deserves our notice when estimating their value as evidence, and that
is the witness they afford us of his own altered feelings with regard
to Christ. He speaks, in his letter to the Galatians, of having been
formerly a devoted Jew, and having persecuted the Church of God and
laid it waste.[138] If we had no other evidence than this, it would be
sufficient. There is no reason to doubt what the Apostle says. He had
been a bitter enemy of Christ. But there is no evidence whatever that
while he was thus hostile to Christ he had ever believed His death
and His resurrection to have been an unreality. Had he disbelieved in
these events as facts, it is more than probable that some trace of such
disbelief would have escaped him in his writings. But it is not so.
The death of Christ was manifestly a notorious fact which neither he
nor any one cared to deny. The resurrection of Christ, though perhaps
received more questioningly, was nevertheless put by or explained away
rather than actually denied. The tradition mentioned at the end of St.
Matthew's Gospel, as commonly reported among the Jews,[139] is probably
a fair sample of the indolent spirit in which the story of Christ's
resurrection was met by them, and, perhaps, regarded by Saul of Tarsus.
In his own case it was not so much that he disbelieved these things
as facts, as that he was ignorant of their power. The death of Christ
was no more to him than the death of any one else. The resurrection
of Christ was to him nothing more than an idle Christian tale. He
disregarded both rather because of the principles associated with them
than because of their intrinsic falsehood. But the time came when it
was otherwise. "It pleased God, who separated him from his mother's
womb, and called him by His grace to reveal His Son in him."[140] He
then found that the man whose death he had known as a fact, though not
as a power, was intimately connected with himself, that he had a share
in His death, and had been crucified with Him, and the resurrection,
which had been to him before but as an idle tale, he now found to be
the unfailing source of a new spiritual life to him. This was probably
more than twenty years before he wrote any one of these Epistles. If we
place his escape from Damascus under Aretas in the year of our Lord 39,
this will bring his conversion to the year of our Lord 36. Now, I ask
you notice this date very carefully. It is as late as we can well fix
the conversion of Saul; some have fixed it much earlier. But supposing
it to have happened as late as A.D. 36, this was but five or at the
most six years after the death of Jesus Christ, which happened in A.D.
30, or, as I believe, in A.D. 31. Now, if the death of Christ was an
unreality, He would in all probability at that time have been still
alive, as He would not yet have been forty years old, and His death
by natural means was not likely to have occurred. But conceive for
one moment the impossible absurdity of the conversion of Saul taking
place and the active life of the Christian Church going on for many
years while Christ, who was supposed to have died upon the cross, was
actually living in obscurity in some unknown corner of the world. The
idea is simply preposterous. The supposition of Christ not having died
as He was believed to have died is too impossible to be maintained.
If we have got Christ's death then as a positive historical fact which
is unquestionable, we have a platform of reality on which to rear
our superstructure of evidence for the reality of His resurrection.
If Christ did not truly rise, there is one very important question
to be answered which has not been, and which never will be answered,
namely--What became of His dead body? The production of that dead body
by the enemies of Christ would have been absolutely fatal to all the
preaching and the faith of the Christians; the Christian Church would
have been effectually stifled in its very birth. I should not now,
after an interval of almost nineteen centuries, be lecturing in St.
George's Hall on the evidences of Christianity if the dead body of
Christ had been produced, and yet nothing, surely, would have been
easier for His enemies to do. If, then, the disciples stole Him away
from the sepulchre while the soldiers slept, and so made away with the
body, we must admit that these Epistles of St. Paul, which at least
are unrivalled in the literature of the world, and which cannot again
be produced at will, owe their origin to a deliberate lie; and that
after an interval of five-and-twenty years, which might have sufficed
for it to have been successfully exposed. And we must confess that
one of the most distinguished and highly educated of the Jews of that
time, who himself had been a violent persecutor of the Christians, was
induced against his will, and apparently not by Christian influence, to
connive at this collusion or become the victim of it, and that in such
a way as to ruin all his worldly prospects, to entail upon him years of
hardship, and to inspire him, or at least to leave him, after almost a
quarter of a century, with all the tact, wisdom, and discretion which
are so conspicuous in his letters to the Churches at Rome and Corinth.
Verily this supposition is absolutely precluded by the very nature of
the case.
There remains then but one other to be advanced, and that is this.
The primitive Christians and St. Paul himself were alike the victims
of delusion. The testimony of the first disciples was based upon an
error. The vision which had arrested Saul on his journey to Damascus,
and changed the whole current of his life, was nothing more than the
hallucination of a sunstroke. The preaching in which he passed so
many years of his life, and breasted so much resistance, was only an
infatuation; the hope, and peace, and joy of which his letters are
so full, and which had taken permanent possession of him upon belief
in Christ, were all a lie. He had sacrificed himself for nothing,
he had toiled and suffered for nought. He had thrown away his life
for a dream. We do not deny that such a position is conceivable; but
we do deny that the letters of St. Paul give evidence of it. Had
the resurrection of Christ been merely a delusion, the Epistles to
Rome, Corinth, and Galatia are not the kind of fruits we should have
expected it to produce after so long an interval; nay, there is room
for the gravest possible doubt whether, being a delusion, it could have
produced them.
This, then, is our standing ground. We do not assume that St. Paul
was inspired. We do not say that his writings are authoritative or
binding upon our faith. We take up no such position. We take only what
we find--the genuine letters of an early convert to Christ, which were
certainly written less than thirty years after the death of Christ,
which contain internal evidence on the part of their writer to his
belief in the central facts they proclaim, at an interval of little
more than five years after those facts occurred. We treat these letters
as the natural productions of any ordinary man. We deduce from them
only such evidence as we should deduce from the letters of Cicero, or
anyone else. We do not affirm that they are in any way supernatural,
but we say that they supply conclusive evidence to the very wide-spread
belief in centres of life so far removed as Rome, Corinth, and Galatia,
in a supernatural fact less than thirty years after it occurred. We do
not say that this wide-spread belief proves the fact to have occurred;
but we do say that if the fact really did occur, it would account
for the belief, and we do say that taking all the circumstances into
consideration there is at least room for the very gravest possible
doubt whether had it not occurred, the phenomena we witness would have
been presented. Given the resurrection, and St. Paul's Epistles are
explained; deny the resurrection, and you cannot account for them.
Given the resurrection, and St. Paul's own character is the natural
consequence of it, St. Paul's conversion its natural product; deny the
resurrection, and he is the greatest of all inconsistencies, and his
conversion, _with its effects_, the most inexplicable of all enigmas.
And here we might be content to leave the case, confident that we have
not overstrained it, and confident in its own intrinsic soundness and
inherent strength, for the more the character, the history, and the
writings of St. Paul are fairly studied, the more disciples they will
win to Christ; but it may, perhaps, be expedient to notice briefly one
or two points in their bearing on this position. It will, of course,
be said that no amount of belief in a fact will prove it to have been
a fact, which is obviously true. The resurrection, if a fact, is a
miraculous fact, so far removed from the limits of ordinary experience
and natural law as to be well-nigh sufficient to cover almost any
contradiction of the one, or any violation of the other. It is no part
of my present business to discuss the question to what extent a belief
in miracles is defensible; that has already been done in a previous
lecture of this course; but I may make this observation, that, granting
the actual occurrence of a miracle like the resurrection, there are
those to whom it would be impossible to prove it by any testimony
whatever. Nay, there are those who would not believe it on the evidence
of their own senses, or, at least, who say so. Any demonstration,
therefore, of a miracle, even if it could be demonstrated, would be
clearly useless for them. It would, of course, on this hypothesis,
fail to reach them. Now, we may concede at once that Christianity is
wholly unable to offer any such demonstration; nay, we may go further,
and say that if it could, it would be no nearer to the overcoming of
such opposition. But let it be observed that the existence of such
opposition by no means proves the evidences of Christianity to be
unsatisfactory or unsound. The person who declares that he would not
believe a miracle like the resurrection even though he were himself the
witness of it, is not likely to believe it on the testimony of a second
person, be he never so trustworthy, even if it had actually occurred.
And this is a fact that deserves to be borne in mind, because so far
from showing that the evidences of the great Christian miracle are
inadequate, it rather shows the absolute impossibility of their being
adequate to meet successfully the case in point. It rather concedes the
strength of those evidences, from mere eagerness to affirm that nothing
could make them strong enough.
But, besides this, it must be remembered that, granting the reality
of a miracle like the resurrection, it is obvious that, having been
witnessed by a limited number of witnesses, it must necessarily
be dependent afterwards for its acceptance upon testimony. On the
supposition of its actual occurrence, a few only could receive it
upon ocular demonstration, and the vast majority of mankind, if they
received it, could only do so upon the testimony of others. It is
therefore clearly conceivable on the hypothesis that many who rejected
it might do so in direct contravention of the truth. Indeed, all who
rejected it must do so.
Because, then, there are found those who reject the evidence of the
resurrection of Christ, it by no means follows they have not done so in
contravention of the fact. The question really is not whether there
is still left any possible room for doubt--for that we have seen there
always must be--but whether the existing testimony is sufficiently
unbroken, and sufficiently uniform, and sufficiently valid, to be
reasonably conclusive. And on this point the known Epistles of St. Paul
are singularly clear. They witness to the fact of five hundred persons
having seen the risen Jesus at one time, of the universal acceptance of
belief in the resurrection, so that neither in the Churches of Rome,
Corinth, or Galatia, does there seem to have been a single Christian
who doubted it. They witness to the fact that St. Paul himself had
lived in familiar intercourse with Peter, James, and others, who had
known the Lord, and that he had originally joined the Christian body at
the most six or seven years after the resurrection, when he must have
had abundant opportunities of testing the validity of its evidence,
and when it would have been impossible for him to have given in his
allegiance to an event so contrary to his experience, except upon
conclusive proof.
Bearing in mind that under any circumstances some must content
themselves with belief on testimony, it is difficult to conceive of
any testimony which could be more convincing or more satisfactory
than that of this Apostle; especially seeing that he was at the first
a violent persecutor of the faith he preached; that he must have had
ample means of sifting the evidence on which it rested; and, because,
living at the time he did, so near to the death of Christ, that which
his testimony loses in the matter of personal eye-witness it more than
gains, all things considered, in the matter of deliberate conviction
and devoted lifelong service.
That is to say, the conversion of the persecutor Saul of Tarsus is
itself a wondrous evidence of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. The
letters of the Apostle are the expression of his mature belief; but at
the time when that belief was formed he must have had ample means of
knowing how far he had followed a cunningly devised fable, and how far
that which he believed was truth and was no lie.
Lastly, it may be said, If the evidence for Christ's resurrection
was so satisfactory when it was first proclaimed, why was it not
universally believed? To this we may answer, Why was Paul the Apostle
at any period of his history Saul the persecutor? or Why were there
any that believed if there were some who doubted? It is gratuitous to
affirm that the want of universality on the one side is more remarkable
than on the other. We can only say that faith is the great touchstone
of man's moral nature. To the end of time it will be true that some
will believe the things that are spoken, and some believe them
not.[141] Why are there now any intelligent and able men who believe
in Christ's resurrection if it is absolute folly to believe in it?
That it is not folly to believe in it we can show to demonstration,
while if, as a matter of fact, it did occur, as for the moment we may
assume it did, it is obvious that the actual effects are what we see
them now to be. There are those who believe, but there are those also
who disbelieve. It is from the nature of the case impossible that a
fact like the resurrection should appeal to man's acceptance like
any ordinary fact of history, a battle or an earthquake. It cannot
do so. If it did, there were no place for the question, "Why should
it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the
dead?"[142] In accepting the resurrection of Christ, we accept also the
inference that it was God who raised Him from the dead, and that He did
so for a special purpose--the purpose, namely, of testifying to His
life, His character, His mission, His teaching, and His claims, which
are inseparable from His teaching. In accepting the resurrection, we
accept not only a bare fact, but a fact that influences our relation
to God and our thoughts of God--a fact involving antecedently many
important principles, and resulting in momentous consequences.
But be it remembered that if the resurrection is established as a fact
at all, it is established as a fact for all time; no progress of mind,
no advancement of science, no change of circumstances, no distance of
time, no lapse of ages can affect its truth. That which has happened
once has happened for ever. The undisputed Epistles of St. Paul furnish
what may be regarded virtually as evidence of a contemporary character
to the truth of Christ's resurrection. Had it not truly happened, they
could not have been written; for the pulse of resurrection life beats
strong in every page. Had it not truly happened, those exigencies of
the early Church would never have occurred which were the occasion of
their being written, for without the death and resurrection of the
Redeemer the Church of the redeemed is an impossibility. Had it not
truly happened, the Christian Church would have had no existence now,
and the commentary of eighteen centuries on the advice and judgment of
Gamaliel, when confronted with the first preaching of the resurrection,
would have been quite other than it is: "And now I say unto you,
Refrain from these men and let them alone; for if this counsel or this
work be of men, it will come to nought; but if it be of God, ye cannot
overthrow it, lest haply ye be found even to fight against God."
* * * * *
_For further treatment of this subject the reader is referred to the
Boyle Lectures for 1869--"The Witness of St. Paul to Christ."_
CHRIST'S TEACHING AND INFLUENCE
ON THE WORLD.
BY THE RIGHT REVEREND
THE LORD BISHOP OF ELY.
CHRIST'S TEACHING AND INFLUENCE ON THE WORLD.
My subject is a large one, and my time is short; therefore, I will say
but very few words of preface. I propose to assume nothing but the
patent facts of history, admitted even by the most advanced sceptics of
the day. Heartily as I myself believe in all the canonical scriptures,
and in all that they teach us, I do not ask you to admit the truth of
miracles, or the inspiration of the Apostles, or the genuineness of
the fourth Gospel, or anything which any moderately reasonable man
can doubt of. All I would assume is this, that we have in history a
general outline of the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, that that
outline corresponds with what we read in the three Synoptical Gospels.
There is really no discordant account or contradictory tradition either
among the early Christians or the early heretics, or the contemporary
heathens. It is everywhere one and the same. It may be more filled
up, more coloured, more draped in one picture than another; but the
features and the lineaments belong unmistakably to one Man. In all the
biographies, all the letters, all the traditions, and they are many and
most unusually numerous and diversified though not diverse, there is in
reality nothing like the discrepancy which we observe in the character
of Socrates as portrayed by his disciple Xenophon, and the character of
the same Socrates as drawn by his other and more famous disciple Plato.
The account in the first three Gospels is uncontradicted by that in
the fourth, by what we read in the Acts, by the letters of the early
disciples, by the traditions carefully gathered up by men like Papias,
some seventy years after the events, by the general belief of after
ages, or by the few notices to be found in the writings of enemies and
unbelievers.
I shall ask, then, that you admit the general truth of the history of
Jesus as handed down to us by St. Matthew, St. Mark, and St. Luke, just
as you would generally admit the evidence of common men, even if some
choose to think that they were credulous men.
I. Let us first look at the character of Christ as so depicted. I
venture to say, in the first place, that it exhibits the most perfect
picture of sublime simplicity ever drawn. The Gospels seem very much
like notes taken from memory by men who were anxious not to lose
some record of One whom they had known and loved. It is impossible
to imagine anything more simple or more simply graphic than their
style--it is still more impossible to imagine anything more removed
from the vulgarity of rhetoric or display or effort at effect, than
the character of Jesus Christ. People have spoken as though He had
been merely a first-rate political reformer, a demagogue belonging to
a type of unusual disinterestedness. Surely His retired, unseen youth,
His gentle, quiet manhood, His calm, dignified, unimpassioned words
are the very opposite in tone and character to those of the noblest
demagogue or the purest political leader that was ever heard of. "He
went about doing good," seems almost to record His history. "He was
meek and lowly of heart," seems almost to sum up His character. The
most untiring energy, the most patient endurance, the most tender and
affectionate benevolence strike us in every act and every word of
Christ. And yet there was nothing feeble, nothing effeminate, nothing
sentimental about Him. Simple as the gentlest child, He was brave as
the hardest warrior. Weeping with the tenderness of a woman for the sad
and the suffering, He rebuked with inflexible sternness the base, the
cruel, and the hypocritical. With the most unsullied purity of thought
and life, He had yet a heart of such large and gentle sympathy that the
very outcasts of mankind could come to Him for help and counsel, and
He never rejected them. He did not shrink from touching the leper, and
the leprous sinner went away from Him a new man, with a new heart and
a new life. But the covetous, the proud, the treacherous, the actor in
religion, were rebuked by Him in words which have made a new language
in Christendom; Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites, sounding to us no
longer as writers of the law, members of a religious body in Palestine,
and actors in dramatic performances, but as synonyms for all that is
untrue in religion and in life. And there is one thing which signally
separates Him as a teacher from all other teachers of religion and
morality, viz., that the great lesson was Himself. I must speak further
of this presently. What I mean here is, that the biographies, though
they give many of His discourses, set before us most of all, not what
He said, but what He did; and His actions are to us, and have been in
all time, the most impressive lessons ever given to man. Probably all
men--even those who do not believe in Him--would confess, that if they
could see anyone living just the life which is related to have been the
life of Jesus, the man so living would be perfect in all parts, the
very ideal of humble-hearted, active-spirited, pure-minded, high-souled
humanity. He taught Himself, by simply living Himself; and His life is
the great lesson to every age of man.
And the originality of His character is almost as observable as its
excellence. He was not simply the Great Teacher, like the philosophers
of old, to whom crowds of disciples were gathered to listen. He was
not the contemplative thinker, living retired from human society. He
was no ascetic, frowning coldly on the innocent happiness of man. On
the other hand, with all His marvellous activity, there is not the
smallest appearance of restlessness, excitement, impetuosity. He was,
if He be rightly described by His biographers, what no other man ever
was--perfectly unselfish, living, acting, thinking, speaking, always
with reference either to the service of God or the good of man.
Of course, as I do not assume the truth of miracles, I am unable to
ask you to give unlimited credence to all that His followers have
recorded concerning Him. But this is evidently the impression that He
left upon their minds, viz., that He possessed amazing power, but that
it was united with infinite condescension, and that it was constantly
engaged in doing good, and never exerting itself to do mischief. They
believed that He had power to do all things, but that he restrained
it from doing evil even to His greatest enemies; that He never used
it to gratify Himself, nor to save Himself from trouble, or even from
suffering; that it was always exercised for the benefit of others;
that in fact the _Self_ which was unspeakably grand was incessantly
restrained and denied.
II. Now let us turn for a few moments to His teaching. It was as
remarkable as Himself. Other moral philosophers, or teachers of the art
of living, argued with their followers, setting forth moral systems
or propounding theological theories. He used no arguments, propounded
no theories, weaved no elaborate systems. All He said was with an
authority which astonished His hearers, and all the more, because of
the humility of His life and the self-denial of His character. His
whole system of casuistry would be contained in four or five pages of
common printing; and though much of it was new, and all of it of the
severest stringency, it yet commended itself at once to the consciences
of them that heard Him; it has commended itself in the main to the
consciences of all subsequent ages, and in principle at least it yet
rules the morality of all Christendom, and in great measure even the
morality of the followers of Mohammed.[143]
It is easy to sketch out a few of the great principles which He thus
set forth. At the root of all lay truth. The Easterns, among whom He
taught, have always been accounted as too ready to practise deceit.
There was nothing Jesus Christ condemned so much as dishonesty or
hypocrisy--the very word hypocrisy, as I have said already, and all our
instinctive hatred and contempt of it, being due to His denunciations
of it to His disciples. Closely connected with this was the stress
which He laid on purity of thought. To impose a weight and put a strain
on outward conduct was all too little: it would very likely lead to
superficial character, to the dreaded and denounced hypocrisy. From the
heart come evil thoughts, and evil words, and evil actions. And the axe
must be laid to the root of the tree. Make the tree good, and its fruit
will be good. To give way to the desire of evil is to do evil.