The Message of Christianity.
Now what is this message of the modern prophet but pure
Christianity?--not the mass of theological doctrine ingeniously piled up
by Justin Martyr and Tertullian and Clement and Athanasius and
Augustine, but the real and essential Christianity which came, fraught
with good tidings to men, from the very lips of Jesus and Paul! When did
St. Paul's conception of the two men within him that warred against each
other, the appetites of our brute nature and the God-given yearning for
a higher life,--when did this grand conception ever have so much
significance as now? When have we ever before held such a clew to the
meaning of Christ in the Sermon on the Mount? "Blessed are the meek, for
they shall inherit the earth." In the cruel strife of centuries has it
not often seemed as if the earth were to be rather the prize of the
hardest heart and the strongest fist? To many men these words of Christ
have been as foolishness and as a stumbling-block, and the ethics of the
Sermon on the Mount have been openly derided as too good for this world.
In that wonderful picture of modern life which is the greatest work of
one of the great seers of our time, Victor Hugo gives a concrete
illustration of the working of Christ's methods. In the saintlike career
of Bishop Myriel, and in the transformation which his example works in
the character of the hardened outlaw Jean Valjean, we have a most
powerful commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. By some critics who
could express their views freely about "Les Misérables" while hesitating
to impugn directly the authority of the New Testament, Monseigneur
Bienvenu was unsparingly ridiculed as a man of impossible goodness, and
as a milksop and fool withal. But I think Victor Hugo understood the
capabilities of human nature, and its real dignity, much better than
these scoffers. In a low stage of civilization Monseigneur Bienvenu
would have had small chance of reaching middle life. Christ himself, we
remember, was crucified between two thieves. It is none the less true
that when once the degree of civilization is such as to allow this
highest type of character, distinguished by its meekness and kindness,
to take root and thrive, its methods are incomparable in their potency.
The Master knew full well that the time was not yet ripe,--that he
brought not peace, but a sword. But he preached nevertheless that gospel
of great joy which is by and by to be realized by toiling Humanity, and
he announced ethical principles fit for the time that is coming. The
great originality of his teaching, and the feature that has chiefly
given it power in the world, lay in the distinctness with which he
conceived a state of society from which every vestige of strife, and the
modes of behaviour adapted to ages of strife, shall be utterly and
forever swept away. Through misery that has seemed unendurable and
turmoil that has seemed endless, men have thought on that gracious life
and its sublime ideal, and have taken comfort in the sweetly solemn
message of peace on earth and good will to men.
I believe that the promise with which I started has now been amply
redeemed. I believe it has been fully shown that so far from degrading
Humanity, or putting it on a level with the animal world in general, the
doctrine of evolution shows us distinctly for the first time how the
creation and the perfecting of Man is the goal toward which Nature's
work has been tending from the first. We can now see clearly that our
new knowledge enlarges tenfold the significance of human life, and makes
it seem more than ever the chief object of Divine care, the consummate
fruition of that creative energy which is manifested throughout the
knowable universe.