Part 7

We have, then, to picture to ourselves this struggle and discipline going on for eighteen years—the call sounding continually in his ears, and the boy, the youth, the strong man, each in turn solicited by the special temptations of his age, and rising clear above them through the strength of perfect obedience, the strength which comes from the daily fulfilment of daily duties—that “strength in the Lord” which St. Paul holds up to us as possible for every human being. Think over this long probation, and satisfy yourselves whether it is easy, whether it is possible to form any higher ideal of perfect manliness.

And without any morbid curiosity, and I think with profit, we may follow out the thoughts which this long period of quiet suggests. We know from the evangelists only this, that he remained in obscurity in a retired village of Galilee, and subject to his reputed father and mother. That he also remained in great seclusion while living the simple peasant life of Nazareth we may infer from the surprise, not unmixed with anger and alarm, of his own family, when, after his baptism, he began his public career amongst them. And yet, on that day, when he rose to speak in the synagogue, it is clear that the act was one which commended itself in the first instance to his family and neighbors. The eyes of all present were at once fixed on him as on one who might be expected to stand in the scribe’s place, from whom they might learn something, a man who had a right to speak.

Indeed, it is impossible to suppose that he could have lived in their midst from childhood to full manhood without attracting the attention, and stirring many questionings in the minds, of all those with whom he was brought into contact. The stories in the Apocryphal Gospels of the exercise of miraculous powers by Christ as a child and boy may be wholly disregarded; but we may be sure that such a life as his, though lived in the utmost possible seclusion, must have impressed every one with whom he came in contact, from the scribe who taught the Scriptures in Nazareth to the children who sat by his side to learn, or met him by chance in the vineyards or on the hill-sides. That he was diligent in using such means for study as were within his reach, if it needed proof, would appear from his perfect familiarity with the laws and history of his country at the opening of his ministry. And the mysterious story of the crisis immediately following his baptism, in which he wrestled, as it were, face to face with the tempter and betrayer of mankind, indicates to us the nature of the daily battle which he must have been waging, from his earliest infancy, or at any rate ever since his first visit to Jerusalem. No one can suppose for a moment that the trial came on him for the first time after the great prophet to whom all the nation were flocking had owned him as the coming Christ. That recognition removed, indeed, the last doubt from his mind, and gave him the signal for which he had been patiently waiting, that the time was come and he must set forth from his retirement. But the assurance that the call would come at some time must have been growing on him in all those years, and so when he does come he is perfectly prepared.

In his first public discourse in the synagogue of Nazareth we find him at once announcing the fulfilment of the hopes which all around him were cherishing. He proclaims, without any preface or hesitation, with the most perfect directness and confidence, the full gospel of the kingdom of heaven: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand.” He takes for the text of his first discourse the passage in Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captive, the recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord,” and proceeds to expound how “this day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears.” And within the next few days he delivers his Sermon on the Mount, of which we have the full record, and in which we find the meaning, and character, and principles of the kingdom laid down once and for all. Mark, that there is no hesitation, no ambiguity, no doubt as to who he is, or what message he has to deliver. “I have not come to destroy but to fulfil the law which my Father and your Father has given you, and which you have misunderstood. This which I am now unfolding to you is the meaning of that law, this is the will of my Father who is in heaven.”

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

How had this perfect insight and confidence been reached? “This young peasant, preaching from a boat or on a hill-side, sweeps aside at once the traditions of our most learned doctors, telling us that this, which we and our fathers have been taught, is not what the God of Israel intended in these commandments of his; but that he, this young man, can tell us what God did really intend. He assumes to speak to us as one having authority. Who gave him this authority?” These, we know, are the kind of questionings with which Christ was met at once, and over and over again. And they are most natural and necessary questionings, and must have occurred to himself again and again, and been answered by him to himself, before he could have stood up to proclaim with the tone of absolute authority his good news to the village congregations in Galilee, or the crowds on the Mount, or by the lake.

Who gave thee this authority? We can only reverentially, and at a distance, picture to ourselves the discipline and struggles by which the answer was reached, which enabled him to go out without the slightest faltering or misgiving, and deliver his full and astounding message, the moment the sign came that the time had come, and that it was indeed he to whom the task was intrusted.

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

In every subtle form this question must have been meeting the maturing Christ day after day. Art thou indeed the Son of God who is said to be coming to redeem this enslaved and degraded people, and with and beside them all the kingdoms of the world? Even if these prophets have not been dreaming and doting, art not thou at least dreaming and doting? At any rate if that is your claim put it to some test. Satisfy yourself, and show us, while satisfying yourself, some proof of your title, which we, too, can recognize. Here are all these material, visible things which, if your claim be true, must be subject to you. Show us your power over some of them—the meanest, if you will, the common food which keeps men alive. There are spiritual invisible forces too, which are supposed to be the ministers of God, and should therefore be under the control of his Son—give us some sign that you can guide or govern the least of them. Why pause or delay? Is the burden growing lighter on this people? Is the Roman getting year by year less insolent, the publican less fraudulent and exacting, the Pharisees and rulers less godless, the people, your own kin amongst them, less degraded and less brutal? You are a grown man, with the full powers of a man at any rate. Why are you idling here when your Father’s work (if God be your Father) lies broadcast on every side, and no man standing forth to “the help of the Lord against the mighty,” as our old seers used to rave?

I hope I may have been able to indicate to you, however imperfectly, the line of thought which will enable each of you for yourselves to follow out and realize, more or less, the power and manliness of the character of Christ implied in this patient waiting in obscurity and doubt through the years when most men are at full stretch—waiting for the call which shall convince him that the voice within has not been a lying voice—and meantime making himself all that God meant him to be, without haste and without misgiving.

LIX.

In Christ, after the discipline of long-waiting years, there was no ambition, no self-delusion. He had measured the way, and counted the cost, of lifting his own people and the world out of bondage to visible things and false gods, and bringing them to the only Father of their spirits, into the true kingdom of their God. He must, indeed, have been well enough aware how infinitely more fit for the task he himself was than any of his own brethren in the flesh, with whom he was living day by day, or of the men of Nazareth with whom he had been brought up. But he knew also that the same voice which had been speaking to him, the same wisdom which had been training him, must have been speaking to and training other humble and brave souls, wherever there were open hearts and ears, in the whole Jewish nation. As the humblest and most guileless of men, he could not have assumed that no other Israelite had been able to render that perfect obedience of which he was himself conscious. And so he may well have hurried to the Jordan in the hope of finding there, in this prophet of the wilderness, “Him who should come,” the Messiah, the great deliverer—and of enlisting under his banner, and rendering him true and loyal service, in the belief that, after all, he himself might only be intended to aid and hold up the hands of a greater than himself. For we must remember that Christ could not have heard before he came to Bethabara that John had disclaimed the great title. It was not till the very day before his own arrival that the Baptist had told the questioners from Jerusalem, “I am not he.”

But if any such thought had crossed his mind, or hope filled his heart, on the way to the Baptist, it was soon dispelled, and he, left again in his own loneliness, now more clearly than ever before, face to face with the task, before which even the Son of God, appointed to it before the world was, might well quail, as it confronted him in his frail human body. For John recognizes him, singles him out at once, proclaims to the bystanders, “This is he! Behold the Lamb of God! This is he who shall baptize with the fire of God’s own Spirit. Here is the deliverer whom all our prophets have foretold.” And by a mysterious outward sign, as well as by the witness in his own heart and conscience, Christ is at once assured of the truth of the Baptist’s words—that it is indeed he himself and no other, and that his time has surely come.

That he now thoroughly realized the fact for the first time, and was startled and severely tried by the confirmation of what he must have felt for years to be probable, is not only what we should look for from our own experiences, but seems the true inference from the gospel narratives. For, although as soon as the full truth breaks upon him he accepts the mission and work to which God is calling him, and speaks with authority to the Baptist, “Suffer it to be so now,” yet the immediate effect of the call is to drive him away into the wilderness, there in the deepest solitude to think over once again, and for the last time to wrestle with and master the tremendous disclosure.

LX.

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

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

He is unmanned by the vision, and flies trembling to his wife, whose brave and loving counsel, and those of his friends and first disciples, scarcely keep him from despair and suicide.

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

LXI.

The strongest and most generous natures are always fondest of those who lean on them.

LXII.

How utterly inadequate must be any knowledge of a human being which does not get beneath the surface? How difficult to do so to any good purpose! For that “inner,” or “eternal,” or “religious” life (call it which you will, they all mean the same thing) is so entirely a matter between each human soul and God, is at best so feebly and imperfectly expressed by the outer life.

There are none of us but must be living two lives—and the sooner we come to recognize the fact clearly the better for us—the one life in the outward material world, in contact with the things which we can see, and taste, and handle, which are always changing and passing away; the other in the invisible, in contact with the unseen; with that which does not change or pass away—which is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever. The former life you must share with others, with your family, your friends, with everyone you meet in business or pleasure. The latter you must live alone, in the solitude of your own inmost being, if you can find no spirit there communing with yours—in the presence of, and in communion with, the Father of your spirit, if you are willing to recognize that presence. The one life will no doubt always be the visible expression of the other; just as the body is the garment in which the real man is clothed for his sojourn in time. But the expression is often little more than a shadow, unsatisfying, misleading. One of our greatest English poets has written:

“The one remains, the many change and pass, Heaven’s light forever shines, earth’s shadows fly. Time, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the bright radiance of eternity, Until death tramples it to fragments.”

And so you and I are living now under the dome of many-colored glass, and shall live as long as we remain in these bodies, a temporal and an eternal life—“the next world,” which too many of our teachers speak of as a place which we shall first enter after death, being in fact “next” only in the truest sense of the word; namely, that it is nearest to us now. The dome of time can do nothing more (if we even allow it to do that) than partially to conceal from us the light which is always there, beneath, around, above us.

“The outer life of the devout man,” it has been well said, “should be thoroughly attractive to others. He would be simple, honest, straightforward, unpretending, gentle, kindly;—his conversation cheerful and sensible; he would be ready to share in all blameless mirth, indulgent to all save sin.”

LXIII.

In a noisy and confused time like ours, it does seem to me that most of us have need to be reminded of, and will be the better for bearing in mind, the reserve of strength and power which lies quietly at the nation’s call, outside the whirl and din of public and fashionable life, and entirely ignored in the columns of the daily press. There are thousands of Englishmen of high culture, high courage, high principle, who are living their own quiet lives in every corner of the kingdom, from John o’ Groat’s to the Land’s-End, bringing up their families in the love of God and their neighbor, and keeping the atmosphere around them clean, and pure, and strong, by their example—men who would come to the front, and might be relied on, in any serious national crisis.

One is too apt to fancy, from the photographs of the nation’s life which one gets day by day, that the old ship has lost the ballast which has stood her in such good stead for a thousand years, and is rolling more and more helplessly, in a gale which shows no sign of abating, for her or any other national vessel, until at last she must roll over and founder. But it is not so. England is in less stress, and in better trim, than she has been in many a stiffer gale.

The real fact is, that nations, and the families of which nations are composed, make no parade or fuss over that part of their affairs which is going right. National life depends on home life, and foreign critics are inclined to take the chronicles of our Divorce Court as a test by which to judge the standard of our home-life, like the old gentleman who always spelt through the police reports to see “what people were about.” An acquaintance, however, with any average English neighborhood, or any dozen English families taken at random, ought to be sufficient to re-assure the faint-hearted, and to satisfy them that (to use the good old formula) the Lord has much work yet for the nation to do, and the national manliness and godliness left to do it all, notwithstanding superficial appearances.

LXIV.

If the angel Gabriel were to come down from heaven, and head a successful rise against the most abominable and unrighteous vested interest which this poor world groans under, he would most certainly lose his character for many years, probably for centuries, not only with upholders of said vested interest, but with the respectable mass of the people whom he had delivered. They wouldn’t ask him to dinner, or let their names appear with his in the papers; they would be very careful how they spoke of him in the Palaver, or at their clubs. What can we expect, then, when we have only poor, gallant, blundering men like Kossuth, Garibaldi, Mazzini, and righteous causes do not always triumph in their hands; men who have holes enough in their armor, God knows, easy to be hit by respectabilities sitting in their lounging-chairs, and having large balances at their bankers?

But you who only want to have your heads set straight to take the right side, bear in mind that majorities, especially respectable ones, are nine times out of ten in the wrong; and that if you see a man or boy striving earnestly on the weak side, however wrong-headed or blundering he may be, you are not to go and join the cry against him. If you can’t join him and help him, and make him wiser, at any rate remember that he has found something in the world which he will fight and suffer for, which is just what you have got to do for yourselves; and so think and speak of him tenderly.

LXV.

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

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

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

LXVI.

The gospel of work is a true gospel, though not the only one, or the highest, and has been preached in our day by great teachers. Listen, for instance, to the ring of it in the rugged and incisive words of one of our strongest poets:

“That low man seeks a little thing to do, Sees it and does it. This high man, with a great thing to pursue, Dies ere he knows it. That low man goes on adding one to one, His hundreds soon hit. This high man aiming at a million, Misses a unit.”

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

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

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

LXVII.

The consciousness of the darkness in one and around one brings the longing for light. And then the light dawns; through mist and fog, perhaps, but enough to pick one’s way by.

LXVIII.