grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the
breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ,
which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of
God."
"There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of
your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all
who is above all and through all and in you all." "Endeavoring to keep
the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."
Each has his appointed place, some as apostles, some as prophets, some
for humbler service,--for "the building up of the body of Christ," "till
we all come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son
of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the
fullness of Christ."
"Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are
members one of another." "Let him that stole steal no more, but rather
let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he
may have to give to him that needeth."
The note of purity is far higher than in Stoic or Platonist. Uncleanness
is spurned with the horror which pure love and holiness inspire.
"Fornication, and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not be once
named among you, as becometh saints. Neither filthiness, nor foolish
talking, nor jesting, which are not becoming, but rather giving of
thanks. For this ye know, that no whoremonger nor unclean person nor
covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of
Christ and of God. Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because
of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of
disobedience." "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled
with the spirit."
There is a tender exhortation to husband and wife, based on the likeness
of their union to Christ and his church. There is a special word to
children, servants, masters. The sweetness is matched by the strength.
"Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his
might."
The epistle is full of the spirit of a present heaven. There is scarcely
any thought of the future, no reference to the second coming, no dwelling
on the hereafter. It is all-sufficient, all-uniting love,--Christ, a
spiritual presence, as the head--God the Father of all. The love of
Christ is a pure spiritual passion. There is no theorizing about him,
not even much personal distinctness,--only the consciousness as of some
celestial personality. The seen and unseen worlds seem to blend in a
common atmosphere.
Even as an ideal, this transcends the philosophy of Epictetus, and
outshines the vision of Plato. As one of the charter documents of a
society which had come into an actual existence,--as the aim toward which
thousands of men and women were struggling, however imperfectly,--it
marks the coming of a new life into the world.
The Pauline idea of Christ is shown as it worked itself out in the brain
and heart of Paul himself. In the Fourth Gospel we have, not the
experience of an individual, but an idealized portrait of the Master.
The germ may have lain in some genuine tradition of his words, as they
were caught and treasured by some disciple more susceptible than the rest
to the mystical and contemplative element in Jesus. These words, handed
down through congenial spirits, and deeply brooded; these ideas caught by
minds schooled in the blending of Hebraic with Platonic thought,--minds
accustomed to rely on the contemplative imagination as the discloser of
absolute truth; the waning of the hope of Messiah's return in the clouds;
the growth in its place of a personal and interior communion with the
divine beauty and glory as imaged in Jesus; a temper almost indifferent
to outward event, too full of present emotion to strain anxiously toward
a future, yet confident of a transcendent future in due season; an
assumption that in this belief lay the sole good and hope of humanity,
and that the rejection of this was an impulse of the evil principle
warring against God; the crystallization of these memories, hopes, and
beliefs into a dramatic portraiture of acts and words appropriate to
Christ as so conceived; a temper in which a portraiture so inspired was
identified with actual and absolute truth--some such genesis we may
suppose for the Gospel which bears the name of John.
The writer shows no such close contact with the actual struggle of life
as vivifies the other biographies of Jesus and the impassioned pleadings
of Paul. He is a pure and lofty soul, but he writes as if in seclusion
from the world. His favorite words are abstract and general. The
parable and precept of the early gospels give place to polemic and
metaphysic disquisition. The Christian communities for which he writes
have left behind them the sharp antagonisms of the first generation, and
have drawn together into a harmonious society, strong in their mutual
affection, their inspiring faith, and their rule of life, and facing
together the cruelty of the persecutor and the scorn of the philosopher.
To this writer, all who are outside of the Christian fold and the
Christian belief seem leagued together by the power of evil. The secret
of their perversity and the seal of their doom is unbelief. Let them
accept the Christ he portrays, and good shall supplant evil in their
hearts. The ground of the acceptance is to be simply the self-evident
beauty and therefore the self-evident truth of the Christ here set forth.
And so we have a portrayal of Christ which at many points profoundly
appeals to the heart, yet which constantly dissipates into a metaphysical
mythology; together with the admonition that only a full belief can save
the soul and the world from ruin. The ethical and emotional elements of
the new religion have thoroughly fused with the elements of dogma and
exclusiveness.
A kind of self-exaltation is by this writer imputed to Jesus, which is as
much less attractive than his attitude in the Synoptics as it is less
genuine. "All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers"--this is
the word of an idolatrous worshiper; far different from him whose only
sense of superiority was expressed in a longing to impart his own
treasure: "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will
give you rest."
But the writer rises to a lofty plane where he conceives the parting
words of Jesus to his friends. Here he is on the ground of what we know
did in some wise really happen--a last interview between the Master and
his disciples, when clouds of defeat and death lowered close before him,
and his words deepened in their hearts the devotion which animated all
their after-lives. That parting scene, preserved elsewhere in
delineations brief and impressive, was now expanded by the brooding,
creative thought of some one in closest sympathy with the occasion and
with the vital impulse it had given. Literal and historical fidelity the
description may lack, but it is in close accord with the realities of
experience. The tender assurances, the prophecies beyond hope, which the
Master is here supposed to speak, had indeed been fulfilled. The loss of
his earthly presence had been more than made good to those in whose lives
he had been felt as a saving power. The Comforter had truly come. The
mutual love of the disciples, and their loyalty to the Master as they
understood him, had planted a new social force in the world, and was
working slowly to transform the world. Thoughts which had been the
possession of philosophers in the schools were become working forces in
the lives of common men and women and children. That deliverance from
the fear of death which thinkers had vainly sought had been won even by
the poor and lowly. All this and more was set forth as in a psalm or
prophecy, in the parting words ascribed to Christ.
"Peace I leave with you, my peace I give unto you, not as the world
giveth give I unto you." "Ye shall see me again, and your hearts shall
rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you."
The predominant notes of the New Testament are tenderness and ardor, but
inwrought with these is a vein of terror and sometimes of fierce wrath.
It is like the denunciation in the Old Testament, to which the vision of
a future world has added a more lurid hue. "Asia's rancor" has not
disappeared, even in the presence of "Bethlehem's heart." Among the
words attributed to Jesus are the threat of that perdition where the worm
dieth not and the fire is not quenched. To him is ascribed (whether
truly or not) the story of Dives in hell, and father Abraham in whose
bosom Lazarus is reposing denies even his prayer for a drop of water to
cool his tongue. Here is the germ of all the horrors of the mediaeval
imagination. The germs bore an early fruitage in that book which bears
the name of "Revelation." It mirrors the passions which spring up amid
the heats of faction and of persecution. Fell hatred fills its pages for
the persecutor and for the heretic. The few gleams of Paradise for the
saved are pale in comparison with the ghastly terrors. It is the first
full outbreak of that disease of the imagination, bred of disease of the
heart, which was to be the curse of Christianity.
We have dwelt upon the central facts and ideas in which Christianity took
its rise. We shall pass with a few brief glances over a tract of many
centuries. Our special concern in this work is with the birth-periods of
the vital and lasting principles of man's higher life. One such phase
was the Greek-Roman philosophy of which the best outcome was Stoicism.
Another critical era was the birth of Christianity from its immediate
lineage of Judaism. The next great epoch is the marriage of rational
knowledge with the spiritual life--which is the story of these last
centuries, in mid-action of which we are standing.
Viewing man's higher life upon its intellectual side, the common
characteristic of the period between the time of the Apostles and our
immediate forefathers is the prevalence of what may be called the
Christian mythology. In other words, the moral rules and spiritual
ideals were almost inextricably bound up with and based upon the
conception of a supernatural world, certainly and definitely known, and
disclosed to mankind through a series of revelations which centred in the
incarnation of God in the man Jesus Christ. Upon this basis was reared a
vast intellectual and imaginative structure--embodied in many creeds,
pictured in visions of Dante and Milton and Bunyan, enforced by
multitudinous appeals to emotion and reason, to love, hope, and terror.
It is the dissolving of this elaborate supernaturalism, and the growth of
a different conception of the spiritual life, which is now going on
before our eyes. To measure the essential significance of the change, we
need not linger long upon the successive steps by which the mythology
expanded and solidified itself. We have seen its germs in the story of
Judaism, of Jesus and his immediate successors. The method and nature of
its growth may be briefly indicated.
We are following only a single thread in the vast web of history. All
the threads work in together, but we must be well content if we can trace
the general line of one or two. It is the history of the moral ideas
which have most directly and closely influenced the life of men, that we
are trying to pursue. There was a wonderful embodiment and outshining of
such ideas in the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. The truth he
taught and lived was in some ways made more applicable and transmissible
by his followers, and in some ways lowered. There grew up the society of
the Christian church. Gradually it took its place among the important
forces of the Roman empire. It won at last the nominal allegiance of the
civilized world. Aiding or thwarting it, coloring and changing it, were
a thousand influences,--side-currents from other religions and
philosophies, social changes, Roman law and tradition, the new life of
the barbarians; old ingrained habits of blood and brain; the constant
push of primal instincts--hunger and sex; tides of war and trade and
industry; slavery and serfdom; strong human personalities, swaying a
little the tide that bore them; all the myriad forces that are always at
work in history.
One can scarcely pass by a leap of thought from the age of Paul to the
age of Dante without an instant's glance at the intervening tract. There
are the early Christian communities, bound together by tender ties of
brotherhood; storms of persecution fanning high the flame of courage and
faith; a new purity and sweetness of domestic life spreading itself like
the coming of the dawn. There are wild vagaries of the mind, taking
shape in fantastic heresies. There is the degeneracy of a faith held in
pureness and peril into a popular and fashionable religion. There are
enthroned monsters like Nero and Commodus; "Christian" emperors, like
Constantine, ambitious, crafty, and blood-guilty; and noble "heathen"
emperors like Trajan and Aurelius. There is the peace of the Empire in
its best days, with some wide diffusion of prosperity and content. There
are incursions of barbarians--the strange, little-known life of nomadic
tribes--with pristine virtues of valor and chastity, half-pictured,
half-imagined, by Tacitus. There is conquest, rapine, subjugation,
suffering. There are ages in which violence is master, and in the
disordered struggle of the violent among themselves the weak are trampled
under foot. There are scenes of humble happiness and content, the toiler
in the fields, the family about the hearth-stone, which scarcely are seen
by the chronicler busy with kings and popes. There are superstitions and
mummeries; wild fears of spectres and devils; sentimental piety handed
with cruelty and debauchery. There are inward struggles, sorrows,
achievements; rapturous glimpses, tender consolations; the ministry of
faithful priests; the comforting of women and the purifying of men by the
thought of the Virgin Mother and the saints. There are civilizers in
state and church,--Alfred, Charlemagne, Hildebrand. There is the
emergence of a social and ecclesiastical order; the ranking of kings,
barons, and vassals; of priests, bishops, and popes; the establishment of
laws and charters; the growth of liturgies and cathedrals.
The contrast is great between the simplicity of a high moral ideal, like
that of Jesus or Paul, which claims, and with such show of reason and
right, the whole allegiance of man, and the vast complexity of good and
evil in which the ideal works only as one obscure and partial element.
How simple, how clear, how sweetly inviting sounds the call,--how strange
and discordant the response!
That inconsistency was explained by the church fathers, like Augustine,
as due to the inherent badness of human nature. That universal badness
flowed from one sin of the common ancestor. That sin was induced by the
machinations of Satan, arch-enemy of God, and practically dividing the
rule of the universe with him. A logical and symmetrical explanation in
its day, but it no longer explains.
Neither does it explain, but it may profit, if the wondering inquirer
turns his thoughts for a moment on his personal history. He has had his
hours of clear vision and high resolve,--why have they borne such poor
fruit in his actual life? His own riddle is one with the riddle of
history.
Again we may say, with no pretense of probing the mystery in its depths,
but as gaining a touch of side-light, it is plain that what we look at as
the strictly moral forces of mankind--the clear thinking, the definite
purpose, the pure aspiration--must be reckoned with as only a part of the
volume of force that carries along the individual and the race. Other
elements of that force are the physical needs; the push and play of
passions ingrained in human nature; the inherited bias; the strength of
habits formed before childhood had begun to reflect,--the thousand forces
which blend with reason and choice to make up our destiny. Man's noblest
aim is to make reason and purpose the rulers in his little republic, but
at the best those rulers must deal with a set of very vigorous and often
mutinous subjects.
Let us not at least wonder, though for the moment we sigh, that neither
did the kingdom of God at once establish itself on earth, as Jesus hoped,
nor did the Spirit guide mankind by a brief and sure path into full
felicity and holiness, as Paul hoped.
The disappointment is a blank contradiction only for those who assume a
superhuman revelation in Scripture or in church, and then have to
reconcile this infallibility with that most fallible groping by which
alone mankind gets along. Unembarrassed at least by that difficulty, let
us note one natural cause of the imperfect progress of Christianity,
namely, the substitution of fancy for clear and sound knowledge of nature
and man, which was inwrought from the beginning in its creed.
We may recall the piercing question of Socrates, "Can virtue be taught?"
Can the best life be so clearly shown and so skillfully inculcated, that
it may be transmitted from man to man and from generation to generation
as surely and safely as the knowledge of a mechanical art or a physical
science? Socrates owned that he knew of no such way to teach
virtue,--that while Pericles could teach his son to be a good horseman,
he could not so guide him but that he became a bad man,--and Socrates
himself found no sure way to guide men into the heroic path he walked
himself.
Now Christianity offered a sort of knowledge as the proper training to
produce virtue. Its knowledge included certain genuine and precious
elements, such as the essential blessedness of purity and love; the trust
and peace which flow from duty done; the hope which springs from the
grave of a holy man;--ideas not new in substance, but wonderfully
vivified and vitalized. But along with this genuine knowledge,
Christianity blended in ever-growing volume a pseudo-knowledge. It had a
professed explanation of the nature of Deity, the nature of humanity, and
their mutual relation, which was so unreal that when applied to the
conduct of human life its fruit was often as ashes and the east wind.
To sum up the method by which Christianity wrought: its vital ideas of
character were infolded in a triple crust of Authority, Ceremony, Dogma.
Its ideas could scarcely have been propagated except under some such
incrustation. Pure gold must be mixed with alloy before it can be
worked. The new society would have quickly dissolved into chaos if it
had not had established laws and usages and discipline and rulers. The
craving of the average man for definite symbols fastened eagerly on the
cleansing water of baptism and the bread and wine of the love-feast. The
thoughtful mind must needs seek to assign to the Master his true place
and relation as between God and man. Here were the germs of hierarchy,
ceremonial, and dogma. Internal order, self-protection against
persecuting emperors and then against barbarian invaders, led to a
gradual strengthening and perfecting of the organization. The craving
for intellectual consistency and symmetry urged on the elaboration of the
creed.
That development of the Christian creed,--in one view, how natural and
inevitable a process; yet what enormous waste of intellect, what
diversion from sound inquiry! The original hypothesis being pure fancy,
all the ingenious deductions are mere excursions into cloudland.
We need not follow in any detail these speculations. A certain purity
and loftiness marks their early stages, in which the Greek theologians
were occupied in blending a sort of Platonic theory of deity with the
historic fact of a noble human personality. With the emergence of the
church from persecution to power, we see that the intellectual degeneracy
has set in along with the moral. The first great council, that of
Nicaea, occupied itself in settling by a majority of votes whether Christ
was of _like_ substance with the Father or of the _same_ substance with
the Father. The assertion of his full equality was in due time followed
by a similar definition of the personality and equality of the Holy
Spirit, with the full doctrine of the Trinity; the double nature of
Christ; the rank of the Virgin Mary. The authoritative interpretation of
human nature had its source in the personal experience and later
theorizing of Augustine. Himself emergent after long struggles from the
tyranny of evil desire, by a transcendent experience in which he saw the
hand of God,--he in effect generalized from this to the inherent and
utter depravity of all mankind, and its entire dependence on a divine
grace which might with equal justice be given or withheld. The lurid
hell which had always shared with a radiant heaven the imagination of the
church took from Augustine a grimmer horror: in the fearful thought of
men, its foundations were now deep sunk in eternal justice, man being
himself from birth a wretch so abominable that hell was his natural
destiny, save as mercy might by inscrutable selection deliver some
portion of mankind.
Later ages brought their own problems. What was the nature of the
atonement,--a compact between God and the Devil, by which Christ was made
a ransom for man, the Devil being unexpectedly cheated of his pay? Or
was Christ's death simply the transfer of a debt on the books of divine
justice? The sacraments, again, what was their precise nature? And so
the scheme was worked out in all its details.
The triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit; a hierarchy of angels; the
creation of man, his seduction by a revolted and fallen angel, and the
exposure of his entire posterity to the just retribution of everlasting
misery; an arrangement between the persons of the Trinity by which the
incarnation and death of the Son became a ransom for mankind; the
establishment by Christ of a visible church, divinely guided to reveal to
men the truth, and impart to them the divine grace; the offer of
salvation upon condition of faith, repentance, and obedience; sacraments
which were channels of divine grace; an endless heaven of bliss for the
submissive and obedient, an endless hell of torment for the negligent or
rebellious,--this was the universe as it existed to the belief and
imagination of the Christian world for many centuries.
Thus Christianity, instead of following a true inquiry into the facts of
the moral life,--in place of cultivating that sound knowledge of man in
which Socrates led the way, or that knowledge of the natural world in
which Aristotle and the Greek physicists had wrought,--instead of such
study, the church based its ideals, its appeals, its helps, on a purely
fanciful interpretation of the universe. Its refined and ingenious
speculations were wasted upon a fantasy.
This want of sound knowledge has for us here a twofold significance. It
points to one cause of the imperfect success of the ideals of Jesus and
of Paul. And by its defect it points us forward to a fulfillment, when
at a later age Virtue and Knowledge should be wed.
But we need to distinguish and to reverence the deep utterances of the
human heart which spoke with stammering tongue in these crude symbols.