+I. Sensibility.+ This is a word to be preferred to sensitiveness,
for it includes sensitiveness; it has the passive quality of
sensitiveness with activity of soul in addition exercised upon the
impressions received. The more perfect the manhood, the more perfect
is this sensibility. The total absence of it is the essence of
vulgarity. The presence of it in its several degrees endows its
possessor, according to the proportion of it, with what Chaucer meant
by "gentilness." 1. It does not seem wrong to say that there was in
Christ the _sensibility to natural beauty._ He also, like us, wished
and sought that Nature should send "its own deep quiet to restore His
heart." We find His common teaching employed about the vineyard and
the wandering sheep, the whitening corn and the living well, the
summer rain and the wintry flood and storm. 2. Still higher in Him
was an intense _sensibility to human feeling._ He saw Nathaniel
coming to Him, and in a moment frankly granted the meed of praise
(John i. 47); when the malefactor on the cross appealed to Him,
Christ saw at once that the fountain of a noble life had begun to
flow (Luke xxiii. 43). It was the same with bodies of men as with
men; He wove into one instrument of work the various characters of
the Apostles; day by day He held together vast multitudes by feeling
their hearts within His own; He shamed and confuted His enemies by an
instinct of their objections and their whispers; men, women, and
children ran to Him, as a child to its mother.
_How did the sensibility of Christ become active?_--1. _As sympathy
with Nature._ There are many who never employ either intellect or
imagination on the impressions which they receive. Remaining passive,
they only permit the tide of the world's beauty to flow in and out of
their mind; they do nothing with it. In Wordsworth, each feeling took
form as a poem. As Christ walked silently along, He lifted up His
eyes and saw the fields whitening already to harvest; and immediately
He seized on the impression and expressed it in words. It marks a
beautiful character to be so rapidly and delicately impressed; but
the beauty becomes vital beauty when, through sympathy with and love
of what is felt, one becomes himself creative of new thought.
Sometimes such sympathy is shown _through the imagination,_ as when
Christ, seeing the cornfield by the shore of the lake while He was
teaching, looked on the whole career of the field, and combined
impressions taken up by the imagination into the Parable of the
Sower. Sensibility becoming sympathy is _discriminating._ Praise
without distinctiveness is wearisome. We find perfect discrimination
in the illustrations Christ drew from Nature. How exquisite the
passage beginning, "Consider the lilies!" This distinctiveness
appears still more in the choice of places for certain moods of
mind,--the temptation in the wilderness, the hill-side for prayer. In
all this, Christ recognises natural religion as His own, and bids us
believe in its beauty, and add it to the spiritual. 2. _As sympathy
with human feeling._ Examples on this are numerous. His tenderness
stayed Him on the wayside to satisfy the mother's heart and bless the
children; touched by the widow's weeping, He gave her back her son.
"Jesus wept" even at the moment when He was about to give back the
lost, because those He loved were weeping. How discriminating the
sympathy which gave to Martha and Mary their several meed of praise!
How unspeakably beautiful the words, "Woman, behold thy son!" Friend,
"behold thy mother!"
This, then, is loveliness of character.
Remember, we have no right to boast of our sensibility to the
feelings of others; nay, it is hateful in us till we lift it into the
beauty of sympathising action. Remember, too, its wise
discrimination. Christ, while feeling with all the world, sanctified
distinctiveness in friendship and love.
+II. Simplicity.+ Milton tells us that poetry must be "simple." The
beautiful character must also possess this quality. But by simplicity
is not meant here the simplicity of Christ's teaching. What is meant
is the quality in His character which corresponds to that which we
call simplicity in poetry; and that which is simplicity in art is
_purity_ in a perfect character. The beauty of Christ's purity was
first in this, that those who saw it saw in it the glory of moral
victory. His purity was not the beauty of innocence in a child; it
was purity which had been subject to the storm, which had known evil
and overcome it. And from this purity, so tried and victorious, arose
two other elements of moral beauty--_perfect justice_ and _perfect
mercy._ Innocence cannot be just, nor is the untempted saint fit to
judge; but Christ is able to be just and yet merciful, because He is
entirely pure.
+III. Passion,+ defined as the power of intense feeling capable of
perfect expression. Milton tells us that poetry must be "passionate."
We may transfer it directly to character as an element of beauty. It
was intense feeling of the weakness and sin of man, and intense joy
in His Father's power to redeem, that produced the story of the
"Prodigal Son." "Come unto Me, all ye who are weary and heavy laden;
and I will give you rest." How that goes home! How deep the passion
which generalised that want into a single sentence! It is a beauty of
character, whether seen in words or action, which passes into and
assumes the diadem of sublimity. Christ's words to the Pharisees have
all the marks of indignation and none of the marks of anger. Passion
and energy limited by temperance imply _repose of character._
Activity in repose, calm in the heart of passion, these things are of
the essence of beauty. And in Him in whom we have found the King in
His beauty, this peacefulness was profound. This is the final touch
of beauty, which gathers into itself and harmonises all the others,
and hence no words are so beautiful as those in which Christ bestows
it as His dying legacy on men, "Peace I leave with you," and repeats
it as His resurrection gift, "Peace be unto you." All moral and
spiritual loveliness lies in knowing what He meant when He said,
"Come unto Me . . . and I will give you rest."--_Rev. Stopford A.
Brooks, M.A.: Christ in Modern Life_ (_Three Sermons,_ pp. 89-131).