Occasional Papers Part 6

It appears throughout the Sermon on the Mount that there was a cla.s.s of persons whom Christ regarded with peculiar aversion--the persons who call themselves one thing and are another. He describes them by a word which originally meant an "actor."

Probably it may in Christ's time have already become current in the sense which we give to the word "hypocrite." But no doubt whenever it was used the original sense of the word was distinctly remembered. And in this Sermon, whenever Christ denounces any vice, it is with the words "Be not you like the actors." In common with all great reformers, Christ felt that honesty in word and deed was the fundamental virtue; dishonesty, including affectation, self-consciousness, love of stage effect, the one incurable vice. Our thoughts, words, and deeds are to be of a piece. For example, if we would pray to G.o.d, let us go into some inner room where none but G.o.d shall see us; to pray at the corner of the streets, where the pa.s.sing crowd may admire our devotion, is to _act_ a prayer. If we would keep down the rebellious flesh by fasting, this concerns ourselves only; it is acting to parade before the world our self-mortification. And if we would put down sin let us put it down in ourselves first; it is only the actor who begins by frowning at it in others. But there are subtler forms of hypocrisy, which Christ does not denounce, probably because they have sprung since out of the corruption of a subtler creed. The hypocrite of that age wanted simply money or credit with the people. His ends were those of the vulgar, though his means were different Christ endeavoured to cure both alike of their vulgarity by telling them of other riches and another happiness laid up in heaven. Some, of course, would neither understand nor regard his words, others would understand and receive them. But a third cla.s.s would receive them without understanding them, and instead of being cured of their avarice and sensuality, would simply transfer them to new objects of desire. Shrewd enough to discern Christ's greatness, instinctively believing what he said to be true, they would set out with a triumphant eagerness in pursuit of the heavenly riches, and laugh at the short-sighted and weak-minded speculator who contented himself with the easy but insignificant profits of a worldly life.

They would practise a.s.siduously the rules by which Christ said heaven was to be won. They would patiently turn the left cheek, indefatigibly walk the two miles, they would bless with effusion those who cursed them, and pray fluently for those who used them spitefully. To love their enemies, to love any one, they would certainly find impossible, but the outward signs of love might easily be learnt. And thus there would arise a new cla.s.s of actors, not like those whom Christ denounced, exhibiting before an earthly audience and receiving their pay from human managers, but hoping to be paid for their performance out of the incorruptible treasures, and to impose by their dramatic talent upon their Father in heaven.

We have said that one peculiarity of this work is the connection which is kept in view from the first between the Founder and His work; between Christ and the Christian Church. He finds it impossible to speak of Him without that still existing witness of His having come, which is only less wonderful and unique than Himself. This is where, for the present, he leaves the subject:--

For the New Jerusalem, as we witness it, is no more exempt from corruption than was the Old.... First the rottenness of dying superst.i.tions, their barbaric manners, their intellectualism preferring system and debate to brotherhood, strangling Christianity with theories and framing out of it a charlatan's philosophy which madly tries to stop the progress of science--all these corruptions have in the successive ages of its long life infected the Church, and many new and monstrous perversions of individual character have disgraced it. The creed which makes human nature richer and larger makes men at the same time capable of profounder sins; admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without a struggle to the coa.r.s.est; hypocrisy has become tenfold more ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human nature has inevitably developed downwards as well as upwards, and if the Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism, they are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make it a question whether mankind has gained on the whole....

But the triumph of the Christian Church is that it is _there_--that the most daring of all speculative dreams, instead of being found impracticable, has been carried into effect, and when carried into effect, instead of being confined to a few select spirits, has spread itself over a vast s.p.a.ce of the earth's surface, and when thus diffused, instead of giving place after an age or two to something more adapted to a later time, has endured for two thousand years, and at the end of two thousand years, instead of lingering as a mere wreck spared by the tolerance of the lovers of the past, still displays vigour and a capacity of adjusting itself to new conditions, and lastly, in all the transformations it undergoes, remains visibly the same thing and inspired by its Founder's universal and unquenchable spirit.

It is in this and not in any freedom from abuses that the divine power of Christianity appears. Again, it is in this, and not in any completeness or all-sufficiency....

But the achievement of Christ in founding by his single will and power a structure so durable and so universal, is like no other achievement which history records. The masterpieces of the men of action are coa.r.s.e and common in comparison with it, and the masterpieces of speculation flimsy and insubstantial. When we speak of it the commonplaces of admiration fail us altogether.

Shall we speak of the originality of the design, of the skill displayed in the execution? All such terms are inadequate.

Originality and contriving skill operated indeed, but, as it were, implicitly. The creative effort which produced that against which, it is said, the gates of h.e.l.l shall not prevail, cannot be a.n.a.lysed. No architects' designs were furnished for the New Jerusalem, no committee drew up rules for the Universal Commonwealth. If in the works of Nature we can trace the indications of calculation, of a struggle with difficulties, of precaution, of ingenuity, then in Christ's work it may be that the same indications occur. But these inferior and secondary powers were not consciously exercised; they were implicitly present in the manifold yet single creative act. The inconceivable work was done in calmness; before the eyes of men it was noiselessly accomplished, attracting little attention. Who can describe that which unites men? Who has entered into the formation of speech which is the symbol of their union? Who can describe exhaustively the origin of civil society? He who can do these things can explain the origin of the Christian Church. For others it must be enough to say, "the Holy Ghost fell on those that believed." No man saw the building of the New Jerusalem, the workmen crowded together, the unfinished walls and unpaved streets; no man heard the c.h.i.n.k of trowel and pickaxe; it descended _out of heaven from G.o.d_.

And here we leave this remarkable book. It seems to us one of those which permanently influence opinion, not so much by argument as such, as by opening larger views of the familiar and the long-debated, by deepening the ordinary channels of feeling, and by bringing men back to seriousness and rekindling their admiration, their awe, their love, about what they know best. We have not dwelt on minute criticisms about points to which exception might be taken. We have not noticed even positions on which, without further explanation, we should more or less widely disagree. The general scope of it, and the seriousness as well as the grandeur and power with which the main idea is worked out, seem to make mere secondary objections intolerable. It is a fragment, with the disadvantages of a fragment. What is put before us is far from complete, and it needs to be completed. In part at least an answer has been given to the question _what_ Christ was; but the question remains, not less important, and of which the answer is only here foreshadowed, _who_ He was. But so far as it goes, what it does is this: in the face of all attempts to turn Christianity into a sentiment or a philosophy, it a.s.serts, in a most remarkable manner, a historical religion and a historical Church; but it also seeks, in a manner equally remarkable, to raise and elevate the thoughts of all, on all sides, about Christ, as He showed Himself in the world, and about what Christianity was meant to be; to touch new springs of feeling; to carry back the Church to its "hidden fountains," and pierce through the veils which hide from us the reality of the wonders in which it began.

The book is indeed a protest against the stiffness of all cast-iron systems, and a warning against trusting in what is worn out. But it shows how the modern world, so complex, so refined, so wonderful, is, in all that it accounts good, but a reflection of what is described in the Gospels, and its civilisation, but an application of the laws of Christ, changing, it may be, indefinitely in outward form, but depending on their spirit as its ever-living spring. If we have misunderstood this book, and its cautious understatements are not understatements at all, but represent the limits beyond which the writer does not go, we can only say again it is one-of the strangest among books. If we have not misunderstood him, we have before us a writer who has a right to claim deference from those who think deepest and know most, when he pleads before them that not Philosophy can save and reclaim the world, but Faith in a Divine Person who is worthy of it, allegiance to a Divine Society which He founded, and union of hearts in the object for which He created it.

X

THE AUTHOR OF "ROBERT ELSMERE" ON A NEW REFORMATION[12]

[12]

_Guardian_, 6th March 1889.

Mrs. Ward, in the _Nineteenth Century_, develops with warmth and force the theme and serious purpose of _Robert Elsmere_; and she does so, using the same literary method which she used, certainly with effect, in the story itself. Every age has its congenial fas.h.i.+on of discussing the great questions which affect, or seem to affect, the fate of mankind. According to the time and its circ.u.mstances, it is a _Summa Theologiae_, or a _Divina Commedia_, or a _Novum Organum_, or a Calvin's _Inst.i.tutes_, or a Locke _On the Understanding_, or an _Encyclopedia_, or a _Candide_, which sets people thinking more than usual and comparing their thoughts. Long ago in the history of human questioning, Plato and Cicero discovered the advantages over dry argument of character and easy debate, and so much of story as clothed abstractions and hard notions with human life and affections. It is a weighty precedent. And as the prophetess of a "New Reformation" Mrs.

Ward has reverted to what is substantially the same method. She is within her right. We do not blame her for putting her argument into the shape of a novel, and bringing out the points of her case in the trials and pa.s.sionate utterances of imaginary persons, or in a conversation about their mental history. But she must take the good with the bad.

Such a method has its obvious advantages, in freedom, and convenience, and range of ill.u.s.tration. It has its disadvantages. The dealer in imagination may easily become the unconscious slave of imagination; and, living in a self-constructed world, may come to forget that there is any other; and the temptation to unfairness becomes enormous when all who speak, on one side or the other, only speak as you make or let them speak.

It is to imagination that _Robert Elsmere_ makes its main appeal, undoubtedly a powerful and pathetic one. It bids us ask ourselves what, with the phenomena before us, we can conceive possible and real. It implies, of course, much learning, with claims of victory in the spheres of history and science, with names great in criticism, of whom few readers probably can estimate the value, though all may be affected by the formidable array. But it is not in these things, as with a book like _Supernatural Religion_, that the gist of the argument lies. The alleged results of criticism are taken for granted; whether rightly or wrongly the great majority of readers certainly cannot tell. But then the effect of the book, or the view which it represents, begins.

Imagine a man, pure-minded, earnest, sensitive, self-devoted, plunged into the tremendous questions of our time. Bit by bit he finds what he thought to be the truth of truths breaking away. In the darkness and silence with which nature covers all beyond the world of experience he thought he had found light and certainty from on high. He thought that he had a.s.surances and pledges which could not fail him, that G.o.d was in the world, governed it, loved it, showed Himself in it He thought he had a great and authentic story to fall back upon, and a Sacred Book, which was its guaranteed witness, and by which G.o.d still spoke to his soul. He thought that, whatever he did not know, he knew this, and this was a hope to live and die in; with all that he saw round him, of pain and sin and misery, here was truth on which he could rest secure, in his fight with evil. Like the rest of us, he knew that terrible, far-reaching, heart-searching questions were abroad; that all that to him was sacred and unapproachable in its sanct.i.ty was not so to all--was not so, perhaps, to men whom he felt to be stronger and more knowing than himself--was not so, perhaps, to some who seemed to him to stand, in character and purpose, at a moral height above him. Still he thought himself in full possession of the truth which G.o.d had given him, till at length, in one way or another, the tide of questioning reached him. Then begins the long agony. He hears that what he never doubted is said to be incredible, and is absolutely given up. He finds himself bin-rounded by hostile powers of thought, by an atmosphere which insensibly but irresistibly governs opinion, by doubt and denial in the air, by keen and relentless intellect, before which he can only he silent; he sees and hears all round the disintegrating process going on in the creeds and inst.i.tutions and intellectual statements of Christianity. He is a.s.sured, and sees some reason to believe it, that the intellect of the day is against him and his faith; and further, that unreality taints everything, belief and reasoning, and profession and conduct Step by step he is forced from one position and another; the process was a similar and a familiar one when the great Roman secession was going on fifty years ago. But now, in Robert Elsmere, comes the upshot. He is not landed, as some logical minds have been, which have gone through the same process, in mere unbelief or indifference. He is too good for that. Something of his old Christianity is too deeply engrained in him. He cannot go back from the moral standard to which it accustomed him. He will serve G.o.d in a Christian spirit and after the example of Christ, though not in what can claim to be called a Christian way. He is the beginner of one more of the numberless attempts to find a new mode of religion, purer than any of the old ones could be--of what Mrs. Ward calls in her new paper "A New Reformation."

In this paper, which is more distinctly a dialogue on the Platonic model, she isolates the main argument on which the story was based, but without any distinct reference to any of the criticisms on her book.

_Robert Elsmere_ rests on the achievements of historic criticism, chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fas.h.i.+oned Christian way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German historical criticism. And the difference between the old and the modern way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between _bad translation_ and _good_; the old way of reading, quoting, and estimating ancient doc.u.ments of all kinds was purblind, lifeless, narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts true life and character and human feeling and motives into the personages who wrote these doc.u.ments, and of whom they speak. These books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and meaning. And where such a change of method and point of view, as regards these doc.u.ments, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them. Revised ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity--"A New Reformation."

Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she likens to the difference between _good translation_ and _bad_, in dealing with the materials of history. Doubtless, in our time, the historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been awakened. In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know, in that parading of the real which we call the realistic. The mode of telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its main features remains, after allowing for the differences in the mode of presenting it. German criticism, to which we are expected to defer, has its mode.

It combines two elements--a diligent, searching, lawyer-like habit of cross-examination, laborious, complete and generally honest, which, when it is not spiteful or insolent, deserves all the praise it receives; but with it a sense of the probable, in dealing with the materials collected, and a straining after attempts to construct theories and to give a vivid reality to facts and relations, which are not always so admirable; which lead, in fact, sometimes to the height of paradox, or show mere incapacity to deal with the truth and depth of life, or make use of a poor and mean standard--_mesquin_ would be the French word--in the interpretation of actions and aims. It has impressed on us the lesson--not to be forgotten when we read Mrs.

Ward's lists of learned names--that weight and not number is the test of good evidence. German learning is decidedly imposing. But after all there are Germans and Germans; and with all that there has been of great in German work there has been also a large proportion of what is bad--conceited, arrogant, shallow, childish. German criticism has been the hunting-ground of an insatiable love of sport--may we not say, without irreverence, the scene of the discovery of a good many mares'

nests? When the question is asked, why all this ma.s.s of criticism has made so little impression on English thought, the answer is, because of its extravagant love of theorising, because of its divergences and variations, because of its negative results. Those who have been so eager to destroy have not been so successful in construction. Clever theories come to nothing; streams which began with much noise at last lose themselves in the sand. Undoubtedly, it presents a very important, and, in many ways, interesting cla.s.s of intellectual phenomena, among the many groups of such inquiries, moral, philosophical, scientific, political, social, of which the world is full, and of which no sober thinker expects to see the end. If this vaunted criticism is still left to scholars, it is because it is still in the stage in which only scholars are competent to examine and judge it; it is not fit to be a factor in the practical thought and life of the ma.s.s of mankind.

Answers, and not merely questions, are what we want, who have to live, and work, and die. Criticism has pulled about the Bible without restraint or scruple. We are all of us steeped in its daring a.s.sumptions and shrewd objections. Have its leaders yet given us an account which it is reasonable to receive, clear, intelligible, self-consistent and consistent with all the facts, of what this mysterious book is?

Meanwhile, in the face of theories and conjectures and negative arguments, there is something in the world which is fact, and hard fact. The Christian Church is the most potent fact in the most important ages of the world's progress. It is an inst.i.tution like the world itself, which has grown up by its own strength and according to its own principle of life, full of good and evil, having as the law of its fate to be knocked about in the stern development of events, exposed, like human society, to all kinds of vicissitudes and alternations, giving occasion to many a scandal, and shaking the faith and loyalty of many a son, showing in ample measure the wear and tear of its existence, battered, injured, sometimes degenerate, sometimes improved, in one way or another, since those dim and long distant days when its course began; but showing in all these ways what a real thing it is, never in the extremity of storms and ruin, never in the deepest degradation of its unfaithfulness, losing hold of its own central unchanging faith, and never in its worst days of decay and corruption losing hold of the power of self-correction and hope of recovery.

_Solvitur ambulando_ is an argument to which Mrs. Ward appeals, in reply to doubts about the solidity of the "New Reformation." It could be urged more modestly if the march of the "New Reformation" had lasted for even half of one of the Christian centuries. The Church is in the world, as the family is in the world, as the State is in the world, as morality is in the world, a fact of the same order and greatness. Like these it has to make its account with the "all-dissolving" a.s.saults of human thought. Like these it has to prove itself by living, and it does do so. In all its infinite influences and ministries, in infinite degrees and variations, it is the public source of light and good and hope. If there are select and aristocratic souls who can do without it, or owe it nothing, the mult.i.tude of us cannot. And the Christian Church is founded on a definite historic fact, that Jesus Christ who was crucified rose from the dead; and, coming from such an author, it comes to us, bringing with it the Bible. The fault of a book like _Robert Elsmere_ is that it is written with a deliberate ignoring that these two points are not merely important, but absolutely fundamental, in the problems with which it deals. With these not faced and settled it is like looking out at a prospect through a window of which all the gla.s.s is ribbed and twisted, distorting everything. It may be that even yet we imperfectly understand our wondrous Bible. It may be that we have yet much to learn about it. It may be that there is much that is very difficult about it. Let us reverently and fearlessly learn all we can about it. Let us take care not to misuse it, as it has been terribly misused. But coming to us from the company and with the sanction of Christ risen, it never can be merely like other books. A so-called Christianity, ignoring or playing with Christ's resurrection, and using the Bible as a sort of Homer, may satisfy a cla.s.s of clever and cultivated persons. It may be to them the parent of high and n.o.ble thoughts, and readily lend itself to the service of mankind. But it is well in so serious a matter not to confuse things. This new religion may borrow from Christianity as it may borrow from Plato, or from Buddhism, or Confucianism, or even Islam. But it is not Christianity.

_Robert Elsmere_ may be true to life, as representing one of those tragedies which happen in critical moments of history. But a Christianity which tells us to think of Christ doing good, but to forget and put out of sight Christ risen from the dead, is not true to life. It is as delusive to the conscience and the soul as it is illogical to reason.

XI

RENAN'S "VIE DE JeSUS"[13]

[13]

_Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_. Livre I.--_Vie de Jesus_.

Par Ernest Renan. _Guardian_, 9th September 1863.

Unbelief is called upon nowadays, as well as belief, to give its account of the origin of that undeniable and most important fact which we call the Christian religion. And if it is true that in some respects the circ.u.mstances under which the controversy is carried on are, as it has been alleged, more than heretofore favourable to unbelief, it is also true that in some other respects the case of unbelief has difficulties which it had not once. It has to accept and admit, if it wishes to gain a favourable hearing from the present generation, the unique and surpa.s.sing moral grandeur, depth, and attractiveness of Christianity. The polemic method which set Christianity in broad contrast with what was supposed to be best and highest in human nature, and therefore found no difficulty in tracing to a bad source what was itself represented to be bad, is not a method suited to the ideas and feelings of our time; and the sneers and sarcasms of the last century, provoked by abuses and inconsistencies which have since received their ample and memorable punishment, cease to produce any effect on readers of the present day, except to call forth a pa.s.sing feeling of repugnance at what is shallow and profane, mixed, it may be, sometimes, with an equally pa.s.sing admiration for what is witty and brilliant.

Even in M. Renan's view, Voltaire has done his work, and is out of date. Those who now attack Christianity have to attack it under the disadvantage of the preliminary admission that its essential and distinguis.h.i.+ng elements are, on the whole, in harmony and not in discordance with the best conceptions of human duty and life, and that its course and progress have been, at any rate, concurrent with all that is best and most hopeful in human history. First allowing that as a fact it contains in it things than which we cannot imagine anything better, and without which we should never have reached to where we are, they then have to dispute its divine claims. No man could write persuasively on religion now, _against_ it any more than _for_ it, who did not show that he was fully penetrated not only with its august and beneficent aspect, but with the essential and everlasting truths which, in however imperfect shapes, or whencesoever derived, are embodied in it and are ministered by it to society.

That Christianity is, as a matter of fact, a successful and a living religion, in a degree absolutely without parallel in any other religion, is the point from which its a.s.sailants have now to start.

They have also to take account of the circ.u.mstance, to the recognition of which the whole course of modern thought and inquiry has brought us, that it has been successful, not by virtue merely of any outward and accidental favouring circ.u.mstances, but of its intrinsic power and of principles which are inseparable from its substance. This being the condition of the question, those who deny its claim to a direct Divine origin have to frame their theory of it so as to account, on principles supposed to be common to it and other religions, not merely for its rise and its conquests, but for those broad and startling differences which separate it, in character and in effects, from all other known religions. They have to show how that which is instinct with never-dying truth sprang out of what was false and mistaken, if not corrupt; how that which alone has revealed G.o.d to man's conscience had no other origin than what in other instances has led men through enthusiasm and imposture to a barren or a mischievous superst.i.tion.

Such an attempt is the work before us--a work destined, probably, both from its ability and power and from its faults, to be for modern France what the work of Strauss was for Germany, the standard expression of an unbelief which shrinks with genuine distaste from the coa.r.s.e and negative irreligion of older infidelity, and which is too refined, too profound and sympathetic in its views of human nature, to be insensible to those numberless points in which as a fact Christianity has given expression to the best and highest thoughts that man can have. Strauss, to account for what we see, imagined an idea, or a set of ideas, gradually worked out into the shape of a history, of which scarcely anything can be taken as real matter of fact, except the bare existence of the person who was clothed in the process of time with the attributes created by the idealising legend. Such a view is too vague and indistinct to satisfy French minds. A theory of this sort, to find general acceptance in France, must start with concrete history, and not be history held in solution in the cloudy shapes of myths which vanish as soon as touched. M. Renan's process is in the main the reverse of Strauss's. He undertakes to extract the real history recorded in the Gospels; and not only so, but to make it even more palpable and interesting, if not more wonderful, than it seems at first sight in the original records, by removing the crust of mistake and exaggeration which has concealed the true character of what the narrative records; by rewriting it according to those canons of what is probable and intelligible in human life and capacity which are recognised in the public whom he addresses.

Two of these canons govern the construction of the book. One of them is the a.s.sumption that in no part of the history of man is the supernatural to be admitted. This, of course, is not peculiar to M.

Renan, though he lays it down with such emphasis in all his works, and is so anxious to bring it into distinct notice on every occasion, that it is manifestly one which he is desirous to impress on all who read him, as one of the ultimate and unquestionable foundations of all historical inquiry. The other canon is one of moral likelihood, and it is, that it is credible and agreeable to what we gather from experience, that the highest moral elevation ever attained by man should have admitted along with it, and for its ends, conscious imposture. On the first of these a.s.sumptions, all that is miraculous in the Gospel narratives is, not argued about, or, except perhaps in one instance--the raising of Lazarus--attempted to be accounted for or explained, but simply left out and ignored. On the second, the fact from which there is no escape--that He whom M. Renan venerates with a sincerity which no one can doubt as the purest and greatest of moral reformers, did claim power from G.o.d to work miracles--is harmonised with the a.s.sumption that the claim could not possibly have been a true one.

M. Renan professes to give an historical account of the way in which the deepest, purest, most enduring religious principles known among men were, not merely found out and announced, but propagated and impressed upon the foremost and most improved portions of mankind, by the power of a single character. It is impossible, without speaking of Jesus of Nazareth as Christians are used to do, to speak of His character and of the results of His appearance in loftier terms than this professed unbeliever in His Divine claims. But when the account is drawn out in detail, of a cause alleged to be sufficient to produce such effects, the apparent inadequacy of it is most startling. When we think of what Christianity is and has done, and that, in M. Renan's view, Christ, the Christ whom he imagines and describes, is all in all to Christianity, and then look to what he conceives to have been the original spring and creative impulse of its achievements, the first feeling is that no s.h.i.+fts that belief has sometimes been driven to, to keep within the range of the probable, are greater than those accepted by unbelief, in its most enlightened and reflecting representations. To suppose such an one as M. Renan paints, changing the whole course of history, overturning and converting the world, and founding the religion which M. Renan thinks the lasting religion of mankind, involves a force upon our imagination and reason to which it is not easy to find a parallel.

His view is that a Galilean peasant, in advance of his neighbours and countrymen only in the purity, force, and singleness of purpose with which he realised the highest moral truths of Jewish religious wisdom, first charming a few simple provincials by the freshness and native beauty of his lessons, was then led on, partly by holy zeal against falsehood and wickedness, partly by enthusiastic delusions as to his own mission and office, to attack the inst.i.tutions of Judaism, and perished in the conflict--and that this was the cause why Christianity and Christendom came to be and exist. This is the explanation which a great critical historian, fully acquainted with the history of other religions, presents, as a satisfactory one, of a phenomenon so astonis.h.i.+ng and unique as that of a religion which has suited itself with undiminished vitality to the changes, moral, social, and political, which have marked the eighteen centuries of European history. There have been other enthusiasts for goodness and truth, more or less like the character which M. Renan draws in his book, but they have never yet founded a universal religion, or one which had the privilege of perpetual youth and unceasing self-renovation. There have been other great and imposing religions, commanding the allegiance for century after century of millions of men; but who will dare a.s.sert that any of these religions, that of Sakya-Mouni, of Mahomet, or that of the Vedas, could possibly be the religion, or satisfy the religious ideas and needs, of the civilised West?

When M. Renan comes to detail he is as strangely insensible to what seem at first sight the simplest demands of probability. As it were by a sort of reaction to the minute realising of particulars which has been in vogue among some Roman Catholic writers, M. Renan realises too--realises with no less force and vividness, and, according to his point of view, with no less affectionate and tender interest. He popularises the Gospels; but not for a religious set of readers--nor, we must add, for readers of thought and sense, whether interested for or against Christianity, but for a public who study life in the subtle and highly wrought novels of modern times. He appeals from what is probable to those representations of human nature which aspire to pa.s.s beyond the conventional and commonplace, and especially he dwells on neglected and unnoticed examples of what is sweet and soft and winning. But it is hard to recognise the picture he has drawn in the materials out of which he has composed it. The world is tolerably familiar with them. If there is a characteristic, consciously or unconsciously acknowledged in the Gospel records, it is that of the gravity, the plain downright seriousness, the laborious earnestness, impressed from first to last on the story. When we turn from these to his pages it is difficult to exaggerate the astounding impression which his epithets and descriptions have on the mind. We are told that there is a broad distinction between the early Galilean days of hope in our Lord's ministry, and the later days of disappointment and conflict; and that if we look, we shall find in Galilee the "_fin et joyeux moraliste_," full of a "_conversation pleine de gaiete et de charme_," of "_douce gaiete et aimables plaisanteries_," with a "_predication suave et douce, toute pleine de la nature et du parfum des champs_," creating out of his originality of mind his "_innocents aphorismes_," and the "_genre d'elicieux_" of parabolic teaching; "_le charmant docteur qui pardonnait a tous pourvu qu'on l'aimat_." He lived in what was then an earthly paradise, in "_la joyeuse Galilee_" in the midst of the "_nature ravissante_" which gave to everything about the Sea of Galilee "_un tour idyllique et charmant_." So the history of Christianity at its birth is a "_delicieuse pastorale_" an "_idylle_," a "_milieu enivrant_" of joy and hope. The master was surrounded by a "_bande de joyeux enfants_," a "_troupe gaie et vagabonde_," whose existence in the open air was a "perpetual enchantment." The disciples were "_ces pet.i.ts comites de bonnes gens_," very simple, very credulous, and like their country full of a "_sentiment gai et tendre de la vie_," and of an "_imagination riante_." Everything is spoken of as "delicious"--"_delicieuse pastorale," "delicieuse beaute," "delicieuses sentences," "delicieuse theologie d'amour_." Among the "tender and delicate souls of the North"--it is not quite thus that Josephus describes the Galileans--was set up an "_aimable communisme_." Is it possible to imagine a more extravagant distortion than the following, both in its general effect and in the audacious generalisation of a very special incident, itself inaccurately conceived of?--

Il parcourait ainsi la Galilee au milieu _d'une fete perpetuelle_.

Il se servait d'une mule, monture en Orient si bonne et si sure, et dont le grand oeil noir, ombrage de longs cils, a beaucoup de douceur. Ses disciples deployarent quelquefois autour de lui une pompe rustique, dont leurs vetements, tenant lieu de tapis, faisaient les frais. Ils les mettaient sur la mule qui le portait, ou les etendaient a terre sur son pa.s.sage.

History has seen strange hypotheses; but of all extravagant notions, that one that the world has been conquered by what was originally an idyllic gipsying party is the most grotesque. That these "_pet.i.ts comites de bonnes gens_" though influenced by a great example and wakened out of their "delicious pastoral" by a heroic death, should have been able to make an impression on Judaean faith, Greek intellect, and Roman civilisation, and to give an impulse to mankind which has lasted to this day, is surely one of the most incredible hypotheses ever accepted, under the desperate necessity of avoiding an unwelcome alternative.

M. Renan is willing to adopt everything in the Gospel history except what is miraculous. If he is difficult to satisfy as to the physical possibility or the proof of miracles, at least he is not hard to satisfy on points of moral likelihood; and he draws on his ample power of supposing the combination of moral opposites in order to get rid of the obstinate and refractory supernatural miracle. To some extent, indeed, he avails himself of that inexhaustible resource of unlimited guessing, by means of which he reverses the whole history, and makes it take a shape which it is hard to recognise in its original records. The feeding of the five thousand, the miracle described by all the four Evangelists, is thus curtly disposed of:--"Il se retira au desert.

Beaucoup de monde l'y suivit. _Grace a une extreme frugalite_ la troupe sainte y vecut; _on crut naturellement_ voir en cela un miracle." This is all he has to say. But miracles are too closely interwoven with the whole texture of the Gospel history to be, as a whole, thus disposed of. He has, of course, to admit that miracles are so mixed up with it that mere exaggeration is not a sufficient account of them. But be bids us remember that the time was one of great credulity, of slackness and incapacity in dealing with matters of evidence, a time when it might be said that there was an innocent disregard of exact and literal truth where men's souls and affections were deeply interested. But, even supposing that this accounted for a belief in certain miracles growing up--which it does not, for the time was not one of mere childlike and uninquiring belief, but was as perfectly familiar as we are with the notion of false claims to miraculous power which could not stand examination--still this does not meet the great difficulty of all, to which he is at last brought. It is undeniable that our Lord professed to work miracles. They were not merely attributed to Him by those who came after Him. If we accept in any degree the Gospel account, He not only wrought miracles, but claimed to do so; and M. Renan admits it--that is, he admits that the highest, purest, most Divine person ever seen on earth (for all this he declares in the most unqualified terms) stooped to the arts of Simon Magus or Apollonius of Tyana. He was a "thaumaturge"--"tard et a contre-coeur"--"avec une sorte de mauvaise humeur"--"en cachette"--"malgre lui"--"sentant le vanite de l'opinion"; but still a "thaumaturge." Moreover, He was so almost of necessity; for M. Renan holds that without the support of an alleged supernatural character and power, His work must have perished.

Everything, to succeed and be realised, must, we are told, be fortified with something of alloy. We are reminded of the "loi fatale qui cond.a.m.ne l'idee a dechoir des qu'elle cherche a convertir les hommes."

"Concevoir de bien, en efifet, ne suffit pas; il faut le faire reussir parmi les hommes. Pour cela, des voies moins pures sont necessaires."

If the Great Teacher had kept to the simplicity of His early lessons, He would have been greater, but "the truth would not have been promulgated." "He had to choose between these two alternatives, either renouncing his mission or becoming a 'thaumaturge.'" The miracles "were a violence done to him by his age, a concession which was wrung from him by a pa.s.sing necessity." And if we feel startled at such a view, we are reminded that we must not measure the sincerity of Orientals by our own rigid and critical idea of veracity; and that "such is the weakness of the human mind, that the best causes are not usually won but by bad reasons," and that the greatest of discoverers and founders have only triumphed over their difficulties "by daily taking account of men's weakness and by not always giving the true reasons of the truth."

L'histoire est impossible si l'on n'admet hautement qu'il y a pour la sincerite plusieurs mesures. Toutes les grandes choses se font par le peuple, or on ne conduit pas le peuple qu'en se pretant a ses idees. Le philosophe, qui sachant cela, s'isole et se retranche dans sa n.o.blesse, est hautement louable. Mais celui qui prend l'humanite avec ses illusions et cherche a agir sur elle et avec elle, ne saurait etre blame. Cesar savait fort bien qu'il n'etait pas fils de Venus; la France ne serait pas ce qu'elle est si l'on n'avait cru mille ans a la sainte ampoule de Reims. Il nous est facile a nous autres, impuissants que nous sommes, d'appeler cela mensonge, et fiers de notre timide honnetete, de traiter avec dedain les heros qui out accepte dans d'autres conditions la lutte de la vie. Quand nous aurons fait avec nos scrupules ce qu'ils firent avec leurs mensonges, nous aurons le droit d'etre pour eux severes.

Now let M. Renan or any one else realise what is involved, on his supposition, not merely, as he says, of "illusion or madness," but of wilful deceit and falsehood, in the history of Lazarus, even according to his lame and hesitating attempt to soften it down and extenuate it; and then put side by side with it the terms in which M. Renan has summed up the moral greatness of Him of whom he writes:--

La foi, l'enthousiasme, la constance de la premiere generation chretienne ne s'expliquent qu'en supposant a l'origine de tout le mouvement un homme de proportions colossales.... Cette sublime personne, qui chaque jour preside encore au destin du monde, il est permis de l'appeler divine, non en ce sens que Jesus ait absorbe tout le divin, mais en ce sens que Jesus est l'individu qui a fait faire a son espece le plus grand pas vers le divin....

Au milieu de cette uniforme vulgarite, des colonnes s'elevent vers le ciel et attestent une plus n.o.ble destinee. Jesus est la plus haute de ces colonnes qui montrent a l'homme d'ou il vient et ou il doit tendre. En lui s'est condense tout ce qu'il y a de bon et d'eleve dans notre nature.... Quels que puissent etre les phenomenes inattendus de l'avenir, Jesus ne sera pas surpa.s.se....

Tous les siecles proclameront qu'entre les fils des hommes il n'en est pas ne de plus grand que Jesus.

And of such an one we are told that it is a natural and reasonable view to take, not merely that He claimed a direct communication with G.o.d, which disordered reason could alone excuse Him for claiming, but that He based His whole mission on a pretension to such supernatural powers as a man could not pretend to without being conscious that they were delusions. The conscience of that age as to veracity or imposture was quite clear on such a point. Jew and Greek and Roman would have condemned as a deceiver one who, not having the power, took on him to say that by the finger of G.o.d he could raise the dead. And yet to a conscience immeasurably above his age, it seems, according to M. Renan, that this might be done. It is absurd to say that we must not judge such a proceeding by the ideas of our more exact and truth-loving age, when it would have been abundantly condemned by the ideas recognised in the religion and civilisation of the first century.