It is a long time since I quoted Bishop Wilson, but he is full of
excellent things, and one of his apophthegms came into my mind the
other day as I read an angry and unreasonable expostulation addressed
to myself. Bishop Wilson’s apophthegm is this: _Truth provokes those
whom it does not convert_. “Miracles,” I was angrily reproached for
saying, “do not happen, and more and more of us are becoming convinced
that they do not happen; nevertheless, what is really best and most
valuable in the Bible is independent of miracles. For the sake of this
I constantly read the Bible myself, and I advise others to read it
also.” One would have thought that at a time when the French newspapers
are attributing all our failures and misfortunes to our habit of
reading the Bible, and when our own Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal is
protesting that the golden rule is a delusion and a snare for practical
men, the friends of the old religion of Christendom would have had a
kindly feeling towards any one—whether he admitted miracles or not—who
maintained that the root of the matter for all of us was in the Bible,
and that to the use of the Bible we should still cling. But no; _Truth
provokes those whom it does not convert_; so angry are some good people
at being told that miracles do not happen, that if we say this, they
cannot bear to have us using the Bible at all, or recommending the
Bible. Either take it and recommend it with its miracles, they say, or
else leave it alone, and let its enemies find confronting them none but
orthodox defenders of it like ourselves!
The success of these orthodox champions is not commensurate with their
zeal; and so, in spite of all rebuke, I find myself, as a lover of the
Bible, perpetually tempted to substitute for their line of defence a
different method, however it may provoke them. Christmas comes round
again, and brings the most beautiful and beloved festival of the
Christian year. What is Christmas, and what does it say to us? Our
French friends will reply that Christmas is an exploded legend, and
says to us nothing at all. The _Guardian_, on the other hand, lays it
down that Christmas commemorates the miracle of the Incarnation, and
that the Incarnation is the fundamental truth for Christians. Which is
right, the _Guardian_ or our French friends? Or are neither the one nor
the other of them right, and is the truth about Christmas something
quite different from what either of them imagine? The inquiry is
profitable; and I kept Christmas, this last winter, by following it.
* * * * *
Who can ever lose out of his memory the roll and march of those
magnificent words of prophecy, which, ever since we can remember, we
have heard read in church on Christmas-day, and have been taught to
regard as the grand and wonderful prediction of “the miracle of the
Incarnation?” “The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin
shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
Butter and honey shall he eat, until he shall know to refuse the
evil and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse
the evil and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be
forsaken of both her kings.” We all know the orthodox interpretation.
Immanuel is Jesus Christ, to be born of the Virgin Mary; the meaning
of the name Immanuel, _God with us_, signifies the union of the divine
nature and ours in Christ, God and man in one Person. “Butter and
honey shall he eat”—the Christ shall be very man, he shall have a true
human body, he shall be sustained, while he is growing up, with that
ordinary nourishment wherewith human children are wont to be fed.
And the sign that the promised birth of Immanuel, God and man in one
Person, from the womb of a virgin, shall really happen, is this: the
two kings of Syria and Israel who are now, in the eighth century before
Christ, threatening the kingdom of Judah, shall be overthrown, and
their country devastated. “_For_ before the child shall know”—before
this promised coming of Jesus Christ, and as a sign to guarantee it,
the kings of Syria and Israel shall be conquered and overthrown. And
conquered and overthrown they presently were.
But then comes the turn of criticism. The study of history, and of
all documents on which history is based, is diligently prosecuted; a
number of learned, patient, impartial investigators read and examine
the prophets. It becomes apparent what the prophets really mean to say.
It becomes certain that in the famous words read on Christmas-day the
prophet Isaiah was not meaning to speak of Jesus Christ to be born more
than seven centuries later. It becomes certain that his Immanuel is a
prince of Judah to be born in a year or two’s time. It becomes certain
that there is no question at all of a child miraculously conceived
and born of a virgin; what the prophet says is that a young woman,
a damsel, at that moment unmarried, shall have time, before certain
things happen, to be married and to bear a son, who shall be called
Immanuel. There is no question in the name _Immanuel_ of a union of the
human and divine natures, of God and man in one Person. “God present
with his people and protecting them” is what the prophet means the name
to signify. In “Butter and honey shall he eat,” there is no question of
the Christ’s being very man, with a true human body. What the prophet
intends to say is, that when the prince Immanuel, presently to be
born, reaches adult age, agriculture shall have ceased in the desolated
realm of Judah; the land, overrun by enemies, shall have returned to a
wild state, the inhabitants shall live on the produce of their herds
and on wild honey. But before this comes to pass, before the visitation
of God’s wrath upon the kingdom of Judah, and while the prince Immanuel
is still but a little child, not as yet able to discern betwixt good
and evil, “to refuse the evil and choose the good,” the present enemies
of Judah, the kings of Syria and Israel, shall be overthrown and their
land made desolate. Finally, this overthrow and desolation are not,
with the prophet, the sign and guarantee of Immanuel’s coming. Immanuel
is himself intended as a sign; all the rest is accompaniment of this
sign, not proof of it.
This, the true and sure sense of those noble words of prophecy which
we hear read on Christmas-day, is obscured by slight errors in the
received translation, and comes out clearer when the errors are
corrected:
“The Lord himself shall give you a sign: Behold, the damsel shall
conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
Milk-curd and honey shall he eat, when he shall know to refuse the
evil and choose the good.
For before the child shall know to refuse the evil and choose the
good, the land shall be forsaken, whose two kings make thee afraid.”
Syria and Israel shall be made desolate in Immanuel’s infancy, says
the prophet; but the chastisement and desolation of Judah also shall
follow later, by the time Immanuel is a youth. Further yet, however,
Isaiah carries his prophecy of Immanuel and of the events of his life.
In his manhood, the prophet continues, Immanuel, the promised child of
the royal house of David, shall reign in righteousness over a restored,
far-spreading, prosperous, and peaceful kingdom of the chosen people.
“Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end,
upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom.” This completion of the
prophecy, too, we hear read in church on Christmas-day. Naturally, the
received and erroneous interpretation, which finds, as we have seen,
in the first part of the prophecy “the miracle of the Incarnation,”
governs our understanding of the latter part also. But in the
latter part, as well as in the former, the prophet undoubtedly has
in view, not a scion of the house of David to be born and to reign
seven centuries later, but a scion of the house of David to be born
immediately; a scion who in his youth should see Judah afflicted, in
his manhood should reign over it restored and triumphant.
Well, then, the “miracle of the Incarnation,” the preternatural
conception and birth of Jesus Christ, which the Church celebrates at
Christmas, and which is, says the _Guardian_, the fundamental truth for
Christians, gets no support at all from the famous prophecy which is
commonly supposed to announce it. Need I add that it gets no support
at all from any single word of Jesus Christ himself, from any single
word in the letters of Paul, Peter, James, or John? The miraculous
conception and birth of Jesus is a legend, a lovely and attractive
legend, which soon formed itself, naturally and irresistibly, around
the origin of the Saviour; a legend which by the end of the first
century had established itself, and which passed into two out of
the four Gospel narratives that in the century following acquired
canonicity. In the same way, a precisely similar legend formed itself
around the origin of Plato, although to the popular imagination Plato
was an object incomparably less fitted to offer stimulus. The father of
Plato, said the Athenian story, was upon his marriage warned by Apollo
in a dream that his wife, Perictiona, was about to bring forth a babe
divinely conceived, and that he was to live apart from her until the
child had been born. Among the students of philosophy, who were Plato’s
disciples, this story, although authorized by his family, languished
and died. Had Plato founded a popular religion the case would have
been very different. Then the legend would have survived and thriven;
and for Plato, too, there would have certainly been a world-famous
“miracle of the Incarnation” investing his origin. But Plato, as
Bossuet says, formed fewer disciples than Paul formed churches. It was
these churches, this multitude, it was the popular masses with their
receptivity, with their native tendencies of mind, heart, and soul,
which made the future of the Christian legend of the miracle of the
Incarnation.
But because the story of the miracle of the Incarnation is a legend,
and because two of the canonical Gospels propound the legend seriously,
basing it upon an evidently fantastic use of the words of prophecy,
and because the festival of Christmas adopts and consecrates this
legend, are we to cast the Gospels aside, and cast the celebration
of Christmas aside; or else to give up our common sense, and to say
that things are not what they are, and that Isaiah really predicted
the preternatural conception and birth of Jesus Christ, and that the
miracle of the Incarnation really happened as the _Guardian_ supposes,
and that Christians, in commemorating it, commemorates a solid fact of
history, and a fact which is the fundamental truth for Christians? By
no means. The solid fact of history marked by Christmas is the birth of
Jesus, the miraculous circumstances with which that birth is invested
and presented are legendary. The solid fact in itself, the birth of
Jesus with its inexhaustible train of consequences, its “unspeakable
riches,” is foundation enough, and more than enough, for the Christmas
festival; yet even the legend and miracle investing the fact, and now
almost inseparable from it, have, moreover, their virtue of symbol.
Symbol is a dangerous word, and we ought to be very cautious in
employing it. People have a difficulty in owning that a thing is
unhistorical, and often they try to get out of the difficulty by saying
that the thing is symbolical. Thus they think to save the credit of
whoever delivered the thing in question, as if he had himself intended
to deliver it as symbolical and figurative, not as historical. They
save it, however, at the expense of truth. In very many cases,
undoubtedly, when this shift of symbol is resorted to for saving the
credit of a narrator of legend, the narrator had not himself the least
notion that what he propounded was figure, but fully imagined himself
to be propounding historical fact. The Gospel narrators of the miracle
of the Incarnation were in this position of mind; they did not in the
least imagine themselves to be speaking symbolically. Nevertheless, a
thing may have important value as symbol, although its utterer never
told or meant it symbolically. Let us see how this is so with the
Christian legend of the Incarnation.
In times and among minds where science is not a power, and where the
preternatural is daily and familiarly admitted, the pureness and
elevation of a great teacher strike powerfully the popular imagination,
and the natural, simple, reverential explanation of his superiority is
at once that he was born of a virgin. Such a legend is the people’s
genuine translation for the fact of his unique pureness. In his birth,
as well as in his life and teaching, this chosen one has been pure;
has been unlike other men, and above them. Signal and splendid is the
pureness of Plato; noble his serene faith, that “the conclusion has
long been reached that dissoluteness is to be condemned, in that it
brings about the aggrandisement of the lower side in our nature, and
the defeat of the higher.” And this lofty pureness of Plato impressed
the imagination of his contemporaries, and evoked the legend of his
having been born of a virgin. But Plato was, as I have already said, a
philosopher, not the founder of a religion; his personality survived,
but for the intellect mainly, not the affections and imagination. It
influenced and affected the few, not the many—not the masses which
love and foster legend. On the figure of Jesus also the stamp of a
pureness unique and divine was seen to dwell. The remark has often been
made that the pre-eminent, the winning, the irresistible Christian
virtues, were charity and chastity. Perhaps the chastity was an even
more winning virtue than the charity; it offered to the Pagan world,
at any rate, relief from a more oppressive, a more consuming, a more
intolerable bondage. Chief among the beatitudes shone this pair:
_Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven_,
and, _Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God_; and of
these two, the second blessing may have been even the greater boon.
Jesus, then, the bringer of this precious blessing, Jesus, the high
exemplar and ideal of pureness, was born of a virgin. And what Jesus
brought was not a philosophy, but a religion; he gave not to the few,
but to the masses, to the very recipients whom the tender legend of his
being born of the gracious Virgin, and laid in the humble manger, would
suit best; who might most surely be trusted to seize upon it, not to
let it go, to delight in it and magnify it for ever.
So the legend of the miraculous conception and birth of Jesus, like
the legend of the miraculous conception and birth of Plato, is the
popular homage to a high ideal of pureness, it is the multitude’s way
of expressing for this its reverence. Of such reverence the legend is
a genuine symbol. But the importance of the symbol is proportional
to the scale on which it acts. And even when it acts on a very large
scale, still its virtue will depend on these two things further: the
worth of the idea to which it does homage, and the extent to which its
recipients have succeeded in penetrating through the form of the legend
to this idea.
And first, then, as to the innate truth and worth of that idea of
pureness to which the legend of the miracle of the Incarnation does
homage. _Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God_, says
Jesus. _God hath not called us to impureness, but unto holiness_, adds
his apostle. Perhaps there is no doctrine of Christianity which is
exposed to more trial amongst us now, certainly there is none which
will be exposed, so far as from present appearances one can judge,
to more trial in the immediate future, than this. _Let us return
to nature_, is a rising and spreading cry again now, as it was at
the Renascence. And the Christian pureness has so much which seems
to contradict nature, and which is menaced by the growing desire
and determination to return to nature! The virtue has suffered more
than most virtues in the hands of hypocrites; and with hypocrites
and hypocrisy, as a power in English life, there is an increasing
impatience. But the virtue has been mishandled, also, by the sincere;
by the sincere, but who are at the same time over-rigid, formal, sour,
narrow-minded; and these, too, are by no means in the ascendant among
us just now. Evidently, again, it has been mishandled by many of the
so-called saints, and by the asceticism of the Catholic Church; for
these have so managed things, very often, as to turn and rivet the
thoughts upon the very matter from which pureness would avert them and
get them clear, and have to that extent served to endanger and impair
the virtue rather than forward it. Then, too, with the growing sense
that gaiety and pleasure are legitimate demands of nature, that they
add to life and to our sum of force instead of, as strict people have
been wont to say, taking from it—with this growing sense comes also
the multiplication everywhere of the means of gaiety and pleasure,
the spectacle ever more prominent of them and catching the eye more
constantly, an ever larger number of applicants pressing forward to
share in them. All this solicits the senses, makes them bold, eager and
stirring. At the same time the force of old sanctions of self-restraint
diminishes and gives way. The belief in a magnified and non-natural
man, out of our sight, but proved by miracles to exist and to be
all-powerful, who by his commands has imposed on us the obligation of
self-restraint, and who will punish us after death in endless fire if
we disobey, will reward us in Paradise if we submit—this belief is
rapidly and irrecoverably losing its hold on men’s minds. If pureness
or any other virtue is still to subsist, it must subsist nowadays not
by authority of this kind enforcing it in defiance of nature, but
because nature herself turns out to be really for it.
Mr. Traill has reminded us, in the interesting volume on Coleridge
which he has recently published, how Coleridge’s disciple, Mr. Green,
devoted the last years of his life to elaborating, in a work entitled
“Spiritual Philosophy: founded on the Teaching of the late Samuel
Taylor Coleridge,” the great Coleridgian position “that Christianity,
rightly understood, is identical with the highest philosophy, and that,
apart from all question of historical evidence, the essential doctrines
of Christianity are necessary and eternal truths of reason—truths which
man, by the vouchsafed light of nature and without aid from documents
or tradition, may always and everywhere discover for himself.” We shall
not find this position established or much elucidated in “Spiritual
Philosophy,” We shall not find it established or much elucidated in the
works of Coleridge’s immediate disciples. It was a position of extreme
novelty to take at that time. Firmly to occupy it, resolutely to
establish it, required great boldness and great lucidity. Coleridge’s
position made demands upon his disciples which at that time it was
almost impossible they should fulfil; it embarrassed them, forced them
into vagueness and obscurity. The most eminent and popular among them,
Mr. Maurice, seems never quite to have himself known what he himself
meant, and perhaps never really quite wished to know. But neither did
the master, as I have already said, establish his own position; there
were obstacles in his own character, as well as in his circumstances,
in the time. Nevertheless it is rightly called _the great Coleridgian
position_. It is at the bottom of all Coleridge’s thinking and
teaching; it is true; it is deeply important; and by virtue of it
Coleridge takes rank, so far as English thought is concerned, as an
initiator and founder. The “great Coleridgian position,” that apart
from all question of the evidence for miracles, and of the historical
quality of the Gospel narratives, the essential matters of Christianity
are necessary and eternal facts of nature or truths of reason, is
henceforth the key to the whole defence of Christianity. When a
Christian virtue is presented to us as obligatory, the first thing,
therefore, to be asked is whether our need of it is a fact of nature.
Here the appeal is to experience and testimony. His own experience
may in the end be the surest teacher for every man; but meanwhile, to
confirm or deny his instinctive anticipations and to start him on his
way, testimony as to the experience of others, general experience, is
of the most serious weight and value. We have had the testimony of
Plato to the necessity of pureness, that virtue on which Christianity
lays so much stress. Here is yet another testimony out of the same
Greek world—a world so alien to the world in which Christianity arose;
here is the testimony of Sophocles. “Oh that my lot might lead me
in the path of holy _pureness_ of thought and deed, the path which
august laws ordain, laws which in the highest heaven had their
birth;...the power of God is mighty in them, and groweth not old.” That
is the testimony of the poet Sophocles. Coming down to our own times,
we have again a like testimony from the greatest poet of our times,
Goethe; a testimony the more important, because Goethe, like Sophocles,
was in his own life what the world calls by no means a purist. “May
the idea of _pureness_” says Goethe, “extending itself even to the
very morsel which I take into my mouth, become ever clearer and more
luminous within me!” But let us consult the testimony not only of
people far over our heads, such as great poets and sages; let us have
the testimony of people living, as the common phrase is, in the world,
and living there on an every-day footing. And let us choose a world the
least favorable to purists possible, the most given to laxity—and where
indeed by this time the reign of the great goddess Lubricity seems,
as I have often said, to be almost established—the world of Paris.
Two famous women of that world of Paris in the seventeenth century,
two women not altogether unlike in spirit, Ninon de l’Enclos and Mme.
de Sévigné, offer, in respect to the virtue with which we are now
occupied, the most striking contrast possible. Both had, in the highest
degree, freedom of spirit and of speech, boldness, gaiety lucidity.
Mme. de Sévigné, married to a worthless husband, then a widow,
beautiful, witty, charming, of extraordinary freedom, easy and broad
in her judgments, fond of enjoyment, not seriously religious; Mme. de
Sévigné, living in a society where almost everybody had a lover, never
took one. The French commentators upon this incomparable woman are
puzzled by this. But really the truth is, that not from what is called
high moral principle, not from religion, but from sheer elementary
soundness of nature and by virtue of her perfect lucidity, she revolted
from the sort of life so common all round her, was drawn towards
regularity, felt antipathy to blemish and disorder. Ninon, on the other
hand, with a like freedom of mind, a like boldness and breadth in her
judgments, a like gaiety and love of enjoyment, took a different turn,
and her irregular life was the talk of her century. But that lucidity,
which even all through her irregular life was her charm, made her
say at the end of it: “All the world tells me that I have less cause
to speak ill of time than other people. However that may be, could
anybody have proposed to me beforehand the life I have had, I would
have hanged myself.” That, I say, is the testimony of the most lucid
children of this world, as the testimony of Plato, Sophocles and Goethe
is the testimony of the loftiest spirits, to the natural obligation
and necessity of the essentially Christian virtue of pureness. So when
legend represents the founder of Christianity and great exemplar of
this virtue as born of a virgin, thus doing homage to pureness, it does
homage to what has natural worth and necessity.
But we have further to ask to what extent the recipients of the
legend showed themselves afterwards capable, while firmly believing
the legend and delighting in it, of penetrating to that virtue which
it honored, and of showing their sense that accompanying the legend
went the glorification of that virtue. Here the Collects of the
Church which have come down to us from Catholic antiquity—from the
times when all legend was most unhesitatingly received, most fondly
loved, most delighted in for its own sake—are the best testimony.
Jesus was manifested, says one of the Epiphany Collects, “to make
us the sons of God and heirs of eternal life,” and we, having this
hope, are to “purify ourselves even as he is pure.” And the Collect
for Christmas-day itself—that very day on which the miracle of the
Incarnation is commemorated, and on which we might expect the legend’s
miraculous side to be altogether dominant—firmly seizes the homage
to pureness and renovation which is at the heart of the legend, and
holds it steadily before us all Christmas-time. “Almighty God,” so
the Collect runs, “who hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take
our nature upon him, and as at this time to be born of a pure Virgin,
grant that we being regenerate, and made thy children by adoption
and grace, may daily be renewed by thy Holy Spirit.” The miracle is
amply and impressively stated, but the stress is laid upon the work
of regeneration and inward renewal, whereby we are to be made sons
of God, like to that supreme Son whose pureness was expressed through
his being born of a pure Virgin. It is as, in celebrating at Easter
the miracle of the Resurrection, the Church, following here St. Paul,
seizes and elevates in the Collect for Easter Eve that great “secret of
Jesus” which underlies the whole miraculous legend of the Resurrection,
and which only through materializing itself in that legend could arrive
at the general heart of mankind.
It is so manifest that there is that true and grand and profound
doctrine of the _necrosis_, of “dying to re-live,” underlying all which
is legendary in the presentation of the death and resurrection of
Jesus by our Gospels, it is so manifest that St. Paul seized upon the
doctrine and elevated it, and that the Church has retained it,—that one
can find no difficulty, when the festival of Easter is celebrated, in
fixing one’s thoughts upon the doctrine as a centre, and in receiving
all the miraculous story as poetry naturally investing this and doing
homage to it. And there is hardly a fast or a festival of the Christian
year in which the underlying truth, the beneficent and forwarding idea,
clothed with legend and miracle because mankind could only appropriate
it by materializing it in legend and miracle, is not apparent. Trinity
Sunday is an exception, but then Trinity Sunday does not really
deal with Gospel story and miracle, it deals with speculation by
theologians on the divine nature. Perhaps, considering the results of
their speculation, we ought now rather to keep Trinity Sunday as a day
of penitence for the aberrations of theological dogmatists. It is,
however, in itself admissible and right enough that in the Christian
year one day should be given to considering the aspects by which the
human mind can in any degree apprehend God. But Trinity Sunday is,
as I have said, an exception. For the most part, in the days and
seasons which the Church observes, there is commemoration of some
matter declared in Scripture, and combined and clothed more or less
with miracle. Yet how near to us, under the accompanying investment of
legend, does the animating and fructifying idea lie!—in Lent, with the
miracle of the temptation, the idea of self-conquest and self-control;
in Whitsuntide, with the miracle of the tongues of fire, the idea of
the spirit and of inspiration.
What Christmas primarily commemorates is the birthday of Jesus—Jesus,
the bringer to the world of the new dispensation contained in his
method and secret, and in his temper of _epieikeia_, or sweet
reasonableness, for applying them. But the religion of Christendom has
in fact made the prominent thing in Christmas a miracle, a legend; the
miracle of the Incarnation, as it is called, the legend of Jesus having
been born of the Virgin. And to those who cannot bring themselves
to receive miracle and legend as fact, what Christmas, under this
popularly established aspect of it, can have to say, what significance
it can contain, may at first seem doubtful. Christmas might as first
appear to be the one great festival which is concerned wholly with
mere miracle, which fixes our attention upon a miracle and nothing
else. But when we come to look closer, we find that even in the case
of Christmas the thing is not so. That on which Christmas even in
its popular acceptation, fixes our attention, is that to which the
popular instinct, in attributing to Jesus his miraculous Incarnation,
in believing him born of a pure Virgin, did homage—pureness. And
this, to which the popular instinct thus did homage, was an essential
characteristic of Jesus and an essential virtue of Christianity, the
obligation of which, though apt to be questioned and discredited in the
world, is at the same time nevertheless a necessary fact of nature and
eternal truth of reason. And fondly as the Church has cherished and
displayed the Christmas miracle, this, the true significance of the
miraculous legend for religion, has never been unknown to her, never
wholly lost out of sight. As times goes on, as legend and miracle are
less taken seriously as matters of fact, this worth of the Christmas
legend as symbol will more and more come into view. The legend will
still be loved, but as poetry—as poetry endeared by the associations of
some two thousand years; religious thought will rest upon that which
the legend symbolizes.
It is a mistake to suppose that rules for conduct and recommendations
of virtue, presented in a correct scientific statement, or in a new
rhetorical statement from which old errors are excluded, can have
anything like the effect on mankind of old rules and recommendations to
which they have been long, accustomed, and with which their feelings
and affections have become intertwined. Pedants always suppose that
they can, but that this mistake should be so commonly made proves
only how many of us have a mixture of the pedant in our composition.
A correct scientific statement of rules of virtue has upon the
great majority of mankind simply no effect at all. A new rhetorical
statement of them, appealing, like the old familiar deliverances of
Christianity, to the heart and imagination, can have the effect which
those deliverances had, only when they proceed from a religious genius
equal to that from which those proceeded. To state the requirement is
to declare the impossibility of its being satisfied. The superlative
pedantry of Comte is shown in his vainly imagining that he could
satisfy it; the comparative pedantry of his disciples is shown by the
degree in which they adopt their master’s vain imagination.
The really essential ideas of Christianity have a truth, depth,
necessity, and scope, far beyond anything that either the adherents
of popular Christianity, or its impugners, at present suppose. Jesus
himself, as I have remarked elsewhere, is even the better fitted to
stand as the central figure of a religion, because his reporters so
evidently fail to comprehend him fully and to report him adequately.
Being so evidently great and yet so uncomprehended, and being now
inevitably so to remain for ever, he thus comes to stand before us
as what the philosophers call an _absolute_. We cannot apply to him
the tests which we can apply to other phenomena, we cannot get behind
him and above him, cannot command him. But even were Jesus less
of an _absolute_, less fitted to stand as the central figure of a
religion, than he is, even were the constitutive and essential ideas of
Christianity less pregnant, profound and far-reaching than they are,
still the personage of Jesus, and the Christian rules of conduct and
recommendations of virtue, being of that indisputable significance and
worth that in any fair view which can be taken of them they are, would
have a value and a substantiality for religious purposes which no new
constructions can possibly have. No new constructions in religion can
now hope to found a common way, hold aloft a common truth, unite men in
a common life. And yet how true it is, in regard to mankind, conduct
and course, that, as the “Imitation” says so admirably, “Without a
way there is no going, without a truth no knowing, without a life no
living.” _Sine viâ non itur, sine veritate non cognoscitur, sine vitâ
non vivitur._ The way, truth, and life have been found in Christianity,
and will not now be found outside of it. Instead of making vain and
pedantic endeavors to invent them outside of it, what we have to do
is to help, so far as we can, towards their continuing to be found
inside of it by honest and sane people, who would be glad to find them
there if they can accomplish it without playing tricks with their
understanding; to help them to accomplish this, and to remove obstacles
out of the way of their doing so.
Far from having anything to gain by being timid and reticent, or else
vague and rhetorical in treating of the miraculous element in the
Bible, he who would help men will probably now do most good by treating
this element with entire unreserve. Let him frankly say, that miracle
narrated in the Bible is as legendary as miracle narrated anywhere else
and not more to be taken as having actually happened. If he calls it
symbolical, let him be careful to mark that the narrators did not mean
it for symbol, but delivered it as having actually happened, and in so
delivering it were mistaken. Let him say that we can still use it as
poetry, and that in so using it we use it better than those who used it
as matter of fact; but let him not leave in any uncertainty the point
that it is as poetry that we do use it. Let no difficulties be slurred
over or eluded. Undoubtedly a period of transition in religious belief,
such as the period in which we are now living, presents many grave
difficulties. Undoubtedly the reliance on miracles is not lost without
some danger; but the thing to consider is that it _must_ be lost, and
that the danger must be met, and, as it can be, counteracted. If men
say, as some men are likely enough to say, that they altogether give
up Christian miracles and cannot do otherwise, but that then they give
up Christian morals too, the answer is, that they do this at their
own risk and peril; that they need not do it, that they are wrong in
doing it, and will have to rue their error. But for my part, I prefer
at present to say this simply and barely, not to give any rhetorical
development to it. Springs of interest for the emotions and feelings
this reality possesses in abundance, and hereafter these springs may
and will most beneficially be used by the clergy and teachers of
religion, who are the best persons to turn them to account. As they
have habitually and powerfully used the springs of emotion contained in
the Christian legend, so they will with time come to use the springs
of emotion contained in the reality. But there has been so much
vagueness, and so much rhetoric, and so much license of affirmation,
and so much treatment of what cannot be known as if it were well known,
and of what is poetry and legend as if it were essential solid fact,
and of what is investment and dress of the matter as if it were the
heart of the matter, that for the present, and when we are just at the
commencement of a new departure, I prefer, I say, to put forward a
plain, strict statement of the essential facts and truths consecrated
by the Christian legend, and to confine myself to doing this. We make
a mistake if we think that even those facts and truths can now produce
their full effect upon men when exhibited in such a naked statement,
and separately from the poetry and legend with which they are combined,
and to which men have been accustomed for centuries. Nevertheless, the
important thing at the present moment is not to enlarge upon the effect
which the essential facts and truths gain from being still used in that
combination, but after indicating this point, and insisting on it, to
pass on to show what the essential facts and truths are.
Therefore, when we are asked: What really is Christmas, and what does
it celebrate? we answer, the birthday of Jesus. What is the miracle
of the Incarnation? A homage to the virtue of pureness, and to the
manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What is Lent, and the miracle
of the temptation? A homage to the virtue of self-control and to the
manifestation of this virtue in Jesus. What does Easter celebrate?
Jesus victorious over death by dying. By dying how? Dying to re-live.
To re-live in Paradise, in another world? No, in this. What, then,
is the kingdom of God? The ideal society of the future. Then what is
immortality? To live in the eternal order, which never dies. What is
salvation by Jesus Christ? The attainment of this immortality. Through
what means? Through means of the method and the secret and the temper
of Jesus.
Experience of the saving results of the method and secret and temper of
Jesus, imperfectly even as this method and secret and temper have been
extricated and employed hitherto, makes the strength of that wonderful
Book in which, with an immense vehicle of legend and miracle, the new
dispensation of Jesus and the old dispensation which led up to it are
exhibited, and brought to mankind’s knowledge; makes the strength of
the Bible, and of the religion and churches which the Bible has called
into being. We may remark that what makes the attraction of a church
is always what is consonant in it to the method and secret and temper
of Jesus, and productive, therefore, of the saving results which flow
from these. The attraction of the Catholic Church is unity, of the
Protestant sects, conscience, of the Church of England, abuses reformed
but unity saved. I speak of that which, in each of these cases, is the
promise apparently held out; I do not say that the promise is made
good. That which makes the weakness and danger of a church, again, is
just that in it which is not consonant to the line of Jesus. Thus the
danger of the Catholic Church is its obscurantism, of the Protestant
sects their contentiousness, of the Church of England, its deference to
station and property. I said the other day, in the East-end of London,
that, ever since the appearance of Christianity, _the prince of this
world is judged_. The _Guardian_ was disquieted and alarmed at my
saying this. I will urge nothing in answer, except that this deference
to the susceptibilities of station and property, which has been too
characteristic of the Church of England in the past—a deference so
signally at variance with the line of Jesus—is at the same time just
what now makes the Church of England’s weakness and main danger.
As time goes on, it will be more and more manifest that salvation
does really depend on consonance to the line of Jesus, and that
this experience, and nothing miraculous or preternatural, is what
establishes the truth and necessity of Christianity. The experience
proceeds on a large scale, and therefore slowly. But even now, and
imperfectly, moreover, as the line of Jesus has been followed hitherto,
it can be seen that those nations are the soundest which have the
most seriously concerned themselves with it and have most endeavored
to follow it. Societies are saved by following it, broken up by not
following it; and as the experience of this continually proceeds,
the proofs of Christianity are continually accumulating and growing
stronger. The thing goes on quite independently of our wishes, and
whether we will or no. Our French friends seem perfectly and scornfully
incredulous as to the cogency of the beatitude which pronounces
blessing on the pure in heart; they would not for a moment admit that
nations perish through the service of the great goddess Lubricity. On
the contrary, many of them maintain this service to be the most natural
and reasonable thing in the world. Yet really this service broke up the
great Roman Empire in the past, and is capable, it will be found, of
breaking up any number of societies.
Or let us consider that other great beatitude and its fortunes, the
beatitude recommending the Christian virtue of charity. “Blessed are
the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Many people
do not even understand what it is which this beatitude means to bless;
they think it recommends humbleness of spirit. Ferdinand Baur, whose
exegesis of texts from the Gospels is more valuable than his criticism
of the mode in which the Gospels were composed, has well pointed out
that the persons here blest are not those who are humble-spirited, but
those who are in the intention and bent of their spirit—in mind, as we
say, and not in profession merely—indifferent to riches. Such persons,
whether they possess riches or not, really regard riches as something
foreign to them, something not their own, and are thus, in the phrase
of another text where our received translation is misleading, faithful
as regards riches. “If ye have not been faithful in that which is
foreign to you, who will give you that which is your own?” The fidelity
consists in having conquered the temptation to treat that for which men
desire riches, private possession and personal enjoyment, as things
vital to us and to be desired. Wherever there is cupidity, there the
blessing of the Gospel cannot rest. The actual poor may altogether fail
to be objects of the blessing; the actual rich may be objects of it in
the highest degree. Nay, the surest of means to restore and perpetuate
the reign of the selfish rich, if at any time it have been interrupted,
is cupidity, envy, and hatred in the poor. And this again is a witness
to the infallibility of the line of Jesus. We must come, both rich
and poor, to prefer the common good, the interest of “the body of
Christ”—to use the Gospel phrase—the body of Christ of which we are
members, to private possession and personal enjoyment.
This is Christian charity, and how rare, how very rare it is, we all
know. In this practical country of ours, where possessing property and
estate is so loved, and losing them so hated, the opposition to it is
almost as strong as that to Christian purity in France. The _Saturday
Review_ is in general respectful to religion, intelligent and decorous,
in matters of literary and scientific criticism reasonable. But let it
imagine property and privilege threatened, and instantly what a change!
There seems to rise before one’s mind’s eye a sort of vision of an
elderly demoniac, surrounded by a troop of younger demoniacs of whom
he is the owner and guide, all of them suddenly foaming at the mouth
and crying out horribly. The attachment to property and privilege is
so strong, the fear of losing them so agitating. But the line of Jesus
perpetually tends to establish itself, as I have said, independently
of our wishes, and whether we will or no. And undoubtedly the line
of Jesus is: “How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the
kingdom of God!” In other words: “How hardly shall those who cling
to private possessions and personal enjoyment, who have not brought
themselves to regard property and riches as foreign and indifferent to
them, who have not annulled self, and placed their happiness in the
common good, make part of the ideal society of the future!”
The legend of Christmas is a homage to the Christian virtue of
pureness, and Christmas, with its miracle of the Incarnation, should
turn our thoughts to the certainty of this virtue’s final victory,
against all difficulties. And with the victory of this virtue let us
associate the victory of its great fellow-virtue of Christian charity,
a victory equally difficult but equally certain. The difficulties are
undeniable, but here the signs of the times point far more to the
emergence and progress of the virtue than to its depression. Who cannot
see that the idea of the common good is acquiring amongst us, at the
present day, a force altogether new? that, for instance, in cases
where, in the framing of laws and in the interpretation of them by
tribunals, regard to property and privilege used to be, one may say,
paramount, and the idea of the common good hardly considered at all,
things are now tending quite the other way; the pretensions of property
and privilege are severely scrutinized, the claims of the common good
entertained with favor. An acceleration of progress in the spread of
ideas of this kind, a decline of vitality in institutions where the
opposite ideas were paramount, marks the close of a period. Jesus
announced for his own period such a close; a close necessitated by the
emergence of the new, the decay of the old. He announced it with the
turbid figures familiar through prophecy to his hearers’ imagination
figures of stupendous physical miracle, a break-up of nature, God
coming to judgment. But he did not announce under these figures, as our
Bibles make him announce, the end of _the world_; he announced “the end
of _the age_,” “the close of the period.” That close came, as he had
foretold; and a like “end of the age” is imminent wherever a certain
stage is reached in the conflict between the line of Jesus and the
facts of the period through which it takes its passage. Sometimes we
may almost be inclined to augur that from some such “end of the age”
we ourselves are not far now; that through dissolution—dissolution
peaceful if we have virtue enough, violent if we are vicious, but
still dissolution—we and our own age have to pass, according to the
eternal law which makes dissolution the condition of renovation. The
price demanded, by the inexorable conditions on which the kingdom of
God is offered, for the mistakes of our past, for the attainment of
our future, this price may perhaps be required sooner than we suppose,
required even of us ourselves who are living now; “verily I say unto
you, it shall be required _of this generation_.”—_Contemporary Review._