have been
preserved, and they are extremely interesting and
instructive.

He liked, when about to pray, to escape from the
house and from the town and go away out into the
natural solitudes. We read, " He went out and
departed unto a solitary place, and there prayed."
Elsewhere it is said, " He withdrew Himself into
the wilderness, and prayed." He seems to have
especially loved mountains as places of prayer.
When the statement is anywhere made that He went
up to a mountain to pray, commentators try to find
out, by examining the vicinity in which He was
sojourning at the time, which mountain it was He
ascended for this purpose. But in this, I think,
they are on the wrong track. In Palestine, as in
many parts of Scotland, there is mountain everywhere.

CHRIST AS A MAN OF PRA YER. 131

A mile or two from any town you are out on it.
You have only to quit the houses, cross a few
acres of cultivated ground, and your feet are on
the turfy pastures, where you can be absolutely
alone. Jesus had, if we may so speak, made the
discovery that He could obtain this solitude any-
where ; and, when He arrived in a town, His first
thought was, which was the shortest road to the
mountain, — ^just as ordinary travellers inquire where
are the most noted sights and which is the best
hotel.

There is a solitude of time as well as a solitude
of space. What mountains and wildernesses are
to towns and cities, the night-time and the early
morning are to the day-time and the early night.
Jesus frequented this solitude too for prayer. We
hear of Him continuing the whole night in prayer
to God ; or it is said that He " rose up a great
while before day, and departed into a solitary place
to pray."

It may partly have been because, on account of
His poverty. He could not easily find solitude in the
houses in which He lodged that Jesus cultivated this
habit,* and this may ^w^ His example a special

* Many of us may be able to be quite alone in our own homes.
Jesus recognised this when He said : " Enter thou, when tbou
prayest, into thy closet ; and, when thou hast shut thy door, pray

132 IMAGO CHRIST I.

interest for any whose circumstances expose them
to the same difificulty. But it is a discovery which
might immensely enrich us all if we were to realise
how easy it is to get into the natural solitudes.
There is scarcely a town out of which you cannot
escape in a very {^\\f minutes and find yourself quite
alone — on a bit of shore, or on a mountain, or in
a pasture or a wood. The town or city may be
thundering away quite near, with its imprisoned
multitudes bound on the treadmill of its toils or its
amusements ; but you are out of it and alone with
God.

There is more than mere solitude in such a
situation to assist prayer. There is a ministry of
nature which soothes the mind and disposes it to

to thy Father which is in secret." The essential thing is to have
the world shut out and to be alone with God. It is for this reason
that we shut our eyes in prayer : it is that our attention, being
withdrawn from all sights and sounds without, may be concen-
trated on the vision and the voices within. We may even so
familiarise ourselves with the inward world that we shall acquire
the habit of transporting ourselves into it at will at any hour
of the day and in any circumstances. Amidst the whirr of
machinery, in the bustle of the street, even in the midst of con-
versation, we may be able mentally to disappear out of time and
stand for an instant in eternity face to face with God ; and few
prayers are more precious than the momentary ejaculations
offered in the course of daily occupations. He who has acquired
this habit has a strong tower into which he can retreat in every
time of need.

CUR 1ST AS A MAN OF PR A YER. 133

devotion. Never did I feel more strongly that
in this habit Jesus had laid bare one of the great
secrets of life than one day when I climbed all
alone a hill above Inveraray and lay on the summit
of it, musing through a summer forenoon. On
every hand there stretched a solitary world of
mountain and moorland ; the loch below was gleam-
ing in the sun like a shield of silver ; the town was
visible at the foot of the hill, and the passengers
could be seen moving in the streets, but no sound
of its bustle reached so high. The great sky was
over all ; and God seemed just at hand, waiting to
hear every word. It was in spots like this that
Jesus prayed.

He prayed, however, in company as well as in
solitude. We hear of Him again and again taking
two or three of His disciples away to pray with
them, and sometimes of Him praying with them all.
The Twelve were a kind of family to Him, and He
assiduously cultivated family worship. He spoke
too of the value of united prayer. " I say unto you,
that if two of you shall agree on earth as touching
anything that they shall ask, it shall be done for
them of My Father which is in heaven." United
prayer acts on the spirit very much in the same way
as conversation acts on the mind. Many a man's
intellect, when he is alone, is slow in its movements

134 IMAGO CHRIST!,

and far from fertile in the production of ideas.
But, when it meets with another mind and clashes
with it in conversation, it is transformed : it be-
comes agile and audacious, it burns and coruscates,
and brings forth ideas out of its resources which
are a surprise even to itself* So, where two or
three are met together, the prayer of one strikes
fire from the soul of another ; and the latter in
his turn leads the way to nobler heights of devo-
tion. And lo ! as their joy increases, there is One
in their midst whom they all recognise and cling
to. He was there before, but it is only when their
hearts begin to burn that they recognise Him ; and
in a true sense they may be said to bring Him
there — " Where two or three are met together in
My name, there am I in the midst of them."

HI.

The occasions which call for prayer are innumer-
able, and it would be vain to attempt to count

* " Certain it is, that whosoever hath his Mind fraught with
many Thoughts, his Wits and Understanding do clarify and break
up, in the communicating and discoursing with Another : he
tosseth his Thoughts more easily ; he marshalleth them more
orderly ; he seeth how they look when they are turned into
Words ; finally, he waxeth wiser than himself, and that more by
an Hour's Discourse than by a Day's Meditation." — Bacons
Essays, xxvii : Of Friendship.

CHRIST AS A MAN OF PRA YER. 135

them. Jesus undoubtedly had, as we have ourselves,
new reasons for praying every day ; but some of
the occasions on which He prayed are specially
instructive.

I. We find Him engaged in special prayer just
before taking very important steps in life. One of
the most important steps He ever took was the
selection from among His disciples of the Twelve
who were to be His apostles. It was an act on
which the whole future of Christianity depended ;
and what was He doing before it took place .? " It
came to pass in those days that He went into a
mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer
to God ; and, when it was day, He called unto Him
His disciples, and of them He chose twelve, whom He
also named apostles." It was after this night-long
vigil that He proceeded to the choice which was to
be so momentous for Him and for them and for
all the world. There was another day for which,
we are told, He made similar preparation. It was
that on which He first informed His disciples that
He was to suffer and die.

Thus it is evident that, when Jesus had a day of
crisis or of difficult duty before Him, He gave Him-
self specially to prayer. Would it not simplify our
difficulties if we attacked them in the same way t
It would infinitely increase the intellectual insight

136 IMAGO CHRISTI.

with which we try to penetrate a problem and the
power of the hand we lay upon duty. The wheels
of existence would move far more smoothly and
our purposes travel more surely to their aims, if
every morning we reviewed beforehand the duties
of the day with God.*

2. Jesus appears to have devoted Himself specially
to prayer at times when His life was unusually full
of work and excitement. His was a very busy life ;
there were nearly always " many coming and going "
about Him. Sometimes, however, there was such a
congestion of thronging objects that He had scarcely
time to eat. But even then He found time to pray.

* In Nicoirs Life of Jesus Christ, pp. 178-80, an important con-
sideration is added: "Jesus Christ not only prayed before great and
decisive acts, but He prayed after them. . . . This teaches us much
which it is easy but fatal to miss. When we have done some great
work by immense expenditure of force, we are tempted to say
our part is done, — we cannot accompHsh more. Many a man
desires to end and crown his public life amidst the shoutings of
applause tor some victory or achievement. He would retire to
boast of it, and live all the rest of his days upon that proud
memory. Better it is to pray, — to pray, if it be God's will, for
new strength, for new if humbler efforts, and, if that is denied,
for blessing on what has been attempted or done. Jesus Christ
did not boast, He did not give up, but He recruited Himself for
new service by continuing in prayer to God. Another tempta-
tion is to pride. We are lifted above the simplicity and humility
in which we lived before. Our hearts swell, and we are tempted
to think our previous life mean and insignificant. Never are we

CHRIST AS A MAN OF PRAYER. 137

Indeed, these appear to have been with Ilim seasons
of more prolonged prayer than usual. Thus we
read : " So much the more went there a fame abroad
of Him, and great multitudes came together to hear
and to be healed by Him of their infirmities ; but
He withdrew Himself into the wilderness and
prayed."

Many in our day know what this congestion of
occupations is : they are swept off their feet with
their engagements and can scarcely find time to eat.
We make this a reason for not praying ; Jesus
made it a reason for praying. Is there any doubt

further from God than when intoxicated by pride. In the pride
of their hearts the wicked angels fell, and we may fall too unless
we are delivered from their sin. Nothing will avail more effect-
ually to allay and silence our pride than prayer. In communion
with our Father our pride is chilled and destroyed. A kindred
temptation after great achievements is the temptation to profound
depression. When one has done one's utmost, and put forth the
whole force of life, one feels completely spent, as if work were
over. Men who have preached with power to multitudes of people
have told us of the terrible languor which succeeds a full outburst
of the heart. They have told us how they felt as if their life went
from them in that supreme effort, and could never be regained.
That is natural ; and we may learn from Jesus Christ how it is
to be met. Let us pray that by prayer and service we may be
taught to feel that our well-springs are in God, and that He who
strengthened and filled us for that achievement, which we fear
we can never repeat, can gird us, if He will, for new and nobler
work."

138 IMAGO CHRISTI.

which is the better course ? Many of the wisest
have in this respect done as Jesus did. When Luther
had a specially busy and exciting day, he allowed
himself longer time than usual for prayer beforehand.
A wise man once said that he was too busy to be
in a hurry ; he meant that, if he allowed himself to
become hurried, he could not do all that he had to
do. There is nothing like prayer for producing this
calm self-possession. When the dust of business
so fills your room that it threatens to choke you,
sprinkle it with the water of prayer, and then you
can cleanse it out with comfort and expedition.

3. We find Jesus engaging in special prayer when
about to enter into temptation. The greatest scene
of prayer in His life is undoubtedly Gethsemane.
As we enter that garden after Him, we fear almost
to look on the scene — it is so sacred and so passes
our understanding ; and we tremble as we listen to
the prayers rising from the ground where He lies.
Never were prayers heard like these. We cannot
fathom them ; yet much may be learned from them.
Let one lesson, however, suffice in the meantime :
He prayed on this occasion before entering into
temptation ; for at the gate of the garden, after the
agony was over. He said, " This is your hour and
the power of darkness." It was the commencement
of His final conflict with the powers of wickedness in

CHRIST AS A MAN OF PR A YER. 139

earth and hell. But He had equipped Himself for
the conflict by the prayer in the garden beforehand,
and so He was able to go through all that followed
with unruffled dignity and with perfect success. His
strength was the strength of prayer.

What an illustration of contrast was presented on
that occasion by the weakness of the disciples ! For
them also the hour and the power of darkness began
at the gate of Gethsemane ; but it was an hour of
disaster and ignominious defeat. Why .? Because
they were sleeping when they ought to have been
praying. " Watch and pray," He had said, bending
over their prostrate forms, " lest yc enter into tempta-
tion." But they heeded not ; and so, when the hour
of temptation came, they fell. Alas ! their experi-
ence has often been ours also. The only armour in
which temptation can be successfully met is prayer ;
and, when the enemy is allowed to come upon us
before we have buckled it on, we have not a chance
of standing.

4. If any scene of prayer in our Lord's life may
compete in interest with this one, it is the last of all.
Jesus died praying. His last words were words ot
prayer. The habit of life was strong in death. It
may seem far off ; but this event will come to us
also. What will our last words be } Who can tell }
But would it not be beautiful if our spirit were so

I40

IMAGO CHRISTI.

Steeped in the habit of prayer that the language of
prayer came naturally to us at the last ? Many
have died with Christ's own last words on their lips.
Who would not covet them for his own ? " Father,
into Thy hands I commend My spirit."

IV.

If anyone were to go through the life of Christ
seeking for answers to His prayers, many of them,
I am persuaded, could be found. But I shall at
present refer only to two on which the Word itself
lays emphasis, and which are specially instructive.

The Transfiguration was an answer to prayer.
This is how it is introduced in one of the Gospels :
" And it came to pass about an eight days after
these sayings. He took Peter and John and James,
and went up into a mountain to. pray. And as He
prayed, the fashion of His countenance was altered,
and His raiment was white and glistering. And,
behold, there talked with Him two men, which were
Moses and Elias." I do not say that He was praying
for this alteration in His countenance and raiment,
or even for the privilege of talking with these wise
and sympathetic spirits about the work which He
was about to accomplish at Jerusalem. But yet,
I say, all this was in answer to the prayer He
was offering when it came. There are some who,

CHRIST AS A MAN OF PR A YER. 141

disbelieving in the direct virtue of prayer to obtain
from God what it asks, yet believe in what they
call the reflex influence of prayer : they allow it does
you good to pray, even if you get nothing directly
by it, and even if there is no God to hear you.
This, taken as the whole theory of prayer, is a
mockery, as the simplest mind must perceive. But
it is none the less true that there is a most blessed
reflex influence of prayer. Prayers for goodness and
purity in a sense answer themselves ; for you cannot
pray for these things without in some measure re-
ceiving them in the very act. To lift up the soul to
God calms and ennobles it. It was this, I imagine,
that was the beginning of Christ's transfiguration.
The absorption and delight of communion with His
Father overspread His very face with beauty and
glory ; and through this outlet the inner glory leapt
forth. In some degree this happens to all who pray,
and it may happen in a high degree to those who
pray much. Moses, after being forty days in the
mount with God, shone with the same kind of light
as the disciples saw in their Master on the Holy
Mount ; and there is a spiritual beauty bestowed in
some degree on all God's saints who pray much
which is of the same nature and is the most precious
of all answers to prayer. Character flows from
the well-spring of prayer.

142 IMAGO CHRISTI.

The Other answer to prayer given to Jesus to
which I desire to call attention took place at His
baptism. Here is St. Luke's account of it : " Now
when all the people were baptized, it came to pass,
that Jesus also being baptized, and praying, the
heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended
like a dove upon Him." It was when He was
praying that the Spirit was sent down upon Him,
and in all probability it was this which at the
moment He was praying for. He had just left His
home in Nazareth to begin His public work ; and
He was in immediate need of the Holy Spirit to
equip Him for His task. It is a forgotten truth
that Jesus was filled with the Holy Ghost ; but it
is one most clearly revealed in the Gospels. The
human nature of Jesus was from first to last depen-
dent on the Holy Ghost, being thereby made a fit
organ for the divine ; and it was in the strength
of this inspiration that all His work, as preacher,
miracle-worker and atoner, was done.* And if in

* " The Holy Spirit, in a peculiar manner, anointed Him with
all those extraordinary powers and gifts which were necessary
for the exercise and discharging of His office on the earth. Isa.
Ixi. I : ' The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me ; because the
Lord hath anointed Me to preach good tidings unto the meek :
He hath sent Me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim
liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them
that are bound,' It is the prophetical office of Christ, and His

CHRIST AS A MAN OF PRA YER. 143

any measure our life is to be an imitation of His —
if we are to help in carrying on His work in the
world or in filling up what is lacking in His
sufferings — we must be dependent on the same
influence. But how are we to get it ? He has

discharge thereof in His ministry on the earth, which is intended.
And He apphes these words unto Himself with respect unto His
preaching of the Gospel (Luke iv. 18, 19) ; for this was that office
which He principally attended unto here in the world, as that
whereby He instructed men in the nature and use of His other
offices. . . . Hereunto was He fitted by this unction of the Spirit.
And here, also, is a distinction between the ' Spirit that was
upon Him,' and His being ' anointed to preach,' which contains
the communication of the gifts of that Spirit unto Him. . . . And
this collation of extraordinary gifts for the discharge of His
prophetical office was at His baptism (Matt. iii. 17). They were
not bestowed on the Head of the Church, nor are any gifts of the
same nature in general bestowed on any of His members, but
for use, exercise, and improvement. And that they were then
collated appears ; for, —

" I. Then did He receive the visible pledge \\\\\Qkv zoxi'^XTsx^di
Him in, and testified' unto others His calling of God to, the
exercise of His office; for then 'the Spirit of God descended
like a dove, and lighted upon Him : and, lo, a voice came from
heaven, saying, This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well
pleased ' (Matt. iii. 16, 17). Hereby was He 'sealed of God the
Father ' (John vi. 27) in that visible pledge of His vocation, setting
the great seal of heaven to His commission. And this also was
to be a testimony unto others, that they might own Him in His
office, now He had undertaken to discharge it (chap. i. 33).

" 2. He now entered on His public ministry, and wholly gave
Himself up unto His work; for before He did only occasionally
manifest the presence of God with Him, somewhat to prepare

144 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

told US Himself : " If ye then, being evil, know how
to give good gifts unto your children, how much
more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy
Spirit to them that ask Him." Power, like
character, comes from the fountain of prayer.

the minds of men to attend unto His ministry, as when He filled
them with astonishment at His discourses with the doctors in
the Temple (Luke ii. 46, 47). And although it is probable that He
might be acted by the Spirit in and unto many such extraordinary
actions during His course of a private life, yet the fulness of gifts
for His work He received not until the time of His baptism, and
therefore before that He gave not Himself up wholly unto His
public ministry.

" 3. Immediately hereon it is said that He was ^fiill of the
Holy Ghost' (Luke iv. i). Before, He was said to 'wax strong
in spirit,' n^puvfieuos (ro(j)Laf, chap. ii. 40, ' continually filling ';
but now He is nXrjprjs UvevixaTos 'Ayiov (' full of the Holy Ghost').
He was actually possessed of and furnished with all that fulness
of spiritual gifts which were any way needful for Him or useful
unto Him, or which human nature is capable of receiving."

Owen, Oh the Holy Spirit.

VIII.
CHRIST AS A STUDENT OF SCRIPTURE

lO

Matt. iv. 4, 7, lo. Luke iv. 16-27

V. 17, 48. ,, viii. 21.

VI. 29. „ xvi. 29, 30.
vii. 12. „ xxiii. 46.
viii. 4, II. ,. xxiv. 27.
ix. 13.
X. 15.
xi. 21, 24.
xii. 3-7. 39-42-
xiii. 14, 15.

XV. 7-9. John V. 39, 45, 46.

xix. 8, 18, 19. „ vi. 32, 45, 49.

xxi. 16, 42. „ vii. 19, 22.

xxii. 29-32, 35-40, 43-45, „ viii. 17, 37.

xxiv. 37-39. „ x. 34, 35.

xxvi. 30, 31, 53, 54. „ xiii 18.

xxvii. 46. „ xvii. 12. 14, 17

CHAPTER VIII.
CHRIST AS A STUDENT OF SCRIPTURE.

I.

T T is probable that Jesus knew three languages.

^ The language of His country was Aramaic ;

and some fragments of it, as they fell from His
lips, have been preserved to us in the Gospels,
such as TalitJia, cimii, the words with which He
raised the daughter of Jairus. But it is not
likely that He read the Scriptures in this His
native tongue. Sometimes, indeed, the quotations
of the Old Testament in the New do not tally
exactly with any form of the Old Testament now
in our hands, and the conjecture has been
hazarded that in such cases the quotations are
taken from an Aramaic version then in existence;
but this is no more than conjecture.

Another language He spoke was Greek. In
Galilee, where He was brought up, there were so
many Greek settlers that it was called *' Galilee
of the Gentiles ; " and Greek was the language of

r48 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

commerce and of the more cosmopolitan kind
of social intercourse. A boy brought up in Galilee
in those days would have the same chance of
learning Greek as in our day a boy brought up
in the Highlands of Scotland has of learning
English. Now in Greek there existed in Christ's
time a version of the Old Testament Scriptures.
We still possess it, under the name of the Sep-
tuagint, or Seventy, the supposed number of the
translators who executed it in Egypt between two
and three hundred years before the Christian era.
It was extensively circulated in Palestine. The
New Testament writers very frequently quote from
it, and there is little doubt that our Lord read it.
The third language which He probably knew
was Hebrew. This can only be stated as a
probability ; for, though Hebrew was the language
of the Jews, it had ceased before Christ's time to
be the spoken language of Palestine. Languages
sometimes decay even in the countries to which
they are native, and become so mixed with
foreign elements as to lose their identity. A
modern example is seen in Italy, where Latin is
now a dead language, having been transmuted by
slow degrees in the course of centuries into Italian.
Though Italian bears considerable resemblance to
the ancient tongue, the boys of Italy of to-day

CHRIST AS A STUDENT OF SCRIPTURE. 149

have to learn Latin just as our own boys do.
The same thing had taken place in Palestine.
The Hebrew language, in which the Old Testa-
ment was written, had degenerated into Aramaic ;
and Jews who desired to read the Scriptures in
the original tongue had to learn the dead language.
There is reason to believe that Jesus acquired
it. In some of His quotations from the Old
Testament, scholars have observed, He purposely
diverges from the Greek and reverts to the exact
terms of the original. It will be remembered
also that in the synagogue of Nazareth He was
asked to read the Scriptures. Now it is probable
that in the synagogue-roll the writing was in
Hebrew, the reader having first to read it in that
language and then to translate it into the language
of the people.* If this be so, it is surely interest-
ing to think of Jesus learning the dead language
in order to read the Word of God in the tongue
in which it was written. Remember, His condition
in life was only that of a mechanic ; and it may
Jiave been in the brief intervals of toil that He
mastered the strange letters and forms that were

• "Vers fiir Vers, abwechselnd mit dem dazu bestellten
Uebersetzer, las der Aufgerufene den Text und der Uehersetzer
sprach das Targum, d. h. die aramaische Paraphrase." —
Hausrath, Neutestameiilliche Zeitgcschichtc.

ISO IMAGO CHRISTI.

to bring Him face to face with the Psahns as
David wrote them and with the prophecies as
they flowed from the pen of Isaiah or Jeremiah.
In our own country the same sacred ambition is
not unknown. At all events, a generation ago
there were working men who learned Greek with
the grammar stuck on the loom in front of
them, that they might read the New Testament
in the language in which it was written ; and I
have spoken with the members of a group of
business men in Edinburgh who met every Saturday
to read the Greek Testament. Certainly there is
a flavour about the Bible, when read in the
language it was written in, which it loses more
or less in every translation ; and it is perhaps
surprising that in our day, when the love of the
Bible is so common and the means of learning are
so accessible, the ambition to read it thus is not
more widely spread.

It is pathetic to think that Jesus neVer possessed
a Bible of His own ; but there can be no doubt of
the fact. The expense of such a possession in those
days was utterly beyond the means of one in His
condition ; and besides, the bulkiness of the rolls
on which it was written would have prevented it
from being portable, even if He could have possessed
it. Possibly in His home there may have been a

CHRIST AS A STUDENT OF SCRIPTURE. 15]

few of the precious rolls, containing the Psalms
or other favourite portions of Holy Writ ; but it
must have been by freg^uetrting the synagogue and
obtaining access to the books lying there, perhaps
through ingratiating Himself with their keeper, as
an enthusiastic musician may do with the organist
of a church in order to be permitted to use the
instrument, that He was able to quench His
thirst for sacred knowledge. We can procure the
Holy Book for next to nothing, and every child
possesses a copy. May its cheapness and universal
currency never make it in our eyes a common
thing !

Of course it was only the Old Testament Jesus
had to read. It may be worth while to recall this
as a reminder of how much more reason we have
to love and prize our larger Bible. When I read
in the Psalms such outbursts of affection for the
Word of God as these : " Oh how I love Thy law :
it is my study all the day ; " " How sweet are Thy
words to my taste ; yea, sweeter than honey to my
mouth ; " " More to be desired are they than gold,
yea, than much fine gold ; sweeter also than honey
and the honey-comb," — I say, when I read such
outbursts of holy feeling, and recollect that they
came from the lips of men who possessed only the
Old Testament, perhaps only a fragment of it —

152 IMAGO CHRIST!.

men in whose Bible there were no Gospels, or
Epistles of Paul, or Apocalypse, who had never read
the Sermon on the Mount or the Prodigal Son, the
seventeenth of John or the eighth of Romans, the
thirteenth of First Corinthians or the eleventh of
Hebrews, — I ask what my feelings are towards the
much larger Bible I possess, and I say to myself
that surely in modern times the heart of man has
become ossified, and the fountains of gratitude have
dried up, and the fires of admiration and enthusiasm
have been put out, so tame, in comparison, is our
affection for the far more perfect Book.*

* No nobler tribute has been ever paid to the Divine Word
than Edward Irving's Orations for the Oracles of God. We quote
a few sentences from the first of them : " There is no express
stirring up of faculties to meditate her high and heavenly strains
— nor formal sequestration of the mind from all other concerns
on purpose for her special entertainment — nor pause of solemn
seeking and solemn waiting for a spiritual frame, before entering
and listening to the voice of the Almighty's wisdom. Who feels
the sublime dignity there is in a saying fresh descended from the
porch of heaven ? Who feels the awful weight there is in the
least iota that hath dropped from the lips of God ? Who feels
the thrilling fear or trembling hope there is in words whereon
the eternal destinies of himself do hang? Who feels the tide of
gratitude swelling within his breast, for redemption and salvation,
instead of flat despair and everlasting retribution ? Or who, in
perusing the Word of God, is captivated through all his faculties,
transported through all his emotions, and through all his energies
of action wound up ? . . .

••Oh! if books had but tongues to speak their wrongs, then.

CHRIST AS A STUDENT OF SCRIPTURE. 153

II.

There is the most indubitable evidence that Jesus
was an assiduous student of the Word of God.
This is furnished, not by repeated statements to
this effect, but by proofs far more impressive. His
recorded sayings abound with quotations from it.
These are sometimes express references to the book

might this book well exclaim —Hear, O heavens ! and give ear,

0 earth ! I came from the love and embrace of God, and mute
nature, to whom I brought no boon, did me rightful homage. To
man I came, and my words were to the children of men. I dis-
closed to you the mysteries of the hereafter, and the secrets of the
throne of God. I set open to you the gates of salvation, and the
way of eternal life, heretofore unknown. Nothing in heaven did

1 withhold from your hope and ambition ; and upon your earthly
lot I poured the full horn of divine providence and consolation.
But ye requited me with no welcome, ye held no festivity on my
arrival : ye sequester me from happiness and heroism, closeting
me with sickness and infirmity ; ye make not of me, nor use me
for your guide to wisdom and prudence, but press me into your
list of duties, and withdraw me to a mere corner of your time ;
and most of ye set me at nought, and utterly disregard me. 1
came, the fulness of the knowledge of God : angels delighted
in my company, and desired to dive into my secrets. But ye,
mortals, place masters over me, subjecting me to the discipline
and dogmatism of men, and tutoring me in your schools of learn-
ing. I came not to be silent in your dwellings, but to speak
welfare to you and to your children. I came to rule, and my
throne to set up in the hearts of men. Mine ancient residence
was the bosom of God ; no residence will I have but the soul
of an immortal; and if you had eniertained me, I should have
possessed you of the peace which I had wuth God."

154 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

and the verse ; but oftener they are allusions to Old
Testament events and personages or unexpressed
quotations so woven into the warp and woof of His
own statements as to show that the Old Testament
drenched His mind through and through, supplied
the scenery in which His imagination habitually
worked, and moulded the very language in which
He thought and spoke.

If His quotations are examined, it will be found
that they are derived from every part of the book,
showing His acquaintance not only with its promi-
nent features, but with its obscurest corners ; so that
we ourselves need not travel anywhere among the
Old Testament writings without the assurance that
His blessed feet have been there before us. It is,
however, peculiarly enjoyable in the reading of
Scripture to be able to halt at a text and know for
certain, from His quoting it, that out of this very
vessel, which we are raising to our lips, Jesus drank
the living water. There arc even texts which we
may without irreverence call His favourites, because
He quoted them again and again. And there are
books of Scripture which seem to have been specially
dear to Him, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Isaiah
being the chief.

Not long ago it fell to my lot to look over the
papers of a deceased friend. As all who have had

CHRISl^ AS A STUDENT OF SCRIPTURE. 155

the same duty to perform must know, it is a pathetic
task. There is a haunting sense of desecration in
rifling the secrets kept hidden during Hfe and learn-
ing exactly what the man was beneath the surface.
My friend had been a man of the world, exposed
to many of the temptations of those who have to
do its business and mingle with its company ; but
he had sustained the character of a religious man.
I had now the means of finding out whether this
was something put on from the outside or growing
from within. It was with deep awe that, as I
advanced, I came upon evidence after evidence of
an inner life with even deeper and fresher roots than
I had ventured to hope for. When I opened his
Bible especially, it told an unmistakable story ; for
the marks of long and diligent use were visible on
exery page — the leaves well worn, the choice texts
underlined, short breathings of the heart noted on
the margins. In some parts the marks of use were
peculiarly frequent. This was the case especially
Vv'ith Psalms, Isaiah and Hosea in the Old Testa-
ment and the writings of St. John in the New. I
now knew the reality of the life that was ended,
and whence its virtues had sprung.

Thus the very aspect of a man's Bible may be a
record of his most secret habits and remain to those
who come after him a monument of his religion or

[56 IMAGO CHRISTL

irreligion. To the living man himself there is
perhaps no better test of his own religious condition
than a glance through its pages ; for by the tokens of
use or neglect he may learn whether or not he loves
it. I copied from the flyleaf of my friend's Bible a
few words which perhaps explain the source of true
love to the Word : " Oh, to come nearer to Christ,
nearer to God, nearer to holiness ! Every day to
live more completely in Him, by Him, for and with
Him. There is a Christ ; shall I be Christless ?
A cleansing ; shall I remain foul ? A Father's love ;
shall I be an alien ? A heaven ; shall I be cast
out?"

III.

There are different methods of studying the
Scriptures with profit. On these we have no
express teaching from the lips of Christ ; but from
the records of His conduct we can see that He
practised them.

According to the method by which it is studied,
God's Word serves different uses in spiritual experi-
ence ; one method being serviceable for one kind
of use, and another for another. Jesus displayed
perfect proficiency in all the ways of using it ; and
from this we are able to infer how He studied it.

CHRIST AS A S7UDENT OF SCRIPTURE. 157

There are especially three prominent uses to
which we find Him putting the Bible, and these
are very important for our imitation.

I. For Defence.

The very first use we find Him making of the
Word is as a defence against temptation. When
the Wicked One came to Him and tempted Him in
the wilderness, He answered every suggestion with,
" It is written.' The Word was in His hands the
sword of the Spirit, and He turned with its edge
the onsets of the enemy.

In like manner He defended Himself with it
against the assaults of wicked men. When they lay
in wait for Him and tried to entangle Him in His
talk. He foiled them with the Word of God. Espe-
cially on that great day of controversy immediately
before His end,*' when all His enemies set upon Him
and the champions of the different parties did their
utmost to confuse and confute Him, He repelled
their attacks one after another with answers drawn
from the Scriptures ; and at last silenced them and
put them to shame in the eyes of the people by
showing their ignorance of the Scriptures of which
they w^ere the chosen interpreters.

* Matt, xxii.

158 IMAGO CHRISTI,

There was yet another enemy He met with the
same weapon. It was the last enemy. When the
terrors of death were closing round Him, like a dark
multitude pressing in upon a solitary man, He had
recourse to His old and tried weapon. Two at least,
if not more, of His seven last words from the cross
were verses out of His favourite book of Psalms.
One of them was His very last word, and with it He
plucked His soul out of the jaws of death : " Father,
into Thy hands I commend My spirit."

For this use of Scripture the practice of com-
mitting it to memory is essential. In every case I
have mentioned Jesus was able to recur to the con-
tents of a memory stored with texts of Scripture and
find at once the necessary weapon for the occasion.
Often, when temptation comes, there is no time to
search for the word to meet it ; everything depends
on being already armed, with sword in hand. This
shows how necessary it is to fill the memory, while
it is plastic, with stores of texts ; we do not know
what use we may get of them in future days of
trial and weakness. In daily reading, when we
have gone through a chapter, it is an excellent plan
to select a single verse and commit it to memory.
Not only does this sharpen the attention on the
whole chapter, but it lays up ammunition for future
battles.

CHRIST AS A STUDENT OF SCRIPTURE. 159

2. For Inspiration.

It is easy from Christ's Old Testament references
to see that He dwelt much among the great spirits
of the past whose lives the Old Testament records.
His earthly environment was unsympathetic in the
extreme. In His own home He was not believed
in. In His own country there was living an evil
generation, as He often said, irresponsive to every
motive that most profoundly affected Him. His
own followers were, in mind and spirit, but children,
whom He was only training to comprehend His
ideas. His overcharged heart longed for com-
panionship, and He had to seek it among the great
figures of the past. In the silent walks and groves
of Scripture He met with Abraham and Moses,
with David and Elijah and Isaiah, and many more
of kindred spirit. These men had lived for aims
similar to His own. They had suffered for them
as He was suffering ; He could borrow the very
words of Isaiah about his contemporaries to de-
scribe His own. If Jerusalem was persecuting Him,
she had always been the city that slew the prophets.
So near did He get in His reading of the Word to
these departed spirits, so alive in His meditations
did they become, that at last two of them, the
greatest of all, Moses and Elias, were actually
drawn back across the boundary of visibility and

l6o IMAGO CHRIST!.

appeared conversing with Him in the Holy Mount.
But this conversation was only the culmination of
hundreds He had held before with them and with
the other prophets in the pages of Holy Writ.

To enjoy this use of the Bible a different kind
of study of it is necessary from that which makes
it useful for defence. For defence the verbal
memory of single texts is what is necessary ; for
inspiration our study must take a wider sweep. It
must embrace the life of a man from beginning to
end ; it must understand the time which produced
him and the circumstances against which he had
to react. We must read about the man till we
see the world of his day, and him moving in it ;
we must learn to catch his tone and accent. Then
he is ours ; he will walk with us ; he will speak to
us ; he will be our companion and friend. This is
the privilege of the Christian who knows his Bible :
whatever be his surroundings in the actual world,
he can transport himself at will into the best of
company, where the brow of every one is crowned
with nobleness, every eye beams encouragement,
and the air is redolent of faith and hope and
love.

3. For Guidance.

Jesus used His Bible as the chart of His own
life. I-earned men, ay, and reverent men, have

CHRIST AS A SI U DENT OF SCRIPTURE. i6i

discussed the question at what age He became fully
aware that He was the Messiah, and by what
degrees He became possessed of a distinct know-
ledge of the path which He was to pursue: at
what point, for example, He learned that He was
to be not a victorious but a suffering Saviour ; and
they have supposed that He came to the knowledge
of these things by the study of the prophecies of
the Old Testament about Himself. I have never
felt myself fit for such speculations ; these things
seem to me to be hidden behind the curtain of
the mystery of His person as God and man in one.
But it is easy in His words to see that He did
follow His own course with intense interest in Old
Testament prophecy, as in a chart. Again and
again it is said He did this and that, that such
and such a prophecy might be fulfilled. To the
deputation sent from the Baptist, and to others. He
pointed out how literally His way of life corre-
sponded with the portrait of the Messiah sketched
by Isaiah and other prophets. His intercourse
with His disciples after His resurrection seems to
have been mainly devoted to showing them from
Moses and all the prophets that His life, sufferings
and death were the exact fulfilment of all that had
been foretold.

To use Scripture thus requires a method of

1 1

1 62 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

I

study far more advanced than is necessary for the
uses of defence or inspiration already explained : it
requires the power of taking a bird's-eye view of
Scripture as a whole, of discerning the main currents
flowing through it from first to last, and especially
of tracing clearly the great central current to which
all the others tend and into vi^hich they finally
empty themselves.

Evidently this was Christ's way of studying the
Bible : He could lift it up and wield it as a whole.
One sees this even in His mode of using single texts.
He rarely quotes a text without revealing in it some
hidden meaning which no one had suspected before,
but which shines clearly to all eyes as soon as it has
been pointed out.* Some rare men in all ages have
had this power. You occasionally hear a preacher

* " Lord, this morning I read a chapter in the Bible, and therein
observed a memorable passage, whereof I never took notice
before. Why now, and no sooner, did I see it? Formerly my
eyes were as open, and the letters as legible. Is there not a thin
veil laid over Thy Word, which is more rarefied by reading, and
at last wholly worn away ? . . . I see the oil of Thy word will
never leave increasing whilst any bring an empty barrel. The
Old Testament will still be a New Testament to him who comes
with a fresh desire of information. . . . How fruitful are the seeming
barren places of Scripture. Bad ploughmen, which make balks
of such ground. Wheresoever the surface of God's Word doth
not laugh and sing with corn, there the heart thereof within
is merry with mines, affording, where not plain matter, hidden
mysteries." — Fuller, Good Thoughts in Bad Times.

CHRIST AS A STUDENT OF SCRIPTURE. 163

who can quote a text so that it becomes transfigured
and shines in his argument like a gem. What gives
this power ? It comes when the mind can go down
and down through the text till it reaches the great
lake of light that lies beneath all the texts, and
a jet from that fiery sea comes up and burns on the
surface.

We are too easily satisfied with enjoying isolated
texts. The shock and stimulus which a single text
can give is very valuable, but a whole book of
Scripture can give a far more powerful shock, if we
read it from beginning to end and try to grasp its
message as a whole. From this we may advance
to groups of books. Sometimes we might take a
single subject and go through the whole Bible to find
out what is taught on it. And why should we not
at last make the attempt to grasp all that the Bible
has to teach, for faith on the one hand and for
conduct on the other?

The best guide to the fulness of Scripture is to
search it, as Jesus did, as the chart of our own life.
In a different way, indeed, from that in which He
found His life prefigured there, yet in a perfectly
legitimate way, we shall find the exact form and
image of our own. In precept and promise and
example we yhall see every deed we have to do,
every resolution we have to form, every turn in life

1 64 IMAGO CHRISTI.

we have to take, laid down ; and, if we act as it is
written, we shall be able to follow up what we do
by saying, as He so often did, " This has been done
that the Scripture might be fulfilled."

Such a course earnestly followed will, however,
bring us still nearer to His method of studying
the Scriptures ; for it will inevitably land us in the
great central current which runs through the whole
of Scripture from first to last. What is this } It is
nothing but Christ Himself. The whole stream and
drift of the Old Testament moves straight to the
cross of Christ. The whole New Testament is
nothing but the portrait of Christ. Let a man seek
the true course of his own life in the Word, and
inevitably it will land him at the cross, to seek mercy
as a perishing sinner in the Saviour's wounds ; and
let him, starting afresh from this point of departure,
seek his true course still farther, and inevitably what
he will see will be, rising upon him in the distance,
astonishing and enchaining him, but drawing him
ever on, the image of perfection in the man Christ
J esus.

IX.
CHRIST AS A WORKER

Matt. iv. 24.

.; viii. 16, 17.

,. ix. 35.

„ xi. I, 4. 5.

,, xii. 15.

,, xiii. 2

» xiv. 13, 14, 35, 36,

„ XV. 30.

„ xix. I, 2

Mark ii. 2.
„ iii. 20.
') vi. 31. 54-56.

» xu!. 34.
., xiv 8

Luke vi. 19.
„ X. 2.
„ xii. I.

John ii, 4.

r» iv. 32-34.

„ vii. 6, 8.

„ ix. 4.

„ xii. 23.

., xvii. 4.

„ xix. 30.

CHAPTER IX.
CHRIST AS A WORKER.

T^HERE are two ideals as to work — the one to
^ do as little, and the other to do as much, as
possible. The former may be called the Oriental,
the latter the Occidental, ideal. The child of the
East, living in a warm climate, where movement or
exertion soon tires, counts idleness the height of
enjoyment, and passes his time, if he can, in a lazy
dream. His very clothing is an index of his tastes
— the capacious garment, the loose slipper. The
son of the West, on the contrary, is apt to be a
stirring being ; he likes the excitement of endeavour
and the exultation of achievement. His clothing is
the least elegant in the world, but it has one virtue
which in his eyes is a sufficient compensation : it is
suitable for movement and work His very pastimes
are strenuous: whilst the Oriental after work stretches
himself on a divan, the Briton spends his leisure in
football or hunting.

Even in the West, indeed, there are great differ-
ences in the tastes of individuals. People of lethargic

1 68 IMAGO CHRISTl.

temperament are slow to work and prone to laziness,
whilst those of the choleric temperament sometimes
carry the enthusiasm for exertion to such extremes
that they do not feel right unless they are in a kind
of tempest of occupation. Among certain classes
the goal of ambition is to be in a position to be able,
if you choose, to do nothing ; this is called being a
gentleman. But the shrevv^der heads perceive that
the pleasures of such a position, when it is won,
seldom come up to the expectations of its possessor,
unless, when released from a bread-winning calling,
he voluntarily devotes himself to some of those in-
valuable services to the community or the Church
which the leisured can best discharge, and on which
the welfare of modern society so much depends.

Such are the differences which prevail amongst
men when choosing only according to taste or
temperament; but on this subject, as elsewhere, our
Lord has set before us, in His teaching and example,
the will of God.

I.

In its bearing on this question there is endless
significance in the fact that Jesus was born in
the cottage of a working man and spent the
greater part of His life doing the work of a
village carpenter. It is impossible to believe that

CHRIST AS A WORKER. 169

this happened by chance ; for the minutest cir-
cumstances of the Hfe of Christ must have been
ordered by God. The Jews expected the Messiah
to be a prince ; but God decreed that He should
be born a working man. And so Jesus built the
cottages of the villagers of Nazareth, constructed
the waggon of the farmer, and mended perhaps
the plaything of the child.

This sheds immortal honour upon work. The
Greeks and the Romans despised manual labour,
accounting it only fit for slaves ; and this pagan
notion easily slips back into the minds of men.
But the example of the Son of man will always
protect the dignity of honest labour ; and the
heart of the artisan will sing at his work as he
remembers that Jesus of Nazareth stood at the
bench and handled the tools of the carpenter.

The virtue of work is manifold. It stamps the
brute earth and the raw materials taken out of
it with the signature of mind,* which is the image
and superscription of Him who is the Supreme
Reason. It is a contribution to the happiness of

* Compare Schleiermacher's definition of Ethics, as " the
collective operation of active human reason upon nature," and
of the aim of moral effort as "the perfect inter-penetration ol
reason and nature, a permeation of nature by reason." — Wuttke,
Christian Ethics, vol. i., p. 48 (translation).

I70 IMAGO CHRIST!.

the race, and it brings the individual into co-opera-
tion with all his fellow-creatures in the common
task of taking possession of their habitation. It
reacts too on the worker. It is a daily school ol
patience, sympathy and honesty. The man who
scamps his work degrades himself.

Our age has learnt these truths well, because
they have been expounded to it by several of its
favourite and wisest teachers ; and there is no
healthier element in the literature of our century
than this Gospel of Labour, as it is called. It
has taught many a man to do his work thoroughly,
not merely because he is paid for it, but because
he delights in it for its own sake and respects
himself too much to pass off for work what he
knows to be sham.*

* " ' Who draws a line and satisfies his soul,

Making it crooked where it should be straight ?

An idiot with an oyster-shell may draw

His lines along the sand, all wavering,

Fixing no point or pathway to a point ;

An idiot one remove may choose his line,

Straggle and be content ; but, God be praised,

Antonio Stradivari has an eye

That winces at false work and loves the true,

With hand and arm that play upon the tool

As willingly as any singing bird

Sets him to sing his morning* roundelay,

Because he likes to sing and likes the song.

CHRIST AS A WORKER. 171

n.

Although the commonest work well done is
nonourable, every kind of work is not of equal
honour. There are some callings in which a man
can contribute far more directly and amply than
in others to the welfare of his fellow-creatures,
and these stand highest in the scale of honour.

It was on this principle that Jesus acted when
He quitted the bench of the carpenter to devote
Himself to preaching and healing. Than these

Then Naldo : ' Tis a petty kind of fame
At best, that comes of making violins ;
And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go
To purgatory none the less.'

But he :
' 'Twere purgatory here to make them ill ;
And for my fame — when any master holds,
'Tvvixt chin and hand a violin of mine,
He will be glad that Stradivari lived,
Made violins, and made them of the best.
The masters only know whose work is good :
They will choose mine ; and, while God gives them ski I
I give them instruments to play upon,
God choosing me to help Him.'

' What ! were God
At fault for violins, thou absent ? '

' Yes ;
He were at fault for Stradivari's work.'"

George Eliot, Stradivarhis.

172 IMAGO CHRIST!.

two there are no callings more honourable, the one
ministering directly to the soul and the other to
the body. By adopting them, however, Jesus
stamped a fresh dignity on the work both of the
preacher and of the physician; and, ever since, many
in both professions have gone about their duties
with intenser ardour and enjoyment because they
have been conscious of walking in His footsteps.

But, though His work had changed, He was
not less a worker than He had been before. It
is a common theme of discussion between manual
and professional labourers whether the toil of the
hand or that of the brain is the more severe.
The artisan thinks that his well-clothed neighbour,
who does not need to touch rough materials or
lift heavy loads, has an easy time of it ; whilst
the professional man, harassed with anxiety and
responsibility, sighs for the regular hours, the well-
learnt task and the freedom from care of the
working man. This is a controversy which will
never be decided. But it is certain, in the case
of Jesus at least, that it was when He entered
on His new career that the real hard work of
His life began. His three years of work as
preacher and healer were years of unexampled
toil. Wherever He went multitudes followed Plim;
when He went into any new region, they sent

CHRIST AS A WORKER. 173

into all the country round about and brought
unto Him all that were diseased in mind or
body ; the crowds about Him sometimes swelled
to such dimensions that the people trode one
upon another ; and sometimes He had not time
even to eat. Such was the pressure and conges-
tion of work with which He was beset. It is
the kind of life which many have to live in this
busy age ; but we can look to Jesus and see in
what spirit to carry the burden.

III.

In Christ's teaching there are many sayings on the
responsibility of devoting our time and strength to
the work of the world. We are servants, to every
one of whom the Divine Taskmaster has given his
own work ; and, when He returns, He will rigidly
require an account of whether or not it has been
done.

The most solemn utterance of this kind is the
great parable of the talents. The master, going
into a far country, leaves each of his servants with
a certain amount of money, one with more, another
with less ; it is to be well employed in his absence ;
and, when he comes back, he looks to receive not
only the principal, but the additional money it has
gained. Those who have made use of their trust

174 IMAGO CHRIST!.

diligently enter into the joy of their lord ; but the
servant who has done nothing with his talent is cast
into outer darkness. It is a parable of truly awful
solemnity. It evidently means that at the last
judgment God will expect us to produce work done
equivalent to the talents and opportunities He has
conferred upon us ; and merely to have done nothing
with them, as the man with one talent did, will be
enough to condemn us. It is not necessary to waste
our time and squander our strength, money and other
gifts on bad objects : merely to have failed to expend
them on the work of life will incur the extreme
penalty of the law.*

This is an exceedingly severe view of life ; but it
is the view by which Jesus lived Himself. He did
not preach what He did not practise. He was
doubtless conscious of possessing vast powers and
of being capable of exerting an influence which

* " And who art thou that braggest of thy life of Idleness ;
complacently shovvest thy bright gilt equipages ; sumptuous
cushions ; appliances for folding of the hands to mere sleep ?
Looking up, looking down, around, behind or before, discernest
thou, if it be not in IMayfair alone, any idle hero, saint, god, or
even devil ? Not a vestige of one. In the Heavens, in the
Earth, in the Waters under the Earth, is none like unto thee.
Thou art an original figure in this Creation ; a denizen in Mayfair
alone, in this extraordinary Century or Half-Century alone I One
monster there is in the world : the idle man. What is his
' Religion ' ? That Nature is a Phantom, where cunning beggary

CHRIST AS A WORKER. 175

would produce enormous changes both on indivi-
duals and in history. But the time allowed Him
for putting this influence forth and impressing
it on the world was very brief. He knew this,
and He always acted like one who has a great
work to do and little time to do it. Every hour
of His time seemed to be apportioned to its own
part of the task, for, when asked to do anything
sooner than He intended, He would say, " Mine
hour is not yet come." Everything with Him had
its own hour. This made Him bold in the face of
danger, for He knew that He was immortal till His
work was done. As He said, there are twelve hours
in the day of a human life, and, till these are spent,
a man walks in safety beneath the shield of Provi-
dence. The edge of earnestness on His spirit grew
keener as time went on ; the purpose of life burned

or thievery may sometimes find good victual. That God is a lie ;
and that Man and his life are a lie. — Alas, alas, who of us is
there that can say, I have worked ? The faithfullest of us are
unprofitable servants ; the faithfullest of us know that best. The
faithfullest of us may say, with sad and true old Samuel, * Much
of my life has been trifled away!' But he that has, and except
'on public occasions' professes to have, no function but that o:
going idle in a graceful or graceless manner, and of begetting
sons to go idle; ... on what iron spikes is he rushing?" —
Carlyle, Past and Present.

On this subject the professional philosophers are no less
severe. See Dorner, Christliche Sittenlehrc, p. 460.

[76 IMAGO CHRIST J.

more within Him, and He v/as straitened till it
should be accomplished. On His last journey to
Jerusalem, as He went before His disciples in the
way, "they were amazed, and, as they followed, they
were afraid." " I must work the work of Him that
sent Me," He would say, " while it is day ; the night
Cometh, when no man can work."

IV.

There is intense joy in work when it is done and
well done. The humblest mechanic feels this plea-
sure, when he sees the article he has been making
passing out of his hands perfect. The poet surely
feels it when he writes Finis at the end of the
work into which he has poured the full force of his
genius. What must it have been to William Wilber-
force to hear on his deathbed that the cause to which
he had devoted the toil of a lifetime had triumphed,
and to know that, when he died, there would not be
a single slave breathing in any of the dependencies
of Britain !

Jesus drank deeply of this well q{ pleasure. The
work He was doing was done perfectly at every
stage ; and it was work of the most beneficent and
enduring kind. As He saw part after part of it
falling accomplished behind Him, as He saw hour
after hour receding into the past filled with its

CHR/ST AS A WORKER. IT]

God-appointed work, He whispered to Himself, " My
meat is to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to
finish His work." And in the article of death, as
He saw the last fold of the grand design unrolled,
He passed out of the world with the cry on His lips,
" It is finished ! " He uttered this cry as a soldier
might do on the battlefield, who perceives, with the
last effort of consciousness, that the struggle in which
he has sacrificed his life has been a splendid victory.
But the triumph and the reward of His work never
come to an end ; for still, as the results of what He
did unfold themselves age after age, as His words
sink deeper into the minds of men, as His influence
changes the face of the world, and as heaven fills
with those whom He has redeemed, "He shall see
of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied."

V.

Rest is as necessary a part of life as work. Even
for work's sake it is necessary ; for it restores the
worker to himself, putting him in possession of all
his powers and enabling him to do his best.

Jesus knew how to rest as well as how to work.
Though there was constant haste in His life, there
was no hurry ; though there was much pressure, there
was no confusion. Nothing was more consp'cuous

12

178 IMAGO CHRISTL

in Him than His unvarying dignity, calmness and
self-possession.

He never did anything unprepared. As He never
did anything before the time, so He never did any-
thing after it. One-half of the worry and confusion
of life arises from doing things at the wrong time,
the mind being either weakened by borrowing to-day
the trouble of to-morrow or exhausted by having on
hand not only to-day's work but that which ought
to have been done yesterday. God never wants us
to do more in a day than we have time for ; and the
day will be found to have room enough for its own
work if it is not encumbered with the work of the
day past or the care of the day to come,*

Jesus was ready for every duty because He came
up with it strengthened by the perfect discharge
of the duty preceding it. His work in the car-
penter's shop was a preparation for the work of
preaching. It acquainted Him with human nature
and human life, initiating Him especially into
the joys and sorrows of the poor, to whom it was
afterwards His boast to preach. Many a preacher
misses the mark because, though he knows books,

* " ^sthetically we may say that want of time is want of
genius ; for genius accomplishes in a very short time, and in right
time, what others cannot accomplish in an unlimited time. But
ethically expressed, it is this : want of time is want of moiaj
energy and wisdom." — Martensen, General EiJiics, p. 426.

CHRIST AS A WORKER. 179

he does not know men. But Jesus " knew what
was in man, and needed not that any should teach
Him." He did not quit this school of experience
till He was thirty years of age. Eager as He
must have been for the work which lay before Him,
He did not rush into it prematurely, but waited
hidden in the country, till mind and body were
mature and everything fully ripe ; and then He
came forth travelling in the greatness of His
strength and did His work swiftly, surely, perfectly.
But in the midst of His work also He took means
to preserve His independence and peace of mind.
When the multitude pressing on Him grew too
large and stayed too long, He withdrew Himseli
into the wilderness. Neither the desire to go on
preaching nor even the appeals of the sick and
dying could detain Him when He felt He needed
to preserve His own calmness and self-possession.
After days of too crowded work He would disap-
pear, to refresh His body by casting it on the breast
of nature and His soul by casting it on the bosom
of God. When He saw His disciples becoming-
exhausted or excited, He would say, " Come ye
yourselves apart into a desert place and rest a
while." For even in the holiest work it is possible
to lose oneself One may resign oneself so com-
pletely to the appeals and needs of men as to have

i8o IMAGO CHRIST/.

no leisure for communion with God. The enthu-
siastic minister, consumed with zeal and willing to
please everybody, neglects his study and allows his
mind to become starved ; and the result is inevitable.
He becomes stale, flat and unprofitable ; and those
whose importunities have induced him to sacrifice
his true self are the first to turn round and complain
that he has disappointed them

For the great mass of the world's workers the
principal opportunity of rest is the Sabbath.* Jesus
threw His shield over this institution, maintaining
that it was made for man, and therefore none had

* *' The importance to a statesman of refusing to be hurried
was recognised by Talleyrand. He had drawn up a confession
of faith, which was to be sent to the Pope on the day of his
death. On the day before he died he was supposed to be at the
point of death, and he was asked whether the paper should be
sent off. His reply was addressed to the Duchesse de Dino, who
repeated it to the first Lord Ashburton, from whom I heard it :
^ Atteiides jiisqiid donain. Tottte ?na vie je me s ids fait une
regie de 7ie jamais me presser, et fai toujour s ete a te7iips'

"With a view to promote thorough calmness, ordeiliness, — and
with higher views also, though these have respect to the man
rather than exclusively to the statesman, — it were to be wished
that he should set apart from business, not only a sabbatical day
in each week, but, if it be possible, a sabbatical hour in each
day. I do not here refer to his devotional exercises exclusively,
but to the advantage he may derive from quitting the current of
bu^ thoughts, and cutting out for himself in each day a sort of
cell for reading or meditation — a space resembling one of those
bights or incurvations in \\^ ronrse of a rapid stream ('called by

CHRIST AS A WORKER. i8i

the light to take it from him. In His day those who
tried to take it away were the Pharisees, who con-
verted it from a day of sacred deHght into a day set
with thorns to wound the conscience. This danger
is not yet past ; but in our day the attack comes
more from the other side — from the Sadducees
rather than the Pharisees. The movements against
the Sabbath originate at present almost entirely
with the idle rich, who naturally, after spending six
days in a round of pleasure and dissipation, have
no taste for a day of quietness, when they might
have to look within and face themselves. If they
obeyed the first part of the fourth commandment,

the Spaniards resting-places), where the waters seem to tarry and
repose themselves for a while. This, if it were only by exer-
cising the statesman's powers of self-government — of intention
and remission in business, of putting the mind on and taking it
off — would be a practice well paid ; for it is to these powers that
he must owe his exemption from the dangers to mind, body, and
business of continued nervous excitement. But to a statesman
of a high order of intellect such intermissions of labour will yield
a further profit ; they will tend to preserve in him some remains
of such philosophic or meditative faculties as may be crumbling
under the shocks and pressures of public life. One who shall
have been deeply imbued in his early years with the love oi
meditative studies, will find that in any such hour of tranquillity
which he shall allow himself, the recollection of them will spring
up in his mind with a light and spiritual emanation, in like
manner (to resume the similitude) as a bubble of air springs
from the bottom of the stayed waters."' — Sir Henry Taylor,
The Statesman, pp. 275, 276.

iS2 IMAGO CHRIST!.

■' Six days shalt thou labour," they would have more
comprehensicn of the second. They generally pro-
fess, indeed, to be acting in the interest of the poor ;
but they take the name of the poor in vain, for the
poor know better. They know that, wherever the
sacredness of the Sabbath is overridden, the poor
man has seven days to toil instead of six. Wherever
the continental Sunday prevails, the noise of mill
and foundry is heard on Sabbath as well as Satur-
day ; and, should the working classes of this country
ever yield to a movement for secularising the Lord's
Day, they will find it true that, whilst they that
honour God are honoured, those who despise Him
shall be lightly esteemed.

It is, however, a problem always requiring fresh
consideration, as the conditions of life change, how
to observe the Sabbath. The day of rest is not
rightly spent unless it is a delight to man as well as
holiness to the Lord. But surely the best security
for reaping all the fruits it v/as intended to yield is
to spend it in the spirit and the company of Him
after whom it is called the Lord's Day.

X.

CHRIST AS A SUFFERER

Matt. ii. 13-18.

„ iv. I.

„ viii. 16 17,

,, ix. 3.

„ xi. 19.

,, xii. 24.

„ xiii. 54-58.

„ xvi. 21.

,, xvii, 22. 23.

„ XX. 17-19.

,, xxvi.

,, xxvii.

Mark iii. 21, 22.

,, viii. 17-21.

„ ix. 19.

,, xiv. 50.

Luke iv. 28, 29.
„ vi. 7.
M xi. 53. 54.
„ xvi. 14.

John vi. 66.

vii. 7, 12; 19.20: 32,^5;

ix. 16, 22, 29.

X. 20.

xii. 10, II, 27.

XV. 18.

xvii. 14.

xviii, 22.

CHAPTER X.
CHRIST AS A SUFFERER.

I.

"ITT'ORK is but one half of life; suffering is
^ ' the other. There is a hemisphere of the
world in the sunshine of work, but there is another
in the shadow of suffering.

Not, indeed, that in any life these states alternate
with anything like the same regularity with which
the earth rolls out of darkness into light, and back
again from light into darkness. Nothing is more
mysterious than the proportions in which the two
elements are distributed in different lots. Some
enjoy the exhilaration of successful exertion nearly
all their days, and know little or nothing of illness,
bereavement or defeat. Others appear to be marked
out by suffering for its own. All through life they
are " acquainted with grief ; " they are scarcely ever
out of mourning, because ever and anon death is
knocking at their door to claim their dearest ; their

1 86 IMAGO CHRISTI.

own health is precarious ; and, whatever dreams of
high and sustained achievement may visit them,
they know, as soon as the excitement subsides, that
they have not physical strength to carry out their
vision.

If you are a child of fortune, scarcely ever
knowing a day's ill health and delighting in your
work, whose results you see day by day waxing
greater and more imposing behind you, go and
stand by the bedside of an invalid laid down with
incurable disease. There you may recognise a mind
more capable than your own, a heart as fit as yours
for love and enjoyment ; but an invisible chain is
wound round the limbs and holds them fast ; and,
though the martyrdom may last for ten or twenty
years, that figure will never rise with its own strength
from where it lies. What does your philosophy
make of such a sight } Yet it is only an extreme
instance of what is occurring in a thousand forms.
The children of sorrow are numerous, and nc
man knows how soon his own life of work may be
changed into a life of suffering. Any moment a
bolt may break from the blue and alter everything.
A cloud no bigger than a man's hand may wax arid
spread till it drapes the sky in blackness from horizon
to horizon. And, even if no such awful calamity
come, time brings to all their own share of suffering.

CHRIST AS A SUFFERER. 187

There is no flock, however watched and tended,

But one dead lamb is there ;
There is no household, howsoe'er defended,

But has one vacant chair.

Suffering, then, is not an element of life that can
be ignored. If we need one to show us how to
work, not less do we need one to teach us how to
suffer. And here, again, the Son of man does not
fail us. Whilst He is the great Captain of work,
calling out the young and the energetic to dare
and to achieve. He is also the sufferer's Friend,
round whom are gathered the weak, the disappointed
and the agonized. When on the cross He cried,
" It is finished," He was referring not only to the
work of His life successfully accomplished, but also
to the cup of suffering drunk out to the last drop.

II.

I. Jesus suffered from what may be called the
ordinary privations of humanity. He was born in a
stable and laid in a manger, thus at the very outset
of His career stepping into the dark hemisphere of
suffering. We know little of the social condition in
which He was brought up : we cannot tell whether
or not in Mary's home He dwelt much in the shadow
of want and misfortune. But at a later stage, we
know from Himself, " foxes had holes and the birds

1 88 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

of the air had nests, but the Son of man had not
where to lay His head." It is not often that one of
the children of men is reduced so low as thus to have
to envy the beast its lair and the bird its nest. As
a rule the end of human life, when the habitation
in which the soul has tabernacled is broken up, is
attended with more or less of suH'ering ; but the
physical suffering which He endured at the last was
extreme. We need only recall the bloody sweat of
Gethsemane ; the scourging, when His body, bent
over a short post, was beaten with all the force of
cruel soldiers ; the thrusting of the crown of thorns
on His head ; the complicated tortures of crucifixion*
We may not be able to assert that none ever suf-
fered so much physical agony as He, but this is at
least probable ; for the exquisiteness of His physical
organism in all likelihood made Him much more
sensitive than others to pain.

2. He suffered keenly from the pain of antici-
pating coining evil. When great sorrow or pain
comes on suddenly, there is sometimes a kind of
bewilderment in it which acts as an anodyne, and it
may be over before the sufferer thoroughly realises it.
But to know that one is in the grasp of a disease
which in, say, six months will develop into intoler-
able agony before carrying one away, fills the mind
with a horror of anticipation which is worse than

CHRIST AS A SUFFERE.^. 189

even the reality when it comes. Jesus foreknew His
sufferings and foretold them to His disciples ; and
these communications grew more and more vivid and
minute month by month, as if they were taking ever
stronger hold of His imagination. This horror of
anticipation culminated in Gethsemane ; for it was
the dread of what was coming which there produced
in His mind such a tumult of amazement and agony
that the sweat fell like great blood-drops from His
face.

3. He suffered from the sense of being the cause
of suffering to others. To persons of an unselfish
disposition the keenest pang inflicted by their own
weakness or misfortunes may sometimes be to see
those whom they would like to make happy rendered
miserable through connection with themselves. To
the child Jesus how gruesome must have been the
story of the babes of Bethlehem, whom the sword of
Herod smote when it was seeking for Him ! Or, if
His mother spared Him this recital, He must at least
have learned how she and Joseph had to flee with
Him to Egypt to escape the jealousy of Herod.
As His life drew near its close, this sense that con-
nection with Himself might be fatal to His friends
forced itself more and more upon His notice.
When He was arrested, He tried to protect
the Twelve from His own fate, pleading with His

190 IMAGO CHRISTI.

captors, " Let these go their way." But He foresaw
too clearly that the world w^hich hated Him would
hate them also, and, as He said, that the time would
come when whosoever killed them w^ould think that
he was doing God service. He had to see the sword
piercing the heart of His mother when she gazed up
at Him dying a death more shameful in that age
than death on the gallows is in ours.

4. The element of shame was all through a large
ingredient in His cup of suffering. To a sensitive
mind there is nothing more intolerable ; it is far
harder to bear than bodily pain. But it assailed
Jesus in nearly every form, pursuing Him all
through His life. He was railed at for the
humbleness of His birth. The high-born priests
and the educated rabbis sneered at the carpenter's
son who had never learned, and the wealthy Phari-
sees derided Him. He was again and again called
a madman. Evidently this was what Pilate took
Him for ; and, when He appeared before Herod,
the gay monarch and his men of war " set Him
at nought." The Roman soldiers adopted an atti-
tude of savage banter towards Him all through
His trial and crucifixion, treating Him as boys tor-
ment one who is weak in the mind. They spat in
His face ; they blindfolded Him, and then, smiting
Him, asked, " Prophesy who struck thee ! " They

CHRIST AS A SUFFERER. 191

made Him a mock-king, with the cast-off coat of a
soldier for a mantle, a reed for a sceptre, and the
thorns for a crown. Under such indignities had His
godlike mind to burn. He heard Barabbas preferred
to Himself by the voice of His fellow-countrymen,
and He was crucified between thieves, as if He were
the worst of the worst. A hail of mockery kept falling
on Him in His dying hours. The passers-by made
faces of derision at Him, adding with their lips the
vilest insults ; and even the thieves who were cruci-
fied with Him cast contempt in His teeth. Thus
had He who was conscious of irresistible strength to
submit to be treated as the weakest of weaklings,
and He who was the Wisdom of the Highest to
submit to be used as if He were less than a man.

5. But to Jesus it was more painful still, being
the Holy One of God, to be regarded and treated
as the chief of sinners. To one who loves God
and goodness there can be nothing so odious as to
be suspected of hypocrisy and to know that he is
believed to be perpetrating crimes at the opposite
extreme from his public profession. Yet this was
what Jesus was accused of. He was believed to be
in collusion with the powers of evil and to cast out
devils by Beelzebub, the prince of the devils. He
to \^hGm the name of God was as ointrrient poured
forth was called a blasphemer and a Sabbath-

[92 IMAGO CflRISTF.

breaker. His very best acts were misconstrued ;
and for going to seek the lost where alone th(?y
could be found He had to submit to be called a
glutton and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and
sinners. In claiming to be the Messiah He was
thought by the majority of all classes to be an
unscrupulous pretender ; the authorities, both eccle-
siastical and secular, decided so in solemn court.
Even His own disciples at last forsook Him ; one
of them betrayed Him ; and the foremost of them
all cursed and swore that he did not know Him.
Possibly there was not a single human being, when
He died, who believed that He was what He claimed
to be.

6. If to the holy soul of Jesus it was painful to
be believed to be guilty of sins which He had not
committed, it must have been still more painful to
feel tljat He was being thrust into sin itself. This
attempt was often made.* Satan tried it in the

* ** Common usage, I cannot but think, has fallen into a serious
error in speaking of the temptation in the wilderness. Men
speak, if they do not think, as if this temptation stood alone in
the life of Christ. Nothing can be a greater mistake. Our
Lord's whole life was one continued temptation. We have but
to read the memoirs, which the Holy Ghost has caused to be
written for our learning, in order to recognise in almost every-
page how the Lord Jesus Christ was exposed to ceaseless
teujptations. He was subjected to trials of temper, trials of

CHRIST AS A SUFtERER. 193

wilderness, and, although only this one temptation
of his is detailed, he no doubt often returned to
the attack. Wicked men tried it : they resorted to
every device to cause Him to lose His temper and
speak unadvisedly with His lips : " They began to
urge Him vehemently, and to provoke Him to speak
of many things, laying wait for Him and seeking to
catch something out of His mouth." Even friends,
who did not understand the plan of His life, endea-
voured to divert Him from the course prescribed to
Him by the will of God — so much so that He had
once to turn on one of them, as if he were tempta-
tion personified, with ** Get thee behind Me, Satan."
Nothing could prove more clearly than such a saying,
so unlike Him who uttered it, how keenly He felt
the point of temptation, and what horror awoke in

character, trials of principle ; He was harassed by temptations
caused by nervous irritability, or want of strength, or physical
weakness, or bodily weariness ; unfair opposition was constantly
urging Him to give way to undue anger and unrestrained passion ;
or rejection and desertion would, had it been possible, have
betrayed Him into moodiness or cynical despair. The machina-
tions of His foes, the fickleness of the mob, even the foolishness
of His disciples, were scarcely ever wanting to try His spirit, and
would often goad Him beyond endurance. All the continually
recurring trials, which are ever betraying man into faults he has
bitterly to deplore, and into sins of which he has to repent in
sorrow, were present in the life of the iLord Jesus Christ." —
BtR^■ARD, The Mental Characic7'istics of the Lordjestis Christ.

13

[94 IMAGO CHRISTI.

Him at* the danger of transgressing by a hairsbreadth
the will of God.

7. While the proximity of sin awoke such loathing
in His holy soul, and the touch of it was to Him
like the touch of fire on delicate flesh, He was
brought into the closest contact with it, and hence
arose His deepest suffering. It pressed its loath-
some presence on Him from a hundred quarters. He
who could not bear to look on it saw it in its worst
forms close to His very eyes. His own presence
in the world brought it out ; for goodness stirs up
the evil lying at the bottom of wicked hearts. The
sacredness of the Person with whom they had to do
intensified the virulence of Pharisees and Sadducees,
and the crimes of Pilate and Judas. What a sea of
all the evil passions in human nature He was gazing
over when, as He hung on the cross. His eye fell on
the upturned faces of the multitude !

It was as if all the sin of the race were rushing
upon Him, and Jesus felt as if it were all His own.
In a large family of evildoers, where the father and
mother are drunkards, the sons jail-birds and the
daughters steeped in shame, there may be one, a
daughter, pure, sensible, sensitive, living in the home
of sin like a lily among thorns. And she makes all
the sin of the family her own. The others do not
mind it ; the shame of their sin is nothing to them ;

CHRIST AS A SUFFERER. 195

it is the talk of the town, but they do not care.
Only in her heart their crimes and disgrace meet
hke a sheaf of spears, piercing and mangling. The
one innocent member of the family bears the guilt
of all the rest. Even their cruelty to herself she
hides, as if all the shame of it were her own. Such
a position did Christ hold in the human family.
He entered it voluntarily, becoming bone of our
bone and flesh of our flesh ; He identified Himself
with it ; He was the sensitive centre of the whole.
He gathered into His heart the shame and guilt
of all the sin He saw. The perpetrators did not
feel it, but He felt it. It crushed Him ; it broke
His heart ; and He died under the weight of the sin
of others, which He had made His own.

Thus we try to bring home to our thoughts the
mystery of Gethsemane and the awful cry of Gol-
gotha, " My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken
Me ? " Eut it is still a mystery. Who can draw
near to that figure prostrate beneath the olive trees
in the garden, or listen to that voice sounding from
the cross, without feeling that there is a sorrow
there whose depths we cannot fathom } We draw
as near as we may, but something calls to us,
" Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further." Only
we know that it was sin which was crushing Him.
" He was made sin for us, who knew no sin, that

196 IMAGO CHRIST/.

we might be made the righteousness of God in
Him."^

III.

The Results of the sufferings of Christ are the
principal theme of the Gospel ; but only a few words
on the subject can be said here.

I. The Epistle to the Hebrews says that " the
Author of our salvation was made perfect through
suffering ; " and, again, that " He learned obedience
through the things which He suffered."

These are mysterious statements. Was He im-
perfect that He needed to be made perfect, or
disobedient that He required to learn obedience }
They cannot surely mean that the smallest iota was
ever wanting to complete His character in either
sense. No, but simply because He was a man, with
a human history and a human development. He had
to ascend a stair, so to speak, of obedience and per-
fection, and, although every step was surmounted at
its own precise time, and He emerged upon it perfect,
yet every new step required a new effort and, when
surmounted, brought Him to a higher stage of per-

* George Herbert's Sacrifice^ with its piercing refrain, " Was
ever grief like Mine ?" is too long to quote. It gives a detailed
and most moving enumeration of the sources of the Saviour's
sufferings.

CHRIST AS A SUFFERER. 197

fection and into a wider circle of obedience.* We
see the progress of this effort with great clearness
in Gethsemane, where in the first access of suffering
He says, " Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass
from Me;" but at the last is able to say in deep
tranquillity, " O My Father, if this cup may not pass
away from Me except I drink it, Thy will be done."
This was the perfection He attained through
suffering. It was complete comprehension of the will
of God and absolute harmony with it. This is our
perfection too ; and suffering is the great means
of bringing it about. Many of us would never
have thought much of God's will unless we had
first felt it as a violent contradiction of our own.
We wondered at it, and rebelled against it ; but,
when we learned, after Jesus, to say, " Not my will,
but Thine, be done," we found that this is the secret
of life, and the peace which passeth all understanding

* " His divine nature was not unto Him in the place of a soul,
nor did immediately operate the things which He performed, as
some of old vainly imagined; but, being a perfect man, His
rational soul was in Him the immediate principle of all His
moral operations, even as ours are in us. Now, in the improve-
ment and exercise of these faculties and powers of His soul, He
had and made a progress after the manner of other men ; for
He was made like unto us 'in all things,' yet without sin. In
their increase, enlargement, and exercise there was required a
progression in grace also ; and this He had continually by the
Holy Ghost (Luke ii. 40)." — Owen, On the Holy Sfirit,

198 IMAGO CHRIST!.

came into our souls. Or at least we have seen
the process in others. I daresay to some of us the
most priceless of all memories is that of ore of the
sons or daughters of affliction made beautiful by sub-
mission to the will of God. There had perhaps been
a struggle once; but it was over; and God's will was
accepted, not only with submission, but with a holy
joy which glorified the whole being. And, as we
have watched the pure and patient face on the
pillow, we have felt that here was one who by sur-
render had won the victory, and we have confessed
that our own life, with all its storm and stress of
activity, might be far less valuable to either God
or man than this one lying bound and motionless :
They also serve who only stand and wait.

2. St. Paul, in one of the most confidential pas-
sages of his writings, tells of a lesson which he
learned from suffering. " Blessed be God," he says,
" the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who
comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be
able to comfort them which are in any trouble by
the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of
God." * He was glad that he had suffered, because
he had learned thereb}^ how to deal with sufferers.
How like his big heart was the sentiment ! And it

* 2 Cor. i. 3, 4.

CHRIST AS A SUFFERER. 199

IS profoundly true. Suffering gives the power to
comfort. Indeed, there is no other way of acquiring
the art. To one in deep trouble there is all the
difference in the world between the words of the
heart-whole, who have never themselves been in
the fire, and the tender grasp and sympathetic tones
of those who have personally suffered. Those, there-
fore, who are in the furnace of bereavement or
pain may take to themselves the inspiring sug-
gestion. Perhaps this is my apprenticeship to the
sacred office of the comforter. Jesus thus acquired
the art; and the tried and tempted of every gene-
ration come to Him with a confidence which is born
of the knowledge of how He personally explored all
the recesses of this kind of experience. " We have
not an high priest which cannot be touched with
the feeling of our infirmities, but was in all points
tempted like as we are, yet without sin."

3. The results of the sufferings of Christ enter
still more deeply into His work as the Saviour. He
foresaw them Himself and spoke often about them.
" Except a corn of wheat," He said, " fall into the
ground and die, it abideth alone ; but, if it die, it
bringeth forth much fruit ; " " I, if I be lifted up
from the earth, will draw all men unto Me ; " " As
Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even
so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoso-

IMAGO CHRIST!.

ever believeth on Him should not perish, but have
eternal life." .

When He died, His cause seemed to be lost.
Not a single adherent was left clinging to it. But,
when this eclipse was over and He came forth from
the grave, His adherents awoke to discover that they
possessed in Him a hundred times more than they
had before been aware of; and the new glory in
which He shone was that of the suffering Saviour.

In every age His sufferings attract to Him the
hearts of men ; for they prove the boundless extent
of His love, His absolute unselfishness, and His
loyalty to truth and principle even unto death.
Thus they have power with men.

But they have also power with God. ** He is the
propitiation for our sins ; and not for ours only, but
also for the sins of the whole world." Because He
died we need not die. God has put into His hands
the forgiveness of sins to be bestowed as a free gift
on all who receive Him. Because He humbled
Himself God hath highly exalted Him. He is
seated now at the right hand of power, a Prince and
a Saviour, and He carries at His girdle the keys of
hell and cf death.

XI.

CHRIST AS A PHILANTHROPIST

Matt. iv. 23, 24. Mark vi. 54-56.

viii. 16, 17. „ X. 21.

i-^- 35- 36.
X. I. 8.
xi. 4, 5.

xiv. 13. 14 ; 36. Luke x. 12-17.

XV. 30-32.
xix. 21.
xxi. 14.
XXV. 34-40.
xxvi. 8-II. • John xiii. 29.

CHAPTER XL

CHRIST AS A PHILANTHROPIST.

PHILANTHROPIST may be thought too light
^ a name to apply to Christ. And it must be
confessed that it has a secular sound.

Some words are unfortunate : in common usage
they are degraded, and their original meaning is
lost. The word " charity " is a well-known instance.
Originally meaning " love," it had at one time a
good chance of being the technical term for the very
highest kind of love — that passion which is kindled
by union with Christ. This is its meaning in the
thirteenth of First Corinthians, and the authority of
so great a chapter might have been expected to
determine for ever the usage of Christendom. But
somehow the word missed this honour and suffered
degradation ; and now " charity " is another name
for "alms." In like manner, "philanthropy" has
been brought down by usage to denote work done
on behalf of men's bodies and temporal condition,
as distinguished from work done for their spiritual

204 IMAGO CHRIST!.

good. But originally it was not so restricted, but
meant simply love to men.

In this wide sense it is ascribed in Scripture to
God Himself. Thus, in a well-known passage in the
Epistle to Titus, the literal rendering is, " But
after that the kindness and philanthropy* of God
our Saviour appeared, not by works of righteous-
ness which we have done, but according to His
mercy He saved us, by the washing of regeneration
and renewing of the Holy Ghost, which He shed on us
abundantly through Jesus Christ our Saviour." Here,
it will be perceived, philanthropy denotes, not God's
kindness to the bodies of men, but His grace to their
souls ; for it displayed itself in bestowing the washing
of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Ghost.

It was in the same way that the philanthropy of
Christ also primarily manifested itself. His work
and sufferings being gone through with a view in
the first place to the salvation of men's souls, while
the relief of their bodily wants and ailments came in
only in the second place. Nor is it easy to under-
stand why work done for the soul's sake should not
be called philanthropy as much as work for the
body's. From the Christian standpoint at least it is a
far greater kindness ; and none can deny that it often

* A.V., "love of God our Saviour towards man."

CHRIST AS A PHILANTHROPIST. 205

involves far-reaching temporal advantages. In both
foreign and home missions the success of the Gospel,
when it saves men's souls, generally includes, as a
secondary but inevitable accompaniment, the sweeping
away of masses of cruelty, poverty and ignorance.

If, indeed, the improvement of men's temporal
condition be dignified with the name of philanthropy,
and sharply dissociated from spiritual aims, the
name of Philanthropist must be denied to Jesus.
He unfolded the utmost consideration for the
physical necessities of men, but always in sub-
ordination to the higher wants of the soul. His
love extended to the whole man — body and soul
together. His love to God and His love to man
were not two passions, but one. He loved man
because He saw God in him — God's handiwork,
God's image, the object of God's love.

This must ever be the pulse of a powerful philan-
thropy— to see God in man ; or, as Christians more
naturally phrase it, to see Christ in man. " Inas-
much as ye did it unto the least of these ye did it
unto Me," are Christ's own words. When I touch
the body of a man, I am touching what was made
to be a temple of the Holy Ghost. In the humblest
— ay, in the most sinful — human being we see one
whom God loves, whom the Saviour died for, and
who m.ay be an heir of the glory of Christ. These

2o6 IMAGO CHRIST!,

are the deep wells of conviction out of which a
strong philanihropy is nourished.

II.

It cannot be said that an active philanthropy has
always been a characteristic of those professing god-
liness. Jesus Himself gave a significant hint of this
in the Parable of the Good Samaritan. The priest
and the Levite passed the poor maltreated way-
farer by, whereas the milk of human kindness was
found in the common, unordained man. History
supplies too many instances to confirm the parable.
Often has the untrained heart of humanity noted and
branded a wrong, and the uncovenanted hand sprung
forth to the relief of misery, when those expressly
called by their offices to the service have remained
silent and supine. It would even seem sometimes
as if intense sympathy with God destroyed sym-
pathy with man. But one of the greatest services
of Jesus to the world was to harmonize religion
and morality. He would not allow neglect of man
to be covered by zeal for God, but ever taught that
he only loves God who loves his brother also.

At present we see these things, which He joined,
put asunder from the other side. One of the
novelties of our own age is an atheistic philan-
thropy. There are those who do not believe in

CHRIST AS A FHILAATHROPIST, 207

God or the God-man, or in the spiritual and eternal
world, but yet make a life of sacrifice for others the
sum of morality. They confess that it was Jesus
who brought their ideal into the world, and that it
was established in the convictions of mankind by
His authority ; but now, they maintain, it is able
to dispense with His support, and they call on us
to love man, not for Christ's sake, but for his own.
They profess to see in man himself, apart from God,
enough to inspire hourly and life-long effort on his
behalf; and in the very brevity of his existence,
which comes completely to an end at death, they
find a pathetic motive for instant activity, because
he must be helped now or never.

In so far as any may be induced by such motives
to embrace the life of self-denial and really grapple
with the problems of poverty and crime. Christians
need not hesitate to wish them God-speed. This is
a wide world, affording room for experiments ; and
it is a world of such fearful misery that there is
little need to forbid anyone who from any motive
may feel inclined to lend it a helping hand. We
may even recognise some to be for Christ who believe
themselves to be against Him. But, where the oppo-
sition is radical and final, we are hardly justified either
by reason or the facts of the case in expecting very
much from such a movement.

2o8 IMAGO CHRISTI.

No doubt there is in the natural heart a love of
man for man, which, if blown up by a favourable
wind, may now and then do wonders ; and the kind-
ness of those who make no profession of religion
sometimes puts Christians to shame. But, on the
other hand, the force which the philanthropic spirit
has to overcome is one of the mightiest in nature.
It is the force of selfishness — that universally dif-
fused instinct which makes the individual seek
his own interest and happiness whatever comes of
others, which makes the strong domineer over the
weak and the many tyrannize over the few. This
force lodges in every human breast ; it pervades
communities as well as individuals ; it is embodied
in customs and laws ; it evolves new forms of wrong
in every age ; and many would say that it rules the
world. This is the force which philanthropy has
to overcome. It is not easily dislodged. It will
not be conquered by fine words. There is needed,
to overcome it, a change which only God can work
by communicating to us His own nature, which is
love.

' Is there a reason in nature for these hard hearts?' O Lear,
That a reason out of nature must turn them soft seems clear.

In the teaching of Christ man is so dignified by
his connection with God and by his immortal destiny,
that e\e]yone who really believes this creed must

CHRIST AS A PHILANTHROPIST, 209

feel himself condemned if he treats his brother ill.
But strip man, as Agnosticism does, of all the great-
ness and mystery with which Christianity invests him
— cease to believe that he comes from God, that
he is akin to beings greater than himself who care
for him, and that his soul is of infinite worth because
it has before it an unending development — and how
long will it be possible to cherish for him the
reverence which wins him consideration and help ?
The brevity of man's existence gives him, according
to the present teaching of Agnosticism, a pathetic
claim to instant help ; but who knows whether in
a society given over to unbelief the argument might
not tell the other way, the selfish heart reasoning
that sufferings which must end so soon do not
matter ?

It was in the generation preceding the French
Revolution that atheistic philanthropy took its rise.
The prophets of the time were predicting an age of
peace and brotherhood, when selfish passion should
disappear and cruelty and wrong no more vex the
world. But, when their teaching had done its work,
its fruit appeared in the Revolution itself, whose
unspeakable inhumanities afforded our race such
glances into the dark depths of its own nature as
can never be forgotten. It is painful to recall that
Rousseau himself, the most eloquent and, in some

210 IMAGO CHRIST/.

respects, the noblest apostle of the new faith, while
preaching universal brotherhood, sent his own chil-
dren one by one, as they were born, to the Foundling
Hospital, to save himself the trouble and expense
of their support. The Revolution did much
destructive work for which the hour had come ;
but it was a gigantic proof that the love necessary
for the work of reconstruction must be sought in
a superhuman source.*

We are living at present in a state of society in
which there is an after-glow of Christian sentiment
even in minds that have ceased to name the name
of Christ, which develops beautiful manifestations ;
but those who know human nature will demand very
strictly where Agnosticism is to get the light and

* " The practical paradox, that the age in which the claims of
humanity were most strongly asserted is also the age in which
human nature was reduced to its lowest terms, — that the age
of tolerance, philanthropy, and enlightenment was also the
age of materialism, individualism, and scepticism, — is explicable
only if we remember that both equally spring out of the negative
form taken by the first assertion of human freedom.

"As the individual thus fell back upon himself, throwing off all
relations to that which seemed to be external, the specific religious
and social ideas of earlier days lost power over him ; and their
place was taken by the abstract idea of God and the abstract idea
of the equality and fraternity of men, — ideas which seemed to be
higher and nobler because they were more general, but which
for that very reason were emptied of all definite meaning, as
well as of all vital power to hold in check the lusts and greeds

CHRIST AS A PHILANTHROPIST.

the glow which will keep back the on-rushing force
of dark and selfish passion, when Christianity is
removed. There is a remnant of Christianity in
many who think they have got quit of it ; but it
remains to be seen how long this will last when
cut off from its source. A sheet of ice holding
on to the edges of a pool may maintain its
position even after the water on whose surface it
has been formed has been drawn off; but it will
not maintain it long, and it will not bear much
weight. The facts with which philanthropy has
to deal are excessively disagreeable to face, and
the temptations to spare oneself and enjoy the
world are insistent.. Not long ago, when the bitter
cry of outcast London grew so piercing as to attract

of man's lower nature. Thus the ambitious but vague procla-
mation of the rehgion of nature and the rights of man was closely
associated with a theory which was reducing man to a mere
animal individual, a mere subject of sensations and appetites,
incapable either of religion or of morality. For an ethics which is
more than a word, and a religion which is more than an aspiration,
imply dejinite relations of men to each other and to God, and all
such relations were now rejected as inconsistent with the freedom
of the individual. The French Revolution was the practical
demonstration that the mere general idea of religion is not a
religion, and that the mere general idea of a social unity is not
a state ; but that such abstractions, inspiring as they may be as
weapons of attack upon the old system, leave nothing behind
to build up the new one, except the unchained passions of the
natural man." — E. Caird, HegcI. pp. 19, 20.

212 IMAGO CHRIS 1 1,

universal attention, tlie heart of the West End was
stirred, and the sons and daughters of fashion left
their frivolities to go " slumming," as it was called, in
the East End. But already, I am told, this is nearly
all over ; and the work of relieving the wretched
is left, for the most part, to the humble followers
of Christ, who were at it before. If strict inquiry
were made, I imagine it would be found that there
are very few philanthropic institutions of any dimen-
sions in our midst that would not go down if they
were deprived of the support of those who give
not only for the sake of man, but for the sake of
the Saviour who has redeemed them.

III.

The actual forms in which the philanthropy of
Christ manifested itself were mainly two.

One of these was the giving of alms to the poor.
This was, it is evident, a constant habit of His —
so much so, that when, on the night of the betrayal,
He said to Judas, who had the bag, "That thou
doest do quickly," the rest of the disciples thought
that the message the betrayer had received was to
visit and relieve with a gift of money someone
in distress. How the bag was filled we do not
know very well. Jesus may have put into it
savings of His own which He had laid by, when

CHRIST AS A PHILANTHROPIST.

213

working as a carpenter, in view of the life He had
in prospect. The Twelve may have done the same ;
and the holy women who followed Him contributed
to it. But there is no reason to think that it was
ever very full, but the contrary. When Jesus gave
alms, it was the poor giving to the poor ; yet He
kept up the practice to the • very end.

There have been good men who have seen so
much peril \\\ this form of philanthropy that they
have pronounced against it altogether ; but the
example of Jesus supports it. There can be no
doubt, however, that it requires caution and con-
sideration. To give to the professional beggar
generally does more harm than good, and too facile
yielding to his importunities is to be accounted a
vice rather than a virtue. But there are deserving
poor. They are known to those whose work lies
among them ; and the wealthy might with advantage
make these workers their almoners. But it is not
difficult to find them out, if we are willing to go
on our own feet into the abodes of poverty. To
many, indeed, this is an unexplored world, though
it is at their doors. But it is not difficult to discover.
Once enter it with a loving heart, and progress is

* Compare Dorner, Christliche Sitte^ilehre^ p. 469: "There
is something holy in poverty. The poor are the altar of th^
Church. But there is no holiness in beggary."

214 IMAGO CHRISTI.

easy. You will find in it honest men, on whom
illness or temporary want of work has fallen, and
whom a gift may help honourably over the time of
need. You will find the aged, who have fought
the battle manfully, but now can fight no more ;
and surely it is an honour to have a few of these
dependent on our bounty. Among the poorest
there are princes of God, who at a future stage of
existence may be in a position to patronise us.*

The other form of His philanthropy was healing.
Because He healed by miracle we naturally think of
it as easily done ; but perhaps it was more an effort
than we suppose. On one occasion, when a woman
touched Him and was healed, without wishing Him
to know. He did know, because, it is said. He
perceived that virtue had gone out of Him. And
there are other indications that these cures must have
cost Him an expenditure of nervous sympathy and

* " Those are ripe for charity who are withered by age or
impotency, — especially if maimed in following their calling ;
for such are industry's martyrs, at least her confessors. Add to
these those that with diligence fight against poverty, thougli
neither conquer till death make it a drawn battle. Expect not,
but prevent, their craving of thee ; for God forbid the heavens
should never rain till the earth first opens her mouth, seeing
some grounds will sooner burn than chap !

"The House of Correction is the fittest hospital for those
cripples whose legs are lame through their own laziness." —
Fuller, The Holy and PrOj 'ane State,

CHRIST AS A PHILANTHROPIST, 215

emotion which imparts a deep pathos to the saying
of St. Matthew, " Himself took our infirmities and
bare our sicknesses." But, in any case, the work
of heaUng was a congenial one in which His loving
nature rejoiced ; and He was never more at home
than in a crowd composed of persons suffering from
every kind of disease and infirmity of body and
mind, amongst whom He moved benignly, touching
one here into health, speaking to another the word
of power, and letting glances of kindness and good
cheer fall on all. The joy radiated far and wide,
when the father returned to his home to be no longer
its burden but its bread-winner, the son to be no
more a care but a pride, the mother to resume the
place and the work from which illness had dislodged
her. The best help to the poor and needy is that
which enables them to help themselves ; and this
was the kind of help which Jesus gave by His
miracles.

We of course do not possess miraculous powers ;
but in their place we have others, which may be put
to the like uses and are capable of working wonders
as far beyond what could be achieved in His day
through natural causes as His miracles are beyond us.

We possess, for instance, the power of science,
There is no form of philanthropy perhaps more
Christ-like than that which puts at the disposal of

2i6 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

the poor and tl"w^ ignorant first-rate medical skill
Our infirmaries and dispensaries are the con-
tinuation of Christ's healing activity. Medical
missionaries carry to the heathen a commission
singularly like that with which Jesus sent forth the
apostles. The Church is beginning to employ
trained nurses in mission work. And in every part
of the country there are medical men who are daily
rendering to the poorest the best efforts of their
art, for which they receive little or no remuneration,
but which they give with even greater inward de-
light than they feel in working for their best-paying
patients, because they are serving Christ in His
members.

There is also the power of politics. Of this
the early Christians had no control ; they had no
influence whatever in the State. But this power is
now in the hands of all. The work of a Wilber-
force or a Shaftesbury shows .what use can be made
of it in putting an end to wrong and misery. It
enables us to ascend the stream and cut great evils
off at their sources. Christian men are only learn-
ing how to use it yet ; some are even shy of touch-
ing it, as if it were unholy. But they will yet prize
it as one of the most powerful instruments put by
Providence into their hands for doing good. We
shall not always be content with a philanthropy that

CHRIST AS A PHILAKTHROFL-^ 217

picks up the victims as they fly broken from the
wheel of oppression ; we will stop the wheel itself.*

These are only specimens of the powers with
which Christian philanthropy is arming itself; and
the strange word of Christ is coming true, "Verily,
verily, I say unto you, he that believeth on Me, the
works that I do shall he do also ; and greater works
shall he do, because I go unto My Fatiier."

IV.

There is nothing more certain than that our Lord
left this part of His work as an example to His
followers. In the distribution of alms from the
common bag He associated the Twelve with Him-
self, giving the bag in charge to one of them. To

* "The ouligation of philanthropy is for all ages, but if we
consider the particular modes of philanthropy which Christ pre-
scribed to His followers, we shall find that they wei e suggested
by the special conditions of that age. The same spirit of love
which dictated them, working in this age upon the same pro-
blems, would find them utterly insufficient. No man who loves
his kind can in these days rest content with waiting as a servant
upon, human misery, when it is in so many cases possible to
anticipate and avert it. Prevention is better than cure, and it is
now clear to all that a large part of human suffering is pre-
ventible by improved social arrangements. Charity will now, if
it be genuine, fix upon this enterprise as greater, more widely
and permanently beneficial, and therefore more Christian than
the other. It will not, indeed, neglect the lower task of relieving

2i8 IMAGO CHRISTI.

one who wished to join the company of those who
followed Him He said, " Go and sell all that thou
hast and give to the poor, and thou shalt have
treasure in heaven, and come and follow Me ; " and
in other cases He may have imposed the same con-
dition of discipleship. He associated the Twelve
with Himself in like manner in the work of healing.
" Heal the sick," He said, as He sent them forth,
" cleanse the lepers, raise the dead, cast out devils :
freely ye have received, freely give."

But the most impressive evidence of all is His
great description of the last judgment, where the
King says to those on His right hand, " Come, ye
blessed of My Father, inherit the kingdom prepared

and consoling those who, whether through the errors and un-
skilful arrangements of society or through causes not yet pre-
ventible, have actually fallen into calamity. . . . But when it
has done all which the New Testament enjoins, it will feel that
its task is not half fulfilled. When the sick man has been visited
and everything done which skill and assi^duity can do to cure
him, modern charity will go on to consider the causes of his
malady, what noxious influence besetting his life, what contempt
of the laws of health in his diet or habits, may have caused it,
and then to inquire whether others incur the same dangers and
may be warned in time. When the starving man has been
relieved, modern charity inquires whether any fault in the social
system deprived him of his share of nature's bounty, any unjust
advantage taken by the strong over the weak, any rudeness or
want of culture in himself wrecking his virtue and his habits of
thrift.'' — Ecce Homo,

CHRIST AS A PHILANTHROPIST. 219

for you from the foundation of the world : for I was
an hungered, and ye gave Me meat ; I was thirsty,
and ye gave Me drink ; I was a stranger, and ye took
Me in ; naked, and ye clothed Me ; I was sick, and ye
visited Me ; I was in prison, and ye came unto Me ; "
but to those on His left hand, " Depart from Me, ye
cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil
and his angels : for I was an hungered, and ye gave
Me no meat ; I was thirsty, and ye gave Me no
drink ; I was a stranger, and ye took Me not in ;
naked, and ye clothed Me not ; sick, and in prison,
and ye visited Me not."

Are there many Christians who realise that this
is the test by which at the final review their
Christianity is to be tried ? Do the habits of
Christendom accord with our Lord's plainest teach-
ing ? There are, indeed, a few who follow Him
along this path. And, though it is a path of self-
denial, they find it one of flowers ; for on the way
to the homes of the destitute they see the marks
of His footsteps, and, in handling the bodies of
the bedridden and suffering, their fingers touch
His hands and His side. Thus, while losing their
life, they find it. But is this a practice of the
average Christian ? Do his feet know the way to
the homes of the blind, the tortured and the friend-
less ? There is a day coming when many of us

220 IMAGO CHRISTI.

shall wish that every penny we have given to
the poor had been a pound ; when those who have
begged from us on behalf of the suffering and the
ignorant, but of whose importunities we have often
complained, will be accounted our best benefactors ;
and when it will be more valuable to us to re-
member one hour passed in the garret of the poor
than a hundred spent at the tables of the rich.
** Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the
least of these My brethren, ye have done it unto
Me."

XII.

CHRIST AS A WINNER OF SOULS

Matt. i. 21.

„ iv, 18-22.

„ ix. 10-13.

Luke iv. 43.

„ vii. 36-50.

., XV.

„ xix. i-io ; 41, 42.

M xxii- 39-43-

John ii. 23.

»

111.

V

iv.

«

vii. 3i» 37-

J»

ix. 35-38.

»>

X. II.

„

xii. 21, 22.

CHAPTER XII.
CHRIST AS A WINNER OF SOULS.

I.

T HAVE heard that one of the diamond-fields
of South Africa was discovered on this wise.
A traveller one day entered the valley and drew
near to a settler's door, at which a boy was amusing
himself by throwing stones. One of the stones fell
at the stranger's feet, who picked it up and was in
the act of laughingly returning it, when something
flashed from it which stopped his hand and made
his heart beat fast. It was a diamond. The child
was playing with it as a common stone ; the
peasant's foot had spurned it ; the cart-wheel had
crushed it ; till the man who knew saw it and
recognised its value.

This story comes often to my mind when I am
thinking of the soul. Was it not the same careless
treatment the soul was receiving when Jesus arrived
in the world and discovered it ? A harlot's soul,
sunk in the mud and filth of iniquity ! why a

2 34 IMAGO CHRIST/.

Pharisee would not stain his fingers to find it.
A child's soul ! the scribes used to discuss in their
schools whether or not a child had a soul at all.

Even yet there is nothing else of less account
in the eyes of the majority than the soul. It is
flung about, it is ignored, it is crushed by the care-
less foot, just as the undiscovered diamond was.
A new soul, fresh out of eternity, enters an earthly
home ; but in most cases the family sin on as if
it were not there ; they are visited by no com-
punctions lest it should be corrupted by their
example. By-and-bye it goes out into the world
and is brought into contact with the multifarious
influences of social life ; but here there is, if possible,
still less sense of its value ; there is no fear of
misleading it, no reverence for its high origin or
its solemn destiny. If it remains undeveloped, or
if it is lost and rushes unprepared upon its doom,
the majority heed not ; its fate is no business of
theirs, and they do not even remember that it
exists.

Our common language betrays that to the
majority the soul is as undiscovered as the diamond
was to the settler and his children. When the
employes are pouring out of a factory at the meal
hour, we say, What a number of hands ! Hands !
not souls ; as if the body and the power of work in

CHRIST AS A WINAER OF SOULS, 225

it were the whole of the man. Even the Church
speaks of the population of the East End as the
masses ; as if they only counted in the bulk, and
were not separable into units, in each of which there
is that which touches heaven above and hell be-
neath. As we watch the multitude pouring along
a crowded street, what is it we see .? Only so many
figures interesting or uninteresting for their looks,
their dress and the like ; or embodied spirits, that
have come from God and are going to God ?

If we have the power of seeing the latter, we
have learned it from Christ. He lifted the soul
up out of the mud and from among the trampling
feet, and said, Behold the diamond ! " What shall
it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose
his own soul ? "

Mankind believed, indeed, in the souls of the
great — the soul that could distinguish itself by
force or wisdom — the soul of Socrates, the soul
of Caesar. "^ But Jesus taught it to believe in the
common soul — the soul of a child, of a woman,
nay, of a publican or a sinner. This is His
immortal discovery. In every child of Adam He

* " Contempt of men is a ground-feature of heathenism,
which goes side by side with the deification of men, and we can
trace this twofold extreme down to the heathenism of our own
days."' — Martensen, Christian EtJiics.

15

226 IMAGO CHRISTI.

perceived the diamond. The rags of the beggar
could not hide it from His eyes, nor the black skin
of the savage, nor even the crimes of the evil-doer.
It was true the soul was lost sunk deep in
ignorance and unrighteousness. But this only made
it the more interesting ; it only stimulated His
desire to rescue and cleanse it, and set it where
it might shine. To a physician who are interest-
ing } Not they that are whole, but they who are
sick ; and among all his patients the m :)st absorb-
ing case is that which most needs his help. It
haunts him day and night ; it runs away with
nine-tenths of his thinking ; he visits it thrice a
day ; and, if the disease is overcome, this case is
the triumph of his art. So Jesus taught, explaining

His own feelings and conduct.

Yet there is a mystery in this estimate of the
soul. Is it really true that one soul — that of
the thief lying to day in prison or of harlequin
who was grinning last night in the circus — is more
precious than the gold of California or the diamonds
of Golconda } To multitudes, if they would confess
the truth, such an assertion has no meaning. Yet it
was made by Him who, while living here below in
time, lived also aloft in eternity and could look
clearly along the track of the future, seeing all that
the soul can become — both the splendid possibilities

CHRIST AS A '.V INNER OF SOULS. 227

it may develop and the depths to which it may
fall.

This unique estimate of the soul was the secret
spring of His work as a soul-winner ; and it is this
faith, kindling mind and heart, which makes the soul-
winner always. A man has no claim to this office
under any of its forms if he does not believe in the
soul more than in money, or physique, or success, or
any earthly thing, and unless the saving of a single
soul would be to him a greater prize than all Greek
and Roman fame.*

II.

There is another motive perhaps even more
essential. It is the sense of a divine call. The

* " There is one power which lies at the bottom of all success
in preaching ; its influence is essential everywhere ; without its
presence we cannot imagine a man as making a minister of the
Gospel in the largest sense. Under its.compulsion a man becomes
a preacher, and every sermon he preaches is more or less shaped
by its presence. That power is the value of the human soul felt
by the preacher, furnishing the motive and inspiration of all his
work. . . . The other motives for the minister's work seem tome
to stand around this great central motive as the staff-officers
stand about the general. They need him, they execute his will ;
but he is not dependent on them as they are on him. Any one of
them might fall away, and he could fight the battle out without
him. . . . Pleasure of work; delight in the exercise of power;
love of Gods truth ; the love of study ; gratification in feeling our
life touch other lives ; the perception of order ; love of regulai
movement; insight into the lives and ways of men; and, lastly,

228 IMAGO CHRISTI.

soul-winner must be conscious that he is doing God's
work, and that it is God's message he bears to men.
Enthusiasm for humanity is a noble passion and
sheds a beautiful glow over the first efforts of an
unselfish life. But it is hardly stern enough for the
uses of the world. There come hours of despair
when men seem hardly worth our devotion. They
are so base and ungrateful, and our best efforts are
able to change them so little, that the temptation
is strong to throw up the thankless task. Those for
whom we are sacrificing ourselves take all we can do
as a matter of course ; they pass us by unnoticed, or
turn and rend us, as if we were their enemies. Why
should we continue to press our gifts on those who
do not want them } Worse still is the sickening
consciousness that we have but little to give :
perhaps we have mistaken our vocation ; it is a
world out of joint, but were we born to put it right ?
This is where a sterner motive is needed than love
of men ; our retreating zeal requires to be rallied by

the pleasure of seeing right ideas replace wrong ideas— these
are the noble members of the staff of the great general. But how
the motive which they serve towers above them all ! " From a
noble lecture on the value of the soul, with which Dr. Phillips
Brooks closes his Yale Lectures oil Preacliiiig. The locus
classicus, however, on this subject is Baxter's Reformed Paster ^
through which the thought of the danger and the preciousness of
the soul sounds like the bell of eternity.

CHRIST AS A WIANER OF SOULS. 229

the command of God. It is His work ; these souls
are His ; He has committed them to our care ; and
at the judgment-seat He will demand an account
of them.

All prophets and apostles who have dealt with
men for God have been driven on by this impulse,
which has recovered them in hours of weakness and
enabled them to face the opposition of the world.
Most of them have experienced a crisis in which
this call has come and clearly determined their
life-work. It came to Moses in the wilderness
and drove him into public life in spite of strong
resistance ; and it bore him through the un-
paralleled trials of his subsequent career. It came
to Isaiah in a vision which coloured all his after
history ; and it revolutionised St. Paul's life in an
hour. Jeremiah felt the divine message like a
sword in his bones and like a fire which consumed
him till he cast it forth among the people.*

This was one of the strongest motives of Christ's
life also. It gave to it its irresistible momentum ;
it strengthened Him in the face of opposition ; it
rescued Him from the dark hour of despair. He

* The difficult question of what constitutes a call to the
ministry is discussed with great good sense in Blaikie's Fo7- the
Work of the Ministry, and with racy wisdom in Spurgeon's
Lectures to My Students.

230 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

was never weary of asserting that the works He did
were not His own, but God's ; and that so were the
words He spoke. His comfort was that every step
He took was in fulfilment of the divine will.

But He had no hour at which His life was
broken in twain by a moral crisis, and the task of
living for others imposed on Him. This vocation
was inwoven with the very texture of His being ;
the love of men was as native to His heart as it
is to the nature of God ; the salvation of men was
the primary passion of His soul ; and, though He
claimed that His works and words were given Him
by God, yet so identified were His own deepest
wishes with the purposes of the divine love, that
He could say, " I and My Father are one."

HI.

The name of Soul-winner which I have ventured
to apply to the Saviour is a scriptural one ; for we
read in Scripture that " he that winneth souls is
wise." It is a word which indicates the delicacy
and the difficulty of the work of seeking the lost.
This work requires tact and skill in him who under-
takes it. Souls have to be zuon ; and this requires
a winning way — a kind of winsomeness — in those
who seek them.

Jesus Himself did not use this word ; but He.

CHRIST AS A WINNER OF SOULS. 231

made use of one suggestive of the same truth.
When calling His disciples to take part with Him in
this work, He said to them, " Follow Me, and I will
make you fishers of men." Every fisher with the
rod knows how much knowledge of the weather and
the water, how much judgment, keenness of eye
and lightness of touch fishing requires. Probably
it was of net-fishing Christ was thinking ; but this
requires no less experience, alertness, tact and
perseverance.

All these qualities are needed in winning souls.
Jesus was the perfect model of this art ; and the
best guide to its acquisition is to watch His methods

I. He made use of His miracles as stepping-stones
to reach the soul. All the acts of kindness and mercy
described in the foregoing chapter were introductions
to the development of the higher and more spiritual
aims which were always in His mind. I do not say
that this was their only purpose; for His miracles had
many meanings. But it was one of them: they often
opened the door to spiritual dealing which could not
have taken place without them. For example, in
the ninth of St. John we read of a man whom He
cured of blindness, without making Himself known
to him. The man conceived a passion of gratitude
and went about praising and championing his un-
known friend ; till Jesus, meeting him, made Himself

232 IMAGO CHRISTL

known, when the man at once exclaimed, "Lord, 1
believe," and worshipped Him. This is a clear case
in which the bodily cure was a prelude to the cure
of the blindness of the soul. In numberless other
instances it must have served the same end ; and, if
it be remembered that the miracles were often nearly
as valuable to the relatives of those who were healed
as to themselves, it will be understood how many
minds must have been conciliated by this means to a
favourable hearing of His divine message.

Philanthropy may serve us also as a stepping-
stone to higher work. Kindness opens hearts ; and
through the open door salvation may be introduced.
There lurks danger, indeed, on either hand ; for, on
the one hand, charity may be robbed of all true
human kindliness by the proselytizer's zeal, and, on
the other, a hypocritical pretence of piety may be
put on by the receiver of temporal advantages, as a
payment for the accepted dole. But, whilst these
dangers need to be avoided, the principle itself has
the highest authority, and in earnest Christian work
it is receiving at present many happy applications.
Zeal for the soul often awakens consideration for the
body also, and produces deeds which smell as sweetly
to the Saviour of men as did the ointment with
which Mary anointed Him.

2. Preaching was one of the principal means by

CHRIST AS A WINNER OF SOULS. 233

which Christ sought the lost. As a separate chapter
occurs below on Jesus as a Preacher, the subject
need not here be dwelt upon. Only let it be noted
how attractive His preaching was — how well fitted
to win men. He invested the truth with every
charm of parable and illustration, though He well
knew that such gay clothing is not truth's native
garb. Truth is plain and simple ; and those who
know it love to have it so. But Jesus had to deal
with those to whom in itself it had no attraction ;
and therefore He administered it to them as they
were able to bear it, trusting that, if once it had
won them and they had learned its worth, they
would welcome it in any garb.

So powerful a means of winning men to God is
preaching still, that it is no wonder that the desire
to preach is often born at the same time as the
desire of saving souls ; but perhaps it is a wonder
that of those who preach so i^w exert themselves, as
Jesus did, to attract men by presenting their message
in beautiful and winsome forms. ^

3. Of course only a small proportion of those who
burn to save the lost can become preachers; but with

* " Man irrt sich erstaunlich, wenn man meint, dass, was
gerade so klingt, wie das Volk in den Arbeitsstunden selbst
redet, von diesem am liebsten gehort werde. Sie haben den
Sonntagsrock angezogen, als sie in die Kirche gegangen sind ;

234 IMAGO CHRIST/.

His preaching Jesus combined another method, which
it is more open to all to imitate — the method of
conversation. We have illustrations of His use of
this method in His conversation with Nfcodemus
and His talk at the well with the woman of Samaria,
which are models, intended to serve to all time, of
this mode of winning souls. If the two cases be
compared together, it will be seen with what perfect
tact He adapted Himself to the circumstances of His
interlocutors, and how naturally, whilst meeting them
on their own ground. He led the conversation to the
point He aimed at, always descending full upon the
conscience.

This is a difficult art ; for religious conversation
must be natural — it must well up out of a heart full
of religion — or it is worse than useless. Yet it is of
priceless value, and no trouble is too great to be
spent in acquiring it. I am not sure but we are
more in need of those who can talk about religion
than of those who can preach about it. A sermon is
often applied by the hearers to one another, whilst
each puts its message away from himself; but con-
versation goes straight to its mark. If it is supported

so thut es ihnen aiich wohl, an der Predigt, die £;ie vernehmen,
das festliche Kleid zu gewahren." From the Preface to Tholuck's
Predigiciiy where wih be found some of the most remarkable
pages on Preaching ever written.

CHRIST AS A WINNER OF SOULS. 235

by an impressive and consistent character, he who
can wield it carries a blessing with him wherever he
goes ; in homes in which he has been a visitor his
memory is cherished as that of one who has made
religion real ; and, though his name may be little
heard of on earth, his track through the world is
marked by a line of light to the eye of Heaven.

Jesus did not, however, need always to be the
aggressor when employing this instrument. In many
cases those whom He conversed with about the con-
cerns of the soul introduced the subject themselves.
Persons who were anxious about religion sought Him
out ; for they instinctively felt that He knew the
way after which they were groping. The passing ot
Jesus through the country was like the passing of a
magnet over a floor where there are pieces of iron :
it drew the souls which had affinity for the divine life
to itself And in all Christian communities there are
some who, in greater or less degree, discharge the same
function. They are known to possess the secret of
life ; those passing through the deepest experiences
of the soul are confident that they will understand
them ; burdened consciences seek their sympathy.
Surely this is the most precious privilege of the soul-
winner: he is never so effectively seeking the lost as
when the lost seek him.

236 IMAGO CHRISTL

IV.

As our subject in these chapters is the imitation
of Christ, we naturally dwell on those aspects of His
life and work in which it is possible for us to imitate
Him. But ever and anon we need to remember at
what a height He is above us. It is only with dis-
tant and faltering steps we can follow Him at all ;
and in many places He passes quite beyond our
reach.

It is so at this point. In some respects, such
as those just mentioned, we can imitate Him in
winning souls ; but He went, in this quest, where we
cannot go : He came not only to seek but to save
the lost. He compared Himself, as a soul-winner,
to the shepherd going after the lost sheep and
bringing it home on his shoulders rejoicing ; and
thus far we may venture to compare our own soul-
winning to His ; but He carried the comparison
further : " The good shepherd giveth his life for the
sheep." He followed sinners to their earthly haunts,
and so may we ; but He followed them further —
down to the gates of hell, where He plucked the
prey from the hands of the mighty. He entered
a supernatural region, where He conquered for us,
made atonement for us, opened for us the gates of
immortality. Of these transactions we can but dimly

CHRIST AS A WINNER OF SOULS. 237

know, for they were done in a region which we have
not seen. Only we know that they were greater —
more pathetic and solemn — than all our thoughts.
The outward sign and symbol of them which we
can see is Golgotha — His body broken for us, His
blood shed for us. And this is the highest symbol
of soul-winning love.

Here we rather bow down and adore than think
of imitation. Yet here too there are lessons which
all must learn who wish to be expert in this art.
No one will have power with men who has not
power with God for men ; the victory may seem
to be won whilst we persuade men, but it has to
be previously won in the pi: c^ of intercession. This
place was to Jesus a place of agony and death ;
and there is no soul-winning without pain and
sacrifice. St. Paul said that he filled up that which
was lacking in the sufferings of Christ for His
body's sake, which is the Church ; and all who will
be partakers of Christ's joy in the redemption of the
world must first be partakers in His sufferings.

V.

If the art of the soul-winner is difficult and
accompanied with much pain, its reward is corre-
spondingly great. I have known an eminent portrait-
painter, who, when the crisis of his picture came at

238 IMAGO CHRIST!.

which it was to be determined whether or not he had
produced a Hkeness of the features only, or a picture
of the soul and character of his subject, used to
fall into perfect paroxysms of excitement, weeping,
wringing his hands and grovelling on the ground ;
but, when it was over and the true likeness stood
embodied on the canvas, gave way to equally ex-
travagant exultation. And it must be a strange
sensation to see an image of beauty, out of nothing
so to speak, gradually developing itself on the canvas
and living there. But what is this compared with
seeing a soul emerging from death into life — its
wings freeing themselves from the hard, ugly chrysalis
of its natural condition, to flutter forth into the
sunshine of eternity }

Of the effect of this sight on Jesus we have an
authentic glimpse in the wonderful parables of the
fifteenth of St. Luke — the shepherd calling his
friends together and saying, " Rejoice with me, for
I have found my sheep which was lost," and the
father of the prodigal crying, " Let us eat and drink
and be merry." He has told us Himself what this
rejoicing means: "Verily I say unto you. There is
joy in the presence of the angels of God over one
sinner that repenteth." And that joy in the faces
of the angels is only a reflection of the joy of the
Lord of angels, on whose face they are ever gazing.

CHRIST AS A WINNER OF SOULS. 239

In His earthly life we see very clearly on at least
one occasion this holy excitement in His heart.*
When He had won the wicked woman of Samaria
to God and holiness, His disciples, arri\ing where
He was with provisions which they brought from the
town, prayed Him, saying, " Master, eat." But He
could not eat ; He was too delighted and absorbed ;
and He answered, " I have meat to eat that ye
know not of." Then, looking towards the cit\',
whither the woman had gone to bring more souls
to Him to be won. He continued in the' same en-
raptured strain, " Say not ye. There are yet four
months, and then coQicth harvest ? Behold, I say
unto you, Lift up your e}es, and look on the fields ;
for they are white already to harvest." It was
the same deep passion in another phase, when He
beheld the city which He had in vain attempted to
win and in which so many souls were perishing, and
wept over it.

In these sacred emotions all soul-winners partake
in their degree ; and there are no higher emotions
in this world. They are the signature and patent
of a nobility derived directly from Heaven ; for the
humblest Christian worker, who is really pained with

* I have heard the late Brovvnlow North say that, though on
one side of His nature Jesus was the Man of Sorrows, on another
He was the happiest of all the ciuldrcn of men.

240 IMAGO CHRIS TI.

the sin of men and rejoices in their salvation, is
feeling, in his degree, the very passion which bore
the Saviour of the world through His sufferings,
and which has throbbed from eternity in the heart
of God.

XIII.

CHRIST AS A PREACHER

i6

Matt. iv. i6 ; 23-25.

>» v.-vii. ,, V. 17.

t. ix. 4, 13 ; 35-38. „ vii. 16.

„ X. 7, 19, 20; 27. ,, viii. 1-8.

„ xi. 27, 28.

xui.
xvi. 14.

Mark i. 38, 39. John iii. 34.

11. 2.

„ vii. 14-16 ; 26 ; 40 ;
iy. 33- 45, 46.

vi. 1-6, .. viii. I. 2.

CHAPTER XITL

CHRIST AS A PREACHER.

I.

T F, m the course of a lifetime, we have been
^ fortunate enough to hear once or twice an
orator of the first rank, we talk of it all our da^'s ;
or, if we can remember a preacher who first made
religion real to us, his image is enshrined in our
memory in a sacred niche. What, then, must it
have ■ been to listen to Him who spake as never
man spake ? What must it have been to hear
the Sermon on the Mount or the Parable of the
Prodigal Son issuing, for the first time, fresh from
the lips that uttered them ?

For thirty years Jesus had kept silence. During
this period the waters of thought and conviction
had been accumulating in His mind ; and, when
the outlet was opened, forth they rushed in copious
volume. He began in Nazareth and Capernaum,
the places of His abode, to preach in the syna-
gogues on the Sabbaths. But He soon extended

244 IMAGO CHRISTI.

His activity to the neighbouring villages and towns.
Nor were the Sabbaths and the synagogues and the
customary hours of worship sufficient for His zeal ;
by-and-bye He was preaching every day, and not
only in the synagogues, but in streets and squares,
and in the more picturesque temple of the hillside
or the seashore.

The enthusiasm of those whom He addressed
corresponded with His own. Almost as soon as
He began to preach His fame spread over the
whole of Syria, bringing hearers from every
quarter ; and from this time onwards we are
constantly hearing that great multitudes followed
Him, the crowd becoming sometimes so dense
that they trode one upon another. They detained
Him when, wearied out with PI is efforts, He
wished to escape into solitude ; and, if at length
He got away for a little, they were waiting for Him
when He cam.e back.

All classes were to be found in His audiences.
Not unfrequently the preacher who can move the
populace is neglected by the educated, whilst he
who can satisfy the cultured few is caviare to the
general. But at the feet of Jesus you might have
seen Pharisees and doctors of the law sitting, who
were come out of every town of Galilee and Judeea
and Jerusalem; whilst, on the other hand, the

CHRIST AS A PREACHER. 245

common people heard Him gladly ; and even the
class below the line of respectability — those who in
general cared nothing for synagogues and sermons
— were roused for once to frequent the public
religious assemblies: "Then drew near unto Him ail
the publicans and sinners for to hear Him/'

Wherein lay the secret of this intense and uni-
versal interest ? The ancients represented the orator
in works of art as drawing men after himself with
golden chains issuing from his mouth. What were
the chains of attraction by which Jesus drew all men
unto Himself?

11.

When the standard of religious life and of preach-
ing is conspicuously low in a country or neigh-
bourhood, the appearance of a man of God who
preaches the Word with power is made remarkable
by contrast ; the darkness of the background making
the light more visible.

,A darkness of this kind, which may be compared
to that of midnight, was brooding over Galilee when
Jesus opened His career as a preacher ; and St.
Matthew, who lived on the spot, describes the con-
trast by quoting these words of prophecy : " The
people that sat in darkness saw great light ; and to
them who sat in the region and shadow of death

246 IMAGO CHRIST!.

light is sprung up." In the same way, the first
criticism passed on the new Preacher by all who
heard Him was a surprised expression of the
difference they felt between Him and their ac-
customed teachers : " The people were astonished at
His doctrine; for He tair^ht them as one having
authority, and not as the scribes."

The scribes were their accustomed teachers, who
harangued them week by week in the synagogues.
No doubt there must have been differences among
them ; they cannot all have been equally bad ; but,
taken as a whole, they were probably the most
barren and unspiritual set of men who have ever
held sway over the mind of a nation. In the col-
lection of Jewish books called the Talmud, which
has come down to us and is, indeed, at present in
process of being translated into the English lan-
guage, we have specimens of their teaching, and
those who have studied them declare that they are
the driest products of the human mind. To read
them is like travelling through endless galleries of
lumber, where the air is darkened and the lungs are
well-nigh asphyxiated with the rising dust.

The people in their criticism of Jesus exactly hit
the principal defect of their teachers. He, they
said, taught with authority, and not as the scribes ;
that is, the scribes taught without authority. This

CHRIST AS A PREACHER. 247

is the leading characteristic of these Talmudic writ-
ings. No teacher speaks as if he had ever been in
touch with God Himself or seen the spiritual world
with his own eyes. Everyone quotes some earlier
teacher, to whose authority he appeals ; they are all
leaning upon one another. This is a fatal kind of
preaching, though it has often prevailed and some-
times loudly arrogated to itself the name of ortho-
doxy. Have you never heard God spoken of as
if He had existed hundreds of years ago, in Bible
times, but no longer moved and worked in the life
and history of today ? Have you never heard joy
in God, the happiness of forgiveness, the fulness of
the Spirit, and the other higher experiences of the
spiritual life, spoken of as if they had, indeed, been
experienced by the saints of the Bible, but were no
longer to be looked for in these modern centuries }
The Bible can be converted into a prison in which
God is confined, or a museum in which the spiritual
life is preserved as an antiquarian curiosity. But
those who came to hear Jesus felt that He was in^
direct contact with the spiritual world and brought
to them news of what He had Himself seen and
felt. He was not a mere commentator, repeating
some faint and far-derived echo of the message re-
ceived from on high by men long dead. He spoke
like one who had just come from the abode of the

248 IMAGO CHKISTI.

Highest, or rather who was still in it, seeing what
He was describing. He was not a scribe, but a
prophet, who could say, " Thus saith the Lord."

So the fame of Him travelled from Dan to
Beersheba ; men said to one another, with kindling
looks, " A great prophet is risen up among us ; "
and the shepherd left his sheep in the wilderness,
the husbandman his vineyard, and the fisher his
nets by the shore, to go and hear the new Preacher ;
for men know they need a message from the other
world, and they instinctively recognise the authentic
voice when they hear it.

HI.

Preaching sometimes acquires an extraordinary
influence from the personality of the preacher.
Those who have merely read the sermon are told
by those who have heard it that they have no con-
ception of what it was : " You should have seen the
man." It is well known that the posthumously
published discourses of some of the greatest pulpit
orators have entirely disappointed the world, pos-
terity asking in surprise where the influence can
have lain. It lay in the man — in the peculiarity of
his personality — in the majesty of his appearance,
or his passionate earnestness, or his moral force.

It cannot be said that the printed words of Jesus

CHRIST AS A PREACHER. 249

are disappointing : on the contrary, their weightiness
and originality must have attracted attention how-
ever they had been spoken. But yet in this case,
also, as can easily be perceived from the criticism of
His hearers, the Preacher told as well as the sermon.

We do not, indeed, know how Jesus looked — \
whether His appearance was attractive, His voice
pleasant, or the like ; the traditions about such ,
things which have come down to us not being trust- \
worthy. But we do know in some respects the
nature of the impressions which He made on His
hearers.

Though for many generations the only preachers "^
whom His countrymen had heard were dry-as-dust
scribes, yet one of the proudest traditions of the
Jewish people was the memory of great speakers
for God whose voices had sounded through-
out the land in days gone by, and whose charac-
teristics were indelibly imprinted on the national
memory ; and, as soon as Jesus commenced to
preach, it was recognised at once that the great
order of the Prophets had revived in Him. They
said He spoke as one of the prophets.

But they went further: they actually believed
that one or other of the old prophets had risen
from the dead and resumed his work in the person
of Jesus. In indulging this fancy, they were divided

2SO IMAGO CHRIST!.

between two of the ancient prophets, and the selec-
tion of these two clearly shows what characteristics
they had specially remarked in Him. The two
were Jeremiah and Elijah : some said He was
Jercn^ah, others that He was Elijah.

Now these were both great prophets ; perhaps
the very greatest in the popular estimation ; so that
it was to their very greatest that they compared
Him. But the two were of types so diametrically
opposite to one another that it may seem impossible
that their characteristics should have been united in
one personality.

Jeremiah was the soft, pathetic prophet — the m.an
of heart, who wished that his eyes were a fountain
of tears to w^eep for the misfortunes of his people.
It is not surprising that Christ's hearers discovered a
resemblance to him ; for it must have been evident
at the first glance that Jesus was a man of heart.
The very first sentences of His Sermon on the
Mount were words of compassion for the poor, the
mourners, the oppressed. The most insignificant
among His hearers must have felt that He took an
interest in him and would take any trouble to do
him good. Although He addressed all classes, His
boast was that He preached the Gospel to the poor ;
whilst the scribes flattered the wealthy and coveted
cultivated audiences, the common man knew that

CHRIS7 AS A PREACHER.

Jesus considered his soul as precious as that of the
wealthiest of His hearers. The sight of a multitude
moved Him with a strange compassion. And, like
Jeremiah, He was such an intense lover of His
country and His countrymen, that even the publican
or harlot was dear to Him because belonging to the
seed of Abraham.

Elijah was in every respect a contrast to Jere-
miah : he was a man of rock, who could rebuke
kings and queens to their faces and stand alone
against the world. It did not seem possible that
one who exhibited the traits of Jeremiah should also
exhibit those of Elijah. Yet the people recognised
in Jesus an Elijah. And they were not mistaken.
It is an entire misapprehension to suppose that Jesus
was all softness and gentleness. There was a stern-
ness in many of His utterances not surpassed even by
Elijah's rebukes of Ahab, and the bold denunciation
of wrong was one of the most imposing elements of
His power. There has never been in this world a
polemic so uncompromising and annihilating as His
against the Pharisees.

The truth is, both characteristics. His softness /
and His sternness, had a common root. As in
the poorest peasant He saw and revered a man, so
in the wealthiest noble He saw no more than a man.
As the rags of Lazarus could not conceal from Him |

252

IMAGO CHRIST!.

the dignity of the soul, so the purple of Dives could
not blind Him to its meanness. He knew what
was in °man — the height and the depths, the glory
and the shame, the pathos and the horror ; and
men felt, as they faced Him, that here was One
whose manhood towered above their own and yet,
stooping down, embraced it and sympathized with
it through and through.

IV.

No preacher has perhaps ever made a profound
impression on the general mind who has not studied
the form in which to put what he has had to say ;
or perhaps the fact might be more correctly stated
by saying, that the true messenger from God to the
people instinctively clothes his message in attractive
and arresting words. Beginners in preaching, I
observe, are apt to neglect this : they think that, if
only they have something good to say, it does not
matter how they say it. As well might a house-
wife suppose that, if only she has som.ething good to
give her guests to eat, it does not matter how it is
cooked.

The teaching of Jesus owed its attractiveness, and
owes it still, in no small degree, to its exquisite form.
The common people do not, I think, as a rule
remember so well the drift of an argument or a long

CHRIST AS A PREACHER. 253

discourse as remarks here and there expressed in
pithy, pointed, crystalline words. This is the form
of most of the sayings of Jesus. They are simple,
felicitous and easily remembered ; yet every one of
them is packed full of thought, and the longer you
brood over it the more do you see in it. It is like a
pool so clear and sunny that it seems quite shallow,
till, thrusting in your stick to touch the pebbles so
clearly visible at the bottom, you discover that its
depth far exceeds what you are trying to measure
it with.

But the discourses of Jesus had a still more
popular quality : they were plentifully adorned with
illustrations. This is the most attractive quality of
human speech. The same God being the Author
of both the world of mind and the world of matter.
He has so fashioned them that the objects of nature,
if presented in a certain way, become mirrors in
which are reflected the truths of the spirit ; and
we are so constituted that we never relish truth so
well as when it is presented in this way. Nature
contains thousands of these mirrors for exhibiting
spiritual truth which have never yet been used but
await the hands of the masters of speech who are
yet to be born.

Christ used this method of illustrating truth so
constantly that the common objects of the country

254 IMAGO CHKISTl.

in which He resided are seen more perfectly in
His words than in all the historians of the time.
The Jewish life of Galilee in the days of Christ
is thus lifted up out of the surrounding darkness
into everlasting visibility, and, as on the screen of
a magic lantern, we see, in scene after scene, the
landscapes of the country, the domestic life of the
people, and the larger life of the cities in all their
details. In the house we see the cup and the
platter, the lamp and the candlestick ; we see the
servants grinding the meal between the millstones
and then hiding the leaven in it, till the whole is
leavened ; we see the mother of the family sewing
a piece of cloth on an old garm.ent and the father
straining the wine into the skin-bottles ; we see, at
the door, the hen gathering her chickens under her
wings and, in the streets, the children playing at
marriages and funerals. Out in the fields we see
the lilies in their stately beauty rivalling Solomon's,
the crows picking up the seed behind the sower, and
the birds in their nests among the branches ; the
doves and the sparrows, dogs and swine, the fig tree
and the bramble bush. Looking up, we see the
cloud carried over the landscape by the south wind,
the red sky of evening promising fair weather for
the morrow, and the lightning flashing from one
end of heaven to the other. We see the vineyard

CHRIST AS A PREACHER. 255

with its tower and winepress ; the field adorned
with the tender blade of spring or sprinkled with
the reapers among the yellow grain of autumn ;
the sheep, too, yonder on their pastures, and the
shepherd going before them or seeking the lost one
far over hill and dale. Are there any figures of
our own streets with which we are more familiar
than the Pharisee and the Publican at prayer in the
Temple ; or the Priest and the Levite and the Good
Samaritan on the road to Jericho ; or the gorgeous
Dives at his daily banquet and Lazarus lying at his
gate with the dogs licking his sores ? Nor were
these pictures less striking to the audiences of Jesus,
though they were familiar ; for —

We're made so that we love
First, when we see them painted, things we've passed
Perhaps a hundred times, nor cared to see.

It was because Jesus had exquisite love and
consideration for His hearers that He thus sought
out acceptable words to win their minds. But there
was a reason in Himself besides. It is when the
mind of a preacher is acting on the truth with
intense energy and delight that it coruscates in
such gleams of illustration. When the mental
energy is only smouldering in a lukewarm way
inside the subject, then you have the commonplace,
prosaic statement ; when the warmth increases and

256 IMAGO CHRIST!.

pervades the whole, you get the clear, strong,
impressive statement ; but, when the glow has
thoroughly mastered the mass and flames all over
it, then come the gorgeous images and parables
which dwell for ever in the minds of the hearers.

V.

However important the form of preaching may
be, the supremely momentous thing is the substance
of it. The form is only the stamp of the coin ; bat
the substance is the metal. What is that — is it
gold or silver, or only copper ? is it genuine or
counterfeit t This is the all-important question.

Never has the substance of preaching been more
trivial than among the Jewish scribes. The Tal-
mudical books show this. The topics they deal
with are in their triviality beneath contempt. The
religion of the scribes was a mere round of cere-
monies, and their preaching was almost wholly
occupied with these : the proper breadth of phy-
lacteries, the proper length of fasts, the articles
on which tithe ought to be paid, the hundred and
one things by which one might be made ceremonially
unclean— these and a thousand similar minutiae
formed the them.es of their tiresome harangues.
There have been times in the history of the Church
since then when the pulpit has sunk almost to as

CHRIST AS A PREACHER. 257

Iowa level. In our own country immediately before
the Reformation the sermons of the monks were,
if possible, even worse — more trivial and low
in tone — than those of the scribes in the time
of Christ. Similarly in Germany last century, when
Rationalism was at its lowest, the pulpit had
reached an almost incredible stage of degradation.*
The truth is, there is a necessity in these things.
When the minds of preachers grow cold, they move
away insensibly from the central things and drift to
those on the circumference ; and at length they
go over the circumference.

Of course the subjects which formed the sub-
stance of Christ's preaching cannot here be enu-
merated. It must suffice to say that His matter
was always the most solemn and vital which can be
presented to the human mind. He spoke of God
in such a way that His hearers felt as \i to their
eyes God was now light and in Him was no dark-
ness at all. As He uttered such parables as the Lost
Sheep and the Prodigal Son, it seemed as if the
gates of heaven were thrown open and they could
see the very beatings of the heart of the divine
mercy. He spoke of man so as to make every

* " Die Zeit der Kaffee- und Kuhpocken-Prcdigten " it is wittily
named by Tholuck, referring, I fancy, to the subjects of some
notorious sermons.

17

258 IMAGO CHRISTI.

hearer feel that till that moment he had never been
acquainted either with himself or with the human
race. He made every man conscious that he carried
in his own bosom that which was more precious
than worlds ; and that the passing hours of his
apparently trivial life were charged with issues
reaching high as heaven and deep as hell. When
He spoke of eternity, He brought life and im-
mortality, which men before then had only vaguely
guessed at, fully to light, and described the world
behind the veil with the graphic and familiar force
■)f one to whom it was no unknown countr}^

Is it any wonder that the crowds followed Him,
that they hung spellbound on His lips and could
never get enough of His preaching ? Intoxicated
as men are with the secularities of this world, they
know, deep down, that they belong to another, and,
interesting as the knowledge of this world is, the
questions about the other world will always be far
more fascinating to the spirit of man. Whence am
I ? What am I ? Whither am I going } Unless
preaching can answer these questions, we may shut
our churches. That voice which sounded on the
Galilean mountain-side, and which spoke of these
mysteries so familiarly, we, indeed, shall never hear,
till we hear it from the great white throne. But
the heart and the spirit that embodied themselves

CHRIST AS A PREACHER. 259

in these sounds never die ; they live an.d burn to-day
as they did then. Whenever a preacher strikes
correctly a note of the eternal truth, it is Christ that
docs it. Whenever a preacher makes you feel that
there is a world of realities above and behind
the one you see and touch ; whenever he lays
hold of your mind, touches your heart, awakens
your aspiration, rouses your conscience — that is
Christ trying to grasp you, to reach you with His
love, to save you. " Now then we are ambassadors
for Christ ; as though God did beseech you by
us, we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled
to God."

xiv;

CHRIST AS A TEACHER

iv. 1 8, 19. M.irk iii. i .

ix. 9; 14-17. „ iv. 34.

X. „ vi. 30-32.

xii. 1-3; 49. „ ix. 35-41.

xiii. 10. II ; 16-36. ,, xvi. 7.

XV. 15. 16; 23. 24; 32 ; 36.

xvi. 5-28, Luke ix. 54-56.

xvii. „ X. I-17.

xviii. 1-3 ; 21, 22. ,, xi. I.

xix. 13-30. „ xxiv. 36-5]

XX. 17-19 ; 20-28.

xxvi. 21, 22 ; 26 36 : 56. John ii. 1 1, 22

xxviii. 7, 10, 16-20. ,, iv. 2.

,, xiii.-xvii.

HAPTER XIV.

CHRIST AS A TEACHER.
I.

I ^HE function of the teacher is a more limited
one than that of the preacher. The preacher
addresses the multitude ; the teacher concentrates
his attention on a select few. The audiences to
whom Jesus preached numbered thousands ; the
men to whom He acted as teacher numbered only
twelve. Yet perhaps in its results His work in the
latter capacity was quite equal in value to His whole
work as a preacher.

The teacher's office had many remarkable occu-
pants before Christ. In the schools of Greek
philosophy Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other
famous masters stood in a relation to their dis-
ciples similar to that which Jesus sustained to
His. Among the Jews also this relationship was
not unknown. In the schools of the prophets, in
the Old Testament, the " men of God " were the
teachers of "the sons of the prophets." John the

264 IMAGO CHRI:bTI,

Baptist, besides preaching to the multitude, had
disciples who followed him.

The standing phrase in Greek for the disciples
of any master is " those about him : " the disciples
of Socrates, for example, are " those about Socrates."
Similarly it is said in the Gospels that Jesus chose
the Twelve " that they should be with Him." This
circumstance alone must have limited the number
of those who were His disciples in the strict sense ;
for few could give up their work and home in order
to follow Him. His habits were itinerant ; and
this made the separation of those about Him from
settled occupations more absolute. It seems, indeed,
that some attached themselves to Him temporarily
and intermittently ; for we hear on one occasion of
as many as a hundred and twenty disciples, and
on another of seventy ; but those whom He chose
out to give up all and be with Him continually were
only twelve.

There was, however, another reason for the strict
limitation of their number. A teacher has to know
his disciples individually and study therp, as a mother
has to study the temperament of each of her chil-
dren separately in order to be to them a good
mother. While the preacher, addressing a crowd,
draws the bow at a venture, not knowing whom
he may hit, and has carefully to avoid references to

CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 265

particular persons,the teacher addresses every question
and remark straight to individuals ; and therefore he
must know the precise mental condition of every
one before him. This is why the names of the
Twelve are so exactly given in evangelist after
evangelist, and their relations to one another indi-
cated. Perhaps they included as great a variety
of disposition and experience as will ever be found
among the same number of men ; but they were
not too numerous for separate treatment, and there
is the completest evidence that their Master studied
everyone of them till He knew him through and
through, and carefully adapted His treatment to
each particular case. His affectionate way with
John exactly suited the temperament of that
disciple ; and equally adapted to the case was His
patient and delicate handling of Thomas. But His
treatment of Peter was the crown and glory of
His activity in this character. How completely
He knew him ! He managed the tumultuous and
fluctuating elements of his character as a perfect
rider does a high-mettled horse. And how success-
ful He was ! He transformed a nature unstable as
water into the consistency of rock ; and on this
rock He built the Church of the New Testament.
Similar results were achieved in the whole apostolic
circle. With the exception of the traitor, every one

266 IMAGO CHRJSTI.

of the Twelve became, by means of the Master*s
teaching, able to be a pillar in the Church and a
power in the world.

Jesus combined the work of the preacher and
that of the teacher. The former was most fascinat-
ing, and it could easily have absorbed His whole
time and strength. The multitudes were clamorous
to have Him, and their needs spoke urgently to His
heart. Yet He saved most of His time for the
training of twelve ;?ien.f We love numbers too
much. We measure ministerial success by them ;
and many servants of God expend on them
their whole strength. It is true, indeed, that no
preacher who has the heart of Jesus in his breast
can join in the depreciation of the multitude which
sounds so wise, but is so cheap. Yet the example
of Jesus teaches us also a different lesson. It is
a saying of one of the wise, that the difference
between being broad and being narrow is the
difference between being a marsh and being a
stream ; and the quaint remark has a bearing on
the present case. If a moderate quantity of force,
such as may be in us, is distributed over too wide
a surface, it may have no more efi'ect than the inch-
deep water of a marsh ; but, concentrated on a
more limited task, it may be like a stream which
sings along its narrow channel and drives the mill.

CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 267

Get a multitude and distribute your influence over
it, and every one may receive but little ; but throw
yourself on twelve men or six or even one, and
the effects may be deep and everlasting. There
are those quite unfit to address a multitude who
might teach a small number ; and it may turn out
in the end that they have done as much as if they
had been endowed with the more coveted gift.

11.

In some respects Christ's methods of teaching the
Twelve were similar to those which He pursued with
the multitude. They heard all His addresses to the
multitude, for they were always with Him ; whereas
the majority of His hearers can only have heard
Him once or twice. Besides, they heard from Him
in private many a discourse not dissimilar in its
structure to His public sermons. In the same way,
they witnessed all His miracles, because they ac-
companied Him wherever He went ; whereas the
majority saw only the miracles performed in one
or two places. Besides, He wrought some of His
very greatest miracles — such, for example, as the
stilling of the tempest — in their presence and for
their benefit alone. This constant repetition of great
impressions was an incalculable advantage.

But that which was distinctive in His method of

268 IMAGO CHKJSTI,

dealing with them was the permission He gave them
to put questions, which He answered. Whenever
there was anything in His public discourses which
was obscure, they asked Him in private what it
meant, and He told them. Or, if they had hesitation
about the truth or wisdom of anything He stated,
they were at liberty to propound their doubts, and
He solved them. Thus, at the beginning of His
ministry, we find them asking why He spake in
parables, and again and again afterwards they re-
quested Him to explain a parable which they had
not fully understood. When they heard His severe
teaching on divorce, they said to Him, " If the case
of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to
marry," and drew from Him a fuller statement on
the subject. In the same way, when they heard
Him say that it is easier for a camel to go through
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter
into the kingdom of God, they exclaimed, " Who
then can be saved ? " and thus led Him on to a
copious discourse on the subject of riches. In short,
we are told that, " when He was alone. He ex-
pounded all things to His disciples."

But He pursued this method further ; He not
only allowed them to ask questions, but provoked
them to do so. He deliberately wound His
statements in obscurity and paradox to excite the

CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 269

questioning propensity. He Himself gave this ex-
planation of His habit of speaking in parables. The
parable waj a veil cast over the face of the truth for
the very purpose of tempting the hearers to lift it
and see the beauty which it half concealed and half
revealed. A teacher has done nothing unless he
awakens the mind to independent activity. As long
as it is merely passive, receiving what is poured into
it but doing nothing more, true education has not
commenced. It is only when the mind itself begins
to work on a subject, feeling within itself difficulties
to which the truth supplies the answers, and wants
to which it gives satisfaction, that growth com-
mences and progress is made. What Christ said
set the minds of His disciples in a ferment ; it was
intended to raise in them all sorts of perplexities,
and then they came to Him for their solution.

The method of Socrates, the wisest of heathen
teachers, was similar. In his teaching also question-
ing played a prominent part. When a disciple
came to him, Socrates would ask a question on
some important subject, such as righteousness, tem-
perance or wisdom, about which the disciple believed
himself to be perfectly well-informed. His answer
would be replied to by another question, designed to
make him doubt whether it was correct or sufficient.
Then Socrates would go on asking question aftei

270 IMAGO CHRISTI.

question from twenty different sides and angles of
the subject, till the disciple was made to see that his
own opinions about it were, as yet, nothing but a
confused bundle of contradictions, and probably also
that his mind itself was a mass of undigested pulp.*
Both methods had the same end — to excite
the mind to independent activity. Yet there is a
subtle and profound distinction between them.
Socrates asked questions which his disciples tried
to answer ; Jesus provoked His disciples to ask
questions which He answered. On the whole, what
was aimed at in the school of philosophy was the
mental gymnastic ; the answers to the questions did
not matter so much. Indeed, many philosophers
have avowed that the chief end of their work is
the mental invigoration obtained in the pursuit of
truth ; f and the saying of one of them is well

* Description by Dr. Chalmers of a foolish preacher ; story
still remembered in Kirkcaldy.

t Compare the witty remark of Novalis {Schriften^ vol. iii.,
p. 196) : " Der Philosoph lebt von Problemen vvie der Mensch
von Speisen. Ein unauflosliches Problem ist eine unverdauliche
Speise. Was die Wiirze an den Speisen, das ist das Paradoxe
an den Problemen. Wahrhaft aufgelost wird ein Problem wenn
es als solches vernichtet wird. So auch mit den Speisen. Der
Gewinn von Beiden ist die Thatigkeit, die bei Beiden erregt
wird. Jedoch gibt es auch nahrende Probleme wie nahrende
Speisen, deren Elemente ein Zuwachs mtiner Intelligenz
warden."

CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 271

known, that, if the Deity were to offer him in one
hand the pursuit of truth and in the other the truth
itself, he would unhesitatingly choose the former.
This may be a wise saying in the region of philo-
sophy ; but no wise man would make it in the
region of religion. It was saving truth of which
Jesus was a teacher. The pursuit of this also dis-
ciplines the mind, but we dare not be satisfied v. ith the
pursuit alone; we must have the answers to the great
questions of the soul. Therefore, whilst Socrates
questioned, Jesus answered ; and to Him, after wan-
dering in the obscurities of doubt and inquiry, men
will always have at last to come for the solution
of the problems of the spirit. '* Lord, to whom
shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life."

III.

If we were to express the aim of Christ in the
training of the Twelve by saying that it was to pro-
vide successors to Himself, we should be using too
strong a word ; for of course in His greatest and
most characteristic work — the working out of re-
demption by His sufferings and death — He had,
and could have, no successor. He finished the worl^
leaving nothing for anyone else to do.

But, this being understood, we may perhaps
best express what He did as a teacher by saying

272 IMAGO CHRIST/.

that He was training His own successors. When
He was taken from the earth, much that He had
been wont to do, and would have continued to do
had He remained here, fell to them. They had to
undertake the championing of the cause which He
had founded, and its guidance in the world. From
the very beginning of His own activity He had
had this in view ; and, in spite of preoccupations,
which would, if He had allowed them, have entirely
absorbed Him, He devoted Himself to the prepara-
tion of those who should take His place after His
departure.

He employed them at first in subordinate and
ministerial branches of His own work. For
example, it is expressly said that "Jesus baptized
not, but His disciples." After they had been longer
with Him and attained to some degree of Christian
maturity. He sent them forth to labour on their
own account. They made tours, perhaps of no
great extent, preaching and healing, and then
returned to tell Him " all things, both what they
had done and what they had taught," and to receive
instructions for further operations. In this way the
ground was sometimes broken up by the disciples
before the Master came to sow it with the seed of
eternal life ; and perhaps regions were overtaken
which He had not time to visit in person. But

CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 273

above all, their powers were being developed and
their faith strengthened in view of the day, which
He foresaw, when they would find themselves left
alone face to face with the task of founding the
Church and conquering the world in His name.

It is one of the characteristics of genuine Chris-
tianity, that it gives us an interest not only in
the great events of the past, but also in the history
of the future. The average man cares little for the
future, except so far perhaps as his own offspring
may be concerned : if he is happy, what does it
matter to him what the state of the world will
be after he is dead ? But to a Christian it does
matter. The faith and love in his heart bind him
to the saints yet unborn. He is interested in a
cause which is to go on after he has left it, and
which he is to meet and take up again at a sub-
sequent stage of his existence. It is almost as
important to him how the work of Christ will
be prospering when he is in his grave as how it
is prospering now. This ought to make us think
anxiously of those who are to be doing our work
after we have left it. Christ thought of this from
the very commencement of His own activity; and
it was not too soon.

A man may do more for a cause by bringing
younger forces into its service and training them to

274 IMAGO CHRIST!.

their work than by lavishing on it every moment
of his own time and every atom of his energy. I
was recently reading a monograph on the history
of a particular branch of medicine ; and intensely
interesting it was to trace the progress from the
beginning of knowledge among the Greek naturalists
down through the Arab physicians of the Middle
Ages, till one came to the vast and daily multiplying
discoveries of modern science. But the name in
the whole succession which chiefly arrested my
attention was that of one whose contributions had
been very large, but who acknowledged that they
had not been strictly his own. He was always
surrounded by a group of young physicians whom
he inspired with enthusiasm for his subject ; then
he was in the habit of giving them single points of
obscurity to investigate ; and it was by the accumu-
lation of these detailed studies that he was able
to make vast additions to science. We need
nothing more pressingly in the Christian Church at
present than men who will thus guide the young
and the willing to their work, showing what needs
to be done and adapting talent to task. By taking
up this function of the teacher, many a man might
bring into the service of Christ those whose contribu-
tions would far surpass his own, as Barnabas did,
when he brought into the Church the services of Paul

CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 275

IV.

Perhpps in our modern life the work most closely
resemblirg the work of Jesus as a teaeher is that
of a professor of divinity.* The students in our
theological seminaries and colleges are at the same
stage as the Twelve were before they were sent forth
on their independent course ; and the intercourse
between Christ and the Twelve, if carefully studied,
would throw much light on the relationship between
professors and students.

To the Twelve the most valuable part of their
connection wnth Christ was simply the privilege of
being with Him — of seeing that marvellous life
day by day, and daily receiving the silent, almost

* In Tlie Public JMiiiistiy and Pasto?'al MetJiods of oitr Lo7'd
Professor Blaikie heads a chapter, " The College of the Twelve."
He also suggests another analog}' : "A young mmister, for
example, may try to multiply himself by means of the j'oung
men of his flock. Some have a rare gift of finding out the most
susceptible of these — getting them about them in classes and
meetings, and perhaps sometimes in walks and at meals — ex-
plaining to them their plans, infusing into them their enthusiasm,
enlisting their sympathies, arid drawing out their talents. . . . Dr.
Chalmers in Glasgow, gathering young men around him, pouring
his own views and spirit into them, rousing them to aid in his
territorial schemes, and thus training the youths who in after
years became the elite of the Christian laity of the west, comes as
near as may be on a m.ere common level to the example of Christ
and His Twelve."'

276 IMAGO CHRIST/.

unobserved, impress of His character. St. John,
reflecting on this three years' experience long after-
wards, summed it up by saying, " We beheld His
glory ! " The word he uses denotes the shekinah
that shone above the mercy-seat. In those lonely
walks through Phoenicia and Peraea, in those close
talks on the hills of Galilee, they often felt that the
holy of holies was being opened to them, and that
they were gazing on the beauty that is ineffable.

The chief defect perhaps of theological train-
ing, as it is practised at present, is the lack of
this close intercourse between the teacher and the
taught. Few professors have attempted it on any
considerable scale. It would, indeed, be trying
work. No eyes are so keen as those of students.
If admitted close to a man, they take immediate
stock of his resources. They are hero-worshippers
when they believe in a professor ; but their scorn
is unmeasured if they disbelieve in him. They can
be dazzled by a reputation ; but only massiveness
of character and thoroughness of attainment can be
sure of permanently impressing them.

I know of only one man in recent times who
threw himself without fear or reserve into the most
intimate relations with students. His conduct was
so Christ-like and is so great an example, that it is
worthy of being commemorated here

CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 277

riofessor Tholuck is well known, by name at
least, to all who have any tincture of theological
knowledge. His numerous works in exegesis and
apologetics give him a high place among the
evangelical theologians of the century. He ranks
still higher as a reforming force. What Wesley
did for the Church of England, and Chalmers for
the Church of Scotland, and Vinet for the Church
of Switzerland, he may be said to have done for the
Church of Germany : he fought down and annihi-
lated the old Rationalism, which corresponded to
our Moderatism, and during the first decades of this
century made evangelical religion a respected and
waxing power in the land.*

But the method by which he chiefly accomplished
this is what will entitle him to lasting remem-
brance in the Church of God. No sooner was he
converted and settled down to his work as an
academic teacher, than he at once began to seek

* The great name of Schleieimacher will doubtless occur to
many as deserving to occupy this place ; and it would be difficult
to overestimate the profundity and extent of his influence. But
to me at least the Life of Tholuck (by Witte, 1886) has been a
revelation as to what were the real sources of the Evangelical Re-
vival in Germany. Schleiermacher intellectualised the movement
and became the scientific guide of those who had been spii itually
quickened ; but the quickening itself, on which in the last resort
all depended, was largely due to humbler instrumentalities.

278 IMAGO CHRIST L

intercourse with his students of a kind most
unusual in Germany. Not satisfied with merely
lecturing from his chair, he made himself personally
acquainted with them all, with the view of winning
them to Christ. He invited them to walk with
him ; he visited them in their lodgings ; he gathered
them in his rooms two evenings a week for prayer,
study of the Scriptures and reports of missionary
enterprise. As time went on and his classes grew,
this became a task of portentous dimensions. But
his devotion to it never relaxed. At the busiest
period of his life, when he was preparing lectures
which filled his class-room with crowds of students
and publishing the books which won him a worlds
wide reputation, he regularly sp^nt four hours a day
walking with students, besides having one student
at dinner with him and another at supper.

It was not superficial work. It bore no resem-
blance to the method of some who think they have
dealt with a man about his spiritual concerns when
they have once forced the subject of religion into con-
versation without preparation. He often found the
approaches to the mind of the student very difficult and
had to begin far out on the circumference of things.
Pie was full of geniality and overflowed with humour ;
he tried the students' wits with the oddest questions,
and those who had enjoyed the privilege of walking

CHRJST AS A TEACHER. 279

with him would retail for weeks afterwards the quips
and sallies in which he had indulged. He was full
of intellectual interest, knew how to draw every man
out on the subjects with which he was acquainted,
and could give invaluable hints on books and
methods of study. He endeavoured to rouse and
stimulate the mind from every side, and many
owed to him their mental as well as their spiritual
awakening. He did not neglect the body either : no
professor in Germany did so much to help on poor
students. Yet, all the time, he had his eye on one
object and was drifting steadily towards it — the
personal salvation of every student with whom he
had to deal.

He had his reward. It w^as known in his lifetime
that his success had been great ; but it is only by
the publication of his biography that it has been
made known how great it was. Among his papers
were found hundreds of letters from students and
ministers owning him as their spiritual father ; and
it turns out that among his converts were some of
the most illustrious names in the German literary
history of the century. In the pulpits and pro-
fessorial chairs of Germany there are at present
hundreds working for the evangel who owe their
souls to him.

Why does such a life seem to us so original and

>8o IMAGO CHRISTL

exceptional ? Why is it not repeated in other
spheres — in the office, the shop and the school, as
well as in the Church and the university ? Tholuck
explained the secret of his life in a single
sentence: " I have but one passion, and that is
Christ."

XV.

CHRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST

Matt. V. 21-48. Luke vii. 36-50.

„ ix. 10-13. „ X, 25-37.

„ xii. 24-45. „ xi. 37-54.

„ XV. 1-14. ,, xii. I.

„ xvi. 1-4. ,, xiii. II-17.

„ xix. 3-12.

,, xxi. 23-46. John ii. iS-20.

„ xxii. „ V.

„ xxiii. ,, vi. 41-65.

„ vii. 10-53.
„ viii. 12-59.

CHAPTER XV.

CHRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST.

^T^HE ministers of the temple of truth, it has been
■^ said, are of three kinds : first, those stationed at
the gate of the temple to constrain the passers-by to
come in; secondly, those whose function is to accom-
pany inside all who have been persuaded to enter,
and display and explain to them the treasures and
secrets of the place ; and, thirdly, those whose duty
is to patrol round the temple, keeping watch and
ward and defending the shrine from the attacks of
enemies. We are only speaking very roughly if we
say that the first of these three functions is that of
the Preacher, the second that of the Teacher, and the
third that of the Controversialist.

I.

At the present time controversy has an evil name;
the mere mention of it excites alarm; and the image
of the controversialist, in most people's minds, is any-
thing but an amiable or admired figure. He who is

284 IMAGO CHRISTI.

called in providence to undertake the function of
controversy can reckon less than almost any other
servant of Christ on the sympathy and appreciation
of Christ's people ; for even those who agree v^^ith
his view of the truth will be sorry that he has
allowed himself to enter the atmosphere of strife,
and regret that he has not rested content with
other kinds of work. This temper of mind of the
Christian public has had its natural result. Able
men are shy of undertaking work of this kind,
easily finding employment for their talents in
other directions, where labour is more appreciated.
Controversy has accordingly fallen to a large ex-
tent into the hands of inferior practitioners; and
it would be easy to mention controversies acknow-
ledged to be of vital consequence to the welfare of
the Church which do not receive the support of
the champions whose advocacy would lend them
dignity in the eyes of men.

It would be interesting to trace this state of public
feeling back to its causes; for without doubt there
are good reasons for it. It would probably be found
to be a reaction from the temper of a time when
controversy was carried to excess ; for, although an
important function of the Church, controversy is
far from being the most important ; and that which
in due proportion is wholesome may in excess be

CHRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST. 285

poisonous. In their zeal for truth good men have
sometimes forgotten to be zealous for charity. Con-
troversy has raged round small points, on which
Christians might well agree to differ, with a heat
and violence which would only have been justified
had the hearths and altars been at stake. When
men thus indulge their passions, they lose from their
own minds the sense of proportion, and, having
expended their superlatives on objects of trifling
importance, they have not the use of them when
subjects emerge to which they would be really
applicable. They also lose their hold on others ; for
the public mind, having been flogged into fury over
questions which it afterwards discovers were not
worth fighting about, refuses to stir even when the
citadel is in danger. Thus has the Church to
expiate her mistakes.

Yet it is no good sign of the times that contro-
versy should be looked down upon. As has been
mentioned in the Preface to this book, we have had
to refrain from printing in full the evidence, from the
Gospels, of the conduct of Jesus in the different
departments of life ; but, had this been done, the
bulkiest of all these bodies of evidence would have
been the appendix to the present chapter. In the
records of His life we have pages upon pages of
controversy. It may have been far from the work

IMAGO CHRIST/.

in which He deh'^rhted most to be eng-aged ; but
He had to undertake it all through His life, and
especially towards the close. The most eminent of
His servants in every age have had to do the same.
St. Paul may not have been indisposed by nature to
throw himself into controversy; but St. John had to
enter into it with equal earnestness. It is scarcely
possible to mention a representative man in any
section of the Christian Church in any age who has
been able altogether to avoid it.

The spirit of the true controversialist is the joyful
and certain sense of possessing the truth, and the
conviction of its value to all men, which makes error
hateful and inspires the determination to sweep it
away.* It was as the King of Truth t that Christ
carried on controversy, and He was borne along by

* " Late in life he (Mozley) speculated on the controversial
temper with an evident though unacknowledged sense of ex-
perience. He did not appear to estimate it over-highly, further
than as he considered it now to be rare. The contrary tem-
perament was dealt with tenderly — the one that really needs the
agreement of those around it, that has a sense of discomfort and
privation without it, that must act with others; but the true
controversial spiiit, that which, strong in the feeling of possession,
of a firm hold of its own view, rises with opposition or neglect,
vvhi( h can ttand alone, ready as it were for ail comers, this was
the temper that, as he defined it, his nature evidently responded
to."— Introduction to Mozley' s Essays.

t John xviii. 37.

CHRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST, 287

the generous passion to cut His fellow-men out from
their imprisonment in the labyrinth of error. Ex- (
cessive aversion to controversy may be an indication
that a Church has no keen sense of possessing truth
which is of any great worth, and that it has lost
appreciation for the infinite difference in value
between truth and error.

II.

There are differences, indeed, in the present feeling
of the public mind to different kinds of controversy.
One of the tasks of controversy is to combat error
outside of the Church. Christianity is incessantly
assailed by forms of unbelief, which arise one after
another and have their day. At one time it is
Deism which requires to be refuted, at another
Pantheism, at another Materialism. To defend the
temple of Christian truth from such assailants is popu-
lar enough and meets with perhaps even excessive
rewards. This kind of controversy is accordingly
much cultivated and sometimes may be indulged
in where it is not needed. When it is of the right
quality, however, its value cannot be overestimated;
and at the present moment it requires the very
highest talent, for the apologetic problems of our
century have not yet been solved.

It is controversy within the Church which excites

288 IMAGO CHRIST/.

alarm and aversion. Yet the controversy which our
Lord waged was inside the Church ; and so has
been that carried on by the most eminent of His
followers. It would, indeed, be well if the sound
of controversial weapons were never heard in the
temple of peace ; but only on condition that it is
also a temple of truth. In the time of Christ it was
the stronghold of error; and not once or twice since
then it has been the same. Jesus had to assail nearly
the whole ecclesiastical system of His time and a
large body of the Church's doctrines. To do so
must, to a thoughtful mind, in any circumstances be
an extremely painful task ; for the faith reposed in
their spiritual guides by the mass of men, who have
little leisure or ability to think out vast subjects to
the bottom, is one of the most sacred pillars of the
edifice of human life; and nothing can be more
criminal than wantonly to shake it. But it some-
times needs to be shaken, and Jesus did so.

Of course the opposite case may easily occur : the
Church may have the truth, and the innovator may
be in error. Then the true place of the Christian
controversialist is on the side of the Church against
him who is trying to mislead her. This also is a
delicate task, requiring the utmost Christian wisdom
and sometimes likely to be repaid with little thanks;
for, while he who defends the Church against error

CHRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST. 2S9

coming from the outside is loaded with honours as
a saviour of the faith, he who attempts to preserve
her from more menacing danger within may be
dismissed with the odious and withering title of
heresy-hunter. But it is not easy to see what ethical
standing-ground there is to the competent Christian
man between either, on the one hand, attacking the
Church himself as heretical or, on the other, being
prepared to defend her from accusations of not
teaching the truth.

III.

Christ and the Jewish teac'ners with whom He
contended had a common standard and test of con-
troversies to which they appealed. Both acknow-
ledged the Scriptures of the Old Testament to be
the Word of God. As this gave a peculiar colouring
to all His work among the Jewish people, whom He
addressed as He could not have preached to any
other nation, so also it immensely simplified His
work as a controversialist. His superiority con-
sisted in His more intimate familiarity with this
standard to which they both appealed. They were,
indeed, the learned men of the nation, and the Old
Testament was their text-book ; while He, as they
liked to remind Him, had never learned. But His
intense love for the V/ord of His Father and His

19

290 IMAGO CHRISTI.

life-long diligence in searching it made Him far
more than a match for them on their own ground.
Out of the stores of memory He could fetch the
passage which was needed on every occasion ; and,
as He brought forth the word which was to over-
throw their argument, He would sometimes taunt
them, who boasted of their acquaintance with the
Bible, by beginning His quotation with the question,
" Have ye never read ? " At other times, in a more
solemn mood, He would tell them plainly, " Ye do
err, not knowing the Scriptures."

He did not, however, trust merely to His know-
ledge of the letter of Scripture. This is the method
of the small controversialist, who is satisfied if he can
always meet text with text and if at the end he has
one text more than his opponent. Such controversy
is barren as the sand of the sea driven with the
wind and has no more value than the bickerings
of kites and crows. It is this kind of controversy
which has brought the controversial function of the
Church into contempt. In the true controversialist
there is more than mere familiarity with the text of
Scripture : he has a grasp of scriptural principles, a
religious experience of his own which interprets the
Scripture, and a nearness to God which imparts
earnestness and dignity to his work.

The mind of Jesus stood thus above the mere

CHRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST. 291

letter of Scripture and handled it with consumnnate
ease and freedom. This was why He scarcely ever
quoted a text of the Old Testament without reveal-
ing a new meaning in it. It was as if His touch
split it asunder and showed the gem flashing at its
heart. Sometimes He would gather a principle from
the general scope of Scripture which seemed to dis-
soly;e and even contradict the mere letter.* While
loving and reverencing the Word of His Father with
His w^hole soul, He knew Himself to be the organ
of a revelation in which the older one was to be
merged, as the light of the stars is lost in the dawn
of the morning.

Rut it was not with Scripture alone that Jesus
operated as a controversialist. There is an appeal
to the common sense and to the reason of men —
an appeal away from the mere pedantry of learning
and the citation of authorities — which every contro-
versialist of real mark must be able to make. And,
if it can be miade in a flash of wit or in an epigram
which stamps itself instantly on the memory, the
effect is irresistible, when the controversy is carried
on before popular judges. Jesus possessed this
power in the highest degree, as many of His sayings
show. One of the most striking is this, at which

♦ E.g., Matt. V. 31, 33.

292 IMAGO CHRIST/.

" they marvelled, and left Him, and went their way " :
" Render unto Caesar the things which are Csesar's
and unto God the things which are God's."

IV.

In any exposition of the ethics of controversy at
the present day, a prominent place would be given
to the duty of treating opponents with consideration.
However severely their arguments may be handled,
their persons ought to be treated with respect, and
they should receive credit for honourable motives.

No rule could be more reasonable. V/e know
but little of our fellow-men at the best, and, when
anything inflames us against them, it is easy to be
blinded by prejudice to their excellences. On the
other hand, we know so much about ourselves that we
may well hesitate to cast stones at others. No man
has all the truth, and an opponent may be seeing a
side of it which we cannot see. God sometimes
gets the whole truth given to the Church only by the
halves of it, held by different minds, meeting at first
in conflict. The fire generated by their collision
unites them at last in perfect fusion.^

* " They that purify sih^er to the purpose, use to put it in the
fire again and again, that it may be thoroughly tried. So is the
truth of God ; there is scrrce any truth but hath been tried over
and over again, and still if any dross liappen to mingle with it,

CHRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST. 293

Yet, excellent as this rule is, it is not without
exceptions ; for Jesus broke it. We have not enough
information to know whether or not at the begin-
ning of His career He treated His opponents with
more consideration ; but, towards the end of His
life. He exposed them with more and more keen-
ness, and at last He poured on Pharisees, scribes
and priests a torrent of scorn never equalled in its
withering and annihilating vehemence.*

In point of fact, our estimate of the characters of
men exercises an important influence on the value
we set on their opinions. We may not be able to
express it in public, yet in secret we may know that
about an opponent which robs his opinions of all
weight. He may be writing or speaking confidently
on religious subjects, while we know him to be a

then God calls it in question again. If in former times there
have been Scriptures alleged that have not been pertinent to
prove it, that truth shall into the fire again, that what is dross
may be burnt up ; the Holy Ghost is so curious, so delicate, so
exact, He cannot bear that falsehood should be mingled with the
truths of the Gospel. That is the reason, therefore, why that
God doth still, age after age, call former things in question,
because that there is still some dross one way or other mingled
with them ; either in the stating the opinions themselves, or else
in the Scriptures that are brought and alleged for them, that
have passed for current, for He will never leave till He have
purified them." — Thomas Goodwin.
* Matt, xxiii.

294 IMAGO CHRISTI.

thoroughly irreligious man, who has not the very
faculty on which true insight in such matters de-
pends, and who could not afford to confess the
truth, ev^en if he knew it, because it would condemn
himself at every point. It may in certain circum-
stances be a duty to make this public. Jesus often
told the Jewish teachers that it was impossible for
them to understand Him, because they lacked moral
sympathy with the truth ; and the interests of
priests and Pharisees were vested in the system of
hypocrisy which their arguments were invented to
defend. Our judgments in such cases are liable to
be mistaken ; but He could completely trust His
own ; and at last He broke all the authority of His
opponents by thoroughly exposing their character.

V.

In the very rush of the controversial onset, how-
ever, Jesus would pause to note and acknowledge a
better spirit, if any sign of candour showed itself
in an opponent.

There was a day of fierce conflict in His life
to which the Ev^angelists devote close attention. It
was one of the days of the last week before He
suffered, and a combination of a most formidable
character took place among His enemies, to con-
fute Him and put Him down. The scribes and

CIJRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST. 295

Pharisees were there of course ; even the Sadducees,
who in general neglected Him, had come out of
their haughty retirement ; and Pharisees and Hero-
dians, who generally hated one another, were for
once united in a common purpose. They had
arranged well beforehand the questions with which
they were to try Him ; they had chosen their
champions ; and one after another they delivered
their assaults upon Him in the Temple. But it
was for them a day of disaster and humiliation ;
for He refuted them so conclusively that " no
man was able to answer Him a word ; neither
durst any man from that day forth ask Him any
more questions."

In the very midst, however, of this exciting scene
a controversialist arose to whom Jesus extended
very different treatment than to the rest. The man
appears to have known comparatively little about
Christ, except that He was one who was everywhere
spoken against. But he was a scribe, and, as his
party was attacking Christ, he was drawn into the
same attitude. He looked upon Him as a misleader
of the people, who deserved to be put down, and he
had come to do so. Yet the answers which he
heard Jesus giving before his own turn came shook
him ; for they were right answers, which by no
means confirmed the impressions of Christ which he

296 IMAGO CHRIST/.

had brought to the spot. Some such acknowledg-
ment seems to have been conveyed in the tone of
his own question, when he put it.

It was, indeed, but a paltry question, "Which is
the first commandment of all .? " This was one of
the subjects on which in the rabbinical schools
they were wont to chop logic, and the man pro-
bably considered that it was one on which he was
superior to any other rabbi. Jesus, however, had
observed something that pleased Him in the man's
look or manner, and, instead of merely overthrowing
and humiliating him, as He had done to the others,
He gave him a full and earnest answer : " The
first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel ;
The Lord our God is one Lord : and thou shalt
love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind : this is the first
commandment. And the second is like, namely
this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
There is none other commandment greater than
these."

To us this is familiar teaching, and it falls on our
senses without making much impression. But it is
not difficult to conceive with what irresistible power
and majesty it may have fallen on a mind which
heard it for the first time. It seems to have thrown
the man completely out of the cavilling attitude into

CHRIST AS A CONTROVERSIALIST. 297

one of intense moral earnestness. It not only smote
his arguments down, but burst open the doors of
his being and went straight to his conscience, which
sent back the echo instantaneously and clearly :
" Well, Master, Thou hast said the truth : for there
is one God ; and there is none other but He : and
to love Him with all the heart, and with all the
understanding, and with all the soul, and with all
the strength, and to love his neighbour as himself,
is more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices."

This was a noble answer. The man had forgotten
the role he had come to play ; he had forgotten his
comrades, and ^^'hat they were expecting of him ; he
let his heart speak and did homage to the moral
dignity of Christ. Jesus marked the change with
deep inward satisfaction and said to him, " Thou
art not far from the kingdom of God."

This is a great example. To attack them
remorselessly in controversy often drives into per-
manent opposition those who mic^ht be won by
milder treatment. Men may appear as opponents
of Christianity who in their hearts are very near
it ; and it is Christ-like to detect this sympathy
and bring it to expression. To prove to men
that they are outside the kingdom is an easy thing
in comparison ; but it may be far better to let
them see that they are only a few steps from

298 IMAGO CHRISTI.

its threshold. The triumph of a ruthless polemic
may gratify the natural heart ; but far more
like the Master, where it is possible, is a winning
irenicum.

XVI.

CHRIST AS A MAN OF FEELING.

Matt. viii. 17.

Matt.

viiL

10.

Matt. xvi. 23.

„ ix. 36.

)!

ix.

2,28.

„ xvii. 17.

„ xiv. 14.

»

xi. (

5.

„ xxvi. 50, 55.

„ XV. 32.

))

xiii

.58.

Mark i. 25.

„ XX. 34.

»

xiv

•31-

„ iii- 5-

Mark i. 41.

»>

XV.

28.

„ XV. 3, 5.

„ iv. 33-

»»

xxvi. 13,

38.

Luke iv. 35; 39-4:

Luke vii. 11-15.

Mark

: vi.
viii

5,6.
. 12.

John xi. 33-38.

Luke vii.

9.

»

xvii. 17.

Matt, xxvii. 34.

Matt.

viii. 4.

Mark x. 13-16 ;

; 21.

»»

ix. 30.

„ xii. 34.

»»

xii. 16.

Luke X. 21.

»>

xiv. 22.

„ xix. 41.

>»

xvi. 20.

John viii. i-i I

J!

xvii. 9.

„ xii. 27.

Mark

vii. 24. 36.

„ xiii. 21.

;>

viii. 26. 3a

^ XX. 16, I

7.

John

V. 13-

CHAPTER XVI.

CHRIST AS A MAN OF FEELING.

O O much learning has been expended in the present
^^ age on the Life of Christ, and every particle
of the record has been so thoroughly sifted, that
it may be questioned if mere intellect will now
discover much that is new in the subject. There
may still, however, be great scope for the divina-
tory power of feeling.* Jesus was as refined and
delicate in feeling as He was wise in speech and
mighty in act ; and the motives of His conduct are
often incomprehensible except to those who possess
in some degree the same feelings as He had. He

* No more brilliant instance of such ps3^chological interpre-
tation could be adduced than the explanation given in Ecce Homo
of our Lord's conduct when the woman taken in adultery was
brought to Him. "He stooped down and wrote on the ground"
(John viii. 8). Why did He do so? It was because He was
ashamed of listening to a foul story. "He was seized with an
intolerable sense of shame. He could not meet the eye of the
crowd, or of the accusers, and perhaps at that moment least
of all of the woman. ... In His burning embarrassment and

302 IMAGO CHRIST!.

taught mankind to feel finely, and ever since He was
in the world there have been increasing numbers
who have learned from Him to regard childhood and
woman, poverty and service, and many other objects,
with sentiments totally different from those with
which they were regarded before His advent.

The notices in the Gospels of the impressions
made on His feelings by different situations in
which He was placed are extraordinarily numerous ;
but a single incident — the raising of the daughter
of Jairus — in which the feelings of His heart came
conspicuously into view will serve as a sufficient
clue.

I.

His Compassion was illustrated in this incident.

It was the case of a man whose only daughter
was lying at the point of death ; and he besought
Jesus greatly for her, says St. Mark. The heart
of Jesus could not but answer such an appeal. In

confusion He stooped down so as to hide His face, and began
writing with His finger on the ground." Everyone who reads
this explanation feels it to be the true one ; it shines with its
own light ; and, when first heard, gives a shock of delighted
surprise.

The author adds, "The effect on Jesus was such as might
have been produced upon many men since, but perhaps scarcely
upon any man that ever lived before."

CHRIST AS A MAN OF FEELING. 303

a similar instance — tliat of a woman with an only
son, the widow of Nain — it is said that, when the
Lord saw her following behind the bier. He had
compassion on her and said to her, " Weep not." He
not only gave the required help in such cases, but
gave it with an amount of sympathy which doubled
its value. Thus He not only raised Lazarus, but
wept with his sisters. In curing a man who was
deaf. He sighed as He said, '* Ephphatha." All His
healing work cost Hirn feeling. There is a great
difference between the clergyman or physician who
merely calls at the house of sorrow as a matter of
duty, to be able to say that he has been there, and
him who takes the suffering of the stricken home
on his heart and goes away melted and broken
down with it.

On this occasion the compassion of Christ was
deepened by the fact that it was a child who was
ill. " My little daughter " she was called by her
father. All the scenes in Christ's life in which
children appear are exquisitely touching ; and it
was His feeling which gave them their beauty and
pathos. As you look at them, you feel that He
not only knew all that is in a father's and a mother's
heart, but sank new wells in the heart of humanity
and brought love up from deeper levels than it had
sprung from before. Ruskin has observed that there

304 IMAGO CHRIST/.

are no children in Greek art, but that they abound
in Christian art — an unmistakable token that it was
the e}e of Christ which first fully appreciated the
attractiveness of childhood.

II.

A second feeling which Jesus showed in this
incident was Sensitiveness.

At Jairus* request He went to the house where
the dying girl was ; but on the way a messenger
met them, who told the poor father that all was
over, and that he need not trouble the Master any
further. Whereupon, without waiting to be ap-
pealed to, Jesus turned to him and said, " Be not
afraid ; only believe."

In this we might see a new instance of His
compassion ; but it also reveals something else :
Jesus was extremely sensitive to the sentiments of
trust or distrust with which He was regarded. If
any generosity of belief was shown towards Him,
His heart filled with gladness, and He acknowledged
His gratification without stint. Thus, when another
applicant for help, in a situation not unlike that of
Jairus, expressed his belief that, if Jesus would only
speak a word even at a distance, without going to
the house in winch the sick person was lying, a cure

CHRIST AS A MAN OF FEELIXG. 305

would ensue, Jesus stood still in the road and, turn-
ing to the bystanders, exclaimed, " I have not found
so great faith, no, not in Israel." The faith of
Jairus, though not so strong as this, had evidently
gratified Him, and it was because He could not
bear to have it clouded witli doubt that He hastened
so promptly to strengthen it.

He had, however, many an experience to en-
counter of the opposite kind, and the feeling thereby
occasioned in Him was keen. If now and then He
had to marvel at the greatness of faith. He had to
marvel far oftener at unbelief. In His own native
place, when He visited it. He could do scarcely any
mighty works on this account. The rebuff so
chilled His heart that the activity of His miraculous
power was restrained. His most signal favours
were somiCtimes received with ingratitude, as in the
case of the ten lepers, of whom only one returned to
give thanks for his cure, causing Him to ask sadly,
" Where are the nine } "

HI.

A third species of feeling which He betrayed on
this occasion was Indignation.

When He reached the house, not only was the
child dead, but the place had been taken possession
of by the mumn^ers who undertook the ghastly

20

3o6 IMAGO CHRISTI.

ceremonial of mourning. Death, though the most
solemn of all events, has in many countries been
invested with absurdity through the mourning
customs with which it has been associated ; but in
Palestine this was carried to an extreme. As soon
as a death took place, the house was invaded by
professional mourners, who filled it with wild ulula-
tions and doleful music. This hideous custom was
in full operation when Jesus arrived, and to His
serene soul it was intolerable. He indignantly
enjoined silence, and, when this was not forthcoming.
He drove the whole ghastly apparatus forth and
cleared the house.

Indignation, though closely allied to sinful anger,
is not vicious, but virtuous. It is the sign of an
honourable and self-respecting nature. The soul
that loves order, uprightness and nobleness cannot
but be indignant at disorder, duplicity and mean-
ness. The indignation of Jesus is often mentioned.
It could be aroused by unseemly noise and con-
fusion, as on this occasion. When casting out
devils, he used angrily to rebuke the outcries of the
possessed. He is represented in the same attitude
when calming the winds and waves in the storm,
presumably because He was counteracting the prince
of the power of the air. The whole empire of
Satan is the empire of disorder, and every manifes-

CHRIST AS A MAN OF FEELING. 307

tation of its power affected Him in this way. This
explains the strange tumult of indignant excitement
in which He advanced to the grave of Lazarus :
His condition of mind was one of angry vengeance
against the ravages of death.*

The state of the times in which He lived afforded
peculiar occasion for the display of this sentiment.
It was because the mourning in the house of Jairus
was professional, with no heart in it, that He dis-
liked it so utterly. But the society of Judaea at
that time was one vast hypocrisy. The holders
of sacred offices were self-seekers ; the professors of

* The story of the raising of Lazarus so abounds with notices
of Christ's emotions that we might have taken it for our clue
instead of the raising of the daughter of Jairus. As He ap-
proached the grave of Lazarus, it is said " He groaned in spirit,
and was troubled ; " but the Greek words are much stronger :
ev€^pifj.r)(TaTO rw Trvevfj-art kqI erdpa^ev eavTov. The first verb
denotes, not groaning, but " visibly-expressed indignation, dis-
pleasure, or wrath ;"' and the second denotes the change in His
countenance caused by this indignation. '• His w^hole frame
was moved. A storm of wrath was seen to sweep over Him."
What was the cause of this angry agitation ? " He was gazing
into the skeleton face of the world, and tracing everywhere the
reign of death. The whole earth to Him was but ' the valley of
the shadow of death ; ' and in those tears which were shed in His
presence He saw that

'Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears.'

. . . But this is not all. Behind the presence of death there

3o8 IMAGO CHRIST!.

piety were hunting for the praise of men ; the
teachers of the people laid grievous burdens on
other men's shoulders, which they would not them-
selves touch with one of their fingers ; sacred
language was a cloak for spoliation and impurity.
Jesus burned with indignation against it all and
poured His feelings out in philippics against the
parties and personalities of the time.

His was holy fire : it was the flame of truth
consuming falsehood, of justice attacking wrong,
of love burning against selfishness. Too often the
crusade against shams and hypocrisy has been
inspired by zeal which is unholy. Men have under-
taken the office of the censor and satirist whose own
hearts have not been pure and whose lives have
been inconsistent, pluckingthe mote out of their
brother's e}'e, and behold a beam was in their own.
They have only masqueraded in the garment of

was the awful reality, not only of sin, 'the sting of death,' but
also of him through whom sin came,— him who is in this Gospel
so frequently calkd ' the piince of this world.' If then we would
rightly understand the true meaning of our Lord's wrath, His
visibly-expressed indignation, we must regard Him here as
confronting in conflict the great enemy of His kingdom, — the
destro5^er of the race which He Himself had come to save."

See a remarkable paper on this difficult passage by the Rev.
John Hutchison, D.D., in the Monti dy Interpreter, vol. u. (T. <Sj
T. Clark, 18S5).

CHRIST AS A MAN OF FEELING. 309

indignation.. But this robe found in Jesus its
true wearer, and He wore it with incomparable
dignity. " Are ye come out," He demanded of
those about to arrest Him, "as against a thief?"
" Judas," He asked the traitor, " betrayest thou the
Son of man with a kiss ? " Before the high-priest,
Pilate and Herod His indignant silence was more
eloquent than the most scorching words. He has
not put off this garment yet : in heaven still burns
'* the wrath of the Lamb."

IV.

A fourth mode of feeling characteristic of Jesus
which was illustrated on this occasion was Delicacy.

Having put the professional mourners out, He
went into the room of death, where the little maid
was lying on the bed. But He did not go alone,
or only with the three disciples whom He had taken
into the house with Him : He took with Him the
father and mother of the maiden, as being deeply
interested in her who was their own and entitled
to see all that happened to her.

Then He took her by the hand before pronouncing
the resurrection words ; for He did not wish her to
be startled when she woke, but to feel the support
of a sympathetic presence. Many a one in an hour
of agitation or when coming out of a swoon has

310 IMAGO CHRIST!.

felt how it steadies and strengthens to be held by
a firm hand and to look into a calm face.

Thus He did all with perfect tact, not by calcu-
lation, but with the instinct of delicate feeling, which
guided Him at every turn to do precisely the best
thing. Yet there was no straining after refinement.
The besetting sin of emotional natures is to over-
strain and overdo. But how healthy and manly
was the feeling of Jesus ! His very next act, after
these exquisite touches, was this : '' He commanded
that something should be given her to eat." In the
same way, after days of healing and preaching in
the wilderness, during which He had been borne
along with the prophetic enthusiasm, it was He who
made the proposal that food should be given to
the multitude, before they were dispersed, lest they
should faint by the way ; the disciples, though far
less preoccupied, never thinking of such a thing.
He excelled them as much in considerateness and
practicality as in delicacy of feeling.

V.

The last kind of feeling exhibited by our Lord
on this occasion was Modesty.

After the miracle was performed, *' He charged
them straitly that no man should know it." This
is the sequel to many a work of wonder in His life.

CHRIST AS A MAN OF FEELING, 311

" See thou tell no man," He said to a leper whom
He had cleansed. " See that no man know it," He
said to two blind men whose sight He had restored.
He straitly charged those, as a rule, out of whom
He had cast devils not to make Him known.

Such notices abound in the Gospels ; yet I am
not sure that I have ever seen the true explanation
of them given. All kinds of elaborate explanations
have been attempted. In one case, for example, it
is said that He forbade the man who had been
healed to mention his cure, lest it should do him
harm by puffing him up ; in another, because his
testimony would have had no weight ; in a third,
because it was not yet time to acknowledge Himself
to be the Messiah ; and so on. Such are the sug-
gestions made by learned men, and there may be
some truth in them all. But they are too elaborate
and recondite ; the real explanation lies on the
surface. It is simply that, while so great a worker.
He disliked to have His good deeds made known.
St. Matthew puts this so plainly that it ought not to
have been overlo(3ked. After mentioning an occasion
when, after healing great multitudes. He charged
them that they should not make Him known, the
evangelist adds that this was in fulfilment of a
prophecy which said, " He shall not strive nor cry,
neither shall any one hear His voice in the street"

112 IMAGO CIIRISTt.

It is one of the penalties of public work for God
that it comes to be talked about, and vulgar people
make a sensation of it. We are well acquainted
with this at the present day, when nothing is
allowed to remain private, and, if a man does
anything in the least out of the common, the
minutest details of his life are dragged out and
exposed to the public eye. But this is contrary
to the very genius of goodness and exposes even
those occupied with the holiest work to the temp-
tation of playing for the praise of men instead of
acting humbly in the eye of God. Jesus detested
it. He would have been hidden if He could ; and
it was a heavy cross to Him that the more He
pressed people to say nothing about Him, the more
widely did they spread His fame.*

Such was the heart of Christ as it is laid bare
in a single story. "By taking a wider sweep we
might have accumulated more illustrations. But
the clue, once seized, can be easily followed in the
Gospels, where the notices of how He telt in the

* There is, liowever, a shrinking from publicity which is
vicious : it may be mere fastidiousness or the cowardice which
fears responsibilit}'. And there is an enjoyment of popularity
which is nothing but unseldsh absorption in the triumph of a
p"ood cause.

CHRIST AS A MAN OF FEELIXG. 313

different situations in which He was placed are far
more numerous than anyone whose attention has not
been specially directed to them would believe.*

Nor would it be difficult to trace the refining
influence which intercourse with Him had on His
disciples — how they learned to feel about things
as He did. There is no other influence so refilling
as genuine religion. Where the Gospel is faith-
fully preached and affectionately believed, there is
gradually wrought into the very features of people
the stamp of the Son of man. The friendship of
Jesus breeds the gentle heart.

Christus miiltum et vultu et nutu docuit." — Bkngel.

XVII.

CHRIST AS AN INFLUENCE

Matt. vii. 28.

viii. 27.

ix. 8, 26, 31, 33

xii. 23.

xiii. 54.

xxii. 22, 33.
Mark i. 45.

ii. I, 2, 12.

vii. 36 37.

ix. 15.

XV 5.
Luke ii. 47, 48.

„ iv. 15, 22. 32. 37

Matt. xiv. i. 2.
Mark iv. 41.

„ X. 32.
Luke V. 8, 26.

,, xxiii. 45, 48.
John xviii. 6.

Mark i. 23-27.

., V. 6, 7.
Luke vi. ii.

„ xiii. 14.

Matt. ii. 1-3.

., iii. 13, 14.

., iv. 19-22.

„ xxvii. 19, 55.
Mark i. 37.

, V. 18.

„ xii. 37.
Luke i. 41

, viii. 40.

„ xi. 27.

„ xxii. 61, 62.

„ xxiv. 32.
John vi. 68.
vii.

CHAPTER XVII.

CHRIST AS AN INFLUENCE.

IN the foregoing chapter we have seen the feelings
produced in the sensitive heart of Christ by the
persons and things He was brought into contact
with. In the present one we have to deal with the
feelings which He produced, by His presence and
actions, in the hearts of men. If much attention is
paid in the records of His life to the depth and
variety of the impressions which others made on
Him, no less surprising is the number of notices
they contain of the impressions which He made on
others.

Simeon the aged, when he held the child Jesus
in his arms in the Temple, prophesied that by con-
tact with Him the thoughts of many hearts would
be revealed ; and this was one of the most out-
standing features of His subsequent life. None who
came near Him could remain indifferent. They
might hate or they might love, they might admire

3i8 IMAGO CHRIST/,

or they might scorn Him ; but in any case they
were compelled to show the deepest that ^vas in
them. In the Talmud there is a fable that King
Solomon wore a ring engraven with the divine
name, and everyone towards whom he turned the
inscription was forced to speak out whatever he was
thinking at the moment. So Jesus, by His mere
presence among men, brought to the surface their
deepest thoughts and feelings and made them dis-
play the best and the worst which their hearts
concealed.

The commonest impression which He is narrated
in the Gospels to have excited is Wonder. " They
marvelled at Him ;" "they wondered ;" " they were
astonished with a great astonishment " — such are
the phrases which recur continually in the records
of His life. Sometimes it was at His teaching that
they marvelled — at its gracefulness, originality and
power — or at the knowledge displayed by one
who had never learned. Still more noisy was their
wonder at His miracles. People ran together to the
spot where a miracle was taking place ; those who
had been cured spread abroad the fame of what had
happened to themselves; and, wherever He went,
there rose around Him a cloud of notoriet)\

CHRIST AS AN INFLUENCE. 319

Though this was the commonest impression made
on people's minds, it was far from the most valuable.
To Himself it was an unpleasant necessity. His
soul shrank from the importunities of the crowd, and
He gauged the depth of their shallow adulation.
The one advantage of it, for the sake of which He
submitted to the necessity, was that it brought to
Him, among the rest, those who really wanted Him
and whom He wanted — as in the case of the woman
who came behind Him in the crowd, when He was
on the way to the house of Jairus, and touched the
hem of His garment, that she might be healed. The
crowed was thronging Him, many no doubt touching
His very person; but they got nothing from this
contact. She came in dire need and trem.bling faith,
and, at her touch, virtue went out of Him and healed
her. But she would hardly have been there but for
the crowd : it was by the noise and excitement that
she was informed that He was near ; at all events
the crowd supplied her with her opportunity.

This may still be the one advantage which com-
pensates for the many drawbacks of the rumour that
rises round religion in some of its forms. The
sensation is a bell that rings into church those who
need Christ. The appearance of popular preachers
is trumpeted abroad, and crowds flock to hear them.
When a distinguished evangelist appears or a revival

322 IMAGO CHRIST/.

access of His prophetic inspiration, why did they
flee crouching before Him ? They were many,
while He was but one ; they were wealthy and
influential, while He was but a peasant. Yet there
was that in Him which they never thought of re-
sisting. They felt how awful goodness is. There
is a majesty in virtue indignant before which the
loftiest sinners cower. I have known a youth from
the country enter an office in the city, where the
daily conversation was so foul and profane that it
would almost have disgraced the hulks ; but a
month after his arrival not a man in the place dared
to utter an unchaste word when he was present.
Yet he had scarcely spoken a syllable of reproof ;
it was simply the dignity of manly goodness that
quelled conscious iniquity.

HI.

The fear exc'ted by Jesus sometimes deepened
into Repulsion. The fear He caused was the fear of
the finite in the grasp of the Infinite. But those who
felt themselves helpless in the hands of the Almighty
felt themselves at the same time exposed in the
sight of the All-seeing and the All-pure.

As the ignorant speak with fluency in the com-
pany of the ignorant, but, if introduced among the
learned, stammer and become afraid of their own

CI/R/ST AS AN INFLUENCE. 323

voices ; or as the beggar, who is quite unconscious
of his rags when moving among his equals, if
brought into a drawing-room filled with well dressed
people, becomes suddenly aware of every patch on
his coat and every hole in his looped and windowed
raggedness ; so, when confronted with spotless holi-
ness, the human soul turns round upon itself and
recognises its imperfections. It was this which made
St. Peter, when he saw the miraculous draught of
fishes, put up his hands in deprecation and cry to
Jesus, *' Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O
Lord." And for the same reason the Gadarenes,
when they beheld the miracle which Jesus had
wrought in their midst, besought Him to depart out
of their coasts. They felt the instinctive shrinking
of the guilty from the holy.

In the tragedy of Faust, Margaret, who is meant
to represent virgin purity, cannot bear the sight of
Mephistopheles, though he is disguised as a knight
and she has no idea who he really is. She shrinks
from him instinctively : —

In all my life not anything

Has given my heart so sharp a sting

As that man's loathsome visage.

Christ's presence produced precisely the opposite
effect : in the unholy it awoke repulsion and the
desire to flee from Him. As He held down His

324 IMAGO CHRIST/.

head with burning shame and wrote on the ground,
when the sinful woman was brought to Him, her
accusers, at length dimly recognising what was
going on in His mind, grew afraid and, " being con-
victed in their own conscience, went out one by one,
beginning at the eldest, even unto the last ; and
Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the
midst." When He drew near to possessed persons,
His mere proximity threw them into paroxysms of
excitement, and they entreated Him to depart and
not torment them ; for merely to see one so holy
was a torment.

The presence of superlative goodness, if it does
not subdue, stirs up the wild beasts which lurk in
the subterranean caverns of the human heart into
angry opposition to itself Christ made the evil in
those who opposed Him show itself at its very worst.
Pilate, for example, only applied to the case of Jesus
the same principles of administration which he had
made use of in hundreds of other cases — the prin-
ciples of the self-seeker and time-server dressed in
the garb of justice ; but never did these principles
appear in all their ghastly unrighteousness till he
released Barabbas and handed over Jesus to the
executioner. The inhumanity and hollowness ot
Sadducee and Pharisee were never seen in their true
colours till the light which streamed from Jesus fell

CHRIST AS AN INFLUENCE. 325

on them and exposed every spot and wrinkle of the
hypocrite's robe. Christ's very meekness provoked
them to deeper scorn of His pretensions ; His silence
under their accusations made them gnash their teeth
with baffled malice ; the castigation of His polemic
made them cling to their errors with more desperate
tenacity.

Thus are hearts hardened by the very excellence
of those with whom they have to deal. As Ahab,
when he met Elijah, hissed at him, " Hast thou
found me, O miine enemy ? " so the mere sense that
his godly mother is praying for him, or that good
people are planning for his spiritual welfare, may
excite in one who is going determinedly down the
broad road a diabolical scorn and rage. The con-
tempt with which one w^ho bears witness for God
is flouted by his comrades is often only an evidence
that they feel his presence a reproach to their own
evil characters, and it is a real, though undesigned,
tribute to his superiority. " Marvel not if the world
hate you ; ye know that it hated Me before it hated
you."

IV.

Although the presence of Jesus repelled some, it
exerted on others the most powerful attraction, and
the most characteristic feature of His character

326 IMAGO CHRIST!.

was Moral Attractiveness. He repelled those who
were wedded to their sins and unwilling to abandon
them, but He attracted all who in any degree were
feeling after a new and better life.

Strong as the power of sin is in the soul of man,
it never altogether overcomes the opposite principle.
There is that in every man which opposes his sin
and protests against it. It reminds the prodigal of
the Father's house, from which he has wandered,
and makes him feel the shame of serving among the
swine. It warns him in solitary hours that the sin
to which he is attached is his worst enemy, and that
he will never be happy till he is separated from it.

This redeeming principle in human nature is the
conscience ; and without its feeling for what is holy
and divine the condition of man would be hopeless.
But it exists even in the wicked ; who cannot withhold
their admiration from the truly good and, though
following the worse, approve the better, course.
It makes men afraid and ashamed of their own
sin, even when they are most abandoned to it. It
may be stimulated by denunciations of sin, like those
of the Baptist ; but it is touched even more effect-
ively by the sight of exceptional purity or by the
compassion which pities ungodliness. This reminds
man of something he has lost ; it causes the sinful
enjoyments with which he is occupied to appear

CHRIST AS AN INFLUENCE. 327

cheap and vulgar ; it makes him uneasy and dis-
satisfied.

Jesus naturally exerted this kind of influence in
the strongest degree. Wherever there existed any
tenderness or susceptibility towards what is high
and pure, it was stimulated by His presence. Con-
science, hearing His voice in its prison, woke up
and came to the windows to demand emancipation.
As the presence of a physician armed with a cure
for some virulent disease excites a sensation among
those afflicted with the malady, who communicate the
new^s of relief to one another with the swiftness of
a secret telegraphy, so, wherever Jesus went, the
heavy-laden and the aspiring heard of Him and found
Him. In publicans and sinners, and even in Phari-
sees, unaccustomed movements showed themselves :
Niccdemus sought Him by night ; Zacchseus
climbed into the sycamore tree to see Him ; the
woman who was a sinner stole to His feet to bathe
them with her tears.

Moral attractiveness is of two kinds — the passive
and the active.

There is a goodness which draws men by the
men? force of its own beauty. It is not thinking of
any such effect ; for it is inward and self-absorbed ;
its attention is concentrated on an inner vision and
occurjied with following a secret law. It would

328 IMAGO CHRIST I,

never think of crediting itself with an influence on
others ; for it is not aware of its own beauty, and
that which sets off all its qualities is the ornament
of humility. This is the goodness especially of the
feminine virtues, and the characters which exhibit
it in a marked degree have always a womanly
element. " Such have many of us seen — some-
times in humble life, faithful and devoted, loyal to
man and full of melody in their hearts to God, their
life one act of praise ; some in a higher sphere,
living amid the pride of life, but wholly untouched
by its spells ; free and unensnared souls, that had
never been lighted up with the false lights and
aspirations of human life, or been fascinated by the
evil of the world, though sympathizing with all that
is good in it, and enjoying it becomingly ; who give
us, as far as human character now can do, an insight
into the realms of light, the light that comes from
neither sun nor moon, but from Him who is the
light everlasting." *

Of such characters Jesus is the head and crown.
His image shines. through all the centuries with the
beauty of holiness. This is why the eyes of men,
sweeping the fields of history in search of excellence,
always rest at last on Him as its perfect and final

* MozLEY, University Sermons,

CHRIST AS AN INFLUENCE. 329

embodiment. This is why none can write of Christ
vvithout falling into a kind of rapture and ecstasy
of admiration, and even those who are bitter and
blustering in their opposition to everything Christian
grow hushed and reverent when they speak of Christ
Himself. No pen can fully render the impression
made on the reader by His life in the Gospels. It
is easy to make a catalogue of the qualities which
entered into His human character ; but the blend-
ing and the harmony and the perfection, the delight
and the subduing charm, who can express } Yet
all this walked the earth in the flesh, and men
and women saw it with their eyes !

The moral attractiveness of the active sort influ-
ences in a different way. There are natures which we
call magnetic. People cannot help being drawn to
them and following where they go. Whatever such
natures do, they act with all their might, and others
are drawn into the rush and current of their course.
It may be an evil course, and then they are ring-
leaders in sin ; for the kingdom of darkness has its
missionaries as well as the kingdom of heaven. Like
other forces of human nature, this one requires to be
redeemed and consecrated. Then it becomes the spirit
of the missionary, the apostle, the religious pioneer.

Nothing in the memoirs of Jesus is more sur-
prising than the apparent ease with which He

330 IMAGO CHRIST/.

induced men to quit their occupations and follow
Him. John and James are in their ship mending
their nets ; but, when He calls, they instantly leave
the ship and nets and their father Zebedee and go
after Him. Matthew is at the seat of custom, and
that is a seat not easily left ; but no sooner is
he called than he forsakes all and follows Jesus.
Zacchseus, who had been an extortioner for a life-
time, was no sooner asked to receive Him into his
house than he began to make proposals and promises
of the utmost generosity. Jesus was engaged in a
splendid work, whose idea and results touched the
imagination of all who were capable of anything noble.
He was wholly absorbed in it ; and to see unselfish
devotion always awakens imitation. He was the
author and leader of a new movement, which grew
around Him, and the enthusiasm of those who
had joined it drew others in. The same power
has belonged in remarkable measure to all great
spiritual leaders — to St Paul, to Savonarola, to
Luther, to Wesley and many more ; who, filled
themselves with the Holy Ghost, have been able to
lift men above the instincts of pleasure and comfort
and make them willing to deny themselves for a
great cause. And no earnest life, in which the
enthusiasm of Jesus burns, fails to exercise in
some degree the same influence.

CHRIST AS AN INFLUENCE. 331

It is one of the healthiest features of our day
that all thinking people are growing sensitive about
their influence. To many the chief dread of sin
arises from perceiving that they cannot sin them-
selves without directly or indirectly involving
others ; and it would be to them the greatest of
satisfactions to be able to believe that they are
doing good to those with whom they are brought
into contact, and not harm.

This is a feeling worthy of the solemn nature of
our earthly existence, and it ought certainly to be
one of the guiding principles of life. Yet it is not
without its dangers. If allowed too prominent a
place among our motives, it would crush the mind
with an intolerable weight and cause conduct to ap-
pear so responsible that the spring of energy would
be broken. It might easily betray us into living
so much for effect as to fall into hypocrisy. The
healthiest influence is unsought and unconscious. It
is not always when we are trying to impress others
that we impress them most. They elude the direct
efforts which we make, but they are observing us
when we are not thinking of it. They detect from
an unconscious gesture or chance word the secret
v/e are trying to conceal. They know quite well
whether our being is a palace fair within or only
a shabby structure with a pretentious elevation.

332 IMAGO CHRIST/.

They estimate the mass and weight of our charac-
ter with curious accuracy; and it is this alone that
really tells. Our influence is the precise equivalent
of our human worth or worthlessness.

A man may strive for influence and miss it. But
let him grow within himself — in self-control, in con-
scientiousness, in purity and submission — and then
he will not miss it. Every step of inward progress
makes us worth more to the world and to every
cause with which we may be identified. The road
to influence is simply the highway of duty and
loyalty. Let a man press nearer to Christ and open
his nature more widely to admit the energy of
Christ, and, whether he knows it or not — it is
better perhaps if he does not know it — he will
certainly be growing in power for God with men,
and for men with God. "Abide in Me, and I in
you : as the branch cannot bear fruit of itself
except it abide in the vine, no more can ye except
ye abide in Me."

Finis.

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