Talks about Jesus

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TALKS ABOUT JESUS

15Y

M. J. SAVAGE,

AUTHOR OF "LIGHT ON THE CLOUD,'' " THE MORALS OF EVOLUTION," ETC

SECOND EDITION.

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BOSTON :

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ELLIS, 141 FRANKLIN STREET.
1891.

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CONTENTS.

PAGE

I. Introduction, i

II. Sources of our Knowledge, 9

III. The Miraculous, 24

IV. Birth and Childhood, 46

V. Public Life, 67

VI. Death and Resurrection, 92

VII. The Messianic Idea, 115

VIII. Jesus and the Church: or, Was Jesus a Christian? . 133

IX. Jesus and Humanity: or, Christianity among the

Religions, 146

INTRODUCTION.

We have had no end of discussion over the questions, Who
are Christians? and What is Christianity? And, so long as the
present indefinite methods are followed, there is no apparent rea-
son why there ever should be any end. No first principles or fixed
starting-point being held in common, each one chooses his own
premises, according to the law of affinity, and then sails easily
on to the conclusion he prefers. While very satisfactory to one
party, it naturally has little effect on the other. Beecher said,
some years ago, that most people go through the Bible like a
magnet through a dish of sand containing iron filings, and "come
out of it with the texts they like sticking all over them." No
better illustration of this can be found than the current discus-
sion about Christianity. Let us see if there is not a method, or a
few principles, that all intelligent and honest persons must accord
as guides.

To the Catholic, the ultimate authority is the Church. The
Church's word is as divine as any recorded utterance of Jesus
himself. And, in any case, it is the Church that must decide
what Jesus meant, what the Apostles meant, and what the Fathers
meant. To a Catholic, then, Christianity is what the Church, in
the properly constituted way, pronounces it to be.

When we come to the Orthodox Protestant, the matter at first
sight would seem to be equally clear. The Bible is held to be
infallibly inspired, and Christianity is simply what the Bible de-
clares it to be. But now we are met with an element of confu-
sion. The principle of Protestantism asserts the " right of private
judgment " as to what the Bible means ; and the history of Prot-

2 Talks about Jesus.

estantism shows plainly that it is capable of meaning a good
many different things. All the Bible is of equal authority to a
man consistently Orthodox: therefore he does not feel com-
pelled to construct his Christian system entirely, or even mainly,
out of the actual history and teaching of Jesus. And, as a matter
of fact, the larger part of the material is found in the words of
Paul.

But now we come to a third position. Many Orthodox writers
and preachers — with perhaps a questionable consistency — and
all "Liberal Christians" have come to the point of saying that
the highest and only ultimate authority in this matter is Jesus
himself. They say, " We will pass by the self-constituted inter-
preters and ushers, and press on to the inner court, and listen to
what the Master himself has to say."

This latter position sounds logical and easy. It is certainly the
one that seems most rational. If Jesus had any definite pur-
pose, and tried to teach a particular thing, he probably not only
knew what it was, but also gave utterance to it. If he knew any-
thing that it was essential to man's welfare that man should
know, and did not speak it, we may most certainly feel entitled
to question his "good-will toward man." I think, then, that we
may take it for granted that he said what he thought ought to
be said.

The next question is, Can we find out what he really did say?

To clear the way for an answer, a few things must be premised.

i. We know that the disciples misunderstood, and so misin-
terpreted, many things he said while he was with them. It is
only natural to suppose that they did the same after his death.
For example, Paul, our earliest witness, — for his letters were
written before either of the "Gospels" — speaks of the possibility
of his having been charged with baptizing in his own name. Of
course this would have been simply absurd, had it been known —
as in Matt, xxviii., 19 — that Jesus had left on authoritative record
the regular church formula for that ordinance. Again, if the dis-
ciples had known that, in the same explicit manner, Jesus had
commanded them to "disciple all nations," the early and bitter
dispute as to the admission of the Gentiles to the Church could

Introduction, 3

by no possibility ever have arisen. Some parts of the record,
then, we know cannot be correct.

2. We must pass wholly by the so-called Gospel of John. We
need not dogmatically deny the traditional authorship. But the
fact that we cannot always tell whether it is "John" or Jesus who
is speaking; and the furthur fact, that even Orthodox critics —
like Prof. Robertson Smith and Dr. Edwin A. Abbott, in their
articles in the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica — either
doubt or deny the Johannine authorship, compel us to leave this
book out of account when we are trying to be sure as to what
Jesus really said.

3. The same Orthodox Prof. Smith, — together with almost all
competent and unbiassed critics, — admits that even Mark, Mat-
thew, and Luke, are only "unapostolic digests" of earlier tra-
ditions as to what Jesus was, did, and said. It is now pretty
well settled that Mark is the oldest of the first three Gospels.
The Encyclopedia Britannica's article of Dr. Abbott considers
this conclusively proved. The reader is referred to his article
(Gospels) for the method and force of that proof. And even
Mark was not finished in its present shape for many years after
the crucifixion.

4. Mark contains only twenty-eight verses not also contained in
either Matthew or Luke. The problem of the relations of these
three Gospels to each other is now explained by the existence of
a more or less fixed and settled tradition that preceded the compo-
sition of either of them, and to which they all had access.

5. These three — the synoptics, or the Gospels that see together
— have a very large element, a tradition in common, beside the
additions which are peculiar to each. This common element repre-
sents so much of the tradition as had already become so fixed that
neither of the writers felt at liberty to change it. Each one
added to this other things he had heard and considered true.
But of course the threefold testimony has a weight of authority
not possessed by either one alone. This common element — the
triple tradition — is so large that a complete life of Jesus can be
constructed by using only those words and phrases which all
three of the synoptics use in common. The addition to this

4 Talks about Jesus.

triple tradition of parables and sayings not contained in it does
not essentially alter the portrait.

Here, then, in the triple tradition, if anywhere, we shall be able
to find traces of what Jesus really was and did and said. This
takes us back as far, and as near to his person, as we can ever
hope to go.

But now that we have got the triple tradition, what shall we do
with it ? How shall we treat it ?

Many prominent preachers, teachers, and writers seem to sup-
pose themselves at liberty to pick and choose as they please, like
the magnet among the iron filings. They take what they like.
They construct an ideal Jesus of their own, and give out a defini-
tion of Christianity in accordance with what their ideal Jesus said
or ought to have said. But, if this method is valid, then there is
no use of study or thought or criticism. It seems to me utterly
irrational and unscientific. The surest means we have of know-
ing what Jesus taught is this triple tradition. If we cannot
accept the testimony as to his teaching in one direction, I see not
how we can in any other. We are shut up to one of two conclu-
sions. Either he taught about himself and his kingdom what the
triple tradition says he did, or else we must surrender the hope of
ever finding out what he did teach.

If what Jesus taught may rightly claim to be called Christianity,
by this method, and this alone, we may hope to find out what it is.

Our nearest approach to certainty is the triple tradition; that
is, so much of the story as Mark, Matthew, and Luke all agree in
telling. And we have no right to assume an ideal of Jesus, and
make it a Procrustes bed to the dimensions of which the triple
tradition itself must be violently conformed. We have no right
to depart from it, except under the guidance of the two following
principles: i. If — as is sometimes the case — the text itself con-
tains the unconscious betrayal of the fact that the disciples misun-
derstood and misinterpreted Jesus, then, of course, this indication
may be followed to its natural conclusion; and 2. Since they
would be more likely to remember and report accurately his teach-
ings than they would the supposed facts of his life, we may place
more reliance on what some one witness reports of his words

Introduction. 5

than we can on similar testimony as to asserted historical inci-
dents. This latter point will be clear to any one who will reflect
that deeds have a more natural tendency to grow than words
have; and who will further remember that the writers, ascribing
to Jesus the Messianic office, would naturally and inevitably trans-
late any supposed prophecy into history.

I have extracted the triple tradition from the Gospels, and
arranged it on the basis of Mark, and in his own words. This I
have supplemented by the teachings of Jesus, gathered from
Mark, Matthew, and Luke, but not contained in the triple tradi-
tion. And though I shall now deal exclusively with the triple
tradition, let the reader remember that no well-authenticated say-
ing of Jesus from any other source contradicts or invalidates the
conclusions to be drawn from this. After I had arranged the
triple tradition, I then went through it, point by point, and, follow-
ing the order of Mark, made a careful analysis of the history, the
teachings, and the character of Jesus. Then, grouping together
the passages which bear on the same points, I made the follow-
ing summary. The references are only to Mark ; but the parallel
passages in Matthew and Luke can easily be referred to.

SUMMARY OF THE TRIPLE TRADITION.

Parentage of Jesus. — His mother is Mary. His father is not
mentioned. No genealogy: no tracing his lineage to David.

Birthplace. — Nazareth: no mention of any other. This is im-
plied all through.

His Gospel. — This consists of two parts, which cover it all:
i. The immediate coming of the kingdom of God, so long ex-
pected. It is "at hand." Mark i., 15, and xiii., 30. 2. Repent-
ance and moral goodness as the only conditions of citizenship in
that kingdom.

The King. — Himself. Mark viii., 27-30.

Time of setting up the kingdom. — Before " this generation "
passes. Mark xiii., 30.

Manner of its establishment. — By his own miraculous appear-
ance, with his angels, in the clouds. Mark xiii., 26, 27.

6 Talks about Jesus.

Signs of its coming. — Portents in earth and heaven. Mark
xiii., 2-25.

Duties of citizenship. — All moral goodness.

Rewards of citizenship. — All good things "in this present
time" (with persecutions), and eternal life. Mark x., 28-30.

Social condition of citizens. — " As the angels " : no marriage
or family life. Mark xii., 25.

Location of kingdom. — On earth. No hint of any other.

Personal claims. — Not son of David, but is the Messiah ; casts
out demons; heals diseases, forgives sins, will die, will rise the
third day, appear in the clouds with angels, and judge his enemies.

Personal character. — Disregards old forms and Sabbath cus-
toms,— will "put new wine in new bottles " ; chooses those who
do God's will for friends and relatives ; slights " signs," teaches
childlikeness, calls God only good, contemns riches, teaches that
service is the only true greatness, makes forgiveness the condition
of forgiveness, teaches that love is all, condemns ostentation of
piety, commends the little — widow's mite — if that is all one is
able to do, and teaches absolute submission to God.

In the light of this analysis of the triple tradition, a few things
are plain : —

1. Not a single point that is peculiar and distinctive in the Or-
thodox creed is here taught.

2. Jesus is purely human. There is no trace of any other
than a natural birth ; and there is no physical resurrection or
ascension.

3. The miracles are less wonderful than many ascribed to the
old prophets.

4. None of the outward rites, institutions, or priestly powers of
the historic Church, are even foreshadowed. Indeed, since "the
kingdom " was to be established during that generation, it becomes
absurd to suppose that Jesus expected any such thing as the his-
toric Church, with its rites and powers.

5. As to what Jesus' " Gospel" was becomes plainly apparent.
He announced as "good news" that the "kingdom," so long ex-
pected, was "at hand." Of the two elements composing his
gospel, one was illusion, and the other eternal truth. His Messi-

Introduction. 7

anic dream was only the local and temporary form of the hope
that forever animates and leads on the race, — the hope and faith
in the possible perfectibility of man. His form of this hope, like
Plato's republic, was visionary. But the hope remains in our
hearts still. But the eternal part of his Gospel lies in the con-
ditions of citizenship in the divine kingdom which he proclaimed,
— love and worship toward the divine ideal, and love and service
toward man, as the motive power in lifting up the race into the
realization of that ideal. This can never be outgrown.

But this needs to be supplemented by something of which Jesus
seems never to have thought. Before one can truly obey God —
the laws of life — and help humanity onward and upward, he must
know. The experience of the world has demonstrated that the
only method by which men can learn what God's laws are, and
how humanity can be helped, is the scientific method of experi-
ment and verification. For lack of his seeing this, some of Jesus'
teaching — as concerning marriage, concerning property, non-
resistance, reliance on prayer for material benefit, and against
forethought — must be disregarded. It may not be the religion of
the immediate future, but, when the world gets wise enough, it is
easy to see that the perfect religion will be made up of two ele-
ments : 1st, a creed composed of all that the world really knows ;
and, 2d, the love of God — call it the human ideal of the divine, if
you will — and love of man that Jesus teaches. The creed will be
the body : the love will be the emotional mainspring, the life-giving
soul. Of the two parts, one is as vital and necessary as the other.

To what extent, then, and in what sense, will a man be a " Chris-
tian " who takes the triple tradition as his starting-point?

Right here a clear-cut distinction must be drawn. Disciple of
Jesus and Christian may not mean the same thing. A man who
believes in and holds to the Jesus of the triple tradition most
certainly will not be a Christian, in the ecclesiastical and dogmatic
sense of that word. For the triple tradition contains no basis for
either the ecclesiasticism or the dogma. The name " Christian "
sprung up many years after the death of Jesus, and historically
has, as a matter of fact, stood for what Jesus did not teach or
establish.

8 Talks about Jesus.

If you call the leaching of the triple tradition Christianity, then
of the two points that are essential to the Gospel, one, the form
of the hope for man embodied in the Messianic belief, cannot be
held to-day; but the other, the method of preparing for the king-
dom of God, through heart-love and righteousness of character,
must be a part of all high and true religion to the world's end.

A word now as to the miracles of the triple tradition, and what
to do with them. They may be all summed up under the follow-
ing heads : —

i. Casting out devils; 2. Healing diseases in general; 3. Walk-
ing the water and stilling the tempest ; 4. Miraculous feeding of
the multitude ; 5. The dove at baptism, and the Transfiguration ;
6. The darkness and the rending of the Temple vail at the cru-
cifixion.

The orthodox Dr. Edwin A. Abbott, in both his " Oxford Ser-
mons " and in his article "Gospels" in the last edition of the En-
cyclopedia Britannica, and the rationalist Mr. P. H. Wicksteed, in
the two first numbers of the Modern Review, point out natural
and rational origins for these wonder-stories, by which neither the
sincerity of the Gospel writers nor the character of Jesus is in any
way impeached. Misinterpretation of nervous diseases, now well
known and medically treated, misinterpretation of metaphors, the
natural growth of marvels, and the reading of prophecy as history }
will easily explain them all.

As Dante's portrait was recovered by removing the concealing
layers of whitewash and the gathered grime of centuries, so, by
tearing off one traditional layer after another, we get back to " the
man Jesus," in the triple tradition. "Behold the man!" And
after beholding, judge — in the light of history — whether you are
a Christian, whether Jesus was a Christian, and, in short, what
Christianity is.

SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE.

Before coming to consider some special phases of the
life and teaching of Jesus, it will be well worth our while to
ask and answer the question as to what are the sources of our
information concerning him. How much do we know ? Are
we as certain of one asserted fact concerning him or one
alleged saying as of any or all others ? And what is the
degree of authority that attaches to this report of him or
that ? For, if I shall say that you are to believe one thing
about Jesus, and another thing you are not to believe, that
you are to accept this part of the record, and that part you
are to question or reject, you certainly have a right to ask
of me by what authority I make this discrimination. If we
could accept the ordinary ecclesiastical idea of the New
Testament as equally and infallibly inspired in every part,
our task would then be comparatively light and simple:
we should have but to take the different statements of
letter-writer or historian or compiler of Gospel as separated
parts of a dissected picture, and, according to the best of our
ability, put them together and make a complete and consist-
ent portrait of Jesus. We should find this indeed no easy
work ; for the different parts of our material are of such a
nature that they may be fitted together in many different
ways, and make many different likenesses of the " Son of
Man. " If we added to our orthodoxy a belief in the in-

10 Talks about Jesus.

fallible interpretation and guidance of the Church, — if, in
short, we were Catholics. — the question would be very much
simplified; for the church tradition and authority have
settled it as to how the different parts of this dissected
picture shall be put together, and how the portrait, when it
is completed, shall appear. But we dare not think it relig-
ious or moral to assume either of these methods as true
or right. We trust that, if there be reasons for our sup-
posing these records to be absolutely infallible, we shall be
able to find such reasons. But having learned that many
of the stories and testimonies, concerning all sorts of things,
that come floating down to us from the past, are very fallible,
that many of them are not to be accepted or retained, we
dare not take it for granted that all these are to be received
without scrutiny or question. So we must trace up the
records : find on what authority they stand ; find, if we can,
who composed them ; how they have come to us in their
present shape ; how much we may accept as absolutely true ;
how much is probable ; how much, if any, must be rejected
as the growth of fancy, of myth, and of legend.

Standing here toward the latter part of the nineteenth
century, and proposing to ask after sources of information
concerning Jesus, the first witness is one that faces us all, if
we only open our eyes. What is the meaning of this great
fact that we call Christendom, — the dom, or domination, of
Christ ? Many and many a time, as boy and youth, have I
stood on the banks of the beautiful river by the side of which
I was born, and, looking over its glassy surface of a lovely
day, as it spread before me placid and smooth as a lake, traced
it up to where it soon lost itself among the hills. And when
the air was clear, a hundred miles to the north, I saw a tower-
ing mountain, with other lesser peaks clustered around it;
and I knew that this river, though I could trace it but a little

Sources of Our Knowledge. i i

way, sprung somewhere about the feet of those grand old
hills. The aspect of the mountain changed as the atmos-
pheric medium changed, as the day was clear or cloudy ; and
sometimes the mists fell and shut it out completely. Never-
theless, I knew that the river traced its way up to, and was
fed from, those mountain summits. I did not believe, indeed,
that the whole river flowed from them ; for I knew that, on
this side and on that, came in tributaries from one direction
and the other, and that the river was thus, as it flowed past
my feet, composed of many different streams. So, standing
here as we do to-day, this broad stream of a Christian civili-
zation flowing past, — or shall I say, rather, on whose surface
we ourselves are borne along, — as we trace it up, we may
seem to lose it in a little way. And yet, as we look off up the
centuries, we see there the towering summit of a mountainous
man, — a man so high that his shadow falls all along down
the ages ; a man so masterly that he has given his name to
the grandest nations of the world. I believe, indeed, that it
is claiming far too much — as many do — to say that the total
civilization of the time has flowed from the lips and the life
of Jesus. For this civilization is the outcome of humanity ;
and humanity is thousands and thousands of years older than
he. It has its spring higher and farther off than Judea or
Galilee. And then, since his time, there have flowed in on
all sides tributaries of art, of science, of invention, and the
mingling currents of many different races and climes. And
yet this one grand fact remains : that Jesus, among all the
names of the past, has stood master over the best and highest
thought of the world ; that still this great stream, composite
though it be, of human civilization, bears his name, and will
bear it for ages yet to come. This is the first witness of
Jesus. It witnesses his existence, it witnesses his mastery.
It is no small force, standing there eighteen hundred years

I 2 Talks about Jesus.

ago, that reaches its hand out over the ages, and shapes and
modifies and moves them to-day. They are no weak words
that thrill human hearts as they have never been thrilled
by any other; that is no weak ideal that is still worshipped
|as divine by uncounted millions of intelligent men and women.

Passing this witness, let us now go up the ages and make
specific and special inquiry. We shall find it but an arid
desert waste through a large part of the Middle Ages. We
shall find the peaceful words of this Jesus of Nazareth
sharpened into swords or bruising like battle-axes, his
beautiful, poetic figures hardened into dogma, his loving
words toward man metamorphosed into racks and thumb-
screws, his tenderness toward children distorted into the
image of a judge that thrusts down the little ones unbaptized
to hell. We shall find his all-inclusive humanity contracted
into narrowness and bitterness and exclusion, we shall find
him who was simplicity itself made the authority for gor-
geous rituals, we shall find him who founded no church
made the corner-stone of a towering and oppressive hierar-
chy ; and we shall wonder what sort of Jesus it was that
could become so misinterpreted in the thought of other
ages. And yet, passing over these deserts of speculation,
we shall now and then find an oasis where flowers of human-
ity and love and charity blossom : in the midst of the cold-
ness and hardness of human hearts, as under the edge of
the mountain glacier, we shall find little Alpine flowers of
purity and tenderness and truth. Even in the midst of cruel
wars and desolation, we shall find the image of the Crucified
softening the hearts of many, and turning them to gentleness
and forgiveness and chivalrous care. And yet we shall find
nothing that will really add to our knowledge of the man we
seek.

We will go on, then, up to the first century of our era;

Sources <>/ ( hir Knowledge. 1 3

and I want, in the simplest way in the world, to place before
you the witnesses that we have for Jesus, that you may see
who they are, what they tell us, and what are the nature and
character of their authority. And, first, are there any in the
outside pagan nations of the world? If, indeed, the stories
that come floating down to us be true, we should expect to
find that they would have been heard of in Asia Minor, in
Egypt, in Rome, in the distant parts of the great empire
that then held the world as one. If, indeed, the earth
quaked when the Jesus died, if the rocks were rent and the
graves were opened, if the sun itself was darkened in heaven
for hours, we should suppose that the curious naturalists and
historians and the seekers after strange and wondrous events
in the pagan world would have heard and would have re-
ported some of these things. And yet we find nothing of
the kind, strange as it may seem. There was Seneca, living
not far from these times ; and then the Elder and the Younger
Pliny, Tacitus, Plutarch, Galen, Epictetus, Marcus Antoninus,
— some of the noblest men of the world. They saw nothing
in that little movement over in Palestine that attracted their
attention, nothing to call out more than a passing word of
contempt. Let me give you some few meagre fragments of
testimony that we have, that you may see their nature.
One historian writes that "under a ringleader named Chrestus
the Jews raised a tumult." In another place, he refers to
the Christians as a class of men devoted to a " new and
mischievous superstition." And Tacitus speaks of Judea
as "the source of this evil," — meaning Christianity. That
is the way they looked at that movement which has given
us Christendom. Another speaks of the Christians as
"a sect hated for their crimes"; and Suetonius gives Nero
special praise for having done the most that he could to wipe
them off the face of the earth. In a Life of Claudius,

14 Talks about Jesus.

another Roman Emperor, Christ is spoken of as " a restless,
seditious, Jewish agitator." Pliny the Younger, writing to
the emperor about the year 104, when he was governor of
Bithynia, says the Christians do not worship the gods nor
the emperors, — as most of the people then did, — nor could
they be induced to curse Christ. He says they met mornings
for virtuous vows, and chanted a hymn to Christ, as to
a god, and in the evening they ate together a common
meal, — probably referring to the Lord's supper. And,
after he had put them to torture, he said all he could find
against them was "a perverse and immoderate superstition."
Lucian, about the middle of the second century, speaks
of Jesus as the crucified Sophist. These little notices,
treating Christianity as just another one of the end-
less sects that sprung up among a superstitious people,
— these are what we find among the great pagan writers of
the time. And indeed it is nothing strange. Suppose, for
example, to-day a new religion should spring up in Poland.
Poland is as important as was Palestine. Poland, like Pales-
tine, is crushed under the heel of an oppressive conqueror.
Suppose a new religion should spring up there : would the
authorities, the great and wise men in Russia to-day, pay
any attention to it ? It would be looked on simply as we
regard a curious superstition on the part of a people for
whom we have nothing but contempt.

Leave the pagan world now, and let us come to the
Jewish, outside of the Christian records, and see if we can
find anything there. In the Talmud, a perfect wilderness
and jungle of religious and political speculations and com-
ments, we find curious, spiteful, distorted, malignant pictures
of Jesus. He is represented as a magician, as a person
who went into Egypt and learned sorcery and the black
art, and by its influence raised a tumult among the people,

Sources of Our Knowledge. 15

and led away a party of deluded followers. This is the
picture which his enemies among the Jews have left.

Come now to the two Jews that we should suppose would
have something to say about Jesus. Philo was born about
twenty years before him. He was the most celebrated of all
the Jewish philosophers, and spent his life at the centre of
learning at that time, in Alexandria. He devoted his years
to the development of the philosophical ideas of his age,
trying to reconcile between the Old Testament and the
Platonism of his time. We should have supposed that
Jesus and a life like his would have attracted the notice of
Philo. And yet, though his life covered the whole period of
the existence of both John the Baptist and Jesus, there is no
single word from beginning to end in all his writings that
would lead us to suppose that he ever heard of the existence
of either. Josephus, the great Jewish historian, was born
about two years after the crucifixion. He lived until after
the destruction of Jerusalem, and wrote a history of the
Jews elaborately from first to last. In his works, as they
have come down to us, there are only two passages that even
pretend to refer to Jesus. One of these is certainly an inter-
polation, and the other one has almost as certainly been
tampered with and changed ; so that, practically, Josephus
does nothing more than merely recognize the existence of a
man named Jesus.

Let us come now still closer, toward the inner circle, to
the age of the post-Apostolic traditions, and what do we
find here ? We discover a volume called the Apocryphal
New Testament, — a collection of writings that sprung up
like a rank growth of weeds in the later ages of the Apostolic
tradition. These books are worthy of our attention only as
illustrating what sort of stories common people at that time
were capable of accepting as true, — weird, wild, fanciful,

l6 Talks about Jesus.

grotesque, extravagant. For example, they tell us a story of
Jesus: of how, when a young man, he worked as a carpenter
with his father. Joseph had manufactured a throne for the
king ; and, the throne being too small to fit into the place
designed for it, Jesus grasps it with his hands, and stretches
it to the proper dimensions. They tell us another story of
how Jesus as a little boy becomes angry with one of his play-
mates, and strikes him dead. Another story still. Playing
one day with the other boys in the streets of Nazareth, they
were making little sparrows and birds out of clay ; and
while they were discussing what they would do with them,
Jesus suddenly claps his hands, and the birds he had made
fly away in the air. I refer to these things as simply illus-
trating the kind of stories that would spring up in an age
like this, — credulous, superstitious, ready for any wonder,
questioning nothing, but believing things perhaps all the
more because they were strange and unheard of.

Take one step further up the ages and nearer to Jesus.
We come to the broken fragments of traditions and gospels
that now no longer exist. We find, for example, such stories
as this : that, during the time when Jesus was baptized, the
Jordan itself was on fire ; this story evidently springing out
of the saying that Jesus was to baptize " with the Holy Ghost
and with fire." We find also Jesus himself represented as
saying that the Holy Ghost personified was his mother, —
not Mary, but the Holy Ghost his mother, — and this mother
taking him by a single hair of his head, and carrying him
miraculously through the air, and setting him on the summit
of Mount Tabor. I speak of this again, simply to show the
stories then in circulation, and how readily all sorts of won-
drous things could gain currency and get written down in
the books of the time.

Leaving these, let us step into the New Testament days,

Son/res of Our Knowledge. iy

and see what we find there. I have now given you, so far
as I know, specimens of every kind of reference to Jesus
outside of the New Testament that we have in the ancient
world. In the New Testament itself, then, what do we find ?
I will speak first of Paul ; and yet by doing so I reverse the
natural order of time that I have been following, for Paul is
the very earliest witness we have for Jesus in the New Testa-
ment. His Epistles were written years and years before the
Gospels ; so that, if you want to find that part of the New
Testament which comes nearest to Jesus, you must not go to
the Gospels, but read the Epistles of Paul, — the first to the
Thessalonians, the two to the Corinthians, that to the Gala-
tians and the one to the Romans. What do we find here?
Strange as it may seem to us, it is yet true that we really
find nothing peculiar as bearing on the personal history of
Jesus. That is, Jesus, in the mind of Paul, seems to have been
little else than an ideal. Paul appears to care almost nothing
for the human life and the human history of Jesus. He tells
us nothing about him except that he describes the supper.
We only find that he saw Jesus in a vision years after the
crucifixion. How much does this mean ? Some one has said
that, when a man says he has seen God in a dream, all that
it can rationally mean is that he has dreamed that he saw
God. When Paul tells us that he saw Jesus in a vision, and
this after Jesus was dead and had been dead for years, of
course we cannot take it as testimony in ihe same sense in
which we would if Paul had been acquainted with Jesus in
his earthly ordinary life, and had told us where he lived, how
he lived, what he said, where he went, and what he did.

Leaving then the testimony of Paul, we come to the Gos-
pels. And this of course is the most important part of it
all. And I wish to be just as clear and simple as I can in
telling you how the Gospels have come into our hands, how

I 8 Talks about Jesus.

they grew up, and what is the nature of their authority.
You must bear in mind first, then, that Jesus himself has left
in the world not one word of his own composition. Neither
is there any record of his ever having commissioned or
asked any one else to write anything about him. Jesus lived
and died, and there was nothing written to be a record of
his wonderful life. And years passed away before there was
anything ; for at the first, as we see on the surface of the
New Testament and all through, the disciples expected Jesus
to return in the clouds almost any day, any week, any year.
Why, then, should they sit down and write records of him ?
But the years passed away, and there was no "sign of the
Son of Man " in the heavens ; and then the disciples began
to think of keeping a record of that wondrous life that they
had known and had learned so to love and revere. And the
first thing that came into existence were brief notes, memo-
rabilia, written by this one and that ; one writing down some-
thing about this part of his life, another about that part.
One perhaps remembered and wrote down a fragment of the
Sermon on the Mount ; another, the words of his prayer ;
another, something else that he said j this one remembering a
parable, and another some striking sententious utterance, —
the rebuke of the Pharisees perhaps. And by and by these
drifted naturally together, and gave us the nucleus of our
present records of Jesus. The first Gospel that came into
its present shape was that of Mark. And you will notice
one strange thing about that. There is no account in it at
all of any miraculous birth. The last part of the last chapter
is the addition of a later hand ; so that in the genuine Mark,
the oldest Gospel we have, there is also no account of any
bodily resurrection or ascension. All these wonders preced-
ing and following the life are absent in the oldest traditions.
The next Gospel of our present four to make its appearance

Sources of Our Kn 19

is that of Matthew. Here we find the wonders occurring
upon the birth of Jesus, and an account of his resurrection.
After that comes Luke. And the marvels attending both
the advent and the departure have wonderfully increased and
grown, until in Luke we have the full-grown story of the
annunciation, the appearance of the angels, the song in
heaven, the wise men, the star, — all the miraculous things
said to have preceded his coming ; and then an elaborate
record of his walks and talks with his disciples after the
resurrection, and of the ascent into heaven. These Gospels
were brought together in their present shape by unknown
authprs as late as eighty or one hundred years after the
birth of Jesus. Thirty or fifty years later still came the
Gospel of John, — not so much a story of the life of Jesus
as a theological treatise ; a wonderful poem, setting forth a
spiritualized, ideal conception of him who had grown to be
no longer Jesus of Nazareth, but the eternal Word of the
eternal God.

These four Gospels are by no means the only ones that
had been written. There are many traces of others, and
Luke himself refers to " many " who had been engaged in
the work of gospel-making. But about 200 A.D. we find
only our four received as authority. And so fixed had the
idea of this number become, that Irenaeus thinks it impos-
sible that they should be either more or less. The reasons
he gives for this opinion are indeed curious enough, and
throw strong light on the credulous and fanciful character
of the age. He thinks that, as there are four winds and
four quarters of the heavens, and as the cherubim were quad-
riform, so of necessity the number of Gospels must be four.

The Gospels, then, as we have them, you must think of not
as composed by the men whose names are attached to them,
but as gradual growths, taking their shape as the result of the

20 Talks about Jesus.

work of many hands, and being in their finished condition
almost as far away from the time of Jesus as we are from the
time of Pope and Dryden. Suppose, for example, that the
life of Alexander Pope had never been written until to-day ;
that only stories and traditions about him had been gathered
up by one and another, collected, written down, and at last
put into shape one hundred or one hundred and fifty years
after his time. Of course, we can see that we could not
attach to stories like these anything in the nature of infalli-
bility. It is obviously absurd to suppose that we can be so
certain of words and texts as to build on them eternal and
infallible dogmas. And yet we do have, as I believe, a
veritable picture of Jesus of Nazareth. We can gather out
of all the Gospels those traditional deeds and sayings which
are common to them all, and thus have a well-nigh indubita-
ble picture. For this old common tradition, which none of
them feel at liberty to alter, must contain the things which
are oldest and which all believed to be true • and thus it
has the highest degree of authority that it is now possible
for us to find. We thus have a tradition in its main features
almost certainly true, and on which we can rest. And this
tradition, which is common to them all, keeps all that is
precious, all that is sacred, all that is human, all that is in
the truest and noblest sense divine. We have in this com-
mon tradition an account of this wonderful man, — his life,
his preaching, his patience, his love, his tenderness, his self-
sacrificing devotion, and his undying faith in God.*

Now let me just sum up in a few brief words the results in
one direction of this discussion. We do not know how long
Jesus lived ; for one Gospel seems to teach that his public
life was about three years, and the other three that it was only

♦This is not the result of liberal criticism only, but is admitted by many of the best
Orthodox ciiiics as well.

Sources of Our Knowlea 21

one. We do not certainly know the year in which he was
born, much less the month or the day of the month. We do
not know the order of events in his career nor the chrono-
logical arrangement of his teachings. But we do know that
Jesus lived ; we do know that he became a fountain of life and
inspiration to the world. Does the condition of the records
inflict upon us any great or irreparable loss ? It seems to me
that it brings, rather, unspeakable gain. Let me tell you why
I believe so.

There are immense critical difficulties that face us the mo-
ment we talk about the Gospels as infallible and inspired.
Infallible, inspired books could not possibly contradict each
other, as these Gospels do. They disagree in regard to the
length of the ministry of Jesus, in regard to the day of his
crucifixion, and a whole host of important as well as of un-
important details. The moment we regard the Gospels as a
natural human growth, these critical difficulties dissolve like
mist and are nowhere to be found. But they face us, and
will face us, and will not down, if we speak of the Gospels as
infallibly inspired. For why could not the Holy Spirit of
God have inspired the different writers into a practical
agreement with each other, so as, at least, to have obviated
flat contradictions ?

And not only critical difficulties : there are also moral diffi-
culties,— as, for example, in regard to the character of God;
in regard to the belief of Jesus in a personal devil, in an
eternal hell, in the existence of demons in all the air, and
that possessed the bodies and souls of men \ in regard to his
ignorance, who at the same time is asserted by the church
to be infallible and divine ; in regard to his cruel pictures of
the exclusiveness and the wrath of God. These moral diffi-
culties are dissipated the moment we regard the Gospels as
the natural and inevitable growth of a special mental and
moral condition of a particular age.

22 Talks about Jesus.

And then we are freed from that horrible bondage which
has held Christendom in its gripe for a thousand years. If
these words are all of them infallibly inspired, then the
mighty dogmatism, the power of the Church that holds men
as in a vice, and will not let them breathe freely nor judge
freely nor move freely, nor dare to hope beyond the limita-
tions of the letter, — this hard dogmatism remains. It is this
dogmatism that is forbidding the world to think, forbidding
it to learn, forbidding it to grow, that has held men down
under the heel of tyrants, that has been made the excuse for
holding slaves, that has been made the reason for tyrannies
and wrongs innumerable. If all these utterances prove abso-
lute and infallible, the very Word of God, then those things
that we dare now to think of as they are, — mistakes and
limitations of human opinions, — become welded and har-
dened into chains to bind the world forever. We are freed,
then, by this natural growth of the Gospels, from this bondage
of texts.

But, then, what do we lose? These Gospels, the most
wondrous books in the world, — no matter who wrote them,
no matter when they were written, no matter where, — we
have them: we have them in our hands, — marvellous pict-
ures of a marvellous life, deathless words of power and
beauty. What matters it who penned them, or when or
where ? Would not Hamlet be as wonderful if Shakespeare
were proved not to be the author ? Would not the Apollo
Belvidere be as marvellous and masterful a work of art with-
out any knowledge of him whose almost divine chisel shaped
the marble into beauty? What matters it? There is that
divine ideal of the divinest man of the world, no matter whose
pencil outlined it. Here are those wonderful sayings, no
matter who gave them utterance. We have, then, the death-
less ideal of a wondrous humanity. We have the picture of

Sources of Our Knowlea 23

the love of God ; we have the heroic self-sacrifice ; we have
the tender pity, we have the stainless purity, we have the
beautiful Jesus of Nazareth to love, to honor, to worship
still, — and all this, as I said, freed from the dogmatism and
the blots and the defects ; for we may let these melt away
as mists that hide a mountain summit, leaving only the per-
fect outline of the ideal beauty. And we are freed from the
necessity of believing that the same loving soul who drew
such perfect pictures of our Father in heaven, who painted
the vivid parable, who coined the beautiful simile, uttered
the tender pity, the forgiveness, and the love, — that he, as
God, made also, and made to be eternal, the blots and the
contradictions and the devil worship and the devil posses-
sion, and the hells and the wails and the despairs. I say
the natural growth of these wondrous Gospels frees us from
this horrible necessity, and gives us Jesus in all his wonder-
ful beauty, our elder brother, the inspiring, lifting, leading
Son of God.

THE MIRACULOUS.

Those who are best fitted to pass an opinion upon the
subject tell us that man has inhabited the earth, at the very
least, one hundred thousand years, and that the probabilities
are that those figures ought to be extended to two hundred
thousand. If we take the smaller of the two numbers, and
say that man has lived here one hundred thousand years, we
must assign, at least, ninety-five out of the one hundred thou-
sand to the period of savagery and barbarism, leaving not
more than five thousand to cover the entire period of civil-
ization. This fact I wish you to bear clearly in mind, be-
cause it will have important meaning for us in our present
discussion. Ninety-five or ninety-seven and one-half per
cent, of the entire period of human life on earth must be
assigned to barbarism and savagery, leaving only five or two
and one-half per cent, for civilization. And we must remem-
ber further that, so far as a great majority of races are con-
cerned, they have not yet risen out of barbarism at all.
Civilization is still the fortunate prerogative of a few favored
peoples. And, further still, we must remember that, even in
those nations that we call civilized, the men and women that
are really entitled to the name are comparatively few. The
masses of Christendom still, so far as their thoughts and
habits are concerned, are characterized by those peculiarities

The Miraculous.

25

which distinguish the barbaric peoples. And yet, in spite of
these far-reaching facts, we arc accustomed to think that the
man who questions the religious opinions of the past is a
little presumptuous, and must, at any rate, give strong rea-
sons for the ground which he takes, and all the while we
know that in every other direction the early-world beliefs
were wrong, and have to be corrected by modern study.

If, indeed, it were true that man started only a few thou-
sand years ago but a little lower than the angels, — perfect in
brain, perfect in body, perfect in heart, perfect in character, —
then indeed, if we could gather up only some broken frag-
ments of tradition concerning what such a man as that
thought and believed and felt, even they would be inval-
uable to us. We should place upon them a higher estimate
than we assign to the best-authenticated opinions of the kind
of men, fallible and feeble, that live around us and with
which we are acquainted. But we know perfectly well that
this glorious dream of a perfect man, as the source of the
present humanity of which we are a part, is only a dream ;
and that, instead of starting perfect up near the angels and
falling to his present level, he started, very imperfect, away
down near the brutes, and has slowly, through these thou-
sands and thousands of years, climbed up to his present
position, which is higher than he has ever seen before.

Now what does it mean that almost the entire life of the
race, thus far, has been characterized by what we call sav-
agery and barbarism, and that comparatively only a little
brief fragment of time has been witness to the civilization of
the leading thinkers of a few favored races ? Why, it means
simply that the world as yet has been in its childhood ; that,
instead of being old, man as yet on earth has hardly passed
through the first flush of his youth. The full-grown manhood
of thought and feeling and life and civilization the world has
not entered upon yet : it is all before us.

26 Talks about Jesus.

What, now, are the characteristics of childhood ? We need
not make any very profound investigation. The children
are all about us, and we can study them every day. The
characteristics of childhood, so far as I care to call your
attention to them this morning, are two : the predominance
of feeling over judgment; and the predominance of fancy, of
credulity, over reason. Feeling and fancy, passion and
imagination highly developed, and reason just budded, not
come to blossom or fruitage at all, — these characterize the
childhood condition more clearly than anything else. The
child lives in a fancy world. It has been one of the enjoy-
ments of my life, since I had children around my feet, to
watch the curious play and development of this fancy, this
imagination ; how, for hour after hour, they create themselves
a world utterly unlike the reality in which I live, though I
be in the same room with them. They endow with life the
dolls and the chairs and the sofas. To them it is perfectly
natural, when I read to them out of yEsop's Fables, that
bears and birds should talk, that all sorts of curious and
supernatural things should happen. This weird, fancy world
seems as natural to them as my world of thought does to me.
Now we find precisely these same things characterizing
the childhood period of the world. All nations have passed
through it. if, indeed, they are not in it still. A large part
of the world has not yet emerged from it ; and, even in those
nations that we call civilized, the great majority of people
are hardly out of it yet. Reason, judgment, — these are not
developed. They live in a strange, weird, fantastic world.
This childhood period knows nothing about law, knows noth-
ing of what we mean by the word "nature," of the relation
between cause and effect, of the order that science has dis-
covered, of the manifestation of any power except it be a
quasi human power. And the heavens above and the earth

llic Miraculous. 27

beneath are one strange creation of fancy, as weird a world
as that which Shakespeare has given us in the pages of his
"Midsummer-Night's Dream." 'flie sun is a god, the stars
are gods. There are spirits of the earth, spirits of the air,
spirits of the water, wood nymphs, undines, nixies, gnomes,
elves, fairies, angels, devils, — the whole universe one wild,
strange scene of fancy and phantasm. But nothing happens
in this world in which the childhood of humanity has been
passed, — nothing happens by law or order: everything is
the result of the caprice or fancy of some of these strange
beings that work their will unhindered. When a man dies
among barbarous people, they never think of looking for any
natural cause: the question is, "Who bewitched him ? What
evil spirit put him to death ? " This is universal. When
anything happens, it never occurs to them to look for any
natural cause and effect, but some spirit, some angel, some
demon, some god, has done it : anything but a natural cause
is assigned. There is no question of what is probable or
improbable, because you will very readily see that, in a world
where there are no order and no laws, one thing is just as
probable as anything else ■ so there is no room to ask any
such question.

The other characteristic of childhood, that I spoke of, is
its simple faith, its credulity, as we call it. It never occurs
to a child at first, until it has learned by experience, that
men can tell the things that are not true. It never occurs
to a child at first to doubt, to ask for proof, to question
whether a thing is so. It is enough for him, no matter
how strange a thing may be, to assert, "My father said so,"
"My mother said so," "My teacher asserted such a thing to
be true." As illustrating this characteristic better than any
bare assertion, I was told, by a gentleman connected with
this congregation, that when his boy was small he was ac-

28 Talks about Jesus.

customed to have a little gathering of his family and friends
at his house on Christmas eve, and to have a Christmas tree
for the children j and he always used to personate Santa
Claus. He came down the back stairs, and through by some
back way behind a curtain suddenly into the parlor; and the
children never suspected it was their own father who was
personating this supernatural visitor; and when, after dis-
tributing the gifts, he disappeared behind the curtain, hur-
ried up the back stairs, and came down again in his usual
dress, looking like the smiling, loving, happy father that
he was, it was very common for him to find the chil-
dren in the back room on their knees by the grate, look-
ing up the chimney, to see where Santa Claus had gone.
And it never occurred to them to question whether the flue
was large enough to take him and his pack, — no question,
no doubt, no reasoning, nothing of the sort. It was enough
that they believed that Santa Claus had come by the chim-
ney, and had departed by the same way he came. This,
again, we find to be one of the predominant, prevailing
characteristics of the childhood condition of the world : never
a doubt, never a question, never an asking for proof, but
the simple acceptance of any wonder, no matter how strange.
It only needs the most superficial reading of the past history
of the world to illustrate how universally* true this is.

And all religions have done all they could to increase and
intensify this condition. Since ecclesiastical power rests on
the belief of the people, absolute credulity, miscalled faith,
has been preached as the highest of all virtues ; and doubt,
or a demand for proof, has been stigmatized as the deadliest
of sins. But, in the eyes of a reasonable manhood, this
pseudo-faith is not a virtue, but a sin, — a sin against man
and a sin against truth.

I said the idea of natural law, of natural causation, is very

llw Miraculous. 29

modern. The Fathers who lived after the time of Christ
taught and believed implicitly that the stars were gods or
angels; and Anaxagoras, an old Greek philosopher who lived
at the time of Pericles at Athens, was sentenced to death —
which sentence was afterwards commuted to perpetual ban-
ishment— because he taught that the sun was a ball of fire,
and not a divine being. And even down to so late a time
as Kepler, just preceding the Newtonian theory of gravita-
tion, Kepler himself, the foremost intellect and astronomer
of his time, believed that there was no other way of explain-
ing the order of the starry movements in the sky except
on the supposition that an angel inhabited, controlled, and
guided each planet and each system in its course. I speak
of this to illustrate how very modern this conception of law
and order in the universe is. I need not detail to you the
steps by which the world has advanced through the belief in
the curative properties of the relics and the bones of saints
through the belief in witchcraft, through the belief in the
king's power to cure scrofula by his touch, to this modern age
wherein we look upon everything from so rationalistic a stand-
point. As illustrating, however, how the story of a modern
miracle is received, I wish to read you an extract. It is
from the New York Nation for March 25, and it will explain
itself : —

The gloom of the famine appears likely to be lighted a good deal in
Ireland by miracles, which are now exciting great sensation among the
Catholics, both lay and clerical. Unhappily, however, there seems to be
nothing " practical " about them, and they promise no addition to the stores
of food and clothing. Considering how many miracles have been worked
during the last ten years in France and Belgium, it is somewhat surpris.
ing that Ireland, whose faith is much more lively than that of either of
those countries, should have gone so long without even one or two. As
usual, the new miracle was first perceived by a poor woman, in the shape
of an apparition of the Virgin, St. Joseph, and St. John close to a Catho-

3<D Talks about Jesus,

lie Church. Other women and children rapidly began to see it, too; then
the housekeeper of an archdeacon saw it ; and then the archdeacon himself
saw it, or something very like it. As soon as the fame of it got abroad,
cripples and diseased persons began to come in in great numbers to get
the benefit of it ; and now the restoration of sight to the blind, hearing to
the deaf, walking to the lame, by merely sitting round the church wr in
contact with it, has occurred so frequendy that the individual cases have
ceased to be reported. The clergy have not as yet pronounced authori-
tatively on the wonder; but they have not repudiated it, and it would
seem to make little difference what they say in the presence of the cures
effected by it. Not the least interesting feature in the modern Catholic
miracles is that, however well authenticated, they never convert a sceptic
or a Protestant. Nobody pays the slightest attention to them except
persons who were fully prepared for such things beforehand.

I have read this as illustrating the spirit with which the
world to-day receives the report of a miracle, no matter how
well authenticated it may be. Now let us see if we can
understand and explain this. Why is it that we have come
into this sceptical attitude of mind ? One principal reason
is this : we have discovered that the universe, so far as we
can investigate and explore, is a scene of natural law; that
is, that there is order everywhere. We have found this, I
say, in every place where we have been able to bring the
matter to a test ; and the inference seems to follow with
almost irresistible force, that, if we have not yet discovered
it everywhere, it is simply because we have not completed
our investigations. That is, it means, if I translate it into
theological language, that we have discovered that the ordi-
nary method of Gods work is a method of order and law,
a following of natural causation and consequence ; and we
believe that this must be his method of working everywhere.
Now modern science does not do what by many it is sup-
posed to do. It does not deny the possibility of what is
called a miracle. It is simply the embodiment of Anglo-
Saxon common-sense. It does not deny a miracle, ihe possi-

The Miraculous.

31

bility of it : it only says, if you make to me an extraordinary
assertion, you must present me extraordinary proof. The
proof must be equal to the strangeness of the thing that you
assert to be true. Now, as a palpable and very simple illustra-
tion, let me give you a case of what I mean. If one of you
should come to me to-day, and say, " As I was walking up
Washington Street, I met a black dog on the sidewalk," it
would never occur to me to doubt it, to dispute it, to question
about it. I should not ask whether anybody else saw it,
whether you were accustomed to tell the truth. I should ac-
cept it simply and unquestioningly. Why ? Because it is one
of the commonest things in the world for people to meet
black dogs on Washington Street. There would be nothing
strange about it. But if you should go on further, and assert,
"While I was looking at this black dog, he suddenly grew a
pair of wings and flew over a five-story block of buildings,"
should I accept that unquestioningly ? Of course not. And
why? Because that is a very strange thing, a very unusual
thing, — so unusual that you would feel I would be justified in
saying that nobody ever saw such a thing as that happen in
the world. I should want a good deal of proof before believ-
ing it. It would not necessarily follow that I should charge
you with purposed and intentional falsehood. I might say :
" Perhaps you are mistaken. It may have been something
else that was black, that was born with wings, that you saw
rise up and fly from the sidewalk over the block of buildings.
Perhaps it was not a dog at all. You may have been mis-
taken." If you asserted still that it was, I should think
possibly that something might be the matter with your brain,
and I should want a medical investigation. You would say
I would be justified in almost anything except believing such
a story as that. You would say it would be almost impos-
sible to bring together proof enough to establish it. If five

32 Talks about Jesus.

hundred peopie on Washington Street should assert that
they all saw it, I question whether there is a man in this
house to-day who would believe it, who would not question
whether it was not intended as an imposition on them, or
whether the whole crowd was not taken with a sudden attack
of insanity. Anything, almost, you would accept rather
than believe it as a literal fact. This, then, is simply what
I mean when I say that people demand, — it is a part of
their present condition of thought, — they demand an unusual
amount of proof before they will believe any unusual thing.

You have all heard, I suppose, about the famous argument
of Hume against miracles. And, perhaps, if you simply take
up the popular impression about it, and do not know what
he said, you may have thought that it was some very dread-
ful thing on his part. But what was his argument ? It was
only putting into philosophical language the very argument
I have been using to you. He simply said this : It is more
likely that men should be deceived, or that they should
falsify, than that a miracle should have occurred ; it is more
in accord, he says, with human experience. And, of course,
we all know that, whether a miracle ever did occur or not,
this statement of Hume is undoubtedly true. We have ex-
perience every day of our lives of people's telling untruths ;
and it is not a very difficult thing to prove that they are
capable of doing that. We also have experience every day
of our lives of people's being mistaken, of their misreport-
ing this thing or that or the other that really did occur or
that they suppose occurred. We do not need any great
amount of proof to make us believe that. And I will ven-
ture to say that what is ordinarily meant by the word '; mira-
cle " is something that has not come within the ran<re of the
experience of any of us. Therefore, we know, from our own
experience with men, that Hume's statement is true, — that

The Miraculous. 33

it is more likely that a man should tell an untruth or be mis-
taken than that a miracle should occur. That is Hume's
famous argument.

Now let us pass on to consider the condition of things,
somewhat at length, in the popular mind. What is the atti-
tude of the Church to-day toward miracles ? Only a few
years ago, if you should pick up and open a volume of Chris-
tian evidences, you would find the miracles placed at the
fore-front, as the leading, strongest, and most convincing
argument of all that Christianity was something supernatural
and divine. What do you find to-day? The miracles, in-
stead of being the strongest argument on which the apologist
for Christianity relies, are everywhere confessed to be a diffi-
culty, a burden, something to be apologized for, something
to be explained, if possible, in accordance with natural law.
A few years ago, I published a little book, in which I at-
tempted to establish the spiritual truth of Christianity on a
spiritual basis. A leading professor in an Orthodox Theo-
logical Seminary wrote me a letter, saying that, if Christianity
was to endure, it must be supported in this way, and not
any longer on doubtful external proofs. As a further illus-
tration, let us look at the position of Dr. Furness. You
know he is one of the leading liberal men of the present
time. He is a firm believer in the actual occurrence of
those things that are called miracles in the New Testament.
How does he explain them ? He does not believe that they
were unnatural at all. He does not believe that they contra-
dicted natural law. He simply says : Given a man of the
character of Jesus, and miracles for him are just as natural
as our ordinary occupations and works are to us. But I
cannot possibly see any force in Dr. Furness' argument.
Until some one shall explain to me how there is any natural
relation between moral goodness and physical power over

34 Talks about Jesus.

physical phenomena, I shall be obliged to regard his argu-
ment as only another failure in the way of an apology. Mr.
Thomas Hughes, the author of " Tom Brown," has recently
published a book called "The Manliness of Christ." He
accepts the miracles in the New Testament as true, but
asserts particularly that they were not unnatural, that they
were in contradiction of no natural law ; and he goes so far
as to say that any man to-day who could come into such
perfect accord with the life and the laws of God as did Jesus
would probably be able to perform the same works which he
performed in his day. Dr. Abbott, the author of the famous
article on the Gospels in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, — he
also finds these miracles a difficulty, although he is a lead-
ing scholar in the Orthodox Church ; and he argues them all
away on the ground of myth and legend and tradition, and
believes that the life of Jesus from the first to the last was a
purely natural and simple life. I speak of these as illustrat-
ing the attitude of modern churchmen, as compared with
that which was taken no more than one hundred years ago.
You are aware of the position of the Catholic Church on
this question. It holds that the stream of miraculous move-
ment has never ceased, but has flowed uninterruptedly in
the Church from the first day until now. No Protestant, of
course, believes this. And yet mark this point. If Jesus
said what he is reported to have said in the Gospels, — which
I very much doubt, — the Catholic position is the only proper
and logical one to hold. For Jesus is reported to have said
that miracles shall be one distinguishing characteristic of
those that believe in him ; and that, after his ascension, not
only shall miracles not cease, but that they shall grow in
numbers and in importance. For he says of the disciples,
"Greater works than these shall ye do, because I go to my
Father." This is in flat contradiction to the Protestant

The Miraculous. \

position. As, however, nobody but the Catholics themselves
believe in the reality of Catholic miracles, either those in
Ireland to-day, or those that recently occurred at Lourdes in
France, or those wrought by the bones of Thomas a Becket,
or those connected with the life of any other saint in any
age, of course 1 need not stop to discuss them.

Let us pass, then, to the Protestant position. What is
that ? The Protestants hold that there was an age of mir-
acles, beginning with the birth of Jesus and ending with the
death of the last apostle ; that all the miracles that are
reported to have occurred during that age must be accepted
as true ; and that then suddenly the miracles ceased, and
that none genuine have occurred from that day to this.
That is the ordinary Protestant position. Let us now ex-
amine it. Is there any reason, then, in the nature of things.
or any reason that we can discover, why we should believe
in the reality of the miracles of the New Testament, and
deny the reality of all others ? That is the question we want
to look squarely and simply in the face. Let us take this
up briefly in its several points.

In the first place, were the Jews a critical people immedi-
ately preceding and following the birth of Jesus ? Were
they a people who would be very likely to be much aston-
ished at miracles, who would look at them very closely, who
would demand a good deal of evidence, whose testimony
would be such that we could rely upon it ? On the other
hand, so eminent a scholar as Dr. Lightfoot of England, a
leading Orthodox scholar, critic, and commentator, tells us,
after studying this whole age, that the Jews at that time —
about the time of Jesus — were given over beyond measure
to beliefs in all sorts of delusions, exorcisms, amulets, charms,
and dreams. Everything strange and wild and unnatural
they were engaged in and ready to believe. This is on the

36 Talks about Jesus.

authority of one of the best Orthodox scholars of the world.
What does the New Testament itself tell us as to the effect
which the miracles produced? Did they astonish the dis-
ciples ? Did they make any special impression upon them ?
Why, the writers of the Gospels naively and unconsciously
confess that they did nothing of the kind. Why should they?
The Jews at that time believed not only in the ability of
Jesus to work a miracle, or of a prophet to work a miracle,
but they believed that devils and demons of every grade
could work miracles. They believed that the heathen divin-
ities could work miracles just as well. They had no more
doubt of a miracle which occurred in Greece or Asia Minor
or Babylon than of one which occurred at Jerusalem. And
we find that the Gospel writers, as I have said, unconsciously
betray the fact that these miracles made no impression.
After the most stupendous miracles, we find the disciples the
next clay grumbling, murmuring, finding fault, doubting, just
as though nothing had ever happend. It seems very strange
that there should be no impression produced by such stupen-
dous occurrences. We are not, then, to regard the Jews as
specially critical, or as being very careful in regard to won-
ders. Now, is there any reason in the nature of things why
miracles should have come then, and never since that time?
None whatever, that I know of. If it is important that men
should believe the truth in order that they may be saved, and
if it is important that they should be convinced, and if mira-
cles are the most effective way of convincing, I know of no
reason in the world why miracles should not occur to-day
just as well as eighteen hundred years ago. If they tell us
that man is fallen, and a supernatural dispensation is needed
to raise him up again, we reply, All intelligent men know that
the story of the fall is an Asiatic myth.

Have we any more testimony for the truth of the miracles

The Miraculous. 37

in the New Testament than we have for any others? This,
friends, is the crucial and important point that I wish to call
your special attention to. Have we any better evidence for
the New Testament miracles than we have for any others in
the history of the world ? In fact, we have not one-tenth part
of the evidence for any miracle said to have occurred eigh-
teen hundred years ago that we have for the reality of those
which I have read to you as having occurred in Ireland
within a few weeks. We have not one-tenth part of the evi-
dence for the New Testament miracles that we have for the
power of the English kings to cure scrofula ; we have not
one-tenth part of the evidence that we have of the reality of
the Salem witchcraft ; we have not one-tenth part of the evi-
dence that we have for the power of Thomas a Becket's
bones to cure the sick ; we have not one-tenth part of the
evidence that we have of other miracles said to have
occurred during the life of Augustine, for which he himself
vouches. To put this more tersely and strongly still, let me
make this statement : you could not convict a man of steal-
ing a jack-knife, you could not imprison him here in Boston
one week, without better evidence than we have for the occur-
rence of any miracle eighteen hundred years ago. The testi-
mony that we have would not even be considered ten minutes
by any modern court of justice. What is the simple state of
the case ? We have not the testimony of one single known
eye-witness for any New Testament miracle, — not one. It is
only that somebody believed that somebody else saw or heard
something strange, somewhere else, at some other time. You
must remember here that the Gospels and the Acts, as we have
them, are purely anonymous. The nearest we come to proof,
the only possible or apparent exception that may be brought
up to your mind, is in the case of Paul. He asserts the reality
of what he calls "signs and wonders." We have his direct

38 Talks about Jesus.

personal testimony for the occurrence of these signs and won-
der.-,. But, when we look at them, what do we find he means?
He includes in these signs and wonders his own ecstatic
visions, — as in that passage where he says he was " caught
up to the third heaven," whether in the body or out of the
body he could not tell — and also certain inarticulate bab-
blings, which were called "speaking with tongues," in the
early churches ; and some other strange occurrences and phe-
nomena that are easily explained, that nobody would now call
miraculous. These are what Paul speaks of as " signs and
wonders." So that the statement remains true that I have
made, — that we have not the direct testimony of any single
person who even claims to be an eye-witness of any miracle
that is said to have occurred eighteen hundred years ago.

There are one or two other points that we want to look at.
Does this impeach the integrity of the New Testament
writers? It is sometimes said, Why, you must believe in
all these wonders of the New Testament, or else you must
charge the disciples, who were ready to lay down their lives
for their opinions, with dishonesty. Nothing is further from
the truth. Is not history full of the mistakes of honest men ?
We do not say that Tacitus told a lie, because he refers to
prodigies and wonders, as strange as any mentioned in the
Bible, as occurring in connection with the history of the
Roman emperors and the Roman armies. We simply believe
the ordinary historic statements of Tacitus, and drop these
other things, as credulities characteristic of the age. Nobody
thinks of questioning his truth. Nobody thinks of question-
ing the sincerity and honesty of Sir Matthew Hale, that
famous judge in England, who condemned so many people
as witches. He was honest and sincere in it : he believed it
as truly as man ever believed anything. And we know from
the history of the world, past and present, that it is not

The Miraculous. 39

necessary that a doctrine should be true, in order that men
should die for it. We talk about men being selfish ; and yet
is it not the commonest thing in the history of the world to
see men dying for their opinions ? And it does not at all
follow that the opinion must therefore be true : it only fol-
lows that they must have believed it to be true. Does it
touch the honesty of these men, then, or their integrity ?
Not at all. They were honest, earnest, faithful, noble, and
they taught that which they believed, — not only what they
believed, but what everybody believed at that time.

There is another difficulty which is frequently brought up.
I want to pass these points in review rapidly, so as to cover,
to your thought, all the difficulties. They tell us that there
was not time after the death of Jesus for these wondrous
stories to grow up and be believed before the Gospels were
written. They say it must have taken a very long time
for people to have come to believe such things. But the
person who makes this objection must have thought and
observed very little. How long does it take for a myth
or a legend or a story to grow ? Why, sometimes it takes
twenty-four hours, — sometimes not so long as that, — 'Some-
times a week. I have seen, — in the five years in which
I have been in Boston, — I have seen the birth and develop-
ment of very large numbers of wonder-stories and myths
and legends ; things utterly baseless and without foundation,
things that only a few years ago would have been accepted
as well-accredited miracles. Let me give you an illustration
of what I mean, because something concrete is more effective
than generalized statement. Only two or three years ago,
I heard a lady, of ordinary intelligence and of undoubted
veracity, telling a lot of her friends, inside of a week after
the supposed event occurred, of some strange, wonderful
thing that she said happened at the other side of the room,

^o Talks about Jesus.

when she was sitting in absolute midnight darkness and
could neither see nor touch it. I happened to be sitting
beside her at the time. Nothing of the sort that she was
telling about occurred. She had no reason to suppose that
it occurred, except in her own imagination ; and, if it had oc-
curred, there was no possible way of her knowing it. And
yet she did not tell it with any if or but or question, but
asserted is as simple truth. It was no less a statement than
that a piano, on the other side of the room from which she
was sitting, lifted itself a foot or two from the floor, and came
down again, and did it several times ; and this, I say, in a
room so dark that you could not see your finger an inch from
your face. When people are in this state of mind, does
it take a great while for legends, myths, and stories to grow ?
Two or three years ago, I attended a funeral in this city.
The appearance of the body was strange. It was that of a
very elderly lady, and yet the face was smooth and without a
wrinkle and looked wondrously youthful ; still, to any one
who was at all acquainted with these things, it was noth-
ing so very unusual. But the friends remarked it as some-
thing wonderful, and they talked about the wonder; and
within three days after I saw it grown into a marvellous
story, half-bordering on a miracle, in one of our daily papers.
There is hardly a week passes that I do not learn some won-
drous thing that I have said or done within the last month,
that I never heard of before. I hear it on unimpeachable
authority, evidence that it is almost impossible for me to
doubt. As a concrete and curious example of it, let me tell
you something that many of you, at any rate, will recog-
nize. Only a little while ago, a detailed story went the
rounds of all the Boston papers — and I know not how
much farther — concerning Dr. Bartol and my little girl, — of
his calling on me, and the wonderful report that was given of

The Miraculous.

4i

his appearance. It was on the authority of one of the leading
poetesses of America, and not the slightest question or doubt
was hinted concerning it. The story, then, rested on unim-
peachable evidence ; and yet, until I read it in the paper, I
had never heard of it. Only a little while ago, as another
illustration, I heard a perfectly well-authenticated story of
one of my brother ministers and his wife, here in the city.
It was of something that he had done on a public occasion
where there were hundreds of people to see. I heard that
some of his parish were considerably troubled about it, did
not altogether like it, thought it might possibly lead to
trouble, — another story, well-authenticated, full-grown, per-
fectly developed. I found out afterward that nothing of the
sort ever happened, — not the slightest foundation for it any-
where. People right in the midst of facts like these talking
about there not being time for stories to grow ! In a state
of mind where such things as these are easily believed, they
grow up on every hand, just as naturally as witchgrass grows
in a New England cornfield. This question, then, is not
an important one ; and it is not worth our while that we
should go into any very elaborate discussion of it.

One point more I must touch. They tell us that, if we take
the miracles out of the New Testament, we must lose the
person of Jesus, because he is so entangled and involved in
these miraculous stories that it is impossible to take them
away without taking him away also, and losing his life and
power out of the world. Let us look at this just a moment.
It was impossible in the state to which criticism had ad-
vanced, perhaps, fifty years ago ; but it is not impossible
now. For this same Dr. Abbott, of whom I have already
spoken, one of the leading Orthodox scholars of the world,
has actually accomplished that which they have been telling
us is impossible. He has disentangled from the Gospels —

42 Talks about Jesus.

in the original tradition, which he calls " the triple tradition "
— the story of Jesus' life, in which the writers of the Gospels,
Mark, Matthew, and Luke, all three perfectly agree. And,
when we get to that life, what do we find ? We find hardly
more than the simple man Jesus. What few miracles are left
are the ones that would most naturally spring up first, very
simple in their nature and origin, and very easily explained.
So that we find Jesus already disentangled from the miracles,
and restored to us as a simple, natural, human life. And,
friends, to my mind this is a great gain. They tell us we shall
lose Jesus, if the miracles are taken out of the Gospels. But,
to my mind, this, as it bears on the person of Jesus, is not loss,
but discovery. He now becomes our brother in very truth ;
not in any incomprehensible, weird, wild, strange, unaccount-
able way, but in very truth our brother. It was our brother,
a simple man, that could have such grand faith in God, that
could have such grand faith in his fellow-men, that could
tell the truth so fearlessly in the face of the direst opposi-
tion, who could go unflinchingly to the cross, who could
give us this perfect picture and ideal of a wondrous life?
But Jesus, as they have given him to us in the unauthorized
and fanciful dogmas of the Church, — what is he? He is a
being neither God nor man ; an incomprehensible, strange
creature ; a person who was ignorant as a man, omniscient as
a God ; who could get tired and suffer on one side of his
being, who could neither weary nor feel the touch of pain on
the other side j who had two wills, a human and a divine ;
two natures, the human and the divine ; who could go
through what looks like only a sham and pretence of suffer-
ing. For where is sacrifice, where is humiliation, where is the
power of sorrow and pain to a God who just temporarily
clothes himself with the human form, who knows all the time
the issue, who simply goes through a little temporary trial of

The Miraculous.

43

a year or a year and a half, and by it earns the eternal ac-
claim and glory of the universe ? To talk about the suffer-
ing, self-sacrifice, or humiliation or self-denial of a life like
that, seems to me to use words without any meaning. Hut
if my brother man, a real man and only a man, could do all
this, then he becomes sublime, a man I can worship, a man
I can look up to, and let him teach and inspire and lead me.
And, then, in regard to the bearing of this subject on the
progress of civilization. If you will notice one thing, and
trace it throughout the whole course of human history, you
will find this to be true. The entire progress of man on
earth has gone along, step by step, with the decay of belief
in the supernatural. That is, during the period of utter
savagery and barbarism, there was nothing else but the
supernatural. At the very first dawn of civilization, there
began to be questions of possible and probable, and the
rejection of this, that, and the other thing, — as we see in the
case of Anaxagoras, — as inconsistent with facts ; and so the
growth of modern science. And do you not see how it must
be true ? Why should men exert themselves to civilize the
world and lift it up, if it is liable to be done all at once in a
minute by a miracle ? Thus the first Christian ages argued
and expected. Take it in the progress of medicine. Why
should men investigate the nature of the human body, study
diseases, and learn their phases, so that they can alleviate
human suffering and sorrow, if you can do it all in five
minutes by a prayer ? Until men cease to believe that they
can do these things by magic, modern civilization gains no
foothold on the earth. If they are able to work miracles in
Ireland to-day, if the Virgin Mary pities them so that she
comes down from heaven to love and sorrow for them, if
St. John and St. Joseph can come and play hide-and-seek in
an old cathedral, why can they not keep men from starving ?

44 Talks about Jesus.

Until, I say, men believe that they, in accordance with the
natural laws of God, must work out civilization, civilization
is never born. The progress of the world, then, in every
department, — as I could show you, if I had time, — has kept
pace, step by step, with the discovery and the belief in natu-
ral causation, in scientific order.

And then once more, and my last thought. The tone of
the civilized world's thought is rapidly changing concerning
that which is really wonderful and sublime. It used to be
thought that the only way for a god to manifest his majesty
was by some weird, unheard-of, unnatural display ; he must
do something that nature never thought of doing, in order to
manifest a divine presence. It is in accord with the spirit of
modern science and the modern civilized thought of the
world to say, God reveals himself most majestically and
grandly in all those things that are natural and orderly.
He who understands the mystery, the infinity of wonder
there is in a drop of water, no longer stops to marvel over
stories of water being turned into wine. He who under-
stands, as the botanist does, the infinite mystery of the
growth and budding and blossoming of the flower, no longer
wonders over old, childish stories of goddesses that passed
over the earth and left flowers in their tracks. He who
understands the dull glow or the burning flame of the Octo-
ber leaves no longer stops to find God and his mystery and
majesty in the fabled burning bush that was not consumed.
He who understands the infinite mystery, marvel, and won-
der of a waving field of grain, no longer looks for God as
one who multiplies a few loaves into food enough for a crowd.
The marvel, the wonder, the mystery of the world, — have they
gone away with miracles ? Nay : every step of science only
brings us nearer and nearer, face to face, with the infinite
awe and the infinite mystery of the living God. The light of

The Miraculous. 45

the stars as they keep on in their eternal courses, not wan-
dering hither and thither through the heavens, to guide
bewildered magicians as they are hunting after the birth of
a child ; the comets, whose law now can be read so that we
can tell how many hundreds of years ago they were here and
how many hundreds of years hence they will appear again. —
are no longer supposed to be portents to give warning of the
coronation, the sickness, or death of selfish or brutal and fool-
ish kings. God's majesty of might among the stars moves
on. His wonder in their brightness, his wonder in the grow-
ing of the grass beneath our feet, his wonder in the eternal
beat and laughter of the sea, his wonder in the sculpturing
and carving of the mountains, his wonder in marking out the
watercourses of the earth, — the wonder of God everywhere,
as modern science is revealing it, is giving us a conception
of infinitude and majesty and glory, beside which all the
poor tricks of legerdemain, which are connected with the
myths of the past, seem contemptible and poor. As Lowell
tells it in his " Parable," a prophet who goes to the mountain
in search of a sign from God, on his return, meets his little
daughter with an equal sign and wonder in her hand, which,
as he says,

" Beside my very threshold,
She had plucked and brought to me."

BIRTH AND CHILDHOOD.

If I should confine myself strictly to the few things that
are absolutely known, I might sum up my morning's dis-
course in two or three brief phrases. All that we really
know about the birth and childhood of Jesus is, first, that
he was born ; secondly, that he had a childhood ; thirdly,
that out of this birth and childhood there came a wondrous
manhood. But on the basis of slight indications and stories
and traditions there has grown up such a stupendous, unnat-
ural, incredible superstructure of dogma that it seems neces-
sary for us, if we will find out what Jesus really was, that we
make some particular and careful investigation of these sto-
ries and of their origin. I ask you, then, not to think of me
as simply critical, fault-finding, picking to pieces this passage
of Scripture or that, but rather as endeavoring to find the real
Jesus. I will, if I can, strike out a road through the jungle
and thick undergrowth of superstition and myth and legend,
if by any means we may find a path, so that we may come to
the cradle of the real child of Joseph and Mary, and find out
that he is not some monstrous birth, separated from us so that
we can never really know or understand him, but that he is
our brother, and may be our teacher, our inspirer and friend.
That we may perforin this work, it will be necessary for me,
as I said, carefully and critically to review the stories that

Birth and Childhood. 47

are told about his birth, that we may see whether they agree
together, out of what they have probably sprung, and how
much reliance may be placed upon them as actual history.

I believe we shall find them to be not historic, but legen-
dary ; not reality, but poetry. And when, by and by, the mind
of the nineteenth century has learned to think of them as
they are, as beautiful developments of the loving and adoring
imagination of Jesus' friends and followers, we shall then be
able to read them simply, as we cannot now, without being
troubled by the supernatural in them, any more than to-day
we are troubled in reading the myths of Greece or Rome ;
any more than we are troubled about the story of Hercules
strangling the serpents in his cradle, or the story of Minerva
springing full-grown and full-armed, with helmet, shield, and
spear, from the brow of her father Jove.

Let us, then, look at the tales that the gospel narrators
tell. We can dispose of John in a word. If you will
take the Gospel of John and read it through carefully with
this one thought in mind, you will find that throughout its
pages Jesus is not treated as a man. You may not be per-
suaded that he is treated as the equal of the omnipotent
God, but he is at least superhuman, a demigod. John was
written, as I have already told you, toward the last of the
second century ; and by this time the Hebrew Jesus was
lost in the growth of Greek philosophy and pagan myth.
So John, wishing to carry out this idea of keeping Jesus
separate from and above humanity, makes no reference
whatever to his having had any human origin. But, appar-
ently by accident, he reveals to us what was the original and
universal tradition, when he makes Nathaniel ask Philip,

II Can any good thing come out of Nazareth ? "

At the other end of this scale stands the Gospel of Mark.
This represents the oldest, the original tradition of all. And

48 Talks about Jesus.

here we find Jesus not superhuman, not a demigod, but a
simple man, the prophet of Nazareth. But this Gospel of
Mark, or the tradition it represents, had come into existence
before the wonder-stories connected with his birth had har-
dened into belief. So there is no trace of any appearance
of angels, of any supernatural birth, of anything wonderful
about his origin in any way whatever. He is treated simply
as the son of Joseph and Mary; and it is said that, when
he comes to John for baptism, he comes from his home in
Nazareth.

Many years after this tradition had taken shape, the Gos-
pel of Matthew was written. Many years after Matthew, the
Gospel of Luke was written. And in these two we find the
tradition partly grown in Matthew, and still more largely
developed in Luke. And if we find, as we go along, that it
is impossible for us to reconcile the conflicting accounts of
Luke and Matthew, we need not be troubled by it at all ;
for, when Luke wrote his Gospel, Matthew's was one among
those "many" that he refers to in his introduction : it had
not yet taken its place as an authority in the Church, and the
writer of Luke would have had no sort of scruple in telling
his own story independently, without raising the question as
to whether it was or was not consistent with the same story
as told by Matthew.

Let us now come to the special points of these stories,
refer to them very briefly, and then look at them side by side.
In the Gospel of Matthew, we find that the home of Joseph
and Mary is represented as having been at Bethlehem, — not
Nazareth, but Bethlehem. Here Joseph and Mary are be-
trothed. And betrothal, you must remember, in the time of
Jesus and among the Jews, was practically the same as mar-
riage ; only there remained the further ceremony of bringing
the bride publicly to her husband's home. Joseph finds that

Birth ninl ( hildhood.

49

Mary is to become a mother, and lie is represented as sus-
pecting her fidelity. Then he dreams that an angel comes to
him, and tells him that the father of the child to be born is
the Holy Ghost. Immediately after this there appear the
three wise men coming from the far east and led by a star.
Curiously enough, in the first instance they are not led to
Bethlehem. They are led to Jerusalem, and here they make
inquiries in regard to the place where this wondrous child is
to be born, until they have aroused the suspicion of Herod.
Then the star, which had not led them aright in the first
place, appears a second time, and directs their course from
Jerusalem to Bethlehem. Meantime, Joseph has had another
dream, and the angel warns him against the hate of Herod ;
and he takes the child and its mother and flies into Egypt.
Now Herod, enraged because the wise men had not come
back and reported to him, — for they also had had a dream,
and been warned to return home another way, — sends out
his soldiers and puts to death all the male children from two
years of age and under in and about the city of Bethlehem.
After Herod's death, Joseph dreams again, and the angel
tells him that it is safe for him to return to his own land.
When he is nearly there, he hears that Archelaus, the son
of Herod, is ruling in his stead, and he is afraid to return
to Bethlehem; and the angel in another dream appears to
him, and he turns northward into Galilee, to the city of
Nazareth, and makes that his home. And that is Matthew's
explanation of how it comes to pass that Jesus is a Nazarene.
Now let us see what the story is in Luke, passing it over
briefly in just this simple way. Here, as I said, we shall find
that the wonders are very largely grown. Now it is not an
angel coming in a dream, but a veritable angel appearing in
person ; and he does not come to Joseph now, nor even to
Mary in the first instance, — for not only must there be a

50 Talks about Jesus.

supernatural foreshadowing of the birth of Jesus, but there
must also be supernatural occurrences connected with the
coming of his forerunner, John the Baptist. So that in the
first instance the angel appears to Zacharias as he ministers
in the temple, and tells him that a wonderful child is to be
born and the name by which he is to be called ; for he is not
to be the Messiah, but the forerunner of the Messiah. And,
as Zacharias doubts, the angel strikes him dumb. Judgments
always hang over the head of the man who asks for proof.
And he is not able to speak again until the time of the naming
of the child, when he calls for a tablet, and writes "his name
as John." Then his speech returns to him, and he breaks out
into a prophetic strain of adoration and praise. Meantime,
another angel has appeared, not to Joseph, — as in the ac-
count in Matthew, — but to Mary, and announced to her the
birth of her child. All this time, in Luke, you must remem-
ber, Joseph and Mary are living in Nazareth ; for that, ac-
cording to Luke, was their original home, and not Bethlehem,
as in Matthew. After the annunciation of the birth of the
wondrous child to Mary, there is no story here of any doubt
on the part of Joseph, or of any trouble about the consum-
mation of the marriage. There must be some way of having
the supposed prophecy fulfilled, of the birth of Jesus at
Bethlehem ; and so we find that Luke has recourse to a story
of there having been a taxing — an enrolment of the people
throughout the whole world as he says, by which of course
he means the Roman Empire — in the days of Augustus
Caesar. And so, as he tells us, all the Jews were obliged
to leave the homes where they were living, and go to the
place where their family had originated. And Joseph,
being of the lineage of David, takes Mary and goes to Beth-
lehem,— quite a long journey and a difficult one at this
time, — and there finds the place crowded and full, — no

Birth and Childhood. 5 I

room for them in the caravansary , and the child is born,
amid the asses and the camels, in a manger. Meanwhile,
angels have appeared to the shepherds. There is no star,
no wise men, no Herod, no slaying of the innocents in Luke ;
but the angels appear ; the shepherds hear their song of
"Peace on earth, good-will to men," and then they come
seeking for the birthplace of the wondrous child. And, after
the presentation of the child on the eighth day after its
birth in the temple, they return again to their home in Naz-
areth.

Now let us compare two or three of tne points of these
different narratives, and see if we can make them seem to
us real and veritable history ; or whether, as I have said, we
must not regard them as the poetic, legendary growth of the
loving imagination of the friends and followers of Jesus grown
famous. In the first place, you will have noticed that Mat-
thew opens with an account of the genealogy of Joseph.
Luke also has a long genealogy. But, if you have ever tried
to compare them together, you will see that they contradict
each other hopelessly at almost every point : there is no
possibility of reconciling them ; and then, furthermore, sup-
posing we could reconcile them, they have no bearing what-
ever on the question, according to the popular belief about
Jesus. For, if Jesus was not the son of Joseph, how does it
make him of the lineage of David to prove that Joseph was
a descendant of David ? Of course Joseph's family tree has
nothing more to do with it, according to the popular belief,
than has yours or mine. Then, as I have already indicated,
Luke makes the parents of Jesus live in Nazareth. Matthew
makes them live in Bethlehem. We find again that this story
of the Holy Spirit having been the father of Jesus could not
possibly have sprung up among the Jews ; for the word for
"spirit" or "ghost" in the Hebrew was a feminine word,

52 Talks about Jesus.

while in the language of the Greeks it was neuter. It
might be possible for the Greeks to think of the Holy Ghost
or Spirit as being the father of the child, but it could not
possibly have occurred to the mind of the Hebrew. And, as
illustrating this and bearing upon it, — bearing also upon what
must have been felt even then as the difficulty concerning
these genealogical tables, — we find another legend, curiously
enough, among the fragments of lost and forgotten Gospels,
of the Holy Spirit as a goddess having been the mother of
Jesus, and Joseph's having been his father. In one of these
fragments, Jesus himself is represented as speaking of the
Holy Spirit as his mother. We find, then, that these two
accounts contradict each other at almost every point, and
there is no possibility of reconciling them. You cannot pos-
sibly, if you take Matthew and sit down with it, find a place
in his account to put in the incidents that Luke says occurred.
If, on the other hand, you sit down with Luke, you cannot
possibly find a place to put in the stories of Matthew. The
two do not go together, and cannot be made to go together.

And then let us glance just for a moment at one way by
which some of these stories may have originated in the first
place, and at the curious misinterpretation and mistakes of
each one of these writers. We find, for example, that Mat-
thew speaks of this virgin birth as having been prophesied
by one of the Old Testament writers. If you turn back to
that prophecy, you will find that it has no bearing whatever
upon the subject. The original word there does not mean a
virgin at all, but only a young woman ; and the prophecy is
not something that is to occur in the far distant future, but
of something that the prophet says particularly shall take
place before the child to be born shall have grown large
enough to know good from evil. Then in regard to this ris-
ing of the star. It was easy enough in those times when

Birth and Childhood. 53

astrology was believed in, when it was supposed that every
remarkable occurrence or change in the life of a great man
or country or church in the world would naturally be her-
alded by some wondrous appearance of star or constellation
in the heavens, — it was natural enough for them to believe in
the guidance of the wise men by a star ; but can we to-day
soberly take such a narration as simple matter of fact ? And
then we find the attempt on the part of Matthew — which, by
the way, is apparent all through his Gospel from one end to
the other — to find in the life of Jesus a fulfilment, not only
of every real prophecy, but of every supposed prophecy, in
regard to the Messiah. There is the saying in the old writ
ings about a star rising out of Jacob. Of course this star in
the original prophecy is only a figurative way of representing
the king himself who was to come. But the story had sprung
up in the time of Jesus that the Messiah was to be heralded
by a star ; and, a hundred years after Jesus, the last pretender
to the Messiahship took the name of Bar-Cochba, son of a
star. And then these three wise men. In one of the stories
that we have of them, we learn their names, — Melchior, Cas-
par, and Balthazar. One came from Europe, another from
Asia, and another from Africa, — America not being dis-
covered, none comes from there, — to represent the whole
world as laying its homage at the feet of the new-born king.
They presented gold, because that was a proper gift for a
king; frankincense, as a fitting way of paying devotion to a
god, — burning incense to him ; and myrrh, as a prophecy
of the embalming of his body for the burial after his death.
And then there is another prophecy. He is made to fly into
Egypt, that it might be fulfilled where it is said, " Out of
Egypt have I called my son." You look at the original, and
you find it has nothing whatever to do with the Messiah, but
simply refers to Israel in Egypt, hundreds and hundreds of

54 Talks about Jesus.

years before. This prophecy that is applied to the slaughter
of the children of Bethlehem, in the original, refers to the
lamentations of Rachel, the mythical mother, when her chil-
dren are carried away captive into Babylon. The whole
story of the destruction of "the innocents" is probably
baseless. Josephus, with no love for Herod, tells everything
bad about him that he can discover, but makes no mention
of this. Furthermore, every mythology has its story of the
"Dangerous Child'' — like Moses — whose death is sought
because his life is to bring revolution or overthrow to the ex-
isting order of things. And then he says at the last, "He
shall be called a Nazarene," — that there is a prophecy like
that. We look at the prophecies all the way through, and
we find that he has here quoted something that does not
exist in the first place, and that he has misunderstood the
word which he makes to read Nazarene. The only thing
we can find in the Old Testament that looks like it reads, in
the original, Nazarite ; and Nazarite has nothing whatever
to do with the city of Nazareth, but refers to a person like
Samson, who let his hair grow long, drank no wine or strong
drink, and was consecrated in a special way and to a partic-
ular kind of life. So that here, again, a prophecy is quoted
that does not exist, and even the word that does exist is
misunderstood and misapplied.

And then, when we come to Luke, just take one more mis-
take,— I cannot go into details in regard to them all. Luke
makes this taxing of the whole world to have taken place
at the time of the birth ; and he says that Cyrenius, or
Quirinus as we should now spell the word, was then gov-
ernor of Syria. We know from the records of history that
Cyrenius was not governor of Syria for ten years after, and
that another man was then holding the office. And this
taxing — Luke misunderstands entirely the purpose of it.

Birth and Childhood. 55

There was no requirement that people should go to the
place where their parents originated. The tax did not even
reach as far as Nazareth, but only covered Judea and the
region round about ; and the tax itself did not occur for ten
years after the birth of Jesus.

These are some of the reasons wny we cannot look at
these narratives as historic fact. Now let us look a little
further. If Jesus was born in this wondrous fashion, is it
not a little strange that there is no sort of reference to it
anywhere else in the Gospels, — nowhere else in the New
Testament except in the opening words of these two Gos-
pels. Mark never has heard of it ; John takes no notice of
it; Paul does not refer to it anywhere ; Peter does not speak
of it ; John, in writing the Book of Revelation, says nothing
about it ; and then, curiously enough, Jesus himself never
refers to it anywhere. There is no use made of it to prove
his supernatural origin or office or power. And then, curi-
ously enough again, do you notice how naively Luke and
Matthew both refer to things which are utterly irreconcilable
with these stories ? Luke says, that, when Jesus was brought
into the temple to be dedicated to God, Simeon and Anna,
very suddenly drawn thither by the Holy Spirit, indicated
by their wondrous prophecy what was to be the fate and
fortune of this child. And the narrative goes on and says
that Joseph and Mary were amazed and astonished at their
words. Why should they be, if they knew that this little
babe they were carrying in their arms was the Almighty
God of the universe ? Why should they be astonished that
some wonderful fate is provided for him ? And then, in the
story of Luke, where he goes up and talks with the doctors
in the temple, his mother and father do not seem to under-
stand the child ; and they say, " Why hast thou thus dealt
with us ? " And when he said, "Wist ye not that I must be

Talks about Jesus.

about my Father's business?" they wondered over the saying,
and could make nothing whatever out of it. Does this seem
possible, if they had known of this marvellous birth ? Then
we find that, when Jesus and John the Baptist met at the
beginning of his public ministry, they seemed to have known
nothing of each other. They are strangers ; and John
sends to Jesus particularly, and asks him if he is the coming
Messiah. And yet Luke tells us that their mothers met and
talked over the future of the two children, and understood
perfectly their high destiny before they were born.

Could it be possible that these mothers could have lived
together thirty years, perhaps been neighbors and friends, and
neither of them have been acquainted with it, neither have
heard of the wondrous origin of Jesus or the prophecies
of the grand future that was before him? And then — still
more striking and conclusive, if possible, — we find that, when
Jesus begins his public ministry, his mother does not believe
in him. His brethren and neighbors and friends, all of them
are represented as persistent unbelievers to the last. If
an angel had come to Mary and prophesied this birth, and
if she had known what child this was, is it credible that
when he begins his public ministry she should have rejected
utterly his claims ? Is it possible that his brothers never
heard anything about it, so that they did not believe a
word of it all their lives long; so that even when he claims
to do some wonderful work, and is leading this new move-
ment through the country, they can say of him, " He is
beside himself"? Is it possible they could have charged
one that they knew was of supernatural birth, even the
omnipotent God, with madness, because he claimed to be the
founder and leader of a new religious movement ? And
then, more wonderful still, when the Church at Jerusalem is
founded, after the death of Jesus, we find the first leader of

Birth and Childhood. 57

that Church for years to be James, the brother of Jesus j and,
curiously enough, we find that this Church, with James at its
head, did not believe a word about the supernatural origin ;
and, when the first question of anything wonderful about his
birth came up, this central, original Church, which had been
led by the brother of Jesus himself, rejected the claim, and
fought continuously for the natural, simple, human origin of
Jesus. And the Ebionites, who were the descendants of this
Church and inherited its name and its traditions, have op-
posed this dogma of the deity of Jesus from the very begin-
ning. And, still further, you may read the records that are
left to us by the immediate personal acquaintances and
friends of all the apostles, those that come immediately after
them, and for two hundred years you do not find on the part
of any one of them the slightest reference to anything like a
supernatural origin for Jesus. The first man that speaks of
it is Justin Martyr, and he wrote about the year 150;
that is, as far from the time of Christ as we are from the
time of Newton. But he does not refer to it, he does
not speak of it as though it were an admitted and accepted
fact known from the beginning, but as something new, a
modern doctrine that was springing up ; and he justifies it
how ? By saying that there is proof of it ? Not at all ; but by
comparing it with similar stories concerning Jupiter and
the heathen gods, of their having had children by human
mothers. The first reference, then, in the Church to it, after
a hundred and fifty years, we find justifying itself by refer-
ence to pagan stories of the amours of the gods. And by
and by, when it does get established in the third and fourth
centuries as a dogma by the Councils, how is it done ?

You that look back, or have been accustomed to look
back, with such reverence to the decisions of those gather-
ings of Oriental, Alexandrian, Grecian, and Roman bishops

58 Talks about Jesus.

in the first few centuries of the Church, I wish that in a
few brief sentences I could picture to you one of their ecu-
menical councils, that you might see whether its opinions
or its decisions are worthy of the respect of the nineteenth
century. Did they come together there, — the greatest and
wisest of them, — search the records for honest proof, consider
carefully, that they might be sure to make no mistake ?
Nothing of the kind. They were managed with all the
adroitness, with all the unscrupulousness, with all the cruelty,
with all the tyranny, with all the personal violence and bru-
tality of the worst possible specimen of a political caucus of
which you have ever read. The Council of Ephesus, held in
the fifth century under the control of Cyril of Alexandria, the
one which decided that Mary hereafter must be called not
simply the "Mother of Christ," but the "Mother of God," —
this very Council of Ephesus Cyril manipulated by the prov-
inces he could control, — got his own followers to go to this
city of Ephesus, as being a particularly favorable place, where
the worship of Diana had prevailed, and where it would be
especially easy to work upon the susceptibilities of the popu-
lace in favor of accepting Mary as a goddess in place of
Diana. And the first day they met, before half the bishops
that had been summoned had arrived, Cyril overawed all
those present, and simply "bullied" them into pronouncing
judgment. In some of these councils, they carried things so
far as to bring in hospital waiters and men connected with
the army, the camp followers, with clubs and weapons to
overawe those that would not give their vote on the side of
the majority, so that they might make it a unanimous thing.
They carried it so far that they compelled bishops to sign
their names to blank papers, which they themselves after-
wards filled up with anything they pleased. In the midst of
violence, then, and personal injury, carried even sometimes

Birth and Childhood.

59

to bloodshed, these doctrines that are supposed to be re-
vealed directly from our Father in heaven were established
among men. Cyril punished Nestorius, his opponent and
the representative of the opposite view, by getting control of
the emperor, who was a weak boy, — getting him under his
power through his influence over his mother and sister. He
banished him, and hurled after him the bitterest possible
malediction, saying that he ought to be hated in this world
and pursued by eternal wrath in the world to come for
daring to say that Mary was only the mother of Christ, and
not the mother of God, — for that was his only crime.
" Boss " Tweed was a respectable man by the side of
"Bishop" Cyril; and yet such men as he have given us
a large part of our "Orthodoxy." It was Cyril who had the
beautiful and learned Hypatia murdered and the flesh scraped
from her bones by a mob of brutal monks.

In this way, then, these dogmas have been established.
Now let me give you just one or two brief specimens of
patristic reasoning concerning the birth and nature of Jesus,
on the part of the Fathers of the early Christian centuries.
I cannot give them verbally ; but they are from such men
as Chrysostom, Basil, Theophylact, Jerome, Damascenes,
Ambrose, and the like, — these leading men, the Fathers of
the Church. When they come to consider this question, do
any of them fall back on the records ? Do they offer any
credible testimony ? They say nothing about it. Chrysos-
tom, for example, goes on at length and speaks of Mary's
adroit management, and admits that she calls Joseph the
father of Jesus. Why does she do it ? He says she does it
for two reasons: first, lest she should have been charged
with having been an adulteress; and, secondly, lest the
devil should find out that Jesus had really been born of a
virgin. This plays a great part in the doctrine of that time.

60 Talks about Jesus.

They represented that the devil was expecting Jesus to be
born about this time ; and that, having read the prophecies,
he knew that he was to be born of a virgin ; and that he was
watching the virgins all over the country, being ready to
work them injury, if he saw the possibility of this strange
thing coming to pass. And, in order to cheat him, Mary
marries Joseph, so that he may not find out that she is a
virgin. This is a specimen of the reasoning of a Church
Father — one whose name stands among the highest — for
accepting such stupendous and strange dogmas as have
grown up in the history of Christianity. Jerome gives these
reasons, and adds another, — that Mary might have a guard-
ian in her flight into Egypt. Basil, Theophylact, and Damas-
cenes, all say that she married to cheat the devil. Lactan-
tius says that, as God had neither father nor mother, so
Jesus must be twice born : once of God, and so without
mother ; and once again of a virgin, and so without father.
Irenasus thinks he must have been virgin-born, in order to
surpass David and Solomon, who were only born in the com-
mon way. The Emperor Constantine, at the Council of
Nice, thinks it was fitting that such a being should " invent
a new way of being born."

Then, again, in this age the relation of marriage was con-
sidered unholy. It was only an uncombed, filthy, wild man
in the desert who was a " saint." They cast contempt on
motherhood, and denied, with impure imaginings, God's own
method of birth ; and so, when God is to visit the earth, they
must make him heap indignity upon his own creation of
wifehood, despise his own wondrous order, and astonish the
world by appearing as a monstrosity. That we can still
respect such absurdities, born of ignorance and filthy minds,
only shows that as yet we are not completely civilized.

With just a word as to the time of the birth of Jesus, I

Birth and Childhood. 61

must pass on to consider a few things concerning his child-
hood. As to the day when Jesus was born, no one knows
or probably ever will know. The twenty-fifth of December
was not fixed upon until four or five hundred years after the
birth. And why was that selected? Not because anybody
knew anything about it; but about this time there was a
great influx of Oriental worships into Rome. Among them
came the cult of Mithra, the Vedic sun-god j and he, of
course, being a sun-god, had his birthday on the twenty-fifth
of December. And why ? Because that is the date of the
winter solstice, the time when the sun appears to stand still
at the end of his southern journey, and turns northward
again, a new-born year, to bring the spring and the flowers
and the summer once more. And Jesus having come to be
looked upon as the " Light of the World," " the Sun of Right-
eousness," the Church fixed upon this day, already widely
celebrated all over the Empire, and determined that they
would celebrate it as the birthday of Jesus. As to the year
when he was born, we know somewhat more nearly, but shall
never know certainly. We know he was born before the
death of Herod the Great ; and we know that Herod the
Great died about four years before the popular date of the
Christian era. So that, if we say that Jesus was born about
the year 5 or 4 B.C., we shall come as near to it as we shall
ever be able to with the data we have to determine by. The
attempt is often made to see something specially significant
in his name. But "Jesus" is only the Greek form of the
common Hebrew "Joshua," and meant nothing more than
James or William does to-day.

Now what do we know of his childhood ? Two Sundays
ago, I gave you two or three specimen stories that sprung up
and were widely popular in the early Church concerning the
wonderful things that Jesus did as a little boy, assisting his

62 Talks about Jesus.

father at his carpenter work, while they were in Galilee. If
you will read the " Gospel of the Infancy," you will find it as
full of strange, fanciful, fantastic, wondrous things as is the
Arabian Nights. For example, Jesus falls in with a little boy
who is possessed of devils, and the mother Mary takes one
of his swaddling-bands and gives it to the youth, and tells
him to lay it across his head ; and immediately the devils, in
the form of crows and serpents, begin to fly out in swarms
from his mouth. Miracles of the most marvellous kind are
wrought by him all the way on his journey into Egypt, and
during his stay there. For example, he and Mary, his
mother, are sitting hungry and thirsty under a fruit-tree,
neither of them able to reach the branches which are above
them ; and the infant Jesus commands the tree to bend down
and bring its fruit within reach of his hungry mother. It
obeys, then bends back again into its place ; and out of its
root springs a fountain to refresh their thirst. These stories
are endless ; this simply as a specimen of them.

What do we really know ? We have one glimpse, the inci-
dent in Luke, which at least appears authentic in itself, and
seems so natural and life-like that at any rate we may be glad
to believe it true. And yet we know how easily and natu-
rally spring up the wondrous stories about the childhood
and youth of those who have afterward become famous and
renowned. But, after all, this is no more wonderful, perhaps,
than the child Alexander Pope writing a finished lyric at the
age of twelve, or the little boy Mozart at seven astonishing
the musicians of Europe by his performance on the organ.
Of the childhood of Jesus, then, we can only gather a glimpse
by looking at what was the probable childhood of any He-
brew boy. Galilee, where Jesus was born, was in the north-
ern part of Palestine, which at this time was divided into
three provinces, — Galilee, Samaria, and Judea. Nazareth

Birth and Childhood. 63

was built up the terraced sides and on the summit of a
beautiful hill, a few miles from the Lake of Galilee, — a little
to the north-west. And from the summit of this hill, and
back of the town, Jesus could look north and see the snowy
heights of Hermon ; he could look toward the west, and catch
a glimpse of the purple Mediterranean, and then the wooded
hills and fruitful valleys in all their beauty stretching out in
every direction as far as the eye could reach. And this city
of Nazareth was wondrously beautiful in its situation and
surroundings, built of small, square, white houses of lime-
stone, quarried from the hill on which it stood ; embowered
in vines, and half-hidden by orchards of olive and palm and
fig. Jesus had a childhood in one of the most beautiful
parts of the world. If you want a picture of the home
where he lived, think of one of those small stone houses,
perhaps with only one room, with a fiat roof where they
could sit in the shade as the sun went down, and get the
cooling breezes from the mountains and the sea ; the room
inside having as furniture only a painted bench or box along
one side, a stool from which they fed as they sat round it
cross-legged on mats upon the floor, a few water-jars with
which they brought the water from the well that is still
to be found in this same city of Nazareth. You can go and
sit on the side of the well where doubtless the mother
of Jesus sat with her water-pot, and gossiped and talked
with her neighbors in those evenings of hundreds of years
ago. Here, then, Jesus was born ; here he grew up under
the loving care of his father and mother.

How much education did he receive ? None at all, in the
modern sense of the word. There were no schools in Gal-
ilee at this time, except in a few of the larger centres. But
the Jewish law, from the first, had laid it upon the conscience
and heart of the parent above all things to teach the chil-

64 Talks about Jesus.

dren, — to teach them about God and duty ; to instruct them
in the law ; to train them in conduct and character j to drill
them in the history of the people. So that Jesus was taught
by his father and mother. The Jews, I have said, laid
special stress upon the matter of education ; for one of their
popular sayings is beautiful enough to become the motto
of the leading civilization of the world. "The world is
saved," said they, "by the breath of school-children." Al-
though you may find in the Talmud many slighting sayings
of women, — as you find in the earliest literature of all
people, — there is one that is beautiful enough for me to
quote, where it is said that " That child is best educated who
is first taught by his mother." Jesus, then, was taught in
the law; taught in the stories, the traditions, the histories,
the wonderful doings of his people, from the first point of
their history down to his own time. Other studies were
under the ban. The law, they said, must be taught " night
and day " : other things only when it was neither night nor
day — i.e., never.

And then he had another kind of education. In the syn-
agogues, which were in every little village and town at this
time all over Palestine, the people gathered every Sabbath
day to hear the reader as he selected now one part and now
another of Jewish law or history; and any one that would,
commented upon it and gave the sense, drew out its mean-
ing and made its application. Jesus, then, was educated in
the synagogue and at home.

And a more wondrous education still he had. Some of
the greatest, the supreme minds of the world have had noth-
ing that goes by the name of education with us. Where was
Shakespeare educated ? Nobody knows, except that he
made the world, the universe, his school, and naturally drank
in the wisdom of his time. Jesus was educated by the trees

Birth and Childhood. 65

and the flowers and those Oriental skies and those stars of
the night ; by his dreams of the past and his enthusiastic
visions of the future. He was able to find

"Tongues in trees, books in the running brooks.
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

He was one of the master minds of genius, and needed
not to follow the line of ordinary drudgery and detail, but
seemed to see that which the world had struggled to master.

And just one more phase in the education of Jesus I
must not pass by. One thing you will be struck with in
reading his life from the very beginning to the end ; and
that is the sharp contrast between his method of dealing
with men and the Jewish law, and that which prevailed in
Jerusalem among the scribes and rabbis of his time. Jesus,
above all things, is pre-eminently humanitarian. He never
thinks of placing a quibble of the law above the heart-ache
or the hunger or the toil or tear of any least child of his
race. The one thing he bitterly and unmercifully condemns
on the part of the Pharisees and their fellows at Jerusalem
is this making the real righteousness of God of no effect on
account of their paltry, petty, contemptible observance of
the little minutiae of the law, and calling this the orthodoxy
of their time. It is from him that the word rings out, " The
Sabbath is made for man, not man for the Sabbath." It is
from him that comes that sentence of condemnation for the
son that bestows his property upon the temple, and neglects
to care for his father and mother. It is he who despises the
pitiful tithing of mint, anise, and cumin, when made a sub-
stitute for practical humanity and helpfulness.

Everywhere moral considerations supreme, everywhere hu-
manity first and foremost • and the law and the ceremony
and the sacrifice and everything else made not to rule and
dominate and crush and tyrannize over man, but to help him,

66 Talks about Jesus.

or be destroyed. This is the characteristic of Jesus. Where
did he get it ? We know not how much of it may have been
his natural, spiritual insight j but we can trace a few of the
external influences that may have led him into this line of
thought. Palestine now is desolated, poor, and dead ; its
beauty and its glory all passed away. But, in the time of
Jesus, Capernaum, a great and flourishing city, only a few
miles — a little short walk — from Nazareth, was for the first
century what New York or London is to the nineteenth.
Right through Capernaum and close to Nazareth, passed the
great highway of trade from Rome, from Greece, from Asia
Minor, on to Arabia, Damascus, and the far East. This great
surging tide of trade flowed back and forth, year after year,
all through the childhood of Jesus, passing almost by his
very door, bringing not simply Jews, but Romans, Grecians,
men from Asia Minor, Phoenicians, Syrians, traders from Tyre,
from Sidon, from Damascus, — from all the peoples of the
then known world. They passed and repassed, so that Jesus
was schooled not in the narrow exclusiveness of Judea, where
no man was a man except he was a Jew ; but he was trained
in the broadest of all schools and systems, — the school of
the world. And he learned there to look upon all nationali-
ties and all men as common children of the one Father who
is in heaven. And out of this has come those wondrously
broad savings, like the parable of the good Samaritan. And
these represent not Jewish exclusiveness, but all humanity.
They fitted the religion of Jesus to go forth as a conqueror
over the world, and appeal not merely to Judaic hearts, but
everywhere to the heart of man. In the midst of these influ-
ences, then, — trained in the laws, the traditions, and in the
common superstitions and beliefs of the time ; filled with
the promises, the prophecies, and the hopes of his race, —
Jesus worked at his trade as a carpenter, and waited for the
deliverance of his people.

PUBLIC LIFE.

We are now to consider some of the main characteristics
and circumstances of the public life and teaching of Jesus.

The modern world would give much for an authentic
portrait of the man as he emerged from the obscurity of
his humble life at Nazareth, and entered upon that career
which has made his name first in the history of religions.
Many men have busied themselves in imagining what his
earthly presence must have been like; and yet none of the
pictures that have ever been made have any claim to authen-
ticity. We do not know how Jesus looked, except as we
judge of his personal appearance by the peculiar type of the
nation to which he belonged. We shall come as near to it
as is now possible if we think of him as a typical Hebrew ;
and the race characteristics have not changed very much.
Jesus, then, belonged to that people that Christianity has
poured contempt upon, and has pursued with persecution
from that day until now.

As to the length of his public ministry the authorities are
not at agreement, and consequently we shall not be able to
decide. As I have already told you, according to the narra-
tive of John, this ministry appears to have extended over
something like three years and a half. According to the
narrative of the synoptics, as they are called, — Mark, Mat-
thew, and Luke, — the ministry was only a little over a year.

6S Talks about Jesus.

Neither can we now determine anything as to the exact
chronological order of either the life or the teaching.

The scene of this ministry was in Galilee, around the
lake, in the towns, on the hill-sides, and in Jerusalem and its
immediate vicinity. Perhaps you have hardly noticed how
small a country this Palestine was, within the contracted
limits of which started this movement that has changed civil-
ization. The widest part of Palestine was hardly more than
the distance from here to the city of Worcester, and the
length of the country from north to south was somewhat less
than four times that distance; that is, about one hundred
and forty miles by forty. This gives you a conception of
how small is this little strip of land that was the scene on
which this greatest drama *of the world has been enacted.

When Jesus was about thirty years old, the narratives tell
us, the nation in Judea, and its immediate vicinity especially,
were startled by what seemed to them the reappearance of
one of the old prophets. John the Baptist appeared in the
wilderness, preaching "the baptism of repentance for the
remission of sins." We do not know anything about the
parentage or the birthplace of this John the Baptist. All
we know is this sudden appearance of his in the wilderness,
and then the death that he met afterward at the hands of
Herod. Picture him clothed in a camel's skin tied about his
waist by a leathern belt, living on the wild honey that he
could gather there in the desert, eating the dried locusts, —
which was no unusual thing, but rather the common food of
the poorest people, — a figure like this, strong only in his
moral earnestness, coming as a prophet with a message to
the people, ringing his word through all that region, so that
it echoed up the valleys and from hill-top to hill-top all over
the land, — the one word, " Repent ! the kingdom of God is at
hand." Here "is the veritable Jewish prophet. We generally

Public Life. Ocj

get a false conception of what these prophets were, grow-
ing out of the mistake that the main characteristic of the
prophet was the foretelling of future events. This, originally,
had nothing whatever to do with the character or the office.
The Hebrew word for prophet, illustrated in the lives of its
most distinguished representatives, simply carries the idea
of one who appears among the people with a message from
God. So that our word, " herald," more nearly represents
the original idea than does our ordinary modern notion of
foreseeing or foretelling something in the future. John the
Baptist then appeared, announcing the immediate coming of
this kingdom of God. And, far off on the hills of Galilee,
the young Jesus, his mind in a ferment, seething with the
thoughts of the past history of his race and of its future high

destiny, as he believed it lay in the mind and heart of God,

this Jesus hears that cry, and to him it is the voice of his
own public call ; and he starts, whether alone or with friends
we know not, and probably walks this not very long distance,
until he appears among those that have been gathered by
the unusual cry of the Baptist, and asks that he also may
partake of this life, and thus proclaim his faith as identical
with that of the prophet.

All this story of the reluctance of John to baptize Jesus
is no part of the original tradition : it is probably an after-
thought. The story of the dove and the opening heavens,
of course, is only legendary and poetical embellishment,
gathering about this crisis period in the life of Jesus in the
imagination of his followers in later times. The one thing
that was central in this scene, the historic kernel of it all,
may have been the recognition on the part of John,— a clear-
sighted man, able to read human nature,— the recognition
in this young, enthusiastic Nazarene of a power that should
constitute him a leader in this movement among the people,

jo Talks about Jesus.

in a higher ana oroader sense than he himself was able to
become. Jesus then receives this baptism, and becomes a
disciple of John. An aftergrowth of this story was the
appearance of fire on the Jordan ; so that Jesus was bap-
tized, not only with water, but "with the Holy Ghost and
with fire."

Just a word as to the significance of baptism, as John prac-
tised it. It was something, so far as we know, comparatively
new at that time. Lustrations and washings and ceremonial
cleansings of every kind are the property of all the ancient
Oriental religions, and not the peculiarity of Christianity or
Judaism ; but this special form of baptism and the idea of
baptizing, not simply proselytes, — a practice which grew up
in after time, — but Jews themselves, as though they also
needed cleansing preparation for this Messianic kingdom,
this was something original and new on the part of the Bap-
tist himself.

Immediately after this baptism, the story tells us that Jesus
was driven by the spirit into the wilderness, and was there
fasting forty days among the beasts, tempted of Satan ; and
at last the angels came and ministered to him. Here, again,
is a legend with a basis of real fact, such as we all can appre-
ciate. What man is there who does not go through a period
of brooding and thinking and questioning himself before
undertaking any great enterprise, before launching himself
into any new career, some one on which hangs the destiny
of all his future ? Jesus, as was the custom at that time, not
as an unusual thing, retires not into a closet or into the quiet
of his home, — for the home of the people in this country at
this age was simply all out-doors, and there was no place of
retirement there, — he withdraws into an uninhabited part of
the country ; and, as many a prophet and saint has done both
before and since, gives himself to hours and days of mental

Public Life. 71

Struggle, meditation, and conflict, of balancing this thing and
that, before he appears, with his mind made up and his face
firmly set toward the career that was opening before his feet.
And after-times, as is common in such cases, dressed up
this mental struggle in objective forms, gave it pictorial ex-
pression ; and the temptations became visible spirits, devils,
delusive phantoms, whose luring shapes and voices suggest
fleshly or spiritual sin. This, again, we know to be no new
thing. And we know furthermore, with our modern knowl-
edge of these wondrous nervous systems and brains of ours,
that the fasting alone was enough to account for all the
visions of devils that filled the air. Saints and prophets
throughout all ages of the world have fasted on purpose to
produce this exalted, ecstatic state of mind, which they inter-
preted as specially holy, and as opening communication for
them with the unseen world. It was one of the commonest
of all Oriental thoughts to believe that a man who was in
ecstasy, or in any way beside himself, was possessed by some
higher power. Even to-day, among the Arabs, the man who
is idiotic or insane is treated with peculiar tenderness and
consideration ; and the people, as they look at him, say his
soul is in heaven with God, and that is the reason that his
earthly movements are so aimless or unaccountable, — his
mind has gone away. Or else they interpret it as the pres-
ence of some other possessing spirit that overpowers and
controls his own, and so is the occasion of all these fantas-
tic and unusual proceedings. Even in modern times, these
things have not been rare. You are familiar with the devil
that Luther saw in his room in the Castle of the Wartbunr,
and at which he flung his inkstand. You are familiar with
the traditions and stories of many another, of the legends of
the saints for the last fifteen hundred years. At the last,
when Jesus had triumphed over all doubt and fear, his mind

Talks about Jesus.

at rest, his future lying all clear and open before him, then
there came a calm and peace figured by the angels that
ministered to him. There are similar legends — showing
how the human mind under the same circumstances works
in the same way — concerning Buddha. He, too, was
tempted by all the evil spirits in all the heavens and in all
the hells. And, when at last he had conquered, the waiting
and ministering spirits filled the air with perfumes, and scat-
tered flowers all around him, and came and ministered to
and lifted him up, and helped him, just as they did in the
case of Jesus. Stories like these belong to more than one of
the world's religions. We cannot believe their literal truth,
for the reason that Macauley said he could not believe in
ghosts, — he "had seen too many of them."

But very soon after the temptation and this decisive crisis
in the life of Jesus there occurs the fatal crisis in the life
of John which precipitates the leadership of the Nazarene.
The Baptist had disturbed the idea of the staid people in
Jerusalem, and by proclaiming the coming of this kingdom
he had disturbed the uneasy mind of Herod. And they
feared lest this talk of another kingdom, and this leading
to a disturbance and uprising of the people that follows it,
should bring them into complication with the Roman Empire.
So a pretext is devised ; and John is suddenly arrested, taken
away from his followers, and shut up in the castle of Ma-
chaerus, on the eastern border of the Dead Sea.

And now it is, when John is taken away, that Jesus, after
his temptation and triumph, begins his own public min-
istry. And what is his message? The same precisely as
that with which John began his career, — " Repent! the king-
dom of God is at hand." "Repent, and believe the gospel."
We want to pause just here, at the opening of this ministry
of Jesus, and clear our minds a little as to the meaning of

Public Life. 73

a few of these common phrases. We have heard them
so long without any definition, or applied inconsiderately to
this thing or that, according to the fancy or the prejudice
of the reader or preacher, that probably, if I should ask
you what Jesus meant by "the kingdom of God" or "the
gospel," I should get a great many very irreconcilable and
inconsistent answers. The kingdom of God, or the kingdom
of heaven, meant to the Jew at this time simply the coming
of that Messianic reign which was more or less outlined and
defined in the minds and expectations of the people. It
was called the kingdom of heaven instead of the kingdom
of God, merely through a fancy of the time. The people
had a superstitious fear of pronouncing the name of God, so
that they ordinarily substituted some other word, frequently
the word "heaven," in its place. What did Jesus mean by
" the gospel " ? The word means God's-spell, or good news.
What was this good news ? People talk now as though it
were the whole four books written under the names of Mat-
thew, Mark, Luke, and John, that make up the gospel. We
call them Gospels ; but that is simply because they contain
a record of the gospel. They are not the gospel. You will
find almost every preacher in Christendom telling you that
the gospel consists of the scheme of salvation outlined by
or represented in his own little peculiar sect : this is the
gospel, and nothing else is. What did Jesus mean by it ?
We want to go back, and take our authority at first hand.
The Jews, as I said, were expecting in some form the coming
of the Messianic kingdom. The gospel of Jesus and of
John, then, was nothing more than this : "The day is close at
hand, this kingdom is coming, — coming very speedily, — this
that you have expected and waited and longed for, that the
prophets have told us about for these hundreds of years, —
this kingdom is close at hand." And Jesus went so far as

74 Talks about Jesus.

to teach that the forerunner they had expected had already
come : it was this Elias, John the Baptist, that Herod had
put to death. The forerunner has come, and the people
have done unto him as they listed ; and now the kingdom
of heaven is speedily to follow. Repent in preparation for
this coming. Believe — not in any transcendental, mystical
way, as they talk about in these later years when they tell
us of salvation by faith. The word "believe" in the mouth
of Jesus had no metaphysical meaning: it was an intensely
practical word, which meant simply, "Believe this message:
I tell you that the kingdom of heaven is close at hand ;
believe, that you may get ready for it ; repent, for it comes
speedily.'*

I have made a very careful study as to what Jesus really
believed concerning the method of this kingdom's coming.
They tell us now — liberalizing and idealizing his words —
that all he meant by it was a very gradual, very slow progress
of light and truth and goodness in the hearts of men. They
point us to the parable of the leaven, — a little put into three
measures of meal, and gradually working through it until
the whole was leavened. They tell us of the parable of the
grain of mustard-seed, which was very small at first, but grew
until it was a tree that shadowed the whole earth. I admit
the force of all these. But they do not have the weight of
authority that the other aspect of this coming kingdom
appears to have. All three of the original Gospels, the
whole triple tradition, as I have explained it to you, is agreed
as to this one thing: that Jesus believed and taught that
there was to be very soon a miraculous revelation from
heaven, an utter overturning, upheaval, and change, and that
the kingdom of God was to come, — yes, suddenly and in a
moment. As the lightning appears out of one side of the
heavens and flashes even to the other side, so speedy and

Public Life. 75

so universal was to be the coming of the Son of Man. I
cannot help being convinced that this was a part of the
belief which Jesus held and taught. And sometime, we do
not know just when, the conviction forced itself upon the
mind of Jesus that he was to be the Messiah of this coming
kingdom, through whom it was to be revealed, and he was
to appear surrounded by a retinue of angels in the clouds of
heaven as its king. We do not know, as I said, at what time
in the ministry of Jesus this took place; but we have the
record of his questioning his disciples and saying to them,
"Whom do people say that I am?" And the answer comes,
"Some of them say that you are Elijah, the prophet; some,
that you are Jeremiah ; and some, that you are that prophet,"
probably meaning Moses, returned again to earth. Some say
one thing, some say another. The people are divided. Jesus
turns to them, and says, ''But whom say ye that I am?"
And Peter answered, "Thou art the Messiah." And Jesus'
answer, as he quietly accepts this statement, is merely that
they must tell no man of it for the present, but wait for
God's own time and revelation of this stupendous fact.

Now, then, we want to look at the characteristics of the
teaching of Jesus and the relation in which he stood to the
parties and other teachers of his time. It would seem very
strange to us in this modern world and amidst our modern'
customs to find a man choosing a few disciples and walking
on foot about the country proclaiming some message as
though it were from God, stopping to converse with people
under trees by the wayside, or by the spring as they waited
to cool themselves in the shade and quench their thirst, or
gathering a crowd upon some street corner and addressing
them with this strange new message,— all this would seem
very peculiar to us ; but it was not strange or peculiar to
those Oriental lands and in the midst of their Oriental ways.

76 Talks about Jesus.

Jesus then chooses his disciples, foremost among whom are
Andrew and Peter ; and he makes hereafter his home at their
house. They lived in Capernaum, on the borders of the lake,
and were among the great crowd of fishermen who lived
by the riches of the finny tribe that this lake contained.
Jesus passed his life, then, in the midst of these humble com-
panions, travelling about the country. And there are three
different aspects of his teaching that we must glance at for
a moment.

The first method we will notice comes nearer than any-
thing else we have in modern times to what we are accus-
tomed to call expository I presume you have heard, first or
last, some minister preach an expository sermon • taking per-
haps a chapter or half a chapter of the Bible, reading it and
commenting upon it more or less at length, on this verse or
that, as he was interested or thought the occasion demanded.
Jesus was accustomed to hear this kind of preaching in the
synagogues on every Sabbath day. The synagogue, at this
time was all over Palestine ; there were several hundreds of
them in Jerusalem ; they were in every important town from
one end of the land to the other. And these synagogues
had grown up out of a felt necessity on the part of the
people to become acquainted with the written law. They
were not able to have copies of this law in their own homes,
as we can at the present time, or there probably would never
have been any synagogues ; and, if there never had been any
synagogues, there probably would never have been any Chris-
tian Church ; for the synagogue is the ancestor of the church
in the direct line of ascent. Jesus, then, as a boy, and all the
way up, had been accustomed to go into the synagogue, and
hear some one get up, — a scribe or a lawyer, — and read a
certain part of the old Scriptures, and then sit down while
any one who chose, as in a modern Quaker meeting, arose

Public Life. -j-j

and addressed the assembly, explaining according to his
idea the meaning of the law, or making a personal and practi-
cal application of it. We find a specimen of this kind of teach-
ing in the history of Jesus j as, for example, in the case of his
first sermon delivered at Nazareth, according to Luke. He
went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, the roll was
handed to him to read, he read a passage from Isaiah, gave
the roll of the law back again to the servant of the syna-
gogue, then sat down and addressed the people, as was the
custom at that time.

Another method was one to which we may give the name
of Socratic, — very much like the method of Socrates, the phi-
losopher, in Athens. This method was that of conversation,
of asking and answering questions ; as for example, when
he preached to the Samaritan woman at the well, or to the
lawyer who came to him and asked him what were the chief
commandments of the law, — a sharp contest of asking and
answering questions on the part of Jesus and those around
him. You remember one of the best cases of it, as con-
nected with the collection of the tribute. They bring to
Jesus one of the Roman denarii, or pennies as it is trans-
lated, and try to catch him, and get him into trouble with the
authorities. They say to him, " Here is this penny, — now is
it lawful to pay this in tribute to Caesar, or is it not ? " The
tribute, as we know, was very unpopular in Jerusalem about
this time. And, if he said it was lawful, he would bring down
upon him the wrath of the Jews ; if he said it was not lawful,
he would bring himself in conflict with the authorities. And
Jesus says, " Bring me a penny, and let me look at it." And,
when they have brought it, he says, "Whose is this image
and superscription?" "Why, that is Caesar's." Then he
says, " Give to Caesar that which belongs to Caesar, and to
God that which belongs to him ; " answering them happily

2 8 7 'a Iks about Jesus.

and sharply, and escaping the trap which they had, as they
supposed, so skilfully laid for him. Case after case of this
kind of question and answer and sharp reply we find all
through the Gospels.

But the most wonderful of all, and the last one that I
refer to, is his teaching by parable. We are so familiar with
these parables that their power, their wonder, their beauty, are
half lost upon us. They are to us like some beautiful ex-
tract from Milton or one of the old poets, that is read and
read and reread in our school-days, until we were tired of it
and the beauty had all evaporated ; and, when we look at it
now, we cannot think of the beauty : we only think of the
drudgery and the weariness of that old school-time. So it is
in regard to these parables. We must not think that Jesus
was the originator of the parable. Five hundred years, at
least, before Jesus lived, Buddha, "the light of Asia," had
taught in parables as remarkably as did Jesus in the after
time. We could make a large collection of most beautiful and
striking examples from the teachings of Buddha ; and yet you
are not to think, on the other hand, that Jesus borrowed his
parables from Buddha. There was probably no sort of con-
nection, so that the fact that Buddha taught thus does not
touch at all the originality of Jesus. But not only did Buddha
teach thus, but the rabbis and the leaders of the schools in
Judea were accustomed to teach in precisely the same way.
And we can find in the old Jewish literature the germ of some
of the most beautiful and touching of Jesus' parables ; just
as we can find in old Italian, Spanish, French, or English lit-
erature some of the germs of Shakespeare's masterly plays.
This, again, does not touch the originality j for this is mani-
fested quite as much in the power with which old material is
used as it is in the invention of new material. The origi-
nality of an architect is not in inventing some new kind of

Public Life. ye*

trees or stones with which to build, but it is the power, the
genius, the beauty with which he builds out of the old world-
wide and universal materials. The word "parable" means
simply placing beside ; that is, placing a story alongside of a
truth to vivify and illustrate it, and fix it in the mind. Jesus
taught at length in these parables, and they are the most con-
spicuous and wonderful part of his teaching. Perhaps you
will hardly be ready to agree with the statement when I make
it j and yet for poetic power, for imaginative strength and
genius, for intellectual clearness and ability, the parables of
Jesus alone are enough to rank him among the foremost
minds of the world. If that one little immortal song of
Gray's, " The Elegy," lifts him up on a pedestal high among
the poets of modern England, that one song making him im-
mortal, ought not these poems in prose, these sermons in
pictures, these wonderful portraits of Jesus, to give him not
only rank as a moralist, but rank as an imaginative genius
equal to almost any that the world has ever seen ?

One word as to the originality of the moral teachings of
Jesus, as to the Sermon on the Mount, for instance. And,
concerning this sermon, let me say that you must not think
of it after the idea of a modern sermon. Jesus never preached
that Sermon on the Mount just as it stands now. It is simply
a collection, gathered up in after-time, of the doctrines, the
ethical teachings and sayings of Jesus, delivered nobody knows
on how many different occasions. This is perfectly apparent
to you as you read it. There is no sort of connection of idea
running all through it, but most abrupt transitions everywhere.
There is a saying on one subject, and right by the side of it a
saying upon another. It is simply a collection of sayings;
and almost every one of them, in some form or other, was
common to the thought of the Jewish people at this time.
Jesus did not originate his morality. He simply gave ex-

8o Talks about Jesus.

pression to, and put into beautiful and permanent form, the
highest, sweetest, noblest, and purest thought of his day.
The difference between him and the other Jewish teachers
perhaps I may illustrate in this way. These beautiful moral
ideas were all over the Jewish life, like the wild flowers all
over Palestine, on hill-side and in valley. Jesus simply
plucked these flowers, trimmed them, arranged them, brought
them together in bouquets, set them in vases of beauty and
finished workmanship, and left them to be the beauty and
fragrance and joy of all future time.

Now just one word more as to the characteristics of his
teaching. How did he differ from the rabbis and the other
masters of his time ? What did the people say about him ?
We shall get our hint right there. The people listened to
him, it says, and were astonished at his doctrine, or at his
method of teaching. For, they said, he does not go on ex-
plaining and interpreting and telling us over and over again
what this passage means or what can be twisted out of that,
but he speaks as though he had authority, and not as the
scribes. What did they mean by this ? They meant simply
this : that Jesus, like the grand, original, primal soul that he
was, rested not on the authority of texts and verbalisms and
quibbles, but fell back on the ultimate, original authority of
his own moral consciousness ; delivered himself first hand,
fresh from the inspiration of the spirit of God within him.
As he says time and again, all through the Sermon on the
Mount, " They used to tell you of olden time to do so and
so ; but /tell you" — . And he said, " Unless your righteous-
ness shall exceed this that they used to practise, you shall
not enter into this coming kingdom of heaven." This was
the one thing then that distinguished him from the rabbis
and teachers of his time, — this falling back on his own
intuitive moral consciousness, daring to revise the old law

Public Life. 81

itself, to put into it new meanings, and say, "You must be
better than your fathers, you must live better, you must think
better, you must make some advance on the olden time, or
you are not fit for the kingdom of heaven."

Now, as the last division of our subject, which is a very
large one, but which I shall try to treat as briefly as I can, I
want to sketch for you the parties of the time in which Jesus
lived, and show you at what points he came in conflict with
them. Why was Jesus' life a tragedy? Why should the
steps of this meek and lowly one lead, and lead inevitably,
to the cross ? Why did not the people accept him ?

The world shows us two types of greatness. One is the
summing up and the giving expression to the main charac-
teristics of the age. Mr. Gladstone defines the orator as one
who receives the feelings, hopes, aspirations of the people,
as the upper air receives the mist from rivers and lakes
and valleys, and, condensing it into clouds, gives it back
again in rain. People hear such an orator, and say, "That
is just what I always felt, but could never express." This
kind of greatness is always popular; for it is the ideal em-
bodiment of the popular life.

The other type is ahead of the age, representing a higher
life, that can only come by disturbing, tearing down, and re-
building. Such was Jesus. This is always misunderstood
and hated by the powers of the age. It is the kind that is
always cast out by its own time, and to which monuments
are built by after generations.

This will come out more particularly, as we look at the
condition of affairs in Jerusalem. The two great divisions
of the Jewish people at this time were the Sadducees and
the Pharisees. The Sadducees were the aristocratic party,
the party which held to the old original law: they were
typical conservatives, — they stuck by the law. This is the

82 Talks about Jesus.

reason why they rejected the traditions of the people. They
would not own a tradition that added anything to the Penta-
teuch. The law as it was settled before they went into cap-
tivity in Babylon, that was the only one they recognized as
divine. Out of that captivity and in later times had grown
up ever so many beliefs about angels, the future life, and im-
mortality. The Sadducees would have none of it: they did
not believe in any angels, in any spirits, or any future life.
There was nothing about them in the old law, consequently
they rejected them. And then these Sadducees, being very
comfortable and aristocratic, almost all of them belonging
to the wealthy part of the community, did not feel any
special interest in any angels to look after their affairs here
or their comfort in a future life. The characteristics, then,
of the Sadducees, were those of extremely comfortable
and respectable conservatism. The word "Sadducee" means
simply son of Zadok.

We need pay no special attention to the Zealots, the Hero-
dians, the Essenes, the scribes, and lawyers. The scribes
and lawyers might equally be Pharisees : these words only
represent those who copied, read, and interpreted the law.
The Herodians were those who had given up any expectation
of a Messianic kingdom, but hoped that through Herod
might come the deliverance of their country ; that is, they
hoped that Herod and his family might be able to break
away ultimately from Rome, and establish the independence
and supremacy of the Jewish people : so they were called
Herodians, or followers of Herod. The Essenes were a
little sect of communists, retired from the world, constituting
a sort of Oriental " Brook Farm " of the first century, or an
Oriental community of Shakers, having nothing whatever to
do with the practical life of the time.

The Pharisees, then, are the ones we need chiefly to un-

Public Life. 83

derstand : and concerning them there is at the present time
one of the most wide-spread misunderstandings of the world.
We have taken the bitter, biting sarcasms and denunciations
of Jesus, applied only to a part of the Pharisees, and out of
those words have pictured a whole school. Who were the
Pharisees, and what does the word mean ? It means simply
a separatist. The Pharisees were the Oriental Puritans of
the first century \ the ones who separated themselves from
everything that they considered evil, and devoted themselves
to what they understood to be the truth, in order that they
might be ready for the coming of the kingdom of God.
They were the great popular party, the party which accepted
new ideas, the party of progress, the ones that represented
the hopes of the Jewish people. In short, the Pharisees of
the first century were the very best people there were. That
does not mean that all of them were good, any more than all
church members are good in the nineteenth century. There
was a good deal of human nature in Judea eighteen hundred
years ago. It was very much like the human nature that we
find in Boston to-day. There were Pharisees and Pharisees.
There were those that were devoted to truth, and there were
those that were devoted to their ceremonials, their spiritual
pride, and their forms. And I think I can detect in this
bitterness of Jesus an element of sadness and disappoint-
ment. For the Pharisees, of all others in Jerusalem, were
the ones among whom Jesus had the right to expect sym-
pathy. It was as though a man's own friend that he had
relied upon had turned against him ; and you know many
and many a time we feel a sense of hurt and injury from
a friend who has deserted us, that we never feel towards a
stranger or an enemy. You remember those words of I )a\ id
where he speaks of Shimei and says, " He, mine own familiar
friend, in whom I trusted, which did eat of my bread, hath

84 Talks about Jesus.

lifted up his heel against me." This I think was much of
the feeling that Jesus had toward the Pharisees.

And that Jesus was not the first one to note the different
classes among them is apparent from the Talmud itself.
You will be very much interested, I think, in finding that the
Jews themselves divided the Pharisees into seven different
kinds, only one of whom they considered true Pharisees and
worthy of the name. And Jesus launched his thunderbolts
of scorn and contempt only against those that the better part
of the Jews themselves looked upon in the same way. You
will find, for example, that they talked about one kind of
Pharisees that they called "heavy-footed"; that is, they
were so exhausted by fasting that they could hardly drag one
foot after the other. Then there was another kind that they
called "bleeding" Pharisees, — a wonderful sarcasm! The
streets in Jerusalem were little, narrow ones ; and the houses
were built, as you know, right on the side of the street, so
that you touched or brushed the walls as you went along.
These " bleeding " Pharisees were the ones that were so
afraid of seeing a woman that, if they met one on the street,
they would violently turn their heads to keep from looking
at her, and bump them against the wall. Then there was the
"mortar" Pharisee, as they called him, — a man who walked
with his back bent like a pestle lying in a mortar, at an
obtuse angle. Then the " humped back," the ones that hung
their head as they walked. Then there was another class
that was called the " Do-alls " ; that is, they were persons who
were all the time hunting for something more in the way of
ceremonial to do, asking their neighbors if there was not
some other duty they could perform. Then there was the
"painted" Pharisee, the one who wore his piety so plainly
upon his face that one could tell him as far as he could see
him. These names were the ones that the Jews themselves

Public Life. 85

gave to these six kinds of Pharisees, long before Jesus
uttered his denunciations against them. The last and true
Pharisee — and you will think you have got into Christianity
when you hear it — is " he who does the will of his Father
in heaven because he loves him " ; that is the true Pharisee,
according to the Talmud.

Now how did it happen that Jesus' life ended as a
tragedy ? What were the points with which he came in con-
tact in the Jewish life of his time ? I must sum them up as
briefly as I can. First, Jesus violated the social conventi6n-
alisms and proprieties of his times. The Pharisees kept
themselves strictly apart by themselves. There was not,
indeed, that hard and fast institution of caste, such as we
know it in India to-day ; and yet the upper class had noth-
ing, or very little, to do with the lower, and felt that they
were made unclean ceremoniously if they came in contact
with them. Jesus associated with publicans, with outcasts,
with sinners, with the rabble. If one of your aristocratic
friends in Boston, who stands highest and thinks the most
of the blue blood in his veins and of the street on which he
lives, should invite to his house and associate on familiar
terms with a man like Denis Kearney, you would perhaps
get an indication of the impression that Jesus made on the
public mind. He put himself on a level with the outcast ;
and, when they taunted him with it, he gave them that divine
answer, " It is the sick that need the physician, and not the
well." Jesus, like all the grand souls of the world, saw not
aristocrat or plebeian, not rich men or poor men, not pure or
sinners : he simply saw men and women, the children of the
one Father in heaven, — an idea that Burns has so finely
expressed in later times, when he said, —

" The rank is but the guinea's stamp,
The man's the gowd for a' that."

86 Talks about Jesus.

And then he offended their spiritual pride. You remem-
ber that story of how the Pharisee invites him to his house,
and the woman that is a sinner comes in j and, as he re-
clines at meat, his feet extended behind him from the table,
and with his sandals off, as was the custom, how she
comes and kneels down and breaks the alabaster box of
ointment upon his feet, and then wipes them with the hairs of
her head, weeping her repentance and sorrow for her past
life. And the Pharisee whispers under his breath, "Why,
this is no prophet : if he was a prophet, he would know what
sort of a woman this is who is paying this kind of strange
attention to him." Then Jesus appeals to him, and says :
" Simon, there were two men that were in debt to a creditor.
One owed him a small sum of money, and the other owed him
a great deal. And when he found neither of them could pay,
he frankly forgave them both : now which of them will love
him most ? " And of course he was compelled to answer,
"The one who is forgiven the most." Then he says : " Here
is this woman : she has sinned much, and been forgiven.
You think you have sinned very little, and God is just as
ready to forgive you. But it is perfectly natural that she
should love more than you do." And so he told them on
every hand, "You ceremoniously clean, even the aristocratic
and noble, just because you think you are so good, are liable
to be left outside, while the publicans and harlots, who know
they are bad and want to be helped, press forward into the
kingdom of heaven ahead of you." Thus he offended their
spiritual pride.

Then he overturned from its very foundation their highest
conception of righteousness. Their righteousness was strict
obedience to the Thorah. It is a misfortune that this word
has come to be translated law. It does not mean law at all,
in our modern sense of the word. This word that we find all

Public Life. 87

through the New Testament ought to be simply Thorah, the
old ancient Hebrew word, because it is almost untranslatable.
But what it means is a land-mark or guide-post, — something
standing in the wilderness or desert to show a person the
way. What the Jews meant by their old Scripture was that it
was a land-mark, a guide-post. This strict obedience to the
Thorah was their idea of righteousness; and they believed
that the kingdom of God could only come by keeping it a
good deal more carefully than they had ever kept it in the
past. And Jesus came, letting all the sinners and publicans
and outcasts of every kind into this kingdom of heaven,
without any regard to their having kept the Thorah at all.
So these Pharisees, who had been living their strict and com-
fortable and careful lives all the way through, found that, if
they accepted this Jesus, this had all got to go for nothing,
and they were no better than anybody else.

How far they carried this matter, it will be interesting for
you to know. Take, for example, two points where Jesus
offended, — in the matter of washings and the Sabbath.
The Talmud, that great body of Jewish literature, contains
one hundred and twenty-six chapters devoted to washings
alone. Four of them are devoted entirely to the manner of
washing the hands. Jesus put this all one side, and said, " It
does not make any difference whether you wash your hands
or not." See how large a part of their tradition he offended
in this. Then in regard to the Sabbath. The observance of
this had grown up until it was such a monster tradition as is
astonishing to see. They had it settled as to what kind of
oil you should fill the lamp with on the Sabbath, what kind
of knots might be tied, as to how far you might walk, how-
much you might carry. You must not carry the weight of
a dried fig ; but you might carry a locust's egg, because that
was supposed to be a charm against some kind of disease ;

88 Talks about Jesus.

you might carry a fox's tooth, because that would cure sleep-
lessness ; or the nail of a man that had been crucified,
because that was a charm against the ague. But you must
not wear nails in your sandals ; you must not walk in the
grass, because you might carelessly knock out some of the
seeds, and that was a kind of threshing. You must not do
anything that would look in the least like any sort of work.
What does Jesus do? He goes walking through the fields of
corn, not only knocking out the grass seeds, but gathering
the corn, rubbing it in his hands and getting the kernels to
eat because he was hungry. He violates their ideas in every
direction, and sums it all up by saying, "This Sabbath that
you are making a burden, that you neither bear yourself nor
enable anybody else to bear, is made for man, and not man
for it. Take off the burden, and let man go free."

And then, again, he interfered with their ecclesiastical jeal-
ousy. We know what this means here in America at the pres-
ent time. We know what the principle is in human nature.
You, if you are a lawyer, are never jealous of a doctor. A
doctor is never jealous of a minister. A man is never jeal-
ous of another man in any other profession. It is the rival in
his own profession that he is jealous of. So that you will find
always one sect of religionists are very jealous of other sects.
Jesus touched their ecclesiastical jealousy at the quick.
"Here is a man not even a Pharisee ; who has paid no atten-
tion to the law, who has never been in our schools, a man
that is not orthodox at a single point, and he claims to come
here and teach us, to teach the people and lead them away
from our ministrations. Away with him ! "

And then he touched, in a way that perhaps you have
never thought of, the business interests of Jerusalem. Do
you know this loyal love of truth, of love to God and of love
to man, that Jesus preached, had in it a power of leverage

Public Life, 89

to overthrow the temple, and that meant the overthrow of
Jerusalem ? Did you ever think of it ? Suppose, for exam-
ple, I should go to Washington, and make a proposition of
some political change that would destroy the capital, move
the national centre perhaps to St. Louis. Every property-
holder in Washington, every man interested in keeping the
capital there, would be my deadly enemy in a moment. Sup-
pose I should go to Lawrence, and propose such a change
in the industries of New England as would destroy all their
mills and all their interests connected with and dependent
upon them. The man that invented the railroad was not
poked upon as a benefactor by those who built stage-
coaches. Any man who proposes a change in advance
creates enemies out of every one who is living on the local
and vested interests of the time. The whole city of Jeru-
salem depended upon the temple and the worship and the
industries connected with it. The Jews had a saying that
Palestine was the eye of the world, and Jerusalem was the
white of the eye, and the temple was the pupil. He who
touched that, then, touched that which was most sacred of
all ; and it overthrew the strength and glory of the city.
You remember the tumult that the apostles raised in Ephe-
sus when they proposed to change the religion, so that the
shrine-makers for Diana would find themselves out of
employment. What a tumult and storm it created about
their ears, so that the crowd rushed into the theatre and
yelled for two hours, hardly knowing why they had come
together, only that something was in the wind that was
going to touch the worship of Diana, and so the prosperity
of the city ! Jesus touched the temple by saying it does not
make any difference where you worship. He overthrew the
central idea of the property-holders of Jerusalem.

Then he interfered with and offended their conception of

qo Talks about Jesus.

the Messiah. Jesus was not at all such a Messiah as the
Jews were led to look for by the best interpretations they
could get of their prophets. Jesus came from Galilee.
They said : " Why, look, there has never come any prophet
out of Galilee. That is a half-barbarous place, a place where
God would not be likely to manifest himself. They do not
pay any attention to the law or to temple-worship, half as
much as they do here." They said : " The Messiah must be
born in Bethlehem. Jesus was not born in Bethlehem, but in
Nazareth." They said : " The Messiah must come in the line
of David ; and Jesus was not born in the line of David."
And, if you notice it, Jesus accepts that charge, and goes on
to prove that there is no need of the Messiah's being a
descendant of David. He offended their conception of the
Messiahship at every point. The Messiah was coming with
power and glory ; there were to be portents and changes in
the heavens preceding his coming. All the old prophets had
said so ; Jesus himself said so concerning his second coming.
But, when he was asked for a sign, he refused to give it ; and
when they asked, " By what authority do you do these
things ? " he refused to tell them. He gave none of the
marks of the Messiah, such as they were looking for ; and
they were offended at him.

Then, as the last and grand offence of all, he disturbed all
the conservatives and peace-lovers of the country by threat-
ening to bring them into trouble with Herod and Rome.
The Emperor of Rome cared very little about the hope of
a Messiah among the Jews. Herod cared very little. He
would take a prophet, one or more of their leaders, — it made
no matter to him, — and put him in prison and behead him
at his will j but, at all events, the peace must be kept. And
this talk of a coming kingdom, and of one coming immedi-
ately, was bringing them into conflict with the authorities

Public Life. 91

at every point, and was injuring what peace and quiet they
already had.

Out of such misconceptions, such misunderstandings, and
misinterpretations, were gathering those clouds of jealousy, of
suspicion, of hatred, of opposition, that hung over that little
hill called Mount Calvary, since that time most famous in all
the world. These black clouds gathered above it, holding in
their bosom the tempest and the thunderbolt, ready to break
upon the patient head of him whom they cast out, but whom
we love and reverence as the foremost man of time.

DEATH AND RESURRECTION.

As we review the story of the death and resurrection of
Jesus, I hope you will bear in mind that I am not arguing
either for or against the question of the resurrection or the
future life of the human soul, but am only treating certain
alleged historical facts.

In the legendary story of Jesus, we are told that it grew
dark at noon on the day of his crucifixion. If we may not
accept this as literal fact, we may at least take it as a beau-
tiful and appropriate poetic setting-forth of that which was
real in his life. His life grew dark before it was noon : be-
fore the sun was at its zenith, it was suddenly eclipsed.

..." This star
Rose . . . through a little arc
Of heaven, nor having wandered far,
Shot on a sudden into dark."

Last Sunday we noticed the gathering of the clouds of
suspicion, hatred, and jealousy around him ; and now we are
to see him passing under the fringes of this tempest that is
so soon to burst with fatal stroke upon his head.

The Jews were accustomed to keep the Passover on Thurs-
day evening, on the fourteenth day of their month Nisan.
This festival seems to have been made up of mingled ele-
ments, some of the customs and practices being drawn from
an original nature-worship, and a part from the later worship

Death and Resurrection. 93

of Jehovah. In any case, at the time we are considering, a
family or a group of friends was accustomed to gather on
this evening, and to eat a lamb roasted whole, with dried
fruits and bitter herbs, in celebration of their deliverance from
the bondage of Egypt. Whether they were originally attached
to them or not, they had come to look upon each one of the
particular parts of the ceremony as having some special and
peculiar significance. Jesus, then, and his disciples,— being
a Jew as he was, — were gathered in an upper chamber in
Jerusalem, in the house of some secret or open friend ; and
he sat down with them to keep this Jewish feast of the Pass-
over. He seems to have been shadowed already with a pre-
monition of the coming disaster ; for we find him talking in
mysterious sentences concerning the death which he was to
suffer. It is hardly possible for us to tell now, with the
records we have at hand, as to whether Jesus really felt cer-
tain that he was to die, or whether he did not expect some
supernatural deliverance, even at the last moment ; for one
of our authorities tells us that he spoke of his being able, if
he would, to command more than twelve legions of angels to
come to his defence and rescue. And then that last pathetic
cry of his upon the cross— " My God, my God, why hast thou
forsaken me ! " — will at least bear an interpretation of disap-
pointment, as though he expected a deliverance that, at the
last moment, did not come. We will not dogmatically decide
that this is the meaning, for it may have another. And yet
there are some serious difficulties in believing that Jesus
told his disciples, in plain terms, that he was coming again ;
for we find, after his death, that they are utterly crushed,
broken, and scattered. They either did not understand that
he was to die, or else they did not believe his word, — that he
would reappear once more.

So much, at any rate, seems plain. Jesus, then, sits with his

94 Talks about Jesus.

disciples, and eats the Jewish feast of the Passover. And,,
when the supper is ended, — that is, the formal part of the
supper, — he takes a loaf of bread and breaks it, and distri-
butes it to the disciples, and says, "Take, eat: this is my
body.*' And he takes a cup of red wine, such as they were
always accustomed to drink, and passes it to them, saying :
" This is my blood which is shed for many. Do this in re-
membrance of me ; for I will not drink with you again until
I do it anew in the coming kingdom of God." This natur-
ally symbolic way of asking them to remember him is beau-
tiful and pathetic. And yet to what a cruel engine of
oppression and outrage has it grown in the history of the
Church. All through mediaeval Christianity it was made the
engine of excommunication and torture, so that men feared
it more than they did death itself ; because the Church had
built up the fable that the priests who were able to turn the
bread and wine into the veritable body and blood of God
had also the power, by preventing the communicant from
partaking of these mysterious emblems, to ensure his ever-
lasting torture in the future world. We cannot believe that
Jesus had the slightest idea that this was to become an es-
tablished rite or sacrament in perpetuity in the Church. For
does not Jesus himself say over and over again that this
coming kingdom is to appear miraculously in the heavens
before the people that were about him were all dead ? He
had no idea then of any unrolling future of the Church, such
as we have seen during the last 1800 years, and of this being
wrought into a perpetual and elaborate ritual.

Either while he is at this supper or very soon after, Judas,
one of the twelve, mysteriously disappears from their num-
ber, and leaves only the eleven disciples. After singing to-
gether a hymn, — as the translation has it, or the Psalms from
the one hundred and fifteenth to the one hundred and eigh-

Death cuid Resurrection. 95

teenth, as was customary at the close of this supper, — Jesus
and his disciples leave the upper chamber toward midnight,
go out of the city in the darkness across the little brook
Kedron, which ran through the valley that separated the
mountain on which Jerusalem stood from the Mount of
Olives, and here seek seclusion, a place for meditation and
prayer, in an olive grove near the foot of the mountain, in a
place called, from an " oil-press " which was near by, Geth-
semane. Here his soul was weighted and troubled, and he
passes through an agony of conflict. Divining without any
doubt the purpose of the absence of Judas, his soul for the
last time goes through that tremendous struggle as to whether
he shall face his fate manfully or save his life by flight. It
must be decided at once, for now the crisis hastens on apace.
Are we to think for a moment that there was any less bravery
in the soul of Jesus because he shrank — young, and rilled
and flushed with life and power as he was — from a speedy
and ignominious death ? Rather, to my mind, does his cour-
age seem to tower above many of those who have met death
without one sign of flinching or reluctance. Insensibility is
not bravery. The highest courage is that which feels what
death means, which shrinks from it in every quivering fibre
of the thrilling life, and which yet, for principle, dares to
walk on and meet it. "Are you not afraid ?" said a young
and boastful officer to an older companion whose face was
blanched and pale as they stood in the midst of the thick
falling shot of the battle-field. " Yes," was the reply, " I am
afraid ; and, if you were one-half as fearful as I, you would
flee." Courage does not mean any lack of shrinking: it
means standing the ground bravely in spite of the shrinking.
While Jesus, then, was passing through this conflict, Judas
is leading a part of the temple guard, which was under the
control of the priests ; and they come with their lanterns and

96 Talks about Jesus.

torches and weapons, enter the garden, and at a signal from
Judas arrest the Nazarene. There is a momentary struggle,
the drawing of a sword on the part of one of the disciples ;
but Jesus, whose weapons were "not of this world," bids him
put it up again, and quietly submits to his fate. Now, then,
he is led away alone. One of the disciples has betrayed
him, one of them is soon stoutly to deny him with an oath,
and all have deserted him in his hour of trial. He is led
away at midnight to the palace of Caiaphas, the high priest;
and the fragments of the Sanhedrin, such as they could
gather at this unseasonable hour, are summoned for the
purpose of condemning him. For his condemnation was
a foregone conclusion ; and whether they had witnesses and
evidence or not was of slight account. For, when an ecclesi-
astical court has decided to put a disturber out of the way,
it does not look very far for witnesses or evidence. But they
are not able to put him to death without the consent of the
Roman power ; for Caesar had taken away from them this pre-
rogative. So they must wait until morning; and then they go
to the Pretorium, the great palace of Herod, now occupied
by Pilate. For Pilate, although he lived at Cesarea a great
part of the time, was accustomed to come to Jerusalem with
his Roman soldiers during the feast, to keep the people
quiet ; lest there should be a popular uprising. They took
him then to Pilate ; and here, in an open court, on a pave-
ment called in the Hebrew, Gabbatha, Jesus the culprit is
brought before the man on whose word hangs his life or his
death. Pilate seems disposed to let him go. He would nat-
urally look with a sort of contempt upon these religious quar-
rels among people with whom he had no sympathy, and he
evidently regarded Jesus only as a simple, good-natured en-
thusiast ; and he proposes to the people that, as it was the
custom on this day of the feast to set free some one who was

Death and Resurrection. 97

held in custody, they accept the gift of the life and freedom
of the Nazarene. But the crowd, instructed by the Phari-
sees and the chief priests, cried out : " Not this Jesus. Give
us Jesus Bar-Abbas, — the son of Abbas — and let this one
be crucified." Pilate did not shrink usually from putting a
man to death ; and though he would have been glad to set
Jesus free, yet he dared not, after the nature of the charge
they had brought against him, lest he should be reported to
Herod or Ccesar as conniving at a popular political uprising :
for they had said, "This fellow claims to be King of the
Jews." Pilate, therefore, easily condemns him, after wash-
ing his hands in water, saying: "I will have nothing to do
with the matter. Do as you please." And they took him
and led him away to be crucified.

The scene of the crucifixion we are unable now to deter-
mine. We only know it was on a little bald-topped hill out-
side of the city, from its peculiar appearance taking the name
of " a skull " : for this word, skull, is the English translation
of the Latin Calvary, and Calvary is the Latin translation of
the Hebrew Golgotha, each of the words meaning simply a
skull, which was given to this hill from some peculiarity of
its rounded outline. Here, then, Jesus is nailed to the cross
while it is lying on the ground, — his arms stretched apart on
the cross-beam, his feet nailed together with a single spike ;
and then the cross is lifted into its position. This is about
twelve o'clock. He hangs there from twelve to three. It
was not unusual for a person in such a position, if he were
strong and robust, to live for a day or two ; hence the sur-
prise when they come to Pilate and tell him that Jesus is
already dead, and when Joseph of Arimathea begs the priv-
ilege of taking down the body and putting it in his own new
tomb. The ladies of Jerusalem, to mitigate the sufferings
of those who were crucified, were accustomed to prepare a

98 Talks about Jesus.

stupefying drink ; but this, when it was lifted to the lips of
Jesus and he had tasted, he refused, preferring to suffer with
a clear brain and to meet his fate with open eye.

Jesus, then, at last is dead, and he is buried away very
hastily on this Friday night, because it was the Jews' " prep-
aration day," — that is, the day preceding the Sabbath j and,
lest they should be polluted by having anything to do with a
dead body, they must despatch this business the night before.
The death of Jesus, as I have already intimated, threw his
followers into utter confusion and dismay. They were scat-
tered abroad, hopeless and aimless. Nobody knew what to
think about it or what to do. We find an intimation as to
their state of mind, in the story of the two disciples taking
an evening walk to Emmaus. They say one to another:
"We do not know what this means. We trusted that this
had been he who should have redeemed Israel ; and yet
now he is crucified and buried, and our hopes are gone."

We must pass over a little time. After a few days or
weeks — we know not just how long it was — had passed,
we find the strange story in circulation that the crucified had
risen again, — that Jesus is alive, that he has ascended into
heaven. We find the scattered disciples gathered again in
Jerusalem into the central congregation which constituted
the first church. Jesus is alive, they say ; he was the Mes-
siah ; he is risen, he has ascended, and will come again.
These were the words that fell on the ear. And a little later
still we find Paul preaching in Jerusalem and in Damascus
and in Asia Minor, "Jesus was the Messiah ; though he was
crucified, he has risen again ; he has ascended to the Father :
he will come in the clouds very speedily — no one knows how
soon — to establish his Messianic kingdom." This was the
message of the first preachers of the Christian Church.

Now comes one of the most important questions con-

Death and Resurrection. 99

nected with this whole life of Jesus, perhaps the most impor-
tant of all, — • the one that I now ask you sincerely and sim-
ply, without prejudice one way or the other, to face : How
does it happen that these discouraged, broken, scattered dis-
ciples come together again, that they are full of hope, that
they believe and assert that Jesus is alive, that he has as-
cended to heaven, that he will come back again to establish
his kingdom ? How did it happen, I say, that such a belief
as this arose ? You are aware of course that the popular
answer to this for hundreds of years has been that the veri-
table body of Jesus did leave the tomb of Joseph of Arima-
thea, and that he appeared to his disciples and talked with
them, gave directions concerning what they were to do, then
in their sight rose into heaven in the very body that he had
worn during the thirty years of his life on earth, and that he
is to appear again in the clouds. This, I say, is the ordinary
answer that is given to this question. Let us look now for a
moment, and see what we must think and believe about it.

I purpose first, without expressing any opinion of my own,
simply to give you the argument, so far as we can get at it,
of the early Church. The triple tradition to which I have so
many times referred — that is, the story of Jesus in which
Mark, Matthew, and Luke all agree — says nothing about
any miraculous return to life or any ascension into heaven.
This is certainly a very striking fact for us to bear in mind.
Our first witness, then, in regard to the matter, is Paul. For
you must remember distinctly — to untangle this snarl and
confusion as to chronological order that we have in the New
Testament — that the stories under the names of Matthew,
Luke, and John, did not take their present shape for many,
many years after Paul preached and wrote his letters to the
churches. Our first witness, then, is Paul. He wrote on the
subject about the year 5S. Let us glance at his argument

577761

X. n

IOO

Talks about Jesus.

a moment, and see how much we should consider it to be
worth at the present time. It seems that there were people in
the church at Corinth who denied the doctrine of the resur-
rection. It is to answer this state of mind that Paul writes.
Here are his arguments. First he says, " If there is no res-
urrection of the dead, then Christ is not risen." You see he
does not give any proof that Christ is risen. " If Christ is
not risen/' he says next, " your faith is vain." Thirdly, " If
Christ is not risen, we are false witnesses, because we say he
is." Next, " If Christ is not risen, they who have died in this
faith have perished." That is, the popular belief at the time
was that those who died before Jesus appeared in the clouds
would be raised again, so that they might participate in his
triumph and kingdom. Paul says, If he is not risen at all,
why, then, those people that have died in this expectation
have perished. Then it seems to have been the custom at
this time, if a person had not been baptized before he died,
to have some one else baptized in his stead, as a sort of
proxy. Paul refers to this, and says, " If Jesus is not risen,
then those persons that have been baptized for the dead have
been doing a useless thing." And then he says, furthermore,
" If he is not risen, why stand we in jeopardy every hour? "
Briefly, there is the substance of all that Paul says in the way
of argument upon the subject, — everything. And yet I
need not say any more about it than that no one at the pres-
ent time would consider it in the light of an argument at all.
Pass over that, then, and let us see the strength of Paul's
testimony as to the resurrection. Of course I am speaking
now from the stand-point of the theory that Jesus' body came
back again from the grave, — the popular modern idea. I
shall have something further to say on that before I am
through. Here is Paul's testimony, which I give you in
detail: first, he says, "Jesus died, was buried, and rose

Death and Resurrection. 101

again the third clay"; secondly, "lie was seen by Peter " ;
thirdly, "Then the whole twelve saw him"; fourth, "Then
he was seen by above five hundred brethren at once";
fifth, "Then James saw him." And right here let me show
you a little fragment of tradition concerning this seeing of
Jesus on the part of James, that you may note the kind of
atmosphere we are in. This tradition, the fragment of a
lost gospel, goes on to tell us that James, the brother of
Jesus, was present at the last supper. Of course we know
that he was not. He was not one of the twelve, and we
know from all sources that only twelve were present. It
says that James there took an oath that he would never taste
any more bread until he had seen Jesus again ; and that the
first thing that Jesus did after the resurrection was to appear
to James with a loaf in his hand, and assure him that he
might now eat, for he had actually risen. Then, again, Paul
says that he was seen by all the apostles ; and last of all by
himself. Now it would seem as though we had personal,
unimpeachable, authentic testimony here ; for Paul distinctly
says that Jesus was seen by all these different persons, and
last of all he says he saw him himself.

Now we should feel compelled to give such evidence as
this a great deal of weight, were it not for the last clause of
the testimony. Perhaps you have never noticed it or seen
its significance. Let me call your attention to it then.
How was it that Paul saw Jesus ? What does he mean by
his seeing him ? So far as we know, he had never seen
Jesus at all in the flesh. He does not claim to have seen
him between the resurrection and the ascension. It is only
a long time after the ascension, when he is on his way to
Damascus, that he says he saw Jesus. And how did he see
him then ? He saw a vision ; that is, Paul's seeing Jesus
was merely a mental or subjective vision. He has a waking

102 Talks about Jesus.

dream of seeing him. And this story of the vision is mixed
up with hopeless contradictions. One of the accounts says
that the attendants of Paul saw a light, but heard nothing
of the voice that is said to have spoken. The other account
says they heard the voice, but saw nothing.

And what kind of a man in regard to the matter of visions
was this Paul who says he saw Jesus ? We know from his
own account that he was one who was given, in a most won-
derful and extraordinary degree, to seeing visions. He tells
us that he had such an abundance, such a multitude, of these
supernatural revelations, that it was necessary for God to
send him some sort of an affliction — "a messenger of
Satan," "a thorn in the flesh" — to keep down his spiritual
pride. He tells us that on a certain day he was caught up
into the third heaven, and saw there wonderful sights and
heard things that it was not lawful for him to tell about.
And he relates all this as though it were the same kind of
matter-of-fact, every-day reality as his visit to Antioch or
preaching in Rome. Paul, then, was a man given to the
seeing of extraordinary visions. And it never occurred to
him to doubt the objective reality of these, any more than
of any ordinary occurrence in his every-day life. If, then,
his seeing of Jesus was only a vision, we are driven almost
of necessity to question whether the similar seeing on the
part of the others of whom he tells us was not also a vision.

Did they have any reason for coming into this exalted and
ecstatic state of mind ? The disciples must have believed
that Jesus would appear again. It was a necessity of their
condition and of their faith. One of the fundamental prin-
ciples of Jewish belief was that an ignominious death was a
sign of the reprobation and wrath of God. And so Paul
speaks of Jesus hanging on the " accursed " tree. It was an
accursed thing to be put to death among the Jews ; and they

J hath ami Resurrection. 103

could not believe that Jesus — this simple, humble, loving,
divine soul — was worthy of the reprobation of God. They
thought there must be some other way of explaining it. They
believed firmly that he was the Messiah. If he was the Mes-
siah, then he must come again, he could not be really dead.
And then they began to look over the old prophecies, as we
find by more than one intimation, and to read them in a new
light, to see here and there hints that the Messiah might pos-
sibly suffer. For we know that these beliefs were all in the
air ; and they said : " He was the Messiah. For some inscruta-
ble reason, God suffered him to be put to death ; but he is
not dead, and he will come again to demonstrate that he was
the Messiah." And then they picked up fragments of his
sayings about his suffering and his rising again, and out of
these grew an excited, expectant slate of mind. And it
needed then how much to start a belief of his appearance ?
Only a fancy, a rumor that somebody somewrhere had seen
him, and it would spread like wild-fire all over the country,
and their hope would flame up anew and their enthusiasm
burn with an unquenchable fire.

This matter of visions I must dwell upon just a moment
longer, to make it clear. The Jews at this time believed that
a dream was a reality. You must remember that they had no
sort of knowledge of this wondrous brain structure of ours,
these marvellous nervous systems that can so exalt and some-
times so cheat us. Anything that they saw, or thought they
saw, they at once gave objective reality to. It was a neces-
sity of their state of mind, and of that stage of the educa-
tion of the human race. They knew no other way of ex-
plaining it. We know to-day perfectly well that there maybe
as many visions that have no external reality corresponding
to them as there are that have : there are cases, hundreds
and thousands of them, in all the nations of the world and

104 Talks about Jesus.

throughout history. If De Quincey had lived in the first cen-
tury instead of the eighteenth, his visions that he saw under
the influence of opium would have been taken as a revela-
tion. Goethe, the great German poet, had the power, not only
of seeing visions, but of actually calling them up at will : so
that he could create objective forms in his own room, and sit
there quietly and study them, and then dismiss them when
he was through. Cases like these are common. Only let me
give you one more illustration. In the sixteenth century
lived one of the most famous of Italian artists of the Re-
naissance, Benvenuto Cellini, who wrote his own life, — an en-
tertaining and wonderful biography, — giving an account of
his paintings, of his sculpture, of his travels, of his quarrels,
of his jealousies, of his loves. And in the midst of this
biography he tells us of the most wonderful visions and reve-
lations. And he tells them with the same matter-of-fact sense
of reality with which he speaks of going to Rome or painting
a portrait. For example, on a certain occasion, he goes with
a magician to the Colosseum in Rome ; a magical powder is
cast upon some burning coals, and suddenly the whole am-
phitheatre is filled with devils. He tells us again — though
he was not much of a saint — that during a part of his life
his head, at morning and evening, was surrounded by a halo.
He tells us also, with a veritable sense of reality, of seeing
a marvellous vision of the sun ; and out of this sun comes
Jesus, the glorified, followed by the Virgin Mary ; and then
the whole court of heaven is open to his view. And he tells
all this as simple matter of fact, showing what the best edu-
cated men were capable of believing and telling even so late
as the sixteenth century. All through history, anywhere and
everywhere, you will find illustrations of this. It has been
very easy for a man to see a vision ; and, when he has seen it,
it is not an uncommon thing for a whole multitude, caught by

Death and Resurrection. 105

the infection, to persuade themselves that they also s<
Now it is a vision of some mighty hero on horseback in the
midst of the battle ; then of a cross in the heavens, such as
was seen by the whole army of Constantine, with the words
In hoc signo vince — " By this sign conquer " — written in the
sky. History is full of these things. I cannot stop to detail
any more of them.

I have not said anything, and shall not at any length,
in regard to the stories contained in Matthew, Luke, and
John j for, as I have already told you, they grew up at a
later day. They are myth, they are legend ; and, not only
that, they contain improbabilities such that we cannot receive
them. Improbabilities did I say? They contain impossi-
bilities. They contradict each other. They contradict Paul.
And then the one thing which would discredit them, if noth-
ing else, and put them outside any veritable history that can
possibly be believed, is the story of the sudden reappearance
and disappearance of Jesus after the resurrection. They tell
us that he appeared, a body of flesh, blood, and bone, bearing
the scars on his hands, his side, his feet ; able to eat and
drink and digest like ordinary mortals ; telling the disciples
that he was not a spirit, but was veritable flesh and bone ;
and that, being such, he suddenly appears in the midst of the
disciples, as suddenly disappears, comes through solid walls
and closed doors, and disappears again as mysteriously.
This is not merely improbable : it is absolutely impossible,
unless we dispute and deny the maxim which lies at the basis
of all sanity and all knowledge, — that two bodies cannot pos-
sibly occupy the same space at the same time. It does not
come within the scope of Omnipotence itself to be absurd.
We must dismiss these, then, without any further question.

Men to-day do not continue to believe in the resurrection
of the body of Jesus, because it is based upon any thing that

io6 Talks about Jesus.

would be called evidence in this nineteenth century; for
there really is not a fragment of what would pass as proof in
a court of justice in Boston. They continue to believe it,
then, for either one or two of the following reasons : first,
because they suppose it to be intimately, necessarily, causally
connected with their belief in their own immortality; sec-
ondly, because they suppose it to be intimately and causally
connected with the origin and existence of the Christian
Church. The editor of Scribners Magazi?ie for April has
put these two positions into such forcible words that I shall
avail myself of his own language in stating them to you, and
then pass on to consider them. He says, in regard to the
first of the above points, that the resurrection of Jesus " is
the only open demonstration of the problem of immortality
ever vouchsafed to the human race." And then, secondly,
in regard to the other point, " The fact that Christianity, as
a living and aggressive religion, exists at this moment, is
proof positive that Christ rose from the dead. It never
would have started, it never could have started, except in the
fact of Christ's resurrection." And, further, "There is no
man living who can form a rational theory of the genesis and
development of Christianity, who does not embrace the res-
urrection as an initial and essential factor." Those two
points it remains for me to notice.

In what relation does the belief in the resurrection of the
body of Jesus stand to our faith in immortality ? I must not
spend many words upon it ; but let me tell you in brief, at
the outset, that I utterly fail to see that it stands in any vital
relation to it at all. Let me tell you what I mean. Accord-,
ing to the popular faith, Jesus was an extraordinary, unnat-
ural, supernatural being, whose body rose from a tomb, — not
air-tight but an above-ground tomb, — after it had lain there
about forty-eight hours ; that he was raised by miracle, — by

Death and Resurrection.

\0 J

the power of God. Now, what bearing can that possibly
have on the question as to whether the bodies of millions
and millions of common people, after they have slept for
hundreds and thousands of years, have been dissipated and
scattered all over the earth, are to be collected together
again, and raised up in the flesh ? That one extraordinary,
supernatural man, eighteen hundred years ago, was raised
from the dead after sleeping forty-eight hours, can hardly be
regarded, by sober, earnest thinkers, as conclusive proof that
everybody else — not extraordinary and not supernatural —
is going to be raised again in bodily form after having been
dust for hundreds and thousands of years. The belief in
a bodily resurrection is hardly held to-day by intelligent
people. It cannot be ; for the obstacles are utterly insuper-
able to any one who tries to understand what it means. If
you want to believe it, you had better not think about it.
This body of mine, for example, in a few years will have
gone back to earth ; it will in the next few hundreds or thou-
sands of years have become a part of one, ten, fifty, one
hundred, possibly one thousand other human bodies. Whose
body, then, shall claim the fragments on the day of the resur-
rection ? The difficulties surrounding it are insuperable, and
we will not stop even to discuss them.

But the doctrine is not held in this shape to-day, you will
say. We believe not that the body is to be raised again
from the grave ; but the belief has changed its form, and now
we trust that the soul does not die at all, but simply con-
tinues to live in spite of the death of the bodv. But this, you
must remember, was not at all the belief which was held in
the first century. They believed that this kingdom of God
was to be here on earth with its centre at Jerusalem ; and of
course any one who was to partake of it and be a citizen of
that kingdom must be raised from the dead and clothed

10S Talks about Jesus.

again with his body within a very few years. What bearing,
then, does the supernatural raising up of the body in one in-
stance, eighteen hundred years ago, have upon our faith, not
in the raising up of our bodies, but in the continued exist-
ence of the soul ? A very little superficial thought even will
show you that there is no sort of logical or rational relation
between the two supposed facts at all.

But we must now come to face that other question, — one of
immense importance, and one that I want to put clearly be-
fore your mind. The editor of Scribners Monthly tells us that
there is no rational way of accounting for Christianity, unless
we believe in the popular doctrine of the resurrection. And
here I come to a point that I have had in mind all the way
through, but that I could not bring out with clearness to you
until I had disposed of the doctrine as it is held in other
forms. Now we are ready to face the question as to what
Paul and his immediate fellow-disciples really believed and
taught. If you will go back and read the records with a
little care, you will find that Paul does not say anything about
any belief in the raising of Jesus from the grave, his resur-
rection from death, or the resurrection of his body. He does
not allude to either of these things. What does he allude
to ? The doctrine that Paul held and preached was the res-
urrection of Jesus "from the dead." And that means, as we
shall see in a moment, something very different from what
we have all this time been talking about. That which has
come to be called the Apostles' Creed, but which, so far
from having been the workmanship of the Apostles, did not
come into its present shape for two or three hundred years
after Christ, contains the absurd dogma, which is repeated
in the churches of Christendom to-day, of " the resurrection
of the body." This, as I am telling you, was not the original
doctrine at all. In order to understand this, we must have

Death and Resurrection. 109

clearly before us what the Jews believed about the universe
and the destiny of human souls. For the sake of putting it
before you in the words of another, so that you may see that
it is not simply my own idea, I want to read to you a brief
description of the Jewish universe. It is from a work
recently published, by a leading and scholarly professor of
the Shemitic languages and literature in Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity, Baltimore. He says : —

The writers of Scripture believed and tell as in their writings that
the earth was a plane surface, square in form, supported at each corner
by pillars resting on the rocky bed of the sea which surrounded it; that
its geographical centre was Judea and Jerusalem ; that underneath it
was an enormous cavern called Sheol, through which flitted the shades
of the departed ; that the vault above was a cube of metal placed like
a tent-cover over the earth, and fastened down at its corners ; that to this
cover all the heavenly bodies were attached, and on it they moved
around for the gratification or benefit of the earth, which was the centre
and reason of the whole creation ; that in this overhanging arch there
were windows, through which, when opened, there descended the rain or
snow from their storehouses just above.

You must remember, then, that in a universe like this they
all believed. They supposed that the souls of the departed
went down into this Sheol. In the earliest ages, they did
not believe in any vital, conscious existence at all : it was
only an underground, shadowy, semi-conscious state they
were in. This was not peculiar to the Jews : it is the belief
of antiquity. Let me read to you just a fragment from the
translation of the Iliad by Mr. Bryant. Achilles is repre-
sented as speaking to Ulysses there in the world of the
departed, — in Hades ; and he says : —

..." Noble Ulysses, spea'; not thus of death,
As if thou could'st console me. I would be
A laborer on earth, and serve for hire
Some man of mean estate who makes scant cheer,
Rather than reign o'er all who have gone down
To death." , . .

1 1 o Talks about Jesus.

The Greeks believed that the dead lived in Hades, — this
underground twilight world. The Romans believed it. The
whole ancient world believed that only heroes, demigods,
special favorites of the deities, ever went on high, to Olym-
pus, to heaven. The Jews did not believe that anybody
except Enoch and Elijah had gone to heaven, in the modern
sense of the term. Heaven was the court of God, where he
sat on his throne, surrounded by angels. All the dead from
Adam down to Jesus had gone down into this underground
cavern, Sheol. And this has been the traditional doctrine
of the Church from that day almost to this. Only a few
years ago, Mr. Edward H. Bickersteth published a poem
called "Yesterday, To-day, and Forever," in which he places
all the dead in this under-abode. He does not undertake to
locate it as they did in ancient times, because the astronomer
has taken away the old conception of the universe. But, in
his poem, none of the dead are ascended : none of them are
to ascend until after the general resurrection and judgment.
The good and the bad, then, are down here somewhere in
this under-abode. Dante teaches very much the same.
His Hell is in the centre of the earth, and here are the
dead. And the doctrine of Jesus having descended into hell
had taken such hold in all Christendom, in Dante's time, that
in his journey through hell he comes to the very place where
the stone wall of an embankment had been jarred asunder
and broken by the earthquake that took place at the time of
Jesus' resurrection. He went down into hell, and set free a
host of the spirits in prison. This, then, was the belief of the
ancient world. But few had gone to heaven. Our idea of
simply a continued existence of the soul and of a future life
in heaven is a purely modern idea : it does not get one single
word of countenance from Christianity. If you think that
you are basing your hope of a continued existence imme-

Death and Resurrection.

in

diately after death, and an ascension into heaven, on Chris-
tianity, you are utterly mistaken. Christianity does not
teach any such doctrine anywhere.

What, then, did Paul believe? He taught "the resurrec-
tion of the dead " : but what did he mean by it ? He did not
go to the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea to see if there was
any body there. It would never occur to the disciples at
that time to see whether the body of Jesus had risen. They
had no interest in his body. The resurrection of the dead,
in their mind, did not depend at all on the question
whether his body had risen or not. The resurrection of
the dead meant simply this, then : that Jesus was not shut
up in Sheol among the multitudes of the common dead that
were there imprisoned. It meant that he had escaped from
Hades ; that he had ascended, had gone into heaven, was
sitting at God's right hand, and would come again to estab-
lish his Messianic throne on earth. This was what the res-
urrection of the dead meant to the disciples. Do you not
see how utterly different it is from the modern perversion
and corruption of the original idea ? It meant only as much
as we would mean to-day, when, standing over the dead
body of a friend, we should say : " He is not dead ; he can-
not be dead ; he is alive. We do not bury him ; he has
gone up on high."' This was the only doctrine of the resur-
rection of Jesus held or preached by the early Church. Of
course it was necessary that this should be believed before
there could be any Christianity. The Church could not
spring out of a grave, or from a belief in a dead Jesus. The
Church had its birth in the belief that he was alive, that he
was coming again to establish his kingdom ; and that is the
gospel that they went preaching all over the world. And
you will notice in these early sermons it was not the propitia-
tion for our sins, it was not his grave, it was not his death

H2 Talks about Jesus.

that was the most important. The one thing which Paul
puts in the forefront as of more significance than anything
else was the resurrection. Jesus is the Messiah ; he is
alive — this is the great informing, inspiring faith of the
early Church.

And now we must just glance a moment at how many
a parallel this belief has in the world. If you think it per-
tains simply to Jesus, you are mistaken. Thousands of
years before Christ, in Egypt, the doctrine had grown up
that Horus, the son of a god and a virgin, had lived until he
was twenty-eight years of age, was put to death in a struggle
with Typhon, — the Devil, the Prince of Evil, — that he was
raised again from the dead, and was made king of all the de-
parted souls. This belief in the disappearance and return
again of some hero who has come for the deliverance of man
has not been confined to any age or to any nation. You find
it in ancient India. To come to comparatively modern times,
it was believed concerning Nero ; it was believed concerning
Charlemagne, concerning King Arthur, concerning Merlin,
concerning the sun-god of the Aztecs of Mexico, and Hiawa-
tha, the great hero of the northern tribes of Indians. It has
been believed even in the most modern times concerning
Napoleon I. There is a religious sect alive to-day who
believe that Napoleon is not dead, that he has only dis-
appeared in the Far East, and that by and by he is coming
back to conquer and rule the earth again. This belief, then,
I say, is wide-spread and common, and is simply an illus-
tration of the saying of the poet, that

" Hope springs eternal in the human breast."

We cannot believe that our great hopes have died. They
spring up again by the law of their very nature, for they are
immortal ; and we must look forward to something grander
yet to be.

Death and Resurrection. I 1 3

The whole New Testament, if you will read it in the light of
what I have said, you will find all alive with the expectation
of this coming. Paul teaches that Jesus is to come before
those that were then living should die. And he comforts
some of the friends of those who have died, by telling them
they are not to be troubled, for, when Jesus comes, they will
be raised again to life, and be permitted to share in the glory
of his Messianic reign. And the last book of the New Tes-
tament— as it stands to-day, the Revelation — is all alive and
on tiptoe with this expectation. Everywhere, all through,
throbs the belief that Jesus is coming quickly. And you
find, as you read the history of the canon of the New Testa-
ment, that, after their expectation had been disappointed
and Jesus did not come, this book was discredited, and
came very near being thrown out of the Bible. But, after
a time, it was reinstated again. As late as the year 1000, all
Europe was thrilled and convulsed with the expectation of
the immediate coming of Jesus ; and men went so far as to
put away their property, and to do all sorts of things in the
way of getting ready. And, from that day to this, the old
belief occasionally — in sublime or ridiculous fashion —
flames out again. You remember only two or three years
ago there was a Convention of all the Evangelical Churches
of America in New York, to take up and treat this subject ;
and leading men in all the churches expressed their belief
that Jesus might be expected to return any day. And yet —
so vital is a baseless superstition when once it is in posses-
sion of the imaginations of men — Jesus himself, who ought
to be regarded as authority on the subject, says that this
coming is to be before the generation to which he was then
speaking had passed away.

These, then, are the facts, so far as we can find them, con-
cerning the story of the death and the resurrection of Jesus.

114 Talks about Jesus.

This discussion does not touch the question of our immortal-
ity one way or the other. Our hope and our faith do not rest
upon any of these things. All nations, even those who lived
hundreds and thousands of years before Jesus was born, have
believed in immortality. The belief has never been so vigor-
ous and so real among any people under heaven as it was in
ancient Egypt. It is a belief that springs out of the human
heart ; and I, for one, trust that it is the whisper of the eter-
nal truth of God.

THE MESSIANIC IDEA.

Any series of talks about Jesus, however brief or fragmen-
tary, that should forget to treat the Messianic idea in its
bearing upon his life and teaching, would be fatally defective.
For, however strange the statement may seem to some of
you that have not studied it and looked into its bearings,
it is unquestionably true that but for the Messianic idea,
wrought out and organized by the thought, the genius, and
the energy of Paul, there would have been no historic, insti-
tuted Christianity in the world. This Messianic idea, then,
is all-important ; and yet the thought of its reality, of its sig-
nificance, has almost faded out of the modern mind. Except
on the part of a very few narrow-minded and bigoted among
the Hebrews, the literal expectation of the fulfilment of their
old national hope has long since passed away. Many of
them mean by it only the general progress and development
of mankind. Some of them hold that the Jewish race person-
ified is God's Messiah to the world, holding up among the
nations the conception of the unity and the moral perfection
of God : and that this is the mission of their race. When we
come among Christians, and ask what they still believe about
the Messiah, we find that there is, underneath the surface, a
smouldering belief in the original New Testament idea ; and
that, if the oxygen of certain conditions of thought can only
get access to it, this latent faith is ready to flame up in a

1 1 6 Talks about Jesus.

nineteenth century enthusiasm almost as vivid and real as
that of the first. But, on the part of most Christians, the be-
lief in any literal coming of Jesus, unless it be by and by, in
some very indefinite future, at the end of the world, is en-
tirely surrendered. And on the part of many of them, as it
finds utterance in sermon, in song, in hymn, in poem, it has
come to be transformed into the idea that, when each believer
dies, Jesus, in some figurative way, comes to him then.

The second coming of Christ, then, has almost passed
out of the thought of the modern world, in any real and
literal sense ; and yet once it was the most vital thing in
Christianity. There are two main questions that we must
now consider ; and my purpose is simply to place these as
clearly as I can before you, and answer them as concisely as
possible.

It has been the standing charge of Christendom against
the Jewish people that they wilfully and wickedly rejected
and cast out their own Messiah, the one that they had been
for a long time expecting ; and that, if they had been willing
to have known the truth, they had light enough to teach
them what they were doing. And this charge has grown
to such stupendous and incomprehensible proportions, that
there have been those among the leading thinkers of the
world, and those by hundreds, who have even charged this
Jewish race with the one grandest crime that the human
mind can conceive, — of even putting to death God himself-
Only now and then do men stop to see what the logic of
their common belief is. But only a few years ago 1 was
reading a sermon of Mr. Beecher's, in which he went this
length of clearly and simply saying that, when the Jews put
Jesus to death on the cross, God died. This, then, must be
the first question for us to consider, — as to whether Jesus
did really fulfil the Messianic expectation of the Jews in any

The Messianic Idea. i 1 7

such realistic sense as to have given the people of his time
a reason for knowing that he was veritably their Messiah.

In order to answer this question, I must ask you to go
back with me, and trace for a moment the origin and devel-
opment of this Messianic idea, — to see what it was, in its
simplest and plainest outline, which the Jews really believed.
We cannot go back so far as the time of Abraham ; for his
history and the words that are put into his mouth were
written many hundreds of years after his death. But it is
sufficient for us to take note that the Jewish nation believed,
with all the intensity of earnest conviction, that God had
veritably appeared to Abraham, — that he had entered into
a personal covenant with him, had promised him, as the re-
ward of his faithfulness, that he should be the father of his
own chosen, peculiar people ; that this people should be
perpetually prosperous, that they should dominate the whole
earth, and that through them all the nations of the world
should be blessed. Right here, in this one belief, we shall
find the seed and root of the Messianic idea. The Jews
then believed that they were the chosen, peculiar people of
Yahweh, the national god ; they believed that the sign of his
blessing was outward prosperity. There is no indication in
their earlier writings of any thought of a future life beyond
the grave. The highest blessing they pronounce upon obe-
dience to Yahweh is long life, great wealth, many children,
peace, and general prosperity. Precisely similar things in
their thought constituted the highest welfare of the people.
They believed, then, that they were a chosen people, and
that as being such there was to spread out before them, in
all coming time, a kingdom in perpetuity of blessing and
peace and dominion over all the world. If there came to
the Jews, then, any calamity or trial, they must explain it
consistently with this underlying, foundation principle. It

1 1 8 Talks about Jesus.

could not mean that Yahweh had turned away his favor from
them forever: it must mean only a temporary and local chas-
tisement, in preparation for some larger triumph, that was
yet to be. So, if you read the prophets and writings of the
Jews all through, you will find the key to everything in this
one principle that I have given you, — the belief that they
were the chosen people, and that, however they might be
cast down temporarily, ultimately their destiny must be one
of triumph, of peace, and of dominion over all the nations
of the world. When, then, their land was overrun by the
heathen, when the city of Jerusalem itself was taken, when
the temple was destroyed, and the flower of the nation was
carried off into captivity in Babylon, did they give up their
hope ? Not at all. So long as they believed in Yahweh, they
could not surrender it. These disappointments were indeed
mysterious ; and yet Yahweh had some ultimate purpose in
them, and out of this degradation there was to spring at
last a triumph that would be glorious. So we find in the
midst of their captivity this religious belief existing; and
there never was a time in their whole history when the relig-
ious life was so active, and when it budded and flowered out
into such heautiful blooms, as during this time of their op-
pression by a foreign power. As we get down toward the
time of Christ, and as calamities thicken upon the people, as
they pass now under the dominion of one kingdom and now
under that of another, suffering famine and persecution and
trial of every kind, we find this hope, this belief in the
Messianic idea, only growing stronger and more intense, and
ready to tlame out into the wildest enthusiasm on the small-
est possible provocation. Messiah after Messiah appears,
each one claiming to be sent by their national god. Book
after book is written, setting forth the nature of this Messi-
anic kingdom. We find only the poorest and feeblest hints

The Messianic Idea. 1 19

of what this was to be in our canonical Old Testament.
From the time when the Book of Daniel was written, down
through the writing of the Book of Enoch, the Book of
Baruch, the Book of Jesus the son of Sirach, the Book of
Tobit, the Book of Jubilees, the Psalms of Solomon, and
many others, we find this Messianic hope pictured in all the
strongest and wildest outlines and all the most brilliant
colors. Book after book was written and put out under the
name of some of the great names of the past, that they might
carry influence among the people, and thus encourage them
in the days of their distress and despair, and prepare them
for the day of their prosperity, which they believed to be near
at hand. Such was the mental condition of the Jews, such
was the religious idea of the time when Jesus is born, and
proclaims himself the coming Messiah, who is to fulfil the
hopes of his nation.

Now I wish, in just as brief a way as I can, to give you a
picture of what it was that the Jews expected. But you must
bear one thing in mind. If somebody should go out from
here to Europe, and report that the people of Boston believed
so and so, you will see at once that such a statement as that
would need important modification. All the people of Bos-
ton cannot agree as to this particular thing or that in their
belief. And yet it is perfectly safe to say that there are
certain principles, certain prominent sentiments, which are
practically universal, and characteristic of the city. So when
we talk about the Messianic expectation of the Jews, we must
not think that everybody in Jerusalem and Judea held pre-
cisely the same ideas, and pictured the future under precisely
the same forms. There were many forms of the Messianic
idea floating in the public mind at this time. And yet there
are certain main outlines which are easily discernible, con-
cerning which a majority of the people were agreed. It is
these, then, that I must call vour attention to.

1 20 Talks about Jesus.

In the first place, the Jews divided all time into two great
epochs or divisions : one was what you will find referred to
in the New Testament as "the present time," — this age, this
world. And you must remember, all through the New Tes-
tament, when you come across the words " this world," that
there is no reference whatever to the planet on which we
live, but simply to the then present age or period of time.
They divided all time into these two epochs, — the present
time and the future, this age and the next age, this world
and the next world. And the present time, or this age, was
the time preceding the coming of the Messiah, the establish-
ment of the Messianic kingdom. And the next age, or next
world, was that kingdom in its finished condition and its
perpetuity. Some of them believed that there was to be a
personal Messiah, and some did not. Some of them looked
for this perfect condition of things only as the restoration of
their original theocracy before they had a human king, when
Yahweh alone was their ruler. But the prevalent idea was
that there was to be a personal Messiah, to be Yahweh's vicar
on earth, to exercise his authority and sit on the throne of
David. They believed that this Messiah was to come in the
line of David, and that the kingdom was to be a continua-
tion of his authority and dynasty. The reason for this was
simple. David was the first one of their kings who unified
and established their national power, and gave them peace
and safety in the midst of their enemies ; and, although the
kingdom of Solomon was in some respects more glorious
and wide-spread than that of David, yet Solomon himself
departed from many of the Jewish customs and laws, and
thus fell into disrepute among the priesthood. So that
David became their ideal king ; and they could conceive no
higher or better destinv for them in the future than that a
king like David, of his line, should come to restore his

The Messianic Idea. 121

throne and kingdom, and reign in his name and his glory
forever.

The lews generally believed that the Messianic kingdom
was to he ushered in by awful portents. We find them pict-
ured in some of the prophets ; we find them graphically and
wildly outlined in the apocalyptic literature of the time ; we
find them in the words of Jesus himself. And here you must
remember, for clearness of thought, that all the figures and
colors that Jesus uses in describing the things that are to
happen before his second coming are borrowed from the pop-
ular pictures and the popular literature of the time. We can
find them all in the apocalyptic books. They believed that
the sun was to be darkened, and that the moon was to be
turned into blood ; the stars were to fall from heaven ; there
were to be earthquakes and pestilences in various places •
wars and rumors of wars, nation rising up against nation ; a
time of affliction such as the world had never seen until that
day, — all this was to usher in the Messianic kingdom, these
were to be the premonitory symptoms of its coming. They
believed that the dead, the faithful, believing dead, of the past,
were to rise again. That is, all those that had been faithful
Tews were to have a part in this coming glory; and, according
to their conceptions of the universe, the only way by which
they could picture the possibility of this realization was by
supposing that these were to be raised from this under-world
of Sheol, and become citizens of the earth again in this Mes-
sianic kingdom.

And, when this kingdom came, what were to be its charac-
teristics ? There was to be no more war ; wild beasts were
to become tame ; health was to be universal ; sickness and
sorrow to be done away ; the world was to become supernat-
urally fruitful. As an illustration, let me give you a quota-
tion from one of the most famous apocalyptic books. This

122 Talks about Jesus.

is an example of what they believed would be general in re-
gard to the products of the earth. They said concerning the
vine that u one vine should have on it a thousand branches,
and every branch a thousand bunches, and every bunch a
thousand grapes ; and every grape should be large enough to
produce a whole measure of wine." They believed that the
wind, as it blew over the tops of the grain, would sift out fine
flour ready for people to gather and make into bread. All
the way through they pictured in the most gorgeous colors
the glorious condition of this perfected kingdom of their
Messiah. These simply as some general outline and indica-
tion of what they believed. It is this Messianic dream, and
not "heaven," or the condition of things in eternity, that
you may see pictured in the Book of Revelation — one of
the class of apocalyptic writings.

Did Jesus bear any of the signs of the kind of Messiah
that the Jews had been taught by all their sacred writings
for generations to expect ? If you say he proved to the Jews
his Messiahship by his supernatural birth, we must answer
that the supernatural birth was not heard of for many long
years after his death. If you say that he proved it by his
miracles, we must answer that miracles were very common
and had been very common throughout the whole history of
the Jews, and had been wrought by many men that were not
Messiahs and had not claimed to be. If you say that he
proved it by his power over the demons, even Jesus himself
admits that many Jews of his own time beside himself had
this same power of exorcising evil spirits. If you say it was
his moral teaching that proved his Messiahship, we must
again confess that the finest and sublimest moral teachings
of Jesus are only the sublimated essence of the teaching of
the best and highest Jews of his own age.

Jesus came, then, not as their Messiah. There were none

The Messianic Idea. 123

of those portents and signs in the heavens, indicating to the
Jews that he was the Messiah. And, when they came to him
and asked him for a sign, he refused to give it. We must
confess, then, as we candidly look over the history, that
Jesus did not bear about him a single one of the marks by
which the Jews expected to know their Messiah when he
came. And, however great the crime of putting to death
a character so sublime, so pure, so noble, as was that of
Jesus of Nazareth, Christendom must hang its head in
shame, and confess that the Church, in the name of this
same Jesus, has committed hundreds of crimes quite as infa-
mous ; has put to death, with quite as cruel tortures, men
that were very like him whom they, at the same time, called
their Master and Lord. Jesus was not, then, in any com-
prehensible sense to us, as we look back over history, the
fulfilment of the Jewish Messianic expectation.

Let us now pass to our second question ; and you will find
that it is intimately connected with this, and springs vitally
out of it. The disciples themselves confessed to the Jews
at that time that Jesus did not fulfil their national hope.
They themselves held precisely the same expectation that
their fellow-countrymen did. How, then, did they believe
that Jesus was the Messiah ? They did not believe that he
had come as yet as the Messiah, but only that he was thus
to come. The one single point that separated Christians
from the Jews, at the first, was simply here : the Jews denied
that Jesus was coming again as the Messiah, and the Chris-
tians asserted it. That was the one sole distinction between
the disciple of Jesus and the ordinary Jew in Jerusalem dur-
ing the first few years after the crucifixion.

Pass then to our second question. To what extent and in
what way has the belief, on the part of the disciples, that
Jesus was the Messiah, reshaped, remodelled, and colored the

24

Talks about Jesus.

facts as to his life and teaching ? You must remember here,
in order to a clear understanding of the point I wish to make,
that the biographies of Jesus, and all the notices we have of
him in the New Testament, were not written for many, many
years after his death. You must remember that it was the
fundamental belief of the disciples that Jesus was to come, in
the immediate future, in fulfilment of the national Messianic
hope of the Jews. You will very readily see then that under
the influence of this belief it would be very natural, inevita-
ble even, that the story of Jesus' life should have become
colored by this belief. Look for a moment at the circum-
stances. Nothing as yet had been written about Jesus. It
was simply a tradition floating in the popular mind that he
had done this thing, that he had said that, on a certain
occasion. We find in the Gospels themselves no chronolog-
ical order, — only mingled, blended, and sometimes contra-
dictory traditions, just as they were floating in the popular
mind. The disciples believed with their whole soul — for
this was the one thing, the only thing, that made them Chris-
tians— that this Jesus was to appear again. Do you not see,
then, that it was inevitable that they should suppose that
Jesus had clone certain things and had said certain things
which they believed the Messiah must do and must say?
The Messiah, when he is born, the popular belief said, must
do such and such things, must say such and such things ; and
he will not be the Messiah unless he does. The next step.
Jesus was the Messiah, and has revealed himself as such.
Then of course he must have done the things that the Mes-
siah was to do, he must have said the things that the Mes-
siah was to say. And they were spurred to this by another
consideration. The one grand thing which the early preacher
of Christianity set out to do was to convince the Jews that
Jesus was the "Christ" — that is, the Messiah. For you

TJic Jl ft ss it Diic Idea. 125

must remember that Christ in the New Testament is always
simply the name of the office, and not the name of the man.
To say, then, that Jesus was the Christ was to say that Jesus
was the Jewish Messiah; for " Christos " is only the Greek
form of the Hebrew word.

Let us now look for a moment, and see to what extent this
preconception did really modify, pervert, and color the facts
in the life of Jesus. They wrote many years after his death,
and with this preconception of what the Messiah ought to say
and do in their minds. For example, the belief had grown
up, on account of the misconception of one of the old proph-
esies, that the Messiah was to be born in some extraordinary
way. Hence the story of the birth by a virgin. And yet, as I
have already told you, go back and study that prophecy, and
you will find that it says nothing whatever about any birth by
a virgin. It is a pure misunderstanding and perversion of it
to get any such meaning out of it. Again, the Messiah must
be of the line of David ; and, although Jesus himself ex-
plicitly refutes this idea, and says that the Messiah need not
be of the line of David, yet the popular belief is so strong
that even his words are forgotten, and the belief springs up
that he was thus born ; and, to prove it, the genealogical table
finds its place in two of the Gospels. If he was of the line of
David and was to inherit his throne, then he must have been
born in the city of David, in Bethlehem ; and so, in spite of
the universal tradition, that points everywhere to Nazareth,
the story of the Bethlehem birth becomes the creed of the
early Church. And then, by and by, they must explain the
fact that the Messiah, so contrary to all the ideas of the time,
was crucified. They find in one of the old prophets a pas-
sage about the "suffering servant of Yahweh." It is per-
fectly plain to the most casual reading that the prophet here
is referring to Israel personified, the nation as a whole. But

1 26 Talks about Jesus.

the methods of interpretation in use by the rabbins at this
time were such that a passage of Scripture could mean any-
thing that could possibly be tortured out of it. So this is
made to apply to and attempt to explain the, at first, stun-
ning fact that the Messiah who came to reign was put to an
ignominious death. Then, of course, they could not believe
that the Messiah was really held a prisoner in Sheol : he
must have escaped, he must be alive. Out of this naturally
and easily springs the doctrine of the resurrection. So we
find, all the way through, that the facts of the life are rewrit-
ten in after time in the light of a preconceived ideal ; so that
the historic Jesus is almost lost to us, having been reshaped
and moulded into the image of the supposed Messiah.

How far did Jesus himself accept the popular Messianic
belief? I want to make our consideration of this just as
plain to you as possible, because it is very important in the
present condition of thought about Jesus and his work. In
how far did Jesus share the popular Messianic belief of the
time ? It is almost impossible for us to decide. If we are
to accept the New Testament records as they stand, then
he held the simple, popular faith in all its crudeness. He
believed that before that generation passed away he himself
was to come in the clouds of heaven, surrounded by angels,
and establish this kingdom of God on earth. And yet, very
strangely, there are also hints of a deeper, more moral
teaching, that seems utterly inconsistent with this belief.
And we are to remember right here that the Gospels them-
selves represent the disciples as perpetually misunderstand-
ing Jesus, misinterpreting what he said, taking some figura-
tive, poetic saying of his, and reducing it to a crude, coarse
literalness in their interpretation. So that, if we are to
doubt the record of the disciples at any point, we must
doubt it here ; for they would be less liable to invent the

The Mess itu lie Idea. 127

grand spiritual principles and doctrines of Jesus than the
cruder ideas which were the common thought of the time.
If, then, we are to question any part of it, we will cast aside
that which ascribes to Jesus the crude, common, popular
belief in regard to the Messianic hope.

And yet, with all the study I have been able to give it,
after some years, I am convinced of this, — that Jesus did
believe that there was to be a miraculous and sudden estab-
lishment of the Messianic kingdom ; but the one grand thing
where he outran his time, where he towered unspeakably
above it, was as to the method of preparation for this coming
kingdom which he held and preached. The Jews of his
time, almost universally, said we must get ready for the
coming of this Messianic kingdom by keeping the law with
more and more minuteness and strictness ; we must get ready
for it by following more carefully the traditions ; we must
be more careful about washing our tables and our cups,
about burnishing the brazen vessels and looking after the
condition of the altar ; we must get ready for it by being
careful how far we walk on the Sabbath day, what sort of
sandal we wear as we walk through the grass, how we shall
wash our hands, as to which hand we shall pour the water
into first, — whether it shall be by pouring it above the wrist
and letting it run down on to the hand, or by pouring it upon
the hand and letting it run up to the wrist. It was ques-
tions like these that Jesus found the rabbis disputing about,
thinking that on such contemptible hinges as these might
turn the coming of the glorious kingdom of God. For the
Jews at this time had frittered away the intellect of their
nation on these feeble subtleties and infinitesimal disputes ;
just as we find the great theologians of the Middle Ages,
for example, disputing over such weighty matters as to how
many disembodied spirits might dance together upon the

128 Talks about Jesus.

point of a needle. It was to such questions as these that
the mind of the Jewish nation was turned.

What does Jesus say ? In the clearest and most emphatic
manner, in a way that cannot be outgrown, that never will be
outgrown, — for it is an ideal as grand and comprehensive as
the horizon, and in the midst of which humanity may pro-
gress forever without outrunning it, — Jesus taught that the
way to get ready for the coming of the kingdom of God was
by inward, spiritual, and moral goodness, by love to God and
love to man. And, with one wave of his mighty, gentle hand,
he brushed their subtleties and ritualisms and absurdities to
the winds. Jesus held that the way to get ready for this
coming kingdom was by the way of meekness, by purity of
heart, by loving kindness, by love to our fellow-men, by all
things that make us like our highest ideal of God, and that
bring us into the most perfect relationship to our fellow-
men. And this is the eternal part of the work of Jesus.

What do we believe to-day about this Messianic kingdom ?
That old vision of the Jews has faded away, and is now
treated by the thoughtful and intelligent world only as a
dream, which takes its place along with Plato's " Republic,"
with More's "Utopia," with Sidney's "Arcadia," with the
highest thoughts and aspirations of the best minds of time ;
as one form of the dream of human progress, one form of the
belief in the possible perfectibility of human society. The
form, then, in which Jesus and his age held the Messianic
dream has passed away. In what sense, then, are we his suc-
cessors ? In what sense do we hold the essential teachings
of Jesus ? We stand where the advancing ranks of humanity
must always stand, if they are to continue to advance, on this
essential, underlying, eternal principle of love to God and
love to man. But is this enough? Grand as it is, I think
not. It needs to be supplemented by that which is the pecu-

The Messianic Idea. 129

liar quality and characteristic of this age in which we live.
It needs to be supplemented by that which is just as divine
as the thought of Jesus himself, the high thought which the
Church has been vilifying and casting out and crucifying
again, as though it were a new Messiah ; it needs to be sup-
plemented, in order that the perfect kingdom of humanity
may come, by the work and the results of science. Let me
illustrate to you just what I mean, and how much. A steam-
engine in the hold of a ship is absolutely essential to its
progress ; and yet it is not enough. Which way shall it
move, on to the rocks or toward the harbor ? Before this
can be settled, there must be the helm, the compass, the chart.
In other words, the work of science must come in as the light
to guide and tell the mariner his way. The steam in a loco-
motive is absolutely essential to the propulsion of the train,
but that is not enough. There must be scientific engineering
to lay out and make solid the track, and there must be intelli-
gence like a locomotive head-light shining out into the dark-
ness to show the way, to reveal the fact that the signals are
all in their places and that the path is clear.

It is not enough, then, to do what Jesus did, and to tell
the world that they must love God and love their fellow-men.
There must come — what this age is developing, and what
will be for its future and everlasting glory — an answer to
the question, what and how. Love God ? Yes. But what
is it to love him ? Obey God ? Yes, absolutely. But what
and where are God's laws that we need to obey ? Here is
the work of investigation. Here come in the methods and
the results of science, — the laws of God everywhere, in the
stars and the sea-depths, in the planets and the atoms, in
our bodies and brains, in society, politics, everywhere. It is
the work of science to investigate as to what the laws of
God are, to verify them, and furnish us a knowledge of

i 30 Talks about Jesus.

causes and results. Then comes in the eternal principle of
the spirit of Jesus as the motive power of religion, to lead
on the human race to its ultimate triumph over all the obsta-
cles of the world.

We must love man ? Yes ; but how love him, how manifest
that love ? The Church, for many ages, has been devoting
itself to giving its conceptions of the truth to the service of
men. The Catholic Church, for instance, has not been pur-
posely going counter to the welfare of humanity. It has
been doing what it believed to be for the salvation of the
world. But for lack of science, for lack of light, for lack of
investigation, for lack of listening to the divine, God-spoken
words of human experience, its tender mercy has been
cruelty, its pity has many a time created poverty and pes-
tilence and crime, its best methods and best endeavors have
resulted in disaster, in aggravating evils it sought to abate.

We need, then, not simply the propulsive power of the
love of God and man, which is the essential spirit and the
very heart of Jesus. We need also the light of the intellect
and the results of the experience of the human race. These
shall furnish us our machinery ; and the love that Jesus
taught shall be the motive power. And so, on the track
marked out, and led by science, the love of God and man
shall drag on the train of every human improvement. I
believe that the Messianic dream of the Jews was only one
form of the dream that we to-day ought to cherish. We are
infidels, in the only serious sense of that word, if we doubt
God, if we doubt the possible perfection of humanity. With
whatever colors we paint it, we may have our dream of a
good time coming. We may believe that evil is transient,
that it can be and ought to be put under foot. We may
look forward to the time when the evils of sickness and
sorrow and toil and poverty, and the gigantic wrongs that

The Messianic Idea. 131

undermine society and threaten our civilization, shall be
wiped out of existence and forgotten. It will not come as
Jesus and his disciples expected it, by sudden miracle from
heaven. It will come through patient investigation; it will
come through the mutual bearing of burdens ; it will come
through long-continued study and effort, liut, if we are
faithful to God and to the trust that our fellow-men place in
us, then it will appear. " The kingdom of God shall come
down out of heaven, and dwell among men ; and all tears
shall be wiped away. There shall be no more sorrow nor
crying, neither any more pain." There shall be no more
pestilence, no more hunger. The spirit in which we should
labor for its realization let me give you in the words of one
of our greatest and most inspiring singers : —

Then to side with truth is noble, when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 'tis prosperous to be just ;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.

Count we o'er earth's chosen heroes, — they were souls that stood alone,

While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,

Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline

To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,

By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

By the light of burning heretics, Christ's bleeding feet I track,
Toiling up new Calvaries ever with the cross that turns not back,
And these mounts of anguish number how each generation learned
One new word of that grand Credo, which in prophet-hearts hath burned,
Since the first man stood God-conquered with his face to heaven up-
turned.

For humanity sweeps onward ; where to-day the martyr stands,
On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands ;
Far in front the cross stands ready, and the crackling fagots burn,
While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return,
To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.

\$2 Talks about Jesus.

They have rights who dare maintain them; we are traitors to our sires,
Smothering in their holy ashes Freedom's new-lit altar-fires.
Shall we make their creed our jailer ? Shall we, in our haste to slay,
From the tombs of the old prophets steal the funeral lamps away
To light up the martyr-fagots round the prophets of to-day ?

New occasions teach new duties; time makes ancient good uncouth;
They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth ;
Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires ! we ourselves must pilgrims be,
Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter

sea,
Nor attempt the Future's portal with the Past's blood-rusted key.

JESUS AND THE CHURCH: or, WAS JESUS
A "CHRISTIAN"?

To the superficial thinker, who has been accustomed to
look upon Jesus as one who came into the world on purpose
to plant and develop Christianity, the question as to whether
he himself was a Christian may at first seem only captious-
ness or sensationalism. But it is the farthest possible from
either the one or the other. In reality, it is one of the most
serious problems with which we can concern ourselves. And
so far from its being a plain matter of fact that Jesus came
to found and establish the Christian Church, as it has existed
during the last eighteen hundred years, a conscientious study
may lead us to the conclusion that he had in mind nothing of
the sort. Indeed, this point is conclusively settled by the
word of Jesus himself, where he says that his kingdom is to
be miraculously revealed from Heaven during the generation
then living. And, as matter of history, instituted Christian-
ity was not constructed out of the actual life and teachings
of Jesus, but was founded by Paul out of the materials
of the Jewish Messianic idea, supplemented, enlarged, and
completed by the pagan philosophy and mythology of the
Orient, of Egypt, and of Greece. It is, then, a pertinent and

1 34 Talks about Jesus.

important question for us to consider, as to whether Jesus was
a Christian.

You will please to bear in mind all through that we are not
discussing the question as to whether the points of the pop-
ular creed of Christendom are true, but only as to whether
Jesus — as represented in the Gospels — held and taught
them.

There is one more preliminary point that is very important.
Are we to take the recorded words of Jesus as a decisive
authority as to what a Christian should do and believe ? You
may wonder at my asking such a question, or even doubt as
to whether I am really serious about it. But, when you have
pondered the question well, you will cease to wonder at me,
and begin to wonder at the theologians. For the words of
Jesus have never been favorite material with the system-
builders and theological architects. Go to Princeton or An-
dover and look over the Scripture texts that are used in the
construction of creeds and theological systems, and you will
find that very few of them are the words of Jesus. They are
chiefly from the Old Testament and from Paul. If one begins
to talk much about the Sermon on the Mount and the Para-
bles, he is straightway in danger of being called in question
as to the matter of "soundness."

And yet, in spite of the theologians, I shall assume that
Jesus knew what he meant, and that, when he knew, he said
it, and said it plainly. If, as the churchmen tell us, he came
into the world on purpose to teach us the truth that is essen-
tial to salvation, it is not very likely that he forgot his errand.
If he intended to reveal anything, he probably put it into
plain language, or else it is not revealed at all. I think then
that we may safely pass by the crowd of self-appointed inter-
preters,— priests, theologians, and all, — and go straight up to
Jesus himself, and take what he believed from his own lips.

Jesus and the Church. 135

If he had no message, or, having one, forgot to deliver it, and
left it for Princeton and Andover to tell us about it, then the
best thing we can do is to dismiss the whole subject, and go
to the Universe, — that is, to God, — first hand, for our laws
and guidance.

As we look over history, we find that Christians of every
age and of every name — however much they may have dif-
fered about other things — have all and always agreed as to
two : first, as to the existence of a Church, or kingdom of
God : and, secondly, as to there being certain conditions of
membership in that Church, or citizenship in that kingdom.
And here, at the very outset, we are struck with what seems
to be a very remarkable agreement between this common
position of Christians and the position of Jesus. For on the
very threshold of his career, we find Jesus standing and
giving utterance to the proclamation of what he calls " the
gospel," — the good news. And what is this gospel ? It is
twofold, and corresponds apparently to the position of the
Church. First, he announces the coming of what he calls
'' the kingdom of God " ; and, secondly, he attaches certain
conditions to the attainment of citizenship in that kingdom.
If I should stop right here, you might suppose that Jesus
and the Church stood on common ground. But, before we
can be clear as to whether Jesus and Christianity are at
agreement, we must raise and answer the questions, first, as
to what they severally mean by "the kingdom of God";
and, secondly, as to whether the conditions of citizenship in
this kingdom are the same with Jesus as they are with the
Church.

These are the central, essential, pivotal points on which the
whole decision must turn. We will take each of the two in
their order.

As to the kingdom, then. Do Jesus and the Christian

1 30 Talks about Jesus.

Church agree here ? Partly they do, and partly they do not.
We can dispose of this first part of our theme very briefly,
and for the sake of clearness will mark off the points.

1. That "the kingdom of God" is coming. Jesus and the
Church are here at one.

2. As to the time of its coming. As to this, the Church
itself is divided into parties. Some say it is coming gradually
all the time, by slow growth. Some say it is coming suddenly,
all at once, and may come any day or hour. This opinion
is confined chiefly to the small and insignificant sect of
" Adventists " ; though some leading dignitaries, preachers,
and theologians have recently expressed their acceptance of
this belief. Jesus taught with the most perfect plainness
that it was coming before the end of the generation in which
he lived.

Some have attempted to evade the simple meaning of his
words, by saying that what he meant by his coming was
the destruction of Jerusalem and the overthrow of Judaism.
If he meant that, it is pertinent to ask why he did not say it.
But the simple matter of fact is that this is only quibbling :
it is an after-thought, intended only to evade an otherwise
insuperable difficulty. If a man interprets that way, it does
not make much difference what he reads : he can make any
book mean anything. You can thus make the Bible teach
anything you please, except what it says.

3. As to the method of its coming, Jesus teaches that,
after the preparation is complete, the kingdom will come
suddenly, by miraculous, supernatural revelation in the
clouds, with trumpet-blast, throne, and attendant angels.
Adventists teach this, as Jesus did, but no others. Others
appear to hold a similar belief ; but what they really mean
is, not that Jesus will thus appear on this earth, but that he
will come in this manner at the end of time, and when this
globe we inhabit is to be destroyed.

Jesus and the Church. 137

4. As to the king, Jesus teaches that it is to be himself.
The Church teaches the same.

5. As to the location of the kingdom, Jesus taught plainly
that it was to be here on earth. At first, the Church held
the same. But, disappointed in that expectation, the general
opinion now is that earth and time will only witness the pre-
paratory stages, and that the real, completed kingdom is to
be in the future life of eternity.

So far, then, we find between Jesus and the Church only
a partial agreement. On one point, indeed, — that as to the
time of his coming, — the disagreement is so great as to
become a hopeless contradiction. Well may they echo the
old question of the early ages, " Where is the promise of his
coming?" For the Church can still look forward to his
coming only on the supposition that, in the case of his orig-
inal promise, he did not know what he said, or else did not
say what was true. And, on either supposition, the expecta-
tion of his coming now is utterly unreasonable.

On this point, then, we are compelled to decide that Jesus
was not a Christian ; that is, he did not hold nor teach what
the great body of Christendom holds and teaches to-day.

We now pass to consider and compare the conditions of
citizenship in "the kingdom of God" as taught by Jesus
and as taught by the Christian Church.

Right here we are met with a difficulty. It is a source of
confusion and perplexity; and yet it will not seriously em-
barrass the solution of our problem. The difficulty is this.
We have not one church with one condition of membership,
but many churches with many conditions. They all claim
to stand on the infallible record, and each one denies the
interpretations of it on the part of all the others. So that
a man who is a good Christian in one part of Christendom
may find himself an anti-Christ and an outcast in another

138 Talks about Jesus.

part. The revelation that was taken as a fixed guide-post
proves to be more like a weather-vane that points in what-
ever direction the wind of popular opinion may happen to
blow. A Christian in Turkey might not be regarded as a
Christian at all in Boston. And even a priest in Italy might
be refused any sort of official recognition at Andover. But,
though the conditions of church membership and of eccle-
siastical salvation are thus widely at variance, there are
yet certain fundamental principles or claims in which all
churches are alike. For example, whatever the local faith
and usage may be, one must accept and conform, if he is to
be in "good and regular standing." He must be a church
member, hold the prescribed belief, have passed through the
proper experience ; he must keep the days, observe the
sacraments, conform to the rites of worship ; he must adopt
the Church's standard of judgment concerning social con-
ventions, customs, and amusements. All these may differ
at different places and times ; but, at whatever time or in
whatever place, the demand for conformity is the same.

As concrete illustrations, let us look at some special cus-
toms and usages — some of the external forms of Christi-
anity — before we pass to the more important matter as to
whether Jesus believed and taught the popular creed of
Christendom.

1. The first thing that strikes us is the enormous propor-
tions of the Church as an institution, and the enormous power
and domineering authority of the clergy. The kingdom that
Jesus everywhere speaks about is simply a loving brother-
hood of equal souls. The only authority is that of goodness,
and the only greatness that of a more zealous service. " Call
no man father, no man master; one is P'ather and Master,
even God." " He that will be great among you, let him
serve." "The princes of the nations exercise authority;

Jesus and the Church. 139

but it shall not be so among you." How it has been in
the Church, let popes and prelates and bishops and presby-
ters and priestly "fathers," and councils and synods, and
inquisitions and dungeons and axes and fagots and excom-
munications answer. Church history reads like a satire, a
ghastly caricature or horrible burlesque of the simple words
and explicit teachings of Jesus.

2. Then note the comparative attitudes of Jesus and the
Church as to rites and ceremonies. The only one that can
even pretend to claim the sanction of his certain word is the
Supper. And this was only to be a memorial for the little
while till he came again. He placed no fence around it, and
exacted no conditions. Judas sat at the first Supper unchal-
lenged. He baptized no one, and commanded no one else
to. He established no prayer-meetings not only, but he
even condemned public prayers, directing very brief peti-
tions, and those in private. He commended simple, child-
like trust in God, since he loved his children and knew per-
fectly beforehand what they needed. He slighted the Jewish
holy days, and said not one single syllable about any others
to take their places. Public humiliation and fast days found
no favor with him : all these things should be between the
private soul and its God, he said. Jesus visited with his
severest condemnation those who placed ceremonial observ-
ance above moral goodness. But the Church has almost
universally done the precise opposite, stigmatizing morality
as " works of the law " ; while what the New Testament
means by " works " is precisely these observances that the
Church exalts. The church doctrine here then, concerning
the whole matter of observances, has always and everywhere
been in flat contradiction to the express teaching of Jesus.

3. Then in regard to the matter of names and professions.
Jesus gives his blessing, not to the one who professes, but to

140 Talks about Jesus.

the one who does. The Church has never had any salva-
tion for those who did not bear the Christian name. Yet the
name of Christian was unknown until long after Jesus' death.
He refers to the matter of name, to the saying, " Lord,
Lord," only to condemn it. And he distinctly says that the
man who is not against his spirit, who is doing God's will, is
"for us," whether he " followeth us " or not. Were he on
earth to-day, many a heathen, Free-Religionist, Jew, many an
"atheist" even, would gain his approval; while many a
" Christian " would hear him say, " I never knew you."

4. The contrast is quite as remarkable between the kinds
and classes of sins on which Jesus and the Church have
placed their severest emphasis of condemnation. Those
which he visited with the bitterest denunciations were the
phariseeisms of pride, of self-seeking, of uncharitableness, of
cruelty, of the lack of brotherlniess and sympathy. Yet
hardly one of these has ever stood in the way of church
membership not only, but they have hardly been a hinder-
ance to high position and distinguished honors. The sins of
weakness and ignorance always called out his pity ; but, not
being respectable, the Church has poured on them the vials
of her wrath.

In general, then, we may conclude, without fear of contra-
diction, that almost all the external rites, ceremonies, and
institutions of the Church have been built up and established
without the slightest authority in the words of Jesus ; while
many of them are there implicitly or expressly forbidden and
condemned.

We pass now to that which has always occupied the post
of chief honor and importance among the orthodox bodies
of Protestantism, — the Creed. Rome has been accustomed
to regard the organized Church as the "body of Christ," and
membership in that, and conformity to its order, as the mat-

Jesus and the Church. 141

tcr of chief importance. But, when Protestantism broke with
Rome, it placed its main emphasis elsewhere. A certain
inner experience was placed first. But this experience was
dependent on, and could only spring out of, a certain faith
or belief. This then, as the condition of all, of necessity
came to the front, and took the place of prime importance.
We are to close our discussion, then, by raising and answering
the question as to whether Jesus held or taught the present
orthodox creed of Protestantism. If he did not, then of
course he was not a Christian in the sense in which that word
is used to-day in England and America.

In replying to this question, I shall not take as the basis of
comparison the creed of any particular branch of the Protes-
tant body ; for, if I did, the other denominations would not
acknowledge its authority. I shall not take, then, as my
standard the Confession of Faith of the Presbyterians or
the Episcopalians, or the Methodists or the Baptists, or the
Congregationalists. Fortunately, we hare ready to our hand
something better than either of these would be.

Some years ago, in order the more effectively to cope with
the spirit and movements of modern civilization which were
threatening the popular creed, the great bodies of European
Protestantism organized themselves into one great Union,
and took the name of the " Evangelical Alliance." Dropping
their minor and unessential differences, they agreed upon
certain articles of belief which they all considered necessary,
which they all held in common, and which they all were
willing to stand upon ; and these articles they laid down as
the planks of their Protestant platform. In January, 1877, an
American Branch of this Evangelical Alliance was organized
in New York. This American Branch readopted the Euro-
pean platform. In this creed, then, of the general Evangeli-
cal Alliance, the Orthodox Protestant Churches of both

142 Talks about Jesus.

Europe and America have volunteered to tell us what they
regard as central and essential in Christianity. By their own
voluntary declaration, then, they are bound ; and of course
none of them is at liberty to decline any consequences that
may naturally follow.

You will permit me to remind you again that we are not
to discuss the question as to whether the articles of this creed
are true, but only as to whether Jesus teaches them. I will
first quote the words of the creed in full, and then give the
separate articles the brief treatment that our present purpose
demands. The creed then : —

"1. The Divine inspiration, authority, and sufficiency of
the Holy Scriptures.

"2. The right and duty of private judgment in the inter-
pretation of the Scriptures.

"3. The unity of the Godhead, and the Trinity of the
persons therein.

11 4. The utter depravity of human nature in consequence
of the Fall.

"5. The incarnation of the Son of God, His work of
atonement for the sins of mankind and His mediatorial
intercession and reign.

"6. The justification of the sinner by faith alone.

" 7. The work of the Holy Spirit in the conversion and
sanctification of the sinner.

" 8. The immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the
body, the judgment of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ,
with the eternal blessedness of the righteous and the eternal
punishment of the wicked.

" 9. The Divine institution of the Christian ministry, and
the obligation and perpetuity of the ordinances of Baptism
and the Lord's Supper.''

Now for comments as brief as we can make them and be
intelligible.

Jesus and" the Church. 143

As to the first article, the inspiration of the Scriptures,
Jesus has not one single word to say. He treats the Old
Testament with respect, and as possessing a certain degree
of authority ; and yet he does not hesitate to change and
amend its precepts, treating them as local and temporary.
Of course he says nothing of the New Testament, which was
not then written.

As to the second article, the right and duty of private
judgment, he asserts that plainly, — " Why even of your own
selves judge ye not what is right? " — but confines it within
the limits of no particular book, or even of any particular
nation or religion.

As to the third article, he asserts the Unity, but says not
one word about any Trinity. The only claim he makes for
himself is that he is to be the Messiah ; and the Messiah
was never regarded by the Jews as other than a man.

Of the doctrine of depravity, the fourth article, if he had
ever heard anything, he failed entirely to allude to it. If
man did fall and plunge the whole race in ruin, and if Jesus
came on purpose to save from the fall, it is very strange that
he should never have mentioned it. This has been the very
corner-stone of Christian theology. And yet, strange as it
may seem, Jesus never once alludes to Adam or Eve, or the
apple or the serpent, or the garden or the fall, or anything
of the sort. And so far from seeming to think of human
nature as depraved at birth, and of infants as being under
God's wrath, he takes a little child in his arms, and makes it
the very type of the divine kingdom.

As to the fifth article, incarnation, atonement etc. he has
not one word to say.

The sixth article, justification by faith, — the central dogma
of Lutheran Protestantism, — seems equally something of
which Jesus has never heard. In the famous judgment scene

144 Talks about Jesus.

which he pictures, and where he himself is to be judge, you
would suppose he would call attention to that which he held
to be of prime importance. If he knew that something else
was to be demanded, it was not less than culpable and cruel
for him not to tell us. And yet, as the condition of acquittal
at the Great Bar, he says not a single syllable of any church
membership, of any baptism or supper, or ritual or prayers,
or observance of days, or obedience to the clergy, or creed
or faith, — not one word ! The only condition he even
alludes to is one which the Orthodox Church has always
stigmatized as "rags," as "mere morality," — goodness and
kindness, and pity and charity and help.

Of the seventh article, the conversion and sanctification
of the sinner by the Holy Spirit, he seems to know as little
as of any of the rest. His conversion is a simple change of
mind or purpose, which he commands each to make for him-
self; and his salification is only a progressive learning to do
and be good.

As to the eighth article of this creed of the Alliance,
Jesus does, in some form, teach immortality and the resur-
rection. But he does not teach any judgment now future.
The judgment be taught was to be at his coming, during the
first century, and not in any time still to come. Whether he
taught endless punishment is a question that hangs on the
meaning of a Greek word that he never uttered, for he spoke
Aramaic ; and whether the Greek accurately translates his
thought it is now impossible to tell. At any rate, the Greek
word itself does not always mean "endless." And, if we
may judge by the prevailing belief of his age, such great au-
thorities as the late Emanuel Deutsch declare unequivocally
that endless punishment was not one of those beliefs.

Concerning the last one of these articles, that which as-
serts the perpetuity of the ministry, and the ordinances, it is

Jesus and the C Jut re It. 145

enough to say that, since Jesus expected his own second
coming and the new Messianic kingdom during the first
century, and since in this kingdom none of these prepara-
tory means would be needed or find any place, it is simply
absurd to suppose that he expected any of these things to
exist some hundreds of years after his time.

The result, now, of our brief survey, is hardly less than
startling. The European and American Evangelical Alliance
professes to have for its object the carrying forward and es-
tablishment of the work that Jesus began. And yet, if he
should come back here to-day, and hold and teach what
he held and taught eighteen hundred years ago, he could no
more be received as a member of this Alliance than I could.
It is perfectly plain, then, that, if the Evangelical Alliance is
"Christian/' Jesus is not. If the great organizations of the
Roman or the Protestant name are the ones to which the
name " Christian " properly and legitimately belongs, then it
does not belong to Jesus. The two great essentials of the
gospel of Jesus were the coming kingdom, and the condi-
tions of sharing its triumph and glory. Concerning neither
of these do the popular churches of Christendom hold or
teach the doctrine of the Galilean.

We need, then, only be careful to love God, seek for and
obey his laws, and try to help our fellow-men to do the same.
We will not grasp after the name of " Christian," as at pres-
ent defined. And if both Romanism and Protestantism cast
us out of their communion, and drive us from the doors of
their churches, it is only what they have already done with
Jesus. The light of God still shines, his love still warms our
hearts, and his truth still leads us toward a better future.

JESUS AND HUMANITY: or, CHRISTIANITY
AMONG THE RELIGIONS.

The old Hebrew legends of Genesis tell us that God
caused the earth to produce the grass and the herbs ; or, as
we should say to-day, these lower forms of life sprung nat-
urally out of the soil. But, when it came to man, he was
created by special supernatural power. Science now dis-
allows any such distinction, and regards the higher and the
lower forms alike as purely natural in their origin. All this
does not touch the disputed questions about God or the soul
or the immortal life ; it only abolishes the old fictitious dis-
tinctions between natural and supernatural, and links all life
together in one wondrous chain. As in the matter of the
different forms of life, so, in regard to religions, Christendom
has been accustomed to distinguish them into two classes, —
natural, supernatural ; human, divine ; false, true. One re-
ligion, Christianity, — including Judaism as its precursor, —
we are told, was made by God himself, and revealed to man
perfect and complete. All others sprung up themselves, like
wild flowers or weeds, out of the natural soil of the human
heart. And, as these human hearts are depraved, of course
their natural products have been wild, extravagant, poison-
dripping, and only evil. It was the popular belief for hun-
dreds of years — and Milton has given it poetic expression

Jesus and Humanity. 147

in his Paradise Lost — that all the gods of the so-called nat-
ural religions were really devils, — the fallen angels, — who
thus managed to lead mankind astray from the worship of
the true God. These fallen angels wrought miracles, gave
out oracles, and uttered prophesies, all in imitation of the
true religion, and to divert mankind from it. Why God, if
he really wanted men to worship him, should have permitted
all this, was never explained.

But, as in the case of the different forms and grades of life,
so also of the different kinds and grades of religion, science
now tells us another story. What comparative biology dis-
allows in the one case, comparative theology disallows in the
other. So long as Christianity stood, a full-grown figure,
against a background of darkness and ignorance, having no
known or traceable connection with anything else earthly or
human, it was easy and natural to think it must have sprung
complete out of the opening heavens, as Minerva did from
the head of Jove. But a wider, deeper, older knowledge of
man and of life on earth enables us to trace the origin and
development of Christianity and of all the other religions,
just as easily and naturally as we can trace the origin and
growth of the grasses, the trees, and the different and ad-
vancing forms of the animal world. We can find the root,
follow up the trunk, trace out the branches, note the bud-
ding leaves, and distinguish the natural fruit of nearly all
the great religions of man. And the result is that we now
know that religion is as natural a development of human
nature as is government, or art, or science, or literature, or
the family. And it takes this shape or that, according to
the nature and quality of a particular race, age, or degree
of civilization.

This does not at all impair the reality or divineness of
religion. It only enhances these, as showing that human

148 Talks about Jesus.

nature is itself inherently and naturally religious and divine.
This natural divinity of all religious life and growth has
found what we may well regard as perfect poetic expression
in Emerson's Problem. And, in spite of its familiarity, we
must quote from it : —

" Not from a vain or shallow thought
His awful Jove young Phidias brought ;
Never from lips of cunning fell
The thrilling Delphic Oracle ;
Out from the heart of nature rolled
The burdens of the Bible old ;
The litanies of nations came,
Like the volcano's tongue of flame,
Up from the burning core below, —
The canticles of love and woe. . . .
These temples grew as grows the grass ;
Art might obey, but not surpass.
The passive Master lent his hand
To the vast soul that o'er him planned ;
And the same power that reared the shrine
Bestrode the tribes that knelt within."

Were there time, and were it needful, I could trace for you
the natural growth of all the great religions. We should find
ourselves away back in savagery, many thousands of years
in the past ; we should find the half-brutal man trembling in
the presence of a stick or stone or toad ; we should see him
afraid of the living being that he supposed to dwell in the
cloud or the lightning or the wind ; we should see him peo-
pling his jungle with the spirits of his dead ancestors and
warriors ; then we should follow him through polytheism,
through henotheism, up to monotheism ; then we should see
his one God gradually purified and elevated, taking on ever
the higher forms and attributes of his own ever-advancing
ideal of beauty and goodness and truth ; until at last we

Jesus and Humanity. 149

should hear Jesus speaking of the one " Spirit " to be wor-
shipped "in spirit and in truth" ; or Wordsworth singing of

"A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts : "

or Matthew Arnold tracing through all history " the Power,
not ourselves, that makes for righteousness."

If we wish to find the fountain-head of Christianity, we
must travel up the ages more than eighteen hundred years,
and must go beyond the boundaries of Palestine. Its ulti-
mate earthly source is the human heart, lost in the depths
and the darkness of an unexplored antiquity. Like a river
that bears a special designation, it is made up of many tribu-
taries that have flowed into it under other names. We
can trace its confluents into the preceding paganism of
Rome, into Greece, into Egypt, into Persia, and into the far-
off and recently unburied civilization and mythology of the
people of Akkad, that lived in the Euphrates Valley long
before Abraham was born or the city of Babylon was
founded. From many a far-distant fountain, the tiny streams
arose, flowed on, gathering volume as they flowed, till, joining
all in one, they took one name from the Jewish Messianic
hope ; and Christianity, like a mighty river, swept its broad
current down the centuries.

Christianity, then, is a natural religion, in precisely the
same sense as is any other historic religion. It differs from
all the rest only as a masterpiece of art differs from those
of inferior genius ; only as the mightiest, most eminent, and
widest-spreading tree of the forest differs from the smaller
growths it over-tops and out-towers. All the religions of the
world are, or have been, the sincere and earnest effort of men
seeking after God, " if haply they might feel after him and
find him," who is "not far from any one of us," and in whom

150 Talks about Jesus.

" we live and move and have our being." Oftentimes men,
as Tennyson expresses it, only —

" Stretch weak hands of faith, and grope
And gather dust and chaff " ;

but still it is true that every religion, from lowest to highest,
has simply been God's child, man, kneeling upon a lower
or a higher step of the

" World's great altar-stairs
That slope through darkness up to God."

Christianity is doubtless the highest and best of all the
historic religions. But it possesses no supernatural birth or
claim that entitles it to look down with scorn or alien con-
tempt upon its "poor relations" of other names.

In comparing and contrasting Christianity with other relig-
ions, it has been common for apologists to take their own at
its best and the others at their worst, which is obviously
unjust. If Buddhism seems a vile superstition, judged by
the praying windmills of Thibet or the moral standards of
Siam, we may well ask ourselves the question as to how
Christianity would look to an intelligent foreigner when
judged by the vulgar wonder of the liquefaction of the blood
of St. Januarius, or the morality of a San Francisco mob pur-
suing a Chinaman? And if we say, "These are corruptions
and perversions of pure Christianity, and it ought fairly to be
judged by the character and teachings of Jesus," it is freely
granted. But must we not also grant a similar thing con-
cerning the other great religions ?

As a matter of historic fact, every one of the great relig-
ions has had a development away from and inconsistent with
the simple teachings of the masters whose names they bear.
You cannot possibly deduce historic Christianity from the
life and words of Jesus. Neither can you deduce historic

Jesus and Humanity. 151

Buddhism from the life and words of Gautama. Glance at
one or two illustrations. The Parsis, or Fire-worshippers, are
known in the modern world as the principal representatives
of the great religion taught and founded by Zarathustra.
And yet fire-worship was no part of the original religion of
Zarathustra at all. It crept into the pure, spiritual cultus
of Mazdeism from the pagan nature-worship of a people
whom the Persians had conquered. And this cuckoo ele-
ment— no part of the original brood — has almost crowded
the true birds out of the nest. So popular Buddhism has
come to be almost exclusively a system of rites and ceremo-
nies ; and yet Gautama was quite as bitter against these
meaningless externals as was Jesus himself. The Church is
so full of similar departures from the words of Jesus that it is
difficult to choose any one specimen. You need only to read
over his teachings, and then open your eyes.

The causes of these perversions and degradations of the
high, spiritual doctrine of the great religious founders is not
hard to trace. The case of Zarathustra, mentioned above,
may illustrate one cause. The Persians conquered a foreign
people with its foreign religion. But the conquered religion
was too firmly rooted in the national life to be destroyed.
So it, in turn, conquers the conquerors, and at last becomes
incorporated in the original belief. There are parasites in
religion as well as in the forests ; and not unfrequently the
parasite overtops and sucks the very life out of a vigorous
tree. Another cause Jesus speaks of in its influence on the
Mosaic religion. " Moses," he said, " suffered you to do " such
and such things, "because of the hardness of your hearts."
That is, when a religion is very much above and beyond the
intellectual and moral life of the people, it frequently be-
comes transformed and degraded to their level. Both these
influences, and others that there is no time to notice, have

15- Talks about Jesus.

been at work upon Christianity, and have helped to make
the popular system what it is. Crude symbols, intended at
first only to translate spiritual truth and bring it in range
of the popular thought, have at last taken the place of the
spiritual truth, and hidden it out of sight. And when Chris-
tianity overran European paganism, instead of substituting
Christianity for it, it adopted and baptized it. So that more
than half of Roman Catholicism is only paganism thinly
veneered and rechristened.

In seeking the comparative place of Jesus, then, among
those who have given their names to great religious move-
ments, we must, in order to be fair, compare the original
teachings, and not the popular developments only. And we
must also take note of one other thing. It is sometimes
thoughtlessly and illogically assumed that, since Christianity
has been the religion of the world's greatest civilization, we
must therefore give Christianity the credit of having created
that civilization. You will not accuse me of any disposition
to underrate Christianity; and yet I cannot help thinking
that this claim cannot be made out. The height to which a
particular tree will grow depends not simply on the nature
of the tree, but also on the soil and the conditions of climate
that surround it. So the influence of an idea upon a people
depends not only on the idea, but also on the quality of the
race-stock, and the physical, mental, and moral capacity of
the people. Mexico and South America have the same op-
portunities for all that distinguishes modern civilization that
are open to the rest of the world. Why, then, are they not
equal to the United States, to Germany and England? We
can put the answer into one word, — race. A few national-
ities have developed the physical, mental, and moral quali-
ties that make them the leaders of the world. And it is just
these natural world-leaders that the natural course of human

Jesus and Humanity, 153

history made Christians. And that Christianity has not done
it all is apparent when you reflect that where Christianity
has taken possession of other races, instead of the relig-
ion's lifting them to our level, they have quite as often
dragged the religion down to theirs.

We are now ready to ask and answer the question, What
is the comparative rank of Jesus among the great religious
masters of history ?

There is a strong disposition in many quarters, even among
liberals and rational thinkers, to so exalt Jesus and Christi-
anity as to make all other religions of very little account.
Of course this is all natural. We can hardly help being
partial to that in which we have been trained and which we
so tenderly love. Each man's mother, to him, must be better
than all other mothers the world has ever seen. He would
be less of a man than he ought, were it otherwise. And
still, as we grow older, we must become able to think that
other men stand in the same relation to their mothers that
we do to ours. And, even could we prove that our mother
is finer-looking and better than all others, we could hardly
respect the man who would lightly desert his own as the
result of our proof.

And then we ought to remember that we are in danger
of depreciating God himself by our over-exaltation of Jesus.
If indeed God has given us the only respectable religion,
what can we think of his impartiality and common father-
hood? I, for one, would like to think that my Father in
heaven had not forgotten all the other children in his re-
membrance of me. I can even love him a little better, if
I can feel that he also loves and cares for the rest of his
human family. In giving to Christianity, then, more than
belongs to it, we may find that we are taking away something
of his goodness and our reverence from our heavenly Father.

154 Talks about Jesus.

I should be glad to believe, though I cannot do it, that all
other religions and all other teachers were just as good as
Christianity and Jesus.

There is no time, nor is there any necessity, for my enter-
ing into an analysis of even a few of the greater religions.
We can indeed select from the higher teachings of all of them
moral and spiritual sayings worthy to be placed alongside of
the Sermon on the Mount. A collection of them might
be made that any minister might read in his pulpit as his
Scripture lesson, and few of his hearers would know that he
had not taken them from the New Testament. Of Tauism,
Confucianism, Brahmanism, Buddhism, Zarathustrianism,
Mohammedanism, the religion of Egypt, of the Grecian and
Roman sages, all this is true. For illustration of this, you
are referred to Conway's Anthology, and to Lydia Maria
Child's Aspirations of the World. At the same time, I sup-
pose there is not more than one or two of the great religions
that any serious and intelligent thinker would look upon as
worthy to be placed alongside of Christianity by way of com-
parison. I shall pass by Judaism, because it is popularly
regarded as a preparatory stage, and really a part, of Chris-
tianity. There is, then, only one left that we need stop to
consider; for, unquestionably, outside of the life and teach-
ing of Jesus the Christ, the world has no religious founder
at all comparable to Gautama the Buddha. Let us, then,
place these side by side.

There is the more propriety in doing this, because the in-
stitutional development of the two religions is so strikingly
similar. When the first Catholic missionary went to China
and came in contact with Buddhism, he was astounded. And
he sent home the report that the devil had been there ahead
of him, and had so closely copied the true faith as to make
it next to impossible for him to gain any foothold. Almost

Jesus and Humanity

:o

every rite and ceremony of the Catholic Church was there in
advance of his coming. In Thibet, the Grand Llama may
stand for the Pope, only the doctrine has developed one step
beyond the papacy. Not only is he infallible, but he is actu-
ally worshipped. One step more, and the Pope will become
a Grand Llama. But Buddhism is five or six hundred years
older than Christianity, and so has had time to develop more
completely.

Now for a few parallels. Buddhism sprang out of Brah-
manism, gained little success in the old religion, became a
missionary faith, and made its chief conquests in other
lands. Christianity sprang out of Judaism, gained little
success in the old religion, became a missionary faith, and
made its chief conquests in other lands. Both of them
started as moral reforms, spread chiefly among the common
people, and had as their ultimate aim the deliverance of man
from sorrow and death. Both had their monastic systems
and their battles with " the world." Both at last converted
kings, and had the great of the earth as patrons. And both,
as they entered other lands, became changed and corrupted,
like a river into which all kinds of waters and soils are
poured. Both had their general councils to settle their arti-
cles of faith ; and both have their sacred books, their writers
of apologies, their witnesses and martyrs. Buddhism is
about five hundred years older than Christianity, and num-
bers among its followers about five hundred millions, as
against about three hundred and twenty-seven millions of
Christians of every name. And, then, it must be said, for
the credit of Buddhism, that it has never persecuted j while
the skirts of Christianity, alas! are bedrabbled with blood.

Pass now to look a little more closely at the personality
and doctrine of the two great teachers. For many things
that I cannot stop to touch upon, I refer you to Mr. Edwin

] 56 Talks about Jesus.

Arnold's The Light of Asia, a beautiful poem as well as an
accurate exposition of Gautama's life and word.*

Both Gautama and Jesus are overgrown with myth and
legend, like a church beautified and at the same time half-
hidden by ivy and running vines and clinging wild roses.
Gautama is miraculously heralded and miraculously born.
He is tempted and opposed by evil spirits. He has his
period of study and retirement and doubt before he appears
as the Saviour of men. Since his death, he has been deified
and worshipped. And, to more millions than those that love
and worship Jesus, his " name " is still the " only one known
under heaven among men by which they" think they "must
be saved."

Christendom has always and justly exalted the self-sacrifice
and devotion of Jesus. Among the Buddha's followers also,
his act of consecration has always been called " The Great
Renunciation." And, indeed, we must confess that the self-
sacrifice in Gautama's case appears to be fully equal to that
of Jesus. If either here must bear the palm, it is certainly
Gautama ; for he was a prince by birth, and he gave up a
throne to make common cause with the lowest and poorest
of the people, — and that, too, in a country where caste has
reached a development never known elsewhere ; where the
highest were higher and the lowest lower than in any other
land.

There is another curious parallel. Jesus is the personal
name; and "the Christ" is the name of the office, and has
given the name to the religion. So Gautama is the personal
name of the Indian founder; "the Buddha" is the official
title, and has given the name to the religion.

* Mr. Rhuys-Davids' book on "Buddhism," published by the London Society for
Promoting Christian Knowledge, teaches the same doctrine, and sustains the accuracy
of The Light of A sia.

Jesus and Humanity. 157

A recent writer in The Index has referred to Gautama's
leaving his wife and child as a defect in his character. But
we must remember, from his stand-point, — and he indeed
says the same, — he was leaving them at unspeakable cost to
his tender love, in order that he might find a way of salvation
that would ultimately include them also in its wide embrace.
And it is only just also that we should remember that Jesus
himself speaks slightingly of marriage as compared with the
better state of the celibate. In Matthew xix., 11, he teaches
that, for those " to whom it is given," the single state is better.

What now, in a word, are the central things in the
Buddha's religion ? He was a prince who became so im-
pressed with the sorrows of men that he determined to leave
his throne and home, and go in search of some way of deliv-
erance. This he did. He tried the schools, the discipline
of the ascetics, and all the methods of his age, until he be-
came convinced that they all were inadequate. Then he
meditated and studied until he believed he had attained to
Buddhahood, that is, the condition of one "enlightened."
He saw " The Way." Then he devoted his life to teaching
this " way of salvation " to his fellow-men. Arnold has
beautifully given us the condition of mind out of which his
high resolve was born : —

" The vail is rent
Which blinded me. I am as all these men
Who cry upon their gods and are not heard
Or are not heeded — yet there must be aid!
For them and me and all there must be help I
Perchance the gods have need of help themselves,
Being so feeble that when sad lips cry
They cannot save ! /would not let one cry
Whom I could save ! How can it be that Brahm
Would make a world and keep it miserable,
Since, if all-powerful, he leaves it so,
He is not good ; and, if not powerful,
He is not God ? "

8 Talks about Jesus.

Does not this sound very modern ? The religion in which
Gautama was reared taught one supreme God, Brahm ; but
he was unconscious, and cared not for man. The rest of the
gods, the hosts of polytheism, Gautama was wise enough to
despise and disbelieve in. Since they do not help anybody,
he says, sarcastically, that perhaps they need help themselves.
At any rate, he teaches his followers not to pray to nor de-
pend upon them.

Here, perhaps, is the reason why he has been called an
atheist. For he clearly recognizes the great power that is
"in and through all things," — as clearly as does Wordsworth
or Matthew Arnold.

" Before beginning and without an end,
As space eternal and as surety sure,
Is fixed a Power Divine which moves to good ;
Only its laws endure."

We should not now call the man an atheist who could use
language like that.

Gautama's central doctrines can be put in a few words.
First is that which he called Dharma. In this he wondrously
anticipated one phase of the modern scientific doctrine of
heredity. Man makes himself, he said. He is the result of
all his past thoughts and deeds. And this law he can never
escape. In each new birth, — for the belief in the transmi-
gration of souls underlies the whole system, — the man's
character and condition are strictly and exactly the result
of all his previous lives.

Secondly comes the doctrine of Karma. Gautama held,
as do many modern scientists, that man had no soul sepa-
rate from his organization, and that all his intellectual and
moral life was the result of this organization. But Karma
represented a mysterious law by which each succeeding life
was bound to the one next preceding it.

Jesus and Humanity. 1 59

Thirdly, the cause of all sorrow and evil was desire. The
shows and pleasures of life were an illusion ; and so long as
a man was led on by a desire for them, so long he would be
whirled about on the restless wheel of change. So long he
would be reborn, and compelled to go through the endless
round of disappointments and losses and tears and sickness
and death.

Fourthly, then, salvation was to be found by the extinguish-
ment of all desire ; for he who is above all want is freed
from the possibility of loss or sorrow. This condition was
Nirvana. This is Buddhist salvation.

The best scholars have disputed as to the precise meaning
of this word. Some locate Nirvana in this life, and make it
a spiritual condition ; some place it in the next, and make
it correspond to the Christian heaven. But one thing is
clear. It is a condition where all desire and care have
passed away ; and, if it be not annihilation, it is so much
like non-existence that the Occidental mind can hardly make
any practical distinction.

3ut, when we come to the last point of his doctrine, — the
condition, the means of salvation, — Gautama towers high
above any other religious teacher excepting Jesus. This way
of life is nothing less than character, moral goodness, obedi-
ence to the laws of right living. And the morality of Buddh-
ism need not shrink from being placed side by side with
that of Christianity itself.

As to the personal character of Gautama as compared
with that of Jesus, perhaps we may leave them standing
side by side without saying one disparaging word of either of
them. There is no ground for attributing absolute perfec-
tion to either. But, on the other hand, for neither of them
do we need feel called upon to offer any apology.

It only remains for us now to indicate two or three respects

160 Talks about Jesus.

in which the religion of the Galilean is grander and better
adapted to civilization than that of the Sakya.

i. While Gautama teaches an external morality that per-
haps is quite equal to that of Jesus, he does not penetrate
so deeply into the human heart, as being the source and
spring of all good and evil. With Jesus, all good is in the
one word, "love"; and all evil, in one other word, "hate."
Here Jesus puts his finger on the emotional mainspring of all
life. This is eternal truth.

2. Gautama has no doctrine of divine Fatherhood. Man
is an orphan, and is thrown upon his own unaided resources.
Jesus teaches that a wise and loving Father orders all life,
and that an infinitely tender love watches over all the chil-
dren of men.

However any may doubt or question this, still, in the light
of science itself, we know that something in this direction is
true. The power that lives in and works through the uni-
verse is on the side of right — that is, the keeping of its own
laws. Man is not alone. By studying and obeying the laws
of the world, he may put the universe at his back as an om-
nipotent helper. He may launch his little boat on " the
stream of tendency " that moves ever toward the better
future, and by its almighty current feel himself swept on.

3. And, lastly, Gautama's is a religion of despair. This
life of desire is an evil, and the source of all our sorrow.
Salvation is to cease wishing, and attain the calm of non-
entity. The New Testament rings with the cry, "We are
saved by hope ! " Desire, hunger, long for all good things !
Hunger and its satisfactions, an ever-increasing capacity
and an ever-increasing supply, — this is the law of life and
growth. " Blessed — hunger and thirst ! — shall be filled ! "
As plants hunger for light and dew, and grow thereby, so man
is eagerly to look up and on, and grow ever to more and more.

Jcs2is and Humanity. 161

There gleams ever before the race the light of an eternal
hope. " Forgetting the things that are behind, and reaching
forth to those that are before," — this, though the words of
Paul, is the very spirit of Jesus.

The spirit at the heart of Jesus, then, surpasses that of all
other religious teachers. Let science give us her body of
ascertained and verified truth, and let the spirit of Jesus be
its soul, and tell me what more we need to make the univer-
sal and eternal religion ?

.