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FROM-THE LIBRARY-OP
TRINITYCOLLEGE TORONTO
Gift of the Friends of the
Library, Trinity College
Xo^ien Lecturer 1879
THE
INFLUENCE OF JESUS
BY THE
RT. REV. PHILLIPS BROOKS, D.D.
DELIVERED IN THE CHURCH OF THE HOLY TRINITY, PHILA
DELPHIA, IN FEBRUARY, 1879
LONDON
MACMILLAN & CO., Limited
1903
BBS
103
Copyright,
BY E. P. BUTTON & Co.
1879.
103H38
OCT
THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP.
JOHN BOHLEN, who died in this city on the 26th
day of April, 1874, bequeathed to trustees a fund ol
One Hundred Thousand Dollars, to be distributed
to religious and charitable objects in accordance with
the well-known wishes of the testator.
By a deed of trust, executed June 2, 1875, tne
trustees under the will of Mr. Bohlen transferred and
paid over to " The Rector, Church Wardens, and Ves
trymen of the Church of the Holy Trinity, Phila
delphia," in trust, a sum of money for certain desig
nated purposes, out of which fund the sum of Ten
Thousand Dollars was set apart for the endowment
of THE JOHN BOHLEN LECTURESHIP, upon the fol
lowing terms and conditions :
The money shall be invested in good substantial and
safe securities, and held in trust for a fund to be called
The John Bohlen Lectureship, and the income shall be
applied annually to the payment of a qualified person,
whether clergyman or layman, for the delivery and publi
cation of at least one hundred copies of two or more
lecture sermons. These Lectures shall be delivered at
such time and place, in the city of Philadelphia, as the
persons nominated to appoint the lecturer shall from time
to time determine, giving at least six months notice to
vi The Bohlen Lectureship.
the person appointed to deliver the same, when the same
may conveniently be done, and in no case selecting the
same person as lecturer a second time within a period of
five years. The payment shall be made to said lecturer,
after the lectures have been printed and received by the
trustees, of all the income for the year derived from said
fund, after defraying the expense of printing the lectures
and the other incidental expenses attending the same.
The subject of such lectures shall be such as is
within the terms set forth in the will of the Rev. John
Bampton, for the delivery of what are known as the
" Bampton Lectures," at Oxford, or any other subject
distinctively connected with or relating to the Christian
Religion.
The lecturer shall be appointed annually in the month
of May, or as soon thereafter as can conveniently be done,
by the persons, who for the time being, shall hold the
offices of Bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church of
the Diocese in which is the Church of the Holy Trinity ;
the Rector of said Church ; the Professor of Biblical
Learning, the Professor of Systematic Divinity, and the
Professor of Ecclesiastical History, in the Divinity School
of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Philadelphia.
In case either of said offices are vacant the others may
nominate the lecturer.
Under this trust the Rev. PHILLIPS BROOKS, S.T.D.,
of Boston, was appointed to deliver the lectures for
the year 1879.
PHILADELPHIA, Easter,
CONTENTS.
LECTURE I.
The Influence cf Jesus on the Moral Life of Man . 9
LECTURE II.
The Influence of Jesus on the Social Life of Man . 71
LECTURE III.
The Influence of Jesus on the Emotional Life of
Man 139
LECTURE IV.
The Influence of Jesus on the Intellectual Life
of Man 207
I.
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS
ON THE MORAL LIFE OF MAN.
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS
ON THE MORAL LIFE OF MAN.
"\T 7HAT is the pwer of Christianity over
jnan, its source, its character, its issue?
This is the question which I wish to study with
you in these four lectures which I have been
invited to deliver. But it is necessary at the
outset that I should indicate the limits within
which I wish to work. All that the subject, as
I have stated it, would include, not four nor forty
lectures could undertake to treat.
I have been led, then, to think of Christianity,
and to speak of it, at least in these lectures,
not as a system of doctrine, but as a personal
force, behind which and in which there lies one
great inspiring idea, which it is the work of the
personal force to impress upon the life of man,
with which the personal force is always strug
gling to fill mankind. The personal force is the
nature of Jesus, full of humanity, full of divinity,
12 The Influence of Jesus
and powerful with a love for man which com
bines in itself every element that enters into love
of the completest kind. The inspiring ideajs
the fatherhood of God, and the childhood of every
man to Him. Upon the race and upon the
. i^_ __ > *~ .-.-
individual, Jesus is always bringing into more
and more perfect revelation the certain truth
that man, and every man, is the child of God.
This is the sum of the work of the Incarnation.
A hundred other statements regarding it, regard
ing Him who was incarnate, are true ; but all
statements concerning Him hold their truth
within this truth, that Jesus came to restore
the fact of God s fatherhood to man s knowledge,
and to its central place of power over man s life.
Jesus is mysteriously the Word of God made
flesh. He is the worker of amazing miracles
upon the bodies and the souls of men. He is
the convincer of sin. He is the Savior by suffer
ing. But behind all these, as the purpose for
which He is all these, He is the redeemer of man
into the fatherhood of God. It would be deeply
interesting to dwell on any one of these special
aspects of His wondrous life ; but when we want
On the Moral Life of Man. 13
to gather into one great comprehensive statement
the purpose for which Jesus lived, and the power
which His life has had over the lives of men, we
must seize His great idea and find His power
there. For every man s power is his idea multi
plied by and projected through his personality.
The special actions which he does are only the
points at which his power shows itself, the
tips of his powerful life, where its magnetic force
is manifested, but not where it is created. And
so the power of Jesus is the idea of Jesus multi
plied and projected through the person of Jesus.
His power is not in the miracles that He did, not
even in the marvellous nature which He bore, but
in the great truth, the primal and final fact of all
the universe, so far as man has any part in it,
which the whole nature of the Savior uttered,
and with whose splendor every miraculous touch
of that nature on the world, or on man s body ox
man s soul, burst forth into light.
I have said already what that idea is, the
relation of childhood and fatherhood between
mar. and God. Man is the child of God by na
ture He is ignorant and rebellious, the prodi-
14 The Influence of Jesus
gal child of God ; but his ignorance and rebellion
never break that first relationship. It is always
a child ignorant of his Father ; always a child
rebellious against his Father. That is what
makes the tragedy of human history, and always
prevents human sin from becoming an insignifi
cant and squalid thing. To reassert the father
hood and childhood as an unlost truth, and to
re-establish its power as the central fact of life ;
to tell men that they were, and to make them
actually be, the sons of God, that was the pur
pose of the coming of Jesus, and the shaping
power of His life.
Of course it is not possible to speak of such an
idea which is indeed the idea of the universe
as if it were a message intrusted to the Son of
God when He came to be the Savior of man
kind. It was not only something which He knew
and taught ; it was something which He was.
No other truth ever so inspires a merely human
teacher, so fills his whole life with itself, so
comes to be not merely the creed which his lips
declare but the life which his whole living utters,
as this truth of man s childhood to God. And in
On tlu Moral Life of Man. \ 5
Him who was at once the manifested God and the
completion of humanity, the idea and the person
are so mingled that we cannot separate them.
He is the truth, and whoever receives Him be
comes the son of God.
As I read the Gospels and see what Jesus is
trying to do with men, it seems to me as if this
truth that man is the child of God were to him,
in a certain genuine sense, a final truth, a
truth beyond which the soul cannot or at least
need not go, a truth which, if it could be really
laid upon the soul, would bring its own evidence
and its own interpretation. It is indeed capable
of being analyzed. It may be resolved into the
several elements which make up its meaning.
It includes the notions of a common nature be
tween the Father and the son, of a spontaneous
affection of the Father, of an essential obligation
of the son, and of a possibility of the son s un
limited growth into the Father s likeness. All
these are present, are assumed in every declara
tion of man s sonship to God which Jesus ever
makes. But He does not unfold them and define
them. It seems to Him as if, when He says to
1 6 The Influence of Jesus
any human creature, " You are God s child," all
these included truths revealed themselves to the
soul in such degree as his spiritual nature was
then able to receive them. It seems to Him as if
when He says to a sinner, forgetful of his sonship,
" Rise up and be God s child," all these included
truths came in with their own power to restore
his life. He always treats the truth of Father
hood as the best children of the best earthly
fathers treat it, not ignorant of the elemental
truths of which it is composed, but best satisfied
to let it rest in its own unity, as if any analysis
must disturb its beauty and its power.
It is more important than we often think, that
we should grasp the general idea, the general
purpose, of the life of Jesus. The Gospels be
come to us a new book when we no longer read
them merely as the anecdotes of the life of one
who, with a great, kind heart, went through the
world promiscuously doing good as opportunities
occurred to Him. The drifting and haphazard
currents gather themselves together, and we are
borne on with the full and enthusiastic impulse
of a great river which knows itself and knows
On the Moral Life of Man. 17
the sea it seeks. And when the ruling idea is
this which fills the life of Jesus, it is doubly true
that only by clearly seizing it can we get at the
heart and meaning of His life. For it is not only
an idea ; it is a religious inspiration. It is not
only the food of the mind ; it is the fire of the
soul. In ^all its human uses, the idea of father
hood comes nearer to being a religious idea than
that of any other human relationship. And
when we catch sight of it as the expression of
man s relationship to God, it has all that mys
terious and beautiful mingling of the most vast
and awful with the most near and personal and
urgent, all that vagueness which we know
includes definiteness, all that definiteness not
excluding vagueness, which is the very essence
of religious impressiveness. And when we think
of it as the idea of Jesus, it must always have
this special beauty connected with it, that Jesus
must have grown up into the apprehension of it
as He grew into the consciousness of His own life.
He must have become aware that all men were
God s sons, and felt the desire to tell them so
and make their sonship a reality, kindling like
1 8 The Influence of Jesus
fire within Him, just in proportion as He came to
know, softly and gradually, under the skies of
Galilee and the roof of the carpenter, the deep
and absorbing mystery that He himself was the
Son of God.
It is not my purpose to prove here that this
which I have given is a true statement of the
idea of Jesus. As He stands there in the broad
sunlight of the Gospels, as His clear words come
down to us through the atmosphere of centuries
which His spirit has purified, I do not see how
any one can have a doubt of what He means by
standing there, what the purpose of His life is
as He himself conceives it. If any man had a
doubt, I should only want to open the Gospels
with him at four most solemn places. Here is
the consummate teaching of Jesus. In His favor
ite form of parable, with the widest gaze across
the vast field of man, with the most profound
and sad and hopeful sympathy with human life,
He tells His story of the Prodigal Son. It is the
everlasting picture of the double possibilities of
man, obedience and disobedience. The old
parable of Eden, the present mystery of your life
On the Moral Life of Man. 19
and mine, the far-off Judgment Day, and the
great White Throne, are all gathered in together
and are lying in the crystal depths of that story.
And lo ! these two possibilities live in the house
of one great Fatherhood. " A certain man had
two sons," and from the embrace of that father s
love neither of the two sons ever departs. Or, if
this seems too metaphorical to be the revelation
of Christ s idea of man, turn to another scene,
and hear Him teaching all men to pray, " Our
Father who art in heaven." Not only the needy
child, who is going in a moment to beg for his
daily bread, but the sinful child, whose lip is
already trembling with the prayer to be forgiven,
begins his petition with the claim of the son
upon the father. In that idea alone the possi
bility and privilege of prayer grow clear. Or,
still more solemn in its special circumstances,
there is the scene beside the tomb from which
He has just risen, when He draws back the cur
tain, and with one word proclaims His life and
His disciples life together. " I ascend unto my
Father and to your Father," He declares. And
when He has ascended, and years have passed
2O The Influence of Jesus
away, and all that He did and was have grown
familial to the disciple who loved Him most and
knew Him best; when that disciple sums up all
his conception of the life of Jesus, what he says
is only this : " To as many as received Him, to
them gave He power to become the sons of God."
Surely, we cannot be wrong if we say positively
that to Christ himself the truth that man was
God s child by nature was the great fact of man s
existence ; and the desire that man might be
God s child in reality was the motive of His own
life and work.
I have dwelt long upon this opening explana
tion. But I must leave it now. My design, in
these lectures, is to try to show how this idea of
Jesus, inspiring and presented through his per
sonality, becomes the shaping power of men s
lives I want to trace its presence in all of the
higher regions of man s life. I want to see how
y
it influences man s doing of duty, and his rela
tion to his fellow-men, and his acceptance of
pain or pleasure, and his treatment of his own
intellectual powers These are my four lecture?
On the Moral Life of Man. 21
Man in his various life, touched and influenced
and shaped and led by the Fatherhood of God,
revealed and renewed to him by Jesus. To-day
I shall speak of man s moral life. The second
lecture will be of the child of God in all his social
existence. The next lecture will treat of his re
lation to enjoyment and suffering, which are the
right hand and the left hand of the same Father.
And in the last lecture I shall speak of that life
of the intellect in which man is most ready to
forget his Father, or to think that his Father has
nothing that he can do for him. They will be
Biblical studies ; for I shall look solely to what
Jesus, the revealer of the Father, did for men in
the few years of which the Gospels tell, in order
to find the types of what it is His perpetual effort
and wish to do. I dare to hope, as the result of
all our studies, that we may be helped somewhat
in that which I think we all find the hardest and
most hopeless work of all our lives, the effort
to keep our highest ideas and our commonest
occupations in constant and healthy contact with
each ether.
Forgive me one word more. It gives me also
22
pleasure to believe that the subject which I have
chosen is one which would not have been un
welcome to my dear friend of years ago, whose
honored name this lectureship bears, and in
whose behalf I shall in some sort speak. For, of
the men whom I have known, there has been
none whose daily moral life, whose association
with his fellow-men, whose meeting of the jo)
and pain of living, and whose ways of thought
and study, have been more in the power of the
idea of Jesus, more inspired by his Lord s revela
tion that he was, more obedient and trustful to
his Lord s authority in order that he might
become, the son of God.
The manifestation of God s fatherhood which
was made in Jesus is the shaping power of
Christian morals, that which makes the moral
ity of Christian life distinct and different from
any other that the world has seen. In what does
that difference consist ? In two things, as it
seems to me : First, in the complete combination
of pattern and power in the source from which
the morality proceeds ; and, second, in the com-
On the Moral Life of Man. 23
b-natSon of reason and authority in the basis
upon which the morality is constantly recognized
as resting. These are the two great character
istics of family morality, of that rectitude and
goodness which grow up in the child as he lives
in his father s house, sheltered by and fed out of
his father s character. Think of them both for
a moment. Where, except in that primal type
of human influence and benefaction, the human
family, do the pattern of goodness and the power
of goodness meet in such perfect unity ? Else
where there may stand up models of excellence,
but they are distant and cold. They do not
carry in themselves their own enforcement.
They are not clothed with the impressiveness of
a deep natural affection. Elsewhere than in the
home there may be very winning persuasions to
goodness ; but nowhere so perfectly as in the
home does the persuasive appeal come from the
mouth of the very goodness which is the natural
pattern of the life which it tries to win. The
good father at once shows goodness as no other
being can show it to the child, and likewise in
vites him to it with an influence that no other
24 The Influence of Jesus
being can possess. And, besides this, the child,
when he has come to goodness like his father s
by obedience to his father, finds himself unable
to tell whether the good life which he tries to
live is something which holds him by its own
inherent fascination, or something to which he
submits in willing acceptance of his father s will.
The essential and the arbitrary blend, and are
lost in one another. The child s nature bears
witness to its oneness with the father s nature by
the way in which it makes its own choices those
duties which come to it in the first place as the
father s mandates.
Now these two qualities, shadowed forth in
every true home, come to their completeness in
the home of God, the home of man in God, which
is Christianity. It will be interesting, I hope,
to follow this truth out in some detail ; but first
we can see, perhaps, how true it is, if we turn
suddenly to our Gospels and open them at once
at what is, after all, the great text-book of Chris
tian morals, the code of Christian life, the cor
respondent and fulfilment in the New Testament
of the Ten Commandments in the Old. I mean
On the Moral Life of Man. 25
the Sermon on the Mount. To that discourse
let us give a few moments study. In the late
summer, Jesus is coming home from one of his
teaching-tours in Galilee, and in the evening he
and the company that follow him approach Ca
pernaum. They will not enter the city till to
morrow morning. To-night the people sleep
around the foot of a great hill that rises near the
town. But Jesus, that he may be more alone,
climbs higher, and spends the night in prayer
and meditation. Out of this solitude, out of
this mysterious communion with His Father, in
which He has, as it were, refilled Himself with
the assurance that the human is son to the Di
vine, He comes when morning breaks, and, gath
ering His disciples around Him, He speaks to
them, and the multitude who have thronged
about Him, the Sermon on the Mount, which is
written in three chapters of St. Matthew s Gos
pel. I do not see how any one who reads it care
fully can fail to feel that in that sermon we have
what is essentially a unit, one single, separate
discourse of Jesus. It has no rhetorical order
or progress. It does not move in any argumenta-
26
tive development. We have but to feel ourselves
back into the bright air and sunshine of that fresh
morning far away in Galilee, with the sweet dis
traction of the early birds rilling the air, and
the soft, dreamy faces of the Galilean peasants
making the listening group, in order to become
aware how perfectly impossible it was that the
discourse should move to any such measure as
might have become the lecture-room of a new
Rabbi. It has its unity in its controlling pur
pose. It is one by the life-blood of the one idea
which beats through it, and which those ready
and responsive peasant natures feel. And what
is that idea ? Neander calls the Sermon on the
Mount " the Magna Charta of the kingdom of
God." It is a fine phrase, and in one sense it
is completely true. But really the idea of God
which fills the great discourse is not the idea of
king, but the idea of father. No doubt the
two, in their original use and in the loftiest use
of them, when, as in the loftiest use of all words,
they refresh the lost memory of their origin, are
really one. The king was originally father. The
Basileia was a family. It belonged to the king,
On the Moral Life of Man. 27
as the family belongs to the father, by right of
blood. It was not like the Turannis, which im
plied a usurpation, an unnatural and cruel thing.
Kingship included the three essential ideas of
fatherhood, which, as I reminded you, are one
ness of nature, natural impulse of obedience, and
the obligation of loving care. The noblest hea
then always felt all this ; and Zeus is either
king of gods and men, or father of gods and
men, as if the two names meant the selfsame
thing. But yet the two words always tended to
drift apart. Lordship and command belonged to
kingship ; love and care belonged to fatherhood.
What we really have, then, in the Sermon on the
Mount, what gives it its great, everlasting value,
is the passing over of kingship into fatherhood ;
or, if you please to put it so, the opening and
deepening of kingship till it reveals the father
hood which lies folded at the heart of it. This,
I am sure, is the key of the Sermon on the
Mount which alone can unlock its meaning.
Men have often pointed out how largely its sepa
rate precepts can be matched out of other codes ;
as if the substance and power of a moral law lay
28 The Influence of Jesus
in its commandments, and did not really rest in
the conception of the commander which breathed
through it and gave it life.
Here, then, is what the Sermon on the Mount
leally means. And, in conformity with this, all
through it there are strung those two great com
binations which I spoke of, the combination
of pattern and power, the combination of reason
and authority. The pattern is a personal nature,
ultimate and absolute, behind which it is im
possible to go. The good is good because it is
like Him. The bad is bad because it is unlike
Him. There is no other standard in the whole
discourse than that. It is assumed that a man
may know God and then that he wants nothing
more, that in God he has the perfect test and
touchstone of all life. " Be ye therefore per
fect," Jesus says, " even as your Father which
is in heaven is perfect." " Love your enemies,
bless them that curse you" ; and why? "That
ye may be the children of your Father which is in
heaven." " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and
His righteousness, and all these things shall be
added unto you." What do these words mean,
On the Moral Life of Man. 29
that close like a great choral amen the sweet
and rhythmical injunctions to a divine careless
ness ? " Take no thought for your life." " Lay
not up treasures on the earth." "Take no thought,
saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we
drink." Let all things go. Only, and then
the words seem to concentrate out of their easy
carelessness into a deep intensity that is all thr
more intense by contrast, only, " seek God s
righteousness, seek to be righteous like Him,
with that divine capacity of likeness which is in
you, as His children, and then everything else
shall follow as it may." These are no solitary
texts. They are only special words in which
the whole current of the sermon flashes up into
peculiar distinctness, as a wave flashes on the
bosom of a stream and shows which way the
stream is running.
And as the Father is the standard of the
moral life that is enforced, so it is from Him and
from His fatherhood that the whole power
comes by which that standard is to be pursued
and finally attained. There is nothing abstract
and cold. Everything shines and burns with
30 The Influence of Jesus
personal affection. I am to be good like my
Father ; I am to be good because of my Father ;
like His character, because of His love. " If ye
forgive men their trespasses, then your Heavenly
Father will forgive you." "Swear not by heaven,
for it is God s throne, nor by earth, for it is
His footstool." " Let your light shine before
men, that they may glorify your Father which is
in heaven." " Blessed are the peace-makers, for
they shall be called the children of God." These,
again, are not exceptional or accidental words.
They are the flashes on the stream which flows
the other way to meet the stream from God to
man which we were just now tracing. Already
it is true, as by and by an Apostle will declare,
that "of Him, and through Him, and to Him,
are all things." The pattern descends from the
Father to the Son. The responsive likeness
goes back from the Son to the Father ; and both
because they are Father and Son to one another.
It is all full of the spirit of spontaneousness. It
is " the Magna Charta of the kingdom of God,"
indeed. BU" the picture fails if we think of the
reluctant king upon the plain at Runnymede with
On the Moral Life of Man. 31
his stern barons compelling him to give what he
gave only with hatred and rage. Rather it seems
to be the prophecy and anticipation of that
heavenly plain where the celestial King in the
mystic picture of the Revelation gives Himself
ungrudgingly to His beloved, whose natures,
perfectly redeemed by Him and conformed to
His, can take Him perfectly ; where "the Lamb
which is in the midst of the throne shall feed
them, and shall lead them unto living fountains of
waters," the anticipation of that and the memory
and completion of the garden at the other end of
human history, where the Father walked with his
children in their first innocence.
Along with this combination the Sermon on the
Mount always keeps the other, the combination
of reason and authority, or of essentialness and
arbitrariness, which is characteristic of the child s
obedience to the father. I must not dwell on
this, but I am sure that all of us have felt, as we
have read those sacred chapters of St. Matthew,
how exquisitely these two lights play through
them and harmonize with one another, the
light that comes to any duty from the command
32 The Influence of Jesus
of God that we should do it, and the light which
the same duty wins because we ourselves per
ceive that it is the right thing to do. The
essence of every beatitude is in the human
heart, and yet the human heart loves to hear the
utterance of the beatitudes from the mouth ol
God as if they were His arbitrary enactments.
I know by that of the nature of God which is in
me as His child, that they which hunger and thirst
after righteousness shall certainly be filled. I
am sure by that subtle knowledge of Him which
the child must have of the Father, that He could
not leave a really longing soul unsatisfied in all
His world. That importunate happiness, eager
to give itself away, must pour itself into every
ready life. But yet I accept the utterance which
Jesus makes of that which I already knew, as a
genuine revelation. The instinct of my wak
ened childhood rests upon the strong confirma
tion of the Father s uttered word. This runs
through all the great discourse. I leave it with
you to trace it there. Only I want you to notice
that this interplay of essentialness and arbitrari
ness is exactly what characterizes every true home
On the Moral Life of Man. 33
life, where the children learn truth and receive
commandments from their father. The child s
partial and growing perception that it must be
so, chimes and harmonizes with the father s dis
tinct injunction that it shall be so.
I am sure that when the listening repose of
the multitude was broken as the sermon closed,
and, like a melted stream, the crowd flowed away
into the city, the people carried something more
with them than a few handfuls of good precepts.
I think that they went silently, or with few words,
with something of exaltation and wonder at
themselves in their faces. They had been taught
that they were God s children. One who was
evidently God s Son Himself had told them so.
He had bidden them, as God s children, at once
to see duty with something of His own immedi-
ateness of perception, and also to hear Him
announcing it to them out of a Father s lips.
Duty, the thing they ought to do, had shone
for them that morning at once with its own
essential sweetness and with the illumination
of their Father s will. Jjlojyonder Jhat^ as they
walked together they said to one another, " He
T
34 The Influence of Jesus
speaks to us with authority. It is not like the
Scribes."
I must not Imger on this hurried study of the
Sermon on the Mount. I have dwelt thus long
upon it because, as it is the longest and most
deliberate statement of moral duty in the Gospels,
I wanted to show how it was all pervaded by and
built about the idea of Jesus. Let us go on now
to see how that idea pervades likewise all His
treatment of the men and women whom His life
touched. It is the idea of a divine fatherhood,
of a natural belonging of every man s soul in
goodness, of wickedness as an exile, an unnatural,
unfilial state of life, and of the return to goodness
as the coming back to a homeland which the
* soul recognizes as it enters into it and claims a?
its true place. I think that this idea of moral?
at once outgoes and comprehends the various
theories of moral life which men have framed and
set in opposition to each other. If in the family
the child s instinct of childhood unites in itself
the perception of his own best good with the
consciousness of obligation to his Father s will,
then in the world, turned by Christ s revelation
On the Moral Life of Man. 35
to one mighty family, the utilitarian and the
intuitional theories of duty may blend in har
mony, and the soul serving God as its Father
may live under the combined power of the two.
But, not to dwell on this, the idea of Jesus
applied to men s moral life must include two
things, a revelation of the moral standard, and
a revelation of the moral motive. Let us take
these in their order.
And first, the moral standard. What is it?
What am I to "be conformed to as the work of
moral improvement goes on in me ? There may
be various answers. One man may say, " To
this law," holding up a scroll of precepts.
"That is to be your goal. When you obey
those, the work is done." Another man says,
"To this person," pointing to some one, human
or divine, whose life is moving along outside of
mine, a pattern, a model, which I am to emulate
as a candle measures its twinkling light against
a star. Now the answer of Jesus is different
from both of these, I think. "You are to be
like your Father," He declares ; " but ; ,t is in the
fact that He is your Father and that you are His
36 The Influence of Jesus
child that the possibility of likeness lies, and
that the kind of possible likeness is decreed.
You are to be like Him, as the child is like the
father, by the attainment of that echo of the
father s nature which is the child s essential heri
tage. You are to be like Him by coming to that
expression of Him which is the true idea of your
child-life. You are to fulfil the unfulfilled pro
gramme of your own life, which is involved in
the fact that you are the child of God. You are
to become like your Father/ fulfilling the in
junction of the Sermon on the Mount by com
ing to yourself, so realizing the picture of the
parable of the Prodigal Son."
Is there here an intelligible and practicable
moral standard ? Man is to return into the idea of
his own life as the son of God. He is to be equal
to his own conception, as that conception is written
in the nature of the Holy Being from whom he
came and to whom he belongs. At least, that is
a standard whose perpetual presence shaped oui
Lord s treatment of the men and women whom
He was trying to restore. Note this in several
particulars. First, look at the combination of
On the Moral Life of Man, 37
sternness and kindliness, of mercy and severity,
which appears wherever Jesus touches a sinner s
life. One day they brought to Him a woman
taken in the act of sin. Their stern, hard faces
the faces of the Scribes and Pharisees
glared at their victim, and then turned away from
her to Him from whom they claimed her condem
nation. " Moses in the Law commanded us that
such should be stoned," they said. It was purely
the reference to a law, to the appraisal of a sin
by its assigned, appointed penalty. There is no
thought of her, no consideration of what she is.
or of what she possibly may be. It is only the
-. F . .-.-. (,.,,..,/ , . ...
sin, the law, and Moses, the appraiser of sins and
laws by the standards of an absolute justice that
is as impersonal and as free from obtrusive sym
pathies as the stars or winds. Then Jesus turns
and looks around upon them all. He_ lets a
silence fall through the great temple while He
itoops and seems to write upon the ground. It
is" as if He wanted a gap, a blank of stillness,
to come between their view about it all and His.
Then He speaks : " He that is without sin among
) ou, let him first cast a stone at her." Do you not
see the difference ? Everything is personal. It
is not " such as she," it is she. They are not mere
mechanical executors of a written law ; they are
men who cannot escape personal judgments them
selves. They have something to do with her
besides to stone her. They are partners in sin.
They are beings with the same obligations, the
same temptations, the same history of failure. The
whole pulsates with personality. And when, after
the Scribes and Pharisees have crept away, He
turns to the woman and says, " I do not condemn
thee: go, and sin no more," along with a deep and
terrible sense of how dreadfully she had sinned,
along with the most complete self-condemnation,
there must have come into the poor creature s
heart a vision of the power of not sinning which
was in her, in which she thenceforth could be
lieve because He believed in it, and in the con
scious possession of which she knew herself to
be, in the first unlost but long unseen idea and
deepest truth of her existence, the child of God.
Or think about the other woman, who came
creeping in, with her box of ointment, to anoint
the feet of Jesus as He sat supping with the
On the Moral Life of Man. 39
Pharisee. The same contrast of treatment shines
out there. The shocked and scandalized Phari
see cries out, " This man ought to have known
who and what manner of woman this is ! " It is
" what manner of woman." She is one of a class.
She is a kind of being, not a being, not one
live, loving, despairing woman. But Jesus begins
to speak, and instantly there she is ! No longer
this " manner of woman," but " this woman." 1
And then her story comes, the story of her
love for her rescuer, and of her humble and ab-
sorbing and self-forgetful desire to do something
for Him ; the story of her tears and kisses on
His feet, and the spilt ointment whose fragrance
yet filled the room. And it is told so that the
most supercilious guests turn with a wondering
recognition of a true human life among them ;
told so that the poor woman herself, while she
cowered with shame and glowed with love, must
have thrilled through and through with self-
recognition, with a knowledge of herself wholly
new but perfectly certain and clear ; told so that
no figure of woman s nature anywhere in history
stands more clearly before the eyes of men to-
40 The Influence of Jesus
day. And it is her possibility, undestroyed by
all her sin ; it is her power of loving the mani
festation of God, the power by which she may
rise out of her sin and be what she was made to
be, it is this that He touches by His words
and calls forth into life, and by its new life saves
her soul, which seemed to be lost and dead.
In both these stories see the severity and see
the gentleness ! There is no making light of
sin ; there is no cruelty to the sinner. These
two hands, one strong with stern holiness, the
other gentle with sympathy, untwist the cords
that bind the soul, and set it free to be itself.
The rebuked sin becomes itself the impulse that
sends the soul away from its sin into the revealed
possibility of goodness. And these two hands
they are which always Christ has used to rescue
men s souls. The perfect severity of holiness
and the perfect tenderness of love, which blend
nowhere but in the thought of the ideal family,
blend perfectly in the moral method of the Son
of God seeking His brethren.
Again, I think that this same idea appears in
the way in which Jesus uses self -sacrifice, that
On the Moral Life of Man. 41
instrument which all the moral disciplines that
the world has seen have always used, but of
which He always seems to make a higher and
peculiar use. One kind of moral training uses
self-sacrifice as punishment. Because you have
done so much which you ought not to have done,
therefore you shall surrender so much which it
would give you pleasure to possess. Another
uses self-sacrifice as an expression of the essen
tial badness of the thing surrendered. Because
the earth is inherently, intrinsically wicked,
therefore come away from it and be separate.
Because the body is accursed, therefore pluck
out thy right eye, cut off thy right hand. But
to Jesus self-sacrifice always is a means of free
dom. That is what always gives to the self-
denials which He demands a triumphant and
enthusiastic air. Not because you have not
deserved to enjoy it, not because it is wicked to
enjoy it, but because there is another enjoyment
more worthy of your nature, for which the native
appetite shall show itself in you the moment that
you really lay hold of it, therefore let this first
inferior enjoyment go ; and by this conception
42 The Influence of Jesus
of the purpose of self-sacrifice, Christ s law and
limit of self-sacrifice is always settled. One day
a young man came to Jesus. He had seen some
glimpse of Jesus s idea. He dreamed that he
might be a son of God. " What shall I do
that I may reach eternal life ? " he said. And
Jesus lifted His finger and pointed out to him
the long line of milestones that marked the way
to his celestial aspiration, humanity, purity,
honesty, brotherly love. They did not satisfy
the youth. He knew them all, and yet he did
not get at what he wanted, what he dreamed of.
" All these have I done. What lack I yet ? "
His soul was like a boat tied fast, but tied with
a long rope. It was able to struggle up the
channel, past headland and light and buoy that
marked the way; but always something held it
back from perfectly laying itself at rest beside
the golden shore. "What lack I yet? What
lack I yet?" And then said Jesus, " Go and sell
all that thou hast, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven ; and come and follow me." He did not
say, " You do not deserve wealth." He did not
say. " It is wicked to be rich." He only said,
On the Moral Life of Man. 43
" You will be free if you are poor, and then I can
lead you to the Father, in whom you shall find
yourself." He went back, past the buoys and head
lands, down the bay to where the rope was tied,
and cut the boat loose from its anchorage. The
sadness with which the young man went away
one would fain believe was the sadness of the
rescued slave, who misses and mourns for the
familiar fetter, even while his heart begins al
ready to open to the embrace of the new life of
liberty that spreads bewilderingly, almost awfully
before him.
I mention only one more indication of the fact
that the standard which the morality of Jesus sets
up is something far more intimate than a law of
abstract right and wrong, or the example of a
person between whom and us there is no essen
tial and indestructible relationship. It is found
in the vehement and passionate reaction which
his teachings and rebukes excited. Jesus went
about the cities which lined the upper shores of
the Sea of Galilee. He told the people of their
sins. He offered them the new life of obedience
to Him. Instantly there was an outbreak. They
44 The Influence of Jesus
did not just ignore Him. He did not merely
seem to them an enthusiast, whom the} could
brush aside out of the reality that filled their
practical life. They were betrayed into that last
rage which no man feels until he is fighting with
the highest idea of himself, the last and most
desperate battle of the human soul. Jesus sees
this, and there is pity burning through and under
His indignation as He cries, " Thou Capernaum,
which art exalted unto heaven, shall be cast down
to hell." It is the heaven where Capernaum be
longs that makes the tragedy of the hell which
she chooses. And so, when the Gadarenes
begged the intrusive miracle-worker to depart
out of their coasts ; or when the congregation of
the synagogue at Nazareth sprang up in rage
when Jesus preached to them ; or when the cry
of blasphemy arose at the sight of the divine
power that was in Him passing beyond the work
of healing lameness, and beginning to claim its
holier and dearer privilege of forgiving sins ; or
when, unseen, unheard, in many a brooding heart
and many a suspicious whisper that vented its
querulous maliciousness in the cou/.try lanes and
On the Moral Life of Man. 45
cottages, or in the palaces or hovels of Jerusalem,
the tide of hatred slowly gathered which broke
out at last with " Crucify him ! crucify him ! "
before Pilate s judgment seat, and raged in taunts
and jeers around the cross, through all these
scenes there is no sufficient explanation of it all,
until you get down to that seat wherein the deep
est power of mortification and of rage resides, a
wounded and wronged conscience. It was the
national consciousness which, under that strange
mingling of nationality and individuality which
was the very genius of Judaism, meant likewise
the consciousness of every man, the conscious
ness that the people was the people of God, that
every man in it was the son of God, it was
this consciousness, summoned to life by the pres
ence among them of the Son of God, that rose
and beat against the low conditions of the life
under which they had buried it, and made the
tempest whose hoarse tumult we hear everywhere
behind the gentle voice of Jesus as we open the
Gospel doors.
This, then, I take to be the beginning of the
Gospel of the Son of God. It is the renewal
46 The Influence of Jesus
of the divine consciousness in every man as the
standard by which he is to be judged. And the
power of that renewal is the Incarnation. " The
Word was made flesh and dwelt among us"; and,
" to as many as received Him, to them gave He
power to become the sons of God." This is
surely the moral power of that which Jesus, when
He talks with Nicodemus, calls the " being born
again." The Pharisee wonders. It seems to
him as if the new-found Rabbi told him some
thing unnatural, something against the course of
nature. It seems to be a going back. " Can a
man enter a second time into his mother s womb
and be born ? " And Jesus answers : " Yes, it is
a going back, only back much farther than you
think, much farther than the mother s womb.
It must be a birth from heaven, taking you back
into heaven again. It must be a birth from
God, restoring in you the first idea of your exist
ence, that you are His child. You can enter into
the kingdom of heaven only as, beneath all its
obscurations and accumulated hindrances, that
idea is stirred to life, and you are born at once
out of the highest heights of God and into the
deepest depths of yourself."
On the Moral Life of Man, 47
Surely such an idea of man makes abundantly
simple that which has often seemed so hard to
understand. I mean the way in which righteous
ness and men s struggles to be good have always
refused to be confined to the limits of any specific
culture or even to those who knew the name
of Christ. Everywhere throughout the world,
everywhere throughout the ages, men have
sought holiness. The best and noblest men
everywhere have always been true seekers after
God. That is inexplicable if Christianity is a
new power, a new gift to the faculties of man,
nay, as it often seems to be stated, a new set of
faculties in man which he has not possessed
before. But how entirely explicable, how natural
it is, if what the Incarnation did was to redeem
men into what was their original and undestroyed
nature and privilege ! What wonder that the
hidden sonship should have been forever flashing
forth wherever the crust of earthliness and sen
suality and selfishness was thinnest ! How di
vinely, as the dream and hope of all the best souls
that had ever lived, as " the desire of all na
tions," comes at last the Son of God " to take
48 The Influence of Jesus
away sin by the sacrifice of Himself," by won
drous and unutterable pain so to make manifest
the love of God that man s selfishness might be
broken into fragments, and the divine idea of
humanity which had flashed forth through cracka
should glow in one unhindered glory over all the
redeemed life of man.
There is not one word of the argument for
righteousness on abstract principles, or on the
ground of its utility, in all the Gospels. Jesus
and Socrates are absolutely incomparable. They
start from different points. They journey by
different roads. They come in sight of one an
other when their separate journeys mount to their
highest elevations. They travel in the same di
rection, but they do not travel together. The
one reveals ; the other argues. And it is cer
tainly true of Jesus that the Christian s eagerness
to show that all good and all methods for all
good were embodied in Him has obscured the
definite and single method which He did use to
bring men into the service of duty. " I am the
Son of Go } " He said. " Yet I am one with
On the Moral Life of Man. 49
you. You, too, are the sons of God. His image,
all blurred and stained, is in you. Let me set it
free, restore it, redeem it ; and then you shall
live by the law of your own renewed wills. The
pattern shall be in your hearts when those hearts
once more are pure. The image of God, mani
fest first in Me, and from Me reawakened in your
own filial consciousness, that is the pattern of
your life, the standard of your duty."
And so we are ready now for the second point
of which I wished to speak. Nothing is so im
perfect, nothing, indeed, is so melancholy, so
tragical, as a pattern set before a man which he
has no power to attain. It is like a boat at sea
with the best compass in the world on board, but
neither oars nor sails. The faithful needle tells
its story ; there is no doubt which way we ought
to sail ; but there we lie, tossing up and down,
without progress, or drifted only by the stupid
sea on which we float. Along with the revelation
of the Divine pattern in Christ finding its echo
in the people s selves to whom He spoke, there
must have come some motive, some stimulus to
follow and attain the pattern which He set ; and
5O The Influence of Jesus
that, the more we read the Gospels, it grows
evident to us was just as simple and just as
peculiarly His own as was the setting up of the
pattern. The motive, too, was wholly personal,
and was all based upon man s filialness. It was
purely and solely the elevation to its highest
power of that same force which, in the human
family, causes the father s life to be repeated
in the child s. We call it love ; but we must
remember that full love always has two elements,
and we must be sure that we keep both of them
in our thought when we speak of the power by
which the human life is shaped into the image
of the Divine. Love is at once admiration and
affection. We often separate the two. We talk
of loving some poor creature in whom there is
nothing admirable. We talk of loving some cold
statue which makes no appeal to our affection.
But really these are only mangled parts of love.
True love, complete love, finely combines a pure,
unselfish perception of the essential quality of
a character with a warm personal gratitude for
what that character bestows on us. The per
ception of absolute quality saves it from foolish
On the Moral Life of Man. 5 1
fondness, and the gratitude rescues it from being
the mere dilettanteism of the connoisseur. It is
a love like this which makes the power of Chris
tian morals. Look, for instance, at that great
event in which the whole life and work of the
Savior found its completion. I mean His cruci
fixion. I do not speak now of the essential mys
tery which is in that wonderful event. I count
alike foolish and short-sighted the two men, both
of whom try to eliminate and scatter the mys-
teriousness of the cross of Christ, one of them
by saying that there is no peculiar and special
character in that strange and single death, the
other by dissecting its power into its elements
and trying to account for all its force. I know that
the death of the beggar, the death of the baby, has
in it a mystery of force which no wisest man can
comprehend. I know that He whose life was
one with the baby s and the beggar s, and yet in
finitely deeper, vaster, must have had a mystery
in His death over which eternity shall keep guard,
husbanding its treasures, and giving them forth
to the eternally ripening soul as it shall need and
shall be able to receive them. He who tells me
52 The Influence of Jesus
that he will read to me now the mystery of the
death of Jesus, shuts my ears with his very offer.
I will not let him tear for me the mystery of the
dawn which no hand can hasten as it slowly
brightens to the full morning. And so it is not
of the essential mystery of Christ s powerful
death, but of its immediate moral power that I
speak. It is the great renewing spectacle of
human life. When men look at it, there comes
up out of their hearts the pattern of divinity
which is there, their sonship to the Holy One ;
and to attain that holiness, to realize it perfectly,
becomes the passion of their lives. And it is
love for the Sufferer which makes that passion,
love with its two perfect elements perfectly com
bined. It is admiration for what He is doing,
the unselfishness, the heroism, the godlike pa
tience. And it is gratitude because He is doing
it for us. It is these two that blend into the pas
sionate devotion with which a man, in the great
phrase of the Gospels, " follows after Christ,"
seeks, that is, with his own essential sonship, to
realize in himself the sonship of the Son of God.
One loves to think, nay, one rejoices to be sure^
. 1
On tiie Moral Life of Man. 53
that under all the most artificial shall we not
say under all the most fantastic? theories which
men have framed and held concerning the power
of the death of Jesus, this sweet and reasonable
influence proceeding from it has always done its
blessed work. With silent, soft, and mighty
pressure, the sight of the Sufferer s holiness and
the gratitude for the Sufferer s pity, as one com
plete power, one perfect love, has drawn the
depths of men s lives on to the nature of the Suf
ferer, and there their oneness to Him has become
known to them, and they, in and through Him,
have been renewed into the image of their
Father and His Father. The robber who was
crucified with Him felt that power first. It was
a baptism of blood, and the power which our
baptisms re-echo found its first utterance in him.
" Being by nature born in sin and the child of
wrath," there by the fellowship of suffering, there
by the power of love, in which admiration and
gratitude met, he was made the " child of grace."
Let us trace now, if I have defined it clearly,
some of the qualities which this inherent charac-
54 The Influence of Jesus
ter of the Christian impulse imprints upon the
Christian morality. And first of all I name that
union of discontent and hope which, in the first
disciples, and in all who have followed in their
footsteps, has always marked the progress of the
Christian s moral life. Remember one more scene
in the rich Gospels. It is once more the Sea of
Galilee. Simon Peter, that transparent nature
in whom we are able to trace, as in the simplest
organism, those changes and reactions which be
come obscure and hard to trace in structures
that are more complete and complicated, Si
mon Peter has Jesus in his little fishing-boat.
And this time it is by some exhibition of His
power, by some wonderful draught of fishes in
the before empty net, that the personality of the
Master has been pressed close upon His disciple.
And then Peter breaks out. Prostrate at Jesus s
knees, " Depart from me," he cries, " for I am a
sinful man, O Lord ! " Despondency, almost de
spair, a deep sight into his own heart, a bitter
sense of contrast with the nature which the touch
of miracle, like a flash of lightning, had made
clear to him, all this is in those passionate and
On the Moral Life of Man. 55
hurried words. But what comes next ? " When
they had brought their ships to land, they forsook
all and followed Him." Peter and all the rest !
Not only all the rest, but Peter! With the
imploring cry, " Depart ! " yet on his lips, he
follows Him whom he had begged to go away.
It was the power of love overwhelming the sense
of unworthiness, and filling him with hope. It
was the noble, beautiful inconsequence and in-
consistence of a great nature all in tumult, which
never felt the attraction of holiness so irresistibly
as when it seemed altogether beyond his reach,
and never so knew how unholy he was as at the
very moment when the power of holiness was
making him its slave and chaining him, a willing
follower and servant, to the feet of the Holy
One. Nothing but personal love can hold and
harmonize that inconsistency. Only in the com
plete devotion of a soul that sees in the appar
ently unattainable that which it knows, by a
sense beyond all reason, by a movement of its
own profoundest consciousness, that it can and
must attain, nothing but that could have made
strength out of such weakness, and hope out of
the very substance of despair.
Again, I think that Christ s whole use of pun
ishments and threats is characteristic of the idea
on which His whole moral treatment of humanity
proceeds. A tyrant uses threats and punish
ments for restriction, desiring to repress that
which is mischievous and bad. A parent, if he
is truly parental, and not at all tyrannical, uses
threats and punishments as means of revelation
and enfranchisement, that he may set free for
their own higher action a knowledge and ability
which is held in prison. The blows of one are
struck to bind the fetters tight ; the other s blows
are struck to loose the fetters, that the limbs na
tive powers may go free. What are the blows of
Jesus ? He sends out His disciples to do His
work, to preach His gospel ; and He declares to
them what shall be the penalty of unfaithfulness
and partial, compromising consecration. " He
that loveth father or mother more than me is not
worthy of me. He that loveth son or daughter
more than me is not worthy of me. He that
findeth his life shall lose it." But instantly,
part of the same verse, before He takes His
breath, He cries, " He that loseth his life for My
On the Moral Life of Man.
sake shall find it." The threat is nothing to
Him. He does not care to inspire fear unless,
startled and stirred by danger, the men to whom
He speaks can be made to tremble down so deep
that the capacity of being all that He wants them
to be shall wake out of its slumber and stand
upon its feet, and, shaking the very thought of
fear away, go forth to a duty which has its only
inspiration in the consciousness of privilege and
in the thought of blessing. He always shakes
the sleepy soul, not as the jailer, who rouses the
wretch upon his execution morning, to lead him
to his death, but as the watchman, who puts the
sword into the drowsy soldier s hand that he may
go and fight his battle. It is as a revelation of
blessing by the dreadfulness of its opposite. It
is as the golden medal shown on its reverse, with
all its deep depressions only indicating the prom
ontories of happiness and goodness which its
true face contains. It is thus that Jesus always
threatens men with punishment. The tutor of a
French prince, I have read, used to tie a rod to
the child s sash when he had deserved to be pun
ished for a fault. It was an appeal to his prince-
liness. It was the suggestion and reminder of
how a prince ought to behave. It was an appeal
to his native nobility, and not to his fear of pain.
It seems to me as if every threatening of Christ
were an appeal to the native princeliness of man,
to his royal nature as the son of the King of
kings, a sacred being to whom sin is eternally
unnatural and punishment a dreadful anomaly
and shame.
And yet again I find the same meaning in the
wise and measured use which Jesus always makes
of the machinery of duty and of the forms of
righteousness in their relation to the impulse of
duty and the purpose of righteousness. These
last are never for a moment lost from sight. The
kingliness of the impulse, the subordination of
the instrument and the form, are never allowed
to become obscure. An abandonment of all
forms and outward instruments is very easy. A
true adjustment of them to the unseen purposes
which they subserve is as rare as it is hard, as
hard as it is rare. It is in the healthiest and
truest family life that their balance is most per
fectly preserved. And when the Lord insists oo
On the Moral Life of Man. 59
celebrating His profound spiritual consecration
by being baptized in Jordan ; when, in His kingli-
ness, He does not refuse to pay His tribute ; when
He sends the poor leper, who is already cured, to
get his warrant of restored health from the priest ;
when He bids His disciples observe and do what
soever the Pharisees who sit in Moses s seat shall
bid them do, in all these cases it is the law of
the family life which He is laying down to them,
the law which reaches back to the fact, but yet
does not neglect the method, and through the
form tries to shape the substance for its maturer
life. It is the perfection of that instinct with
which the dying Socrates, having left his rich
legacy of spiritual teaching to his scholars, with
his last breath bids them not forget the cock
for ^Esculapius, which was the formal type and
expression of his piety.
I have only one more suggestion to offer on
this head. There are words of Jesus, here and
there, in which He distinctly sets His own faith
fulness as the type and inspiration of the faithful
ness which He expects of His disciples. Listen
to the solemnity which is in His voice as, at the
6o
table of the Last Supper, He looks up into His
Father s face and prays for these, His brethren .
" As Thou has sent Me into the world, even so
have I also sent them into the world. Sanctify
them through Thy truth." Or, just before, look
ing directly into the disciples eyes, " This is my
commandment, that ye love one another as I
have loved you." And yet again, " I in them
and Thou in Me, that they all may be one in Us."
Who can read words like these and not catch
sight of what it was that was to fill these disci
ples lives with energy, and to be the atmos
phere wherein their new goodness should get all
its growth ? God s fatherhood to them made
visible in Christ, His Son ; their sonship to God
made visible in Christ, their brother. It was as
if, at the beginning of all the ages down which
their Christian life has run, they lay, like Jacob
on the night when he went out to his new life
from his father s house, and to them, as to him.
a ladder seemed to stretch up into heaven, and
the angels of God ascended and descended on
it, the angels of duty bringing God s strength
to men, and carrying men s obedience to God, on
On the Moral Life of Man. 6l
the ladder of the fatherhood and sonship that
bound the heavens to the earth, set up in the
new Beth-el, the new House of God, which was
the life of Jesus.
It only remains that we should point out what
must be some of the perpetual marks of a moral
ity which is the outgrowth of such a faith as
ours. Those marks belong to the Christian
morality of all times. They are not separable
from it. When we look into the future and see
the goodness of humanity developing within the
idea of Jesus, we must expect to see a greater
and greater prominence of those marks in it
When we seek our own moral development from
Him, we must look for it in the only kind
which His method can bestow.
The first mark will be the prominence of
what we may call the duties of sentiment.
" Thou shalt love the Lord." " Thou shalt love
thy brother." Thou shalt love. The duty of
loving, there is nothing of that in the codes of
abstract duty. It is impossible to exclude that
from its fundamental place in the system of duty
whose constant spring is in the fatherhood of
6? The Influence of Jesus
God. But evidently this quality, this exaltation
of the duty of sentiment over the duty of action,
which makes the action valuable simply as an
utterance of the sentiment, this is a most im
portant quality It cannot be ignored. It gives
the color and tone to all the morality which it
pervades. It exposes that morality, no doubt,
at the outset, to the charge and the danger
of weakness and sentimentality, but in the end
it gives it a buoyancy and elasticity and per
petual vitality which prophesy for it a perma
nence as endless as the Being in whose love it
lives is everlasting ; and so it is the one moral
ity for which we can predict no end. Of this
quality in duty it is no Christian s place to be
ashamed or afraid. None of us may melt it
away or sink it out of sight. In its prominence
lies the soul of the duty that we do. We may
not try to make that duty cold and soulless which
has its true being in the central commandment
which is its living soul, " Thou shalt love."
Another mark of the Christian morality, the
morality whose root is in the sonship of the soul
to God, is the harmony with which it holds the
On the Moral Life of Man. 63
absoluteness of goodness and the various respon
sibilities of men. It is full of discriminations
which yet never tamper with the unchangeable
sanctity of righteousness. As in the parable of
Him from whom it all proceeds, so, in the life
which that parable describes, the different talents
of different servants are fully taken into the
account. Duty is measured by chance, and yet
the essential idea of duty is never weakened. I
am bound to do less than you, but I am just as
severely bound to do my little as you are to do
your much. Where else could those ideas be
kept in perfect harmony and peace, neither of
them hurting the other, but within the larger
idea of fatherhood ? In what group could the
child take his little task, fitted to his little hands,
and do it, with the entire conviction that he
must do it, and, nevertheless, not vexed nor be
wildered by the sight of tasks a thousand times
greater than his own being done close by his side ;
and, at the same time, the great man, the hero,
dedicate himself to his vast work with no sense
of oppression or injustice, nor with any feeling of
superiority or pride, in what group could these
64 The Influence of Jesuit
two faithful souls work on, in such difference
and yet in such identity, but in a family where
every child has his own special duty, great or
small, clothed with the absoluteness of the Father
hood which is over all ? Where, but in the family
idea of man, can these two necessary conceptions
of the difference of duties and the absoluteness of
duty meet in perfect peace ?
I note again, as a characteristic of the morality
of sonship, the way in which it secures humility
by aspiration and not by depression. How to se
cure humility is the hard problem of all systems
of duty. He who does work, just in proportion to
the faithfulness with which he does it, is always
in danger of self-conceit. Very often men seem
to have given up the problem in despair, and they
lavish unstinted praise upon the vigorous, effec
tive worker without any qualifying blame of the
arrogance with which he flaunts the duty that
he does in the world s face. " The only way to
make him humble," they would seem to say,
" would be to make him idle. Let him stop doing
duty and then, indeed, he might stop boasting.
His arrogance is only the necessary price that the
On the Moral Life of Man. 65
world and he pay for his faithfulness." To such a
problem the Christian morality brings its vast con
ception of the universe. Above each man it sets
the infinite life. The identity of nature between
that life and his, while it enables him to emulate
that life, compels him, also, to compare himself
with it. The more zealously he aspires to imitate
it, the more clearly he must encounter the com
parison. The higher he climbs the mountain,
the more he learns how the high mountain is past
his climbing. It is the oneness of the soul s life
with God s life that at once makes us try to be
tike Him and brings forth our unlikeness to Him
It is the source at once of aspiration and humility
The more aspiration, the more humility. Humility
comes by aspiration. If, in all Christian history,
it has been the souls which most looked up that
were the humblest souls ; if to-day the rescue of a
soul from foolish pride must be not by a deprecia
tion of present attainment, but by opening more
and more the vastness of the future possibility ;
if the Christian man keeps his soul full of the
sense of littleness, even in all his hardest work
for Christ, not by denying his own stature, but
I
66
by standing up at his whole height, and then
looking up in love and awe and seeing God tower
into infinitude above him, certainly all this
stamps the morality which is wrought out within
the idea of Jesus with this singular excellence,
that it has solved the problem of faithfulness and
pride, and made possible humility by aspiration.
And yet, once more, the morality of Jesus in
volves the only true secret of courage and of the
freedom that comes of courage. More and more
we come to see that courage is a positive thing.
It is not simply the absence of fear. To be brave
is not merely not to be afraid. Courage is that
compactness and clear coherence of all a man s
faculties and powers which makes his manhood
a single operative unit in the world. That is
the reason why narrowness of thought and life
often brings a kind of courage, and why, as men s
range of thought enlarges and their relations
with their fellowmen increase, there often comes
a strange timidity. The bigot is often very
brave. He is held fast unto a unit, and pos
sesses himself completely in his own selfishness.
For such a bravery as that the man and the
On the Moral Life of Man. 67
world both pay very dear. But when the grasp
that holds a man and his powers is not his self-
consciousness but his obedience to his Father,
when loyalty to Him surrounds and aggregates
the man s capacities, so that, held in His hand,
the man feels his distinctiveness, his distinctive
duty, his distinctive privilege, then you have
reached the truth of which the bigot s courage
was the imitation. Then you have secured cour
age, not by the limitation, but by the enlargement
of the life. Then the dependence upon God
makes the independence of man in which are
liberty and courage. The man s own personality
is found only in the household of his Father, and
only in the finding of his personality does he
come to absolute freedom and perfect fearlessness.
May I take a moment now before I close to
recapitulate the points along the journey which
we have travelled together to-night ? We found
the family character of Christian duty the way
in which it gathered its source out of the essen
tial sonship of man to God indicated in the
meeting, first, of the pattern of righteousness
68 The Influence of Jesus
and the power of righteousness ; and, second, of
reasonableness and authority in all the duty
which the New Testament enjoins. This I tried
to show you in the text-book of duty, the Ser
mon on the Mount.
Then I tried to show where the moral standard
was put by Jesus. It is in the heart of every
son of God made conscious of his sonship by the
Son of God, who is Jesus.
Then we traced the nature of this standard as
it was actually shown, first, in the combination
of severity and goodness in the treatment of man
by Jesus ; second, in the character of His teaching
about self-sacrifice ; and third, in the vehement
opposition and hatred which His life excited.
At the same time we saw that while this
standard came to its full manifestation in Chris
tianity, it had been struggling for utterance
through all the religious life of man.
Passing, then, from the standard of morals to
the motive of morals as Jesus established it, it
seemed to be love, justly and fully composed of
its two elements of admiring appreciation and
personal gratitude.
On the Moral Life of Man. 69
The working of this motive we saw, first, in
the play of discontent and hope which charac
terizes all the moral life of Christianity; second,
in the use which Jesus makes of threats and
punishments ; third, in the relation which He
establishes between forms and methods on the
one hand and impulses and purposes upon the
other; and, fourth, in His distinct embrace of all
motive within His own person.
And last of all I tried to show how Christian
morality, as the result of all that I had pointed
out before, was marked supremely by the duties
of sentiment, by combination of absoluteness and
breadth with personal definiteness, by the effort
to secure humility through aspiration, and by
the courage which is born of obedience.
I know full well how lightly I have travelled
over such vast, rich ground, and how much of its
riches I have left ungathered. I can only hope
that I have shown some thoughtful people where
the riches lie, that they may go themselves and
gather them.
It was in His sonship to God that the secret
of the holiness of Jesus lay. His Father s busi-
70 The Influence of Jesus.
ness was the sum of all His life. He knew no
motive except that which was summed up in
the gratitude of His great prayer : " Father, I
have glorified Thee on the earth : I have fin
ished the work which Thou gavest Me to do."
The model and the impulse of all duty He
carried in His own filial heart, which was forever
bearing witness to Him of His Father s perfect-
ness. His incarnate days, with all their common
duties held and illuminated in that high con
sciousness of sonship, must have been one with
the eternity of the past and the eternity that was
to be. Duty must have been its own revealer
and its own reward. Liberty must have been
sublimely consistent with the most scrupulous
obedience. The doing right and the being right
must have been like the sunshine and the sun.
And what duty was to our Master it shall be to
us just as soon as we are filled with His idea,
just as soon as His spirit bears witness with our
spirits that we too are the sons of God.
II.
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS
ON THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN.
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS
ON THE SOCIAL LIFE OF MAN.
A TRAVELLER in the Old World is deeply
interested in seeing what are the most
complete embodiments of themselves which the
different struggles of human nature in thought and
devotion, have left in art. I remember well the
impression of contrast which I received from two
when I saw them for the first time, many years
ago. In one of the most rich and beautiful of
European galleries hangs Raphael s greatest Ma
donna, called the Madonna of St. Sixtus. Among
the dreary sands at the edge of the Egyptian
desert, under the shadow of the Pyramids, stands
the mighty Sphinx, the work of unknown hands,
so calm and so eternal in its solitude that it is
hard to think of it as the work of human hands
at all ; as true a part of the great earth, it seems,
as any mountain that pierces upward from its
bosom. These two suggest comparisons which
74 The Influmce of Jesus
are certainly not fancies. They are the two
great expressions, in art, of the two religions,
the religion of the East and of the West.
Fatalism and Providence they seem to mean.
Both have tried to express a union of humanity
with something which is its superior; but one
has joined it only to the superior strength of the
animal, while the other has filled it with the
superior spirituality of a divine nature. One
unites wisdom and power, and claims man s hom
age for that conjunction. The other combines
wisdom and love, and says, "Worship this." The
Sphinx has life in its human face written into a
riddle, a puzzle, a mocking bewilderment. The
Virgin s face is full of a mystery we cannot fathom*
but it unfolds to us a thousand of the mysteries
of life. It does not mock, but blesses us. The
Sphinx oppresses us with colossal size. The Vir
gin is not a distortion or exaggeration, but a glo
rification of humanity. The Egyptian monster is
alone amid its sands, to be worshipped, not loved.
The Christian woman has her child clasped in
her arms, enters into the societies and sympathies
of men, and claims no worship except love.
On the Social Life of Man. 75
It is in this last difference the difference
between the solitude of one and the companion
ship of the other that we feel, I think, most
distinctly how different is the Christianity of the
picture from the sublime paganism of the statue.
The picture is Christian, because it is so truly hu
man. It has not lost humanity in trying to inter
pret Deity. It invites, entices, wins the soul of the
man who studies it. It folds itself about his life
with a kindred life. It wants him. It seeks him.
It is not satisfied till it has found him. Then,
as if it were satisfied, there seems to come a new
depth in its color, a new sweetness in its celestial
light.
I am to speak to you to-day of the way in
which the influence of Jesus enters into the
social life of man. I have been led to this
remembrance of what we may almost call the
constructive power in a great work of Christian
art. It is positive, and finds and fastens the re
lationship of human souls to the Divine soul, and so
of human souls to one another. As I began to
write this lecture, in the midst of the Christmas
days, I could not help feeling how the same idea
76 The Influence of Jesus
was present in that ever-vivid scene of Bethlehem,
which shines in the simple and inspired words of
the first chapters of the Gospels with a clearness
and a depth that the pencil of Raphael could
never give. A father, a mother, and a child arc
there. No religion which began like that could
ever lose its character. The first unit of human life,
the soul, is there in the new-born personality of
the childhood. But the second unit of human
life, the family, is just as truly there in the
familiar relation of husband and wife, and the sa
cred, eternal mystery of motherhood. He who
would know the whole about this Jesus must learn
not merely what his own soul will grow to be, but
likewise what new life the presence of Jesus in
the midst of it will give to this the primal typal
group of human life and to all the other groups,
the larger families which this one represents.
Let me define, then, in a few words, what I
want to do to-day. It is to show how the idea of
Jesus is the constructive power of the social life
of man in all its various degrees. That idea we
saw in our last lecture was the sonship of man
to God, levealed in the sonship to God of Jesus
On the Social Life of Man, 77
Christ himself. All that He had to show man He
had first in Himself; and it was by the develop
ment in men s sight of His own gradually con
scious life that He revealed to men all that they
might become. If this be true, then it is by
a study of the social life of Jesus, by seeing
how His experience from the very beginning
opened into successive relationships, and claimed
for itself larger and yet larger intercourses,
that we can get His true idea of how the rela
tionships and intercourses of all men ought to
be built, how that idea of the Divine Father
may become the shaping and cohesive power of
them all. This makes the duty that lies before
us once more a Biblical study. In those old
stories of the Gospels lies our material. Every
one of those stories is the idea of Jesus flashed
from a new side of His jewel life. All that the
fatherhood of God may be to any of His children
it was first and perfectly to that only-begotten
Son. If we can see what He was among his
fellow-men and what His life among them was to
Him, we shall have the key to all the mysteries
and prob ems of our own social life.
7 8 The Influence of Jesus
In the first place, then, the social life of
Jesus underwent the natural and human progress
and change from an instinctive impulse to a de
liberate and reasonable conduct. He would have
been no true child and man, He would have been
a human monster, if it had not been so. I think
that it is a most happy sign of the healthy reality
which the life of Jesus is gaining in men s
thoughts in these our modern days, thai this
idea of the development of his consciousness,
the gradual growth into the knowledge and the
use of His own nature, is no longer an idea that
bewilders and shocks the believer in the Lord s
divinity. It is felt to be a necessary part of the
belief in His humanity. Two centuries, perhaps
one century, ago, I think that Christ was far less
real to men than He is now. However it may
have been with the last century, the century be
fore the last was a religious age. But its religion
had grown strangely impersonal. It believed
doctrines far more than it believed in the Son of
Man. The seventeenth century believed the di
vinity of Christ, but its belief in the divine Christ
was weak, and the belief in the human Christ
On the Social Life of Man. 79
was wellnigh lost, and with this loss I cannot but
feel that we must in some way connect the dis
like of Christmas and its observance which
then arose, and which is but just now passing
entirely away. It had its local causes, which
account for it, no doubt. But the whole idea of
childhood, with its necessary concomitant idea
of growth, was a bewilderment and almost an
offence to that theology whose Christ was a mys
terious and unaccountable being, a true spiritual
Melchisedec, without vivid and real human asso
ciations, without age, without realized locality, a
dogma, a creed, a fulfilment of prophecy, an ad
justment of relations, not a man. It is because
Jesus to-day is intensely real, intensely human
to us, that we welcome and do not dread
the truth of increase and development from
babyhood to the full strength and stature of a
man.
And nowhere is this clearer or more beautiful
than in that feature of His life which we have to
day to study. The social life of Christ was first
an instinct. The child clasped His tiny arms
about His mother s neck, or laid His little hand
8o The Influence of Jesus
into the strong hand of Joseph, as they walked
on the long road to Egypt, with the same simple
desire to utter love and to find love which is the
first sign of Life akin to their own that millions of
parents hearts have leaped to recognize in theii
first-born. Nay, he but little understands the
dignity and unity of all God s vast creation who
is offended or distressed when he is told that in the
Lord of Life these primal affections were of the
same sort with those which make the beauty of
the life of the beings which are less than man.
Even the dog, the bird, the lion, know these first
instincts of companionship which found their con
summate exhibition upon earth when the Son of
Mary clung to a human mother with a human love.
That instinctive character never passed out of the
relationships of Christ. When He bade the disc i-
ples go with Him to the mountain of transfigura
tion or to the garden of the agony, beneath evry
design of their enlargement or enlightenment, who
does not feel beating the simple human derire
for company in the supremely triumphant or
supremely terrible moments of life ? When
He looks at His disciples, as the multitude are
On the Social Life of Man. 81
leaving Him, and asks them, " Will ye also go
away ? " or when these same disciples forsake
Him and flee upon the night of trial, below the
sorrow that He feels for their defection as a sign
of their unworthiness, who does not hear the poor
heart cry out with that same dread of being left
alone which the forlorn wretch in his prison feels
as the cell door clashes to between him and hu
manity ? We must start with this instinct, and
always this instinct must remain, felt like the
beating heart which makes it live, underneath
all the fuller understanding of itself into which
the companionship of Christ, his social life,
may grow. But such a growing understand
ing comes. As Jesus develops into manhood, the
idea of His existence grows and rounds itself to
clearness. By and by He is full of the conscious
ness that He is the Son of God, and that through
His sonship this world-full of men is to learn that
they are God s sons and are to be brought back
to their Father. And when He had been filled
with that idea, then the instinct which had
already drawn Him to his brethren found its in
terpretation. He knew why He sought them.
6
82 The Influence of Jesus
It was for the self-indulgence of His own con
sciousness, and it was for the enlightenment of
theirs. By and by, if I ask why Jesus shrink?
from solitude, and craves to have John and James
and Peter with him, I find myself able to say,
I find myself compelled to say, something more
than just that such is His healthy human instinct.
I recognize that He is deliberately seeking two
things there : first, the self-knowledge of His own
sonship to God ; and, second, the enlightenment
of these men s consciousness to know that they
are the sons of God. I see the sun break in with
a triumphant burst of light upon a chamber set
with countless jewels, but which has thus far
been wholly shut up in the dark. There is a
double joy, I think, in the great heart of the sun
light as, almost with a shout that one can hear,
it floods the opened chamber with itself. First, it
finds new interpretation of itself, it finds itself, as
it were / in the new stories of its glory which the
jewels tell, as, one by one, they burn under its
touch ; and, second, it feels every jewel quiver
under its fiery hand with the transporting discov
ery of its own nature. I see a good man, long
On the Social Life of Man. 83
shut out from human company, come among his
brethren. With a leap and burst almost like the
sunshine, he casts his solitude behind him and
flings himself into their sympathies and hopes. I
let the explanation of it at first rest in the mere
unexplained instinct of humanity ; but when
I come to analyze his motive to its elements, I
know that it must be made up of these two im
pulses, the desire of self-knowledge and the de
sire of illuminating others, the desire of burning
and the desire of shining, which are the two
strong, ineradicable passions of the soul. The man
goes into the multitude that he may find himself
and that he may declare them to themselves.
All human society which has not these impulses
more or less consciously within it is but the
herding of animals for the mere fear of being
alone or the mere joy of being together.
All this is illustrated with great clearness in
that event which has a profound interest as
marking the first recorded time when Jesus ever
deliberately and of His own accord sought the
society of His fellow-men. He lingered behind
the group into which the mere circumstances of
84 The Influence of Jesus
His life had cast Him, and for Himself He sought
the venerable doctors in the Temple. What took
Him there ? To find Himself and to show them
to themselves. The two great, everlasting hu
man impulses, the impulse of the student seeking
to know himself, and the impulse of the mis
sionary seeking to enlighten men, these two,
which partial men call inconsistent and incom
patible with one another, burned with a single
flame the first no doubt the brightest, but yet
incapable of being separated from the other in
the soul of Jesus, as, among His brethren, He
began to "be about His Father s business."
In general, then, the social nature of man is
the provision at once for his most complete self-
consciousness and for his fullest activity and
efficiency. It was by losing His life in the mul
titude and mass of lives, in the body of the
humanity to which He belonged, that Jesus at
once found His own life and found the lives of
the lost whom He had come to seek. At the
very outset He bore witness that not in absolute
singleness, not in elemental unity and perfect
solitude of being, is the highest existence to be
On the Social Life of Man. 85
found. He recognized at once in man that
multiplicity and power of relationship within the
unit of humanity which makes the richness of
our human life. If it be so, as we believe it is,
that in the constitution of humanity we have the
fairest written analogue and picture of the Divine
existence, then shall we not say that the human
Christ gave us, in the value which He set on
human relationships, in His social thought of
man, an insight into the essentialness and
value of that social thought of God which we
call the doctrine of the Trinity ? May it not be
that only by multiplicity and interior self-relation
ship can Divinity have the completest self-con
sciousness and energy ? Surely, the reverent
and thoughtful eye must see some such meaning
when Jesus Himself makes the eternal compan
ionship of the life of Deity the pattern and pic
ture of the best society of the souls of earth, and
breathes out to His Father these deep and won
drous words, " As thou Father art in Me and
I in Thee, that they all may be one in Us."
Let us pass on now to examine in more detail
the social life of Jesus as it is written in the Gos-
86 The Influence of Jesus
pels, and to see, if we can, what suggestions come
from it to throw light upon the true methods of
all social living. It naturally divides itself into
the three sections into which all our relations to
our fellow-men fall ; and in that division it will
be natural for us to consider it. I shall speak
first of the natural relationships of Jesus with
individuals ; and then of His relation to the group
of disciples which was the rudimentary church j
and then of His relation to His country. The
purely social, the ecclesiastical, and the patriotic
life demand our study.
Every now and then there are flashes of
light upon the Gospel page which let us see what
a bright, sunny, sympathetic life the Savior lived,
how perfectly free from harshness and asceti
cism was that character which, at the same time,
carried a sweet and gentle seriousness and a
robust earnestness with it wherever it went.
" The son of man came eating and drinking, and
they say, a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a
friend of publicans and sinners." So Jesus Him
self described one day the current impression
that His life made upon the people of Jerusalem.
On the Social Life of Man. 87
The words are like an instantaneous photograph
of that far distant time. Where one s enemies
find chance to taunt, one s friends almost always
find occasion to be puzzled. In those words we
can see friends and enemies alike busied with the
strange life of Jesus, and only gradually finding
out that it was they who were strange, and not
He, gradually coming first to feel and then to
understand that this life of His, so bright and
yet so serious, so individual and yet so social,
had reached completely what their lives were
only crudely struggling after. The same feeling
broke forth upon another day. Jesus was supping
at a " great feast " in the house of Levi, no
sumptuous Venetian banquet, such as the great
master s hand has painted, but a half-barbaric
scene of profuse hospitality which merely told the
host s good-will, and the Pharisees looked on
and said, " Why do the disciples of John fast,
and likewise the disciples of the Pharisees, but
thine eat and drink?" They hated John the
Baptist, but they understood him. They found
him in the same region of spiritual endeavor in
which they lived themselves. They recognized
88 The Influence of Jesus
in him the same desire to realize individual
responsibility and the seriousness of life by iso
lation, by surrender, by cutting off everything
which by completing life should confuse it. Jesus
had pushed on where they could not follow Him.
He had gone into the very heart of the society
where men lose their individuality to find His,
and into the very centre of that world where
seriousness is ordinarily lost, to find there the
true solemnity of living.
For always there are these three possible
stages in every advancing moral and spiritual
life. There is, first, safety in simplicity ; and,
second, the loss of self in complication ; and then,
at last, the higher self-possession in a sym
metrical and harmonized multiplicity. They are
the stages which are represented by childhood
and young manhood and middle life, in every
complete career. The child, with his simple,
serene, uncomplicated thought of life, seems
master of himself ; the young man, tossed like a
helpless swimmer in the midst of the billowy
world, has lost himself; the man of middle age,
who has reached the profoundest faiths and prin-
On the Social Life of Man. 89
ciples of living, has found himself, and lives in
a steady self-possession which is to the child s
security like the noonday to the dawn. Now
the Pharisees were children. They were afraid
of life. They wanted to perpetuate childhood
by keeping it out of the power of life. John
Baptist s disciples, too, were children ; only the
difference was that their great master knew that
the true childhood does not last, but turns to
something greater. He sent his disciples forth
into life, the life of exposure, and so the life
of true attainment, when he pointed them to
Jesus and said, " Behold the Lamb of God which
taketh away the sins of the world," not merely
stifles them and keeps them down, but " taketh
them away."
Nowhere is Jesus satisfied until He himself
has reached, and till He has led His disciples
on towards, this third region of completed char
acter, and made them possess themselves, not in
solitude, where character would be so much easier
and so much more imperfect, but in contact with
the world. I know that we lose much of the
beauty of His treatment, both of Himself and
The Influence of Jesus
of His servants, when we feel about in its clear
depths for conscious and definite intentions. I
know that He, above all men, did what He did
because He was what He was, from a deepei
necessity than any deliberate persuasion that
His disciples needed this or that teaching at this
or that special time. But still, as we formulate
the impulses of nature into the laws of nature,
and find reasons, which the winds and suns do
not care themselves to know, why they should
blow and shine just as we feel and see them,
reasons true, though not the truest or the deep
est, so we may dare to say about the acts of
Jesus, " He must have done this act for this," if
we can only keep the deeper knowledge that He
did every act just as He did it because He was
Jesus, and could not do it otherwise. Using such
reverent liberty, I think we may love to study
the way in which He opened every social event
into its deeper meaning, so that the men who
were in danger of losing themselves in the crowd
might really find themselves, might enter into a
self-possession there which they could not attain
in solitude. Let us look at a few.
On the Social Life of Man. 91
Jesus went one day to a marriage feast at the
little town of Cana. Why did He go ? I knov
no reason except that for which we go to where
our friends are happy, to make them know
that we are glad because of their happiness.
When He came there, the rooms were full of
men and women, all vividly conscious that they
belonged to one another. Husbands and wives,
brothers and sisters, all degrees of kinship, all
kinds of cousins, all feeling their common blood
upon this family holiday. To Him, the grave,
strong, sweet-faced man who stood among them,
so familiar yet so strange, they were His Father s
children. They had forgotten that. They were
so absorbed in their brotherhoods that they had
forgotten their Father. The miracle which Jesus
did was like the opening of a window upward,
so that that truth shone down upon them. They
were giving one another bread and meat in token
of their brotherhood. Suddenly Jesus spoke to
the water in the jars, and there was wine before
them, so suddenly, so mysteriously, so apart from
any ministry which they were doing to each
other, that they looked into one another s facet
92 The Influence of Jesus
and felt divinity. They said, " Our Father must
be here. We are not only brothers, we are
children. Let us remember that." And each
remembered it the better because he did not
drink the mysterious wine alone, but saw his
brethren drinking it beside him. Each found
himself the child of God more easily because of
the fragment of the universal family in which
the wonder and awakening came to him.
Or turn again to one of the scenes of which I
spoke in the last lecture. Jesus went once to
supper in a ruler s house. Again the conscious
ness of brotherhood lay like a rich atmosphere
through the great, softly lighted hall. While
they are eating, behold a poor creature comes
creeping in, and casts herself at the feet of the
honored Guest, and begins (what other words can
describe it except those dear words of the story ?)
to " wash His feet with her tears, and did wipe
them with the hairs of her head, and kissed His
feet and anointed them with the ointment." Jesus
looked up, and with clear, brave, simple words
told the perplexed company that she was one
of them, able to love, able to trust, able to be
On the Social Life of Man. 93
forgiven. What then? All these are privileges
and powers of childhood knowing a fatherhood
above it. The guests listened ; and as when a
group of men, all prosperous, all respectable,
brothers to one another, talking together, see
suddenly among them one, their brother too,
but poor, sick, wretched, pitiable, and then their
thoughts turn back to the house where they all
were children, and the father who was father
to them all ; as the very sight of inequality
compels the simple sense of brotherhood to
complete itself with the memory of fatherhood ;
so, when Jesus lifted this poor creature up and
said, as He looked round upon the upright,
reputable men, "This is your sister," the brother
hood that filled the hall warmed with the deeper
memory of fatherhood, and the guests found
their childhood to God in the strange society of
the noblest of His sons and the most degraded
of His daughters.
There was one house where Jesus went very
often, the cottage of Mary and Martha and
Lazarus at Bethany. There He lived not merely
a social but a domestic life, not merely a life
94 The Influence of Jesus
of society, but a life of home. In that house,
brotherhood and sisterhood bloomed into such
perfect flower that it has been fragrant and
beautiful to all the generations. They were
religious people. No doubt each of them in soli
tude strove after and found the fatherhood of
God. But we can well imagine that when they
were together it was their brotherhood and sis
terhood that was most prominent. And what
did Jesus do for them ? Silver and gold, like
His disciple, He had none ; but such as He
had, His own supreme consciousness, such as He
was, He gave to them. One day He told the
anxious elder sister that there was a " better
part " in life than the most faithful work for the
comfort of brother and of sister. He taught her
His own lesson, that man cloth not live by bread
alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of
the mouth of God his Father. On another sol
emn day He allowed the household life to feel
the shock of death and to be broken, in order
that He might call upon His Father and their
Father to restore it by what was like to a new
birth. And as the coming of a child into a
On the Social Life of Man. 95
household breaks open its narrowness to let in
the broad thought of God, so the brotherhood
and sisterhood of Bethany must have been deep
ened and filled with the consciousness of sonship
and daughtership, whenever that boy-man
young forever with something of the perpetual
youth of those who have passed through the
grave and come out in the timeless life beyond
went about among them.
I turn to one scene more. Jesus was teaching
one day in the Temple, doing His Father s busi
ness, and some one told Him that far off, on the
outside of the crowd, His mother and His broth
ers were waiting to talk with Him. He paused
perhaps a moment, as if pondering whether He
should leave His work, and then, just, it seems
to me, as if He stooped down and took hold of
the human relationship which had been offered
Him, and turned it over to show men its diviner
side, He looked around and said, " Who are My
mother and My brethren ? " And then, stretch
ing out His hand to His disciples, "These are
My mother and My brethren." It was as if H
said, "Motherhood and brotherhood are true anJ
g6 The Influence of Jesus
real only within the fatherhood of God. When
ever that common fatherhood is real, there is a
true relationship to which the tender associations
of earthly kinship are in themselves inferior.
The earthly kinships are the symbol of this
celestial reality. The beauty of the household is
in the reality, not in the symbol. The symbol
and the reality belong together. My brothers
and My mother after the flesh do represent to
Me, as no other beings can, the dear fatherhood
of God, the relations of eternity. But sometimes
the symbol must wait, lest it hinder instead of
helping the reality." Therefore, Mary waited
while Jesus went on and preached to those
whom He claimed as " brother and sister and
mother," because they were doing the will of
His Father which was in heaven.
All these are illustrations. In every one of
them, I take it, the meaning is the same. Jesus
begins with the individual. He always does.
His first and deepest touches are upon the single
soul. Before all social life there is the personal
consciousness and its mysterious private rela
tions to the Father from whom it came. The
On tJie Social Life of Man. 97
father cannot teach his boy so early that God
shall not have taught him first. The mother
cannot drop such soft, unconscious influence
into her child s soul that it shall not find the soul
itself already full of the influence of God. In the
individual experience man s life always begins.
But there are some things of the individual life
which the individual cannot get save in the com
pany of fellow-men. There are some parts of
his own true life always in his brethren s keeping,
for which he must go to them. That the indi
vidual may find and be his own truest and fullest
self, Jesus, his Master, leads him to his fellows.
The wedding guest at Cana, the Pharisee at
Levi s table, the sisters with their restored
brother, the brothers of the Lord in the house
of the carpenter, all, just as soon as Jesus
sanctified and blessed the society in which they
lived, saw coming to them as it were out of the
heart of that society a selfhood which no solitary
contemplation could have gained. Each of them
found his Father among his brethren, reached
God through the revelation of other human
lives.
7
98 The Influence of Jesus
This is the fundamental truth out of which
comes the regulative law of Jesus about social
life. Society does not exist for itself, but for the
individual ; and man goes into it not to lose, but
to find himself. The ancient society, the heathen
society of to-day, whether in some savage island
or in some fashionable parlor, is ready always to
sacrifice the personal nature, the individual soul.
As if society itself were an object worthy of per
fecting for its own value, it overwhelms individ
ual character and pitilessly sees lives lost in its
great whirlpool. I think the great charge that
Jesus, if He spoke to-day, would bring against our
modern social life, our present society, as it in
large part exists, would be this. He would see
its impurity ; He would recognize the falseness
that pervades it ; He would turn away from its
sordidness with disappointment ; but, most of
all, He would miss in it that power to cultivate the
personal life of the individual by the revelation of
the divine side of human existence which is every
where His ideal of social living. It is not always
so. There are small groups of men gathered on
such high ground that each of them becomes
On the Social Life of Man. 99
aware of himself, of his capacities and duties, in
the association with his brethren. Especially
there are .friendships, the sympathetic meeting of
man and man, in which each knows himself as he
could not in solitude. But our ordinary life with
one another, what, in the language of the world,
we call society, has so left and lost the spontane-
ousness of natural impulse and so failed to attain
the highest conception of itself as the family of
God, it so hangs fast in the dull middle regions
of conventional propriety and selfish expediency,
that it becomes not the fountain, but the grave, of
individuality. Men go to it to escape themselves.
Men dread it, as they grow older, for younger
men, because its influences seem to be fatal to
original and positive character. Men flee to soli
tude to recruit their personality. Nowhere do
we find on earth that picture of society recon
structed by the idea of Jesus, society around the
throne of God, which shines out upon us from
the mysterious promises of the Apocalypse ; the
glory of which society is to be this, that while
the souls stand in their vast choruses of hundreds
of thousands, and all chant the same anthems
ioo The Influence of Jcsm
and all work together in the same transcendent
duties, yet each bears the sacred name written
on the flesh of his own forehead, and carries in
his hand a white stone, on which is written a new
name which no man knoweth saving he that
receiveth it. It is individuality emphasized by
company, and not lost in it, because the atmos
phere in which the company is met is the idea oi
Jesus, which is the fatherhood of God.
And here we come where we can understand
some other things which the great Teacher
said, which, if they stood alone, would puzzle us
hopelessly. Here He is, in His mountain sermon,
telling of what is to be the issue of His work. It
is almost as if He spoke in reverie. He hardly
seems to be speaking to the people, or to be con
scious of them. He seems to be reading for the
first time a page of the future which has never
opened to Him before ; or to be rereading one
which, however often He may read it, is forever
new and wonderful. " Think not that I am come
to send peace on the earth," He says ; "I came
not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to
set a man at variance against his father, and the
On the Social Life of Man, 101
daughter against her mother, and the daughter-
in-law against her mother-in-law : and a. .nan s
foes shall be they of his own household." And
at another time, when He looked around, and saw
a superficial multitude following Him, He seemed
seized with that desire which many a true man
has felt, to test and sift the allegiance that
seemed to be gathering only too easily. He
paused and turned, and stopped the crowd that
was pursuing Him, and He cried out across their
heads, so that the farthest heard Him, " If any man
come to Me and hate not his father and mother
and wife and children and brethren and sisters,
he cannot be My disciple." There is almost
defiance in the words. But they seem to me to
be like so many words of Jesus which we cannot
understand if we think of Him only as a teacher,
only as a giver of lessons to men whom He
counted His pupils. We must think of Jesus as
a soul, undergoing experiences, living a life all
through those years, or else the Gospels are a
very dead and barren book. And if we have
known what it is to look forward and see, with
terror which yet is glorified by hope, that the
IO2 The Influence of Jesus
great purpose on which our heart is set is to be
won only by first casting it, with seeming reck
lessness, away, if, for instance, we have seen that
we must lay the foundations of a boy s true faith
upon the very ruins of what he has been calling
his creed ; if the reformer, full of the visions
of a bright, free, happy land, knows often
that he must take the firebrand and set the land
on fire before he can begin his work ; if every
one of us has had to disturb the unreal quiet of
what called itself a friendship in order that we
might be deeply and truly a friend to some heart
which he coveted, if all these are familiar things,
then we can understand how the Rebuilder of
human life about the fatherhood of God dwelt
with pathetic certainty upon the destruction that
must come before that construction could begin.
The more intensely He knew the preciousness of
the end, the more necessary and the more terrible
became the seeming sacrifice of that end over which
He must go to reach it. The more He gloried,
with His heart full of the memories of heaven, in
the prospect of the re-established family of God,
where each child should find his own distinctive
On the Social Life of Man. 103
childhood in the common filial life of all, so much
the more He saw with sadness, but with certainty,
that the merely human groupings of men, in
which each man lost his own true self among his
brethren, must be broken up. The more He
longed to see the Temple full of consecrated wor
shippers, the more ruthlessly He drove out the
barterers and hucksters who had monopolized its
courts.
The key, then, to all Christ s treatment of
man s social life lies here, in the constant de
sire to foster the consciousness of divine sonshij
by intercourse with those who are fellow-sons of
the same Father. And here we see what is
meant by the constant alternation, the effort after
balance, as it were, between society and solitude,
first in the life of Jesus himself, and then in the life
which He enjoined on His disciples. Think over
some of the purely solitary moments which Jesus
passed. No sooner was His work fairly begun, no
sooner was He completely consecrated to it, than
the Spirit, His Spirit, took Him away from the
company of His home, and the solitude of the
Temptation followed. The need of realizing
IO4 The Influence of Jesus
Himself had come. He must struggle into the
knowledge of what it meant to be in the world.
He must meet the devil of doubt and of despair.
It is a most mysterious event, but its mystery is
of that sort which becomes more and more myste
rious to us, not because it is so unlike, but because it
is so like, what goes on in our own careers. That
is always the most wonderful sort of mystery.
Jesus, there in the desert, shakes His life free, as
it were, from the shell of childhood, and thereby,
for the first time, takes possession of the perfectly
childlike soul. He is a man, and the secret which
manhood whispers into His ear in that moment of
initiation, a secret not new and yet forever
new, because it is infinite, is simply that God is
His Father. Care, obedience, trust, the holding
back of the life until the Father bids it go, the
sending forth of the life wherever the Father de
mands it, these, which are the elements of con
scious childhood, Jesus took up there in the desert.
That totality of life, that unity of it in a single con
ception and a single use, which often afterwards
cameso grandly from His lips, it must have been
there in the desert that He came to know it first.
On the Social Life of Man. 105
All that was done in solitude. And then, when the
idea is there, when the core and centre of life has
been set, He comes down, and instantly He draws
near to men and draws men to Him. About that
core, both for its own satisfaction and safety and
for the blessing of the lives He summons, He must
group the souls into a society. He sees Simon
Peter and Andrew, and they are no sooner with
Him than James and John are beckoned with a
bright gesture or challenged with a ringing word
from their half-mended nets ; and then, with
them around Him, He plunges into populous Gali
lee, and all its villages begin to know His face and
watch for His coming, and make their contribution
to His company. Solitude makes the conscious
ness ; society develops, multiplies, and confirms
it. That which would have remained only a
quality in Him, if He had stayed in the desert,
becomes a life when He goes forth into the world.
What Goethe wisely says of all men does not
lose its truth when we are thinking of the Son of
Man : " A talent shapes itself in stillness, but a
character in the tumult of the world." This is
Christ s balance between solitude and society.
ioo The Influence of
Each makes the other necessary. With us they
often lose this value, because they are not set in
any relation to each other. Solitude is barren,
and so society is frivolous. Solitude creates no con
sciousness for society to ripen. Solitude is like an
unfertile seed, and society is like an unplanted
ground. Each craves the other, not because it
wants its complement, but because it is tired of
itself and longs to change.
I think there is something exquisitely beauti
ful in the unerring play of this balance in the life
of Jesus. Not more surely does the night open
into day than solitude fulfils itself with company.
Once and again He goes apart into a mountain
and prays by Himself all night. No one is there but
Him and God. The silence is like heaven about
Him. But as the morning comes a new need cer
tainly comes with it. No longer loneliness, but
company ; not solitude, but voices ; and so the
earliest light finds Him among the crowd of His
disciples choosing His twelve apostles, or walking
across the boisterous waters of Gennesaret to
join His toiling servants in their boat. Every
body must have felt how the two needs trera-
On the Social Life of Man. 107
ble in response to one another in the intense
atmosphere of that vivid night before His cru
cifixion. It seems as if He took great deep
draughts of the idea of His life, of the father
hood of His Father, as if it entered by great
waves into His soul, and as if each wave so
overwhelmed the soul it filled that He needed
to reassure and recover Himself in the familiar
company of His disciples. First there is the long
conversation of the Supper. Then comes the
terrible solitude of the Garden of Gethsemane.
Again and again the Sufferer comes wandering
back to where the tired and unconscious men
are lying. It is as one who was passing through
some deep experience might go into the chamber
where a child was sleeping and find relief when
the burden of the solitary crisis was too great to
bear. Then, as the Lord s career sweeps more
and more into that channel where it must run
alone, where none can share it, how, still, the
craving for society seems to beat responsive to
every new throb of suffering ! He turns and
looks at Peter ; He would almost open his heart
to Pilate ; He looks back and tells the women
io8 The Influence of Jesus
who follow him to Calvary about the future of
the beloved land that murdered Him; and at
last, even upon the cross, He has mercy to give
to the robber at His side, and care still for
His mother and the disciple whom He loved.
Every moment of deepening communion with
His Father has its corresponding moment of
sympathy with His brother men. The two halves
of the great heart die together as they have lived
together. The balance trembles more and more
lightly as the life beats lower, but it trembles
still even to the last, and Jesus ceases to love
only when He ceases to live.
And this same poise and mutual supply which
was between society and solitude in the life of
Jesus Himself He was always trying to establish
in the lives of those whom He taught. One day
He cured a man of lunacy. It was a deep mys
tery to the poor creature. He wanted to go
with Jesus, to leave his house and friends and
country, to hide his life under the shelter of this
power of God, and to study it forever. Jesus
quietly lays the finger of His authority upon the
other scale and says, " Go h me to thy friends."
On the Social Life of Man. 109
Another day He raises a dead girl to life, and,
just as the glad father and mother and all the
eager friends are rushing forth into the street to
tell their joy and wonder, He lifts his finger and
says, " See that no man knows it ! " And so
it is always with the separate scholars of His
school. Peter wants to stay upon the mountain
of transfiguration, and his Master leads him
down among the needs of men, to where the
poor boy with the unclean spirit is foaming and
raving at the mountain s foot. Nicodemus sits
with Him in the midnight chamber. The next
time we see him he is saying a timid word for
the Lord in the Sanhedrim. The woman of
Sychar fulfils the quiet conversation at the
well by the impetuous seeking of the men whom
she knew in the city, that they might be the
sharers of her joy. Everywhere the solitary
completes itself in the social. Solitude shapes
and colors the precious forms of character which
then the furnace of society burns to solidity
and brilliancy and permanence.
I am often struck by seeing how the loftiness
of the life of Jesus altogether escaped the per-
no The Influence of Jesu*
plexity of many of the questions with which our
lives are troubled, as the eagle flying through
the sky is not worried how to cross the rivers.
We debate whether self-culture or our brethren s
service is the true purpose of our life. We vacil
late aimlessly. Now we shut ourselves up and
meditate and try to grow. Now we rush forth
and make the wide world ring with what we
call our work. The two so often have no con
nection with each other. We are so apt to live
two lives. But Jesus knows but one. All cul
ture of His soul is part of our salvation. All
doing of His work is ripening His nature. Jesus
in the still night far off upon a solitary hill-top,
Jesus in broad daylight dragged by a hooting
mob from Pilate s judgment-seat to Calvary, both
of them are Jesus saving the world ; both of
them are Jesus living His life. And not until
our brawling ceases and the champion of each
side of the question rounds his truth with his
adversary s truth which he has been denouncing,
not until the apostle of self-culture knows that
no man can come to his best by selfishness, and
the apostle of usefulness knows that no man can
On the Social Life of Man. 1 1 1
do much for other men who is not much him
self, not until then shall men have fairly started
on the broad road to the completeness of God
their Father in the footsteps of the Son of Man.
It remains only to speak of one or two of the
special exhibitions of the social life of Jesus in
illustration of what I have been saying. One
of the most interesting is His treatment of men
in classes. It is always saved from the extrava
gance and grotesqueness into which the empha
sis of class lines tends to run by the strong value
of the individual life which lay at the bottom of
His consciousness. Indeed, I think that as one
reads that interesting story of how the various
groups of men came up to John the Baptist and
received his teaching about their special duties,
first " the people," then " the publicans," and
then "the soldiers," one feels how different
that is from anything in the life of Jesus. He
deals, indeed, with the great classes into whicli
men were divided in His time. He was known
as the friend of publicans. He cried aloud be
fore the multitude, " Woe unto you, Scribes and
Pharisees," but He was no partisan of wealth nor
112
any more of poverty ; whoever listened to Him
could not help feeling that in His view the class
was good or bad only as it made the individual
good or bad, and that no class condition could
overrule the essential condition of the personal
souls within it. Here is where all party spirit
shows its viciousness. Here is where all social
ism shows its weakness. Here is where all the
weak idolatry of organic methods fails. It loses
sight of the final unit in its watch over some
of the accidental and temporary combinations of
mankind. The final unit is the man. And that
unit of value was never out of the soul of Jesus.
After the day when He told them the story
which they never could forget, of how there was
a man with a hundred sheep and how one of
them wandered from the flock and got astray
among the hills, and of how the shepherd left all
the rest and went and found that one and came
down out of the hills si-nging, with the rescued
sheep across his shoulders, after that keynote
of the preciousness of the individual had been
struck, it never ceased to be heard through
everything that Jesus said and did. When He
On the Social Life of Man. 1 13
sat at rich men s tables His proud hosts knew
that it was not because they were rich but be
cause they were men that He had come to them.
When He entered poor men s huts they knew that
it was not their poverty but their manhood that
He honored. And that which, on the whole, has
kept Christianity from becoming the religion of
any class as against other classes, that which
has always made it able, just when it seemed
on the point of lending itself to such monopoly,
to break out of the grasp of those who would put
it to such partisan and partial use, has been the
healthy and ineradicable individualism which is
at its heart. Men cry to-day, " Christianity is the
religion of the rich and comfortable," and while
they speak their cry is drowned in the rush of
the poor, the hungry, and the wretched to some
common men s revival. They cry again. " The
Christian belief belongs to the ignorant," and lo,
the wisest thought of the world comes back
again as it is ever coming to the mystery of
Christ and of His treatment of the soul of man.
It is not that they have mistaken the class to
which they should assign the Christian faith.
114 "The Influence of Jesus
Their mistake has been in giving it to any class.
It belongs to the individual. It always has its
eye fastened on him. One of the noblest func
tions of Christianity in the world is to lie be
hind the class crystallizations of mankind, like a
solvent into which they shall return and blend
with one another, to crystallize, no doubt, again,
but always to be reminded that the classes into
which they crystallize are lesser facts than the
manhood into which they are repeatedly dis
solved.
We must put here, no doubt, the deep interest
with which Jesus looked always at the young.
He was talking of deep and difficult things, and
through the crowd there came a little company
of women bringing their children for Him to
bless. Instantly He turned aside from the grown
men and women, and, waving His disciples inter
ference back, His hands were on the little won
dering creatures heads. And when a young
man came with a puzzled question, the teller of
the story years afterwards remembered the look
which was in the eyes of Jesus as He answered
him. " Jesus beholding him loved him," Mark
On the Social Life of Man. 115
writes. In both these stories, and perhaps still
more in the way in which He surrounded Him
self with that garland of vigor and enthusiasm,
the cluster of young men whom He called His
disciples, everywhere there is the value set on
youth. And youth is the period of individual
life, of individual hope. Class life has not be
gun. The child of the king and the child of
the beggar will play together if no older wisdom
or folly interferes. Nay, the queen who will not
let the beggar s fingers touch her robe will take
the beggar s baby in her arms and clasp it to
her bosom. He who touches a child of any class
touches, as it were, the undivided humanity, and
his touch may be felt anywhere through all its
classifications. He who speaks to the infant
speaks to mankind behind the Babel of its di
visions. No wonder that Socrates was accused
at Athens that he corrupted the youth. No
wonder that Jesus said of little children, " Of
such is the kingdom of Heaven."
Another interesting point in the social life of
Jesus is His courtesy. There is perhaps, no
part of our life that is so unres 1 and unsatisfac
1 1 6 The Influence of Jesus
tory, none of which we find it so hard to give
an account to ourselves, as the courtesy which
we pay to one another. And there is none
which, in the life of Jesus, is more thoroughly
satisfactory and perfect. I find the secret of it
in the clear perception and value of the per
sonal life behind the class condition of which we
have just been speaking. True courtesy gets its
essence from honor of the individual, while it
gets its special form from consideration of the
class condition. I may be just as courteous to the
beggar as to the king, but I do not treat them
both alike. Now, when Jesus met the woman
of Samaria at the well He honored her ; He val
ued and reverenced her soul. When He met
Pontius Pilate, He honored him. When He
dealt day after day with the ripening treachery
of Judas Iscariot, He honored him. When He
found John the Baptist making the door ready
through which He was to enter on His work,
He honored him. The spiritual nature, the
special humanity, of each of them seemed to
Him, not in any mere fiction but in simple truth,
to be a beautiful and precious thing. His honor
On the Social Life of Man, 117
for that was the soul of His courteousness. And
then the special words He said, whether of sym
pathy or of rebuke, might be just what the spe
cial occasion bade them be. Different as the)
were, they were all courteous alike because of
this personal honor and value that filled them
all. There is no complete courtesy that has not
such a soul and such a body, a soul of honor
for the individual, living in and uttering itself
through the intelligent recognition of the class
condition.
Or, look at the way in which this principle
governs all the treatment by Jesus of the hard
question of privilege. Privilege, which is a per
vading, obstinate fact in the world, becomes an
exasperating fact from the crude confusion of
personal nature with official life or accidental
circumstances. Let the two be finely and con
stantly discriminated, and privilege loses the
largest part of its obnoxiousness, loses all its
obnoxiousness for the best and noblest men.
Perhaps this discrimination was never more finely
or clearly made than on that day when, after one
of the discussions with the rulers of the people.
1 1 8 The Influence of Jesus
in which they had tried to browbeat Him with
the authority of their position, Jesus quietly
turned to the multitude and His disciples and
said to them, " The Scribes and the Pharisees sit
in Moses seat. All therefore whatsoever they
bid you observe, that observe and do, but do not
ye after their works." I can easily conceive of
how the scales may have dropped from the eyes
of some ingenuous Jew as he listened to those
words. Behold, it was possible to own and
recognize these men s position, and yet not be
obliged to call them good when they were bad, or
great when they were little. Behold, one might
keep his own intellect and conscience true, and
yet not seize the sword to destroy all present
social order. Behold, one might obey present
authority, and yet be expectant of the coming
day when only the best should rule. To the
listener who heard all that in the words of Jesus,
the privilege of the Scribes and Pharisees was
no longer an exasperation. His hate and envy
of them turned to pity. There might be other
men not morally within the sound of the Lord s
voice, who would still be jealous of the soft cush-
On the Social Life of Man. 1:9
ions and the pompous words of the men who sat
in Moses s seat ; but they were only Scribes and
Pharisees out of office emulating the vices of
the Scribes and Pharisees who happened to
be in.
As Jesus in His earthly life was always feeding
His human nature out of the Divine nature on
which it rested in mysterious unity, so were His
special judgments always drawing largeness and
truth from the simple and eternal principles
which lay below them in His consciousness.
This was the secret both of His boldness and
His prudence. Indeed, I think that we can
hardly speak of Jesus as either bold or prudent
in the way in which we speak of other men.
The region of principles, of absolute righteous
ness and truth, lies above the consciousness of
prudence and of boldness ; and it was in that
region that He lived and moved. An illustration
of this is found in His dealing with yet another
of the perplexing questions of men s social life.
They brought to Him, one morning in the Tem
ple, the poor shame-stricken creature whom they
had arrested in adultery. And Jesus, no doubt
I2O The Influence of Jesus
seeing first that He had touched her conscience,
bade her go free and live a better life, in a way
that must have seemed, even to thoughtful and
sympathetic Jews, to open the door to dangerous
license in family life and personal chastity. Then,
when perhaps this impression was still fresh in
the minds of men, there came another morning.
Jesus was in Judea again. And one day His old
enemies, the Pharisees, remembering, perhaps,
what He had said to the wretched woman,
began to ask Him about marriage and di
vorce. And then Jesus amazed them with the
lofty stringency of His ideas. He went back
beyond Moses. What Moses had allowed He
would allow no longer. " Whosoever shall put
away his wife, except it be for fornication, and
shall marry another," He declares, " committeth
adultery." But along with His decree comes the
deep principle on which it is based, " Have ye
not read that He which made them at the begin
ning made them male and female ? " It all goes
back to the creation. It is part of the birthright
of man from the hand of his Father, this right of
the wife to the husband and of the husband to
On the Social Life of Man. 121
the wife. It is no mere arrangement for the
good order of society. It is in the very nature
of the children of God. It is in this fundamental-
ness of its character that the secret of His large
treatment of it lay. If it had been an arbitrary
rule of society, it could not have been trifled with.
A single indulgence would have scattered it for
ever. But an essential principle has flexibility
which an arbitrary rule cannot have. A mere
rule-maker can have no personal considerations.
But God, in whom all principles reside, from
whom they all proceed, finds room for personal
discrimination and education within the applica
tion of His principles. It is the depth of His
government that makes the specialness of His
government. It is because His government
comes out of the profoundest secrets of His
character, that it is able to adapt itself to all the
individual peculiarities of our lives. Who can
say how this truth may affect that seeming con
flict between the law of God and the mercy of
God which has driven men to shape for them
selves such strange and artificial doctrines of
atonement ? And it is in the wonderful com-
122 The Influence of Jesus
bination of the vast and transcendental with the
minute and the familiar in Him who was both
"conceived of the Holy Ghost" and also "born of
the Virgin Mary," that the fitness of the Savior
not merely for the rescue of the soul, but for the
salvation of society, is found.
I have dwelt so very long upon the influ
ence of Jesus upon the general social life of
man, that not many moments are left to speak
of His life in the Church and in the State, which
were parts of the subject that I undertook to
treat. But not many moments are needed for
the little that I want to say on each. I am not
called upon to write an ecclesiastical or a political
treatise. I only want to try to see, according to
the simple picture which the Gospel gives us,
how these two great organisms which have so
filled history with their power, the Church and
the State, looked in the eyes and stood forth
in the words of the deep, transparent man of
Judea and Galilee whose influence we have been
endeavoring to feel.
Of the Church of Jesus I think we nevei
On the Social life of Man. 123
cease to be surprised when we see, as we read
the Gospels with eyes out of which the mist of
ecclesiastical history has been wiped, how natu
rally and simply and artlessly it was the expres
sion of the life of Jesus. I wish that I could
tell the story with as entire an absence of the
institutional and magical and artificial air which
the subsequent centuries have breathed around
it as it has while it lies shining there in that un
conscious and immortal story.
The great French writer who has told the
story of the life of Jesus has at least revived for
us one picture which we had almost lost be
hind the curtaining mists of the long Christian
history. He has shown us the Master walking
with His group of disciples along the borders
of Gennesaret, now lingering in a little village,
now traversing a field of corn, now pausing on
the high bluff beyond Capernaum that overlooks
the lake, now sitting in the boat and talking to
His friends while they were fishing. A curious
picture the Frenchman has made out of the
scene. It is partly an idyl of careless peasants,
partly a conclave of conspirators, partly a sym-
124 The Influence of Jews
posium of philosophers. It is half Arf;adia and
half the Agora of Athens. But through all the
confused conception this at least is kept, a
clear, fresh sense of personal companionship,
of a group gathered and held about a personal
centre, and gradually becoming fired with the
idea with which that central life was burning,
until, regenerated by that idea itself, the group
became the regenerating power of the world. If
we look simply at the transparent story of the
Gospels, that picture gives us, beyond all doubt,
the cradle, the cell-life, of the Christian Church.
The history is full of human nature. The open
ing life of Jesus was full of His consciousness
that He was the Son of God. The ambition of
which His soul was full was the desire to let
men know that they, too, were the sons of God,
and to rescue them into the full enjoyment of
their sonship. That desire gave to the young
man s opening life a relationship to all humanity.
All these men about Him were His unconscious
brethren, the unconscious children of the Father
in whose life all His life was bound up. I can
think of the boy Jesus, as this consciousness
On the Social Life of Man. 125
grew in Him, going from day to day with deep
ening awe about the streets of the Galilean vil
lage which was His world. The men who laid
their hands upon His head, the women who
chattered to Him with their motherly good-will
the boys and girls He played with, it was
dawning upon Him that these were all children
of His Father. But by and by, out of the multi
tude, began to gather about Him those in whom
this consciousness of His awoke some kindred
consciousness. A young man here, a woman
there, sometimes a very child, with a child s
insight and a child s strange outlook, all these
began to find themselves interpreted in Him.
Their deepest questions of their own life found
some answer in what they saw Him being every
day. The process was miraculous, was a wonder,
not in its kind, but in its degree, in the depth
to which it opened their souls and filled their
doubts with light. First came the mere attrac
tion of His presence and His person. Then it
was found that this attractior had its source in
a nature which they gradually came to know.
Then the sight of this nature became a revela-
126 The Influence of Jesus
tion of their own possibilities ; a new life for
themselves, like His life, opened to them. Then
there gradually shone out from this revelation
its central idea, that which made their possibility
possible, that in whose full realization their
possibility should be perfectly attained. They
were the sons of God ; and then every kindness,
every self-sacrifice, every devotion of His life
with them, softened their lives more deeply with
love, for the more and more complete reception
of this transforming idea into their heart of
hearts. This little group of people, who had
more or less thoroughly learned what Jesus was
revealing every day, made up the slowly com
pacted company of the disciples. It seemed as
if it were going to stop there, perhaps. If it had,
there would have been only another sect added
to the many sects of religionists that filled the
world. But what came next ? One morning,
after Jesus had been praying on a mountain by
Himself all night, as soon as it was day, " He
called unto Him His disciples, and of them He
chose twelve whom also He named apostles."
Out of the heart of the discipleship comes the
On the Social Life of Man. 12?
apostleship. Out of the centre of the learning
comes the transmission. The inward tendency
reacts into the outward tendency. The idea of
Jesus, which has been revealing itself to a few
and enshrining itself in their experience, reclaims
its essential universalness ; and the best of the
learners are the first to be sent forth into the
world, which is the true partner in all that they
have found. Jesus says to the most earnest of
them all, " I will give unto thee the key of the
kingdom of heaven." He touches their experi
ence, and bids them remember all that they have
learned. " Ye are witnesses of these things,"
He declares. Some outward force gave sign of
the idea they carried. " He gave them power
over unclean spirits." All these things sur
rounded them with certain personal importance.
But after all it was only the necessary pulsing
forth of that which had been gathered inward
for the outward spring. It was He that really
went torth, and His going forth was the going
fortli of the Father whose revelation He was.
" He that receiveth you receiveth Me, and He
that receiveth Me receiveth Him that sent Me."
128 The Influence of Jesus
It is interesting to see how deep this relation
ship between discipleship and apostleship lies.
It bears witness at once that the influence of
Jesus is based upon and fed from a personal idea,
and also that it belongs to all the world. By
and by the outgoing Christian life began to draw
in upon itself again. The dogmatic ages came.
The apostles were again disciples. Then, once
again, there came the expansive impulse. The
later missionary work began. The newly elabo
rated doctrine, the deepened knowledge of God
the Father in Christ the Son, reached out and
craved to fill the world. It is the history of all
life, this history of the Christian Church. The
knowing of Jesus and the telling of Jesus minis
ter to and succeed each other, the scholar life
and the missionary life, the inward and the out
ward movement, the systole and diastole of the
Great Heart which beats eternally with the idea
of Jesus.
Let us dwell with what interest and delight
we will upon the rich history of the Church
which has come since, the germ and essence of
it all is in that body of disciples bound to each
On the Social Life of Man. 129
other by the revelation of their human sonship
to the Father. It is a family picture. The Lord s
Supper realized in the simplest way as the Fa
ther s table is its transparent sacrament. I would
let a man forget, or never know, all about councils
and bishops, all about corruptions and reforma
tions, all about creeds and confessions. If he
kept that picture, he would know the open secret
of the Christian Church. He would keep these
truths which are the great saving truths of eccle
siastical history, again and again submerged in
the waves of angry times, but forever reappear
ing in their power, the truth that the ministry
of the Church is not distinct from and above the
Church, but is only the Church itself in its utter
ance, doing and saying representatively what all
the Church in all its membership has the right
and the duty to say and do ; and the truth that,
as an elect body, the Church is but the type of
the complete humanity, elect, not that it may
be saved out of the world, but that the woild
may be saved by its witness and specimen of
what the whole world is in its idea. It is the
sons of the Father who have learned their son-
9
1 30 The Influence of Jesus
ship through the Son crying to all the family oi
God, and bearing witness that to be a son of man
is to be a child of the Almighty.
The church spire is nothing, after all, but the
elevated and prolonged house-roof. And so the
battlemented city wall is but the enlargement
and solidification of the simple fence that encloses
the familiar homestead. If the idea of Jesus is
the constructive power of the Christian Church,
it lies no less at the heart of the whole conception
of the State as He conceived it. Jesus was a
patriot. That sentiment which makes so much
of the poetry of the earth the love of men for
their native land was very strong in His
bosom. With our modern, half-personal, un-
localized ideas of Jesus, it must always be strik
ing sometimes it is startling to remember
that there was one little district of a few miles
square upon the surface of this earth which was
known as " His own country." That little group
of hills with the quiet valleys among them which
lies between Nazareth and the Sea of Tiberias
He loved as we love the streets or farms where
On the Social Life of Man. 131
we were born. And not very far off to the
southward lay the great city of His race, where
His feet never seemed to enter except solemnly,
and over which He wept with a lamentation
that is the type and pattern of every sincerest
patriot s most loving and unselfish sorrow for his
sinful land. And the great indignation with
which Jesus lashes the Scribes and Pharisees
has its primary meaning in that same passionate
remonstrance which the heart of every patriot
utters when the land he loves is so ruled by bad
hands that he cannot give his love free utterance
in approbation and support, but is compelled,
perhaps, to work against his country because he
must work for righteousness. No one who reads
the Gospels can miss these simple, recognizable
signs of the true patriotism of Jesus. But why
is it that His patriotism is a part of His life to
which we least often turn ? It is not only that
He lived a larger life and did a larger work,
which has far outreached the Jewish people and
touched us with its influence. There is some
thing in the quality of His patriotism which is
peculiar, which separates it from the patriotism
132 The Influence of Jesus
of the Athenian or the Roman. What is that
quality ? It is the constant predominance of the
sonship to God over the sonship to David in his
consciousness, making him always eager for the
land of David, because of the interests of God
which it enshrined. This is a distinct and defi
nite quality when it appears in a man s patriot
ism. It makes his patriotism fine and lofty
above the measure of the common patriotic feel
ing of mankind. It makes the patriot s relation
to his land very like the man s relation to his
body. The man loves his body. He works for
it by natural impulse. He is not always thinking
of the soul which the body contains, and which
gives to it its value. And yet it always is the
soul which makes the body worthy of his care
and work. The body without the soul the
poor dead corpse, or the beautiful or powerful
structure of an idiot is dreadful. No man can
work with healthy joy for them. And so it is,
as Jesus reveals and illustrates it to us, with ref
erence to a man s relation to his country. A
true man s patriotic impulse is spontaneous. It
springs up without thought. No conscious cal-
On the Social Life of Man. 133
culation makes me love the hills and valleys, the
streets and houses, of the land where I was born.
But yet, unless I know of something underneath
all this, I am not satisfied. My patriotism lives
and flutters as a sentiment unless I know that
the land I love is really making, by its constant
life, a contribution to the righteousness and prog
ress of the world. When I know that, then I set
my patriotic impulse free to act. My land be
comes to me merely the special spot where I am
placed to labor for the universal spiritual benefit
of man. Then the old Psalmist s words become
real to me ; and as I live my life of citizen or
public officer, as I take my office or cast my vote
or pay my tax, I say with David, " Because of
the house of the Lord our God, I will seek to do
thee good." Such was the perpetual, self-limited
character of the love of Jesus for His native
land.
I know that here is the essence of what most
men, as they look at history, are apt to dread to
day, of a theocracy, of a religious State and of
a State religion. If this which I have said be
true, if the State and its machineries be valu-
134 The Influence of Jesus
able to the Christian patriot, as His State was
valuable to Jesus, because of the spiritual in
terests which they enshrine, because of the
family life of man with God which they repre
sent, then why should he not ask that the
State should manifest its spiritual function to
the fullest degree by becoming distinctively and
openly the minister of Christ ? Why should he
not ask that Christianity, as he conceives it and
as it seems to him to be unspeakably important,
should be taught in the State schools ? Nay, why
should he not ask that only men distinctively
and positively Christian in belief and life should
be intrusted with the conduct of the nation ?
How can he live, how can he be a patriot, in any
land which is as purely secular in its administra
tion as all our lands are growing more and more
to be ? It is an urgent question. We can only
find its answer, I think, in two considerations
which \i(y man can ignore. One is that the ideas
and methods of spiritual men, and even of Chris
tian men, are so divergent from one another that
it is only on the broadest basis of the most gen
eral purposes of spiritual life that they can meet,
On the Social Life of Man. 135
not in their special methods or their special
creeds, but only in the desire and assertion of
righteousness and truth to which all their meth
ods and their creeds belong. The other consid
eration is that, even were all spiritual men at
one, they still might doubt whether it would be
well to make the government of their land the
agent and maintainer of their faith. Any ma
chinery of government which men have yet
devised is too coarse and clumsy for so delicate
a task as the inculcation and encouragement of
faith. Government works by compulsion ; faith,
by inspirations. Government lays its hand on
actions ; faith nestles into unseen affections.
Government estimates appearances ; faith looks
only at realities. And so government, though
all the land were unanimously and harmoniously
Christian, would still be a poor minister of Chris
tianity. These are the considerations which
make the Christian man consent to live in a
State whose chosen policy is secular, and yet
lets him feel that there are unowned spiritual
influences and powers in her to which he may
rejoice to lend his aid.
136 The Influence of Jesus
Let these considerations pass away, let all
the spiritual desire and aspiration of the land be
fused into a perfect unanimity of thought and
action, and let some new finer machinery of
governmental action be devised or developed
which shall be capable of spiritual uses ; and then
theocracy, a religious State, a State religion, a
national creed, a Christian public education, a
divine responsibility in every officer, all these
would be not merely conceivable, they would be
the only methods which the Christianized State
could think of for a moment. There could be
nothing secular in such a heavenly community
as that. Only it would be altered utterly from
what we see now. It would be the New Jeru
salem for which we hope, and not the old earthly
city which we know so well. At present we can
only keep it constantly before our eyes and
always proclaim it as the true ideal. We can,
and I think we ought to, earnestly assert, when
men praise it most loudly, that secularism, how
ever we may accept it cheerfully, as the only ex
pedient for the present time, is not the highest
nor the eternal type of government. We may
On the Social Life of Man. 137
strive, by that devotion to the spiritual element
in national life which even pure secularity of
public methods still leaves possible, to hasten
the day, which must come if Christ be what we
know He is, when the idea of Jesus shall be the
shaping and moving power of the Christian State ;
and among the happy sons of God the Son of
God shall evidently reign, as the old phrase de
scribes, " King of nations as King of saints."
I must not even stop to gather into a summary
what I have said to-night. I have spoken of the
principles which underlay and gave form and
color to the whole social life which Jesus lived ;
and then specially His life with His disciples
and His life with His nation. Those principles
were always the same. Jesus the Friend, the
Teacher, the Patriot, is always first Jesus the
Son of God.
The social influence of Jesus all issues from
the fatherhood of God which He reveals, and
into which He claims God s children. By it the
family, the Church, the State, exist. It is the
power of construction and reform and education
138 The Influence of Jesus.
As it is realized in each, the life of each becomes
exalted and inspired. It makes all history di
vine. And even the world that is not yet
becomes intelligible when we can look through
the glowing window of the revelation and see
the idea of Jesus still the constructive power of
the society of heaven. " I looked," says John,
" and lo ! a Lamb stood on Mount Zion, and with
Him an hundred and forty and four thousand
having His Father s name written in their fore
heads."
III.
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS
ON THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF MAN
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS
ON THE EMOTIONAL LIFE OF MAN.
AT 7E say that life is made up of joy and pain.
But it is not really so. At least, when we
speak in those words, we are talking of life only
in its most superficial sense. Joy and pain are
the expressions of life, but not life itself, not its
true substance. Far down beneath them both
lie the real processes of which they try to tell the
tale. And even the tale they try to tell they
cannot tell with certainty. The same essential
life which makes one man happy makes an
other man sad. And so even as symptoms they
perpetually mislead us. If I am really trying to
get at the quality of a man s living, it means very
little to me at first to know that he is a happy
man. I must know a great deal more about
him before I can make any use of the fact that
he is happy. And when we are trying to test
not the quality of another man s life but the
142 The Influence of Jesus
quality of our own, all of us who are thoughtful
discover very early that happiness or unhappi-
ness may mean very much or very little, that
there is a consciousness underneath sorrow and
joy into which we must penetrate, in which we
must live, before we can know our true lives.
And yet it is by joy and pain that lives mostly
communicate with one another. The man who
lacks emotion lacks expression. That which is
in him remains within him, and he cannot utter
it or make it influential. And on the other
hand the man who lacks emotion lacks recep-
tiveness. That which other men are, if it does
not make him glad or sorry, if it gives him
neither joy nor pain, does not become his. The
emotion of lives is the magnetism that they
emit, something closely associated with their
substance and yet distinct from it, in which
they communicate with one another. There is
a condition conceivable in which the emotions
should be so delicately and perfectly true to the
quality of the lives from which they issue that
they should furnish a perfect medium of com
munication. That would be a state of existence
On the Emotional Life of Man. 143
in which truth and goodness should inevitably
shine forth in gladness from the man who was
true and good, and should instantly be answered
in gladness from every other man on whom they
struck. The poet sings,
" Serene shall be our days, and bright
And happy shall our nature be,
When love is an unerring light,
And joy its own security."
The prophecy declares itself not yet fulfilled.
It is a noble, truthful condition for which we
are waiting. Until it comes he who would find
life must look behind joy and sorrow, and, while
He questions them, can never let their answers
pass unchallenged, must always cross-question
and examine them, and see what this especial
joy or sorrow means.
I am to speak to-day about the influence of
Jesus through joy and sorrow, the way, that
is, in which the life that was in Him came forth
from Him through His evident happiness and
suffering, and entered into other men through
the happiness and suffering that He awoke in
them. It is the study of a subtle history,
144 The Influence of Jesus
crowded with pathetic interest, which is going
on through all these years of the Gospels. As
I took up the subject it seemed to me to be
necessary that I should say first of all what I
have said, that both in Jesus and in those who
come under His influence there is something
behind the suffering and happiness in which
they meet each other, and that the happi
ness and suffering are but the light or the
aroma which come from the life behind. " Can
any connection be traced between the chemical
nature of a substance, or the conditions under
which it burns, and the nature of the light
which it emits?" That is the statement of
one of the most interesting problems which
natural science has met in this day of its many
triumphs, the problem whose study has led on
to the spectrum analysis and all its wonders
Can any true connection be reliably traced
between the way that a man lives and the joy
or sorrow that his life emits ? That is the cor
responding question in moral science for which
no man has yet devised its spectroscope, but
which, as it finds its solution more and more,
On the Emotional Life of Man. 145
must deepen a hundred-fold the intercourse of
man with man and man s understanding of
himself.
What, then, was it that lay behind the phe
nomena of pleasure and pain in Jesus ? First
of all, no doubt, experience, the simple doing
of acts and undergoing of contacts, without
regard to the emotions they produced. It is a
striking fact that many of the words which, in
long use of them, have become exclusively ap
propriated to pain originally belonged simply
to experience without reference to whether it
brought distress or pleasure. The old Greek
and Latin words from which our words for suf
fering come simply meant " to undergo," and
were used of the contact with happy as well as
with unhappy things. It was to touch and be
touched by the furniture of the great crowded
world. And even our English words which
are stained all through with the associations
of pain, the very word " suffering " itself, and
" patience " and " submission " and that hard
word "bear," they all essentially mean nothing
but experience. It is something taken on the
10
146 The Influence of yes us
back and carried, but that may be either a
burden under which the bent back groans, or
an inspiration and delight under which the
shoulders leap and grow buoyant as the proud
mother s arms do, when she carries her first
born child. Is it not a sign that human misery
overweighs human joy, or at least a sign that
men have come to think that there is far more
of pain than of happiness to be suffered in the
world, that the words of experience have come
to be words of sadness, as if the touch of life
must wound us all and make us sore ? At any
rate, the history of such words bears witness that
there is a conception of experience back of pain
and pleasure, in a region where the conception
of them has not yet been born, that the life,
which shows itself in enjoyment or distress, con
sists in the actions and contacts out of which
the enjoyment or distress proceeds. And so
our first step is to trace the real influential
life of Jesus back into the actual experiences
of His life. It is not essentially because He
was happy or was sad that He has such power
over men to-day. It is because of what He did
On the Emotional Life of Man. 147
It is because of His part in our human lot and
the way in which He bore that part. If He
had borne pain somewhere else, in some region
of transcendental experience which we could not
understand, whatever mysterious power might
have been attributed to that pain in influencing
the currents of the universe and its government,
it never could have come to any direct influence
upon the hearts and lives of men. And on the
other hand, if it had been possible for Him to live
our life and share our lot completely and yet
have known no pain, have passed in sunny joy
from Bethlehem to Olivet, His life would still
have been the influential power of the world.
That was not possible. To live a life like His
in such a world as ours, by a deep inevitable
necessity involved the pain. The cross was
the predestined seal on that experience. But
yet the experience is separable from the pain,
and it was in the experience, not in the pain,
that the true life abode.
This is the first step backward. But we can
not rest here. The mere experiences which
make up any man s career cannot really consti-
148 The Influence of Jesus
tute his life. They are too incoherent. Our
histories are not our lives. The idea of life is
unity. Experiences are manifold. Underneath
their superficial variety they must find unity
in some controlling law. They have no char
acter save what they get from it ; and without
character there is no true life. The next step
back, then, in the true life of Jesus is to the law
which lies behind the experiences, in which
must rest the reason and the meaning of His
going hither and thither and meeting this and
that man, now up to Jerusalem, now down to
Galilee, now sitting arguing with Nicodemus,
now pouring out His heart to His disciples, now
in calm dignity replying to the taunts of the
Pharisees. His own conception of the law of
life is clear enough. My meat is to do the
will of Him that sent Me," He once said. It
was God s will, not His own choice, not their
own fitness, not even directly the good of the
men about Him, that made him do the acts and
incur the contacts that filled up His days.
God willed these things. That was the unity
in which all His experiences found their con-
On the Emotional Life of Man. 149
sistency. That was the soil in which their roots
were set, from which they drew their nourish
ment. That, in the deeper meaning, was His
life ; the Law by which He lived, the will of God.
And yet there is another step. A law is not
the final life. It cannot be. Law is external,
but life is something which must fill every inmost
part of a man s being. It must think in his
brain, throb in his heart, and make the will leap
like a resolute muscle to its task. A law cannot
do that. It is not intimate enough. That must be
done by something which is part of the man him
self, something that is his own, some form in which
the world outside himself has passed into his being
and given itself to him, some conception which is
a fountain of force and inspiration. Now, all that
can only be fulfilled in some controlling and
inspiring idea, some idea or conception which,
taking possession of the intelligence, has then set
fire to the affections, and so possesses the whole
man. When you get back to that you can go
back no farther. Here, then, we are, where we
have started in each of our lectures. Here we
are, once again at the idea of Jesus. That idea,
150 The Influence of Jestts
as I conceive it, as I am sure you know by this
time that I conceive it, is the fatherhood of God
to man, to be made known by Jesus to mankind
through the clear manifestation of His own son-
ship to God. Ideas make for themselves laws
by their own inherent and divine creativeness
The law which Christ s sonship to God makes is
obedience to God. The way in which Christ s
obedience to God enters into Him and becomes
more than a rule of action, becomes the very
element in which He lives, is by its being per
petually fastened to, perpetually fed out of, His
idea that He was the Son of God. In that idea,
that fundamental conception of His mind, that
fundamental affection of His soul, you find at last
what you have been seeking, His real life. You
can go back no farther. You have laid your
hand upon the Man of the Gospels, where His
being becomes one with the uncaused Existence
of eternity. At last you have found the true life
of Jesus.
I think that it is like that marvel and mystery
of nature, so familiar and yet so strange, so per
petually repeated in our sight and yet so far
On the Emotional Life of Man. 151
away from the apprehension of anything in us
save our imagination, the wonder that fills the
woods and will burst forth between the very
bricks of cit) streets, the ever old, ever new
mystery of the growing and flowering of a plant.
The flower opens on the stalk ; but the flower is
not the life, for you may pluck it off leaf by leaf,
and the plant still lives. The stalk builds its
strong fibre ; but its fibres are not life, for they
may all be perfect and the plant be dead. The
hungry roots reach out into the fertile ground ;
but the roots are not life, only wonderful channels
to bear the life that has been given them. Not
until you see the earth give itself to the plant,
and, turning into sap, send itself through the wait
ing veins until it flushes into color far up in the
air, not until then have you gone back where
you can go back no farther, and really found the
life. So here is the perfect flower of the life of
Jesus. It is the blood-red flower of the cross. Is
that pain life ? Surely not. The thief beside him
bears pain too, and we can call it only death. Is
life, then, the experience that brings the pain?
The injustice of the rulers, the mocking of the
1 52 The Influence of Jesus
people, the brutality of the soldiers, is that
His life? No, surely not. The deadest soul
might have encountered all of these experiences.
Is it, then, that deep compulsion that lay under
neath it all ? Is it that necessity which has been
on Him all His days that He should do His
Father s will, that compulsion which has brought
Him to the cross ? Not yet have we attained
the life, for mere obedience may be mere death.
But behind all there lies the idea of Jesus, that
God is His Father, and that He may make these
men know that He is their Father too. When
that is touched, behold the miracle ! See how
the dry roots of obedience fill themselves with
love ; see how the hard stalk of experience
grows soft and pliable with purpose ; and then
see how the flower of pain utters a life profoundly
deeper than itself, and tells the world that story
which it is the struggle of all pain and pleasure
in the career of Christ to tell, which all healthy
pain or pleasure in the career of man is tempting
him to learn, of man s unbroken sonship to his
Father, of the belonging of his soul to the soul
af God.
On tJic Emotional Life of Man. 153
I have dwelt long upon this analysis of the
real seat of influential life in Jesus, because onl)
by understanding this can we truly understand
the position and meaning which He would give
to suffering and enjoyment in His life or in ours.
I trust that the importance of what I have been
saying will appear as I go on. It will be enough
at present to suggest as the principle which gov
erns all Christ s treatment of these phenomena
of life that in His thought of them they are
phenomena. They are not essential, they are
accidental. Consequently they are neither to
be sought nor shunned, but to be accepted as
they come, with a welcome which goes below
them and deals with the conditions out of which
they spring. Jesus always thinks of Himself as
undergoing the will of God, because God is His
Father. The pain and pleasure which come to
Him in undergoing that will come not simply
with their own inherent qualities of comfort or
discomfort, but with the values which they get
from that obedience of which they are the signs
and consequences. This is the key to all His
attitude towards them. And of this principle all
154 The Influence of Jesus
the special study to which we now proceed will
be in illustration.
Our subject properly divides itself into two
parts : I. What is the position and meaning
of enjoyment and sorrow in the life of Jesus ?
2. What is the position and meaning of enjoy
ment and sorrow in the life of His disciples ? It
is once more a Biblical study in which we are
to engage, and the ground over which we are to
r ange is the rich field of the four Gospels.
I ask you to recall as simply as you can, as
much as possible as if you read it for the first
time, the story of the life of Jesus. One of the
things which, if we can do that, will, I think,
impress us most, will be the constant presence of
the emotions of pleasure and of pain in the ex
perience of Him whose history we are reading,
whose person in those graphic pages stands be
fore us. We shall have occasion in a few mo
ments to go over in detail the series of special
instances ; but just now remember merely the
general impression which the story makes. It
is a country with an atmosphere. Clouds and
On the Emotional Life of Man. 155
sunshine are playing across its surface all the
time. The actual features of the varied land
scape are always changing their aspect with the
light that falls upon them. The special events
which happen have an additional character as
they lie in the light or in the shade. What a
landscape would be which had no atmosphere
above it, which received no shadow and no sun
light on it, that would a life be which was made
up of events but knew no emotions. A dreadful
place ! Hills, valleys, oceans, rivers, fields, all
perfect, all grouped with one another in complet-
est symmetry, but all bathed in one monotonous,
unchanging light ; all the same every day and
every hour ; no soft transitions from the solemn
gloom into the happy brilliance, none of that
change of smile and frown with one another that
makes us feel the fitness when we talk about the
" face of nature " ! A dreadful world ! A world
in which no character could grow, no manhood
ripen. The life of Jesus shows us no such world
as that. It is changing every moment with the
light and shade. A sensitiveness whose quick
ness to impressions we feel almost painfully
156 The Influence of Jesus
trembles in every line. Only and here is
where the principles which I have just been
stating show their influence in His life Jesus,
with all His sensitiveness to pain and joy, still
never allows pain or joy to be either the purpose
of life or the test of life with Him. The country,
to renew our figure, is bright with sunshine or se
rious with shadow, and gets its ever-changing
beauty from their constant alternation ; but it
never sets itself to work to make the clouds
whose shadows are to rest upon it, nor does it
judge its landscape by the special gloom or glory
which is cast on it at any moment. So, to speak
not in figure, the sensitiveness of Jesus to pain
and joy never leads Him for a moment to try to be
sad or happy with direct endeavor ; nor is there
any sign that He ever judges the real character
of Himself or any other man by the sadness or
the happiness that for the moment covers His life.
He simply lives, and joy and sorrow issue from
His living, and cast their brightness and their
gloominess back upon His life ; but there is no
sorrow and no joy that He ever sought for itself,
and He always kept a self-knowledge underneath
On the Emotional Life of Man. 157
the joy or sorrow, undisturbed by the moment s
nappiness or unhappiness. They were like rip
ples on the surface of the stream, made by its
flow, and, we are ready to imagine, enjoyed by
the stream that made them, not sought by the
stream for themselves, nor ever obscuring the
stream s consciousness of its deeper currents.
The supreme sorrow of the cross was never
sought because it was sorrowful, and even while
He hung in agony it never obscured the certainty
of His own holiness in the great Sufferer s soul.
These are the perpetual characteristics of the
emotional life of Jesus, which our theology has
often conjured out of sight, but which are of un
speakable value, as I think ; for a clear under
standing of them puts the Man who suffered and
enjoyed more than any other man that ever lived
in a noble and true relation to His suffering and
joy, and makes His pain and pleasure a gospel
to men in their sadness and their gladness every
where.
I turn to a more minute examination of the
illustrations of this. The pleasures and suffer
ings of Jesus lie in three different classes, and
each of them demands our careful study.
158 The Influence of Jesus
The first class is composed of those which
belonged to His physical nature, those which
could not have come to Him, which could not
come to any man, except through the medium of
a human body. It is good to see how manifold
these joys and sorrows are. They begin in that
strange, half-conscious life of infancy, where it is
always so hard to estimate pleasure and pain,
where it is so hard to tell what value to give to a
cry that issues from an infant s lips or a smile
that plays across his face. And yet the pain
and delight of childhood we know are realities,
inextricably snarled in with the first possession
of a mortal body which breathes the breath of this
alert and exacting world. The poverty and pri
vation of the inn at Bethlehem and the forced
and hurried journey into Egypt are instances of
what I mean. They are not events on which
we need to dwell. What they were to Jesus we
cannot tell. They touch the outmost rim of the
capacity of pain ; but they open the way, for
what comes afterwards. They declare what life
is going to mean to this new mortal who has
come into its power. They are the first few
On the Emotional Life of Man. 159
notes, not clearly intelligible in themselves, but
giving us the key in which the opening life
is to be lived. But as soon as the dim thicket
of infancy opens into the clear path of manlj
life it becomes apparent that all the spiritual ex
periences of Jesus have an almost unexampled
association with His physical life. Very few
men s souls are so bound in with their bodies as
was His with the frame He wore. At the very
outset of His public career, when His self-under
standing was gathering itself up for the work H<
had to do, He went away into the desert and
was tempted. What happened there is at once
one of the most mysterious and one of the most
intelligible passages in the life of Jesus. To
any man who has been young, who has faced
life, who has listened while many voices called
him to turn aside into plausible paths, and the
one great voice of the God of Duty called him
right onward to whatever might await him, to
every such man the essential meaning of the
Temptation is beyond all doubt. At the same
time its special scenery and action is very vague.
Material fact and impalpable vision shoot through
160 The Influence of Jesus
each other and cannot be unsnarled. But this,
at least, is plain, the body shared in the expe
rience. Long, painful hunger went before the
spiritual trial, and it is out of lips at once weak
and tense with physical exhaustion that the pat
tern answers of all tempted souls proceed. By
and by came another event which brings some
thing of the same confusion of the mysterious
and the intelligible. Jesus goes up into another
mountain, and is transfigured. Indeed, in many
respects this story belongs beside the story of
the Temptation. The two mountains are the
complements of one another. As the Tempta
tion was the typical utterance of the perplexed
conditions of human living, so the Transfigu
ration was the irrepressible utterance of the
essential glory of human nature filled with di
vinity, reclaimed and openly asserted to be the
Son of God. And in the Transfiguration, as in
the Temptation, the body has its share. Not
merely does the soul enjoy sublime converse with
God and with the past. A sweet and awful glad
ness shines out from the face and hands, and
even pierces from the hidden limbs through the
On the Emotional Life of Man. 161
coarse garments which shine "white as the light."
I do not know the meaning of it all, but I know
that what came to the spiritual came in some
echo to the physical, and the body shared the
gladness of the soul. And when we turn the
page again and look into Gethsemane, the same
completeness of the human life is there. " Being
in an agony, He prayed more earnestly, and His
sweat was as it were great drops of blood."
However it may be swathed about and purified
and glorified by the suffering of the consecrated
soul, there was physical pain there in the Garden
on the night before the cross. The next day came
the cross itself, and the struggle of the devout-
est souls with themselves has always been to keep
the sight of the body s agony from monopolizing
all their pity, and hiding from their sight the
nobler and deeper suffering of the tortured spirit
of the Crucified. In all of these scenes, is it not
striking to see how the body bore the spirit
company, how there came no spiritual delight or
misery but that the physical chords were struck
and could be heard sounding through the finer
and more subtle music ?
1 62 The Influence of Jesus
Again, it is not possible for one who really
wants to know the sort of life that Jesus lived to
turn away indifferently from what the people said
about Him who used to see Him every day
Morning by morning, night by night, He went
about those strange old streets where men looked
at Him curiously, exactly as we should look
at any wondrous life that came and set itself in
the familiar framing of these streets which we
know so well. All the more, often, because
they had no keen spiritual sympathy with Him,
the outward life which He lived photographed
itself upon their watchful observation. They
were like reporters, not like disciples, and so
their superficial account of what He did was per
haps all the more true. What did they say ?
One day He told them what He had often over
heard : " The Son of man is come eating and
drinking, and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man
and a wine-bibber." Coarse, brutal, full of hostile
caricature, no doubt the words are ; but still
they give us the sort of picture which we would
like to have, from his foe s pencil, of any man
whom we desired to know. At least there must
On the Emotional Life of Man. 163
be an indication in what direction His life was
lived. No man with callous, stolid body, that
could not suffer and could not enjoy, could ever
have been taunted with that peculiar tone of
mockery.
But there is something else in Jesus that
always gives me a profound and vivid sense of
how that human body which He wore was full of
the capacity of suffering, and of how large a part
of His total experience its emotions made. The
fear of death, or rather, perhaps, the fear of dying,
is something almost wholly physical. I know it
is not conscience, it is not the dread of meet
ing, as we feebly say, a God with whom she has
lived in tenderest and most trusting communion
for these forty years, I know it is not these that
make a true, pure saint turn white-cheeked and
tremble when you go and tell her that she is to
die. The emotion really has its birth where you
behold its symptoms, in the body. It is the flesh
that shrinks from the thought of dissolution with
as truly a physical instinct as that with which
the finger draws back from the knife that pricks
it. Now through the Gospels there runs, almost
164 The Influence of Jesus
from the beginning, a Via Dolorosa whose stones
you can almost feel still tremble under the
feet of Jesus walking to His more and more
clearly realized death. One day at Csesarea Phi-
lippi we can begin to trace it first. " From that
day forth began Jesus to shew unto His disciples
how that He must suffer many things of the elders
and chief priests and scribes, and be killed."
Then down in Galilee, " Jesus said unto them,
The Son of man shall be betrayed into the hands
of men, and they shall kill Him." Then, on the
way up to the city where the cross was waiting,
" Behold we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son of
man shall be betrayed, and they shall condemn
Him to death, and shall deliver Him to the Gen
tiles to crucify Him." It is a horror that belongs
to a man whose body loves to live. " If it be
possible, let this cup pass from Me." It was the
cup of death, long watched and waited for, at
last felt pressing with its cold rim on the lips.
" It is finished." It was the same cup, drained
at last, and the body giving itself ever to the
peace of death which lay on the othei side of the
dreadfulness of dying.
On the Emotional Life of Man. 16^
It is an unnatural, a somehow unhumanized
eye that does not find these signs of the physi
cal sensibility of Jesus scattered all through the
Gospels. A poor sick woman crawls up and lays
her finger on His garment s hem. Instantly He
turns and asks, " Who touched Me ? " He has
felt her finger through the sensitive body and
the sensitive soul together. Who can picture the
pain and pleasure which always must have been
beating into His nature through the sensitive
substance of a body such as that ?
But there is another region in which the physical
conditions are unmistakably active, while it yet
lies close on the borders of the purely spiritual
being. Into that region we must follow Jesus
before we can understand all the susceptibility
to pain and joy that was bound up with the body
that He wore. It is the region in which man
feels the influences of external nature, and gath
ers delight or sorrow, is exalted or depressed,
by the touches of the world around him. How
wide and rich that region is in the best and com-
pletest men, all of us know ; and I do not believe
that any one can consider the way in which Jesus
1 66 The Influence of Jesus
treated the world of nature, and especially can
read His parables, without being sure that He
lived in that region and was open to its influences
always. " Consider the lilies of the field, how
they grow," He cried, as they walked together,
treading the autumnal crocus under foot. " Lift
up your eyes and look on the fields, for they are
white already to harvest." So He caught the
picture of His truth as He sat by the well at
Sichem and gazed down the bright open valley
that leads toward Jerusalem. " When it is even
ing ye say, Fair weather, for the sky is red ; and
in the morning, Foul weather to-day, for the sky
is red and lowering." So the influence of the
>ky overhead flowed down into His teaching.
And in one parable so short, so perfect, the
exquisite jewel among the parables all the
work that He was doing, all the promise of God
for humanity, shone out in the picture which
had sunk into His soul in countless quiet walks
through peaceful fields. " So is the kingdom of
God as if a man should cast seed into the ground,
and should sleep and rise night and day, and the
seed should spring up and grow he knoweth not
On the Emotional Life of Man. 167
how." In all these there is pleasure. Joy comes
in through the quick, delighted eyes, and runs
through all the physical frame, which is part of
that natural beauty to which it responds, a joy
that interprets to the healthy man the happiness
of the happy brutes, as there is another joy that
gives him some understanding of the bliss of
God.
" How good is man s life, the mere living ; how fit to em
ploy
All the heart and the soul and the senses forever in
joy!"
This is the joy that sings itself under the deep
lessons of the parables, like the music under the
pathos of a hymn, or the tingle of blood under
the solemn consecration of the soldier who rushes
to the fight.
And now what is the meaning of this sensi
bility to pain and pleasure which belonged to
His body ? What did it mean to Jesus ? It is
not hard to read. It is a witness of the com
pleteness of human life in Him. Pure health it
is which answers instantly to external physical
conditions with their appropriate reply. True
healthiness is always sensitive. To go into any
1 68 The Influence of Jesus
Gethsemine and not to feel the body sympathize
with the soul, is not completeness but meagre-
ness of life. To stand where food is spread be
fore us and either morosely to hate it or greedily
to clutch it, both are morbid. Both the ascetic
and the glutton are self-conscious. The true
human being forgets the body, not because the
body is detached and cast away, but because the
body is doing its work perfectly, as the passen
ger on the great ship forgets the engine only
because the engine s healthy pulse has become
part and parcel of his shipboard life.
And again, the physical sensibility of Jesus
bore testimony to the condition of the world He
dwelt in. How wonderfully interesting it be
comes in this regard ! The perfect health regis
ters disorder by its pain as truly as it proclaims
and praises order by its happiness. And here was
Jesus, standing with His representative human
body in this manifold and complicated world.
How will the world utter itself on Him ? Behold,
now a quick pain leaps through Him as He treads
on some serpent in the way; now a sweet joy
falls through the body on the spirit, as the breath
On the Emotional Life of Man. 169
of heaven blows upon His cheek. Pain and joy,
joy and pain, in quick succession ! What shall
we say ? What can we say, but that here in the
centre of the Bible the philosophy that runs
through the Bible, the philosophy which makes
man the centre and registering test of nature,
comes to its perfection ? The Old Testament
had told of how nature to obedient man had been
all good ; how nature to man disobedient had
declared its sympathy in thorns and thistles and
angry beasts. The New Testament was to tell
of a whole creation groaning and travailing, wait
ing for the redemption of the human body. Here
in the midst of Scripture stands the sensitive
body of the Son of Man, fully in the present lot
of His brother men; and to Him the mottled
world, the world that was God s child, and
yet was full of selfishness and sin, the world
whose name, as He Himself gave it, was the
Prodigal Son, a son, but prodigal; prodigal, yet
a son, to Him this mingled world declared
itself in mingled pain and pleasure, and wrote
the story of its own condition in what He suf
fered and enjoyed.
170 The Influence of Jesus
And yet once more. The physical sensitive
ness of Jesus no doubt helped, as no other
medium could have helped, that deep, mysterious
process, the development of the self-conscious
ness of Jesus. Why should I not believe that
out of the physical difficulties which tore His
hands He plucked the full flower of His knowl
edge of His own soul, and, wrapped up at the
heart of that, His knowledge of the soul of His
Father ? Why should I not believe that His
gratitude for the pure joy of physical living was
one of the doors through which He entered into
the complete sense of how His soul s life issued
from and belonged to God ? That which is the
sign of any condition always, by a subtle law,
deepens and ripens and confirms that condition.
And so when Jesus said to Pilate, who was
threatening Him with the physical pain of cruci
fixion, " Thou couldst have no power at all against
Me except it were given thee from above," it was
not merely a testimony that He felt already the
holding of His soul in His Father s everlasting
hand, it was also a nestling of the soul yet
more deeply and tenderly into the hollow of the
hand that held it.
On the Emotunal Life of Man. 171
This was what the succession of physical pain
and pleasure meant to Jesus. It was the witness
of His complete human life ; it was the register
of the disordered world ; and it was the instru
ment for the development of His spiritual con
sciousness. And now have we not the answer
to our second question upon this first point ?
What did He intend that pain and joy should
mean to His disciples ? These same three things,
no doubt. Think of the times when He dis
tinctly recognized the susceptibilities of their
bodily life. Once on the Sabbath day he walked
through a cornfield, and the hungry men plucked
the ripe ears and rubbed them in their hands and
ate them. Jesus said, " The Son of man is Lord
of the Sabbath." His recognition of human
nature and its needs lay behind the positive in
stitution v u ich He did not dishonor. Even in
Gethsemane the tired friends who were keeping
Him company fell asleep ; and it was only with
the wonder of one who for the moment was out
of the power or hope of rest that He dropped His
gentle reproach upon them. When the crowd
followed Him across the lake, He was as quick
172 The Influence of Jesus
to see their starved faces as He -was to read their
sinful hearts. " I have compassion upon the
multitude," He said, " because they continue with
Me now three days and have nothing to eat." It
s simply to Him the sign that they are men.
He touches the fact of their humanity in helping
them, and that seems to give Him joy. The
same appeared when men came to Him and
complained that His disciples were not ascetics
like the disciples of John. "Why do the disci
ples of John fast often, but Thine eat and drink ? "
" Can ye make the children of the bridechamber
fast while the bridegroom is with them ?" He re
plied. That physical pleasure should be the
accompaniment of spiritual joy, He accepted as
part of the harmony of the universe.
Nor is it less true that Jesus accepted the pain
of other men, like His own pain, as an utterance
of the condition of the world in which they all
were living together. When, as He put His
fingers in the deaf man s ears and looked up to
heaven before He gave the poor creature hearing,
He sent a sigh up with the prayer, it must have
been that He felt thr ugh this one crack the
On tJic Emotional Life of Man. 173
whole tumult of the disturbed creation in which
all deformity and suffering had their deep roots.
And we may almost turn at random to His mira
cles : see Him with the nobleman who came from
Capernaum to Cana, cultivating his faith at the
same time that He cured his son ; stand with
Him in the boat and see Him send calm into the
tempest and into His disciples frightened hearts
at once ; look across the stormy water and see
Him lift Peter out of the waves and out of his
doubt at the same time, to recognize how He
always used the body s sensibilities to develop
the soul s consciousness, how by physical pain
and joy He helped the spirit to know itself and
to know its Father.
To Jesus, and to His disciples, and to all men
who know the bodily life as He knew it and
taught them to know it, the pain and happiness
of which the human body is capable must be
very noble messages. When I suffer or when
I enjoy, when down these nerves the quick
agony shoots and leaves me trembling like a
poor tree which the blast has shivered, or when
through the healthy blood peace runs like the
1 74 The Influence of Jesus
sunlight on a flowing river, when, in the aggre
gate of life, beneath affections, thoughts, dreams,
memories, desires, there is always felt this human
body with its pangs and blisses, what a noble
meaning there is in it all as it lies open to the
influence of Jesus ! " Lo, I am human ! " And all
the dignity and pathos of humanity surrounds
me. "Behold in what a disturbed and struggling
world I live ! " And hope and fear, twin cap
tains of the soul, patience and expectation,
spring to life. " See here, touching this very
flesh of mine, the fingers of the hand whose heart
is my Father s," and through the passions which
the body feels opens a way into the deepest woes
and loftiest pleasures, which can belong only to
the sons of God.
I must pass on to the joys and sorrows of the
next deeper grade, to those which have their roots
not in the senses but in the affections. They are a
great deal deeper. The way in which the body s
pains will easily be borne or the body s pleasures
easily be sacrificed in order that we may delight
ourselves in the indulgence of the affections or
escape their wounds, is proof enough how we all
On the Emotional Life of Man. 175
feel that the heart is the true seat of life, and not
the body. " When the numbness comes up to my
heart, then I shall depart," said Socrates, after he
had drunk the poison. The passions of the body
may mean much, but they can never mean life or
death. Only in the loves we have for others than
ourselves can we truly live or die.
When we come to study this region of the life
of Jesus, the field that opens to us is very wide.
We can do hardly more than just point out its
features. And the most prominent among them
all must be the absorbing affection of His life,
the pure love that He had for His Father, God.
We go about and about this centre of the life of
Jesus, we talk of what it made Him do, we talk of
how He tried to communicate it to those whom He
taught. But it very often seems to me as if those
of us who have read the Gospels most have but
seldom grasped the love which Jesus had for His
Father and understood it as a simple conscious
ness ; not as a motive, but as a pure atmosphere of
pleasure, the perpetual bright flower of the abso
lute unity of will which was between them. There
are some simple expressions of this in the Gospel
176 The Influence of Jesus
which get their profoundest beauty only as we
think of them with the most absolute simplicity.
Jesus one evening went away by Himself into a
mountain and " continued all night in prayer to
God." We say that He was seeking preparation
for the solemn task of selecting His disciples,
which He undertook the next day. Certainly
the communion of that night must have prepared
Him for the task, but in itself what was it but
the simple resting of one nature on the bosom
of the nature which it loved, and in the fact of
loving which it found its perfect joy ? I think
that if we go behind that simplicity we lose the
beauty and majesty of it all. The most majestic
is always the simple, not the complicated. And so
it is not what I may picture to myself that Jesus
asked of His Father in those sacred hours ; it is
simply that Jesus was with His Father, every inter
ference of the daytime being completely set aside ;
that life touched life in the complete communion
of love, that is the final fact on which the mind
which is seeking the happiness of Jesus in the life
o r the affections rests without asking for analysis.
That is only one instance. Another come?
On the Emotional Life of Man. 177
before us in that deep and eager cry w nich broke
forth from the lips of Jesus on the cross. " My
God, My God," He cried out, " why hast Thou
forsaken Me ? " I do not pretend to understand
all the meaning of that cry. Nobody understands
it. What wonder is it if, when the last words
of any faithful man finishing his noble life have
always something in them which the most true
and lifelong sympathy that stands about his bed
cannot comprehend, the dying words of Jesus
should have mystery in them and suggest strange
questions which we cannot answer ? But though
I do not understand it fully, I know that I come
nearest to its meaning when its meaning seems to
me most simple. It is pure love, love thwarted,
hindered, and perplexed, but yet pure love, with
that triumph which love always carries in its
very existence whether it reach its object and
call back response or not. Jesus does not beg
for release. He does not even ask for vindication.
He only utters love. And that cry after His
Father lets us look down into His heart and see
that in loving His Father and being loved by
Him was His perpetual joy.
12
178 The Influence of Jesus
And yet see how this cry of Jesus illustrates
what I said about the position which pleasure
and pain always took in His life. They are
always subordinated to the doing of a will, which
will in its turn gets its value from the idea which
inspires it. So here. The joy of loving and the
pain which only love can bring beat tumultu-
ously together in this cry. But underneath them
both there is obedience, and the idea from which
obedience proceeds. Not for one moment does
He think of coming down from the cross to find
His Father. Whether He find Him or lose Him,
whether the issue of His love be the perfect joy
of union or the exquisite suffering that separa
tion brings, He must obey Him first. Even if
His doing of His Father s will seems to shut
Him out of His Father s presence, there cannot
be a question ; the will must be done. Oh, how
often souls have forgotten, as they weighed the
raptures, the ecstasies of faith against its hard
and present duties when the two seemed to be
not compatible with one another, how often
they have forgotten that the question which was
greater and more sacred of the two, the rapture
On the Emotional Life of Man. 179
or the obedience, was settled once forever on the
cross !
We pass from this supreme affection of Jesus
to the others which are included in it. I had
occasion i my last lecture to speak of the rela
tions which Jesus held to those persons who
were immediately connected with Him by the
ties of kindred. I refer again to the family life
in which He lived, only to notice what was the
kind of pleasure and suffering that it brought
to Him which He could not otherwise have
met. That it did bring Him both there can
be no doubt. In all his intercourse with John
the Baptist we never can lose remembrance of
the relationship between them. The old pic
tures which have grouped them as children by
the Virgin s knee express a feeling which we
can never cast aside. It is impossible to make
their connection simply official. When John
baptizes Jesus, it is a kinsman s hand that leads
the exalted youth into the water. And by and
by, when the disciples went to the prison and
took the body of the murdered Baptist and
buried it, and came and told their Master, it
180 The Influence of Jesus
was for one of His own family blood as well
as for one of His own divine spirit that Jesus
mourned. And there is another passage which
always seems to me to open a glimpse of the
family affection which was in the heart of Jesus.
He had avoided Judea because it was not safe
for Him to work there. He was laboring in
Galilee. And his brethren came to Him and
said, " Depart hence and go into Judea. If
Thou do these things, show Thyself unto the
world." It was almost a jeering mockery
" Neither did His brethren believe in Him,"
the writer adds. The pain of having those
doubt Him who ought to know Him best, of
having His own flesh and blood turn on Him
and mock Him, it is evident that Jesus knew
what that pain was, and that it was something
peculiar to Him, something different from the
unbelief and hostility of the promiscuous crowd.
Then turn for another instance to the cruci
fixion, to those few hours of distress which
sometimes seem to epitomize all that there was
in His entire life. " There stood by the cross
of Jesus His mother and His mothei s sister,"
On the Emotional Life of Man. 181
and just as He was dying the Sufferer turned
and gave His mother to the care of His disciple.
" Woman, behold thy son ! " " Son, behold thy
mother ! " It was a pang within all the other
pangs, a woe that perceptibly added to their
wretchedness, when among the faces that pitied
Him He saw her face who bore Him, the face
into which He had looked up from His cradle
When I think over these three stories, it seems
to me that I discover what the real meaning was
of that additional element of joy and pain which
came to Jesus through His family affections.
In each I seem to see that the family relation
ship was representative of something deeper
that lay in behind. His special connection with
those special lives was, as it were, the manifesta
tion point of His relationship to all the world.
What He was to those brethren who had always
lived in the same house with Him he was essen
tially to all mankind. In them He realized witli
peculiar vividness what was true of all the
world. All men were sons of God along with
Him, but that sonship shone forth in a peculiar
clearness in these men, who were also of Mary s
1 82 The Influence of Jesus
blood as well as He. It gave him joy when
any of His brethren in the most remote degree
realized the sonship which was revealed in
Him or (as He himself expressed it) came to
the Father through Him. But that joy was
vividest when one of His brethren in the nearest
and most special sense attained that high belief.
The pain of any human being touched Him,
but in His mother s pain humanity pressed itself
closest to His sensibility and gave Him a special
distress proportioned to His special love. In
general, the woes and pleasures through His
family affections were those which belonged to
His whole contact with humanity, only deepened
and emphasized and vivified by the particular
dearness in which these kindred lives stood to
His own.
And yet I hasten on to say that such an
account of the emotions which belong to
Christ s domestic life does not in the least con
flict with that spontaneous character which is
of the every essence of such emotions always.
Indeed, the best and noblest natures, as I think,
are marked by hardly anything so much as
On the Emotional Life of Man. 183
this, the simultaneous spontaneousness and
reasonableness of the lives they live. One kind
of man is all spontaneous, and can furnish no
account of what he feels and does. Another
kind of man is all reasonable, and lets no impul
sive action slip from his will till it has ac
counted for itself to his conscious understanding.
Both of these men are partial. There is a man
who is more complete than either, who is as
impulsive as a child and yet in the heart of
whose impulsive action there always lies the
true reasonableness of manhood. He does the
natural human acts because he must do them,
and yet he knows why he does them. The
spontaneousness does not obscure the reason,
and the reason does not hamper and clog the
spontaneousness. So it always seems to me
that it is with Jesus. He presses His brother s
hand with brotherly affection. His brother s
sneer wounds Him as no stranger s can. His
mother s sorrow enteis into its own secret
chamber of sympathy in Him where no other
sorrow can intrude. And yet all the while,
with all the instinctive value which He gave ta
1 84 TJu Influence of Jesus
them for their own sake, these home affections
all are ties to bind Him to humanity, windows
through which He looks into the depths of
human life, interpretations to His soul of the
wider brotherhood in the vaster family.
Surely there is here a noble indication of
what the family affections as sources of suffering
and happiness may be to all men, of what they
must be to all men who dwell in them within the
larger family which Jesus shows. It is dreadful
if we lose their spontaneousness. Beyond all
analysis there lies the relation which every true
son holds to a true father. It is a final fact
You cannot dissolve it in any abstract theory.
It issues from the mysterious sympathy of the
two lives, one of which gave birth to the other.
It has ripened and mellowed through all the rich
intercourse of dependent childhood and imitative
youth and sympathetic manhood. It is an eter
nal fact. Death cannot destroy it. The grown
up man feels his father s life beating from beyond
the grave, and is sure that in his own eternity
the child relation to that life will be in some
mysterious and perfect way resumed and glori-
On the Emotional Life of Man. 185
fied, that he will be something to that dear life
and it to him forever. All this remains Its
bright spontaneousness nothing is allowed :o tar
nish. And yet the adult son delights to learn
how, through his intimacy with that nature out
of which his sprang, he is introduced into an
understanding of the whole human race. In a
deeper sense than we are apt to give the words,
his father "brings him into the world." His
father s life is to him the illumination point of
all humanity. In loving his father he loves his
race. And all the joy and pain, all the rich
ness and pathos of his home life, while they
keep their freshness and peculiar sanctity, have
in them and below them all the multitudinous
happiness and sorrow of the larger life in the
great household of the world. The child feels
something of this truth by instinct. The thought
ful man delights to realize it more and more as
he grows older.
To come back, however, to the life of Jesus,
we are aware that His relations to those who
held the ties of kinship with Him, while they
were clear and real, were not a large or promi
1 86 The Influence of Jesus
nent element in His life. He quickly went be
yond the household of the carpenter in Hia
eagerness to attain the household of God. He
was the brother of all men. And the truth of
all the emotion which filled the social life of
Jesus when we sum it up, seems to be this : that
all multiplied and deepened relationships with
men bring mingled joy and sorrow ; a joy and a
sorrow which it is not possible to separate and
weigh against each other, because they are so
subtly and intricately mingled that the joy makes
part of the sorrow and the sorrow makes part of
the joy, and you cannot take away either without
finding that the other has eluded you ; a joy and
sorrow also which no man can ever gain by di
rectly and deliberately seeking them, but which
come unsought to every man who, regardless of
the pleasure or the pain they bring, enters into
profound connections with his fellow-men. These
are the two key truths of any social life which
goes beyond a club acquaintance or a parlor
friendship. He will certainly fail who hopes to
know men deeply and only to get happiness
never to get anxiety, distress, disappointment
On the Emotional Life of Man. 187
out of knowing them ; and he has mistaken the
first idea of human companionship who seeks
friendships and contacts with mankind directly
and simply for the pleasures they will give him.
Now Jesus quietly and steadily met both these
laws. He calmly deepened His relations to
mankind as much as possible, accepting all the
pain that such profound relationships might
bring; and always with Him the happiness or
unhappiness of His associations were but acci
dents, and not the final purposes for which He
won His friends or encountered the hostility
of His enemies. Here is one of His disciples,
Simon Peter. Two picturesque moments stand
out in the history of the intercourse of Jesus
tfith that interesting man. At the foot of Her-
mon, tempted by a question of his Master, Peter
burst forth with a hearty and enthusiastic utter
ance of his conviction of the divine nature which
had been steadily impressing itself upon him.
" And Jesus answered and said unto him, Blessed
art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath
not revealed it unto thee, but My Father which
is in heaven." In the high-priest s house at Je-
1 88 The Influence of Jesus
rusalem, when Jesus was standing a culprit on
the night of His arrest, waiting for the scourging
and the cross, He overheard this same Peter say
twice, " I do not know Him," when some ser
vants questioned him about the prisoner whose
fate was the question of the hour. "And the
Lord turned and looked on Peter. And Peter
went out and wept bitterly." See what two in
fluences came out of this friendship. See what
joy and sorrow issued from the bosom of this
love. See how the joy at hearing the confession
of such a profound, far-reaching truth as His
own divinity must have been full of fear which
was almost certainty that the disciple would fail
in some of the inevitable applications of the
truth which he must be so imperfectly appreci
ating even while he enthusiastically proclaimed
it. See how the suffering which the treason
brought must still have had in it a consolation,
as Jesus detected in the very passion of the de
nial the crushed remonstrance of the love which,
even under the denial, was living still. Or take
a yet harder case. Jesus had another disciple
whom He saw slipping more and more away
On the Emotional Life jf Man. 189
from Him, who He saw would some day betray
Him with the worst ingratitude. And yet I think
that every man whose sad and anxious office it
has ever been to try to lift a soul which in spite
of all his struggles has been always sinking
deeper and deeper into the depths, will bear me
witness that in the patience and wisdom and
faithfulness which his Master lavished upon
Judas Iscariot for years there must have been a
pathetic pleasure, peculiar and subtle because of
the growing hopelessness of results which com
pelled each effort to find its satisfaction in its
own essential nature. It must have had some
thing of the delight in mere service with which
one watches at the bedside of a sick friend, of
whose recovery all hope is gone. And both in
Peter and in Judas the second of the truths of
which I spoke appears, that it was not for the
joy or for the sorrow that their society would
bring that Jesus sought them. Peter and Judas
alike He sought because they were the sons of
God ; the pain or pleasure they would give Him
came afterwards and as an accident.
In all of Christ s associations the same inevi-
The Influence of Jesus
table mingling of the sad and glad appears.
There was a little family at Bethany in which
He often made His home, and the last time He
left the hospitable door He carried out with Him
two memories, the memory of how the eyes of
Mary had looked up into His face, eager with
the desire to understand all His sacred truth,
and the memory of how the same eyes had
streamed with tears beside her brother s tomb.
The same voices of the populace at Jerusalem
which cried " Hosanna ! " cried " Crucify him ! "
before the week was done. The happiness of
promising heaven to a dying thief was filled with
pity that only by a torturing death had the poor
wretch been brought into the sight and hope of
life. One day He saw a poor widow in the Tem
ple give a true charity ; but the same sensitive
ness of soul which made Him find pleasure in
her simple act laid Him open to the distress
which only such a soul could feel at the ostenta
tious hypocrisy of the Pharisees. And all through
His life the deep, enthusiastic happiness at giv
ing men the chance of their divine inheritance
was mingled with the distress of knowing that
On the Emotional Life of Man. 19!
men who would not take what He held out to
them must be worse off than if He had not come
to them. " He that heareth My word hath ever
lasting life," and " On whomsoever this stone
shall fall it shall grind him to powder," the
opposite fates of men, with the emotions they
awakened, the two were always on His heart
together and crowded each other on His lips.
So it must always be. To be a true minister
to men is always to accept new happiness and
new distress, both of them forever deepening
and entering into closer and more inseparable
union with each other the more profound and
spiritual the ministry becomes. The man who
gives himself to other men can never be a
wholly sad man ; but no more can he be a
man of unclouded gladness. To him shall
come with every deeper consecration a before
untasted joy, but in the same cup shall be mixed
a sorrow that it was beyond his power to feel
before. They who long to sit with Jesus on
His throne may sit there if the Father sees
them pure an;l worthy, but they must be bap
tized with the baptism that He is baptized with
192 The Influence of Jesus
All truly consecrated men learn little by little
that what they are consecrated to is not joy ol
sorrow, b lt a divine idea and a profound obedi
ence, which can find their full outward expres
sion not in joy, and not in sorrow, but in the
mysterious and inseparable mingling of the two.
There yet remains one other class of pleasures
and sufferings which belong to all devoted and
ideal natures, and in which Jesus had a share.
It consists of the moral joys and pains, of those
which come from the acute perception of right
and wrong, of moral fitness or unfitness in the
things about us. You cannot put a man very
high unless you give him a good share of that
quality. Merely to see that things are right or
wrong, and not to feel a pleasure in their right-
ness and a pain in their wrongness, does not in
dicate a finely moulded character. The moral
perceptions, even the moral obediences, do not
make a full moral life. The moral emotions must
be there too. That such a power as this was in
Jesus nobody can doubt who knows Him. And
yet we are a good deal surprised, I think, when
On the Emotional Life of Man. 193
we survey His history and see how few are the
moments in which this power prominently ap
pears. The reason is that the life of Jesus, and
all His thoughts and feelings, had personal shapes
and directions. We do not know how largely
this is true until we read the Gospels with this
thought in our minds. The great moral enthu
siasts kindle when they see a good deed done,
rejoice in the progress of humanity, have a keen
happiness when some new instance brings out
the fitness for virtue which is in the whole great
world, and on the other hand suffer as if a spear
pierced them or a club smote them when a bad
action makes a discord and wrongs the funda
mental purpose of the world. There is very
little indeed of that in Jesus. We cannot think
of Him as a pure moral enthusiast. With Him
almost everything is personal. He is glad
when a man is good because the man s own life
is illuminated, and still more because the man
glorifies His Father which is in heaven. A
wickedness wounds Him because it is a degra
dation to the man who does it and an insult to
God. Behold Him as He goes into the Temple^
13
IQ4 The Influence of Jesus
which the greedy people had turned into a
market-house. It is " My Father s house " for
which he is so jealous. It is no abstraction of
reverence for which He burns. It is exactly
as if a child came home and found his moth
er s chamber turned into a huckster s shop. It
is as literal, as personal, as that. The profound
sense of unfitness, of discord, is there, but it is
held in solution in this more vehement feeling
of personal wrong. It is this personalness of
all His moral enthusiasms, as it seems to me,
that keeps us from ever feeling or fearing in
Jesus any of that moral pedantry or what, with
a word that has no dignified equivalent, we call
that priggishness which haunts the words of
the moral enthusiasts who kindle at the har
monies and discords of abstractions, whether they
lAk as utilitarians or as transcendentalists.
Nevertheless, though this is true, the sense of
the absolute must underlie and must appear
through the personal enthusiasms of Jesus.
Otherwise the moral quality would evaporate,
and His personal emotions would come to be only
mere fondnesses and prejudices. And there are
On the Emotional Life of Man. 195
instances enough in which we can feel, beating
and shining through His personal affections, the
delight and sorrow with which His soul recog
nized the essential qualities of holiness and sin.
I have already spoken of the indignation which
possessed Him in the desecrated Temple. As
an illustration of the opposite emotion, there
occurs that beautiful outburst in which, almost
with surprise, certainly with a sudden overflow
of gladness, as He saw the perfection of the
method of God s treatment of the world and
revelation of Himself through innocence, Jesus
breaks out and cries, "I thank Thee, O Father,
Lord of heaven and earth, that Thou hast hid
these things from the wise and prudent and hast
revealed them unto babes." What a happy
heart is there ! It is all personal, and yet the
personalness holds clearly in its heart a sense of
the beauty of a moral idea, the idea that the
profoundest belongs to the purest, the loftiest
truth to the innocent and guileless heart. One
day a centurion came to Jesus and wanted Him
to work a miracle ; and as they talked about it,
the simplicity of the man s trust came out. He
196 The Influence of Jesus
illustrated His belief in the power of Jesus by
describing his own relation to the forces which
were under him. " I say to this man, Go, and
he goeth ; and to another, Come, and he cometh."
Instantly, as it would seem, so large and true a
conception of the world all held together in one
sublime system of authority and obedience, run
ning up to the highest, running down to the
least of its activities, filled the soul of Jesus with
delight. " I have not seen so great faith, no, not
in Israel," He said. One other day, in a remote
country village, He met ten lepers. As the poor
wretches stood afar off and cried to Him, He bade
them go and show themselves to the priests.
And as they went, lo, their leprosy was gone and
they were clean. Then one of them turned back,
all radiant with gratitude, and fell down at his
healer s feet. National prejudice, for the man
was a Samaritan, old bitterness, the selfishness
which comes with sudden happiness, all these
were broken through, and there he lay, all over
whelmed with thankfulness and love. Mean
while the other nine went cheerily upon their
way, meanly satisfied with the mere fact of
On the Emotional Life of Man. 197
health. There comes a sorrow and a joy into
the face and words of Jesus which are primarily
and formally personal, but are not wholly so. In
at the heart of it, it is the joy which every noble
heart feels at the very sight of gratefulness, and
the pain that each true soul experiences at the
very presence of ingratitude. That such things
are, their very being and essential qualities,
these are what wake responses of gladness or of
sadness in the soul. You have to reach in and
find that feeling underneath the personal emo
tions of Jesus. But it is always there. When
He pities Jerusalem, His pity has an eternal
dignity about it, because the woe which He com
miserates is but part of the universal tragedy
of sin. When the poor woman stops Him by
the roadside, and with the wit of wretchedness
claims even for a dog some crumb of the precious
mercy, His praise of her is more than recognition
of her quick rejoinder; it is a pleasure in the
sight of that clear hold on the right of the weaker
over the stronger which is part of the moral
structure of the universe. And at the last, when
the supreme joy of His life comes, and
198 The Influence of Jesus
an appeal to His Father s perfect knowledge He
exclaims, " I have glorified Thee on the earth, I
have finished the work that Thou gavest Me to
do," there is heard inside of that appeal a pure
joy in the establishment of righteousness and
the setting up of the kingdom of salvation which
is the basis of the personal gratulation that the
words express. I must not multiply illustra
tions. I do not know one instance of Christ s
joy in moral harmony that is not held in the
bosom of some personal affection. But, on the
other hand, I do not know one instance of per
sonal affection which does not get its value from
some moral emotion at the centre of it. That is
the kind of moral enthusiasm which the influence
of Jesus has spread throughout the world. It is
not calm, cool approbation of goodness, it is
delight in a good man, with which the Christian
kindles. But it is always certainly his goodness
in him not his mere person, but the moral
nature which his person vividly exhibits that
excites the Christian s admiration. And so it is
neither an enthusiasm for goodness nor an en
thusiasm ol humanity that the influence of Jesus
On the Emotional Life of Man. 199
is creating in the world, but a communion of
saints, a race of men each delighting in the
other for his holiness, and each delighting in
holiness for the brightness that it gives the
others lives.
I do not think that it would be right to close
this study of the pleasure and the pain which
Jesus experienced and into which His disciples
are constantly led, without saying two or three
words upon a point which may often suggest a
difficulty. I have been speaking of the certain
satisfaction of His soul in moral fitness, in the
harmony of righteousness. But, some one asks,
how is it with those other harmonies in which
we are always finding delight, the fitnesses
which the aesthetic nature recognizes and loves?
Was there anything of those in Jesus ? Had He
anything of what we call the sense of artistic
beauty ? Did He get any of that joy of taste oi
which our modern life makes so much ? It is
not an easy question to answer in a word. We
may point to the special earnest purpose which
filled all of the life of Jesus. We may say that
2OO The Influence of Jesus
He who was walking on to Calvary had no
time in the intenseness of His moral life for art
and its luxuriousness. We may say that He
was a Jew, and it was not in the nature of His
race to gather from beautiful things that happi
ness which they imparted to the quick-eyed
Greek. We may say that it was a mere ques
tion of the accidental circumstances and furni
ture of the life of Christ, that the physical
sensibility and the moral impressibleness which
we have been studying in Him make un
doubtedly a large part, while undoubtedly they
do not make the whole of that only half-
accountable element in us which we call the
cEsthetic nature, and so that the capacity of the
pleasure which that nature values only waited
in Him for some circumstances to develop it.
We may say that though Jesus made nothing
of artistic beauty, yet His religion has made
much of it, and out of Christianity the highest
artistic life has come. We may say all these
things, and no doubt all of them have truth.
But still the great impression of the life of
Jesus, as it seems to me, must always be of the
On the Emotional Life of Man. 201
subordinate importance of those things in
which only the aesthetic nature finds its pleas
ure. There is no condemnation of them in that
wise, deep life. But the fact always must remain
that the wisest, deepest life that was ever lived
left them on one side, was satisfied without
them. And His religion, while it has developed
and delighted in their culture, has always kept
two strong habits with reference to art which
showed that in it was still the spirit of its Mas
ter. It has always been restless under the sway
of any art that did not breathe with spiritual and
moral purpose. Never has Christian art reached
the pure aestheticism of the classics. And in its
more earnest moods, in its reformations, in its
puritanisms, it has always stood ready to sacri
fice the choicest works of artistic beauty for the
restoration or preservation of the simple maj
esty of righteousness, the purity of truth, or the
glory of God.
I have intimated already, once or twice to-day,
what significance there is, not merely in the
separate presences of joy and trouble in the life
2O2 The Influence of J esus
of Jesus, but also in the proportions which they
hold to one another, and the way in which they
are perpetually mingled. Let me recur to thai
a moment as I close. In that respect, as in
many others, the last day of Jesus, the day of
His crucifixion, presents no unreal picture of
what His whole life was. That day, in spite
of the tragedy which was ripening fast all through
the morning, and the cross upon which the sun
went down, was not all dark. Strange glimpses of
a light which must have brought deep delight to
the soul of Jesus shone out through all its course.
Follow Him in your thought from the time when
He met His disciples in Jerusalem the night
before. First came the sitting down at supper
with them, a feast of joy, the only familiar
board at which we ever see Jesus through His
life before His crucifixion. No sooner is He
there, and the quiet happiness begun, than the
disciples begin to quarrel about some foolish
question of precedence, and Jesus is distressed.
Then comes the beautiful action in which, as it
were, He refreshes the joy of devotion which had
filled the years of labor that were all over now.
On the Emotional Lift of Mat. 203
He bends and washes the disciples feet. No
sooner is that done than Judas has to be con
victed and dismissed. Then comes the bright
moment when St. Peter bursts out with his
promise of loyalty, followed the next instant by
the Savior s sad prophecy of how near His disci
ple s weakness lay to his promised strength.
Next follows the encouraging description of the
Spirit of comfort and strength which was to come
when Jesus had departed. Then, looking in the
blank, unsuspicious faces of the men about Him,
the Lord s voice sinks again as He foretells how
they will be persecuted. In an instant all that
is forgotten, and He is wrapt away from all the
present in a celestial memory and a divine antici
pation. " Now, O Father, glorify Thou Me with
the glory which I had with Thee before the
foundation of the world." With that ecstasy
still filling Him, He goes out to the Garden and
its agony. He is betrayed and deserted. Yet
still one last poor flash of Peter s loyalty lightens
the darkness for an instant. The denial, the
trial, the scourging, the crucifixion, follow fast.
Yet even in the midst of their horror there is
204 The Influence of Jesus
room for some momentary gleams of joy. The
wavering of Pilate ; the cries of a few sympathetic
voices among the hooting mobs as He passed
through the street ; the group of friends at the
foot of the cross ; and then that great joy which
must have fallen into His spirit when from the
other cross there came a cry of faith and hope ;
at last the utter satisfaction which fills His soul
as He exclaims, "It is finished," all of these
come in to show that the very agony of agonies
was charged with the divine capacity of joy.
As we gather the total impression of that won
drous day, how complete it is ! How joy and
sorrow interfuse and blend with one another !
And the result is a new compound of life which
is different from either. How evident it is that
by some principle more deep than just that joy
is pleasant and pain is hard to bear, they are
distributed. It is as if Jesus walked under a
cloud, and yet felt always that in the very sub
stance of cloud there was suffused and softened
light. The cloud had light in its darkness and
darkness in its light ; and so the explanation of
t all was clear. A sunlight through the cloud
On the Emotional Life of Man. 205
He felt, and behind the sunlight there must be
a sun. Behind the bitter circumstances lay a law,
the blessed law of obedience, which was fellow
ship with God ; and behind the law a truth which
was God Himself.
Under that same cloud of circumstances we
must walk; but if there is behind it, for us, too,
that law and that truth which really made the
life of Jesus, the law of obedience and the truth
of sonship, then for us, too, light shall come
through the cloud, and, mingling with its dark
ness, make that new condition in which it is best
for a man s soul to live, that sweet and strong
condition in which both joy and sorrow may
have place, but which is greater than either of
them, the condition which He called peace.
IV.
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS
ON THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF MAN
THE INFLUENCE OF JESUS
ON THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE OF MAN.
"TV/TEN and books have their favorite words.
As the result of years of thoughtful life,
of constant and studious dwelling upon one class
of ideas, almost all men appropriate out of the
great treasury of the language certain words
which they make their own. Their friends grow
used to hearing those words from their lips.
The words become filled with their personality.
Some color or shade or tone comes into them, as
such a speaker habitually uses them, which indi
cates on which side he has approached their
meaning, and they who honor him can hardly
hear the words or speak them without entering
into communion with his spirit.
If such an habitual use of certain words with cer
tain tones is true and always fresh, if it does not
come out of affectation and does not degenerate
into mannerism, it often gives us the material for
2IO The Influence of ^
an excellent study of a man s life and nature. If
he is only real, we may judge him by his words.
As he speaketh with his mouth so is he. Tell
me what words a man uses most, and reproduce
for me the tones in which he speaks them, and I
ought to be able to tell you a good deal about
what sort of man he is. Count for me the
favorite words of any book, and give me some
idea of the association in which they stand, and
I ought to know much of the book s quality and
of what influence it will exert on those who
read it.
I am to speak to-day of the influence of Jesus
upon intellectual life, upon the world of thought ;
and I know no better way to approach a sub
ject so interesting, so rich, and yet, as it seems to
me, in its central point so simple, than by ob
serving the prominence of one word and the
very marked and characteristic way in which
that word is used in the book which tells us
most of what we know about the mind of Jesus.
The book is the Gospel of St. John. The word
is truth. It is only in that one book that the
word is found upon the lips of Jesus with any of
On the Intellectual Life of Jlfau. 21 1
that special intonation which is peculiarly His
own. There are three other Gospels, three
other accounts of the Lord s life, but in neither
of them does this, which is his most characteris
tic utterance in the fourth Gospel, once appear.
I need not pause to say that such a fact suggests
no real difficulty or discrepancy between the
records. As different as Matthew and John
were from each other, so different must have
been the words of their Master which were
caught in the memory and treasured in the heart
of each. In the same way in which Zenophon
and Plato both wrote of Socrates, and, holding
different mirrors on different sides of that won
derfully interesting figure, have given us, not two
Socrateses, but a completer Socrates than we
could have had if only one of them had seen him
and described him, so the first Gospel and the
fourth enlarge each other, and the historic Jesus
comes in the stereoscopic fulness of His recorded
life and nature from the two. But Plato is more
to us than Zenophon. The great Athenian lives
in the Dialogues as he does not in the Memora
bilia, And John is more to us than Matthew.
212 The Influence of Jesus
A word of Jesus constantly appearing in those
discourses of Jesus which most impressed the
most sympathetic and spiritual of his disciples
will, if we can see what He meant by it, admit
us very deeply into His heart and will. Such a
word is truth, as it is used by Jesus constantly
in the Gospel of St. John.
The word, then, is distinctly a word of the
intellect. Whatever other elements may enter
in, however it may enlarge itself and become a
word of the entire nature, the intellectual element
can never be cast out of it. He whose favorite
word is truth must be a man who values intel
lectual life, who is not satisfied unless his own
intellect is living, and who conceives of his fellow-
men as beings in whom the intellect is an impor
tant and valuable part. This must belong to any
habitual use of the word at all ; and so, when
we find it appearing constantly upon the lips of
Jesus, in the record of that one of His disciples
who understood Him best, we feel that we know
this at least about Him, that He cared for the
intellect of man, that He desired to exercise
some influence upon it, that He was not satisfied
On the Intellectual Life of Man, 213
simply to win man s affection by His kindness,
nor to govern man s will by His authority, but
that He also wished to persuade man s mind
with truth.
But we must know something more of what
a man s conception about truth is before we can
see what sort of influence he will exert upon
men s intellects. Take Martin Luther s idea of
truth, and Professor Huxley s idea, and Mr.
Emerson s idea. How evident it is that the
same word would be spoken in distinguishably
different tones, and would strike with different
force upon the hearer s ears and character as
it came from three such different men. And
so it is not enough that we should know the
fact that Jesus constantly talked of truth. That
would assure us that He sought an intellectual
influence. We must also know what He meant
by truth, and how He spoke of it. That will
reveal to us what kind of intellectual influence
it was that He desired. Let us turn then to
some of the sayings of Jesus concerning truth.
And, as we look at them, remember it is not the
essential importance of what He says that wo
214 The Influence of Jesns
want to dwell on, but merely the indication in
His saying of what He means by truth, of which
He speaks so much. On one occasion, when He
had been speaking very powerfully about His
own personal relation to His Father, a great
many of His hearers were persuaded and be
lieved on Him. Then Jesus said to those Jews
that believed on Him, "If ye continue in My
word, then are ye My disciples indeed ; and } *
shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free." That puzzled them. It stirred their
Jewish blood. They told Him that they were
born of Abraham, and were no man s slaves.
" How sayest Thou, Ye shall be made free ? "
And Jesus answered them, " Truly I say unto you,
every man that committeth sin is the servant of
sin." That was the freedom that His truth was
to bring, a spiritual freedom, a freedom from
wickedness, an untwisting of the tight cords
from their hold on the personal nature. Truth
was something which, when it came, would set
the whole man free. By and by, in the same
talk, He warmed into earnest pity not unmixed
with indignation. Poor people ! there they stood
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 215
before Him, and would not, could not, under
stand the things He said to them. Would not
and could not were all mixed together. But
His indignation reaches back behind them. It
:annot stop short of the Evil Spirit who is thei
Jeluder. " Ye are of your father the Devil, ana
the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a
liar from the beginning and abode not in the
truth." Again, see what a moral thing the
truth is. He who does not abide in it is not
merely a doubter, not merely a disbeliever, he
is a liar. The truth is truthfulness. The sub
jective and objective lose themselves in one
another. Then let the whole strain change.
The warm discussion, the earnest indignation,
is long past and over. Jesus is sitting with the
men who loved Him in the quiet atmosphere of
the Last Supper. A question of one of the
disciples drew from Him the words which per
haps have fascinated and mysteriously fed as
many souls as any words He ever spoke. " I
am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life," He
said. " I am the Truth." We must have some
notion of what truth meant to Him which shall
2i6 The Influence of Jesus
be large enough to contain those words. A truth
which a man could be ; a truth which could sum
up and consist of personal qualities. Evidently
it is not mere fact, this truth of His ; not some
thing merely done, merely made, and standing
finished and recognizable, to be walked around
and measured and studied on the outside by any
patient eye. It is something living, something
ever taking shape, something spiritual, and to
be known only from the inside by spiritual sym
pathy. The evening passed on, and by and by
Jesus began to unfold to His disciples the prom
ise of what He would do for them even after He
had left them. He is going to send them the
Comforter, He says. And this Comforter, when
He is come, is to " reprove the world of sin, of
righteousness, and of judgment." Deep words,
and full of meaning, much of which we have not
fathomed yet. But this, at least, we know is in
them. It is a spiritual helper who is coming ;
TS. soul coming to help souls ; a moral master
who shall judge and rule the moral life. And
so when in a minute Jesus, as He goes on speak
ing, gives this Comforter another name, and says,
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 217
" When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come, He will
lead you into all truth," we know again that
truth cannot mean in Him merely objective
verity ; it must have in it the elements of char
acter, since the leading of man into it by the
Divine soul is to be the perfection of man s life.
The evening wears on still, and by and by Jesus
has ceased to speak directly to His friends. His
voice is heard in prayer. And in His prayer
there comes what we may almost call His sum
ming up and report of all His life to His Father.
" For their sakes I sanctify Myself, that they
also might be sanctified through the truth," He
says. It is His own character through which
alone truth can come to make character in His
disciples. It is the deep and satisfied declara
tion that His whole life had been given to seek
ing the fulfilment of the petition which He had
just offered, " Sanctify them through Thy truth."
The same crowded night slowly creeps away,
and in the morning everything is once more
altered. Jesus is standing before Pilate. And
as the strange interview goes on, He has once
more occasion to declare the sum and purpose
218 The Influence of Jesus
of His life. " To this end was I born," Pie
says, " and for this cause came I into the world,
that I should bear witness to the truth. Every
one that is of the truth heareth My voice."
" Every man of the truth." Again you see how
the air grows hazy with the meeting of the
subjective and objective conceptions. They are
words of character. A " man of the truth " is
something more than a man who knows the truth,
whose intellect has seized it ; that, we are sure,
would be the very tamest paraphrase of the sug
gestive words. It would take the whole life and
depth out of them. A " man of the truth " is a
man into all whose life the truth has been pressed
till he is full of it, till he has been given to it,
and it has been given to him, he being always
the complete being whose unity is in that total
of moral, intellectual, and spiritual life which
makes what we call character. He is the man
of whom Pilate s prisoner said, " He hears my
voice." No wonder that Pilate, hearing a new
sound in an old familiar word, felt all his old
questions stir again within him, and asked with
an interest which was too weary to be called a
hope, " What is truth ? "
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 219
These passages will show how the word truth
sounds when Jesus says it. I have not hesitated
to multiply them, because out of them all comes
forth, I think, a perfectly clear conception of
what the intellectual life was in Jesus. The
great fact concerning it is this, that in Him the
intellect never works alone. You never can
separate its workings from the complete opera
tion of the whole nature. He never simply
knows, but always loves and resolves at the
same time. Truth which the mind discovers
becomes immediately the possession of the af
fections and the will. It cannot remain in the
condition of mere knowledge. Indeed, knowl
edge is no word of Jesus. Solomon in the Book
of Proverbs is always talking about knowledge.
Jesus, in the Gospel of John, is always talking
about truth. So genuine is the unity of His
being, that what comes to Him as knowledge
is pressed and gathered into every part of Him,
and fills His entire nature as truth. The rays
of intellectual light are absorbed into the whole
substance of the spontaneous affections and the
unerring will. The rig - 1 and the true, the wrong
22O The Ii^fluence of Jesus
and the false, are not separable from one another.
The life is simple because of its completeness,
It is the true unity of a man.
When we see how constantly it is the crudity
of an unappropriated, unassimilated intellectual
ity that disappoints us in intellectual people;
when we find ourselves turning away from many
a learned man whose knowledge has not been
pressed into character ; when we find that the
action of the intellect forcing itself upon our
notice because it is working out of proportion to
or out of harmony with the other parts of a man s
nature, his conscience, his affections, and his
active powers, always dissatisfies and makes us
restless, and, with all the interest which we may
feel in him, does not let us think that we have
found the fullest and most perfect man, when
we see all this, it becomes clear to us what a
distinguishing thing in Jesus was this unity of
life in which the special action of the intellect
was lost. We catch something of the spirit
with which His disciple, fondly recurring years
afterwards to the bright days when He first knew
Jesus, twice used the same description of Him :
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 221
"The word was made flesh and dwelt among us,
full of grace and truth." " The law was given by
Moses, but by Jesus Christ came grace and truth."
We have only to dwell upon men s best con
ception of a Deity to see how distinct and how
lofty this conception of intellectuality is which
the life of Jesus sets be f ore us. The partialness
which we see in man, and which lets us easily
divide our fellow-men into classes and label
them the men of intellect or the men of action,
passes away as we mount to any thought of God
which is at all worthy of Him. What God
knows is one and the same with the love with
which He loves and the resolve with which He
wills. You cannot draw a fence through the
great ocean of infinity. Mythology dreams of
its many gods with many functions. The mo
ment that one God stands forth above all gods,
the many things which the partial deities do lose
themselves in the one perfect thing which the
one only Deity is. And all wisdom unites
with all power and all love no less in the guid
ing of a little child along the slippery path
which leads to manhood, than in the vast con-
222 The Influence of Jesus
duct of the destinies of the colossal man who
lives through all the generations of the race.
We need only to think of the kind of human
creature who has always most easily commanded
the instinctive admiration of his brethren, and
we shall see that the same character reappears in
him. It is not the intellectual man as such, not
the man in whom intellect stands crudely forth
as the controlling element in life, that other men
are drawn to most. The greatest men that ever
lived are those in whom you cannot separate the
mental and moral lives. You cannot say just
what part of their power and success is due to a
good heart and what to a sound understanding.
And in every circle there are apt to appear some
persons of great influence and great attractive
ness, of whom you never think as being specially
intellectual. If any one calls them intellectual,
it startles you ; but as you think about your
wonder, you discover that it does not come from
an absence of the intellectual life in those who
are thus spoken of, but from the fact that the
intellectual part of them is so blended and lost
in the rounded and symmetrical unity of their
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 223
life that you have never been led to think of it
by itself. All this is very frequently true con
cerning women, whose unity of life is often more
apparent than is that of men.
Again, the superiority of this sort of life is
seen in the instinctive way with which men seek
to produce it in their systems of education for the
young. In the family and in the school parents
and teachers whose own ambitions are purely
and hardly intellectual will rarely seek for chil
dren so narrow an existence as they are prac
tically seeking for themselves. All men who
have anything to do with education are drawn
irresistibly into the valuing of character. They
cannot disregard subjective life. They cannot
sow seed over the fallow ground till they have
first made it fertile with right emotion. And, on
the other hand, the intellectual culture of the
race, strong as the motives are that incite men to
it for its own sake, could probably never main
tain its ground and keep the enthusiastic interest
of the best and wisest men if, in spite of count-
It ss disappointments, it were not clearly seen to
J we, upon the whole, a close connection with
224 The Influence of Jesus
men s moral conditions and the symmetrical
completeness of their lives.
But perhaps what I am urging is seen most
clearly if we watch the change which comes to
all our natures in their loftiest, which are their
truest, moods. The best study of essential hu
man nature is to be found, not in the exceptional
men who stand out distinct above their fellows,
nor in the ordinary man in his ordinary moments,
when the fire of his life burns low, but in those
states which come to all healthily susceptible
human natures, in which their powers are most
active with the least distortion, times of exalta
tion, in which the exalted man is conscious that
he is not transported out of himself, but is simply
realizing himself in a supreme degree. And one
of the characteristics of such times of healthy
exaltation is the manifest unity of the life, and
especially the way in which intellectual action,
without being quenched, nay, burning at its very
brightest, blends with the quickened activity of
all the being, and is not even thought of by it
self. A time of heroic sacrifice brings quick per
ceptions, which yet the hero has no time to dwelJ
On the Intettectnal Life of Man. 225
upon with pride before they are lost in the tor
rent of rich impulses which is sweeping through
his life. The days when death comes near our
life with that freedom and refinement which it
always tries to bring, are days in which we think
the truest and profoundest thoughts about the
overpowering mystery ; but it is so much else to
us then besides a thing to think about, it is
something so much nearer and greater than a
problem of the brain, that we hardly know
that we are thinking about it at all. So love and
hope and joy and indignation and fervent admi
ration for a noble man, and any sudden sight of
our own best possibilities, all of these are con
ditions in which the intellect works vigorously,
but it works in the midst of a being all quickened
and exalted together, and so it is lost in th^ large
action of the whole. " He who does not lose his
reason in certain things," says Lessing, " has none
to lose." But the reason is lost, not by any palsy
or death that falls on it, but by the vehement
life of will and affections, among which the life
of the reason takes its true place as but one
member of the perfect whole.
15
226 The Influence of Jesus
There is a noble passage of Wordsworth which
tells this same story, and shows how under the
greatest influences of nature the same rich blend
ing of the life takes place. He is describing the
consecrating effects of early dawn :
" What soul was his when from the naked top
Of some bold headland he beheld the sun
Rise up and bathe the world in light. He looked
Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth
And ocean s liquid mass, beneath him lay
In gladness and deep joy. The clouds were touched
And in their silent faces did he read
Unutterable love. Sound needed not
Nor any voice of joy ; his spirit drank
The spectacle ; sensation, soul, and form
All melted into him. They swallowed up
His animal being ; in them did he live
And by them did he live. They were his life.
In such access of mind, in such high hour
Of visitation from the Living God,
Thought was not ; in enjoyment it expired.
No thanks he breathed, he proffered no request ;
Rapt into still communion that transcends
The imperfect offices of prayer and praise,
His mind was a thanksgiving to the Power
That made him ; it was blessedness and love ! "
I must not dwell longer on these illustrations.
This fact, so abundantly set forth in our own
best experiences, is the fact that fills and ex
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 227
plainr the intellectual history of Jesus. The
" mind of Christ," of which one of His followers
spoke years afterwards, is mingled and lost in
the completeness of His life ; and that com
pleteness, to take one step farther, is represented
to Himself by the obedience which He owed
and always rendered to His Father. The unity
of life is rescued from vagueness and made a true
reality to Jesus by the one enveloping relation
to God which comprehends it all. We shall un
derstand that, I think, if we turn again to the
unique and precious story in which is told us all
that we know about the boyhood of Jesus. The
child of twelve years old finds his way back to
the Temple, where the sacredness of life and
the connection of man with God had for the
first time been set forth before Him in ceremo
nial richness. He cannot turn His back upon
the wonderful, delightful place. He cannot go
quietly down into Galilee, and leave the Temple,
which is radiant with knowledge and holiness,
behind Him. We must remember that the
Temple was indeed the centre of knowledge for
the Jews. There sat the doctors. There the
228 The Influence of Jesus
law was taught. When Jesus, then, tarried in
Jerusalem and clung about the Temple courts,
it was the craving after knowledge, it was that
sweet, vague outlook into vast cloud-swept fields
of possible intelligence, which makes the poetry
of every pure boy s life to-day, it was this lofty
wish to know, that kept Him there. But when
His parents came back and found Him, and
when, with a boy s directness and a boy s ab
sorption in the present task, He looked up at
them in surprise, as if it were a wonderful thing
that any one should think He could be doing
anything but just what He was doing then,
and answered, " Wist ye not that I must be
about My Father s business ? " it was an answer
of obedience ; all alive with thought ; yet, when
He stated the purpose of His life, it was not
thought, but duty. The intellectual activity was
held in the bosom of an obedience which made
the boy s life a unit. Out of that obedience the
intellectual activity received its impulse, and tc
the more and more complete fulfilment of that
obedience it contributed its results.
Thus the character of the intellectual life of
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 229
Jesus was indicated at the very start. We have
only to look at some of the striking moments of
His mental experience, to see how that character
ran through them all. There is much that might
be said about the Temptation, that mysterious
experience in the wilderness with which His
early life of contemplation passed over into the
later life of action. All that I point out to you
now is this, that, while it is evident that in
those terrible hours the whole nature of Jesus
was submitted to a fearful struggle, and that,
as not the least among the elements that made
up the ordeal, His intellectual judgments were
shaken, His knowledge of truth was invaded by
tumultuous doubt, His sight of His Father was
obscured, yet, at the last, and as the sum of
all, the question was not one of intelligence but
of will. It was a choice of obediences that made
the real crisis. It was the rejection of Satan s
" Fall down and worship me," and the dear
acceptance of "Thou shalt serve the Lord Thy
God," that marked the victory. " Then the
Devil leaveth Him, and behold angels came
and ministered unto Him." The moment that
230 The Influence of Jesus
the obedience of the life was established, the
mental tumult settled into peace within it.
At the other end of the career of Jesus the
same thing was seen. In the Garden of Geth-
semane reason seemed to totter on her throne.
For the last time the desperate hands had to
cling to the truth in instant fear. But there,
too, it is not by the direct conviction of the
reason ; it is by the adjustment of the whole
life in obedience to which, no doubt, the rea
son gave its assent, but which was a transaction
far beyond the reason s limits that the trem
bling reason finds composure. When He said,
" Thy will be done," all the obscurity began to
scatter, and those words which He said four
days later, after He had risen, to His disciples,
"Ought not Christ to have suffered these things ?"
words with the echo in them of the same sur
prise with which He long before spoke to His
parents in the Temple, words full of the peace
of satisfied intelligence, began to take shape
upon His lips.
It is a poor and pitiable life indeed that can
not understand in some degree, out of its own
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 231
history, this experience of the Temptation and
of Gethsemane. Who of us has not bowed his
will to some supreme law, accepted some obe
dience as the atmosphere in which his life must
live, and found at once that his mind s darkness
turned to light, and that many a hard ques
tion found its answer ? Who has not sometimes
seemed to see it all as clear as daylight, that
not by the sharpening of the intellect to super
natural acuteness, but by the submission of the
nature to its true authority, man was at last to
conquer truth ; that not by agonizing struggles
over contradictory evidence, but by the har
mony with Him in whom the answers to all our
doubts are folded, a harmony with Him brought
by obedience to Him, our doubts must be en
lightened ?
But to return to Jesus, I think we have in
what we have been saying the best light that
we can get upon the method of His inspiration
by His Father, and so, by inference, upon the
method of all the inspiration of the holy men
who spoke for God. When I hear Jesus say,
44 As My Father hath taught Me I speak these
232 The Influence of Jesus
things ; and He that sent Me is with Me : the
Father hath not left Me alone ; for I do always
those things that please Him," I cannot be sur
prised as I read on to the next verse and find
that " As He spake those words many believed
on Him." For the words made the breadth and
depth of His inspiration plain. At the base of
it all lay His obedience : " For I do always those
things that please Him." Out of that obedience
came continual communion. " He that sent Me
is with Me. The Father hath not left Me alone."
And to the spirit lying close in that communion
to the Father s spirit, to the soul of the Son
lying in its completeness on the soul of the
Father, came the wisdom of the Father to be
given to the world. What did they think of
the next truth that Jesus uttered after He had
thus explained Himself? Did it seem to them
something which He by unusual penetration had
discovered ? Did it seem to them a single, sepa
rate message, apart from all other communica
tion, told by God to Jesus to be told to them ?
They must have understood Him better than
that. They must have known that, however the
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 233
intelligence of Jesus had been illuminated to know
this special truth, that special illumination of the
intelligence was subordinate to and included in
the consecration of the whole life by obedience ;
that in whatever sense Jesus knew this because
God told Him, He never could have been told
if underneath all the communication between
Him and His Father it had not been true at
the base of everything that He and His Father
were one. I cannot conceive of the true hearer
of Jesus losing that large thought of His Lord s
inspiration ever again. Not a mere message-
bringer could He ever seem ; but the eternal
truth manifest first in character before it pre
sented itself in specific revelation ; the Word of
God, in which and by which the words of God
through Him gained their authority and value.
Once or twice Jesus declares with perfect
frankness the limits of His knowledge. There
are some things which He does not know. " Of
that day and hour knoweth not the Son," He
says, " but the Father." What does it mean ?
The ancient cracle or the modern fortune-teller
could not do that and yet keep men s faith.
234 Th& Influence of Jesus
They have no self, no character behind their
words. Men do not believe properly in them,
but only in their words. But Jesus always is
behind His words. " Ye believe not," He said
once to the Jews, " because ye are not of My
sheep." He must possess men before His words
could take possession of them. We must believe
Him inspired, see Him full of God, before we
can believe His words inspired, and see them
burn with truth. Not from simple brain to
simple brain, as the reasoning of Euclid comes
to its students, but from total character to total
character, comes the New Testament from God
to men.
If we turn now from the thought of Christ s
own intellectual life to think of the immediate
influence which He exercised upon His disciples,
I do not know how to approach that part of our
subject better than through the medium of an
analogy which must be suggested to any one
who thoughtfully reads the record of Jesus along
with the record of that only one among purely
human teachers whom Christian men have ever
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 235
ventured to compare with Him. No one can
read the Gospel of St. John and then turn to
what is left us of the life of Socrates, without
being struck and almost startled with the sug
gested comparison between the account of Christ s
last talk with His disciples before His crucifixion,
which is given in five chapters of that Gospel,
and the beautiful story of what Socrates said to
Simmias and Cebes and his other friends in the
prison at Athens just before he drank the hem
lock, the story which Plato has written for us
in the Phaedo. And nowhere could the essential
difference as well as the likeness of the two
great teachers become more apparent. Nowhere
could the critics who loosely class Jesus and Soc
rates together see more distinctly where their
classification fails, where the line runs beyond
which Socrates cannot go, beyond which the
nature of Jesus sweeps out of our sight.
I should like to dwell for a few moments on
this comparison. The story in St. John is famil-
.ar enough. The points in the story which Plato
tells I may venture to recall to you. The two
may stand in our imagination side by side. And
236 The Influence of Jesus
in their mere details there is much that suggests
comparison. The quiet upper chamber at Jeru
salem where the young man sits with His young
companions at the simple supper, where vener
able traditions blend with the joy of present
companionship and the pain of coming separa
tion, is set off against the rugged prison open
ing upon the Agora at Athens, where, in the
inner chamber, the friends of Socrates have
come to talk with him once more before he dies.
The old man sits on the bed at first, with his leg
drawn up, rubbing the spot from which the fetter
had just been taken off preparatory to his death.
The relief that he feels in his leg opens his talk
with a remark upon the strange connection be
tween pain and pleasure. By and by he drops
his feet upon the floor, and so sits on the bed
side, calmly talking. Once he drops his hand
affectionately upon the head of Phaedo, as if he,
too, would have a " disciple whom he loved," and
draw one trusting heart closer to him than the
rest. His wife comes in to him with their three
boys, and he talks with them kindly, but there
is no tenderness, and after a little while he bids
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 237
them to be taken away, for they evidently trouble
him. The humor that had played through all
his life is with him to the last. Once he makes
a pun. And at the very end, when the disciples
asked him how they should bury him, he bids
them bury him what way they will, " if only you
can catch me and I do not give you the slip " ;
and as he speaks, he gently smiles to see how
lightly all that he has been saying has sunk into
them, and to fancy these clumsy affectionate
Athenians chasing his fleeting spirit to cage it
in a tomb. Once comes a message from the
executioner to tell him about the poison he will
have to drink, which is a sharp, violent note,
intruding on the music of his thought, that some
how reminds us of the departure of Judas from
the Passover table. For an instant the coming
woe starts up dramatically real. There is one
beautiful moment when the disciples are half
convinced, but still frightened and trembling.
Socrates sees it in their faces, and tells
them of it. And Cebes answers, " Well, Soc
rates, suppose that we are frightened ; do you
encourage and comfort us. Or rather, suppose
238 The Influence of Jesus
not that we are frightened, but that there is a
child within us who is so." And Socrates play
fully takes up the pretty thought. " Ah, yes,"
he says, " we must find some charm that we can
sing over this frightened child to quiet him," and
so he goes on with his talk again. The words
in which Phsedo afterwards recalls the impression
that his master s presence made on him that day
might almost have been on the lips of John. " I
had no painful feeling of pity, as might seem
natural to a person present at such a catastrophe,
nor did I feel a pleasure as on ordinary occasions
when we talked philosophy, though the dis
course was of the same kind. It was a peculiar
feeling that possessed me, a strange mixture of
pleasure and grief, when I thought that he
would soon cease to be." All through the con
versation we can hear the religious festival in
which the Athenians are engaged outside, to cele
brate the return of the sacred ship from Delos,
the Passover, as it were, of the Athenian life.
At last, without a shock, continuing the calm and
peaceful teaching to the last, the great man takes
the cup and drinks the poison, and all is over
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 239
There lies his body before them, more eloquent
in silence than any of the words he said.
And now what was it that they talked about on
that last day ? The discussion hovered and flut
tered a little at first before it settled to its work ;
but it soon became a sustained argument for im
mortality. It is very hard to think that this man
is just going to die, and knows it, who sits here
calmly arguing that the soul must be immortal.
And what were his arguments ? Really, they
were three. The first was the distinctness be
tween the soul and the body, as testified by what
was the favorite doctrine of Socrates, the soul s
pre-existence. If the soul existed before the
body, it surely might outlive it. Nay, it must be
ready for the other bodies which are waiting foi
it. In support of this belief he dwells upon his
theory of recollection to account for the presence
of ideas in man which man never cculd have ac
quired by the senses. Then comes his second
argument, in which he pleads the indestructi
bility of the soul from its simplicity, its incom-
posite nature. Then Simmias and Cebes interpose
two exquisitely stated difficulties ; one suggest-
240 The Influence of Jesus
ing that, after all, the soul may be to the bod)
what the music is to the lyre ; the other wonder-
ing whether the body may not possibly outlive
the soul, as the unthinking cloth outlives the
wise and skilful weaver by whose hand it was
made. Socrates replies to both of them and
satisfies them ; and then goes on to his third
argument, which is a long and very subtle one
about ideas and their accessory attributes, in
which he tries to draw the distinction between
the imperishable idea and the perishable attri
butes of life.
These are his arguments. They are sur
rounded with an atmosphere of feeling. Rev
erence and gratitude to God, affection for his
disciples, and a tender sense of duty, these
play around and through the whole discussion
and give it softness and richness. It is not hard
and cold. It does not rely wholly upon the
worth of its arguments for its power. That is
seen in the fact that, though the arguments in
the shape in which Socrates puts them would
convince no man of the truth of immortality
to-day, still the whole scene remains as one of
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 241
the sacred pictures of the human soul. That
prison cell is one of the temples of man s faith,
one of the vestibules of immortality. But still
the discourse is an argument. It is a search
after knowledge. It is a struggle of the intel
lect. It is consoled by the thought of a divinity
behind it which will make allowance for its de
ficiencies ; but it feels no direct and present in
fluence from the wisdom of that divinity. What
it knows it must discover for itself, and hold,
when it is won, as an intellectual conviction.
Now turn the leaves of four hundred years, and
in the chamber of the Passover feel the differ
ence. As Jesus speaks, argument disappears.
Conviction is attained by the immediate per
ception of life by life. " If ye had known Me,
ye should have known My Father also, and
from henceforth ye both know Him and have
seen Him." " In My Father s house are many
mansions : I go to prepare a place for you."
That is the argument of Jesus for immortality.
It is not right to say that Socrates appeals to
the reason and fails, while Jesus speaks to the
heart and succeeds. The appeal of Jesus is to
16
242 The Influence of Jesus
the reason, too, only it is to that spiritual reason
which is no special function of the nature, but
is the best action of the whole nature working
together, the affection and the will being the
partners of the brain ; or rather, for that does
not express the intimacy of their life, the affec
tion and the will being one manhood with the
brain and sharing its intelligence. The difference
of result is, in one word, the difference between con
vincing the intellect and making the man believe.
I do not know that I can make this clearer,
and I must not steal the time to quote largely
from the discourse of Jesus in support of what
I mean. But let us put one or two pairs of pas
sages together. The philosopher asks, " Shall
a man who really loves knowledge, and who is
firmly persuaded that he shall never truly attain
it except m Hades, be angry and sorry to have
to die ? " The Son of God says, " Now I go to
Him that sent Me." Socrates says, "Be well
assured I do expect this, that I shall be among
good men, though this I do not feel so confident
about ; but I shall go to gods who are good gov
ernors," Jesus cries, " Now, O Father, glorify
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 243
thou Me with Thine own self." Socrates draws
in confused but elaborate detail the road to Hades
and its geography. Jesus says, " In My Father s
house are many mansions " ; and, " Father, I will
that they whom Thou hast given Me be with Me
where I am." Socrates is noble in his frank
uncertainty about his life. "Whether I tried in
the right way and with what success I shall
know certainly when I arrive there, if it please
God." Jesus is divine in His certainty. " O
righteous Father, the world hath not known
Thee, but I have known Thee." " I have fin
ished the work which Thou gavest Me to do."
Socrates tells of a "demon," or angel, who has
the care of every man while he is alive, and
when he is dead takes him to the place of judg
ment. Jesus says, " I will pray the Father, and
He shall give you another Comforter, that He
may abide with you forever." " He shall testify
of Me." The sage consoles his disciples by send
ing them out to find other teachers. " Greece is
a wide place, Cebes, and there are in it many
good men. And there are, besides, many races
of barbarians, all of whom are to be explored in
244 The Influence of Jesus
search of some who can perform such a charm
as we have spoken of." The Savior declares
simply, " I will not leave you comfortless. I will
come unto you." Socrates says, when they ask
him for his last legacy, " If you take good care
of yourselves, you will always gratify me and
mine most." Jesus says, " This is My command
ment, that ye love one another as I have loved
you." And, if we let our eye run out beyond
the times when both the tragedies the tragedy
of Athens and the tragedy of Jerusalem were
finished, and see what thoughts of the two suf
ferers were left behind them, we hear Phaedo
closing his long story with these words : " This
was the end, Echecrates, of our friend : of all the
men whom we have known, the best, the wisest,
and the most just." Nay; before the poison was
given by the jailer s hand we hear him say to his
great prisoner, " I have found you the most gen
erous and gentle and best of all who ever came
here." And then our thoughts run to Jerusa
lem, and hear the centurion who commanded the
soldiers who crucified Jesus say, as he sees the
Crucified give up the ghost, " Truly this was
the Son of God."
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 245
I know not what to say to any man who does
not feel the difference. I can almost dream
what Socrates would say to any man who said
there was no difference between Jesus and him.
But how shall we state the difference ? One
is d Vine and human ; the other is human only.
One is Redeemer ; the other is philosopher. One
is inspired, and the other questions. One re
veals, and the other argues. These statements,
doubtless, are all true. And in them all there
is wrapped up this, which is the truth of all the
influence of Jesus over men s minds, that where
Socrates brings an argument to meet an objec
tion, Jesus always brings a nature to meet a nat
ure, a whole being which the truth has rilled
with strength, to meet another whole being which
error has filled with feebleness.
I must hasten on to speak of the special
characteristics which this general character of
His teaching gave to the influence which Jesus
exercised over the intellectual life of His disci
ples. But let me ask you first to remember two
notable utterances of His, in which He distinctly
246 The Influence of Jesus
stated this theory of the mind and its work, which
we have gathered by inference from many of His
words. One of them is in those words which it
would seem as if a great deal of the broadest
and best religious thought of our age had almost
taken for its motto. No doubt, like all mottoes,
it has been often in danger of losing some of
its profoundness by the very familiarity which it
has gained, as a coin loses sharpness by the con
stant circulation which proves that men know
its value ; but, on the whole, I do not know what
verse there is in the New Testament which any
man who longed to see the intellect of men
most alive and most thoroughly consecrated to
the best uses, would sooner choose to write upon
the walls of his thoughtful century than that
which Jesus spoke in the Temple about the
midst of the feast : " If any man will do My will,
He shall know of the doctrine." The other
passage is that beautiful account of the simple
and humble wonder of Judas, not Iscariot, who
found it hard to believe that he and his brother
disciples were to receive enlightenments from
God which did not come to other men. And
On the Intellectual Life of A fan. 247
Jesus went on to explain the process to him.
" If a man love Me," He said, " he will keep My
words, and My Father will love him, and We will
come to Him and make our abode with Him."
Those, I think, are the two critical passages in
vhich Jesus gives us His doctrine of the intel
lectual life. They are as clear and definite as
if they were written in a book of science. They
both declare that in the highest things the in
tellect can never work alone for the discovery of
truth. Truth, when it is won, is the possession
of the whole nature. By the action of the whole
nature only can it be gained. The king must
go with his counsellors at his side and his army
at his back, or he makes no conquest. The in
tellect must be surrounded by the richness of the
affections and backed by the power of the will,
or it attains no perfect truth.
Of such an influence, what was the effect on
those disciples ? What sort of an intellectual
life did they attain ? It is not hard to point out
some, at least, of the habits of mind into which
Jesus led them. The first is their habit of re
garding the physical world as the utterance of a
248 The Influence of Jcsiis
divine will, in sympathy with the divine char
acter. There are two ways of looking at the
earth which have divided men in all time. The
one has counted it something outside of man,
with only external relation to him, holding him,
feeding him, forcing him to work. The other
has counted it in some true sense a medium of
revelation and influence from God to man. The
first view is the view of science, and is always
tending to hard superficialness, to the spiritual
poverty of the fingering slave who will " peep and
botanize upon his mother s grave." The other
view is the view of poetry, and its corrupt ten
dency is toward superstition, toward that exces
sive human self-consciousness which thinks that
stars move and winds blow only to bring us mes
sages out of the unseen world. Between these two
conceptions of nature all human thought divides.
"Poetry," says Coleridge, "is not the proper an
tithesis to prose, but to science." Science looks
to the world for facts and knowledge ; poetry
asks of it influence and character. Science han
dles the material; poetry questions the creative
soul within. Each has its proper business with
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 249
this wondrous earth. Each makes its admirable
kind of man. Sometimes, though very rarely,
the two meet in the same man ; but never so
that one or the other is not in clear preponder
ance and does not give a distinct color to the
character. Now of the Apostles there can be no
doubt which view of the earth their Lord had
led them to. His parables, the stones of the
wheat and tares in the field, of the fig-tree on the
hillside, of the sheep wandering in the moun
tains, of the net dragged through the rushing
waters of the lake, all of them were poems ; all
of them sought in nature not the form, but the
soul, not the shape, but the meaning. And
when the disciples wanted to call down the fire
from heaven to destroy a village of the Samari
tans where Jesus had not been received, it was
the poetic thought of nature that was in their
minds. Nothing could have been more unscien
tific. It was very crude and ignorant, poor
poetry, poor sense of the meaning of the natural
forces, of the purpose of the heavens and their
fire, and of the way in which their power could
be shown, but it was the crudeness of the
250 The Influence of Jesus
poet, not of the scientist ; it was the vague and
coarse effort of that same power which, made
clear and fine, enabled them to understand the
parables of Jesus and not to be offended at His
miracles, which finally prepared them for the
resurrection, and made St. Matthew not afraid
to write that when Jesus expired on the cross
the earth quaked, and the rocks rent, and the
graves were opened.
To this same spirit it belonged to easily ac
knowledge mystery, or the largeness of life, its
necessary extension into regions which they had
not explored. Men are made quite as much by
their sense of what there is in the world which
they do not know, as by the few truths of which
they think that they have gained the mastery,
The outlook into mystery has even a stronger in
tellectual influence than the inspection of discov
ered fact. The sin with which Jesus was always
upbraiding the Pharisees what He called hy
pocrisy is at once a spiritual and an intellectual
vice. It was a disbelief of the greatness of God
which made it possible for them to dream of
imposing upon Him. It was a pride in then
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 25 1
selves which could not look into the vastness of
truth. The unbelief which Jesus upbraids is not
the doubt of special doctrine, but that narrow
and worldly temper to which the whole world of
mystery was inconceivable. The doubter whom
Christ rebukes is not the earnest and eager be
liever who has become lost in the highways of
faith. It is the unventuresome spirit which is
incapable of faith at all, which has reduced the
world to materialism like the Sadducee, or made
duty into law and religion into ceremony like
the Pharisee. For neither of them was there
any outlook. For His disciples, the word of
intellectual life, as of moral discipline, was
" Watch." " Expect new things. The world is
large. Out of the darkness shall come light.
Be ready for surprises." Such readiness is the
rightful possession only of men who live not in
the forms but in the principles of things ; and so
the spiritual thoroughness into which Jesus led
His disciples is bound up closely with the intel
lectual progress which they attained.
Again, Jesus inspired them with His own
view of the actual condition of things around
2$ 2 The Influen:e of Jesus
them, and of the way in which the better life of
the world was to come. The character of Christ s
own reforming spirit was clear enough. He said
that He wanted not to destroy, but to fulfil the
agencies which He found here in the world. He
never cared to reshape circumstances until He
had regenerated men. He let the shell stand as
He found it until the new life within could burst
it for itself. It is very wonderful to me to see
how thoroughly His disciples caught His method.
They could not have caught it so completely and
so soon if it had not been that it was based on
a large principle, if it had not been more than a
special trick or tact. Almost instantly, as soon
as the disciples began their work, they seem to
have been filled with a true conception of its
divine method, that not from outside, but from
inside ; not by the remodelling of institutions,
but by the change of character ; not by the sup
pression of vices, but by the destruction of sin,
the world was to be saved. That truth with
whose vitality all modern life has flourished, with
the forgetfulness of which all modern history
has always tended to corruption, that truth onty
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 255
dreamed of by a few spiritual philosophers in the
ancient world, it is one of the marvellous phe
nomena of human thought, that it should have
leaped full-grown to life with the first influence
of Christianity. A few faint flutterings about
the old methods of repression, and the disciples
of Jesus settle at once to the new methods of
development.
Another of the intellectual habits which
naturally grew out of the first principles of Jesus
was His discovery of interest in people whom
the world generally would have found most un
interesting. And this same habit, passing over
into His disciples, made the wide and democratic
character of the new faith. There are signs
enough that Jesus had His special feelings to
wards these men who were most congenial to
Him. As the most prominent of all such signs,
we all remember His peculiar love for the per
ceptive and appreciative John. At the table of
the Last Supper, by the cross from which the
Sufferer looked down on His few faithful friends,
on the morning of the resurrection, at the Sea
of Tiberias, where the risen Jesus met the famil-
254 The Influence of Jesus
iar company again, everywhere John appears as
the disciple whom Jesus loved. We cannot pic
ture to ourselves a character so definite as that
of Jesus which should be destitute )f such affin
ities ; and yet, always, as we read the Gospels,
there is a larger fact behind this special friend
ship, there is a value of human nature and of
all men who bear it, on the bosom of which this
special friendship floats like a mere accident.
The result is, a true freedom from fastidiousness,
a breadth and quickness of sympathy and hope
which gives a singular largeness to the intellec
tual life of Jesus, which we all recognize. Some
thing of the same sort begins to show itself at
once in His disciples. I do not know how we
better can describe it than by saying that it
keeps all the warmth and directness of personal
intercourse without its distortions and partiali
ties. This is an intellectual as well as a spiritual
condition. It keeps thought and observation
large, and makes the judgment at once earnest
and true. It is the power that redeems the
mind from narrowness while it still keeps it eager
and intense.
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 255
There is one other habit which character
ized always the thought of Jesus, and which also
passed out from Him to his disciples. It is not
easy to describe, but it seems to consist in a con
stant progress from the arbitrary and special to
the essential and universal forms of thought. In
one part of the Sermon on the Mount this habit
of Jesus is supremely manifest. It is told in the
fifth chapter of St. Matthew. The Pharisees
those dull and earthly spirits who yet have drawn
forth for us the divinest words of Jesus had
followed the great Teacher and were persecuting
Him with questions. Those questions were all
of the same sort. They all began with some
special law, sometimes of the Old Testament,
sometimes of the Rabbinical traditions, and went
on to the inevitable conflict of that law in its
letter with the conditions of human life. The
law was good, but the mere letter of the law be
came exhausted or confused before it had accom
plished the purpose for which the law was
evidently made. Jesus takes each of these laws
and opens it. Its principle appears underneath
its letter. It is seen to be no arbitrary enact-
256 The Influence of Jesus
ment for the settlement of a special difficulty, but
an essential truth, true everywhere. For in
stance, the prohibition of murder opens into the
picture of a vigorous and vital peace out of which
all malice and hatred should have faded away.
The prohibition of adultery enlarges itself into
the picture of a world all bright with purity.
The command to perform an oath expands iuto
the promise of a life so simply pure and faithful
that in it no oath should ever need be spoken
The " eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth "
changes into " resist not evil," and men see how
all justice has mercy at its heart. There is noth
ing that marks the limits of men s intellectual life
more than the degree in which they have the
power of this progress from the local to the uni
versal, from the partial to the complete. All
thought, like all life, must begin with specialness,
must fasten itself upon one point of the great
earth ; but just as Jesus in his influence upon
our race has left behind Judea and its geography
and gone forth to become the possession of the
world, so it would seem as if His teaching were
always starting from special problems only to
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 257
extend itself to the great principles which under
lie those problems and which have their applica
tions throughout all human life.
Indeed, I think that the figure which I just
suggested is one that may give us a good ded of
light. I remember years ago how the first sight
of Palestine seemed to adjust for me the two
thoughts of the local and the universal Christ as
I had never been able to adjust them before.
As one travels through that land, the New Tes
tament story is rescued from vagueness and ob
scurity, and the historic life becomes a clear and
realized fact ; while at the same time the poverty
of the country, the failure of the material to sat
isfy and account for and accompany the spiritual,
sets one free for a larger and truer grasping of
the Divine power. It is like the relation between
an immortal word and the mortal lips that uttered
it. The lips die, and you look at them when they
are dead, and see at once how they were made to
speak the word, how their whole mechanism was
built for it, and yet how, even while they uttered
it, they were dying in giving expression to what
by its very nature was eternal. So Palestine, the
17
2$ 8 The Influence of jfesus
home-land of Jesus, opens into Christendom ; and
so each arbitrary command and special revelation
which He gave opens into eternal principles and
universal truths.
A poetic conception of the world we live in,
a willing acceptance of mystery, an expectation
of progress by development, an absence of
fastidiousness that comes from a sense of the
possibilities of all humanity, and a perpetual
enlargement of thought from the arbitrary into
the essential, these, then, I think, are the intel
lectual characteristics which Christ s disciples
gathered from their Master ; and I think that we
can see that these characteristics make, as we set
them all together, a certain definite and recog
nizable type of mental life, one that we should
know from every other if we met to-day a man
in whom it was embodied. It is a type in which,
according to the description which I tried to give,
the intellect, while it is plentifully present, does
not stand alone and force itself upon our thought
It is a type in which character is the result that
impresses us, character holding in harmony all
the elements of the nature, rather than intellect
On the Intellectual Life of Man, 259
uality, which is the predominant presence of one
element. It is a type in which righteousness and
reason so coincide and co-operate that you can
not separate them, and do not want to. It is a
type of life in which, fulfilling the conjunction
which David loved so much to describe, " Mercy
and Truth are met together."
If I have rightly traced the general character
of the mental life and influence of Jesus, we are
prepared now, I think, to bring it home into asso
ciation with that which through all these lectures
we have held to be the central and formative idea
of Jesus. I have drawn the indications of His
intellectual character from what is told us in
the Gospel of John. One key-word, truth, ap
pears, as I said, upon His lips, almost exclusively
in that book. And now in that same book it is
almost alone that Jesus is always calling God His
Father. Mark does not quote at all such words,
and Matthew and Luke quote them very seldom.
The two, then, go together. That same pro-
founder insight into the mind of Jesus which sees
His intellectual life and influence not standing
alone, but part of the whole nature, seizes also
260 The Influence of Jesus
upon that representation which sums up His
whole life as the life of a son lived in the house
hold of his father. And we can see ourselves
why this is so. As soon as we unite in our minds
the various characteristics which we have seen
to belong to the intellectuality of Jesus, and then
look about the world for any picture of an intel
lectual life which shall present to us, however
faintly, the total impression which they make, we
find ourselves drawn at once to the learning
child in His Father s house. The poetic concep
tion of the world, the satisfied acceptance of mys
tery, the constant thought of development, the
absence of fastidiousness, and the perpetual open
ing of the arbitrary into the essential, all of
these blend most healthily in that primary type
of intellectual influence which is seen wherever
a docile child stands learning truth within his
father s house. It is no hard touch of intellect
on intellect. It is a warm approach of life to life,
in which it is not merely knowledge but charac
ter, in which knowledge is held in solution, that
passes over from the wiser to the foolisher. If
this be true, then see what we have reached
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 2t>i
Here at the bottom of His intellectual life and
influence, as at the bottom of all His other life
and influence, lies the idea of Jesus. Still before
all things, at the root and source of everything
else that He is, He is the Son of God. Once,
when they would not understand Him, He turned
sadly and looked forward past the crucifixion into
the prospect of a fuller comprehension of it,
which, it may be, we are only now beginning to
attain ; and as He pictured it to his hope, this
truth of His Sonship lay at the bottom of it.
" When ye have lifted up the Son of Man," He
said, " then shall ye know that I am He, and that
I do nothing of Myself, but as My Father hath
taught Me I speak these things." At the bottom
of His whole conception of intellectual life lies
the never-failing, never-fading consciousness that
He is the child of God. You touch some flower
of a parable, you are pierced by the sharp thorn
of some rebuke, and when you ask for the secret of
the sweetness or the pain you find it in the life-
blood of this idea that comes up out of the
deep heart of His life. You ask yourself what
is the one quality that you must put into the
262 The Influence of Jesus
wonderful talk of Socrates to make it approach
the vastly more wonderful talk of Jesus, and you
can name nothing but this, so wholly lacking in
the sage of Athens, so totally pervading every
word of the Man of Palestine, the consciousness
that He is God s child, knowing God as a son
knows a father, speaking with an authority which
no scribe can have, not because He knows more
things, but because He knows everything differ*
ently in that ever-present sense of Sonship.
There is one short story in the Gospel of St.
John, which, if we had the time to study it in
detail, would teem with illustration of what I
have been saying. It is the story of Nicodemus,
a very precious passage for the understanding
of the intellectual method of Jesus. Nicodemus
is one of St. John s men. Neither of the other
writers is drawn to him. But St. John seems, as
he writes the narrative, to feel that he is opening
to us his Master s very heart. If we had time
to dwell minutely on the story, we should see
how Jesus does for Nicodemus the three things
which every thorough teacher must do for every
scholar. He gives him new ideas, He deepens
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 263
with these ideas his personal character and re
sponsibility, and He builds for him new rela
tions with his fellow-men. When Nicodemus
goes away from Jesus, he carries with him the
new truth of regeneration ; he is trembling with
the sense that, to make that truth thoroughly
his, he himself must be a better man ; and by
and by he is seen setting himself against the
current of his fellow-judges to speak a word for
the Master who had spoken such educating
words to him. These are the elements that
make up the effect of all effective influence,
new truth, new character, new duty, not distinct,
not distinguishable from each other, but all
mingled in one complete change and eleva
tion of the man s whole nature. And when
we look for the spring on which Christ laid
His hand for such a comprehensive awakening
of the man s life, we find it where we should
have looked for it, in the truth of sonship
brought to the world in Him, " God so loved
the world that He gave His only-begotten Son."
There is an old legend which says that Nico
demus and Gamaliel and St. Stephen were
264 The Influence of Jesus
buried close together, and that years afterwards
their bodies were found side by side. In a cer
tain way they belong together. They were all
students of the things of God, various types of
sacred wisdom. But if we want to rate them
rightly, we shall find the fineness and the lofti
ness of their intellectual life to stand just in pro
portion to the fulness and clearness with which
at the heart of each man s knowledge lay the
idea of Jesus, that man is the son of God.
I want to spend what little time is yet left me
in this lecture and this course in trying to trace
the presence in all the intellectual life of Chris
tendom of those peculiar characteristics, or rather
of that peculiar character, which we have seen
to-day to belong to the intellectual life of Jesus and
His disciples. Christ s method of knowledge has
been always present under the currents of modern
thought and the impulses of modern study, and
he who watches closely can see how they bear
witness to its presence even while they are not
conscious of it as they move upon its bosom. In
one brief statement of it, the method of Jesus
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 265
may be summed up thus : At the bottom of all
truth lies the truth of truths, that man is the
child of God. All that man knows is really a
knowing of his Father, and can be thoroughly
won only by obedience. And so the moral, the
spiritual, and the intellectual lives are one.
The first consequence of the constant presence
of this method is in a continual struggle after
symmetry in the intellectual action of mankind.
The tendency of modern times, often thwarted
and defeated, is not to be thoroughly and finally
content with one-sided development, with the
use and development of certain special faculties
of men. Sometimes this symmetry will be con
ceived of as something only to be attained by
the race at large ; others, more bold and ideal
istic, will dare to anticipate it even for the indi
vidual ; but before all men who watch the human
intellect there will hover a dream of the fulfilment
of human life on every side, of the ultimate shaping
of a symmetrical manhood in which the functions
which seem contrary or independent shall be
brought into absolute harmony and co-operation.
Lacordaire writes of the "tortures of conscience
266 The Influence of Jesus
struggling with genius." The highest Christian
hope for man pictures the issue of that struggle
in a lofty peace where both shall find their per
fect satisfaction. Goldsmith, when he dedicates
his comedy of " She Stoops to Conquer " to Dr.
Johnson, says, " It may serve the interests of
mankind, also, to inform them that the greatest
wit may be found in a character without impair
ing the most affected piety." It may be doubted
whether a somewhat finer wit and a somewhat
loftier piety than the great London sage pos
sessed must not be shown before the harmony of
wit and piety shall be complete; but no man who
is a Christian is willing to accept an impious wit
or a witless piety as the final accomplishment of
man, and all modern education, while it some
times seems to attempt their union only by the
rapid succession, and not by the harmonious
mingling of the scientific and the moral instruc
tions, acknowledges that both are necessary to
the perfect man.
Again, the Christian thought of knowledge
must always seek, not merely symmetry in the
knowing man, but also harmony in all the knowl
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 267
edge he can win. Under one fatherhood the
whole world becomes sacred. The old distinc
tions of useful and useless knowledge will not
hold. The responsibility of each man for the
working of his intellect must be acknowledged.
The sin of mental carelessness or wilfulness must
take its place among the sins against which men
struggle and for which they repent. The appli
cation of moral standards to history, to art, and
to pure letters must be learned and taught. The
isolation of the artistic impulse from all moral
judgments and purposes must be restrained and
remedied. The whole thought of art must be
enlarged and mellowed till it develops a relation
to the spiritual and moral natures as well as to
the senses of mankind. It will lose, perhaps, the
purity and simplicity which has belonged to the
idea of art in classic and unchristian times, but
it will become more and more a part of the gen
eral culture of human life. That is the change
which has come between the Venus of Milo and
the Moses of Michael Angelo ; between the
Iliad and Paradise Lost ; between the Idyls of
Theocritus and the best modern novel. Mere
268 The Influence of Jesus
simplicity of method and effect have given place
to harmony of method and effect, littleness to
largeness, fastidiousness to sympathy, and the
Christian world has really learned more and more
to believe what the Christian poet sang, that
" He who feels contempt
For any living tiling, hath faculties
That he hath never used : and Thought with him
Is in its infancy."
Another truth which modern and Christian
thought must make more and more of as it
grows riper is the immediateness of divine influ
ence. The ancient poet invoked his muse as he
began his poem, but the invocation must have
meant very little to him. It was the striking of
the strings before he settled into the full strain
he meant to play ; as if he said to the world,
" Listen, for I am ready with my song." The
Christian thinker summons no muse, but as he
speaks there is a sense of something vast behind
him out of which influences come to him; there
is conviction which is not born out of mere
self-conceit ; there is earnestness which is not
the self-excitement of the Pythian damsel on her
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 269
tripod. There is in all men who command the
ears of other men a sense of something behind
them some call it truth, some call it God
for which, for whom, they speak. This is the
loftier tone in modern speculation. This is the
feminine element in modern thought, perpetually
inspiring and leading and lifting that masculine
reason,
" Whose halting wisdom after knows
What her diviner virtue fore discerns."
The intellectual life of Christendom, again,
tends to democracy. Less and less will it con
sent to be the privilege of the selected few.
The fact is plain. The reason of the fact is no
less clear to one who traces the idea of Jesus
everywhere. It is impossible to keep the bounds
of mental life shut against any man when the
source of all men s knowledge is in God, whc
is the Father of us all, and when the faculty of
knowledge is closely connected with the faculty
of moral obedience, which is the right and duty
of mankind. Instantly this began when Chris
tianity was once a living fact. Peter stepped
out of the chamber of the Pentecost and spoke
270 The Influence of Jesus
to the great multitude in words which assumed
in them the power of understanding, of judging,
of deciding questions which up to that time had
been the sacred possession of the scribes and
doctors. There was nothing like that speech
before that day. The germs of the modern ser
mon, the modern lecture, and the modern school
were in it. Thenceforth men s intellects might
differ, but the intellectual chance was open to
every man. To the dullest child belonged the
right to learn all that he could learn, all that it
was in him to learn, of His Father.
And yet once more. The everlasting progress
of knowledge was assured. Once stretch an in
finite life behind our human lives, on which they
rest, in which they belong, and how the everlast
ing contradiction between the little that we know
already, and the vast uncertain bulk of what
we do not know, is robbed of its oppressive
ness. There are two classes of men, with two
dispositions, which come from that contradiction.
One man, frightened at the great bulk of
ignorance, refuses to look it in the face, flees
for the preservation of his self-content to the
On the Intellectual Life of Man. 271
little that he knows, makes believe that that is
all there is to know, and refuses to hear of any
more. He is the bigot who lives through all the
ages and is found in every climate of the globe
and every region of human study. Another
man is so fascinated by the unknown that he
refuses to place value on the known. The little
which man has gained amounts to nothing. And
with the depreciation of all present knowledge
comes the loss of any solid starting-point for
advance into the great vague world that lies be
yond. He is the sceptic who mocks the bigot
for his obstructiveness, and yet himself makes
no progress because he has no foothold from
which he can move. It is like the vague air
taunting the solid rock. If in our modern Chris
tian times there is a better spirit than either of
these men can show ; if it is not necessary for
us that we should be bigots or sceptics either ;
if it is possible for us to value every fragment of
knowledge, not for itself alone, but for the whole,
of which it is a part, and which it prophecies and
promises ; if, as we gaze into the darkness of the
272 The Influence of Jesus
unknown we are not paralyzed, but inspired, be
cause in what we know already we hold the clew
which, as it runs out into the darkness, we can
feel fastened at the other end to the throne around
which burns the unapproachable light of perfect
knowledge toward which we may freely and
eternally advance, the reason of it all must be
that the idea of Jesus has bound our ignorance
and the knowledge of God together, and made it
possible for man so to count all that his Father
knows as the great region for his soul to grow in,
and so to value the little he knows as the gift
and pledge and promise of his Father, who knows
all, that he can neither be proud of his own wis
dom nor be dismayed before his own ignorance ;
but must live, as the child lives in his father s
house, the happy life of complete humility and
unlimited hope.
I must not linger at the close. If in these
lectures I have failed to show that which it has
been upon my mind and heart to describe, I
shall not in a few last words redeem my failure.
On tlu Intellectual Life of Man. 273
I dare not, I do not hope that I have succeeded ;
but I hope that I have not wholly failed. For
to me what I have tried to say is more and more
the glory and the richness and the sweetness of
all life. The idea of Jesus is the illumination and
the inspiration of existence. Without it moral
life becomes a barren expediency, and social life
a hollow shell, and emotional life a meaningless
excitement, and intellectual life an idle play or
stupid drudgery. Without it the world is a puz
zle, and death a horror, and eternity a blank.
More and more it shines the only hope of what
without it is all darkness. More and more the
wild, sad, frightened cries of men who believe
nothing, and the calm, earnest, patient prayers
of men who believe so much that they long for
perfect faith, seem to blend into the great appeal
which Philip of Bethsaida made to Jesus at that
Last Supper, where so much of our time in these
four hours has been spent, " Lord, show us the
Father, and it sufficeth us." And more and more
the only answer to that appeal seems to come
from the same blessed lips that answered Philip,
274 Th e Influence of Jesus.
the lips of the Mediator Jesus, who replies, " Have
I been so long with you and yet hast thou not
known Me ? He that hath seen Me hath seen
the Father."
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The influence
Jesus
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