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Dmsioal^24't) 


JESUS  IN  THE 
EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 


^^^ 


^FEB  8  1934 

JESUS  IN  TH#%!£njn^ 
EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 


T.  R.  GLOVER 

Fellow  of  St.  John's  College,  Cambridge, 
and  Public  Orator  in  the  University. 
Author      of      "The      Jesus      of      History" 


NEW  ^^tSlr  YORK 
GEORGE  H.  DORAN  COMPANY 


Copyright,  1921,  by 
T.  R.  Glover 


PRINTED   IN   THE  UNITED   STATES   OF   AMERICA 


INTRODUCTION 

One  of  the  parables  of  Jesus  turns  on  the  ferment  of 
leaven  in  a  mass  of  meal — a  vivid  forecast  of  his  own 
effect  on  the  minds  of  men.  He  found  a  world  full  of 
established  ideas,  heirlooms  of  a  great  and  progressive 
past,  and  the  immediate  effect  of  his  coming  was  a 
struggle  between  inheritance  and  experience.  "It  was 
said  to  them  of  old  time;  but  I  say  unto  you."  The 
minds  of  most  of  us  are  like  palimpsests  written  over  and 
over  again ;  here  the  latest  notion  stands  out  in  the  new- 
est script,  but  between  the  letters  are  to  be  found  traces 
of  ideas  much  older,  obliterated  but  legible;  there  the 
old  is  almost  untouched,  but  the  closer  observer  finds  hints 
of  a  "later  hand."  Every  great  thinker  sets  men  re- 
writing these  palimpsests,  and  it  is  long  before  it  is  com- 
pletely achieved;  and  often  by  that  time  a  new  story  is 
being  superimposed  on  the  corrected  page.  Jesus  had 
the  same  material  to  work  upon  as  every  great  teacher, 
and  his  work  was  done  in  the  same  way,  on  the  same 
terms,  and  with  the  same  result  in  the  clash  of  old  and 
new.  He  has  reacted  on  mankind,  as  we  all  know ;  he  has 
transformed  their  ideas,  blotted  out  old  preconceptions 
and  convictions,  and  through  experience  brought  men  to 
a  new  set  of  principles ;  but  the  process  has  been  long  and 
slow. 

It  is  not  as  if  men  had  really  known  at  first  what  he 
meant  and  what  his  principles  involved  or,  indeed,  guessed 
how  much  his  personality  was  to  signify.  It  is  easy  to 
talk  of  his  disciples  taking  the  Christian  message  to  the 
world;  but  when  we  begin  to  consider  what  this  meant, 

V 


vi  INTRODUCTION 

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

In  one  region  and  another  of  experience  humanity  has 
experimented  with  Jesus,  constantly  with  new  and  un- 
expected results ;  it  has  explored  him  with  anxiety ;  it  has 
enjoyed  him;  and  by  exploring  and  enjoying  him  it  has 
found  more  and  more  in  him,  and  it  has  grown  in  the 
process. 


INTRODUCTION  vii 

Our  task  in  this  volume  is  primarily  historical.  We 
have  to  watch  the  Christian  apostle  and  the  Christian 
community  brought  face  to  face  with  new  issues,  in- 
tellectual, spiritual,  and  social,  and  doing  their  best  to 
adjust  old  and  new,  often  with  a  belief  in  the  perma- 
nence of  the  old  which  experience  does  not  sustain,  fre- 
quently with  a  good  deal  of  fear  which  proves  not  war- 
ranted. The  ancient  world  had  had  a  long  religious 
experience;  and  if  some  of  its  standard  ideas  were  as 
yet  insufficiently  examined,  some  of  its  gains  were  real 
and  permanent.  The  Christian  Gospel  had  to  be  re- 
examined in  connection  with  them  all. 

The  chief  questions  in  religion  for  that  ancient  world 
were  these: — Is  God  many  or  one?  Is  he  just? 
Can  man  have  peace  with  God  and  be  sure  of  it?  Is 
man's  own  personality  secure,  and  for  how  long?  We 
shall  in  turn  have  to  discuss  these  questions  and  the 
older  answers  to  them;  to  review  the  belief  in  spirits, 
that  heirloom  from  animistic  times,  the  philosophic 
foundation  of  polytheism;  the  problem  of  justice  which 
haunts  Greek  thinkers  from  Theognis  to  Plato  and  be- 
yond, and  is  the  inspiring  motive  of  Jewish  apocalyptic; 
the  conception  of  religion  as  safety,  and  of  sacrifice  as 
the  supreme  mode  of  religion,  the  assurance  of  God's 
acceptance.  As  all  these  ideas  had  been  perpetually 
readjusted  to  growing  experience  of  the  nature  of 
morality,  a  fuller  discussion  of  sin  and  its  forgiveness 
will  properly  follow,  and  with  it  a  survey  of  the  central 
question  of  the  nature  of  God,  and  then  of  the  problem 
of  personal  immortality,  which  occupied  antiquity  more 
and  more,  and  at  every  stage  depended  on  the  conception 
of  God  dominant  in  the  day.  Lastly  in  this  connection 
we  must  consider  the  attempt  made,  upon  the  back- 
ground of  these  beliefs  and  of  others,  to  explain  the 
place  of  Christ  in  the  universe  which  he  was  remodeling. 


viii  INTRODUCTION 

The  second  part  of  the  book  will  deal  more  directly 
with  the  Christian  society.  There  we  shall  have  to  re- 
view the  efforts  of  the  Church  as  it  wrestles  with  its 
own  problems  of  existence  and  effectiveness,  as  an  insti- 
tution. The  personal  relations  which  its  members 
generally  maintained  with  their  Founder  have  been  at 
every  period  decisive  for  the  character  of  the  Church  at 
large;  and  we  must  make  some  endeavor  to  determine 
these  relations,  particularly  when  and  where  they  are 
most  intense  and  most  controlling. 

Finally,  there  are  the  broader  effects  of  the  ideas  of 
Jesus  upon  human  progress  and  the  human  spirit  at 
large — sometimes  the  result  of  conscious  and  deliberate 
application  of  his  principles  to  the  affairs  of  men,  per- 
haps as  often  the  unconscious  and  unrecognized  but 
none  the  less  real  outcome  of  men's  affection  for  him. 

Of  course,  as  Aristotle  said  of  his  own  Ethics,  all  this 
will  be  attempted  "in  outline  and  not  in  detail."  A 
further  difficulty  will  be  that  in  all  such  study  we  have 
to  isolate  and  to  analyze  ideas  which  were  operative  to- 
gether and  acted  and  reacted  on  one  another;  but  that 
also  is  inevitable  unless  the  reader  will  tolerate  some 
repetition  among  the  chapters.  Finally,  writer  and 
reader  here  will  have  different  roles;  the  writer  is  to  be 
the  historian  merely ;  it  is  for  the  reader  to  pass  upon  the 
evidence  submitted  and  to  be  the  theologian.  In  any 
case  the  work,  if  properly  done  by  both  writer  and 
reader,  should  result  in  a  new  sense  of  the  significance 
of  Jesus  in  the  experience  of  men. 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

Introduction   v 

I.   The  War  with  the  Daemons 1 

II.  The  Problem  of  Divine  Justice 18 

III.  Saviours  and  Salvation 35 

IV.  The  Lamb  of  God 52 

V.  The  Forgiveness  of  Sin 71 

VI.   The  Revelation  of  God 92 

VII.   Immortality 113 

VIII.   Alpha  and  Omega 132 

IX.   The  Church  Compromising 147 

X.   The  Lordship  of  Jesus 169 

XI.   The  Friendship  op  Jesus 182 

XII.   The  Church  Triumphant 196 

XIII.  The  Humanizing  of  Life 211 

XIV.  The  Reconciliation  of  Freedom  and  Re- 
ligion    231 


IX 


CHAPTER     I 

THE  WAR  WITH  THE  DAEMONS 

I 

A  chance  phrase  will  sometimes  open  a  man's  mind  to 
us  and  show  us  a  series  of  thoughts  and  ideas,  of  precon- 
ceptions and  presuppositions,  which  surprise  us.  We 
have  known  him,  intimately,  too ;  and  behind  all  lay  this ! 
It  is  with  some  such  feeling  that  we  find  a  whole  world 
of  strange  background  to  the  familiar  thinking  of  St. 
JPaul.  He  speaks  of  the  wisdom  of  God,  and  then  he 
adds,  "which  none  of  the  princes  of  this  world  knew; 
for,  had  they  known  it,  they  would  not  have  crucified 
the  Lord  of  Glory"  (I  Cor.  2:8).  It  was  not  of  Pontius 
Pilate  and  Herod  that  Paul  was  speaking,  but  of  beings 
far  more  awful  and  far  more  powerful — thrones,  domin- 
ions, principalities  and  powers,  as  he  calls  them  else- 
where, "the  world-rulers  of  this  darkness,"  and  at  their 
head  is  "the  prince  of  the  power  of  the  air."' 

There  had  grown  up  in  Jewish  thought  a  great 
scheme  of  things  which  embodied  a  spirit  world  at  war 
with  God.  Satan  appears  in  the  Old  Testament,  first  of 
all  as  an  accuser,  and  then  as  a  maker  of  mischief.  In 
the  period  between  the  main  body  of  the  Old  Testament 
and  the  beginnings  of  the  New,  he  had  gained  a  greater 
prominence  in  men's  thoughts  and  was  now  lord  of  the 
angels  that  fell,  the  great  enemy  of  God,""  "the  Black 


1  See  II  Cor.  4:4;  Eph.  3:2;  Eph.  6:12;  Col.  2:30;  Gal.  4:3,  9.  For  princi- 
palities and    powers  and  thrones,   cf.   II   Enoch    (Secrets)    20:1. 

2  Cf.  Testament  of  Dan  5,  "For  I  read  in  a  book  of  Enoch  the  just,  that 
the  ruler  of  them  is  Satan."  Cf.  II  Enoch  (Secrets)  18:3.  In  I  Enoch 
65:6,  the  Satans  appear  in  the  plural. 


2  JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

One*".  God,  with  his  purposes,  and  the  forces  that  stand 
with  him,  is  confronted  by  powers  of  evil,  not  scattered 
and  desultory,  but  organized,  ruled,  and  guided,  well 
drilled,  well  led,  and  not  unaware  of  God's  designs. 
Again  and  again,  through  traitors  in  God's  Kingdom, 
they  got  wind  of  the  plans  of  God*  and  anticipated  them, 
defeated  them  where  they  could,  and  fought  a  war  of 
cunning  and  skill  against  God.** 

The  Jews  did  not  stand  alone  in  this  conception  of  the 
spirit  world.  For  the  primitive  peoples  of  today  and  for 
some  who  are  not  so  primitive,  the  whole  universe  is  full 
of  daemon  powers,  more  real  than  we  can  imagine.  In  an 
Indian  temple  I  have  seen  women  undergoing  the  process 
of  having  devils  driven  out  of  them.  I  have  seen  men 
of  education  bowing  in  these  temples  to  avert  the  anger 
of  such  spirits.  To  the  stranger  from  the  West,  with 
his  modern  science,  they  are  nothing.  To  the  ancient 
world  they  were  more  real  than  the  men  and  women  in 
the  streets.  All  the  daemons,  devils,  imps,  and  bogeys  of 
popular  belief,  and  all  the  gods  of  all  the  cults  and  all  the 
religions  were  being  reduced  to  one  system;  all  were 
necessary  in  an  orderly  Cosmos.  The  later  Greek 
philosophers  explained  through  daemons  the  origin  of 
evil,  all  the  mystery  and  all  the  trouble  of  the  world ;  and 
also  the  otherwise  inexplicable  gulf  between  the  ultimate 
but  unknowable  One  God  and  man.  Gods  lived  beyond 
the  atmosphere;  daemons  in  the  air;  man  on  earth.  So 
'there  was  this  daemon  world  proven;  proven  by  all  sick- 
ness and  sin ;  proven  by  long  belief,  by  the  old  religions ; 
proven  by  the  agreement  of  all  mankind;  proven  by  the 
assent   of   the   best   and   most   catholic   of   philosophic 


*  Barnabas  4:11.  ,       ,,t      , 

*Cf.    Enoch    16:3;   not  all   the  mysteries  were   known  to  the  Watchers 

who  fell. 

»  Cf .   H.   A.   A.   Kennedy,   St.  Paul  and  the  Mystery   Religions,  p.    121; 

St.  Paul  and  the  Last  Things,  pp.  324,  325;  Clemen,  Primitive  Christianity 

and  Non-Jewish  Sources,  pp.  83,   110. 


THE  WAR  WITH  THE  DAEMONS  3 

thinkers.  The  Jew  and  the  Christian  were  monotheists, 
but  they  too  believed  in  the  existence  of  daemons;  they 
were  face  to  face  with  this  awful  reality  of  the  daemon 
world  at  war  with  God.  Paul,  it  is  quite  clear,  shared 
that  belief,  though  he  did  not  give  to  it  the  importance 
that  other  men  gave. 

Into  that  war,  however,  according  to  Paul,  came  a  new 
force — the  son  of  God,  the  Lord  of  Glory.'  He  battled 
with  the  powers  of  evil,  and  the  battle  went  strangely, 
and  they  trapped  him.  Pilate  and  Herod  were  mere 
tools  in  the  hands  of  these  daemon  powers,  and  they  cap- 
tured the  Son  of  God.  They  crucified  the  Lord  of  Glory, 
and  inflicted  on  God  the  most  awful  disaster  that  could 
be  conceived.  Then  it  turned  out,  says  Paul,  that,  so 
far  from  defeating  God's  purposes,  with  all  their  skill 
and  all  their  cunning,  they  had  only  played  into  the 
hands  of  God.  For  the  defeat  of  Christ  on  the  cross  led 
to  the  Resurrection,  to  the  triumph  of  God  over  the 
daemon  powers,  to  captor  made  captive,  death  conquered, 
mankind  set  free;  and  all  the  glorious  promises  of 
spiritual  liberty  and  of  peace  with  God  which  the  Chris- 
tian world  knows,  and  in  which  it  rejoices. 

In  Paradise  Lost  we  have  this  story  in  its  most  glori- 
ous form,  but  few  of  us  accept  it  as  history.  All  this 
dim  world  has  passed  from  our  minds ;  this  tale  of  war  in 
the  spirit  sphere  is  for  us  the  merest  mythology — "as 
much  a  dream  as  Milton's  hierarchies,"  wrote  John  Keats." 
Yet  for  St.  Paul's  contemporaries  the  permanence  of  the 
daemons  was  better  assured  than  that  of  the  Lord  of 
Glory;  their  part  and  place  in  the  world  was  proved  and 
accepted,  his  was  a  doubtful  Jewish  assertion." 


^  The  Lord  of  Glory  is  a  name  of  God  in  I  Enoch. 

'  Keats,   Letter  io   Reynolds,   Augt^st   25,    1819. 

®  Celsus,  about  a.d.  178,  ridiculed  this  war  of  Satan  with  God;  it  was 
not  "holy"  to  suggest  that  the  greatest  God  had  a  rival;  it  was  all  a  mis- 
understanding (quite  in  the  Christian  style)  of  Heraclitus'  doctrine  of 
strife.      Celsus,   however,   accepted  belief  in   daemons  as  natural  and  right. 


4  JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

Two  problems  here  confront  the  historian.  He  has  to 
explain  how  this  phantasmagoria  disappeared,  and  why, 
if  this  legend  of  war  was  the  real  Christian  faith,  or 
some  vital  part  of  it,  the  Lord  of  Glory  has  not  gone 
with  the  rest  of  the  dramatis  personae.  The  identifica- 
tion of  the  Lord  of  Glory  with  the  carpenter  of  Nazareth 
was  surely  the  keystone  of  the  Christian  faith.  If  the 
one  is  dismissed  as  a  figure  in  a  fairy  tale,  what  signifi- 
cance is  left  to  the  other?  If  we  abandon  Paul's 
"mythology"  or  turn  it  into  "symbol,"  which  is  a  politer 
way  of  doing  the  same  thing,  do  we  not,  by  this  process 
of  discarding,  rob  the  Christian  tradition  and  the 
Christian  faith  of  its  distinctive  note  and  its  real  value? 

If  the  affirmation  of  the  writer  to  the  Hebrews  is  to 
stand,  "Jesus  Christ,  yesterday  and  today  the  same,  and 
forever";  if  the  Church  is  to  maintain  that  he  has  any 
permanence;  we  shall  have  to  show  what  has  been  his 
real  place  in  human  experience,  and  to  prove  that  the 
teaching  of  the  Church  about  its  Master  rests  not  on 
abstract  theory  or  mythology,  but  has  foundations  in 
what  men  have  actually  experienced  of  him.  We  shall 
have  to  treat  such  evidence  as  the  Christian  generations 
give  us,  exactly  as  we  do  all  historical  evidence — ^with 
the  same  sympathy,  with  the  same  caution,  applying  the 
same  canons  of  judgment,  using  the  same  habits  of 
doubt,  looking  in  the  same  spirit  of  truthfulness  for 
alternative  explanations,  careful  always  to  limit  our 
statements  severely  by  our  real  knowledge. 

The  modern  psychologist  has,  we  may  say,  settled  a 
great  many  questions  suggested  by  the  demonology  of 
the  past.  He  treats  visions  and  voices,  dual  personality, 
conversion,  and  so  forth,  in  a  way  foreign  altogether  to 
Paul's  contemporaries,  as  to  modern  Roman  Catholic,  to 
Hindu  and  animist;  and  his  conclusions  so  far  appeal  to 
the  best  trained  minds  as  more  satisfactory  than  the 


THE  WAR  WITH  THE  DAEMONS  5 

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


II 


After  quoting  the  evidence  of  St.  Paul  for  the  wide- 
spread belief  in  daemons,  it  may  seem  a  contradiction  to 
suggest  that  in  the  New  Testament  the  daemons  are 
already    beginning    to    recede    from    the    first    line    of 


6  JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

interest ;  yet  it  is  true.  The  writers  of  the  Gospels  refer 
all  sorts  of  diseases  to  daemon-possession,  as  their  con- 
temporaries did.  They  stood  with  their  neighbors  in 
psychology,  as  was  natural,  and  they  shared  their  opin- 
ions in  medicine.  But  while  they  keep  the  old  language 
and  the  old  beliefs,  they  are  in  possession  of  a  principle 
which  makes  these  of  less  consequence.  For  them  the 
daemons  and  gods  of  polytheism  are  no  longer  very 
interesting.  This  is  doubly  clear.  Paul  puts  it  quite 
explicitly  that  they  are  defeated  and  are  "coming  to 
naught";  and  the  chief  interest  of  the  early  Christian 
was  manifestly  in  Jesus.  The  pagan  gods  were  quickly 
disposed  of;  they  were  the  angels  that  fell — mere 
daemons  like  the  rest.  But  it  was  a  longer  time  before 
the  daemons,  and  their  milder  but  legitimate  descend- 
ants, the  fairies,  were  definitely  expelled  for  ever  from 
the  sphere  of  existence;  but  it  was  achieved,  and  by  the 
New  Testament  principle  of  concentrating  emphasis  on 
Jesus  Christ. 

Thus  Tatian,  in  the  second  century,  proclaims  with  joy 
that  "instead  of  daemons  that  deceive  we  have  learnt 
one  Master  who  deceiveth  not."  A  modern  Japanese, 
Uchimura,  struck  the  same  note;  it  was  joyful  news, 
"one  God  and  not  eight  million."  Tatian  found  it  an 
attraction  in  Christianity  that  it  is  "monarchic"  and 
"sets  man  free  from  ten  thousand  tyrants."  Modern 
scholars  are  only  beginning  to  realize  the  burden  laid  on 
the  human  mind  by  astrology  and  kindred  impostures 
that  came  from  the  East,  and  with  a  jargon  of  phil- 
osophy and  religion  imposed  themselves  on  the  Roman 
world.  Tatian  knew  it  well  enough  and  renounced  the 
Greeks  and  their  philosophy.'  Philosophy  had,  in  fact, 
by  its  surrender  to  polytheism  and  popular  belief  in 
daemons,  strengthened  their  hold  on  men.     The  Gospel 


»  See  Tatian,  cc.  9,  16,  17. 


THE  WAR  WITH  THE  DAEMONS  7 

did  not  in  so  many  words  deny  their  existence,  but  first 
degraded  them  and  broke  their  hold,  and  at  last  anni- 
hilated them.  By  so  doing  it  took  terror  out  of  men's 
souls,  it  made  obscene  and  cruel  rites  needless,  and 
greatly  purified  and  sweetened  life. 

It  is,  however,  important  to  note  that  there  was  a 
struggle.  The  Gospel  could  be  made  infinitely  more 
palatable  to  many  minds  by  bringing  it  into  line  with 
other  religions,  by  blending  with  it  religious  and  philo- 
sophical principles  on  which  they  rested,  but  which  were 
vitally  opposed  to  Christian  history  and  Christian  ideals. 
Such  combinations  appeared  to  clear  up  real  philosoph- 
ical difficulties  and  left  men  in  a  congenial  atmosphere  of 
magic  and  daemonic  agencies.  It  does  an  historian's 
heart  good  to  see  the  swinging  blows  with  which 
Ignatius  hammers  a  contemporary  theory  (c.  A.  D.  110) 
that  made  Jesus  into  a  "daemon  without  a  body."  It  is 
worth  remembering  that  the  Church  always  held  to  the 
real  humanity  of  Christ;  it  was  left  for  the  heresies  to 
spin  endless  genealogies  of  figments,  metaphors,  essences, 
and  daemons.  To  some  minds  fancy  always  seems  more 
able  than  truth  to  fire  the  imagination.  Today  it  is  hard 
for  the  Western  thinker  to  make  anything  at  all  of  the 
fragments  of  Gnostic  theology  and  demonology  that  have 
come  down  to  us,  or  to  understand  how  anybody  could 
ever  have  been  interested  in  them.  This  is  in  itself  an 
indication  of  what  the  absorbing  interest  in  Jesus  has 
done;  and  when  one  grasps  that  it  stands  between  us 
and  systems  like  the  many  forms  of  modern  Hinduism 
and  theosophy,  one  realizes  anew  the  value  of  the  his- 
torical Jesus. 

At  times  it  might  seem  as  if  the  early  Christian,  like 
converts  from  heathenism  today,  really  used  the  Gospel 
as  a  sort  of  super-magic.  He  employed  "the  Name  that 
is  aibove  every  name"  to  expel  devils;  and  from  an  ex- 


8  JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

perience  of  my  own  in  India  I  can  understand  why  he 
did."*  But  that  was  by  the  way.  What  made  that  name 
of  value  was  the  Man  who  bore  it,  and  the  supreme  inter- 
est of  his  character  and  story,  his  cross  and  resurrection, 
and  yet  more  his  teaching  upon  God  and  the  intimate 
relation  with  God  which  was  at  last  the  only  way  of  ex- 
plaining him.  If  Jesus  embodied  God,  if  "God  was  in 
Christ  reconciling  the  world  unto  himself,"  if  God  was 
essentially  like  Jesus,  then  obviously,  however  real  they 
might  be,  the  daemons  were  irrelevant.  As  the  daemon- 
world  was  at  best  a  theory  to  explain  phenomena  possibly 
susceptible  of  other  explanations,  when  Jesus  made  it 
irrelevant  it  ceased  to  be  of  interest  and  it  died.  This 
is  shortening  the  story  but  not  changing  its  meaning. 
If  throughout  the  Middle  Ages  and  even  after  the  Refor- 
mation men  believed  in  daemons  and  witches,  as  they 
did,  the  liberation  of  the  human  mind,  which,  as  we 
shall  see  in  a  later  chapter,  belongs  to  the  work  of  Christ, 
steadily  drove  the  superstition  into  the  background 
where  it  gradually  died.  Jesus  is  allied  with  the  powers 
of  the  mind,  and  his  Gospel  naturally  militates  against 
"imaginations  and  every  high  thing  that  thrusts  itself 
up,"  as  Paul  said. 

Ill 

That  Jesus  was  historical  differentiates  him  at  once 
from  the  daemon  "Rulers  of  the  World"  and  their  hosts. 
They  were  creatures  of  the  fancy;  and  he  was,  in  our 
ordinary  sense  of  the  word,  real.  They  depended  on  a 
theory  or  a  series  of  theories,  and  their  dispositions  and 
natures,  when  they  had  any,  were  mere  matters  of  legend 
and  fairy   tale;    but   there   was   nothing   authoritative. 


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


THE  WAR  WITH  THE  DAEMONS  9 

nothing"  final,  about  them.  Indeed  there  was  nothing  to 
begin  on,  such  as  a  real  person  offers.  A  character  guar- 
anteed by  history  is  something  definite  to  work  upon, 
however  multiple  it  may  be.  It  is  possible  to  spend  one- 
self with  profit  in  the  study  of  a  real  man;  but  if  a 
daemon  or  a  fairy  has  any  lineaments  at  all,  they  are 
borrowed;  and  the  peacock's  feathers  are  more  interest- 
ing on  the  peacock  than  on  the  jackdaw,  especially  when 
the  jackdaw  itself  is  a  fable. 

It  was,  as  we  have  seen,  an  immense  gain  that  Jesus 
was  objective,  that  one  could  say  of  him,  "This  befel  him 
and  that  definitely  did  not.'*  The  value  of  this  will  be 
brought  out  by  even  a  very  short  investigation  of 
Plutarch's  method  of  handling  legend  or  a  little  talk 
with  a  Hindu  defending  Hinduism.  On  the  one  side 
there  is  nothing  but  a  series  of  dissolving  views;  with 
Jesus  you  are  on  the  rock  at  once  and  have  positive 
knowledge.  To  the  troubled  in  heart  it  was  intense 
relief  to  turn  to  a  real  figure  with  a  real  experience  and 
no  "perhaps"  underlying  all.  But  he  is  more  than  his- 
torically real;  he  is  real  in  a  deeper  sense. 

The  first  three  gospels  give  records  of  a  peculiar  inti- 
macy about  his  life,  his  character,  his  mind  and  person- 
ality. They  yield  a  surprising  amount  of  detail,  vivid, 
various,  and  true.  He  can  be  known  well,  for  while  his 
sayings  are  often  perplexing  and  stimulating,  as  he 
meant  them  to  be,  his  meaning,  his  general  drift,  his 
fundamental  ideas  are  extraordinarily  clear.  He  has  a 
reality,  an  intensity,  that  makes  other  men  look  beg- 
garly in  their  outfit,  starved  in  nature  and  parochial. 

Here  is  a  man  of  genius  going  quite  beyond  everyone 
else  we  know  of  that  kind;  a  man  of  wide  range  in  ex- 
perience, of  intuition,  of  acumen  and  instincf.  He  knows 
what  his  experience  means  and  he  does  not  miss  it.  He 
sees  and  feels  things  with  an  intensity  that  we  do  not 


10        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

reach.  It  is  of  this  type  that  our  greatest  teachers  are 
in  every  sphere.  The  tourist,  for  instance,  sees  a  water- 
fall, a  rock  so  many  feet  high  with  water  coming  over; 
he  looks  at  it,  and  then  takes  a  newspaper  from  his 
pocket  till  it  is  time  to  go  home.  Wordsworth  sees  more 
and  realizes  he  is  face  to  face  with  a  great  storehouse 
of  experience: 

"The  sounding  cataract 
Haunted  me  like  a  passion." 

The  sound  of  it  rang  in  his  ears ;  the  sight  of  it  stayed 
with  him,  the  color,  the  gleam,  the  beauty ;  he  knew  they 
would,  and  was  (so  to  speak)  too  busy  to  waste  any- 
thing in  momentary  enjoyment.  Jesus,  we  can  guess, 
felt  Nature — experienced  Nature — in  a  way  very  similar. 
Men  miss  a  great  deal  of  their  experience;  but  he  is 
clearer-headed  than  we  are.  He  sees  things,  grasps 
things  and  realizes  them.  To  take  a  crucial  case,  already 
referred  to,  he  realized  pain.  When  men  drew  the  great 
spiritual  teachers  of  that  day,  they  left  out  any  sugges- 
tion of  their  being  amenable  to  pain  when  they  could, 
and  made  them  impassive.  Jesus*  followers  drew  him  on 
the  cross.  Men  have  always  felt,  as  they  got  into  touch 
with  Jesus,  that  here  is  a  man  who  knows  where  the 
problems  hurt.  Why  does  the  widow  lose  her  son?  He 
had  lived  with  a  widow  and  her  children,  and  worked  for 
her  day  in  and  day  out,  and  from  her  he  learnt  a  tender- 
ness for  all  women  and  all  widows.  What  is  the  mean- 
ing of  that  pain?  Or  the  pain  of  a  prodigal  son?  That, 
too,  he  has  drawn  in  his  parables.  He  felt  it  and  he 
knew  it.  The  problem  bore  on  him  and  burdened  him 
and  took  him  to  the  cross.  What,  again,  is  the  meaning 
of  the  devilish  hardness  of  the  human  heart?  What  in- 
deed? Four  years  of  war  have  revealed  ugly  streaks  in 
us ;  we  fancied  they  were  not  there ;  but  he  knew.    Here, 


THE  WAR  WITH  THE  DAEMONS  11 

then,  was  a  man  who  had  been  bruised  and  agonized  by  the 
problems  that  trouble  us.  He  had  to  wrestle  with  these 
things.  He  would  have  no  anodyne.  He  drank  the  cup 
without  the  anesthetic.  He  went  through  it  all  till  he 
knew  the  points  that  trouble  men  and  women.  He  knew 
exactly  where  the  difficulty  comes;  and  he  has  found 
peace.  Matthew  Arnold  wrote  a  good  deal  of  theology 
which  is  obsolete,  but  there  are  certain  things  which  he 
wrote  which  rise  higher  than  much  modern  criticism. 
"Jesus  Christ,"  he  said,  "was  above  his  reporters";  but 
he  said  a  greater  thing  still.  "Jesus  bases  himself 
always  on  experience,  and  never  on  theory";  and  that  is 
a  great  truth. 

Genius  differs  from  our  common  endowment  perhaps 
most  in  this  that  it  seizes  the  fact  with  meaning;  and, 
that  once  achieved,  all  the  rest  fall  into  lucidity.  For 
Jesus  experience  was  not  sheer  sickening  pain,  for  he 
understood  what  to  do  with  it.  He  penetrated  farther 
into  it  than  we  do.  This  again  is  the  mark  of  the  genius, 
of  the  poet.  Jesus  had  a  hold  of  the  centrality  of  God 
in  experience  in  a  way  that  still  surprises  us.  Call  it 
genius,  insight,  intuition — or  use  the  speech  of  the 
Church  and  say  Word,  Essence,  Homoousios — the  fact 
we  are  all  trying  to  express  is  the  intense  hold  that 
Jesus  has  of  the  Real;  he  knowSy  where  others  are  guess- 
ing, and  guessing  badly." 

Our  age  is  not  the  first  to  discover  the  value  to  ordi- 
nary people  of  a  great  man.  The  names  of  Socrates  and 
Zeno  haunt  the  discourses  of  that  day.  They  and  not 
the  daemons  were  the  moral  examples,  a  significant  fact. 
"Place  before  yourself  what  Socrates  or  Zeno  would  have 
done  in  such  circumstances,"  said  Epictetus.'-  "Though 
you  are  not  yet  a  Socrates,  you  ought  to  live  as  one  who 


"See  p.    110. 
^Manual,   ZZ. 


12        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

wishes  to  be  a  Socrates.""  "Go  away  to  Socrates  and  see 
him  .  .  .  and  think  what  a  victory  he  felt  he  won  over 
himself.""  Others  gave  similar  advice;  "Do  everything 
as  if  Epictetus  saw."''  And  among  Romans  Cato  and 
Laelius  were  recommended.  "We  ought  to  choose  some 
good  man,"  writes  Seneca,  "and  always  have  him  before 
our  eyes  that  we  may  live  as  if  he  watched  us,  and  do 
everything  as  if  he  saw."'®  So  old  and  so  natural  is  the 
use  men  make  of  other  men  who  have  been  victorious  in 
life;  so  much  more  profitable  is  history  than  theory. 

The  great  man  is  felt  not  to  be  an  accident,  or  (to 
use  a  biological  term)  a  "sport,"  but  to  be  a  real  and 
relevant  manifestation  of  what  human  nature  is.  What 
is  possible  for  one  can  be  possible  under  conditions  for 
another;  and  then  the  question  rises  about  the  condi- 
tions, a  question  difficult  enough  but  soluble  somehow, 
men  feel.  And  man,  by  nature  built  to  be  moral  and  to 
be  religious,  built  to  seek  for  truth,  is  driven  by  his 
experience  of  the  "great  Man"  to  look  more  deeply  into 
human  nature  and  into  its  relations  with  the  spiritual 
environment,  with  God.  In  epitome,  all  real  progress 
in  religion  has  been  achieved  by  men  who  would  face 
the  facts  and  divined  which  facts  to  face;  by  men  who 
realized  that  victory  in  the  sphere  of  mind  and  char- 
acter is  the  best  evidence  as  to  ultimate  reality;  or, 
simply,  by  men  who  had  good  fathers  and  friends  and 
knew  it,  and  put  them  definitely  above  doubtfully  moral 
gods  and  daemons,  and  slowly  rethought  their  ideas 
of  God  and  rebuilt  their  religious  systems  on  the  im- 
pulse of  their  experience  of  human  goodness."  It  is  not 
necessary  here,  nor  possible,  to  survey  through  nineteen 


"  Manual,    SO. 
^*  Discourses,   II,    18,    22. 
15  Seneca,  Ep.  25:5. 
"£*.    11:8. 

"  The    last    clause    epitomizes    a    good    deal    of    the    progrecs    in    religion 
made  by  Greece  before  Plato. 


THE  WAR  WITH  THE  DAEMONS  13 

centuries  how  men  s  experience  of  Jesus  has  driven  them 
into  fresh  thought  on  God  and  man.  But  to  realize  how 
far  ahead  of  religions  based  on  daemon-theories  and 
old  legends  Christianity  is,  some  close  study  in  detail 
of  its  records  and  its  contrasts  is  invaluable. 

To  recapitulate,  before  we  pass  on,  the  victory  of 
Jesus  has  only  been  slowly  won.  Tradition,  association, 
esthetics,  sheer  conservatism,  and  terror  have  all  played 
their  part  in  retarding  it.  There  must  be  daemons,  men 
felt,  or  all  the  world  would  not  say  so ;  what  "everybody" 
says,  must  be  true — paraphrasing  Stoic  doctrine  of  the 
consensus  of  mankind.  But  experience  of  Jesus  was  a 
great  corrective.  He  was  very  difficult  to  explain;  the 
reconciliation  of  what  he  said  with  the  teaching  of  priest 
and  philosopher  and  gossip  was  very  hard;  but  in  the 
end  fact  conquers.  There  he  was,  historical,  true,  intel- 
ligent of  his  experience,  a  pioneer  in  fact  and  an  inter- 
preter; and  there  he  is  still. 


IV 


It  is  difficult  to  recall  an  instance  of  a  great  person- 
ality putting  a  new  truth  before  the  world  and  passing 
away  from  the  life  of  mankind  before  the  new  lesson 
was  learnt  to  the  very  end  and  transcended.  The  prophets 
pass  away;  the  commentators  pass,  and  the  doctors — ■ 
these  last  two  very  quickly.  The  poets  stand  far  better, 
for  they  take  us  farther  into  reality;  Jesus  best  of  all, 
for  he  reaches  the  greatest  depths  in  all  he  feels  and 
says.  We  have  not  yet  exhausted  what  he  has  to  say;  at 
times  it  seems  as  if  we  had  hardly  begun  to  explore  it. 
In  two  ways  we  realize  how  far  ahead  he  is  of  us.  When- 
ever the  Church  returns  to  him  and  begins  to  take  him 
seriously,  there  is  always  a  resurrection,  evidence  of  a 
new  life;  and  this  could  not  be  if  his  value  were  spent. 


14       JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

And,  further-— for  the  Church  does  not  always  lead  the. 
intelligence  of  mankind — ^when  new  light  reaches  the 
Church  from  without,  again  and  again  it  proves  that 
the  new  science,  or  the  new  scholarship,  the  new  politics 
or  the  new  psychology,  that  seemed  "dangerous"  to  the 
Gospel  of  Christ,  is  not  inimical  in  the  least,  has  nothing 
about  it  that  we  could  think  alien  to  the  spirit  of  the 
Jesus  of  history.  Four  years  of  war  have  taught  us 
much  evil,  but  they  have  at  least  revealed  that  Jesus' 
conception  of  man  was  truer  than  those  estimates  com- 
monly framed  by  politicians,  emperors,  war  offices,  and 
journalists.  No  political  society  has  yet  attempted  to 
organize  itself  on  the  basis  of  the  belief  that  Jesus  can 
be  unreservedly  right  in  his  view  of  man.  Our  economics 
and  our  nationalism  make  Jesus  inevitable;  there  is  no 
getting  rid  of  him  till  we  have  transcended  him.  The 
war  again  raised  in  millions  of  homes  the  question  that 
Jesus  settled.  The  New  Testament  speaks  of  him  abolish- 
ing death  and  bringing  life  and  immortality  to  light 
(II  Tim-  1 :10) ;  it  suggests  that  the  sting  of  death  is 
gone,  that  the  tragedy  is  all  resolved  in  quiet  and  content 
by  his  cross  and  his  resurrection.  The  gulf  between 
such  a  view  and  the  sorrow  we  know  in  every  land  of 
Europe  today  measures  the  distance  between  us  and  the 
disappearance  of  Jesus. 

But  if  Jesus  is  still  a  great  correction  to  our  thought 
about  men,  still  more  is  he  to  our  thought  about  God. 
If  a  man  were  to  make  the  experiment  for  a  week,  never 
in  reading,  in  thought  or  in  speech,  to  let  the  name  of 
God  pass  without  trying  to  put  into  it  the  full  meaning 
that  Jesus  gives  it,  the  staggering  task  would  bring 
home  to  him  how  far  Jesus  is  from  being  superseded, 
how  far  we  are  from  having  exhausted  the  value  of  his 
message  about  God.  Jesus  again  will  remain  till  we 
have  worked  out  the  full  value  and  meaning  of  what 


THE  WAR  WITH  THE  DAEMONS  15 

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

So  far  we  have  been  dealing  with  the  part  played  by 
Jesus  in  shaping  and  clearing  thought.  But  thought  is 
tested  in  life  and  conduct.  There  are  about  us  hundreds 
of  men  and  women  who  have  found  that  in  the  business 
of  keeping  level  with  life,  in  the  more  desperate  business 


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


16        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

of  fighting  one's  character  through  to  something  like 
decency,  Jesus  is  still  a  dependable  factor.  We  are  not 
dealing  with  propositions  in  the  air ;  we  are  dealing  with 
Someone,  they  tell  us,  to  whom  we  can  go  and  say,  "Come 
and  help  me,"  and  he  does.  If  some  psychologists  will 
not  quite  let  us  say  that,  they  must  concede  that  we  find 
help  when  we  bring  him  in.  It  is  not  clear  that  the  psy- 
chologists are  at  the  end  of  their  discoveries,  and  their 
disciples  often  quote  them  too  soon  and  with  too  dogmatic 
a  tone;  there  are  still  facts  about  suggestion  to  be  dis- 
covered and  to  be  v/eighed ;  and  when  psychology  has  said 
its  last  about  the  facts,  it  is  philosophy  that  has  to  bring 
in  the  verdict  on  the  facts.  In  the  meantime  it  is  the 
experience  of  countless  souls  that  where  we  touch  Jesus 
we  do  somehow  touch  the  real.  Do  we  not  know  men  and 
women  who  have  been  remade  by  Jesus  Christ?  In  our 
own  lives,  too,  we  know  the  help  that  Jesus  has  been 
and  is.  It  is  our  experience  that  we  can  depend  upon 
him,  that  we  can  utilize  him ;  and  our  experience  is  guar- 
anteed in  measure  by  the  similar  experience  of  others. 
Even  if  this  form  of  expression  needs  correction,  and 
granting  that  our  experience,  even  when  so  confirmed, 
needs  examination,  we  have  here  a  strong  presumption 
of  evidence;  we  are  justified  in  thinking  that  truth  awaits 
us  in  this  direction.  If  we  find  help  in  Jesus  it  seems 
reasonable  to  maintain  that  Jesus  has  not  passed  away, 
and  to  attribute  some  large  part  of  his  effect  to  his  being 
a  real  historical  personality,  neither  a  legend  nor  a  dogma, 
but  a  man. 

If  he  has  not  passed  away,  he  remains  the  concern  of 
all  who  take  life  seriously.  We  shall  never  understand 
the  last  nineteen  centuries,  if  he  and  his  influence  are 
unfamiliar  or  unintelligible  to  us.  We  shall  not  have 
our  full  equipment  for  facing  the  future  if  so  great  a 
Force,  intelligible,  available  and  unexhausted,  is  left  by 


THE  WAR  WITH  THE  DAEMONS  17 

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


^ 


CHAPTER     II 
THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVINE  JUSTICE 

All  through  Christian  history  we  find  an  emphasis  on 
the  judgment  seat  of  Christ,  an  inspiration  at  once  of 
terror  and  of  hope,  but  so  far  at  least,  an  integral  part 
of  the  Christian  scheme  of  things.  To  the  historian  it 
is  plain  that  the  picture  of  this  judgment  seat,  the  "great 
white  Throne,"  owes  features  to  older  story;  and  certain 
reflections  at  once  occur.  Has  the  judgment  seat  a  legiti- 
mate place  in  Christian  thought,  or  is  it  a  survival  of 
pre-Christian  tradition  and  alien?  In  other  words,  is  it 
a  matter  of  inheritance  or  does  it  rest  on  some  real  ex- 
perience? And  again,  if  experience  has  been  used  to 
point  to  such  a  conclusion  of  human  history,  is'  this  the 
sole  and  necessary  inference  of  the  experience,  or  is  an- 
other alternative  possible?  Assuming  a  "last  judgment" 
of  some  sort,  what  relevance  or  relation  can  the  historical 
carpenter  of  Nazareth  have  to  it?  For  it  is  at  least  a 
remarkable  thing  that  when  Christians  borrowed  from 
Jews  the  idea  of  a  Judgment  Day,  and  developed  it  along 
the  lines  of  the  Greek  philosophic  myths,  they  transferred 
the  supreme  place  to  Jesus. 

To  understand  the  central  idea  of  a  Great  Assize, 
whether  Jewish,  Platonic,  or  Christian,  it  is  well  to  ex- 
amine the  experience  which  led  men  to  venture  such  a 
hjrpothesis.  It  must  be  borne  in  mind  that  it  is  not  so 
much  folklore  as  philosophy  that  underlies  the  doctrine, 
an  attempt  to  justify  the  ways  of  God  to  men.    As  the 

18 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVINE  JUSTICE  19 

data  in  the  problem  are  common,  we  shall  take  them  as 
the  Christian  had  them  presented  to  him. 


There  are  two  judgment  seats  in  the  New  Testament — 
Pilate's  (Matt.  27:19)  and  Christ's  (II  Cor.  5:10)— and 
whatever  uncertainty  there  be  about  the  judgment  seat 
of  Christ,  there  is  no  mystery,  no  wonder,  no  perhaps, 
about  the  judgment  seat  of  Pilate;  we  are  touching  fact 
there.  The  story  is  familiar.  The  priests  have  got  their 
man.  One  of  his  followers  .ent  back  on  him  and  sold 
him — a  thing  that  has  often  happened  in  the  East,  and 
is  not  unknown  in  the  West.  They  took  him  to  Pilate 
with  an  accusation  and  some  sort  of  evidence.  Pilate 
was  no  Roman  of  the  old  school;  he  did  not  hold  with  all 
the  ancient  traditions  of  self-rule  and  principle;  but  he 
was  shrewd  and  clever,  and  he  saw  through  the  situation. 
He  knew  the  priests  very  well ;  he  had  also  heard  a  little 
of  the  man  perhaps — one  of  those  tiresome  "kings  of  the 
Jews";  but  a  glance  at  the  man  told  him  at  once  that 
there  was  nothing  of  importance  this  time.  There  is  no 
case;  but  these  people  are  not  in  a  pleasant  mood;  and 
his  record  is  not  strong  enough  to  leave  him  quite  inde- 
pendent. So  the  question  rises :  What  is  to  be  done  with 
this  poor  creature? 

It  is  a  festival,  at  which  the  tradition  is  that  a  prisoner 
shall  be  released;  and  there  is  a  notable  prisoner  in  his 
hands,  a  man  whom  they  all  know.  Barabbas,  we  are 
told,  had  made  an  insurrection,  and  in  the  course  of  it 
there  had  been  murder.  The  Fourth  Gospel  says  he  was 
a  brigand.  In  the  nineteenth  century  there  were  men 
in  Greece  whom  the  Turks  called  brigands,  but  the  Greeks 
counted  them  patriots;  the  difference  was  merely  in  the 
point  of  view.    The  Greek  people  loved  them  and  made 


20        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

ballads  about  them,  till  the  name  klepht  (thief,  in  old 
Greek)  became  romantic.  Barab^as  was  probatoly  of  this 
type.  He  had  defied  the  law.  Yes,  but  foreigners  had 
made  the  law.  He  had  given  trouble  to  the  Government, 
and  the  persons  killed  very  likely  were  Roman  soldiers. 

According  to  one  gospel  (Matthew's)  Pilate  offers  the 
crowd  the  choice  of  Jesus  or  Barabbas.  The  others  give 
another  account  of  how  the  alternative  was  presented. 
The  talk  in  the  crowd  must  have  been  ebb  and  flow, 
somehow  so.  There  are  no  real  grounds,  says  one  man, 
for  Jesus  being  put  to  death.  No,  but  we  are  in  such 
a  position,  that  if  we  free  Jesus  we  kill  the  patriot. 
Some  people  had  thought  that  Jesus  might  be  the  Mes- 
siah, but  he  is  a  hopeless  failure.  There  is  no  reason 
why  Jesus  should  not  be  released  on  the  merits  of  the 
case,  and  Barabbas  in  accordance  with  custom.  Jesus  or 
Barabbas?  Well,  we  cannot  give  away  Barabbas.  But, 
after  all,  it  is  not  really  we  who  condemn  either  Jesus 
or  Barabbas  to  death;  we  would  release  both.  The  re- 
sponsibility rests  with  the  man  who  has  fastened  the 
alternative  upon  us,  or  it  is  inherent  in  the  situation. 
All  we  have  to  do  is  to  decide  who  has  served  our  people 
best.  One  man  calls  out  for  Barabbas,  and  then  every- 
body shouts  "Barabbas!"  "And  what  about  Jesus?" 
There  are  people  at  work  among  the  crowd  representing 
the  priests,  and  the  cry  goes  up:  "Crucify  him!"  The 
only  chance  to  get  Barabbas  is  to  have  Jesus  crucifie4. 
So  the  cry  comes  with  more  volume,  and  Pilate  gives 
them  Barabbas;  and  that  is  the  end  of  Jesus  called 
Messiah.* 

Jesus  was  condemned  because  he  was  unpopular.  He 
had  had  a  chance  of  popularity  and  had  missed  it.     He 


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


THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVINE  JUSTICE  21 

was  unpatriotic.  "Render  unto  Caesar,"  he  said,  "the 
things  that  are  Caesar's."  A  very  clever  answer!  But 
on  the  straight  issue  of  Rome  or  Israel  he  had  floundered. 
Barahbas  had  been  definitely  patriotic.  The  teaching  of 
Jesus  was  unpractical.  It  was  not  going  to  lighten  the 
burden  of  Roman  oppression.  It  was  very  pretty  for  an 
ideal  world,  for  Utopia,  as  we  say;  for  Plato's  Republic, 
as  they  used  to  say;  very  beautiful.  But  we  live  in  a 
real  world;  and  Jesus  was  unpractical.  Unpopular,  un- 
patriotic, unpractical,  unintelligible — it  is  a  heavy  indict- 
ment, and  the  periods  in  history  have  been  few  when  it 
would  not  carry  condemnation  with  it. 

The  suffering  of  the  innocent  is  no  strange  thing; 
what  would  war  be  without  it?  A  certain  percentage 
of  miscarriages  is  always  to  be  expected  of  justice. 
Again  and  again  in  history  we  see  a  general  collapse  of 
conscience  in  government  or  people,  under  the  influence 
of  fear  of  some  foreign  enemy,  or  for  want  of  the  habit 
of  facing  new  ideas  in  politics  or  economics,  or  even  in 
religion.  History  is  full  of  such  horrors.  Nor  is  it  only 
the  past  that  knows  them. 

II 

After  all,  the  condemnation  of  Jesus  raises  the  com- 
mon issue  of  injustice  and  wrong.  It  is  the  crucial  case. 
So  the  question  rises.  Is  the  thing  going  to  stay  there 
or  is  it  not?  Is  the  judgment  seat  of  Pilate  the  last 
word?  Our  instinct,  the  instinct  of  all  men,  is  that 
what  is  wrong  cannot  be  left  wrong ;  it  must  be  set  right 
somehow.  Men  have  felt  there  must  be  a  court  of  appeal 
that  will  put  it  right. 

God's  ways,  of  course,  are  inscrutable.  Children  die, 
and  ships  are  wrecked;  the  plain  laws  of  Nature  work 
out  in  pain  and  perplexity ;  but  there  is  something  worse, 


22        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

far  worse,  which  has  to  be  explained  in  God's  manage- 
ment of  the  universe.  The  most  tragic  thing  of  all  is 
man's  failure  to  achieve  justice.  All  society  is  an  en- 
deavor toward  justice,  from  the  first  dawn  of  history, 
from  the  earliest  appeal  to  chief  or  king  for  an  award 
between  tribesman  and  tribesman,  from  the  day  when 
the  people  called  for  the  first  publication  of  laws,  down 
through  all  the  codes — codes  of  Moses,  of  Manu,  of 
Justinian — Magna  Charta,  Habeas  Corpus;  has  not  jus- 
tice been  the  common  life-nerve  of  every  revolution? 
Does  it  not  underlie  all  the  great  movements?  And  yet, 
after  all  these  centuries  of  pain  and  tragedy,  man  does 
not  recognize  justice;  and  even  where  he  does,  a  whiff 
of  terror  or  passion,  and  he  tramples  underfoot  the  very 
principle  on  which  he  lives,  for  which  he  and  his  fathers 
have  sacrificed  so  much.  Is  it  not  tragic?  For  does  it 
not  imply  that  man,  with  all  his  long  experience,  all  his 
slowly  developed  but  real  sensitiveness,  cannot  trust  him- 
self against  passion? 

But  does  not  all  society,  all  real  life,  rest  upon  the 
distinction  between  right  and  wrong  being  fundamental, 
and  ever  more  profoundly  real?  If  experience  means- 
anything,  is  it  not  the  progressive  discovery  of  the  nature 
of  right  and  wrong?  And  to  confuse  them,  is  it  not  the 
negation  of  the  very  idea  of  cosmos  itself,  a  flat  denial 
that  there  is  any  reality,  any  principle,  in  the  universe? 
If  the  universe  is  rational,  the  distinction  between  right 
and  wrong  must  be  clear,  definite,  reliable  at  last,  however 
long  the  process  of  discovery;  and  those  who  suffered 
to  make  the  discovery  ought  surely  to  have  the  benefit 
of  it.  Otherwise  human  life  is  the  voyage  of  a  derelict, 
without  chart  or  helm,  and  without  port. 

God's  own  character  is  involved ;  for  if  God  can  manage 
no  better  thing  for  such  a  wonderful  spirit  as  Jesus  of 
Nazareth  than  to  fumble  him  into  the  hands  of  a  con- 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVINE  JUSTICE  23 

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

Then  that  scene  of  Pilate  and  Jesus  is  not  the  end  of 
the  story?  That  was  the  great  question  with  mankind. 
For  centuries  men  had  been  thinking  and  dreaming  of 
another  tribunal.  From  Homer  down  to  Plato  men  had 
wrestled  with  the  problem  of  justice.  How  could  Zeus 
pretend  to  rule  the  universe  and  look  on  at  what  was 


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


24        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

done  there?  So  asked  Theognis,  neither  pietist  nor  phi- 
losopher, but  a  good  conservative,  shocked  by  the  over- 
turn of  the  one  society  in  which  he  believed.  And  so 
asked,  sooner  or  later,  all  thinking  men.  The  problem, 
somewhere  or  other,  in  one  form  and  another,  underlies 
all  the  tragedies  of  the  great  Greek  dramatists.  If 
Agamemnon  is  murdered,  "the  doer  must  suffer";  and 
the  righteousness  of  the  universe  is  proved  by  the  slay- 
ing of  Aegiathus  and  Clytaemnestra  and  the  acquittal  of 
Orestes.  A  generation  later,  the  question  is  put  again 
by  Euripides,  more  pungently,  and  with  a  closer  adher- 
ence to  the  facts  of  life.  In  his  Trojan  Women,  for  in- 
stance, punishment  seems  to  impend  upon  the  guilty,  but 
all  the  time  we  know,  and  everybody  knows,  that  Helen 
goes  unpunished  and  all  the  misery  and  shame  fall  on 
the  guiltless;  and  there  is  frankly  no  recompense  to  the 
good  who  suffer  for  the  sins  of  others,  unless  perhaps 
Hecuba  hits  the  dim  clue  to  it: 

"0  stay  of  Earth,  that  hast  thy  seat  on  earth. 
Whoe'er  thou  art,  ill-guessed  and  hard  to  know, 
Zeus,  whether  Nature's  law,  or  mind  of  man. 
To  thee  I  pray ;  for  on  a  noiseless  path 
All  mortal  things  by  justice  thou  dost  guide."* 

Then  the  end  of  the  play  comes;  her  husband  is  dead, 
her  sons  are  dead,  her  daughters  are  made  human  sac- 
rifices or  given  as  concubines,  her  little  grandson  is  killed 
for  policy,  and  she  is  led  away  into  slavery ;  and  the  ques- 
tion remains.  Law  of  nature,  human  intelligence,  phys- 
ical basis  of  earth — what? — can  it  be  that  righteousness 
is  the  norm  of  all?  And  Euripides  leaves  us  the  ques- 
tion, heightened,  not  answered. 

Plato  had  to  wrestle  with  the  same  problem.    Obvious 
injustice  revolts  people;  but  supposing  one  could  dodge 


»  Troades,    884. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVINE  JUSTICE  25 

its  consequences?  "Imagine  the  unjust  man  to  be  master 
of  his  craft,  seldom  making  mistakes,  and  easily  correct- 
ing them;  having  gifts  of  money,  speech,  strength — the 
greatest  villain  bearing  the  highest  character ;  and  at  his 
side  let  us  place  the  just  in  his  nobleness  and  simplicity — 
being,  not  seeming — without  name  or  reward— clothed  in 
his  justice  only — the  best  of  men  who  is  thought  to  be 
the  worst,  and  let  him  die  as  he  has  lived — scourged, 
racked,  bound,  his  eyes  put  out,  at  last  impaled — and  all 
this  because  he  ought  to  have  preferred  seeming  to  be- 
ing." Men  are  taught  to  be  righteous  for  the  sake  of 
the  rewards;  here  the  supposed  order  of  things  is  re- 
versed; and  the  unrighteous  man,  rich  by  dishonesty,  can 
worship  the  gods  better  and  will  be  more  loved  by  them 
than  the  just.*  It  will  not  do  to  quote  poets  and  moral- 
ists: we  all  know  what  convention  says  (yofios)  ;  what 
does  Nature  ((^vVis)  say?  Is  the  ultimate  reality,  what- 
ever it  be,  moral  ?  Or  is  the  whole  idea  of  morality  hallu- 
cination, or  a  humbug  maintained  by  people  for  ulterior 
ends? 

More  than  once  Plato  put  his  reply  in  the  form  of 
myth,  premising  that,  without  pressing  details,  a  man  of 
sense  would  say  that  this,  or  something  like  it,  must  be 
near  the  truth  of  things.  In  the  Gorgias  he  describes  a 
tribunal  in  the  world  beyond,  where  the  judge  judges 
every  man  as  he  comes  before  him,  naked  soul  to  naked 
soul;  the  marks  of  earthly  rank  are  gone,  and  the  judge, 
not  knowing  who  this  is,  looks  with  piercing  eyes  upon 
the  naked  soul,  and  sees  this  and  this  and  this,  and  judges 
exactly  by  what  he  sees.  Absolute  justice,  that  is  Plato's 
profoundest  thought  upon  the  world.  Justice  is  for  him 
the  foundation  of  all  existence  and  its  inevitable  end. 

The  Jews  had  the  same  idea;  but  in  their  pictures  the 
judge  was  not  a  shadowy  figure  like  that  of  Plato's;  he 


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


26        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


'^  Republic,  1:331   F. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVINE  JUSTICE  27 

stay;  till,  after  centuries  of  thought  and  suffering  and 
progress,  Plato  drew  the  inference  that  the  Homeric  gods 
are  not  gods,  and  he  drew  it  largely  as  a  result  of  the 
conviction  that  they  fell  short  in  moral  sense. 

"By  all  that  He  requires  of  me 
I  know  what  God  Himself  must  be." 

The  modem  couplet  sums  up  a  great  deal  of  history. 
God  has  been  interpreted  over  and  over  again  through 
the  moral  sense  of  man ;  he  has  revealed  himself  in  man's 
experience.  (We  must  be  careful  not  to  limit  the  mean- 
ing we  give  to  the  phrase,  but  to  be  sure  that  we  recog- 
nize that  man's  experience  includes  a  large  number  of 
elements,  all  available  for  his  spirit.)  Broadly,  man's 
conception  of  God  and  man's  ethical  standards  advance 
or  recede  together. 

Now,  whether  the  universe  is  rational  enough  to  con- 
firm him  or  not,  it  is  recognized  that,  with  the  coming 
of  Jesus,  the  conception  of  God  became  enlarged  with 
new  values,  and  acquired  a  richness  and  depth  it  never 
had  before."  With  this  new  view  of  God  an  inevitable 
progress  followed  in  man's  ethical  ideas,  in  man's  demand 
for  justice,  his  insistence  that  the  universe  must  be  rea- 
sonable and  just.  Jesus  may  have  been  wrong  in  all  this, 
and  the  universe  may  fall  short  of  what  he  conceived  to 
be  inevitable  from  his  experience  of  God.  That  is  not 
our  present  affair;  the  point  is  that  the  progressive  illu- 
mination which  life  threw,  or  seemed  to  throw,  upon  jus- 
tice and  right,  reached  a  new  stage ;  the  old  ideas  were  re- 
thought more  powerfully  than  ever;  the  standards  were 
advanced  with  a  great  sweep  forward;  more  than  ever 
before  was  asked  of  the  universe,  more  was  expected 
of  God. 


•Wi-h  this  Chapter  VI  deals  more  fully. 


28        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

ni 

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


■'Close  analogies  with  Matthew.  25  are  found  in  Enoch  14:3;  62:5;  90; 
and  other  such  books,  but  without  the  firmness  and  coherence  of  the  gos- 
pel version,  in  which,  too,   there  is  a  development  in  principle. 

8  J.  H.  Leckie,  World  to  Come,  p.  27:  "It  is  an  excellent  rule  to  sus- 
pect all  accounts  of  Jewish  doctrine  in  proportion  as  they  suggest  sym- 
metry,   order,   and   logical    coherence." 

B  Even  if  we  limit  ourselves  to  St.  Paul,  scholars  find  it  hard  to  make 
a  harmony  of  his  teachings;  his  eschatological  views  changed  with  his 
spiritual  growth  and  experience.  Cf.  H.  A.  A.  Kennedy,  St.  Paul  and 
Last  Things,  pp.  21,  25;  Stevens,  Theology  of  N.  T.,  p.  482;  R.  H.  Charles. 
Apocrypha  and  Pseudonyma,  I,  529;  J.  H.  Leckie,  World  to  Come, 
p.     181. 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVINE  JUSTICE  29 

A  sane  treatment  of  apocalyptic  must  be  on  the  lines 
of  our  usual  treatment  of  parable  and  of  poetry.  A 
forced  harmony  of  details  makes  foolishness  of  the  real 
value;  the  suggestion  of  each  picture  must  be  seized  and 
then  the  analogy  must  be  dropped.  At  the  same  time, 
we  have  to  recognize  the  extraordinary  poetic  value  which 
the  Last  Judgment  has  had,  for  nothing  lends  itself  to 
great  poetry  that  has  not  some  profound  truth  in  it. 

To  secure  the  deeper  meaning  of  the  Great  Day  to 
come,  Dies  irae  dies  ilia,  let  us  go  back  to  the  judgment 
seat  of  Pilate.  What  was  most  real  there?  Pilate  with 
his  powers  of  life  and  death?  the  priests?  the  voice  of 
the  people?  the  hideousness  of  human  cowardice  and 
falsity,  of  mob-psychology?  No,  there  was  something 
more  real.  After  all,  it  was  not  Jesus  who  was  on  trial 
before  Pilate;  it  was  the  Jewish  religion,  it  was  the 
Roman  Empire,  it  was  human  justice,  on  trial  before 
Jesus.  Pilate  was  judged  for  ever  there  and  then  by 
Jesus;  and  so  were  the  priests,  and  the  people  who 
shouted  for  Barabbas,  some  because  they  wanted  him, 
and  some  because  they  did  not  like  to  say  anything  else ; 
and  so  were  all  the  men  and  women  whose  lives  were 
shaped  and  determined,  as  they  looked  at  Jesus  on  the 
Cross  that  day.  That  principle  always  holds.  A  man 
writes  himself  down  when  he  says  he  does  not  like  a 
great  work  of  art,  drama,  or  music,  or  picture.  We 
exhibit  our  own  characters  in  our  judgments  of  Jesus 
Christ;  we  label  ourselves,  and,  what  is  more,  we  give 
a  turn  to  our  development  for  good  or  ill.  Pilate  and 
Caiaphas  and  the  rest  had  been,  like  all  men,  develop- 
ing character  in  the  ordinary  way — by  choices,  inclina- 
tions, and  fancies,  by  tacit  acceptances  of  principles  of 
life.  This  day  suddenly  and  for  ever  declared  what  type 
of  men  they  had  chosen  to  be,  or  had  become  by  that 
negligence,  which  after  all  is  a  choice  too.     And,  as  al- 


30        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

ready  suggested,  the  day  confirmed  their  choices  and  fixed 
their  characters ;  they  accepted  themselves  more  definitely 
as  they  stood.  The  attitude  of  every  man  that  day  was 
partly  the  outcome  of  his  former  life  and  so  revealed  it; 
but  it  was  also  a  new  self-determination  brought  aibou^ 
by  the  contact  of  the  character  he  had  developed  with 
something  wholly  new,  a  new  situation,  a  new  type,  and 
so  it  became  decisive  for  the  future.  The  day  was  as 
decisive  for  the  other  onlookers,  for  those  who  wept,  for 
those  who  had  looked  away  and  would  not  see,  for  Simon 
the  Cyrenian  whom  (and  his  sons  after  him)  it  brought 
into  the  circle  of  Jesus'  followers.  And  the  day  was 
decisive  for  mankind;  if  it  was  to  be  a  choice  between 
Pilate  and  Jesus,  then  God's  universe  must  fit  and  match 
one  of  them,  and  that  one  could  hardly  be  Pilate.  Pilate's 
universe  will  not  do. 

The  higher  ideal  prevails.  The  moral  sense  of  man- 
kind has  moved  more  and  more  to  the  standards  of 
Jesus,  as  we  can  see  in  men's  criticisms  of  the  Church 
and  of  Christian  people.  "That,"  says  the  world,  "is  not 
what  you  expect  of  a  Christian";  in  which  is  implied 
that  more  is  expected  of  a  Christian  than  of  another  man. 
In  other  words,  the  world  has  curiously  slipped  into 
admitting  that  the  standards  of  Jesus  are  at  any  rate  the 
highest  we  have  yet  reached.  Anyone  who  accepts  this, 
is  logically  involved  in  a  far  more  serious  treatment  of 
sin  and  in  a  profounder  apprehension  of  God,  a  new 
study  of  reality.  The  world,  in  its  more  quiet  and  candid 
moods,  when  it  is  not  controversial,  knows  quite  well  by 
now  that  the  character  and  personality  of  Jesus  are  the 
ultimate  standard.  However  uncertain  about  God  we 
m'ay  be.  Christian  and  non-Christian  alike,  deep  in  our 
hearts,  if  we  put  it  in  plain  language,  we  have  a  feeling 
that  if  God  really  is  like  Jesus  Christ,  things  are  all 
right.    In  blunter  language,  what  we  really  mean  is  this, 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVINE  JUSTICE  31 

that  if  God  will  mould  himself  on  the  example  of  Jesus, 
then  we  can  trust  him.  That  means  that,  for  everyone 
who  is  dissatisfied  with  the  justice  of  the  world,  there 
is  eventually  one  court  of  appeal,  the  tribunal  of  Jesus 
Christ,  that  we  live  in  a  world  where  Jesus  is  the  last 
word. 

The  early  Christians,  and  not  they  alone,  went  further. 
They  were  convinced  that  Jesus  has  the  last  word — a 
proposition  not  so  different  as  it  seems  at  first  sight,  if 
we  concede  that  personality  survives  death.  What  is 
remarkable,  is  that  Jesus  would  appear  to  have  shared 
this  belief,  or  something  very  like  it,  and  this  without 
being  aibsurd  or  insane.  In  any  case  it  is  strange  enough. 
For  picture  the  carpenter's  shop;  a  customer  drops  in  C 
and  orders  a  plough  to  be  made  or  a  yoke,"*  and  the  car- 
penter agrees  to  make  it.  Next  day  you  can  see  him 
busy  with  it,  bending  over  his  bench,  wiping  the  sweat 
from  his  face.  You  see  him  on  the  Galilaean  road,  dusty 
and  dirty  v  ith  long  travel.  You  see  him  sitting  by  the 
roadside  with  a  crowd  of  his  friends,  as  they  hand  him 
bread  and  he  passes  them  the  salt.  You  see  him  drop  off 
to  sleep  in  a  boat  with  sheer  fatigue ;  and  at  last  you  see 
him  hanged  on  a  cross.  And  then,  within  one  generation, 
they  say  the  world  is  going  to  be  judged  by  that  crucified 
carpenter.  It  is  incredible;  and  yet  mankind  at  its 
soberest  and  quietest  has  age  by  age  said  that  it  cannot 
think  of  anybody  else.  That  is  one  aspect  of  Jesus  in 
the  experience  of  men. 

IV 

That  Christians  have  believed  that  Jesus  would  judge 
the  world  in  person,  does  not  prove  that  he  will.  That 
is  not,  however,  our  point.    We  have  to  learn  what  they 


^°  Justin,    Dialogus    cunt     Tryphone,    88,    p.     316    C,     says    Jesus    made 
these. 


32        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

have  believed  and  do  believe,  and  why ;  and  the  latter 
inquiry  is  the  harder  and  the  more  profitable.  We  have 
to  go  further  yet,  however,  and  ask  what  effect  the  belief 
has  had  in  the  lives  and  characters  of  those  who  have 
held  it. 

But  first  we  must  look  a  little  more  closely  at  the  be- 
lief. It  is  that  we  must  all,  as  Paul  said  (II  Cor.  5:10), 
be  inspected,  made  manifest,  uncovered,  before  the 
judgment  seat  of  Christ.  It  will  be,  as  Plato  put  it, 
naked  soul  to  naked  soul.  That  has  been  the  Christian 
thought;  that  he  knows  more  about  us  than  we  know 
ourselves,  and  far  more  than  some  of  our  intimate  friends 
know.  He  knows  the  temptation;  the  battle;  the  half- 
victory,  which  the  world  calls  defeat.  We  have  to  remem- 
ber that,  if  Jesus  is  the  same  yesterday  and  today  and 
for  ever,  the  judge  pictured  by  this  early  Church  on  that 
throne  is  the  same  friend  who  sits,  says  Paul,  on  the 
right  hand  of  God  and  makes  intercession  for  us — one 
of  the  most  beautiful  pictures  of  the  New  Testament.  It 
is  here  that  the  simile  of  the  human  law  court  quite 
breaks  down;  the  human  judge  limits  his  survey.  But 
Jesus  knows  the  full  story;  and  he  sets  the  same  value 
on  men  and  women  as  he  did  when  he  was  here.  In  the 
stories  of  the  dealings  of  Jesus  with  men  and  women 
we  read  how  highly  he  valued  the  human  soul;  and  by 
the  statement  that  Jesus  sits  upon  that  final  tribunal  is 
meant  that  the  human  soul  is  to  be  judged  by  him  who 
is  most  interested  in  it  and  loves  it  best. 

The  outcome  of  this  in  ordinary  life,  has  been  that 
with  every  fresh  realization  of  Jesus  men  have  moved 
on  to  a  firmer  and  more  searching  self-criticism.  They 
have  lived  in  the  presence  of  the  Great  White  Throne, 
and  applied  its  standards  all  the  way  through  life  to 
themselves;  and  we  know  what  great  characters  they 
grew.    Lord  Morley  has  spoken  of  men  "fortified  by  the 


THE  PROBLEM  OF  DIVINE  JUSTICE  33 

training  in  the  habits  of  individual  responsibility  which 
Protestantism  involves.""  "Look  exactly  (aKpi^s)  how 
you  walk,"  wrote  Paul  (Eph.  5:15).  It  has  been  de- 
scribed as  the  merit  of  Calvin's  theology  that  it  com- 
pelled men  to  contemplate  themselves  as  for  ever  stand- 
ing face  to  face  with  the  sovereign  majesty  of  God." 
Lack  of  the  self-criticism  which  Jesus  induces  is  one  of 
the  reasons  for  the  comparative  failure  of  the  Church 
today. 

Further,  in  proportion  as  men  have  seen  the  histor- 
ical Jesus  oftener  and  spent  more  time  in  his  company, 
they  have  been  more  sympathetic  in  their  criticism  of 
others.  Shallow  people  are  always  right;  they  never 
have  any  difficulty  in  deciding  the  issue — I  was  going  to 
say  on  half  the  evidence,  but  often  they  don't  want  so 
much;  and  their  judgments  are  not  generous.  The  real 
Jesus  deepens  human  nature  and  sweetens  it.  Where 
men  have  realized  the  judgment  seat  of  Christ,  there  has 
been  a  closer  attention  for  unexpected  manifestations 
of  Jesus  Christ.  The  Son  of  Man,  as  he  said,  comes  in 
an  hour  when  we  look  not  for  him.  He  comes  in  queer 
shapes  and  forms,  in  new  duties,  and,  I  think,  particularly 
in  the  distasteful  duty  of  thinking  things  over  again. 
In  the  picture  which  Jesus  himself  draws  of  the  last 
judgment,  we  find  that  the  people  on  the  left  hand  of 
the  Judge  got  there  by  the  simple  process  of  inattention, 
by  not  thinking  of  things  anew  and  often  enough.  There 
has  always  been  poverty,  they  said,  and  thought  no  more 
of  it.  There  has  always  been  injustice;  so  we  let  it  go. 
There  has  always  been  ignorance;  so  we  did  not  trouble 
about  it.  Again  and  again  that  scene  in  King  Lear  comes 
into  my  mind  in  this  connection.  Lear  on  the  heath 
realizes  what  poor  houseless  wretches  have  all  their  lives 


**  Compromise,  p.   240. 

"A.  V.  G.   Allen,   Continuity  of  Christian  Thought,   303. 


34        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

through.  "Oh !  I  have  ta'en,"  he  cries,  "too  little  care  of 
this."  The  vision  of  Jesus  on  the  throne  makes  men 
more  responsive  to  truth  that  comes  from  the  unpopular 
and  the  unpractical.  It  has  meant  a  greater  boldness  in 
the  confession  of  Christ.  Put  the  issue:  Is  it  the  judg- 
ment seat  of  Pilate  or  the  judgment  seat  of  Christ  that 
is  final?  If  it  is  the  judgment  seat  of  Christ,  men  have 
felt  secure  in  the  confession  of  Christ;  the  growth  of 
the  sense  of  reality  about  the  triumph  of  Christ  has 
reacted  upon  their  loyalty  to  him  and  to  his  teaching — 
and  this  to  the  great  gain  of  all  the  world.  And  what 
peace  of  mind  has  come  with  the  assurance  that  the  last 
word  is  with  Jesus,  and  that  he  and  his  understand  one 
another,  we  do  not  need  to  read  far  in  Christian  literature 
to  find  out.    A  stanza  of  Charles  Wesley  may  sum  it  up : 

"Jesus,  my  all  in  all  thou  art. 

My  rest  in  toil,  my  ease  in  pain; 

The  medicine  of  my  broken  heart. 
In  war  my  peace,  in  loss  my  gain: 

My  smile  beneath  the  tyrant's  frown, 

In  shame,  my  glory  and  my  crown." 


CHAPTER    III 
SAVIOURS  AND  SALVATION 


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


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

35 


36        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

The  name  "Saviour,"  moreover,  belonged  to  competing 
religions;  there  were  other  gods  who  were  called  "sav- 
iour," gods  of  a  different  order.  The  mystery  religions  to 
which  scholars  are  turning  our  attention  so  much  (a  good 
deal  more  than  they  need,  I  sometimes  think)  offered  men 
salvation.  There  are  those  today  who  discover  in  that 
offer  of  salvation  a  close  parallel  to  the  Christian  re- 
ligion. The  parallel  is  by  no  means  so  close  as  is  often 
imagined." 

It  would  be  an  interesting  study  to  trace  the  reasons 
for  the  adoption  of  the  word  "salvation"  by  the  Church 
in  preference  to  "the  Kingdom  of  God,"  which  was  the 
phrase  used  by  Jesus  at  least  at  the  beginning  of  his 
ministry.  One  cause  for  the  change  would  probably  be 
the  transplanting  of  the  Gospel  to  Gentile  ground. 
"Messiah"  was  done  into  Greek,  and  became  more  a  per- 
sonal name  than  a  description.  The  whole  series  of  con- 
ceptions bound  up  with  the  Messiah  and  the  Kingdom  of 
God  were  foreign  to  the  Greek  world.  The  Greeks  and 
the  Hellenized  were  entitled,  if  Christian  freedom  was 
anything  at  all,  to  choose  the  vocabulary  which  best  con- 
veyed to  them  the  fullness  of  their  new  experience.  The 
Jew  supposed  he  knew  what  Messiah  and  Kingdom  of  God 
meant,  though  his  interpreters  varied  so  widely  that  a 
stranger  could  reasonably  plead  that  the  terms  lacked 
definition  and  did  not  convey  any  clear  ideas.  On  the 
other  hand,  the  Greek  in  similar  way  found  more  content 
in  his  own  coinage  of  "salvation,"  though  here,  too,  more 
ideas  were  covered  by  the  term  than  conduced  to  clear 
thinking.  So,  while  the  title  "Christ"  survived,  the 
"Kingdom  of  God"  fell  into  the  background ;  and,  in  spite 
of  efforts  being  made  today  to  bring  it  forward  again, 


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


SAVIOURS  AND  SALVATION  37 

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


^  Growth   of  Christianity,   p.    128. 


38        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

Gospel,  that  a  language  was  found  at  all  equal  to  ex- 
pressing the  mind  of  Jesus. 

But  we  use  language  at  our  own  peril;  and  the  term 
salvation  needed  revision  and  purification,  and  it  has  had 
it.  Today  it  is  difficult  for  anyone  not  an  archaeologist, 
and  unacquainted  with  Indian  thought,  to  realize  that  the 
term  is  susceptible  of  other  than  a  conventional  Christian 
meaning.  Hence  when  we  are  told  that  Christianity  was 
only  one  of  a  number  of  religions  which  offered  men  sal- 
vation, an  idea  is  often  conveyed  that  the  Christian  relig- 
ion hardly  differed  from  the  rest.  A  closer  examination  of 
the  meaning  of  these  offers  of  salvation  and  the  charac- 
ters of  the  cults  that  made  them  is  necessary. 

There  are,  however,  some  preliminary  considerations. 
First  of  all,  the  documents,  on  which  our  knowledge  of 
those  religions  depends,  have  to  be  dated;  and  a  liturgy 
is  perhaps  the  hardest  of  all  books  to  date,  in  that  it  is 
very  generally  a  mosaic  of  fragments  from  older  docu- 
ments and  may  be  endlessly  edited  and  reedited.  This 
formula  or  that  prayer  may  be  far  older  than  the  rest  of 
the  book ;  the  larger  part  of  the  compilation  may  be  good 
evidence  for  the  beliefs  of  an  earlier  day,  or  the  whole 
may  be  quite  modern  work,  done  in  an  artificially 
archaized  style.  In  such  literature  borrowing  is  easy 
and  adaptation  is  easy,  especially  before  the  invention 
of  printing,  when  books  were  still  made  singly  and  in 
manuscript;  and  the  easier  such  operations  were  for  the 
priest,  the  less  surely  can  they  be  checked  by  the  scholar 
hundreds  of  years  later.  It  is,  again,  arguable  that  to 
amalgamate  features  found  in  different  cults  and  so  to 
form  a  common  type  of  mystery  religion,  and  then  to 
impose  this  type  upon  the  cults  and  to  assume  that  they 
generally  conformed  to  it,  is  not  legitimate  scholarship. 
Mr.  Edwyn  Bevan,  in  a  striking  article  in  the  Hibbert 
Journal  (October,  1912),  pointed  out  that  more  is  talked 


SAVIOURS  AND  SALVATION  39 

by  moderns  about  saviour-gods  and  their  deaths  and 
resurrections  than  the  evidence  is  readily  equal  to  prov- 
ing; that  they  are  not  at  all  so  plentiful  as  some  people 
suppose;  that,  v^hen  some  Gnostic  sects  have  them  and 
others  do  not,  it  is  not  enough  for  a  scholar  to  label  them 
Gnostic  gods;  and  that  the  Gnostic  sects  which  have 
saviour-gods  may  as  probably  (or  under  the  circum- 
stances more  probably)  have  borrowed  from  Christianity 
as  Christianity  from  Gnosticism.  It  is,  further,  to  be 
noted  that  to  the  end  Christian  polemic  is  directed 
against  the  Olympian  gods  and  that  allusions  to  compet- 
ing sacraments  are  not  so  common.  Julian  the  Apostate 
prayed  with  fervor  to  Athena. 

But,  if  we  knew  for  certain  that  the  Gnostic  sects  and 
the  mystery  religions  had  every  one  a  doctrine  of  salva- 
tion and  even  a  personal  saviour-god,  not  much  is  proved. 
Salvation  is  a  vague  term.  It  makes  all  the  difference 
from  what  these  various  cults  offered  salvation,  and  to 
what,  or  for  what,  and  by  what  means.  We  find  that 
men's  minds  in  the  centuries  round  the  Christian  era 
were  obsessed  by  astrology*  and  other  doctrines  from 
the  East;  they  were  full  of  planets  and  their  influences, 
of  fate  and  destiny ;  and  all  these  things  were  interwoven 
with  religion,  with  belief  in  immortality,  with  dread  of 
the  long  journey  before  the  soul,  if  transmigration  with 
its  ^'sorrowful  weary  wheel'*  were  true.  Men  wanted 
assurance  for  their  personality,  and  escape  from  fate  and 
destiny,'  and  all  the  fears  of  life  and  death. 

It  is  a  curious  and  interesting  thing,  that  some  of  the 
most  beautiful  phases  of  Indian  religion  in  these  last 
centuries  have  had  the  same  endeavor,  to  set  men  free 


*  See  generally  Cumont,  Astrology  and  Religion,  and  his  Oriental  Reli- 
gions in  Roman  Empire;  and  P.  Wendland's  brilliant  book,  Die  hellen- 
istische-romische   Knltur. 

'  Cf.  H.  A.  A.  Kennedy,  St.  Paul  and  the  Mvsterv  Religions,  pp.  24, 
216;  Welland,  op.  cit.,  p.  176;  Reitzenstein,  Hell.  Myst.  Rellg.,  p.  38; 
Poimandres,    p,    103. 


40        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

from  the  chain  of  act  and  deed ;  free  by  virtue  of  a  union 
with  a  God  who  will  lift  them  out  of  it  all,  lift  them  out 
of  the  hands  of  fate,  out  of  the  power  of  death  and  re- 
birth, and  set  them  free  from  all  the  play  of  circum- 
stance and  pain  and  sorrow.  The  very  striking  poems  of 
Tuka  Ram,**  the  Maratha  mystic  of  the  same  period  as 
the  English  Vaughan,  haunt  the  reader.  "I  know  thy 
faith,"  says  Tuka,  addressing  his  god,  Vitthoba,  "I  have 
grasped  thy  feet,  I  will  not  let  them  go.  I  will  not  take 
anything  to  let  them  go.  I  have  clung  to  them  so  long 
that  thou  wilt  find  it  an  old  affair  and  a  perplexing  one  to 
get  rid  of  me.  Tuka  says,  I  will  not  let  thee  go,  not  if 
thou  givest  me  all  else."  "He  fastens  us  to  his  waist- 
cloth  and  takes  us  quickly  across  the  stream  of  the 
world."  "I  have  had  enough  of  running  .  .  .  now 
take  me  on  thy  hip;  do  not  make  me  walk  any  more." 
Those  who  have  seen  the  Indian  child  riding  on  his 
mother's  hip,  will  know  what  Tuka  means,  when  he  says : 
"We  sit  on  his  hip,  hence  we  have  full  confidence."  Some 
of  Dr.  Nicol  MacnicoFs  verse  renderings  of  Tuka  might 
be  interpolated  among  Cowper's  poems  from  Madame 
Guyon,  and  not  be  detected  without  reference  to  the 
French. 

But  what  is  "the  stream  of  the  world"?  In  other 
poems  Tuka  speaks  of  the  awful  prospect  of  ceaseless  in- 
carnation that  the  doctrine  of  Karma  involves;  "eight 
million  times  have  I  to  enter  the  gate  of  the  womb"; 
and  he  tells  of  the  desolation  that  the  doctrine  makes  of 
love  and  friendship,  and  of  the  family.  He  compares 
son,  brother,  father,  and  wife  to  logs  jammed  on  a  stream 
in  flood ;  the  key-log  is  drawn ;  the  water  rushes  over  the 
land  and  the  logs  are  scattered  and  none  touches  its  neigh- 
bor again;  and  so  it  is  with  all  we  love  in  the  stream 


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


SAVIOURS  AND  SALVATION  41 

of  the  world,  we  meet  to  part  for  ever,  while  each  pur- 
sues up  and  down  the  weary  cycle  of  eight  million  lives. 
Tuka  and  other  mystics  of  India  believed  that  from  this 
a  man  might  be  saved  by  Bhakti,  by  self -annihilating  de- 
votion to  a  friendly  god/  Karma  and  Bhakti  are  the 
two  poles  of  Indian  religious  thought.  Vitthoba  seemed 
to  Tuka  to  promise  salvation ;  but  even  if  Madame  Guyon 
and  he  have  some  affinity,  as  all  mystics  are  said  to  have, 
it  was  not  such  a  salvation  as  Tuka  conceived  of,  that 
William  Cowper  believed  he  had  lost. 

The  salvation  offered  by  the  mystery  cults  of  the 
Roman  Empire  was  of  much  the  same  character;  it  was 
escape  from  death  and  its  concomitants,  from  reincarna- 
tion, but  not  from  sin,  unless  salvation  from  sin  con- 
tributed to  the  main  purpose.  Their  moral  teaching  was 
perhaps  not  negligible,  but  it  was  not  in  the  first  line. 
It  was  of  secondary  importance ;  and  when  morality  takes 
a  subordinate  place,  it  may  as  well  be  left  out.  It  re- 
mains a  fact  that  these  religions  fell  far  short  of  the 
teaching  of  the  great  philosophers  of  antiquity. 

Into  this  world,  full  of  moral  impulses  and  moral  teach- 
ing, full  of  religions  that  offered  salvation,  comes  a  new 
religion,  which  unites  the  moral  and  the  devotional,  v/hich 
brings  ethics  into  the  very  heart  of  religion  and  makes 
God  the  center  of  morality.  Those  who  speak  of  Chris- 
tian salvation  as  if  it  were  merely  what  was  offered  by 
those  old  religions — escape  from  death  and  fear  of  death, 
or,  as  if  it  were  some  doubtfully  moral  device  invented 
by  Jesus  to  tamper  with  God's  moral  order — can  surely 
not  have  looked  far  into  the  mind  of  Jesus  himself.  Noth- 
ing can  be  less  like  the  meaning  of  Jesus. 

One  thing,  however,  we  have  to  note.  The  Christian 
idea  of  salvation  has  never  really  been  a  fixed  one.  It 
has  always  tended  to  enlarge  its  scope  as  men  have  en- 

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


42        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

tered  into  the  ideas  of  Jesus ;  and  that  is  one  of  the  ways 
in  which  Jesus  has  asserted  himself,  and  one  of  the  rea- 
sons why  he  remains.  He  keeps  opening  the  eyes  of  the 
Church  to  larger  vision  of  his  meaning  and  of  his 
thought.  Salvation  must  have  a  wide  range  when  it 
comes  from  Jesus.  Could  he  have  offered  men  a  salva- 
tion as  pitiful  as  some  of  us  conceive?  His  conception 
of  salvation  will  be  large  as  his  thoughts  of  men,  and 
deep  and  high  and  wonderful  as  his  thoughts  of  God; 
greater  as  we  grow  to  understand  it. 

II 

We  can  begin  by  asking  from  what  the  Christian  re- 
ligion offered  men  salvation,  and  offers  it  still. 

First  of  all  we  may  put  fear.  It  is  extraordinary,  the 
range  of  fear  in  human  experience.  There  are  physical 
fears  of  pain,  sickness,  and  death,  fears  that  we  share 
with  the  animals.  There  are  more  human  fears  like  the 
fear  of  bereavement,  of  which  the  animal  knows  a  little, 
and  men  and  women  so  much.  There  are  fears  of  death, 
not  because  it  wipes  out  me,  but  because  it  wipes  out 
someone  else.^  A  man  of  fine  spirit  spoke  to  me  of  his 
daughter:  "I  would  give  anything,'*  he  said,  "to  have  it 
proved  to  me  that  I  should  see  her  again."  If  we  refuse 
to  be  overborne  by  death  and  add  to  the  range  of  our 
outlook  a  world  beyond  the  grave,  the  very  addition  in- 
creases the  scope  of  fear  and  doubt.  There  rise  the 
horror,  the  uncertainty,  and  the  bad  dreams  of  that  other 
world  in  which  we  may  find  ourselves.  The  ancient 
world  was  possessed  with  the  fear  of  daemons;  a  large 


*  To   illustrate    this,    three   familiar   lines   of    one    of   the    finest   spirits    of 
antiquity  may  be  quoted — Georgics,  2:490; 

Felix  qui  potuit  rerum  cognoscere  causas 
Atque  mettis  omnes  et  inexorabile  fatum 
Subjecit    pedibus    strepitumque    Acherontis    avari. 


SAVIOURS  AND  SALVATION  43 

part  of  mankind  today  is  haunted  with  the  fear  of  being 
born  into  this  world  again.  The  writer  to  the  Hebrews 
speaks  of  men  who  all  their  lives,  through  fear  of  death, 
were  subject  to  bondage.  Fear,  then,  is  obviously  the 
first  thing  from  which  we  have  to  be  saved.  It  is  worth 
noting  that  the  early  Christian  gave  a  large  place  to 
death  among  the  things  from  which  Christ  saves.  Paul 
obviously  connected  physical  death  with  the  coming  of 
moral  evil  into  the  world — a  view  difficult  to  the  modern 
biologist,  and  not  based,  so  far  as  we  know,  on  anything 
in  the  teaching  of  Jesus.^ 

The  Christian  brought  news  to  the  world  that  Jesus 
lives,  and  that  Jesus  has  "abolished"  death,  and  brought 
life  and  immortality  to  light.  The  ancients  thought 
meanly  of  woman ;  woman  was  the  weaker  vessel,  and  they 
saw  with  surprise  women  laying  down  their  lives  for 
Jesus  Christ,  without  having  a  Plato  to  write  about  them, 
as  Socrates  had.  Women  and  slaves,  the  cheapest  of 
human  beings,  showed  no  fear  of  pain  and  no  fear  of 
death  for  his  sake.  We  have  already  considered  the 
Christian  victory  over  the  daemons.  Thus  the  chief  fears 
of  the  ancient  world  were  overcome. 

But  there  are  other  things  more  insidious  than  fear; 
and  here  is  the  profounder  and  more  permanent  half  of 
the  early  Christian  message.  "Joy  or  grief,  fear  or  de- 
sire, what  matters  it?"  asked  Horace,"  quoting  the  estab- 
lished classification  of  motives.  Socrates  held  that  if  a 
man  knew,  he  would  not  sin;  but  even  an  Ovid  could 
mend  that  with  his  video  meliora  proboque,  deteriora 


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

^0  Epistles,   1,  vi,   12;   Cf.  Virgil,   ^n.,  vi:733;  and  Plato,  Phaedo,   83,   B. 


44        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

sequor,  passion  triumphant  over  knowledge  and  sweeping 
man  into  evil  with  open  eyes.  "What  I  would  not,  that  I 
do,"  said  Paul,  carrying  the  matter  a  stage  further. 
Some  of  the  ancients  explained  sin  by  making  it  the  out- 
come of  contact  or  relation  with  some  external  thing. 
The  sounder  psychologists  saw  with  Jesus  that  it  combes 
from  within,  but  not  all  of  them  realized  its  significance 
as  an  expression  of  a  man's  real  self.  The  light  that 
leads  astray  is,  as  Burns  said,  light  from  heaven — the 
perversion  of  a  gift  of  God,  of  the  highest  of  his  gifts. 
And  this  is  effected  by  passion,  which  starts  a  new  group 
of  fears.  In  the  war  many  a  man  was  less  afraid  as  to 
what  the  enemy  might  do  than  as  to  what  he  might  him- 
self do.  Fear  of  moral  lapse  comes  to  be  in  the  highest 
and  ultimate  group  of  fears ;  and  with  it  comes  the  dark- 
est of  all  things,  despair.  Fear,  passion,  and  despair  all 
coming  from  within,  there  was  a  place  for  the  Christian 
message  of  a  man's  salvation  from  himself.  Jesus  Christ 
can  set  you  free,  it  ran,  from  the  man  within,  so  that 
passion  and  anger  and  craving  will  no  longer  rule  you. 
The  mystery  religions  had  a  cheaper  psychology  and  an 
easier,  and  they  did  not  really  touch  this  region  of  fear 
— a  contrast  which  makes  more  wonderful  the  salvation 
v/hich  Jesus  brought. 

So  far,  we  have  thought  of  perils  round  about  us,  and 
of  evil  within.  But  God,  where  does  God  touch  this 
story?  Paul  speaks  of  the  law  and  its  value,  but  also  of 
its  terror;  and  as  the  Greek  philosophers  traced  the 
origin  of  law  to  nature,  he  traced  it  to  God ;  the  law  was  of 
God's  giving,  implanted  in  man's  nature.  The  Ten  Com- 
mandments are  written  large  in  human  society.  There  is 
no  real  human  society  without  them.  If  we  could  imagine 
God  abolished,  we  should  still  have  to  keep  the  Decalogue 
— "thou  shalt  not  commit  adultery,  thou  shalt  not  steal, 
thou  shalt  not  kill."    But  God  is  more  than  the  law.   The 


SAVIOURS  AND  SALVATION  45 

Scripture  speaks  of  the  wrath  of  God,  not  as  the  heathen 
who  feared  the  irritability  of  his  gods,  but  of  a  wrath 
of  God  directed  against  men  who  broke  his  law\  The 
burden  of  the  law  on  a  nature  like  Paul's  was  incessant 
and  it  filled  life  with  boding  and  fear.  "Fear  hath  tor- 
ment" (I  John  4:18). 

The  object  of  pagan  worship  has  again  and  again  been 
to  placate  the  ill-temper  of  gods,  or,  to  induce  the  gods 
to  go  away  and  leave  the  worshipper  alone.  The  won- 
derful part  of  the  Christian  message  was  that  men  were 
given  deliverance  not  by  being  taken  out  of  the  way  of  the 
wrath  of  God,  but  by  being  brought  into  the  very  heart 
of  God.  There  is  another  phase  of  this.  When  Paul  wants 
to  describe  a  life  that  is  desperate,  he  speaks  of  man 
being  without  hope  and  without  God  in  the  world.  With- 
out God — how  like  that  is  to  Jesus'  picture  of  the  prodi- 
gal son!  He  was  without  his  father,  as  he  had  v/ished 
to  be.  He  went  to  a  far  country  to  have  a  good  time,  as 
people  call  it,  and  like  other  people  who  have  a  good 
time,  he  went  through  his  money ;  he  came  to  starvation, 
and  he  w^as  without  food,  without  friends  and  without  his 
father.  It  was  no  life  at  all;  not  natural,  but  abnormal, 
an  existence  of  despair.  "This  is  the  condemnation 
that  .  .  .  men  loved  darkness  rather  than  light"  (John 
3:19),  as  men  will  whose  eyes  are  in  bad  condition.  The 
Christian  promise  was  of  deliverance  from  all  this  nega- 
tion of  life,  from  the  abnormal,  from  the  unnatural,  from 
despair;  but  the  Christian  "return  to  Nature"  and  "life 
according  to  Nature"  had  a  personal  center. 

Ill 

When  Jesus  tells  the  story  of  the  prodigal  son,  he 
brings  out,  with  a  beauty  that  grows  upon  those  who 
try  to  understand  him,  the  great  surprise  that  awaited 


46        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

the  youth  on  his  return.  He  hoped  for  food,  and  perhaps 
some  clean  clothes;  but  the  first  thing  to  which  he  was 
restored  was  his  father.  He  came  back  like  a  tramp,  and 
the  first  touch  of  home  is  his  father's  kiss  on  his  cheek; 
his  father's  arms  round  his  neck.  He  was  restored  to  the 
best  robe,  the  most  splendid  entertainment,  yes,  and 
something  more;  to  sonship,  to  the  real  life  of  the  family, 
to  his  father.  And  in  all  this,  the  real  restoration  was  to 
his  father,  and  the  rest  followed.  What  a  picture!  The 
personal  relation  lies  at  the  heart  of  all  Jesus'  good  news. 

"The  Son  of  Man  is  come  to  seek  and  to  save  that  which 
is  lost,"  he  said.  He  enters  into  the  house  of  the  strong 
man  not  to  destroy  but  to  reapply  what  is  held  there  in 
bondage.  He  restores  to  men  their  lost  vision;  he  finds 
the  lost  faculty  and  gives  it  back;  the  lost  aptitude;  the 
lost  sympathy;  the  lost  intuition.  Men  have  never  been 
quite  able  to  explain  what  salvation  is.  They  have  al- 
ways used  metaphors.  Paul  says  it  is  a  new  creation.  A 
man  is  made  over  again,  very  much  as  if  God  took  a  man 
to  pieces  and  made  a  new  Adam  out  of  him,  and  put  the 
new  Adam  in  a  new  world.  The  Fourth  Gospel  sums  it 
up  as  being  born  again.  In  an  ancient  poem  about  spring, 
one  line  runs:  **New  spring,  singing  spring,  spring  the 
world  reborn.""  One  would  almost  think  it  a  description 
of  what  we  read  in  the  New  Testament. 

Century  after  century  we  find  the  Christian  Church 
speaking  in  the  same  way  about  the  gladness  of  the  Holy 
Spirit.  Some  of  the  words  which  the  ancients  used  about 
the  Holy  Spirit  have  gone  downhill.  I  suppose  it  was 
because  people  could  not  believe  them  to  be  true  of  the 
Holy  Spirit  and  the  Christian  life ;  for  the  ancient  Chris- 
tians said  that  the  Church  was  hilarious,  that  the 
Christian  spirit  is  a  hilarious  spirit,  a  gay  spirit.    The 


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


SAVIOURS  AND  SALVATION  47 

words  hardly  seem  reverent  today.  But  think  of  the 
buoyancy  of  a  life  which  has  been  saved  in  earnest.  Some 
people  do  not  give  its  value  to  "life"  as  used  in  the  New 
Testament;  they  picture  the  Christian  life  as  a  starved 
affair,  and  think  that  the  Christian  can  never  enjoy  any- 
thing, but  that,  if  he  starts  to  enjoy  himself,  he  is  always 
told  "Don't."  Jesus  never  said  that.  "I  am  come  that 
they  might  have  life,  and  that  they  might  have  it  more 
overflowingly" — the  utmost  development  of  the  ideal 
and  natural  life,  the  real  achievement  at  last  of  its 
promise. 

In  the  mind  of  Jesus  it  would  appear  that  a  man  is 
above  all  things  saved  for  God,  for  in  the  story  of  the 
prodigal  the  happiest  figure  is  the  father.  Salvation  is 
restoration  to  God,  "peace  with  God"  as  Paul  calls  it 
(Rom.  5:1).  Here  we  have  once  more  to  give  to  the  name 
God  the  whole  connotation  that  Jesus  gave  it;  salvation 
has  to  be  measured  by  the  scale  of  Jesus*  conception  of 
God.  How  much,  he  would  suggest,  would  God  imply  by 
salvation?  No  mere  rescue  from  an  external  hell,  as 
Odysseus  escapes  from  the  sea  and  comes  ashore  scathed 
and  stripped,  and  only  just  alive,  if  saved.  That  is  not 
how  Jesus  conceives  of  God  doing  things.  "Fear  not, 
little  flock;  it  is  your  Father's  good  pleasure  to  give  you 
the  kingdom." 

Salvation,  again,  in  the  speech  of  Jesus,  means  that  the 
man  saved  gains  a  new  sense  of  the  significance  of  other 
men;  that  he  puts  a  new  value  on  manhood  and  its 
opportunities;  that  he  is  captured  for  all  the  ideals  of 
Jesus  Christ,  as  they  bear  on  men,  the  family,  and  the 
society;  that  he  is  found  in  the  service  of  Jesus  Christ 
for  the  ransom  of  the  world,  for  the  setting  free  of  man- 
kind. That  is  not  a  negative  idea.  It  is  positive,  and  the 
larger  the  more  we  think  it  out,  as  large  as  the  measure 
of  Jesus  Christ  himself  (Eph.  4:13).    This  is  not  theory; 


48        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

it  is  the  actual  experience  of  the  Christian  world.  We 
may  fairly  allow  that  Christian  experience  has  given  a 
very  different  value  to  the  term  "salvation"  from  what 
it  had  in  the  mystery  religions. 

IV 

The  mystery  religions  gave  salvation  by  ritual  and 
fasting,  by  sacred  food  and  mystic  drink.  When  v/e  come 
to  discuss  how  Jesus  saves  men  it  will  be  clear  at  once 
to  anyone  who  has  studied  him,  that  his  way  will  be 
another,  and  something  much  more  spiritual,  and  more 
intimate.  When  we  ask  what  it  is,  difficulties  crowd 
upon  us,  so  much  has  been  thought  and  written  upon  it, 
so  standardized  are  many  of  our  ideas.  Metaphors  from 
sacrifice,  suggestions  from  the  mystery  religions,  modes 
of  thought  borrowed  from  Roman  law,  have  all  affected 
our  ordinary  views,  till  it  is  difficult  now  to  explain  what 
Jesus  did  without  a  preliminary  discussion  to  make  our 
explanatory  terms  themselves  intelligible.  Today,  instead 
of  using  metaphor,  we  are  more  apt  to  ask  what  happens 
in  salvation,  conversion,  or  whatever  it  be  called — 
psychologically;  what  passes  between  Christ,  or  God,  and 
the  man  concerned. 

Here,  though  it  may  seem  to  run  counter  to  what  has 
just  been  said,  an  illustration  may  help.  It  has  the  ad- 
vantages of  not  being  theological,  of  having  no  history, 
and  of  being  drawn  from  nature.  Some  years  ago  the 
cotton  crop  in  Egypt  began  to  fail.  The  cotton  plant  was 
doing  badly;  it  had  a  parasite  growing  upon  it.  A 
botanist  was  sent  out  to  Egypt,  and  he  embarked  on  a 
series  of  experiments.  He  found  that,  when  the  cotton 
was  kept  in  a  certain  temperature,  the  parasitic  plant 
throve  and  killed  it.  As  the  temperature  of  the  glass- 
house was  raised,  the  parasite  plant  drooped,  and  the 


SAVIOURS  AND  SALVATION  49 

cotton  throve ;  and  finally  the  cotton  got  clear  of  it.  After 
a  while  he  was  able  to  tell  the  cotton-growers  what  was 
wrong;  they  were  irrigating  too  much;  the  ground  was 
cold  with  water;  and  when  the  roots  struck  down  into 
the  cold  earth,  the  plant  was  chilled  and  the  parasite 
grew.  When  they  changed  the  irrigation  arrangements, 
the  parasite  died,  and  the  cotton  plant  lived,  saved  by  a 
change  of  temperature. 

The  curse  of  human  life  is  the  failure  to  develop.  A 
man  becomes  absorbed  by  this  or  that,  by  pleasure,  by 
business,  by  vice  it  may  be,  or  by  wholly  legitimate  in- 
terests carried  out  of  proportion;  and  he  becomes,  as  we 
say,  one-sided.  Nothing  saves  him  but  a  human  interest 
in  a  real  person ;  he  falls  in  love  and  revises  all  his  stand- 
ards, and,  unconsciously  influenced  by  the  woman's  love 
for  him  and  by  his  love  for  her — if  she  be  a  woman  of 
any  real  worth  and  capable  of  helping  a  man — he  de- 
velops into  a  new  creature,  as  we  casually  say.  If  she 
bears  him  a  child,  the  child  lifts  husband  and  wife  into 
a  new  atmosphere,  alters  the  temperature  of  their  lives, 
and  a  great  deal  of  selfishness  is  atrophied  by  the  warmth 
and  interest  that  the  child  makes,  as  its  life  and  mind 
grow  and  expand ;  they  live  in  a  region  of  higher  thoughts 
and  keener  hopes  and  delights.  Psychologically,  love,  in 
such  a  case  as  this,  does  for  a  man  what  the  higher  tem- 
perature did  for  the  Egyptian  cotton. 

The  simplest  and  most  natural  explanation  of  what 
Jesus  effects  comes  to  us  along  the  same  lines.  Jesus 
changes  the  spiritual  temperature  and  the  parasite  sin 
dies ;  and  the  natural  man"  revives  and  grows  into  what 
God  meant.    It  has  been  one  of  our  greatest  mistakes  to 


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


50        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

think  that  the  Christian  virtues  are  anything  but  natural ; 
we  have  abused  the  word  "natural"  and  degraded  it. 
Nature,  in  its  true  sense,  is  the  thought  of  God ;  and  man 
degraded  and  atrophied  by  sin  is  not  natural.  The 
gracious  side  of  human  nature  (as  real  every  whit  as  the 
ugly)  gives  us  the  clue.  The  beautiful  instincts,  the 
powers  of  mind  and  character,  make,  we  feel,  the  true 
man.  What  Jesus  does  is  to  give  them  a  chance  to  grow. 
He  has  opened  the  windows  of  the  human  heart,  or  rather 
has  tempted  the  human  heart  to  open  its  own  windows, 
to  the  sunshine  of  God.  It  would  seem  as  if  St.  Paul  had 
anticipated  us  here,  when  he  says  that  "God  has  shined 
in  our  hearts,  in  the  face  of  Jesus  Christ"  (II  Cor.  4:6). 

Those  of  us  who  think  about  germs  (and  most  people 
do  today),  who  are  interested  in  hospitals,  know  that  the 
air  of  God  and  the  sunshine  of  God  are  two  of  the  most 
healing  and  protecting  things  the  body  can  have.  Jesus 
told  men,  and,  what  is  more,  he  made  men  believe,  that 
what  we  want  is  more  of  God,  and  not  less.  The  sun- 
shine of  God  was  let  into  the  human  heart  by  Jesus,  and 
the  real,  beautiful  human  plant  'began  to  thrive  in  that 
sunshine,  and  sin  to  die.  He  brought  men  to  the  point 
where  they  would  be  reconciled  to  Gk)d.  He  did  this  by 
his  death  on  the  Cross — that  death  in  which  he  showed 
the  real  nature  of  God,  and  brought  men  to  believe  that 
God  does  not  leave  them  and  their  pain  and  sin  alone, 
but  identifies  himself  with  man's  life.  Jesus  came  into 
the  world  to  make  people  willing  to  believe  that  God  was 
ever  so  much  better  than  they  thought,  to  offer  reconcilia- 
tion, freedom  of  mind  and  heart's-ease. 

It  is  always  a  person  who  opens  the  door  to  the  higher 
life  for  us — ^wife,  child,  father,  mother,  friend.  The 
great  book  that  inspires  us  was  written  by  a  man  or 
woman  of  a  great  personality.  All  the  best  things  and 
the  greatest,  the  great  idea,  the  new  vision,  peace  of 


SAVIOURS  AND  SALVATION  51 

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


^^  Communion   with   Cod,    p.    132. 


CHAPTER     IV 

THE  LAMB  OF  GOD 

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


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

52 


THE  LAMB  OF  GOD  53 

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

It  is  not  our  present  affair  to  pursue  inquiry  into  all 
the  fields  of  metaphor  where  Christians  have  strayed. 


54        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

But  sacrifice  has  been  a  central  thought,  and  it  differs 
from  most  of  the  other  metaphors,  notably  from  those 
mentioned  above,  in  having  had  no  secular  history.  It 
has  always  been  a  religious  term,  uniquely  associated  with 
ancient  religion  through  the  whole  course  of  its  develop- 
ment; for  to  many  minds  in  all  periods  the  sacrifice  has 
been  the  very  center  of  all  religion.  This  of  itself  will 
explain  why  the  word  is  so  difficult  and  ambiguous.  Re- 
ligion has  changed  constantly,  and  the  feelings  waked 
from  age  to  age  by  sacrifice  have  been  those  which  men 
are  most  reluctant  to  analyze.  It  is  worth  noting,  how- 
ever, that  the  men  who  did  analyze  them  became  the 
pioneers  in  religion. 

"The  Lamb  of  God"  is  a  very  interesting  phrase,  and 
it  has  gathered  a  great  mass  of  associations.  It  does  not 
belong  to  the  earliest  stratum  of  the  New  Testament, 
though  Paul's  ''Christ  our  passover"  (I  Cor.  5:7)  points 
towards  it.  It  is  put  by  the  Fourth  Gospel  in  the  mouth 
of  John  the  Baptist  in  a  sentence  that  attributes  to  Jesus 
the  taking  away  of  the  sin  of  the  world.  In  the  Apoca- 
lypse the  visions  of  the  exile  are  haunted  with  the  Lamb 
victorious,  the  Lamb  unlocking  the  sealed  book  of  God's 
purposes,  the  Lamb  surrounded  by  ten  thousand  times 
ten  thousand  clad  in  white,  who 

"Ascribe  their  conquest  to  the  Lamb, 
Their  triumph  to  his  death." 

To  understand  the  writer,  we  must  ask  how  he  comes 
to  interpret  life  so,  and  why  he  links  the  victory  of 
Christ  with  the  figure  of  the  sacrificial  lamb.  For,  of 
course,  it  comes  from  Hebrew  ritual,  with  a  memory  of 
the  Passover.  Hebrew  ritual  suggests  the  symbol;  but 
why  did  anyone  look  for  a  symbol?  What  was  the  ex- 
perience that  sought  expression?  The  Passover  lamb 
was  a  symbol  of  a  number  of  things — of  a  great  escape 


THE  LAMB  OF  GOD  55 

from  bondage  to  begin ;  and  its  reappearance  in  the  Apo- 
calypse suggests  that  the  Christian  had  in  his  mind  the 
sense  of  a  great  deliverance.  It  suggests  acceptance  by 
God,  and  God's  care  for  his  own;  and  these  also  were  in 
the  thoughts  of  the  great  Christian  writer.  Gradually, 
by  thinking  through  his  language,  his  turns  of  phrase, 
and  his  symbols,  we  come  face  to  face  with  a  man  who 
associates  a  great  deal  of  real  experience  with  Jesus 
Christ. 

But  it  will  not  quite  do  to  say  that  sacrifice  is  the 
natural  word  to  use  to  unlock  the  mystery  of  Jesus.  For 
today,  after  nineteen  centuries  of  experience  of  Jesus, 
almost  every  idea  that  men  then  associated  with  sacrifice 
is  lost  or  transformed — a  curious  commentary  on  the 
notion  that  the  use  of  the  word  was  obvious.  If  we  are 
to  understand  what  the  writers  of  the  Bible  say  about 
sacrifice,  we  have  for  the  time  to  strip  our  minds  of  all 
that  Jesus  has  done  in  reshaping  our  speech.  When  I 
think  now  of  sacrifice,  I  see  a  Hindu  temple  in  the 
bright  sunlight  of  a  December  day,  a  temple  gaudy  with 
blues  and  yellows  and  whites,  tawdry  and  dirty,  and 
thronged  with  pilgrims.  Here  was  a  sacred  tree  with 
votive  rags  tied  on  every  bough;  on  the  other  side  was 
a  group  of  priests,  naked  from  the  waist  up  (one  of 
them  telling  us  he  is  a  B.A.  of  the  University),  and  near 
them  was  a  little  goaf,  a  sacrifice,  to  be  given  to  the  god- 
dess. One  of  the  priests  caught  it  up,  held  its  front 
legs  back  against  its  sides,  put  its  head  in  a  great  wedge ; 
and  with  one  slash  of  a  big  knife  the  head  was  off  and 
the  blood  spurted  out.  When  I  read  in  Hebrews  that  "it 
is  not  possible  for  the  blood  of  bulls  and  of  goats  to  take 
away  sin,"  I  think  of  Kalighat,  and  I  understand.  People 
today  associate  primarily  self-sacrifice  with  "sacrifice"; 
not  so  the  ancients. 

One  day  in  the  market  of  Maymyo,  in  Upper  Burma,  an 


56        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

American  friend  and  I  stood  by  an  old  man  who  was  sell- 
ing tapers  of  some  fragrant  kind.  The  missionary, 
knowing  well  what  they  were,  asked  him :  "And  what  are 
those  for?"  He  said  they  were  to  be  given  to  the  god. 
"But  what  does  the  god  do  with  them?"  And  the  old  man 
said:  "I  don't  know;  we  give  them  to  the  idol."  "I  don't 
know!"  The  ancient  world,  when  it  crossquestioned  it- 
self, did  not  know  where  exactly  in  religion  was  the  place 
of  sacrifice.  Even  of  the  Hebrews  Professor  A.  B.  David- 
son wrote  that  "the  sacrificial  system  is  left  in  the  Old 
Testament  without  explanation  as  regards  redemptive 
relations,  except  in  a  general  way."'  And  to  think  in  a 
general  way  is  a  most  fertile  source  of  error,  as  the 
Greeks  have  taught  us,  from  Socrates  onward. 

II 

The  longer  the  history  of  an  idea,  the  less  chance  there 
is  that  at  any  moment  it  will  be  used  clearly.  Old 
memories  and  emotions,  old  associations  linger  and  con- 
fuse the  impression;  and  where  truth  of  utmost  moment 
is  concerned,  an  indefinite  impression  does  not  much  help 
thought.  A  survey  of  the  development  of  the  conception 
of  sacrifice  will  put  us  in  a  better  position  to  deal  with 
its  use  in  Christian  thinking.  Six  stages  may  be  noted 
for  clearness'  sake,  if  it  be  understood  that,  while  logi- 
cally they  are  distinct,  chronologically  they  overlapped  in 
the  most  perplexing  way. 

The  first  stage,  which  anthropologists  can  recapture  for 
us,  is  one  so  old  that  it  appears  to  antedate  private  prop- 
erty''— a  fact  of  the  utmost  moment  in  interpreting  the 
ideas  then  associated  with  sacrifice,  for  it  practically 
eliminates  the  individual  from  the  act.     The  sacrifice  is 


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


THE  LAMB  OF  GOD  57 

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

In  the  second  stage,  men  begin  to  lay  more  stress  on 
the  mind  of  their  god  than  on  his  physical  necessities, 
and  they  conceive  that  the  business  of  sacrifice  is  to 
reconcile  their  god  to  them  rather  than  to  repair  his 


37&.  252.     *Ib.  257.     »7fe.   124,  365.     <^ lb.  439.     ''Odyssey,  xi:152. 


5S        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

energies/  Sacrifice  is  a  gift  to  placate  an  offended  god. 
The  ground  of  his  irritation  may  be  unknown  or,  if 
guessed,  may  be  quite  trivial.  He  has,  however,  to  be 
coaxed  out  of  his  ill-temper.  This  type  of  sacrifice,  the 
piacular,  does  not  primarily  include  the  idea  of  sin,^  but 
it  recognizes  some  mental  activity  and  feeling  in  the  god. 
It  is  said  to  have  had  but  a  small  part  in  the  development 
of  the  higher  sense  of  sin  that  we  find  in  the  Old  Testa- 
ment." The  "presents,"  which  Genesis  says  Cain  and 
Abel  offered,  have  a  parallel  in  the  Greek  poet:  "Gifts 
persuade  the  gods,  gifts  persuade  awful  kings.""  Primi- 
tive law  and  primitive  morality  deal  almost  entirely  with 
acts,  not  with  motives.  It  was  late  in  history,  and  a 
great  forward  step  taken,  when  Draco  in  Athens  dis- 
tinguished between  intentional  and  accidental  homicide. 
But  this  second  stage  represents  a  distinct  advance  in 
thinking. 

The  third  stage  gives  us  the  piacular  sacrifice,  more 
properly  so  called — the  sin-offering,  a  gift  made  in 
acknowledgment  of  wrong  done  by  the  offerer  or  by  those 
whom  he  represents.  What  the  idea  of  the  wrong  is, 
depends  naturally  on  the  current  conceptions  of  morals; 
but  the  introduction  of  moral  ideas  into  sacrifice  marks  a 
great  epoch  in  human  thought.  The  second  and  third 
stages  overlap  in  history,  and  they  both  represent  a  more 
developed  and  thought-out  belief  than  the  first,  in  the 
possibility  of  god  and  man  being  more  or  less  mutually 
intelligible.  Probably,  if  heads  are  counted,  these  stages 
are  more  important  than  any  of  the  others;  views  of 
these  types  meet  us  all  over  the  world  both  in  antiquity 
and  today.    But  the  real  progress  of  religion  depends  on 


8  Robertson  Smith,  Early  Religion  of  the  Semites,  p.  396. 

^  lb.  p.  401. 

"7&.  p.  415. 

"  The  line  is  quoted  with  disapproval  by  Plato,  Rep.,  Ill,  p.  390  E, 
but  he  does  not  say  who  is  the  poet.  It  is  referred  to  by  Euripides, 
Medea,   964. 


THE  LAMB  OF  GOD  59 

their  being  transcended.  While  it  is  well  said  that  "the 
cultus  is  the  heathen  element  in  Israelite  religion/"''  we 
must  note  the  desire  to  be  right  with  God.  From  now 
onward  even  more  clearly  than  before,  all  progress  de- 
pended  on  the  growth  of  the  conception  of  God. 

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


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


60        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

wish  to  reconcile  their  utterances  with  a  pre-critical  view 
of  the  Pentateuch,  may  urge  that  they  would  have;  but 
it  is  at  least  clear  that  for  the  Prophets  sacrifice  was 
not  in  the  forefront  of  religion,  while  for  their  contem- 
poraries it  was.  When  a  man  has  once  grasped  that  re- 
ligion is  not  ritual  but  mind,  when  he  is  a  pioneer  in  this 
belief,  it  is  generally  safer  to  assume  that  he  takes  a 
bolder  view  than  the  temporizing  people  who  endeavor 
to  reconcile  old  and  new  and  to  minimize  contrasts.  It 
is  of  interest  to  note  how  swiftly  the  Christian  apologists 
seized  on  these  passages  in  the  Prophets,  how  thoroughly 
alert  they  were  to  their  real  meaning,  and  how  trench- 
antly they  used  them  to  prove  to  the  Jew  that  the  age 
of  sacrifices  was  over,  and  that  there  was  no  compromise 
possible  any  longer  on  the  issue,  and,  sometimes,  that  the 
whole  association  of  sacrifice  with  the  religion  of  Jeho- 
vah had  been  nothing  but  a  stupid  blunder  on  the  part 
of  Israel." 

Plato  was  as  clear  as  the  Prophets  that  sacrifice  was 
a  mistake  in  religion,  that  it  rested  on  a  wrong  view  of 
the  gods  altogether,  and  that  it  confused  the  moral  sense. 
"Envy,"  he  said,  "stands  outside  the  divine  choir.*"'  In 
the  Laivs^"  he  signalizes  three  great  errors  among  men's 
ideas  as  to  the  gods:  first,  the  belief  that  there  are  no 
gods;  second,  the  concession  that  there  are  gods,  who 
have,  however,  no  interest  in  human  affairs;  third,  the 
worst  error  of  all,  that  there  are  gods,  interested,  too,  in 
man  and  his  doings,  but  gods  who  are  easily  influ- 
enced by  sacrifice.  "Quacks  and  prophets,"  he  says 
elsewhere,"  "go  to  rich  men's  doors  and  persuade  them 
that  they  have  power  from  the  gods,  by  means  of  sacri- 
fices and  chants,  to  cure  any  wrong  deed  of  their  own  or 


"  Cf .  Justin's   Trypho;  TertuUian,  Adv.  Jud.;  Barnabas. 

"Plato,  Phaedrus,   247   A. 

16  Plato,  Laws,  x:885. 

"  Plato,  Republic,  II,  364  A.  ff. 


THE  LAMB  OF  GOD  61 

their  ancestors  in  a  course  of  pleasures  and  feasts";  for 
a  human  feast  with  abundant  wine  accompanied  sacrifice 
both  in  Greece  and  in  Palestine.  The  Greek  world  re- 
ceded from  the  clear  thinking  of  Plato ;  the  fear  of  death, 
the  spell  of  the  past,  the  charm  of  ritual  religion,  were 
too  strong ;  but  Stoics  and  Epicureans  were  alike  insistent 
that  sacrifices  served  no  purpose  at  all  in  religion/^ 

The  fifth  stage  is  obvious.  In  Israel,  the  priests  ad- 
justed their  theory  of  sacrifice  to  the  teaching  of  the 
Prophets,  toning  down  the  words  of  the  bolder  thinkers, 
as  the  friends  of  the  obsolete  always  will.  Sacrifice  be- 
came symbolic;  it  was  given  a  moral  connotation  which 
it  had  not  originally  had ;  it  was  by  all  means  to  be  main- 
tained, while  the  prophetic  warning  to  cleanse  the  heart 
was  of  course  important  too.  The  old  books  were  welded 
with  the  new  Priestly  Code,  and  the  Pentateuch  resulted. 
In  this  period,  as  under  the  Macedonian  dynasty,  the 
Jews  never  let  history  stand  between  themselves  and  their 
ancestors;"  their  religion  was  semper  eadem.  The  correct 
theory  was  that  sacrifice  was  ordained,  and  suggested  to 
men,  directly  by  God.'"  In  the  reestablished  temple  at 
Jerusalem  sacrifice  was  regularly  made  till  Titus  de- 
stroyed city  and  temple  in  A.D.  70;  and  it  is  of  interest 
to  note  who  maintained  it.  The  priestly  family  of  Zadok 
gave  their  name  to  the  Sadducees ;  conservative  in  ritual, 
they  were  conservative  in  thought,  and  repudiated  mod- 
ern doctrines  of  spirit  and  angel  and  the  soul's  eternal 
life.''  At  the  same  time,  they  compromised  in  practice  and 
policy  with  Hellenism  and  honestly  earned  by  their  teach- 
ing and  their  lives  the  contempt  of  good  Jews.  "They 
could  only  persuade  the  rich,"  says  Josephus. 


"Cf.  Seneca,  Ep.,  95,  47-50. 

i»P.  Wendland,  Hell.  Rom.  Kultur,  pp.  198,  199;  Drummond,  Philo, 
I,   p.   242. 

2«A.   B.   Davidson,   Theol.   O.  T.,  p.  311. 

21  Acts  5:17;  Josephus,  Antt.,  xviii:l,  4;  xiii:10,  6.  W.  Fairweather,  Back- 
ground  of   Gospels,    149-153. 


62        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


22  On  the  synagogues,  see  J.  P.  Peters,  Religion  of  Hebrews,  pp.  381- 
404;  W.  Fairweather,  Background  of  the  Gospels,  pp.  25  ff.;  1.  Abrahams, 
Pharisaism  and  the  Gospels,  pp.  1  ff.;  Josephus,  C.  Apion,  II,  18;  Luke 
4:16,  20;  Acts  13:15. 

23  Fairweather,  Background,   p.    10. 

2*  It  may  be  added  that  the  Essene  sect  disapproved  of  animal  sacrifice; 
Philo,  2:457;  Josephus,  Antt..  18:1,  5. 


THE  LAMB  OF  GOD  63 

To  sum  up,  sacrifice  was  a  language  used  by  all  men, 
but  understood  by  none;  no  uniform  interpretation  could 
be  given  to  it.  Its  meaning  varied  with  men's  thought 
of  God.  It  depended  on  use  and  wont ;  it  was  maintained 
most  strongly  by  those  who  thought  least  deeply  on 
religion.  The  real  thinkers  saw  that  it  did  not  touch  the 
prcyblem  of  sin  at  all ;  it  had  no  effect  on  God  or  gods ;  it 
could  not  purify  the  conscience  of  man  (Heb.  9:9).  Sac- 
rifice depended  on  the  instinct  that  man  must  give  God 
something — a  natural  outcome  of  anthropomorphism,  the 
danger  of  which  Plato  saw.  The  only  real  value  in  sacri- 
fice, whether  act  or  metaphor,  lay  in  the  belief  that  some- 
how God  and  man  could  communicate,  could  be  intelli- 
gible; but  the  clearer  thinkers  knew  of  better  ways  by 
which  God  and  man  touched  each  other.  Sacrifice  was 
in  fact  obsolete  where  real  religion  was  concerned;  and 
the  stronger  minds  counted  it  immoral. 

Ill 

In  dealing  with  the  Christian  religion,  its  ideas,  and  the 
expression  given  to  them,  the  first  thing  is  to  learn  the 
mind  of  Jesus  himself.  He  was  a  child  of  the  syna- 
gogue ;  from  boyhood  he  had  the  custom  of  going  to  the 
synagogue  (Luke  4:16),  and  he  was  more  at  home  there 
than  in  the  Temple  with  its  grandeurs  and  its  squalors 
(Matt.  21:12,  13;  Mark  11:15).  It  would  be  significant 
if  he,  with  his  genius  in  religion,  his  insight  and  intui- 
tion in  all  that  bears  on  God,  went  back  from  the  stage  of 
the  synagogue  to  that  of  the  Temple,  if  he  fell  short  of 
the  Prophets.  But  he  does  not.  He,  too,  omits  sacrifice. 
His  teaching  centers  in  another  conception  of  God.  "Your 
heavenly  Father"  has  not  to  be  persuaded  by  your  gifts. 
No,  it  is  the  other  way  round ;  "It  is  your  Father's  good 
pleasure  to  give  you  the  kingdom."     All  ancient  ritual. 


64        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


25  Contrast  Apocalvpse  of  Baruch,  84:ia 
'^Calvin,  Institutes,  II,  16:3. 


THE  LAMB  OF  GOD  65 

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

IV 

But  the  New  Testament  has  other  accounts  of  the  work 
of  Jesus.  The  writer  to  the  Hebrews,  quoting  the 
fortieth  Psalm,  contrasts  two  clauses,  "sacrifice  and  offer- 


-"^  On  all  this,  more  fully  in  Chapter  X. 


66        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

ing  and  burnt  offerings  and  offering  for  sin  thou  wouldest 
not  .  .  ."  and  "then  said  he,  Lo,  I  come  to  do  thy  will" ; 
and  he  insists  that  the  second  abrogates  the  whole  scheme 
of  sacrifices.  "By  which  will,"  he  continues,  "we  are 
sanctified,  by  the  offering  of  the  body,  of  Jesus  Christ 
once  for  all"  (Heb.  10:5-10).  With  a  clearness  and 
definition  which  are  not  always  recognized  by  his  readers, 
he  sweeps  aside  metaphor  and  symbol,  and  speaks  things. 
"The  law,"  he  says,  "had  a  shadow  of  good  things  to 
come,  and  not  the  exact  image  of  them."  One  guesses 
that  in  his  mind  is  some  memory  of  Plato's  cave  with 
the  men  bound  there,  who  see  not  things,  not  even  models 
of  them,  but  the  shadows  of  models,  and  live  prisoners 
in  a  world  of  shadows.  The  old  law  of  sacrifice  and  ritual 
offered  not  even  an  image  of  the  real;  it  was  at  best  a 
shadow  of  an  image.  So  he  moves  away  from  analogy  to 
psychology,  from  the  symbol  to  the  person.  We  must 
try  to  follow  him. 

Jesus  died,  he  says,  to  put  away  sin  by  the  sacrifice  of 
himself.  What  did  he  do?  He  identified  himself  with  the 
will  of  God,  and  by  so  doing  cast  such  a  flood  of  light  on 
it  as  transfigured  it.  He  prayed  in  Gethsemane  what  he 
taught  his  disciples  to  pray:  "Thy  will  be  done."  That 
lies  at  the  heart  of  all  Christian  prayer;  it  is  the  center 
of  the  Christian  life;  and,  suggests  our  writer,  it  is 
the  center  of  the  life  and  work  of  Jesus.  He  suggests 
that,  in  a  wonderful  way,  a  way  past  our  grasp,  Jesus 
and  the  will  of  God  are  identified,  and  that  everything 
which  Jesus  did  is  brought  about  by  that  identification 
of  himself  with  the  will  of  God.  There  is  hardly  an 
author  of  the  New  Testament  who  has  such  a  haunting 
sense  of  what  it  cost  Jesus — prayer,  suffering,  tempta- 
tion, agony,  and,  as  he  says,  strong  crying.  We  do  not 
easily  grasp  the  reality  and  the  range  of  his  sacrifice 
of  himself.    "He  learnt  by  what  he  suffered"  (Heb.  5 :8) , 


THE  LAMB  OF  GOD  67 

we  read,  and  we  think  of  Greek  tragedy  and  its  interpre- 
tations of  suffering,  and  we  rememiber  the  width  of  cul- 
ture of  our  author.  He  has  got  clear  away  from  the 
world  of  shadows  into  the  region  of  fact  and  experience, 
into  the  inner  life  of  Jesus,  the  very  being  of  God.  If 
we  fail  here  and  do  not  get  things  clear,  it  is  because 
we  are  not  deep  enough,  or  true  enough,  or  enough  Chris- 
tian, to  see  and  to  speak  of  things  like  this;  but  let  us 
try  to  see  what  he  means. 

When  he  speaks  of  the  will  of  God,  he  means  substan- 
tially what  we  should  call  the  nature  of  God.  The  will 
is  the  expression  of  the  real,  the  deepest,  nature.  It  is 
God  at  the  most  definite,  the  most  essential.  The  writer 
suggests,  then,  that  Jesus  and  the  will  of  God  interpret 
each  other;  that  in  Jesus,  in  his  life  and  mind  and  death, 
we  read  the  mind  and  life  of  God,  the  will  and  nature  of 
God;  that  in  Jesus  God  is  made  intelligible  to  us  and 
becomes  our  own,  ours  because  we  see  and  understand. 
Roberts  Browning  says  in  his  Fra  Lippo: 

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

The  interpretation  calls  our  attention  to  the  thing,  and 
changes  our  feeling;  it  ceases  to  be  foreign  to  us.  Men 
had  known  the  will  of  God,  as  they  called  it,  but  they 
had  not  loved  it.  They  saw  it  from  without;  they  con- 
ceived of  God  as  a  hard,  alien,  external  force,  and  they 
shuddered  and  shrank  from  him.  They  had  no  point  of 
approach,  and  he  remained  inscrutable;  and  the  very 
fact  of  his  being  unintelligible  made  him  awful.  The 
arbitrariness  of  God  haunted  their  minds  with  terror ;  it 
was  indeed  the  source  of  the  fear  that  drove  them  to 
sacrifice  'beasts  to  God,  yes,  and  their  own  children;  it 
was  a  thing  of  horror  and  pain.     But  Jesus  takes  the 


68        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

will  of  God,  and  interprets  it,  and  makes  it,  with  all  its 
mystery,  a  new  thing :  he  brings  us  to  see  it  in  the  light 
of  his  own  experience.  He  teaches  us  to  find  in  God's 
nature  something  akin  to  his  own  nature,  something, 
therefore,  that  we  can  accept  and  trust,  and  by-and-by 
may  love.  If  we  may  again  use  Plato's  parable  of  the 
cave,  Jesus  has  brought  us  out  in  the  open  air,  where 
we  no  longer  have  to  be  content  with  shadows  of  images, 
but  we  see  things  in  the  sunshine  of  God.  We  have 
our  faces  turned  the  other  way  altogether;  we  are  in 
the  atmosphere  of  God;  and  when  your  eyes  adjust  them- 
selves a  little  to  the  new  blaze  of  light,  we  look  more  and 
more  into  the  reality  of  things.  The  writer  to  the 
Hebrews,  in  a  later  chapter,  puts  it  that  Jesus  has 
brought  us  into  the  very  presence  of  God  (10:19,  with 
9:24). 

In  the  ancient  religions  of  sacrifice,  men  put  them- 
selves right  with  God  by  bargain,  and  gift,  by  getting 
safely  away  from  God,  by  inducing  God  to  go  away  from 
them,  or  alternatively,  by  sharing  with  God  a  meal,  at 
first  merely  physical  and  later  on  magical,  which  allowed 
the  sensation  of  a  semi-physical  union  with  God.  Jesus 
has  done  the  thing  by  bringing  us  nearer  than  ever 
before  to  God,  into  the  very  heart  and  mind  of  God.  It 
makes  all  life  utterly  different.  It  means  rethinking  all 
moral  and  religious  ideas  in  a  full  view  of  God  as  he  is, 
and  working  everything  out  on  the  lines  of  the  heavenly 
Father's  nature  as  interpreted  by  Jesus  in  his  life  and, 
above  all,  in  his  death.  A  new  life,  a  new  world,  new 
men  and  women,  the  taking  away  of  sin — all  was  made 
possible  by  the  work  of  Jesus,  by  his  intense  unity  with 
God,  by  the  evidence  of  this  given  to  us  in  his  death. 
Old  modes  of  religious  thought  ceased  to  be  possible  for 
men  who  had  any  real  experience  of  Jesus;  the  tradi- 
tional paled  before  the  real;  the  shadows  fled. 


THE  LAMB  OF  GOD  69 

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

The  statement,  attributed  by  the  Fourth  Gospel  to 
John  the  Baptist,  that  "the  Lamb  of  God  taketh  away 


70        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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

It  is  not  out  of  the  way,  then,  that  the  Apocaljrpse  pic- 
tures the  victorious  Christ  as  the  Lamb  slain,  and  again 
and  again  associates  his  victory  over  sin  and  evil  with 
his  death,  and  to  his  death  ascribes  the  purity  and  beauty 
of  all  the  white-robed  souls  that  he  has  redeemed. 


28  This  matter  will  be  resumed  in  Chapter  XIII. 


CHAPTER    V 
THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN 

Luther  once  said  that  the  forgiveness  of  sin  is  nodus 
Deo  vindice  dignus,  a  knot  that  it  needs  a  God's  help  to 
unravel.  Whether  we  consider  forgiveness  as  a  practical 
or  as  an  intellectual  problem,  he  was  right.  As  with 
other  matters  of  real  import  the  difficulties  only  unfold 
themselves  when  we  try  to  solve  them ;  at  the  first  blush 
most  things  that  matter  are  simpler  than  we  find  them 
on  closer  acquaintance.  If  sin  and  its  forgiveness  occupy 
a  far  less  place  in  contemporary  thinking  than  they  once 
did,  it  is  perhaps  as  much  due  to  shallowness  as  to  sanity. 
To  neglect  one's  bodily  health  is  not  much  wiser  than  to 
fidget  about  it;  quiet  thinking  about  health  or  sin  never 
hurt  any  man. 

The  poet  of  Job  was  a  man  who  loved  this  glorious 
world — 

"The  beauty  and  the  wonder  and  the  pK)wer, 

The  shapes  of  things,  their  colors,  lights  and  shades. 

Changes,  surprises — and  God  made  it  all!" 

"When  the  morning  stars  sang  together,  and  all  the 
sons  of  God  shouted  for  joy"  (Job  38:7).  Three  or 
four  hundred  years  after  him,  another  poet  of  his  race — a 
poet  who  saw  cloudily  and  in  symbol  at  times,  and  at 
other  times  with  extraordinary  vividness — "saw  a  new 
heaven  and  a  new  earth:  for  the  first  heaven  and  the 
first  earth  were  passed  away  .  .  .  and  he  that  sat  upon 
the  throne  said,  Behold!  I  make  all  things  new"  (Rev. 

71 


72        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

21:1,  5).  Nothing  but  a  new  creation  would  serve;  the 
world  he  had  known  was  impossible;  let  it  pass. 

The  contrast  between  these  two  views  of  the  world 
sums  up  a  great  deal  of  human  experience.  With  all 
its  charm  and  wonder,  there  is  something  wrong  with 
the  world,  and  the  deepest  and  tenderest  natures  have 
felt  it  most. 

"Our  sweetest  songs  are  those  that  tell  of  saddest 
thought/' 

A  close  attention  to  humanity  brings  the  mind  at  once 
to  conduct — to  conduct  as  the  index  of  spirit;  and  men 
have  been  driven  in  spite  of  themselves  to  wrestle  with 
the  problem  of  evil. 

I 

It  would  be  a  long  story  to  trace  the  growth  of  the 
idea  of  sin.  The  records  of  our  race  show  how,  in 
thinking  of  sin,  men  have  steadily  shifted  from  the 
external  to  the  internal.  In  all  man's  thought  upon 
life  and  upon  society  that  transition  is  to  be  seen. 
More  and  more  stress  has  been  laid  upon  motive,  upon 
the  reactive  effect  of  action,  and  upon  spirit  and  its 
changes.  Morality  his  grown  more  reflective,  and  man 
more  self-conscious  and  more  individual.  Taboos  live 
long,  but  they  too  are  judged  by  reason.  It  has  been 
a  long,  slow  process;  and  in  the  end  man  acquits  the 
accident  and  the  external  of  his  sin,  and  brings  himself 
in  guilty.  We  watch  the  man  in  Plato's  Republic  wres- 
tling with  the  lust  of  his  eyes  to  gaze  greedily  on  the 
bodies  of  the  criminals  put  to  death;  the  fight  is  within 
him,  and  in  anger  at  himself  he  yields  to  himself.'  In 
the  Gorgias,  as  we  have  seen,''  Plato  goes  further  and 
tells  us  how  sin  writes  itself  indelibly  upon  the  soul  of 


Republic,  1V:439   E,   440  A.     -Chapter  II,   p.   25. 


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  73 

the  sinner.  Still  more  significant  were  the  contributions 
of  Hebrew  prophets  and  psalmists  to  clear  thinking  upon 
sin.  If  the  Greek  brought  out  that  the  man  who  sins, 
sins  against  Nature  and  against  his  own  soul,  the  Hebrew, 
with  his  clearer  conception  of  God's  personality,  grasped 
a  still  more  central  fact.  Isaiah's  vision  of  God  is  imme- 
diately followed  by  his  confession  of  sin  (Isaiah  6),  and 
the  words  of  the  Psalmist  are  familiar: 

"I  know  my  transgressions : 

And  my  sin  is  ever  before  me. 

Against  thee,  thee  only,  have  I  sinned." — (Psalm  51 :3,  4) 

Commentators  with  a  gust  for  the  obvious  like  to  point 
out  the  exaggeration  in  this  confession,  whether  the 
psalm  is  David's  and  refers  to  Uriah  and  his  wife,  or 
whether  it  is  a  more  universal  story,  the  utterance  of 
an  unknown  thinker.  Exaggeration — but,  in  the  depths 
of  it,  truth. 

In  the  new  and  strange  world  that  Alexander  the 
Great  made,  the  supreme  teachers  of  the  Greek  world 
were  the  Stoics,  and  their  main  interest  lay  in  ethics. 
Bishop  Lightfoot  well  called  their  new-coined  word  Con- 
science {a-vvuBrja-Lsi)  "the  crowning  triumph  of  ethical 
nomenclature.'"  Another  great  contribution  was  irpoaipea-is 
(purpose  or  motive).  They  recognized  motive  as  the 
key  to  morality,  while  in  the  older  religions,  especially 
the  Roman,  emphasis  fell  on  act.  The  change  is  revo- 
lutionary. In  Judaism  there  is  a  cleavage;  for  some 
Jews  sin  assumed  a  growing  importance,  while  on  others, 
as  we  shall  see,  it  sat  lightly  enough. 

It  is  interesting  to  reflect  on  the  processes  by  which 
the  gains  of  man's  knowledge  have  been  gathered.  The 
modern  is  so  apt  to  associate  religion  with  morality,  that 
it  is  something  of  a  shock  to  be  told  how  little  priest 


'Commentary   on   Philippians,    p.    301. 


74        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

and  cult  and  temple  contributed  to  eth-ical  progress, 
either  in  Greece  or  in  Israel.  While  it  may  'be  true,  as 
Andrew  Lang  urged,  that  in  no  race  have  religious  cere- 
monies been  unaccompanied  by  moral  teaching,  still  the 
priest  has  rarely  been  much  of  a  thinker,  rarely  a  pioneer 
in  ethics ;  his  business  passed  into  his  soul,  and  his  busi- 
ness lay  with  old  rules,  with  established  forms,  with  the 
practice  of  older  days.  Prophet  in  Israel,  philosopher 
in  Greece,  were  laymen,  men  of  problems  and  questions-^ 
spiritual  anarchists  or  spiritual  reconstructionists,  as 
you  chose  to  regard  them;  men  who  cared  nothing  for 
settled  thought  and  accepted  usage,  but  who  drove  hard 
at  fact,  would  have  principle,  and  must  base  all  on  the 
fundamental.  But  long  before  the  philosophers  and  the 
prophets  whose  names  we  know,  there  were  others  who 
lifted  the  thinking  and  feeling  of  mankind  forward, 
men  who  groped  their  way  to  truth,  vita  didicere  magis- 
tra,  felt  the  pressure  of  life  and  built  their  laws  out  of 
experience.  These  men,  slow-thinking,  but  very  sure, 
were  the  fathers  of  the  philosophers,  their  brothers  and 
their  best  disciples. 

But,  valid  and  beyond  price  as  the  contributions  of 
Plato  and  the  Stoics  were,  and  the  contributions  of 
Prophet  and  Psalmist,  a  great  deal  was  left  to  achieve. 
They  settled  a  great  many  points.  Sin  is  violation  of 
Nature's  laws;  it  is  more  damaging  to  the  sinner  than 
to  his  victim;*  it  is  at  last  rebellion  against  God.  So 
much  was  gained,  and  remains  gained;  Isaiah  and  Plato 
have  much  to  say  to  the  most  modern  of  us;  they  are 
not  superseded.  But  Jesus  transformed  the  whole  situa- 
tion by  revealing  the  character  and  personality  of  God 
and  by  bringing  into  the  range  of  discussion  a  man's 
neighbor  and  society  at  large,  as  the  immediate  interests 
of  God.    He  did  this  partly  by  what  he  said,  a  great  deal 


Plato,   Crito,  49. 


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  75 

more  by  what  he  was.  "To  overlook  or  to  underrate  the 
influence  which  has  been  exercised  upon  moral  develop- 
ment by  great  personalities  has  been  a  too  frequent 
tendency  of  philosophical  Ethics.'"  Personality  itself  has 
again  and  again  been  the  revelation  that  has  superseded 
tradition.  The  Cross  was  a  stimulus  to  rethink  sin;  and 
it  remains  so.  The  teaching  of  Jesus  made  previous 
thinkers  seem  shallow;  they  had  handled  far  too  easily 
the  relation  of  man  to  God;  their  morality,  sound  and 
true  to  Nature  as  far  as  it  went,  was  not  thought  out 
deeply  enough;  their  psychology — ^this  is  a  bold  thing 
to  say,  when  one  remembers  to  whom  one  is  referring — 
was  not  sufficient,  too  many  factors  were  lost.  But  the 
Cross  carried  things  further;  it  became  in  itself  the 
source  of  ''conviction  of  sin" ;  men  by  it  saw  further  into 
the  love  of  God  and  into  the  meaning  of  their  own  sin 
than  ever  before.  Put  into  modern  terms,  clumsy  and 
ugly  enough,  sin  is  the  exploitation  of  man,  the  using 
of  the  gifts  of  God  against  God,  the  negation  of  God, 
the  repudiation  in  toto  of  God's  love,  of  the  personal, 
throbbing,  fathomless  Fatherhood  of  that  God  whom 
Jesus  revealed.  "Sin,"  as  Neville  Talbot  has  put  it, 
"sin,  as  the  wilful  devotion  to  self  of  those  who  are  made 
for  Another  and  for  others,  is  the  central  and  root 
tragedy  of  life." 

If  we  are  to  discuss  the  forgiveness  of  sin,  we  have 
to  be  clear  with  ourselves  as  to  what  we  mean  both  by 
sin  and  by  forgiveness.  If  Bernard  Shaw  tells  us  bluntly 
that  there  is  no  forgiveness  of  sin,  while  the  early  creed 
will  have  us  say  daily :  "I  believe  .  .  .  the  forgiveness  of 
sins,"  supposing  that  the  playwright  and  the  early  the- 
ologian mean  the  same  thing,  it  is  plain  that  they  are 
contradicting  each  other.  That  is  possibly  Mr.  Shaw's 
intention.    The  matter  is  not  settled  by  either  of  them, 


^  Hastings  Raihdall,   Conscience  and   Christ,   p.   21, 


76        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

nor  would  it  be  if  they  agreed  or  thought  they  agreed. 
What  does  forgiveness  imply?  How  much  of  sin  can  be 
forgiven?  Do  we  distinguish  between  sin  and  sins? 
What  should  forgiveness  effect,  then,  if  we  do  so  dis- 
tinguish? 

II 

We  may  begin  by  considering  three  aspects  of  sin 
which  can  be  readily  recognized.  If  sin  is  primarily 
a  record,  can  that  record  be  deleted?  But  it  is  never 
merely  a  record;  there  is  also  what  St.  Augustine  called 
"the  violence  of  habit";'  can  a  habit  be  "forgiven,"  or 
would  it  be  altered  if  it  were  forgiven?  In  the  third 
place,  apart  from  the  record  of  a  man's  sins,  and  his 
habit  of  sin,  a  sinful  act  of  his  may  have  contaminated 
another  man's  springs  of  judgment  and  conduct;  granted 
that  his  habit  of  sin  may  be  overcome,  that  the  record  of 
his  own  acts  may  be  somehow  deleted,  how  can  he  have 
peace,  and  how  can  belief  in  justice  be  secure,  if  the 
influence  of  his  act  remain  operative  in  the  life  of  an- 
other? There  are  at  least  three  problems  here,  none  of 
them  easy. 

First,  then,  the  record.  Men  are  always  haunted  by 
the  consciousness  that  a  thing  done  remains  done.  How- 
ever much  they  repent,  however  pure  and  great  and 
valuable  their  lives  have  become — "Well,  he  was  in  prison 
for  forgery,  and  she  did  have  an  illegitimate  child ;  there 
is  no  getting  past  that ;  those  things  cannot  be  undone." 
So  the  commonplace  always  think,  inside  the  Church  and 
out  of  it.  So,  too,  say  the  religious  teachers,  the  hymn- 
writers — 


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


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  77 

^'Liher  scriptus  proferetur," 

So,  too,  the  Bible,  "The  dead  were  judged  out  of  the 
things  which  were  written  in  the  books,  according  to 
their  works  (Rev.  20:12);  So,  too,  says  conscience.' 
Actions,  deeds,  are  done  and  remain.  Memory  cannot 
abolish  itself;  remorse  is  there,  furious  resentment 
against  oneself  for  the  folly  that  led  to  sin  against  one- 
self, that  robbed  oneself  of  the  clean  page  and  the 
pleasure  which  the  clean  page  means.  Remorse  is  essen- 
tially self-centered ;  it  has  little  relation  to  others.  Where 
God  comes  into  the  reckoning,  there  is  an  added  horror,  a 
sense  very  native  to  the  human  mind  that  the  record  has 
alienated  God.  If  remorse  is  impersonal  and  does  not 
regard  others,  this  is  very  personal ;  God  has  been  turned 
into  an  enemy.  By  now,  if  time  makes  an  interpretation 
valid,  the  Christian  Church  has  said  this  often  enough; 
but  it  is  not  historically  the  view  of  Jesus,  it  is  one  of 
the  ideas  he  died  to  abolish. 

If  the  unthinking  forgive  sin  easily,  the  thoughtful 
do  not;  they  reckon  hardly  with  themselves.  Even  if 
";he  full  and  self-consistent  concept  of  sin"  implies,  as 
Dr.  Tennant  says,  knowledge,  will,  and  intention — if 
without  these,  it  be  not  sin — still  ignorant  acts  involve 
consequences;  ignorance  traps  a  man  into  disease  physi- 
cally; and  morally—?  Greek  tragedy  shows,  painfully 
enough,  that  in  a  great  man's  estimate  of  his  record  and 
of  himself,  his  ignorant  action  counts.  Human  law  will 
not  admit  the  plea  of  ignorance;  Nature's  law  does  not 
admit  it;  will  God's  law  allow  it?  Does  a  deep-going 
man  forgive  himself  his  own  ignorance?  What  right  has 
he  to  be  ignorant?     The  child  dies,  because  the  mother 


^  The  simile  is  in  Daniel  7:10;  and  in  other  apocalyptic  books.  It 
occurred  independently  to  the  Greeks,  some  of  whom  ricliculed  it — Zeus 
would  not  have  material  for  books  enough;  Euripides,  Melantppe,  fr, 
506,  Nauck. 

*Cf.  Wisdom,   17:11;  if  the  text  is  right. 


78        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

did  not  know;  "I  ought  to  have  known,"  she  says,  and 
she  is  right;  the  child  was  given  to  her  that  she  might 
know  for  it.  But  it  is  an  insufficient  view  of  sin  that 
emphasizes  the  deed,  and  it  means  loss  of  proportion. 
The  motive  is  of  more  import;  it  is  more  real  and  more 
formative. 

Second  we  set  the  "violence  of  habit."  Motive,  atti- 
tude, taste,  make  instinct,  and  instinct  gives  a  turn  to 
habit  and  that  to  character.  It  was  remarked  in  an- 
tiquity, and  Burns  among  others  of  modern  times  has 
also  remarked,  that  one  effect  of  sin  is  a  change  of  char- 
acter. "Each  one  of  us,"  said  the  Hebrew,  "has  been 
the  Adam  of  his  own  soul.""  "Whatever  the  mental  pic- 
tures you  often  make,  to  that  color  your  mind  (Siavota) 
comes;  the  mind  is  dyed  by  its  pictures,"  writes  Marcus 
Aurelius  (V:16).    And  Burns: 

"But,  oh,  it  hardens  all  within 
And  petrifies  the  feeling." 

R.  L.  Stevenson  in  his  Christmas  sermon  spoke  of  the 
danger  of  defiling  the  imagination.  The  New  Testament 
abounds  with  similar  observations;  St.  Paul  has  a  series 
of  metaphors  all  drawn  from  the  physical  senses — "the 
heart  darkened"  (Rom.  1:21)  and  "darkened  in  mind" 
(Siavota,  Eph.  4:18) ;  the  mind  and  the  conscience  stained 
(Titus  1:15),  and  the  conscience  cauterized  (I  Tim.  4:2). 
Cumulatively  the  pictures  suggest  a  mind  cut  off  from 
reality — ^all  the  channels  of  communication  blocked,  and 
all  that  is  transmitted  falsified  in  the  process ;  the  whole 
is  summed  up  in  a  striking  phrase,  vovs  dSo/ci/xo?  (Rom. 
1:28),  a  mind  unfit  for  its  proper  functions.  "This  is 
the  condemnation,"  writes  John  (3:19),  "that  men  love 
darkness  rather  than  light."     Much  has  (been  said  and 


'''Apocalypse   of  Bariich,    54:19. 


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  79 

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


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


80        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

is  to  be  pitied  for  a  disease  from  which  he  suffers,  two 
questions  arise:  How  did  he  incur  it,  and  has  he  trans- 
mitted it?  What  are  we  to  make  of  the  effects  of  our 
characters  in  the  lives  and  minds  and  personalities  of 
others?  If  a  man  of  great  gifts  neglects  or  misuses 
them  as  a  result  of  my  influence,  if  he  turns  them  into 
instruments  of  corruption,  what  becomes  of  that  other 
lost  soul  and  its  powers,  used  for  evil,  even  if  mine  is 
recovered  for  God  and  man?  Forgiveness,  if  it  is  to  be 
real  and  complete,  has  surely  to  cover  this  third  aspect 
of  sin. 

Ill 

Many  methods  have  been  tried  to  meet  the  case  of 
sin.  Neglect  of  it  as  negligible  has  been  suggested  as 
if  it  were  as  good  a  course  as  any.  Sir  Oliver  Lodge 
has  said,  apparently  with  some  satisfaction,  that  the 
modern  man  has  not  time  to  think  about  his  sins."  If 
sin  is  a  serious  thing  at  all,  it  is  a  pity  the  modern  man 
should  be  so  short  of  time.  Much  stress  was  laid  in 
antiquity,  and  some  since  then,  on  moral  endeavor.  The 
Stoic  sage  bade  a  man  examine  himself,  confess  his  sins 
to  his  conscience,  forgive  them,  and  then  do  better." 
Jewish  legalism  reached  a  similar  result.  But  every- 
thing here  depends  on  a  man's  conception  of  God  and 
of  God's  standards ;  if  it  is  not  very  high,  he  may  easily 
satisfy  himself;  but  if  it  be  a  high  one,  if  it  be  continu- 
ally expanded  with  new  glimpses  of  God,  then  new  visions 
of  duty  break  in  upon  him,  and  he  concludes,  sometimes 
in  blank  despair: 

"Not  the  labors  of  my  hands 
Can  fulfil  Thy  law's  demands." 


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


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  81 

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


"Persius  3:32. 

"Epictetus,  D.,   1:5. 

"  Origen,  c.  Celsum,  3:65. 


82        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


^«  Rashdall,   Conscience  and  Christ,  p.   129. 

"  Perhaps  it  is  not  fanciful  to  see  in  the  Greek  term  for  sin  (&ixapria, 
"missing"  the  mark)  another  suggestion  of  this  idea  that  sin  hardly  con- 
cerns God. 

*'  Confirmation  is  to  be  found  in  some  of  the  Apocalyptic  books.  Cf, 
R.  H.  Charles,  Apocalypse  of  Baruch,  p.  81  flF. 

^*  Compare  a   beautiful   passage  in   Wisdom    11:23-26. 

^^Cf.  Apocalypse  of  Baruch,  84:10.  "Pray  .  .  .  that  the  Mighty 
One  may  be  reconciled  to  you  and  that  He  may  not  reckon  the  multitude 
of  your  sins,  but  remember  the  rectitude  of  your  others."  Cf.  ih.  14:7, 
12,  "a  store  of  works." 


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  83 

amply  make  up  for  their  own  individual  deficiencies. 
Their  religion  was  therefore  happy  and  hopeful"  (p.  36). 
"Salvation  was  the  privilege  of  every  Israelite,  who, 
believing  in  God  and  in  his  law,  tried  to  do  his  best  and 
was  sorry  for  his  failures  and  lapses"  (pp.  77,  78).  The 
God  of  the  Rabbis  was  "very  personal  and  childlike.  He 
did  not  care  for  system  and  theories,  but  he  was  always 
there  when  wanted"  (p.  95)  f  his  people,  too,  had  "little 
philosophy"  (p.  79). 

There  was  another  type  of  Judaism  which  has  histori- 
cally had  more  influence,  the  Judaism  of  the  Dispersion, 
of  men  battling  more  nakedly  with  the  world,  with  pagan- 
ism, and  with  the  higher  thought  of  the  Greeks.  Mr. 
Montefiore  finds  it  "inferior"  (p.  93),  "more  anxious  and 
pessimistic,  more  sombre  and  perplexed"  (p.  114).  It 
had  suffered  from  contact  with  the  Greek  spirit,  and 
"began  to  invent  theories  and  justifications  of  its  reli- 
gion instead  of  accepting  it  as  a  delightful  matter  of 
course"  (p.  96).  "Directly  you  have  to  justify  a  thing, 
it  becomes  a  little  external.  ...  If  you  accept  ...  as  a 
matter  of  course,  you  love  it  without  asking  why"  (p.  99). 
So  the  Jew  of  the  Dispersion  was  "more  theoretic  and 
systematic,  but  his  outlook  on  life  was  less  accurate  and 
less  sensible"   (p.  96). 

I  have  given  Mr.  Montefiore's  own  words,  because  I 
do  not  wish  to  misrepresent,  and  because  he  is  the  expert 
and  I  am  not.  But  the  impression  they  leave  on  my 
mind  is  not  quite  what  he  intends.  The  naivete  of  the 
Rabbinic  Jew  does  not  seem  to  me  a  higher  thing  than 
the  more  difficult  and  reflective  religion  of  the  Dispersion. 
It  is  too  like  the  common  sense  and  the  simplicity  which 
we  find  in  other  fields  and  there  recognize  to  be  the  result 
of  mere  inattention.    Paul's  religion  was,  as  Mr.  Monte- 


21  See   Oesterley  and   Box,   Religion  and   Worship  of  the  Synagogue,  pp. 
591-403,  on  the  Day  of  Atonement. 


84        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

fiore  says,  quite  different  from  that  which  he  describes; 
but  surely  it  was  not  of  a  lower  type,  unless  the  philos- 
opher, who  aims  with  Plato  at  the  ''contemplation  of  all 
time  and  of  all  existence,'""  is  inferior  to  the  man  who 
has  not  begun  to  think  or  who  has  abruptly  dropped  the 
habit.  Things  are  not  simple  in  God's  universe.  To  be 
unconscious  of  difficulties  is  not  to  be  above  them.  If 
this  is  to  defy  the  common  sense  of  the  "man  in  the 
street,"  I  cannot  help  it.  In  any  case.  Rabbinic  Judaism 
did  not,  historically,  capture  the  world;  it  did  not  hold 
the  reflective  Jews  of  the  Dispersion;  and  the  reason  is 
not  far  to  seek — it  managed  everything  too  easily,  "healed 
the  hurt  of  the  daughter  of  my  people  lightly,  saying. 
Peace,  peace;  when  there  is  no  peace.'"' 

IV 

Jesus  is  reported  by  the  Fourth  Gospel  to  have  said 
that  the  Holy  Spirit  would  convince  the  world  of  sin 
(16:9).  Rabbinic  Judaism  did  no  such  thing.  Super- 
stitious and  magical  as  they  largely  were,  the  mystery- 
cults  of  the  heathen  were  nearer  the  truth  about  sin. 
Jesus  with  the  Rabbis  emphasized  repentance,  but  he 
touched  nothing  that  he  did  not  deepen.  He  gave  men  a 
new  clue  to  the  force  and  meaning  of  sin;  he  brought 
them  to  a  new  sense  of  repentance.  Repentance,  as 
Luther  saw  when  he  began  in  earnest  the  study  of 
Greek,  means  above  all  things  "rethinking."  A  man  must 
have  some  idea  of  what  Tils  sin  means  to  God,  of  what 
it  means  in  the  human  milieu.  In  order  to  do  this,  he 
must  have  some  conviction  of  God.  The  knowledge  of 
God  will  be  more  fully  dealt  with  in  the  next  chapter.  It 
is  enough  here  to  recall  how  Jesus  re-created  the  very 
idea  of  God  for  men,  and  this  made  possible  a  real  re- 


''^  Republic,  VI:486  a. 
-=' Jeremiah  6:14.  8:11. 


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  85 

thinking  of  life  and  conduct.  The  cross  gave  men  a  new 
object-lesson  in  the  nature  of  sin  and  the  outcome  of  it, 
showed  it  in  its  hideousness,  for.  the  cruel,  vulgar,  and 
negative  thing  it  is.  Some  realization  of  God,  his  law, 
his  nature,  has  always  been  the  prelude  of  repentance 
properly  so  named,  though  it  is  also  true  that  penitence 
in  its  fullness  is  a  Christian  grace,  which  grows  by 
knowledge  of  Jesus. 

But  our  problem  is  the  work  of  Jesus  in  dealing  with 
sin,  and  we  shall  do  best  to  follow  the  lines  laid  down 
already.  How  has  Jesus  affected  the  mind  of  mankind 
with  regard  to  the  record,  the  habit,  and  the  influence 
of  sin? 

First,  once  more,  the  record.  Something  is  needed,  as 
the  writer  to  the  Hebrews  says,  that  "will  clean  your 
conscience."  It  is  conscience  that  makes  cowards  of  us 
all ;  if  conscience  blushes,  Tertullian  said,  prayer  blushes 
too."*  There  is  no  coming  to  God,  if  conscience  says  we 
shall  not  be  welcome.  It  is  a  question  of  balance,  or 
perspective,  as  we  like  to  put  it.  There  stands  the  record ; 
we  conclude  that  it  is  intolerable  to  God,  that  it  alienates 
God.  Jesus  distinguishes ;  he  'brought  out  the  hatef  ulness 
of  sin  to  God,  he  never  minimized  it,  his  Passion  empha- 
sized it;  but  he  put  in  the  center  of  his  teaching  his 
conviction  that  sin  does  not  alienate  God  from  the  child 
whom  he  loves.  As  we  have  seen  already,"  Jesus  always 
takes  the  line  that  the  Father  wants  his  son  above  all 
things.  The  prodigal  wastes  the  old  man's  substance  in 
the  strange  land;  but  it  is  not  the  substance  (nor  an 
I.O.U.  for  it)  that  the  old  man  wants;  he  wants  his  boy, 
because  he  is  his  boy  and  needs  a  father's  care  and  love. 
Jesus  never  suggests  that  he  is  effecting  any  change  in 
moral  law,  any  dislocation,  legal  fiction,  or  dodge  of  any 
kind.    His  emphasis  is  not  on  acts  done,  on  guilt  or  on 

■-*  Tertullian,  De  exhort,  castitatis,   10.     -'^Chapter  IV,  p.  64. 


86        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

penalty  incurred;  it  is  not  on  law,  nor  on  God's  majesty 
and  the  vindication  of  majesty  and  law;  he  does  not 
deny  or  in  reality  obscure  these  things,  but  for  him  the 
matter  of  first  significance  is  the  love  of  God. 

The  record  remains,  but  the  sting  is  taken  out  of  it; 
the  forgiven  son  leaves  off  thinking  of  his  record,*'  he 
is  more  impressed  by  his  father's  feeling  for  him,  and 
if  he  thinks  of  the  record,  it  becomes  itself  of  new  value 
for  it  enhances  the  wonder  of  his  reception.  "To  anyone 
who  really  experiences  it,"  says  Herrmann,'''  "forgiveness 
comes  not  as  a  matter  of  course,  but  as  an  astounding 
revelation  of  love."  (The  contrast  here  with  the  ideas 
of  the  Rabbinic  Jew  as  set  forth  by  his  advocate  is 
patent,  and  it  is  significant).  Christ,  as  Zwingli  saw, 
sets  men  free  from  the  sense  of  condemnation  by  reveal- 
ing not  only  the  divine  justice  and  horror  of  sin,  but 
also  the  divine  mercy  and  love;  he  removes  the  barrier 
which  prevents  God  and  man  from  falling  into  each 
other's  arms.^*  The  barrier  is  of  man's  building,  the 
honest  structure  that  conscience  builds  as  a  prison  about 
him;  but  conscience  too  needs  educating  and  pitches  the 
love  of  God  too  low.  Jesus  changes  that;  he  is  himself 
the  guarantee  for  God,  the  pledge  of  God's  love.  The 
consequence  is  a  great  change  of  mind  in  the  man.  He 
moves  over  to  God's  point  of  view.  He  no  longer  wishes 
to  escape  the  consequences  of  his  actions.  If  the  Father 
of  Jesus  makes  a  law,  the  man  will  now  wish  at  all  costs 
to  maintain  it,  he  will  cooperate  to  the  extent  of  wishing 
to  bear  the  penalty  that  his  Father  thinks  helpful  to 
him  and  to  others.  But  is  this  forgiveness?  If  the 
penalty  is  still  to  be  borne?  But  what  is  the  penalty,  when 


2' Cf .  Luther:  "If  thou  wilt  confess  sin,  then  have  a  care  that  thjou 
lookest  and  thinkest  far  more  on  thy  future  life  than  on  thy  past  life." 
Herrmann,  Communion  of  Christian  with  God,  p.  255. 

^  Herrmann,  ih.,  p.  251. 

28  See  A.  V.  G.  Allen,  Continuity  of  Christian  Thought,  pp.  289.290. 


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  87 

once  there  is  reconciliation?  Is  it  a  punishment  if  you 
wish  it?  Let  him  do  what  he  will!  The  crop  sown 
has  to  be  reaped;  but  Another  will  help  in  the  reaping; 
and  it  is  something  to  work  along  with  such  a  Friend  even 
in  so  painful  and  humiliating  a  task.  And  it  is  man's 
experience  that  in  this  work,  as  in  all  work  done  for  God 
and  with  God,  the  great  Friend  does  the  larger  part. 
If  Jesus  is  right  about  God,  punishment  is  not  vindictive ; 
it  is  remedial,"^  and  justice  is  love.  "Though  he  slay  me, 
yet  will  I  trust  in  him.'""  When  one  grasps  the  inward- 
ness of  Christian  thought  and  experience  here,  the  lan- 
guage used  so  often  in  the  past  about  one's  own  righteous- 
ness being  filthy  rags''  becomes  quickly  intelligible;  Zin- 
zendorf,  following  Paul  and  John,  is  right,  when  we  un- 
derstand what  he  means : 

"Jesu,  thy  blood  and  righteousness 
My  beauty  are,  my  glorious  dress ; 
'Midst  flaming  worlds,  in  these  arrayed, 
With  joy  shall  I  lift  up  my  head." 

We  may  very  well  use  other  words  and  other  symbols ;  but 
he  too  has  caught  the  truth.  The  cross  has  lit  up  the  real 
nature  of  God ;  the  love  that  chose  it  becomes  the  supreme 
thing;  the  record  is  not  ignored,  but  its  paralyzing  effect 
is  gone;  the  conscience  is  set  free  to  enjoy  God  and  all 
his  dealings.  Rothe,  as  rendered  by  John  Wesley,  sums 
up  the  experience : 

"0  love,  thou  bottomless  abyss! 

My  sins  are  swallowed  up  in  thee; 
Covered  is  my  unrighteousness. 

Nor  spot  of  guilt  remains  in  me. 
While  Jesu's  blood  through  earth  and  skies 
Mercy,  free  boundless  mercy,  cries." 


2*  Cf.    Clement    of    Alexandria,    Strom.,    6:6,    46:    "The    punishments    of 
God  are  saving  and  educative";   referring  to  the  punishment  of  the   dead, 
so  Job  13:15   (A.V.).     ^i  Cf .  Isaiah  64:6  (A.V.). 


88        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

Secondly,  the  power  of  sin.  During  the  long  Euro- 
pean war,  and  especially  towards  its  end,  all  the  world 
realized,  as  Napoleon  had  said,  that  morale  is  everything. 
Spirit  is  the  source  of  victory.  Jesus,  as  we  have  seen, 
floods  the  human  soul  with  an  intense  conviction  of  the 
love  of  God;  and  the  man  shouts  in  sheer  joy:  "I  can 
do  all  things  through  Christ  who  strengtheneth  me" 
(Phil.  4:  13).  This  has  been  put  in  a  variety  of  ways,  all 
pointing  to  the  same  experience.  Dr.  Chalmers  spoke  of 
"the  expulsive  power  of  a  new  affection,"  an  illustration 
from  human  life  which  goes  a  long  way.  "Every  one  who 
knows  what  it  is  to  be  forgiven,"  wrote  Dr.  Denney, 
"knows  also  that  forgiveness  is  the  greatest  regenerative 
force  in  the  life  of  man."''  "The  spirit  of  life  in  Christ," 
said  Paul  (and  we  had  better  take  pains  to  give  the  real 
value  to  the  words  he  chose),  "set  me  free  from  the  law 
of  sin  and  death"  (Rom.  8:2).  Charles  Wesley  says  the 
same,  as  forcibly: 

"He  breaks  the  power  of  cancelled  sin. 
He  sets  the  prisoner  free." 

St.  Augustine  gives  a  further  hint.  We  love  more,  he 
says,  a  possession  that  we  have  lost  and  found  again  than 
if  we  had  never  lost  it.'"  A  new  tie  of  common  experi- 
ence binds  the  good  shepherd  to  the  sheep  he  has  found, 
and  would  bind  the  sheep  to  the  shepherd  if  sheep  were 
susceptible  of  such  feelings.  Men  transcend  sheep  here; 
memory  gives  a  new  motive,  and  the  common  experi- 
ence of  which  Christ  and  the  soul  share  the  secret  has  a 
power  of  transmuting  the  minus  to  a  plus,  with  a  force 
that  overcomes  the  reflex  of  habit.  As  for  the  subliminal 
self  and  its  power  of  storing  dead  selves  with  their  hor- 
rible reminders  and  influences,  the  Author  of  the  sub- 


»*  Denney,  Christian  Doctrine  of  Reconciliation,  p.   6. 
3^  Augustine,    Confessions,   VTII:3,   7. 


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  89 

liminal  self  may  be  trusted  to  purify  that  self  also;  for 
the  idea  that  God  leaves  things  half  done  has  never 
found  acceptance  with  real  thinkers.  Christ  will  descend 
into  that  hell  at  least,  whatever  we  say  about  the  Apostles' 
Creed;  and  when  he  has  made  it  full  of  himself,  what 
it  throws  up  into  the  conscious  may  be  trusted  to  be 
sweet  and  wholesome.  Human  love  has  this  effect — 
changing  the  innermost  character  and  instincts  and  stor- 
ing impulses  for  good. 

All  this,  be  it  noted,  is  not  conjecture ;  it  is  the  experi- 
ence men  have  had  of  Jesus,  interpreted  soberly,  if  joy- 
fully, in  language  as  near  the  fact  as  they  could  bring 
it.  If  the  language  has  the  surge  and  swing  about  it  of 
"joy  unspeakable  and  full  of  glory,"  that  is  always  the 
mark  of  real  experience,  new  and  startling;  and  it  con- 
firms the  Christian  story,  that  men  should  find  it  un- 
speakable. Historically,  men  have  found  the  power  of 
habit  overcome  and  the  nature  transformed  by  Jesus 
Christ — instinct  and  impulse  as  much  changed  as  mind 
and  heart,  a  rebirth  of  the  whole  being.  What  forgive- 
ness could  be  without  this,  it  is  hard  to  see;  it  must  be 
this,  or  it  is  nothing;  and  Christian  experience  is  solid 
on  the  reality  of  this  change. 

In  the  third  place,  the  influence  of  sin  upon  others — 
in  some  ways  the  hardest  aspect  of  the  matter.  A  man 
submits  himself  to  Christ,  is  reborn,  remade,  or  what- 
ever our  phrase  be  to  describe  the  amazing  extent  of 
the  change;  but  the  woman  he  seduced,  or  the  son  whom 
he  tainted  with  low  moral  standards,  what  of  them? 
Can  he 

"Let  the  wretch  go  festering  through  Florence," 

and  be  at  peace  with  God  ?  The  act  is  beyond  recall ;  the 
innocent  suffer  or  are  defiled;  how  can  there  be  "peace 


90        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

with  God,"  would  it  not  be  damnable  insensibility? 
There  are  two  lines  of  reply.  It  is  a  consideration  to  be 
remembered,  that  a  man  is  responsible  for  his  influence, 
but  not  wholly  for  another's  reception  of  it.  The  great 
quack  of  the  last  days  of  the  French  monarchy  took  in 
all  sorts  of  persons,  but,  as  Carlyle  points  out,  Cagliostro 
failed  with  thoroughly  honest  people.  If  the  woman  or 
the  son,  whom  we  have  imagined,  had  been  thoroughly 
sound,  the  bad  influence  would  have  been  turned  aside. 
The  man  is  responsible  for  the  effects  of  his  influence, 
which  are  serious  enough,  but  not  for  another  man  or 
woman's  self-determination.  The  other  person  is  never 
merely  wax;  he,  too,  or  she,  has  a  responsibility.  But, 
put  things  at  the  very  worst,  the  problem  will  be  best 
decided  by  reference  to  the  Christian  experience  of 
Jesus.  "It  is  simply  not  true,"  says  Dr.  D.  S.  Cairns, 
"to  speak  of  the  irreparable  past,  and  not  well  to  dwell 
upon  it.  Go  deeper  and  take  God  into  account.  It  is 
part  of  his  omnipotence  that  he  can  retrieve  it.  The 
story  is  not  finished  yet.  Those  who  believe  in  God 
believe  in  a  retrieving  future."  Thus  it  all  comes  back 
once  again  to  that  conviction  of  God  which  Jesus  has 
brought  into  human  experience.  Jesus  was  after  all  the 
friend  of  men,  clear-sighted  beyond  the  best  of  us;  was 
he  going  to  leave  men  unhealed  just  when  the  healing 
mattered  most  to  themselves  and  to  others  ?  To  think  so 
is  to  miss  the  reality  of  his  nature. 

Finally,  we  have  to  remember  that  the  holiness,  which 
Jesus  gives  to  character,  is  not  a  negative  thing  of  taboos, 
"a  fugitive  and  cloistered  virtue,"  in  Milton's  fine  phrase, 
that  "slinks  out  of  the  race,  where  that  immortal  garland 
is  to  be  run  for,  not  without  dust  and  heat."  He  has 
given  us  another  conception  of  holiness,  as  a  positive 
and  redemptive  thing  that  seeks  the  contact  of  sinful  men, 
that  faces  dust  and  heat,  temptation,  agony,  and  the  cross 


THE  FORGIVENESS  OF  SIN  91 

itself — something  functional  and  reproductive,  no  "trea- 
sure in  a  napkin"  buried  and  sterile,  but  seed  sown  and 
growing  and  bearing  a  hundredfold,  the  most  prolific  and 
living  thing  imaginable.  To  venture  on  a  modern  simile, 
it  is  more  like  chlorine  than  blotting-paper. 

It  is  thus  that  Jesus  has  dealt  with  sin.  He  gave  it  an 
importance  it  had  never  had  before;  he  brought  out  its 
meaning;  he  got  it  into  the  light  of  God's  face.  But  he 
also  brought  men  to  look  on  God's  face.  "We  have  peace 
with  God,"  says  Paul  (Rom.  5:1) ;  it  is  historically  true, 
and  the  way  of  it  and  the  results  of  it  deserve  attention. 
The  man  who  is  at  peace  with  God  is  no  longer  resentful 
of  God's  action,  whatever  form  it  take.  He  no  longer 
tries  to  protect  himself  against  God.  As  in  a  human 
friendship  a  man  drops  habits  of  criticism  and  self-pro- 
tection, and  absorbs  his  friend,  so  the  man  "at  peace 
with  God"  opens  his  heart,  consciously  and,  perhaps  still 
more,  unconsciously  to  God.  It  is  not  till  then  that  God's 
personality  can  make  itself  felt. 

The  result  in  the  growth  of  mind  and  character  cannot 
be  hid.  Of  such  growth  the  Christian  Church  can  show 
abundant  evidence,  both  in  individuals  and  in  the  society 
they  make.  So  that  we  are  justified  in  concluding  that 
there  has  'been  some  real  and  effective  treatment  of  sin, 
that  men  have  been  set  free  from  it,  and  have  a  new  life 
in  God — in  short,  that  Jesus  has  reconciled  men  to  God, 
that  he  has  solved  the  problem  of  forgiveness,  and  that 
the  solution  is  "the  love  of  God  which  is  in  Christ  Jesus 
our  Lord"  (Rom.  8:39). 


CHAPTER     VI 
THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD 

Tantum  Deus  cognoscitur  qioantum  diligitur. 

— Bernard  of  Clairvaux. 

In  the  long  history  of  religion  with  all  its  cross-cur- 
rents and  backwaters,  the  windings  of  the  stream,  and 
the  great  barren  expanses  of  shale  and  sand  where  no 
water  is,  it  is  possible  with  care  to  mark  a  direction  and 
a  progress.  Certain  things  emerge  from  close  study 
which  it  is  impossible  to  mistake  and  which  gain  signifi- 
cance as  we  reflect  upon  them. 

Man,  it  has  been  said,  is  incurably  religious,  and  the 
explanation  is  given  by  Plato — "the  unexamined  life  is 
not  livable  for  a  human  being.'"  He  is  bound  by  some- 
thing implanted  in  him  to  reflect  upon  his  experience, 
and,  while  thought  does  not  add  to  his  experience,  it  so 
brings  out  the  meaning  of  it,  as  to  make  it  a  new  thing 
and  to  prepare  the  way  for  fresh  discovery.  The  past 
becomes  the  present  and  points  to  the  future — is  the 
future,  one  might  almost  say,  so  truly 

"Old  experience  doth  attain 

To  something  of  prophetic  strain." 

I 

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


Apology,  38  A. 

92 


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  93 

First  of  all,  man  is  driven  to  unify  his  experience.  We 
talk  of  people  thinking  in  compartments,  but  it  is  impos- 
sible to  do  it  for  very  long;  either  the  thought  or  the 
compartments  must  go,  and  with  mankind  at  large  it  is 
thought  that  triumphs.  Plato's  ideal  of  "the  contempla- 
tion of  all  time  and  all  existence"^  owes  to  him  a  magni- 
ficent phrasing ;  the  ideal  was  latent  in  every  living  mind 
from  the  beginning — a  vague  date,  I  know,  but  no  other  is 
available.  Probably  all  the  great  strides  in  thought  have 
been  connected  with  the  unification  of  experience.  A  dis- 
covery or  even  a  suggestion  that  reduces  our  categories, 
that  simplifies  our  thinking,  is  always  hailed  as  a  step  for- 
ward ;  if  it  prove  valid,  it  will  never  be  really  lost.  The 
greatest  truths  are  those  that  achieve  this  for  us  most 
effectively,  and  over  the  largest  range. 

Secondly,  however  picturesque  in  long  retrospect  the 
vague  cults  and  fears  of  animism  may  seem,  animism 
has  never  given  a  secure  foothold  to  thinking  man.  The 
Olympian  gods  of  Greece  were  bound  to  overcome  their 
predecessors.  Mankind  tacitly  held  that  there  is  nothing 
in  the  universe  greater  than  personality;  the  word  is  of 
the  most  modern,  the  faith  very  ancient.  Men  gave  their 
gods  personality;  or,  rather,  they  found  themselves  un- 
able to  think  of  their  gods  as  less  than  personal.  To 
recognize  the  gods  as  possessed  of  feeling,  intellect,  and 
character  was  a  step  forward — a  necessary  step;  and 
where  it  was  not  taken  there  was  no  progress.  Perhaps 
the  chief  value  of  this  step  forward  was  that  it  made 
another  inevitable — to  the  unity  of  the  godhead.  The 
unthinking  in  Greece  held  for  ever  to  vague  animistic 
conceptions,  to  demons;  and  there  was  periodic  reaction 
to  them.  The  separate  gods  long  held  the  field,  but  the 
thinkers  saw  beyond  them.  Israel  and  Greece  took  dif- 
ferent roads  at  this  point;  Greece  reached  the  unity  of 


Republic,  VI: 486  A. 


94        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

God  more  decisively  than  his  personality ;  Israel,  by  some 
happy  instinct  or  thanks  to  prophetic  genius,  grasped 
and  kept  the  personality  of  the  one  God,  and  there  lay 
the  key  to  the  future. 

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


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  95 

In  the  fourth  place,  man  came  to  realize  intensively 
the  significance  of  his  own  personality.  A  large  part  of 
Greek  history  may  be  summed  up  as  a  series  of  experi- 
ments, by  which  the  individual  secures  recognition  of 
himself.  Politically  it  became  more  and  more  obvious 
how  much  he  meant ;  Greek  history  was  made  and  unmade 
in  a  degree  beyond  anything  we  know  in  the  West  by 
men  amazingly,  even  desperately,  individual  and  unmis- 
takable. Greek  philosophy  is  the  outcome  of  the  indi- 
vidual man's  determination  to  do  his  own  thinking  him- 
self, and  be  done  with  his  neighbor  and  his  grandfather. 
In  religion  it  is  the  same.  The  Greek  made  up  his  mind 
that  he  must  be  immortal."  It  is  this  glorious  assertion 
of  personality,  with  the  glad  acceptance  of  the  duties 
that  go  with  it,  that  made  the  Greek  the  world's  teacher. 
Strange  as  it  seems,  he  had  to  teach  the  Hebrew  the  doc- 
trine of  personal  immortality. 

These  four  tendencies  are  to  be  traced  through  the 
history  of  all  religion.  They  have  their  fates,  of  course ; 
here  one  is  over-emphasized  and  another  lost.  But  a 
survey  of  the  whole  field  confirms  us  in  the  conviction 
not  only  of  their  validity  but  of  their  vitality.-  Where 
one  or  other  of  these  tendencies  is  repressed,  religion 
suffers.  Men's  convictions  as  to  the  nature  of  God  control 
the  fates  of  races  and  empires ;  they  are  the  most  potent 
things  mankind  has.  A  doctrine  of  God  that  ignores  his 
unity,  his  personality,  or  my  personality,  or  the  right- 
eousness that  must  govern  us  both,  leads  to  disaster.  Any 
doctrine,  further,  that  suggests  contempt  or  even  inatten- 
tion towards  any  real  feature  in  God  or  man,  fails  to 
endure,  or,  if  it  endures,  the  human  race  suffers  for  it. 
My  personality  includes  feeling  and  reason,  the  instinct 
for  wife  and  child  and  state,  an  imperious  demand  for 


'  Plutarch,  who  sometimes  hits  off  (or  borrows)  a  good  phrase,  says, 
"The  hope  of  immortality  and  the  passion  to  be  is  of  all  our  loves  oldest 
and  greatest."      {Non   Snaviter,    U04   c.)- 


96        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

an  ever  larger  life,  for  a  richer  development  of  nature 
and  character — that  is  what  the  Greek  teaches  us,  and 
we  know  by  now  that  he  is  right ;  and  any  religion  which 
denies  me  any  of  these  claims  will  produce  a  poorer  type 
of  mankind,  a  lie  of  some  sort,  and  not  the  true  thing. 
And  further,  before  we  pass  on,  when  the  modern  man 
— at  his  simplest,  as  we  may  lightly  say — is  overheard 
asking:  "How  can  I  be  right  with  God?"  the  question 
embodies  the  four  great  tendencies  we  have  been  dis- 
cussing; it  recognizes  God  and  his  ego  as  paramount, 
acting  together  in  a  single  sphere,  and  both  recognizing 
Right  as  their  common  ground.  History  itself  is  a  record 
of  man's  endeavor  to  "get  right  with  God,"  to  find  out 
God's  meaning  for  human  life  and  to  adjust  society  to  it.* 

II 

But,  as  Plato  says,  "the  Father  and  Maker  of  this 
whole  it  is  hard  to  find,  and  when  one  has  found  him  to 
declare  him  to  all  is  impossible." '  That  a  sense  of 
strangeness  and  foreignness  lies  like  a  fog  across  the 
entrance  of  the  divine  country,  a  certain  wonder  whether 
a  mere  man  has  any  business  there,  an  unreality  about 
it  all,  is  the  moving  confession  of  a  modern  thinker." 
God  is  so  manifold  that  it  is  hard  to  be  sure  that  one  has 
the  whole  of  him.  His  ideas  man  only  slowly  gathers; 
some  easily,  as  those  about  gravitation  and  by  and  by 
those  about  fire,  and  later  and  with  less  ease  those  about 
germs  (let  us  say)  and  electricity;  but  his  more  funda- 
mental thoughts  are  more  deeply  hidden  and  only  to  be 


*  The  influence  of  the  Stoic  "Law  of  Nature"  on  the  development  of 
Roman  law  is  only  one  obvious  illustration. 

'^Timaeus,  29  C;  cf.  Clem.  Alex.  Protr.  68,  and  Celsus,  Orig,  c. 
Cels.  7:  42,  who  quote  the  passage  from  very  different  angles  and  in 
very    different    tempers. 

•Phillips  Brooks,   The  Light  of  the    World,  p.  6. 


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  97 

reached  by  longer  and  more  painful  experience  and 
thought  more  long  and  painful  still/  And  man  is  im- 
patient of  the  lingering  processes  of  thought.  The  phil- 
osophers are  so  slow,  and  life  so  short;  one  must  have 
an  effective  relation  with  God,  and  there  are  other 
teachers  who  do  not  for  ever  tell  us  to  wait  and  see; 
they  act  and  achieve — at  least  they  say  so.  A  great 
cleavage  comes  in  men's  progress;  these  go  to  the  right, 
moving  slowly  and  stumblingly,  checking  their  move- 
ments and  their  discoveries,  halting  and  retracing  their 
steps  again  and  again;  those  go  gaily  and  confidently  to 
the  left,  happy  in  their  freedom  from  doubt,  happy  in 
their  activity  and  their  sensations;  and  mankind  is 
indebted  to  both — though  to  which  the  more,  we  may 
not  so  readily  agree. 

Must  we  know  God  before  we  can  have  relations  with 
Godhead?  The  Graeco-Roman  world  was  divided  on  this 
question.  The  philosophers  were  uncertain  and  slow, 
not  clear  about  God's  personality,  stronger  on  his  unity, 
far  from  precise  about  our  consciousness  of  relation  with 
him.  "He  is  not  far  from  any  one  of  you,"  they  said; 
they  even  spoke  of  a  holy  spirit  within  you  ;^  but  then  it 
was  not  clear  once  more,  whether  they  meant  spirit  or 
breath,  a  divine  indwelling  in  the  soul,  or  a  divine  crea- 
tion of  the  soul  from  some  fragment  of  itself  (divinae 
particulam  aurae) .'  There  was,  they  said,  a  great  Some- 
thing beyond,  the  soul  of  the  world  (anima  mundi)  per- 
haps, or  Something  further  away  still,  "beyond  being.'"" 
But  how  is  one  to  have  contact  with  that?  In  him  we 
live  and  move  and  have  our  being;  his  laws  condition  our 
life: 


^  Hence  perhaps  the  famous  saying  of  Heraclitus   <c.  600  B.C)   that  "a 
hidden  harmony  is  better  than  one  obvious." 

®  So  Seneca,  Ep.  41,  1:  Sacer  intra  nos  spiritus  sedet. 

^Horace,  Satires,  2:2,  79;  cf.  Epictetus,  D.,  2:8:  vt  iToOTavnatl  rouBtov. 

"Celsus  ap.  Origen,  c.  Cels..  7:45. 


98        JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

"Thou  dost  preserve  the  stars  from  wrong; 
And  the  most  ancient  Heavens,  through  Thee,  are 
fresh  and  strong." 

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


"Seneca,  Consolation  (end). 


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  99 

The  common  man's  hurry  is  the  quack's  opportunity. 
Hence  came,  as  we  have  seen,  the  sects  that  promised 
speedy  peace  with  heaven,  certainty,  security  and  enjoy- 
ment, rapt  moments  and  the  most  delicious  sensations 
of  union  with  gods,  and  light  upon  immortality.  Intui- 
tion and  initiation  were  the  watchwords.  Religion  was 
dissipated  in  an  emotionalism  that  lost  all  sense  of  defini- 
tion ;  nothing  was  clear,  all  was  vague.  There  were  (and 
are)  those  whose  teaching  is  that  that  is  ideal  religion; 
but  something  was  lost,  when  reason  abdicated — the 
stem  morality  of  the  Stoic  went,  the  clear  vision  of 
Plato,  the  very  sense  of  truth.'^ 

From  the  struggle  certain  results  emerge.  A  faraway 
God  will  not  do;  any  tampering  with  the  reality  of  the 
soul  is  fatal;  emotion  is  no  guide  to  truth;  religion 
without  morality,  morality  without  religion,  neither  will 
satisfy  the  stern  and  loving  nature  of  man. 

Ill 

The  Jew  in  the  Roman  Empire  had  after  all  a  richer 
heritage  in  religion  than  the  Greek.  Before  the  days 
of  the  great  prophets  Israel  had  been  clear  about  the  per- 
sonality of  Jehovah.  It  was  a  gain  that  the  syncretism, 
that  made  one  Zeus  of  many  and,  by  keeping  all  the 
legends  of  the  many,  made  the  one  polygamous  and  non- 
moral  generally,  had  no  parallel  in  Israel's  experience. 
Slowly,  led  by  prophet  and  psalmist,  Israel  concentrated 
mind  and  heart  on  one  God,  "the  God  of  the  whole  earth," 
the  God  of  Nature,  the  God  of  history;  and  a  monothe- 
ism grew  up  that  was  passionate. 

"The  lord  descended  from  above 
and  bowed  the  heavens  hie; 

^  p.  Wendland,  Hell.  Rom.  Kultur,  p.  168,  sums  up  this  general  move- 
ment as  "Theosophy  for  the  cultured,  superstition  the  vulgar's  daily  bread." 


100      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

And  underneath  his  feet  he  cast 

the  darkenes  of  the  skie; 
On  Cherubs  and  on  Cherubins 

ful  royally  he  rode, 
And  on  the  wings  of  al  the  windes 

came  flying  al  abroad. 

So  the  Elizabethan  Puritan  rendered  the  eighteenth 
Psalm.  The  hundred  and  fourth  Psalm,  the  thirty-eighth 
chapter  of  Job,  show  alike  with  what  feeling  and  poetry 
monotheism  could  clothe  itself,  and  how  Nature  in  its 
beauty  becomes  a  revelation  of  God.  The  visions  of 
Isaiah  and  the  other  great  prophets  all  associate  the  One 
God  with  righteousness,  terrible  and  overpowering,  but 
eminently  just  and  reasonable.  If  prayer  is  the  final 
test  of  any  real  monotheism,"  Hebrew  religion  alone  in 
antiquity  could  stand  it.  The  unity  of  all  experience, 
the  personality  of  the  One  God,  the  universal  scope  of 
righteousness,  are  the  glorious  contribution  of  Israel  to 
the  religion  of  mankind.  Very  curiously,  personal  im- 
mortality was  only  a  later  conviction,  but  in  time  it  was 
achieved. 

It  is  too  late  to  quarrel  with  the  forgotten  scholars 
who  organized  the  canon  of  the  Old  Testament,  and  per- 
haps needless,  for  their  spiritual  and  their  literary 
instincts  were  generally  sound.  The  apocryphal  and 
pseudonymous  books  of  the  last  three  centuries  B.C.  have 
neither  the  religious  nor  the  literary  value  of  the  earlier 
prophets.  But  a  great  deal  is  lost  for  the  student  of  reli- 
gion who  neglects  them.  The  Jew  in  those  difficult  cen- 
turies was  in  the  most  painful  contact  with  new  situa- 
tions and  the  new  ideas  that  they  involve.  He  had 
reached  the  conception  of  Jehovah  being  the  God  of  the 
whole  earth;  but,  influenced  by  Greek  and  perhaps  other 
thinkers,  he  was  not  quite  so  easy  about  his  own  rela- 

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


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  101 

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

"  It  is  pointed  out  that  this  idea  is  already  in  Ezekiel,  but  see  Daniel 
and  the  Book  of  Jubilees  for  a  furthur  development  of  it.  Also  R.  H. 
Charles,  Enoch,  index  s.v.  Angels.  ^  ^ 

"Drummond,  Philo,  2,  pp.  214  ff.;  cf.  II  Enoch  (Secrets),  30:8:  "On 
the  sixth  day  I  commanded  my  Wisdom  to  make  man  of  seven  substances.  ' 

"A.  B.  Bruce,  Apologetics,  p.  286. 

"  W.  Fairweather,   The  Background  of  the  Gospels,  p.   329. 

"Wisdom    11:24. 


102      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

the  individual — "the  souls  of  the  righteous  are  in  the 
hand  of  God,"  "  and  he  will  keep  them  and  give  them 
another  life,  a  better  life,  v^ith  not  only  the  conscious- 
ness of  the  victory  of  right  but  ocular  evidence  of  it.  A 
last  judgment,  resurrection,  immortality,  a  Messianic 
intervention — the  ideas  are  never  far  away  in  this  period. 
Naturally  they  are  never  very  distinct;  men's  guesses 
and  intuitions  wavered;  but  Jehovah  would  overcome 
Satan,  and  the  pious  believer  was  safe  in  entrusting  him- 
self to  God.  In  this  period  of  depressed  national  life, 
there  thus  rises  a  developed  conception  of  personal  reli- 
gion, which  can  be  traced  back  to  the  individualism  of 
Jeremiah.^" 

When  we  compare  the  development  of  religion  in  Israel 
with  the  course  it  took  in  the  Graeco-Roman  world,  it 
seems  a  fair  conclusion  from  the  experience  of  Israel 
that  more  is  gained  in  the  quest  of  the  knowledge  of  God 
along  the  line  of  thought  and  intellect  than  by  the  line 
of  cult  and  emotion.  Emotion  has  its  place;  it  may  be 
doubtfully  true  that  some  experience  of  facts  is  only 
reached  by  means  of  emotion;  but  emotion  seems  a  nor- 
mal concomitant  of  the  deepest  experiences.  Thus  emo- 
tion has  to  be  crossexamined,  its  evidence  has  to  be 
checked,  and  its  data  corrected.  Every  man  is  born  a 
metaphysician,  and  knows  that  emotion  and  intuition  are 
amenable  to  the  court  of  experience  and  that  experience 
can  only  be  interpreted  by  reason ;  though  not  every  man 
will  take  the  trouble  to  carry  the  process  through.  The 
Jew,  if  Mr.  Montefiore's  picture  of  him  is  true,  grew 
tired  of  thinking  out  his  religion  and  took  it  for  granted. 
Meantime  the  Graeco-Roman  world,  depressed  by  long 
wars  and  ruined  by  the  loss  of  freedom,  was  in  a  hurry 
for  spiritual  peace;  it  swung  off  from  the  philosophic 


"Wisdom  3:1. 

20  J.  p.  Peters,  Religion  of  the  Hebrews,  p.  441. 


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  103 

school  to  the  shrine,  and  'before  long  it  compelled  the 
philosophers  also  to  come  and  make  their  peace  with  the 
gods  of  taboo  and  magic. 

IV 

Into  such  a  world  came  Jesus,  a  re-creating  force.  He 
brought  a  new  conception  of  God,  which  on  examination 
we  find  to  comprise  all  the  gains  made  by  all  the  world 
through  centuries  of  experience.  The  four  great  features, 
which  we  have  noticed  in  the  development  of  religious 
thought,  are  to  be  found  in  his  teaching — one  world.  One 
God  and  that  God  personal,  righteousness,  and  the  per- 
sonality of  man.  But  the  difference  with  him  lies  in  the 
value  he  gives  to  personality.  Personal  as  the  Hebrew 
prophets  had  made  God,  none  of  them  dreamed  of  a  God 
so  intensely  real,  so  boundlessly  personal,  so  amazingly 
akin  to  man.  The  boldness  and  the  sweep  of  Jesus  here 
outrun  description.  The  corollaries  of  his  belief  in  God's 
personality  are  an  entire  transformation  of  the  idea  of 
righteousness  and  a  new  emphasis  on  the  significance  of 
the  human  soul,  that,  next  to  his  belief  in  God,  has  been 
the  most  powerful  thing  in  history. 

Plato  had  recognized  the  natural  affinity  of  God  and 
man,  their  mutual  intelligibility ;  man,  he  said,  was  made 
by  nature  to  be  intimate  with  God  (oiKet'ws  cx^iv  tt/oo?  tw 
Ocov);  but  Plato  never  came  near  such  a  sense  as  Jesus 
had  of  God's  kinship,  interest,  and  nearness.  Jesus  pic- 
tures a  God  who  loves  and  who  enjoys  the  world  he  has 
made,  down  to  the  last  little  sparrow  in  a  nestful,  who 
thinks  in  terms  of  color  and  life  and  movement,  and 
who  above  all  else  loves  and  enjoys  the  nature  of  man, 
sees  through  man's  limitations  his  worth  and  grandeur, 
and  cannot  do  without  him.  What  teacher  ever  gave 
God  so  thorough  and  so  puissant  a  personality?    He  will 


104      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


21  Cf.  Phillips  Brooks,  The  Light  of  the  World,  p.  333.  "The  summons 
of  God  for  men  to  join  Him  in  His  joy  appears  to  open  a  new  region  of 
motive." 

--  D.   S.  Cairns,   Christianity  and  the  Modern   World,  p.  52. 


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  105 

in  words — ^but  such  words!  Words  of  genius  full  of  the 
life  and  spirit  of  a  most  vital  and  energizing  personality. 
The  words  had  his  life,  his  fire,  his  depth,  and  his  happi- 
ness in  them,  and  they  were  irresistible.  He  spoke  in 
pictures,  far  more  illuminating  than  definitions.  More 
still,  Jesus  brought  home  to  men  his  conviction  of  God 
by  what  he  was.  There  is  no  describing  personality; 
you  have  to  touch  if  to  know  it.  Genius  and  talent  are 
extraordinarily  alike,  except  that  they  are  utterly  differ- 
ent. "There's  very  little  difference  between  one  man  and 
another,"  said  a  working  man  to  Professor  William 
James;  "but,"  he  added,  "what  there  is,  is  very  im- 
portant." Genius  gets  outside  our  categories  and  defies 
even  our  powers  of  quotation  and  misquotation;  it  will 
not  be  hackneyed.  Jesus  is  clear  away  beyond  all  our 
teachers.  His  personality  leaps  from  the  Greek  text, 
and  the  Elizabethan  English,  despite  our  familiarity  with 
them,  and  is  alive  again  and  charms  men  still  into  half- 
believing  what  he  says,  and  wholly  venturing  upon  it  and 
finding  it  true. 

Do  men  find  it  true?  Can  we  use  the  experience  of 
the  Christian  Church,  if  we  can  recapture  it,  to  deter- 
mine the  truth  of  what  he  said?  Let  us  go  back  a  little. 
Let  us  recall  the  four  points  on  which  we  find  that  man 
has  been  insisting  through  all  his  religious  history.  If 
there  is  not  something  fundamental  about  them,  some- 
thing in  a  deep  sense  true,  then  it  is  hard  to  find  any 
meaning  at  all  in  the  experience  of  mankind.  We  find, 
however,  that  not  one  of  them  is  lost  sight  of  without 
some  tragic  decline  in  the  people  who  lose  it,  church  or 
no  church,  some  failure  to  keep  abreast  of  the  deep 
realities,  some  abandonment  of  what  is  essential  in  human 
nature.  But  where  men  have  taken  Jesus  at  the  foot  of 
the  letter  and  treated  him  so  seriously  as  to  risk  life  and 
the  soul  on  his  veracity,  we  find,  as  the  Fourth  Gospel 


106      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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

"To  read  what  is  yet  unread 
In  the  manuscripts  of  God," 

to  hold  communion  with  the  Heavenly  Father  along  the 
line  of  everything  that  interests  him — a  large  pro- 
gramme,  larger  perhaps  than  any   one  before   Christ, 

2'  It  is  interesting  to  note  the  prevalence  in  the  Fourth  Gospel,  com- 
monly supposed  to  be  more  mystical  than  the  other  three,  of  words  that 
emphasize  thought  and  intellect  rather  than  feeling;  viz.,  the  verb  "to 
know,"  the  nouns  "light"  and  "truth." 

2*  A  later  chapter   (XIII)   will  take  up  this  point. 


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  107 

except  Plato  perhaps,  could  have  contemplated.  Jesus 
has  historically  created  this  mind  in  men — a  passion  to 
reach  God  in  all  he  does,  color,  movement,  life  and  death, 
the  sea,  the  stars,  and  the  human  soul. 

"The  pure  in  heart  shall  see  God,"  said  Jesus  (Matt. 
5) ;  the  impure  do  not  see  him;  they  do  not  want  to  see 
him,  and  they  are  saved  from  it,  though  not  to  their 
gain.  But  men  convicted  of  sin  are  afraid  of  God.  In 
both  ways  sin  has  been  an  obstacle  to  the  knowledge  of 
God.  If,  then,  we  find  the  Christian  with  a  passion  for 
God,  on  God's  terms,  and  with  a  growing  intelligence  of 
God,  it  seems  reasonable  to  conclude  that,  whatever  the 
process,  sin  has  in  him  been  effectively  dealt  with.  When 
we  find  further  that  the  Christian  habitually  attempts  it 
in  the  belief  that  Jesus  was  serious  and  spoke  from 
experience  when  he  spoke  of  God;  when  we  find  that  he 
achieves  the  impossible,  captures  historically  the  Roman 
Empire  for  Christ,  wins  Europe  to  a  Reformation  for 
Christ,  makes  Christ  the  mainspring  of  the  most  momen- 
tous changes  in  modern  India  and  China;  it  again  seems 
reasonable  to  conclude  that  the  Christian  is  in  touch 
with  some  real  force.  Jesus  came  in  an  age  rather  like 
our  own,  an  age  willing  to  discuss  for  ever ;  he  came  with 
the  power  of  God  and  changed  the  world. 

This  is  to  treat  Christian  experience  in  a  summary 
way,  but  the  more  closely  it  is  studied,  the  more  it  verifies 
the  teaching  of  Jesus  upon  God.  When  an  experiment  in 
science  succeeds,  it  is  fair  to  hold  that  the  principles  to 
be  tested  in  it  are  confirmed — unless  there  is  error  some- 
where, met  and  frustrated  by  some  accident.  But  in  sci- 
ence nothing  is  based  on  single  experiments;  a  result  is 
not  counted  established  till  it  is  confirmed  by  a  series  of 
experiments  and  by  independent  observers.  The  belief 
that  Jesus  has  made  a  real  revelation  of  God  rests  on  the 
evidence  of  lives  devoted  to  testing  it  in  every  century 


108      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

since  Pilate  ruled  over  Judaea,  in  every  continent,  and  by- 
men  of  the  most  widely  different  antecedents,  in  race, 
culture,  and  religion.  The  Christian  life  rests  on  Jesus' 
conception  of  God  as  relevant,  as  a  father,  as  ours  in 
deepest  literalness.  But,  again  and  again,  it  must  be 
remarked  that  the  impulse  to  put  the  thing  to  the  test 
came  and  still  comes  from  the  personality  of  Jesus  him- 
self, and  from  the  cross  which  Jesus  chose  and  in  which 
he  showed  men  the  essential  nature  of  God. 

A  further  point  remains.  That  Jesus  has  stimulated 
men  to  explore  God  to  his  depths  and  heights,  has  already 
been  said;  but  there  is  another  side  to  it.  God,  it  is 
men's  experience,  is  to  be  apprehended  along  the  line  of 
every  human  faculty,  every  sensitivness.  The  author  of 
every  aspect  of  life  will  touch  the  human  spirit  at  every 
point.  Interests,  as  the  Latin  proverb  says,  pass  into 
character;  a  man  is  developed  by  what  interests  and 
occupies  him.  The  Christian  occupation  has  been  with 
God,  following  the  cue  and  the  impulse  given  by  Jesus. 
What  has  been  its  reaction  upon  character?  Does  the 
Christian  nation  (so  far  as  we  can  judge  from  the  very 
partially  Christian  nations  as  yet  known)  recede  as  a 
result  of  living,  as  far  as  it  does,  on  the  principles  of 
Jesus?  Men's  ideas  of  God,  formulated  or  not,  but  acted 
upon,  have  been  the  most  potent  factors  in  the  fate  of 
races  and  institutions.  It  may  seem  abstract,  but  there 
are  few  things  so  drastic  and  operative  as  an  idea.  What 
have  been  the  effects  of  the  ideas  of  Jesus  upon  national 
life?  That  will  occupy  us  in  two  later  chapters,  but, 
without  risking  repetition,  it  will  suffice  to  suggest  that 
so  far  the  nations  that  have  been  most  serious  in  dealing 
with  the  ideas  of  Jesus  have  not  proved  backward  in 
other  ways,  whatever  the  test. 

The  same  holds  of  individual  men  and  women.  Jesus, 
beside  giving  the  impulse  to  explore  God,  enlarges  our 


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  109 

capacities  for  knowing  God.  The  habit  of  studying  and 
assimilating  all  that  we  mean  by  Christ,  enlarges  a  man's 
aptitude  for  capturing  that  mind  of  God  which  Jesus 
tempts  him  to  explore.  Jesus  develops  character  in 
those  who  follow  him,  and  character  is  the  key  to  the 
discovery  of  God,  as  he  said.  He  charms  men  to  forget 
themselves  in  coming  with  him,  and  the  obedience  that 
is  instinctive  becomes  illumination.  The  historical  Jesus 
whom  they  follow,  they  discover — when  their  attention 
is  taken  from  themselves  and  their  own  preconceptions 
and  fixed  upon  him — to  be  not  the  veiling  but  the  unveil- 
ing of  God,  and  seeing  him  as  he  is  they  grow  like  him 
(I  John  3:2). 

V 

So  far  the  effect  of  Jesus  in  the  experience  of  men  as 
the  Revealer  of  God.  Out  of  this  experience  came  the 
Christology  of  the  Church.  In  Christology  we  begin  to 
touch  the  region  of  theory,  but  the  promise  made  to  the 
reader""  that  he  and  not  the  writer  is  to  be  the  theologian, 
will  be  kept.  All  that  I  now  propose  is  to  suggest  that 
an  examination  of  the  titles  given  to  Jesus  by  the 
Church,  will  show  that  they  are  each  an  attempt  to 
explain  his  person  from  his  work,  and  that  taken  together 
they  shed  a  light  on  the  Church's  experience — a  light  the 
more  valuable,  because  here  the  Church  will  not  be  speak- 
ing directly  of  that  experience  for  any  purpose,  but  will 
reveal  it  unconsciously. 

The  names  given  to  Jesus  are  many  and  are  drawn 
from  a  good  many  types  of  thought  and  analogy.  Messiah 
is  Hebrew ;  Logos  is  Greek ;  Homoousios  is  another  Greek 
word,  and  more  philosophical;  Photagogos,  the  Light- 
bringer,  came  from  the  mysteries.'^    But  they  all  point 


25  In  the  introduction. 

2"  Cf.   Clement   of   Alexandria,   Ptotrcpticus. 


110      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

to  the  same  thing.  Whether  "anointed"  by  God,  or  the 
"reason"  of  God  (an  idea  owing  something  to  the 
Stoic  "generative  reason,"  Xoyos  cnrepimriKo^y  and  "soul 
of  the  universe,"  anima  mundi)  Jesus  is  in  either  case 
recognized  as  one  who  has  a  special  right,  and  even  a 
commission,  to  interpret  God  to  men.  In  other  words  the 
titles  speak  of  the  Christian  belief  that  Jesus  did  bring 
a  valid  and  realiable  revelation  of  God  to  men.  Homo- 
ousios  says  the  same  thing.  If  God  was  really,  as  the 
Neo-Platonists  said,  "beyond  being,"  if  he  could  neither 
be  apprehended  nor  set  forth,  imagined  nor  grasped  by 
reason,  feeling,  or  any  human  faculty;  if  there  was  no 
link  between  God  and  man,  then  Jesus  was  as  futile  in 
the  long  run  as  any  other  man.  But  this  the  Church 
would  not  believe,  and  it  "denied  the  antecedent,"  and 
affirmed  a  real  essential  link  between  God  and  Jesus; 
whatever  "being"  might  be,  it  was  not  an  impassable  gulf 
between  Jesus  and  God,  it  was  something  in  which  they 
were  one.""  When  then  Jesus  speaks  of  what  God  is,  he 
is  not  traveling  outside  his  experience,  he  is  speaking 
with  knowledge,  and  in  him  we  can  know  God.  That  lies 
at  the  heart  of  the  Church's  more  philosophical  doctrines. 

There  are  simpler  and  dearer  names  than  Homoousios. 
Jesus  is  Mediator,  Paraclete,  High  Priest,  the  Beloved, 
for  the  men  of  the  first  century — all  names  that  speak 
of  the  real  relation  which  he  establishes  between  God 
and  men.  All  the  Incarnation  doctrines  point  to  the  same 
conviction  that  Jesus  does  reveal  God. 

If  he  does  not — then  it  would  look  as  if  human  experi- 
ence had  very  little  real  value,  as  if  little  were  to  be  learnt 
from  it,  whatever  clarity  and  force  of  mind  were  brought 
to  bear  upon  it.    For  if  Jesus  does  not  reveal  God,  our 


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


THE  REVELATION  OF  GOD  111 

chance  of  learning  of  God  from  souls  of  less  depth  and 
purity  and  intensity  is  small  indeed.  We  shall  be  driven 
back  to  the  vagueness  of  the  later  Greek  speculation; 
nor  is  that  a  distant  risk.  One  effect  of  the  discoveries 
of  natural  science,  of  the  progress  made  in  that  field,  is 
to  emphasize  the  grandeur  and  wonder  of  the  mind  (if 
we  may  venture  so  much)  that  underlies  the  creation. 
We  are  liable  to  lose  ourselves  in  a  dim  consciousness  of 
a  power  that  deals  with  universals  at  best,  a  power  to  be 
surmised,  not  known,  of  which  little  can  be  predicated 
beyond  ingenuity  and  efficiency — features  more  and  more 
staggering  as  we  track  out  the  laws  and  forces  at  work 
in  the  world,  and  less  and  less  human  with  every  acces- 
sion to  our  knowledge.  Less  and  less  human  (if  the 
adjective  may  be  allowed)  this  power  becomes,  less  and 
less  intelligible  to  humanity,  because  ingenuity  and  effi- 
ciency do  not  make  character;  and  in  proportion  as  they 
are  magnified  without  the  balancing  attributes  of  love 
and  tenderness,  they  make  their  possessor  more  awful, 
awful  to  the  verge  of  hateful. 

But  this  line  of  thought  ignores  the  better  part  of  our 
experience,  and  the  part  which  can  be  more  closely  and 
clearly  known  and  understood.  It  is  the  human  side  of 
things  which  we  know;  and,  just  because  Jesus  shares 
that,  we  can  understand  him  and  use  him.  To  clear  our 
thought  and  to  give  us  a  real  base  of  action,  we  must 
have  a  firm  hold  on  man's  experience;  and  Jesus  gives 
us  that.  Luther  put  the  case  strongly,  but  not  too 
strongly,  when  he  wrote  in  his  Commentary  on  Gala- 
tians  (1:3) :  "Whensoever  thou  art  occupied  in  the  mat- 
ter of  thy  salvation,  setting  aside  ail  curious  speculations 
of  God's  unsearchable  majesty,  all  cogitations  of  works, 
of  traditions,  of  philosophy,  yea  and  of  God's  law,  too, 
run  straight  to  the  manger  and  embrace  this  infant  and 
the  virgin's  little  babe  in  thine  arms,  and  behold  him  as 


112      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

he  was  born,  sucking,  growing  up,  conversant  among 
men,  teaching,  dying,  rising  again,  ascending  up  above 
all  the  heavens  and  having  power  above. all  things.  By 
this  means  shalt  thou  be  able  to  shake  off  all  terrors  and 
errors,  like  as  the  sun  driveth  away  the  clouds.  And 
this  sight  and  contemplation  will  keep  thee  in  the  right 
way  that  thou  mayest  follow  whither  Christ  is  gone.""** 
In  his  Table-Talk  we  find  the  idea  again  and  more  than 
once:  "Begin  thou  to  seek  God  there,  where  Christ  him- 
self began";  "He  that  without  danger  will  know  God 
and  will  speculate  of  him,  let  him  look  first  into  the 
Manger,  that  is  let  him  begin  below  .  .  .  Afterwards  he 
will  finely  learn  to  know  who  God  is.  As  then  the  same 
knowledge  will  not  affright,  but  it  will  be  most  sweet, 
loving  and  comfortable.  But  take  good  heed  (I  say)  in 
any  case  of  high  climbing  cogitations,  to  clamber  up  to 
Heaven  without  this  Ladder,  namely  the  Lord  Christ  in 
his  humanity."  "* 

Our  danger  is  the  abstract;  the  Neo-Platonist  gloried 
in  it,  but  not  profitably,  for  God  in  his  thought  became 
more  and  more  emptied  of  all  content  and  sank  to  being, 
as  a  modern  philosopher  has  said,  "the  deification  of 
the  word  Not."  But  if  it  is  a  real  relation  which  Jesus 
establishes  between  God  and  men,  if  Jesus  does  reveal 
God,  then,  not  to  go  further  from  the  limits  of  our  sub- 
ject, we  are  led  to  a  reflection,  surely  legitimate.  If 
Jesus  is  continually  enlarging  our  capacity  for  God,  is 
it  not  a  promise  of  fuller  knowledge  and  clearer  vision 
— a  pledge  that  some  day  we  shall  see  him  himself  as  he 
is,  and  give  him  his  own  name?  So  at  least  one  early 
Christian  writer  promises  us  (Rev.  2:17;  3:12). 


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


CHAPTER  VII 
IMMORTALITY 


In  the  so-called  Gospel  of  Nicodemus  are  loosely  linked 
two  apocryphal  books  of  very  different  interest  and  prob- 
ably of  different  age.  The  first  need  not  detain  us;  it 
is  a  retelling  of  the  story  of  the  trial  and  crucifixion  of 
Jesus  with  much  added  detail,  detail  trivial  as  the  clues 
in  a  dull  detective  story.  To  this  has  been  appended,  by 
the  simplest  of  devices,  a  work  of  imagination.  Joseph 
of  Arimatheia  tells  the  chief  priests  of  two  men  risen 
from  the  dead  since  the  crucifixion;  the  men  are  asked 
to  tell  what  happened;  they  "made  on  their  faces  the 
sign  of  the  cross  and  said  to  the  chief  priests,  'Give  us 
paper  and  ink  and  a  pen.'  They  brought  them.  And  sit- 
ting down  they  wrote  thus: 

"  'Lord  Jesus,  the  resurrection  and  the  life  of  the  world, 
give  us  grace  that  we  may  set  forth  thy  resurrection 
and  the  wondrous  things  which  thou  hast  done  in  Hades. 
We  then  were  in  Hades  with  all  them  that  had  fallen 
asleep  from  the  beginning.  And  in  the  hour  of  midnight 
into  those  dark  places  rose  as  it  were  the  light  of  the 
sun  and  shone,  and  we  were  all  enlightened  and  saw  one 
another.' " 

Abraham  and  others  recognize  what  is  happening: 
'This  is  the  light  from  the  great  enlightenment,"  and 
Isaiah  gently  quotes  the  prophecy  he  made  when  alive: 
"Land  of  Zebulon  and  land  of  Naphthali,  the  people  that 

113 


114      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

sitteth  in  darkness,  behold  a  great  light."  "An  ascetic 
from  the  desert"  comes  and  tells  how  he  has  made  the 
ways  of  the  Son  of  God  straight,  and  preached  repent- 
ance, and  how  when  he  saw  the  Son  of  God  he  said: 
"Behold  the  Lamb  of  God  who  taketh  away  the  sin  of  the 
world,"  and  how  he  baptized  him,  and  how  he  has  been 
sent  by  him  to  preach  to  the  dead.  Adam  and  Seth  take 
part  and  recall  an  ancient  prophecy  of  the  Son  of  God 
"made  man,"  and  patriarchs  and  prophets  rejoiced 
greatly. 

Satan  now  tells  Hades  of  the  deeds  and  death  of  Jesus, 
and  bids  prepare  to  hold  him  fast ;  and  Hades  doubts  the 
wisdom  of  Satan's  bringing  him  there.  As  they  talked, 
"there  was  a  great  voice  as  thunder  that  said:  'Open 
your  gates,  ye  rulers,  and  be  ye  lifted  up,  ye  everlasting 
doors,  and  the  King  of  Glory  shall  come  in.*  And  Hades, 
when  he  heard,  saith  to  Satan:  'Go  forth,  if  thou  canst, 
and  withstand  him.'  "  The  gates  are  made  fast,  while 
David  and  Isaiah  recall  their  prophecies  of  old.  The  cry 
to  the  gates  is  repeated,  and  Hades  asks:  "Who  is  this 
King  of  Glory?"  The  angels  of  the  Lord  say:  "A  Lord 
strong  and  mighty,  a  Lord  mighty  in  war";  and  on  the 
word,  the  gates  of  brass  were  burst  and  the  iron  bars 
broken,  and  all  the  dead  were  loosed  from  their  chains, 
and  the  King  of  Glory  came  in  as  a  man,  and  all  the  dark 
places  of  hell  were  enlightened.  Satan  is  bound  and 
delivered  to  Hades  till  the  Second  Coming. 

The  King  of  Glory  now  turns  to  the  dead,  slain  by  the 
wood  of  the  tree  that  Adam  touched,  and  promises  by 
the  wood  of  the  cross  to  raise  them.  Adam  is  filled  with 
sweetness;  prophets  and  saints  break  into  thanksgiving. 
"The  Saviour  blessed  Adam  on  the  brow  with  the  sign 
of  the  cross,"  prophets,  martyrs,  and  patriarchs  too,  and 
"took  them  and  leapt  forth  from  Hades,"  and  they  fol- 
lowed and  sang:  "Blessed  is  he  that  cometh  in  the  name 


IMMORTALITY  115 

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


\:iem.  Alex.,  Strom.,  VI  :6,  §  47. 


116      JlESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

We  have,  however,  to  recognize  that  many  "descents 
into  hell"  were  told  of  in  classical  antiquity — descents 
made  by  Odysseus,  by  Er  the  son  of  Armenios,  by  ^neas, 
and  many  more;  to  the  north  the  Finns  tell  of  Waina- 
momen,  and  eastward  are  other  legends.  All  these  stones 
are  prompted  by  the  same  impulse. 

"Strange,  is  it  not?  that  of  the  myriads  who 
Before  us  pass'd  the  door  of  darkness  through, 

Not  one  returns  to  tell  us  of  the  road 
Which  to  discover  we  must  travel  too." 

It  looks  as  if  Man  were  determined  to  have  some  knowl- 
edge of  that  road  and  that  goal,  when  all  over  the  world 
we  find  stories  of  one  traveler  who  found  that  bourne 
and  did  return,  and  with  news  of  import  to  all  who  live 
and  love.  It  may  not  seem  of  much  import,  but  it  may 
be  noted  that  of  all  these  heroes  of  discovery,  Jesus  is 
the  only  one  of  whom  we  can  be  sure  that  he  was  his- 
torical. If  the  "harrowing  of  hell"  is  fiction,  it  has  grown 
out  of  an  historical  tradition,  or  it  has  been  attached  to  it. 

II 

Historically  the  belief  in  immortality  has  had  two  bases 
in  thought.  Men  have  had  to  explain  visions  of  the  dead. 
Ancient  religion  and  animistic  religion  to  this  day  pay 
great  attention  to  the  reporting  of  such  visions  and  in- 
deed to  their  production.  The  Lives  of  many  Roman 
Catholic  saints  and  nuns,  even  very  modern  ones,  are 
full  of  such  things,  incredible  and  absurd  as  they  are  to 
people  trained  to  handle  evidence  with  any  scientific  care. 
One  Baptist  mission  on  the  Congo  river  lost  its  most 
attractive  convert,  because,  during  some  native  initiation 
ceremonies,  he  saw  his  dead  father  and  learned  from 
the  dead  man's  lips  that  the  Christian  religion  is  false — a 


IMMORTALITY  117 

story  which  the  scientific  observer  will  not  at  first  readily 
distinguish  from  those  told  at  Lourdes  and  elsewhere  in 
Catholic  regions.  But  for  men  no  longer  at  the  primitive 
point  of  view,  such  appearances  have  ceased  to  be  con- 
clusive evidence.  Do  such  visions  ever  really  give  new 
facts,  or  do  they  merely  emphasize  with  new  force  and 
color  what  men  have  known  subconsciously  all  along? 
When  we  know  better  how  far  visions  are,  and  how  far 
they  are  not,  the  product  of  the  brain  that  records  them, 
the  evidence  of  visions  will  begin  to  have  value.  But  at 
present  we  are  only  beginning  to  realize  what  tricks  the 
mind  plays  upon  itself,  and  the  part  of  the  physical  nature 
in  suggesting  them  and  joining  in  the  play. 

On  the  other  hand,  men  have  based  their  belief  in  an- 
other life  on  what  they  have  observed  of  the  operations 
of  moral  law.  In  primitive  and  even  later  society,  a  fron- 
tier crossed  enabled  a  man  to  escape  the  consequences  of 
criminal  acts.  Can  moral  law  be  evaded  by  crossing 
another  frontier?  men  have  asked.  Is  it  conceivable  that 
death  brings  Jesus  and  Judas  to  one  end  and  one  level,  that 
God  in  the  long  run  groups  them  together  and  is  equally 
done  with  both  of  them?  "Conceivable"  is  the  touchstone 
here;  it  comes  too  near  that  "consensus"  which  the  Stoics 
used  to  prove  the  existence  of  God,  the  after-life,  divina- 
tion, and  other  things. 

If  it  is  diflficult  to  believe  in  life  beyond  the  grave,  is  it 
less  difficult  to  disbelieve  in  it?  "Neither  with  the  cursed 
things,  nor  without  them,"  is  a  man's  proverb  on  women, 
quoted  by  Aristophanes.  We  may  not  be  able  to  manage 
with  this  doctrine  of  immortality,  but  we  cannot  manage 
without  it.  With  the  fullest  realization  of  its  diflScul- 
ties — not  merely  those  of  the  head  but  those  of  the  heart 
too — ^men  and  women,  grown  and  deepened,  in  whose 
natures  humanity  is  most  thoroughly  and  essentially 
human,  have  held  the  faith  that  God  does  not  play  with 


118      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

us  as  children  with  sand  castles,  building  elaborately  and 
content  to  see  the  waves  wash  all  away,'  playing  not  with 
senseless  sand,  but  with  sentient  natures  like  his  own. 
If  he  could  so  play,  surely  he  would  be  inferior  even  to 
ordinary  men,  how  much  more  to  the  best  and  deepest, 
those  trained  and  intelligent  natures  who  have  been 
taught  in  the  school  of  love  and  pain  and  have  learned 
there  the  value  of  the  soul. 


Ill 


If  we  are  to  correct  our  own  random  impressions  of 
haste  or  despair,  it  must  be  by  watching  the  movement 
of  thought  over  the  centuries,  and  among  those  peoples 
who  have  shaped  the  thinking  of  our  modern  world. 
Accident  plays  a  large  part  in  history,  but  less  than  else- 
where in  the  progress  of  thought.  We  have  remarked 
already  the  great  tendencies  in  religion  to  emphasize  the 
oneness  of  all  regions  of  experience,  the  personality  of 
God,  righteousness,  and  the  personality  of  the  individual 
man.    The  last  includes  immortality. 

Homer's  picture  of  the  world  beyond  is  famous,  a  nerve- 
less, noiseless  existence,  existence  as  it  were  without  life, 
in  a  darkness  that  allowed  only  a  bare  consciousness  of 
discomfort,  without  distinctions  between  good  or  bad, 
brave  or  coward.  Sons-in-law  of  gods  reached  Happy 
Isles,  at  some  stage  in  the  history  of  epic  poetry;  but 
the  picture  of  the  dead  as  drawn  by  Odysseus  is  cheerless 
and  hopeless. 

With  the  development  of  the  Greek  cities  in  Asia  Minor 
in  the  eighth  century  B.C.  and  the  simultaneous  awaken- 
ing of  the  Greek  mind  all  over  the  world  and  in  every 
realm  of  thought,  we  find  side  by  side  with  the  great  intel- 
lectual movement,  associated  with  the  philosophers  and 


2  Homer,  Iliad.  XV:362-364. 


IMMORTALITY  119 

inquirers  of  Ionia,  another  movement  chiefly  upon  Euro- 
pean soil.  The  cults  of  Orpheus  and  Dionysus,  the  mys- 
teries of  Eleusis  with  their  teaching  of  another  life,  and 
of  the  need  of  preparation  for  it,  may  not  have  appealed — 
did  not,  so  far  as  we  know,  appeal — to  the  circles  of  Thales 
and  Heraclitus;  but  they  captured  a  great  constituency 
precisely  in  the  period  when  men  began  to  frame  deeper 
thoug'hts  and  to  see  things  with  clearer  edges.  The  Greek 
always  leaned  to  a  consciousness  of  his  own  claims  on 
society  and  on  Nature ;  and,  though  at  this  period  he  still 
had  a  vivid  local  patriotism,  he  was  beginning  to  be  more 
definitely  than  ever  an  individual.  The  emphasis  on  mys- 
teries in  that  age  implies  the  individual  conscious  of  him- 
self and  provident  of  his  own  future  after  death.  "Happy 
is  he  that  has  seen  the  doing  of  sacred  things,  the  awful 
rites  (of  Eleusis) ;  he  that  is  not  initiate  and  he  that  has 
part  therein,  have  never  the  same  lot,  when  dead  and  in 
dank  darkness  below.'"  Such  language  is  unmistak- 
able. 

On  the  whole  the  philosophic  mind  rejected  the  cults 
along  with  the  myths  of  the  gods  and  much  else;  and 
the  movement  of  the  fifth  century,  with  its  thorough- 
going rationalism  and  its  reference  of  everything  to  the 
standard  of  each  individual,  was  not  one  to  reestablish 
anything.  Two  names  stand  out  at  this  point — names  of 
representative  and  formative  men — Euripides  and  Plato. 
Euripides  combined  in  a  very  impressive  way  two  strains 
not  easily  reconciled — he  had  a  mind  relentlessly  logical, 
loyal  to  the  new  standards  of  thought,  exigent  to  the 
bitter  end  for  demonstration  (his  own  word)  and  with 
it  a  faculty  for  passionate  feeling.  His  insight  into  the 
human  heart  brings  him  to  the  verge  of  belief  in  im- 
mortality; he  hovers  about  the  problem — "who  knows  if 
life  itself  indeed  be  death?" — but  he  will  not  recognize 


Homeric  Hymn   to   Demeter,   474-482. 


120      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

the  craving  of  the  heart  for  the  object  of  its  love  as 
evidence.  His  reason  checks  his  feeling,  and  he  leaves 
the  question  in  suspense.  We  have  "no  experience  of 
death,"  he  says,^  and  hearsay  evidence  is  guesswork — 
**borne  upon  tales  v^^e  drift,  drift  idly."  God  also  for  him 
is  not  demonstrated. 

Plato,  however,  does  not  reject  this  intuition  that  there 
must  be  something  beyond,  though  he  sees  as  clearly  that 
intuition  is  not  demonstration.  What  he  has  to  say  on 
immortality  he  casts  in  the  form  of  myth — "I  do  not 
mean  to  affirm  that  the  description  which  I  have  given 
of  the  soul  and  her  mansions  is  exactly  true — a  man  of 
sense  ought  hardly  to  say  that.  But  I  do  say  that,  inas- 
much as  the  soul  is  shown  to  be  immortal,  he  may  ven- 
ture to  think  that  something  of  the  kind  is  true.  The 
venture  is  a  glorious  one.'"  But  Plato  strongly  puts 
forward  another  doctrine  about  the  soul,  which  it  is  said 
has  an  eastern  origin — the  transmigration  of  souls,  and 
he  binds  it  up  with  immortality.  Euripides  had  known 
of  this  doctrine — it  was  in  the  air,  for  it  seems  that  the 
Orphics  taught  it — but  he  would  not  have  to  do  with  it; 
it  was  a  fancy  without  evidence  of  any  kind,  and  he  let 
it  alone. 

How  far  thought  and  the  conditions  of  national  "and 
social  life  react  and  are  each  other's  product,  it  is  always 
hard  to  say,  but  a  heightened  individualism  is  the  mark 
of  the  age  of  Plato  and  his  successors.  The  philosophers 
who  shaped  the  thinking  of  later  Greece  were  nearly  all 
unmarried  and  childless,  many  of  them  foreigners,  volun- 
tary exiles  from  their  native  places,  some  even  barbarians, 
it  would  seem — men  in  short,  who  lacked  many  of  the 
spiritual  ties  that  make  us  thoroughly  human.  Their 
thought  is  individu'alistic — Stoic  or  Epicurean,  Cynic  or 


*  Euripides,  Hippolytus,  191-197. 
=  Plato,  Phaedo,  114. 


IMMORTALITY  121 

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

Immortality  had  no  secure  foundation  in  Greek 
thought;  and  men  and  women  turned  to  Oriental  cults 
which  offered  certainty,  to  god  or  goddess  as  might  be, 
with  whom  some  kind  of  sure  relation  could  be  estab- 
lished. There  were  weak  points  in  the  polytheism  of 
these  cults  and  in  their  want  of  connection  with  either 
morals  or  truth.     But,  as  we  have  seen  in  a  previous 

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


122      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

chapter,  men  were  in  a  hurry.  Eastern  astrology  with 
its  suggestion  of  a  scientific  basis,  the  immemorial  an- 
tiquity, the  impressiveness,  the  very  cost  and  intricacy 
of  Eastern  religions,  influenced  them;  above  all,  the 
assurance  that  that  way  lay  the  saving  of  the  soul.  If 
the  mystery  religions  of  the  Roman  Empire  afford  a  piti- 
ful exJhibition  of  the  decline  of  the  human  mind,  it  re- 
mains that  they  bear  witness  to  mian's  unconquerable 
instinct  for  immortality.  Philosophy  had  ignored  it,  and 
this  was  Nature*s  vengeance  for  a  forgotten  truth. 

IV 

When  we  turn  to  the  Hebrews,  it  is  quite  another  story. 
The  Old  Testament,  as  it  is  commonly  read,  is  a  con- 
fusion, but  historical  criticism  finds  a  pathway.  It  then 
appears  that  there  are  there  two  groups  of  conflicting 
ideas,  one  derived  ultimately  from  ancestor  worship,  the 
other  and  later  from  monotheistic  belief."  The  emphasis 
of  the  great  prophets  was  upon  the  fact  of  God;  on  the 
earthward  side  they  rather  looked  to  the  nation  and  its 
destiny  than  dealt  with  the  individual  and  his  hopes  and 
fears  as  to  another  life.  They  did  a  great  work,  for 
they  drove  Israel  out  of  the  notion  of  a  local  and  tribal 
god  into  the  awful  thought  of  One  God  who  rules  all  the 
ends  of  the  earth,  who  taketh  up  the  isles  as  a  very  little 
thing.  There  are  gleams  of  recognition  of  what  such 
a  God  means  for  the  individual.  The  poet,  who  wrote 
Job,  "reflects  all  the  darkness  of  the  popular  doctrine 
and  likewise  exhibits  the  actual  steps,  whereby  the  human 
spirit  rose  gradually  to  the  apprehension  that  man's  soul 
is  capable  of  a  divine  life  beyond  the  grave."  Even  in 
death  he  feels  it  is  "still  capable  of  the  highest  spiritual 
activities,  though  without  the  body,"  but  he  seems  not 


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


IMMORTALITY  123 

to  hint  that  this  higher  life  may  be  endless,  natural  in- 
ference as  it  seems  to  us  from  the  train  of  his  thought." 
The  73rd  and  139th  Psalms  and  the  inserted  26th  chapter 
of  Isaiah  show  a  later  and  higher  development.  But 
generally  in  the  Old  Testament  Sheol  is  the  abode  of  the 
dead,  with  various  modifications,  as  men's  thoughts  of 
God  and  the  hereafter  grew  deeper  and  clearer. 

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

^''R.  H.  Charles,  Eschatology,  pp.  71,  72. 

"J.  H.  Moulton,  Early  Zoroastrianism,  p.  321,  quoting  Bousset  and 
agreeing  that  Zarathushtra  practically  is  to  be  struck  out  of  the  list  of  the 
prophets  who  contributed  to  the  growth  of  Israel's  religion. 


124      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

of  him  as  preexistent  in  heavenly  state,  the  companion 
of  God  and  the  angels,  at  God's  right  hand,  the  super- 
natural Son  of  Man." 

The  uncertainty  about  the  Messiah  is  reflected  in  the 
various  forecasts  given  of  his  kingdom.'"  It  would  be  a 
supreme  triumph  of  Israel,  culminating  in  an  earthly 
paradise.  Then  it  became  spiritualized  in  an  indefinite 
way;  the  living  and  the  dead  were  to  receive  spiritual 
bodies.  It  was  transferred  to  heaven.  A  great  crisis 
or  catastrophe  would  inaugurate  it;  a  great  last  judg- 
ment in  this  world,  or  in  another,  would  bring  the  end 
of  all  wrong  and  oppression,  the  Kingdom  of  God,  the 
utter  rejection  of  the  Gentile.  So  much  was  distantly 
in  the  vein  of  the  Prophets;  and  then  the  individual 
raised  his  head,  and  the  whole  problem  of  the  future  was 
changed  with  the  shifting  of  the  emphasis. 

Five  elements  contribute  confusion  to  the  pictures  of 
the  future — the  Messiah,  Israel,  and  now  resurrection 
and  immortality,  and  judgment.  Resurrection  and  im- 
mortality are  not  the  same  thing.  Who  would  "rise"  was 
the  question?  All  Israel?"  or  the  just  alone?'"  or  all 
men?'®  Or  is  there  no  bodily  resurrection  at  all,"  as 
men  began  to  surmise  under  Greek  influence  in  the  first 
century  B.C.,  and  is  the  true  doctrine  immortality?'*  At- 
tention was  directed  increasingly  to  rewards  and  punish- 
ments, as  the  ethical  interest  prevailed  over  the  national, 
and  by  and  by  reward  and  punishment  were  thought  of 
as  eternal.  Finally,  a  new  aeon  or  age  without  sin  be- 
comes the  hope  or  expectation. 


"  Cf.  W.  Fairweather,  Background  of  Gospels,  p.  276. 

"J.  H.  Leckie,   World  to   Come,  p.  30. 

"Enoch,  2:1   f. 

"XII  Testaments;   I   Enoch  82-90. 

"IV  Esdras  7:32  ff-126.     "Jubilees. 

18  I  Enoch  91-104;  Fairweather,  Background  of  Gospels,  pp.  283-291.  There 
were  Arab  Christians  in  the  third  century  (Eusebius,  Church  History,  6:37) 
who  believed  the  soul  died  and  decayed  with  the  body  and  then  shared  its 
resurrection;  a  curious  illustration  of  an  older  idea  holding  out  against 
the    Greek. 


IMMORTALITY  125 

Thought  has  moved  considerably,  and  a  Messiah  and 
a  Davidic  kingdom  recede;  where  they  are  still  kept,  the 
harmonizing  of  the  outlooks  is  impossible.  In  Philo  the 
Messiah  and  his  kingdom  are  very  far  away  in  the  back- 
ground, if  not  out  of  sight." 

Through  all  the  confusion  'a  clue  is  found,  when  we 
grasp  that  God  and  the  soul  and  immortality  are  dis- 
entangling themselves  from  accidental  associations,  and 
standing  more  and  more  in  the  light  as  the  real  things 
of  experience  and  of  faith.  The  Jew  has  come  nearer  to 
the  heart  of  the  problem  than  the  Greek. 


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

For  the  early  Christian  one  argument  sufficed  for  im- 


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


126      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

mortality — Christ  is  risen.  Men  had  seen  him  after  his 
rising,  had  heard  him,  had  spoken  with  him,  had  touched 
him.  Stoics  and  Epicureans  in  Athens  laughed  when 
Paul  came  to  the  "rising  -again  of  dead  men"  (Acts 
17:32) — educated  people  did  not  talk  so;""  they  laughed 
and  dismissed  the  subject,  and  went  away  to  thresh  again 
the  rotten  straw  of  Zeno  and  Epicurus,  for  Athens  was  a 
university  city.*' 

Can  we  today  say  with  Paul :  "But  now  is  Christ  risen 
from  the  dead,  and  become  the  first  fruits  of  them  that 
slept"  (1  Cor.  15:20),  or  have  we  to  trim  our  speech  to 
come  a  little  nearer  Athens?  We  have  to  consider  the 
resurrection  of  Christ  side  by  side  with  what  we  are 
coming  to  know  of  the  facts  of  psychology,  and  we  have 
to  be  as  sure  of  our  psychology  as  of  the  Christian  story. 
We  have  to  consider  the  tricks  the  mind  plays  upon  itself 
and  the  part  of  the  physical  nature  in  suggesting  them 
and  joining  in  the  play.  We  have  to  ask  whether  the 
disciples  were  not  just  at  that  stage  of  culture  when  the 
mind  fails  to  realize  it  is  playing  such  tricks ;  and  whether 
we  must  say  that  Christ  did  not  rise  from  the  dead,  but 
that  certain  psychopathic  temperaments  thought  he  did 
and  suggested  it  to  others.  We  cannot  shirk  such  ques- 
tions; and,  in  the  present  stage  of  knowledge,  we  shall 
not  get,  if  we  are  in  a  hurry,  any  very  encouraging 
answer. 

Guesses  have  been  made  at  what  happened — guesses 
conditioned  by  our  very  slight  knowledge  of  the  soul  and 
its  way;  and  I  shall  not  add  to  their  number.  Instead 
of  guessing,  we  note  that  the  group  of  men  whom  we 
meet  in  the  epistles  and  the  Acts  are  the  same  we  met  in 


20  Compare  the  savage  outburst  of  contempt  by  Celsus  (Origen  c.  Cels. 
2:55),  the  "distraught  women,"  "humbug,"  "misled  opinion,"  "fancy" 
and  "lying." 

2*  If  I  borrow  a  phrase  from  The  Life  of  Sterling,  I  have  not  forgot- 
ten Seneca  and  Epictetus,  who,  however,  took  their  turn  at  the  straw. 


IMMORTALITY  127 

the  gospels,  but  in  outlook,  temper,  spirit,  and  faith  they 
are  changed.  That  is  history,  and  it  must  be  recognized 
and  then,  if  possible,  understood.  Something  has  hap- 
pened; we  may  recognize  so  much;  and  if  we  are  uncer- 
tain what  exactly  happened,  we  may  note  that  it  turned 
defeat  into  victory,  it  put  the  hope  of  imm.ortality  on  a 
new  footing,  and  it  changed  the  history  of  the  world.^ 

But  in  any  case,  Paul  put  the  matter  once  and  for  all 
when  he  said:  "If  in  this  life  only  we  have  hope  in 
Christ,  we  are  of  all  men  most  miserable."  We  may  not 
yet  be  able  to  solve  our  difficulties  as  historians,  or  to 
construct  the  story  of  the  risen  Christ,  but  one  thing  is 
forever  luminously  clear — the  Christian  faith  is  bound 
up  with  immortality ;  both  stand  or  fall  together. 

Here  again,  if  we  may  use  the  sort  of  canon  we  tried 
to  apply  before,  we  can  say  that,  if  Christian  history  and 
experience  go  for  anything  at  all  in  a  rational  universe, 
then  they  point  to  some  essential  truth  in  the  belief  in 
immortality.  Christian  history,  the  experience  to  be  read 
in  the  life  of  the  Christian  generations  and  still  verifi- 
able in  life  today,  emphasizes  the  significance  of  Jesus. 
All  that  has  past,  all  that  has  been  done,  carries  us  back 
to  him,  heightens  his  value,  and  forces  us  to  ever  more 
vigorous  effort  to  apprehend  him.  Immortality  for  us 
depends  on  the  Person  of  Jesus  Christ. 

Jesus,  it  may  be  said,  added  little  to  the  ideas  of  the 
•apocalyptic  writers ;  but  it  would  not  be  very  wisely  said. 
It  is  always  bad  criticism  to  suppose  that  to  the  original 
mind  words  mean  at  all  what  they  do  to  the  quotational 
type,  to  the  intelligent  echoes.  So  far  we  have  seen  God 
and  immortality  associated,  and  if  now  we  find  them  again 
associated  in  the  mind  of  Jesus,  it  is  relevant,  and  it  is 
fair,  to  say  that  we  have  a  new  fact.    To  judge  of  his 


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


128      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

right  to  an  opinion  on  this  matter  of  immortality,  we 
have  to  make  sure  that  we  have  exhausted  the  value  and 
connotation  of  "God"  in  his  thought  and  speech,  that  we 
are  at  his  point  of  view  and  see  God  as  he  sees  God,  feel 
him,  understand  him,  share  his  life  and  work  as  Jesus 
does.  Such  a  canon  of  procedure  would  be  laid  down 
whatever  the  historical  or  literary  personality  we  might 
be  studying.  The  word  comes  from  the  thought — have 
we  fathomed  the  thought  of  Jesus?  The  thought  comes 
out  of  the  experience — how  near  are  we  to  realizing  that? 
The  experience  depends  on,  as  it  helps  to  make,  the  per- 
sonality. Are  we  sure  there?  We  have  not  under  our 
hands  the  whole  evidence  in  the  case  for  immortality, 
until  we  have  made  better  use  of  the  experience,  the  in- 
sight and  intuition,  the  personality  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth. 
If  it  is  the  developed  -and  not  the  immature,  the  whole 
man  and  not  the  half  man,  whose  thought  and  insight 
count,  whatever  the  sphere  concerned,  then  surely  here 
above  all  we  must  ask  what  does  our  utmost  man  think? 
and  why  does  he  think  it?  and  how  does  he  reach 
it? 

It  is  to  be  noted  that  Jesus  chiefly  speaks  of  God  in 
relation  to  individuals,  as  if  it  were  in  and  through  such 
relations  that  God  is  best  to  be  known.  The  magnificent 
pictures  of  the  Old  Testament — "Clouds  and  darkness  are 
round  about  him"  (Psalm  97 :2) ;  "The  sea  is  his,  and  he 
made  it  and  his  hands  formed  the  dry  land"  (Psalm 
95:4) — such  pictures  'and  conceptions  Jesus  hardly  uses. 
All  his  talk,  so  far  as  we  have  it,  turns  on  the  significance 
of  the  individual  to  God,  and  in  this  he  gives  the  indi- 
vidual a  new  value,  associating  him  with  a  God  so  rich 
himself  in  new  values.  In  parable  and  in  direct  speech 
Jesus  brings  out  the  incredible  interest  of  God  in  the 
individual  -and  his  love  of  him.  Perhaps  the  crowning 
instance  is  the  conclusion  to  the  parable  of  the  lost  sheep, 


IMMORTALITY  129 

where  he  borrows  or  recreates  a  scene  from  Job.  When 
God  in  Job  shows  the  new-made  universe  to  his  friends, 

"The  morning  stars  sang  together, 

And  all  the  sons  of  God  shouted  for  joy." 

In  Jesus'  story  this  happened  for  one  sinner  who  re- 
pented. Is  it  credible  that  the  moral  being  of  a  solitary 
human  unit  is  so  full  of  import  for  God?  Could  it  be,  if 
that  human  unit  wereias  evanescent  as  the  drift  of  smoke 
from  a  steamer  at  sea?  Is  not  the  bottom  knocked  out 
of  all  Jesus'  teaching,  is  he  not  very  nearly  discredited,  if 
Pindar  is  right  after  all  with  his  thought :  "What  is  any 
of  us?  what  not?  Children  of  a  day!  A  dream  of  a 
shadow  is  man"?  For  here  is  a  case,  it  looks,  of  "either 
.  .  .  or" — one  way  or  the  other — the  love  of  God  for  the 
single  lonely  human  soul,  or  the  whole  race  a  dream  of  a 
shadow.    A  middle  path  seems  hardly  possible  here. 

Is  there  anything  of  moment  for  our  purpose  in  the 
fact  that,  where  Jesus  Christ  has  been  real  for  men,  they 
have  instinctively  believed  in  immortality,  as  if  it  fol- 
lowed naturally?  In  the  fact  that,  where  love  and  loss 
together  make  the  instinct  and  the  intuition  for  immor- 
tality, men,  wherever  he  is  fairly  represented  to  them, 
naturally  gravitate  to  Jesus?  Anima  naturaliter  Chris- 
tiana, in  Tertullian's  phrase.  Is  it  a  vicious  circle,  or  is 
it  the  natural  fitness  of  things? 

We  have  spoken  of  Jesus  as  a  teacher  with  a  unique 
experience  of  God,  but  if  we  submit  our  minds  in  lall  fair- 
ness to  the  experience  of  his  personality,  live  with  him,  in 
him,  as  Christians  have,  the  matter  does  not  rest  there. 
He  begins  to  transcend  our  categories  and  classifications, 
until  we  have  to  grapple  in  earnest  with  the  Christian 
conception  of  incarnation,  and  the  Christian  belief  that 
he  not  merely  gives  us  the  truth  about  God,  but  brings 
God  into  our  life  here  and  now,  and  that  he  is  in  some 


130      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


^>Phaedo,  85  CD. 


IMMORTALITY  131 

The  world  has  little  more  to  say  than  Edward  Fitz- 
gerald drew  from  Omar,  little  more  than  Pindar  said — "A 
dream  of  a  shadow  is  man."  But  the  Church  has  learned 
a  new  song;  and,  however  dark  or  mysterious  the  future, 
the  conviction  that  Jesus  must  rule  keeps  the  Church 
singing  it. 

"His  Kingdom  cannot  fail; 

He  rules  o'er  earth  and  heaven; 
The  keys  of  death  and  hell 
Are  to  our  Jesus  given. 
Lift  up  your  heart !  lift  up  your  voice! 
Rejoice;  again  I  say,  Rejoice!" 


CHAPTER     VIII 

ALPHA  AND  OMEGA 

Corde  natus  ex  parentis  ante  mundi  exordium 
A  et  Q  cognominatus,  ipse  fons  et  clausula. 

Prudentius,  Cath.,  9:10. 

There  was  a  controversy  once,  of  which  we  hear  little 
today,  between  Supralapsarians  and  Sublapsarians.  It 
seems  remote  enough,  this  discussion  as  to  whether  God's 
plan  for  man's  redemption,  his  device  of  sending  his  Son 
in  the  flesh,  was  conceived  by  God  before  the  fall  of  man 
or  after  the  fall  of  man.  And  yet  a  good  deal  is  bound 
up  with  it.  Did  Adam  and  Eve  and  the  serpent  really 
disorganize  the  whole  counsel  of  God  for  the  world  for 
all  time?  Had  he  to  alter  all  his  plans,  and  start  afresh 
with  a  sort  of  second-best,  with  a  patch,  shall  we  say,  on 
a  mistake?  Or  are  we  to  say  with  Plato  that  "God  al- 
ways geometrizes,"  that  his  design  is  thought  out,  that 
he  knows  what  he  is  going  to  do  and  he  does  it? 

Of  course,  the  modern  criticism  of  all  such  controversy 
is  a  simple  one.  How  can  we  know  what  was  in  the  mind 
of  God  round  the  time  of  Adam  and  Eve  in  the  Garden 
of  Eden — always  assuming  there  was  a  Garden  of  Eden 
with  an  Adam  and  an  Eve  in  it? 

We  have  to  accept  our  age  and  its  modernity.  Nothing 
is  gained  by  affectation.  The  rather  fabulous  "Age  of 
Faith"  is  not  for  us,  however  much  we  archaize ;  our  date 
is  written  upon  us,  and  we  do  better  to  accept  it  and  be 
honest  with  ourselves.  We  do  not  know  about  the  Garden 
in  Eden.    Emphasis  on  fact,  on  what  we  can  be  sure  of, 

132 


ALPHA  AND  OMEGA  133 

with  the  refusal  of  mere  supposition,  is  the  great  gain 
in  the  modern  way  of  approach  in  the  spheres  of  science, 
history,  and  religion ;  and  it  comes  very  close,  as  we  shall 
see,  to  the  mind  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth. 

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


The  early  Christian  was  carried  into  a  whole  new  world 
of  fresh  experience.  There  has  been  nothing  like  it  in 
human  history. 

"We  were  the  first  that  ever  burst 
Into  that  silent  sea." 


134  •   JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

Our  English  poets  have  spoken  nobly  of  the  joy  of  that 
discovery  of  the  Pacific  Ocean;  a  whole  new  world  un- 
explored and  we  the  first  to  reach  it!  The  early  Chris- 
tian had  a  similar  happiness;  he  was  face  to  face  with. 
new  fact  and  new  experience,  far  beyond  anything  that 
anyone  had  ever  dreamt  of.  He  started  from  the  great 
fact  of  the  historic  Jesus,  from  his  personality,  from  the 
largeness  and  variety  of  his  character.  To  be  with  Jesus 
was  revelation.  To  watch  him,  to  see  the  movement  of 
his  face,  to  look  at  his  eyes,  to  catch  his  tones,  brought 
a  man  in  a  new  way  face  to  face  with  the  real.  Anyone 
who  has  been  on  some  mountain  with  the  mists  all  about 
him,  the  shapes  of  things  all  lost  or  transformed,  knows 
what  it  is  when  the  sun  comes  and  the  mists  go,  and  you 
see  the  real  world  in  a  new  light  of  beauty.  There  are 
friends  whose  effect  on  our  minds  is  much  the  same.  The 
coming  of  Jesus,  his  very  person,  cleared  the  mists  away ; 
and  above  all,  his  death  lit  up  the  heart  of  God.  The 
Pacific  beckoned  the  mariner  on  to  exploration;  and  the 
death  of  Jesus  has  called  men  to  explore  God;  and  what 
followed  his  death,  the  resurrection  and  all  associated 
with  it,  formed  another  great  area  of  fact  that  set  men 
wondering,  thinking,  forming  theories,  testing  them, 
exploring  God. 

Men  had  been  possessed  by  the  notion  of  a  divided 
world,  where  the  ways  of  foreigners,  their  thoughts  and 
their  religion,  were  things  apart  and  irrelevant.  Our 
religion  for  us,  they  said,  your  religion  for  you.'  It  was 
a  wrong  theory,  and  it  did  not  bear  out  even  the  facts 
of  the  ancient  world ;  for  Alexander  the  Great  had  shown 
the  unity  of  the  world,  and  the  Stoic  teaching  emphasized 
the  common  humanity  of  man.  But  the  news  of  Jesus 
Christ  spread  swiftly  over  the  world;  something  leapt 
from  heart  to  heart,  it  captured  men,  and  all  the  invinci- 


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


ALPHA  AND  OMEGA  135 

ble  natural  barriers  between  men  turned  out  to  be  imag- 
inary. The  great  fact  was  revealed  by  the  spread  of  the 
Gospel  into  all  the  world,  that  man  is  man,  universally 
the  same;  with  the  same  aptitudes,  the  same  nature;  the 
soul  was,  as  Tertullian  said,  "naturally  Christian,"  Chris- 
tian in  its  inmost  essence  and  nature.  The  common 
passion  felt  for  Jesus  the  Saviour  bound  men  together  as 
neither  empire  nor  philosophy  had  done.  That,  too,  was 
a  revelation.  The  call  of  the  Gentile  and  the  response  of 
the  Gentile  upset  men,  staggered  them,  startled  them 
into  a  new  recognition  of  God  and  of  all  that  is  associated 
with  Jesus. 

The  new  relation  with  God,  of  which  they  had  become 
conscious  in  Christ,  was  another  stimulus  to  thought. 
Justified,  as  Paul  said,  by  believing  in  Jesus,  put  right, 
readjusted,  we  have  peace  with  God.  With  this  peace 
with  God  went  much  else — victory  over  temptation,  itself 
a  revelation  of  new  fact.  The  power  of  temptation  de- 
clined, the  interests  were  changed,  when  a  man  found 
himself  in  Christ.  He  had  what  today  we  might  call 
heightened  effectiveness,  but  what  he  called  the  power 
of  the  Holy  Ghost.  Paul  strikes  the  note,  when  he  says : 
"I  can  do  all  things  through  Christ  who  strengthens  me." 
Further,  men  had  what  George  Fox  later  on  called  "great 
openings,"  new  visions  of  the  relations  of  things,  glorious 
divination  of  the  purposes  of  God,  of  God's  methods,  of 
new  forces  at  work  in  the  world,  glimpses  of  God's  de- 
vices and  God's  ideas.  Men  found  all  these  in  Christ; 
but  why? 

Long  before  Plato  had  said  that  the  unexamined  life  is 
not  livable  for  human  beings;''  and  here  was  the  early 
Christian  with  an  extraordinary  mass  of  new  experience, 
all  associated  with  Jesus  of  Nazareth.  He  could  not  let 
it  alone ;  he  must  move  on  to  an  explanation  of  Jesus ;  and 


=«  Plato,   ApoL,    38   A. 


136      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

many  were  offered,  first  and  last.  The  writer  of  the 
Apocalypse,  looking  before  and  after,  summed  up  the 
story  when  he  called  Jesus  Alpha  and  Omega,  the  begin- 
ning and  the  end.  I  do  not  know  of  literary  antecedents 
for  his  use  of  these  two  letters  of  the  alphabet ;  but  some- 
times people  are  original,  and  not  infrequently  experience 
of  Jesus  is  the  secret  of  their  freshness  of  mind.  The 
writer  coined  a  phrase  and  the  Christian  world  ac- 
cepted it. 

II 

First  of  all,  let  us  look  at  Alpha.  Nowadays  we  steal 
ideas  from  scientific  books  and  scientific  men,  or,  to  be 
more  exact,  the  journalists  steal  them  and  we  borrow 
from  the  journalists,  and  at  each  stage  of  the  process 
something  is  lost.  Natural  law  haunts  our  minds.  Some 
of  us  are  possessed  by  a  theory  of  natural  law  churning 
on  for  ever  and  ever  and  ever,  with  no  heart  and  little 
mind  at  the  back  of  it,  as  if  evolution  evolved  itself  and 
needed  neither  an  intelligence  nor  a  power  behind  it  to 
start  it  or  to  maintain  its  process,  whatever  that  may 
prove  to  be.  Ancient  Greek  thinkers,  the  serious  ones, 
emphasized  God's  Providence  (Trpovoui),  It  was  a  great 
word  in  those  days;  it  covered  the  government  of  the 
universe,  and  there  were  those  who  hoped  that  it  covered 
the  lives  of  individual  men.  The  keynote  of  all  Jewish 
apocalyptic  was  Providence — perhaps  the  soundest  ele- 
ment in  all  that  strange  literature.''  The  Christian,  grow- 
ing up  with  the  idea,  and  then  brought  into  this  new  ex- 
perience of  Jesus,  was  bound  to  connect  the  two.  God 
must  have  thought  about  Jesus  ahead  of  the  time."    What 


•See  Wisdom  6:8;    12:8;    14:3;    17:2. 

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


ALPHA  AND  OMEGA  137 

is  the  alternative?  Can  we  really  picture  God  in  the 
style  of  a  celestial  Mr.  Micawber,  "waiting  for  some- 
thing to  turn  up,"  till,  unexpectedly,  through  the  unfor- 
seen  action,  I  suppose,  of  natural  laws,  Jesus  is  thrown 
up  on  the  surface  of  things,  a  happy  chance,  that  enables 
some  of  God's  ideas  to  be  fulfilled,  a  great  piece  of  luck 
for  God  ?  The  thought  is  impossible ;  it  negates  the  very 
idea  of  God. 

Christians  have  always  been  amenable  to  the  ideas  of 
their  times,  and  this  was  one  bound  up  with  the  nature  of 
God.  They  were  confronted  by  what  we  still  feel  to  be 
the  most  wonderful  character  of  history,  by  the  trans- 
formation of  every  aspect  of  life,  and  by  a  great  move- 
ment in  every  people  of  the  world  they  knew.  Small  won- 
der they  connected  their  experience  with  their  conception 
of  Providence.  God  must  have  foreseen  it;  yes,  before 
ever  he  laid  the  foundation  of  the  world,  they  said,  God 
loved  Christ  (John  17 :  24) .  The  followers  of  Jesus  felt 
they  were  witnesses  of  the  supreme  fulfilment  of  God's 
thought-out  ideas  for  the  world.  God  foreknew,  God 
purposed  and  planned  the  death  of  Jesus  on  the  Cross. 
The  New  Testament  is  full  of  that  conviction.  It  was 
no  accident,  no  blunder,  no  patch  on  a  mistake;  it  was 
the  design  of  God  himself.  To  that  the  thought  of  the 
early  Christian  was  brought  by  his  experience  of  Jesus. 
A  misguided  ingenuity  set  the  apologists  of  the  second 
century  to  work  upon  the  Old  Testament,  to  prove  by  texts 
that  from  the  very  first  God  had  been  telling  mankind 
in  riddles  what  he  would  do.  Nothing  could  be  more  in- 
genious or  more  perverse  than  some  of  these  attempts, 
but  they  bear  witness  to  the  conviction  that  Christ  is  no 
chance  item  in  the  world's  story. 


The  Assumption   of  Moses    (dated  by  Dr.   Charles  between  a.d.  7  and   30) 

makes    Moses   say    that    "the   Lord    of    the    world   prepared    me  before   the 

foundation    of    the    world    that    I    should    be    the    mediator    of  His    cove- 
nant"   (1:14). 


138      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

Christian  thought  went  still  further.  In  the  Epistle 
to  the  Ephesians  (1:4)  we  read  that  God  chose  us  also 
in  Christ  before  the  foundation  of  the  world.  The  Apoc- 
alypse speaks  of  names  written  from  the  foundation  of 
the  world  in  the  Book  of  Life  (13:8;  17:8).' 

The  word  in  these  passages  translated  "world"  does 
not  mean  the  earth ;  it  means  the  universe,  infinite,  order- 
ly, and  thought  out  by  God;  and  Christ,  they  suggest,  is 
the  deepest,  the  most  essential,  expression  of  the  very 
being  and  mind  of  God;  and  they  conclude,  not  unreason- 
ably, that  all  began  with  Christ,  that  Christ  is  Alpha. 
That  is  not  our  modern  way  of  thinking.  It  is  well  to 
face  up  to  a  conception  of  this  magnitude,  for  it  is  a  chal- 
lenge, and  to  ask,  if  not  this,  then  what?  Have  we  the 
issue  in  our  minds,  are  we  facing  the  alternatives?  Is 
the  Church  really  thinking  deeply  enough  about  what  is 
implied  and  involved  in  that  historical  Jesus,  who  has 
remade  the  world  and  has  remade  us  ? 

That  there  is  in  this  line  of  speculation  a  real  danger 
of  slipping  into  some  form  of  fatalism  or  determinism,  is 
evident.  Luther  found  the  corrective  of  predestinarian 
thinking  in  the  very  person  whose  significance  has  turned 
us  in  this  direction.  He  saw  the  consequences  of  over- 
emphasis, and  he  said  bluntly:  ''Dispute  not  in  any  case 
of  Predestination.  But  if  thou  wilt  needs  dispute  touch- 
ing the  same,  then,  I  truly  advise  thee  to  begin  first  at 
the  wounds  of  Christ,  as  then  all  that  Disputation  will 
cease  and  have  an  end  therewith."®  If  the  impossibility 
of  Christ  being  an  accident  leads  us  to  a  strong  view  of 
Providence,  the  other  impossibility,  of  his  being  a  cog 
in  the  inanimate  wheel  of  things,  neither  more  moral  nor 


'  Cf .  II  Enoch  (Secrets)  23:5;  "Every  soul  was  created  eternally  before 
the  foundation  of  the  world."  We  have  here  to  remember  the  Platonic 
doctrine  of  preexistence. 

« Luther's  Tahle-Tatk,  ch.  XXXVII,  p.  405,  in  the  first  English  trans- 
lation (folio)  by  Henry  Bell,  a  volume  with  an  interesting  story  of 
its  own  . 


ALPHA  AND  OMEGA  139 

less  moral  than  Judas,  is  quite  as  unthinkable.  The 
strong  vivid  humanity  of  Jesus  is  our  prime  fact;  and 
in  theology,  as  in  all  spheres  of  thought,  every  deduction 
has  to  be  controlled  by  the  facts  of  which  we  are  certain. 
Historically,  Jesus  has  stimulated  thought  and  specula- 
tion, and  has  been  again  and  again  the  corrective  that 
kept  it  sane  and  true. 

Ill 

Let  us  turn  to  Omega.  If  God  foreknew  Christ,  Christ 
is  the  fulfilment  of  God's  ideas  for  man;  the  guarantee 
that  man  is  not  a  mistake,  a  blot  on  the  universe.  Paul 
once  said  that  "in  Jesus  is  the  Yes"  (II  Cor.  1:19,  20). 
Ancient  religion  was  largely  negative;  the  taboo  domi- 
nated it ;  and  on  the  moral  side  'Thou  shalt  not'*  was  the 
note;  as  if  to  be  man,  a  man  must  be  anything  rather 
than  man,  as  if  the  human  was  all  sinful.  But  Jesus, 
as  R.  L.  Stevenson  wrote,^  ''would  not  hear  of  a  negative 
morality."  'Thou  shalt  not  seethe  a  kid  in  its  mother's 
milk";  "Thou  shalt  not  steal" — so  ran  the  old  law.  "Be 
of  good  courage,"  said  Jesus,  "freely  ye  have  received, 
freely  give ;  it  is  your  Father's  good  pleasure  to  give  you 
the  kingdom."  As  for  the  powers  of  evil  which  obsessed 
the  minds  of  his  contemporaries,  while  it  appears  that 
Jesus  accepted  the  current  belief  in  their  existence  and 
activity,  he  laid  no  stress  on  them;  instead  he  empha- 
sized God.  Religious  teachers  have  often  put  temptation 
and  its  dangers  in  the  forefront  of  their  lessons.  In  the 
story  of  the  empty  house  Jesus  shows  his  mind  plainly; 
he  has  not  come  to  reduce  human  life  to  vacuity  and 
nonentity,  but  to  fill  it  with  God,  with  the  great,  splendid, 
various  God  whom  he  knows ;  and  to  prove  that,  so  filled. 


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


140      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

it  is  human  nature  at  last,  lovable,  living,  and  delightful. 

Men  tended  to  conceive  of  religion  in  those  days  under 
one  type  of  life  and  experience.  That  habit  of  mind  is 
still  with  us,  and  militates  against  religion.  Jesus  had 
the  largeness  of  range  that  we  find  in  all  who  enter  deeply 
into  God's  thought.  He  recognizes  the  variety  of  human 
nature;  and  his  whole  attitude  is  the  saying  of  Yes — 
not  No — to  it  in  its  variety,  not  to  our  casual  ideas  of 
it,  but  to  human  nature  deeply  thought  out.  Man's 
nature  is  in  essence  quite  another  thing  from  the  ani- 
mal's— differentiated  from  it  by  memory  and  reason 
developed  to  a  degree  not  found  in  the  beast,  by  fore- 
sight, and  above  all  by  a  far  more  highly  complicated 
social  sense,  by  that  vastly  greater  interdependence  of 
men  on  one  another  which  follows  from  the  far  larger 
variety  of  types  of  mind  and  character  and  aptitude  found 
in  mankind.  To  miss  this  variety  has  been  the  great 
failure  of  many  leaders  who  have  sought  to  reconstruct 
society  and  religion;  they  have  endeavored  to  reduce 
mankind  to  one  mould,  or  they  have  tried  to  stereotype 
some  fugitive  phrase  of  social  life.  Here  Jesus  outgoes 
them;  he  sees  more  clearly  and  he  grasps  more  firmly 
the  purpose  and  mind  of  God. 

The  ''promises  of  God,"  to  which  Paul  says  that  Jesus 
is  the  Yes,  are  to  be  read  in  this  manifold  nature  of  man, 
in  man's  instinct  for  knowledge,  for  intelligence,  for  love, 
and  for  immortality,  and  for  all  the  variety  and  fullness 
of  experience  that  these  mean  for  all  and  for  each. 
Jesus  does  not  miss  what  Paul  sees.  He  does  not  pre- 
scribe religion  of  one  type  any  more  than  he  prescribes 
nature  of  one  type.  "Wisdom,"  he  says,  "is  justified  of 
all  her  children"  (Luke  7:35).  History  has  shown  us 
how  the  most  varied  types  of  nature  find  themselves  in 
Jesus  and  grow  in  Jesus;  the  artist,  the  thinker,  the 
popular  preacher,  the  statesman,  the  linguist,  the  scholar, 


ALPHA  AND  OMEGA  141 

the  musician,  have  all  found  freedom  in  him.'  Yes,  and 
what  is  much  more  wonderful,  husbands  and  wives,  and 
fathers  and  mothers,  have  found  freedom  in  Jesus.  Un- 
like so  many  of  the  great  religious  teachers,  in  that 
ancient  pagan  world,  in  India  today  and  in  the  Roman 
Church,  Jesus  said  Yes  to  the  family  with  all  its  many 
interests,  its  unity  and  diversity,  and  its  freedom."  His 
conception  of  God  is  so  large  and  generous  that  he  makes 
religion  as  free  as  the  freedom  of  God  and  as  various  as 
the  variety  of  God.  The  Church  has  its  periodic  fits  of 
nervousness  about  new  ideas  and  nev/  energies.  It  is 
amazing  to  see  how  loose  Jesus  sat  to  many  of  the  things 
that  the  Church  has  most  emphasized.  He  lived  in  the 
universal,  while  his  followers  cling  to  the  local  and  the 
temporal.  He  has  no  quarrel  with  the  man  who  strikes 
out  a  new  line  or  finds  a  new  truth;  far  from  it,  there 
is  no  one  who  would  more  rejoice  in  the  explorer  and  the 
pioneer.  "Flesh  and  blood  hath  not  revealed  it  unto  thee, 
but  my  Father  which  is  in  heaven"  he  is  reported  to 
have  said  to  one  pioneer  spirit  (Matt.  16:17). 

Religion  with  Jesus  thus  escapes  the  many  drawbacks 
with  which  it  has  to  contend  elsewhere.  His  religion  is 
remarkably  free  from  symbol  with  all  the  limitations  and 
misunderstandings  that  symbol  involves.  He  spoke  of 
God  naturally  and  directly,  as  a  modern  would  speak  of 
a  subject  that  really  interested  him  to  friends  whom  he 
trusted.  There  is  not  the  rather  artificial  awe  about  his 
voice  when  he  speaks  of  God  that  some  teachers  have 
affected.  It  is  bcause  he  is  more  genuine  than  they  and 
has  a  stronger  instinct  for  reality.  Religion  with  him  is 
spontaneous  and  natural  intercourse  with  God.  Much 
ancient  religion,  and  a  good  deal  that  goes  by  the  name 
today,  we  can  only  call  taboo."    Whatever  a  taboo  may 


«  More  upon  this  in   Chapter  XIV.     » And  on  this  in   Chapter  XIII. 
^^  Dr.    Standing,    of   Madagascar,    made   a  collection   of  over    1,300   taboos 
in  operation  among  the  Malagasy. 


142      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

have  been  to  begin  with,  it  is  always  outgrown  in  time, 
and  when  it  is  not  allowed  to  die  it  becomes  an  obstacle 
to  progress.  But  Jesus  looks  forward  and  not  backward, 
and  in  his  teaching,  faithfully  interpreted  in  the  light 
of  his  mind,  there  is  no  hint  of  fear  of  progress.  His 
religion  is  not  a  matter  of  tradition,  of  loyalty  and  obedi- 
ence to  ancient  revelation,  nor  does  it  impose  a  system 
that  will  in  time  grow  old.  The  religions  of  his  day  were 
religions  of  old  books;  so  is  Hinduism;  so  is  some 
Christianity  today.  His  is  the  religion  of  the  new  song. 
Is  it  fanciful  to  say  that  only  artists  and  explorers  and 
thinkers  can  ever  sing  the  new  song — and  people  of  the 
new  life  and  the  new  spirit? 

Can  one  imagine  a  God  who  created  man  with  all  his 
wonderful  gifts  in  order  that  he  might  not  use  them;  a 
God  who  would  really  want  what  men  have  made  of  them- 
selves in  the  name  of  religion?  One  sees  in  India  men 
with  the  cramped  arm  above  the  head — an  arm  withered 
and  dry,  that  will  never  come  down,  that  will  never  be  of 
any  use  whatever,  that  will  never  do  anything.  I  have 
seen  a  man  whose  left  hand  had  nails  ten  inches  long. 
Such  self-destruction  means  the  repudiation  of  a  gift  of 
God.  And  in  the  West  we  sometimes  see  men  with  para- 
lyzed minds  calling  themselves  Christians,  as  proud  of 
the  withered  intellect  as  the  Sannyasi  of  his  ruined  arm. 
That  was  never  God's  idea  in  giving  men  minds;  and 
here  also  Jesus  stood  for  God's  idea.  Above  all  others,  he 
who  sets  men  free  from  every  kind  of  paralysis,  intellec- 
tual and  spiritual,  is  Jesus.  Christianity  is  essentially 
progressive,  or  it  falls  short  of  the  standards  of  its 
Founder,  who,  as  Paul  says,  wants  us  to  move  on  to  the 
perfect  man,  "to  the  measure  of  the  stature  of  the  full- 
ness of  Christ."  Paul  sees  a  progress  that  goes  far  beyond 
anything  that  he  can  ask  or  think.  Jesus  himself  is  the 
pledge  of  all  this  progress.     There  is  no  one  else  big 


ALPHA  AND  OMEGA  143 

enough  or  brave  enough  to  face  it,  or  to  make  us  face  it. 
Think  of  the  eighteen  or  nineteen  centuries  of  revolution 
and  change  since  his  day;  the  people  who  have  been 
undismayed  through  it  all  have  been  the  men  and  women 
who  had  the  outlook  of  Jesus  and  his  faith  in  God.  The 
dead  past  might  bury  its  dead;  they  were  the  people  of 
the  future;  and  that  is  what  Christ's  people  are  still. 

The  "Yes"  of  Jesus  goes,  as  we  have  seen,  beyond  this 
life.  He  is  the  pledge  of  an  immortality,  real,  tolerable, 
and  progressive.  Jesus  is  too  real,  men  have  felt,  for 
God  to  sweep  away  and  remain  God;  and  he  has  taught 
us  to  think  of  God  in  another  way  altogether." 

IV 

Alpha  and  Omega  belonging  to  the  same  alphabet ;  end 
and  beginning  explain  each  other,  as  Aristotle  hinted. 
God's  universe  is  one.  If  Jesus  Christ  is  Omega  as  well 
as  Alpha,  if  the  experience,  in  virtue  of  which  men  have 
moved  to  this  great  conception  of  him  is  approximately 
right,  then  a  light  is  shed  on  the  whole  of  God's  universe, 
and  on  the  whole  of  God.  Jesus  becomes  the  solution  of 
all  the  mysteries  of  the  world  and  of  human  experience. 
He  makes  things  intelligible;  he  opens  to  those  who 
knock.  All  the  doors  are  not  yet  unlocked,  but  he  has 
the  key;  so  that,  as  Dr.  Cairns  has  said,  "Here  is  some- 
thing that  discloses  the  very  soul  of  things,  the  nature 
of  the  universe  itself;  the  stars  themselves  move  on  the 
lines  of  Jesus."  That  is  a  great  thought.  Virgil  drew 
a  picture  of  battle,  of  wounds  and  death,  and  then  of 
the  burning  of  the  dead.  He  describes  the  solemn  ritual, 
and  the  torch  set  to  the  pyres;  and  how  the  men  who 
loved  them  sit  by  and  watch  the  fires  blaze,  and  the  bodies 
of  their  friends  perish,  watching  by  the  pyres  till  "dewy 


See  Chapter  VI. 


144      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

night  wheels  round  the  sky  set  with  the  blazing  stars."  " 
It  is  a  stern  picture,  that  Virgil  draws,  of  the  passion- 
less stars  in  the  quiet  heaven,  moving  on  in  their  beauty 
and  wonder,  irrespective  of  human  hearts  that  break; 
the  contrast  is  so  true  and  so  awful.  But  Jesus  gives 
us  another  picture  of  One  who  calls  the  stars  by  name, 
who  binds  up  the  broken  heart.  So  the  Psalmist  had  said 
(Psalm  147:3,  4);  but  who  could  believe  it  until  Jesus 
showed  men  the  heart  of  God?  Where  Jesus  has  been 
real,  the  stars  and  the  processes  of  nature,  irrelevant  to 
us  as  they  seem  in  certain  moods  of  experience,  become 
interpreted  by  the  love  of  God  . 

The  world  is  full  of  mystery.  Pain  comes  as  a  surprise 
to  every  fresh  man  and  woman  born  into  the  world.  The 
world's  wrongness  and  confusion  and  death,  all  these 
things  are,  generation  by  generation,  for  each  of  us, 
problem  and  darkness.  And  there  stands  a  figure  who 
says,  in  the  words  given  to  him  in  the  Fourth  Gospel — 
whatever  we  make  of  the  Fourth  Gospel,  again  and  again 
it  sums  up  the  very  gist  of  the  mind  of  Jesus — "These 
things,"  he  says,  "have  I  spoken  unto  you,  that  in  me 
you  might  have  peace.  In  the  universe  you  will  have 
trouble.  Be  of  good  courage;  I  have  overcome  the  uni- 
verse."" Did  he  say  that?  The  Christian  world,  as  it 
has  entered  into  the  Christian  experience,  echoes  the 
Apocalypse:  "Yes,  he  did  overcome,  and  blessing  and 
honor  and  glory  and  power  be  unto  him."  "We  see 
Jesus,"  says  the  writer  to  the  Hebrews,  "made  lower  than 
the  angels  by  the  suffering  of  death";  we  see  him 
"tempted  like  as  we  are,"  but  "crowned  with  glory  and 
honor."  That  is  the  Christian  interpretation  of  Jesus, 
the  Christian  experience  of  Jesus.  In  Jesus  the  promise 
is  that  we  shall  see  the  end,  which  is  to  explain  all  the 


"^««rf,    XI,    182-202. 
"John   16:33. 


ALPHA  AND  OMEGA  145 

doubt  and  pain  of  that  beginning  with  which  we  have  to 
wrestle. 

"Then  the  end,"  says  Paul  (I  Cor.  15:24).  The  end 
has  never  been  quite  lost  sight  of  by  the  Church.  It 
has  been  the  perpetual  vision  of  the  Christian  thinker — 
a  dream  that  quickened  passion  and  gave  new  heart  to 
work.  The  writer  of  the  Apocalypse  sees  Babylon  fall 
and  the  new  Jerusalem  come  down  from  heaven  "having 
the  glory  of  God" ;  he  sees  Death  itself  cast  into  the  lake 
of  fire.  In  the  darkest  hour  of  Western  history,  St. 
Augustine  wrote  of  the  City  of  God.  Bernard  sang  of 
Jerusalem  the  Golden  in  the  misery  of  the  Middle  Ages : 

"Spe  modo  vivitur,  et  Sion  angitur  a  Bahylone." 

There  has  always  been  a  feeling,  a  conviction,  explicit 
or  tacit,  that  the  work  of  Jesus  Christ  will  not  be  left 
half-done;  that  he  is  too  great  to  cease  to  count,  or  to 
cease  to  be;  that  his  is  a  spirit  that  will  win  through  to 
triumph,  to  the  full  development  of  human  character  in 
the  individual  and  in  the  race;  that  Jesus  himself  is  a 
pledge  that  we  can  reckon  upon  the  activity  of  God  and 
the  cooperation  of  God;  that  God  is  no  mere  spectator 
of  the  idle  course  of  things,  but  the  Architect,  the  Geo- 
metrician, who  thought  all  things  out,  and  will  carry  all 
things  through;  that  God  will  hold  on  to  his  own,  till 
Jesus  Christ  is  indeed  Alpha  and  Omega. 

One  thing,  however,  is  vital.  Alpha  and  Omega,  with 
all  that  we  have  seen  they  imply,  are  names  that  Christian 
faith  and  Christian  intuition  have  given  to  a  carpenter. 
The  writer  to  the  Hebrews  speaks  of  "looking  away  and 
fixing  the  eyes  upon  Jesus" — ^keeping  full  in  the  fore- 
front, not  a  theological  figure  but  the  real,  one,  true, 
vivid  Jesus ;  yesterday  and  today  the  same,  and  for  ever ; 
tender,    intelligent,    sympathetic,    wonderful,    available. 


146      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


CHAPTER     IX 
THE  CHURCH  COMPROMISING 

I 

Of  the  discoveries  made  during  the  war,  the  most 
startling  to  many  people  has  been  the  attitude  of  perhaps 
four-fifths  of  the  army — that  is,  of  the  British  nation — 
to  the  Church  and  to  Christian  tradition.  "It  is  awful 
to  realize  that,  when  one  stands  up  to  preach  Christ,  the 
soldier  feels  that  you  are  defending  a  whole  ruck  of 
obsolete  theories  and  antiquated  muddles."  So  writes 
Mr.  Studdert-Kennedy  in  The  Church  in  the  Furnace. 
"The  man  in  the  street"  (to  use  the  unpleasant  phrase 
of  today)  is  beginning  to  think  and  to  say  what  the 
educated  have  felt  for  a  very  long  time. 

If  we  speak  of  the  Church,  "we  must  admit,"  wrote 
Wellhausen  in  1884,  "that  the  nation  is  more  certainly 
created  by  God  than  is  the  Church  and  that  he  operates 
more  impressively  in  the  history  of  peoples  than  in  the 
history  of  the  Church.  .  .  .  The  Church  is  exposed  to 
the  dangers  inherent  in  an  artificial  foundation."  The 
Church  had  always  held  the  exact  opposite;  it  had  been 
loud  in  its  insistence  that  it  was  independent  of  the  State, 
more  divine  in  its  origin,  more  universal  in  its  scope. 
Ultramontane  and  Puritan — it  is  hard  to  say  which  main- 
tained this  view  more  strongly,  the  one  thinking  of  a  uni- 
versal Church  beyond  the  Alps,  the  other  of  a  Church  in 
heaven.  When  the  war  came,  the  panic  haste  with  which 
the  churches  of.  this  country  prostrated  themselves  to 

147 


148      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

the  Government  and  flung  themselves  into  a  nationalism 
little  less  hysterical  than  that  of  the  press,  was  a  con- 
fession that  in  England  at  least  we  believed  the  nation 
to  be  more  certainly  created  by  God  than  the  Church,  and 
Pope  Pius  and  his  successor  did  not  do  much  better.  The 
long  alliance  of  English  religion  with  capital,  and  its 
economic  orthodoxy,  seemed  to  millions  of  our  fellow 
countrymen  to  prove  that  the  Church  was  "an  artificial 
foundation,"  an  organization,  superbly  sensitive  to 
finance,  and  a  practical  reinforcement  of  a  good  many 
other  organizations,  less  arrogant  in  their  spiritual 
claims,  but  not  more  commercial  and  political  in  their 
outlook. 

As  for  the  "ruck  of  obsolete  theories,"  men  have  always 
felt  an  unreality  in  church  history.  Dogma  stood  for  the 
unproven,  the  untrue,  the  irrelevant.  Lessing,  in  the 
eighteenth  century,  had  said  that  Christianity  had  been 
tried  for  eighteen  centuries,  while  the  religion  of  Christ 
remains  to  be  tried;  and  Lord  Morley  says  it  is  "hardly 
less  true  than  it  was  a  hundred  years  ago." '  What  has 
the  Athanasian  Creed  to  do  with  Jesus  of  Nazareth? 
Does  it  suggest  his  language,  his  attitude  to  life,  his 
spirit?  Is  it  not  a  hideous  perversion?  Perhaps 
Nietzsche  was  right  after  all,  when  he  asked:  "What  did 
Christ  deny?"  and  answered:  "Everything  which  today 
is  called  Christian."  Such  views  have  long  been  held; 
and  when  they  are  so  widely  held,  it  is  better  for  the 
Church  to  know  it  and  not  to  live  in  a  fool's  paradise. 

Its  associations  tainted  with  capitalism,  its  creeds  mere 
jargon — ^what  is  to  help  the  Church?  In  one  body  a 
liturgy  of  Elizabethan  English  and  a  ceremony  grow- 
ingly  Italianate — in  another  a  service  dull,  conventional, 
and  vacuous — both  as  unreal  as  they  can  be;  if  you  are 
not,  it  is  asked,  a  woman  or  a  corpse,  what  is  there  for 


1  Recollections,    I,    p.    370. 


THE  CHURCH  COMPROMISING  149 

you  in  it  all,  you  the  Englishman  of  today?  That  is 
unfair,  it  is  retorted;  think  of  the  energy  and  goodness 
of  the  clergy.  Once  again  to  quote  The  Church  in  the 
Furnace,  Mr.  N.  S.  Talbot  this  time:  "There  is  great 
danger  today  in  the  exaltation  of  religious  devotion  and 
activity  over  love  of  the  truth.  During  the  last  sixty 
years  so  much  of  the  best  and  most  intense  achievements, 
whether  Evangelical  or  Catholic,  have  been  reared  on  a 
basis  of  reactionary  thought."  He  adds  that  the  theo- 
logical colleges  represent  "a  process  of  half-baking"  and 
(on  a  later  page)  that  their  pupil  is  "in  danger  of  being 
blinkered  all  his  life."  That  is  just  what  educated  people 
complain  of;  the  Church,  for  all  its  talk,  is  not  sym- 
pathetic with  progress,  is  not  alert  to  recognize  intel- 
lectual movement,  mistrusts  art  as  much  as  it  does  intel- 
lect, is  afraid  of  science  and  Socialism,  clings  to  out-of- 
date  scholarship  and  pre-Christian  psychology,  presses 
philanthropy  without  economics  and  missions  without 
anthropology.  In  fact  Newman  was  only  a  little  more 
explicit  than  the  rest  of  them,  when  he  avowed  that  the 
object  of  himself  and  his  friends  was  "to  hurl  back  the 
aggressive  force  of  the  human  intellect." 

If  things  are  well  with  the  churches,  "they  will  be 
full,"  says  Dr.  D.  S.  Cairns,  "of  the  spirit  of  life,  of 
adventure,  of  experiment  and  adaptability."  No  one  can 
say  that  they  are  full  of  these  signs  of  life ;  the  features 
of  the  Church  today  are  mistrust  of  its  message,  fear, 
and  abject  compromise  with  "the  man  in  the  street,"  a 
feeling  that  his  sense  must  decide  upon  what  the  Church 
ought  to  do  and  to  believe.  No  wonder  the  Church  is 
despised.  Even  a  cab-driver  expects  you  to  decide  where 
you  wish  him  to  drive  you.  The  man  in  the  street  knows 
quite  well  in  his  heart  that  the  Church  ought  to  have 
clearer  vision  than  he. 

Summing  up  all  this  criticism  and  confession,  we  find 


150      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

it  comes  to  this.  The  Church  has  been  criticized  for  its 
methods  of  organization,  for  its  formulation  of  its  beliefs, 
and  for  its  interpretation  of  Jesus  Christ  to  the  world. 
These  are  three  great  necessary  functions  of  the  Church ; 
and  in  each  case  the  criticism  touches  the  Church  exactly 
v/here  it  has  failed  to  represent  the  living  Jesus.  He  was, 
it  would  seem,  not  greatly  interested  in  organization,  per- 
haps not  at  all ;  still  less  could  the  crucified  carpenter  be 
suspected  of  launching  a  society  organized  to  support 
privilege  and  capitalism.  He  was  not  bound  up  with  obso- 
lete views  of  the  world  and  impossible  beliefs,  the  enemy 
of  intellectual  life ;  he  was  the  freshest  and  keenest  spirit 
imaginable.  So  far  from  representing  Jesus  to  the 
world,  the  Church  has  made  him  odious  to  the  intelligent 
mind.  "Ecrasez  I'infame"  and  "Nous  avons  chasse  ce 
Jesus-Christ"  are  very  illuminating  and  not  improper 
comments  on  one  Church's  gifts  of  interpretation,  and 
they  will  not  be  met  by  pleading  the  tender  piety  of 
nuns  or  the  happy  ignorance  of  peasants.  Lourdes  is  no 
answer  to  Voltaire.  If  things  are  better  in  England,  it 
is  because  English  Christendom  never  quite  excommuni- 
cated John  Wesley  and  Charles  Darwin. 

II 

The  Church  has  had  a  long  history,  and  when  the 
worst  is  said  of  it,  it  has  kept  and  cultivated  some  sort  of 
relation  with  the  historical  Jesus.  It  has  endured  per- 
secution for  him,  and  its  attention  to  him  has  kept  it 
alive  through  all  sorts  of  queer  alliances  with  political 
and  economic  systems,  and  has  set  it  free  again  and  again 
from  all  kinds  of  tangles  of  bad  thinking.  The  weak  spot 
has  been  the  Church's  uncertainty  what  to  make  of  Jesus. 

It  has  been  devoted  to  him,  but  never  quite  convinced 
that  he  was  practical,  never  sure  that  a  great  movement 


THE   CHURCH   COMPROMISING  151 

could  be  "ran"  on  his  lines,  on  abstract  ideas,  never  really 
alive  to  his  genius  and  his  seriousness.  The  Church  has 
always  been  gathered  from  the  world,  and  has  always 
shown  traces  of  the  pit  whence  it  was  digged.  A  man 
does  not  easily  get  clear  of  his  background  and  his  up- 
bringing, nor  of  the  unconscious  preconceptions  that 
come  from  them  and  affect  every  judgment  and  every 
action.  Part  of  the  weakness  of  the  Church  in  England 
is  due  to  the  fact  that  it  has  to  draw  its  recruits  from 
the  English  people.  It  was  always  so.  The  early  Church 
drew  from  a  complicated  civilization,  with  centuries  of 
thoroughly  non-Christian  thought  filtered  deep  into  every 
cultured  brain,  and  many  more  centuries  of  primitive 
superstition  alive  in  the  fancies  and  feelings  of  those 
who  thought  slightly  or  not  at  all.  Englishman,  Graeco- 
Roman,  and  Indian  must  help  Christ  out  with  what  they 
have  from  their  heritage — ''bring  forth  the  best  robe  and 
put  it  on  him."  And  a  motley  thing  they  made  of  it  with 
"gold  and  guegaws  fetcht  from  Aaron's  old  wardrobe  or 
the  Flamen's  vestry,"  ^  forgetful  altogether  of  his  parable 
against  patches.  To  win  the  world  for  him,  they  adopted 
good  ideas  from  his  competitors,  which  he  had  refused 
outright  to  do  (Luke  4:6-8). 

At  other  times,  in  shame  and  penitence  the  Church  has 
recognized  that  to  the  end  discipleship  is  the  condition  of 
apostleship,  and  it  has  returned  to  the  real  Jesus  and 
learned  of  him,  loved  him  and  trusted  him,  obeyed  him 
at  the  foot  of  the  letter,  and  gained  a  new  lease  of  life. 
And  then  the  old  doubt  has  returned.  Is  life  sufficient 
without  the  help  of  the  dead?  "It  all  depends,"  as  a 
woman  missionary  said  to  me  in  North  India,  "on  whether 
we  believe  the  Holy  Ghost  will  come  up  to  the  scratch." 
Jesus  undoubtedly  believed  this ;  the  Church  has  not  been 
so  sure.    It  has  believed  in  the  Holy  Ghost  plus.    Jesus 


"  Milton,   Of  Reformation  in  England,   p. 


152      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

in  Gethsemane  faced  a  risk,  and  on  the  cross  took  it, 
which  has  often  been  too  much  for  the  Church. 

The  Church  was  left  in  the  world — a  very  various,  con- 
fused, and  infinitely  perplexing  world;  and  the  Master 
had  not  settled  everything.  He  had  frequently  been 
unintelligible,  as  the  disciples  told  him.  He  was,  as  a 
modern  scholar  shrewdly  remarks,  "singularly  indifferent 
to  the  danger  of  being  misunderstood.'"  Did  he  ordain 
sacraments  at  all,  and  if  he  did,  in  what  sense  ?  Scholars 
remark  in  the  synoptic  gospels  some  absence  of  interest 
on  his  part  in  sacraments  and,  indeed,  the  habit  of  mind 
that  does  not  care  for  them.  Did  he  "found"  a  "church," 
and  what  did  he  conceive  it  to  be,  if  he  did?  What  were 
its  functions,  its  rights,  its  charter?  Scholars  debate 
these  points,  and  often  decide  against  ecclesiastical  tradi- 
tion. "The  thought  of  founding  a  church,"  says  Weinel, 
"had  been  even  more  absent  from  Jesus'  mind  than  it 
was  from  Paul's."  He  must  have  foreseen  some  outcome 
from  the  intimacy  of  his  disciples,  some  eventual  tend- 
ency to  organization;  did  he  ignore  it,  and  if  so,  why? 
Because  it  did  not  matter?  Because  he  believed  that  the 
Holy  Ghost  might  be  trusted  to  guide  them  in  all  the 
organization  they  would  need?  Because  he  believed  that 
a  living  faith  needs  no  special  methods,  that  God  fulfils 
himself  in  many  ways? 

Let  us  leave  questions  for  a  while  and  see  what  our 
records  tell  us  about  the  earliest  Christians  and  their 
attempts  to  work  together. 

Ill 

We  may  begin  with  St.  Paul,  who  is  our  first  literary 
authority  on  the  Church  and  its  character  and  purposes. 
Putting  together  what  he  says  and  implies,  we  find  that 


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


THE  CHURCH   COMPROMISING  153 

th«;  churches  in  his  day  were  not,  as  a  rule,  composed  of 
very  desirable  people ;  they  lacked  refinement  and  culture. 
"The  social  aspect  of  a  Christian  Church,"  says  a  great 
Scottish  divine,*  "must  have  been  in  many  cases  very  like 
that  of  a  small  dissenting  congregation  in  an  English 
town  where  dissent  is  feeble."  Add  to  this  some  of  the 
features  of  a  church  in  India  or  China,  gathered  from 
the  heathen.  The  Corinthian  Church'  was  full  of  quar- 
reling— not  merely  about  belief  and  practice,  but  about 
more  concrete  things,  which  the  members  took  to  the  law 
courts ;  and  there  were  worse  scandals  still.  The  cheaper 
t5T)es  of  Greek,  who  formed  the  majority,  had  all  the 
defects  of  the  Greek  mind,  but  little,  it  would  seem,  -of 
its  grandeur,  and  the  Church  bristled  with  every  kind  of 
wrongheadedness.  Its  members  came  from  Judaism  and 
heathenism.  There  were  actual  Jews,  and  Judaizers 
as  well — perhaps  these  were  the  party  which  so  blandly 
proclaimed  "We  are  of  Christ" ;  Christ  had  not  announced 
any  break  with  Jewish  law,  and  had  thereby  set  an 
example  which  they  at  least  were  upholding.  There  were 
ascetics  and  vegetarians,  following  lines  of  holiness  which 
the  whole  world  had  recognized  for  centuries  as  the  gist 
of  all  religion.  On  the  other  hand,  there  was  a  "Spirit" 
party,  which,  it  now  appears  more  and  more,  bore  only 
too  striking  a  likeness  to  groups  in  the  mystery  religions 
of  the  day — they  were  what  in  our  times  is  called  "psy- 
chopathic," subject  to  trances  and  visions  and  ecstatic 
speech  with  "tongues"  (tongues  unknown  to  gram- 
marians or  lexicographers,  and  of  no  value  to  anyone)  ; 
they  had  revelations,  and  they  prophesied  endlessly. 
Allied  with  this  party,  or  perhaps  at  variance  with  it, 
but  certainly  akin  to  it,  were  the  antinomians,  set  free 
from  the  body,  living  in  the  spirit,  and  therefore  free  to 


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


154      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

let  the  body  have  its  pleasures  while  the  soul  rose  superior 
to  them — people  emancipated  from  ordinary  laws  and 
conventions.  As  one  comes  to  understand  them,  men  and 
women,  there  is  no  wonder  that  in  a  city  like  Corinth 
Paul  emphasizes  that  in  dress  and  manners  a  Christian's 
first  duty  is  to  be  conventional.  Theosophy  of  one  kind 
and  another  flourished,  and  every  other  kind  of  crotchet 
-■ — baptism  for  the  dead  being  one  of  them — in  an  atmos- 
phere of  sloppy  thinking.  Magical  conceptions  of  reli- 
gion were  bound  to  be  present  in  a  community  gathered 
from  that  world. 

With  such  a  medley  of  religious  ideas,  there  were  the 
most  widely  differing  traditions  of  government.  A 
Church  recruited  from  all  the  world  must  expect  to  have 
differences  of  system  and  tradition.  The  Church  had 
grown  up  like  Jesus  himself  in  the  synagogue;  and  from 
the  descriptions  of  the  procedure  of  synagogue  worship 
which  the  gospels  give  us,  and  those  of  the  early  Church, 
which  we  find  in  St.  PauFs  epistles,  in  the  teaching  of  the 
Apostles,  in  Pliny's  rescript  to  Trajan  (about  A.D.  112), 
in  Justin  (about  A.D.  150)  and  in  Tertullian  (about  A.D. 
200),  it  is  clear  that  the  earliest  Christians,  when  they 
left  the  synagogue  or  were  turned  out  of  it,  followed  in 
their  new  association  (it  might  be  more  colorless  to  say, 
their  new  room)  the  lines  along  which  they  had  always 
been  accustomed  to  worship,  and  regulated  their  pro- 
cedure much  as  they  had  always  done,  adding  by  the  sec- 
ond century  to  the  books  read  aloud  the  "memoirs  of  the 
apostles."'  But  many  beside  Jews  of  the  Dispersion, 
trained  in  spiritual  worship  and  used  to  synagogue  con- 
trol, came  into  the  Church,  and  they,  too,  had  traditions 
and  habits.  All  sorts  of  systems  have  been  recognized 
here  and  there  in  the  story,  and,  if  in  some  cases  mis- 
takenly, still  variety  is  proved  up  to  the  hilt. 


•Justin,   First  Apology,   61,   62  ff. 


THE   CHURCH  COMPROMISING  155 

Not  to  make  a  long  story  of  it,  the  government  of  vil- 
lage elders  has  been  detected  in  the  Seven,  the  succession 
of  the  next  of  kin  in  the  predominance  of  James  in  Acts 
and  of  other  relatives  of  Jesus,  whose  names  and  strange 
story  are  preserved  for  us  by  Eusebius/  The  Gentile 
sick  and  burial  clubs  with  their  presidents  and  overseers 
are  traced  in  the  government  of  the  Church;  the  word 
€7rto-K07ros  hints  as  much,  and  the  fact  that  burial  grounds 
were  the  first  church  property  goes  a  long  way  to  confirm 
it.  (Ne  sint  areae!  "No  burial  grounds!"  is  one  of  the 
first  anti-Christian  war-cries.)  Roman  governors  could, 
and  it  appears  did,  allow  Christian  groups  a  recognition 
as  burial  clubs,  which  they  could  not  give  on  any  other 
basis  of  association.  Here  and  there  a  great  man  joined 
the  Christians  with  his  household;  he  ruled,  as  he  had 
done  before,  in  his  own  familia,  and  "the  church  in  his 
house"  would  probably  obey  him  as  readily  as  it  had  done 
while  they  were  all  pagans;  he  would  hardly  register  his 
household  as  a  burial  club  and  it  was  scarcely  a  syna- 
gogue. Men  who  had  grown  up  in  the  civil  service  of 
Rome,  as  organized  after  Vespasian,  their  minds  trained 
to  think  in  terms  of  Roman  law  and  their  habits  formed 
in  government  offices,  however  loyally  they  accepted  what 
they  found  in  the  Church,  were  bound  to  modify  it. 
Their  position  would  count,  and  their  unconscious  ways 
of  thought  still  more.  Bow  much  they  influenced  their 
new  environment  stands  out  amazingly  when  we  compare 
the  Church  we  find  in  Paul's  letters  with  that  in  Cyp- 
rian's, scarcely  two  centuries  later;  every  fundamental 
idea  or  tradition  has  vanished  or  is  bewilderingly  trans- 
formed, legalized  past  belief. 

Put  the  two  pictures  together — the  Corinthian  recruits 
with  their  wild  religious  ideas  and  plenty  of  other  people 


'  Church  History,  III,  20 ;  giving  an  extract  from  Hegesippus   (whom  he 
puts  in  the  reign  of  Hadrian,  a.d.   117-138). 


156      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

of  the  kind — and  the  decent  serious  men  with  a  turn  for 
order  in  procedure  and  sanity  in  thinking.  Link  the  un- 
conventional and  the  conventional  as  we  have  seen  them, 
and  ask  who  or  what  is  to  weld  them,  who  is  to  rule,  or 
is  the  movement  to  break  up?  Will  the  Holy  Ghost 
suffice?    For  now  the  problems  of  the  Church  begin. 

Danger  lay  in  three  directions.  The  honest  group- 
leader,  Philemon  or  Titus  or  Flavius  Clemens  (the  Em- 
peror Domitian's  Christian  cousin),  found  himself  con- 
fronted with  prophets,  with  thinkers,  and  with  men  whose 
religious  ideas  all  cames  from  the  Greek  mysteries.  The 
types  are  distinct  but  not  mutually  exclusive. 

Many  great  religious  movements  have  seen  the  prophets 
reappear  and  have  owed  them  great  debts.  **Built  upon 
the  foundation  of  the  apostles  and  prophets"  says  Paul 
(Eph.  2:20).  Men  of  insight  and  fervor  and  power  are 
among  them ;  men,  too,  with  other  gifts  less  valuable  but 
more  immediately  noticeable — men  ecstatic,  fanciful,  and 
unreliable,  creatures  of  mood  and  impulse — men  of 
trances*  and  visions,  who  "speak  with  tongues."  They 
have  remarkable  power  over  assemblies;  they  carry  them 
away;  the  mood  of  the  prophet,  his  frenzy,  may  sweep 
from  man  to  man,  may  capture  the  crowd ;  reason  and  its 
inhibitions  are  lost;  and  there  is  no  telling  what  the  -out- 
come may  be. 

Paul  makes  the  curious  confession  that  he  himself 
"speaks  with  tongues  more  than  them  all"  (1  Cor.  14:18), 
but  in  the  same  connection  he  emphasizes  sense  and  rea- 
son. "I  will  pray  in  the  spirit,  but  I  will  pray  with  my 
understanding  also,"  and  "sing  with  my  understanding." 
He  will  know  throughout  what  he  is  doing  and  remain 
under  the  control  of  reason;  he  will  not  lose  conscious- 
ness.'*   What  might  happen  when  a  prophet  was  carried 


8  Dreams,  too;  cf.  Jude  8;  Plato,  Timaeus  71,  72,  suggests  that  after 
recovery  from  his  sleep  or  dementia  the  prophet  may  be  able  to  explain 
the  inspired   word   rationally. 


THE   CHURCH   COMPROMISING  157 

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


»Cf.  H.  A.  A.  Kennedy,  St.  Paul  and  Mystery  Religions,  p.  287;  T. 
M.  Lindsay,  Church  and  Ministry,  p.  47;  Rufus  Jones,  Studies  in  Mysti- 
cism, p.  12,  who  remarks  that  Paul  evidently  set  slight  value  on  mystic 
phenomena.  John  Wesley  records  their  occurrence  when  he  preached; 
if  Charles  preached,  they  did  not  occur. 

^0  Cf .  2  Clement  13:3,  on  the  contrast  between  Christian  preaching  and 
Christian  conduct  as  a  source  of  Gentile  rejection  of  the  Gospel  as  nvddv 
-ivaxal  v'Kavrjy. 

"The  emphasis  on  the  prophets  points  to  an  early  date  for  this  book; 
cf.  Chapter  XIII,  p.  233. 


158      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

The  Church  took  refuge  at  last  from  the  prophet  in  the 
president  or  'overseer,  the  ''bishop"  as  etymology  would 
call  him.  Without  disputing  over  the  status  and  so  forth 
of  the  bishop,  we  can  admit  a  certain  leading  of  the  Spirit 
here.  As  the  native  churches  of  China  and  India  and 
other  lands  largely  pagan  gain  independence,  we  shall 
see  strange  outcrops  of  what  we,  taught  by  church  his- 
tory, shall  recognize  as  heathenism ;  and  a  sound  practical 
bit  of  advice  for  the  moment  will  be  "stick  to  the  mis- 
sionary," and  it  will  be  a  parallel  (saner,  let  us  hope) 
to  the  emphasis  of  Ignatius  of  Antioch  on  the  bishop. 
The  early  Church,  perhaps,  had  suffered  too  much  from 
prophets;  but  organization  was  too  rigid  a  Roman  trait, 
and  the  reaction  to  bishop  against  prophet  was  carried 
too  far.  "Prophesying,"  wrote  Edwin  Hatch,"  "died 
when  the  Catholic  Church  was  formed."  It  cost  the 
Church  endless  schisms  through  the  centuries,  not  all  of 
them  beneficial.  The  contest  between  the  Spirit  under 
control  and  the  Spirit  in  free  play,  as  it  has  been  called, 
still  goes  on. 

The  danger  to  the  Church  from  the  thinkers  need  not 
keep  us  long.  All  thinkers  are  dangerous" — especially 
the  quick  thinkers  and  the  conservative.  Men  came  into 
the  Church  from  the  philosophic  schools  and  from  the 
Gnostic  groups,  and  they  brought  dogmata  with  them, 
fixed  ideas  which  they  intended  to  keep  and  which  they 
applied  at  once.  An  example  will  shorten  the  story.  God, 
some  of  them  held,  and  pain  are  contradictories;  God 
cannot  suffer,  a  godlike  man  cannot  suffer;  "Is  Christ 
pathetos,  susceptible  of  suffering?"  The  question  comes 
already  in  Luke's  time  (Acts  26:23;  and  cf.  Luke  24:26). 
If  Jesus  suffered,  he  could  not  be  Christ,  they  argued; 


"  Greek  Influence  on  Christianity,  p.  107. 

*»  All  things  are  at  odds,  says  Emerson,  when  God  lets  a  thinker  loose  in 
this  planet. 


THE  CHURCH  COMPROMISING  159 

if  he  was  Christ,  he  did  not  suffer ;  he  was  Christ ;  there- 
fore he  did  not  suffer,  and  what  suffered  was  a  phantasm. 
This  was  the  result  of  quick  thinking  with  a  conservative 
hold  on  an  old  dogma.  This  very  issue  caused  the  Church 
no  end  of  trouble ;  and  there  were  many  more.  Pending 
the  results  of  sound  Christian  thinking,  the  bishop  was 
the  obvious  rule,  and  then  (more  soundly)  the  tradition; 
and  both  expedients  land  the  Church  in  new  dangers  of 
rigidity.  There  is  always  danger  in  associating  religion, 
and  especially  religious  thought,  with  law ;  law  has  always 
a  tendency  to  stereotype  what  it  touches,  and  even  holi- 
ness has  come  under  its  deadening  influence.  Prescribed 
thinking  (if  the  play  on  words  may  be  tolerated)  is  pro- 
scribed thinking. 

Most  serious  of  all,  because  (apparently)  least  sus- 
pected, was  the  danger  from  the  mystery  religions.  "The 
kingdom  of  God  is  not  eating  and  drinking,"  said  Paul 
(Rom.  14:17),  but  he  was  a  Jew,  and  the  finer  religious 
tempers  of  the  Graeco-Roman  world  had  another  experi- 
ence. They  had  known  contact  with  gods  whom,  on 
becoming  Christians,  they  had  recognized  to  be  daemons 
only,  but  still  real  and  capable  of  contact  with  their  wor- 
shippers; and  this  had  been  by  initiation,  by  sacrament, 
by  mystery.  The  modern  anthropologist  sees  clearly  that 
they  had  been  relapsing  to  the  level  of  primitive  animists, 
weaving  religion  out  of  hole-and-corner,  taboo,  and  make- 
believe;  and  he  comments  on  the  extraordinary  revival 
of  every  kind  of  old  pagan  superstition  and  the  invasion 
of  the  Western  world  by  the  sham  science  (astrology  in 
particular)  and  sham  religion  of  the  Orient,  not  the 
thought  of  the  Orient  at  its  best.  But  the  men  of  the 
day  thought  they  saw  further  than  Paul  and  the  anthro- 
pologist. They  were  satisfied  that  truth  can  be  conveyed 
in  religious  emotion,  that  feeling  may  unite  you  with 
God,  that  the  initiated  may  in  trance  have  the  vision  of 


160      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

God  and  be  an  epopt,  that  the  holy  fast  and  the  mystic 
fare  may  corporeally  make  you  one  with  God  and  trans- 
form your  mortality  into  immortality.  It  was  an  age 
when  spirit  itself  was  counted  matter;  and  the  Stoics, 
holding  this  ultimate  identity  and  having  allowed  astrol- 
ogy and  divination  to  be  real  sciences,  ended  by  conceding 
more  or  less  every  religion  to  its  adherents.  Men  and 
women  came  into  the  Church  who  thought  in  the  terms  of 
the  old  religions.  In  them  they  had  known  spiritual  peace 
or  at  least  satisfaction ;  and  they  began  to  interpret  their 
new  Christian  experience  in  the  terms  of  the  old.  They 
came  over  in  such  numbers  and  were  admitted  so  easily, 
that  at  last  their  conceptions  prevailed.  And  then  where 
lay  the  real  value  of  the  Christian  religion? 

Behind  the  religion  of  Jesus  and  the  mystery  religions 
lay  totally  different  principles,  and,,  above  all,  funda- 
mentally different  conceptions  of  God.  The  Father  of 
Jesus  was  as  unlike  a  mystery  god  as  could  be  imagined ; 
every  idea  of  depth  and  moral  grandeur,  of  truth  and 
purity,  of  love  and  fatherhood,  that  we  find  associated 
with  God  in  the  teaching  of  Jesus  makes  the  difference 
more  impressive.  Jesus  lived  in  the  open  air,  thought  in 
the  open  air,  and  the  sunshine;  these  religions  were  the 
affairs  of  caves,"  of  mummery  and  pretending  and  sym- 
bol, proper  to  polytheism.  "Jesus,"  says  a  modern 
scholar,"  "nowhere  shows  the  sovereign  clarity  of  his 
intelligence  more  astonishingly  and  obviously  to  anyone 
who  knows  anything  of  antiquity  than  in  that  whole  pas- 
sage where  he  says  that  nothing  from  without  can  either 
defile  or  cleanse  a  man."  The  mystery  religions  were 
primarily  magical  and  retrograde,  condemned  by  all  the 
best  minds  of  Greece  ;'*  their  motive  principles  were  fear 

"  The  shrines  of  Mithras  were  built  so  as  to  seem  caves. 

"  Professor  John  Macnaughton,  of  Toronto. 

"  Cf.  Plato,  Repj<blic,  II;  and  the  question  of  Diogenes:  "Will  Patai- 
kion  the  brigand  have  a  better  lot  after  death  than  Epameinondas  because 
he   has  been   initiated?" — Diog.    Laert,,    6:39. 


THE   CHURCH   COMPROMISING  161 

and  a  desire  for  self -maintenance.  The  teaching  of  Jesus, 
his  insistence  on  intelligence,  was  the  exact  opposite  of 
the  artificial  fog,  the  vanity,  and  the  traditionalism  of 
these  cults.  It  is  the  greatest  irony  of  history  that  in  the 
terms  of  these  mystery  religions  the  faith  of  Jesus  was 
to  be  interpreted  for  centuries.  It  was  not  till  the  third 
century  that  the  Church  succumbed  to  the  attack,  and  it 
was  the  sixteenth  when  Christendom  threw  it  off."  It 
is  a  measure  of  the  greatness  of  the  Christian  religion 
that  in  spite  'of  this  inheritance  from  heathenism,  and 
much  else  from  the  same  source,  it  bred  saints  and  heroes, 
martyrs  and  thinkers,  who  still  caught  the  spirit  of  Jesus 
and  triumphed  over  the  danger  that  swamped  millions 
in  superstition. 

IV 

The  victory  of  organization  and  the  sacramental  inter- 
pretation of  the  religion  had  consequences  the  most 
momentous — though  not  surprising,  when  we  grasp  how 
entirely  alien  the  new  ideas  were  to  the  mind  of  Jesus, 
and  how  antithetical. 

The  early  Church  had  been  something  of  a  democracy, 
made  so  and  kept  so  by  the  lay  traditions  of  the  syna- 
gogue and  the  Greek  instinct  for  individual  thought  and 
action.  An  official  priesthood,  charged  with  the  duty  lof 
administering  sacraments  like  the  graded  priests  of 
Mithras,  and  entrusted  with  the  intellectual  responsibility 
of  deciding  the  faith  of  the  Church,  found  its  analogue  in 
the  bureaucracy  of  the  Roman  Empire;  its  warrant  it 
drew  from  the  Old  Testament  by  expedients  of  interpre- 
tation that  sound  scholarship  will  not  allow."     It  pro- 


"See  A.  V.  G.  Allen,  Continuity  of  Ckristian  Thought,  pp.  33,  126, 
251,  376. 

"  See  Lightfoot,  Philippians,  p.  261 ;  and  cf,  p.  244,  for  his  statement 
that  there  is  no  sacerdotalism  in  the  N.T.;  it  came  (p.  260)  from  Gentile 
sources   in  the   first   instance. 


162      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


THE  CHURCH  COMPROMISING  163 

lays  down  the  theory  definitely  that  Noah's  ark  is  a  type 
of  the  Church.  He  compiled  a  handbook  of  typology,  the 
effects  of  which  do  not,  perhaps,  even  yet  quite  all  belong 
to  the  past,  and  this  is  one  of  his  types.  And,  unfor- 
tunately, it  was  a  true  one.  It  rested  on  what  every- 
body knew  perfectly  well.  Noah's  ark  contained  beasts 
clean  and  unclean,  and  so  did  the  Church.  (A  modern 
suggestion  has  been  that  there  was  one  difference — the 
unclean  did  not  go  in  by  sevens  into  Noah's  ark.)  What 
a  contrast  between  Paul's  "elect,  called,  holy,"  and  Cyp- 
rian's "clean  and  unclean"!  The  persecution  of  Decius 
showed  how  sound  the  comparison  with  the  ark  was.  It 
broke  suddenly  on  the  world,  and,  as  Professor  Gwatkin 
used  to  say,  there  was  a  rush  to  the  altars.  Christians 
made  haste  to  sacrifice  to  heathen  gods,  and  got  certifi- 
cates from  the  magistrates  to  prove  they  did  so.  Several 
such  libelli,  as  they  were  called,  have  been  found  in 
Egypt.'*  When  the  storm  abated,  the  renegades  wanted 
to  come  back  to  the  Church,  and  they  were  allowed  to 
come — on  terms  of  penance  and  at  the  request  of  martyrs 
who  had  stood  firm.  They  had  to  get  back  into  the 
Church  to  escape  damnation,  and  penance  was  more  read- 
ily intelligible  and  more  definite  than  repentance;  it  was 
something  concrete  and  external. 

There  were  two  reactions  from  this  new  theory  of  the 
Church  and  the  practice  that  it  produced.  The  Church 
failed  to  satisfy  the  ardent  individual  religious  tempera- 
ment. The  conviction  was  in  the  air,  the  heathen  con- 
viction, that  matter  is  impure,  that  sense  and  sex  are 
unclean;  and  there  was  the  object-lesson  of  the  Egyptian 
monks  of  Serapis  and  many  more  who  renounced  sex  and 
the  world.  Christian  monasticism  rose,  a  prtotest  against 
a  lax  Church,  a  new  and  strenuous  way  of  imitating  the 


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


164      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

Christ  who  came  eating  and  drinking.  Simultaneously, 
or  very  little  later,  rose  the  distinction  between  the  visi- 
ble and  the  invisible  Church — between  those  whose 
names  are  indeed  written  in  heaven  and  those  who  are 
for  the  time  within  the  Church  on  earth.  Both  reactions 
testify  to  the  same  feeling  -of  the  unreality  of  the  Church. 
The  sects  and  movements  of  the  Middle  Ages  revealed 
similarly  that  the  Church  was  not  meeting  the  needs  of 
the  human  mind.'''* 

A  great  organization,  in  proportion  as  it  is  successful 
and  means  to  be  more  successful,  must  have  practical 
men  to  manage  it,  whether  it  is  a  railway  company  or  a 
church;  and  it  tends  to  choose  leaders  of  the  strenuous 
successful  type,  who  can  speak  for  it  with  the  Govern- 
ment and  command  the  support  of  ordinary  people." 
Ordinary  people  and  the  Government  alike  wish  it;  both 
want  things  settled.  The  type  is  familiar  to  us,  not  too 
subtle,  not  too  intellectual,  not  too  spiritual,  but  quick, 
drastic,  and  effective.  The  last  two  adjectives,  or  their 
equivalents,  come  in  stories  of  episcopal  elections  of  the 
fourth  and  fifth  centuries;  the  last  bishop  was  not  "a 
doing  kind  of  man,"  the  next  shall  be.  So  Ambrose  and 
Synesius  are  transfigured  from  laymen  to  bishops,  'One  a 
soldier,  the  other  a  philosopher  and  hunter.  The  Church 
was  not  always  so  lucky  in  its  choices.  The  practical  offi- 
cial always  overdoes  his  simplifications;  he  will  com- 
promise at  the  cost  of  the  spiritual  issue;  he  seeks  short 
cuts,  and  in  the  region  of  the  intellect  and  of  spiritual 
truth  short  cuts  are  peculiarly  dangerous.     The  great 


=oSee  A.  V.  G.  Allen,  Continuity  of  Christian  Thought,  p.  207. 

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


THE   CHURCH   COMPROMISING  165 

things  will  not  be  simplified  in  that  way.  Constantine, 
for  very  proper  reasons  of  State,  reconciled  the  Empire 
and  the  Church ;  he  got  control  of  the  Church ;  and  then, 
resolved  to  have  no  more  divisions  in  the  Church,  he  sum- 
moned the  bishops  to  Nicaea  in  A.D.  325;  he  sat  by  and 
waited  till  they,  with  no  pressure  from  himself,  decided 
what  was  Christian  faith;  and  then  he  intervened  as 
Emperor — all  the  world  should  accept  it  at  once  and  be 
done  with  heresies  and  unchristian  divisions.  The 
Church  has  generally  had  to  pay  for  its  alliances  with 
governments. 

"Better  bad  laws  that  are  fixed,"  said  an  Athenian 
statesman,  "than  good  ones  subject  to  change"  ;^''  and 
every  practical  man  agrees  with  Cleon.  There  is  always 
a  sort  of  horse-sense  about  business  men,  but  they  some- 
times fail  to  realize  that  the  gifts  required  for  a  swift 
decision  in  a  purchase  of  barley  or  indigo  are  not  quite 
those  required  for  the  discovery  of  spiritual  truth.  The 
official  tries  to  take  the  average  opinion  of  today,  but  it 
is  generally  yesterday's  news  that  he  gets;  tomorrow  is 
not  practical  politics,  it  can  take  care  of  its  own  affair,  as 
someone  said  in  another  connection.  That  mistrust  of 
tomorrow,  which  so  tragically  parts  fathers  and  sons,  is 
still  more  a  mark  of  bureaucracy.  The  demand  of  a 
great  organization  for  leaders  whom  it  knows  involves 
the  rule  of  old  men ;  the  rank  and  file  often  do  not  recog- 
nize a  pioneer  until  he  is  left  behind.  All  over  the  world, 
and  in  every  communion,  the  Church  tends  to  be  con- 
trolled by  the  established  and  the  practical ;  and  to  these 
the  spirit  of  Jesus  cannot  be  congenial.  He  came  to  set 
fire  on  earth,  to  launch  divisions,  to  put  a  leaven  in  society 
which  would  never  leave  it  in  peace;  and  the  Church 
stands  for  traditional  order,  a  deposit  of  truth,  settled 

22  Thucydides,    3:37. 


166      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

economics  and  stable  society,  for  all  that  old  men  love  and 
young  men  doubt,  for  reaction  and  unreality. 

"A  real  belief  in  Christ,  besides  answering  questions, 
starts  them.""  One  great  part  of  the  Churches  work  has 
been  to  think  out  Jesus  Christ,  no  easy  task.  When  the 
Gospel  reached  the  Greek  world,  it  underwent  change, 
and  necessarily ;  for  the  Greek  mind  was  not  the  Hebrew. 
The  hillside  is  one  and  the  same,  but  when  it  was  said 
that  Robert  Burns  chose  his  farm  as  a  poet  and  not  as  a 
farmer,  we  have  a  hint  of  how  differently  men  may 
judge;  and  which  is  the  real,  the  farmer's  Mossgiel  or 
the  poet's?  The  change  that  the  shift  to  the  Greek 
world  meant  was  inevitable,  full  of  risk  but  not  formid- 
able. The  Christian  was  forced  to  think  out  the  relations 
of  Jesus  with  **all  time  and  all  existence."  He  had  to 
clear  up  for  himself  the  bearing  of  his  new  experience 
of  God  in  Christ  upon  every  problem  of  thought  and  con- 
duct, of  society  and  government.  It  meant  a  clearer  view 
of  G<od  and  a  firmer  grasp  of  Christ — a  greater  Christ 
than  men  had  dreamed,  ampler  and  richer,  "very  God  and 
very  man." 

So  much  was  all  to  the  good.  But  men  grew  w^eary 
of  heresies,  tired  of  thought.  They  accepted  Greek 
philosophy's  preconceptions  in  the  Roman  Empire  with- 
out that  brilliant  freedom,  that  passion  for  truth,  that 
we  know  in  Plato.  And  the  Church  began  to  insist  on  a 
"deposit"  of  truth  similarly  left  by  the  Apostles.'^*  The 
Christian  faith  was  to  be  discovered  by  adjustment;  and 
when  its  synods  and  councils  met,  they  were  filled  with 
officials  and  old  men.  How  near  disaster  they  could  come, 
we  are  reminded  in  the  saying  Atkanasius  contra  mun- 
dum.     The  young  Athanasius   saved   the   situation   at 


«N.   S.  Talbot. 

-*  The   beginning   of   it   in   Jude   3;    "the    faith    which    was    once  {iira^) 
delivered  to  the  saints." 


THE   CHURCH   COMPROMISING  167 

Nicaea,  almost  single-handed,  and  rescued  the  Church 
from  a  fatal  compromise.  But  what  were  the  credentials 
of  the  bishops  to  warrant  them  in  settling  the  Christian 
faith?  Paul's  caustic  comment  on  the  small  contribution 
of  professional  "pillars"  comes  to  one's  mind;  "they 
added  nothing  to  me"  (Gal.  2:6).  If  the  Church  is  "the 
.body  of  Christ,"  the  "body"  has  too  often  tried  to  usurp 
the  functions  of  the  Head.  For  a  defense  men  fall  back 
on  "corporate  thinking"  and  "Christian  consciousness"; 
but  here  let  me  quote  Dr.  Tennant :  "A  common  mind  is 
not  only  a  superfluous  conception  ...  it  would  seem  to 
denote  the  non-existent." 

Once  framed,  there  the  creed  was,  to  accept  and  not  to 
discuss,  a  good  civil  servant's  rule."""  Government  fixes 
the  rates  for  parcel  post;  you  pay  ninepence  for  two 
pounds,  or  we  do  not  accept  your  parcel.  There  is  the 
creed;  take  it  as  it  stands,  or — on  second  thoughts,  we 
will  make  you  take  it.  And  the  hideous  story  of  persecu- 
tion began,  and  was  justified  blasphemously  with  words 
of  charm  and  grace,  "Compel  them  to  come  in  (Luke 
14:23).  Faith  came  to  mean  no  longer  a  personal  rela- 
tion with  the  Father  of  Jesus;  God,  it  was  held,  would 
like  the  civil  servant,  have  nothing  to  do  with  a  man, 
unless  he  accepted  certain  Greek  speculations,  hardened 
into  Roman  law.  It  was  a  premium  on  thoughtlessness; 
and  ever  since  the  Renaissance  and  the  Reformation 
taught  men  to  think  again,  the  old  creeds  have  meant 
unceasing  difficulties.  Not  that  they  do  not  embody 
truth,  but  they  speak  a  language  which  for  most  men  is 
dead.  At  Pentecost,  we  are  told,  every  man  heard  in  his 
own  tongue ;  at  Nicaea  the  language  was  Greek.  Our  debt 
to  the  Greek  is  chiefly  the  inspiration  we  gain  from  his 


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


168      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

insistence  on  thinking  in  Greek;  it  is  a  warrant  to  us  to 
think  in  modern  English,  to  do  it  with  the  precision  of 
Socrates  and  the  glow  and  the  faith  of  Jesus. 


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


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


CHAPTER     X 

THE  LORDSHIP  OF  JESUS 

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

169 


170      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

is  clear  that  some  considerable  experience  lies  behind 
them,  if  we  can  only  recapture  it. 


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


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


THE  LORDSHIP  OF  JESUS  171 

henceforth  let  no  man  trouble  me.  I  am  a  branded 
slave." 

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

It  is  worth  while  to  note  that  Paul's  metaphors  describ- 
ing Christian  duty  in  terms  of  debt  and  slavery  and 
stewardship,  were  all  previously  used  by  Jesus  himself. 
If  they  seem  hard  to  us  and  unsympathetic,  Jesus  took 
them  as  not  unnatural  illustrations,  and  they  recur  inde- 


172      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

pendently  to  Paul.  There  is  surprising  severity  in  Jesus' 
parables  from  slavery;  and  Paul  in  his  turn  recognizes 
the  stern  element  in  the  Gospel. 

Paul's  life  shows  in  three  ways  at  least  the  effects  of 
the  Lordship  -of  Jesus.  In  the  first  place  it  is  a  life  con- 
trolled by  Jesus.  He  and  his  friends  think  of  going  into 
Mysia,  but  the  Spirit  of  Jesus  will  not  allow  them;  into 
the  province  of  Asia,  but  the  Spirit  of  Jesus  forbids 
(Acts  16.) ;  and  then  comes  the  vision  of  the  man  of 
Macedonia,  and  with  it  guidance.  The  Quakers  speak 
of  a  man  having  a  "stop";  and  a  man  knows  what  his 
own  "stops"  are.  Whatever  they  were  in  Paul's  case,  at 
one  and  another  point  he  was  "stopped";  and  then  at 
Troas  he  had  "a  concern,"  as  the  Quakers  say,  to  go  to 
Macedonia;  and  in  each  instance  he  was  right.  He  was 
told  at  the  Damascus  gate  to  go  into  the  city,  and  it 
would  be  shown  to  him  where  he  was  to  go  next;  it  was 
to  be  a  life  of  orders  given  and  obeyed.  The  Spirit  of 
Jesus  guides  and  controls  the  man  throughout.  It  takes 
away  a  great  deal  of  freedom,  but  it  gives  something  else. 

For  if  the  guidance  is  the  guidance  of  Jesus,  the  re- 
sponsibility belongs  to  Jesus — not  to  Paul,  so  long  as  he 
obeys.  That  is  a  very  great  thing  indeed.  Men  criti- 
cized Paul's  message.  Very  well!  "Who  art  thou,"  he 
says  (Rom.  14:4),  "that  judgest  another  man's  servant? 
To  his  own  master  he  standeth  or  falleth."  And  with 
one  of  his  familiar  tangents  of  thought,  he  adds :  "Yea, 
he  shall  be  holden  up."  "Let  no  man  trouble  me;  I  am 
the  branded  slave  of  the  Lord  Jesus."  So  he  says,  find- 
ing, one  guesses,  in  the  thought  consolation  for  messages 
rejected. 

If  Jesus  tells  Paul  not  to  go  into  the  province  of  Asia, 
then  Paul  is  not  responsible  for  Asia.  If  Jesus  sends 
him  to  Macedonia,  and  he  finds  himself  in  prison  there, 
then  that  is  where  Jesus  wishes  him  to  be.     If  he  has 


THE  LORDSHIP  OF  JESUS  173 

got  his  friend  Silas  into  prison  too,  the  responsibility 
still  rests  with  Jesus  and  not  with  Paul.  Tertullian  has 
the  same  thought  put  into  military  form.  He  speaks  of 
the  Christian  in  persecution.  God  assigns  a  man  to  a 
certain  place  in  the  world,  to  stay  there.  For  some  Chris- 
tians, Tertullian  says,  the  whole  New  Testament  is 
summed  up  in  one  text:  "When  they  persecute  you  in 
one  city,  flee  ye  to  the  next."  But  he  was  not  going  to 
flee  to  the  next.  He  draws  an  illustration  from  the  army. 
A  soldier  goes  to  battle;  he  fights;  he  is  wounded;  he 
falls;  he  dies.  Who  willed  it?  The  man  who  enlisted 
him  as  a  soldier.  "There  you  have  the  will  of  my  God" ; 
stay  in  Carthage!  And  he  stayed  himself  and  was  not 
martyred.'  It  is  the  same  story  as  Paul's,  who  also  uses 
the  military  metaphor.  The  responsibility  rests  with 
Jesus  Christ.    What  a  consolation  that  can  be! 

There  is  another  element  of  consolation.  At  the  end 
of  his  first  letter  to  the  Corinthians  Paul  sets  two  words 
which  English  people  run  together.  But  Anathema  and 
Maran-atha  have  nothing  to  do  with  each  other.  The 
Greek  word  is  a  curse  and  the  Aramaic  a  blessing.  Let 
such  a  man  be  Anathema!  That  is  a  curse.  Maran-atha, 
our  Lord  cometh !  That  is  a  blessing.  The  slave  is  in  a 
dreadful  position;  but  the  Master  is  coming,  and  then 
all  will  be  well.  Surely  that  phrase  is  the  echo  of  Jesus. 
How  often  he  spoke  of  slaves  in  positions  of  trust  work- 
ing and  waiting  for  an  absent  master !  "The  lord  of  that 
servant  cometh  in  an  hour  when  he  looks  not  for  him." 
"Thank  God!"  says  Paul,  "Maran-atha,  our  Lord  is  com- 
ing!    Then  he  finds  me  where  he  wishes  me  to  be." 

II 

The  word  saint  has  had  a  curious  history.  It  stands 
in  a  very  peculiar  position  today.    We  give  it  to  people 

=»  Tertullian,   De  Fuga,   14. 


174      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


THE  LORDSHIP  OF  JESUS  175 

where  no  man  but  the  High  Priest  once  a  year  might 
tread,  is  rendered  in  Greek  hagia  hagion. 

To  the  Greek  reader,  especially  if  he  had  Hebrew 
memories  as  Paul  had,  the  words  hegiasmenois  and 
hagiois — "sanctified"  and  "saints" — would  be  apt  to  sug- 
gest a  number  of  ideas  all  full  of  religious  history  and 
suggestion.  The  people,  so  termed,  were  the  god's  own; 
they  belonged  to  him  and  were  set  apart  for  him  and  for 
his  uses ;  they  were  sealed,  as  it  were,  by  him  and  for  him, 
and  protected  by  all  the  sanctity  of  their  god.  And,  it 
should  be  added,  they  shared  that  sanctity  and  might  com- 
municate it. 

All  depends  on  the  god  and  on  his  character ;  and  here 
the  history  of  the  word  will  help  the  student.  When  the 
writer  known  as  Peter  bids  his  friends  to  be  "holy  in  all 
conduct  of  life  along  the  lines  of  the  holy  one  who  called 
you"  (I  Peter  1:15),  and  cites  Leviticus  11:44  as  his 
warrant,  "Ye  shall  be  holy,  because  I  am  holy,"  he  intro- 
duces a  great  qualification.  For  the  taboo  words  in 
themselves  have  no  moral  suggestion  whatever.  In 
Hebrew,  the  root  q'd'sh  gives  us  qddosh  =  holy ;  qedesh  ~ 
holy  place;  5edes/ie/i=harlct ;  and  unless  we  know  some- 
thing about  temples  of  Southern  India  today,  or  of 
ancient  Corinth  or  Comana,  the  association  of  ideas  is 
impossible.  But  in  the  ancient  Semitic  world,  as  in  Hindu- 
ism today,  there  was  nothing  odd  about  it ;  the  woman  was 
a  "consecrated  woman,"  a  "holy  woman";  the  particular 
god  or  goddess  to  whom  she  was  dedicated  was  to  be 
served  in  this  way.  "I  am  thy  servant,  and  the  son  of 
thine  handmaid,"  is  a  beautiful  saying  of  a  Hebrew 
psalmist  (Psalm  116:16)  ;  but  in  Tamil  today,  "son  of  a 
servant  of  god"  is  the  grossest  of  insults,  for  the  "serv- 
ant of  god"  is  a  temple  harlot  (devadasi)^  and  no  one 
would  wish  to  be  her  son.  It  is  the  character  of  the  god 
that  is  decisive  of  the  nature  of  his  service. 


176      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

So  Paul's  word,  with  Peter's  commentary,  may  give 
us  a  new  conception  of  the  Christian  life.  The  Christian 
belongs  to  Jesus  Christ — is  taboo  to  him — is  his;  and  the 
character  of  Jesus  Christ  is  decisive  for  the  nature  of  the 
Christian's  service.  "Present  your  bodies  a  living  sac- 
rifice, holy,  acceptable  to  God,"  writes  Paul  to  the  Romans 
(12:1);  and  to  the  Corinthians  he  varies  the  phrase: 
"Do  you  not  know  that  you  are  the  temple  of  God,  and 
that  the  Spirit  of  God  dwells  in  you  ?  If  any  man  destroys 
(or  spoils  or  corrupts)  the  temple  of  God,  that  man  shall 
God  destroy;  for  the  temple  of  God  is  holy — which  you 
are"  (1  Cor.  3:16).  Here,  then,  we  have  sacrifice  and 
temple;  and  the  priesthood  of  the  ordinary  Christian 
comes  in  the  Apocalypse — the  full  series  of  dedication- 
words  all  linking  men  to  Jesus  Christ,  and  involving  his 
way  of  life,  not  "according  to  the  tradition  of  men, 
according  to  the  elements  of  the  world,"  but  "according 
to  Christ"  (Col.  2:8).  The  writings  of  Paul  are  full  of 
this  twofold  suggestion  of  belonging  to  Christ  and  hav- 
ing a  new  life  in  him  (Eph.  4:22,  24;  Rom.  8:2,  10,  14). 

It  is  worth  while  to  look  a  little  more  closely  at  this 
New  Testament  idea  of  the  Christian  being  the  property 
of  his  God,  and  at  what  hagios  implies  in  this  case, 
"You  are  Christ's,  and  Christ  is  God's" — what  does 
Christ  do  with  his  property,  with  what  is  dedicated  to 
him?  The  first  answer  is  that  he  keeps  it  and  protects 
it;  and  here  taboo  helps  us  again.  In  the  book  entitled 
In  Old  New  Zealand,  the  author  tells  a  curious  story  of 
the  power  of  taboo.  A  chief's  food  is  taboo — even  what 
he  leaves  of  it  when  his  meal  is  over  and  he  goes  away. 
A  case  occurred  where,  on  some  expedition,  a  slave  found 
food  and  ate  it,  and  then  was  told  it  was  the  chief's.  In 
a  few  hours  he  was  dead  of  terror — not  afraid  of  the 
chief's  vengeance,  but  of  the  inherent  awfulness  of  the 
food  he  had  eaten.     In  Isaiah  65:5  the  bystanders  are 


THE  LORDSHIP  OF  JESUS  177 

warned  not  to  come  near  certain  pagan  rites,  lest  they 
should  be  "sanctified."  So  in  Ezekiel  44:19  the  danger 
is  mentioned  of  being  "sanctified"  by  "holy"  garments. 
Men  believed  that  something  of  the  god  passed  into  what 
was  holy  to  him  and  protected  itself.  While  we  put  this 
down  to  superstition,  we  may  use  the  illustration.  God, 
the  Apostle  tells  us,  puts  something  of  himself  into  and 
upon  his  own,  and  keeps  thern  safe.  "It  is  God,"  writes 
Paul,  "who  has  also  sealed  us  for  himself"  (II  Cor. 
1:22).  "You  have  been  sealed  with  the  Holy  Spirit  of 
promise"  (Eph.  1:13).  In  an  ancient  household,  where 
locks  were  clumsy  and  few,  everything  that  the  master 
wished  to  be  kept  safe  from  the  slaves  was  sealed  up.^ 
In  the  Apocalypse  we  read  how  the  servants  of  our  God 
are  sealed  on  the  brow  (7:3),  and  with  the  name  of  the 
Lamb  and  of  his  Father  (14:1).  Thus  the  Christians 
are  marked  out  as  God's  own — "a  holy  nation,  a  people 
for  his  own  possession"  (I  Peter  2 :9) . 

Throughout  the  New  Testament  the  thought  is  empha- 
sized that  God  will  keep  his  own.  We  need  only  think  of 
the  ancient  use  of  names  in  magic,  to  realize  what  is  the 
value  of  "the  name  above  every  name" — especially  when 
we  bear  it  on  our  own  brows.  But  the  protection  of  God 
goes  far  beyond  the  sphere  of  magic.  God  always  means 
for  the  Christian  the  loving  Father  of  Jesus  Christ;  and 
God,  "for  the  great  love  wherewith  he  loved  us,"  saves 
from  sin  and  keeps  the  Christian  holy  in  Jesus'  sense  of 
the  word — "you  v/ho  are  kept  (guarded  or  garrisoned) 
in  the  power  of  God"  (I  Peter  1:5).  He  "is  able  to 
stablish  you"  (Rom.  16:25),  and  to  "keep  you  fn)m 
stumbling"  (Jude  24).  There  is  the  further  promise  of 
keeping  in  martyrdom;  for  martyrdom  was  never  far 


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


178      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

away  from  the  early  Christian — "ye  have  not  yet  resisted 
unto  blood,"  says  the  writer  to  the  Hebrews  (12:4),  with 
the  thought  in  his  mind  that  that  stage  is  quite  likely  to 
be  reached.  "I  also  will  keep  thee  from  the  hour  of 
trial,"  says  the  Apocalypse  (3:10).  Nor  is  it  only  in 
the  martyr's  death  that  he  is  to  be  kept.  For  God,  it  is 
implied,  will  keep  his  own  as  long  as  he  loves  them;  if 
he  chose  them  "before  the  foundation  of  the  world," 
how  long  will  he  wish  to  keep  them  afterwards?  Will 
he  tire  of  them  at  death?  Paul  did  not  think  so — "Y© 
are  dead,  and  your  life  is  hid  with  Christ  in  God"  (Col. 
3:3).  Immortality  and  resurrection  are  bound  up  with 
the  consecrated  life.  If  a  man  is  hagios,  he  is  Christ's 
for  ever.    "Who  shall  separate  us?" 

Returing  to  the  idea  of  the  service  of  the  god  to  whom 
man  or  woman  is  consecrated,  we  find  this  also  bound  up 
with  the  conception  of  the  Christian  hagios.  "If  a  man 
purify  himself,  he  shall  be  a  vessel  unto  honor,  sanctified 
{hegiasmenon)  y  meet  for  the  Master's  use,  prepared  unto 
every  good  work"  (II  Tim.  2:22).  The  Christian  is 
"created  in  Christ  Jesus  for  good  works"  (Eph.  2:10). 
The  hagios  in  the  temple  was  a  servant,  engaged  in  work 
for  the  god.  So  the  Christian  hagios  is  not  merely  kept 
as  a  curiosity  laid  by,  or  a  fine  edition  of  some  rare  book, 
a  thing  precious  but  not  very  useful;  he  is  for  Christ's 
use — not  a  folio,  but  a  pocket  edition,  in  and  out  of  the 
pocket  and  rubbing  up  against  everything  in  the  pocket, 
stained,  scarred,  worn,  and  showing  every  sign  of  close 
identification  with  the  owner.  Just  as  such  a  book  is  the 
intimate  thing,  and  makes  the  relic  of  a  friend,  penciled 
and  corrected  in  his  own  hand,  thumbed  and  personal  to 
the  last,  so  Paul  conceives  of  the  Christian  being  identi- 
fied with  Jesus  Christ  in  his  work,  used  to  the  uttermost 
and  bound  up  with  that  service  by  every  tie  of  love  and 
redemption. 


THE  LORDSHIP  OF  JESUS  179 

To  sum  up,  we  find  surely  a  richer  and  stronger  con- 
notation for  an  abused  word — a  whole  series  of  deep  and 
beautiful  meanings.  The  saint  is  just  an  ordinary  per- 
son, limited,  apt  to  stumble,  fallible,  foolish — "nothing" 
(I  Cor.  1:28) — but  he  is  dedicated  to  Jesus  Christ,  sealed 
with  his  name,  kept  in  his  power,  identified  with  him  in 
the  common  life  that  is  implied  by  sympathetic  and  intel- 
ligent surrender  to  his  purpose,  and  (most  wonderful  of 
all)  found  available  by  Jesus  Christ  and  used  by  him  in 
his  work  of  redemption.  And  we  have  to  remember  that 
the  word  was  deliberately  used,  to  describe  the  experi- 
ence of  the  men  who  used  it.  Thus  it  too  lights  up  the 
Lordship  of  Jesus. 


Ill 


Slavery  and  sanctity  are  not  sources  from  which  we 
draw  our  metaphors  today,  but  the  language  of  the  New 
Testament  writers,  when  once  we  study  it,  is  very  clear. 
They  gave  to  Jesus  a  place  of  authority;  if  we  are  to  do 
so,  we  must  do  it  as  spontaneously  and  of  our  experience. 

What  then  is  the  authority  of  Jesus  ?  First  let  us  look 
at  his  intellectual  authority.  Nothing  is  omitted  in  his 
survey.  Especially  we  must  note  the  significance  of  his 
use  of  human  facts — that  the  crowning  thing  to  prove  his 
authority  is  the  good  news  for  the  miserable.  When  the 
'accident  of  the  opening  book  in  the  synagogue  put  into 
his  hand  the  passage  of  Isaiah,  the  beautiful  words  about 
the  healing  of  the  brokenhearted  and  the  good  news  for 
the  poor  moved  Jesus  in  a  way  that  men  remembered. 
Jesus  always  grasped  the  fact  that  matters ;  there  is  pro- 
portion in  all  his  teaching  and  all  his  thinking — that  in 
itself  is  the  stamp  of  genius  in  any  region  of  thought. 
The  modern  Jew  loves  to  point  out  that  nearly  everything 
Jesus  said  was  said  by  the  Rabbis;  it  is  in  the  Talmud. 


180      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

"Yes,"  said  the  German  scholar  Wellhausen,  "and  how 
much  else  is  in  the  Talmud?"  It  is  all  there,  good  and 
bad  and  trifling;  but  there  is  not  that  indiscriminate 
heaping  together  of  things,  relevant  and  irrelevant,  in  the 
words  of  Jesus.  If  the  Stoics  said  some  things  that  he 
also  said,  how  much  they  omitted!  When  we  study  the 
books  which  Shakespeare  read  and  the  plays  which  he 
wrote  from  them,  the  striking  thing,  again  and  again,  is 
what  he  omitted;  and  what  genius  omits  is  sometimes  as 
important  as  what  genius  puts  in.  What  Jesus  omits 
counts  as  well  as  what  he  says.  How  much  the  great 
teachers  of  the  world  omit  that  Jesus  keeps !  How  little 
does  their  teaching  group  itself  round  the  real  center,  as 
his  thoughts  always  do! 

In  the  next  place  there  is  his  moral  authority.  The 
moral  insight  of  Jesus,  his  sure  touch,  is  one  of  the 
things  that  constitute  his  Lordship.  As  we  have  seen, 
the  eventual  standard  by  which  men  judge  their  own 
lives  and  the  lives  of  others  is  his  life.  But  the  center  of 
morals,  he  has  taught  us  to  see,  is  love;  and  there  is  his 
authority — in  the  great  loving  heart  of  Jesus.  The 
authority  of  parents  and  friends  is  just  this,  that  nobody 
cares  so  much  for  us,  no  one  does  so  much  for  us,  no  one 
sees  so  much  in  us.  Who  ever  saw  so  much  in  men  as 
Jesus,  cared  for  them  more,  or  did  more  for  them?  "We 
love  him,"  says  the  famous  disciple,  "because  he  first 
loved  us."  There  was  no  question  as  to  his  Lordship 
among  those  who  really  knew  him.  Above  all,  his  sense  of 
God  gave  him  a  right  to  speak.  He  is  the  great  expert  in 
life— 

"The  master  light  of  all  our  seeing — " 

the  inspirer  of  right  living,  the  master  of  consolation, 
who  "brought  life  and  immortality  to  light,"  who  "abol- 
ished death"  and  gave  peace.    So  the  Church  has  always 


THE  LORDSHIP  OF  JESUS  181 

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


.^,,,^M  i}fP: 


CHAPTER  XI 
THE  FRIENDSHIP  OF  JESUS 


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

182 


THE  FRIENDSHIP  OF  JESUS  183 

It  is  significant  that  the  Church  began  with  the  most 
ordinary,  and  the  most  delightful,  of  human  experiences. 
Jesus  chose  twelve  "that  they  might  be  with  him."  The 
Gospel  thus  starts  with  friendship,  and  the  Church  is 
founded  in  friendship.  Jesus  was  with  these  men,  and 
they  with  him,  on  the  basis  of  friendship,  of  the  give- 
and-take  that  always  exists  between  friends.  Think  of  the 
common  life,  the  rough  and  the  hard  together,  and  Jesus, 
the  splendid,  sympathetic,  and  intelligent  friend  all  the 
way  through.  We  have  glimpses  of  their  casual  talk, 
of  the  freedom  with  which  they  speak  to  him — another 
characteristic  of  real  friendship.  They  are  not  on  their 
guard  against  him  or  against  themselves,  as  they  lie 
under  the  trees  with  him  and  talk  on  the  mountain  side; 
it  was  all  so  casual  and  natural.  The  thoughts  of  Jesus, 
in  Charles  Lamb's  phrase,  slid  into  their  minds  when  they 
were  imagining  no  such  thing,  in  a  most  beautiful  and 
natural  way.  They  unconsciously  came  to  share  his 
sanity  and  his  habit  of  peace;  and  his  repeated  "Cour- 
age!" (6dp(Tci)  became  their  own  mood.  He  had  a  genius 
for  friendship ;  and  it  gave  him  the  power  of  winning  the 
love  and  the  passion  of  men  of  different  types,  of  captur- 
ing their  imagination  and  enlisting  them  to  follow  out 
his  ideas.  This  can  hardly  be  overemphasized.  Think  of 
the  names  he  has  for  his  friends.  He  calls  them  "chil- 
dren" or  "boys."  As  I  have  been  told  not  to  overempha- 
size this,  it  is  pleasant  to  find  that  Clement  of  Alexandria 
seventeen  centuries  ago  noticed  the  diminutives  and 
found  a  special  point  in  these  friendly  names.' 

But,  historically,  the  death  upon  the  cross  stamped 
Jesus  as  the  friend  of  men.  "The  Son  of  God,  who  loved 
me  and  gave  himself  for  me,"  has  been  the  predominant 
conception  of  Jesus  from  Paul's  day  onward.  The  Latin 
poet  of  the  Middle  Ages,  whose  verse  Dr.  Johnson  could 

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


184      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

not  read  without  tears,^  puts  the  same  thought  in 
music: 

"Quaerens  me  sedisti  lassus, 
Redemisti  crucem  passus; 
Tantus  labor  non  sit  casus!'* 

''Worthy  is  the  Lamb,  for  he  was  slain."  His  death  and 
passion,  realized  in  conjunction  with  his  personal  interest 
in  men  as  individuals,  with  the  sense  that  no  solitary  unit 
of  humanity  lies  outside  his  heart — these  have  won  men 
for  Jesus  and  have  given  the  motive  principle  of  Christian 
life,  sheer  abandoment  of  self  in  gratitude  to  Jesus. 

Here,  as  elsewhere,  we  have  to  interpret  Jesus  in  the 
experience  of  men  by  the  Jesus  of  history.  If  Jesus  is 
"the  same  yesterday  and  today  and  for  ever,"  if  that 
statement  has  any  real  meaning  at  all,  it  suggests  that  he 
has  still  the  same  aptitude  for  real  friendship — that  he 
may  have  his  own  friendly  names  for  his  friends  of  a 
later  day  than  the  Boanerges  and  the  Rock  and  the 
Zealot — and  that  he  may  even  yet  enjoy  the  human  sym- 
pathy that  can  share  little  things  as  well  as  big,  the  quaint 
as  well  as  the  sorrowful,  the  gay  as  well  as  the  tragic. 
The  story  in  the  gospels  suggests  a  great  willingness  in 
Jesus  to  share  life  with  his  friend.  If  Justin  Martyr  was 
right  in  saying  that  Jesus  made  yokes  in  his  shop — and  a 
carpenter  certainly  seems  the  natural  person  to  make 
them — we  may  surmise  that,  when  Jesus  invites  a  man 
to  be  his  yoke-fellow,  he  knows  what  he  means.  We  are 
told  that  the  ancient  yoke  was  made  for  a  pair  of  oxen. 
Can  friendship  go  further  than  to  ask  another  out  of 
sheer  intimacy  to  share  one's  work,  especially  when  it  is 
difficult?  It  is  not  everybody  that  a  man  would  ask  to 
share  his  cabin  in  a  long  and  dangerous  voyage,  or  his 
work  in  a  difficult  milieu  in  a  tropical  climate. 


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


THE  FRIENDSHIP  OF  JESUS  185 

II 

St.  Paul's  letters  are  not  treatises  of  theology ;  not  one 
of  them  is  a  synopsis  of  Christian  doctrine;  they  are 
occasional  writings;  and  the  frequent  recurrence  of  a 
thought  is  a  sign  that  it  is  a  fundamental  idea  with  him. 
He  is  peculiarly  apt  to  use  verbs  and  nouns  compounded 
with  the  Greek  preposition,  which  means  *'with"  (a-w). 
They  are  rather  difficult  sometimes  to  translate  into  Eng- 
lish; fellow- worker,  fellow-prisoner,  fellow-servant,  fel- 
low-traveler— these  are  some  of  the  nouns  he  uses  for 
his  friends,^  and  they  are  easy  enough  to  render;  but  for 
Jesus  he  has  a  very  similar  series  of  verbs  which  are 
beyond  translation  without  paraphrase.  "I  am  crucified 
with  Christ"  (Gal.  2:20) ;  "becoming  conformed  with  his 
death"  (Phil.  3:10)  ;  "we  were  buried  with  Christ"  (Rom. 
6:4) ;  "God  made  us  alive  with  Christ"  (Eph.  2:5) ;  "if 
we  have  died  with  Christ,  we  believe  that  we  shall  also 
live  with  Christ"  (Rom.  6:8)  ;  and  then,  in  a  great  burst, 
in  one  verse  of  the  Romans  (8:17),  "Fellow-heirs,  if  we 
suffer  with  him,  we  shall  be  glorified  with  him." 

Taken  together,  they  are  a  brilliant  commentary  on 
that  other  striking  phrase  of  Paul's  (Phil.  3:10),  "That 
I  may  know  him  and  the  fellowship  of  his  sufferings." 
*  Jesus  Christ  had  to  face  the  cross  and  death,  to  go 
through  all  sorts  of  humiliations  and  sufferings,  and  Paul 
avows  that  his  great  ambition  is  to  be  in  it  with  him. 
The  war  gave  us  many  illustrations  of  that  spirit.  It  is 
the  spirit  which  is  associated  with  the  word  incarnation, 
the  spirit  which  made  it  impossible  for  God  to  keep  out  of 
the  mess  and  trouble  that  we  call  life.  Jesus  came  into 
the  thick  of  it  and  bore  the  cross,  that  accumulation  of 
shame  and  anguish  and  rejection ;  and  Paul  says :  "I  have 
to  be  in  it  with  him,  in  the  fellowship  of  his  suffering." 


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


186      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

That  idea  haunts  him,  as  can  be  seen  from  its  frequency 
in  this  small  group  of  epistles.  He  speaks  of  the  suffer- 
ings of  Christ  welling  over  upon  himself  (II  Cor.  1:5). 
He  does  not  want  to  stand  out.  Reading  the  account  that 
Paul  wrote  to  the  Corinthians  of  what  he  went  through — 
shipwreck,  stoning,  perils  of  robbers,  and  so  forth,  a 
modern  critic  has  said  that,  as  a  mere  feat  of  physical 
endurance,  Paul's  career  was  a  wonder.  In  another  place 
Paul  expresses  the  feeling  that,  if  anything  were  wanting 
in  the  shame  and  suffering  that  Christ  bore,  he  would  like 
to  bear  just  that;  so  that,  between  them,  he  and  his  part- 
ner, his  Lord  and  Saviour,  might  bear  the  full  tale  of 
human  suffering  (Col.  1:24).  That  is  an  ambition  that 
reaches  out  beyond  the  range  of  some  of  us,  a  picture  of 
friendship  more  intense  than  some  of  us  know;  yet  we 
find  it  again  and  again  in  the  Church.  There  are  people, 
who  are  ready,  who  are  wishful,  to  endure  the  very  worst 
for  Christ,  to  help  him,  to  be  with  him.  I  asked  a  man 
in  the  far  south  of  India  what  he  got  out  of  his  missionary 
life.  He  hesitated,  and  then  he  said  something  like  this : 
"A  sense  of  nearness  to  the  Master."  At  the  heart  of  the 
Gospel  is  the  assurance  that  Jesus  is  a  person  to  whom 
men  can  get  very  near ;  they  always  could,  he  is  so  ready, 
so  easy;  he  has  such  a  knowledge  of  men,  and  such  sym- 
pathy with  men. 

Ill 

The  Fourth  Gospel  often  crystallizes  in  a  phrase  of 
beauty  the  actual  words  of  Jesus  given  by  its  predeces- 
sors. "I  have  called  you  friends,"  says  Jesus;  and  then 
the  evangelist,  again  summing  up  the  whole  story,  repre- 
sents him  as  saying,  "All  things  that  I  have  heard  'of  my 
Father  I  have  made  known  unto  you"  (John  15 :15).  The 
essense  of  friendship  is  thus  represented  as  fellowship  in 
ideals  and  sympathy  in  thought.    To  share  his  mind,  to 


THE  FRIENDSHIP  OF  JESUS  187 

enter  into  his  thoughts,  is  a  part  of  that  friendship  with 
Jesus  to  which  men  are  called.  It  is  not  a  real  friendship 
that  will  not  go  over  the  whole  of  the  ground  with  the 
friend.  Paul  puts  before  us  the  whole  gamut  of  suffering, 
through  which  Christ  went,  as  an  ideal  experience  for  the 
Christian ;  and  that  is  hard  enough.  In  this  Fourth  Gos- 
pel there  is  the  other  ideal,  which  in  some  ways  is  even 
harder — the  spiritual  discipline  of  sounding  all  the 
thoughts  of  Jesus  to  the  very  depths.  We  are  called  on 
to  share  to  the  utmost  his  full  experience  of  God,  to 
grasp  with  him  the  mind  of  God,  to  live  v/ith  him  in  the 
love  of  God — as  he  understood  all  these  things.  It  is  a 
call  to  us  to  be  at  once  great  souls,  great  hearts,  great 
minds.  Meanwhile  we  are  very  like  the  rest  of  the  world, 
common  people,  commonplace  through  and  through.  What 
then?  Abraham  Lincoln  once  said:  "The  Lord  likes 
common  people  best;  that  is  why  he  made  so  many  of 
them."  Nobody  believed  that  common  people  could  be 
great,  capable  of  great  life  and  great  death  and  great 
thought,  till  Jesus  called  them  to  all  this,  and  they  "heard 
him  gladly,"  common  people  as  they  were.  It  is  what  he 
makes  of  his  friends  that  convinces  the  world  that  he  is 
in  touch  with  the  real. 

Jesus  calls  on  his  friends  to  share  his  interest  in  men 
and  women,  and  he  has  the  gift  of  communicating  his 
capacity  of  being  interested  in  the  most  ordinary.  When 
he  promises  to  make  his  followers  "fishers  of  men,"  some 
of  them  think  at  once  of  whale  fisheries.  But  an  episode 
like  that,  when  he  saw  the  crowds  as  sheep  without  a 
shepherd,  as  a  harvest  ready  to  be  reaped,  and  asked  his 
disciples  to  pray  the  Lord  of  the  Harvest  to  send  laborers 
into  his  harvest,  points  to  more  commonplace  tasks,  to 
duties  which  stir  the  imagination  less  and  call  for  more  of 
purpose.  "For  us,"  said  John  Robinson  of  Leyden,  "to 
ask  anything  at  the  hands  of  the  Lord,  which  withal  we 


188   JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

do  not  offer  ourselves  ready  instruments  to  effect  and  to 
bring  to  pass,  is  to  tempt  God's  power  and  to  abuse  his 
goodness."  Friendship  with  Jesus  has  to  carry  a  man  to 
the  point  of  feeling  with  Thomas  in  the  Fourth  Gospel, 
that,  if  the  whole  enterprise  is  a  failure,  he  will  "go  and 
die  with  him" ;  and  it  involves  less  tragic  ministries.  The 
friends  of  Jesus  have  been  equal  to  both. 

It  is  significant  how  few  names  we  know  in  the  first  cen- 
tury of  the  Church,  apart  from  the  personal  friends  whom 
Paul  mentions  in  his  letters.  Legend  is  busy  with  the 
Apostles,  sending  Thomas  to  Malabar,*  Mark  to  Alexan- 
dria," and  so  forth.  History  knows  less.  The  Syrian 
Church  was  a  very  great  one,  and  we  have  a  few  pages 
each  from  Ignatius  and  from  Tatian — pages  full  of  char- 
acter." We  know  that  Tatian  made  a  Syriac  harmony  of 
the  gospels  in  the  second  century;  and  we  have  its  out- 
lines in  Arabic.  Sooner  or  later  Syrian  Christendom 
reached  Malabar,  and  Sian-Fu  in  West  China,  where  the 
famous  tablet  remains  to  commemorate  it.  Within  the 
last  ten  or  fifteen  years  fresh  evidence  of  unknown  activi- 
ties of  that  Church  appeared  from  the  deserts  of  Turke- 
stan in  the  form  of  a  bilingual  New  Testament.  A  few 
leaves  of  Galatians  survived,  the  Syriac  version  on  one 
side  and  an  entirely  unknown  language  written  in  Syriac 
character  on  the  other.    Who  were  the  missionaries  of  the 


*  It  is  not  proved,  though  it  is  possible,  that  the  Christians  of  St. 
Thomas,  the  "Syrians"  of  India,  go  back  to  the  first  century.  Certainly 
the  so-called  cross  of  St.  Thomas  on  the  Mount  outside  Madras  does  not 
prove  it.  But  there  is  nothing  inherently  impossible  in  the  story  that 
Thomas  went  to  India.  For  ancient  traffic  with  Malabar,  see  H.  G.  Raw- 
linson's  interesting  book,  Intercourse  betzveen  India  and  the  Western 
World  to  the  Fall  of  Rome  (1916)  and  its  references  to  Strabo  c.  118 
(on  the  trade  about  the  Christian  era  and  the  120  merchantmen  sailing 
from  Myos  Hormos)  and  Pliny  N.H.  6:26  (on  the  discovery  of  the  mon- 
soon and  its  nature  about  a.d.  45). 

8  Eusebius,   Church  History,  II,   16. 

•The  romantic  tale  of  the  letters  exchanged  by  King  Abgar  of  Edessa 
and  Jesus,  and  the  gnostic  Hymn  of  the  Soul  are  the  brightest  pages  in 
early  Syrian  Christian  literature,  to  which  might  be  added  the  strange 
Acts   of   Thomas. 


THE  FRIENDSHIP  OF  JESUS  189 

Syrian  Church  ?^  Alexandria  made  immense  contributions 
to  Christian  thought,  but  who  took  the  Gospel  there  ?  To 
sail  to  Malabar  or  go  overland  to  China  might  be  roman- 
tic enough — till  one  arrived;  Alexandria  was  only  in  the 
way  of  the  most  ordinary  trade.  Christians  went,  and 
their  Friend  went  with  them ;  they  could  not  help  telling 
his  story;  and  nameless  common  men  working  for  Christ 
among  men  as  lowly  and  nameless  as  themselves  laid  the 
foundations  on  which  rose  one  of  the  greatest  schools  of 
Christendom.  "I  look  upon  all  the  world  as  my  parish," 
said  J'ohn  Wesley*  in  a  sentence  memorable  in  the  history 
of  English  Christianity;  so  did  these  unknown  men  look 
on  the  world,  remembering  a  recorded  saying  of  their 
Friend,  and  not  supposing  they  were  doing  anything 
remarkable. 

Others  again  went  westward.  Who  were  the  Roman 
Christians,  who,  on  the  receipt  of  the  news  of  Paul's  com- 
ing, tramped  forty  miles  south  to  Apii  Forum  to  meet 
him  ?  Were  they  old  friends  from  Greece  and  Asia,  whose 
names,  perhaps,  are  in  Romans  16?  or  were  they  strang- 
ers? Who  preached  Christ  to  Flavins  Clemens  and 
Flavia,  cousins  of  the  Emperor  Domitian — Flavia  the  first 
woman  to  suffer  for  Christ,  whose  name  we  know?'  When 
Tertullian  in  A.D.  197  writes :  "We  are  but  of  yesterday, 
and  we  have  filled  everything,  cities,  islands,  camp,  palace, 
forums  ...  all  we  have  left  you  is  the  temples,"  when 
he  says  that  even  in  Britain  there  are  Christians  and 
beyond  the  borders  of  the  Roman  Empire,  he  points  to 
the  results  of  Christian  life  and  preaching  and  martyr- 
dom, but  he  does  not  know  the  names  of  the  men  and 
women.    Nor  do  we  in  general  know  the  names  of  those 


'Von  Harnack,  Expansion  of  Christianity,  2:140,  points  out  that  the 
Syrians  were  a  nation  of  traders  who  traveled  the  world.  Syrian  ped- 
lars are  not  unknown   in   America  yet. 

^Journal    (Everyman   edition),   I,   p.   201. 

^  See  E,  G.  Hardy,  Studies  in  Roman  History  (first  series),  p.  67; 
Suetonius,  Domitian,   15;   Eusebius  Church  History,  III,   18. 


190      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

who  have  revolutionized  the  thought  of  India  in  the  nine- 
teenth century. 

The  Christian  Church  has  been  made  by  utterly  obscure 
people — by  nasty  slaves  and  washerwomen,  said  Celsus, 
who  take  women  and  children  into  corners  of  verandahs 
and  whisper  "Only  believe!"  to  them" — yes!  by  slaves, 
said  the  Christian  apologist,  who  were  burnt  alive  for  it 
and  in  the  flames,  "torn  and  bleeding,"  shouted,  "We  wor- 
ship God  through  Christ.""  Jesus  has  certainly  had  the 
gift  of  filling  the  hearts  of  his  friends  with  a  transfigur- 
ing passion,  of  communicating  to  them  the  instincts  and 
the  power  that  made  his  own  nature. 

The  means  used  have  been  summed  by  von  Harnack  as 
"infinite  love  in  ordinary  intercourse."  Paul  sets  out  his 
methods,  in  writing  to  the  Corinthians  (I  Cor.  9:16  ff.), 
and  reduces  them  to  a  sentence :  "I  am  made  all  things  to 
all  men"  and  "this  I  do,"  he  adds,  "for  the  gospel's  sake." 
There  are  all  varieties  of  human  temperament,  and  the 
Christian  is  called  to  show  an  infinite  variety.  The  par- 
able of  the  Talents  conveys  the  duty  lof  ingenuity  and 
alertness  of  seizing  the  opportunity  when  it  comes  and 
of  going  to  meet  it. 

Wesley  tells  of  an  experiment  he  once  made.  It  was 
suggested  by  someone  who  believed  in  calls,  that  he  should 
not  speak  of  Christ  to  anyone  unless  he  was  conscious  of  a 
call  to  speak  to  that  person.  So  he  rode  from  London  to 
York,  played  fair  by  the  experiment,  and  when  he  reached 
York,  realized  he  had  not  been  conscious  of  any  call  at  all 
and  had  said  no  word  of  Christ  to  anyone.  He  writes  this 
down  in  his  Journal,  and  his  conclusion  that  it  is  all  a 
device  of  the  devil.  There  comes  a  man,  is  his  thought; 
whether  I  "feel  like"  speaking  to  him  or  not,  the  call  is 
no  matter  of  feeling,  it  is  the  outcome  of  intellectual  grip 


i»  Celsus   ap.    Origen,    c.    Cels,   III,    55. 
"Tertullian,    Apology,    21. 


THE  FRIENDSHIP  OF  JESUS  191 

of  the  two  facts,  that  he  needs  Christ  and  Christ  needs 
him.  So  the  Wesleyan  society  came  into  being,  and  the 
Christian  Church  grew  by  no  other  magic.  The  friends 
of  Jesus  had  got  his  mind,  and  knew  what  to  do.  "Ho 
that  hath  the  word  of  Jesus,"  said  Ignatius  of  Antioch, 
"can  understand  his  silence.'"" 

"How  did  Christianity  rise  and  spread  among  men?" 
asks  Carlyle ;  "It  arose  in  the  mystic  deeps  of  man's  soul ; 
and  was  spread  by  the  'preaching  of  the  word/  by  simple, 
altogether  natural  and  individual  efforts;  and  flew,  like 
hallowed  fire,  from  heart  to  heart,  till  all  were  purified 
and  illuminated  by  it."'^ 

The  personal  relation  was  the  heart  of  it  all.  "The 
Son  of  God  who  loved  me  and  gave  himself  for  me"; 
"Christ  sent  me  ...  to  preach  the  gospel" ;  "To  me  who 
am  less  than  the  least  of  all  saints  is  this  grace  given  to 
preach  among  the  Gentiles  the  unsearchable  riches  of 
Christ." 

IV 

One  point,  further,  on  which  the  testimony  of  Chris- 
tians agree,  is  the  adequacy  of  Jesus  as  friend.  He  under- 
stood the  individual,  and  had  leisure  for  him;  he  prayed 
for  his  followers  in  detail.  In  the  Epistle  to  the  Hebrews 
the  writer  picks  out  Jesus'  gifts  of  sympathy  and  intelli- 
gence; the  verb  "He  is  able"  rings  through  it  as  one 
of  the  great  keynotes,  introducing  point  after  point. 
Tempted  himself  "he  is  able  to  help  the  tempted."  "He 
is  able  to  sympathize  with  our  weaknesses";  "able  to 
understand  those  who  are  ignorant  and  who  wander," 
and  then,  in  the  great  passage  a  little  later :  "He  is  able 
to  save  to  the  uttermost."  That  is  the  great  Christian 
experience;   it  is  written  all  through  the  story  of  the 

"  Ignatius,  Ephes.,   15. 

^3  Carlyle   in   Signs   of  the   Times. 


192      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

Christian  Church.  "Christ  in  very  deed,"  said  Luther, 
**is  a  lover  of  those  which  are  in  trouble  and  anguish,  in 
sin  and  death,  and  such  a  lover  as  gave  himself  for  us." 

Here  are  a  few  lines  from  Livingstone's  diary.  "That 
hymn,"  he  says,  "of  St.  Bernard  on  the  name  of  Christ, 
it  pleases  me  so;  it  rings  in  my  ears  as  I  wander  in  the 
wide,  wide  wilderness."  That  was  not  a  metaphor.  He 
was  tramping,  a  solitary  white  man  with  savages  and 
heathen,  through  untracked  Africa,  a  lonely,  sick  pioneer. 
He  writes  down  in  his  diary  in  Latin  four  verses  of  that 
Jesu  dulcis  memoria,  which  about  that  time  Edward  Cas- 
wall  translated  into  the  familiar  words : — 

"Jesus,  the  very  thought  of  Thee 
With  sweetness  fills  my  breast ; 

But  sweeter  far  Thy  face  to  see. 
And  in  Thy  presence  rest." 

And  he  goes  on  to  the  verse : — 

"But  what  to  those  who  find?    Ah!  this 

Nor  tongue  nor  pen  can  show; 
The  love  of  Jesus,  what  it  is 

None  but  His  loved  ones  know."" 

Sed  quid  invenientibus?  That  is  the  thing  that  makes 
heroes.  A  little  later  he  writes  (July  5,  1848)  how  he 
preached  to  those  savage  followers.  He  had  none  around 
him  but  heathen,  and  he  speaks  of  the  awfulness  of  the 
living  with  them,  in  the  atmosphere  of  savagery  and 
superstition,  of  murder  and  impurity.  He  says :  "I  like 
to  dwell  on  the  love  of  the  great  Mediator,  for  it  always 
warms  my  heart,  and  I  know  that  the  gospel  is  the  power 
of  God."  What  a  theme  to  preach  to  savages!  He  could 
not  help  it,  it  was  the  subject  which  drew  him;  he  must 

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


THE  FRIENDSHIP  OF  JESUS  193 

speak  about  it,  and  he  did.  He  deeply  impressed  them. 
Sir  Harry  Johnston,  in  his  Livingstone,  says  he  knows  the 
talk  of  black  men  in  camp,  the  scandal  and  the  slander 
that  they  know  or  invent,  but  never  about  Livingstone." 
It  was  a  right  instinct  that  led  Livingstone  to  speak  of 
the  love  of  the  great  Mediator,  and  these  men  saw  it  in 
his  life  and  checked  their  tongues.  Again,  in  a  still  later 
passage,  he  is  in  a  place  of  difficulty  and  great  danger. 
There  was  a  strong  probability  that,  if  he  took  a  certain 
road  openly,  as  he  was  going  to,  he  would  be  killed.  He 
was  used  to  danger,  but  this  time  he  wavered  as  to  his 
course.  Then  he  wrote  in  his  diary  (January  14,  1856)  : 
"I  read  that  Jesus  came  and  said:  *A11  power  is  given 
unto  me,  and  lo !  I  am  with  you  always,  even  unto  the  end 
of  the  world.'  It  is  the  word  of  a  gentleman  of  the  most 
sacred  and  strictest  honor,  and  there  is  an  end  on  't.  I  will 
not  cross  furtively  by  night  as  I  intended." 

Once  again  let  us  look  at  the  Fourth  Gospel.  "My  peace 
I  leave  with  you.  My  peace  I  give  unto  you."  (If  Jesus 
did  not  say  that  in  so  many  words,  does  it  not  sum  up 
what  he  did  say?  "Fear  not,  little  flock";  "I  am  with 
you";  "Why  are  ye  fearful,  0  ye  of  little  faith?")  If 
the  Fourth  Gospel  was  written  later  than  the  others,  then 
behind  the  words,  as  they  are  crystallized,  there  is  the 
added  experience  of  the  Christian  Church.  "My  peace  I 
give  unto  you."  They  have  had  it;  they  have  it  still. 
Jesus  has  proved  true,  and  that  is  why  those  words  can  be 
written  in  that  Fourth  Gospel.  So  much  for  the  ordinary 
life  of  the  tempted,  of  those  in  danger  and  in  trouble. 
Jesus,  they  find,  is  a  friend  indeed;  in  his  pain,  in  his 
cross,  there  is  peace  and  comfort  for  his  followers.  "Fear 
not!  I  have  overcome  the  universe."  "Consolation  in 
Christ,"  is  one  of  Paul's  great  phrases.  But  the  troubles 
of  this  life  are  not  all. 


"P.  365. 


194      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

"Who  shall  lay  anything  to  the  charge  of  God's  elect?" 
asks  Paul,  with  his  mind  on  another  tribunal  than  that  of 
Nero.  "Who  is  he  that  condemneth?  It  is  Christ  that 
died,  yea  rather,  that  is  risen  again,  who  is  even  at  the 
right  hand  of  God,  who  also  maketh  intercession  for  us." 
Jesus  stood  beside  him  when  he  had  to  face  Nero;  and 
Paul  knows,  deep  in  his  heart,  that  when  he  stands  before 
the  great  white  throne  there  will  be  One  at  his  side  who 
will  put  strength  into  him  there.  One  to  make  intercession 
for  him,  who  is  making  it  now — a  beautiful  thought 
which  we  find  also  in  Hebrews  and  in  the  Epistle  of  John : 
**He  ever  liveth  to  make  intercession  for  us";  "We  have 
an  advocate  with  the  Father."  Paul  asks,  "Who  shall 
separate  us  from  the  love  of  Christ?"  and  he  surveys  first 
the  things  that  may  meet  us  in  this  world,  the  things  that 
he  has  met — tribulation,  distress,  persecution,  anguish, 
peril,  and  sword;  and  he  dismisses  them  with  a  sweep; 
"In  all  these  things  we  are  more  than  conquerors  through 
him  that  loved  us."  Then  he  launches  out  into  the  other 
v/orld,  that  world  of  darkness  and  daemons.  "I  am  per- 
suaded," he  says,  "that  neither  death,  nor  life,  nor  angels, 
nor  principalities,  nor  powers,  nor  things  present,  nor 
things  to  come,  nor  height,  nor  depth,  nor  any  other 
created  thing  shall  be  able  to  separate  us  from  the  love  of 
God,  which  is  in  Christ  Jesus  our  Lord."'" 

The  hymn  book  is  a  great  record  of  Christian  experi- 
ence, a  library  of  human  documents,  a  selection  from  the 
confessions  of  men  and  women  of  all  ages.  The  Nev/ 
Song  has  indeed  been  sung,  and  the  love  of  Jesus,  and  his 
sufficiency,  has  been  the  keynote.  It  has  not  been  that 
all  these  people  sought  him  out;  again  and  again,  they 
have  not  wanted  him ;  but  by  and  by  he  comes  into  their 
lives,  and  what  a  difference  he  makes!     St.  Augustine 


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


THE  FRIENDSHIP  OF  JESUS  195 

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


"  Augustine,    Confessions,    IV,    2,    Ubi    proles    etiam    contra    votum    nas 
ciiur;  quamvis  jam  natu  cogat  se  diligi. 


CHAPTER    XII 
THE  CHURCH  TRIUMPHANT 


It  was  Nero,  the  Christians  always  said,  who  started 
their  persecution,  and  a  famous  chapter  of  Tacitus  con- 
firms them;  and  in  the  reign  of  Domitian  (81-96)  it 
began  again,  and  perhaps  on  a  wider  scale.  The  Govern- 
ment was  going  to  stamp  out  in  blood  a  pestilent  sect  too 
long  tolerated,  but  everywhere  hated  because  of  its  crimes 
— a  sect,  too,  that  retaliated  hatred  for  hatred  and  was 
the  enemy  of  mankind.    So  men  said. 

There  was  something  absurd  in  this  little  Jewish  sect 
aspiring  to  conquer  the  world.  Its  origin  was  too  well 
known.  Fifty  or  sixty  years  before,  its  founder  had  been 
crucified;  the  verb  had  no  pathos  then,  only  shame.  Its 
doctrines  were  folly.  Strange  religions  had  made  their 
way  from  the  East,  and  gotten  a  foothold  in  Greece  and 
Italy,  especially  in  Rome  where  everything  gathered  that 
was  shameful  among  mankind;^  but  most  of  these  reli- 
gions were  old,  and  if  they  told  tales  as  impossible  as  the 
Christians,  the  tales  had  the  glamor  of  antiquity.  One 
could  believe  that  something  might  have  happened  long 
ago  when  the  world  was  young,  and  far  away  in  countries 
so  distant  and  so  romantic  as  to  be  half  fairy  land,  which 
one  would  never  accept  if  reported  yesterday  from  a 
Roman  province.  But  massed  against  this  new  supersti- 
tion were  all  the  religions  of  all  the  lands,  faiths  hoary 


» Tacitus,   Annals,    15:44. 

196 


THE  CHURCH  TRIUMPHANT  197 

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


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


198      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

The  struggling  and  contemptible  little  Church  had 
lost  i'cs  founders,  all  its  best  leaders.  Peter  and  Paul  had 
perished  in  Nero's  reign,  a  quarter  of  a  century  ago ;  and 
the  rest  of  the  Apostles  cannot  long  have  survived  them. 
A  race  of  epigoni,  whose  names  a  later  age  of  the  Church 
let  die,  had  succeeded.  The  first  glow  of  faith  was  grow- 
ing dull  and  dim.  The  Church  of  Corinth,  quarrelsome  as 
ever,  became  a  scandal;  and  the  best  in  these  decades 
that  the  Church  could  do  is  the  epistle  of  Clement  of 
Rome.^  It  was  a  critical  moment  for  the  Church,  and  the 
arch-enemy  knew  his  hour  and  launched  the  persecution. 

Then  from  an  island  of  exile  an  obscure  Christian,  who 
tells  us  his  name  was  John,  and  who  may  be  presumed 
from  his  local  interests  and  local  knowledge  to  have  come 
from  western  Asia  Minor,  sends  his  friends  a  book — a 
book  of  odds  and  ends  and  ectasies  and  bad  grammar." 
It  was  a  book  in  a  bad  style — perhaps  the  worst  style  in 
that  age  of  degenerate  literature' — and  full  of  the  old 
apocalyptic  effects,  white  horses,  times,  beasts,  dragons, 
thunder  and  lightning  and  judgment,  with  Ezekiel's 
twenty-seventh  chapter  rewritten,  and  little  epistles  to 
the  Asian  churches,  and,  to  be  fair,  some  very  moving 
passages  of  a  more  original  sort.  No  educated  Greek 
would  have  cared  to  read  it  through;  but  perhaps  that 
was  not  the  writer's  object — "unfit  audience  let  me  find 
though  few."  There  was  still  a  public  for  apocalyptic, 
who  enjoyed  cloudy  symbolism  and  confused  pictures;  and 
his  book  would  certainly  appeal  to  them.  But  it  had,  if 
one  studied  it  closely,  certain  definite  characteristics; 


'  His  Epistle  to  the  Corinthians  may  be  dated  about  A.D.  95. 

*  Very  interesting  criticism  of  the  book,  its  authorship,  its  style,  gram- 
mar, etc.,  by  Dionysius  of  Alexandria  is  quoted  by  Eusebius,  Church  His- 
tory, VII,  25.  Ke  will  not  allow  it  to  be  by  the  author  of  the  Fourth 
Gospel. 

'The  simple  verse  of  Enoch  21:1,  is  the  best  short  description  of  all 
apocalyptic  literature — "And  I  proceeded  to  where  things  were  chaotic." 
(Dr.   Charles's   rendering.) 


THE  CHURCH  TRIUMPHANT  199 

when  the  trumpets  and  vials  and  voices  were  worked 
through,  several  things  of  importance  stood  out. 

The  man  had  read  ancient  history,  and  to  some  pur- 
pose. He  did  not  rewrite  Ezekiel's  chapter  for  nothing. 
Ezekiel  had  prophesied  against  Tyre,  when  Tyre  was  a 
very  great  place  indeed;  and  Tyre  had  gone.  His  mind 
ran  on  Babylon,  which  had  been  an  even  greater  state 
than  Tyre;  and  Babylon  was  gone.  And  his  other  favor- 
ite reading  had  been  in  books  written  under  Macedonian 
kings  of  Syria,  in  the  days  of  world-empire  of  Greek  cul- 
ture; and  they  had  gone. 

"Such  is  the  fate  of  Keasars  and  of  kings  i" 

But  history  does  not  repeat  itself  without  explaining 
itself;  and  it  was  evident  that  he  was  satisfied  that  he 
knew  why  all  these  powers  were  gone. 

"After  these  things,"  he  says,  in  his  casual  way — for 
with  all  his  emphasis  on  times,  he  leaves  his  readers  to 
work  any  symmetry  and  chronology  they  can  into  the 
book,  and  after  eighteen  centuries  they  are  still  busy  with 
it,  finding  undoubted  references  to  Armageddon  and  to 
November  11,  1918,  no  doubt,  and  much  else  that  is  inter- 
esting— "after  these  things  I  saw  another  angel  come 
down  from  heaven  having  great  power;  and  the  earth 
was  lightened  with  his  glory ;  and  he  cried  mightily  with 
a  strong  voice  saying,  Babylon  the  great  is  fallen,  is 
fallen!"  (18:1).  It  is  very  clear  that  he  does  not  mean 
the  Babylon  that  Cyrus  took  six  centuries  before.  He 
describes  an  enemy  he  knows,  and  grasps  her  spiritual 
menace,  a  power  allied  with  all  the  evil  of  the  world,  with 
all  the  social  wrong.  Look  at  the  things  in  which  she 
trades,  rich  and  varied  as  the  wares  of  Tyre.  "Cinnamon 
and  odors  and  ointments  and  frankincense" — how  far  she 
reaches!  For  these  things  came  from  Arabia  and  Mala- 
bar.   Gold  and  silver,  pearls  and  ivory,  fabrics  and  wine 


200      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

and  wheat — ^and  the  list  ends  with  horror — "and  slaves 
and  souls  of  men"  (18:13).  The  great  whore  sits  with 
a  cup  in  her  hand,  "drunken  with  the  blood  of  the  saints 
and  the  blood  of  the  witnesses  of  Jesus"  (17:6),  and  says 
in  her  heart,  "I  sit  a  queen,  and  am  no  widow,  and  shall 
see  no  sorrow"  (18 :7).  And,  explicitly,  she  is  "that  great 
city,  which  reigneth  over  the  kings  of  the  earth"  (17:18). 

He  defines  the  situation  as  no  Christian  writer  had 
yet  done.  Paul  was  a  Roman  citizen  by  birth,  and  as 
Luke  shows,  generally  got  on  very  well  with  the  represen- 
tatives of  the  Roman  Government ;  he  had  no  quarrel  with 
Rome,  Rome  stood  between  the  world  and  Antichrist." 
But  that  was  thirty  years  ago.  This  man  sees  another 
Rome.  There  are  no  more  dreams  of  peace;  there  is  no 
peace;  it  is  war.  Hatred  is  in  every  syllable.  Rome  is 
Antichrist,  the  great  enemy  of  Jesus  and  of  God.  But 
from  ancient  history  he  has  learnt  one  thing;  the  enemies 
of  God  do  not  prosper,  one  after  another  they  fall.  Tyre, 
Babylon,  Antiochus;  and  -one  more  will  fall.  In  ancient 
war  defeat  meant  extinction  and  subjection;  "And  after 
these  things  I  heard  a  great  voice  of  much  people  in 
heaven,  saying,  Alleluia  .  .  .  for  he  hath  judged  the 
great  whore  .  .  .  and  her  smoke  rose  up  for  ever  and 
ever"  (19:1-3);  and  after  that,  "Let  us  be  glad  and 
rejoice,  and  give  honor  to  him;  for  the  marriage  of  the 
Lamb  is  come,  and  his  wife  hath  made  herself  ready 
(19:7). 

It  is  a  book  of  victory.  "I  looked,  and  lo !  a  Lamb  stood 
on  the  mount  Sion,  and  with  him  an  hundred  and  forty 
and  four  thousand,  having  his  Father's  name  written  in 
their  foreheads.  And  I  heard  a  voice  from  heaven,  as 
the  voice  of  many  waters  and  as  the  voice  of  a  great 


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


THE  CHURCH  TRIUMPHANT  201 

thunder;  and  I  heard  the  voice  of  harpers  harping  with 
their  harps:  and  they  sang  as  it  were  a  new  song  before 
the  throne  .  .  .  and  no  man  could  learn  that  song  but 
the  hundred  and  forty  and  four  thousand  which  were 
redeemed  from  the  earth"  (14:1-3).  We  have  no  statis- 
tics of  the  early  Church;  were  there  so  many  Christians 
in  the  world  itself  in  a.d.  90?  But  he  sees  further,  "a 
great  multitude  which  no  man  could  number";  borrow- 
ing a  phrase'  he  computes  it  at  "ten  thousand  times  ten 
thousand  and  thousands  of  thousands" — "of  all  nations, 
and  kindreds,  and  peoples,  and  tongues,"  stood  before  the 
throne,  and  before  the  Lamb,  clothed  with  white  robes, 
and  palms  in  their  hands,"  and  "these  are  they  that  came 
out  of  the  great  tribulation,  and  have  washed  their  robes, 
and  made  them  white  in  the  blood  of  the  Lamb"  (7 :9-14) . 

An  exile  on  Patmos,  he  sees  a  despised  Church,  poor 
within  and  menaced  from  without ;  and  he  sees  this  spec- 
tacle of  triumph.  He  is  a  dreamer.  No,  he  is  practical; 
his  book  is  a  challenge  to  the  Christian  Church,  a  call  to 
faith,  to  courage,  to  endurance — to  martyrdom.  Death 
is  very  much  the  same  wherever  we  meet  it;  but  the 
martyr  would  die  alone,  hated  by  his  country,  insulted — 
furiously  insulted — in  the  hour  of  death.  "Here  is  the 
patience  of  the  saints,"  he  says,  the  patience  of  the  dedi- 
cated. Set  your  teeth,  he  cries,  the  worst  is  coming,  and 
the  best;  you  will  be  put  to  death,  but  you  will  live  and 
reign  with  Christ  for  ever  and  ever;  and  with  you  all 
the  people  you  had  to  save  and  did  not  save,  all  you  longed 
for  and  despaired  of,  will  be  Christ's;  Alleluia;  Babylon 
is  fallen. 

Can  we  imagine  the  amusement  with  which  a  Greek  of 


■^  Cf.  I  Enoch  40:1;  they  are  angels  or  spirits  merely  in  the  old  book; 
men  and  martyrs  in  the  new.     Perhaps  Enoch  rests  on  Daniel  7:10. 

'Jewish  Apocalyptic  foresaw  no  blessed  resurrection  for  ths  Gentile  in 
the  first  century  B.C.,  nor  in  the  first  century  a.d.;  R.  H.  Charles,  Escha- 
tology,  pp.  297,  300.  The  immense  impression  made  on  Paul  by  the  call 
of  the  Gentiles  should  be  noted. 


202      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

culture  or  a  Roman  governor  would  have  glanced  at  this 
motley  book?    Bad  style  and  taste,  confusion  and  repeti- 
tion, he  would  have  noted,  and  the  perennial  silly  cry  oJ 
the  failure  and  the  beaten,  "A  time  will  come!" 
It  did  come. 

II 

The  Christian  Church  has  through  the  ages  drawn  tc 
itself  the  best,  the  worst,  and  the  middling  among  man- 
kind. The  Corinthian  Church  was  dependent  on  the 
floating  population  of  a  seaport,  with  a  notorious  and 
abominable  temple  of  Aphrodite.  The  average  man  has 
always  been  largely  represented  in  the  Church,  and  per- 
haps (as  suggested  in  a  previous  chapter)  has  had  rather 
more  than  his  share  in  the  official  guidance  of  the  Church. 
Every  kind  of  crank  and  crotchet  too  has  drifted  into  the 
Christian  community;  sometimes  they  drift  out;  often 
they  develop  a  certain  degree  of  Christian  sense  which 
neutralizes  their  queerness;  very  often  the  Church  has  to 
exercise  whatever  faculty  it  has  of  '^'suffering  fools 
gladly";  now  and  then  they  make  imperishable  contri- 
butions to  the  body  that  barely  tolerates  them. 

"Ye  see  your  calling,  brethren,"  writes  Paul  to  Corinth 
(I  Cor.  1:26  f.),  "how  that  not  many  wise  men  after 
the  flesh,  not  many  mighty,  not  many  noble,  are  called." 
Whether  he  learnt  rhetoric  or  not  at  Tarsus,  he  is  surely 
using  one  of  its  figures  here,  and  saying  a  little  less  than 
he  means;  and  then  he  swings  into  a  glorious  and  famous 
passage  telling  how  God  uses  weak  things,  base  things, 
things  despised,  "j'-ea!  and  things  that  are  not,  to  bring 
to  nought  things  that  are  .  .  .  and  of  him  are  ye  in 
Christ  Jesus."  His  prophecy  of  the  Christian  future  is 
more  genial  than  John*s;  there  is  less  hatred  in  it,  but 
not  a  whit  less  conviction. 

Elsewhere  (I  Cor.  6:9,  10)  Paul  runs  over  a  list  of  dis- 
gusting vices,  some  reprobated,  others  tolerated,  in  the 


THE  CHURCH  TRIUMPHANT  203 

Roman  Empire,  some  almost  extinct  in  Christendom  but 
still  to  the  fore  in  heathendom;  and,  winding  up  that 
those  addicted  to  them  shall  not  inherit  the  Kingdom  of 
God,  he  wheels  round  upon  his  friends  and  says  bluntly: 
"And  such  were  some  of  you."  "Once  ye  were  darkness," 
he  writes  to  others  (Eph.  5:8),  "but  now  are  ye  light  in 
the  Lord."  The  Church  has  little  to  boast  about  in  some 
of  its  material ;  the  miracle  has  been  what  has  been  made 
of  it. 

Jesus  Christ  drew  to  himself  the  "whiter  souls,"  ani- 
mae  candidiores,  who  were  looking  for  God  in  the  Roman 
Empire,  as  he  has  since  done  elsewhere — men  and  women 
who  hated  the  uncleanness  and  cruelty  of  paganism ;  reli- 
gious temperaments  who  wanted  God  and  said  so;  peo- 
ple who  v/andered  disappointedly  among  the  cults,  who 
were  weary  of  daemons  and  were  drawn  by  the  "mon- 
archic" character  of  the  Christian  religion,*  by  its  pure 
morals  and  the  power  its  adherents  found  in  it  to  face 
martyrdom.  "Every  man,"  wrote  Tertullian,  "who  wit- 
nesses this  great  endurance,  is  struck  with  some  misgiv- 
ing and  is  set  on  fire  to  look  into  it,  to  find  what  is  its 
cause ;  and  when  he  has  learnt  the  truth,  he  instantly  fol- 
lows it  himself  as  well."  That  sounds  like  autobiography. 
The  philosophic  type  came,  too,  led  by  motives  not  very 
different,  and  gave  the  Church  Justin  Martyr  and  prob- 
ably others  of  the  apologists. 

Tertullian  said  that  tlhe  human  soul  is  in  its  true 
nature  Christian — anima  n<aturaliter  Christiana,  a  fine 
piece  of  insight,  well  phrased.  Some  of  his  proofs  or  illus- 
trations of  his  theory  are  a  little  quaint;  but  he  was 
right — the  more  right  the  deeper  one  goes.  As  on  the 
mission  field  today,  there  were  souls  who  only  wanted 
to  hear  and  they  would  follow  Christ — beautiful  natures 
and  the  most  winning  type  of  convert.    Other  souls  were 


•Tatian,  cf.  p.  6. 


204      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

troubled  with  a  conflict  of  two  natures,  and  were  Chris- 
tian with  the  one  and  earthly,  sensual  or  devilish  with 
the  other,  capable  of  acts  of  high  Christian  quality,  capa- 
ble of  horrible  relapse  and  of  apostasy,  but  still  within 
the  influence  of  Christ.  Human  nature  is  incalculable, 
and  the  envoy  of  Christ  is  confronted  by  perpetual  sur- 
prises, the  bitterness  of  failure  when  success  was  assured, 
the  deep  and  grateful  joy  of  triumph  snatched  out  of 
disaster. 

For  let  us  once  more  look  at  our  records.  Paul  notes, 
along  with  their  faults,  a  number  of  remarkable  good 
points  about  the  churches  of  his  converts.  They  are 
living  in  a  new  way,  'or,  like  new  converts  in  the  heathen 
world  today,  more  and  more  toward  a  new  way.  They 
have  great  gifts — of  real  prophecy,  of  spiritual  insight, 
of  sheer  goodness.  Even  Corinth,  a  generation  later,  is 
recorded  to  have  had  an  "insatiable  passion  for  kind- 
ness.'"" They  are  beginning  to  overcome  differences  in 
race,  education,  and  tradition — to  live  together  in  unity, 
to  build  on  one  Foundation,  to  show  signs  of  having 
"learned  Christ,"  to  "shine  as  lights  in  the  world."  In  the 
third  century  and  in  the  fourth  there  were  still  martyrs, 
and  great  thinkers,  and  real  saints  in  the  Noah's  Ark 
Church.  And  so  it  is  with  later  centuries.  The  sixteenth 
century,  if  it  gave  a  Leo  X  to  the  world,  also  gave  a 
Luther,  a  Melanchthon,  a  Calvin,  a  Knox — men  whom  we 
hear  criticized  now  and  then  without  much  real  knowl- 
edge of  what  they  actually  were  and  what  they  achieved. 
The  eighteenth  century  had  the  Wesleys  and  Law;  and 
nearly  all,  to  this  day,  of  our  greatest  English  hymns 
come  from  the  eighteenth  century. 

The  plain  historical  fact  is  tJhat  we  never  can  tell  when 
the  Church  is  going  to  break  out  into  new  life.  The  won- 
derful thing  about  it  is,  as  Paul  saw,  that  it  is  in  a  real 


'0  1  Clement  of  Rome,  ad  Cor.,  2:2. 


THE  CHURCH  TRIUMPHANT  205 

relation  with  God  in  Christ;  and  when  that  is  the  case, 
there  is  always  liable  to  be  new  light  and  new  truth  break- 
ing out  of  Zion,  as  John  Robinson  of  Leyden  saw. 

Ill 

Let  us  turn  to  the  cardinal  services  rendered  by  tihe 
Christian  Church  to  religion  and  to  sound  thinking. 

First  of  all,  then,  the  Church  has  (with  fluctuations) 
appealed  to  the  higher  elements  in  man.  It  has  always 
assumed  in  man  much  larger  capacity  for  thought  and 
ideal  than  its  rivals  have  allowed;  it  has  acted  on  the 
belief  that  man  is  made  for  the  Gospel  and  the  Gospel  for 
man,  and  it  has  taught  mankind  to  think.  Wyclif  was  a 
rebel  against  the  Church  of  his  day,  but  he  interpreted  the 
nobler  and  more  permanent  conviction  of  Christendom, 
when  he  maintained  that  preaching  was  the  best  work 
that  a  priest  could  do,  better  than  praying  or  ministering 
the  sacraments."  Paul  would  have  stood  with  him.  "Let 
Glasgow  flourish  by  the  preaching  of  the  word"  was  an 
old  Reformation  motto,  which  a  mawkish  age  shortened 
and  made  commonplace. 

The  Church  has  always  stood  for  Jesus.  With  what- 
ever degree  of  directness  or  indirectness,  the  historical 
Jesus  has  been  held  up  to  men.  The  world  has  been 
familiarized  with  him — insufficiently,  it  is  true,  but  his 
name  and  some  fragments  of  his  story  are  more  widely 
known  than  those  of  any  other  man.  The  early  Ohurch 
translated  the  New  Testament  into  Latin,  Syriac,  Ethio- 
pic,  Armenian,  and  in  the  fourth  century  Ulfilas  did  it  into 
Gothic."    The  sixteenth  century  resumed  the  task  and  did 


^^  A.   V.   G.  Allen,   Continuity  of  Christian   Thought,   p.   252. 

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


206      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

it  into  most  languages  of  Europe;  the  seventeenth  did  it 
into  at  least  one  North  American  speech"  and  the  eigh- 
teenth saw  it  done  into  Gaelic  for  the  Highlands  of  Scot- 
land, as  readers  of  Boswell  remember."  The  nineteenth 
century  was  above  all  the  century  of  Bible  translation; 
William  Carey  alone  translated  the  New  Testament  into 
eighteen  languages  of  the  East.  Statistics  deaden  the 
imagination  at  least  as  often  as  they  quicken  it.  But  all 
this  work  of  the  study  is  evidence  of  the  place  of  Jesus 
in  the  experience  of  men,  of  the  conviction  that  he  is  rele- 
vant to  every  man.  Bible  translation  was  'only  half  the 
task;  a  printed  Bible  in  a  Congo  tongue  is  useless  if  the 
Congo  man  cannot  read.  So  he  is  taught  to  read;  and 
the  proclamation  of  the  historical  Jesus  and  the  educa- 
tion of  mankind  have  gone  on  together.  And  song  and 
art  have  had  their  share  in  both  sides  of  the  work." 

Further,  there  has  been  a  steady  emphasis  on  the 
supremacy  of  Jesus — again  the  outcome  of  experience; 
and  it  has  worked  as  a  factor  for  clear  thinking  in  the 
Church.  Whatever  the  deadening  effect  of  tradition  and 
convention,  it  makes  for  the  development  of  freedom 
when  the  stress  falls  steadily  on  the  clearest  of  all  think- 
ers who  have  dealt  with  God.  The  very  wrangling  about 
creeds,  lamented  by  a  certain  type  of  Christian  not  of 
the  profoundest,  has  been  itself  a  necessary  stage  of 
growth  and  a  powerful  contribution.  If  at  times  theory 
about  Jesus  has  bulked  larger  in  some  minds  than  Jesus 
himself,  still  the  whole  movement  of  interpretation,  the 
rise  of  Christology,  has  meant  thought,  and  it  has  directed 
thought  to  Jesus,  and  in  both  ways  it  has  helped  mankind. 
Indeed  Christianity  involved  it  and  could  not  have  con- 
tinued without  it. 


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


THE  CHURCH  TRIUMPHANT  207 

In  the  next  place  the  Church  has  stood  for  the  love 
of  God.  How  mankind  has  always  felt  its  way  toward  one 
personal  God,  we  have  seen.  Jesus  carried  this  further, 
and  by  his  teaching  of  the  love  of  God,  by  the  incarna- 
tion of  it  in  his  whole  personality,  he  carried  it  flamingly 
in  the  general  heart  of  man.  Through  a  series  of  cata- 
clysms and  earthquakes  that  have  shaken  society  to  its 
foundations  and  made  havoc  of  slighter  faiths,  the  convic- 
tion of  the  love  of  God  has  persisted  in  the  Church  and 
still  persists.  It  has  never  been  obscure  how  hard  it  is 
to  reconcile  experience  with  the  love  of  God;  the  Church 
has  not  had  an  easy  task  in  maintaining  its  faith  in  God, 
but  historically  Jesus  .  has  been  the  ground  of  belief, 
the  guarantee  of  the  Unseen. 

Once  more,  and  still  in  the  spirit  of  Jesus,  the  Church 
has  stood  for  the  redemption  of  the  world,  for  the  faith 
that  God  plays  fair  with  man.  It  has  believed  that  in 
the  long  run  all  the  world  comes  to  the  judgment  seat  of 
Christ.  In  this  faith,  though  with  long  periods  of  dead- 
ness,  the  Church  has  made  it  its  business  to  share  Christ 
with  every  man.  The  vision  of  the  Apocalypse  was  never 
lost ;  with  all  its  odd  features,  tihe  Church  with  some  hesi- 
tation canonized  the  book,  and  stuck  to  it.''  A  conviction 
of  the  goodness  of  God,  of  the  redemption  of  the  whole 
race,  is  a  dynamic  thing.  It  brings  to  a  head  the  feel- 
ing that  righteousness  must  mark  the  dealings  of  God 
with  man,  and  gives  it  a  joy  and  a  certainty  which  have 
made  the  Christian  faith  a  different  thing  from  all  the 
cults  and  systems  of  the  world. 

The  Church  has  always  stood  for  the  significance  of 
the  individual ;  it  could  not  well  do  otherwise  when  Christ 
died  for  him.  Not  to  repeat  what  has  already  been  said, 
and  is  tx)  be  said  in  the  chapters  that  follow,  but  to  sum 
up :  the  Church  has  constantly  supplied  the  leaders  in  all 


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


208      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

movements  for  freedom  and  the  betterment  of  life — the 
leaders,  the  ideals,  and  the  impulse.  If  at  times  it  has 
also  contained  the  protagonists  of  reaction  and  social 
paralysis,  they  have  drawn  their  principles  and  ideas 
from  another  source  than  Jesus,  as  the  comparison  of  his 
historical  record  shows  at  once.  At  the  worst,  there  has 
always  been  in  the  Church  an  instinct  to  insist  on  the 
highest  standards  of  morality ;  at  times  with  a  dead  sense 
of  these  being  laws  imposed  from  without,  the  will  of 
an  arbitrary  Ruler;  more  profoundly,  with  the  realiza- 
tion that  the  ethics  of  Jesus  are  the  interpretation  of 
fundamental  human  nature  and  of  the  purposes  of  the 
redeeming  and  loving  God.  It  is  true  that  the  Church  in 
both  these  matters  has  at  times  wavered  and  compro- 
mised, but  on  the  reality  of  man's  spiritual  being  it  has 
never  knowingly  compromised ;  it  has  stood  for  the  truth 
of  the  forgiveness  of  sins;  it  has  never  lowered  the  flag 
on  the  issue  of  immortality. 

In  short,  with  all  its  failures,  confusions,  and  omis- 
sions, it  has  been  the  Church  of  Christ;  and  one  proof 
of  it  is  that  the  Church  has  achieved  new  forms  from 
time  to  time,  at  incalculable  cost,  and  been  glad  to  do  so, 
for  the  sake  of  making  clearer  the  mind  of  its  Master. 
Jesus  was  right  in  his  comparison  of  the  Kingdom  of 
God  with  leaven.  The  life  within  has  never  left  the 
Church  in  what  it  might  call  peace  and  he  would  call 
death;  there  have  been  disturbance,  upheaval,  division; 
church  history  is  not  pretty  reading;  the  leaven  keeps 
working.  There  has  been  a  terrific  dead  weight  of  dough 
for  it  to  quicken ;  but  a  little  fresh  warmth  from  the  sun- 
shine of  God  in  tJhe  face  of  Christ,  and  the  whole  mass 
heaves  together  with  the  pulse  of  life;  the  great  ideas 
revive  and  Jesus  triumphs. 


THE  CHURCH  TRIUMPHANT  209 

IV 

In  a  splendid  passage,  the  writer  to  the  Hebrews 
(11:22  f.)  describes  the  city  of  the  living  God,  the 
heavenly  Jerusalem,  the  national  assembly  {ecclesia) 
and  festival  (panegyris)  of  the  first-born,  registered  citi- 
zens in  heaven,  and  the  spirits  of  just  men  made  perfect. 
Let  us  put  it  into  prose. 

WitJh  the  generations  larger  and  larger  masses  of  peo- 
ple have  been  trained  in  the  ideas  of  Jesus.  Boys  and 
girls  have  been  taught  to  love  him;  and  in  spite  of  the 
modern  inadequacy  of  the  Sunday  school,  it  represents 
a  high  ideal  and  a  fairly  solid  achievement.  Godly  men 
and  women  have  married  and  had  children,  who  by  Chris- 
tian training  have  grown  to  be  the  salt  of  the  earth,  as 
Jesus  foretold — workers,  heroes,  martyrs,  covenanters, 
scholars,  teachers,  missionaries — practical  saints  of 
every  kind  of  spiritual  and  intellectual  power,  who  have 
made  and  are  making  the  world  over  again.  The  roll  of 
the  Church  is  far  more  wonderful  and  interesting  than 
that  roll  of  Israel,  which  the  writer  to  the  Hebrews  un- 
folds ;  the  range  is  wider,  the  problems  severer,  the  char- 
acters more  various,  more  gracious,  more  spiritual;  and 
Jesus  predicted  this  too — the  least  in  the  Kingdom  are 
ahead  of  the  greatest  of  the  prophets. 

Think  of  the  races  conquered  or  civilized  by  tihe 
Church — Greece  and  Rome  to  begin;  think  of  the  salva- 
tion of  Europe  when  our  own  kindred,  still  glorious  sav- 
ages, swept  down  on  the  decaying  empire;  think  of  the 
training  of  Scotland,  the  planting  of  Plymouth,  the  shap- 
ing of  New  England ;  think  of  Madagascar  and  the  Pacific 
islands,  and  savage  man  made  Christian  in  a  prepara- 
tory way;  think  of  a  century's  upheaval  in  Indian  reli- 
gion and  Indian  ideals  of  society;  think  of  the  martyrs 
in  China  in  1900 — ^has  the  Church  been,  let  us  say,  on 


210      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

the  whole  and  with  all  deductions  to  be  properly  made,  a 
power  in  the  world?  and  for  good?  Then  add  all  it  has 
done  in  art  and  song,  from  "Hail  gladdening  light" 
(<^ws  iXapov)  on  to  Dante  and  Milton  and  beyond.  Has  it 
not  come  reasonably  near  Paul's  conception  of  a  "glorious 
church"  (Eph.  5:27)? 

If  the  old  Greek  poet,  Simonides,  was  right  in  say- 
ing that  "the  city  teaches  the  man,"  is  it  not  possible 
that  a  society  like  this  can  teach  the  man  too?  A  great 
world-wide  society  of  men  and  women,  a  society  of  friend- 
ship," conscious  of  the  redeeming  love  of  God,  inspired 
by  the  same  passion  for  one  Lord,  with  every  variety  of 
character  and  of  experience  and  one  experimental  knowl- 
edge at  the  heart  of  all — has  it  not  a  value  in  suggesting 
to  us  facts  omitted  in  our  survey,  ideas  imperfectly 
weighed,  ideals  unattempted,  a  faith  in  God  and  man 
which  the  world  has  always  struggled  for  and  only 
achieved  in  Jesus?  All  the  real  criticisms  made  against 
the  Church  touch  it  where  it  has  in  some  degree  left  the 
line  of  Jesus;  they  are  reminders,  very  salutary,  that 
"the  servant  is  not  above  his  lord"  (John  13 :16) .  Every- 
one who  does  nothing  to  meet  these  criticisms,  to  help 
the  Church  to  swing  right  again,  is  in  effect  turning  his 
back  on  history  and  on  Christ.  But  our  theme  is  Jesus 
in  the  experience  of  men ;  and  I  close  the  chapter  with  the 
submission  that  the  experience  of  the  Church,  in  her 
triumphs  and  her  failures  alike,  points  to  the  reality  and 
the  permanent  significance  of  Jesus. 


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


CHAPTER     XIII 

THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE 

One  of  tihe  outstanding  features  of  social  progress 
among  mankind  has  been  the  progressive  development  of 
the  individual.  More  and  more  he  has  concentrated 
attention  on  himself,  and  while  it  has  not  always  been 
pure  gain  to  society,  none  the  less  the  gain  far  outweighs 
the  loss.  In  the  region  of  politics  the  Greek  first  discov- 
ered the  individual.  The  Funeral  Speech  of  Pericles,  as 
recorded  by  Thucydides,  and  the  arguments  of  Callicles  in 
Plato's  Gorgias,  show  the  good  and  the  bad  side  of  the 
movement.  Callicles  will  hear  nothing  of  law  or  morality 
being  founded  in  nature ;  the  individual  is  the  real  thing, 
and  nature  means 

"That  they  should  take  who  have  the  power 
And  he  should  keep  who  can." 

Pericles'  ideal  is  nobler.  The  individual  sh?ll  be  his 
utmost,  shall  be  developed  in  every  capacity  and  apti- 
tude, shall  enjoy  all  the  liberty  needed  to  this  end,  that, 
when  he  has  carried  nature's  gifts  to  him  to  their  high- 
est stage,  when  he  has  become  rich  in  imagination, 
insight,  and  character,  he  may  consecrate  all  he  is  to  the 
city  he  loves.  The  ideal  is  one  which  Jesus  himself  might 
have  put  forward,  with  two  important  modifications. 
Pericles  does  not  reckon  god  or  gods  as  a  factor,  hardly 
as  an  incident,  in  the  story;  the  teaching  of  Jesus  makes 
God  central,  the  center  implied  in  every  radius  and  in 
every  smallest  or  largest  arc  of  the  circumference.    With 

211 


212      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

this  change,  would  go  another;  for  the  city  of  Athens  he 
would  put  something  larger.  ** 'Dear  City  of  Cecrops!' 
said  he  of  old/'  so  Marcus  Aurelius  wrote  in  his  diary 
(4:23),  "and  wilt  not  thou  say,  'Dear  City  of  God'?" 
Jesus  would  have  said  it,  indeed  he  did  say  it  in  his  own 
vocabulary ;  and  when  he  speaks  of  the  Kingdom  of  God, 
it  is  with  the  fullest  emphasis  on  the  Founder  and  Maker 
of  his  ideal  city  or  kingdom.  **City,"  the  writer  to  the 
Hebrews  calls  it,  a  man  steeped  in  Greek  ways  of  thought ; 
"Kingdom"  was  the  Hebrew  word  of  Jesus. 

It  was  the  boast  of  Athenians  that  Athens  was  the 
education  of  Greece.'  Greece  was  as  truly  for  a  thou- 
sand years  before  Christ,  and  for  some  hundreds  of  years 
after,  the  education  of  the  world,  and  in  some  degree  it 
is  so  still.  The  great  lesson  was  what  Pericles  set  forth — 
that  more  might  be  made  of  man  in  every  way,  thinker, 
citizen,  parent,  poet,  artist;  and  the  Greek  showed  how 
it  might  be  done.  The  barbarian  and  the  Greek  differed 
above  all  in  this,  that  life  with  the  Greek  was  better 
thought  out,  better  understood,  and  therefora  better 
used.  About  a.d.  178,  Celsus,  in  his  attack  on  Christian- 
ity, allowed  that  barbarians — people  who  were  not  Greeks, 
such  as  the  Egyptians  and  the  Persians,  and  in  a  good 
temper  he  might  possibly  have  added  the  Hebrews — were 
able  to  discover  religious  truths  (dogmata  is  his  word), 
but  "to  judge  them,  to  establish  them,  to  develop  for 
moral  growth  what  the  barbarians  have  discovered — 
that  is  a  task  for  which  the  Greeks  are  fitter."^  It  was 
very  much  the  idea  of  Greek  Christian  thinkers.  The 
Greek  did  make  more  of  life  and  more  of  man  than  any 
people  of  antiquity — humanized  man,  in  fact.  And  if 
we  say  that  Jesus  carried  the  process  further,  it  is  well 
first  to  see,  in  outline  at  least,  what  the  Greeks  had  done 
before  him. 


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


THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE  213 

I 

A  thousand  years,  perhaps,  before  Christ  Homer  drew 
some  of  the  finest  pictures  of  chivalry  that  the  world  has 
yet  had.  His  imagination  sees  deep  into  human  charac- 
ter, and  the  great  fundamental  human  virtues  move  him. 
He  reads  the  warrior's  mind  and  shows  us  the  hero. 
"Friend  of  my  soul!"  says  Sarpedon,  "were  it  that,  once 
we  two  were  escaped  from  this  war,  we  should  live  for 
ever,  ageless  and  immortal,  neither  would  I  fight  in  the 
forefront,  nor  send  thee  into  the  battle  that  gives  glory 
to  men.  But  now  fates  of  death  stand  over  us,  ten  thou- 
sand of  them,  that  mortal  man  may  not  flee  nor  escape; 
therefore  let  us  go ;  either  to  another  we  shall  give  renown 
or  he  to  us.*"  When  Andromache  begs  Hector  to  stay, 
not  to  go  to  the  battle  and  leave  their  baby  boy  an  orphan, 
"All  this,"  he  cries,  "is  a  care  to  me;  but  I  have  a  respect 
unto  the  Trojans  and  to  the  long-robed  Trojan  women."* 

alBeo/JLat  Tpwas  Kal  TpuaSas  eA-AcecrtTreVAovs. 

That  is  Greek  courage,  courage  with  the  eyes  open,  the 
risks  well  seen  and  taken;  and  there  is  another  virtue 
there,  aidos,  self-respect  blended  with  the  thought  of 
others.  Aidos  carries  with  it  regard  foi:  suppliant  and 
stranger,  for  the  helpless,  for  the  fallen  foe — "Not  holy 
is  it  to  boast  over  men  slain";  it  is  the  sense  that  there 
is  a  god,  and  the  greatest  of  all  gods,  who  looks  after  the 
stranger  within  the  gates,  the  herald  from  the  enemy, 
the  helpless.  It  does  not  always  prevail;  the  Homeric 
hero  is  capable  of  horrible  ruthlessness — "Heaven  send 
not  one  of  the  Trojans  escape  sheer  doom  and  our  hands 
— no,  not  the  lad  whom  his  mother  carries  in  her  womb !"' 
But  Achilles  lets  the  aged  Priam  ransom  his  son's  body; 


^  Iliad,   XII,   322. 
*  Iliad,  VI,   441. 
"  Iliad,  VI,  57. 


214      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

the  scene  is  one  no  reader  can  forget.  Athene  enjoys  the 
lies  and  cunning  of  Odysseus ;  but  Achilles  cries  from  his 
heart:  "Hateful  to  me  as  the  gates  of  Hades  is  he  who 
hideth  one  thing  in  his  heart,  and  speaketh  another.*" 
The  simple  great  natural  virtues  are  all  in  Homer. 

A  later  day  saw  the  rise  of  the  intellectual  virtues — of 
the  instinct  to  know,  to  inquire,  to  understand,  and  to 
judge — of  the  courage  that  will  face  new  ideas  and  new 
ignorance,  that  will  move  away  from  ancient  moorings 
and  explore  strange  seas  of  thought — of  the  feeling  that 
thought  is  not  luxury  or  amusement,  but  duty,  man's 
supreme  task.    Here  Ionia  and  Athens  led  the  way. 

Later  still  in  the  days  after  Alexander  the  gentler  vir- 
tues rise.  "Mere  unmotived  kindness,"  as  Mr.  Bernard 
Bosanquet  points  out,  becomes  a  spring  of  action;  there 
is  a  new  feeling  for  children  and  women,  for  slaves;  a 
new  sense  for  beauty  in  flower  and  tree  and  murmuring 
sound."  Stress  is  laid  by  the  Stoics  on  the  intrinsic  value 
of  goodness,  the  importance  of  will,  the  inwardness  of 
true  virtue,  the  examination  of  oonscience,  the  control 
of  impulse,  the  cultivation  of  God's  outlook. 

Socrates  used  to  say  he  was  a  "citizen  of  the  universe 
( Ko(r/jno<5) .  "  After  Alexander  patriotism  and  parochialism 
ran  into  one  another;  patriotism  had  no  other  meaning. 
The  world's  old  divisions  were  gone;  the  new  kingdoms 
were  personal  domains  with  no  stable  frontiers.  Race 
was  more  than  country,  and  race  itself  was  of  little 
account.  Alexander  had  "married  Europe  to  Asia."  In 
one  sense  the  universe  was  the  only  body  politic  left  of 
which  a  man  could  be  a  citizen.  A  subject  of  Antiochus 
or  of  Ptolemy — or,  later  on,  of  Caesar — he  could  still 
boast  and  believe  in  the  city  of  Zeus,  the  universe.  The 
Stoic  was  glad  to  accept  this  new  franchise;  he  knew  no 
longer  of  foreigners  or  local  laws,  "man  was  a  sacred 


"Iliad,  IX,  312.     ^Theocritus,  Idyll,  1:1. 


THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE  215 

thing  to  man,"  and  men  and  stars  were  ruled  by  one  law, 
divine,  eternal,  inevitable,  the  law  of  Nature,  a  law  that 
knew  no  outlaw,  foreigner  or  barbarian,  one  for  man  and 
woman,  slave  and  free.  The  conception  powerfully  modi- 
fied Roman  law  in  the  direction  of  breadth  and  humanity. 

The  world's  progress  had  been  immense,  but  it  still 
had  a  long  way  to  go.  If  the  Stoic  counted  "man  a  sacred 
thing  to  man,"  the  government  did  not.  The  citizenship 
of  the  universe  was  amenable  to  Aristotle's  criticism  of 
Plato's  Republic;  relations  within  it  were  "rather 
watery."  Those  who  talked  most  -of  it  were  men  without 
children,  a  class  notoriously  sagacious  without  under- 
standing; and  when  one  remembers  that  one  of  their 
ideals  was  "emotionlessness"  ("the  savage  and  hard 
apathy,"  Plutarch  calls  it),  it  grows  clear  that  a  great 
deal  of  life  lay  outside  the  range  of  the  citizen  of  the  uni- 
verse. Indeed  his  teachers  told  him,  as  a  practical  meas- 
ure, to  keep  within  himself,  to  be  limited  to  "the  things  in 
thine  own  power,"  tecum  habita — to  condole  but  not  to 
sympathize;  to  reckon,  if  he  had  a  child,  that  it  would 
die;  to  realize  that,  if  he  did  not  love  his  wife's  beauty, 
he  would  not  be  thrown  into  emotion  and  out  of  balance 
by  her  adultery.  "Emotionlessness"  was  bound  to  work 
out  into  inhuman  insensibility;  it  was  inwardly  a  selfish 
counsel,  a  counsel  of  despair,  to  steel  the  heart  to  keep  it 
from  breaking,  to  keep  it  equal  to  work.  It  was,  as  some 
more  human  critics  felt  at  the  time,  in  effect  an  apostasy 
from  the  universe,  unbelief.  They  preached  nature  and 
defied  nature.  The  motive  was  not  the  highest,  and  no 
other  will  avail  with  mankind  in  the  end. 

But,  as  Dr.  Edward  Caird  pointed  out,*  the  Stoics 
missed  the  vital  fact  that  man  is  essentially  a  develop- 
ing being,  "partly  is  and  wholly  hopes  to  be."  There 
was  not  enough  experiment  about  the  Stoic;  who  can 

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


216      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

master  human  psychology,  who  turns  his  back  on  woman 
and  is  not  interested  in  children?  They  made  great  con- 
tributions to  psychology,  but  in  whole  areas  of  the  soul 
they  had  no  belief.  Nor  did  they  believe  so  much  in  per- 
sonality as  to  be  able  to  carry  it  past  the  dissolution  into 
atoms.  For  men  who  reject  immortality,  who  do  not 
believe  in  outcome  to  their  own  endeavors  to  help  man- 
kind forward  even  on  earth,  Stoicism  is  the  highest  phil- 
osophy, and  a  very  hig'h  one;  but  it  cuts  too  many  ques- 
tions to  do  more  than  contribute  to  rival  creeds.  Where 
Stoicism  failed,  the  mystery  cults  were  not  likely  to 
succeed. 

It  is  the  complaint  of  many  that  in  the  European  war 
civilization  failed,  and  many  others  hold  that  it  had 
already  failed  in  peace.  But  in  the  early  centuries  of  our 
era,  under  the  best  government  that  the  Mediterranean 
broadly  had  ever  known,  and  in  peace,  civilization  rested 
normally  on  atrocities  that  today  are  abnormal  even  in 
war.  That  it  grew  gentler  under  the  Empire,  is  a  propo- 
sition hard  to  maintain  in  view  of  the  civil  wars  and  reli- 
gious persecutions  of  the  third  century  a.d.  It  had  reached 
a  standstill.  In  four  hundred  years  the  tools  show  no 
improvement;  currency  and  finance  decline;  government 
grows  more  and  more  bureaucratic,  and  apart  from  the 
Christian  Church  it  is  difficult  to  find  new  ideas  anywhere. 

II 

"The  advance  of  the  community  depends  not  merely  on 
the  improvement  and  elevation  of  its  moral  maxims,  but 
also  -on  the  quickening  of  moral  sensibility.  The  latter 
work  has  mostly  been  effected,  when  it  has  been  effected 
on  a  large  scale,  by  teachers  of  a  certain  singular  personal 
quality."  So  wrote  John  Morley  in  1874,"  and  it  will 
serve    as    a    text    for    the    next    stage    of    our    study. 


Compromise,   p.    237. 


THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE  217 

The  rejection  of  Jesus  gives  the  measure  of  his  age.  He 
had,  like  other  leaders  of  men  in  the  field  of  intellect  and 
feeling,  to  develop  the  spiritual  and  intellectual  qualities 
by  which  he  should  be  understood.  Here  once  more,  as 
in  the  case  of  the  knowledge  of  God,  Jesus  abolishes 
nothing  real ;  he  comes  "not  to  destroy  but  to  fulfil" ;  and 
the  boundless  significance  of  his  work  lay  in  uniting  all  the 
virtues,  that  the  common  people  and  the  Stoics  between 
them  knew,  in  a  new  and  intimate  relation  with  religion, 
or  rather  with  God,  and  giving  them  a  new  breadth  and 
freedom  and  life.  The  theory  on  which  men  do  kindness 
is  one  thing,  the  real  reason  another ;  there  are  people  who 
do  good  by  instinct  and  on  impulse  and  give  wrong  rea- 
sons for  it — a  fact  to  be  remembered  when  we  criticize 
Stoic  theory;  but  Jesus  gave  all  virtue  a  new  center  and 
a  new  motive ;  act  and  theory  jarred  no  more ;  the  human 
spirit  had  a  charter  and  an  inspiration  to  be  what  God 
meant  it  to  be. 

The  fact  that  he  was  a  carpenter,  a  poor  man,  im- 
pressed men  from  the  beginning.  "He  took  upon  him 
the  form  of  slave,"  wrote  Paul  (Phil.  2:7).  "The  Lord 
ate  from  a  cheap  bowl,"  said  Clement  of  Alexandria,'"  "and 
made  his  disciples  lie  on  the  ground,  on  the  grass,  and 
he  washed  their  feet  with  a  tov/el  about  him,  the  lowly- 
minded  God  and  Lord  of  the  universe.  He  did  not  bring 
a  silver  footbath  from  heaven  to  carry  about  with  him. 
He  asked  the  Samaritan  woman  to  give  him  to  drink  in 
a  vessel  of  clay  as  she  drew  from  the  well."  Jesus,  writes 
Phillips  Brooks,  "so  poor,  so  radical,  so  full  of  the  sense 
of  everything  just  as  it  is  in  God."" 

A  fictitious  Chinaman  of  our  day  speaks  of  him  as 
"unlettered,  untraveled,  inexperienced" — a  rather  aca- 
demic view  of  things.     Unlettered  he  was  not;  he  read 


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


218      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

the  Old  Testament  in  Hebrew,  and  other  books;  and  he 
spoke  Aramaic  and  Greek.  A  man  with  two  languages, 
who  at  least  reads  a  third,  is  not  quite  illiterate.  But 
inexperienced — what  is  experience?  It  depends  on  a 
man's  gift  of  seeing  and  feeling.  Jesus  himself  speaks 
of  men  seeing  but  not  seeing;  more  than  once  he  notices 
this  in  men,  and  with  an  air  of  surprise  at  them.  Pales- 
tine was  not  a  backwater;  it  was  on  a  trade  route;  and 
if  it  had  been  an  out-of-the-way  place.  Burns  may  suggest 
to  us  what  experience  a  man  of  genius  may  gain  in  a 
corner  of  life.  Climate  and  the  habits  of  the  day  drove 
Jesus  outdoors  for  his  education,  and  it  was  real.  He 
knew  what  it  was  to  work  all  day,  and,  on  coming  home, 
to  have  to  face  the  tragedy  of  the  lost  coin,  the  children 
hungry,  and  the  clothes  past  mending.  A  man  who  goes 
through  sudden  popularity,  who  carries  a  threatened  life, 
who  lives  with  a  cross  before  his  eyes,  may  be  surmised 
to  have  had  experience. 

But  it  is  enough  to  survey  his  interests.  "Suffer  little 
children  to  come  unto  me,"  is  a  saying  hardly  to  be  par- 
alleled in  ancient  literature.  How  can  he  who  has  to  teach 
mankind  go  "looking  for  something  to  heat  the  water  in 
for  the  baby's  bath?"  is  the  question  of  Epictetus.'^  Like 
Dr.  Johnson,  Jesus  loved  young  men,  whether  like  Dr. 
Johnson  he  found  them  more  virtuous  than  old  men,  or 
(as  we  did  in  the  European  war)  saner.  The  evangelists 
emphasize  how  he  spoke  with  women  and  took  kindnesses 
from  them.  He  was  not  afraid  of  women,  nor  ever  warned 
his  followers  to  keep  away  from  them.  He  never  felt 
family  life  to  be  a  mistake  or  hinted  that  marriage  was 
unclean;  and  how  many  religions  past  and  present  have 
stood  for  celibacy,  and  resented  God's  invention  of  sex? 
The  traditional  Moses  seemed  to  imply  that  labor  was 
God's  curse  on  sin,  but  no  such  idea  is  to  be  found  in  the 


"Epictetus,  Diatr.,  3:22. 


THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE  219 

teaching  of  Jesus.  How  many  of  his  parables  show  a 
bright  interest  in  human  energy,  in  the  mind  set  to  work, 
in  the  tasks  of  men  and  women  ?  And  not  a  hint  that  it  is 
all  a  curse!  "Is  it  lawful  to  heal  on  the  Sabbath?"  he 
asked.  Is  God's  man  (in  other  words)  or  your  taboo  of 
more  consequence?  "Is  not  a  man  better  than  a  sheep?" 
(Matt.  12 :12).  It  is  hardly  a  hundred  years  since  English 
law  was  with  great  difficulty  persuaded  to  admit  this  prop- 
osition, and  to  leave  off  hanging  a  man  for  stealing  a 
sheep.  If  he  had  lived  today,  Jesus  might  have  asked 
still  worse  questions. 

Jesus  had  none  of  the  resentment  against  humanity 
which  has  at  times  swept  over  the  finer  spirits  of  our 
race,  a  mood  to  be  read  in  Shakespeare  himself.  With  his 
eyes  open  to  human  hatefulness,  Jesus  likes  men  and 
enjoys  them.  His  quick  responsiveness  to  the  emotions 
of  others,  to  the  woman's  wit,  his  pleasure  in  sharing  the 
feelings  of  his  friends,  his  sympathy  with  "the  least  of 
these,  my  brethren,"  his  sensitiveness  to  the  unsaid — ^all 
these  gifts  reveal  not  only  character  but  faith.  A  genial 
interest  in  others  may  be  born  in  a  man,  and  it  may 
degenerate  in  various  ways;  or  it  may  be  interwoven 
with  a  deeper  insight,  and  become  a  great  belief  in  man  as 
a  creation  of  God,  embodying  (one  may  say  it)  the  deepest 
thoughts  of  God,  a  great  deal  of  God's  own  nature.  That 
this  is  the  case  with  Jesus  appears  from  his  acute  pleasure 
in  bird  and  flower,  and  his  relation  of  these  things  to  the 
mind  of  God,  and  from  the  assurance  he  gives  to  his  dis- 
ciples that  ''ye  are  of  more  value  than  many  sparrows." 
By  a  curious  chance  an  inscription  has  been  found,  issued 
by  an  ancient  food  control  office,  fixing  the  maximum  price 
for  sparrows,  so  much  for  a  string  of  ten,  five  for  a  half 
of  that,  and  for  a  quarter  of  it  two."    Jesus  quotes  the 


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


220      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

prices  and  then  sets  another  value,  very  different,  upon 
the  birds,  by  sweeping  at  once  into  the  presence  of  God; 
and  then,  with  the  picture  of  God  himself,  interested  and 
delighted  in  every  individual  sparrow,  with  the  sparrow 
thus  raised  to  the  highest  point  it  has  ever  reached,  he 
reminds  men  how  much  more  thought  God  has  put  into 
them,  how  much  more  interesting  God  finds  them,  how 
much  more  lovable.  He  brings  out  the  significance  of 
man  by  bringing  him  into  relation  with  God,  and  it  is 
exactly  the  opposite  result  he  draws  from  that  of  civil 
servants  and  statisticians. 

To  the  Inland  Revenue  Office  a  man  has  a  certain  tax- 
paying  value,  apart  from  which  he  seems  negligible.  To 
the  census  official  a  man  is  (let  us  say)  one-forty-millionth 
of  the  United  Kingdom.  By  similar  calculation  the  sta- 
tistician will  bring  out  that  to  God  a  man's  significance  is 


1,500,000,000 


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


THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE  221 

III 

It  aas  been  complained  that  Jesus,  with  the  horrors  of 
slavery  under  his  eyes,  said  not  a  word  about  it.  Of  how 
little  use  a  discussion  of  the  false  economics  of  slavery 
would  have  been  in  that  generation,  may  be  guessed  from 
the  scant  attention  paid  by  our  own  to  the  warnings  given 
us  of  the  disastrous  effects  of  war  upon  the  world's 
economics.  We  were  told;  but  we  all  knew  better,  and 
were  wrong.  In  the  nineteenth  century  the  merchants 
of  Liverpool  gave  a  gold  casket  to  the  Prince  Regent  for 
his  endeavors  to  maintain  against  Wilberforce  and  Clark- 
son  and  other  enthusiasts  that  essential  foundation  of 
England's  commercial  prosperity,  the  slave  trade.  The 
experts  were  on  one  side,  and  on  the  other  the  "philan- 
thropists" and  "agitators" ;  and  "most  of  what  is  decently 
good  in  our  curious  world,"  says  Lord  Morley,  "has  been 
done  by  these  tv/o  much-abused  sets  of  folk.""  And  what 
set  them  to  disturb  England  about  mere  Negroes?  His- 
torically, it  was  the  assertion  by  Jesus  of  the  value  of  the 
individual  Negro  to  God — not  so  much  by  word  spoken, 
as  by  the  quieter  and  more  impressive  witness  of  the 
cross.  Jesus,  unable  to  convince  men  in  any  other  way, 
died  for  the  Negro. 

Paul,  dealing  with  the  religious  ideas,  valid  enough,  of 
some  of  his  friends,  brings  in  a  final  consideration :  "De- 
stroy not  him  with  thy  meat  for  whom  Christ  died" 
(Rom.  14:15).  The  very  phrase  chimes  through  the 
Christian  centuries.  When  the  new  Roman  governor  of 
Cyenaica  about  a.d.  410  began  to  oppress  the  people,  the 
brilliant  and  charming  Synesius  wrote  to  him  in  a  tone 
that  he  could  not  mistake;  the  governor  was  treating 
human  beings  as  if  they  were  cheap,  but  "man  is  a  thing 
of  price,  for  Christ  died  for  him."    The  scholar  Muretus 


Recollections,  11,  p.  172. 


222      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

in  1554  said  the  same  to  the  physicians  who  proposed  to 
try  upon  him  an  experiment,  in  anima  vili:  "Vilem  ani- 
mam  appeMas,"  came  a  voice  from  the  bed,  "pro  qua 
Christus  non  dedignatus  est  mori?"  Kett  in  rebellion  in 
Norfolk  said  it  to  the  court's  emissary:  "Call  not  them 
villeins  for  whom  Christ  died."  It  has  been  a  charter  of 
the  oppressed  through  the  ages.  The  mind  of  Jesus, 
exhibited  by  his  death,  stands  still  in  marked  contrast 
with  our  modern  materialistic  way  of  making  much  of 
things  and  property  and  little  of  men.  When  Mr.  Bernard 
Shaw  flippantly  talked  of  compensating  sweated  labor 
with  cheap  forecasts  of  heaven,  whatever  class  of  people 
he  meant  to  hit,  he  did  not  touch  the  Jesus  of  Nazareth 
and  of  Calvary.  He  at  least  never  spoke  in  that  vein; 
and,  if  his  followers  had,  the  great  world  might  have 
credited  them  with  more  sense  and  less  enthusiasm. 

The  great  illustrative  fact  of  heathenism  is  its  cheapen- 
ing of  human  life.  The  last  centuries  of  Indian  history 
before  British  rule  are  a  commentary  on  this;''  the  doc- 
trine of  Karma,  with  its  teaching  of  8,000,000  rebirths, 
so  said  an  Indian  official  of  a  Maharaja  to  me,  is  one  cause 
for  the  carelessness  about  individual  life.  And  India  is 
not  a  land  of  savages,  nor  was  the  Roman  Empire.  Na- 
tions are  remade  less  by  treaties  and  Acts  of  Parliament 
and  rearrangements  of  outward  things  than  by  deep 
regenerations  of  spirit  and  desire.  Tyndale,  the  trans- 
lator of  our  New  Testament  in  1526,  said  in  what  seems  a 
very  modern  tone  that,  if  the  King  of  England  did  amiss, 
it  lay  in  the  right  of  the  meanest  to  tell  him  he  did  naught. 
England  read  and  revised  and  re-read  his  New  Testa- 
ment for  a  century,  and  told  a  king  of  England  that  he 
did  naught — told  him  in  a  way  intelligible  to  himself  and 
to  posterity.    No  wonder  the  Marquis  Wellesley  in  1808 


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


THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE  223 

deprecated  the  circulation  of  the  Bible  in  Bengali  as  dan^ 
gerous  "without  the  safeguard  of  a  commentary" — an 
interesting  explanation,  one  notes,  of  the  object  of  a  com- 
mentary. The  Marquis  was  right;  the  Bible  has  made 
great  upheavals  in  India"  as  it  did  in  the  Roman  world 
and  elsewhere.  Factory  Acts  in  England  began  with  the 
evangelical  Lord  Shaftesbury,  and  have  a  parallel  in  that 
clause  in  the  Code  of  Justinian  which  exempts  a  mima, 
who  becomes  Christian,  from  being  dragged  back  to  the 
theater  and  the  life  of  shame. 

An  interesting  conversation,  illuminative  for  our  pres- 
ent purpose,  is  to  be  found  in  the  Life  of  Henry  George 
(p.  438).  Henry  George  was  talking  with  Cardinal  Man- 
ning of  their  common  interests.  "I  loved  the  people," 
he  said,  "and  that  love  brought  me  to  Christ  as  their  best 
friend  and  teacher."  "And  I  loved  Christ,"  said  Man- 
ning, "and  so  learned  to  love  the  people  for  whom  he 
died." 

But,  as  Dr.  Johnson  wrote  in  Goldsmith's  Traveller, 

"How  small  of  all  that  human  hearts  endure 

That  part  which  kings  or  laws  can  cause  or  cure!" 

Life  is  not  made  by  the  constitution  under  which  we  live, 
nor  by  the  laws  that  should  control  us.  It  depends  far 
more  on  what  the  Greek  calls  "the  unwritten  laws  the 
breaking  of  which  brings  admitted  shame."  The  caustic 
English  sarcasm,  "worse  than  wicked — vulgar,"  hits  off 
what  Thucydides  meant.  How  little  manners  matter  and 
how  much !  George  Whitefield,  as  Dr.  Dale  once  pointed 
out,  never  dreamed  of  preaching  about  courtesy  and  good 
manners,  but  Jesus  did  preach  about  them — did  it 
explicitly  and  much  more  implicitly.  The  "high-minded 
man,"  according  to  Aristotle,"  "justly  despises"  others 


^'  See   J.    N.    Farquhar's   fascinating   book,    Modern   Religious   Movements 
in  India. 

"  Nicomachean  Ethics,  IV,   8,  p.   1124b. 


224      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

and  is  "ashamed  of  receiving  a  benefit."  Jesus  let  women 
minister  to  him  of  their  substance,  and  accepted  it  as  nat- 
ural and  friendly  that  his  disciples  should  row  while  he 
slept,  but  there  is  in  every  syllable  of  his  teaching-,  in 
every  movement  of  his  mind,  that  recognition  of  God's 
interest  in  the  meanest  of  men,  which  is  the  antithesis  of 
contempt.  The  definition  of  a  gentleman  as  one  who 
never  puts  his  feelings  before  the  rights  of  others  or  his 
rig'hts  before  their  feelings,  is  quite  in  his  vein.  The 
gravamen  of  rudeness  is  its  suggestion  that  the  other 
man  does  not  matter,  and  is  uninteresting.  Jesus  made 
every  man  interesting  by  bringing  out  that  God  is  inter- 
ested in  him.  He  himself  found  something  attractive  or 
of  importance  in  every  man ;  he  had  a  genius  for  appre- 
ciation and  he  conveyed  it  to  those  who  caught  his  mind. 
If  eminent  Christians  have  sometimes  lacked  it,  it  has, 
perhaps,  been  because  they  were  too  eminent  to  be  quite 
Christian.  Jesus,  however,  said  plainly :  "Let  the  greater 
among  you  be  as  the  younger,"  and  added,  in  a  sentence 
as  charming  and  playful  as  it  was  true:  "I  am  among 
you  as  the  serving  man"  (6  SiaKoi/wv)  (Luke  22 :26,  27) . 
Paul,  in  the  same  spirit,  will  have  Christians  "forbear  one 
another"  and  "speak  truth  in  love"  (Eph.  4:2,  15)  ;  but 
even  he,  one  feels,  fell  short  of  the  charm  that  appears 
in  Jesus'  dealings  with  men  and  women.  Children  went 
to  him,  mothers  showed  him  their  babies,  all  sorts  of 
people  brought  him  all  sorts  of  troubles  and  questions ; 
and  he  was  a  man  who  could  be  interrupted  witliout  explo- 
sion. He  has  the  secret  of  charm  and  he  can  communicate 
it,  though  how  is  another  question,  but  it  is  to  those  who 
believe  in  him  through  and  through.  Any  defect  of  belief 
in  Jesus  shows  itself  somewhere  in  unbelief  in  God  or 
disbelief  in  man.  The  headmaster  of  one  of  our  great 
schools  recently  wrote,  in  an  essay  on  education,  that  "it 
is  hard  to  take  even  the  shortest  railway  journey  and  keep 


THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE  225 

true  to  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount."  Perhaps  Jesus  would 
not  have  pushed  people  off  a  tram-platform,  which  would 
seem  to  indicate  that  his  standards  of  the  relative  import- 
ance of  things  were  different  in  some  way  from  ours,  and 
that  our  life  is  not  yet  humanized  beyond  his  ideal. 

Clement  of  Alexandria  tells  us  of  vain  persons  who 
held  up  the  example  of  Jesus  as  a  reason  for  rejecting 
marriage,  which  "they  call  mere  prostitution  and  a  prac- 
tice introduced  by  the  devil.""  This  was  not  mere  rhetoric. 
To  primitive  thought  (and  there  is  still  much  of  it  in  the 
world)  there  was  something  supernatural  in  conception, 
something  demoniacal;  some  religions  defied  it  and  made 
a  sacred  ritual  of  the  process  of  reproduction;  some 
repudiated  it  as  polluting.  Clement  takes  another  view 
of  Nature,  much  more  like  that  of  Jesus.  Nature  made 
us  to  marry,  and  "the  childless  man  falls  short  of  the  per- 
fection of  Nature.'"**  Men  must  marry  for  their  country's 
sake  and  for  the  completeness  of  the  universe;'"  the  mar- 
ried man  exhibits  "a  certain  distant  image  of  the  true 
Providence.""  The  heathen  may  practice  abortion  and 
expose  their  children  and  keep  parrots  instead,  but  the 
begetting  and  bringing  up  of  children  is  a  part  of  the 
Christian  married  life."  "Who  are  the  two  or  three 
gathering  in  the  name  of  Christ,  among  whom  the  Lord 
is  in  the  midst?  Does  he  not  mean  man,  wife,  and  child 
by  the  three,  seeing  woman  is  made  to  match  man  by 
God?'"^  Tertullian  said  there  would  be  something  shame- 
less about  God  calling  us  sons,  if  he  forbade  us  to  have 
sons  by  taking  marriage  from  us.^*  This  group  of  pas- 
sages from  two  great  Christian  thinkers  about  the  year 
A.D.  200  is  significant  enough,  more  still  when  we  find 

^^  Stromateis,   3:49. 
^'>  Strom.,    2 -A 39,    5. 
'"Strom.,  2:140,   1. 
''^  Strom.,    7:70,   end. 
'"  Paidagogos,  2:83,    1. 
"^^  Strom.,   3:68,1. 
^  Adv.    Marcion,    4:17. 


226      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

Paul  allowing  marriage  "because  of  harlotries"  (II  Cor. 
7:1,  2).  When  one  realizes  how  deeply  the  ideal  of  celi- 
bacy had  tainted  the  spiritual  atmosphere,  this  concep- 
tion of  Christian  married  life  grows  more  surprising,  but 
it  represents  the  real  teaching  of  Jesus. 

When  men  challenged  Jesus  upon  the  divorce  question, 
and  quoted  Moses  against  him,  he  threw  over  Moses. 
Moses  had  an  eye  on  his  constituency  and  compromised 
(Mark  10:5).  The  real  issue  was  the  design  of  God  in 
making  and  mating  the  sexes;  did  God  mean  temporary 
unions,  shorter  or  longer?  Today  we  hesitate  perhaps 
in  referring  matters  so  abruptly  to  God,  and  try  the  inter- 
mediate court  of  Nature;  and  Jesus  meets  us  there  quite 
readily,  he  has  no  suspicion  of  Nature  and  the  facts  of  the 
case  are  all  he  wants.  As  usual,  he  does  not  much  argue 
the  matter.  He  goes  to  the  home  for  endless  illustrations 
of  spiritual  life  and  he  never  (like  Paul)  draws  a  parable 
from  the  breakdown  of  marriage  (Rom.  7 :2) .  How  much 
home  meant  to  him  appears  in  his  tone  from  time  to  time 
— "the  Son  of  Man  hath  not  where  to  lay  his  head" — in 
the  welcome  he  gives  to  children,  in  his  tenderness  for 
widows  and  mothers.  It  is  not  idly  that  the  friendliest 
of  modern  poets  slips  into  speaking  of 

"Little  children  saying  grace' 

In  every  Christian  kind  of  place." 

It  is  just  where  one  would  expect  them,  and  exactly  what 
they  would  be  doing. 

In  the  Middle  Ages — that  curious  "age  of  faith"  when 
men  believed  furiously  in  Christ,  fought  crusades  for  him 
and  burned  heretics  for  him,  but  accepted  neither  his 
teaching  nor  his  spirit  as  very  real  or  serious — the 
Church  swung  altogether  over  to  celibacy ;  whatever  else 
they  did,  priests  might  not  marry.  "I  praise  marriage," 
said  Jerome,  "I  praise  wedlock,  but  because  they  bear 


THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE  227 

me  virgins;  I  gather  from  the  thorn  the  rose.^"  Luther 
brought  his  generation  abruptly  back  to  the  ideas  of 
Jesus,  when  he  shocked  it  by  marrying  the  ex-nun  Kath- 
arine Bora.^^  The  modern  biologist,  with  his  mind  upon 
Nature  and  society,  and  less  interested  in  church  tradi- 
tion, stands  here  with  Jesus  and  Luther.  "It  was  one  of 
the  greatest  social  services  of  the  Reformation  that  it 
broke  with  the  ascetic  ideal  so  far  as  marriage  was  con- 
cerned, and  ranked  the  married  life  higher  than  the  un- 
married. .  .  .  The  sterility  of  monks  and  nuns  and 
priests  for  so  many  centuries  turned  the  laws  of  heredity 
against  the  moral  progress  of  the  race."*'  But  the  home 
matters  still  more  than  the  stock,  and  children  notori- 
ously grow  up  better  in  Christian  homes  than  in  Platonic 
barracks  or  convent  orphanages — and  even  in  quite  ordi- 
nary homes,  as  French  statesmen  have  found.  What 
England  owes  to  the  children  of  ministers  and  clergy  and 
even  deacons,  may  be  read  in  part  in  the  Dictionary  of 
National  Biography,  sl  work  without  much  theological 
bias. 

The  school  owes  something  to  the  Christian  Church. 
By  the  second  century  daily  reading  of  the  Bible  was 
inculcated,  for  the  Church  quickly  realized  that  the  Chris- 
tian was  called  to  be  better  educated  and  more  intellectu- 
ally alert  than  the  heathen — to  be  more  "human."  By  1609 
common  education  was  a  municipal  charge  in  Holland, 
for  the  "Protestants  of  the  Netherlands  saw  the  immense 
importance  of  education  to  their  cause,  based  as  it  was  on 
the  study  of  the  Scriptures,  and  the  general  education  of 
the  people  and  the  wide  diffusion  of  printed  books,  espe- 
pecially  the  Bible,  had  much  to  do  with  the  reality  of  the 
Dutch  Reformation,  and  with  its  popular  character."" 


25  Jerome,  Ep.,  22:20. 

29  See   further   Ch.   XIV,   p.   244. 

"  W.  Rauschenbusch,   Christianity  and  the  Social  Crisis,   167,  174. 

28Winnifred  Cockshott,   The  Pilgrim  Fathers,  p.   114. 


228      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

The  Pilgrim  Fathers,  who  gave  American  life  its  spirit,, 
took  these  Dutch  ideas  with  them  to  New  England;  and 
school  and  college  were  among  the  first  concerns  of  the 
Puritans  there,  as  they  are  still  in  America.  England  is 
the  one  Protestant  country  that  has  despised  education. 
John  Knox  put  things  on  another  footing  in  Scotland  a 
generation  before  1609.  It  is  interesting  to  find  that 
today  on  the  Congo  at  least  one  great  missionary  society 
will  not  accept  converts  into  the  Church  till  they  can 
read;  the  New  Testament,  i.e.,  the  historical  Jesus,  is 
the  Negro's  best  safeguard  against  superstition,  his 
surest  hope  of  development.  And  the  heathen  see  what 
it  means;  "The  God  of  the  Catholics,"  the  saying  goes 
at  Yakusu,  "has  no  books."  How  many  colleges,  before 
and  after  Harvard,  founded  in  1636  by  men  "dreading  to 
leave  an  illiterate  ministry  to  the  churches,"  does  man- 
kind owe  to  Christian  emphasis  on  the  development  of 
the  mind? 

The  date  of  The  Teaching  of  the  Apostles  has  been  dis- 
puted. Discovered,  and  printed  in  1881,  it  came  as  a 
shock  to  those  who  were  not  prepared  for  such  startling 
simplicity  in  the  early  Church,  and  some  prefer  to  see 
in  it  a  fancy  sketch  of  some  fourth  century  heretic. 
Sounder  opinion  confirms  an  earlier  date;  perhaps  about 
A.D.  100  would  serve.  Here,  then,  is  a  short  chapter  from 
this  remarkable  book.  "Everyone  that  cometh  in  the 
name  of  the  Lord,  let  him  be  received ;  and  then  when  you 
have  tested  him,  you  shall  know,  for  you  will  have  sense, 
right  and  left.  If  he  that  cometh  be  on  a  journey,  help 
him  as  much  as  you  can.  But  he  shall  not  abide  with 
you  more  than  two  or  three  days,  if  it  be  necessary^  But 
if  he  will  settle  with  you,  if  he  is  a  craftsman,  let  him 
work  and  eat.  If  he  has  not  a  craft,  according  to  your 
sense  take  measures  that  he  shall  not  live  among  us  idle, 
a  Christian.    If  he  will  not  do  this,  he  is  a  trafficker  in 


THE  HUMANIZING  OF  LIFE  229 

Christ.  Beware  of  such."  The  early  Church  has  to  trans- 
late Jesus'  word,  ''Give  to  him  that  asket'h  of  thee";  and 
realizes  that  the  best  gift  a  man  can  have  given  him  is  a 
trade  and  a  chance  to  work  at  it.  "You  will  Lave  sense." 
Probably  the  modern  could  not  better  the  suggestion  to 
the  little  community. 

Family  life,  education,  trade-teaching — the  Church 
began  as  it  has  gone  on  with  the  ideal  of  helping  men. 
A  "passion  for  doing  good"  marked  the  Corinthian 
Church,  as  we  have  seen;  and  there  are  various  ways  of 
doing  good.  To  feed  the  hungry,  is  one;  to  put  him  in 
the  way  of  feeding  others,  is  a  still  better.  The  Christian 
was  in  the  world  to  carry  out  the  ideas  of  God  in  their 
full  compass.  Many  he  took  from  the  common  store  of 
his  times,  some  he  discovered  for  himself;  he  would 
"have  sense."  He  made  mistakes,  of  course;  but  his 
love  of  Jesus  was  a  steady  corrective,  for  it  kept  him  in 
touch  with  an  emancipating  spirit,  and  gave  him  an  in- 
spiration which  has  never  died. 

Stoic  cosmopolitanism  was  eclipsed  by  Christian.  "If 
then  God,"  says  Peter  (Acts  11 :17),  "gave  them,  the  same 
gift,  who  was  I  to  be  able  to  prevent  God?"  and  he  jus- 
tifies the  universalism  of  the  Church  from  its  identity  of 
experience.  Jesus  was  interpreted  aright;  his  thought 
of  God  as  center,  as  God  and  Father  of  all,  included  all 
mankind.''  The  language  of  the  cross  was  intelligible  to 
all  men;  it  had  the  same  revelation,  the  same  charm  for 
all.  By  the  end  of  the  first  century  the  hymns  of  the 
Apocalypse  include  all  nations  and  races  and  languages 
joining  in  one  song,  a  new  song.  That  song  has  not 
grown  old.  In  Christ  there  is  neither  barbarian,  Scythian, 


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


230      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


CHAPTER  XIV 

THE  RECONCILIATION  OF  FREEDOM  AND 
RELIGION 

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

231 


232      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

is,  fundamentally,  on  the  human  side,  man's  protest  and 
appeal  to  the  Supreme  against  the  sorrows,  indignities, 
and  sins  of  this  present  world.  It  is  the  endeavor  of 
man,  through  that  appeal,  to  unite  himself  with  the  life 
of  that  unseen  and  ruling  world,  and  so  to  win  the  power 
from  it  to  dominate  and  transmute  the  life  of  time." 
Historically,  this  is  the  truer  view.  Primitive  religion, 
when  it  has  outlived  its  time,  grows  to  be  very  like  magic 
and  is  a  limitation  upon  man's  mind  and  action;  but  in 
every  really  living  community  thought  and  religion  have 
always  interacted  on  each  other.  How  could  it  be  other- 
wise? In  essence  the  religious  life  is  the  deepest  life  of 
all;  for  the  most  fundamental  thing  in  man  is  his  relation 
of  himself  and  of  all  the  world  to  God,  so  that  thought 
will  be  at  the  very  heart  of  religion. 

Yet  those  who  say  that  religion  and  thoug'ht  are  antag- 
onistic, and  point  to  the  Christian  Church  and  to  other 
religions  for  proof  of  what  they  say,  have  a  certain  case. 
For  many  men  and  women  realize  the  need  of  religion,  as 
they  call  it,  but  want  it  merely  as  an  anodyne  against  the 
troubles  of  life,  or  as  a  protection  against  God.  They 
want  "salvation,"  regarding  it  as  something  definite  and 
precise,  a  final  settlement  with  God,  a  discharge  of  obli- 
gations, rather  than  as  renewal  of  relations  with  an  old 
friend.  Many  others  mean  to  base  their  lives  on  reli- 
gion, but  resent  the  labor  of  thoug'ht ;  they  prefer  things 
fixed  and  done  with,  settled  notions,  and  laws  laid  down 
and  needing  only  to  be  carried  out;  they  do  not  count 
thought  a  duty  or  a  necessity.  Men  ask  for  a  simple 
Gospel,  "the  old,  old  story,"  forgetful  that  the  heart  of 
"the  old,  old  story"  is  only  reached  when  it  is  daily  a  new 
surprise,  that  nothing  that  is  real  remains  simple  very 
long.  Others  lean  to  ritual  on  aesthetic  grounds  or  from 
sentiment,  and  a  great  many  throug'h  sheer  force  of  habit ; 
and  some  of  them,  if  only  there  is  enough  symbol,  are  not 


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  233 

very  anxious  as  to  what  the  symbol  means — a  danger  that 
seems  inseparable  from  symbolism.  But,  above  all,  there 
is  a  class  for  whom  truth  is  a  static  thing,  something  of 
which  they  feel  "you  know  what  it  is  and  there  it  is,"  as 
if  "the  faith  once  delivered  unto  the  saints"  (Jude  3) 
were  a  set  of  propositions  simple  and  definite,  and  life- 
less as  the  multiplication  table — as  if  "faith"  were  not 
rather  an  instinct  to  explore  God,  to  know  the  heights 
and  depths  of  Christ,  to  track  out  the  great  spiritual  pur- 
pose behind  all  existence. 

There  is  always  disaster  where  thought  and  religion  are 
regarded  as  antagonistic.  It  has  often  happened  in  the 
history  of  men  and  nations,  that  the  religious  have  stood 
on  one  side  and  the  speculative  on  the  other,  with  a  good 
deal  of  mutual  contempt,  sometimes  with  hatred.  In  Eng- 
land the  mood  is  perhaps  less  one  of  hatred  than  of  quiet 
contempt;  "the  Church,"  someone  has  said,  "is  thought 
of  as  feminine ;  the  world  is  not  as  much  afraid  of  it  as  of 
Ramsay  Macdonald."  Society  depends  on  thought  and 
movement;  if  it  is  not  progressive,  it  declines.  The 
Roman  Empire  fell  because  it  became  an  ideal  bureau- 
cracy; men  gave  up  the  hope  of  new  ideas,  and  even  the 
very  notion  that  they  were  desirable;  they  left  their 
thinking  to  be  done  by  civil  servants.  Freedom  is  the 
necessary  condition  of  reaching  hig'her  stages  of  life  and 
thought ;  and  if  the  Church  manage  to  get  the  reputation 
for  missing  this  conception,  men  turn  against  it.  It  is 
not  in  the  Christian  Church  alone,  but  in  other  religious 
communities,  even  in  a  greater  degree,  that  men  have 
come  to  believe  that,  with  too  close  an  investigation  into 
religion  and  its  basis,  all  confidence  in  it  goes;  that  it  is 
safe,  so  long  as  one  does  not  touch  it  and  does  not  examine 
it,  but  that  to  ask  questions  is  dangerous  to  faith.  The 
prevalence,  real  or  supposed,  of  this  fear  among  Christian 
teachers  has  provoked  the  caustic  definition  of  faith  as 


234      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

"believing  what  you  know  to  be  untrue."  We  deserve 
that  taunt  when  we  are  shy  of  thought.  That  mood  is 
not  faith;  it  is  doubt.  In  some  of  the  most  religious 
spirits  of  antiquity,  as  of  today,  and  in  every  religion,  we 
find  that  inherent  scepticism ;  and  the  honest,  the  candid, 
and  the  good  say:  "If  that  is  religion,  let  us  have  none 
of  it."  We  can  have  too  much  of  the  past,  too  much  even 
of  our  inheritance.  "If  our  duty  to  the  Past  is  to  re- 
member, our  second  duty  is  to  forget."'  We  need  to 
forget;  we  need  to  have  new  experience;  we  have  to  be 
dissatisfied  with  our  lange  in  truth;  we  have  to  explore 
beyond  it.  All  men  who  know  and  love  truth,  know  that ; 
and  what  can  they  think  of  a  Christian  Church,  where 
that  spirit  is  suspecjt? 

I 

When  we  ask  the  mind  of  Jesus  upon  the  question,  he 
is,  as  always,  abundantly  clear.  The  sentence,  attributed 
in  the  Fourth  Gospel  (8:32)  to  Jesus,  "The  truth  shall 
set  you  free,"  is  like  other  sayings  in  that  book,  rather 
an  extraordinarily  vivid  summary  of  the  whole  teaching 
and  spirit  of  Jesus  than  an  actual  quotation.  If  he  did 
not  say  it — well!  he  lived  it;  his  eyes  flashed:  "The  truth 
shall  make  you  free."  We  attribute  to  Jesus,  very  un- 
imaginatively, an  omniscience,  which  takes  much  of  the 
meaning  out  of  his  whole  story.  Omniscience  may  be  an 
inert  thing;  the  most  omniscient  people  we  meet  have 
often  very  little  mind  at  all.  What  we  find  in  the  histori- 
cal Jesus  is  a  much  greater  thing  than  omniscience;  it  is 
that  freedom  of  mind,  that  activity  of  intellect,  which  we 
associate  with  all  great  characters  who  launch  into  the 
world  ideas  that  emancipate.  Jesus  has  an  infinite  capac- 
ity for  interest  in  things  and  people,  in  the  human  mind 
and  its  relations  to  God.    Interest  was  with  him  a  habit; 


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


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  235 

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


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


236      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

acceptance  of  ignorance,  in  whatever  piety  it  cloaks  itself. 
We  must  remember  his  independence,  his  sincerity  of 
mind;  we  often  miss  "the  immense  amount  of  real  hard 
thinking  implied  in  the  religious  and  moral  teaching  of 
Jesus."^  He  lived  in  a  world  When  men  were  beginning 
more  and  more  to  look  to  the  past  (real  or  fictitious)  for 
guidance  in  religion.  All  the  cults  had  sacred  books,  and 
many  hidden  books.  He  read,  but  he  read  "as  one  having 
authority."  "It  was  said  to  them  of  old  time  .  .  .  but 
I  say  unto  you,"  is  not  the  utterance  of  one  in  bondage 
to  quotations  or  traditions  (Matt.  5:35).  He  criticized 
Moses'  law — "an  eye  for  an  eye"  was  not  right;  and  he 
criticized  Moses  himself  for  compromising  'on  a  moral 
question  and  permitting  what  was  not  in  God's  law 
(Mark  10:5,  with  Matt.  19:8).  When  he  used  scripture, 
it  was  not  as  his  contemporaries  did,  still  less  as  Christian 
apologists  of  a  century  later  did ;  he  went  to  the  heart  of 
it,  and  took  what  he  found  to  be  true.*  He  treated  reli- 
gious traditions  and  usages  in  the  same  way;  taboos 
about  food  he  put  aside  as  irrelevant  to  a  man's  real  being 
(Mark  7:18).  It  is  shrewdly  suggested  that,  if  he  had 
said  anything  in  tune  with  the  growing  fancy  for  asceti- 
cism, we  should  have  heard  of  it.  His  sayings  reflect  his 
mind.  He  has  not  the  flaws  of  contemporary  style  in 
speech;  he  is  simple  and  direct;  he  uses  "the  language 
actually  employed  by  men,"  as  if  he  had  read  and  accepted 
William  Wordsworth's  preface  to  Lyrical  Ballads  (the 
edition  of  1800).  Imagination,  playfulness,  and  intensity 
give  life  to  his  words;  there  is  no  hint  of  artifice  in 
them;  they  are  all  nature  and  truth.  It  is  a  dynamic 
speech  that  does  things,  like  Luther's  words,  that  were 
called  "half-battles."  His  intolerance  of  even  the  half- 
false  in  speech  is  shown  in  his  refusal  of  polite  compli- 


*  Rashdall,   Conscience  and   Christ,   p.    78. 

*  Cf.    Loisy,    Ev.    Syn.,    1:569:    " L' emancipation    de    Paul,    heaucoup    plus 
apparcnte,  n'etait  pas  plus  reele." 


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  237 

merits ;  he  will  not  have  "good  Master,"  and  he  will  limit 
affirmation  and  denial  to  yes  and  no. 

Such  speech  comes,  and  can  only  come,  from  a  mind  of 
equal  sincerity.  He  does  not  use  quotations,  because  he 
goes  to  facts — "Tell  John  what  things  ye  hear  and  see" 
— and  to  facts  which  people  can  verify.  Truth  is  essen- 
tially loyalty  to  the  fact,  to  the  actual,  to  the  intelligible 
in  the  fact;  there  is  no  copyright  in  it;  and  while  some 
people  naively  hold  that  such  loyalty  narrows  range,  that 
it  binds  and  limits  the  mind,  the  great  poets  confirm  the 
experience  of  Jesus  that  it  sets  free.  Above  all  his  genius 
is  for  the  fact  with  meaning.  A  man,  he  suggests,  may 
gain  skill  in  weather  lore  by  observation  and  reflection. 
Facts  are  not  all  of  equal  significance.  Knowledge  in- 
volves scale  and  perspective,  distinction  between  mosqui- 
toes and  camels,  between  potherbs  and  the  great  cardinal 
virtues  of  faith  and  mercy — and  intelligence,  we  may  add 
by  way  of  gloss.  Truth  is  not  merely  an  affair  of  the 
intellect,  for  it  depends,  as  the  intellect  does  too,  on  a 
man's  whole  moral  being.  Jesus  stood  for  honesty,  and 
for  thought  and  intelligence;  and  so  far  as  we  are  loyal 
to  him,  we  shall  not  be  in  bondage  to  the  second-hand  or 
cramped  by  traditions. 

On  the  contrary  Jesus  makes  it  clear  that  he  came,  into 
the  world  to  emancipate  men — not  to  make  them  of  one 
mind  but  of  many,  to  launch  divisions  of  thought.  Micah's 
words  will  be  fulfilled;  families  will  be  divided.  He 
"comes  to  set  fire  to  the  world"  (Luke  12:49),  as  if  to 
start  the  forest  fire  that  changes  the  whole  aspect  and 
character  of  a  countryside.  What  a  picture  of  himself 
he  draws  creating  divisions,  unsettling  men,  driving  them 
this  way  and  that,  inaugurating  all  the  friction  and  all 
the  stimulus  that  comes  when  men  of  different  minds 
handle  truth  in  earnest !  He  saw  all  this,  and  summed  up 
the  whole  story  in  the  parable  of  the  leaven — disturb- 


238      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

ance,  disorders,  bubbles,  and  broken  bubbles.  Some  people 
think  the  Church's  history  is  a  succession  of  broken  bub- 
bles. Very  well,  but  what  makes  them,  and  what  breaks 
them?  What  bursts  the  old  wine-skins?  What  makes 
the  seed  bear  thirty-fold?  Jesus  believes  in  that  fierce, 
strenuous,  wild,  discordant,  adventurous  creature,  life. 
"Fear  not,  little  flock,"  he  says,  "it  is  your  Father's  good 
pleasure  to  give  you  the  kingdom"  (Luke  12:32).  But 
there  is  more  than  a  hint,  in  another  saying,  that  you 
must  be  "violent,"  as  the  Authorized  Version  renders  it, 
a  man  of  drastic  mind  and  forceful  action,  if  you  want  to 
capture  it  and  hold  it.  "The  truth  shall  make  you  free" — 
dreadfully  free!  And  when  he  has  linked  the  Kingdom 
of  God  with  all  this  upheaval,  he  is  represented  as  saying 
to  us:  "My  peace  I  give  unto  you,"  and:  "Ye  shall  find 
rest  unto  your  souls."  Is  he  contradicting  himself?  That 
he  is  right  is  the  verdict  of  the  type  that  Jesus  loves ;  it 
is  to  be  the  life  of  adventure  in  a  new  world,  the  life  of 
intellectual  battle  and  spiritual  peace,  and  none  better.  It 
all  comes  from  his  central  belief  in  God,  God  tKe  author 
of  life,  creative,  insurgent,  upheaving  life,  and  God  the 
lover  of  it. 

He  is  in  vivid  contrast  with  the  world  in  which  he  found 
himself.  The  stricter  Stoics  of  that  day  practically  elim- 
inated God  from  the  world;  to  the  vulgar  they  left  their 
own  religions  as  good  enough  for  them,  so  drawing  a  fatal 
distinction  between  truth  and  religion.  The  adherents 
of  the  mysteries,  on  the  other  hand,  would  not  have  ques- 
tions, as  we  saw,  because  questions  upset  faith  and  strike 
at  the  root  of  religion ;  they  would  have  men  stick  to  what 
they  were  told,  hold  to  what  they  do  not  know,  to  what 
they  do  not  understand,  to  the  irrational,  to  the  unex- 
amined life,  to  dreams  and  visions  and  mystery. 

What  a  contrast  Jesus  is  to  the  Church  today,  with  its 
lethargy,  with  its  fear  of  new  ideas,  its  clinging  to  auth- 


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  239 

ority  and  the  conventional,  its  mistrust  of  argument,  and 
of  spiritual  appeal!  Men  have  learned  to  count  many  of 
these  things  as  the  characteristics  of  the  Church  of 
Christ,  as  if  they  were  not  essential  unbelief  and  atheism. 
But  all  that  is  foreign  to  the  historic  Jesus,  utterly 
repugnant  to  the  very  heart  of  him,  as  to  every  man  who 
really  believes  in  truth.  No,  the  real  difficulty  has  not 
been  in  Jesus;  it  has  been  in  ourselves.  We  have  been 
reluctant  to  take  Jesus  seriously;  we  have  not  believed 
that  he  means  what  he  says,  we  have  labelled  it  paradox, 
and  dismissed  it  as  if  that  settled  the  question.  We  have 
not  been  willing  to  believe  that  Jesus  and  truth  will  pre- 
vail, to  believe  with  him  that  truth  is  a  living  thing  that 
looks  after  itself,  because  it  belongs  to  God,  because  it  is 
one  with  God  and  shares  his  vitality.  We  have  been 
afraid  to  believe  that  the  Christian  Gospel  is  a  thing  of 
God,  and  that  it  has  his  life  and  his  power  of  giving  life 
and  transmitting  it. 

II 

But  there  is  another  side  to  the  story ;  for  the  Church 
of  Jesus  has  been  again  and  again  the  champion  and  the 
exponent  of  freedom  of  mind.  Paul  said :  "I  will  sing  in 
the  spirit,  but  I  will  sing  with  the  understanding  also." 
Understanding  was  one  of  the  marks  of  the  early  Church, 
and  the  awakening  of  the  intellectual  life.  Lucian,  the 
great  satirist  of  the  second  century,  has  a  story  about  a 
false  prophet  called  Alexander,  who  ran  a  shrine  at 
Abonoteichos  in  Asia  Minor,  and  made  a  good  deal  of 
money  out  of  it.  At  a  certain  stage  in  the  holy  rites  in 
*his  temple,  there  was  a  proclamation:  "Epicureans  out- 
side !  Christians  outside !"  The  god  was  good  enough  for 
the  heathen;  but  the  Christian  was  not  to  be  taken  in 
with  a  big  snake  with  a  mask  tied  to  it;  he  would  see 
the  string.    That  is  the  evidence  of  a  heathen,  and  the 


240      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

story  seems  to  me  characteristic  of  the  nearly  Church; 
it  shows  the  quickened  mind  and  the  new  independence. 
Beggars  and  tramps  and  strolling  prophets,  as  we  have 
seen,'  infested  that  Church;  but  The  Teaching  of  the 
Apostles  shows  how  soon  the  Christian  brought  sense  to 
bear  on  new  economic  questions.  "You  will  have  sense," 
writes  the  author.  The  Christian  martyr,  again,  like  the 
passive  resistor  and  the  conscientious  objector  of  today, 
had  the  independence  of  mind  to  choose  to  do  his  own 
thinking  and  not  to  accept  blindfold  the  opinions  dic- 
tated by  the  government  of  the  day.  Christians  carried 
that  determination  to  think  for  themselves  to  the  amphi- 
theatre, and  the  leopard,  to  the  stake  where  they  were 
burned  alive — not  one,  nor  two  of  them,  but  dozens — a 
course  which  involved  some  clearness  and  independence, 
and  they  achieved  it. 

We  may  further  note,  when  we  turn  to  the  ordinary 
everyday  life  of  those  first  two  centuries,  that  the  Gospel 
spread  to  higher  and  higher  levels  of  society.  It  was, 
partly,  because  the  people  who  became  Christians  got  into 
the  habit  of  handling  fact,  as  John  Wesley's  converts 
round  Bristol  left  off  being  dirty,  drunken,  and  stupid, 
when  the  Gospel  came  to  them,  and  became  clean  and 
quick  of  mind  and  enterprising,  and  then  found  them- 
selves well-to-do  without  expecting  it,  or,  in  the  first 
instance,  of  seeking  it.  The  Gospel  also  captured  think- 
ing people ;  and  one  of  the  features  of  the  second  century 
is  that  the  Church  has  more  and  more  of  the  better  minds. 
There  was  more  and  more  theology,  and  more  and  more 
heresy,  which  meant  that  people  were  thinking,  if  not 
always  with  the  clearness  of  Jesus,  and  sometimes  too 
much  under  the  influence  of  their  non-Christian  training. 
The  heathen  temple  was  almost  always  a  small  place,  as 
it  still  is,  and  the  Christian  church  a  large  one;  for  the 


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


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  241 

temple  was  a  place  at  Which  rites  were  performed,  the 
Christian  church  a  place  where  people  were  taught,  and 
regularly  came  to  learn  to  think.  That  is  written  all 
through  the  early  Church,  and  it  is  written  in  India 
today,  though,  of  course,  the  early  Church  had  neither 
the  money  nor  the  freedom  to  build. 

As  evidence  of  activity  of  mind  and  of  sheer  originality 
in  the  religious  life,  we  may  take  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews.  The  writer  is  a  man  who  attempts  a  new  experi- 
ment in  religion,  who  does  a  new  thing  all  against  the 
world's  religious  experience.  The  synagogue  had  indeed 
tentatively  led  the  way,  as  we  have  seen,  dropping  ritual 
for  the  Torah ;  but  this  man  goes  further.  It  is  hard  to 
realize  today  what  a  pioneer  in  thought  he  was,  when  he 
tried  the  experiment  of  a  religion  without  priest,  altar, 
sacrament,  or  sacrifice,  without  the  Torah,  "outside  the 
camp,"  outside  Israel,  and  gave  up  all  except  Jesus  and 
the  presence  of  God.  The  Christian  was  an  innovator,  a 
revolutionary  in  thought,  in  those  early  days,  and  he  was 
generally  right.  One  of  the  most  striking  things  is  how 
fundamentally  wrong  all  the  thinkers  outside  the  Chris- 
tian Church  had  been  on  monotheism.  None  of  them 
believed  that  ordinary  people  could  take  in  the  idea  of 
one  God  only,  or  would  be  content  with  it,  if  they  did 
take  it  in.  That  was  axiomatic  even  with  the  Stoic.  The 
history  of  Christendom  and  of  Islam  has  shown  exactly 
the  opposite,  and  has  proved  that,  for  a  religion  to  live 
and  to  be  passionate,  it  must  have  one  God  only.  So  far 
from  being  an  idea  impossible  to  take  in,  it  is  the  idiea 
that  the  common  man  has  realized  again  and  again;  and 
it  has  been  with  him  a  driving  force,  a  passion,  and  a 
source  of  power.  In  war,  empire,  and  commerce,  no 
less  than  in  learning  and  thought,  the  monotheist  has 
triumphed  over  the  polytheist.  It  means  surely  that  his 
religion  has  given  him  something  real.     Judaism  was 


242      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

monotheistic,  but  it  was  a  sect;  the  Christian  Church 
was  universal,  and  its  monotheism  conquered  the 
world. 

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


*Gr.  Lit.  Gesch,  135. 

'I  owe  this  to  Dr.  D.  S.  Cairns. 


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  243 

III 

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

He  studied  Greek:  and  a  new  epoch  in  European 
thought  began,  when  he  learned  that  the  Greek  word 
Metanoein  means  "to  think  again,"  and  not,  as  the  Latin 


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


244       JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

said,  "to  do  penance.'"  He  studied  church  history;  and, 
in  the  words  of  Principal  Lindsay,  he  was  "half  exultant 
and  half  terrified  at  the  result  of  his  studies."  The 
power  of  the  Pope  rested  on  sham  history  and  bogus 
documents — on  the  forged  Decretals  and  on  the  forged 
Donation  of  Constantine.  Other  scholars  had  led  the  way 
here ;  but  when  Luther  saw  that  they  were  right,  scholar- 
ship was  translated  into  action,  and  into  history. 
"Luther's  speeches  at  Leipzig,"  says  Dr.  Lindsay,  "laid 
the  foundation  of  that  modern  historical  criticism  of  in- 
stitutions which  has  gone  so  far  in  our  days.'""  Yes,  and 
more;  the  man  had  entered  into  the  freedom  of  Christ; 
he  was  not  afraid  of  fact;  he  learnt,  he  thought,  and  he 
saw  the  relevance  of  the  facts ;  and  he  acted  with  the  free- 
dom that  Jesus  had  given  him.  He  re-examined  the 
question  of  vows  and  of  celibacy;  and  then  he  married  his 
Katharine,  and  had  his  little  John,  and  he  learned  the 
beauty  and  delight  and  difficulty  of  family  life.  He  loved 
singing  and  laughter,  and  little  children;  and  he  wrote 
Christmas  carols,  and  translated  the  Bible.  The  contri- 
bution of  Bible  translation  to  freedom  of  thought  and 
education  we  have  already  discussed." 

Luther  struck,  as  the  missionaries  today  are  striking, 
a  blow  for  freedom  of  mind,  for  the  sweeping  away  of  all 
superstition,  by  putting  the  Bible  in  the  hands  of  com- 
mon people  and  bringing  the  historical  Jesus  face  to 
face  with  them.  How  directly  Luther  approaches  the 
real!  Men  talked  about  visions  of  angels  and  of  saints. 
Luther  anticipated  modern  psychologists  in  suspecting 
such  things.  Luther  said:  "If  it  were  in  my  choice,  I 
would  not  wish  God  to  appear  to  me  or  to  speak  to  me 


'  Chapter  V.  It  is  an  illuminating  contrast  that  Loyola,  after  trying 
Erasmus'  Greek  Testament,  refused  to  read  it,  because  it  interfered  with 
"his  devotional   emotions."      Cf.   Froude,   Erasmus,  p.    130. 

10  T.  M.  Lindsay,  Reformation,  I,  pp.  235,  239. 

"  Chapter  XII,  Chapter  XIII,  pp.  206,  228.  See  A.  V.  G.  Allen,  Con- 
tinuity  of  Christian  Faith,  p.    275. 


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  245 

from  heaven."  No,  he  would  "hold  by  His  common  revela- 
tion to  all  men  in  the  words  and  works  of  Christ.""  He 
was  for  no  private  property  in  revelation,  no  spiritual 
aristocracy.  And  further,  "No  man,"  he  said,  "must  be 
coerced  in  spiritual  matters."  That  is  the  voice  of  free- 
dom. It  is  a  pity  that  we  do  not  hear  more  of  it.  The 
emphasis  laid  by  the  religious  today  on  authority  and 
tradition  does  not  point  to  freedom.  The  claim  to  the 
right  of  private  judgment  and  the  great  doctrines  of 
justification  by  faith  and  the  priesthood  of  all  believers 
meant  (and  still  mean)  the  right  of  the  individual  con- 
science, and  its  duty,  to  seek,  to  find,  and  to  hold  truth  as 
it  is  enabled  by  God — the  widest  of  all  charters  of  liberty. 

Behind  it  all  is  Luther's  conviction  of  the  value,  the 
meaning  and  force  of  the  crucified  Jesus."  The  Chris- 
tian religion  is  based  on  fact,  not  fancy,  nor  even  dogma. 
It  begins  with  Jesus,  working,  living,  suffering;  and  the 
condition  of  its  progress  is  never  to  get  far  away  from 
the  pierced  hands  and  the  crown  of  thorns.  The  whole 
Reformation  movement  was  an  attempt  to  get  nearer  to 
the  mind  of  Jesus.  Monasticism,  sacraments,  tradition, 
the  Church — did  they  bring  men  nearer  to  that  mind? 
That  was  the  test.  Positively,  the  emphasis  fell  on  God 
in  Christ,  on  the  individual  soul,  on  righteousness  as 
illuminated  and  given  by  Christ.  Out  of  this  new  appeal 
to  Jesus  came  a  new  world,  a  new  era,  a  new  England. 
Out  of  it,  or  from  nowhere,  will  come  the  world  we  want 
to  see.  We  cannot  dispense  with  the  historical  Jesus 
yet;  he  is  our  best  safeguard  against  wild  thinking, 
fancy,  theosophy,  polytheism,  superstition,  as  he  is 
against  rigidity,  dullness,  officialism,  and  oppression — 
against  Zeitgeist  in  every  form. 

There  is  much  cant  today  about  the  divisions  of  Chris- 
tendom, but  it  is  still  true,  as  Milton  said,  that  "under 

"  See  Herrmann,    Communion  of  Christians  with  God,  pp.    187,   188. 
"See    Chapter    IV;    Chapter    VI. 


246      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


IV 


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


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


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  247 

problems  of  psychology  in  connection  with  religion  that 
perplex  us,  we  surely  need  not  be  afraid.  Or,  again,  if 
we  are  told  that  economic  science  clashes  with  what  Jesus 
said  of  economics,  we  shall  go  and  see  what  Jesus  did 
say ;  and  perhaps,  like  the  writer  of  The  Teaching  of  the 
Apostles,  we  shall  get  some  inkling  of  what  he  would 
say,  if  he  were  living  in  a  different  order  of  society  from 
that  of  the  Roman  Empire.  The  very  last  thing  we 
should  find  would  be  any  insistence  on  his  part  that 
change  was  wrong.  Mohammed  fixed  Moslem  chronology 
irrevocably  and  disastrously  on  the  basis  of  an  erroneous 
astronomy,  current  in  his  day;  and  in  that  there  is  an 
illuminating  contrast  with  the  historical  Jesus.  Where 
the  spirit  of  Jesus  is,  there  will  be  liberty  and  with  it  a 
new  spirit  of  joy  and  of  freedom.  We  do  not  go  into  the 
intellectual  problems  of  our  day  tied  and  bound,  because 
Jesus  set  us  free;  we  know  whose  we  are  and  whom  we 
serve ;  we  know  the  type  of  mind  that  he  loved,  the  type 
of  mind  that  he  gave;  and  Jesus  will  be  for  us,  as  for 
those  before  us,  the  Author  of  Freedom. 

But  surely  we  have  to  go  further.  The  Christian  life 
is  not  to  be  conceived  as  a  long  struggle  of  accommoda- 
tion with  the  discoveries  which  men  of  science  and 
scholarship  make  of  God's  laws  in  the  world  around  us 
and  of  God's  doings  in  the  past.  The  follower  of  Jesus 
is  called  to  be  a  pioneer  himself;  and  it  is  a  common 
experience  that  one  great  feature  of  the  Christian  life  is 
the  constant  feeling  that  there  is  more  beyond.  There 
is  something  of  the  infinite  in  Jesus;  and,  as  one  feels 
■with  every  real  aspect  of  nature,  we  are  never  done 
learning.  I  have  gained  more  here  from  the  poet 
Wordsworth  than  from  anybody.  The  poet  seems  a  man 
with  no  very  symmetrical  system  of  the  universe,  and 
for  this  reason,  he  would  tell  us,  that  he  is  always  being 
surprised  by  what  he  thought  he  knew.     Common  peo- 


248      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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

The  very  existence  of  Jesus  has  been  to  humanity  one 
of  the  greatest  stimulants  to  thoughts;  and  thus  one  of 
the  great  factors  in  developing  the  human  mind.  His 
personality  has  been  the  most  baffling  problem  Avith 
which  men  have  had  to  wrestle ;  it  is  the  key  to  any  true 
intelligence  of  human  nature.     Historically,  one  of  the 


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  249 

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

V 

One  or  two  questions  remain.  There  is  little  about 
art  in  the  gospels.  One  might  even  say  that  there  is  no 
indication  there  that  Jesus  cared  about  art;  though  per- 
haps it  would  be  truer  to  say  that  the  people  with  whom 


250      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

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


15  «'Art  is  perfect  when  it  seems  to  be  nature,"  said  Longinus,  ch.  22.  ^ 
1'  "Not    infrequently    the    first    native    contributions    to    a    Christian    liter- 
ature  take   the    form    of    hymns," — World's    Missionary    Conference,    1910, 
Report,    vol.    II,    p.    124. 

"A  very  remarkable  expression  in  the  Wisdom  of  Solomon  (13,3)  is 
worth  recalling  here.  The  writer  speaks  of  fire,  wind,  swift  air,  circling 
stars,  raging  water,  luminaries  of  heaven;  "for  the  first  Author  of 
beauty    created    them." 


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  251 

with  him.  He,  like  them,  goes  beyond  us  in  his  intuitions 
of  God's  sense  of  color  and  form. 

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

A  gap  frequently  felt  in  the  systems  of  theologians 
is  due  to  their  failure  to  allow  a  place  in  religion  for 


252      JESUS  IN  THE  EXPERIENCE  OF  MEN 

humor.  Have  we  ever  fully  availed  ourselves  of  the 
playfulness  of  Jesus'  speech?  When  he  told  his  fol- 
lowers that  if  a  man  hits  them  on  one  cheek,  they  must 
turn  the  other,  did  he  not  know  they  would  laugh — ^he, 
who  grew  up  in  the  market-place  of  Nazareth  ?  When  he 
said  that  the  distinction  between  Jew  and  Gentile  was 
that  the  Gentile  was  always  asking,  "What  shall  we  eat 
and  what  shall  we  drink?"  was  there  no  play  of  humor 
in  that?  When  he  spoke  about  swallowing  a  camel,  was 
there  no  gleam  of  playfulness  there?  I  do  not  believe 
that  the  phrase  of  Jesus  there  was  just  current  coin. 
At  any  rate,  the  people  of  the  day  did  not  take  it  so,  and 
I  think  they  would  have  known  their  own  common  phrases, 
and  would  hardly  have  troubled  to  record  them.  They 
remembered  his  ways  of  speech,  because  in  his  playful- 
ness and  charm  there  was  something  individual  and  orig- 
inal. We  are  told  that  the  fount  of  humor  is  a  loving 
heart,  that  sees  the  incongruity,  and  smiles  and  sighs  at 
the  same  time.  John  Bunyan  expressed  it  exactly,  when 
he  said: 

"Some  things  are  of  that  nature  as  to  make 
One's  fancy  checkle  while  his  heart  doth  ache." 

Bunyan's  humor  had  provoked  criticism  of  his  Pilgrim, 
as  he  tells  us  in  a  later  preface: 

"And  some  there  be  who  say  he  laughs  too  loud." 

There  are  always  people  like  that  in  the  Church — 
dear,  earnest,  useful  people,  and  so  dull;  but,  when  the 
Kingdom  of  Heaven  comes,  everybody  will  have  sense  of 
humor,  and  in  every  case  it  will  be  a  gift  from  the  same 
Giver.  "A  real  sense  of  humor,"  wrote  Rendel  Harris, 
"breaks  into  flower  when  we  have  overcome  the  world."" 


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


FREEDOM  AND  RELIGION  253 

And  who  is  he  that  overcometh  the  world?  It  is  matter- 
of-fact  that  kills  art  and  kills  humor;  and  it  is  Jesus, 
who  gets  people  out  of  matter-of-fact,  and  gives  the  spirit 
of  the  new  life,  to  which  all  these  things  are  real  and 
living,  who  gives  the  artist  subjects  and  gives  him  free- 
dom, gives  him  love  and  humor  and  happiness,  sensitive- 
ness to  the  questions  and  suggestions  of  Nature,  and  the 
enjoyment  of  God. 

The  great  thing  that  Jesus  has  done,  the  center  of  all, 
has  been  to  enlarge  man's  capacity  for  God.  That  is  the 
secret  of  it.  The  ideas  of  little  children  are  very  lim- 
ited. They  are  not  always  very  ready  to  recognize  the 
claims  of  "gutter  children"  or  outsiders.  The  story  of 
home  life  is  the  story  of  the  growth  of  the  child  and  the 
training  of  his  capacity  for  taking  the  whole  world  into 
his  heart ;  and  Jesus  has  done  that  with  men  and  women, 
Who  are  harder  to  teach  than  little  children.  Jesus  has, 
indeed,  given  the  human  heart  the  capacity  for  God. 
God  is  comprehended  in  how  many  ways,  along  the  line 
of  every  faculty,  and  of  every  sensitiveness?  God  speaks 
to  one  man  in  color,  to  another  in  sound,  to  another  in 
movement,  to  another  in  rhy  thm,  to  another  in  the  beauty 
of  children,  to  another  in  the  need  of  the  world.  Jesus 
all  through  the  centuries  has  been  making  the  human 
heart  larger,  and  more  human,  and  more  apt  to  get  hold 
of  God  and  then  to  want  more  of  him.  He  has  been,  of 
all  beings,  the  most  intelligent  of  God,  the  most  sympa- 
thetic with  all  God's  creatures,  the  great  interpreter,  not 
only  of  God,  but  of  everything  in  which  God  is  interested, 
the  bird  on  the  wing,  the  flower  in  the  field.  Where  the 
spirit  of  the  Lord  Jesus  is,  there  is  liberty. 


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