Some Christian Convictions Part 3

These two views came into collision in the struggle for a larger faith which we call the Reformation. Augustine had stated the position which became traditional when he wrote, "I would not believe in the Gospel without the authority of the Church." But Luther insisted on the contrary: "Thou must not place thy decision on the Pope, or any other; thou must thyself be so skilful that thou can'st say, 'G.o.d says this, not that.' Thou must bring conscience into play, that thou may'st boldly and defiantly say, 'That is G.o.d's word; on that will I risk body and life, and a hundred thousand necks if I had them.' Therefore no one shall turn me from the word which G.o.d teaches me, and that must I know as certainly as that two and three make five, that an ell is longer than a half. That is certain, and though all the world speak to the contrary, still I know that it is not otherwise. Who decides me there? No man, but only _the Truth_ which is so perfectly certain that n.o.body can deny it."

And Calvin took the same ground: "As to their question, How are we to know that the Scriptures came from G.o.d, if we cannot refer to the decree of the Church, we might as well ask, How are we to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, bitter from sweet."

The truth of the religious experiences recorded in the Bible is self-evidencing to him who shares these experiences, and to no one else.

The Bible has, in a sense, to create or evoke the capacities by which it is appreciated and verified. It is inspired only to those who are themselves willing to be controlled by similar inspirations; it is the word of G.o.d only to those who have ears for G.o.d's voice. There is a difference between the phrases: "It is certain," and "I am certain." In other matters we appeal to the collective opinion of sane people; but such knowledge does not suffice in religion. Our fellows.h.i.+p with G.o.d must be our own response to our highest inspirations. The Bible is authoritative for us only in so far as we can say: "I have entered into the friends.h.i.+p of the G.o.d, whose earlier friends.h.i.+p with men it records, and know Him, who speaks as personally to my conscience through its pages, as He spake to its writers. The Spirit that ruled them, the Spirit of trust and service, controls me." This is John Calvin's position. "It is acting a preposterous part," he writes in his _Inst.i.tutes_, "to endeavor to produce sound faith in the Scriptures by disputations. Religion appearing to profane men to consist wholly in opinion, in order that they may not believe anything on foolish or slight grounds, they wish and expect it to be proved that Moses and the prophets spake by divine inspiration; but as G.o.d alone is a sufficient witness of Himself in His own word, so also the word will never gain credit in the hearts of men, till it is confirmed by the testimony of the Spirit."

If, then, the authority of the Bible depends upon the witness of the Spirit within our own souls, its authority has definite limits. We can verify spiritually the truth of a religious experience by repeating that experience; but we cannot verify spiritually the correctness of the report of some alleged event, or the accuracy of some opinion. We can bear witness to the truthfulness of the record of the consciousness of shame and separation from G.o.d in the story of the fall of Adam and Eve; we must leave the question of the historicity of the narrative and the scientific view of the origin of the race in a single pair to the investigations of scholars. Our own knowledge of Jesus Christ as a living Factor in our careers confirms the experience His disciples had of His continued intercourse with them subsequent to His crucifixion; but the manner of His resurrection and the mode in which _post mortem_ He communicated with them must be left to the untrammelled study of historical students. The religious message of a miraculous happening, like the story of Jonah or of the raising of Lazarus, we can test and prove: disobedience brings disaster, repentance leads to restoration; faith in Christ gives Him the chance to be to us the resurrection and the life. The reported events must be tested by the judgments of historic probability which are applied to all similar narratives, past or present. The Bible's authority is strictly _religious_; it has to do solely with G.o.d and man's life with man in Him; and, when read in the light of its culmination in Christ, it approves itself to the Spirit of Christ within Christians as a correct record of their experiences of G.o.d, and the mighty inspiration to such experiences. Surely it is no belittling limitation to say of this unique book that it is an authority _only on G.o.d_. Every fundamental question of life is answered, every essential need of the soul is met, when G.o.d is found, and becomes our Life, our Home.

And with such _self-evidencing_ authority in the books of the Bible, it is a question of minor importance who were their authors and when they were written--the questions which the literary historical criticism undertakes to answer. Luther put the matter conclusively when he said in his vigorous fas.h.i.+on: "That which does not teach Christ is not apostolic, though Peter or Paul should have said it; on the contrary that which preaches Christ is apostolic, even if it should come from Judas, Annas, Pilate and Herod." Some persons have been greatly troubled in the last generation by being told that scholars did not consider the conventionally received authors.h.i.+ps of many of the books of the Bible correct, but thought that Moses did not write the Pentateuch, or David the _Psalms_, or Solomon the _Proverbs_ or _Ecclesiastes_, or Isaiah and Jeremiah more than parts of the books that bear their names, or John and Peter all the writings ascribed to them. We are not to judge of writings by their authors, but by their intrinsic value. Suppose Shakespeare did not write more than a fraction of the plays a.s.sociated with his name, or that he wrote none of them at all; the plays themselves remain as valuable as ever; their interpretation of life in its tragedy and humor, its heights and its depths, is as true as it ever was. Whatever views of their composition or authors.h.i.+p may be reached by literary experts, the Scriptures possess exactly the same spiritual power they have always possessed. The Lord has been "our dwelling-place in all generations," whether Moses or some other psalmist penned that line; and Jesus is the bread of life, whether the apostle John or some other disciple whom Jesus loved records that experience. Scholars may make the meaning of the Scriptures much plainer by their searching studies; and they must be encouraged to investigate as minutely and rigorously as they can. To be fearful that the Bible cannot stand the test of the keenest study, is to lack faith in its divine vitality. To found a "Bible Defence League" is as unbelieving as to inaugurate a society for the protection of the sun. Like the sun the Bible defends itself by proving a light to the path of all who walk by it. The only defence it needs is to be used; and the only attack it dreads is to be left unread.

And in speaking of the authority of the Bible we cannot forget that it is not for Christians the supreme authority. "One is your Master, even Christ." We must be cautious in speaking of the Bible, as we commonly do, as "the word of G.o.d." That t.i.tle belongs to Jesus. The Bible contains the word of G.o.d; He is for us _the_ Word of G.o.d. We dare not overlook His untrammelled att.i.tude towards the Scriptures of His people, who let His own spiritual discernment determine whether a Scripture was His Father's living voice to Him, or only something said to men of old time, and given temporarily for the hardness of hearts that could respond to no higher ideal. As His followers, we dare not use less freedom ourselves. We test every Scripture by the Spirit of Christ in us: whatever is to us unchristlike in Joshua or in Paul, in a psalmist or in the seer on Patmos, is not for us the word of our G.o.d: whatever breathes the Spirit of Jesus from _Genesis_ to _Revelation_ is to us our Father's Self-revealing speech.

Nor do we think that G.o.d ceased speaking when the Canon of the Bible was complete. How could He, if He be the living G.o.d? "Truth," said Milton, "is compared in Scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression, they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition." The fountain of G.o.d's Self-revealing still streams. Religious truth comes to us from all quarters--from events of today and contemporaneous prophets, from living epistles at our side and the still small voice within; but as a simple matter of fact, its main flow is still through this book. When we want G.o.d--want Him for our guidance, our encouragement, our correction, our comfort, our inspiration--we find Him in the record of these ancient experiences of His Self-unveiling. When near his death, after years of agony on his bed, when he himself had become a changed man, Heinrich Heine wrote: "I attribute my enlightenment entirely and simply to the reading of a book.

Of a book? Yes! and it is an old homely book, modest as nature--a book which has a look modest as the sun which warms us, as the bread which nourishes us--a book as full of love and blessing as the old mother who reads in it with her trembling lips, and this book is _the_ Book, the Bible. With right is it named the Holy Scriptures. He who has lost his G.o.d can find Him again in this book; and he who has never known Him, is here struck by the breath of the Divine Word."

CHAPTER III

JESUS CHRIST

Three elements enter into every Christian's conception of his Lord--history, experience and reflection. Jesus is to him a figure out of the past, a force in the present, and a fact in his view of the universe. Whether we be discussing the Christ of Paul, or of the Nicene theologians, or of some thoughtful believer today, we must allow for the memory of the Man of Nazareth handed down from those who knew Him in the flesh, the acquaintance with the Lord of life resulting from personal loyalty to His will, and the explanation of this Lord reached by the mind, as, using the intellectual methods of its age, it tries to set His figure in its mental world.

The Jesus of the primitive Church was One whom believers wors.h.i.+pped as the Christ of G.o.d, in whose person and mission they saw the fulfilment of Israel's prophecy and the inauguration of a new religious era. They represent their conception of Him as corresponding to and created by His own consciousness of Himself. He was aware of a unique relations.h.i.+p to G.o.d--He is His Son, _the_ Son. And because of this divine sons.h.i.+p He is the Messiah, commissioned to usher in the Kingdom of G.o.d, and to bring forgiveness and eternal life to men. This He does by becoming their Teacher and their lowly Servant, laying down His life for them in suffering and death, and rising and returning to them as their Lord. He appeals to them for faith in G.o.d, for loyalty to Himself as G.o.d's Servant and Son, and for trust in His divine power to save them.

This conception of Jesus is given us in doc.u.ments which must be investigated and appraised as sources of historical knowledge. The four gospels are our princ.i.p.al informants, and no other writings in existence have been so often and so minutely examined. Among scholars at present it is a common hypothesis that Mark's is the earliest narrative; that this was combined with a _Collection of Sayings_ (compiled, perhaps, by Matthew) and other material in our first gospel, and by another editor (probably Luke) with the same or a similar _Collection of Sayings_ and still other material in our third gospel. Later yet, a fourth evangelist interpreted for the world of his day the Jesus of the first three gospels in the light of his own and the Church's spiritual experience.

The earlier sources, as is usually and naturally the case with literary records of the past, are considered historically more reliable than the later. The words of Jesus in the form in which they are given in the Synoptists are more nearly as Jesus spoke them, than in the form in which they are recorded in _John_. There is a tendency, often found in kindred doc.u.ments, to make events more marvellous as the tradition is handed on. In _Mark_, for instance, the Spirit descends upon Jesus "as a dove," symbolizing the quietness with which the Divine Power possessed Him; in _Luke_, the symbol is materialized, and the Holy Spirit descends "in _bodily form_ as a dove." The writers interpret the narrative for their readers: _Matthew_ takes Jesus' ideal of the indissoluble marriage-tie, as it is given in _Mark_, and allows, in the practical application of the ideal, divorce for adultery; he adds to Jesus' word about telling one's brother his fault "between thee and him alone"

further advice as to what shall be done if the brother be obdurate, ending with "Tell it unto the Church." _John_ subst.i.tutes for the many sayings of Jesus in the earlier gospels, in which He appears to look forward to a speedy and sudden coming of His Kingdom in power, other sayings, in which He promises to come again spiritually and dwell in His followers. On the other hand, in some particulars scholars think that the later writers had more accurate information, and used it to correct misunderstandings conveyed by their predecessors; the length of our Lord's ministry, the procedure followed at the trial, the date of the crucifixion, are by many supposed to be more exactly given in _John_ than in the Synoptists. In general there is no reason for questioning the data in the later sources, save as they seem to come from an interest of the Church of their day, unrelated with the Jesus of the earlier records.

In such doc.u.ments we must expect some events to be supported by more historic proof than others. The evidence for Jesus' resurrection (to take a typical case), is far weightier than that for His birth of a virgin-mother. There is probably no sc.r.a.p of primitive Christian literature which does not a.s.sume the risen Christ; and the origin of the Christian Church, and the character of its message and life, cannot be explained apart from the Easter faith in the Lord's victory over death and presence with His people in power. The virgin-birth rests on but two records (possibly on only one), neither of which belongs to the earlier strata of the tradition, and which are with difficulty reconciled with the more frequently mentioned fact that Jesus is the Son of David (an ancestry traced through Joseph). But in discussing the historicity of the narratives, it is just to the evangelists to recall that their main purpose was not the writing of history as such, but the presentation of material (which undoubtedly they considered trustworthy historically) designed to convey to their readers a correct religious estimate of Jesus Christ. "These are written that ye may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of G.o.d; and that believing ye may have life in His name." They do not often take the trouble to tell us on what evidence they report an event or a saying; they either did not know, or they did not care to preserve, the sequence of events, so that it is impossible to make a harmony of the gospels in which the material is chronologically arranged. But they spare themselves no pains to give _the truth of the religious impression of Jesus_ which they had received.

And when one compares all our doc.u.ments, it is significant that they do not give us discordant estimates of the religious worth of Jesus. The meaning for faith of the Christ of _John_ is not at variance with the meaning for faith of the Christ of _Mark_ or of the Christ of the supposed _Collection of Sayings_. The Church put the four gospels side by side in its Canon, and has continued to use them together for centuries, because it has found in them a religiously harmonious portrait of its Lord. This is also true of the portraits of Jesus to be found in the _Acts_ and the epistles. The Christ of the entire New Testament makes upon us _a consistent religious impression_; and the unity of His significance for faith is all the more noteworthy because of the different forms of thought in which the various writers picture Him. Behind the primitive Church stands an historic Figure who so stamped the impress of His personality upon believing spirits, that, amid puzzling discrepancies of historical detail and much variety of theological interpretation, a single religious image of Him remains. We, whose aim is not primarily to reconstruct the figure of Jesus for purposes of scientific history, but to arrive at an intelligent conviction of His spiritual worth, are entirely satisfied with a portrait which correctly represents the religious impression of the historic Jesus.

Two diametrically opposed cla.s.ses of scholars have denied that in the Christ of the gospels we possess such a trustworthy report. A very few have held that the evangelists do not record an historic life at all, but describe a Saviour-G.o.d who existed in the faith of the Church of the First Century. The allusions, however, in the letters of Paul alone to definite historical a.s.sociations connected with Jesus are sufficient to confute this view. There undoubtedly was a Jesus of Nazareth. Moreover, the divine redeemers of mythology, of whom this theory makes so much, are most unlike the Jesus of the gospels in moral character and religious power; and the old argument is still pertinent that it would have required a Jesus to have imagined the Jesus of the evangelists'

story.

A much larger number of scholars, determined beforehand by their philosophic views to reject all elements in the records which transcend usual human experience, have for several generations sought to reconstruct the figure of Jesus on an entirely naturalistic basis.

Instead of the Jesus of the gospels, they give us, as the actual Man, Jesus the Sage, or the Visionary, or the Prophet, or the Philanthropist, who, they think, was subsequently deified by His followers. Such reconstructions handle the sources arbitrarily, eliminating from even the earliest of them that which clashes with their preconceptions. They fail to do justice to Jesus' consciousness of Himself, of His unique relation to G.o.d, of His all-important mission to men, as the critically investigated doc.u.ments disclose it. Historically, they do not give us a Figure sufficiently significant for faith to account for the Christian Church; scientifically, their portraits do not long prove satisfactory, and are soon discarded on further investigation of the facts; and religiously, they do not appeal to Christian believers as adequate to explain their own life in Christ.

It is not surprising that these attempts have failed. The historic Jesus did not make the same impression upon everybody who met Him; men's judgments of Him varied with their spiritual capacities, and their spiritual capacities affected what He could do for them. There is enough historicity in the narratives to convince sober historians, whatever their faith or unfaith, that Jesus existed as a man among men, and that He was conscious of a relations.h.i.+p to G.o.d and a significance for men which transcend anything in ordinary human experience. It requires something more than sound historic judgment to see in Jesus what He saw in Himself, or what Peter saw in Him when he called Him "the Christ of G.o.d." We can never prove to any man on the basis of historical research alone that the portrait of Jesus in the gospels correctly represents the _religious_ impression of the historic Jesus. When we deal with anything religious, a subjective element enters and determines the conclusion, exactly as the artistic spirit alone can appreciate that which has to do with art. The gospels as appreciations appeal only to the similarly appreciative. We can show that the earliest stratum of the gospel tradition, according to the most rigorous methods of critical a.n.a.lysis, gives us a Jesus who possessed a meaning for His followers akin to the meaning the Jesus of our four gospels possessed for the Church of the First Century, and possesses for the Church of our day.

Only as Jesus comes to have a supreme worth to any man can he believe that the estimate of their Master in the minds of the first disciples can be the accurate impression of a real man.

When, then, we speak of the Christ of history, we mean not the figure of Jesus as reproduced by scientific research apart from Christian faith, but the Christ of the four gospels, whose figure corresponds to the religious impression received from the historic Jesus by His earliest followers. _Lives of Christ_ by historical students have their value when our main aim is historical information; but the best of them is poor indeed compared with our gospels when we wish to attain the life of Christ's followers. The humblest reader of the New Testament has the same chance with the most learned scholar of attaining a true knowledge of Jesus for religious purposes; and Jesus remains, as He would surely wish to remain, a democratic figure accessible to all in the simply told narratives of the evangelists.

Each age seems to have its own way of phrasing its religious needs; and various elements in the picture of Jesus have been prized by the succeeding ages as of special worth. Our generation finds itself religiously most interested in three outstanding features in the record of His life:

(1) _His singular religious experience._ His first followers were impressed with His unique relation to G.o.d when they saw in Him the awaited Messiah. The narratives represent Him as invariably trusting, loving, obeying the Most High as the Father, Lord of heaven and earth.

His sayings lay special stress on G.o.d's tender personal interest in every child of His, on His stern judgment of hypocrites, on His Self-sacrificing love, and on His kindness to the unthankful and the evil. While it is not easy for us with the limited materials at hand to discriminate clearly between the elements in Jesus' thought of G.o.d which He shared with His contemporaries, and those which were His own contribution, so discerning a believer as Paul, reared in the most earnest circles of Jewish thought, could not name the G.o.d to whom he had been brought through Jesus, without mentioning Jesus Himself; G.o.d was to him "the G.o.d and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." The Deity Paul wors.h.i.+pped may be described as that loving Response from the unseen which answered the trust of Jesus; or rather that personal Approach to man from the unseen which produced Jesus. Men who had not been atheists before they became Christians are addressed by another writer as "through Jesus believers in G.o.d." It is not enough to say that in Jesus'

experience G.o.d was Father; others before Him, both within and without Israel, had known the Divine Fatherhood. It was the fatherliness in G.o.d which evoked and corresponded to Jesus' sons.h.i.+p, that formed His new and distinctive contribution. A mutual relations.h.i.+p is expressed in the saying: "No one knoweth the Son, save the Father; neither doth any know the Father, save the Son." Moving familiarly as a man among men, Jesus did not hesitate to offer them forgiveness, health, power, life; and to offer all these as His own possessions through His peculiar touch with the Most High--"All things have been delivered unto Me of My Father." In the words of the late Professor G.W. Knox, "Jesus set forth communion with G.o.d as the most certain fact of man's experience, and in simple reality made it accessible to everyone."

His consciousness of G.o.d was not something wholly new; He was not "a lonely mountain tarn unvisited by any stream," but received into His soul the great river of a nation's spiritual life. He was the heir of the faith of His people, and regarded Himself as completing that which a long line of predecessors had begun. He did not find it necessary to invent new terms to express His thought; but as He pa.s.sed the old words through the alembic of His mind they came out with new meaning. His originality consisted in His discriminating appropriation of His inheritance, and in His using it so that it became alive with new power.

Madame de Stael said that Rousseau "invented nothing, but set everything on fire." Jesus took the religion of Israel, and lived its life with G.o.d, and after Him it possessed a kindling flame it had never shown before. The faith of a small people in a corner of the Roman Empire, with a few thousands of proselytes here and there in the larger towns about the Mediterranean, became in a generation a force which entirely supplanted the Jewish missionary movement and rapidly spread throughout the world.

(2) _A singular character._ More striking than anything Jesus said or did is what He _was_. That which He wors.h.i.+pped in the G.o.d He trusted, He Himself embodied. We can estimate His character best, not by trying to inventory its virtues (for a very similar list might be attributed to others of far less moral power) but by feeling the effect He had on those who knew Him. They are constantly telling us how He amazed them, awed them, and bound them to Himself. Their superlative tribute to Him is that, holding His own pure and exalted view of G.o.d, they felt no incongruity in thinking of Him as beside G.o.d on the throne. It may have been their belief in His Messiahs.h.i.+p, accredited by His resurrection and destining Him to come with power and judge the world, that led them to place Him at the right hand of G.o.d; but there was the place where He seemed to them to belong. None have ever conceived G.o.d more highly than they who said, "G.o.d is love," and these men set Jesus side by side with G.o.d. The evangelists do not attempt to describe what He was like; they let us hear Him and watch Him, as He lived in the memories of those who had been with Him; and He makes His own impression. The crowning tribute is that we have no loftier adjective in our vocabulary than "Christlike."

(3) _A singular victory_--a victory over the world and sin and death.

Jesus believed in and proclaimed a new order of things in the world--the Kingdom of G.o.d--in which His Father's will should be realized. It was an order in which men should live in love with one another and with G.o.d, in which justice, kindness and faithfulness should prevail in all relations.h.i.+ps, and in which all G.o.d's children's needs should be supplied, their maladies healed, their wrongs righted, their lives made full. This Kingdom was already in the earth in Himself and in the new life He succeeded in creating in those who followed Him. It found itself opposed by physical forces that were injurious to humanity; and these He met fearlessly, sleeping in a storm so violent as to terrify His fisherman companions; and, what is more, He commanded these forces for His Father's purpose in a way that amazed His first followers and is still amazing to us. The reports of His mighty works have to be carefully scrutinized by historical scholars, and no doubt the historicity of some of them is much more fully attested than that of others; but when every allowance is made for the ideas of a prescientific age in which miracles were relatively frequent, and for the possible growth of the marvellous elements in the tradition, enough remains to show that here was a Personality whose power cannot be limited by our usual standards of human ability. Judged by past or present conceptions of what is natural, His works were supernatural; He Himself regarded them as the breaking into the world through Him of the new order that was to be. He discouraged men's craving for the physically miraculous, and thought little of the faith in Him produced by its display; but there can be no question of His extraordinary control of physical forces for the aims of His Kingdom. It was, however, in the moral conflict between the Divine Order and things as they were, that He saw the decisive collision, and faced it with heroic faith in His Father's victory. When the dominant authorities in Church and State were about to crush Him, He looked forward undismayed, and in the glowing pictures of fervent Jewish men of hope He imaged the Divine Rule He proclaimed coming in power.

He was to His followers the Conqueror of sin. He went forth to wage war with evil in the world, because He was conscious that He had first bound the strong man, and could spoil his house. In an autobiographical parable He seems to have told them something of His own battle with temptation and of His victory. They found in Him One who both shamed and transformed them; they saw Him forgiving and altering sinners; and, above all, His cross, from the earliest days when they began to ask themselves what it meant, had for them redemptive force.

He was to them the Victor of death. However the historian may deal with the details of the narratives of the appearances of the risen Jesus to His disciples, he cannot fail to recognize the conviction of Jesus'

followers that their Lord had returned to them and was alive with power.

We must remember that it was to faith alone that the risen Jesus showed Himself, and that no one outside the circle of believers (unless we except Saul of Tarsus) saw Him after His death. Historical research, independent of Christian faith, may not be able positively to affirm the correctness of the Easter faith of the disciples, for the data lie, in part at least, outside the range of such research. But the historian must leave the door open for faith; and he may go further and point out that faith's explanation best fits the facts. Present faith finds itself prepared to receive the witness of the men of faith centuries ago. The attempt to banish Jesus from our world signally failed; He was a more living and potent force in it after, than before, His death.

This singular religious experience, character and victory we ascribe to the Jesus of history through the tradition which preserves for us His religious impression upon His immediate followers. There are some who lay little stress upon the events of the past; like Sh.e.l.ley's Skylark, they are "scorners of the ground." Why, they ask, should we care what took place in Palestine centuries ago? The answer is that it is the roots which go down into historic fact which give the whole tree of Christian faith its stability and vigor. A tree gathers nourishment and grows by its leaves; and Christianity has undoubtedly taken into itself many enriching elements from the life about it in every age; but a tree without roots is neither st.u.r.dy nor alive. A Christianity which disregards its origin in the Jesus of genuine memory may label anything "Christian" that it fancies, and end by losing its own ident.i.ty; and a Christianity which does not constantly keep learning of the Jesus of the New Testament, and renewing its convictions, ideals and purposes from Him, ceases to be vital. We do not think of Christianity as a fixed quant.i.ty or an unchanging essence, but as a life; and life is ever growing and changing. But with all its growth and change it keeps true to type, and the type is Jesus Christ. The gospels, which conserve the impress of that Life upon men of faith, are anchors in the actual amid windy storms of speculation. We are not constructing a Christ out of our spiritual experiences, but letting Him who gave life to these early followers, through their memories of Him, recreate us into His and their fellows.h.i.+p with G.o.d and man.

Their spiritual experiences are the sensitive plate which caught and kept for all time the image of the historic Jesus; but their experience is a memory, and there must be a further experience in us upon which this memory throws and fixes His image before we know Jesus Christ for ourselves. Unless a man's soul is unimpressionable, he cannot be faced with the Christ of the New Testament without being deeply affected. "We needs must love the highest when we see it," and to millions throughout the earth Jesus is their highest inspiration. For them He ceases to belong to the past and becomes their most significant Contemporary. They do not look back to Him; they look up to Him as their present Comrade and Lord; and in loyalty to Him they find themselves possessed of a new life.

In a previous chapter, we used the phrase "man's response to his highest inspirations" as a description of religious experience; and in responding to the appeal of Jesus, His followers pa.s.s into the characteristically Christian experience of the Divine--an experience which involves two main elements: communion through Jesus with G.o.d, and communion with Jesus in G.o.d.

_Communion through Jesus with G.o.d_. His singular religious experience they find themselves sharing to some degree. They repeat His discoveries in the unseen and corroborate them. G.o.d, the G.o.d and Father of Jesus Christ, becomes their G.o.d and Father, with whom they live in the trust and love and obedience of children. And for them Jesus' consciousness of G.o.d becomes _authoritative_. It is not that they consider Him in possession of secret sources of information inaccessible to them, but that, incomparably more expert, He has penetrated farther and more surely into the unseen, and they trustfully follow Him. He does not lord it over them as servants, but leads them as His friends. "Man," says Keats, in a remark which ill.u.s.trates Jesus' method with His disciples, "Man should not dispute or a.s.sert, but whisper results to his neighbor."

He, who of old did not strive nor cry aloud, still so quietly gives those who obey Him His att.i.tude towards G.o.d, that they scarcely realize how much they owe Him. Only here and there a discerning follower, like Luther, is aware how all-important is the contribution that comes through a conscious sharing of Christ's revelation, "Whosoever loses Christ, all faiths (of the Pope, the Jews, the Turks, the common rabble) become one faith."

And when once Jesus is authoritative for a man, He is the _supreme_ religious authority. A tolerant Roman, like Alexander Severus, set statues of Apollonius, Christ, Abraham, Orpheus, "and others of that sort," in his lararium; and many today are inclined to make a similar religious combination. Where Christ is concerned, there can be for His followers no other "of that sort." We cherish every discovery of the Divine by any saint of any faith which does not conflict with the revelation of Jesus; but to those who have found Him the Way to the Father, His consciousness of G.o.d is decisive. In the margin of his copy of Bacon's _Essays_, William Blake wrote opposite some statement of that worldly-wiseman, "This is certain: if what Bacon says is true, what Christ says is false." A loyal Christian must set every opinion he meets as clearly in the light of his Lord's mind, and choose accordingly his course in the seen and in the unseen.

When through Jesus we are in fellows.h.i.+p with His G.o.d, Jesus Himself becomes to us _the revelation of G.o.d_. The Deity to whom we are led through His faith discloses Himself to us in Jesus' character. What we call Divine, as we wors.h.i.+p it in One whom we picture in the heavens or indwelling within us, we discover at our side in Jesus; and if we are impelled to speak of the Deity of the Father, when we characterize our highest inspirations from the unseen, we cannot do less than speak of the Deity of the Son, through whom in the seen these same inspirations pa.s.s to us. Jesus Himself awakens in us a religious response. We instinctively adore Him, devote our all to Him, trust Him with a confidence as complete as we repose in G.o.d. We are either idolaters, or Jesus is the unveiling in a human life of the Most High; He is to us G.o.d manifest in the flesh.

And Jesus is also _the revelation of what man may become_. None ever had a sublimer faith in man than He who dared bid His followers be perfect as their Father is perfect. He did not close His eyes to men's glaring unlikeness to G.o.d; He said to His auditors, "ye being evil"; He believed in the necessity of their complete transformation through repentance.

But when He asked them to follow Him, He set no limits to the distance they would be able to go. He did not warn them that they must stop at the foot of Calvary, while He climbed to the top; or that they could not go with Him in His intimacy with the Father. Some Christians, out of reverence for Jesus, think it necessary to draw a sharp line between Him and ourselves, and remind us that we cannot overpa.s.s it; but He drew no such line. He believed in the divine possibilities of divinely changed men. As a matter of fact we find ourselves immeasurably beneath Him, and, the more we long to be like Him, the greater the distance between us seems to become. But He is as confident that He can conform us to His likeness, as that He Himself is at one with His Father.

It is worth emphasizing that this Personality in whom we find the revelation of G.o.d and the ideal of manhood is a figure in history. When an apostle was speaking of "the one Mediator between G.o.d and men," he laid stress on the fact that He was "Himself _man_." When a distinction is drawn between the Christ of experience and the Christ of history, we must not be confused. The content of the name "Jesus" was given once for all in the impression made by the Man of Nazareth, One made "in all points" like ourselves. We may understand Him better than those who knew Him in the flesh; we may see the bearing of His life on many situations that were entirely beyond even His ken; and so we may have "a larger Christ," exactly as succeeding generations sometimes form truer estimates of men than contemporaries; but all that is authentic in our "larger Christ" was implicit in the Man of Galilee. That to which we respond as to G.o.d is the historic Jesus mirrored in His disciples'

faith. We agree with the eloquent words of Tertullian: "We say, and before all men we say, and torn and bleeding under your tortures we cry out, 'We wors.h.i.+p G.o.d through Christ. Count Christ a man, if you please; by Him and in Him G.o.d would be known and adored.'" And our a.s.surance that we can become like Jesus rests on the fact that this life has been already lived. A mountain top, however lofty, we can hope to scale, for it is part of the same earth on which we stand; but a star, however alluring, we have no confidence of reaching. Jesus' worth as an example to us lies in our finding in Him "ideal manhood closed in real man."

In fellows.h.i.+p through Jesus with G.o.d we discover that His victory is vicarious; He conquered for Himself _and for us_ the world and sin and death.

He imparts His faith in the coming of the Divine Order in the world.

His followers share His fearless and masterful att.i.tude towards physical forces; when they appear opposed to G.o.d's purpose of love, the Christian is confident that they are not inherently antagonistic to it: "to them that love G.o.d all things work together for good." What is called "nature" is not something fixed, but plastic; something which can be conformed to the will of the G.o.d and Father of Jesus. A pestilential Panama, for instance, is not natural, but subnatural, and must be brought up to its divine nature, when it will serve the children of G.o.d.

The Rule of G.o.d in nature, like the Kingdom in Jesus' parables, must both be awaited patiently--for it will require advances in men's consciences and knowledge to control physical forces in the interest of love--and striven for believingly. And even when bitter circ.u.mstances seem, whether only for the present or permanently, inescapable, when pain and disaster and death must be borne, the Christian accepts them as part of the loving and wise will of G.o.d, as his Lord acquiesced in His own suffering: "The cup which the Father hath given Me, shall I not drink it?" And Jesus confers His confidence in the alterability of the world of human relations. Christians believe in the superiority of moral over material forces, in the wisdom and might of love. A life like Christ's is p.r.o.nounced in every generation unpractical, until under His inspiration some follower lives it; and slowly, as in His own case, its success is acclaimed. His principles, as applied to an economic inst.i.tution such as slavery, or to the treatment of the criminal, are counted visionary, until, constrained by His Spirit, men put them into practice, and their results gradually speak for themselves. His followers in every age have seemed fools to many, if not to most, of their judicious contemporaries; but cheered by His confidence, they venture on apparently hopeless undertakings, and find that He has overcome the world.

Jesus' victory over sin works in true disciples a similar conquest.

Christians label any unchristlikeness sin, and they vastly darken the world with a new sense of its evil, and are themselves most painfully aware of their own sinfulness. Jesus' conscience has creative power, and reproduces its sensitiveness in theirs; they are born into a life of new sympathies and obligations and penitences. By His faith, and supremely by His cross, He communicates to His followers the a.s.surance of G.o.d's forgiveness which reestablishes their intercourse with Him, and releases His life in them; and Jesus lays them under a new and more potent compulsion to live no longer unto themselves, but unto their brethren.

Jesus' conquest of death is to His followers the vindication of His faith in G.o.d, and G.o.d's attestation of Him; and with such a G.o.d Lord of heaven and earth, death has neither sting nor victory; it cannot separate from G.o.d's love; and it is itemized among a Christian's a.s.sets.

The face of death has been transfigured. Aristides, explaining the Christian faith about the year 125 A.D., writes, "And if any righteous man among them pa.s.ses from the world, they rejoice and offer thanks to G.o.d; and they escort his body as if he were setting out from one place to another near." Christians speak of their dead as "in Christ"--under His all-sufficient control.