The Cradle of the Christ Part 6

The critics of Baur urged with ceaseless iteration the absurdity of accounting for the New Testament, and explaining the developments of the first century, by means of bodiless ideas, subst.i.tuting phantoms of thought for persons, intellectual issues for the interactions of living men. Life, it was said, presupposes life; life alone generates life. To create a New Testament out of rabbinical fancies is preposterous. True enough. History is not spectral; but neither are ideas spectral. Ideas imply living minds, and living minds are persons. But the persons are not of necessity single individuals. They may be mult.i.tudes; they may be generations; they probably are a nation. The individuals that loom up conspicuously represent mult.i.tudes, an epoch, of which they are mouth pieces and agents. Do no individuals whatever loom up? None the less creative is the epoch; none the less vital are the ideas. The great events of the world depend not on individuals, but on the c.u.mulative force and providential meeting of wide social tendencies that have been gathering head for ages and pointing in certain directions. Mahomet, a sensitive, receptive, responsive spirit, gave a name to the arabian movement; he neither originated it, nor finally shaped it. Luther, brave, self-poised, independent soul, was not the author of the Reformation, though he gave character to it. Others had gone before him, and broken a way. The time for reformation had come, thousands were watching for the light which Luther descried, and eagerly aided in its diffusion. Innumerable sparks burst into flame. He was child, not father of the movement; so it may have been with Jesus, with Peter, with Paul.

They presupposed the ideas of their age, and the agency of living men.

The literature of the New Testament, which is all that Baur concerned himself with, stands for what it is, a literature; a product of intellectual activity in the age that created it. The popular notion that Scripture was penned by men whose minds were full of thoughts not their own, but G.o.d's, contains a rational truth. All great literature, all literature that is not occasional, incidental, ephemeral, is inspired in this sense. The writers held the pen while the spirit of their age, of many ages, of all ages at length, rolled through them. It is true of all representative, of all national books. It is true of the "Iliad" of Homer, of Dante's Divina Commedia, of the Book of Job, the Koran, the "Three Kings," the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the Dhammapada, the elder Edda. Such books as express the mind of an epoch are productions of an era, not of a man. The productive force is in the time. The man is of moment but incidentally. In discussing such works, all consideration of the man may be dispensed with. Strauss and Baur were Hegelians, who regarded the world-movements described in literatures and events, as moments in the experience of G.o.d. Nothing to them, therefore, was spectral. In tracing the pedigree of ideas, they felt themselves to be tracing the footprints of Deity.

The difficulty of constructing one harmonious character from the four gospels of the New Testament need not be expatiated on here. It is a difficulty that never has been overcome, and that increases in dimensions with our knowledge of the book. It is, of course possible, not easy, but possible, for one standing at either extreme to drag the opposite extreme into apparent accord. The believer in the divinity of the Christ planting himself on the doctrine of the Logos, reads his theory into the earlier gospels, loads the language with meaning it was never meant to bear, stretches the homely incidents on the rack of his hypothesis, and painfully excavates the figure he has already laid there. The believer in the humanity of the Christ, pursuing the opposite method, belittles the Johannean conception till it comes within the compa.s.s of his argument, dilutes the statements, expurgates and attenuates the thought, till nothing remains but sentimentalism. Each vindicates one view by sacrificing the other. To one who would preserve both representations, the task of combination is desperate. They are the centres of two opposite systems. One is a human being, a man; the other is a demi-G.o.d. One is a teacher of moral and religious truth; the other is an incarnation of the truth. One indicates the way; the other _is_ the way. One invites to life; the other _is_ the life. One talks about G.o.d and immortality; the other manifests G.o.d, and _is_ immortality. One points to heaven; the other "is in heaven." One is a helpful human friend; the other is a divine Saviour. One claims allegiance on the ground of his providential calling; the other demands spiritual surrender on the ground of his transcendent nature. One collects a body of disciples; the other forms and consecrates a church, and puts it in charge of a Holy Spirit, that shall save it from error and evil. After what has been said in previous chapters it is unnecessary to enlarge.

Let whoever will take Furness' portrait of Jesus on one hand, and Pressense's on the other; let him place them side by side; let him subject them to close scrutiny, comparing each with the original sketches; and he will rise from the contemplation satisfied that the two pictures cannot represent the same person.

Scarcely less is the difficulty of constructing a harmonious character from the first gospel alone. Renan brought to this experiment rare powers of mind, and a singular skill in letters. An orientalist, well versed in the productions of eastern genius; an accomplished literary investigator, practised in discerning between the genuine and the spurious; without dogmatic prejudice or predilection, neither christian nor anti-christian; enthusiastic, yet critical; approaching the subject from the historical direction; preparing himself laboriously for his task, and devoting to it all the capacity there was in him, Renan yet signally failed to construct a morally harmonious figure. Though conceiving Jesus as simply a man, he was obliged to resort to most obnoxious extravagances to make the narratives cohere. The "Vie de Jesus" is a standing refutation of the theory that the elements of a harmonious biography are to be found in the first gospel. It is the Christ of the first gospel who curses unbelieving and inhospitable cities; who threatens to deny in heaven those that deny him on earth; who speaks of the unpardonable sin, that "shall not be forgiven, either in this world, or in the world to come;" who will have none called "Master" but himself; who condemns to "everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels" those who have not a.s.sisted "these my brethren;" who bids his friends regard as no better than "a heathen man and a publican," the offender who will not listen to the Church; who launches indiscriminate invective against scribes and pharisees; who antic.i.p.ates sitting on a throne, a judge of all nations, with his chosen followers sitting on twelve thrones of authority in the same kingdom.

These statements must be qualified, allegorized, "spiritualized" a good deal, before they can be made congenial with the attributes of meekness, humility, gentleness, patience, loving-kindness, human sympathy, benevolence, justice, that adorn the image of a human Jesus. One set of qualities or the other, must be disavowed, unless we would incur the reproach that has fallen on Renan, of transforming Jesus into a terribly magnificent, and superbly unlovely person. Of this there is no necessity, for there is no necessity for constructing a harmonious character, on any hypothesis. We are not called on to construct a character at all. We may frankly own that the materials for constructing a character are not furnished. The first gospels exhibit stages in the development of the Christ idea; they do not give a portraiture of the man Jesus.

The hypothesis of mental and sentimental development in the experience of Jesus comes to the aid of the believers. Signs of such an interior progress do certainly appear, or can be made to appear by force of enthusiastic exegesis. The teacher who admonishes his disciples not to cast their pearls before swine, relates, with approval, the parable of the sower who flung his seed right and left, heedless that some fell on thorns that grew up and choked them, and some on stony ground, where having no root, they withered away. The man who twice frigidly repulsed the Canaanite woman who begged on her knees the boon of his compa.s.sion, telling her that he was not sent, save to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, adding, "it is not meet to take the children's bread and cast it to the dogs," not only extends his effectual sympathy to her in her immediate need, but is found afterward, seeking and saving these very lost, going into the wilderness to find them that had gone astray, visiting the country of the pagan Gergesenes, and opening the blind eyes of Samaritans. The twelve disciples called and sent to the twelve tribes of Israel, one to each tribe, none to spare for the people beyond the borders of Palestine, became later seventy apostles commissioned to carry the message of the kingdom to all the tribes of the earth. The exorciser of evil spirits begins by casting devils into the herd of swine, thus "spoiling the pig-market" of a village, herein showing himself a true Jew, and ends by sitting at meat with publicans and sinners. By ingenious piecing, light skipping over dates and discrepancies careless of sequence and consequence, with resolute purpose to extract from the doc.u.ments, by all or any means, a consistent human character, the development theory may be pushed a little way. But it soon comes against an insurmountable difficulty; the stream narrows just where it ought to widen, namely, as it approaches the ocean. It is towards the end of his career that the fanaticism discloses itself. The terrible outbreaks of anger, the invectives, the diatribes, the superb claims of authority, the horrid descriptions of the day of judgment, the discouragement and despair, come at the last. The serenity disappears; the sunlight pales; the day closes in mist. The man shrinks, instead of expanding, as he grows.

This is Renan's account of it; an account more deeply colored with gloom than need be; for that the baffled, tortured Jesus, lost his moral poise, and became a deliberate impostor, is not fairly deducible from any text; but the account is still essentially close and natural.

Starting, as Renan does, from the position that the four gospels contain materials for an intelligible portraiture of Jesus; that those materials may be discovered, sifted, and arranged so as to produce a well proportioned figure; and that the principle of this human construction, must, on the supposition, be the principle according to which the characters of men are and must be constructed, namely, by tracing the actions and reactions between them and the circ.u.mstances of their time and place; starting, we say, from this position, it is difficult to avoid the inferences that he draws in regard to the disastrous effect that skepticism and opposition had on the mental and moral character of the hero. That "he made no concession to necessity;" that "he boldly declared war against nature, a complete rupture with kindred;" that "he exacted from his a.s.sociates an utter abandonment of terrestrial satisfactions, an absolute consecration to his work," is no more than the plain texts imply. Renan does not strain language when he says: "In his excess of rigor, he went so far as to suppress natural desire. His requirements knew no bounds. Scorning the wholesome limitations of human nature, he would have people live for him only, love him alone."

"Something preternatural and strange mingled with his discourse; as if a fire was consuming the roots of his life, and reducing the whole to a frightful desert. The sentiment of disgust towards the world, gloomy and bitter, of excessive abnegation which characterizes christian perfection, had for its author, not the sensitive joyous moralist of the earlier time, but the sombre t.i.tan, whom a vast and appalling presentiment carried further and further away from humanity. It looks as though, in these moments of conflict with the most legitimate desires of the heart, he forgot the pleasure of living and loving, of seeing and feeling." "It is easy to believe that from the view of Jesus, at this epoch of his life, every thought save for the kingdom of G.o.d, had wholly disappeared. He was, so to speak, entirely out of nature; family, friends, country had no meaning to him." "A strange pa.s.sion for suffering and persecution possessed him. His blood seemed the water of a second baptism he must be bathed in, and he had the air of one driven by a singular impulse to antic.i.p.ate this baptism which alone could quench his thirst." "At times his reason seemed disturbed. He experienced inward agitations and agonies. The tremendous vision of the kingdom of G.o.d, ceaselessly flaming before his eyes, made him giddy. His friends thought him, at moments, beside himself. His enemies declared him possessed by a devil. His pa.s.sionate temperament, carried him, in an instant, over the borders of human nature. * * * Urgent, imperious, he brooked no opposition. His native gentleness left him; he was at times rude and fantastical. * * * At times his ill humor against all opposition pushed him to actions unaccountable and preposterous. It was not that his virtue sank; his struggle against reality in the name of the ideal became insupportable. He hurled himself in angry revolt against the world. * * * The tone he had a.s.sumed could not be sustained more than a few months. It was time for death to put an end to a situation strained to excess, to s.n.a.t.c.h him from the embarra.s.sments of a path that had no issue, and, delivered from a trial too protracted, to introduce him, stainless, into the serenity of his heaven."

This is strong language, even shocking to minds accustomed to worship a character of ideal perfection. But it is scarcely bolder than the case warrants. The privilege to pick and choose material has its limits. We have no right to take what pleases us and leave the rest. Statements that rest on equal evidence deserve equal acceptance. If the result be not agreeable, the responsibility is not with the critic.

The only wonder is that such a person as the literal record justifies, should be accepted as the founder of a religion. How can Renan stand before his portrait of Jesus, and say, "the man here delineated merits a place at the summit of human grandeur;" "this is the supreme man; a sublime personage;" "every day he presides over the destiny of the world; to call him divine is no exaggeration; amid the columns that, in vulgar uniformity crowd the plain, there are some that point to the skies and attest a n.o.bler destiny for man; Jesus is the loftiest of these; in him is concentred all that is highest and best in human nature." Such a conclusion is not justified by the premises. The homage is not warranted by the facts. It will not do to make out a catalogue of human weaknesses, and then urge those very weaknesses as a chief t.i.tle to glory.

In the opinion of some it is wiser and kinder to confess at once that the image of Jesus has been irrecoverably lost. In the judgment of these, it is unphilosophical to set up an ideal where none is required.

No doubt every effect must have a cause, but to a.s.sume the cause, or to insist on the validity of any single or special cause, is unscientific.

Each event has many causes, a complexity of causes. Renan himself says: "It is undeniable that circ.u.mstances told for much, in the success of this wonderful revolution. Each stage in the development of humanity has its privileged epoch, in which it reaches perfection without effort, by a sort of spontaneous instinct. The Jewish state offered the most remarkable intellectual and moral conditions that the human race ever presented. It was one of those divine moments when a thousand hidden forces conspire to produce grand results, when fine spirits are supported by floods of admiration and sympathy."

In truth, was such a person as Jesus is presumed to have been, necessary to account for the existence of the religion afterwards called Christian? As an impelling force he was not required, for his age was throbbing and bursting with suppressed energy. The pressure of the Roman empire was required to keep it down. The Messianic hope had such vitality that it condensed into moments the moral results of ages. The common people were watching to see the heavens open, interpreted peals of thunder as angel voices, and saw divine portents in the flight of birds. Mothers dreamed that their boys would be Messiah. The wildest preacher drew a crowd. The heart of the nation swelled big with the conviction that the hour of destiny was about to strike, that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. The crown was ready for any kingly head that might dare to a.s.sume it. That in such a state of things antic.i.p.ation should fulfil itself, the dream become real, the vision become solid, is not surprising. It was not the first time faith has become fact. The first generation of our era exhibited no phenomena that preceding generations had not prepared for and could not produce.

No surprising original force need have been manifested. The spirit was the native spirit of the old vine growing in the old vineyard.

Jesus is not necessary to account for the ethics of the New Testament.

They were as has been said, the native ethics of Judaism, unqualified.

The breadth and the limitation, the ideal beauty and the practical point were alike Jewish. The gorgeous abstractions, gathered up in one discourse, look like fresh revelations of G.o.d; as autumn leaves plucked and set in a vase seem more luminous than do myriads of the same leaves covering the mountains and the meadows, their crimson and gold blending with the brown of the soil and the infinite blue of the sky. The ethics of the New Testament, like the ethics of the Old, have their root in the faith that Israel was a chosen people; in the expectation of a king in whom the faith should be crowned; in the antic.i.p.ation of a judgment day, a national restoration, a celestial sun-burst, a final felicity for the faithful of Israel. The enthusiasm, the extravagance, the fanaticism, the pa.s.sive trust, the active intolerance, the asceticism, the arbitrariness, bespeak in the one case as in the other, the presence of an intense but narrow spirit. They are not the ethics of this world.

They are not temporal. The power of an original, creative soul should be attested by some modification of the popular code, rather than by an exaggeration of it. We should look for something new, not for a more emphatic repet.i.tion of the old. But nothing new appears. The exaggerations are exaggerated; the precepts suggested by the distant prospect of the kingdom are simply reiterated in view of its speedy establishment. Trust in Providence and faith in the Messiah are all in all; the virtues of common existence are less and less. The inhumanities that Renan ascribes to an access of fanaticism in Jesus are the humanities of an unreal Utopia.

The prodigious manifestation of mental and spiritual force that broke out in Paul requires no explanation apart from his own genius. He never saw Jesus and apparently was incurious about him. His originality was intellectual, and his system bears no trace of a foreign personality. As Renan says: "The Christ who communicates private revelations to him is a phantom of his own making;" "It is himself he listens to, while fancying that he hears Jesus." If ever man was self-motived, self-impelled, self-actuated, it was he. He needed no prompter. Hot of brain and heart, he was only too swift to move. Whether, as some think, driven by over-mastering ambition to lead a new movement, or, as others contend, constrained by inward urgency to attempt a moral reform on a speculative basis, or, according to yet a third supposition, eager to bear the glad tidings of the gospel to the gentile world, his own genius was from first to last, his guide and inspiration. There is no evidence to prove that his "conversion" added anything new to the ma.s.s of his moral nature, or changed the quality of ruling attributes, or determined the bent of his will to unpremeditated issues. He was converted to the Christ, not to Jesus; and his conversion to the Christ, was nothing absolutely unprepared for. His zeal for Israel blazed furiously against the disciples who claimed that the Christ had come, and to the end of his stormy days it still continued to burn against disciples of the narrow school who would not believe he had come to any but Jews. His zeal for Israel, sent him away by himself to meditate a grander Christ.

The Christ, not Jesus, was his watch-cry. A man of ideas, intensely interested in speculative questions, keenly alive to the joy of controversy and the ecstasy of propagandism, he filled his boiler with water as he rushed along, leaving Peter and the rest to fill theirs at the nazarene spring. So little is Jesus to be credited with Paul's achievement, that it is the fashion to call his a distinct movement.

Enthusiastic admirers of his genius, call him the real founder of Christianity. Severe critics of his claim accuse him of corrupting the religion of Jesus in its spirit, and diverting it from its purpose. On either supposition, he was not a disciple.

The worship of Jesus, it has been said, is the redeeming feature of Christianity. This evidently is the opinion of John Stuart Mill, who writes, confounding, as is usual, Jesus with the Christ: "The most valuable part of the effect on the character which Christianity has produced by holding up in a divine person a standard of excellence and a model for imitation, is available even to the absolute unbeliever, and can nevermore be lost to humanity. For it is Christ rather than G.o.d whom Christianity has held up to believers as the pattern of perfection for humanity. It is the G.o.d incarnate, more than the G.o.d of the Jews or of nature, who being idealized has taken so great and salutary a hold on the modern mind;" and more to the same effect, in the essay on Theism.

Before Mr. Mill's intellectual eccentricities were as well understood as they are now, this testimony to the humanizing influence of christian, as distinct from philosophical theism, would have possessed great weight. As it is, it only excites our wonder that so keen and inexorable a thinker should so completely lose sight of facts. That Christendom has worshipped the Christ is true. Is it true that it has worshipped Jesus?

Again we might say: Yes;--the Jesus who demanded faith in himself as the condition of salvation; the Jesus who depicted the Son of Man, sitting on a throne of judgment, summoning before him all nations, and placing the sheep on his right hand, the goats on his left; the Jesus who threatened everlasting fire, and spoke of the devil and his angels; the Jesus who made the church umpire in matters of faith and works; the Jesus who bade his friends forsake father and mother, brother and sister for his sake. But did Christendom ever deify the man of the Beat.i.tudes, the relator of the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son, the friend of publicans and sinners? Is Jesus the central figure in the Nicene, or the Athanasian creed? Is he the G.o.d of Calvin, or of Luther, of Augustine, even of Borromeo, or Fenelon? Long before the dogmatical or ecclesiastical system of Christendom was formed, the image of Jesus had faded away from the minds of christians, if it ever was stamped there. That it was ever stamped there is not quite apparent. In the east there exists no trace of it after the apostolic age, or beyond the circle of his personal friends. In the west the personal influence is not distinctly visible at any distance. From the reported heroism of the early christian centuries no solid conclusion can be drawn, for the reason that the reports come from panegyrists like Tertullian, and from a period when the apostolic age had become a tradition. Writers like Neander make the most of a few recorded instances of devotion which distinguished the christians from the pagans about them; and James Martineau uses them as evidence of an original spiritual genius in the young religion. They are indeed beautiful, but they do not refer back so far as the historical Jesus for their source of inspiration. That in a community composed, with scarcely an exception, of poor people, the ordinary social distinctions should be un.o.bserved; that slaves, among whom in early times many converts were made, should have been acknowledged as brethren in Christ; should have appeared in public religious meetings as equal with the rest _before the Lord_; should have partaken of the communion on the same terms, taking their place among the believers, and receiving the pa.s.sionless kiss of brotherhood and of sisterhood, is not surprising, especially when it is considered that these slaves belonged to hardy, white races, that they discharged, some of them at least, the most honorable offices of labor, and were, except for the mere accident of their condition, physically as well as morally, peers of the best.

It is simply in the course of nature that poor people, grouped in communities, sharing a common and a painful lot, should help each other in times of trouble. The christians did so. At every weekly or monthly service collections were made for the relief of the poor, the sick, the infirm, the aged, widows, prisoners, and toilers in the mines. These contributions were sent to the points of greatest need, converging on occasion from many directions at centres of extreme necessity. It is recorded that about the middle of the third century several members of the church in Numidia, men and women, were carried off captive by barbarians. The Numidian churches being poor applied to the Metropolitan church at Carthage. Cyprian, the bishop there, collected more than four thousand dollars in his diocese and sent the money as ransom, with a letter full of sentiments of kindness. On another occasion a portion of the sacred vessels of the sanctuary were sold to raise funds for a similar purpose. In this there was nothing strange. The acts were done in strict conformity with a long established usage.

A more remarkable example often cited in evidence that the spirit of Jesus was alive still in the societies that worshipped him as Lord, occurred in the year 254, shortly after the Decian persecution, the most general and the most hideous to which the church had been exposed. In consequence of this persecution, which was attended with such slaughter that the unburied bodies poisoned the air, a fearful pestilence broke out in the city of Alexandria. Unhappily for the literalness of the truth, it is Lactantius who tells the story. "The plague," he says, "made its appearance with tremendous violence and desolated the city, so that, as Dionysius, the Christian bishop writes, there were not so many inhabitants left, of all ages, as heretofore could be numbered between forty and seventy. In this emergency the persecuted christians forgot all but their Lord's precept, and were unwearied in their attendance on the sick, many perishing in the performance of this duty by taking the infection. 'In this way,' says the bishop with touching simplicity, 'the best of the brethren departed this life, some ministers, and some deacons,' the heathen having abandoned their friends and relations to the care of the very persons whom they had been accustomed to call men-haters. A like n.o.ble self-devotion was shown at Carthage, when the pestilence which had desolated Alexandria made its appearance in that city, and, I quote the words of a contemporary, 'all fled in horror from the contagion, abandoning their relations and friends, as if they thought that by avoiding the plague, any one might also exclude death altogether. Meanwhile the city was strewed with the bodies or rather carca.s.ses of the dead, which seemed to call for pity from the pa.s.sers by, who might themselves so soon share the same fate; but no one cared for anything but miserable pelf; no one trembled at the consideration of what might so soon befall him in his turn; no one did for another what he would have wished others to do for him. The bishop hereupon called together his flock, and, setting before them the example and teaching of their Lord, called on them to act up to it. He said that if they took care only of their own people, they did but what the commonest feeling would dictate; the servant of Christ must do more, he must love his enemies, and pray for his persecutors; for G.o.d made his sun to rise and his rain to fall on all alike, and he who would be the child of G.o.d must imitate his Father.' The people responded to his appeal; they formed themselves into cla.s.ses, and they whose poverty prevented them from doing more gave their personal attendance while those who had property aided yet further. No one quitted his post but with his life." The example shows the more gloriously against the dark background of horror that stood so near. Yet, to the misery of the persecution by which the people were educated in sympathy, patience, fort.i.tude, and willingness to resign life, the benignant heroism must, in part, have been due.

Previous to the persecution the spirit of consecration had departed from the church. Christianity had become a social and cla.s.s affair. Luxury had crept in, and eaten up the heart of conviction. The alliance of church and state had been especially disastrous to the church, the mingling of secular ambition with spiritual aspiration operating fatally on the finer qualities of faith. Few could have suspected then that the spirit of Jesus had ever been with the church. The persecution purged the christian communities with fire. The surface was burned over, and only the roots and seeds were left in the ground. The persecution ended, tranquillity being restored, the roots burgeoned, the seeds sprung up, all the heroism of the two dreadful years, all the patience and fort.i.tude turned to gentleness; and a copious rain of mercy, blessing every body, even the persecutors, was the result of the battle's thunder and flame. The suffering that had been endured softened the heart towards all suffering. The persecutors no longer active or hateful, their pa.s.sive forbearance seemed, in contrast with their recent fury, a species of mercy calling for positive grat.i.tude. Not to be hated was felt to be identical with being loved; not to kill was by sudden revulsion of emotion, accepted as a kindly saving of life. To be kind to those who had desisted from hurting was natural. Besides, the persecution was incited and pressed by the government in Rome. The populace even there were not responsible for it, and in the distant provinces simply followed the metropolitan precedent. Their infatuation had therefore its pitiable as well as its outrageous aspect. They too were victims of the imperial policy, were perishing of the contagion which that policy caused, and thus were paying a terrible penalty for their own unwitting crime. It is unnecessary to suppose that any personal contagion from the character of Jesus, stealing through the murky ages of eastern and western life, communicated its saving grace to the Carthaginian brotherhood. Uninspired human nature is sufficient to explain the beneficent display.

The conclusion is that no clearly defined traces of the personal Jesus remain on the surface or beneath the surface of Christendom. The silence of Josephus and other secular historians may be accounted for without falling back on a theory of hostility or contempt. The Christ-idea cannot be spared from Christian development, but the personal Jesus, in some measure, can be.

In some measure, not wholly; the earliest period of the church does require his presence; the first, the original, the only disciples lived under the influence of a great personalty, and were moulded by it. Their attachment to a commanding friend is avowed in the apparently authentic parts of the New Testament. If we know anything about those men, it is that they lived, moved and had their being in the memory of a great friend. Their attachment to him took hold of their heart-strings. They were haunted by him. This appears in their frequent meetings for the expression and confirmation of their feelings, in their communion suppers, memorial occasions purely and always, without a trace of mysticism or a shade of awe; in their attachment to the places he had consecrated by his presence; in their affection for each other. Ignorant they were, unintellectual, unspiritual in the moral sense of the word, rather impervious to ideas, dull, common place, simple-hearted. They were not soaring spirits, audacious, independent like Paul, but exactly the reverse, timid, self-distrustful, pusillanimous by const.i.tution.

Their ambition flew low, fluttering round sparkling jewels on the Messianic crown. Their master was not such an one as they would have chosen, had they been allowed to select. He met none of their expectations, he fulfilled none of their hopes. His rebuke was more frequent and more cordial than his praise. Their stupidity annoyed him, their selfishness grieved his heart. Instead of justifying their confidence in him as the Christ, he utterly overthrew one form of it by allowing himself to be captured, convicted and put to death. Still they clung to his memory. True, they clung to him in the conviction that he was the Christ and would have confessed themselves dupes had that conviction been dispelled. But why was it not dispelled? Why did they believe, in the face of the crushing demonstration of the cross? They antic.i.p.ated his return, because he had told them he should reappear in clouds. But why did they believe him? Why did they believe, when month after month, year after year, went by and still he did not return? It was because they loved him, and trusted him in spite of evidence. When he did not return, they thought he meant to try their faith; still they met together; still they prayed and waited, imagining themselves to be in intimate communion with him in his skies.

That these men, with their unworthy conceptions of the kingdom, accepted him as their Christ, proves not only that his power over them was very great, but that he himself lived on the highest level of hebrew thought, and ill.u.s.trated the highest type of hebrew character; that he was a genuine prophet and saint; all the more so, perhaps, for the completeness of his self-abnegation. Had he raised the standard of revolt, and appealed to arms, his name might have been more conspicuous in secular history. He sacrificed himself wholly; kept no shred of preeminence for his own behoof.

Hence, the person of Jesus, though it may have been immense, is indistinct. That a great character was there may be conceded; but precisely wherein the character was great, is left to our conjecture. Of the eminent persons who have swayed the spiritual destinies of mankind, none has more completely disappeared from the critical view. The ideal image which christians have, for nearly two thousand years worshipped under the name of Jesus, has no authentic, distinctly visible counterpart in history.

This conclusion will be distressing to those who have accorded to Jesus, by virtue of a perfect humanity a certain primacy over the human race, and even to those who, regarding him as the complete fulfilment and perfect type of human character have looked to him as the beacon star "guiding the nations, groping on their way." It will be welcome only to the few calm minds who feel the force of ideas, the regenerating power of principles. These will rejoice to be relieved of the last thin shadow of a supernatural authority in the past, and committed without reserve to the support and solace of simple humanity trained in the humble observance of uninterrupted law. Their grat.i.tude for the human influence of the person is unqualified by distrust of the claims of the individual.

The Christ of the fourth Gospel--the incarnate Word--who has been a.s.serting absolute spiritual creatorship over his disciples, calling himself the vine whereof they were branches, the door by which they must enter, the light by which they must walk, the way their steps must tread,--says to them at the critical hour: "It is expedient for you that I go away; if I go not away the Comforter cannot come to you." There was danger in his personal continuance. They were to live not in dependence on him, but in communion with the "Spirit of Truth," which, as proceeding from him and from the Father also, was to bring freshly home to them what he had said, and to guide them further on to all truth. How many times must those words be repeated, with new applications in the new exigencies of faith! How little disposition do we find in his followers to heed them! They have gone on with the process of idealization, placing him higher and higher; making his personal existence more and more essential; insisting more and more urgently on the necessity of private intercourse with him; letting the Father subside into the background as an "effluence," and the Holy Ghost lapse from individual ident.i.ty into impersonal influence, in order that he might be all in all as regenerator and saviour. From age to age the personal Jesus has been made the object of an extreme adoration, till now, faith in the living Christ is the heart of the gospel; philosophy, science, culture, humanity are thrust resolutely aside, and the great teachers of the race are extinguished in order that his light may shine.

Yet from age to age the warning has been given again, the vain farewell has been spoken, "it is expedient for you that I go away." Perhaps he went, in one form; but he quickly re-appeared in another; and each new presentation had its own special kind of evil effect. The Christ of Peter, James and John retired to make room for Paul's "Lord from heaven." He withdrew in favor of the incarnate Word. The incarnate Word loses itself in the Second Person of the Trinity. The imagination of man, unable to invent further transformations rested here: Christendom for fifteen hundred years has knelt in awe before the divine image it projected on the clouds of heaven. But the work of disenchantment began early. The sublimated ideal slowly came down from the skies. The glorified Christ a.s.sumed the lineaments of a human being, from Deity became archangel, chief of all the celestial hierarchy; from archangel slipped down through the ranks of spirits, till he occupied the place of Son of G.o.d, preexistent, and in attributes, super-human; thence he declined a step to the position of premiership over the human family, the inaugurator of a new type of man, virgin-born as indicating that he was not the natural product of the generations but was introduced into nature by an original law; a further lapse from the supreme dignity brought him to the plane of humanity, but reported him as miraculously endowed with gifts from the Holy Spirit, supernaturally graced with attributes of power and wisdom, sent on a special mission to found a church and declare a law, raised from the dead to demonstrate immortality, and lifted to the skies to establish the presence of a living Deity. To this eminent station he bids farewell to stand as the perfect man, teacher, reformer, saint, before the enthusiastic gaze of humanitarians, who made amends for the spoliation of his celestial wardrobe by the splendor with which they endowed his human soul. Here the idealists place him, still claiming for him no exceptional birth, no super-human origin, no preexistence, no miraculous powers over nature, no superiority of wit or wisdom, no immunity from errors of opinion or mistakes of judgment, no fated sanct.i.ty of will, no moral impeccability, but ascribing to him an unerringness of spiritual insight, an even loftiness of soul, an incorruptibility of conscience, a depth and comprehensiveness of humanity which raise him far above the plane of history, and tempt them to look longingly backward, instead of directing a steady gaze forward. But this figure is now seen to be an ideal, like the rest unjustified by chronicle or by fact. The comforter, which is the spirit of truth, requires that he should go away, following his predecessors into the realm of majestic and beneficent illusion. The Christ in every guise disappears and there remain only the uneven and incomplete footprints of a son of man from which we can conclude only that a regal person at one time pa.s.sed that way.

All these transformations, it will be observed, came in the order of mental development, each timely and beneficent in its place. The crowning and the dis-crowning were alike inevitable and good. The glorification and the disappearance were both justified. The final change comes neither too late nor too soon; _not too late_, for still the immense majority of mankind live in sentiment and imagination, worship ideal shapes, being quite incapable of appreciating knowledge, loving truth, or obeying principles. It will be generations yet, before any save the comparatively few think they can live without this great friend at their side. Sentiment is conservative. The poetic feeling detains in picturesque form the ideas which if exposed to the action of clear intelligence would be rejected as unsubstantial. The imagination like the ivy loves to beautify ruins, making even robber castles and deserted palaces attractive to tourists. Wordsworth, the poet of Nature expresses the feeling that will at times come over powerful and cultivated minds, in moods of sentiment--

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers.

Little we see in Nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

This Sea that bares her bosom to the Moon, The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers, For this, for everything, we are out of tune, It moves us not;--Great G.o.d! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn, Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

This is pure sentiment. The sea was as lovely to Wordsworth, is as lovely to Tyndall, as it was to the superst.i.tious Greeks. The winds awaken similar emotions in the sensitive being. Why then, should Wordsworth, having all that is or ever was to be had, beauty of form, movement, color, regret the superst.i.tion that peopled the sea with fanciful beings and animated the winds with supernatural spirits? Why not be content with the facts, and the more content, because the fancies are gone that disguised them? Is it not a weakness to love dreams better than realities? Mr. Leslie Stephen, in his admirable "History of English Thought in the XVIII century" explains this mood of mind by saying that for the expression of feeling symbols are necessary, and superst.i.tion supplies all the symbols there are. The bare truth may awaken emotions, but it gives them no voice, and emotion unuttered, becomes feeble; in all but sensitive natures it dies. "In time," says Mr. Stephen, "the loss may be replaced, the new language may be learnt; we may be content with direct vision, instead of mixing facts with dreams; but the process is slow; and till it is completed, the new belief will not have the old power over the mind. The symbols which have been a.s.sociated with the hopes and fears, with the loftiest aspirations and warmest affections of so many generations may be proved to be only symbols; but they long retain their power over the imagination." It is not wise, therefore, to be impatient with sentiment that has so valid an excuse; nor is it magnanimous to stigmatize as weak and childish the romantic attachment to the symbol which is all that remains, which, with the unthinking, unadventurous mult.i.tude is so large a part of what abides of the mind's spiritual endowment. We must be patient with the conservatism that is born, not of fear, but of feeling, sympathizing when we can, with those that grieve when the idols lose their sanct.i.ty, and rejoicing that sentiment has the power to break the shock caused by the sudden dispelling of illusions. At the same time, it must be remembered that intellect is the propelling force in the intellectual world; that the acute, unimaginative, determined minds, impatient of the mists, however beautiful, that conceal knowledge, clear a way for the homes and gardens of the new generations; that the love of truth, simple and unadorned, is the mother at last of real beauty.

The disappearance of the resplendent figure of the Christ from the heaven of our philosophy has not, therefore, come _too soon_; for thinking, clear-sighted, brave and resolute minds there are. Discerning eyes, bright and gentle, look out and see the fields, sown with new seed, whitening for a new harvest. To such as these Jesus is no longer necessary for faith in humanity, for enthusiasm and constancy in humanity's service. Heroic men and saintly women exist in such numbers and in such variety that they sit in judgment on the judges, and call the censors to account. The education of mankind in the qualities that knit and adorn society has gone so far that these virtues require no longer a super-human representative to give them honor. Knowledge of every kind has so abundantly increased that the aid of revelation to throw light on important subjects is not demanded. Philosophy, literature, science have taken possession of the fields once occupied by the surmise of faith, and are carefully mapping out the departments of speculation. The problems that remain dark,--and they are the many,--we are content should remain so till light comes from the proper sources. The darkest of them, no darker than they have always been, are no longer complicated by the difficulties of revelation which added enigmas where there were enough before, but lie open to all the light that can be thrown upon them. The confusion introduced into the orderly sequence of the world's development by the exceptionally providential man subsides, and the c.u.mulative power of history is brought to bear on the necessities of the hour. Relieved from the sacred duty of turning backward for the form of the perfect man, thereby overlooking the present and suspecting the future, we are permitted to estimate fairly the conditions of the present existence, and to prepare for the future with unprejudiced, rational minds. The standard of moral attainment and the quality of moral character set up as authoritative by any single race, however distinguished, by any one era, however brilliant, abuses and injures the standards of other races, and casts suspicion on the attributes of other generations. The belief that at some time humanity has already come to full flower, discourages the laborers in the human garden. Humanity is still a-making; its perfection is prophecy not history.

The lesson of the hour is self-dependence, or rather, if we prefer, dependence on the laws of reason. It will be a gain for truth when true thoughts shall be welcomed because they are true, not because they are spoken by a particular sage; when erroneous thoughts shall be judged by their demerits, without fear of casting affront on the character of a saint. James Martineau's tender wisdom gains nothing in charm by being attributed to his beautiful fiction of a Christ, and Mr. Moody's painful caricatures of Providence have an unfair advantage in being sheltered behind the authority of the Hebrew Messiah. The holy beauty of Mr.

Martineau's ideal person is more than offset by the awful grandeur of the "evangelical" Avenger, equally a creature of imagination. In the realm of fancy the lurid conception outlasts and overwhelms the radiant one. Safety lies in withdrawal from the realm of fancy, and domestication in the humbler realm of fact. The lesson can be now safely taught. Let men learn it as soon as they will. Dependence on individual personalities has been the rule hitherto; dependence on general ideas and organic laws, dependence on discovered fact and intelligent conclusion, will be the reliance hereafter. As for the demands of the heart, which must have persons to cling to, they will adjust themselves to the new science and will satisfy themselves in the future as they have done in the past. Are all the fine personalities dead? Then the sooner we give them a chance to revive by removing the prodigious personality whose shadow has blighted them, the better for us. Are there none to love with enthusiastic ardor? Who have made us think so, if not they by whom all amiable and adorable attributes have been claimed before? Are there no feet it is an honor to sit at, no heads it is a privilege to anoint, no hands it is a dignity to kiss? Whose fault can this be, if not theirs who challenged the adoration of men and women and p.r.o.nounced it consecrated because rendered to him for one? Are there no leaders worth following, no causes worth espousing? They that think so must be listening to the voice that bade men follow in Galilee, and sighing because they cannot take up the cross that was imposed on the faithful in the cities of Judaea.

The imagination of man has not lost its power or forgotten its function since it performed the prodigious task of enthroning its hope by the side of the G.o.dhead. It is adequate to new and healthier performance. A world of fresh materials lies before it; new heavens display their glories; a new earth offers opportunity and prospect; a new humanity presents its varieties of good and evil. New beauties gladden the open vision; new glories fascinate the kindling hope. The regions of possibility, so far from being exhausted, have but begun to disclose their treasures. The realities of to-day surpa.s.s the ideals of yesterday. Art has a new birth. Poetry has a new birth. Philosophy teems with new births. These all look forward with confident expectation. Why should religion, which has built up more grandeurs than any of them, turn her back to the new day, confess her creative power exhausted, and creep back to the images of her own idolatry? The Christ-idea, become human, will surpa.s.s its old triumphs.

AUTHORITIES.

To meet the wishes of such as may desire to know on what grounds his opinions are founded, or to pursue them further, the author gives the t.i.tles of a few books that may be profitably consulted. It were easy to make a long list of erudite works; much easier than to make a short list of accessible and suggestive volumes. In an essay prepared for the intelligent and thoughtful, not for the learned or scholarly cla.s.s, reference to stores of erudition would be out of place. For this reason, the pages are left unenc.u.mbered with notes, and the books cited are purposely such as come within easy reach of general readers. The better known book is preferred before the less known, the conservative when it will answer the purpose, before the destructive. If the whole case were presentable in English, none but English authorities would be mentioned.

Unfortunately for the general reader, the best literature is in German or French, much of which is still untranslated. To indicate these is a necessity for those who are acquainted with those languages, while those who are not, will, it is believed, find enough in English writings reasonably to satisfy their need.