verses of the 1st chapter, (Χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο
οὐδἕ ἑν. Ὅ γέγονεν ἐν αὐτῷ ζωὴ ἦν,) which
many of the Fathers approve, which Lachmann has introduced into his text, and
which Mr. Bunsen appears to regard as of very high importance. On the
question of a various reading, I might have deferred to these
authorities; on a question of pointing, their judgment is merely that
of ordinary students. The simplicity of the Apostle's style, it seems
to me, is violated by the change. Nor am I yet aware what we gain by
it. Is it the pleonasm in the 1st verse which is objected to? Surely
we must strike out half the verses in the Psalms, if we complain of
such pleonasms. I believe we shall find, when we have done so, that
the force of that which we have retained has not been increased, but
weakened. Or is it that the words, 'in Him was life,' are regarded as
a mere commonplace? God give us such commonplaces in exchange for all
the rarities and refinements that wise men can present us with! I do
not mean that the difference between 'being' and 'becoming' is not
involved in all the doctrine of these verses. No one can read them
thoughtfully without perceiving it. But need it be thrust upon us in
the very terms of school philosophy? Does it not come out much more
naturally and truly in the old simple Hebraic forms? Those who suppose
these forms to be obsolete for us, cannot suppose them to have been
obsolete for the writer of the fourth Gospel, unless they accept
Baur's theory concerning him.
I have also not been induced to depart from our version of the words,
Ἡν τὸ φῶς τὸ ἀληθινὁν, ὃ φωτίζει πάντα
ἄνθρωπον ἐρχόμενον εἰς τὸν κόσμον, in spite
of the many objections which have, in modern times and in old times,
been raised against it. I do not think that I have what is called a theological
interest in defending it. If the light is said to lighten every man, I
can ask no more. Give what force you will to the coming into the
world, connect it with what clause of the sentence you will, that
assertion remains good, perhaps even less qualified than it is in our
translation. Moreover, a single text would be a very poor ground on
which to rest such a doctrine. A person who finds it in every line of
St. John--nay, implied in the whole Bible--can afford to make a
present of one passage to those who find it inconvenient. I contend
for the fidelity of our version upon a different ground. If we
construe the words, 'The light which lighteneth every man was coming
into the world,' we destroy the order of the Apostle's discourse, and
we go near to make him contradict himself. He declares that the Word
was in the world, and that the world knew Him not. The coming into it,
in the sense of being made flesh, is reserved for the 14th verse. My
great object in this Sermon has been to assert this order, and to show
how much we mistake the purpose of the Evangelist when we substitute
another of our own. Until some rendering of the passage is suggested
which does not involve that great mischief, I must adhere to the one
with which we are all familiar.
DISCOURSE III.
The notion of St. John as the teacher who possesses a higher lore than
the other writers of the New Testament, which I have considered in
this Sermon, may be traced especially to Origen. If the reader is at
the pains to consider the opening of his Commentary upon St. John, he
will discover in what sense this Gospel seemed to him a kind of
quintessence of all the previous revelations of God. His own emblem is
drawn from the first-fruits of a sacrifice; a better comparison in
itself, but one which does not make its meaning at once evident to the
modern reader. I cannot have any wish to speak disrespectfully or
disparagingly of Origen, with whose mysticism some will accuse me of
having only too much sympathy. Yet I cannot help thinking that his
attempt to distinguish between the spiritual and the sensible Gospel,
has been the source of infinite confusions in the study of the
Evangelist. Its other evil consequences--as cultivating a morbid
ingenuity in seeking for distant analogies, and in destroying the
force of plain narratives--have been often dwelt upon. I allude to it
in connexion with what I have said, in this Sermon and in the eighth,
of our Lord's forerunner.
Even the most earnest seekers after truth are continually perplexed by
the question how John the Baptist could have been a guide into what
Origen and his school have taught them to consider the most esoteric
part of the Christian faith. 'If the least in the kingdom of heaven,'
they say, 'was greater than he, how can he have been possessed of a
doctrine which even some of the great in the kingdom of heaven seem
very imperfectly to have apprehended?' The answer to this question, I
believe, will come to such persons gradually,--at last decisively.
What is called the doctrine of the Logos--the idea of the Logos--may
have been seized and possessed by one here and one there, at different
periods of the Church. The best of these, like Clemens of Alexandria,
may have been driven to it by the necessities of their position, by
their conflict with the false Gnosticism, by the impossibility of
preaching the Gospel to Heathens without the belief in a universal
Teacher. They may have been often dazzled with their own light--often
tempted, if not to glorify themselves upon the possession of it, yet
to denounce others as carnal or earthly who were without it. I cannot,
indeed, say that I trace as much scorn of others and exaltation of
their own wisdom in the Alexandrian school, as in that which was most
opposed to it, in the hard dogmatist of Carthage. But they were
tempted to make distinctions which interfere, it seems to me, most
grievously with all that is truest in their teaching. If the Word is
the Teacher and Light of men, as they represented Him to be, the
vulgarest men must have been under His teaching; the commonest facts,
the most simple forms of nature, must be instruments through which His
learning is communicated. If the Word has been, as they say, made
flesh, fleshly things cannot be despicable, but must contain those
spiritual truths which the wise and prudent who despise them, and
exult in their own intellectual superiority, cannot find. Therefore
the simplest men, the preachers of repentance, those who have brought
a message to the poor,--whether they have talked of the living Word or
not,--have borne the best and fullest witness of Him. It is so now; it
has been so always. The prophets of old spoke of a Word because they
were preachers of repentance. I contend that John the Baptist spoke of
Him just as they did, only with more clearness, with a stronger
apprehension of His personality. But if John was the messenger of a
Word made flesh, if the Incarnation is the beginning of a new world,
the opening of a new heaven, it must needs be that the least of those
who are born into that world, who are permitted to ascend into that
heaven, is greater than John. If, indeed, he forgets the answer which
was given to the disciples when they asked, '_Who is greatest in the
kingdom of heaven_?' if he begins to exult in his knowledge or in his
privileges; if he scorns the world which Christ has redeemed; if he
denies that Christ is the Light of the world; he not only puts himself
below John the Baptist, but below every Jew, Mahometan, worshipper of
Juggernaut; he more openly sets Christ at nought than they do. The
Christian world may come to this utter denial of its Master; then will
come a preacher of repentance,--a preacher of the living Word to
publicans and sinners,--an Elias to witness of judgments upon Scribes
and Pharisees, who will make it evident that the deepest lore is also
the simplest; that that which is most divine has most power over those
who have been most given up to the world, the flesh, and the devil.
To return for a moment to the Alexandrian divines. I cannot acquit
Clemens of having given encouragement to that esoterical doctrine
which led Origen, it appears to me, into such dangerous refinements.
But the spirit of his 'Pædagogue' is so personal and so practical,
that many of the tendencies to which his pupil yielded were
counteracted, if not wholly overcome, in him. Above all, there is one
passage of Origen's Commentary which shows him to have utterly
departed from the principle which goes through all the books of
Clemens. He considers (tom. i. c. 23) why the name Logos should have
been especially chosen as a title of the Saviour. He has been
extensively followed by persons who would not like to acknowledge that
they have learnt anything from him, in this mode of speaking. But it
is surely fatal to the humble study of St. John. We do not suffer him
to tell us of the Word, and then to tell us how the Word was made
flesh, and dwelt among men, and manifested forth His glory. We start
from an assumption and speculation of our own; we chain the Apostle,
as if he were a Proteus, that we may compel him to give forth, not his
own oracles, but those which we have put into his mouth. If I could
induce but one student of divinity to abandon this perilous and
irreverent course, I should believe that God had permitted me to be an
instrument of some good to His Church.
DISCOURSE IV.
Mr. Alford has given it as his opinion that the sentence, '_Lamb of
God that taketh away the sin of the world_,' does not refer at all to
the Paschal feast, but to the words in the 53d chapter of Isaiah. He
raises the natural objection, of which I have spoken in this
Discourse, that the scape-goat bears away sins, but that no such
association is connected with the Lamb except in the words, '_Surely
He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows_.' I do not venture to
affirm that the words of Isaiah were not in the Baptist's mind when he
uttered this sentence, or that they did not suggest themselves to the
minds of the disciples who heard him speak, and who followed Jesus.
But supposing that to be the case, why did the Prophet connect the
lamb that was led to the slaughter, and the sheep that was dumb before
his shearers, with the exclamation in the fourth verse? Why did
Isaiah, as well as John, think of a lamb instead of a goat? We are all
agreed that the scape-goat was the most obvious image, one specially
suggested, to a preacher in the wilderness. Why was it not the one to
which that preacher in the wilderness resorted? Why did he
industriously choose another image, which no tradition except that of
one passage in a prophet seemed to justify? Why has all Christendom
accepted and ratified that selection, the other being thrown quite
into the background, only furnishing an occasional simile to divines,
being scarcely brought within the range of our sympathies even by the
earnestness and genius of an adventurous and devout painter of our own
day, while the lamb has been the favourite subject of Christian art in
all ages? Surely these questions require to be considered. The
Passover, I admit, does not suggest the thought of a sin-bearer. That
thought is suggested to the conscience by the sense of sin, or rather
is that sense. But did not the Passover suggest to those who had that
thought deeply fixed in their own minds and consciences, the sense of
a deliverer? May not John have felt--may not all Christendom have
felt--that the sin-bearer must, as I have expressed it in this
Discourse, go into the presence of God to deliver us from our burden
and bondage, not into a land uninhabited?
The intolerable burden which Luther had felt on his conscience leads
him to speak of this verse with intense delight and satisfaction. (See
Werke, b. vii. p. 1637, u. s. w. Walch.) Starting from his inward
experience, he takes it for granted that Isaiah's words were the
exposition to the Jew of the inadequacy of the legal lamb offered day
by day, or at the annual feast, to take away sin. St. John's words,
_in that sense_, become, for him, the interpretation of Isaiah's
words, 'Surely the Lamb that was dumb before his shearers hath carried
our sins.' '_Behold that Lamb of God!_' But it never occurs to him
that the Jew could have separated the lamb at the feast from the
consciousness of evil, or that it could have suggested any thoughts
which did not point to a deliverer from the evil. On many subjects
older writers or modern writers may see further than he does; on
_this_ no one, I think, is so entitled to bear witness.
DISCOURSE V.
_Note 1._
Those who maintain that it is dangerous to attempt any revision of our
present translation of the Scriptures are fond of two arguments
especially. One is, that the language which would be substituted, in
almost every case, for that of the divines in King James's reign would
be less simple and popular than theirs; the other is, that no vital or
fundamental doctrine of our faith is affected by any errors or
inadvertencies into which they may have fallen.
These arguments have been illustrated by a large amount of eulogistic
and vituperative rhetoric; but plain readers would rather that they
were brought to some practical test. Here is one. I have urged that we
should put _Signs_ in nearly all those verses of St. John in which we
now find '_Miracles_.' Is this change likely to affect the simplicity
of our version, to make its 'language not understanded by the people?'
Is 'miracle' one of their ordinary, homely, Saxon expressions? Would
it be exceedingly difficult for a preacher to make his humble
parishioners understand the use and purpose of 'Signs?'
But there is the _cui bono_ objection:--'You unsettle a mode of speech
to which we are accustomed. To what end? Is there anything "vital" in
the difference?' Vital means, I suppose, if it is rendered into our
vernacular speech, that which affects life--the life of individuals or
of societies. I venture to think that this change is important to the
life of both. The habit of looking for wonderments, as the decisive
and overpowering witnesses of Christ, has, it seems to me, been most
mischievous to the life of the Church, is affecting the life of each
one of us. Those who wish to think and speak of Him as not only born
at a certain time into the world, but as living before the world, and
as the founder of it, find themselves perpetually embarrassed by the
notion which has worked itself into the minds of our people and of
ourselves, that He established His claim to be an extraordinary person
by doing extraordinary acts in the towns of Galilee and the city of
Jerusalem, instead of showing by signs what He is and always has been.
The Catholic doctrine is more undermined than we are at all aware by
the feeling which this deviation from the original has sanctioned and
promoted. We assume Christ's simple humanity as the ground of our
thoughts, and then add on to it an indefinite notion of divinity. The
truth which was so dear to the earnest Evangelical teachers of the
last century, that Christ is to be proclaimed as the Emmanuel, 'God
with us,' that the whole Gospel is concerning a living Christ, suffers
scarcely less from the same cause. And how much the whole argument of
Protestants with Romanists about _their_ miracles is weakened, and its
practical effect destroyed, by the use of an expression which (such is
the curious Nemesis upon those who, for any cause whatever, trifle
with language) we have derived, not from the Vulgate, but from
Theodore Beza, I fancy some of our professional anti-Romanist orators
might discover, if they spent some of the time in studying the
controversy and the history of the Church which they spend in
constructing denunciations against the superstitions and apostasy of
their opponents.
I offer these as proofs that in one instance, at all events, 'vital'
benefits may be gained by an earnest and sober consideration of our
existing translation, and that even deadly mischiefs may be averted by
it. And I am inclined to think that it is a fair instance. Among those
divines who are most earnest for a revision, and would be most
competent to take part in it, there is not one, so far as I am aware,
who would not watch with the greatest jealousy over the Saxon
character of our version, who would wish to substitute for a single
venerable phrase a nineteenth century equivalent, who would not
sacrifice anything excepting truth to the preservation of that which
is popular and human, who would not expect, as the reward of a
steadfast adherence to truth, that the book would become more a book
for the English people, and less a book for the schools. And I am
satisfied that these honest and learned men may look for
another--even, if possible, a higher--reward for their serious
devotion to the book which they love and reverence most. Many
delusions like that of which I have spoken are perpetuated, I am
persuaded, through phrases which crept into our version from
carelessness,--which have been repeated and turned into arguments by
pulpit rhetoricians,--which often lead honest Englishmen to doubt the
truth of the Bible. They will be, in the best sense, defenders of the
faith if they rescue the words which the Psalmist speaks of as
purified seven times in the fire from any earthly dross, and if they
spoil the trade of those who wish it to be mingled with the genuine
ore.
I will add one word in conclusion. Much is said in our day about
verbal inspiration. Some accuse their brethren of superstition for
maintaining it; some accuse their brethren of infidelity for not
maintaining it. I suspect that a common name may cover the most
opposite feelings and convictions. A believer in verbal inspiration,
like Mr. Tregelles--who lives laborious days that he may discover the
purest text, so that none of the inspired words may fall to the ground
or be perverted--is one of the noblest witnesses for truth I can
conceive of. May God give us more and more of such men, and hearts to
honour them for their works' sake! On the other hand, those who say
they believe in verbal inspiration, whenever they wish to direct the
wrath of their disciples or of a religious mob against men that are
more righteous than themselves, and who then show that they are afraid
of trying God's words, and freeing them from insincere mixtures, lest
the minds of the people should be disturbed, are not exactly those
whom one can think of as '_Israelites indeed, in whom is no guile_.'
_Note 2._
My attention has been called by a friend to a very interesting
interpretation of the dialogue between Jesus and the Virgin, which is
given by Gregory of Nyssa, Tom. ii. p. 9, B. c. He makes, it will be
seen, the words of our Lord interrogative: 'Is not my hour yet
come?'--
Τὴν γὰρ μητρῴαν συμβουλὴν, ὡς οὐκέτι
κατὰ καιρὸν αὐτῷ προσαγομένην
ἀπεποιήσατο, εἰπών· τί ἐμοὶ καί σοι
γύναι; μὴ καί ταύτης μου τῆς
ἡλικίας ἑπιστατεῖν ἑθέλεις; οὔπω ἕκει
μου ἡ ὥρα ἡ τὸ αὑτοκρατὲς περιεχομένη
τῇ ἡλικίᾳ καὶ αὐτεξούσιον;
DISCOURSE XII.
I have spoken in this _Sermon_ on two subjects, of which I have spoken
at some length in my Theological Essays; the 'Resurrection' and the
'Judgment.' I am not the least anxious to correct any impressions
which my remarks in that book may have made on the minds of religious
critics. If they have misunderstood me, nothing which I could say
would make me intelligible to them. If they have misinterpreted me
without misunderstanding me, I am not the sufferer. But I shall be
very glad if what I have said here should remove any difficulty from
the minds of earnest and thoughtful men, some of whom have written
their complaints to me in a most kind and friendly spirit, evidently
regarding me as a fellow-inquirer after truth, and wishing that we
should help each other in the pursuit of it.
I think they will perceive, from what I have said on the
words--'_Those that are in their graves shall hear the voice of the
Son of God, and they that hear shall live_,'--that I am not less
zealous than they are to assert the absolute identity of the body of
humiliation with the body of glory. That truth cannot be asserted in
stronger language than it is asserted by St. Paul in the 15th chapter
of the 1st Corinthians, and by our own Burial Service. God forbid
that any one should make it weaker! What I affirm is, that we do not
gain the least strength for this conviction by setting aside St.
Paul's assertion, that corruption shall not inherit incorruption; and
that the Burial Service nowhere gives the slightest hint that what is
committed as earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, shall be
reunited to constitute that body which we have a sure and certain hope
will be raised, and will be made like unto Christ's glorious body.
This attempt to identify the corruption of the body with the body, the
effects of death with the substance which death is unable to destroy,
I know has the sanction of great and venerable names. Transubstantiation
and Consubstantiation have also the sanction of names which are most
dear to the Church. But if Bonaventura and Thomas à Kempis cannot bind
us to the one, or Luther to the other; if we have a right to feel that
we partake with them of the sacrament of Christ's risen and glorified
body most completely when we forget the theories by which here on
earth they limited it; we are surely not bound by the rhetoric of
Donne or of Jeremy Taylor, however much we may reverence them both, to
adopt what seems to us merely an earthly and sensual explanation of a
glorious reality, directly interfering with the scriptural account of
it, and with many of the most practical and consolatory truths which
flow from it. I do not wish to get rid of any passage in the New
Testament upon the subject, or to give it a forced construction. I do
wish that we may look straight at all the passages in it, and not
allow a conception which we have formed,--a very natural, but it seems
to me a very low and grovelling conception,--to interfere with the
full understanding and reception of them. I would not wish a better
argument against the popular theory than the eloquent sermon of Donne
in the support and elucidation of it. Let any one see how utterly
unrestrained the fancy of a devout and excellent man becomes when it
enters into this speculation, how entirely it loses sight of all
scriptural guidance, how it revels amongst the images of the
charnel-house. And then let any one ask himself whether this is the
doctrine of that divine passage in St. Paul, which reaches indeed from
earth to heaven, which is not afraid of the lowest objects when it is
in contact with the highest; yet in which all is clear and awful, as
if he knew that he was speaking of death and life, of God and man, and
as if the Spirit who was guiding him abhorred all conceits and
trifling. Only imagine Donne's Sermon substituted for the 15th of
Corinthians, when we meet in the church around the coffin of a friend!
It is a very simple test; but I think any one who applies it fairly
will know what is the worth of the additions which the fancy, even if
it is not ordinarily a vulgar fancy, makes to the divine testimony.
Precisely on the same ground do I protest against the exercises of
this same fancy respecting what is called, by a phrase which I have
not met with anywhere in Scripture, the intermediate state of
disembodied spirits. I am told by a gentleman, who seems to know, that
they are placed in the moon, or in one of the fixed stars. Any one who
can find consolation in such an opinion, I should be very sorry to
deprive of it. But I must say plainly, that we are in a world of life
and death; and that if we have nothing better than these dreams to
sustain each other with, we had better hold our peace. In the words of
our Lord in the 5th chapter of St. John, in the comment upon these
words at the tomb of Lazarus, I find what I want, and what I believe
every one wants, and more than we shall ever get to the bottom of, if
we meditate upon them from this day till the consummation of all
things. While I have them I will not, for my part, build up a world of
fantasies which, seeing that it has no foundation in the nature of
things or in the word of God, any physical discovery, any application
of ordinary logic, may throw down in a moment. _Da nuces puero._ The
boyhood of the Church, as of individuals, may have innocently occupied
itself in cracking nuts, and eating the poor kernel in the inside.
_Our_ faith perishes in such experiments. Let us put away childish
things, and try that we may know those blessed things which are freely
given us of God.