Hearken to me, ye children of the Immortal,
dwellers of the heavenly worlds, I have known the
Supreme Person who comes as light from the dark
beyond.
_Isha Upanishat._
Studying at its best the Christian view of the world of life—and it is
not worth any man's while to study it at less—we find that Jesus Christ
stands there always as greatest among prophets, though 'more than a
prophet.' He is in the line of the prophets but at their head; he is
their culmination and their fulfilment. He knew himself to be a prophet,
and to have the lot of one who 'is not without honour save in his own
country.' He lived and taught, and he and his teaching were received,
after the manner of the prophets that had gone before. Like Isaiah and
Jeremiah he spoke the language of drama and poetry, and gave body in
parable and pictorial visions to his message. Like them he spoke and
preached always with passion and as being conscious of a very wall of
opposing forces. For him as for them the exaltation of religious
machinery above religious life, and all self-satisfaction through mere
forms and ceremonies, meant an onset of spiritual death. To use these
things as a shelter within which a man might follow his self-seeking
bent, whether of greed or of fear, was the worst (but one) of sins.
'Hypocrites,' that is, 'play-actors', 'generation of vipers,' he said of
the professionally religious of his time. That there was for him one sin
greater than such play-acting is of his own supreme greatness. No other
prophet recognized and denounced as he did the sin that cannot be
forgiven; for no other prophet had as he had the full personally
realized revelation of an indwelling God whom man, consciously, might
cast out. This, with his marvellous balance of judgement in regard to
the letter or the machine and the spirit—the organ and the life that
shapes and uses it—is a marked element in his _differentia_ among
prophets. And we, who are friends to them all in so far as they protest
against depreciation of spirit and life, and against men who make of the
products of life from which life has departed obstacles to the urgency
of the present, have to consider whether we can go with him as far as he
goes, or whether this element of difference between him and the rest is
in any way to weaken our alliance with him. He is not only one among his
fellows; he is also unquestionably different from them. Is there
anything about this difference that should make us who are friends of
the prophets quarrel with the Christian who accepts and welcomes it?
First, let us look at his attitude towards the instruments of religion
as compared and contrasted with that of other prophets of his race.
'_Your new moons and your appointed feasts my soul hateth_,'—that is the
note of the elder prophets. '_The Sabbath was made for man, not man for
the Sabbath_'—that is his. The prophet of old was contemptuous of
institutional and ceremonial religion; he suffered, as we say, from
reaction and went to extremes, reprobating the instrument as well as the
spirit that misinterpreted and misused it. Jesus taught in the
synagogue, cleansed the temple from those who had made the historic
house of prayer to be a den of thieves, sent the leper to show himself
to the priest, and in general accepted the institutions of religion, and
the hierarchical organization, of the place and people that were his
own. Yet no man can say he overvalued these. His insistence on the
spiritual freedom of man and the pre-eminence of spirit and life was
both constant and passionate. The institution he accepted, as he
accepted the tools of his carpenter's trade, the food and furniture of
life as he found it, the language and the manners of his people. Freedom
and unity, love, truth, beauty and holiness, as realities in the life of
God and man, for these he pleaded, preached, worked, suffered and died.
Yet those other things were not to be despised or left undone. He came
and he lived not to destroy but to fulfil. In this he is pre-eminent
among, apart from, the religious prophets who went before him. His
piercing and balanced judgement was the primary source of Christian
sacramentalism. He despised nothing of the earth and the body; he found
a place for all in the life of the spirit. He was the first preacher to
point to loveliness in the flowers of the field; and for twelve hundred
years no other, in any nation or kind of religion, did the like. Then
Francis of Assisi, his true follower, sang the Song of the Sun. The long
history of Christian sacramentalism spreads out far and deep and gathers
up in itself from all quarters the pursuit of beauty is well as the
hunger and thirst after righteousness and truth; but its pure source is
plain to see in the Gospels. There the fine adjustment of the relation
between matter and spirit, life and its organs, is maintained. There the
value and the meaning and pertinence of life's own instruments to its
user, of the body to the soul, is as clearly insisted on as is the
supremacy in both meaning and value of life itself. There is none of the
abstract spiritualism that is one of the prophet's most dangerous
snares. There is none of the contempt and the blinding reaction which so
often disfigure and discredit his utterances. And for this, we who have
come fresh from learning our new lesson about the movement of organic
life and its difficult striving upon the earth may dare to praise him.
It is a beginning for us. Not in this respect, at least, shall we stand
aloof from him or complain that science or philosophy has built a
barrier against him. That Christians the world over have lost touch with
him in this regard as in others is for the moment nothing to us. We know
that they are feeble and fallible like ourselves and that his way of
judgement is hard. To keep the balance even, never to allow a secret
materialism to be brought into the scale, or a protest to sink into
repudiation—this is hard indeed. And we know that a thousand other
temptations have beset the Christian during the centuries that have gone
by and that, being as he is and just as we are ourselves, he has
succumbed to not a few of them. We know all that; but we are seeking to
find out what greatness it is that lies behind all the faults and
follies, the absurdities, the crimes even, of Christians, and keeps
Christianity alive and potent. We begin to see, perhaps, that this
greatness is Christ—that it is 'Jesus the prophet of Nazareth in
Galilee.'
Of this greatness and its character he himself had an unique
consciousness which was a most important and most marked element in his
difference from the Hebrew prophets before him. He 'spoke with authority
and not as the Scribes,' not as those theologians and jurists whose
strength rested on tradition and the letter of the past; he spoke, in
short, as a prophet. So the people discovered. The voice of the prophets
was characteristically authoritative and neither showed respect for
tradition nor claimed its support. But the note of the prophets of old
was '_Thus saith the Lord_'; and the note of the prophet of Nazareth was
'_I say unto you_.' Both came among men with an authority lacking to the
followers of tradition; but by the first it was thought of as delegated,
in the second it was recognized as inherent. Not, '_the Lord said unto
me_,' but '_I say unto you_.' The difference is enormous; it is also
profound in significance and implications. It means, to begin with, a
different knowledge of God. No longer is God only speaking to his
messengers across a dividing space, speaking as a king upon his throne
might to a subject at his feet, charging that subject with a mission.
The message is no longer carried and reported by a man; it is originated
in him and given by him. Jesus is conscious that the life and spirit of
God are become his own life and spirit. He knows the indwelling God
given to be made man in co-operative union with man, knows him in and
through and as himself, the prophet of Nazareth in Galilee. He does not
need to refer either to a God, or to a tradition, that is extraneous to
himself. Therefore his prophetic authority exceeds not only that of the
Scribes but that of all the prophets. It gave this impression to those
of his contemporaries who had eyes to see and ears to hear. To such men
it gives the same impression now. And if there are Christians who
explain the impression and reason from it, erroneously, have we any
right to be surprised? Consider the height to which we have been carried
and the problems that open up before us as we survey this man. Consider
the habits of interpretation most usual among us. Consider the
tangibility and conspicuousness of _things_, the intangibility and, to
the senses and the mind itself, the elusive mysteries of personality, of
nature, of consciousness, even of knowledge and every other manifest
activity. We cannot fairly blame Christians for what has been done among
them in an attempt to explain and reason about Jesus Christ. The attempt
has been honest enough and successful enough to hold the allegiance of
thinking men for generations.
The truth is that we are learning, as we never learnt before, to
question the manner of our own thinking about these high matters. We
have become aware, as we were not, of the insidious materialism of our
instruments of thought. We have learnt that to apply a logic of things
and their qualities to problems of the nature of God and man is to
ensure misunderstanding. So when Christians tell us that the person of
Jesus Christ is divine and that he had, or was, or is, a human nature
and a divine nature, and a human will and a divine will conjoined in the
divine person, we see plainly that they are applying to the truth of him
that logic of things and their qualities which they have acquired
through dealing easily and habitually with things. They are trying to
explain him by taking human nature as one thing or set of qualities, and
divine nature as another, and they are joining them by a third. You see
two vertical stones and one across the top. And if the stones are alive
and the top one 'hypostatically' effects the union between the other
two, stones they still are; or sets of qualities conceived as things,
which is all the same.
The mighty consciousness of Jesus escaped entanglement by these logical,
spatial, materialistic nets. He knew by experience the activity of a
will in which the will of God and the will of man were united and
engaged at once in one purpose. He knew, felt, lived, God and man as one
in himself. And in the fulness of this he differed from all other
prophets, for whom it was at best, and that but rarely, an unrealized
ideal.
Shall we say, then, that for us and for Christians it is well not to
reason about the problems he presents to thought? Even if we do, we
shall reason and so will they. Neither we nor they can help it. But we
may put our reasoning together, and learn each from the other. There is
a meeting-place here, inviting us to join hands.
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