birth, to the beliefs that are dearest to him. But if we trace back
through Christian and Jewish lineage the idea of immortality, we are
quite unable to discover the time or place of its beginning. The early
Jew thought of death much as did the early Greek,--as the extinction of
all that was precious in life, and the transition to a shadowy and
forlorn existence in the realm of shades. The Hades of Homer seems much
to resemble the Sheol of the Old Testament, though more vividly
conceived. The strong, ruddy, passionate life of the Hebrew found as
little to cheer it in the outlook beyond death as did the energetic,
graceful, joyful life of the Greek. Ancient Egypt had, at least for the
initiate, a noble teaching of retribution hereafter to crown the mortal
career with fit consummation of joy or woe. Ancient Persia had in its
own form a like doctrine. The Hebrews in their servile period caught not
a scintilla of the Egyptian faith. In their exile it is probable that
they did get some unrecorded influence from their Persian neighbors.
Unmistakably, their emigrants to Alexandria, meeting there the nobler
form of Greek culture while the Palestinian Jews encountered its baser
side, caught some inspiration from the philosophy which followed, though
afar off, the noble visions of Plato. Whether Persia or Greece was more
directly the source of the new hope which crept almost unperceived into
the stern bosom of Judaism is not certain. But the first clear voice of
that hope comes from the time of the martyrs. In the second book of the
Maccabees is told--probably by an Alexandrian Jew--the story of the men
and women who faced a dreadful death rather than disobey the Law of their
God. In that last extremity--that confrontal of the soul by the
bitterest choice, and its acceptance of death rather than
wrong-doing--comes the sudden voice of a hope triumphant over the tyrant.
"Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life, but the King of the
world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting
life." So in succession bear testimony the seven sons of one mother,
herself the bravest of them all. "She exhorted every one of them in her
own language, filled with courageous spirit; and stirring up her womanish
thoughts with a manly courage, she said unto them: 'I cannot tell how ye
came into my womb: for I neither gave you breath nor life, neither was it
I that formed the members of every one of you. But doubtless the Creator
of the world who formed the generations of man, and found out the
beginning of all things, will also of his due mercy give you breath and
life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake.
Fear not this tormentor, but, being worthy of thy brethren, take thy
death, that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren.'"
Just as the death of Socrates inspired in Plato the out-reaching hope of
a hereafter, so these Jewish martyrdoms quickened the doubtful guess, the
dim conjecture, into fervid conviction. From this period dates the
settled Jewish belief in immortality.
The form which that belief assumed is seen in the book of Daniel. That
book was a creation of this period, inspired by its sufferings,
aspirations, and hopes. The writer, assuming the name and authority of a
traditional hero,--by that easy confusion of the ideal and the historical
which we have seen before,--blends with stories of unconquerable fidelity
and divine deliverance his own interpretation of the world's recent
history and probable future. It is an early essay in what we call the
philosophy of history, the first recorded conception of a world-drama.
Median, Persian, Greek, and Roman monarchies move their appointed course
and pass away. God's plan is working itself out, and the culmination is
yet to come. In vision the prophet beholds it: the "Ancient of days,"
with garment white as snow and hair like pure wool, upon a throne like
fiery flame, with wheels as burning fire. Thousands of thousands
minister before him: the judgment is set and the books are opened. One
like the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven, and there is given
to him dominion and glory and a kingdom which shall not pass away. In
his kingdom shall be gathered the saints of the Most High. Many of them
that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever-lasting
life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
This was the figure in which the Jewish imagination clothed the Jewish
hope. The national and the individual future blent in one anticipation.
The dead were to "sleep in the dust" until the day when the divine
kingdom was established, and then were to rise again to life, and
according to their deserts were to share the endless glory or shame.
So philosophy makes its essay at the destiny of mankind. So imagination
fashions its pictures. And back of philosophy and imagination we trace
the elemental and highest forces of the soul. It is martyrdom and
motherhood that inspire the immortal hope. Man faces the worst that can
befall him--drinks the hemlock or suffers the torture--rather than be
false to duty. The mother broods over the life mysteriously sprung from
her own, and given back by her as a sacred trust to the service of the
right and to an unseen keeping. And to martyr and mother comes the
voice, "All shall be well with thee and thine."
Christianity, inheriting from Judaism the belief in immortality, gave it
a more central place, and a more appealing force. Of the older religion,
the special characteristic--compared with the Greek and Roman world--was
the impressing upon a whole people of a law of conduct, in which with a
multitude of external ceremonies were bound up the fundamental principles
of justice, benevolence, and chastity, enforced by the authority of a
personal and righteous God. We see the educational effect upon the
religious Hebrew of this clearly personal God. It constantly lifted him
out of the littleness of self-consciousness, setting before his
imagination the loftiest object. It gave definiteness and impressiveness
to his best ideals. And, further, this anthropomorphism, as we name it
now, was but the primitive expression of the principle which is central
in all forms of religious faith, that man and the universe are in some
deepest sense at one, and that man's closest approach to the secret of
the universe lies through his own noblest development. That is one way
of saying what the Jew felt when his imagination gave to the sternest
command and the highest promise the sanction, "Thus saith the Lord."
The Hebrew religion was wrought out under constant pressure of disaster.
It was the religion of a proud, brave people, who were constantly held in
subjection to foreign conquerors. Hence came a quality of intense
hostility to these tyrannical foes, and also a constant appeal to the
Divine Power which seemed often to conceal itself. Hence--and from that
sorrowful lot of the individual which often matches this national
tragedy--hence comes the passionate, pleading, poignant quality through
which the Old Testament has always spoken to the struggling and
suffering,--with gleams of hope, the more intense from the clouds through
which they shine.
The note of the New Testament is exultant. There is keen sense of
present evil, endurance, struggle; but there is a deeper sense of a great
deliverance already begun and to be perfected in the future. The heart
of this new energy, joy, and hope is love for a human yet celestial
friend. This love was awakened by a personality of extraordinary
nobility and attractiveness. The personal affection inspired imagination
and ideality to their highest flights. Its original object became
invested with superhuman traits and elevated to a deity. To trace with
certainty and minuteness the historic lineaments of the real man is not
altogether possible; but the essential truth concerning him is
sufficiently plain.
The biographies which we possess of Jesus were written from thirty to a
hundred years after his death. In these records memory and imagination
are intimately blended. On the one hand, the power and loftiness of his
character and words stamped certain traits unmistakably and indelibly on
the minds of his followers. But on the other hand, he was so suggestive
and inspiring--there were among his disciples natures so susceptible,
responsive, yet untrained, and their community was soon fused in such a
contagion of passionate feeling unchecked by reason--that the seeds of
his words and acts fruited in a rich growth of imagination, which blent
closely with the historic reality. And with the central inspiration of
his life there mixed in his followers ideas more or less foreign to him,
so that the result in the Gospels is a composite which often defies
certainty of analysis.
If we read with open mind the Gospel narratives, the foremost, vivid
impression we get is of a personage using superhuman power over natural
forces for the benefit of mankind. As he is described, Jesus is before
all a worker of beneficent miracles. He is a teacher, too, and an
unexampled one. But he enforces his teaching by means utterly
transcending the credentials of other teachers. He is a tender human
friend, but he expresses his friendship by services such as no other
friend can render. He allays tempests by a word. He creates bread and
wine at will. He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind. He raises
the dead. In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power. It is
this, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which has
distinguished him in the eyes of his worshipers. What is the wisest word
about immortality worth--what do we care for what Socrates or Plato
said--when here is one who raised Lazarus from the dead and rose himself?
What need for any argument or assurance about Providence, when here is
one through whom the very order of nature is set aside at the impulse of
beneficent love?
But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and the
growing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led in
our time to a different conception.
The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life.
His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in its
interior harmony and its relations with the world about it. _Love your
enemies_,--in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement of
conduct. _The pure in heart shall see God_,--with that he put in the
hands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision.
The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chastity, justice, and
piety. Jesus sublimated this,--in him chastity becomes purity; in place
of justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to a
love embracing earth and heaven.
Jesus taught in parables. A story--an outward, objective fact, something
which the imagination can body forth--often facilitates the impartation
to another mind of a spiritual experience. The soul has no adequate
language of its own,--it must borrow from the senses and the imagination.
The central idea of Jesus is expressed in the saying, "No man knoweth the
Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son."
That is, man is a mystery except to his Maker; he does not even
understand himself. And correspondingly, "No man knoweth the Father save
the Son:" only the obedient and loving heart recognizes the Divinity.
God is not known by the intellect: he is felt through the moral nature.
Peace, assurance, sense of inmost reality, comes through steadfast
goodness.
Jesus impressed this idea by the figure of father and son. What symbol
could he have used more intelligible? more universally coming home? Like
all statements of highest truth, all symbols, it was imperfect; it did
not furnish an adequate explanation of the workings of the universe.
But, under the homeliest figure, under the guise of the nearest human
relation, it expressed the greatest truth of the inner life.
Further, Jesus threw his emphasis where men need it thrown,--not on
abstract ideas, but on action. His teaching was always as to conduct.
Purity, forgiveness, rightness of heart were his themes.
Above all, he lived what he taught. He left the memory of a life which
to his followers seemed faultless. And ever since, those who felt their
own inadequacy have laid closest hold on his success, his victory, as
somehow the pledge of theirs.
Jesus was a Jew, but in him there was born into the world a higher
principle than Judaism. The historic lineage is not to be too much
insisted on. When he said, "Love your enemies," "Forgive that ye may be
forgiven," he brought into the traditional religion a revolutionary idea.
Judaism was largely a religion of wrath. Jesus planted a religion of
love.
The tender plant was soon half choked by the old coarse growth, and for
many centuries the religion named after Christ had a vein of hate as
fierce as the old Judaism. But blending with it, and struggling always
for ascendency, was the religion of love, symbolized by the cradle of
Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary.
Of the Judaic traits in Jesus, conspicuous was the prophetic feeling and
tone. He was possessed with an absolute fullness of conviction, and
spoke in a tone of blended ardor and certitude. "He taught as one having
authority." He rarely gave reasons. If in his words we find appeal to
precedent or argument, it is really as little more than illustration or
picture to clothe his own intuition. His followers believed his words,
either because of some conscious witness in their breasts, or because
their love and reverence for him won for his assertions an unquestioning
acceptance.
From Judaism he took the familiar idea of one all-powerful and holy God;
a moral ideal which was chiefly distinguished from that of the
Greek-Roman world by its greater emphasis on chastity; and also the
belief in a constant divine interposition in human affairs, which soon
was to culminate in the establishment of a divine kingdom on earth.
Jesus woke in his followers an ardor for goodness, a tenderness for their
fellow men, and a supreme devotion to himself. His words went straight
to the springs of character. He brushed aside religious ceremonial as of
no importance. He sent the searching light of purity into the recesses
of the heart. He made love the law of life and the key of the universe.
He interpreted love, as a principle of human conduct, by illustrations
the most homely, real, and tender. Love is no mere delicious emotion: it
is giving our bread to the hungry, ourselves to the needy. It is not a
mere felicity of kindred spirits,--love them that hate you, pray for them
that despitefully use you!
Jesus was the greatest of poets. To every fact, to every idea, he gave
its most beautiful and spiritual interpretation. When he speaks of God,
his speech is the pure poetry of the soul. Yahveh becomes to him the
All-father. His providence is over the lilies and the sparrows. His
rain and sunshine are shed on the unjust as on the just. His inmost
nature is set forth by the human father meeting his returning prodigal a
great way off. His very life is shared with his children. It wells up
in Jesus himself: the light in his eyes, the tenderness in his tones, the
yearning in his heart,--it is _my Father_ ye know in me!
How does that Divine Power appear in the procedure of the universe? What
real providence is there for the slain sparrow? What is the actual
destiny of those human lives which show only frustration and failure?
Jesus does not answer these questions. It does not appear that he tried
to answer them. His words are filled with a glad, unquestioning trust.
He is not the philosopher seeking to measure life. He is the lover
living it, the poet delighting in it.
The secret of Jesus lay in his sense of the "kingdom of God" within
him,--of obedience, peace, and joy, which was in itself sufficient.
Simply to communicate and impart that was to spread the Kingdom among men.
A teacher like John the Baptist--possessed by the idea of righteousness,
and of the world's deficiency, but without tranquillity in his own
heart--could look only for a divine interposition, a catastrophe. John
is a sort of Carlyle. But Jesus, hearing him, and brooding the deeper
truth, goes about proclaiming a present heaven.
The marks of this inner state defined themselves against the conditions
of life he saw about him.
Thus, he shows his estimate of wealth in the story of the young ruler.
"Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor!"
Toward the other prize which men most seek, reputation, his feeling is
expressed to the two brethren asking chief places: "He that will be chief
among you, let him be your servant."
As to learning, intellectual attainment, his characteristic word is,
"Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed
them unto babes." "Be as little children."
The prevalent forms of religious observance he quietly acquiesced in,
except where they barred the free play of human charity. Then he set the
form aside, as being only the servant of the spirit. "The Sabbath was
made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
Such was his attitude toward wealth, honor, intellectual wisdom,
ceremonial.
Toward the outcasts, the publican and harlots, his attitude was of pure
compassion. Toward the Pharisees it was denunciatory. Wealth of
ceremony and poverty of spirit, self-complacency mixed with scorn for
others and with hostility to new light and love, roused in him a wrath
which broke in lightning-flashes. "Woe unto you! whited sepulchres full
of dead men's bones, children of hell!"
In the ethics of Jesus chastity has a high place, yet he has few words
about it. His is an exalted and ardent goodness, of which purity is an
almost silent element. His effect is like that of a noble woman, whose
presence is felt as an atmosphere. When he speaks, his words set the
highest mark,--"Be pure in _heart_."
We may contrast the scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene with that
between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota. The philosopher is proof
against allurement, and gives kindly advice, which clearly will have no
effect; Jesus, without conscious effort, wakes a passion of repentance
which transforms the life. So again we may compare the check which
Epictetus prescribes against undue tenderness, "Say while you kiss your
child, he is mortal," with the habitual attitude of Jesus toward
children,--taking them in his arms, and saying, "Of such is the kingdom
of heaven." It is in such scenes as these--in his relations especially
with women and with children--that we best see the genius of the heart,
the newness which came into the world with Jesus.
While dwelling in an inner realm of joy, he had the keenest sense of the
sin and sorrow in men's lives. "He was filled with compassion for the
multitude, as sheep having no shepherd." Their epilepsies,
leprosies,--the hardness of heart, the insensibility to the higher
life,--these moved him with a great pity. Scarcely save in little
children did he see the heart-free joy, the natural freedom and
happiness, which was his own. The hard-heartedness of the rich, the
scorn of the self-righteous for the outcasts, moved his indignation.
Thus the holy happiness of his own life was mingled with a profound sense
of the trouble of other lives.
His reading of the trouble was very simple: there were but two forces in
the world, moral good and evil, God and Satan, and God was shortly to
give an absolute triumph to the good.
Among the chief impressions he made was that of commanding power. He
must have been full of healthy and majestic manhood. Women and children
were attracted to him, as the weak are attracted by the strong. In the
storm on the lake, his spirit so rose above the elemental rage--as if
upborne with delight by the sublime scene--that his companions forgot
their fears, and in the remembrance it appeared to them that the sea and
wind grew calm at his word. His strength seemed to impart itself to the
weak, his health to the sick. The stories of marvel which richly
embroider the whole story are partly the halos of imagination investing a
personality which commanded, charmed, inspired.
Sometimes evil was considered the work of wicked spirits,--so especially
in cases of lunacy. Over some such cases Jesus had a peculiar power. He
even imparted this power to some of the disciples, who caught his
inspiration. The disciples, and probably Jesus, believed that this power
extended to other sicknesses. Of the uniformity of nature there is no
recognition in the New Testament. Man's power over events is believed to
be measured by his spiritual nearness to God. "If ye have faith as a
grain of mustard seed," ye can cast mountains into the sea.
When the soul exchanges its solitary communing for the actual world, it
needs to see manifested there the divinity it has felt. Jesus found this
manifestation partly in his power through faith to do "mighty works,"
partly in the expectation of the near coming of the Kingdom.
These in one sense typify the forms in which the religious soul always
and everywhere finds the divine presence. Man himself masters the forces
of nature, and as he does so has the consciousness of some higher power
working through him. And he looks for a better future for himself and
for mankind.
But the peculiarity of Jesus--looked at from a modern standpoint--was
that he combined the most ardent, pure, and tender feeling and conduct
with a simple belief that in the course of events only moral and
spiritual forces are to be reckoned with; that man has power over nature
in proportion to the purity and intensity of his trust in God; and that
the whole order of society is to be speedily transformed by a divine
interposition. These ideas were inwrought in Jesus, and blended with his
ardor of goodness, his tenderness, his sense of a mission to seek and
save the lost.
In his teaching, God feeds and clothes his children as he feeds the birds
and clothes the grass. There is no need that they should be anxious
about their physical wants. Their troubles will be banished if they will
pray in faith. Disease, lunacy, all devilish evil, will vanish before
the presence of the trusting child of God. All the injustice and wrong
of the world are speedily to vanish through the direct intervention of
God. It is the old anthropomorphic idea of God--the idea of the Prophet
and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender,
through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of
exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary
interpretation of the world.
What the ruling power of the universe will do he infers from the most
attractive human analogy. If even an unjust human judge yields to the
importunity of a petitioner, much more will the divine judge listen to
the cry of the wronged and suffering. If a human father gives bread to
his children when they ask, much more will the divine father.
We are to remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and
the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time. The force in him
which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating the
higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight. This
insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life.
But it could not suffice to disclose those broad facts as to the
procedure of the phenomena of nature which we call science. To the Jew
of the New Testament period,--to Paul as much as to the fishermen of
Galilee,--the world was directly administered by a personal being who
habitually set aside for his own purposes the ordinary course of events.
The higher minds of the Greek-Roman world had reached a different
conception. Thinkers like Aristotle had assumed the constancy of nature
as the basis of their teaching, poets like Lucretius had proclaimed it.
But the great mass of the Greek-Roman world still believed, as the entire
Jewish people believed, in the habitual intervention of some divine
personality. What distinguished and dignified the Jewish belief was that
it attributed all such interventions to a single deity who embodied the
highest moral perfection, instead of to a mixed multitude representing
evil as well as good impulses. All Jewish history was written on this
hypothesis. The only records of the past which Jesus knew were the Old
Testament and its Apocrypha, in which each crisis of the nation or the
individual displayed the decisive interference of the heavenly power.
The occurrences which we name miracles were hardly distinguished by the
Jew as generically different from ordinary occurrences; they were only
more marked and special instances of God's working. That a man
especially beloved of God for his goodness should be given power to heal
the blind and the lunatic seemed as natural as it was that his loving
compassion should win the outcast and his fiery rebuke appall the
hypocrite.
It seems clear that Jesus, not less than his disciples, regarded his
power over physical ills as just as truly an incident of his character
and mission as was the power to inspire conduct and reclaim the erring.
What differentiated him from them was that he held the physical marvels
of far less relative account than they did. Obscure as the detailed
narratives must remain to us, it seems unmistakable that he habitually
discouraged all publicity and prominence for his works of healing. His
spiritual genius showed him that the stimulation of curiosity and
expectation in this direction diverted men from the principal business of
life, and the essential purport of his message,--to love, obey, and trust.
The point at which the idea of divine intervention most seriously
affected his work seems to have been in his growing expectation of a
speedy consummation which should in a day establish on earth the kingdom
of truth and righteousness. His earlier teachings include striking
utterances upon the gradual development of character in man, the slow
ripening of society, as in the parables of the leaven and the sower.
Here he was on the firm ground of his own observation and consciousness.
But as the problem of his own mission pressed for an explicit solution;
as the lofty passion of the idealist, the yearning tenderness of the
lover of men, were thwarted and baffled by the prodigious inertia of
humanity,--so he was thrown back more and more on that promise of some
swift catastrophic judgment and triumph which was the closing word of
ancient prophecy, and which seemed to answer the cry of his soul.