The second period of our Lord’s ministry is one, in the main, of
joyful progress and triumph, in which the test of true manliness must
be more subtle than when the surroundings are hostile. It consists,
I think, at such times, in the careful watchfulness not to give wrong
impressions, not to mislead those who are touched by enthusiasm,
conscious of new life, grateful to him who has kindled that life in
them.
It is then that the temptation to be all things to all men in a wrong
sense—to adapt and accommodate teaching and life to a lower standard
in order to maintain a hold upon the masses of average men and women
who have been moved by the words of lips touched by fire from the
altar of God—has generally proved too much for the best and strongest
of the world’s great reformers. It is scarcely necessary to elaborate
this point, which would, I think, be sorrowfully admitted by those who
have studied most lovingly and carefully the lives of such men, for
instance, as Savonarola or Wesley. If you will refer to a valuable work
on the life of a greater than either of these, Mr. Bosworth Smith’s
“Mohammed and Mohammedanism,” you will find there perhaps the best
illustration which I can give you of this sad experience.
When Mohammed returns from Medina, sweeping at last all enemies out of
his path, as the prophet of a new faith, and the leader of an awakened
and repentant people, his biographer pauses to notice the lowering of
the standard, both in his life and teaching. Power, he pleads, brings
with it new temptations and new failures. The more thoroughly a man
is carried away by his inspiration, and convinced of the truth and
goodness of his cause and his message, the more likely is he to forget
the means in the end, and to allow the end to justify whatever means
seem to lead to its triumph. He must maintain as he can, and by any
means, his power over the motley mass of followers that his mission
has gathered round him, and will be apt to aim rather at what will
hold them than at what will satisfy the highest promptings of his own
conscience.
We may allow the plea in such cases, though with sorrow and
humiliation. But the more minutely we examine the life of Christ the
more we shall feel that here there is no place for it. We shall be
impressed with the entire absence of any such bending to expediency, or
forgetting the means in the end. He never for one moment accommodates
his life or teaching to any standard but the highest: never lowers
or relaxes that standard by a shade or a hair’s-breadth, to make the
road easy to rich or powerful questioners, or to uphold the spirit of
his poorer followers when they are startled and uneasy, as they begin
half-blindly to recognize what spirit they are of. This unbending
truthfulness is, then, what we have chiefly to look for in this period
of triumphant progress and success, questioning each act and word in
turn whether there is any swerving in it from the highest ideal.