Gamaliel talked as if he did not know, or had not decided in his own
mind, whether the disciples' claims for their Master were just or not.
But the attitude of impartiality and hesitation was the cover of rooted
unbelief. He speaks as if the alternative was that either this 'counsel
and work' was 'of man' or 'of God.' But he would have been nearer the
truth if he had stated the antithesis--God or devil; a glorious truth
or a hell-born lie. If Christ's work was not a revelation from above,
it was certainly an emanation from beneath.
We sometimes hear disbelief, in our own days, talking in much the same
fashion. Have we never listened to teachers who first of all prove to
their own satisfaction that Jesus is a myth, that all the gospel story
is unreliable, and all the gospel message a dream, and then turn round
and overflow in praise of Him and in admiration of it? Browning's
professor in _Christmas Day_ first of all reduces 'the pearl of price'
to dust and ashes, and then
'Bids us, when we least expect it,
Take back our faith--if it be not just whole,
Yet a pearl indeed, as his tests affect it.'
And that is very much the tone of not a few very superior persons
to-day. But let us have one thing or the other--a Christ who was what
He claimed to be, the Incarnate Word of God, who died for our sins and
rose again for our justification; or a Galilean peasant who was either
a visionary or an impostor, like Judas of Galilee and Theudas.