this anticipation of a divine judgment close at hand. The promise, the
threat, the tremendous imagery, were dear to the heart of the early
church. They fed the imagination of the mediaeval church. But that
modern Christianity which finds in Christ the source and embodiment of
all its own refined and exalted conceptions is inclined to look away from
all this millennial prophecy; to weaken or ignore its significance, or to
attribute it to the misconception of the disciples. This modern
Christianity fastens its attention on those teachings of purely spiritual
and universal truth in which Jesus indeed spoke as never other man spoke.
This exclusive insistence on the ethical and spiritual element may
suffice for those to whom Christ is an ideal or a divinity. But if we
are to study the historical development of our religion, and not merely
its present form, it seems necessary to recognize this belief in the
Judgment and Advent as a very important factor in the story.
Unless we attribute to his disciples and biographers a misunderstanding
almost inconceivable, he identified himself with the Son of Man whom the
prophecy of Daniel and the popular belief expected to set up a divine
kingdom on earth. The whole story in the later chapters of the Gospels
is pervaded by this idea. The powerful imagery of a Day of Judgment, the
splendid promises and lurid threatenings, the specific incidents of
teaching and event, the overstrained eagerness,--which will not suffer a
son to wait to bury his father, or allow a fig-tree to refuse miraculous
fruit,--all agree in the presentation of Jesus as absorbed with this
tremendous expectation.
That he was on the whole so little unsteadied by this anticipation seems
due to his profound, sympathetic sense of the sad and sorrowful elements
which somehow mingle with human destiny. He was not thinking chiefly of
himself,--not even though he was to be God's vicegerent. What filled his
heart, was the destiny of men. He wept over Jerusalem,--he mourned for
those who would go away into darkness. The realities of human
experience, widened by sympathy, came close home to him.
It seems plain--so far as anything can be plain in the details of the
story--that as his mission went on his temper of a pure spiritual
idealism changed into a controversy with the leaders of the established
religion. He went to Jerusalem, foreseeing that the controversy would
there take an acute form, with the gravest issues. At times the presage
rose of his own defeat and death. Suppose that were to happen?
Still--so spoke his victorious faith--God's cause would triumph. And it
would triumph speedily and visibly. So he heartened his followers for
any event. "Be prepared--you who are to me brothers and sisters and
mother--be prepared even for my death. All the same, my truth will
vindicate itself, God will triumph, you shall be saved!"
Jerusalem, it is plain, struck him much as Rome did Luther. Gorgeous
buildings, splendid ceremonies, august authorities, and along with it a
mass of greed, formality, worldliness.
A solemn sense comes over him that this cannot endure. The disciples
childishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikes
him as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, "There shall not one
stone be left upon another."
His indignation rises and seeks expression in some outward act which
shall blaze upon the dull multitude the sense of their sinful state. He
goes into the courts of the Temple, drives out the money-changers and
merchants, overthrows their tables, scatters all the apparatus of trade.
This is the turning-point in his career; he has given an effective handle
against him to the formalists and bigots who already hated him, and they
speedily bring about his ruin.
The life of Jesus culminates in the scenes of the last night. At the
supper, sure now of his impending fate, his willing self-devotion
expresses himself in that poetry of humble objects which was
characteristic of him, and with passionate intensity. "This bread is my
body." "This wine is my blood." "I give myself for you."
The scene in Gethsemane shows the dismay and recoil of the hour when his
ardent faith met full the stern actuality. God was not to interfere,
defeat and death were before him. All was hidden, save a fate which rose
upon his imagination in dark terror. "O my Father, if it be possible,
let this cup pass from me!" Then comes the victory of absolute
self-surrender, "Not my will, but thine, be done."
The birth-hour of the religion of Jesus was that in which he began to
declare forgiveness to the outcast and good tidings to the poor. But the
birth-hour of Christianity, as the worship of Jesus, was that in which
Mary Magdalene saw her master as risen and eternally living.
The impulse which caught up and gave wings to his work just when it
seemed crushed came from the heart of Mary. In a spiritual sense the
mother of Christianity was a woman who had been a sinner, and was
forgiven because she loved much. The faith that sent the disciples forth
to conquer the world was the faith that their Lord was not dead but
living, not a memory but a perpetual presence. That conviction first
flashed into the heart of Mary. It was born of a love stronger than
death, the love of a rescued soul for its savior. It sprang up in a mind
simple as a child's, incapable of distinguishing between what it felt and
what it saw, between its own yearning or instinct and the actualities of
the outward world. It took bodily form under a glow of exaltation that
knew not itself, whether in the body or out of the body. It crystallized
instantly into a story of outward fact. It communicated itself by
sympathetic intensity to other loving and credulous hearts. They too saw
the heavenly vision. Its acceptance as a reality became the corner-stone
of the new society. About it grew up, in ever increasing fullness and
definiteness of outline, a whole supernal world of celestial
personalities. But the initial fact was the heart's conviction--Jesus
lives! Our friend and master is not in the grave, nor in the cold
underworld; he is the child of the living God, and he draws us toward him
in that divine and eternal life.
To get some partial comprehension of how the belief in Jesus'
resurrection took possession of the disciples' minds, we are to remember
that during the last months of their master's life he was in a state of
tense, high-wrought expectation, which communicated itself to them.
Something wonderful was just about to happen. There was to be a sudden
and amazing manifestation of divine power, by which the kingdom of God
was to triumph and thenceforth to reign. But the way to this
consummation might lead through the valley of the shadow of death. In
the soul of Jesus a sublime hope and a dark presage alternated and
mingled. It is not to be supposed that he held a definite and unchanging
conception. Cloud-shadows and sunbursts played by turns across him, with
the intensity natural to a soul of vast emotions. Constant through it
all was the fixed purpose to be true to his mission, and with victorious
recurrence came his confidence in the divine issue. His sympathetic
disciples were vaguely, profoundly stirred by this elemental struggle and
victory. They too became intensely expectant of some great catastrophe
and triumph. After the first shock of the Master's death, all this
emotion surged up in them afresh, with their love heightened as death
always heightens love, with the fresh and vivid memories of their leader
sweeping them on in the current of his purpose and hope and faith. His
words were true,--he must, he will, conquer and reign. If he has gone to
the underworld, he will live again. "Will,"--nay, is he not here with us
now? Is he not more real to our thought and love than ever before? And
first in one mind, then in another, the conviction flashes into bodily
image. Mary has seen the Master! Peter has seen him! And for a little
time--for "forty days"--the electric air seems often to body forth that
luminous shape. The story, as it grew with years, took on one detail
after another, became definite and coherent, was accepted as the charter
and foundation of the little society.
To rightly understand the faith of the disciples in the risen Christ, we
must look below the stories of sense-appearance in which that faith
clothed itself. What they essentially felt--what distinguished their
faith from a mere opinion or dogma--was not a mere expectation, "The dead
_will_ rise;" not a mere fact of history, "Some one _did_ rise;" it was
the conviction and consciousness, "Our friend _is living_." It was an
experience--including and transcending memory and hope--of present love,
present communion, present life.
Sight and speech lent their forms to clothe the ineffable experience of
Mary and the disciples. For us, the story of outward events--the visible
form, the eating of bread and fish, the conversations, the floating up
into the clouds--all this fades away as a mirage. The reality below this
symbol--the sense of the human friend's continued and higher life--this
abides and renews itself; not as an isolated historic fact, but as an
instance and counterpart of the message which in every age comes to the
bereaved heart--of a love greater than loss, a life in which death is
swallowed up.
The religion of the followers of Jesus became a centring of every
affection, obligation, and hope, in him.
For the first few years all this was merged in the eager expectation of
his return. While this lasted in its fullness, even memory was far less
to them than hope. They did not attempt any complete records of his
earthly life,--what need of that, when the life was so soon to be
resumed? The bride on the eve of her marriage is not reading her old
love-letters,--she is looking to the morrow.
That first eager flush had already passed when the earliest gospels were
written. By that time hope had begun to prop its wavering confidence, by
looks turned back even to a remote past. Hence the constant appeals to
the supposed predictions of the Old Testament; hence even the imagining
of special events in the life of Jesus to fulfill those predictions.
The Old Testament as conceived by the writers of the New is fantastically
unlike the original writings. The Evangelists found Messianic prophecies
everywhere. The writers of the Epistles, Paul and the rest, dealt with
ceremonies and histories as a quarry out of which to hew whatever
allegory or argument suited their purpose.
In Luke's Gospel we first see fully displayed the idea of Christ which
took possession of the common mind, and has largely held it ever
since,--a personal Savior,--a gracious, merciful, all-powerful deliverer.
It is a gospel of the imagination and the heart--inspired by the actual
Jesus, but half-created by ardent, adoring imagination.
This conception grew up side by side with Paul's. It is far closer to
the popular mind and heart than Paul's idea,--his was philosophic and
metaphysic; this is pictorial. Paul has been studied by theologians, but
the Gospels have given the Christ of the common people.
The early church was divided into two parties, of which one was led by
Paul, who stood for the free inclusion of all who would accept Jesus as
the Messiah, and would impose no further requirement of ceremony or
dogma, trusting all to the guidance of "the Spirit"--the Spirit of which
the sufficient fruit and evidence was "love, joy, peace, long-suffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." The other party, led
by disciples who had known and followed Jesus himself, maintained that
the entire Jewish law was still in force, and treated Paul as a dangerous
heretic. To narrate the struggle and the final reconcilement is beyond
the purpose of this book, but we must pause a moment on the figure of
Paul.
It marks the extraordinary force and vividness of Paul's character, that
in a few pages of letters, in which the autobiography is only brief and
incidental, he has so displayed himself that few historical characters
are more familiar.
We see him,--deep-hearted, vehement, irascible, tender, self-assertive;
intensely bent on the higher life; thwarted in that aspiration by unruly
passion,--lust of the flesh and pride of the spirit; stumbling,
stammering, conquering; a nature full of internal conflict, brought into
harmony by one sublime spiritual affection; thenceforth throwing its
whole energy into the diffusion of a like harmony throughout this world
of troubled conflict.
We see a mind guided in its deepest workings by the realities of personal
experience, but wholly untrained in logic, unversed in accurate
knowledge; acquainted with history only through the Old Testament;
ignorant of the philosophy of Greece; taught by intimate association with
many men and women in their deepest personal experiences; familiar by
travel and observation with the broad life of the time, and judging it
from a lofty ethical standpoint; wholly credulous as to miracle; wholly
confident in its own theories--theories gendered in the strangest wedding
of fact and fancy; using constantly the form of argument, which often is
pure fantasy; illumined by gleams of spiritual insight, which sometimes
broaden into pure radiance; striving always to express the conscious fact
of a great freedom of the soul which binds it fast to all duty; aiming at
a human society dominated wholly and solely by the same spiritual
principle; but often clothing both the personal and social ideal in forms
of thought which have become obsolete, so that for us to-day his truth
has to be stated in other language, and broadened by other truths.
Where Paul has always touched men closest is in the earnestness and
difficulty of his struggle for the good life, and in the sense of a
celestial aid,--he calls it "the love of Christ,"--which somehow brings
habitual victory in the conflict, and sheds peace in its pauses, and
gives assurance of ultimate triumph and perfect fruition.
The main theme for which Paul contends in most of his epistles was vital
to the life of the early church,--that its members were not to be held to
observance of the Jewish ritual. In support of that theme, Paul develops
his philosophy of the universe. The main lines of that philosophy are
essentially these: that when God had created man, man's sin incurred the
penalty of death; that God chose the Jews as his peculiar people, and
gave them the code of laws contained in the books of Moses; that the law
was too difficult for weak human nature to perfectly obey, so that death
still reigned on earth, with dire penalty impending in the afterworld;
that God then had recourse to another plan. He sent his Son into the
world, who became a man, taking on him that fleshly nature which is the
occasion and the symbol of human transgression, but which he wore in
perfect holiness. God then caused this fleshly nature of Jesus to die
upon the cross, while the spiritual nature outlived the perishing body,
appeared in radiant form to men, and returned to the eternal realm. By
this visible sign God made proclamation to mankind, "Die unto sin by
forsaking sin, and I will give you holiness which issues in eternal life.
The death and resurrection of my son, Jesus Christ, are the token and
promise of my free gift, which only asks your acceptance. Accept it, by
turning from sin, and you shall receive the sense of companionship with
Christ, and the consciousness of a divine power working in you and in the
world. Of set laws you have no longer need; rites and ceremonies were
but the type of the reality which now is freely given to you. Your sole
obligation is to love; your fidelity to that shall constantly merge in
the sense of joyful freedom; the imperfect attainment of earth shall
issue into the eternal felicity of heaven."
In such language we try to restate Paul's philosophy. Thus, or somewhat
thus, he thought. Just how he thought we can never be sure, nor does it
matter. The mould of his belief was so different from ours that all
which closely concerns us is to discern if we can what was the kernel of
genuine experience, the permanent reality and truth, which vivified this
world-scheme.
In Paul before his conversion we see the man who struggles to conform to
a standard of conduct so high, exacting, and minute, that it touches
every particular of life, and who yet is beset by a constant sense of
failure and disappointment. From this slough of despond he is
lifted--how? By the sense of a love which extends to him from the unseen
world. It takes form to him as the personal love of one who has lived,
has died, and in some inexpressible way still lives. This friendship in
the unseen world is the sufficient, the absolute pledge of a God who
loves and saves. No matter what be the theory about it, of incarnation
or atonement, here is the reality as it comes home: the man Jesus,
highest, noblest, dearest, makes himself real and present to me, though
long ago he died and was laid in the grave. This one fact carries answer
enough for all the craving of heart and soul. That I shall at last
triumph over all besetting evils, that the ruler of the universe is my
friend, that earth is the vestibule of heaven,--all this I can joyfully
believe when once I have the sense of that single human friend still
befriending me in the unseen world.
This was what the risen Christ meant to the early church. This was the
common belief that bound its two parties, the Jewish and the Pauline
Christians, at last into one. This was what gave the full meaning to all
the stories of Jesus told over and over and at last written down. This
was what fired the common heart of mankind as not the wisdom of Plato nor
the nobility of Epictetus had touched it.
Paul's experience is the more remarkable because he had never even seen
Jesus in the flesh. He had borne in a sense a personal relation to him,
in the fact that he had hated and persecuted his followers. The
conviction that he had been in the wrong came to him with a tremendous
revulsion of feeling. The poignancy of remorse was followed by an
exquisite sense of forgiveness, which shed its depth and tenderness on
his whole after-life. In him we first see the power of the personality
of Jesus to touch those who never had seen him.
At such points we feel how shallow is the plummet-line with which our
so-called psychology measures the "soul" it deals with. The influence,
the presence, the living love, of one who has died,--how paradoxical, how
unintelligible, to our human science; how significant to our human
experience!
What concerns us historically as to Paul is that he was the conspicuous
agent in transforming this sentiment into a moral force. The belief that
Jesus was risen had great emotional power, but that emotion might easily
waste itself, might even undermine the solid foundations of character.
Paul held the belief in its literal form, but it had for him a further
significance, as the symbol and type of the soul's experience in its
every-day walk. The death we are most concerned about is the extinction
of evil act and desire. Life--the only life worth thinking of, here or
hereafter--is lofty, pure, and tender life. Die to sin, live to
holiness, and present or future is safe with God.
Paul's theology is in one sense a passage in a long chapter of
pseudo-science. It is one of a series of attempts to explain the
universe from a starting-point of fable. These have been the
accompaniment--sometimes as help, sometimes as obstacle--of a spiritual
life far deeper than the stammering language they found. And it is to be
noted that Paul himself when at his best rises above his theology or
forgets it. The words of his which have lodged deepest in the world's
heart are the vital precepts of conduct, and the utterances of love and
hope. In one matchless passage, he celebrates "charity"--simple human
love--as the one sufficient, supreme, and eternal good.
Some misconceptions in his philosophy became the fruitful seeds of
mischievous harvests. One such seed was the ambiguous sense of
"faith"--the confusing of intellectual credence with moral fidelity.
This misconception--which underlies much of the New Testament--was an
almost inevitable incident of a religion generated as this was.
Christianity based itself, in its own theory, on the bodily resurrection
of Jesus from the dead. This was offered as a basis for the whole appeal
which the church made to the world. Thus Belief--or Credulity--usurped
the place among the virtues which of right belongs to Truth.
Another misconception lay in the use of "flesh," the antithesis of
"spirit," as the name of the evil principle. Paul indeed uses "the
flesh" in no restricted sense of merely sensual sin. With him it equally
includes all other forms of wrong, like malevolence and pride and
self-seeking. But the nomenclature and the way of thought which it
reflected put a stigma on the whole physical nature of man. In that
stigma lay the germ of asceticism, hostility to marriage, depreciation of
some vital elements of man's nature.
Paul's conception of the church never was fully realized. He expected to
see the whole body of believers filled with a "holy spirit," a
divine-human inspiration, which should of itself guide them into all
truth and duty. Outward law or doctrine there needed none, beyond the
acceptance of Christ as God's son who had lived and died and risen.
Accept that, and the divine spirit would be given you. No need then of
circumcision or sacrifice, of Sabbath or fast, of written code or human
ruler. The saint is free from all law but that of love; the company of
saints needs no control or guidance but that.
The beautiful ideal shattered itself against a stubborn fact. Love of
Christ did not guide his followers into all truth, or into harmony with
each other. Paul's life was half spent in a bitter contest with men who
loved Christ as well as he did. His epistles are full of the struggle
with that great party of Christ's followers who called him a heretic and
sought to win away his converts. Suppose any one had asked him: "You say
the spirit of Christ will guide his followers into all truth,--why does
it not guide these Christian Jews and you into so much of truth as will
make you friends instead of foes?"
Paul was hoping too much. The new impulse in the world--sublime,
beautiful, full of power and promise--was by no means sufficient to lead
the world straight and sure to harmonious perfection. There was no such
gift of "the spirit" as to supersede all search, all struggle, all human
leadership and human groping. That hope was almost as exaggerated as the
expectation--with which in Paul's mind it mingled--of Christ's bodily
return. The road to be traveled by mankind was still long and arduous.
Any complete history of the early church must deal largely with the
stubborn and bitter contest between the Jewish and Pauline parties,--the
champions of the law and the champions of liberty. That contest gave its
stamp to the epistles of Paul, and was indeed their most frequent
occasion. At a later time the attempt to harmonize the two parties seems
to have given birth to the book of Acts, in which history mixes with
fiction. But we are here concerned only with such features of the
history as made the most vital and permanent contributions to religion,
and for this purpose we need only specify the Epistle to the Ephesians.
This epistle opens the heart of the early church. It assumes to be
written by Paul, but there are some indications that this name was
borrowed by the real author. This assumption of a great name, so common
in this age, as in the books of Daniel, Wisdom of Solomon, Enoch, and
others, marks a timidity, a deference to authority of the past. Only the
greatest, like Jesus and Paul, dared to speak in their own name.
Primarily the epistle is a plea for unity between Jewish and Gentile
Christians,--broadening into an appeal for unity between all classes and
individuals, an appeal for purity and holiness, in the name of Christ the
head. Occasional sentences and phrases will sufficiently show its tenor
and spirit.