Part 27

Our first endeavour must therefore be to acquire a distinct and, so far as may be possible, a complete conception of the personal character of Jesus Christ. Here, however, we are met by the question, Are we to consider Him at first in His human nature separately, or must we, in order to appreciate Him truly, contemplate Him at once in the completeness of His Personality, combining the human with the divine? I answer, not without some hesitation, that the line seems pointed out by Holy Scripture. We are told there that His nature is twofold, that in Him we see God in man, that the whole work which He came to accomplish depended upon that nature; but, on the other hand, we find that the form in which He presented Himself to His contemporaries, and through the medium of historical records to the Church, in which and by which He drew mankind to Himself, was thoroughly human; and so it seems to me clear that our first duty must be to collect from the Gospel narrative all the characteristic traits of His humanity, and so learn to know Him as perfect man. We may or may not avail ourselves of external help in this part of the inquiry; but if we do, the utmost caution and discrimination will be needed. It is certain that all so-called lives of Jesus are written under some kind of prepossession, and convey impressions which, however fair and honest they may be, have a strong colouring of personal feelings. Doubtless by such lives as those by Neander, Baumgarten, Pressensé, not to speak of the "Ecce Homo," a student may have his attention drawn to traits which he might otherwise fail to appreciate: but I believe that, until the mind is saturated with the truth set forth with all plainness and in all completeness in Scripture, the loss will outweigh the gain. I do not say that, in an advanced stage of inquiry, those among us especially who have to consult the wants of other minds, may not profitably resort to these and similar writings for supplementary information or suggestions: but this observation is to some extent true of other works in which the false infinitely preponderates over the true; and if you once go outside of the Gospels for aid in the natural attempt to gain an independent position as an impartial inquirer, you may entangle yourself in the subtle webs of sophistry, such as are woven by Rénan, Keim, or Strauss. Speaking indeed of Pressensé's work on our Saviour's life, which, on the whole, approaches most nearly to a faithful and complete portraiture, a friend remarkable for sound strong sense remarked to me that a careful perusal served but to convince him of the needlessness of such remouldings of the sacred history. And for my own part, I do not hesitate to say that you will act most wisely if you keep to the gospel narrative exclusively until you have ascertained to your own satisfaction what are the true characteristics of our Lord. I do not entertain any doubt as to the result. No healthy moral nature ever came into contact with that Personality without recognizing its unapproached and unapproachable excellence. Nay, I will add, no human heart susceptible of tender or noble emotions ever fixed its gaze upon Jesus without acknowledging in Him the embodiment of love. Attestations to this effect might be adduced in abundance from writings of men who have passed their lives in ineffectual efforts to extricate themselves from the perplexity arising from their inability to reconcile that impression with their intellectual system: but we need no testimony from without. Go to Christ, hear Him speak, watch His actions, and you will have an evidence, at once complete and adequate, that in Him was a human nature which, in its entire freedom from all moral evil, and in its perfect development of all moral goodness, stands absolutely alone.

You may say this is mere assumption. I can only answer, You have to judge for yourselves. I do not profess to draw out the evidence, but simply to show what is its nature, and where it is to be found. I do not attempt to delineate that character; at the utmost, I could but give you but a very imperfect account of the impression which it has made on my own very imperfect nature. I simply assert that the evidence is there, and that upon you rests the responsibility of examining it. Its effect, as I doubt not, will depend upon your moral nature; not indeed upon your moral goodness--Christ speaks to sinners--but upon your moral susceptibility, your capacity to discern and appreciate moral goodness. If that character does not attract, subdue, and win you, I freely admit all other evidence will be useless so far as your innermost convictions are concerned. But numerous as are the cases of individuals who have remained in, or relapsed into, a state of scepticism from various causes, intellectual or moral, few indeed are the cases of men who have not borne with them into that dreary region an abiding sense of the personal and supreme goodness of Jesus.

But the more carefully you examine that character, the more forcibly you will be struck by the fact that this Man, of whom the most special and most distinctive characteristics are absolute truthfulness and absolute humility, speaks throughout with an authority which involves the assumption of a divine nature. This statement does not rest on particular texts open to misconstruction or evasion, but on the tenor of each and every discourse, on His acts not less than His words. He addresses man as man's Master; He speaks as the Son of God, as one with God. This fact is stated in strong, not to say irreverent, terms by the author of "Ecce Homo": "During His whole public life Jesus is distinguished from the other prominent characters of Jewish history by His unbounded personal pretensions." Two writers, differing widely in tone of mind, but alike in depth of thought and earnestness of purpose, prove, were proof needed, that those pretensions are justified by the truth of the Incarnation, and by that alone. (See the Rev. M. F. Sadler, "Immanuel," pp. 264-309; and Mr. Hutton's "Essay on the Incarnation.") You will, in fact, soon find that you have no alternative but either to give up all that has wrought itself into your moral nature, and intwined itself around the fibres of your affections, all your convictions of the moral excellence of Jesus, or to accept Him, even as He presents Himself, the God-man. His enemies felt this. They persecuted Him because He made Himself, as they said truly, equal with God. They crucified Him because He claimed the powers and attributes of the Son of God. Modern sceptics of loftier strain feel this keenly. They might be content to accept Him as a moral teacher; for, in that case, they could deal with Him as their equal by nature, receiving or rejecting His teaching as it might accord or not with their own judgment; if they reject Him it is simply or mainly, as they will tell you, because He claims to be more than man, and, as they well know, to be no less than God. They ask (perhaps you will ask), how did He justify the claim? The answer, of course, involves the whole controversy; but I will once more state my own conviction. If you put yourselves under His teaching, He will not leave you in doubt. You will attain by degrees only to any real appreciation of His human goodness; but together with the growth of that appreciation will dawn upon you the consciousness, ever increasing in clearness and intensity, that in Him you are gazing upon the Incarnate God. You will have a twofold evidence: the evidence of a perfectly logical conviction, founded on sure inferences from sure premises, upon the inseparability of truth and goodness, self-knowledge and perfect wisdom, and the evidence of direct intuition; you will feel yourselves in the presence of God.

And now let me read a passage which is a very remarkable attestation to the effect produced upon a man of strong sense and thorough independence of character, by an honest and reverent study of our Lord's Person and teaching. You will find it in the treatise on the Incarnation, published within the last few months, in Mr. Hutton's Essays: "And now let me honestly ask myself, and answer the question as truly as I can, whether this great, this stupendous fact of the Incarnation is honestly _believable_ by an ordinary man of modern times, who has not been educated into it, but educated to distrust it; who has no leaning to the orthodox creed, as such, but has generally preferred to associate with heretics; who is quite alive to the force of the scientific and literary criticisms of his day; who has no antiquarian tastes, no predilection for the venerable past; who does not regard this truth as part of a great system, dogmatic or ecclesiastical, but merely for itself; who is, in a word, simply anxious to take hold, if he so may, of any divine hand stretched out to help him through the excitement and the languor, the joy, the sorrow, the storm and sunshine, of this unintelligible life. From my heart I answer, Yes--believable, and more than believable, in any mood in which we can rise above ourselves to that supernatural spirit which orders the unruly wills and affections of sinful men; _more_ than believable, I say, because it so vivifies and supplements that fundamental faith in God as to realize what were else abstract, and, without dissolving the mystery, to clothe eternal love with breathing life."[162]

Let me call your attention to the remarkable resemblance, of which I believe the writer to have been unconscious, between these most striking words and those which I quoted from Plato. What the ancient inquirer longed for, but sought in vain, the modern has sought and found, and with it the one and the only imaginable solution of the mystery of life.

I speak to persons able to bring the stores of varied reading to bear upon these questions, and we live in a time when learning has fairly rivalled science in bringing regions of thought hitherto unknown, or known only to solitary students, within the cognizance of men of general cultivation. As a matter of a deep interest and importance, I would ask you, when you have attained to a complete conception of our Lord's Person, to compare His teaching with that of men whose influence has been most widely and abidingly felt in the world. I will not insult our Master by placing His name in juxtaposition with the founder of Islamism, nor indeed would it fairly enter into the inquiry; for if you separate the elements of truth derived from Judaism and from Christianity, through the medium of a corrupt tradition, the Koran will yield you but a mass of idle legends. It is indeed the fashion at present to speak of Mahomet as "a great and genuine prophet, with a Divine mission" (see Hutton's Essays, i. p. 277). Now I do not doubt his sincerity at the beginning of his career, or his steadfast adherence to the one great truth which he proclaimed; but it must never be forgotten that he invented a special revelation to justify indulgence in his master-sin (see the Koran, c. 66), and that he commanded the propagation of his religion by the sword. There are, however, three great names connected with those mighty revolutions of thought which have permanently affected the moral or religious convictions of mankind; I speak of them specially, because their character and teaching were wholly uninfluenced by revelation, and because they severally represent the highest development of pre-Christian character: Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates. Of two I have already spoken, and will now simply refer you to the clear and impartial accounts given by Ampère, Francke, and Barthélemi St. Hilaire, to justify my statement, that although, as might be expected, in some points of their moral teaching and in their spiritual aspirations they bear a true resemblance to Him in whom human nature was perfectly represented, yet each of them differed, as indeed all other men differ, from Him, in one special characteristic; each of them is the creature of his race and of his age; the influence of each is felt in the full development of the peculiar tendencies of his own section of the human family; in the one case, of physical languor and mental dreaminess; in the other, of a formal and conventional morality, and of political unity secured by the sacrifice of all independent action and thought. I turn to Socrates. There is a special reason why we should direct our attention to his character. It has at various times been brought into comparison with that of our Lord; even when that comparison is not distinctly brought out, it is often intentionally, or it may be unintentionally, suggested. That character has been delineated by Mr. Jowett, in the prefaces of his translation of the Platonic dialogues, with a sagacity beyond all praise, with an impartiality which trenches upon indifference, not merely in questions of merely speculative interest, but of moral concernment.[163] It is a noble work, representing the labour of long years devoted almost exclusively to the study of the master-mind of Greece. Socrates there stands before us. We enter into his thoughts, we know him as a living man. His character may indeed have undergone some change of representation in passing through the mind of the most imaginative of human teachers, his greatest disciple, Plato; but it is a change which does but magnify and idealize his loftiest characteristics. Let us see, then, in what respects this wisest and best of men, this teacher whom the great Fathers of Christendom justly reverenced as a true though unconscious preparer of men's spirits for the coming Teacher, resembles, in what respects, not less than the other two, he especially differs, from our Lord.

This strikes us at a glance. Socrates is altogether and throughout a Greek. His intellect, his character, is Greek. The stamp of an exclusive nationality is upon him. He has the feelings, the prejudices, of a singularly exclusive section of an exclusive race. His code of morals tolerates, I will not say sanctions, habits and feelings "quite at variance," as Mr. Jowett says, "with modern and Christian _notions_." Characters moulded to a great extent under his influence became living embodiments of some of the worst characteristics of heathenism, of force, pride (ὑβρις [Greek: hubris]), and licentiousness, as, for instance, Critias, Charmides, and Alcibiades. Exquisite and perfect as was his sympathy with all that was noble, all that was graceful and beautiful in Hellenic culture, it went no further. Graces which to the Christian are the very foundation of spiritualist life, had no place, no name even, in his philosophy. I cannot recall, among all his sayings, one that expresses sympathy with man in his extremest degradation and misery, or indignation with his countrymen for their treatment of their slaves. I would not be unjust. I never turn to the pages in which his spirit breathes without recognizing its attractions for the lover of man and the seeker after God; but still the fact remains, and stands out more clearly the more fully that spirit is made known, that Socrates, in his best and in his worst characteristics, was out and out an Athenian by character, by temperament, by moral sympathy, and by religion also, not less than Confucius was a Chinese, and Siddartha a Hindoo.

I touch briefly on another important point Socrates was a true, honest, earnest seeker after truth. I give this high praise unreservedly. As such, he represents the best tendencies of Gentile thought. As an honest seeker he had the fitting reward. So far as his search was not impeded by moral causes to which I have alluded, it was successful. He apprehended and taught truths of infinite value. But note this; he had not, did not profess to have, definite convictions upon the most important of all truths. Mr. Jowett says deliberately,[164] and as I think truly, "Socrates cannot be proved to have believed in the immortality of the soul." His speculations concerning a future state of retribution, recorded doubtless with a considerable admixture of Platonism in the Phædo, are deeply interesting; but they are speculations only, resting partly on grounds of which he recognises the insufficiency, or of which we cannot doubt the unsoundness. Socrates gave what he found. He sought for life and immortality; he drew very near to the region where they are to be found; he prepared the spirit of man for their announcement; but he did not bring them to light That was the work of Him who at once declares the truth, and justifies its reception.

And now, keeping these characteristics in mind, let me ask you to consider them in reference to our Lord's teaching. One of our most popular and graceful writers--the Dean of Westminster--has done good service to the truth by pointing out repeatedly the very conspicuous and utterly peculiar characteristic of the Saviour, that He is wholly devoid of national exclusiveness. This is the more striking since His birth and all the circumstances of His early life would naturally have imbued Him with the prejudices of the most exclusive of all nations: a nation which was intended to be exclusive, which could only fulfil its special mission by exclusiveness. Mr. Hutton puts this with his usual force, but somewhat harshly: "To trust in Him really, to believe that He can help us to reduce the vulgar chaos of our English life to any order resting on an eternal basis, is far easier if we believe that the very same mind is shining on our consciences which entered into the poorest of lots among nearly the most degraded generation of the most narrow-minded race that the world has ever known, and made it the birthplace of a new earth" (Essays, vol. i., p. 283). Christ speaks ever to man as man; His words find an echo in universal consciousness; in Him there is neither Jew nor Gentile, and, _note specially this point_, neither bond nor free.

At this point, however, we may be met with an objection which has been presented with considerable skill, and appears to have seriously affected the judgment of inquirers. It is asserted that, after all, our Lord was but a Jewish Rabbi, differing indeed in some remarkable characteristics from other teachers of the synagogue, but only to an extent which may be accounted for, partly by His position and education, and the influence of Essenian principles, partly by peculiarity of nature and gifts which our opponents admit to have been of the highest order, marking Him, as they would say, as a man of transcendent genius, one of the few in the world's history in whom men are compelled to recognise a master of the soul. Hebrew writers of great learning, by whom this notion is gladly accepted, in their efforts to establish it have done signal if unwitting service to our cause. They have enabled readers of general culture and unbiassed judgment to ascertain for themselves some important facts which were formerly known thoroughly to those only who had sufficient learning and leisure to enable them to penetrate into the depths of Rabbinical literature, the most intricate and repulsive which human labour ever produced. It is now comparatively easy to ascertain what was the true character of the Jewish Rabbi, and of Rabbinical teaching; what, too, was the special character of the Essenian teaching,[165] at and about the period when our Lord impressed His stamp upon the mind of man. Now I would challenge any controversialist to deny that our Lord's teaching differed from that of all the Rabbis, not merely in degree, but in kind. It differed in principle, in its processes, in its results, in its tone, its spirit, in every essential characteristic. This was felt at once by His hearers: the first and most abiding impression made upon the mass of His countrymen was that He taught _not_ as the scribes. This was the secret of the attraction which drew and retained disciples. "_Where_ shall we go? _Thou_ hast the words of eternal life." This was the cause of the fierce antagonism on the part of the Rabbis. They felt that His system was incompatible with their own. The scribe, as such, was a mechanical instrument; his authority was that of the system under which he worked, he held the minds of his hearers bound down and crippled by fetters by which he was himself bound even more tightly. Properly speaking, he was not even an interpreter of the law, with the principles of which he was little concerned, but simply a referee on points of casuistry or of formal observance which had been settled in past ages. The one merit which he claimed was that of unswerving adherence to the old customs, the old interpretations, the old applications of the law. Of all disqualifications for the office of a scribe, the most fatal would be independence of spirit, originality of thought or feeling. Many sayings of the Rabbis express this principle with the utmost _naïveté_: _e.g._, "A scribe will have no portion in the world to come, even should he be faithful to the law of God, and full of good works, if his teaching be not wholly in accordance with tradition." Our Lord's charge against them, that they made the word of God of none effect by their tradition, scarcely puts this point in a stronger light than their declaration "that it is highly perilous for any learned man to read the Bible, since he may be induced to trust to its guidance rather than to his teacher." For the more advanced disciple the rule was, "that for one hour given to the study of the Bible, two should be devoted to the Talmud." When we read of different schools of Rabbis, and learn that they represented different tendencies, we naturally suppose that there must have been some movements of spirit, some struggles of moral and intellectual spontaneity. And it is true that between the school of Shammai and that of Hillel and the Gamaliels there was a wide divergence, the one relaxing and the other enforcing rigorous observances, the one encouraging, the other condemning all genial culture; but when we compare the teaching of the two parties which is fully represented in the Talmud, we see that the liberality of the most advanced is bounded within very narrow limits. Hillel, the best of all, had the spirit of his caste. Eternal life, according to him, was the portion of those who had attained to a perfect knowledge of the unwritten and traditional system to which he devoted his own life.