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THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

THE

MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

THOMAS HUGHES, Q. C,

AUTHOR OF "TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS," ETC.

RY N

JNIVBRSITY OF

. CALIFORNIA. /

BOSTON:

HOUGHTON, OSGOOD AND COMPANY.

€f)Z WHbtviitst fhctii, Camfcrfafle.

1880.

hhs-

RIVEESIDE, CAMBRIDGE :
STEBEOTYPED AND PRINTED
H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY.

/'/'/(> &

NOTE.

The greater part of the following pages
appeared originally in " Good Words," and
are now republished with the permission
of the proprietors of that magazine.

T. H.

CONTENTS.

♦

INTRODUCTORY.

PAGB

The Motive op the Book 1

PART I.

The Holt Land a. d. 30 — The Battle Field
op the Great Captain 8

PART H.
The Tests of Manliness 17

PART m.
Christ's Boyhood 35

PART IV.
The Call op Christ 61

PART V.
Christ's Ministry. Act I » ... 77

Viii CONTENTS.

PART VL

FAGX

Chbist's Ministbt. Act II 95

PART vn.
Chbist's Ministbt. Act HI 110

PART VIII.
The Last Act 126

Conclusion 137

UN IVEtt&ITY OF

CALIFORNIA.

V

THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

INTRODUCTORY.

THE MOTIVE OE THE BOOK.

Some time ago, when I was considering
what method it would be best to adopt in
Sunday -afternoon readings with a small
class in the Working Men's College, I re-
ceived a communication which helped me
to come to a decision. It came in the form
of a proposal for a new association, to be
called " The Christian Guild." The pro-
moters were persons living in our north-
ern towns, some of which had lately gained
a bad reputation for savage assaults and
crimes of violence. My correspondents be-
lieved that some organized effort ought to
be made to meet this evil, and that there
was nothing in existence which would serve

2 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

their purpose. The Young Men's Christian
Associations had increased of late, indeed,
in numbers, but had failed to reach the
class which most needed Christian influ-
ences. There was a wide-spread feeling,
they said, that these associations — valu-
able as they allowed them to be in many
ways — did not cultivate individual manli-
ness in their members, and that this defect
was closely connected with their open pro-
fession of Christianity. They had separ-
ated their members too much from the ordi-
nary habits and life of young men ; and
had set before them a wrong standard,
which taught, not that they were to live in
the world and subdue it to their Master,
but were to withdraw from it as much as
possible.

Therefore they would found their new
" Christian Guild " on quite other princi-
ples. They aimed, indeed, at something
like a revival of the muscular Christianity
of twenty-five years ago, organized for mis-
sionary work in the great northern towns.

INTRODUCTORY. 3

The members of the Guild must be first of
all Christians, but selected as far as possi-
ble for some act of physical courage or
prowess. It was proposed that the medal
of the Royal Humane Society, or the cham-
pionship of a town or district in running,
wrestling, rowing, or other athletic exer-
cise, should qualify at once for membership.
These first members were to form the root,
as it were, out of which branches of the
Guild were to grow — one, they hoped, in
every great centre of population. Each
branch, if properly supported, might attract
the most vigorous and energetic young men
of its district, and so by degrees give a
higher tone to the sports and occupations
which absorb the spare time and energies
of young Englishmen.

I did not see my way to joining any such
movement, which, indeed, never seemed at
all hopeful to me ; nor do I know whether
anything more has been done in the mat-
ter. But the proposal set me thinking on
the state of things amongst us which the

4 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

Christian Guild was intended to meet. I
was obliged to admit that my own experi-
ence, now stretching over a quarter of a
century in London, agreed to some extent
with that of my northern correspondents
Here, too, this same feeling exists, or it may
be this same prejudice, as to " Young
Men's Christian Associations " amongst the
class from which their members are for the
most part taken. Their tone and influence
are said to lack manliness, and the want of
manliness is attributed to their avowed pro-
fession of Christianity. If you pursue the
inquiry, you will often come upon a distinct
belief that this weakness is inherent in our
English religion ; that our Christianity does
appeal and must appeal habitually and
mainly to men's fears — to that in them
which is timid and shrinking, rather than
to that which is courageous and outspoken.
This strange delusion is often alleged as
the cause of the want of power* and attrac-
tion in these associations.

I do not myself at all share this opinion

INTRODUCTORY. 5

as to the Young Men's Christian Associa-
tions, for, so far as I have had the means
of judging, they seem to me, especially in
the last few years, to have been doing ex-
cellent service, though they work in a nar-
row groove. But whether this be so or
not is a matter of comparative indiffer-
ence, and the controversy may safely be left
to settle itself. But the underlying belief
in the rising generation that Christianity is
really responsible for this supposed weak-
ness in its disciples, is one which ought not
to be so treated. The conscience of every
man recognizes courage as the foundation
of manliness, and manliness as the perfec-
tion of human character, and if Christian-
ity runs counter to conscience in this mat-
ter, or indeed in any other, Christianity
will go to the wall.

But does it ? On the contrary, is not
perfection of character — " Be ye perfect
as your Father in heaven is perfect," per-
fection to be reached by moral effort in the
faithful following of our Lord's life on

6 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

earth — the final aim which the Christian
religion sets before individual men ; and
constant contact and conflict with evil of
all kinds the necessary condition of that
moral effort, and the means adopted by our
Master, in the world in which we live, and
for which He died ? In that strife, then,
the first requisite is courage or manfulness,
gained through conflict with evil, — for
without such conflict there can be no per-
fection of character, the end for which
Christ says we were sent into this world.
But was Christ's own character perfect in
this respect, — not only in charity, meek-
ness, purity, long-suffering, but in courage ?
If not, can He be anything more than the
highest and best of men, even if He were
that; can He be the Son of God in any
sense except that in which all men are
sons ?

This was the question which was forced
on me at the time by the proposals of the
Christian Guild, and it gave me the hint I
was in search of as to the method of our

INTRODUCTORY. 7

Sunday readings. We followed it up as
well as we could through the events re-
corded in the gospels, applying the test at
every stage of the drama. The results are
collected in the following papers.

PART I.

THE HOLY LAND A. D. 30 — THE BATTLE
FIELD OE THE GREAT CAPTAIN.

u Phoenicia and Palestine were sometimes annexed to and
sometimes separated from the jurisdiction of Syria. The for-
mer was a narrow and rocky coast ; the latter was a territory
scarcely superior to Wales in fertility or extent ! Yet Phoe-
nicia and Palestine will ever live in the memory of mankind,
since America as well as Europe has received letters from the
one and religion from the other." — Gibbon, chap. i.

In order to approach our subject with
any chance of making the central figure
clear to ourselves, and getting out of the
atmosphere of unreality in which our ordi-
nary religious training is too apt to leave us,
we must make an effort to understand the
condition and the surroundings of life in
Palestine when our Lord appeared in it as a
leader and teacher.

Take first the southern portion, the scene
of the opening and closing days of His min-

THE HOLY LAND A. D. 30. 9

istry, and of periodical visits during those
three years. While He was* still a boy un-
der ten years of age the Romans had de-
posed Herod Archelaus, and had annexed
Judaea, which was from thenceforth ruled
as a province of the Empire by a Roman
procurator. The rebellion of Judas of Ga-
mala, which followed shortly afterwards,
was a fierce protest of the Jews against the
imperial taxation and the yoke of Rome.
It was suppressed in the stern, Roman fash-
ion, and from that time till the commence-
ment of Christ's public ministry Jerusalem
and the surrounding country were on the
verge of revolt, a constant source of anxiety
to the Roman procurators, and held down
with difficulty by the heavy hand of the le-
gions which garrisoned them.

All that was best and worst in the Jew-
ish character and history combined to ren-
der the Roman yoke intolerably galling to
the nation. The peculiar position of Jeru-
salem— a sort of Mecca to the tribes ac-
knowledging the Mosaic law — made Syria

10 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

the most dangerous of all the Roman prov-
inces. To that city enormous crowds of pil-
grims, of the most stiff-necked and fanatical
of all races, flocked three times at least in
every year, bringing with them offerings
and tribute for the temple and its guar-
dians, on a scale which must have made the
hierarchy at Jerusalem formidable even to
the world's master, by their mere command
of wealth.

But this would be the least of the causes
of anxiety to the Roman governor, as he
spent year after year face to face with these
terrible leaders of a terrible people.

These high priests and rulers of the Jews
were indeed quite another kind of adver-
saries from the leaders, secular or religious,
of any of those conquered countries which
the Romans were wont to treat with con-
temptuous toleration. They still represent-
ed living traditions of the glory and sanc-
tity of their nation, and of Jerusalem, and
exercised still a power over that nation
which the most resolute and ruthless of Ro-

TEE HOLY LAND A. D. 30. H

man procurators did not care wantonly to
brave.

At the same time the yoke of high priest
and scribe and pharisee was even heavier
on the necks of their own people than that
of the Roman. They had built up a huge
superstructure of traditions and ceremonies
round the law of Moses, which they held
up to the people as more sacred and bind-
ing than the law itself. This superstruct-
ure was their special charge. This was,
according to them, the great national in-
heritance, the most valuable portion of the
covenant which God had made with their
fathers. To them, as leaders of their na-
tion, — a select, priestly, and learned caste,
— this precious inheritance had been com-
mitted. Outside that caste, the dim multi-
tude, " the people which knoweth not the
law," were despised while they obeyed, ac-
cursed as soon as they showed any sign of
disobedience. Such being the state of Ju-
dsea, it would not be easy to name in all
history a less hopeful place for the reform-

12 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

ing mission of a young carpenter, a stran-
ger from a despised province, one entirely
outside the ruling caste, though of the
royal race, and who had no position what-
ever in any rabbinical school.

In Galilee the surroundings were slight-
ly different, but scarcely more promising.
Herod Antipas, the weakest of that tyrant
family, the seducer of his brother's wife,
the fawner on Caesar, the spendthrift op-
pressor of the people of his tetrarchy, still
ruled in name over the country, but with
Roman garrisons in the cities and strong-
holds. Face to face with him, and exercis-
ing an imperium in imperio throughout Gal-
ilee, were the same priestly caste, though
far less formidable to the civil power, and
to the people, than in the southern prov-
ince. Along the western coast of the Sea
of Galilee, the chief scene of our Lord's
northern ministry, lay a net- work of towns
densely inhabited, and containing a large
admixture of Gentile traders. This infus-
ion of foreign blood, the want of any such

THE HOLY LAND A. D. 30. 13

religious centre as Jerusalem, and the con-
tempt with which the southern Jews re*
garded their provincial brethren of Galilee,
had no doubt loosened to some extent the
yoke of the priests and scribes and law-
yers in that province. But even here their
traditionary power over the masses of the
people was very great, and the conse-
quences of defying their authority as penal,
though the • penalty might be neither so
swift or so certain, as in Jerusalem itself.
Such was the society into which Christ
came.

It is not easy to find a parallel case in
the modern world, but perhaps the nearest
exists in a portion of our own empire. The
condition of parts of India in our day re-
sembles in some respects that of Palestine
in the year A. D. 30. In the Mahratta
country, princes, not of the native dynasty,
but the descendants of foreign courtiers
(like the Idumsean Herods), are reigning.
British residents at their courts, hated and
feared, but practically all-powerful as Ro-

14 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

man procurators, answer to the officers and
garrisons of Rome in Palestine. The peo-
ple are in bondage to a priestly caste scarce-
ly less heavy than that which weighed on
the Judaean and Galilean peasantry. If
the Mahrattas were Mohammedans, and
Mecca were situate in the territory of Scin-
diah or Holkar; if the influence of twelve
centuries of Christian training could be
wiped out of the English character, and the
stubborn and fierce nature of the Jew sub-
stituted for that of the Mahratta ; a village
reformer amongst them, whose preaching
outraged the Brahmins, threatened the dy-
nasties, and disturbed the English residents,
would start under somewhat similar condi-
tions to those which surrounded Christ when
He commenced his ministry.

In one respect, and one only, the time
seemed propitious. The mind and heart of
the nation was full of the expectation of a
coming Messiah— a King who should break
every yoke from off the necks of his peo-
ple, and should rule over the nations, sit-

THE HOLY LAND A. D. 30. ^ /* 15 <

ting on the throne of David. ^The^ii/ensity' 'Y/y,
of this expectation had, in the opening da^fey .
of his ministry, drawn crowds into the wil- ^ tyj
derness beyond Jordan from all parts of
Judaea and Galilee, at the summons of a
preacher who had caught up the last ca-
dence of the song of their last great prophet,
and was proclaiming that both the deliver-
ance and the kingdom which they were
looking for were at hand. In those crowds
who flocked to hear John the Baptist there
were doubtless some even amongst the
priests and scribes, and many amongst the
poor Jewish and Galilean peasantry, who
felt that there was a heavier yoke upon
them than that of Rome or of Herod An-
tipas. But the record of the next three
years shows too clearly that even these
were wholly unprepared for any other than
a kingdom of this world, and a temporal
throne to be set up in the holy city.

And so, from the first, Christ had to con-
tend not only against the whole of the es-
tablished powers of Palestine, but against

16 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

the highest aspirations of the best of his
countrymen. These very Messianic hopes,
in fact, proved the greatest stumbling-block
in his path. Those who entertained them
most vividly had the greatest difficulty in
accepting the carpenter's son as the prom-
ised Deliverer. A few days only before
the end He had sorrowfully to warn the
most intimate and loving of his compan-
ions and disciples, uYe know not what
spirit ye are of."

We must endeavor to keep these exter-
nal conditions and surroundings of the life
of a Galilean peasant in the reigns of Au-
gustus and Tiberius Caesar in our minds, if
we really wish honestly to understand and
appreciate the work done by one of them
in those three short years, or the character
of the doer of it.

PART II.

THE TESTS OF MANLINESS.

" Obvius in palatio Julius Atticus speculator, cruentum
gladium ostentans, occisum a se Othonem, exclamavit; et
Galba, 'Commilito,' inquit, ' quis jussit? ' insigni animo ad
coercendam militarem licentiam, minantibus iutrepidus, ad-
versus blandientes incorruptus." — Tacit. Hist., lib. i., cap.

XXXV.

One other precaution we must take at
the outset of our inquiry, and that is, to
settle for ourselves, without diverging into
useless metaphysics, what we mean by
"manliness, manfulness, courage." My
friends of the Christian Guild seemed to
assume that these words all have the same
meaning, and denote the same qualities.
Now, is this so? I think not, if we take
the common use of the words. " Manliness
and manfulness " are synonymous, but they
embrace more than we ordinarily mean by
the word " courage ; " for instance, tender-

18 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

ness, and though tfulness for others. They
include that courage which lies at the root
■of all manliness, but is, in fact, only its
lowest or rudest form. Indeed, we must
admit that it is not exclusively a human
quality at all, but one which we share with
other animals, and which some of them —
for instance, the bulldog and weasel — ex-
hibit with a certainty and a thoroughness
which is very rare amongst mankind.

In what, then, does courage, in this ordi-
nary sense of the word, consist ? First, in
persistency, or the determination to have
one's own way, coupled with contempt for
safety and ease, and readiness to risk pain
or death in getting one's own way. This
is, let us readily admit, a valuable, even a
noble quality, but an animal quality rather
than a human or manly one, and obviously
not that quality of which the promoters of
the Christian Guild were in search. For I
fear we cannot deny that this kind of cour-
age is by no means incompatible with those
savage or brutal habits of violence which

THE TESTS OF MANLINESS. 19

the Guild was specially designed to put
down and root out amongst our people.
What they desired to cultivate was ob-
viously, not animal, but manly, courage :
and the fact that we are driven to use these
epithets "animal" and "manly" to make
our meaning clear, shows, I think, the ne-
cessity of insisting on this distinction and
keeping it well in mind.

We should note, also, that the tests of
the Guild were, with one exception, not
really adapted as tests even of animal cour-
age, much less of manliness. For they pro-
posed that the possession of the Royal
Humane Society's medal, or the badge of
excellence in athletic games, should be the
qualification for the first members. Now
the possession of the medal does amount to
primd faeie evidence, not only of animal
courage but of manliness; for it can only
be won by an act involving not only per-
sistency and contempt of pain and danger,
but self-sacrifice for the welfare of another.
But proficiency in athletic games has no

/

20 TEE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

such meaning, and is not necessarily a test
even of animal courage, but only of mus-
cular power and physical training. Even
in those games which, to some extent, do
afford a test of the persistency, and con-
tempt for discomfort or pain, which con-
stitute animal courage, — such as rowing,
boxing, and wrestling, — it is of necessity a
most unsatisfactory one. For instance,
Nelson, — as courageous an Englishman as
ever lived, who attacked a Polar bear with
a handspike when he was a boy of fourteen,
and told his captain, when he was scolded
for it, that he did not know Mr. Fear, —
with his slight frame and weak constitution,
could never have won a boat race, and in a
match would have been hopelessly astern of
any one of the crew of his own barge ; and
the highest courage which ever animated a
human body would not enable the owner of
it, if he were himself untrained, to stand
for five minutes against a trained wrestler
or boxer.

Athleticism is a good thing if kept in its

THE TESTS OF MANLINESS. 21

place, but it has come to be very much
over-praised and over-valued amongst us,
as I think these proposals of the Christian
Guild, for the attainment of their most
admirable and needful aim, tend to show
clearly enough, if proof were needed. We
may say, then, I think, without doubt, that
its promoters were not on the right scent,
or likely to get what they were in search of
by the methods they proposed to use. For
after getting their Society of Athletes it
might quite possibly turn out to be com-
posed of persons deficient in real manliness.
While, however, keeping this conclusion
well in mind, we need not at all depreciate
athleticism, which has in it much that is
useful to society, and is indeed admirable
enough in its own way. But as the next
step in our inquiry, let us bear well in
mind that athleticism is not what we mean
here. True manliness is as likely to be
found in a weak as in a strong body.
Other things being equal, we may perhaps
admit (though I should hesitate to do so)

22 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

that a man with a highly-trained and de-
veloped body will be more courageous than
a weak man. But we must take this cau-
tion with us, that a great athlete may be a
brute or a coward, while a truly manly
man can be neither.

Having got thus far, and satisfied our-
selves what is not of the essence of manli-
ness, though often assumed to be so (as by
the promoters of the Christian Guild), let
us see if we cannot get on another step,
and ascertain what is of that essence. And
here it may be useful to take a few well-
known instances of courageous deeds and
examine them ; because if we can find out
any common quality in them we shall have
lighted on something which is of the es-
sence of, or inseparable from, that manli-
ness which includes courage — that manli-
ness of which we are in search.

I will take two or three at hazard from a
book in which they abound, and which was
a great favorite here some years ago, as I
hope it is still, I mean Napier's " Penin-

THE TESTS OF MANLINESS. 23

sular War." At the end of the storming
of Badajoz, after speaking of the officers,
Napier goes on, " Who shall describe the
springing valor of that Portuguese grena-
dier who was killed the foremost man at
Santa Maria? or the martial fury of that
desperate rifleman, who, in his resolution to
win, thrust himself beneath the chained
sword blades, and then suffered the enemy
to dash his head in pieces with the ends of
their muskets." Again, at the Coa, " a
north of Ireland man named Stewart, but
jocularly called ; the Boy,' because of his
youth, nineteen, and of his gigantic stature
and strength, who had fought bravely and
displayed great intelligence beyond the
river, was one of the last men who came
down to the bridge, but he would not pass.
Turning round he regarded the French
with a grim look, and spoke aloud as fol-
lows : ' So this is the end of our brag.
This is our first battle, and we retreat !
The boy Stewart will not live to hear that
said.' Then striding forward in his giant

24 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

might lie fell furiously on the nearest ene-
mies with the bayonet, refused the quarter
they seemed desirous of granting, and died
fighting in the midst of them."

" Still more touching, more noble, more
heroic, was the death of Sergeant Robert
McQuade. During McLeod's rush this
man, also from the north of Ireland, saw
two men level their muskets on rests
against a high gap in a bank, awaiting the
uprise of an enemy. The present Adju-
tant-general Brown, then a lad of sixteen,
attempted to ascend at the fatal spot. Mc-
Quade, himself only twenty-four years of
age, pulled him back, saying, in a calm,
decided tone, * You are too young, sir, to be
killed,' and then offering his own person to
the fire fell dead pierced with both balls."
And, speaking of the British soldier gen-
erally, he says in his preface, " What they
were their successors now are. Witness
the wreck of the Birkenhead, where four
hundred men, at the call of their heroic offi-
cers, Captains Wright and Girardot, calmly

THE TESTS OF MANLINESS. 25

and without a murmur accepted death in a
horrible form rather than endanger the
women and children saved in the boats.
The records of the world furnish no parallel
to this self-devotion." Let us add to these
two very recent examples of which we have
all been reading in the last few months : the
poor colliers who worked day and night
at Pont-y-pridd, with their lives in their
hands, to rescue their buried comrades ;
and the gambler in St. Louis who went
straight from the gaming-table into the fire,
to the rescue of women and children, and
died of the hurts after his third return from
the flames.

Looking, then, at these several cases, we
find in each that resolution in the actors to
have their way, contempt for ease, and
readiness to risk pain or death, which we
noted as the special characteristics of ani-
mal courage, which we share with the bull-
dog and weasel.

So far all of them are alike. Can we get
any further? Not much, if we take the

26 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

case of the rifleman who thrust his head
tinder the sword-blades and allowed his
brains to be knocked out sooner than draw
it back, or that of "the boy Stewart."
These are intense assertions of individual
will and force, — avowals of the rough hard-
handed man that he has that in him which
enables him to defy pain and danger and
death, — this and little or nothing more ;
and no doubt a very valuable and admira-
ble thing as it stands.

But we feel, I think, at once, that there
is something more in the act of Sergeant
McQuade, and of the miners in Pont-y-
pridd — something higher and more admi-
rable. And it is not a mere question of
degree, of more or less, in the quality of
animal courage. The rifleman and "the
boy Stewart " were each of them persistent
to death, and no man can be more. The
acts were, then, equally courageous, so far
as persistency and scorn of danger and
death are concerned. We must look else-
where for the difference, for that which

THE TESTS OF MANLINESS. 27

touches us more deeply in the case of Ser-
geant McQuade than in that of " the boy-
Stewart/ ' and can only find it in the mo-
tive. At least it seems to me that the
worth of the last lies mainly in the sub-
limity of self-assertion, of the other in the
sublimity of self-sacrifice.

And this holds good again in the case
of the Birkenhead. Captain Wright gave
the word for the men to fall in on deck by
companies, knowing that the sea below
them was full of sharks, and that the ship
could not possibly float till the boats came
back ; and the men fell in, knowing this
also, and stood at attention without utter-
ing a word, till she heeled over and went
down under them. And Napier, with all
his delight in physical force and prowess,
and his intense appreciation of the qualities
which shine most brightly in the fiery ac-
tion of battle, gives the palm to these When
he writes, " The records of the world fur-
nish no parallel to this self-devotion." He
was no mean judge in such a case ; and, if

28 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST..

he is right, as I think he is, do we not get
another side-light on our inquiry, and find
that the highest temper of physical courage
is not to be found, or perfected, in action
but in repose ? All physical effort relieves
the strain, and makes it easier to persist
unto death, under the stimulus and excite-
ment of the shock of battle, or of violent
exertion of any kind, than when the effort
has to be made with grounded arms. In
other words, may we not say that in the
face of danger self-restraint is after all the
highest form of self-assertion, and a charac-
teristic of manliness as distinguished from
courage ?

But we have only been looking hitherto
at one small side of a great subject, at the
courage which is tested in times of terror,
on the battle-field, in the sinking ship, the
poisoned mine, the blazing house. Such
testing times come to few, and to these not
often in their lives. But, on the other
hand, the daily life of every one of us teems
with occasions which will try the temper of

THE TESTS OF MANLINESS. 29

our courage as searchingly, though not as
terribly, as battle-field or fire or wreck.
For we are born into a state of war ; with
falsehood and disease and wrong and mis-
ery, in a thousand forms, lying all around
us, and the voice within calling on us to
take our stand as men in the eternal battle
against these.

And in this life-long fight, to be waged
by every one of us single-handed against a
host of foes, the last requisite for a good
fight, the last proof and test of our courage
and manfulness, must be loyalty to truth —
the most rare and difficult of all human
qualities. For such loyalty, as it grows in
perfection, asks ever more and more of us,
and sets before us a standard of manliness
always rising higher and higher.

And this is the great lesson which we
shall learn from Christ's life, the more
earnestly and faithfully we study it. " For
this end was I born, and for this cause
came I into the world, to bear witness
to the truth." To bear this witness against

30 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

avowed and open enemies is comparatively
easy. But to bear it against those we love,
against those whose judgment and opinions
we respect, in defense or futherance of that
which approves itself as true to our own in-
most conscience, this is the last and abiding
test of courage and of manliness. How nat-
ural, nay, how inevitable it is, that we
should fall into the habit of appreciating
and judging things mainly by the standards
in common use amongst those we respect
and love. But these very standards are apt
to break down with us when we are brought
face to face with some question which takes
us ever so little out of ourselves and our
usual moods. At such times we are driven
to admit in our hearts that we, and those
we respect and love, have been looking at
and judging things, not truthfully, and
therefore not courageously and manfully,
but conventionally. And then comes one
of the most searching of all trials of courage
and manliness, when a man or woman is
called to stand by what approves itself to

*v

>A. ^

ras tests of MANzhi-Eae'.y 3i

their consciences as true, and to protes^f/or /
it through evil report and good repor%^/j »
against all discouragement and opposition '
from those they love or respect. The sense
of antagonism instead of rest, of distrust
and alienation instead of approval and sym-
pathy, which such times bring, is a test
which tries the very heart and reins, and
it is one which meets us at all ages, and in
all conditions of life. Emerson's hero is the
man who, u taking both reputation and life
in his hand, will with perfect urbanity dare
the gibbet and the mob, by the absolute
truth of his speech and rectitude of his
behavior." And, even in our peaceful
and prosperous England, absolute truth of
speech and rectitude of behavior will not
fail to bring their fiery trials, if also in the
end their exceeding great rewards.

We may note, too, that in testing manli-
ness as distinguished from courage, we shall
have to reckon sooner or later with the idea
of duty. Nelson's column stands in the
most conspicuous site in all London, and

32 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

stands there with all men's approval, not
because of his daring courage. Lord Peter-
borough in a former generation, Lord Dun-
donald in the one which succeeded, were
at least as eminent for reckless and success-
ful daring. But it is because the idea of
devotion to duty is inseparably connected
with Nelson's name in the minds of Eng-
lishmen, that he has been lifted high above
all his compeers in England's capital.

In the throes of one of the terrible revo-
lutions of the worst days of imperial Rome,
— when probably the cruellest mob and
most licentious soldiery of all time were
raging round the palace of the Csesars, and
the chances of an hour would decide whether
Galba or Oth o should rule the world, the
alternative being a violent death, — an of-
ficer of the guard, one Julius Atticus, rushed
into Galba's presence with a bloody sword,
boasting that he had slain his rival, Otho.
" My comrade, by whose order ? " was his
only greeting from the old Pagan chief.
And the story has come down through eigh-

THE TESTS OF MANLINESS. 33

teen centuries, in the terse strong sentences
of the great historian prefixed to this chap-
ter, a test for all times.

Comrade, who ordered thee ? whose will
art thou doing ? It is the question which
has to be asked of every fighting man, in
whatever part of the great battle-field he
comes to the front, and determines the man-
liness of soldier, statesman, parson, of every
strong man, and suffering woman.

" Three roots bear up Dominion : knowledge, will,
These two are strong ; but stronger still the third,

Obedience : 'tis the great tap root, which still,
Knit round the rock of Duty, is not stirred,

Though storm and tempest spend their utmost skill.'

I think that the more thoroughly we sift
and search out this question the more surely
we shall come to this as the conclusion of
the whole matter. Tenacity of will, or will-
fulness, lies at the root of all courage, but
courage can only rise into true manliness
when the will is surrendered ; and the more
absolute the surrender of the will the more
perfect will be the temper of our courage
and the strength of our manliness.

34 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

" Strong Son of God, immortal Love,"

our laureate has pleaded, in the moment of
his highest inspiration,

" Our wills are ours to make them thine."

And that strong Son of God to whom this
cry has gone up in our day, and in all days,
has left us the secret of his strength in the
words, " I am come to do the will of my
Father and your Father."

PAET III.

Christ's boyhood.

" So close is glory to our dust,
So near is God to man ;
When duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can." — Emerson.

One great difficulty meets the student of
our Lord's life and character from what-
ever side, and with whatever purpose, he
may approach it. The whole authentic rec-
ord of that life, up to the time of his bap-
tism, when He was already thirty years
old, is comprised in half-a-dozen sentences.
All that we know is the story of his visit
to Jerusalem at the age of twelve, when He
was lost in the crush of the great feast, and
his parents turned back to look for Him :
" And it came to pass, that after three days
they found Him in the temple, sitting at the
feet of the doctors, both hearing them and
asking them questions. And all that heard

36 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

Him were astonished at his understanding
and answers. And when they saw Him
they were amazed, and his mother said
unto Him, Son, why hast thou so dealt with
us ? Behold, thy father and I have sought
thee sorrowing. And He said unto them,
How is it that ye sought me ? Wist ye not
that I must be about my Father's business?
And they understood not this saying which
He spake unto them. And He went down
to Nazareth and was subject unto them."

The silence of the evangelists as to all
other details of his youth and early man-
hood, except this one short incident, which
belongs rather to his public than to his
private life, is intended no doubt to fix our
attention on the former, as that which most
concerns us. At the same time it is impos-
sible for those who will follow, as best they
may, Christ's steps and teaching, setting
before themselves that highest outcome and
aim of it all, " be ye perfect as your Father
in heaven is perfect," not to turn often in
thought to those early years of his in which

CHRIST S BOYHOOD. 37

the weapons must have been forged, and
the character formed and matured, for the
mighty war.

And it cannot be denied that, to such
seekers, this short temple story is in many
ways baffling, even discouraging. There is
something at first sight, willful indeed, pos-
sibly courageous, but not manly, in a boy
of twelve staying behind his parents in a
strange city without their knowledge or
consent ; something thoughtless, almost un-
gracious, in the words of reply to Mary's
" thy father and I have sought thee sorrow-
ing " — " How is it that ye sought me ?
wist ye not that I must be about my
Father's business ? " (or " in my Father's
courts," as the words are more truly trans-
lated).

The clue to this apparent divergence
from the perfect manly life is given with
rare insight and beauty in Mr. Holman
Hunt's great picture. At any rate the face
and attitude of the boy there seemed for
the first time to make clear to me the

38 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

meaning of the recorded incident, and to
cast a flood of light on those eighteen years
of preparation which yet remained before
He should be ready for his public work.
The real meaning and scope of that work,
in all its terrible majesty and suffering
and grandeur, have just begun to dawn on
the boy's mind. The first sight of Jeru-
salem, and of the temple, has stirred new
and strange thoughts within Him. The re-
plies of the doctors to his eager question-
ings have lighted up the consciousness
which must have been dimly working in
Him already, that he was not altogether
like those around Him — the children with
whom He was accustomed to play, the
parents at whose knees He had been
brought up.

Many of us must have seen, all must
have read of, instances of a call to their
spirits being clearly recognized by very
young children, and coloring and molding
their whole after lives. We can scarcely
say how early this awakening of a con-

CHRIST 8 BOYHOOD. 39-

sciousness of what he is, of what he is.
meant to do, has come to this or that young
child, but no one will question that it does
so come in many instances long before the
age of twelve. And so I think we may
safely assume that when Christ came up for
the first time to the feast which commemo-
rated the great deliverance of his nation,
the boy was already conscious of a voice
within, calling Him to devote Himself to
the work to which the God of his fathers
had in like manner called in their turn,
Moses, and Samuel, and David, and Elijah,
and Judas Maccabseus, and all that grand
roll of patriot prophets, and kings, and
warriors, with whose names and doings He
would be already familiar. Amidst all the
pomp of the great festival He found the
chosen people weighed down by a sterner
and more degrading bondage than had be-
fallen them in all their long annals. And
all that He heard and saw in the holy city,
amongst the crowds of worshippers, and
the rabbis teaching in the temple courts —

40 TEE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

the first view of the holy hill of Sion, the
joy of the whole earth — the strange con-
trast of the eager traffic, the gross Mam-
mon worship, the huge slaughtering of
beasts with all the brutal accompaniments,
with that universal longing and expecta-
tion in those multitudes for the Messiah,
who should lead and work out the final de-
liverance and triumph of the people of
God in that generation — must have stirred
new questionings within Him, questionings
whether that voice which He had been al-
ready hearing in his own heart was not
only a call, such as might come to any He-
brew boy, but the call — whether amongst
all that vast assembly He was not the one
upon whom the supreme task must be laid,
who must be the deliverer of this people, so
certainly and eagerly looked for.

To the young spirit before whose inward
eye such a vision is opening all human ties
would shrink back, and be for the moment
forgotten. And, when recalled suddenly
by the words of his mother, the half con-

CHRIST'S BOYHOOD. 41

scions dreamy answer, " How is it that ye
sought me ? Wist ye not that I must be in
my Father's courts, about his business ? "
loses all its apparent willfulness and abrupt-
ness.

And so, full of this new question and
great wonder, He went home to the village
in Galilee with his parents, and was sub-
ject to them ; and the curtain falls for us
on his boyhood and youth and early man-
hood. But as nothing but what is most
important, and necessary for understanding
all of his life which we need for our own
growth into his likeness, is told in these
simple gospel narratives, it would seem that
this vivid light is thrown on that first visit
to Jerusalem because it was the crisis in our
Lord's early life which bears most directly
on his work for our race. If so, we must,
I think, allow that the question once fairly
presented to the boy's mind would never
again have left it. Day by day it would
have been coming back with increasing in-
sistency, gathering power and weight. And

42 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

as He submitted it day by day to the God
whom prophet and Psalmist had taught
every child of the nation to look upon as
" about his path and about his bed, and
knowing every thought of his heart," the
consciousness must have gained strength
and power. As the habit of self-surrender
and simple obedience to the voice within
grew more perfect, and more a part of his
very being, the call must have sounded more
and more clearly.

And, as He was in all things tempted
like as we are, again and again must his
human nature have shrunk back and tried
every way of escape from this task, the call
to which was haunting Him ; while every
succeeding month and year of life must
have disclosed to Him more and more of its
peril and its hopelessness, as well as of its
majesty.

We have, then, to picture to ourselves
this struggle and discipline going on for
eighteen years — the call sounding contin-
ually in his ears, and the boy, the youth,

CHRIST S BOYHOOD. 43

the strong man, each in turn solicited by
the special temptations of his age, and ris-
ing clear above them through the strength
of perfect obedience, the strength which
comes from the daily fulfillment of daily du-
ties — that " strength in the Lord " which
St. Paul holds up to us as possible for every
human being. Think over this long proba-
tion, and satisf}7" yourselves whether it is
easy, whether it is possible to form any
higher ideal of perfect manliness.

And without any morbid curiosity, and
I think with profit, we may follow out the
thoughts which this long period of quiet
suggests. We know from the evangelists
only this, that He remained in obscurity in
a retired village of Galilee, and subject to
his reputed father and mother. That He
also remained in great seclusion while liv-
ing the simple peasant life of Nazareth we
may infer from the surprise, not unmixed
with anger and alarm, of his own family,
when, after his baptism, He began his pub-
lic career amongst them. And yet, on that

44 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

day when He rose to speak in the syna-
gogue, it is clear that the act was one which
commended itself in the first instance to his
family and neighbors. The eyes of all
present were at once fixed on Him as on
one who might be expected to stand in the
scribe's place, from whom they might learn
something, a Man who had a right to speak.
Indeed, it is impossible to suppose that
He could have lived in their midst from
childhood to full manhood without attract-
ing the attention, and stirring many ques-
tionings in the minds, of all those with
whom He was brought into contact. The
stories in the Apocryphal Gospels of the ex-
ercise of miraculous powers by Christ as a
child and boy may be wholly disregarded ;
but we may be sure that such a life as his,
though lived in the utmost possible seclu-
sion, must have impressed every one with
whom He came in contact, from the scribe
who taught the Scriptures in Nazareth to
the children who sat by his side to learn, or
met Him by chance in the vineyards or on

CHRIST'S BOYHOOD. 45

the hill-sides. That He was diligent in
using such means for study as were within
his reach, if . it needed proof, would appear
from his perfect familiarity with the laws
and history of his country at the opening of
his ministry. And the mysterious story of
the crisis immediately following his baptism,
in which He wrestled, as it were, face to
face with the tempter and betrayer of man-
kind, indicates to us the nature of the daily
battle which He must have been waging,
from his earliest infancy, or at any rate ever
since his first visit to Jerusalem. No one
can suppose for a moment that the trial
came on Him for the first time after the
great prophet to whom all the nation were
flocking had owned Him as the coming
Christ. That recognition removed, indeed,
the last doubt from his mind, and gave Him
the signal for which He had been patiently
waiting, that the time was come and He
must set forth from his retirement. But
the assurance that the call would come at
some time must have been growing on Him

46 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

in all those years, and so when it does come
He is perfectly prepared.

In his first public discourse in the syna-
gogue of Nazareth we find Him at once an-
nouncing the fulfillment of the hopes which
all around Him were cherishing. He pro-
claims, without any preface or hesitation,
with the most perfect directness and confi-
dence, the full gospel of the kingdom of
heaven. "The time is fulfilled, and the
kingdom of God is at hand." He takes for
the text of his first discourse the passage in
Isaiah : " The Spirit of the Lord is upon
me, because he hath anointed me to preach
the gospel to the poor ; he hath sent me to
heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliver-
ance to the captive, the recovery of sight to
the blind, to set at liberty them that are
bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the
Lord," and proceeds to expound how "this
day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears."
And within the next few days He delivers his
Sermon on the Mount, of which we have the
full record, and in which we find the mean-

CHRIST S BOYHOOD. 47

ing, and character, and principles of the
kingdom, laid down once and for all. Mark,
that there is no hesitation, no ambiguity, no
doubt as to who He is, or what message
He has to deliver. " I have not come to de-
stroy, but to fulfill the law which my Father
and your Father has given you, and which
you have misunderstood. This which I am
now unfolding to you is the meaning of
that law, this is the will of my Father who
is in heaven."

Thus He springs at once, as it were,
full-armed into the arena; and it is this
thorough mastery of his own meaning and
position from the first — this thorough in-
sight into what He has to do, and the
means by which it is to be done — upon
which we should fix our thoughts if we
want to understand, or to get any notion at
all of, what must have been the training of
those eighteen years.

How had this perfect insight and confi-
dence been reached? "This young peas-
ant, preaching from a boat or on a hill-side,

48 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

sweeps aside at once the traditions of our
most learned doctors, telling us that this,
which we and our fathers have been taught,
is not what the God of Israel intended in
these commandments of his ; but that He,
this young Man, can tell us what God did
really intend. He assumes to speak to us
as one having authority. Who gave Him
this authority ? " These, we know, are the
kind of questionings with which Christ was
met at once, and over and over again. And
they are most natural and necessary ques-
tionings, and must have occurred to Him-
self again and again, and been answered by
Him to Himself, before He could have
stood up to proclaim with the tone of abso-
lute authority his good news to the village
congregations in Galilee, or the crowds on
the Mount, or by the lake.

Who gave thee this authority ? We can
only reverentially, and at a distance, picture
to ourselves the discipline* and struggles
by which the answer was reached, which
enabled Him to go out without the slightest

CHRIST S BOYHO&P. /-> 4&, t

faltering or misgiving, and deliver ms/^JL /*

and astounding message, the moment the^Y^i r
sign came that the time had come, and that ^ ~C
it was indeed He to whom the task was.
entrusted.

But the lines of that discipline, which in
a measure is also the discipline of every one
of us, are clearly enough indicated for us in
the story of the temptation.

In every subtle form this question must
have been meeting the maturing Christ day
after day. Art thou indeed the Son of God
who is said to be coming to redeem this
enslaved and degraded people, and with
and beside them all the kingdoms of the
world? Even if these prophets have not
been dreaming and doting, art not Thou at
least dreaming and doting ? At any rate
if that is your claim put it to some test.
Satisfy yourself, and show us, while satisfy-
ing yourself, some proof of your title which
we, too, can recognize. Here are all these
material, visible things which, if your claim
be true, must be subject to you. Show us
4

50 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

your power over some of them — the mean-
est if you will, the common food which
keeps men alive. There are spiritual invisi-
ble forces too, which are supposed to be
the ministers of God, and should therefore
be under the control of his Son — give us
some sign that you can guide or govern the
least of them. Why pause or delay? Is
the burden growing lighter on this people ?
Is the Roman getting year by year less in-
solent, the publican less fraudulent and ex-
acting, the Pharisees and rulers less god-
less, the people, your own kin amongst
them, less degraded and less brutal ? You
are a grown man, with the full powers of a
man at any rate. Why are you idling here
when your Father's work (if God be your
Father) lies broadcast on every side, and
no man standing forth to " the help of the
Lord against the mighty," as our old seers
used to rave ?

I hope I may have been able to indicate
to you, however imperfectly, the line of
thought which will enable each of you for

CHRIST S BOYHOOD. 51

*

yourselves to follow out and realize, more or
less, the power and manliness of the charac-
ter of Christ implied in this patient waiting
in obscurity and doubt through the years
when most men are at full stretch, — wait-
ing for the call which shall convince Him
that the voice within has not been a lying
voice, — and meantime making Himself all
that God meant Him to be, without haste
and without misgiving.

In the time of preparation for the battle
of life this is the true touchstone. Haste
and distrust are the sure signs of weakness,
if not of cowardice. Just in so far as they
prevail in any life, even in the most heroic,
the man fails, and his work will have to be
done over again. In Christ's life up to the
age of thirty there is not the slightest trace
of such weakness, or cowardice. From all
that we are told, and from all we can infer,
He made no haste, and gave way to no
doubt, waiting for God's mind, and pa-
tiently preparing Himself for whatever his
work might be. And so his work from

52 TEE MANLINESS OF CERIST.

the first was perfect, and through his whole
public life He never faltered or wavered,
never had to withdraw or modify a word
once spoken. And thus He stands, and
will stand to the end of time, the true
model of the courage and manliness of boy-
hood and youth and early manhood.

Before passing on to the public life of
Christ, there is one point which has been
raised, and upon which perhaps a few words
should be said, although it does not directly
bear upon our inquiry. I refer to the su-
pernatural power which all Christians hold
to have dwelt in Him, and to have been
freely exercised within certain limits during
his public career. Was He always con-
scious of it ? And, if so, did He exercise it
before his call and baptism ? Here we get
not the slightest direct help from the gos-
pel narratives, and (as has been already
said) no reliance whatever can be placed on
the apocryphal stories of his boyhood. We
are therefore left to our own judgment and
reason, and there must always be differ-

CHRIST 8 BOYHOOD. 53

ences between the conclusions at which one
man and another will arrive, however hon-
estly each may search for the truth.

To me, however, one or two matters
seem to be clear enough. The first is, that
He had only the same means as the rest of
us of becoming conscious of his relation-
ship to God. For, if this were not so, He
is no example for us, He was not " tempted
like as we are." Now the great difference
between one man and another depends
upon how these means are used; and, so
far as they are used according to the mind
and will of God, we gain mastery over our-
selves and our surroundings. " As the
world was plastic and fluid in the hands of
God, so it is ever to so much of his attri-
butes as we bring to it," may be a start-
ling saying of Mr. Emerson's, but is one
which commends itself to our experience
and reason, if we only consult them hon-
estly. Let us take the most obvious exam-
ple of this law. Look at the relations of
man to the brute creation. One of us shall

54 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

have no difficulty in making friends of
beasts and birds, while another excites their
dread and hate, so that even dogs will
scarcely come near him. There is no need
to go back to the traditions of the hermits
in the Thebaid, or St. Francis of Assisi,
for instances of the former class. We all
know the story of Cowper and his three
hares from his exquisite letters and poem,
and most of you must have read, or heard
of the terms on which Waterton lived with
the birds and beasts in his Yorkshire home,
and of Thoreau, unable to get rid of wild
squirrels and birds who would come and
live with him, or from a boat taking up
fish, which lay quietly in his hand till he
chose to put them back again into the
stream. But I suppose there is scarcely
one of us who has not himself seen such in-
stances again and again, persons of whom
the old words seemed literally true, " At
destruction and famine thou shalt laugh;
neither shalt thou be afraid of the beasts of
the earth. For thou shalt be in league

CHRIST 8 BOYHOOD. 55

with the stones of the field, and the beasts
of the field shall be at peace with thee."

I remember myself several such ; a boy
who was friends even with rats, stoats, and
snakes, and generally had one or other of
them in his pockets ; a groom upon whose
shoulders the pigeons used to settle, and
nestle against his cheeks, whenever he went
out into the stable-yard or field. Is there
any reasonable way of accounting for this ?
Only one, I think, which is, that those who
have this power over, and attraction for,
animals, have always felt towards them and
treated them as their Maker intended —
have unconsciously, perhaps, but still faith-
fully, followed God's mind in their dealings
with his creatures, and so have stood in
true relations to them all', and have found
the beasts of the field at peace with them.

In the same way the stones of the field
are in league with the geologist, the trees
and flowers with the botanist, the compo-
nent parts of earth and air with the chem-
ist, just in so far as each, consciously or un-

56 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

consciously, follows God's methods with
them — each part of his creation yielding
up its secrets and its treasures to the open
mind of the humble and patient, who is
also at bottom always the most courageous,
learner.

And what is true of each of us beyond
all question — what every man who walks
with open eyes, and open heart, knows to
be true of himself — must be true also of
Christ. And so, though we may reject the
stories of the clay birds, which He modeled
as a child, taking wing and bursting into
song round Him (as on a par with St.
Francis's address to his sisters the swallows
at Alvia, or the flocks in the Marches of
Venice, who thereupon kept silence from
their twitterings and songs till his sermon
was finished), we cannot doubt that in pro-
portion as Christ was more perfectly in
sympathy with God's creation than any
mediaBval saint, or modern naturalist, or
man of science, He had more power than
they with all created things from his earli-

CHRIST S BOYHOOD. 57

est youth. Nor could it be otherwise with
the hearts and wills of men. Over these
we know that, from that time to this, He
has exercised a supreme sway, infinitely
more wonderful than that over birds and
beasts, because of man's power of resistance
to the will Christ came to teach and to do,
which exists, so far as we can see, in no
other part of creation.

I think, then, it is impossible to resist
the conclusion that He must have had all
these powers from his childhood, that they
must have been growing stronger from day
to day, and He, at the same time, more and
more conscious of possessing them, not to
use on any impulse of curiosity or self-will,
but only as the voice within prompted.
And it seems the most convincing testi-
mony to his perfect sonship, manifested in
perfect obedience, that He should never
have tested his powers during those thirty
years as He did at once and with perfect
confidence as soon as the call came. Had
He done so his ministry must have com-

58 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

menced sooner ; that is to say, before the
method was matured by which He was to
reconstruct, and lift into a new atmosphere
and on to a higher plane, the faith and life
of his own nation and of the whole world.
For it is impossible to suppose that the
works which He did, and the words He
spoke, at thirty — which at once threw
all Galilee and Judaea into a ferment of
hope and joy and doubt and anger —
should have passed unnoticed had they been
wrought and spoken when He was twenty.
Here, as in all else, He waited for God's
mind : and so, when the time for action
came, worked with the power of God. And
this waiting and preparation must have
been the supreme trial of his faith. The
holding this position must have been in
those early years the holding of the very
centre of the citadel of Man's soul (as
Bunyan so quaintly terms it), against which
the assaults of the tempter must have been
delivered again and again while the gar-
rison was in training for the victorious

CHRIST S BOYHOOD. 59

march out into the open field of the great
world, carrying forth the standard which
shall never go back.

And while it may be readily admitted
that Christ wielded a dominion over all
created things, as well as over man, which
no other human being has ever approached,
it seems to me to be going quite beyond
what can t>e proved, or even fairly assumed,
to speak of his miracles as supernatural, in
the sense that no man has ever done, or can
ever do, the like. The evidence is surely
all the other way, and seems rather to indi-
cate that if we could only have lived up to
the standard which we acknowledge in our
inmost hearts to be the true one, — could
only have obeyed every motion and warning
of the voice of God speaking in our hearts
from the day when we first became con-
scious of and could hear it, — if, in other
words, our wills had from the first been dis-
ciplined, like the will of Christ, so as to be
in perfect accord with the will of God, — I
see no reason to doubt that we, too, should

60 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

have gained the power and the courage to
show signs, or, if you please, to work mir-
acles, as Christ and his Apostles worked
them.

PART IV.

THE CALL OF CHEIST.

" Sound, thou trumpet of God ! come forth, great cause, to

array us !
King and leader, appear! thy soldiers sorrowing seek thee."

A. Clough.

At last the good news for which they
had been longing comes to the expecting
nation. A voice is heard in the lonely-
tracts beyond Jordan — the route along
which the caravans of pilgrims from Gali-
lee passed so often, to and from the feasts
at Jerusalem — proclaiming that the king-
dom of heaven is at hand. The news is
soon carried to the capital, and from Jeru-
salem and all Judaea, and all the region
round about Jordan, the people go out to
hear it ; and, when they have heard it, are
baptized in crowds, eagerly claiming each
for himself a place in this kingdom. It
gathers strength till it moves rulers and

62 TEE MANLINESS OF CEBIST.

priests, council and Sanhedrim, as well as
the people who know not the law ; and pres-
ently priests and Levites are sent out from
Jerusalem to test messenger and message,
and ask, u Who art thou ? What kingdom
is this thou art proclaiming without our
sanction ? " It spreads northward also,
and the despised Galileans from lake shore
and half pagan cities flock down to hear it
for themselves, and the simplest and brav-
est souls amongst them, such as Andrew
and Simon Peter, to attach themselves to
the preacher. From the highways and
lake cities it pierces the Galilean valleys,
and comes to the ears of Jesus, in the car-
penter's cottage at Nazareth.

He, too, is moved by the call, and starts
for the Jordan, filled, we may be sure, with
the hope that the time for action has come
at last, that the God of Israel is again
about to send deliverance to his people.
May we not also fairly conjecture that, on
his way to Bethabara, to claim his place in
the national confession and uprising, He

THE CALL OF CHRIST. 63

must have had moments of rejoicing that
the chief part in the great drama seemed
likely after all to be laid on another ? As
a rule, the more thoroughly disciplined and
fit a man may be for any really great work,
the more conscious will he be of his own
unfitness for it, the more distrustful of him-
self, the more anxious not to thrust himself
forward. It is only the zeal of the half-in-
structed when the hour of a great deliver-
ance has come at last — of those who have
had a glimpse of the glory o f the goal, but
have never known or counted the perils of
the path which leads to it — which is ready
with- the prompt response, " Yes — we can
drink of the cup ; we can be baptized with
the baptism."

But in Christ, after the discipline of
those long waiting years, there was no am-
bition, no self-delusion. He had measured
the way, and counted the cost, of lifting his
own people and the world out of bondage
to visible things and false gods, and bring-
ing them to the only Father of their spirits,

64 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

into the true kingdom of their God. He
must, indeed, have been well enough aware
how infinitely more fit for the task He
Himself was than any of his own brethren
in the flesh, with whom He was living day
by day, or of the men of Nazareth with
whom He had been brought up. But He
knew also that the same voice which had
been speaking to him, the same wisdom
which had been training him, must have
been speaking to and training other humble
and brave souls, wherever there were open
hearts and ears, in the whole Jewish na-
tion. As the humblest and most guileless
of men He could not have assumed that no
other Israelite had been able to render that
perfect obedience of which He was Himself
conscious. And so He may well have hur-
ried to the Jordan in the hope of finding
there, in this prophet of the wilderness,
" Him who should come," the Messiah, the
great deliverer — and of enlisting under his
banner, and rendering Him true and loyal
service, in the belief that, after all, He

THE CALL OF CHRIST. 65

Himself might only be intended to aid, and
hold up the hands of a greater than Him-
self. For, we must remember that Christ
could not have heard before He came to
Bethabara that John had disclaimed the
great title. It was not till the very day
before his own arrival that the Baptist had
told the questioners from Jerusalem, " I am
not He."

But if any such thought had crossed his
mind, or hope filled his heart, on the way
to the Baptist, it was soon dispelled, and
He, left again in his own loneliness, now
more clearly than ever before, face to face
with the task, before which even the Son of
God, appointed to it before the world was,
might well quail, as it confronted Him in
his frail human body. For John recognizes
Him, singles Him out at once, proclaims to
the bystanders, " This is He ! Behold the
Lamb of God ! This is He who shall bap-
tize with the fire of God's own Spirit.
Here is the deliverer whom all our prophets
have foretold. And by a mysterious out-

66 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

ward sign, as well as by the witness in his
own heart and conscience, Christ is at once
assured of the truth of the Baptist's words
— that it is indeed He Himself and no
other, and that his time has surely come.

That He now thoroughly realized the
fact for the first time, and was startled and
severely tried by the confirmation of what
He must have felt for years to be probable,
is not only what we should look for from
our own experiences, but seems the true
inference from the gospel narratives. For5
although as soon as the full truth breaks
upon Him He accepts the mission and work
to which God is calling Him, and speaks
with authority to the Baptist, " Suffer it to
be so now," yet the immediate effect of the
call is to drive Him away into the wilder-
ness, there in the deepest solitude to think
over once again, and for the last time to
wrestle with and master, the tremendous
disclosure. And the story of the tempta-
tion which immediately follows — so full of
mystery and difficulty in many ways — is

THE CALL OF CHRIST. 67

invaluable for the light which it casts, not
only on this crisis of his life, but before and
after — on the history of the world's re-
demption, and the method by which that
redemption is to be accomplished, the part
which each individual man and woman is
called to play in it.

For Christ's whole life on earth was the
assertion and example of true manliness —
the setting forth in living act and word what
man is meant to be, and how he should
carry himself in this world of God's, — • one
long campaign, in which " the temptation "
stands out as the first great battle and vic-
tory. The story has depths in it which we
can never fathom, but also clear, sharp les-
sons which he who runs may read, and no
man can master too thoroughly. We must
follow Him reverently into the wilderness,
where He flies from the crowds who are
pressing to the Baptist, and who to-morrow
will be thronging around Him, if He goes
back amongst them, after what the Baptist
has said about Him to-day.

68 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

Day after day in the wilderness the strug-
gle goes on in his heart. He is faint from
insufficient food in those solitudes, and with
bodily weakness the doubts grow in strength
and persistence, and the tempter is always
at his side, soliciting Him to end them once
for all, by one act of self-assertion. All
those questionings and misgivings as to his
origin and mission which we have pictured
to ourselves as haunting Him ever since his
first visit to Jerusalem, are now, as it were,
focussed. There are mocking voices whis-
pering again as of old, but more scornfully
and keenly, in his ear, " Are you really the
Messiah, the Son of God, so long looked
for ? What more proof have you to go upon
than you have had for these many years,
during which you have been living as a poor
peasant in a Galilean village ? The word
of this wild man of the wilderness ? He is
your own cousin, and a powerful preacher,
no doubt, but a wayward, willful man, clad
and fed like a madman, who has been nurs-
ing mad fancies from his boyhood, away

THE CALL OF CHRIST. 69

from the holy city, the centre of national
life and learning. This sign of a descend-
ing dove, and a voice which no one has
heard but yourself? Such signs come to
many, — are never wanting when men are
ready to deceive themselves, — and each
man's fancy gives them a different mean-
ing. But the words, and the sign, and the
voice, you say, only meet a conviction which
has been growing these thirty years in your
own heart and conscience ? Well, then, at
least for the sake of others if not for your
own sake, put this conviction to the proof,
here, at once, and make sure yourself, be-
fore you go forth and deceive poor men,
your brethren, to their ruin. You are fam-
ishing here in the wilderness. This, at
least, cannot be what God intends for his
Son, who is to redeem the world. Exercise
some control over the meanest part of your
Father's kingdom. Command these stones
to become bread, and see whether they will
obey you. Cast yourself down from this
height. If you are what you think, your

70 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

Father's angels will bear you up. Then,
after they have borne you up, you may go
on with some reasonable assurance that your
claim is not a mere delusion, and that you
will not be leading these poor men whom
you call your brethren to misery and de-
struction."

And when neither long fasting and weak-
ness, or natural doubt, distrust, impatience,
or the most subtle suggestions of the tempt-
er, can move his simple trust in his Father,
or wring from Him one act of self-assertion,
the enemy changes front and the assault
comes from another quarter. " You may be
right," the voices seem now to be saying ;
" you may not be deceived, or dreaming,
when you claim to be the Son of God, sent
to redeem this fair world, which is now
spread out before you in all its glory. That
may be your origin, and that your work.
But, living as you have done till now in a
remote corner of a despised province, you
have no experience or knowledge of the
methods or powers which sway men, and

THE CALL OF CHkl87f\ Jfl

establish and maintain these kingaojins of /v
the world, the glory of which you^are uoh>
holding. These methods and powers have y<y/
been in use in your Father's world, if it be x
his, ever since man has known good from
evil. You have only to say the word, and
you may use and control these methods and
powers as you please. By their aid you
may possibly • see of the travail of your
soul and be satisfied ; ' without them you
will redeem nothing but perhaps a man
here and there — without them you will
postpone instead of hastening the coming of
your Father's kingdom, to the sorrow and
ruin of many generations, and will die a
foiled and lonely man, crushed by the very
forces you have refused to use for your
Father's service. If they were wholly evil,
wholly unfit for the fulfillment of any pur-
pose of his, would He have left them in
command of his world till this day ? It is
only through them that the world can be
subdued. Your time is short, and you have
already wasted much of it, standing shiver-

72 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

ing on the brink, and letting the years slip
by in that cottage at Nazareth. The wisest
of your ancestors acknowledged and used
them, and spread his kingdom from the
river to the Great Sea. Why should you
reject them ? "

This, very roughly and inadequately
stated, is some shadow of the utmost part
or skirt, as it were, of the trial-crisis, last-
ing forty days, through which Christ passed
from his private to his public career. For
forty days the struggle lasted before He
could finally realize and accept his mission
with all that it implied. At the end of
that time He has fairly mastered and beaten
down every doubt as to his call, every
tempting suggestion to assert Himself, or to
accept or use any aid in establishing his
Father's kingdom which does not clearly
bear his Father's stamp and seal on the
face of it. In the strength of this victory
He returns from the desert, to take up the
burden which has been laid on Him, and
to set up God's kingdom in the world by

TEE CALL OF CHRIST. 73

the methods which He has learned of God
Himself — and by no other.

Thus in following the life of Christ up to
this point, so far as we have any materials,
we have found its main characteristic to be
patience — a resolute waiting on God's
mind. I have asked you to test in every
way you can, whether this kind of patience
does not constitute the highest ideal we can
form of human conduct, is not in fact the
noblest type of true manliness. Pursue
the same method as to this isolated section
of that life, the temptation, which I readily
admit has much in it that we cannot un-
derstand. But take the story simply as
you find it (which is the only honest
method, unless you pass it by altogether,
which would be cowardly) and see whether
you can detect any weakness, any flaw, in
the perfect manliness of Christ under the
strain of which it speaks — whether He
dpes not here also realize for us the most
perfect type of manliness in times of soli-
tary and critical trial. Spare no pains, sup-

74 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

press no doubt, only be honest with the
story, and with your own consciences.

There is scarcely any life of first-rate im-:
portance to the world in which we do not
find a crisis corresponding to this, but the
nearest parallel must be sought amongst
those men, the greatest of their kind, who
have founded or recast one of the great re-
ligions of the world. Of these (if we ex-
cept the greatest of all, Moses) Mohammed
is the only one of whose call we know
enough to speak. Whatever we may think
of him and the religion he founded, we
shall all probably admit that he was at any
rate a man of the rarest courage. In his
case, too, it is only at the end of long and
solitary vigils in the desert that the vision
comes which seals him for his work. The
silver roll is unfolded before his eyes, and
he who holds it bids him read therein the
decrees of God, and tells him, " Thou art
the prophet of God, and I his angel."

He is unmanned by the vision, and flies
trembling to his wife, whose brave and

THE CALL OF CHRIST. 75

loving counsel, and those of his friends
and first disciples, scarcely keep him from
despair and suicide.

I would not press the parallel further
than to remark that Christ came out of the
temptation with no human aid, having trod
the wine-press alone, serene and resolute
from that moment for the work to which
God had called Him.

It remains to follow his life in action,
and to scrutinize its special characteristics
there. And again I would ask you to sift
every step thoroughly for yourselves, and
see whether it will not bear the supreme
crucial test from first to last. Apply that
test, therefore, without scruple or limitation
in respect of this special quality of manli-
ness, from which we started on our inquiry.
I have admitted, and admit again, frankly
and at once, that if the life will not stand
the test throughout, in every separate ac-
tion and detail, the Christian hypothesis
breaks down. For we may make allow-
ances for the noblest and bravest men, for

76 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

Moses and Elijah and St. Paul, for Soc-
rates and Luther and Mohammed, and
every other great prophet, but we can
make none for the perfect Son of man and
Son of God. His life must stand the test
under all circumstances, and at every mo-
ment, or the ground breaks through under
our feet, and God has not revealed Himself
in man to men, or redeemed the world by
the methods in which Christendom has be-
lieved for nineteen hundred years.

PART V.

cheist's ministry, act i.

" This perfect man, by merit called my son,
To earn salvation for the sons of men."

Milton, Paradise Regained, Book I.

It will be necessary for our purpose to
follow in outline the events of our Lord's
ministry as a consecutive narrative. If I
do so without calling your attention to the
endless difficulties and questions which have
been fairly raised as to the occurrence and
sequence of many of those events, it is not
because I wish to ignore them myself, or to
lead you away from the examination of
them. In our time, which is, perhaps, be-
fore all things an age of criticism, much
has been done towards the creation of a
science of history, and therefore of a science
of religion, which is the highest part of his-
tory. "We have discovered, or at any rate

78 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

have done much to perfect, the use of new
and searching methods of investigation, and
have applied, and are applying, these to
every department of human knowledge and
human life.

It was not to be expected, or indeed to
be wished, that the new criticism should
pause before that history, or the books con-
taining it, which our forefathers held too
sacred to be looked upon or treated as or-
dinary history. It has not paused, and,
while respecting our fathers' reverent feel-
ing for the books which have done so much
for our nation and for the world, we may
rejoice that it has not ; and that friend and
foe in this generation have been alike busy
in turning all the light which recent re-
search has placed within their reach upon
the story of our Lord's ministry, and the
gospel narratives in which it is contained.

We English were in danger of idolatry
in this matter, — of putting the Book in the
place of Him of whom it testifies, — and it
is "well for us that we have been shaken;

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT I. 79

however roughly, out of a habit which fos-
tered unreality in the very centre of our
lives. We were inclined to claim for
Christ's religion, and for its evidences, im-
munities which neither He nor his apostles
ever claimed. That position has been
abandoned, and the best representatives of
every school of religious thought amongst
us (so far as I am aware) now challenge
the freest inquiry, and lend their own aid
in carrying it on. And amongst the first,
and not least formidable, difficulties which
have met Christian writers has been that
of harmonizing the writings of the four
evangelists so as to make the several nar-
ratives fit into one continuous whole.

Whether it is possible that this can ever
be done completely, in the absence of the
discovery of new evidence, which there is
no reason to look for, seems to be very
doubtful. At any rate it has not been ac-
complished hitherto. But the general out-
line comes out clearly enough, and this is
all we need in order to pursue our own par-
ticular inquiry satisfactorily.

80 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

Turning, then, to the point at which we
have arrived, we shall find ourselves at once
met by questions of detail as to our Lord's
return from the wilderness after his tempta-
tion. Whether He returned to the scene
of John's baptism, on the Jordan, and re-
mained there for some days, or went
straight back into Galilee from the desert ;
whether He commenced his active ministry
at once, or even yet postponed it until
John had been put in prison — are ques-
tions about which there is as yet no general
concurrence of opinion.

You may each of you judge for your-
selves of the difficulties by comparing the
passages in the four gospels which relate to
this period.

Taking this warning with us, we need
trouble no further about the harmonies. In-
deed, for our purpose, they are of very little
consequence, for, take the narrative how we
will, it divides itself beyond all question
into several distinct and clearly marked
periods. The first of these is that between

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT I. 81

the temptation and the formal opening of
Christ's ministry in Galilee, marked by his
first great discourse at Nazareth, the aban-
donment of his home, and the selection of
the five first Apostles for special and con-
tinuous service. This first period extends
at most over a few months, or more proba-
bly weeks, beginning a few days before the
feast of the Passover, and ending in the
early summer ; at the time, not (so far as I
am aware) exactly ascertained, when Herod
Antipas seized John the Baptist and put
him in prison. We must run through it
shortly, noting the principal events, and
then applying our test to such of them as
seem to come within the scope of our in-
quiry.

The temptation over, Christ appears to
have returned by Bethabara on his way to
his Galilean home. The crowds were still
pressing to John's baptism, and a group
of the most earnest amongst them had al-
ready gathered round the Baptist, and were
attaching themselves to his person, as the

82 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

sons of the prophets round Elisha, the
Apostles round Christ Himself, the com-
panions of Medina round Mohammed.

To two of these disciples John points out
Christ as that Son of God, of whom he was
sent to bear record. They follow Him,
spend a few hours of the afternoon with
Him, and recognize Him as the Messiah.
One of them, Andrew, brings his brother
Simon Peter to Christ. He Himself calls
Philip, who in his turn brings his friend
Nathanael. With these five Christ starts
for his home in Galilee.

These earliest followers, we may note,
are almost certainly of the twelve Apostles,
As to Andrew, Simon Peter, and Philip,
who are expressly named, there is no ques-
tion ; and there is good reason to believe
that the companion of Andrew, whose
name is not given, was John, the son of
Zebedee, and that Nathanael was the
Apostle Bartholomew, whose name is con-
stant^ coupled in the gospels with that of
Philip. Nathanael was of Cana of Galilee,

CHRIST'S MINISTRY. ACT I. 83

of what trade we do not know ; the other
four were of Bethsaida, a suburb of Caper-
naum, fishermen on the Sea of Galilee.

They accompany Christ to Cana, Na-
thanael's home, where they meet Christ's
mother, and are present at the marriage
feast, at which his first miracle is wrought.
From thence they follow him to Caper-
naum, and some of them go on with Him
to Jerusalem to the Passover, at which He
drives out the cattle-dealers from the outer
court of the temple, and overthrows the
tables of the money-changers.

This act fixes the attention of all Jeru-
salem upon Him, and brings Him at once
under the notice of the Sanhedrim. One of
its members, a Pharisee, seeks an interview
with Him by night. He commits Himself
neither to the mob nor to the nobleman.
After the feast He remains for some time
in the northern part of Judaea, where his
fame attracts followers, whom his disciples
baptize. He then passes through Samaria,
still attended by his followers, stopping

84 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

some days in the city of that name, and
preaching there. They then go into Gali-
lee, and, while the disciples apparently
separate for the time to their own homes
and pursuits, He returns to Nazareth, to
begin his formal ministry amongst those
who had known Him from his childhood.
They turn upon Him in the middle of his
first discourse, and attempt to murder Him.
He leaves his old home for the neighboring
village of Cana, where He is found by £he
ruler whose son is sick at Capernaum. He
heals the child, and follows the father to
that city, where He hears of the imprison-
ment of the Baptist, and at once enters on
the second stage of his public career.

And now, following the narrative step
by step so far, see if you can find any trace
in it of a failure of courage, even for a mo-
ment. In the first place you will find, gen-
erally, that there is no wavering or hesita-
tion at any point. The time for these is
past, and, the call once recognized and ac-
cepted there is no shrinking or looking

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT I. 85

round, or going back. The strain and bur-
den of a great message of deliverance to
men has again and again found the weak
places in the faith and courage of the most
devoted and heroic of those to whom it has
been entrusted. Moses pleads under its
pressure that another may be sent in his
place, asking despairingly, " Why hast
Thou sent me ? " Elijah prays for death.
Mohammed passes years of despondency
and hesitation under the sneers of those
who scoff, " There goeth the son of Abdal-
lah, who hath his converse with God ! "
Such shrinkings and doubtings enlist our
sympathy, make us feel the tie of a com-
mon humanity which binds us to such men.
But no one, I suppose, will maintain that
perfect manliness would not suppress, at
any rate, the open expression of any such
feelings. The man who has to lead a great
revolution should keep all misgivings to
himself, and the weight of them so kept
must often prove the sorest part of his bur-
den.

86 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

But let us pass on to the particular
events of this period. As to many of them
the question of whether they are courage-
ous or not, perhaps does not arise, except
in so far as it arises on every act in our
lives, each of which may, and indeed must,
be done either manfully with perfect direct-
ness, or unmanf ully with more or less adroit-
ness. The man whose yea is yea and his
nay nay, is, we all confess, the most cou-
rageous, whether or no he may be the most
successful in daily life. And He who gave
the precept has left us the most perfect
example of how to live up to it. And this
quality you will find shines out at once
in these early conversations with Nathan-
ael, Nicodemus, and the woman of Samaria,
as much as in the discourses of his later
years.

Before considering them we may glance
at the purification of the temple, an act
which at any rate should satisfy those who
think courage best proved by physical dar-
ing. At this time, we must remember, He

CHRIST'S MINISTRY. ACT I. ST

had no following, such as the crowd that
swept after him on Palm Sunday, three
years later, into the temple courts. But,
leaving the act to speak for itself, look at
the rare courage, of the speech by which
that act is justified when it is challenged.
He, not even a Levite, a mere peasant from
a despised province, had presumed to exer-
cise authority in the very temple precincts !
Jerusalem was full of worse idolatries, but
the idolatry of the temple buildings was,
perhaps, the strongest. The Jews seem to
have regarded them as Christians have some-
times regarded the visible Church, or the
Bible — as an object of worship ; to have
thought that if they perished God Himself
would perish. And so Christ's answer goes
straight to the root of their idolatry. His
words were not understood by the crowd,
or even by his own disciples, in their full
meaning — that his body, and the body of
every man, is the true temple of God. But
they understood enough of them to see that
He had no superstition about these splendid

88 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

buildings of theirs, and was trying to lift
them above local and national prejudices,
and those who would not be lifted brooded
over them till their day of vengeance came.

But there were those on whom the daring
acts and words of Christ were already tak-
ing hold. Many of those who had come up
to the Passover believed in Him, some even
amongst the rulers. One of these we hear
more of at once.

Nicodemus, we must remember, was a
leading member of the Sanhedrim, a repre-
sentative of that section of the rulers who,
like the rest of the nation, were expecting a
deliverer, a king who should prevail against
the Caesar. They had sent to the Baptist,
and had heard of his testimony to this
young Galilean, who had now come to Je-
rusalem, and was showing signs of a power
which they could not but acknowledge. For,
had He not cleansed the temple, which they
had never been able to do, but, notwith-
standing their pretended reverence for it,
had allowed to be turned into a shambles

CHRIST'S MINISTRY. ACT I. 89

and an exchange ? They saw that a part
of the people were ready to gather to Him,
but that He had refused to commit Himself
to them. This, then, the best of them must
have felt, was no mere leader of a low, fierce,
popular party or faction. Nicodemus at
any rate was evidently inclined to doubt
whether He might not prove to be the king
they were looking for, as the Baptist had
declared. The doubt must be solved, and
he would see for himself.

And so he comes to Christ, and hears di-
rectly from Him, that He has indeed come
to set up a kingdom, but that it is no visi-
ble kingdom like the Caesar's, but a king-
dom over men's spirits, one which rulers as
well as peasants must become new men be-
fore they can enter — that a light has come
into the world, and "he that doeth truth
cometh to that light."

From beginning to end there is no word
to catch this ruler, or those he represented ;
no balancing of phrases or playing with
plausible religious shibboleths, with which

90 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

Nicodemus would be familiar, and which
might please, and, perchance, reconcile, this
well-disposed ruler, and the powerful per-
sons he represented. There is, depend upon
it, no severer test of manliness than our be-
havior to powerful persons, whose aid would
advance the cause we have at heart. We
know from the later records that the inter-
view of that night, and the strange words
he had heard at it, made a deep impression
on this ruler. His manliness, however,
breaks down for the present. He shrinks
back and disappears, leaving the strange
young peasant to go on his way.

The same splendid directness and incisive-
ness characterize his teaching at Samaria.
There, again, He attacks at once the most
cherished local traditions, showing that the
place of worship matters nothing, the ob-
ject of worship everything. That object is
a Father of men's spirits, who wills that all
men shall know and worship Him, but who
can only be worshipped in spirit and in
truth. He, the peasant who is talking to

CHRIST'S MINISTRY. ACT I. 91

them, is Himself the Messiah, who has come
from this Father of them and Him, to give
them this spirit of truth in their own hearts.

The Jews at Jerusalem had been clamor-
ing round Him for signs of his claim to
speak such words, and in the next few days
his own people would be crying out for his
blood when they heard them. These Sa-
maritans make no such demand, but hear
and recognize the message and the messen-
ger. The seed is sown, and He passes on,
never to return and garner the harvest;
deliberately preferring the hard, priest-rid-
den lake cities of the Jews as the centre of
his ministry. He will leave ripe fields for
others to reap. This decision, interpret it
as we will, is that of no soft or timid re-
former. Take this test again and compare
Christ's choice of his first field for work
with that of any other great leader of men.

This first period fitly closes with the
scene at Nazareth. Here He returns, while
the reports of his doings at the feast at
Jerusalem are fresh in the minds of his

92 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

family and fellow-townsmen. They are ex-
cited and divided as to Him and his do-
ings. A thousand reasons would occur for
speaking soft things, at such a moment, for
accommodating His teaching, here at any
rate, to the wants and tastes of his hearers,
so as to keep a safe and friendly asylum at
Nazareth, amongst the scenes and people
He had loved from childhood. It is clear
that some of his family, if not his mother
herself, were already seriously alarmed and
displeased. They disliked what they had
heard of His teaching at Jerusalem and on
His way home, which they felt must bring
Him to ruin, in which they might be in-
volved. He must have seen and conversed
with them in his own home before that
scene in the synagogue, and have had then
to endure the bitter pain of alienating those
whom He loved and respected, and had
reason to love and respect, but who could
not for the time rise out of the conven-
tional, respectable way of looking at things.
To stand by what our conscience wit-

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT I. 93

nesses for as truth, through evil and good
report, even against all opposition of those
we love, and of those whose judgment we
look up to and should ordinarily prefer to
follow ; to cut ourselves deliberately off
from their love and sympathy and respect ,
is surely, I repeat, one of the most severe
trials to which we can be put. A man has
need to feel at such times that the Spirit of
the Lord is upon him in some measure, as
it was upon Christ when He rose in the
synagogue of Nazareth and, selecting the
passage of Isaiah which speaks most di-
rectly of the Messiah, claimed that title for
Himself, and told them that to-day this
prophecy was fulfilled in Him.

The fierce, hard, Jewish spirit is at once
roused to fury. They would kill Him then j J
and there, and so settle his claims, once
for all. He passes through them, and away
from the quiet home where He had been
brought up — alone, it would seem, so far
as man could make Him so, and homeless
for the remainder of his life. Yet not

94 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

alone, for his Father is with Him ; nor
homeless, for He has the only home of
which man can be sure, the home of his
own heart shared with the Spirit of God.

PART VI. W/j

Christ's ministry, act n. ^

" What is it that ye came to note ?
A young man preaching from a boat."

A. Clough.

The second period of our Lord's minis-
try is one, in the main, of joyful progress
and triumph, in which the test of true man-
liness must be more subtle than when the
surroundings are hostile. It consists, I
think, at such times in the careful watch-
fulness not to give wrong impressions, not
to mislead those who are touched by en-
thusiasm, conscious of new life, grateful to
Him who has kindled that life in them.

It is then that the temptation to be all
things to all men in a wrong sense — to
adapt and accommodate teaching and life
to a lower standard in order to maintain a
hold upon the masses of average men and
women who have been moved by the words

96 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

of lips touched by fire from the altar of
God, — has generally proved too much for
the best and strongest of the world's great
reformers. It is scarcely necessary to labor
this point, which would, I think, be sorrow-
fully admitted by those who have studied
most lovingly and carefully the lives of
such men, for instance, as Savonarola or
Wesley. If you will refer to a recent and
valuable work on the life of a greater
than either of these, Mr. Bosworth Smith's
11 Mohammed and Mohammedanism," you
will find there perhaps the best illustration
which I can give you of this sad experience.
When Mohammed returns from Medina,
sweeping at last all enemies out of his path,
as the prophet of a new faith, and the
leader of an awakened and repentant peo-
ple, his biographer pauses to notice the
lowering of the standard, both in his life
and teaching. Power, he pleads, brings
with it new temptations and new failures.
The more thoroughly a man is carried away
by his inspiration, and convinced of the

CHRIST'S MINISTRY. ACT II. 97

truth and goodness of his cause and his
message, the more likely is he to forget the
means in the end, and to allow the end to
justify whatever means seem to lead to its
triumph. He must maintain as he can, and
by any means, his power over the motley
mass of followers that his mission has
gathered round him, and will be apt to aim
rather at what will hold them than at what
will satisfy the highest promptings of his
own conscience.

We may allow the plea in such cases,
though with sorrow and humiliation. But
the more minutely we examine the life of
Christ the more we shall feel that here,
again, there is no place for it. We shall
be impressed with the entire absence of any
such bending to expediency, or forgetting
the means in the end. He never for one
moment accommodates his life or teaching
to any standard but the highest : never
lowers or relaxes that standard by a shade
or a hair's-breadth, to make the road easy
to rich or powerful questioners, or to uphold
7

98 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

the spirit of his poorer followers when they
are startled and uneasy, as they begin half-
blindly to recognize what spirit they are of.
This unbending truthfulness is, then, what
we have chiefly to look for in this period of
triumphant progress and success, question-
ing each act and word in turn whether
there is any swerving in it from the highest
ideal.

It is not easy to mark off distinctly the
time over which it extends, but it seems to
me to commence with his return to Caper-
naum, after the healing of the centurion's
son, when He hears of the imprisonment
of John, and to end with the estrangement
of many of his followers at his teaching as
to the bread of life, and the nearly con-
temporaneous and final and open rupture
with, and defiance of, the chief priests and
scribes and Pharisees, when they change
from suspicious and watchful critics into
open and avowed enemies, baffled for the
moment, but dogging his footsteps and
thirsting for his blood.

CHRIST 8 MINISTRY. ACT II. 99

It is upon his relations with these scribes
and Pharisees more particularly that we
must keep our attention fixed, as it is here,
if anywhere, that we may look for a failure
of nerve and truthfulness, and therefore of
manliness.

We must gather our connected view of
this period from all the narratives, and shall
find the beginning most clearly indicated in
St. Matthew, in the last part of the fourth
chapter, where He recalls to his side Peter
and Andrew and the sons of Zebedee —
who appear to have left Him for the mo-
ment and to have returned to their boats
and nets at Bethsaida — and opens his
ministry in the lake cities by the Sermon
on the Mount* For the end we must go to
the eleventh chapter of St. Luke, where, in
the house of a Pharisee, He speaks the
words which madden Pharisees and lawyers
into urging Him vehemently to speak of
many things, and watching for the words
which will enable them to entangle, and, as
they think, to destroy Him.

100 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

First, then, as to the main facts so far as
they are necessary for our purposes. We
may note that our Lord accepts at once the
imprisonment of the Baptist as the final
summons to Himself. Gathering, there-
fore, a few of John's disciples round him,
and welcoming the restless inquiring crowds
who had been roused by the voice crying in
the wilderness, He ' stands forward at once
to proclaim and explain the nature of that
new kingdom of God, which has now to be
set up in the world. Standing forth alone,
on the open hill-side, the young Galilean
peasant gives forth the great proclamation,
which by one effort lifted mankind on to
that new and higher ground on which it
has been painfully struggling ever since,
but on the whole with sure though slow
success, to plant itself and maintain sure
foothold.

In all history there is no parallel to it.
It stands there, a miracle or sign of God's
reign in this world, far more wonderful
than any of Christ's miracles of healing.

CHRIST 8 MINISTRY. ACT II. 101

Unbelievers have been sneering at and ridi-
culing it, and Christian doctors paring and
explaining it away ever since. But there
it stands, as strong and fresh as ever, the
calm declaration and witness of what man-
kind is intended by God to become on this
earth of his.

As a question of courageous utterance
(with which we are* here mainly con-
cerned), I would only ask you to read it
through once more, bearing in mind who
the preacher was — a peasant, already re-
pudiated by his own neighbors and kinsfolk,
and suspected by the national rulers and
teachers ; and who were the hearers — a
motley crowd of Jewish peasants and fisher-
men, Romish legionaries, traders from Da-
mascus, Tyre, and Sidon, and the distant
isles of Greece, with a large sprinkling of '
publicans, scribes, Pharisees, and lawyers.

The immediate result of the sermon was
to bow the hearts of this crowd for the time,
so that He was able to choose followers
from amongst them, much as He would.

102 TEE MANLINESS OF CERIST.

He takes fishermen and peasants, selecting
only two at most from any rank above the
lowest, and one of these from a class more
hated and despised by the Jews than the
poorest peasant, the publicans. It is plain
that He might at first have called apostles
from amongst the upper classes had He
desired it — as a teacher with any want of
courage would surely have done. But the
only scribe who offers himself is rejected.

The calling of the Apostles is followed
by a succession of discourses and miracles,
which move the people more and more,
until, after that of the loaves, the popular
enthusiasm rises to the point it had so often
reached in the case of other preachers and
leaders of this strange people. They are
ready to take him by force and make him a
king.

The Apostles apparently encourage this
enthusiasm, for, which He constrains them
into a ship, and sends them away before
Him. After rejoining them and rebuking
their want of understanding and faith, He

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT II. 103

returns with them to the multitudes, and
at once speaks of Himself as the bread
from heaven, in the discourse which offends
many of his disciples, who from this time
go back and walk no more with him. The
brief season of triumphant progress is draw-
ing to an end, during which He could re-
joice in spirit in contemplating the human
r harvest which He and his disciples seem to
be already successfully garnering.

But, even while the prospect was fairest,
while the people were surging round Him
in the first enthusiasm of their new faith,
there had been ominous signs of that an-
tagonism of the rulers which was to end on
Calvary, and we have now to glance at the
relations of Christ with them during this
same period.

This antagonism was of gradual growth.
In the first instance many of the scribes
and Pharisees seem to have followed Him,
more for the purpose of hearing and watch-
ing, than in a spirit of direct hostility. In
the Sermon on the Mount He only once al-

104 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

ludes to them directly, when He tells his
hearers that unless their righteousness ex-
ceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees
there can be no place for them in this king-
dom of which He is now proclaiming the
laws. It does not appear, however, at first
that they were alienated by what was then
said, for soon afterwards we find Pharisees
and doctors of the law from Jerusalem
" and every town of Galilee and Judaea "
sitting by while He teaches, " and the
power of the Lord was present to heal
them."

Now, however, they are aroused and
startled by Christ's address to the palsied
man — " Thy sins are forgiven thee."
The cure of the man silences them for the
moment. They are filled with fear, and
glorify God, saying, " We have seen
strange things to-day." But Christ's next
act again rouses their jealousy afresh.
He has not called any of them to his side ;
that, probably, they would have deemed
presumption. They are waiting and watch-

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT II. 105

ing ; thinking, doubtless, that their pres-
ence gives a sanction and respectability to
the young teacher, which He, and the
crowds who come to hear and be healed,
will in due course learn to appreciate.
Meantime it might restrain Him and them
from rash acts and words, which would
ruin a national movement that might possi-
bly be hereafter guided to the advantage
of Israel.

But now, while the great men are thus
balancing, and probably admiring them-
selves for their liberality, Christ singles
out Levi the publican, calls him as an Apos-
tle, and goes to his house to feast with a
large company of other publicans. The
great people remonstrate angrily. Such an
act outrages all their notions of the ortho-
dox conduct of a prophet. Christ replies,
simply, that He has come to call sinners,
not the righteous, to repentance.

A few days later an even more serious
question is raised between them. On a
Sabbath day his disciples pluck and eat the

106 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

corn, and Christ justifies them. On the
next Sabbath, while they are watching Him,
He heals a man, with the obvious purpose
of trying them, and claims to be Lord of
the Sabbath as He had claimed power to
forgive sins. They begin to be filled with
madness, and commune what they can do to
Him.

Still, however, the breach is not final.
They have not abandoned the hope of using
the young preacher and prophet for their
purposes. So Simon, one of their number,
invites Him to his house, and, though neg-
lecting the usual courtesies of an enter-
tainer (as out of place in the case of a peas-
ant), is evidently not treacherous in the in-
vitation. He might well flatter himself on
his freedom from class prejudices, and feel
that such condescension would have a good
effect on his guest, and might lead Him in
good time to rely on and consult persons
moving in the upper ranks of Jewish society
as to his future course.

The story of the woman, a sinner, who

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT II. 107

gets into the room and anoints Christ's
feet, and the use which He makes of the
incident — to bring home to Simon's mind,
with the most exquisite temper and court-
esy, but with the most faithful firmness,
his shortcomings as a host, and his want of
true insight as a man — are amongst the
finest illustrations we have of his method
with the great and powerful of his nation.
Before leaving the house He once more re-
asserts his power to forgive sins.

We must now follow Him to Jerusalem,
to which He goes up to one of the feasts,
and, at the headquarters of the scribes and
Pharisees, deliberately raises afresh the
burning questions which He had left rank-
ling in the minds of the provincial hier-
archy. He heals the impotent man at the
pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath day, and
sends him through the streets carrying his
bed. Challenged to defend Himself (prob-
ably before the Sanhedrim), He claims,
more explicitly than ever before, that God
is his Father, and has given Him not only

108 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

power to do mighty works, but " author-
ity to execute judgment ; " that their own
Scriptures testify of Him as He who can
give them life if they will come to Him for
it. Upon which they, naturally enough,
seek to slay Him ; but He gets back un-
scathed to Galilee, and then follows the
scene which I have referred to as the end
of this period of his ministry.

The Pharisees are now dogging his foot-
steps wherever He goes, but even yet have
not given up the hope of coming to some
terms with One whom they cannot help ac-
knowledging to wield a power over the peo-
ple which has slipped away from them-
selves. Influenced possibly, by a discourse
in which He upbraids the people as an evil
generation, without specially alluding, as was
so often his custom, to the people's leaders
and teachers as those upon whom the chief
guilt rested, they again invite Him into
their own circle. But now the time is past
for the kindly courtesy of the feast in Si-
mon's house. The usual means of washing

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT II. 109

before meat are there, but He rejects them.
They express a well-bred astonishment, and
then follows that scathing denunciation of
their hypocrisies and tyrannies, of their
" inward parts full of ravening wickedness,"
which makes the breach final and irrevoca-
ble between the Son of Man and the rulers
of Israel.

Thenceforth Christ has more and more to
" tread the wine press alone," surrounded
by bewildered followers, and powerful ene-
mies resolved on his destruction, and un-
scrupulous as to the means by which it
must be compassed.

PART VII.

MINISTRY. ACT HI.

" By the light of burning martyr fires Christ's bleeding feet
I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns
not back." Lowell.

We have now reached the critical point,
the third act in the world's greatest drama.
All chance of the speedy triumph of the
kingdom of God, humanly speaking,' in this
lake country of Galilee, — the battle-field
chosen by Himself, where his mightiest
works had been done and his mightiest
words spoken, — the district from which
his chosen companions came, and in which
clamorous crowds had been ready to declare
Him king, — is now over. The conviction
that this is so, that He is a baffled leader,
in hourly danger of his life, has forced it-
self on Christ. Before entering that bat-
tle-field, face to face with the tempter in

CHRIST 8 MINISTRY. ACT III. Ill

the wilderness, He had deliberately rejected
all aid from the powers and kingdoms of
this world, and now, for the moment, the
powers of this world have proved too strong
for Him.

The rulers of that people — Pharisee,
Sadducee, and Herodian, scribe and lawyer
— were now marshaled against Him in one
compact phalanx, throughout all the coasts
of Galilee, as well as in Judaea.

His disciples, rough, most of them peas-
ants, full of patriotism but with small power
of insight or self-control, were melting
away from a leader who, while He refused
them active service under a patriot chief at
open war with Caesar and his legions, be-
wildered them by assuming titles and talk-
ing to them in language which they could
not understand. They were longing for one
who would rally them against the Roman
oppressor, and give them a chance, at any
rate, of winning their own land again,
purged of the heathen and free from tribute.
Such an one would be worth following to

112 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

the death. But what could they make of
this " Son of Man," who would prove his
title to that name by giving his body and
pouring out his blood for the life of man —
of this " Son of God," who spoke of re-
deeming mankind and exalting mankind to
God's right hand, instead of exalting the
Jew to the head of mankind ?

In the face of such a state of things to
remain in Capernaum, or the neighboring
towns and villages, would have been to
court death, there, and at once. The truly
courageous man, you may remind me, is not
turned from his path by the fear of death,
which is the supreme test and touchstone of
his courage. True ; — nor was Christ so
turned, even for a moment.

Whatever may have been his hopes in
the earlier part of his career, by this time
He had no longer a thought that mankind
could be redeemed without his own perfect
and absolute sacrifice and humiliation. The
cup would indeed have to be drunk to the
dregs, but not here, nor now. This must

CHRIST'S MINISTRY. ACT III. 113

be done at Jerusalem, the centre of the
national life and the seat of the Roman
government. It must be done during the
Passover, the national commemoration of
sacrifice and deliverance. And so He with-
draws, with a handful of disciples, and even
they still wayward, half-hearted, doubting,
from the constant stress of a battle which
has turned against Him. From this time
He keeps away from the great centres of
population, except when, on two occasions
— at the Feast of Tabernacles and the
Feast of the Dedication — He flashes for a
day on Jerusalem, and then disappears
again into some haunt of outlaws, or of
wild beasts. This portion of his life com-
prises something less than the last twelve
months, from the summer of the second
year of his ministry till the eve of the last
Passover, at Easter, in the third year.

In glancing at the main facts of this pe-
riod, as we have done in the former ones,
we have to note chiefly his intercourse with
the twelve Apostles, and his preparation of

114 TEE MANLINESS OF CERIST.

them for the end of his own career and the
beginning of theirs ; his conduct at Jerusa-
lem during those two autumnal and winter
feasts ; and the occasions when He again
comes into collision with the rulers and
Pharisees, both at these feasts and in the
intervals between them.

The keynote of it, in spite of certain
short and beautiful interludes, appears to
me to be a sense of loneliness and oppres-
sion, caused by the feeling that He has
work to do, and words to speak, which
those for whom they are to be done and
spoken, and whom they are, first of all
men, to bless, will either misunderstand or
abhor. Here is all the visible result of his
labor, and of his travail, and the enemy is
gathering strength every day.

This becomes clear, I think, at once,
when, in the first days after his quitting the
lake shores, He asks his disciples the ques-
tion, " Whom do the world, and whom do
ye, say that I am?" He is answered by
Peter in the well-known burst of enthu-

CHRIST'S MINISTRY. ACT III. 115

siasm, that, though the people only look on
Him as a prophet, such as Elijah or Jere-
miah, his own chosen followers see in Him
" the Christ, the Son of the living God."

It is this particular moment which He
selects for telling them distinctly, that
Christ will not triumph as they regard tri-
umphing ; that He will fall into the power
of his enemies, and be humbled and slain
by them. At once the proof comes of how
little even the best of his own most inti-
mate friends had caught the spirit of his
teaching or of his kingdom. The announce-
ment of his humiliation and death, which
none but the most truthful and courageous
of men would have made at such a moment,
leaves them almost as much bewildered as
the crowds in the lake cities had been a few
days before.

Their hearts are faithful and simple, and
upon them, as Peter has testified, the truth
has flashed once for all, that there can be
no other Saviour of men than this Man
with whom they are living. Still, by what

116 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

means and to what end the salvation shall
come, they are scarcely less ignorant than
the people who had been in vain seeking
from Him a sign such as they desired. His
own elect " understood not his saying, and
it was hid from them, that they perceived
it not." Rather, indeed, they go straight
from that teaching to dispute amongst them-
selves who of them shall be the greatest
in that kingdom which they understand so
little. And so their Master has to begin
again at the beginning of his teaching, and,
placing a little child amongst them, to de-
clare that not of such men as they deem
themselves, but of such as this child, is the
kingdom of heaven.

The episode of the Transfiguration fol-
lows ; and immediately after it, as though
purposely to warn even the three chosen
friends who had been present against new
delusions, He repeats again the teaching
as to his death and humiliation. And He re-
iterates it whenever any exhibition of power
or wisdom seems likely to encourage the

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT III. 117

frame of mind in the twelve generally which
had lately brought the great rebuke on
Peter. How slowly it did its work, even
with the foremost disciples, there are but
too many proofs.

Amongst his kinsfolk and the people
generally, his mission, thanks to the cabals
of the rulers and elders, had come by this
time to be looked upon with deep distrust
and impatience. " How long dost Thou
make us to doubt ? Go up to this coming
feast, and there prove your title before
those who know how to judge in such mat-
ters," is the querulous cry of the former as
the Feast of Tabernacles approaches. He
does not go up publicly with the caravan,
which would have been at this time need-
lessly to incur danger, but, when the feast
is half over, suddenly appears in the tem-
ple. There He again openly affronts the
rulers by justifying his former acts, and
teaching and proclaiming that He who has
sent Him is true, and is their God.

It is evidently on account of this new

118 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

proof of daring that the people now again
begin to rally round him. "Behold, He
speaketh boldly. Do our rulers know that
this is Christ ? " is the talk which fills the
air, and induces the scribes and Pharisees,
for the first time, to attempt his arrest by
their officers.

The officers return without Him, and
their masters are, for the moment, power-
less before the simple word of Him who, as
their own servants testify, " speaks as never
man spake." But if they cannot arrest and
execute, they may entangle Him further,
and prepare for their day, which is surely
and swiftly coming. So they bring to Him
the woman taken in adultery, and draw
from Him the discourse in which He tells
them that the truth will make them free —
the truth which He has come to tell them,
but which they will not hear, because they
are of their father the devil. He ends with
asserting his claim to the name which every
Jew held sacred, " before Abraham was, I
am." The narrative of the seventh and

Vk

CHRIST'S MINISTRY. ACT III. 119

eighth chapters of St. John, which repbrd/ *o
these scenes at the Feast of Tabernacles,
have, I believe, done more to make men
courageous and truly manly, than all the
stirring accounts of bold deeds which ever
were written elsewhere.

The report of what had happened at the
Feast of Tabernacles seems to have re-
kindled for a moment the fitful zeal of the
people of Galilee. Christ does not, how-
ever, avail Himself of this reaction until
the time comes for another return to Jeru-
salem to the Feast of Dedication, when,
probably in the month of November or early
in December, He returns once more to Ca-
pernaum, to prepare for his last journey.
The Pharisees, impotent themselves for the
moment, now hurry to warn Him that
Herod is seeking to kill Him ; but He
passes on his way with perfect indifference.

The crowds seem, as of old, inclined to
gather round Him again. He selects sev-
enty from amongst them, and sends them
on to prepare his route, following Himself,

120 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

and, this time, it being his last pilgrimage,
with the multitude.

And now, again, in the first days of this
progress, the most trusted of the Apostles
show how little, eyen yet, they understand
their Lord, or their own work. When they
see their Master once more at the head of
a throng of followers the old spirit comes
back on them as strongly as ever, and they
are anxious to call down fire from heaven
to consume those who will not receive Him.
His rebuke and warning, yet again, pass by
them, and get -no hold on them. Rather,
the incidents of the journey impress them
more and more with the belief that, at last,
the kingdom is coming with power. At
length, at some point in the progress, they
are amazed, and as they follow are afraid.
Once more Christ takes them aside, and
endeavors to dispel their dreams, repeat-
ing to them, in painful detail, what will
happen to Himself at Jerusalem at the
end of this journey ; that He will be be-
trayed, delivered to the Gentiles, mocked,

CHRIST S MINISTRY. ACT III. 121

scourged, spat upon, crucified. In spite of
this warning, and while it is yet ringing in
their ears, we find James and John asking
for the places of honor in the kingdom of
their own imaginations !

At the feast He is met by the Pharisees
and scribes in a somewhat different temper
from that which they had shown at the end '
of his last visit. For He is once again at
the head of a vast and eager multitude.
They know that some, even of their own
number, are inclined to believe in Him.
They appeal to Him, passionately, to say
who He* is. He replies by referring to his
former teaching about his Father, whom
they claimed as their God, adding, " I and
my Father are one."

Such a reply He well knew could only
have one result. He was alone ; and in the
ears of those who surrounded Him He was
speaking blasphemy, which could only be
expiated by instant death. Yet He neither /
hesitates nor temporizes, but, when they
seize stones to inflict the penalty, meets

122 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

them with a bearing so calm and manly
that they can no more cast the first stone at
Him than they could three months before
at the woman taken in adultery.

He leaves Jerusalem once more after the
feast, going across Jordan with his Apostles
to the country where John came preaching
and baptizing, and remains there preaching
to those who come to Him, until the news
of Lazarus's death takes Him for a few days
to Bethany. After the raising of his friend
He returns to Peraea again, and leaves
it only when the great caravan is passing by
on its way to the Passover, in the early
spring. He joins the caravan with his dis-
ciples, passing with it through Jericho, the
city of priests, and selecting there the pub-
lican Zacchaeus as his host, — a last lesson,
by example, of the kind of material which
will be used in building up his kingdom.

On the first day of the feast He rides into
Jerusalem in apparent triumph, the city
mob joining the pilgrim mob in greeting
Him with loud Hosannas. Once more He

CHRISTS MINISTRY. ACT III. 123

cleanses the temple, and rouses the covet-
ousness of the money-changers into active
alliance with the bigotry of the priests, and
the wild anger and jealousy of the rulers,
to sweep this terrible Galilean revolutionist
from the face of the earth, before He shall
ruin them all.

For two days He continues to meet them
in the temple and public resorts of the city,
shaming, confuting, and denouncing them,
and widening hour by hour that breach
which was already gaping wide between
the nation and city and their true Lord and
King. The last scene in the temple, re-
corded in John, brings the long struggle to
a close.

The more carefully you study this long
wrestle with the blind leaders of a doomed
nation, which has now come to an end, the
more you will recognize the perfect truth-
fulness and therefore the perfect courage,
which marks Christ's conduct of it. From
beginning to end there is no word or act
which can mislead friend or foe. The

124 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

strife, though for life and death, has left no
trace or stain on his nature. Fresh from
the last and final conflict in the temple
court, He can pause on the side of Olivet to
weep over the city, the sight of which can
still wring from Him the pathetic yearnings
of a soul purified from all taint of bitter-
ness.

It is this most tender and sensitive of
the sons of men — with fibres answering to
every touch and breath of human sympathy
or human hate — who has borne with abso-
lutely unshaken steadfastness the distrust
and anger of kinsfolk, the ingratitude of
converts, the blindness of disciples, the fit-
ful and purblind worship, and hatred, and
fear, of the nation of the Jews. So far, we
can estimate to some extent the burden
and the strain, and realize the strength and
beauty of the spirit which could bear it all.
Beyond and behind lie depths into which
we can but glance. For in those last hours
of his life on earth the question was to be

CHRIST 8 MINISTRY, ACT III. 125

decided whether we men have in deed and
in truth a brotherhood, in a Son of Man,
the head of humanity, who has united man-
kind to their Father, and can enable them
to know Him.

PART VIII.

THE LAST ACT.

" Thou seem'st both human and divine ;
The highest, holiest manhood Thou ! "

Tennyson.

We have reached the last stage, which is
also the most critical one, of our inquiry.
It is upon the accounts which we have of
Christ's agony that the scornful denials of
his manliness mainly rest. How, it is"
asked, can you Christians recognize as per-
fect man, as the head and representative of
humanity, one who showed such signs of
physical fear and weakness as Christ, by
your own confession, showed in the garden
of Gethsemane? Even without going to
the roll of saints and martyrs, hundreds of
men and women can be named who have
looked a cruel death in the face without
flinching, and endured tortures at least as

THE LAST ACT. 127

painful as his with a constancy which was
wanting in Him.

It was, indeed, a speech of this kind, in
which the death of the Abolitionist leader,
John Brown, was contrasted with that of
Christ, as one so far superior in manliness
that it ought to be enough of itself to
shame Christians out of their superstition,
which confirmed me in proposing this in-
quiry to you, as the most necessary and
useful one we could engage in.

Now I freely admit that there is no re-
corded end of a life that I know of more
entirely brave and manly than this one of
Captain John Brown, of which we know
every minutest detail, as it happened in the
full glare of our modern life not twenty
years ago. About that I think there would
scarcely be disagreement anywhere. The
very men who allowed him to lie in his
bloody clothes till the day of his execu-
tion, and then hanged him, recognized this.
"You are a game man, Captain Brown,"
the Southern sheriff said in the wagon.

128 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

" Yes," lie answered, " I was so brought up.
It was one of my- mother's lessons. From
infancy I have not suffered from physical
fear. I have suffered a thousand times
more from bashfulness ; " and then he
kissed a negro child in its mother's arms,
and walked cheerfully on to the scaffold,
thankful that he was " allowed to die for a
cause, and not merely to pay the debt of
nature, as all must."

There is no simpler or nobler record in
the "Book of Martyrs," and in passing I
would only remind you, that he at least was
ready to acknowledge from whence came his
strength. " Christ, the great Captain of lib-
erty as well as of salvation," he wrote just
before his death, " saw fit to take from me
the sword of steel after I had carried it for
a time. But He has put another in my
hand, the sword of the Spirit, and I pray
God to make me a faithful soldier wher-
ever He may send me." And to a friend
who left him with the words, " If you can
be true to yourself to the end how glad we

THE LAST ACT. 129

shall be," he answered, " I cannot say, but
I do not think I shall deny my Lord and
Master, Jesus Christ." The old Abolition-
ist would have been as amazed as any man
at such a comparison as we are dealing
with, and would have reminded us that, so
far from treading the wine-press alone, he
was upheld by the sympathy and enthusi-
asm of all of his own nation, and of the
world outside his own nation, for whom he
cared.

No such support had Christ. He knew
too well that even the strongest of the little
band which came with Him to the garden
would deny Him before the light dawned
over Olivet. And that sense of utter lone-
liness it was, more probably than all the
rest of the burden which He was carrying,
that wrung from Him the prayer of agony,
recalled almost before it was uttered, that
the cup might pass from Him, and caused
the sweat as it were great drops of blood \o
fall from his brow as He knelt and prayed.

How the tradition of that agony and

9

130 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

bloody sweat has come to us is hard to say,
as the nearest witnesses were asleep; but
no Christian doubts that it is a true one, or
that the passion of human weakness which
then passed over his soul was a genuine
shrinking from the unutterable anguish
which was weighing it down to the dust.

But even admitting frankly all that is
recorded of the agony and bloody sweat,
such admission can only enhance the sub-
lime courage of all that follows. It is his
action when the danger comes, not when
he is in solitary preparation for it, which
marks the man of courage.

Let us just glance at this action. As
Judas with his torchmen draws near He
gathers Himself together, rouses his sleepy
followers, and meets his enemy in the gate.
There could have been no quailing in the
glance before which the armed crowd of
priests' retainers went backward and fell to
the ground.

Follow Him through that long night : to
the Sanhedrim chamber, where He Himself

THE LAST ACT. 131

furnishes the evidence which the chief priest
sought for in vain while He was silent — to
the court of the palace, where He bore the
ribaldry and dastard tortures and insults of
the low Jewish crowd till morning, turning
in the midst of them with the reminding
look to Peter, which sent his last friend,
broken down by the consciousness of his
own cowardice, weeping into the night — to
the judgment-seat of Pilate, and the scourg-
ings of the Roman soldiers — to Herod's
hall and the insults of the base Galilean
court — back again to the judgment-seat of
the representative of the divine Tiberius,
and so to the final brutalities in the praeto-
rium while the cross is preparing, and the
blood which is dripping from the crown of
thorns on his brow mingles with that which
flows from the wounds of his scourgings —
and find, if you can, one momentary sign
of terror or of weakness.

In all the world's annals there is nothing
which approaches, in the sublimity of its
courage, that last conversation between

132 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

the peasant prisoner, by this time a mass of
filth and blood, and the Roman procurator,
before Pilate led Him forth for the last time
and pleaded scornfully with his nation for
the life of their King. The canon from
which we started must guide us to the end.
There must be no flaw or spot on Christ's
courage, any more than on his wisdom and
tenderness and sympathy. And for the last
time I repeat, the more unflinchingly we
apply the test, the more clear and sure will
the response come back to us.

We have been told recently, by more
than one of those who profess to have
weighed and measured Christianity and
found it wanting, that religion must rest on
reason, based on phenomena of this visible,
tangible world in which we are living.

Be it so. There is no need for a Chris-
tian to object. He can meet this challenge
as well as any other. We need never be
careful about choosing our own battle-field.
Looking, then, at that world as we see it,
laboring heavily along in our own time

THE LAST ACT. 133

■ — as we hear of it through the records of
the ages — I must repeat that there is no
phenomenon in it comparable for a moment
to this of Christ's life and work. The more
we canvass and sift and weigh and balance
the materials, the more clearly and grandly
does his figure rise before us, as the true
Head of humanity, the perfect Ideal, not
only of wisdom and tenderness and love,
but of courage also, because He was and
is the simple Truth of God — the expres-
sion, at last, in flesh and blood, of what He
who created us means each one of our race
to be.

We have now finished our endeavor to
look at the life of Christ from one point of
view, and in special connection with one
human quality. I trust it may prove to be
only the first step for many of you in a
study which will last your lives. At any
rate it is one which the reverence which is
felt by every member of this College for
our founder ought to commend to us above
all others.

134 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

He, as yon all know, was never weary of
impressing on us, term after term, year af-
ter year, that the aim of this place is to
make good citizens, and that this can only
be done by keeping vividly before ourselves,
in all our work here, that common human-
ity which binds us all together by the ties
of family, of neighborhood, of country.
What that common humanity means and
implies, he taught us, can only be under-
stood by reference to a Son of Man, and
Son of God, in whom we have all a common
interest, through whom we have all a com-
mon spiritual relationship to his and our
Father.

To bring this home to us all, as the cen-
tral truth of our own lives, as the master-
key of the confusions and perplexities in our
own hearts and in the world around us,
was the crowning work of his life, and I
trust we have been true to his principle and
his method in our attempt to realize the
life of this Son of Man, and Son of God
on this earth, which is so mysteriously at

THE LAST ACT. 135

strife with the will of its Creator and Re-
deemer.

Into the heart of the mystery of that
strife the wisest and best of us cannot pene-
trate, but the wayfaring man cannot help
seeing that it is precisely around this life
of the Son of Man and Son of God that
the fiercest controversies of our time are
raging. Is it not also becoming clearer
every day that they will continue to rage
more and more fiercely — that there can be
no rest or peace possible for mankind —
until all things are subdued to Him, and
brought into harmony with his life ?

It is to this work that all churches and
sects, Catholic and Protestant, that all the
leading nations of the world, known collec-
tively as Christendom, are pledged: and
the time for redeeming that pledge is run-
ning out rapidly, as the distress and per-
plexity, the threatening disruption and an-
archy, of Christendom too clearly show. It
is to this work too that you and I, every
man and woman of us, are also called ; and

136 THE MANLINESS OF CHRIST.

if we would go about it with any hope and
courage, it can only be by keeping the life
of Christ vividly before us day by day, and
turning to it as to a fountain in the desert,
as to the shadow of a great rock in a weary
land.

From behind the shadow the still small
voice — more awful than tempest or earth-
quake — more sure and persistent than day
and night — is always sounding, full of
hope and strength to the weariest of us all,
"Be of good cheer, I have overcome the
world."

Ilopevov kol av iroiov o/xouos.

CONCLUSION.1

AN ADDRESS, DELIVERED AT CLIFTON COL-
LEGE, SUNDAY EVENING, OCTOBER, 1879.

"They crowd upon us in this shade,
The youth who own the coming years —
Be never God or land betrayed
By any son our Harvard rears."

The Rev. R. Lowell.

"What is it in such societies as yours that gives
them so strong a hold on, so unique an attrac-
tion for, those who have been for years engaged
in the rough work of life ? That the fact is so
I think no one will deny, explain it how they
will. I at least cannot remember to have met
with any man who will not own that a visit to
one of our great schools moves and touches him
on a side of his nature which for the most part
lies quiet, almost dormant, but which he feels it
is good for him should be stirred. He may go
back to his work without an effort to explain to
himself why these unwonted sensations have vis-
ited him, but not without a consciousness that he
has had a change of air which has done him good
i Printed by request. — T. H.

138 CONCLUSION.

— that he has been in a bracing atmosphere, like
that at the top of some high mountain pass,
where the morning sun strikes earlier and more
brightly than in the valleys where his daily task
must be done.

To him who cares to pursue the inquiry, I
think the conviction will come, that to a stranger
there is something at once inspiring and pathetic
in such societies as this, standing apart as they
do from, and yet so intimately connected with,
the great outside world.

Inspiring, because he finds himself once again
amongst these before whom the golden gates of
active life are about to open, for good or evil
— each one of whom holds in his hands the keys
of those gates, the keys of light or of darkness,
amongst whom faith is strong, hope bright, and
ideals, untainted as yet by the world's slow stain,
still count for a great power.

Pathetic, because he knows but too well how
hard the path is to find, how steep to climb, on
the further side of those golden gates — how
often in the journey since he himself passed
out from under them, his own faith and hope
have burned dimly, and his ideal has faded away
as he toiled on, or sat by the wayside, looking

CONCLUSION. 139

wistfully after it ; till in the dust and jar, the
heat and strain of the mighty highway, he has
been again and again tempted to doubt whether
it was indeed anything more than a phantom ex-
halation, which had taken shape in the glorious
morning light, only to vanish when the work-
day sun had risen fairly above the horizon, and
dispersed the colored mists.

He may well be pardoned if, at such times,
the remembrance of the actual world in which he
is living, and of the generation which moved into
line on the great battle-field when he himself
shouldered musket and knapsack, and passed into
action out of the golden gates, should for a mo-
ment or two bring the pathetic side of the picture
into strongest relief. " Where are they now
who represented genius, valor, self-sacrifice, the
invisible heavenly world to these? Are they
dead? Has the high ideal died out of them?
Will it be better with the new generation ? " 1

Such thoughts, such doubts, will force them-
selves at times on us all, to be met as best we
may. Happy the man who is able, not at all
times and in all places, but on the whole, to hold
them resolutely at arm's length, and to follow
1 Emerson.

140 CONCLUSION.

straight on, though often wearily and painfully,
in the tracks of the divine visitor who stood by
his side in his youth, though sadly conscious of
weary lengths of way, of gulfs and chasms,
which since those days have come to stretch and
yawn between him and his ideal — of the differ-
ence between the man God meant him to be —
of the manhood he thought he saw so clearly in
those early days — and the man he and the world
have together managed to make of him.

I say, happy is that man. I had almost said
that no other than he is happy in any true or
noble sense, even in this hard materialist nine-
teenth century, when the faith, that the weak
must to the wall, that the strong alone are to
survive, prevails as it never did before — which
on the surface seems specially to be organized
for the destruction of ideals and the quenching
of enthusiasms. I feel deeply the responsibility
of making any assertion on so moot a point to
such an audience in such a place as this ; never-
theless, even in our materialist age, I must urge
you all, as you would do good work in the
world, to take your stand resolutely and once
for all, at school and all your lives through, on
the side of the idealists.

CONCLUSION. 141

In doing so I trust and believe I shall not be
running counter to the teaching you are accus-
tomed to hear in this place. I know that I should
be running counter to it if anything I may say
were to give the least encouragement to dreami-
ness or dawdling. Let me say, then, at once and
emphatically, that nothing can be farther from
my wish or thought. The only idealism I plead
for is not only compatible with sustained and
vigorous work: it cannot be maintained with-
out it.

The gospel of work is a true gospel though
not the only one, or the highest, and has been
preached in our day by great teachers. And I do
not deny that the advice I have just been giving
you may seem at first sight to conflict with the
work-gospel. JListen, for instance, to the ring of
it in the rugged and incisive words of one of our
strongest poets : —

11 That low man seeks a little thing to do,

Sees it and does it.
This high man, with a great thing to pursue,

Dies ere he knows it.
That low man goes on adding one to one,

His hundreds soon hit.
This high man aiming at a million,

Misses a unit."

142 CONCLUSION.

This sounds like a deliberate attack on the ideal-
ist, a direct preference of low to high aims and
standards, of the seen to the unseen. It is in
reality only a wholesome warning against aim-
ing at any ideal by wrong methods, though the
use of the words " low " and " high " is no doubt
likely to mislead. The true idealist has no
quarrel with the lesson of these lines ; indeed,
he would be glad to see them written on one of
the door-posts of every great school, if only they
were ballasted on the other by George Her-
bert's quaint and deeper wisdom.

" Pitch thy behavior low, thy projects high,
So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be.
Sink not in spirit : who aimeth at the sky,
Shoots higher much than he that means a tree."

Both sayings are true, and worth carrying in
your minds as part of their permanent furniture,
and you will find that they will live there very
peaceably side by side.

There is in truth no real antagonism between
them. The seeming paradox, like so many
others, disappears in the working world. Inthe
stress of the great battle of life it will trouble no
soldier who keeps a single eye in his head and

CONCLUSION. 143

a sound heart in his bosom. For he who has
tEe~cTearest and intensest vision of what is at
issue in that battle, and who quits himself in it
most manfully, will be the first to acknowledge
that for him there has been no approach to vic-
tory except by the faithful doing day by day
of the work which lay at his own threshold.

On the other hand the universal experience of
mankind — the dreary confession of those who
have merely sought a " low thing," and " gone
on adding one to one ; " making that the aim
and object of their lives — unite in warning us
that on these lines no true victory can be had,
either for the man himself or for the cause he
was sent into the world to maintain.

No, there is no victory possible for boy or
man without humility and magnanimity ; and no
humility or magnanimity possible without an
ideal. I have been pleading with you boys to
take sides with the idealists at once and through
life. I have told you unless you do so you can
neither be truly humble nor truly magnanimous.
You may reply, " Well, that advice may be good
or bad, we cannot tell, until you tell us how we
are to side with them, and what you mean by an

144 CONCLUSION.

idealist." Such a reply would be only reason-
able, and I will try to answer the demand it
makes, or at any rate to give you a few hints
which will enable you to work out the question
for yourselves.

There is not one amongst you all, I care not
how young he may be, who has not heard or felt
the call in his own heart to put aside all evil
habits, and to live a brave, simple, truthful life in
this school. It may have come to you while lis-
tening in chapel or elsewhere to religious teach-
ing, or in the play fields or dormitories ; when
you have been alone or in company, at work or
at play, but that it has come, at some time, in
some place, there is not a boy in this chapel who
will deny. It is no modern, no Christian experi-
ence, this. The choice of Hercules, and number-
less other Pagan stories, the witness of nearly all
histories and all literatures, attest that it is an
experience common to all our race. It is of it
that the poet is thinking in those fine lines of
Em rson which are written up in the Hall of
Marlborough College: —

" So close is glory to our dust,
So near is God to man —

CONCLUSION. 145

When duty whispers low, 'thou must,'
The youth replies, ' I can.' "

It does not wait for the reasoning powers to be
developed, but comes right in upon the boy him-
self, appealing to him to listen and follow.

It is this whisper, this call, which is the ground
of what I have, for want of a better name, been
speaking of as idealism. Just in so far as the
boy listens to and welcomes it he is becoming an
idealist — one who is rising out of himself, and
into direct contact and communion with spiritual
influences, which even when he shrinks from
them, and tries to put them aside, he feels and
knows to be as real, and will live, I hope, to ac-
knowledge to be more real than all influences
coming to him from the outside world — one
who is bent on bringing himself and the world
into obedience to these spiritual influences. If
he turns to meet the call and answers ever so
feebly and hesitatingly, it becomes clearer and
stronger. He will feel next, that just in so far
as he is loyal to it he is becoming loyal to his
brethren : that he must not only build his own
life up in conformity with its teaching, must not
only find or cut his own way straight to what is
10

146 CONCLUSION.

fair and true and noble, but must help on those
who are around him and will come after him, and
make the path easier and plainer for them also.

I have indicated in outline, in a few sentences,
a process which takes a life-time to work out.
You all know too, alas ! even those who have al-
ready listened most earnestly to the voice, and
followed most faithfully, how many influences
there are about you and within you which stand
across the first steps in the path, and bar your
progress ; which are forever dwarfing and dis-
torting the ideal you are painfully struggling
after, and appealing to the cowardice and lazi-
ness and impurity which are in every one of us,
to thwart obedience to the call. But here, as
elsewhere, it is the first step which costs, and
tells. He who has once taken that, consciously
and resolutely, has gained a vantage ground for
all his life. That first step, remember, ought to
be taken by English boys at our English schools.

And here let me turn aside for a moment to
note for you what seems to me, looking from out-
side, the ideal for which you English boys should
just now be specially striving. The strength
and weakness of the nation of which you are a

CONCLUSION. 147

part will always be reflected powerfully in these
miniature England's, and there is a national
weakness which is alarming all thoughtful Eng-
lishmen at this time. Our race on both sides of
the Atlantic has, for generations, got and spent
money faster than any other, and this spend-
thrift habit has had a baleful effect on English
life. It has made it more and more feverish and
unsatisfying. The standard of expenditure has
been increasing by leaps and bounds, and de-
moralizing trade, society, every industry, and
every profession until a false ideal has estab-
lished itself, and the aim of life is too commonly
to get, not to be, while men are valued more and
more for what they have, not for what they are.
The reaction has, I trust, set in. A period of
depression, such as not been known for half a
century, has come, happily in time to show us
how unreal and transitory is all such material
prosperity, that a nation's life cannot stand any
more than a man's in the things which it possesses.
But the reign of Mammon will be hard to put
down, and all wholesome influences which can
be brought to bear upon that evil stronghold will
be sorely needed.

148 CONCLUSION.

Amongst these none should be more potent
than that of our great schools. It is probably
too late for the present generation of grown men
to restore a sounder tone and set up a higher
ideal. Those by whom it must be done, if it be
done at all, are now growing up in such schools
as this. There can be, I fear, no question that
the outside world has been reflected in our
schools. I hear on all sides stories of increased
expenditure of all kinds. There must be fancy
dresses for all games, and boys are made to feel
uncomfortable who do not conform to the fashion,
or who practice such useful and often necessary
economies as wearing old clothes or traveling
third-class. You know whether such things are
true here. If they are, they are sapping true
manliness, and tainting our national life at its
roots. But the stain, I believe, has not sunk so
deep, and the reaction may be swifter and deeper
than elsewhere in societies bound together in so
close an intimacy as must exist in such schools as
this.

In no other portions of English society can
public opinion be modified so swiftly and so rad-
ically as in a public school. One generation of

CONCLUSION. 149

brave boys may do it, and a school generation is
only a short four or five years. I say, then, de-
liberately, that no man can gauge the value in
English life at this present critical time of a
steady stream of young men, flowing into all pro-
fessions and all industries from our public schools,
who have learnt resolutely to use those words so
hard to speak in a society such as ours, " I can't
afford ; " who have been trained to have few
wants and to serve these themselves, so that they
may have always something to spare of power
and of means to help others ; who are " careless
of the comfits and cushions of life," and content
to leave them to the valets of all ranks. Many
of us have hopes from all we hear and know of
this and other such schools that such a stream of
free and helpful young men may be looked for.
Will you, boys, and, above all, you elder boys,
who can give a tone to the standards and ideals
of to-day here, which may last for many years,
see that, so far at any rate as Clifton is con-
cerned, such hopes shall not be disappointed ?

And take my word for it, while you will be
doing a great work for your country, and restor-
ing an ideal which has all but faded out, you will

150 CONCLUSION.

be taking the surest road to all such success as
becomes honest men to achieve, in whatever walk
of life you may choose for yourselves. The out-
look is by no means cheerful even for those who
have learnt to live simply, and to estimate " com-
fits and cushions " at their true value, either in
England or elsewhere. The following of false
ideals has, I fear, thrown heavy odds for many
years to come against the chances in our modern
life of those who will not bow down to them.

It is more than thirty years smce the wisest of
American writers, and one of the best of Amer-
ican gentlemen, speaking to the young men of
New England, made much the same sad confes-
sion as I am making to you to-day. " The young
man," he says, " on entering life finds the way to
lucrative employment blocked by abuses. The
ways of trade are grown selfish to the borders
of theft, and supple to the borders (if not beyond
the borders) of fraud. The employments of com-
merce are not intrinsically unfit for a man, or
less genial to his faculties ; but these are now in
their general course so vitiated by derelictions
and abuses, at which all connive, that it requires
more vigor and resources than can be expected

CONCLUSION. 151.

of every young man to right himself in them.
Has he genius and virtue ? the less does he find
them fit for him to grow in, and if he would
thrive in them he must sacrifice all the brilliant
dreams of boyhood and youth; he must forget
the prayers of his childhood, and must take on
him the harness of routine and obsequiousness.
... I do not charge the merchant or manufac-
turer. The sins of our trade belong to no class,
to no individual. One plucks, one distributes,
one eats. Everybody partakes, everybody con-
fesses — with cap and knee volunteers his con-
fession, yet none feels himself accountable. He
did not create the abuse, he cannot alter it. . . .
It happens, therefore, that all such ingenuous
souls as feel in themselves the irrepressible striv-
ings of a noble aim, who by the law of their
nature must act simply, find these ways of trade
unfit for them, and they come forth from it.
Such cases are becoming more common every
day. But by coming out of trade you have not
cleared yourselves — the trail of the serpent
reaches into all the lucrative professions and
practices of men. Each has its own wrongs.
Each finds a very intelligent conscience a dis-

152 CONCLUSION.

qualification for success." And so further on he
adds — " Considerations of this kind have turned
the attention of many philanthropists and intelli-
gent persons to the claims of manual labor as
part of the education of every young man. If
the accumulated wealth of the past generation is
thus tainted — no matter how much of it is
offered to us — we must begin to consider if it
were not the nobler part to renounce it, and to
put ourselves into primary relations with the soil
and nature, and, abstaining from whatever is dis-
honest and unclean, to take each of us bravely
his part with his own hands in the manual labor
of the world."

It is a sad confession that our modern society
has come to such a pass, but one which I fear
holds as true for England as for America. That
it will continue so no one who has faith in a
righteous government of the world can believe.
There seem to me signs on all sides that it is
coming to an end, and that a new industrial world
is already forming under the wreck of the old.
But the time of change must be one of sore trial,
and your generation will have to bear the strain
of it. In such a time as this they only will be

CONCLUSION. 153

able to help their country in her need who have
learned in early life the great lessons of sim-
plicity and self-denial, and I don't hesitate to say
that the worst education which teaches simplic-
ity and self-denial is better than the best which
teaches all else but this.

The first aim then for your time and your
generation should be, to foster, each in your-
selves, and each in your school, a simple and self-
denying life — your ideal, to be a true and useful
one, must have these two characteristics before
all others. Of course purity, courage, truthful-
ness are as absolutely necessary as ever, without
them there can be no ideal at all. But as each
age and each country has its own special needs
and weaknesses, so the best mind of its youth
should be bent on serving where the need is
sorest, and bringing strength to the weak places.
There will be always crowds ready to fall in with
the dapper, pliant ways which lead most readily
to success in every community. Society has been
said to be " always and everywhere in conspir-
acy against tjie true manhood of every one of its
members;" and the saying, though bitter, con-
tains a sad truth. So the faithful idealist will

154 CONCLUSION.

have to learn, without arrogance and with per-
fect good temper, to treat society as a child, and
never to allow it to dictate. So treated, society
will surely come round to those who have a high
ideal before them, and therefore firm ground un-
der their feet.

" Coy Hebe flies from those that woo

And shuns the hand would seize upon her ;
Live thou thy life, and she will sue,
To pour for thee the cup of honor."

Let me say a word or two more on this busi-
ness of success. Is it not, after all, the test of
true and faithful work? Must it not be the
touchstone of the humble and magnanimous, as
well as of the self-asserting and ambitious ? Un-
doubtedly ; but here again we have to note that
what passes with society for success, and is so
labeled by public opinion, may well be, as often
as not actually is, a bad kind of failure.

Public opinion in our day has, for instance,
been jubilant over the success of those who have
started in life penniless and have made large
fortunes. Indeed, this particular class of self-
made men is the one which we have been of late
invited to honor. Before doing so, however,

CONCLUSION. 155

we shall have to ask with some care, and bear-
ing in mind Emerson's warnings, by what meth-
ods the fortune has been made. The rapid ac-
cumulation of national' wealth in England can
scarcely be called a success by any one who
studies the methods by which it has been made,
and its effects on the national character. It
may be otherwise with this or that millionaire,
but each case must be judged on its own merits.

I remember hearing, years ago, of an old mer-
chant who, on his death-bed, divided the results
of long years of labor, some few hundreds in
all, amongst his sons. " It is little enough, my
boys," were almost his last words, "but there
is n't a dirty shilling in the whole of it." He had
been a successful man too, though not in the
" self-made " sense. For his ideal had been, not
to make money, but to keep clean hands. And
he had been faithful to it.

In reading the stories of these last persons
whom the English nation is invited to honor, I
am generally struck with the predominance of
the personal element. The key-note seems gen-
erally some resolve taken in early youth con-
nected with their own temporal advancement.

156 CONCLUSION.

This one will be Lord Mayor ; this other Prime
Minister ; a third determines to own a fine estate
near the place of his birth, a fourth to become
head of the business in which he started as an
errand-boy. They did indeed achieve their ends,
were faithful to the idea they had set before
themselves as boys ; but I doubt if we can put
them anywhere but in the lower school of ideal-
ists. For the predominant motive being self-
assertion, their idealism seems never to have
got past the personal stage, which at best is but
a poor business as compared with the true thing.
Try the case by a teste very one of you can ap-
ply directly and easily. One boy here resolves
— I will win this scholarship ; I will be head of
the school ; I will be captain of the eleven ; and
does it. Another resolves — this school shall be
purer in tone, simpler in habits, braver and
stronger in temper, for my presence here ; does
his best, but doubts after all whether he has suc-
ceeded. I need not say that the latter is the best
idealist ; but which is the most successful Clifton
boy?

I must bring these remarks to an end, and yet
have only been able to touch, and that very

CONCLUSION. 157

lightly, the fringe of a great subject. I am sure
many of you have felt this ; and I shall be sur-
prised if some amongst you are not already lis-
tening to me with a shade of jealousy in your
minds, which might formulate itself somehow,
perhaps thus : " Is this talk about idealism quite
straightforward ? Have n't we heard all this
before ? — Self-denial, simplicity of life, courage,
and the rest, are they not the first fruits of Chris-
tianity as we have been taught it? And we
have been told, too, that this call of which you
have been talking is the voice of Christ's spirit
speaking to ours. Can any good come of swad-
dling these truths in other clothes which will
scarcely fit them better, or make them more easy,
or more acceptable ? "

To which I am glad to reply from my heart
— Truly ; so it is. Rem acu tetigesti. Christ is,
indeed, the great idealist. " Be ye perfect as
your Father in heaven is perfect," is the ideal
He sets before us — the only one which is per-
manent and all-sufficing. His own spirit com-
muning with ours is that call which comes to
every human being. But my object has been to
get you to-night to look at the facts of your own

158 CONCLUSION.

experience — and, as I have said already, the
youngest has some experience in these deep mat-
ters — without connecting them for the moment
with any form of religion.

Supposing the whole Bible, every trace of
Christendom, to disappear to-morrow, the same
thing would, nevertheless, be occurring to you,
and me, and every man. We should each of us
still be conscious of a presence, which we are
quite sure is not ourself, in the deepest recesses of
our own heart, communing with us there and
calling us to take up our twofold birthright as
man — the mastery over visible things, and above
all the mastery over our own bodies, actions,
thoughts — and the power, always growing, of
this mysterous communion with the invisible.

It is, therefore, that I have abstained from the
use of religious phraseology, believing that, apart
altogether from the Christian revelation, the ideal-
ist will, and must always remain, nearest to the
invisible world, and therefore most powerful in
this visible one.

I think this method is worth using now and
then, because, no doubt, the popular verdict of this
time is against idealism. If you have not already

CONCLUSION. 159

felt it, you will assuredly feel, as soon as you
leave these walls, that your lot is cast in a world
which longs for nothing so much as to succeed
in shaking off all belief in anything which cannot
be tested by the senses, and gauged and measured
by the intellect, as the trappings of a worn-out
superstition. Men have been trying, so runs the
new gospel, to live by faith, and not by sight,
ever since there is any record at all of their lives ;
and so they have had to manufacture for them-
selves the faiths they were to live by. What is
called the life of the soul or spirit, and the life of
the understanding, have been in conflict all this
time, and the one has always been gaining on
the other. Stronghold after stronghold has fallen
till it is clear almost to demonstration that there
will soon be no place left for that which was once
deemed all-powerful. The spiritual life can no
longer be led honestly. Man has no knowledge
of the invisible upon which he can build. Let
him own the truth and turn to that upon which
he can build safely — the world of matter, his
knowledge of which is always growing ; and be
content with the things he can see and taste and
handle. Those who are telling you still in this

160 CONCLUSION.

time that your life can and ought to be lived in
daily communion with the unseen — that so only
you can loyally control the visible — are either
willfully deceiving you, or are dreamers and vis-
ionaries.

So the high priests of the new gospel teach,
and their teaching echoes through our literature,
and colors the life of the streets and markets in a
thousand ways ; and a Mammon-ridden genera-
tion, longing to be rid of what they hope are only
certain old and. clumsy superstitions, — which
they try to believe injurious to others, and are
quite sure make them uneasy in their own efforts
to eat, drink, and be merry, — applauds as openly
as it dare, and hopes soon to see the millennium
of the flesh-pots publicly declared and recognized.

Against which, wherever you may encounter
them, that you young Englishmen may be ready
and able to stand fast, is the hope and prayer of
many anxious hearts ; in a time, charged on
every side with signs of the passing away of old
things, such as have not been seen above the
horizon in Christendom since Luther nailed his
protest on the church door of a German village.

ST. GEORGES, HANOVER SQUARE.

£!:e pass'd up the aisle on the arm of her sire,
A delicate lady in bridal ar.tire,

Fair emblem of virgin simplicity ;
Flair" London was there, and, my word, there were

tew
1 bat stood by the altar, or hid in a pew.

But envied Lord Nigel's felicity.

Beautiful Bride!— So meek in thy splendor,

?o frank in thy love, and its trusting surrender,

Departing you leave us toe town dim !
IVfay happiness wing to thy bower, unsought,
knd may Nigel, esteeming his bliss as he ought,

Prove worthy thy worship, — confound him !

Frideiuck Luck:<;r.

TRIBUTES TO MR. HUGHES,

THE RECEPTION AT THE LOTOS CLUB.

^ CORDIAL WELCOME TO THK AUTHOR OF "TOM
BHOWN AT RUGBY''— PLEASANT CHATS WITH THE
MKMBKR8 OF THE CLUB— REMARKS OF THE
PR SIDKNT. MR. HUGHKS AND OTHERS.

The Lotos Club gave a reception to Thomas
Hughes Saturday evening, at the club-house at
ETlth-ave. and Twenty-first-st. An address of
welcome was made by the President. Mr.
Elughes responded ieelingly, speaking of
the great interest he had felt in the
struggle for freedom in America, and
for the establishment of the English
colony in Tennessee. A Jfurrorous speech was
made by Abram S. Hewitt. It was followed
by addresses by Charles Dudley Warner,
George Fawcett Rowe, Chauncey M. Depew,
Dr. A. E. Macdonald, Noah Brooks and
others.

THE GATHERING AND SPEECHES.
The reception was of a most cordial but informal
character. More than a hundred members of the
siub were present. The early portion ot the evening
was passed in social talks among the members, and
between Mr. Hughes and those who were presented
to him. The author ot* " Tom Brown" sat at the
right of the president at the tables, and at his left
were Abram S. Hewitt and Dr. W. A. Hammond.

we have long m
to make
fritmd In 1861 b

And so,-!".) tie
g< oa old Eorua
deeper, sine. -iter
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and guest," Tho
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At the close o:
and was receiv
hands. His op
apparent emot

Mr. Chairm£
I find it
the thanks
feel must arise I
find myself upoi
has just been id
to call him my c
still older fnei
that epithet u
but I think y
one has known
when, during th
portion of our I
the kindliest am
to nave the rign
ble to feci the ef
placed me In
liaess to m:
pathetic audient

He has spoke
and to that I
carry out tuose :
best sense in wh
and have beenj
good and great
upon our side, \
believe so succ
work of those i
the greater Brit
island, which, a!
your Srates— wfa
what is passing
and bold— I
mast be a
see great troubl
turo that awaits
lore very long,
world, will in tfi
Nation from vih'

But there is

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