JESUS OF NAZARETH
When we hear any other speaker, even a very good one, he produces
absolutely no effect upon us, or not much, whereas the mere fragments
of you and your words, even at second-hand, and however imperfectly
repeated, amaze and possess the souls of every man, woman and child who
comes within hearing of them.--Plato, _Symposium_, 215 D (Jowett).
_Dominus noster Christus veritatem se non consuetudinem
cognominavit_.--Tertullian, _de virg. vel._ 1.
Towards the end of the first century of our era, there began to appear
a number of little books, written in the ordinary Greek of every-day
life, the language which the common people used in conversation and
correspondence. It was not the literary dialect, which men of letters
affected--a mannered and elaborate style modelled on the literature of
ancient Greece and no longer a living speech. The books were not
intended for a lettered public, but for plain people who wanted a plain
story, which they knew already, set down in a handy and readable form.
The writers did their work very faithfully--some of them showing a
surprising loyalty to the story which they had received. Like other
writers they were limited by considerations of space and so forth, and
this involved a certain freedom of choice in selecting, omitting,
abridging and piecing together the material they gathered. Four only
of the books survive intact; of others there are scanty fragments; and
scholars have divined at least one independent work embodied in two
that remain. So far as books can, three of them represent very fairly
the ideas of an earlier generation, as it was intended they should, and
tell their common story, with the variations natural to individual
writers, but with a general harmony that is the pledge of its truth.
[Sidenote: The Gospels]
At an early date, these books began to be called Gospels[1] and by the
time they had circulated for a generation they were {114} very widely
known and read among the community for which they were written. Apart
from a strong instinct which would allow no conscious change to be made
in the lineaments of the central figure of the story, there was nothing
to safeguard the little books from the fate of all popular works of
their day. Celsus, at the end of the second century, maintained that a
good deal of the story was originally invention; and he added that the
"believers" had made as free as drunk men with it and had written the
gospel over again--three times, four times, many times--and had altered
it to meet the needs of controversy.[2] Origen replied that Marcion's
followers and two other schools had done so, but he knew of no others.
It may to-day be taken as established that the four gospels, as we know
them, stand substantially as near the autograph of their authors as
most ancient books which were at all widely read, though here and there
it is probable, or even certain, that changes on a slight scale have
been made in the wording to accommodate the text to the development of
Christian ideas.[3] This is at first sight a serious qualification,
but it is not so important as it seems. By comparison of the first
three gospels with one another, with the aid of the history of their
transmission in the original Greek and in many versions and quotations,
it is not very difficult to see where the hand of a later day has
touched the page and to break through to something in all probability
very near the original story.
This is the greatest problem of literary and historical criticism
to-day. All sorts of objections have been raised against the
credibility of the gospels from the time of Celsus--they were raised
even earlier; for Celsus quotes them from previous
controversialists--and they are raised still. We are sometimes told
that we cannot be absolutely certain of the authenticity of any single
saying of Jesus, or perhaps of any recorded episode in his life. A
hypertrophied conscience might admit this to be true in the case of any
word or deed of Jesus that might be quoted, and yet maintain that we
have not lost much. For, it is a commonplace of historians that an
anecdote, even if false in itself, may contain historical truth; it
{115} may be evidence, that is, to the character of the person of whom
it is told; for a false anecdote depends, even more than a true story,
upon keeping the colour of its subject. It may be added that, as a
rule, false anecdotes are apt to be more highly coloured than true
stories, just as a piece of colour printing is generally a good deal
brighter than nature. The reader, who, by familiarity with books, and
with the ways of their writers, has developed any degree of literary
instinct, will not be inclined to pronounce the colours in the first
three gospels at least to be anything but natural and true. However,
even if one were to concede that all the recorded sayings and doings of
Jesus are fabrications (a wildly absurd hypothesis), there remains a
common element in them, a unity of tone and character, which points to
a well-known and clearly marked personality behind them, whose actual
existence is further implied by the Christian movement. In other
words, whether true or false in detail, the statements of the gospels,
if we know how to use them aright, establish for us the historicity of
Jesus, and leave no sort of doubt as to his personality and the
impression he made upon those who came into contact with him.
We may not perhaps be able to reconstruct the life of Jesus as we
should wish--it will not be a biography, and it will have no dates and
hardly any procession of events. We shall be able to date his birth
and death, roughly in the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, more exactly
fixing in each case a period of five years or so within which it must
have happened. Of epochs and crises in his life we can say little, for
we do not know enough of John the Baptist and his work to be able to
make clear his relations with Jesus, nor can we speak with much
certainty of the development of the idea of Messiahship in the mind of
Jesus himself. But we can with care recapture something of the
experience of Jesus; we can roughly outline his outward life and
environment. What is of more consequence, we can realize that,
whatever the particular facts of his own career which opened the door
for him, he entered into the general experience of men and knew human
life deeply and intimately. And, after all, in this case as in others,
it is not the facts of the life that matter, but the central fact that
this man did know life as it is before he made judgment upon {116} it.
It is this alone that makes his judgment--or any other man's--of
consequence to us. It is not his individual life, full of endless
significance as that is, but his realization thereby of man's life and
his attitude toward it that is the real gift of the great man--his
thought, his character, himself in fact. And here our difficulty
vanishes, for no one, who has cared to study the gospels with any
degree of intelligent sympathy, has failed to realize the personality
there revealed and to come in some way or other under its influence.
So far in dealing with the religious life of the ancient world, we have
had to do with ideas and traditions--with a well thought-out scheme of
philosophy and with an ancient and impressive series of mysteries and
cults. The new force that now came into play is something quite
different. The centre in the new religion is not an idea, nor a ritual
act, but a personality. As its opponents were quick to point out,--and
they still find a curious pleasure in rediscovering it--there was
little new in Christian teaching. Men had been monotheists before,
they had worshipped, they had loved their neighbours, they had
displayed the virtues of Christians--what was there peculiar in
Christianity? Plato, says Celsus, had taught long ago everything of
the least value in the Christian scheme of things. The Talmud,
according to the modern Jew, contains a parallel to everything that
Jesus said--("and how much else!" adds Wellhausen). What was new in
the new religion, in this "third race" of men? The Christians had
their answer ready. In clear speech, and in aphasia, they indicated
their founder. He was new. If we are to understand the movement, we
must in some degree realize him--in himself and in his influence upon
men.
In every endeavour made by any man to reconstruct another's
personality, there will always be a subjective and imaginative element.
Biography is always a work of the imagination. The method has its
dangers, but without imagination the thing is not to be done at all. A
great man impresses men in a myriad of different ways--he is as various
and as bewilderingly suggestive as Nature herself--and no two men will
record quite the same experience of him. Where the imagination has to
penetrate an extraordinary variety of impressions, to seize, not a
series of forces each severally making {117} its own impression, but a
single personality of many elements and yet a unity, men may well
differ in the pictures they make. Even the same man will at different
times be differently impressed and not always be uniformly able to
grasp and order his impressions. Hence it is that biographies and
portraits are so full of surprises and disappointments, while even the
writer or the painter will not always accept his own interpretation--he
outgrows it and detests it. And if it is possible to spend a life in
the realization of the simplest human nature, what is to be said of an
attempt to make a final picture of Jesus of Nazareth? Still the effort
must be made to apprehend what he was to those with whom he lived, for
from that comes the whole Christian movement.
[Sidenote: Celsus on "coarseness" of Jesus]
Celsus denounced Jesus in language that amazes us; but when he was
confronted with the teaching of Jesus, the moral worth of which a mind
so candid could not deny, he admitted its value, but he attributed it
to the fact that Jesus plagiarized largely from Greek philosophy and
above all from Plato. He did not grasp, Celsus adds, how good what he
stole really was, and he spoiled it by his vulgarity of phrase. In
particular, Celsus denounced the saying "Whosoever shall smite thee on
the right cheek, turn to him the other also." The idea came from the
_Crito_, where Socrates compels Crito to own that we must do evil to no
one--not even by way of requital. The passage is a fine one, and
Celsus quoted it in triumph and asked if there were not something
coarse and clownish in the style of Jesus.[4]
Celsus forgot for the moment that the same sort of criticism had been
made upon Socrates. "'You had better be done,' said Critias, 'with
those shoemakers of yours, and the carpenters and coppersmiths. They
must be pretty well down at the heel by now--considering the way you
have talked them round.' 'Yes,' said Charicles, 'and the cowherds
too.'"[5] But six centuries had made another man of Socrates. His
ideas, interpreted by Plato and others, had altered the whole thinking
of the Greek world; his Silenus-face had grown beautiful by {118}
association; the physiognomy of his mind and speech was no longer so
striking; he was a familiar figure, and his words and phrases were
current coin, accepted without question. But to Celsus Jesus was no
such figure; he had not the traditions and preconceptions which have in
turn obscured for us the features of Jesus; there was nothing in Jesus
either hallowed or familiar, and one glance revealed a physiognomy.
That he did not like it is of less importance.
[Sidenote: The words of Jesus]
Taking the saying in question, we find, as Celsus did, absurdity upon
the face of it, and, as he also did, something else at the heart of
it--a contrast between surface and inner value broad as the gulf
between the common sense which men gather from experience and the
morality which Jesus read beneath human nature. Among the words of
Jesus there are many such sayings, and it is clear that he himself saw
and designed the contrasts which we feel as we read them. This sense
of contrast is one of the ground-factors of humour generally, perhaps
the one indispensable factor; it is always present in the highest
humour. If we then take the words of Jesus, as they struck those who
first heard them--or as they struck Celsus--we cannot help remarking at
once a strong individual character in them, one element in which is
humour,--always one of the most personal and individual of all marks of
physiognomy.
Humour, in its highest form, is the sign of a mind at peace with
itself, for which the contrasts and contradictions of life have ceased
to jar, though they have not ceased to be,--which accepts them as
necessary and not without meaning, indeed as adding charm to life, when
they are viewed from above. It is the faculty which lets a man see
what Plato called "the whole tragedy and comedy of life"[6]--the one in
the other. Is it not humour that saw the Pharisee earnestly rinsing,
rubbing and polishing the _outside_ of his cup, forgetful of the fact
that he drank from the inside? that saw the simple-minded taking their
baskets to gather the grape-harvest from bramble-bushes? That pleaded
with a nation, already gaining a name for being sordid, _not_ to cast
pearls before swine, and to forsake caring for the morrow, because such
care was the mark of the Gentile world--the distinguishing sign between
Gentile and Jew? {119} That told the men he knew so well--men bred in
a rough world--to "turn the other cheek,"--to yield the cloak to him
who took the coat, not in irony, but with the brotherly feeling that
"his necessity is greater than mine"--to go when "commandeered" not the
required mile, making an enemy by sourness of face, but to go two--"two
additional," the Syriac version says--and so soften the man and make
him a friend?[7]
What stamps the language of Jesus invariably is its delicate ease,
implying a sensibility to every real aspect of the matter in hand--a
sense of mastery and peace. Men marvelled at the _charm_ of his
words--Luke using the Greek _charis_ to express it.[8] The homely
parable may be in other hands coarse enough, but the parables of Jesus
have a quality about them after all these years that leaves one certain
he smiled as he spoke them. There is something of the same kind to be
felt in Cowper's letters, but in the stronger nature the gift is of
more significance. At the cost of a little study of human character,
and close reading of the Synoptists, and some careful imagination, it
is possible to see him as he spoke,--the flash of the eye, the smile on
the lip, the gesture of the hand, all the natural expression of himself
and his thought that a man unconsciously gives in speaking, when he has
forgotten himself in his matter and his hearer--his physiognomy, in
fact. We realize very soon his complete mastery of the various aspects
of what he says. That he realizes every implication of his words is
less likely, for there is a spontaneity about them--they are "out of
the abundance of his heart"; the form is not studied; they are for the
man and the moment. But they imply the speaker and his whole relation
to God and man--they cannot help implying this, and that is their
charm. Living words, flashed out on the spur of the moment from the
depths of him, they _are_ the man. It was not idly that the early
church used to say "Remember the words of the Lord Jesus." On any
showing, it is of importance to learn the mind of one whose speech is
so full of life, and it is happily possible to do this from even the
small collections we possess of his recorded sayings.
{120}
Quite apart from the human interest which always clings about the
childhood of a significant man, the early years of Jesus have a value
of their own, for it was to them that he always returned when he wished
to speak his deepest thought on the relations of God and man. In the
life and love of the home he found the truest picture of the divine
life. This we shall have to consider more fully at a later point.
Very little is said by the evangelists of the childhood and youth at
Nazareth, but in the parables we have Jesus' own reminiscences, and the
scenes and settings of the stories he tells fit in easily and
pleasantly with the framework of the historical and geographical facts
of his life at Nazareth.
The town lies in a basin among hills, from the rim of which can be seen
the historic plain of Esdraelon toward the South, Eastward the Jordan
valley and the hills of Gilead, and to the West the sea. "It is a map
of Old Testament history."[9] On great roads North and South of the
town's girdle of hills passed to and fro, on the journey between Egypt
and Mesopotamia, the many-coloured traffic of the East--moving no
faster than the camel cared to go, swinging disdainfully on, with
contempt on its curled lip for mankind, its work and itself. Traders,
pilgrims and princes--the kingdoms of the world and the glory of
them--all within reach and in no great hurry, a panorama of life for a
thoughtful and imaginative boy.
The history of his nation lay on the face of the land at his feet, and
it was in the North that the Zealots throve. Was it by accident that
Joseph the carpenter gave all his five sons names that stood for
something in Hebrew history? Jesus himself says very little, if
anything, of the past of his people, and he does not, like some of the
Psalmists, turn to the story of Israel for the proof of his thoughts
upon God. But it may be more than a coincidence that his countrymen
were impressed with his knowledge of the national literature; and
traces of other than canonical books have been found in his teaching.
It implies a home of piety, where God was in all their thoughts.
[Sidenote: His early life]
The early disappearance of the elder Joseph has been explained by his
death, which seems probable. The widow was {121} left with five sons
and some daughters.[10] The eldest son was, according to the story,
more than twelve years old, and he had probably to share the household
burden. The days were over when he played with the children in the
market at weddings and at funerals, and while he never forgot the games
and kept something of the child's mind throughout, he had to learn what
it was to be weary and heavy-laden. His parables include pictures of
home-life--one of a little house, where the master in bed can argue
with an importunate friend outside the door, who has come on a very
homely errand.[11] In a group of stories, parables of the mother, we
see the woman sweeping the house till she finds a lost drachma, the
recovery of which is joyful enough to be told to neighbours. We see
her hiding leaven in three measures of meal, while the eldest son sat
by and watched it work. He never forgot the sight of the heaving,
panting mass, the bubbles swelling and bursting, and all the commotion
the proof of something alive and at work below; and he made it into a
parable of the Kingdom of God--associated in the minds of the weary
with broken bubbles, and in the mind of Jesus with the profoundest and
most living of realities. It was perhaps Mary, too, who explained to
him why an old garment will not tolerate a new patch. Whatever is the
historical value of the fourth Gospel, it lays stress on the close
relation between Jesus and his mother.
One of the Aramaic words, which the church cherished from the first as
the _ipsissima verba_ of Jesus, was _Abba_. It was what Mary had
taught him as a baby to call Joseph. The fact that in manhood he gave
to God the name that in his childhood he had given to Joseph, surely
throws some light upon the homelife. To this word we shall return.
Jesus had always a peculiar tenderness for children. "Suffer little
children to come unto me," is one of his most familiar sayings, though
in quoting it we are apt to forget that "come" is in Greek a verb
carrying volition with it, and that Mark uses another noticeable word,
and tells us that Jesus put his arms round the child.[12] Little
children, we may be sure, came to him of their own accord and were at
ease with him; {122} and it has been suggested that the saying goes
back to the Nazareth days, and that the little children came about
their brother in the workshop there. Mr Burkitt has recently
remarked[13] that we may read far and wide in Christian Literature
before we find any such feeling for children as we know so well in the
words of Jesus; and in Classical Literature we may look as far. To
Jesus the child is not unimportant--to injure a child was an
unspeakable thing. Indeed, if the Kingdom of God meant anything, it
was that we must be children again--God's little children, to whom
their Father is the background of everything. The Christian phrase
about being born again may be Jesus' own, but if so, it has lost for us
something of what he intended by it, which survives in more authentic
sayings. We have to recover, he said, what we lost when we outgrew the
child; we must have the simplicity and frankness of children--their
instinctive way of believing all things and hoping all things. All
things are new to the child; it is only for grown-up people that God
has to "_make_ all things new." Paul has not much to say about
children, but he has this thought--"if any man be in Christ, it is a
new creation, all things are made new." Probably the child's habit of
taking nothing for granted--except the love that is all about it--is
what Jesus missed most in grown men. Every idealist and every poet is
a child from beginning to end--and something of this sort is the mark
of the school of Jesus.
[Sidenote: Jesus and nature]
The outdoor life of Jesus lies recorded in his parables. Weinel has
said that Paul was a man of a city--Paul said so himself. But Jesus is
at home in the open air. The sights and sounds of the farm are in his
words--the lost sheep, the fallen ox, the worried flock, the hen
clucking to her chickens. This last gave a picture in which his
thought instinctively clothed itself in one of his hours of deepest
emotion. It is perhaps a mark of his race and land that to "feed
swine" is with him a symbol of a lost life, and that the dog is an
unclean animal--as it very generally is elsewhere. He speaks of
ploughing, clearly knowing how it should be done; and like other
teachers, he uses the analogies of sowing and harvest. The grain
growing secretly, and the harvest, over-ripe and spilling its wheat,
were to him pictures of human life.
{123}
Wild nature, too, he knew and loved. The wild lily, which the women
used to burn in their ovens never thinking of its beauty, was to him
something finer than King Solomon, and he probably had seen Herodian
princes on the Galilean roads. (It is a curious thing that he has more
than one allusion to royal draperies.) He bade men study the flowers
(_katamanthanein_). It is perhaps worth remark that flower-poetry came
into Greek literature from regions familiar to us in the life of Jesus;
Meleager was a Gadarene. The Psalmist long ago had said of the birds
that they had their meat from God; but Jesus brought them into the
human family--"Your Heavenly Father feedeth them." Even his knowledge
of weather signs is recorded. Not all flowers keep in literature the
scent and colour of life; they are a little apt to become "natural
objects." But if they are to retain their charm in print, something is
wanted that is not very common--the open heart and the open eye, to
which birds and flowers are willing to tell their secret. There are
other things which point to the fact that Jesus had this
endowment,--and not least his being able to find in the flower a link
so strong and so beautiful between God and man. Here as elsewhere he
was in touch with his environment, for he loved Nature as Nature, and
was true to it. His parables are not like AEsop's Fables. His lost
sheep has no arguments; his lily is not a Solomon, though it is better
dressed; and his sparrows are neither moralists nor theologians--but
sparrows, which might be sold at two for a farthing, and in the
meantime are chirping and nesting. And all this life of Nature spoke
to him of the character of God, of God's delight in beauty and God's
love. God is for him the ever-present thought in it all--real too, to
others, whenever he speaks of him.
An amiable feeling for Nature is often to be found in sentimental
characters. But sentimentalism is essentially self-deception; and the
Gospels make it clear that of all human sins and weaknesses none seems
to have stirred the anger of Jesus as did self-deception. When the
Pharisees in the synagogue watched to see whether Jesus would heal on
the Sabbath, he "looked round about upon them all with anger," says
Mark. This gaze of Jesus is often mentioned in the Gospels--almost
unconsciously--but Luke and Matthew drop the last two words in quoting
this passage, and do so at the cost {124} of a most characteristic
touch. Matthew elsewhere, in accordance with his habit of grouping his
matter by subject, gathers together a collection of the utterances of
Jesus upon the Pharisees, with the recurring refrain "Scribes and
Pharisees, actors." The Mediterranean world was full of Greek actors;
we hear of them even among the Parthians in 53 B.C., and in Mesopotamia
for centuries; and as there had long been Greek cities in Palestine,
and a strong movement for generations toward Greek ways of life, the
actor cannot have been an unfamiliar figure. To call the Pharisees
"actors" was a new and strong thing to say, but Jesus said such things.
Of the grosser classes of sinners he was tolerant to a point that
amazed his contemporaries and gave great occasion of criticism to such
enemies as Celsus and Julian. He had apparently no anger for the woman
taken in adultery; and he was the "friend of publicans and
sinners"--even eating with them.
[Sidenote: His sense of the real]
The explanation lies partly in Jesus' instinct for reality and truth.
Sensualist and money-lover were at least occupied with a sort of
reality; pleasure and money in their way are real, and the pursuit of
them brings a man, sooner or later, into contact with realities genuine
enough. Whatever illusions publican and harlot might have, the world
saw to it that they did not keep them long. The danger for such people
was that they might be disillusioned overmuch. But the Pharisee lied
with himself. If at times he traded on his righteousness to over-reach
others, his chief victim was himself, as Jesus saw, and as Paul found.
Paul, brought up in their school to practise righteousness, gave the
whole thing up as a pretence and a lie--he would no longer have
anything to do with "his own righteousness." But he was an exception;
Pharisees in general believed in their own righteousness; and, by
tampering with their sense of the proportions of things, they lost all
feeling for reality, and with it all consciousness of the value and
dignity of man and the very possibility of any conception of God.
Jesus had been bred in another atmosphere, in a school of realities.
When he said "Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of heaven,"
his words were the record of experience--the paradox was the story of
his life. He had known poverty and hand-labour; he had been "exposed
to feel what wretches feel." Whatever criticism may make of the story
of his feeding {125} multitudes, it remains that he was markedly
sensitive to the idea of hunger--over and over he urged the feeding of
the poor, the maimed and the blind; he suggested the payment of a day's
wage for an hour's work, where a day's food was needed and only an
hour's work could be had; he even reminded a too happy father that his
little girl would be the better of food. No thinker of his day, or for
long before and after, was so deeply conscious of the appeal of sheer
misery, and this is one of the things on which his followers have never
lost the mind of Jesus. Poverty was perhaps even for himself a key to
the door into the Kingdom of God. At any rate, he always emphasizes
the advantage of disadvantages, for they at least make a man in earnest
with himself.
There is a revelation of the seriousness of his whole mind and nature
in his reply to the follower who would go away and return. "No man,
having put his hand to the plough and looking back, is _fit_ for the
Kingdom of God." This every one knows who has tried to drive a furrow,
and all men of action know only too well that the man, whom Jesus so
describes, is fit for no kind of Kingdom. It is only the
sentimentalism of the church that supposes the flabby-minded to be at
home in the Kingdom of God. Jesus did not. The same kind of energy is
in the parables. The unjust steward was a knave, but he was in
earnest; and so was the questionably honest man who found treasure in a
field. The merchant let everything go for the one pearl of great
price. Mary chose "the one thing needful." We may be sure that in one
shop in Nazareth benches were made to stand on four feet and doors to
open and shut. The parables from nature, as we have seen, are true to
the facts of nature. They too stand on four feet. The church laid
hold of a characteristic word, when it adopted for all time Jesus'
_Amen_--"in truth." Jesus was always explicit with his followers--they
should know from the first that their goal was the cross, and that
meantime they would have no place where to lay their heads. They were
to begin with hard realities, and to consort with him on the basis of
the real.
The world in the age of Jesus was living a good deal upon its past,
looking to old books and old cults, as we see in Plutarch and many
others. The Jews no less lived upon their great books. Even Philo was
fettered to the Old Testament, {126} except when he could dissolve his
fetters by allegory, and even then he believed himself loyal to the
higher meaning of the text. But nothing of the kind is to be seen in
Jesus. His knowledge of Psalmist and Prophet excited wonder; but in
all his quotations of the Old Testament that have reached us, there is
no trace of servitude to the letter and no hint of allegory. He does
not quote Scripture as his followers did. Here too he spoke as having
authority. If sometimes he quoted words for their own sake, it was
always as an _argumentum ad hominem_. But his own way was to grasp the
writer's mind--a very difficult thing in his day, and little done--and
to go straight to the root of the matter, regardless of authority and
tradition. Like draws to like, and an intensely real man at once
grasped his kinship with other intensely real men; and he found in the
prophets, not reeds shaken with the wind, courtiers of king or of
people, but men in touch with reality, with their eyes open for God,
friends and fore-runners, whose experience illumined his own. This
type of manhood needed no explanation for him. The other sort
perplexed him--"Why can you not judge for yourselves?" how was it that
men could see and yet not see? From his inner sympathy with the
prophetic mind, came his freedom in dealing with the prophets. He read
and understood, and decided for himself. No sincere man would ever
wish his word to be final for another. Jesus was conscious of his own
right to think and to see and to judge, and for him, as for the modern
temper, the final thing was not opinion, nor scripture, nor authority,
but reality and experience. There lay the road to God. Hence it is
that Jesus is so tranquil,--he does "not strive nor cry"--for the man
who has experienced in himself the power of the real has no doubts
about it being able to maintain itself in a world, where at heart men
want nothing else.
[Sidenote: The temptations of Jesus]
When so clear an eye for reality is turned upon the great questions of
man's life and of man's relations with God, it is apt here too to reach
the centre. From the first, men lingered over the thought that Jesus
had gone to the bottom of human experience and found in this fact his
power to help them. He was made like to his brethren; he was touched
with the feeling of our infirmities; he was "able to sympathize"
(_dynamenon sympathesai_) for he was "tempted in all respects like us."
In {127} the Gospel, as it is handed down to us, the temptation of
Christ is summed up in three episodes set at the beginning of the story
and told in a symbolic form, which may or may not have been given to
them by Jesus himself. Then "the devil left him"--Luke adding
significantly "till a time." The interpretation is not very clear.
Strong men do not discuss their own feelings very much, but it is
possible now and then to divine some experience from an involuntary
tone, or the unconscious sensitiveness with which certain things are
mentioned; or, more rarely, emotion may open the lips for a moment of
self-revelation, in which a word lays bare a lifetime's struggle. It
will add to the significance of his general attitude toward God and
man's life, if we can catch any glimpse of the inner mind of Jesus.
We have records of his being exhausted and seeking quiet. Biographers
of that day concealed such things in their heroes, but the Gospels
freely reveal what contemporary critics counted weaknesses in Jesus.
He weeps, he hungers, he is worn out. He has to be alone--on the
mountain by night, in a desert-place before dawn. Such exhaustion is
never merely physical or merely spiritual; the two things are one. Men
crowded upon Jesus, till he had not leisure to eat; he came into touch
with a ceaseless stream of human personalities; and those who have been
through any such experience will understand what it cost him. To
communicate an idea or to share a feeling is exhausting work, and we
read further of deeds of healing, which, Jesus himself said, took
"virtue" (_dynamin_) out of him, and he had to withdraw. When the
Syro-Phoenician woman called for his aid, it was a question with him
whether he should spend on a foreigner the "virtue" that could with
difficulty meet the claims of Israel, for he was not conscious of the
"omnipotence" which has been lightly attributed to him. It was the
woman's brilliant answer about the little dogs eating the children's
crumbs that gained her request. The turn of speech showed a vein of
humour, and he consented "for this saying."[14] If human experience
goes for anything in such a case, contact with a spirit so delicate and
sympathetic gave him something of the {128} strength he spent. The
incident throws light upon the "fluxes and refluxes of feeling" within
him, and the effect upon him of a spirit with something of his own
tenderness and humour. For the moment, though, his sense of having
reached his limits should be noticed.
The church has never forgotten the agony in the garden, but that
episode has lost some of its significance because it has not been
recognized to be one link in a chain of experience, which we must try
to reconstruct. It has been assumed that Jesus never expected to
influence the Pharisees and scribes; but this is to misinterpret the
common temper of idealists, and to miss the pain of Jesus' words when
he found his hopes of the Pharisees to be vain. Gradually, from their
pressure upon his spirit, he grew conscious of the outcome--they would
not be content with logomachies; the end might be death. Few of us
have any experience to tell us at what cost to the spirit such a
discovery is made. The common people he read easily enough and
recognized their levity. And now, in exile, as Mr Burkitt has lately
suggested,[15] he began to concentrate himself upon the twelve. It was
not till Peter, by a sudden flash of insight, grasped his
Messiahship--a character, which Jesus had realized already, though we
do not know by what process, and had for reasons of his own
concealed,--it was not till then that Jesus disclosed his belief that
he would be killed at last. From that moment we may date the falling
away of Judas, and what this man's constant presence must have meant to
Jesus, ordinary experience may suggest. Shrewd, clever and
disappointed, he must have been a chill upon his Master at all hours.
His influence upon the rest of the group must have been consciously and
increasingly antipathetic. Night by night Jesus could read in the
faces which of them had been with Judas during the day. The sour
triumph of Judas when the Son of man was told to go on to another
village after a day's journey, and the uncomfortable air of one or more
of the others, all entered into Jesus' experience; and night by night
he had to undo Judas' work. He "learnt by what he suffered" from the
man's tone and look that there would be desertion, perhaps betrayal.
The daily suffering involved in trying to recapture the man, in going
to seek the lost sheep in the wilderness of bitterness, may be {129}
imagined. Side by side, King, Pharisee and disciple are against him,
and the tension, heightened by the uncertainty as to the how, when and
where of the issue must have been great. Luke's graphic word says his
face was "set" for Jerusalem--it would be, he knew, a focus for the
growing forces of hatred.
Day by day the strain increased. Finally Jesus spoke. The where and
how of the betrayal he could not determine; the when he could. At the
supper, he looked at Judas and then he spoke.[16] "What thou doest, do
quickly." The man's face as he hurried out said "Yes" to the unspoken
question--and for the moment it brought relief. This is the background
of the garden-scene. What the agony meant spiritually, we can hardly
divine. The physical cost is attested by the memory of his face which
haunted the disciples. The profuse sweat that goes with acute mental
strain is a familiar phenomenon, and its traces were upon him--visible
in the torchlight. Last of all, upon the cross, Nature reclaimed her
due from him. Jesus had drawn, as men say, upon the body, and in such
cases Nature repays herself from the spirit. The worn-out frame
dragged the spirit with it, and he died with the cry--"My God, my God,
why hast thou forsaken me?"
Turning back, we find in Luke[17] that Jesus said to his disciples "Ye
are they that have continued with me in my temptations." Dr John
Brown[18] used to speak of Jesus having "a disposition for private
friendships." A mind with the genius for friendliness is not only
active but passive. We constantly find in history instances of men
with such a gift failing in great crises because of it--they yield to
the friendly word; it means so much to them. Thus when Peter, a friend
of old standing and of far greater value since his confession at
Philippi, spoke and reinforced the impressions made on Jesus' mind by
his prevision of failure and death, the temptation was of a terrible
kind. The sudden rejoinder, in which Jesus identifies the man he loved
with Satan, shows what had happened. But, if friendship carried with
it temptation, yet when physical exhaustion brought spiritual
exhaustion in its train, the love and tenderness {130} of his friends
upheld him. But, more still, their belief in him and in his ideas,
their need of him, drove the tempter away. He could not disappoint
them. The faces that softened to him,--all that came to his mind as he
thought of his friends name by name--gave him hope and comfort, though
the body might do its worst. It was perhaps in part this experience of
the friendship of simple and commonplace men that differentiated the
teaching of Jesus from the best the world had yet had. No other
teacher dreamed that common men could possess a tenth part of the moral
grandeur and spiritual power, which Jesus elicited from them--chiefly
by believing in them. Here, to any one who will study the period, the
sheer originality of Jesus is bewildering. This belief in men Jesus
gave to his followers and they have never lost it.
[Sidenote: Man's relations with God]
It was in the new life and happiness in God that he was bringing to the
common people that Jesus saw his firmest credentials. He laid stress
indeed upon the expulsion of devils and the cure of disease--matters
explained to-day by "suggestion." But the culmination was "the good
news for the poor." "Gospel" and "Evangelical" have in time become
technical terms, and have no longer the pulse of sheer happiness which
Jesus felt in them, and which the early church likewise experienced.
"Be of good cheer!" is the familiar English rendering of one of the
words of Jesus, often on his lips--"Courage!" he said. One text of
Luke represents him as saying it even on the cross, when he spoke to
the penitent thief.
Summing up what we have so far reached, we may remark the broad
contrast between the attitude of Jesus to human life and the views of
the world around him. A simple home with an atmosphere of love and
truth and intelligence, where life was not lost sight of in its
refinements, where ordinary needs and common duties were the daily
facts, where God was a constant and friendly presence--this was his
early environment. Later on it was the carpenter's bench, the
fisherman's boat, wind on the mountain and storm on the lake, leaven in
the meal and wheat in the field. Everywhere his life is rooted in the
normal and the natural, and everywhere he finds God filling the meanest
detail of man's life with glory and revelation.
Philosophers were anxious to keep God clear of contact with matter;
Marcus Aurelius found "decay in the substance {131} of all
things--nothing but water, dust, bones, stench."[19] Jesus saw life in
all things--God clothing the grass and watching over little birds.
To-day the old antithesis of God and matter is gone, and it comes as a
relief to find that Jesus anticipated its disappearance. The religious
in his day looked for God in trance and ritual, in the abnormal and
unusual, but for him, as for every man who has ever helped mankind, the
ordinary and the commonplace were enough. The Kingdom of God is among
you, or even within you--in the common people, of whom all the other
teachers despaired.
We come now to the central question of man's relation with God, never
before so vital a matter to serious people in the Mediterranean world.
Jew and Greek and Egyptian were all full of it, and men's talk ran much
upon it. Men were anxious to be right with God, and sought earnestly
in the ways of their fathers for the means of communion with God and
the attainment of some kind of safety in their position with regard to
him. Jew and Greek alike talked of heaven and hell and of the ways to
them. They talked of righteousness and holiness--"holy" is one of the
great words of the period--and they sought these things in ritual and
abstinence. Modern Jews resent the suggestion that the thousand and
one regulations as to ceremonial purity, and the casuistries, as many
or more, spun out of the law and the traditions, ranked with the great
commandments of neighbourly love and the worship of the One God. No
doubt they are right, but it is noticeable that in practice the common
type of mind is more impressed with minutiae than with principles. The
Southern European to-day will do murder on little provocation, but to
eat meat in Lent is sin. But, without attributing such conspicuous
sins as theft and adultery and murder to the Pharisees, it is clear
that in establishing their own righteousness they laid excessive stress
on the details of the law, on Sabbath-keeping (a constant topic with
the Christian apologists), on tithes, and temple ritual, on the washing
of pots and plates--still rigorously maintained by the modern Jew--and
all this was supposed to constitute holiness. Jesus with the clear
incisive word of genius dismissed it all as "acting." The Pharisee was
essentially an actor--playing to himself the most contemptible little
comedies of holiness. {132} Listen, cries Jesus, and he tells the tale
of the man fallen among thieves and left for dead, and how priest and
Levite passed by on the other side, fearing the pollution of a corpse,
and how they left mercy, God's own work--"I will have mercy and not
sacrifice" was one of his quotations from Hosea,--to be done by one
unclean and damned--the Samaritan. Whited sepulchres! he cries,
pretty to look at, but full of what? of death, corruption and foulness.
"How _can_ you escape from the judgment of hell?" he asked them, and no
one records what they answered or could answer.
[Sidenote: Jesus the liberator]
It is clear, however, that, outside Palestine, the Jews in the great
world were moving to a more purely moral conception of religion--their
environment made mere Pharisaism impossible, and Greek criticism
compelled them to think more or less in the terms of the fundamental.
The debt of the Jew to the Gentile is not very generously acknowledged.
None the less, the distinctive badge of all his tribe was and remained
what the Greeks called fussiness (_to psophodees_).[20] The Sabbath,
circumcision, the blood and butter taboos remained--as they still
remain in the most liberal of "Liberal Judaisms"--tribe marks with no
religious value, but maintained by patriotism. And side by side with
this lived and lives that hatred of the Gentile, which is attributed to
Christian persecution, but which Juvenal saw and noted before the
Christian had ceased to be persecuted by the Jew. The extravagant
nonsense found in Jewish speculation as to how many Gentile souls were
equivalent in God's sight to that of one Jew is symptomatic. To this
day it is confessedly the weakness of Judaism that it offers no impulse
and knows no enthusiasm for self-sacrificing love where the interests
of the tribe are not concerned.[21]
The great work of Jesus in this matter was the final and decisive
cleavage with antiquity. Greek rationalism had long since laughed at
the puerilities of the Greek cults; but rationalism and laughter are'
unequally matched against Religion, and it triumphed over them, and, as
we see in Plutarch {133} and the Neo-Platonists, it imposed its
puerilities--yes, and its obscenities--upon Philosophy and made her in
sober truth "procuress to the lords of hell." It was a new thing when
Religion, in the name of truth and for the love of God, abolished the
connexion with a trivial past. Jesus cut away at once every vestige of
the primitive and every savage survival--all natural growths perhaps,
and helpful too to primitive man and to the savage, but confusing to
men on a higher plane,--either mere play-acting or the "damnation of
hell." Pagan cults he summed up as much speaking. Once for all he set
Religion free from all taboos and rituals. Paul, once, on the spur of
the moment, called Jesus the "Yes" of all the promises of God--a most
suggestive name for the vindicator and exponent of God's realities. It
is such a man as this who liberates mankind, cutting us clear of
make-believes and negations and taboos, and living in the open-air,
whether it is cloud or sun. That Jesus shocked his contemporaries with
the abrupt nakedness of his religious ideas is not surprising. The
church made decent haste to cover a good many of them up, but not very
successfully. A mind like that of Jesus propagates itself, and
reappears with startling vitality, as history in many a strange page
can reveal.
We must now consider what was the thought of Jesus upon God and how he
conceived of the relation between God and man. He approached the
matter originally from the standpoint of Judaism, and no attempt to
prove the influence of Greek philosophy is likely to succeed. The
result of Greek speculation upon God--where it did not end in pure
pantheism--was that of God nothing whatever could be predicated--not
even being, but that he was to be expressed by the negation of every
idea that could be formed of him. To this men had been led by their
preconception of absolute being, and so strong was the influence of
contemporary philosophy that Christian thinkers adopted the same
conclusion, managing what clumsy combinations they could of it and of
the doctrine of incarnation. Clement of Alexandria is a marked example
of this method.
To the philosophic mind God remains a difficult problem, but to the
religious temper things are very different. To it God is the one great
reality never very far away, and is conceived not as an abstraction,
nor as a force, but as a personality. {134} It has been and is the
strength and redemption of Judaism, that God is the God of Israel--"Oh
God, thou art my God!" How intuition is to be reconciled with
philosophy has been the problem of Christian thinkers in every age, but
it may be remarked that the varying term is philosophy. To the
intuition of Jesus Christians have held fast--though Greeks and others
have called it "folly"; and in the meantime a good many philosophies
have had their day.
The central thought of Jesus is the Fatherhood of God. For this, as
for much else, parallels have been found in the words of Hebrew
thinkers, ancient and contemporary, and we may readily concede that it
was not original with Jesus to call God Father. The name was given to
God by the prophets, but it was also given to him by the Stoics--and by
Homer; so that to speak of God's Fatherhood might mean anything between
the two extremes of everything and nothing. Christian theology, for
instance, starting with the idea of the Fatherhood of God, has not
hesitated to speak in the same breath of his "vindicating his
majesty"--a phrase which there is no record or suggestion that Jesus
ever used. There may be fathers who vindicate their majesty, as there
are many other kinds, but until we realize the connotation of the word
for men who speak of God as Father, it is idle to speak of it being a
thought common to them. The name may be in the Old Testament and in
Homer, but the meaning which Jesus gave to it is his own.
Jesus never uses the name Father without an air of gladness. Men are
anxious as to what they shall eat, and what they shall drink, and
wherewithal they shall be clothed--"your heavenly Father knoweth that
ye have need of all these things." Children ask father and mother for
bread--will they receive a stone? The women had hid the leaven in the
three measures of meal long before the children began to feel hungry.
And as to clothes--God has clothed the flower far better than Solomon
ever clothed himself, "and shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of
little faith?" The picture is one of the strong and tender parent,
smiling at the child's anxiety with no notion of his own majesty or of
anything but love. So incredibly simple is the relation between God
and man--simple, unconstrained, heedless and tender as the talk round a
table in Nazareth. Jesus is greater than the men who have elaborated
{135} his ideas, and majesty is the foible of little minds. The great
man, if he thinks of his dignity, lets it take care of itself; he is
more interested in love and truth, and he forgets to think of what is
due to himself. Aristotle said that his "magnificent man" would never
run; but, says Jesus, when the prodigal son was yet a great way off,
"his father saw him, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him."
This contrast measures the distance between the thought of Jesus and
some Christian theologies. It is worth noting that in the two
parables, in which a father directly addresses his son, it is with the
tender word _teknon_, which is more like a pet name. It adds to the
meaning of the parable of the prodigal, when the father calls the elder
brother by the little name that has come down from childhood. It was a
word which Jesus himself used in speaking to his friends.[22] The
heavenly Father does not cease to be a father because his children are
ungracious and bad. He sends rain and sun--and all they mean--to evil
and to good. The whole New Testament is tuned to the thought of
Jesus--"the philanthropy of God our saviour."[23]
Plato had long before defined the object of human life as "becoming
like to God." Jesus finds the means to this likeness to God in the
simplest of every day's opportunities. "Love your enemies and do good,
and ye shall be sons of the Highest, for he is good and pitiful."
"Blessed are the peace-makers," he said, "for they shall be called
children of God." This is sometimes limited to the reconciliation of
quarrels, but the worst of quarrels is the rift in a man's own soul,
the "division of his spiritual substance against itself" which is the
essence of all tragedy. There are some whose least word, or whose
momentary presence, can somehow make peace wherever they go, and leave
men stronger for the rest they have found in another's soul. This,
according to Jesus, is the family likeness by which God's children are
recognized in all sorts of company. To have the faculty of
communicating peace of mind--and it is more often than not done
unconsciously, as most great things are--is no light or accidental gift.
Jesus lays a good deal more stress upon unconscious instinct than most
moralists do. Once only he is reported to have spoken of the Last
Judgment, which was a favourite theme {136} with the eschatologists of
his period, Jewish, pagan, and Christian. He borrowed the whole
framework of the scene, but he changed, and doubly changed, the
significance of it. For he discarded the national or political
criterion which the Jew preferred, and he did not have recourse to the
rather individualistic moral test which Greek thinkers proposed, in
imitation of Plato; still less did it occur to him to suggest a
_Credo_. With him the ultimate standard was one of sheer kindness and
good-heartedness--"inasmuch as ye did it to one of the least of these
my brethren." But it is still more interesting to note how this
standard is applied. Every one at the Last Judgment accepts it, just
as every one accepts the propositions of moralists in general. But the
real cleavage between the classes of men does not depend on morality,
as the chilly suggestion of the mere word reminds us. Men judge other
men not by their morality, professed or practised, so much as by their
unconscious selves--by instinct, impulse and so forth, the things that
really give a clue to the innermost man. The most noticeable point
then in Jesus' picture of the Last Judgment is that, when "sheep" and
"goats" are separated, neither party at once understands the reasons of
the decision. These are conscious of duties done; the others have no
very clear idea about it. Elsewhere Jesus suggests that, when men have
done all required of them, they may still have the feeling that they
are unprofitable servants; and it is precisely the peace-makers and the
pure in heart who do not realize how near they come to God. The priest
and the Levite in the parable were conscious of their purity, but Jesus
gives no hint that they saw God. The Samaritan lived in another
atmosphere, but it was natural to him and he breathed it unconsciously.
The cultivation of likeness to God by Greek philosophers and their
pupils was very different. Plutarch has left a tract, kindly and
sensible, on "How a man may recognize his own progress in virtue," but
there is no native Christian product of the kind.
[Sidenote: The Kingdom of God]
From what Jesus directly says of God, and from what he says of God's
children, we may conclude that he classes God with the strong and sunny
natures; with the people of bright eyes who see through things and into
things, who have the feeling for reality, and love every aspect of the
real. God has that sense which is peculiar to the creative mind--the
keen joy {137} in beauty, that loves star and bird and child. God has
the father's instinct, a full understanding of human nature, and a
heart open for the prodigal son, the publican and the woman with seven
devils. "In his will is our peace," wrote the great Christian poet of
the middle ages. "Doing the will we find rest," said a humble and
forgotten Christian of the second century.[24] They both learnt the
thought from Jesus, who set it in the prayer beginning with _Abba_
which he taught his disciples, and who prayed it himself in the garden
with the same _Abba_ in his heart. "In the Lord's prayer," said
Tertullian, "there is an epitome of the whole Gospel."[25]
At this point two questions rise, which are of some historical
importance, and bear upon Jesus' view of God. It is clear, first of
all, that the expression "the Kingdom of God" was much upon the lips of
Jesus, at least in the earlier part of his ministry. It was not of his
own coining, and scholars have differed as to what he really meant.
Such controversy always rises about the terms in which a great mind
expresses itself. The great thinker, even the statesman, has to use
the best language he can find to convey his ideas, and if the ideas are
new, the difficulty of expression is sometimes very great. The words
imply one thing to the listener, and another to the speaker who is
really trying (as Diogenes put it) to "re-mint the currency," and how
far he succeeds depends mostly upon his personality. To-day "the
Kingdom," or more accurately "the Kingship of God," is in some quarters
interpreted rather vigorously in the sense which the ordinary Jew gave
to the phrase in the age of Jesus; but it is more than usually unsound
criticism to take the words of such a man as meaning merely what they
would in the common talk of unreflective persons, who use words as
counters and nothing else. There was a vulgar interpretation of the
"Kingship of God," and there was a higher one, current among the better
spirits; and it is only reasonable to interpret this phrase, or any
other, in the light of the total mind of the man who uses it. It is
clear then that, when Jesus used "the Kingship of God," he must have
subordinated it to his general idea of God; and what {138} that was, we
have seen. To-day the phrase is returning into religious speech to
signify the permeation of society by the mind of Christ, which cannot
be far from what it meant to the earliest disciples. It is significant
that the author of the fourth gospel virtually dropped the phrase
altogether, that Paul preferred other expressions as a rule, and that
it was merged and lost in the idea of the church.
Closely bound up with the "Kingdom of God" is the name Messiah, with a
similarly wide range of meanings. The question has also been raised as
to how far Jesus identified himself with the Messiah. It might be more
pertinent to ask with which Messiah. On the whole, the importance of
the matter can be gauged by the fate of the word. It was translated
into Greek, and very soon Christos, or Chrestos, was a proper name and
hardly a title at all except in apologetics, where alone the conception
retained some importance. The Divine Son and the Divine Logos--terms
which Jesus did not use--superseded the old Hebrew title, at any rate
in the Gentile world, and this could hardly have occurred if the idea
had been of fundamental moment in Jesus' mind and speech. If he used
the name, as seems probable, it too must have been subordinated to his
master-thought of God's fatherhood. It would then imply at most a
close relation to the purposes of God, and a mission to men, the
stewardship of thoughts that would put mankind on a new footing with
God. The idea of his being a mediator in the Pauline sense is foreign
to the gospels, and the later conception of a purchase of mankind from
the devil, or from the justice of God, by the blood of a victim is
still more alien to Jesus' mind.
[Sidenote: The cross]
These are some of the features of the founder of the new religion as
revealed in the Gospels--features that permanently compel attention,
but after all it was not the consideration of these that conquered the
world. Of far more account in winning the world was the death of this
man upon the cross. It was the cross that gave certainty to all that
Jesus had taught about God. The church sturdily and indignantly
repudiated any suggestion, however philosophic, that in any way seemed
likely to lessen the significance of the cross. That he should taste
the ultimate bitterness of death undisguised, that he should refuse the
palliative wine and myrrh (an action symbolic of his {139} whole
attitude to everything and to death itself), that with open eyes he
should set his face for Jerusalem, and with all the sensitiveness of a
character, so susceptive of impression and so rich in imagination, he
should expose himself to our experience--to the foretaste of death, to
the horror of the unknown, and to the supreme fear--the dread of the
extinction of personality; and that he should actually undergo all he
foresaw, as the last cry upon the cross testified--all this let the
world into the real meaning of his central thought upon God. It was
the pledge of his truth, and thus made possible our reconciliation with
God. If we may take an illustration from English literature,
Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_ may suggest something here. It has been
noticed how small a part Caesar plays in the drama--how little he
speaks; what weakness he shows--epilepsy, deafness, arrogance,
vacillation; and how soon he disappears. Would not the play have been
better named _Brutus_? Yet Shakespeare knew what he was doing; for the
whole play is Julius Caesar, from the outbreak of Cassius at the
beginning--
Why! man he doth bestride the narrow world
Like a colossus,
to the bitter cry of Brutus at the end--
O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Caesar determines everything in the story. Every character in it is a
mirror in which we see some figure of him, and the life of every man
there is made or unmade by his mind toward Caesar. Caesar is the one
great determining factor in the story; living and dead, he is the
centre and explanation of it all.
What was written in the Gospels of the life and death of Jesus, might
by now be ancient history, if the Gospels had told the whole story.
But they did not tell the whole story; and they neither were, nor are,
the source of the Christian movement, great as their influence is and
has been. The Jesus who has impressed himself upon mankind is not a
character, however strong and beautiful, that is to be read about in a
book. Before the Gospels were written, men spoke of the "Spirit of
Jesus" as an active force amongst them. We may criticize their phrase
and their psychology as we like, but they were speaking of something
they knew, something they had seen {140} and felt, and it is that
"something" which changed the course of history. Jesus lives for us in
the pages of the Gospels, but we are not his followers on that account,
nor were the Christians of the first century. They, like ourselves,
followed him under the irresistible attraction of his character
repeating itself in the lives of men and women whom they knew. The Son
of God, they said, revealed himself in men, and it was true. Of his
immediate followers we know almost nothing, but it was they who passed
him on to the next generation, consciously in their preaching, which
was not always very good; and unconsciously in their lives, which he
had transformed, and which had gained from him something of the power
of his own life. The church was a nexus of quickened and redeemed
personalities,--men and women in whom Christ lived. So Paul wrote of
it. A century later another nameless Christian spoke of Christ being
"new born every day over again in the hearts of believers," and it
would be hard to correct the statement. If we are to give a true
account of such men as Alexander and Caesar, we consider them in the
light of the centuries through which their ideas lived and worked. In
the same way, the life, the mind and the personality of Jesus will not
be understood till we have realized by some intimate experience
something of the worth and beauty of the countless souls that in every
century have found and still find in him the Alpha and Omega of their
being. For the Gospels are not four but "ten thousand times ten
thousand, and thousands of thousands," and the last word of every one
of them is "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."