Part 24

Let us briefly recall our Lord's words in the first three Gospels. Constantly He calls Himself _the Son of Man_, meaning--(can we doubt?)--one who had no ordinary interest in mankind, in manhood, in all humanity; constantly He confesses Himself, and is confessed to be, the Son of God; constantly He claims to be King: He demands absolute obedience, boundless love ("he that loveth father or mother more than Him is not worthy of Him"); He forgives sins; He has authority over the Sabbath; He baptizes with the Holy Ghost; He promulgates His own law even where it seems to contradict Moses' law; He is at least _represented_ (as I do not assume miracles I must say no more) as with creative power, multiplying bread, restoring sight, calling the dead to life, saying to the tempest, "Peace, be still;" He proclaims Himself the Judge of all the earth, about to sit upon His throne, with all nations, the dead, small and great, gathered before Him, and the angels of God waiting to do His pleasure; He pronounces the sentence, and it runs in words which indicate that the great act of obedience was waiting on Himself in prison, in sickness, in need, and in suffering, that the great sin was neglecting Him, Him as represented by His servants. There is one other scene which seems to me even more telling than all these. Each of the three Evangelists relate, St. John alone omits to relate, the institution of the Last Supper. There distinctly--whatever may be held by differing sects as to its meaning and its blessing--there distinctly Jesus Christ presents Himself to our faith as the Power which sustains all spiritual life; pointing to Himself as the great Sacrifice, the anti-typical Paschal Lamb, and then professing that His Body and Blood can feed and sustain the souls of all disciples in all coming time. What is this but, first to proclaim Himself the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world; and then to attribute that sustaining, strengthening, life-giving power to Himself which can be predicated of nothing short of God?

I therefore fearlessly assert that, if our Christian records be in any way better than waste paper, if they be any records of Christ at all, we cannot but learn from them that He presented Himself to His followers, not as Prophet merely, not as Teacher only, but as their Priest, their King, their God.

Now, observe, first, the perfect originality of this. No one ever professed anything like it before. All the heathen fables about gods coming down among men, all their belief or half belief that some men were the offspring of deity, meant nothing like this. Their gods were themselves but deified men or personified powers of nature. It was easy to make mythic stories about their bodily appearance, or about their earthly loves and their earthly progeny.

Or, to speak of something grander, though perhaps less poetical, the great pantheistic religions gave ready room for the fancy that there was a spark of deity in every sentient being, and that it might be more and more developed into God. In them, indeed, God is but the general principle of life and intelligence which runs throughout all the universe; it is duller in one spot and brighter in another; here it may almost go out in darkness, and there it may burst forth into the light of heaven and of glory. But it is not a person; at the highest it is an impersonal power. It may dwell therefore in the Bull Apis, it may reside in the Lama of Thibet, it may grow to be the highest intelligence in Buddha. In none of them is it really God. It is but the embodiment and the kindling up of a spark of Divine Being, but not a living, thinking, willing maker of the universe and ruler of all things. But Jesus Christ, when He was upon earth, lived among the only people on the earth who had a clear conception of one great and personal God, so one and so personal as each separate man is one and personal, man having been made in the express likeness of God. Jesus Christ lived among a people who esteemed that one personal God so great and so awful that they dared not even speak His name, the name by which He had specially revealed Himself, for they thought that that name, if human lips should utter it, would shake heaven and earth. Yet it was this great, only, incommunicable, unutterable Being, whose Son He called Himself, whose very essence He claimed for His own.

Let it not be said, that He came at a moment when Jewish hopes were all centred on some heavenly Messenger to redeem and restore them, that He only fell into their notions, took advantage of their expectations and flattered their prejudices. They expected a Messiah, no doubt, with much in him that was heavenly (if you will, Divine); they expected Him to redeem their nation, to overthrow their enemies, to advance their kingdom. But they never thought that their Messiah would claim to be the Supreme JEHOVAH, they never thought that He was to redeem, not their bodies, but their souls, by dying as a lamb sacrificed upon the altar; they never thought that, instead of satisfying their patriotism and elevating their nation, He would teach them to subordinate patriotism to universal love of man, and that instead of extending the earthly kingdom of Israel through the world, He would found a kingdom which should be wholly moral and spiritual, and which would place the Greek, the Roman and the Samaritan on the same footing with the long-favoured children of Abraham. So far were they from any thoughts like these, that it was because of all this that they crucified their Christ.

And if all this were original in Jesus, it was as bold as it was original. The humble, unostentatious, unselfish, Jewish peasant declares Himself the One Eternal God. If it was assumption only, it deserved the death which was its consequence.

But just let us consider it for a moment. Was it fanaticism? I have already pointed to the calmness, self-possession, soberness of Christ. No character in history exhibits these qualities so markedly. There is not a symptom of restlessness, excitement, intemperance, of any kind in one of His discourses. His eloquence--and no one can doubt His eloquence who has read, "Consider the lilies of the field," who has heard "Come unto Me, all ye that travail and are heavy laden"--but His eloquence, though more heart-thrilling than any human eloquence, was never rhetorical, never emotional. It carried conviction because it sounded like _truth uttered by love_. In fact, fanaticism or insanity are charges that cannot be made against Him on any ground whatever, except on the ground that He believed what He taught, and that no reasonable man could believe it. And if so, I think the charge must be abandoned, for Bacon, Locke, Leibnitz, Newton have believed it, and it is still believed by the most reasoning minds in Christendom.

Imposture is another charge. I have reminded you that the great principle of Christ's teaching was truth. If there was one point on which it could with some colour of probability be said that He was an enthusiast, it would be in His love of truth, and His scorn for all that was false and hypocritical. It would be strange indeed that such a teacher should lay the foundation of His teaching in falsehood. And be it remembered, that the supposed falsehood was not to please popular tastes, or to take advantage of popular prejudices, but to run counter to and offend them all, having apparently no purpose, but the purely disinterested purpose of mending men's manners against their wills, and having evidently no earthly end but persecution, suffering, and death. The fanaticism is the most inexplicable, the imposture the most improbable ever heard or thought of.

III. And now let us see what the teaching of this so-called fanatic or impostor has done.

I suppose it will be acknowledged that He lived at a time when the world was singularly _in want_. Heathenism had failed to satisfy it. The world had outgrown its infancy, and had tossed away its dolls. The philosophers derided, even the poets could hardly play with, their old heathen deities. Society was corrupt to its core. The old monarchies had sunk one by one,--Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Macedonia--oppressed with their own vices. Rome had indeed reached the height of power, but it was power to be vile and so to be miserable. And there was a groan uttered from universal humanity for something to save it from the utter exhaustion of sensuality hard by suffering, of moral, social, and political degradation. Judea itself, where still God was worshipped, was no exception to the general rule, though it had yet hardly fallen to the depth of imperial Rome. And what of philosophy? Certainly it could never have had a better trial. The greatest moral philosophers the world ever knew, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, had taught at Athens. The sound of their voices reached Rome, and echoed through all the civilized world. Without doubt, their teaching was valued, without doubt it was valuable to the thinking few; but the effect produced upon the many is too truly described by Ovid, "Video meliora proboque, Deteriora sequor." The salt of society had not been discovered; for society stank, and was corrupt throughout.

And then Jesus Christ set forth a remedy, and it was HIMSELF. It cannot be too emphatically said, or too steadily borne in memory, that CHRISTIANITY IS CHRIST. So He taught; so His disciples after Him--not a law--not a theory--not a code of morals--not a system of casuistry--not even an elaborate theology--but "they ceased not to teach and to preach Jesus Christ."

_And this did satisfy human wants._

(1) Moral philosophy never moved more than a few thoughtful minds. A strong law, like the law of Moses or the laws of Rome, may put a curb on men's passions and keep them in by bit and bridle, lest they fall upon you. But there was something vastly more powerful in the teaching of Christ. He propounded Himself to His followers, as the one great object of their loyalty and love. Now love and loyalty are the very groundsprings of noble and disinterested life. The servant of law lives in obedience to law, because to break law is to incur its penalties. The moralist trains himself with special reference to himself. The very necessity of his training turns the moral eye inward, creates self-consciousness, and produces, perhaps despondency from failure, perhaps self-confidence from success. The effect of loyalty is altogether otherwise. The eye, the heart, the hope, are all turned outwards--and in the case of the Christian--not outwards only but upwards. The result is, not the calculating morality, which may easily make a man selfish, but the absorbing love of a master, which makes him self-devoted. And coincident with the love and loyalty to the Master, came the brotherhood of all who loved and obeyed that Master; a close tie of brotherhood towards them, and earnest desire to bring others into that brotherhood, and so an universal charity to mankind. Thus did the Great Teacher provide for the wants of man, considered as a _moral being_.

(2) Let us see how He provided for His wants as _a spiritual being_. It is the witness of all religious antiquity, that, whilst the soul longed to look up to, and rest in something above it, it was ever striving to bring that which was above it down to a level with itself. It could not grasp infinity, and it was ever trying to make it finite. So it devised man-gods and idol-gods. So it degraded God to be no higher than man, nay, "likened its Maker to the grazed ox." What Jesus Christ did was to bring God down to man, but not to degrade and lower Him by doing so. He professed not to be a Man-God,--like the Saturn and Jupiter of Latium, like the Lama of Thibet, or like the Buddha of Ceylon and China; but the God-Man, God dwelling in human flesh, and manifesting all the character of infinity in the person of the finite. So He satisfied the yearnings of the human soul, without lowering the dignity of the Divine Spirit. It is impossible to remember the fables of heathenism without feeling that Deity is not only lowered, but utterly lost in them. But I appeal to your experience and to your hearts, whether the conception of God conveyed to us through Christ is not raised, rather than depressed--raised even above the conception of the High and Lofty One which inhabiteth eternity, as discovered by our reasonings, or as revealed to our faith, in the theism of the philosopher or the writings of the Jewish prophets.

(3) Once more, He provided for man's wants _as a social and political being_. Social polity has ever oscillated between an absolute despotism and a pure democracy. There are many who say that the only ideal of good government is either a paternal despotism, or "liberty, equality, and fraternity." It is most true that our Lord declined persistently to mingle Himself with earthly politics, or to meddle in the affairs of earthly kingdoms. But He declared that His mission was to set up in this world a kingdom not of this world. And the principles, the polity of that kingdom combined in a marvellous manner the unopposed will of the Father-King with the fraternal equality of all the people. As King of the kingdom of God He exacted the most devoted loyalty and the most unswerving obedience; but to the members of the kingdom He said, "All ye are brethren." He forbade any to aspire to pre-eminence, or authority, like the kings of the Gentiles; to those who desired to sit on His right hand and on His left He only promised that they should drink of His cup of suffering, and be baptized with His baptism of blood.

(4) Lastly, He provided for man's natural wants _as a sinful being_. Every religion witnesses to the anxiety of the religious mind to throw off a weight from the conscience by austerities, or by sacrifices, or by gifts. I am aware that I am treading on ground which may lead me into controversy, and from this I must guard myself. Still I think every one who reads the Gospels must confess that the Christian history and the Christian faith culminate in sacrifice. I do not wish to reason on it; I readily admit its deep mystery, and the great difficulty of explaining it; I only assert, and I assert without fear of contradiction, that Christ set forth Himself, and that His disciples set Him forth to the world as One who suffered for the sins of that race which He had made His own; that He first bound them closely to Himself, and then drained off to the dregs that cup which their sins had prepared for _them_. He came into mankind that He might carry off the curse which sin had cast into the midst of it. And I know, indeed, that there are some, and some for whose scruples and difficulties I feel deep respect, who, acknowledging all the debts due to Christianity, for raising, ennobling, and purifying human life and human thought, yet say that they could accept every portion of it save only its doctrine of atonement and sacrifice. They think it derogatory to the mercy and to the love of God, and they doubt if the sins of feeble beings like ourselves can ever be so offensive to His majesty as to need such an intervention, or to cost so tremendous a price. I say I respect their scruples, for in some cases I believe they have been the scruples of men very pure in life and very loving in heart. But of this I am most certain, that there is nothing in Christianity which has so commended it to the acceptance of mankind at large. And certainly its effect, if fully exhibited, is very remarkable. Its effect is first to enhance our sense of sin, and secondly to enhance our sense of the love of God. Wellnigh every other system of forgiveness tends to make light of sin. If repentance be easy, sin cannot be so very hard. Wellnigh every other system of religion has created a dread of the Sovereign Ruler of the Universe, and has seldom, if ever, led to devoted love of Him. Strangely enough, too, all past religions had treated sin, when great, as inexpiable, and gave no room for repentance, even though sought carefully and with tears. But the Christian faith in the atoning love of Christ has deepened, beyond all comparison with aught besides, our conviction of the darkness and the danger of sin; has yet assured us that repentance for sin is not impossible, but to be attained and then certain to be accepted; and, lastly, has been the one only convincing evidence that, for all the clouds and darkness in which nature and natural religion have enveloped the Deity, there is yet a loving Heart in heaven, and that we may, with undoubting, filial confidence cast our orphan souls upon the Fatherhood of God. And so it is a fact, which nothing can take away, that, with all its admitted mystery and deep obscurity, the cross of Christ has been, even more than all else in His marvellous history, that which has won human hearts, and which has satisfied human yearnings.

IV. Let us pass to the reception of Christ's teaching in the world. There is not much that is new to be said about this. First, as to the mode of its propagation: it was not propagated by force, like the religion of Mohammed; nor was it a political revolution, as Buddhism was a great rising against the caste system of the Brahmins, joined with a modification or so-called reformation of their theological and philosophical theories. Christ forbade His followers to mix themselves up in the politics either of the Jews or of the heathens; and, as to force, He told them, in words which all Christian history since has verified, that "they who take the sword shall perish with the sword." In fact, the mode of the propagation of the faith of Christ was the simplest conceivable: it was merely a proclaiming of Christ as the Prince and the Saviour of the world. Apostles preached the kingdom of God, invited men to come into it, declared that Christ was its King, claimed from His subjects obedience to His sovereignty, and promised them peace in their hearts here and happiness in His home hereafter. It is a matter of perfect indifference to my present argument whether you acknowledge that this preaching was accompanied with miracles or not. If it was, then _cadit quæstio_. Probably no one in this company will say, as the Jews said and as some of the heathens said, that those miracles were due to Satanic agency. If there were miracles therefore, they were of God. But, if you refuse your assent to miracles, then I only say the result was all the more miraculous. If there was nothing but a simple teaching of Christ--if only men narrated the life of the Jewish carpenter, told of His death, declared him to be their King, set up His cross as their hope, and claimed submission to Him as their God; and if thereupon, in the midst of Jerusalem and Rome, and Athens and Corinth, and Ephesus and Philippi, and Smyrna, and Antioch, and Alexandria, at a time when art and science, and civilization and philosophy were at the greatest height ever known; if then and there, in the space of a single generation, thousands and hundreds of thousands, of all ages and all classes, bowed their heads and gave up their hearts to Christ, I ask what was it that gave such magic power to the so-called "foolishness of preaching?" I answer, It was the force of truth; and I ask again, Has any other answer ever been given?

The progress of Christianity in every stronghold of heathenism soon roused the jealousy of the governors of the world. We need not dwell upon the cruelties with which its votaries were persecuted. Men clothed in garments smeared with pitch, and then lighted up as living torches, to add a horrid lustre to the festivities of the Emperor. Men crucified with their heads downwards. Men thrown to wild beasts. The heart sickens at the recital of their sufferings, and still more at the ferocity of their torturers. But nothing stopped them. Every human power was exerted. Every device was tried. But neither skill nor force availed. The stream flowed onwards till it became a river; the river spread out till it became a flood. In the short space of three centuries from the death of Jesus, Europe, Asia, and Africa, as far as civilization had reached, owned Him as their sovereign, and marched under His banner. Not a blow had been struck in His favour, though thousands and hundreds of thousands had died rather than disown Him. And then the heathen oracles were silent, the heathen altars were deserted, the heathen philosophers were changed to Christians; Christian presbyters ministered where heathen priests had sacrificed; Christian orators spoke where heathen advocates had pleaded; Christian judges decreed justice in the seats of the prætors and the proconsuls; a Christian Emperor sat upon the throne of the Cæsars. It is so still; the great bulk of the civilized world still retains, and professes to be guided by, laws, customs, and morals, which are really drawn from the teaching of Jesus Christ.

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(1) It is said that the spread of Christianity is at least partly due to mere human and common-place causes.[145] It is said for instance, that the civilization of the heathen empire was effete, that society was corrupt, that the very world was wearied with its own wickedness. Very true: yet it was in the Augustan age that Christ lived and taught, the very climax of ancient art and letters, and refinement, and philosophy. Very true; but still, that which will be our only refuge if we are driven out of our faith, had offered everything that it can ever have to offer. Moral philosophy had done its best. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Seneca, had done all that could be done by reasoning and moral teaching, to win men from vice, and to train them to virtue. And earth, for all that, was wearing the very semblance of hell. Men, no doubt, were weary of it, and they listened the more readily to Him who promised to the weary rest. Is it no mark of design and wisdom, that the remedy was offered at that very time when it was the most needed, and when the need was the most keenly felt?

(2) It is said, that the world then, in its deep dissatisfied restlessness and inquietude, was turning right and left for satisfaction, and that thus it readily lent an ear to the superstitious and the supernatural. It may have been so. It had apparently given up all faith; and the unbeliever passes readily into the credulous. But I cannot think it reasonable to conclude, that an age of philosophical scepticism, of unbridled licentiousness, even though it might combine with these some disposition in favour of the marvellous, would be likely to admit the pretensions of Christianity without careful investigation; when Christianity bore with it requirements of the most rigid morality, offered in exchange for its philosophy simple faith, in exchange for its licentiousness the sternest self-denial, and gave it no promise in this life, but of contempt and suffering, and very likely martyrdom.

(3) It is said once more, that the unequalled organization of the Primitive Church made it a firm phalanx sure to win its way through the ranks of the fiercest foes. Very true. The economy of the Primitive Church, with its bishops, priests, deacons, and deaconesses in every city and suburb, with its strict and unbroken unity throughout the world which it had won and was winning, was, no doubt, an organization, a freemasonry, a secret society if you will, which constituted the best possible machinery for preserving and propagating its faith. Is it no sign of the superhuman wisdom of its Founder, that He not only taught the great secret of life; but that He devised means whereby that secret should be guarded and handed on to men?