What is Christianity?
LECTURE I
THE great English philosopher, John Stuart Mill, has somewhere
observed that mankind cannot be too often reminded that there was once a man of
the name of Socrates. That is true; but still more important is it to remind mankind
again and again that a man of the name of Jesus Christ once stood in their midst.
The fact, of course, has been brought home to us from our youth up; but unhappily
it cannot be said that public instruction in our time is calculated to keep the
image of Jesus Christ before us in any impressive way, and make it an inalienable
possession after our school-days are over and for our whole life. And although no
one who has once absorbed a ray of Christ’s light can ever again become as though
he had never heard of him; although at the bottom of every soul that has been once
touched an impression remains, a confused recollection of this kind, which is often
only a “superstitio,” is not enough to give strength and life. But where the demand for further and more trustworthy knowledge
about him arises, and a man wants positive information as to who Jesus Christ was,
and as to the real purport of his message, he no sooner asks for it than he finds
himself, if he consults the literature of the day, surrounded by a clatter of contradictory
voices. He hears some people maintaining that primitive Christianity was closely
akin to Buddhism, and he is accordingly told that it is in fleeing the world and
in pessimism that the sublime character of this religion and its profound meaning
are revealed. Others, on the contrary, assure him that Christianity is an optimistic
religion, and that it must be thought of simply and solely as a higher phase of
Judaism; and these people also suppose that in saying this they have said something
very profound. Others, again, maintain the opposite; they assert that the Gospel
did away with Judaism, but itself originated under Greek influences of mysterious
operation; and that it is to be understood as a blossom on the tree of Hellenism.
Religious philosophers come forward and declare that the metaphysical system which,
as they say, was developed out of the Gospel is its real kernel and the revelation
of its secret; but others reply that the Gospel has nothing to do with philosophy,
that it was meant for feeling and suffering humanity, and that philosophy has only been forced upon it. Finally, the latest critics that have come into the field
assure us that the whole history of religion, morality, and philosophy, is nothing
but wrapping and ornament; that what at all times underlies them, as the only real
motive power, is the history of economics; that, accordingly, Christianity, too,
was in its origin nothing more than a social movement and Christ a social deliverer,
the deliverer of the oppressed lower classes.
There is something touching in the anxiety which everyone shows
to rediscover himself, together with his own point of view and his own circle of
interest, in this Jesus Christ, or at least to get a share in him. It is the perennial
repetition of the spectacle which was seen in the “Gnostic” movement even as early
as the second century, and which takes the form of a struggle, on the part of every
conceivable tendency of thought, for the possession of Jesus Christ. Why, quite
recently, not only, I think, Tolstoi’s ideas, but even Nietzsche’s, have been exhibited
in their special affinity with the Gospel; and there is perhaps more to be said
even upon this subject that is worth attention than upon the connexion between a
good deal of “theological” and “philosophical” speculation and Christ’s teaching.
But nevertheless, when taken together, the impression which these
contradictory opinions convey is disheartening: the confusion seems hopeless. How can we take it amiss of anyone, if, after trying to find
out how the question stands, he gives it up? Perhaps he goes further, and declares
that after all the question does not matter. How are we concerned with events that
happened, or with a person who lived, nineteen hundred years ago? We must look
for our ideals and our strength to the present; to evolve them laboriously out of
old manuscripts is a fantastic proceeding that can lead nowhere. The man who so
speaks is not wrong; but neither is he right. What we are and what we possess, in
any high sense, we possess from the past and by the past only so much of it, of
course, as has had results and makes its influence felt up to the present day. To
acquire a sound knowledge of the past is the business and the duty not only of the
historian but also of everyone who wishes to make the wealth and the strength so
gained his own. But that the Gospel. is a part of this past which nothing else can
replace has been affirmed again and again by the greatest minds. “Let intellectual
and spiritual culture progress, and the human mind expand, as much as it will;
beyond the grandeur and the moral elevation of Christianity, as it sparkles and
shines in the Gospels, the human mind will not advance.” In these words Goethe,
after making many experiments and labouring indefatigably at himself, summed up
the result to which his moral and historical insight had led him. Even though we were to feel no desire
on our own part, it would still be worth while, because of this man’s testimony,
to devote our serious attention to what he came to regard as so precious; and if,
contrary to his declaration, louder and more confident voices are heard to-day,
proclaiming that the Christian religion has outlived itself, let us accept that
as an invitation to make a closer acquaintance with this religion whose certificate
of death people suppose that they can already exhibit.
But in truth this religion and the efforts which it evokes are
more active to-day than they used to be. We may say to the credit of our age that
it takes an eager interest in the problem of the nature and value of Christianity,
and that there is more search and inquiry in regard to this subject now than was
the case thirty years ago. Even in the experiments that are made in and about it,
the strange and abstruse replies that are given to questions, the way in which it
is caricatured, the chaotic confusion which it exhibits, nay, even in the hatred
that it excites, a real life and an earnest endeavour may be traced. Only do not
let us suppose that there is anything exemplary in this endeavour, and that we are
the first who, after shaking off an authoritative religion, are struggling after
one that shall really make us free and be of independent growth —a struggle which must of necessity give rise to much confusion and half-truth.
Sixty-two years ago Carlyle wrote:—
In these distracted times, when the Religious Principle, driven
out of most Churches, either lies unseen in the hearts of good men, looking and
longing and silently working there towards some new Revelation; or else wanders
homeless over the world, like a disembodied soul seeking its terrestrial organisation,
into how many strange shapes, of Superstition and Fanaticism, does it not tentatively
and errantly cast itself! The higher Enthusiasm of man’s nature is for the while
without Exponent; yet does it continue indestructible, unweariedly active, and
work blindly in the great chaotic deep: thus Sect after Sect, and Church after
Church, bodies itself forth, and melts again into new metamorphosis.
No one who understands the times in which we live can deny that
these words sound as if they had been written to-day. But it is not with “the religious
principle” and the ways in which it has developed that we are going to concern
ourselves in these lectures. We shall try to answer the more modest but not less
pressing question, What is Christianity? What was it? What has it become? The
answer to this question may, we hope, also throw light by the way on the more comprehensive
one, What is Religion, and what ought it to be to us? In dealing with religion,
is it not after all with the Christian religion alone that we have to do? Other religions no longer stir the depths of our hearts.
What is Christianity? It is solely in its historical sense that
we shall try to answer this question here; that is to say we shall employ the methods
of historical science, and the experience of life gained by studying the actual
course of history. This excludes the view of the question taken by the apologist
and the religious philosopher. On this point permit me to say a few words.
Apologetics hold a necessary place in religious knowledge, and
to demonstrate the validity of the Christian religion and exhibit its importance
for the moral and intellectual life is a great and a worthy undertaking. But this
undertaking must be kept quite separate from the purely historical question as to
the nature of that religion, or else historical research will be brought into complete
discredit. Moreover, in the kind of apologetics that is now required no really high
standard has yet been attained. Apart from a few steps that have been taken in the
direction of improvement, apologetics as a subject of study is in a deplorable state: it is not clear as to the positions to be defended, and it is uncertain as to
the means to be employed. It is also not infrequently pursued in an undignified
and obtrusive fashion, Apologists imagine that they are doing a great work by crying up religion as though it were a job-lot
at a sale, or a universal remedy for all social ills. They are perpetually snatching,
too, at all sorts of baubles, so as to deck out religion in fine clothes. In their
endeavour to present it as a glorious necessity, they deprive it of its earnest
character, and at the best only prove that it is something which may be safely accepted
because it can do no harm. Finally, they cannot refrain from slipping in some church
programme of yesterday and “demonstrating” its claims as well. The structure of
their ideas is so loose that an idea or two more makes no difference. The mischief
that has been thereby done already and is still being done is indescribable. No! the Christian religion is something simple and sublime; it means one thing and
one thing only: Eternal life in the midst of time, by the strength and under the eyes of God. It is no ethical
or social arcanum for the preservation or improvement of things generally.
To make what it has done for civilisation and human progress the main question,
and to determine its value by the answer, is to do it violence at the start. Goethe
once said, “Mankind is always advancing, and man always remains the same.” It is
to man that religion pertains, to man, as one who in the midst of all change and
progress himself never changes. Christian apologetics must recognise, then, that
it is with religion in its simple nature and its simple
strength that it has to do. Religion, truly, does not exist for itself alone, but lives in an inner fellowship with
all the activities of the mind and with moral and economical conditions as well.
But it is emphatically not a mere function or an exponent of them; it is a mighty
power that sets to work of itself, hindering or furthering, destroying or making fruitful. The main thing is to learn what religion is and in what its essential character consists; no matter what position the individual who examines it may take
up in regard to it, or whether in his own life he values it or not.
But the point of view of the philosophical theorist, in the strict
sense of the word, will also find no place in these lectures. Had they been delivered
sixty years ago, it would have been our endeavour to try to arrive by speculative
reasoning at some general conception of religion, and then to define the Christian
religion accordingly. But we have rightly become sceptical about the value of this
procedure. Latet dolus in generalibus. We know to-day that life cannot be
spanned by general conceptions, and that there is no general conception of religion
to which actual religions are related simply and solely as species to genus. Nay,
the question may even be asked whether there is any such generic conception as “religion” at all. Is the common clement in it anything more than a vague disposition? Is it only an
empty place in our innermost being that the word denotes, which everyone fills up
in a different fashion and many do not perceive at all? I am not of this opinion;
I am convinced, rather, that at bottom we have to do here with something which is
common to us all, and which in the course of history has struggled up out of torpor
and discord into unity and light. I am convinced that Augustine is right when he
says, “Thou, Lord, hast made us for Thyself, and our heart is restless until it
finds rest in Thee.” But to prove that this is so; to exhibit the nature and the
claims of religion by psychological analysis, including the psychology of peoples,
is not the task that we shall undertake in what follows. We shall keep to the purely
historical theme: What is the Christian religion?
Where are we to look for our materials? The answer seems to
be simple and at the same time exhaustive: Jesus Christ and his Gospel. But however
little doubt there may be that this must form not only our point of departure but
also the matter with which our investigations will mainly deal, it is equally certain
that we must not be content to exhibit the mere image of Jesus Christ and the main
features of his Gospel. We must not be content to stop there, because every great
and powerful personality reveals a part of what it is only when seen in those whom it influences. Nay, it may be said that the more
powerful the personality which a man possesses, and the more he takes hold of the
inner life of others, the less can the sum-total of what he is be known only by
what he himself says and does. We must look at the reflection and the effects which
he produced in those whose leader and master he became. That is why a complete answer
to the question, What is Christianity, is impossible so long as we are restricted
to Jesus Christ’s teaching alone. We must include the first generation of his disciples
as well those who ate and drank with him and we must listen to what they tell us
of the effect which he had upon their lives.
But even this does not exhaust our materials. If Christianity
is an example of a great power valid not for one particular epoch alone; if in
and through it, not once only, but again and again, great forces have been disengaged,
we must include all the later products of its spirit. It is not a question of a
“doctrine” being handed down by uniform repetition or arbitrarily distorted; it
is a question of a life, again and again kindled afresh, and now burning
with a flame of its own. We may also add that Christ himself and the apostles
were convinced that the religion which they were planting would in the ages to come
have a greater destiny and a deeper meaning than it possessed at the time of its institution; they trusted to its spirit leading from one point
of light to another and developing higher forces. Just as we cannot obtain a
complete knowledge of a tree without regarding not only its root and its stem
but also its bark, its branches, and the way in which it blooms, so we cannot
form any right estimate of the Christian religion unless we take our stand upon
a comprehensive induction that shall cover all the facts of its history. It is
true that Christianity has had its classical epoch; nay more, it had a founder
who himself was what he taught — to steep ourselves in him is still the chief
matter; but to restrict ourselves to him means to take a point of view too low
for his significance. Individual religious life was what he wanted to kindle and
what he did kindle; it is, as we shall see, his peculiar greatness to have led
men to God, so that they may thenceforth live their own life with Him. How,
then, can we be silent about the history of the Gospel if we wish to know what
he was?
It may be objected that put in this way the problem is too difficult,
and that its solution threatens to be accompanied by many errors and defects. That
is not to be denied; but to state a problem in easier terms, that is to say in
this case inaccurately, because of the difficulties surrounding it, would be a very
perverse expedient. Moreover, even though the difficulties increase, the work is,
on the other hand, facilitated by the problem being stated in a larger manner;
for it helps us to grasp what is essential in the phenomena, and to distinguish
kernel and husk.
Jesus Christ and his disciples were situated in their day just as we are situated in ours; that is to say, their
feelings, their thoughts, their judgments and their efforts were bounded by the
horizon and the framework in which their own nation was set and by its condition
at the time. Had it been otherwise, they would not have been men of flesh and blood,
but spectral beings. For seventeen hundred years, indeed, people thought, and many
among us still think, that the “humanity” of Jesus Christ, which is a part of
their creed, is sufficiently provided for by the assumption that he had a human
body and a human soul. As if it were possible to have that without having any definite
character as an individual! To be a man means, in the first place, to possess a
certain mental and spiritual disposition, determined in such and such a way, and
thereby limited and circumscribed; and, in the second place, it means to be situated,
with this disposition, in an historical environment which in its turn is also limited
and circumscribed. Outside this there are no such things as “men.” It at once
follows, however, that a man can think, speak, and do absolutely nothing at all
in which his peculiar disposition and his own age are not coefficients. A single word may seem to be
really classical and valid for all time, and yet the very language in which it is
spoken gives it very palpable limitations. Much less is a spiritual personality,
as a whole, susceptible of being represented in a way that will banish the feeling
of its limitations, and with those limitations, the sense of something strange or
conventional; and this feeling must necessarily be enhanced the farther in point
of time the spectator is removed.
From these circumstances it follows that the historian, whose
business and highest duty it is to determine what is of permanent value, is of necessity
required not to cleave to words but to find out what is essential. The “whole”
Christ, the “whole” Gospel, if we mean by this motto the external image taken
in all its details and set up for imitation, is just as bad and deceptive a shibboleth
as the “whole” Luther, and the like. It is bad because it enslaves us, and it
is deceptive because the people who proclaim it do not think of taking it. seriously,
and could not do so if they tried. They cannot do so because they cannot cease
to feel, understand and judge as children of their age.
There are only two possibilities here: either the Gospel is
in all respects identical with its earliest form, in which case it came with its
time and has departed with it; or else it contains something which, under differing historical forms, is of permanent validity.
The latter is the true view. The history of the Church shows us in its very commencement
that “primitive Christianity” had to disappear in order that “Christianity”
might remain; and in the same way in later ages one metamorphosis followed upon
another. From the beginning it was a question of getting rid of formulas, correcting
expectations, altering ways of feeling, and this is a process to which there is
no end. But by the very fact that our survey embraces the whole course as well as
the inception we enhance our standard of what is essential and of real value.
We enhance our standard, but we need not wait to take it from
the history of those later ages. The thing itself reveals it. We shall see that
the Gospel in the Gospel is something so simple, something that speaks to us with
so much power, that it cannot easily be mistaken. No far-reaching directions as
to method, no general introductions, are necessary to enable us to find the way
to it. No one who possesses a fresh eye for what is alive, and a true feeling for
what is really great, can fail to see it and distinguish it from its contemporary
integument. And even though there may be many individual aspects of it where the
task of distinguishing what is permanent from what is fleeting, what is rudimentary
from what is merely historical, is not quite easy, we must not be
like the child who, wanting to get
at the kernel of a bulb, went on picking off the leaves until there was nothing
left, and then could not help seeing that it was just the leaves that made the bulb.
Endeavours of this kind are not unknown in the history of the Christian religion,
but they fade before those other endeavours which seek to convince us that there
is no such thing as either kernel or husk, growth or decay, but that everything
is of equal value and alike permanent.
In these lectures, then, we shall deal first of all with the
Gospel of Jesus Christ, and this theme will occupy the greater part of our attention.
We shall then show what impression he himself and his Gospel made upon the first
generation of his disciples. Finally, we shall follow the leading changes which
the Christian idea has undergone in the course of history, and try to recognise
its chief types. What is common to all the forms which it has taken, corrected by
reference to the Gospel, and, conversely, the chief features of the Gospel, corrected
by reference to history, will, we may be allowed to hope, bring us to the kernel
of the matter. Within the limits of a short series of lectures it is, of course,
only to what is important that attention can be called; but perhaps there will
be no disadvantage in fixing our attention, for once, only on the strong lines and
prominent points of the relief, and, by putting what is secondary into the background, in looking at
the vast material in a concentrated form. We shall even refrain, and permissibly
refrain, from enlarging, by way of introduction, on Judaism and its external and
internal relations, and on the Graeco-Roman world. We must never, of course, wholly
shut our eyes to them nay, we must always keep them in mind; but diffuse explanations
in regard to these matters are unnecessary. Jesus Christ’s teaching will at once
bring us by steps which, if few, will be great, to a height where its connexion
with Judaism is seen to be only a loose one, and most of the threads leading from
it into “contemporary history” become of no importance at all. This may seem a
paradoxical thing to say; for just now we are being earnestly assured, with an
air as though it were some new discovery that was being imparted to us, that Jesus
Christ’s teaching cannot be understood, nay, cannot be accurately represented, except
by having regard to its connexion with the Jewish doctrines prevalent at the time,
and by first of all setting them out in full. There is much that is true in this
statement, and yet, as we shall see, it is incorrect. It becomes absolutely false,
however, when worked up into the dazzling thesis that the Gospel is intelligible
only as the religion of a despairing section of the Jewish nation; that it was
the last effort of a decadent age, driven by distress into a renunciation of this earth, and then
trying to storm heaven and demanding civic rights there—a religion of miserabilism!
It is rather remarkable that the really desperate were just those who did not welcome
it, but fought against it; remarkable that its leaders, so far as we know them,
do not, in fact, bear any of the marks of sickly despair; most remarkable of all,
that while indeed renouncing the world and its goods, they establish, in love and
holiness, a brotherly union which declares war on the world’s misery. The oftener
I re-read and consider the Gospels, the more do I find that the contemporary discords,
in the midst of which the Gospel stood, and out of which it arose, sink into the
background. I entertain no doubt that the founder had his eye upon man in
whatever external situation he might be found—upon man who, fundamentally, always remains the same,
whether he be moving upwards or downwards, whether he be in riches or poverty, whether
he be of strong mind or of weak. It is the consciousness of all these oppositions
being ultimately beneath it, and of its own place above them, that gives the Gospel
its sovereignty; for in every man it looks to the point that is unaffected by all
these differences. This is very clear in Paul’s case; he dominates all earthly things
and circumstances like a king, and desires to see them so dominated. The thesis of the decadent age and the religion of the wretched may
serve to lead us into the outer court; it may even correctly point to that which
originally gave the Gospel its form; but if it is offered us as a key for the understanding
of this religion in itself, we must reject it. Moreover, this thesis and the pretensions
which it makes are only illustrations of a fashion which has become general in the
writing of history, and which in that province will naturally have a longer reign
than other fashions, because by its means much that was obscure has, as a matter
of fact, been cleared up. But to the heart of the matter its devotees do not penetrate,
as they silently assume that no such heart exists.
Let me conclude this lecture by touching briefly on one other
important point. In history absolute judgments are impossible. This is a truth which
in these days—I say advisedly, in these days—is clear and incontestable. History
can only show how things have been; and even where we can throw light upon the past,
and understand and criticise it, we must not presume to think that by any process
of abstraction absolute judgments as to the value to be assigned to past events
can be obtained from the results of a purely historical survey. Such judgments are
the creation only of feeling and of will; they are a subjective act. The false notion
that the understanding can produce them is a heritage of that protracted epoch in which knowing and knowledge were expected
to accomplish everything; in which it was believed that they could be stretched
so as to be capable of covering and satisfying all the needs of the mind and the
heart. That they cannot do. This is a truth which, in many an hour of ardent work,
falls heavily upon our soul, and yet—what a hopeless thing it would be for mankind
if the higher peace to which it aspires, and the clearness, the certainty and the
strength for which it strives, were dependent on the measure of its learning and
its knowledge.
LECTURE II
OUR first section deals with the main features of the message
delivered by Jesus Christ. They include the form in which he delivered what he had
to say. We shall see how essential a part of his character is here exhibited, for
“he spoke as one having authority and not as the Scribes.” But before describing
these features I feel it my duty to tell you briefly how matters stand in regard
to the sources of our knowledge.
Our authorities for the message which Jesus Christ delivered
are—apart from certain important statements made by Paul—the first three Gospels.
Everything that we know, independently of these Gospels, about Jesus’ history and
his teaching, may be easily put on a small sheet of paper, so little does it come
to. In particular, the fourth Gospel, which does not emanate or profess to emanate
from the apostle John, cannot be taken as an historical authority in the ordinary
meaning of the word. The author of it acted with sovereign freedom, transposed events
and put them in a strange light, drew up the discourses himself, and illustrated great thoughts by imaginary situations. Although, therefore,
his work is not altogether devoid of a real, if scarcely recognisable, traditional
element, it can hardly make any claim to be considered an authority for Jesus’ history;
only little of what he says can be accepted, and that little with caution. On
the other hand, it is an authority of the first rank for answering the question,
What vivid views of Jesus’ person, what kind of light and warmth, did the Gospel
disengage?
Sixty years ago David Friedrich Strauss thought that he had almost
entirely destroyed the historical credibility not only of the fourth but also of
the first three Gospels as well. The historical criticism of two generations has
succeeded in restoring that credibility in its main outlines. These Gospels are
not, it is true, historical works any more than the fourth; they were not written
with the simple object of giving the facts as they were; they are books composed
for the work of evangelisation. Their purpose is to awaken a belief in Jesus Christ’s
person and mission; and the purpose is served by the description of his deeds and
discourses, as well as by the references to the Old Testament. Nevertheless they
are not altogether useless as sources of history, more especially as the object
with which they were written is not supplied from without, but coincides in part
with what Jesus intended. But such other great leading purposes as have been ascribed to the evangelists
have been one and all shown to lack any foundation, although with each individual
evangelist many secondary purposes may have come into play. The Gospels are not
“party tracts” neither are they writings which as yet bear the radical impress
of the Greek spirit. In their essential substance they belong to the first, the
Jewish, epoch of Christianity, that brief epoch which may be denoted as the palaeontological.
That we possess any reports dating from that time, even though, as is obvious in
the first and third Gospel, the setting and the composition are by another hand,
is one of those historical arrangements for which we cannot be too thankful. Criticism
to-day universally recognises the unique character of the Gospels. What especially
marks them off from all subsequent literature is the way in which they state their
facts. This species of literary art, which took shape partly by analogy with the
didactic narratives of the Jews, and partly from catechetical necessities—this simple
and impressive form of exposition was, even a few decades later, no longer capable
of exact reproduction. From the time that the Gospel was transferred to the broad
ground of the Graeco-Roman world it appropriated the literary forms of the Greeks,
and the style of the evangelists was then felt to be something strange but sublime.
When all is said, the Greek language lies upon these writings only
like a diaphanous veil, and it requires hardly any effort to retranslate their contents
into Hebrew or Aramaic. That the tradition here presented to us is, in the main,
at first hand is obvious.
How fixed this tradition was in regard to its form is proved
by the third Gospel. It was composed by a Greek, probably in the time of Domitian; and in the second part of his work, the Acts of the Apostles—besides the preface
to the first—he shows us that he was familiar with the literary language of his
nation and that he was an excellent master of style. But in the Gospel narrative
he did not dare to abandon the traditional type: he tells his story in the same
style as Mark and Matthew, with the same connexion of sentences, the same colour,
nay, with many of precisely the same details; it is only the ruder words and expressions,
which would offend literary taste, that are sparingly corrected. There is another
respect, too, in which his Gospel strikes us as remarkable: he assures us at the
beginning of it that he has “had perfect understanding of all things from the very
first,” and has examined many accounts. But if we test him by his authorities, we
find that he has kept in the main to Mark’s Gospel, and to a source which we also
find appearing again in Matthew. These accounts both seemed to him, as a respectable
chronicler, to be preferable to the crowd of others. That offers a good guarantee for them. No
historian has found that it is possible or necessary to substitute any other tradition
for the one which we have here.
Another point: this tradition is, apart from the story of the
Passion, almost exclusively Galilean in its character. Had not the history of Jesus’
public activity been really bounded by this geographical horizon, tradition could
not have so described it; for every historical narrative with an eye to effect
would have represented him as working chiefly in Jerusalem. That is the account
given by the fourth Gospel. That our first three evangelists almost entirely refrain
from saying anything about Jerusalem arouses a good prejudice in their favour.
It is true that, measured by the standard of “agreement, inspiration
and completeness,” these writings leave a very great deal to be desired, and even
when judged by a more human standard they suffer from not a few imperfections. Rude
additions from a later age they do not, indeed, exhibit—it will always remain a
noteworthy fact that, conversely, it is only the fourth Gospel which makes Greeks
ask after Jesus—but still they, too, reflect, here and there, the circumstances
in which the primitive Christian community was placed and the experiences which
it afterwards underwent. People nowadays, however, put such constructions on the text more readily than is necessary. Further, the conviction
that Old Testament prophecy was fulfilled in Jesus’ history had a disturbing effect
on tradition. Lastly, in some of the narratives the miraculous element is obviously
intensified. On the other hand, Strauss’ contention that the Gospels contain a very
great deal that is mythical has and not been borne out, even if the very indefinite
defective conception of what “mythical” means in Strauss’ application of the word,
be allowed to pass. It is almost exclusively in the account of Jesus’ childhood,
and there only sparingly, that a mythical touch can be traced. None of these disturbing
elements affect the heart of the narrative; not a few of them easily lend themselves
to correction, partly by a comparison of the Gospels one with another, partly through
the sound judgment that is matured by historical study.
But the miraculous element, all these reports of miracles! Not
Strauss only, but many others too, have allowed themselves to be frightened by them
into roundly denying the credibility of the Gospels. But, on the other hand, historical
science in this last generation has taken a great step in advance by learning to
pass a more intelligent and benevolent judgment on those narratives, and accordingly
even reports of the marvellous can now be counted amongst the materials of history
and turned to good account. I owe it to you and to the subject briefly to specify
the position which historical science today takes up in regard to these reports.
In the first place, we know that the Gospels come from a time
in which the marvellous may be said to have been something of almost daily occurrence.
People felt and saw that they were surrounded by wonders, and not by any means only
in the religious sphere. Certain spiritualists among us excepted, we are now accustomed
to associate the question of miracles exclusively with the question of religion.
In those days it was otherwise. The fountains of the marvellous were many. Some
sort of divinity was, of course, supposed to be at work in every case; it was a
god who accomplished the miracle; but it was not to every god that people stood
in a religious relation. Further, in those days, the strict conception which we
now attach to the word “miracle” was as yet unknown; it came in only with a knowledge
of the laws of Nature and their general validity. Before that, no sound insight
existed into what was possible and what was impossible, what was rule and what was
exception. But where this distinction is not clear, or where, as the case may be,
the question has not yet been raised at all in any rigorous form, there are no such
things as miracles in the strict sense of the word. No one can feel anything to
be an interruption of the order of Nature who does not yet know what the order of Nature is. Miracles,
then, could not possess the significance for that age which, if they existed, they
would possess for ours. For that age all wonders were only extraordinary events,
and, even if they formed a world by themselves, it was certain that there were countless
points in which that other world mysteriously encroached upon our own. Nor was it
only God’s messengers, but magicians and charlatans as well, who were thought to
be possessed of some of these miraculous powers. The significance attaching to “miracles” was, therefore, in those days a subject of never-ending controversy;
at one moment a high value was set upon them and they were considered to belong
to the very essence of religion; at another, they were spoken of with contempt.
In the second place, we now know that it . is not after they
have been long dead, nor even after the lapse of many years, that miracles have
been reported of eminent persons, but at once, often the very next day. The habit
of condemning a narrative, or of ascribing it to a later age, only because it includes
stories of miracles, is a piece of prejudice.
In the third place, we are firmly convinced that what happens
in space and time is subject to the general laws of motion, and that in this sense,
as an interruption of the order of Nature, there can be no such things as “miracles.” But we also recognise that the
religious man if religion really permeates him and is something more than a belief
in the religion of others—is certain that he is not shut up within a blind and brutal
course of Nature, but that this course of Nature serves higher ends, or, as it may
be, that some inner and divine power can help us so to encounter it as that “everything
must necessarily be for the best.” This experience, which I might express in one
word as the ability to escape from the power and the service of transitory things, is always felt afresh to be a miracle each time that it occurs; it is inseparable from every, higher religion, and were it to be surrendered, religion would be at an end.
But it is an experience which is equally true of the life of the individual and
of the great course of human history. How dearly and logically, then, must a religious
man think, if, in spite of this experience, he holds firmly to the inviolable character
of what happens in space and time. Who can wonder that even great minds fail to keep the two spheres quite separate? And as we all live, first and foremost,
in the domain not of ideas but of perceptions, and in a language of metaphor, how
can we avoid conceiving that which is divine and makes us free as a mighty power
working upon the order of Nature, and breaking through or arresting it? This notion,
though it belong only to the realm of fantasy and metaphor, will, it seems, last as
long as religion itself.
In the fourth place, and lastly, although the order of Nature
be inviolable, we are not yet by any means acquainted with all the forces working
in it and acting reciprocally with other forces. Our acquaintance even with the
forces inherent in matter, and with the field of their action, is incomplete; while
of psychic forces we know very much less. We see that a strong will and a firm faith
exert an influence upon the life of the body, and produce phenomena which strike
us as marvellous. Who is there up to now that has set any sure bounds to the province
of the possible and the actual? No one. Who can say how far the influence of soul
upon soul and of soul upon body reaches? No one. Who can still maintain that any
extraordinary phenomenon that may appear in this domain is entirely based on error
and delusion? Miracles, it is true, do not happen; but of the marvellous and the
inexplicable there is plenty. In our present state of knowledge we have become more
careful, more hesitating in our judgment, in regard to the stories of the miraculous
which we have received from antiquity. That the earth in its course stood still;
that a she-ass spoke; that a storm was quieted by a word, we do not believe, and
we shall never again believe; but that the lame walked, the blind saw, and the
deaf heard will not lqe so summarily dismissed as an illusion.
From these suggestions you can arrive for yourselves at the right
position to take up in regard to the miraculous stories related in the Gospels,
and at their net results. In particular cases, that is to say, in the application
of general principles to concrete statements, some uncertainty will always remain.
So far as I can judge, the stories may be grouped as follows:—(1) Stories which
had their origin in an exaggerated view of natural events of an impressive character; (2) stories which had their origin in sayings or parables, or in the projection
of inner experiences on to the external world; (3) stories such as arose in the
interests of the fulfilment of Old Testament sayings; (4) stories of surprising
cures effected by Jesus’ spiritual force; (5) stories of which we cannot fathom
the secret. It is very remarkable, however, that Jesus himself did not assign that
critical importance to his miraculous deeds which even the evangelist Mark and the
others all attributed to them. Did he not exclaim, in tones of complaint and accusation,
“Unless ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe!”? He who uttered these
words cannot have held that belief in the wonders which he wrought was the right
or the only avenue to the recognition of his person and his mission; nay, in all
essential points he must have thought of them quite otherwise than his evangelists. And the
remarkable fact that these very evangelists, without appreciating its range, hand
down the statement that Jesus “did not many mighty works there because of their
unbelief,” shows us, from another and a different side, with what caution we must
receive these miraculous stories, and into what category we must put them.
It
follows from all this that we must not try to evade the Gospel by entrenching ourselves behind the miraculous
stories related by the evangelists. In spite of those stories, nay, in part even
in them, we are presented with a reality which has claims upon our participation.
Study it, and do not let yourselves be deterred because this or that miraculous
story strikes you as strange or leaves you cold. If there is anything here that
you find unintelligible, put it quietly aside. Perhaps you will have to leave it
there forever; perhaps the meaning will dawn upon you later and the story assume a significance of which you
never dreamt. Once more, let me say: do not be deterred. The question of miracles
is of relative indifference in comparison with everything else which is to be found in the Gospels. It is not miracles
that matter; the question on which everything, turns is whether we are helplessly
yoked to an inexorable necessity, or whether a God exists who rules and governs, and whose power to compel Nature we can move by prayer and make a part of our experience.
Our evangelists, as we know, do not tell us anything about the
history of Jesus’ early development; they tell us only of his public activity.
Two of the Gospels do, it is true, contain an introductory history (the history
of Jesus’ birth); but we may disregard it; for even if it contained something
more trustworthy than it does actually contain, it would be as good as useless for
our purpose. That is to say, the evangelists themselves never refer to it, nor make
Jesus himself refer to his antecedents. On the contrary, they tell us that Jesus’
mother and his brethren were completely surprised at his coming forward, and did
not know what to make of it. Paul, too, is silent; so that we can be sure that
the oldest tradition knew nothing of any stories of Jesus’ birth.
We know nothing of Jesus’ history for the first thirty years
of his life. Is there not a terrible uncertainty here? What is there left us if
we have to begin our task by confessing that we are unable to write any life of
Jesus? How can we write the history of a man of whose development we know
nothing, and with only a year or two of whose life we are acquainted? Now,
however certain it may be that our materials are insufficient for a “biography,”
they are very weighty in other respects, and even their silence on the first
thirty years is instructive. They are weighty because they give us information
upon three important points: In the first place, they offer us
a plain picture of Jesus’ teaching, in regard both to its main features and to its
individual application; in the second place, they tell us how his life issued in
the service of his vocation; and in the third place, they describe to us the impression
which he made upon his disciples, and which they transmitted.
These are, in fact, three important points; nay, they are the
points on which everything turns. It is because we can get a clear view of them
that a characteristic picture of Jesus is possible; or, to speak more modestly,
that there is some hope for an attempt to understand what his aims were, what he
was, and what he signifies for us.
As regards the thirty years of silence, we gather from our evangelists
that Jesus did not think it necessary to give his disciples any information about
them. But much may be said about them negatively. First of all, it is very improbable
that he went through any Rabbinical school; he nowhere speaks like a man who had
assimilated any theological culture of a technical kind, or learned the art of scholarly
exegesis. Compare him in this respect with the apostle Paul; how clearly it can
be seen from the latter’s epistles that he had sat at the feet of theological teachers. With Jesus we find nothing of the kind; and hence he caused a stir by appearing in the schools and teaching at all. He
lived and had his being in the sacred writings, but not after the manner of a professional
teacher.
Neither can he have had any relations with the Essenes, a remarkable
order of Jewish monks. Were that so, he would have belonged to the pupils who show
their dependence on their teachers by proclaiming and doing the opposite of what
they have been taught. The Essenes made a point of the most extreme purity in the
eye of the law, and held severely aloof not only from the impure but even from those
who were a little lax in their purity. It is only thus that we can understand their
living strictly apart, their dwelling in particular places, and their practice of
frequent ablutions every day. Jesus exhibits a complete contrast with this mode
of life: he goes in search of sinners and eats with them. So fundamental a difference
alone makes it certain that he had nothing to do with the Essenes. His aims and
the means which he employed divide him off from them. If he appears to coincide
with them in many of his individual injunctions to his disciples, these are accidental
points of contact, as his motives were quite other than theirs.
Further, unless all appearances are deceptive, no stormy crisis,
no breach with his past, lies behind the period of Jesus’ life that we know. In none of his sayings
or discourses, whether he is threatening and punishing or drawing and calling people
to him with kindness, whether he is speaking of his relation to the Father or to
the world, can we discover the signs of inner revolutions overcome, or the scars
of any terrible conflict. Everything seems to pour from him naturally,
as though it could not do otherwise, like a spring from the depths of the earth, clear and unchecked in its flow. Where shall we find the man
who at the age of thirty can so speak, if he has gone through bitter struggles—struggles
of the soul, in which he has ended by burning what he once adored, and by adoring
what he burned? Where shall we find the man who has broken with his past, in order
to summon others to repentance as well as himself, but who through it all never
speaks of his own repentance? This consideration makes it impossible that his life
could have been spent in inner conflict, however little it may have been lacking
in deep emotion, in temptation and in doubt.
One final point: the picture of Jesus’ life and his discourses
stand in no relation with the Greek spirit. That is almost a matter for surprise;
for Galilee was full of Greeks, and Greek was then spoken in many of its cities,
much as Swedish is nowadays in Finland. There were Greek teachers and philosophers
there, and it is scarcely conceivable that Jesus should have been entirely
unacquainted with their language. But that he was in any way influenced by them,
that he was ever in touch with the thoughts of Plato or the Porch, even though
it may have been only in some popular redaction, it is absolutely impossible to
maintain. Of course if religious individualism—God and the soul, the soul and
its God; if subjectivism; if the full self-responsibility of the individual;
if the separation of the religious from the political—if all this is only Greek,
then Jesus, too, stands within the sphere of Greek development; then he, too, breathed
the pure air of Greece and drank from the Greek spring. But it cannot be proved
that it is only on this one line, only in the Hellenic people, that this development
took place; nay, it is rather the contrary that can be shown; other nations also
advanced to similar states of knowledge and feeling; although they did so, it is
true, as a rule, only after Alexander the Great had pulled down the barriers and
fences which separated the peoples. For these nations, too, no doubt it was in the
majority of cases the Greek element that was the liberating and progressive factor.
But I do not believe that the Psalmist who uttered the words, “Whom have I in heaven
but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee,” had ever heard
anything of Socrates or of Plato.
Enough: from their silence on the first thirty years of Jesus’
life, and from what the evangelists do not tell us of the period of his activity,
there are important things to be learnt.
He lived in religion, and it was breath to him in the fear of
God; his whole life, all his thoughts and feelings, were absorbed in the relation
to God, and yet he did not talk like an enthusiast and a fanatic, who sees only
one red-hot spot, and so is blind to the world and all that it contains. He spoke
his message and looked at the world with a fresh and clear eye for the life, great
and small, that surrounded him. He proclaimed that to gain the whole world was nothing
if the soul were injured, and yet he remained kind and sympathetic to every living
thing. That is the most astonishing and the greatest fact about him! His discourses,
generally in the form of parables and sayings, exhibit every degree of human speech
and the whole range of the emotions. The sternest tones of passionate accusation
and indignant reproof, nay, even irony, he does not despise; but they must have
formed the exception with him. He is possessed of a quiet, uniform, collected demeanour,
with everything directed to one goal. He never uses any ecstatic language, and the
tone of stirring prophecy is rare. Entrusted with the greatest of all missions, his
eye and ear are open to every impression of the life around him—a proof of intense calm
and absolute certainty.
Mourning and weeping, laughing and dancing, wealth and poverty,
hunger and thirst, health and sickness, children’s play and politics, gathering
and scattering, the leaving of home, life in the inn and the return, marriage and
funeral, the splendid house of the living and the grave of the dead, the sower and
the reaper in the field, the lord of the vintage among his vines, the idle workman
in the marketplace, the shepherd searching for the sheep, the dealer in pearls on
the sea, and, then again, the woman at home anxious over the barrel of meal and
the leaven, or the lost piece of money, the widow’s complaint to the surly official,
the earthly food that perishes, the mental relation of teacher and pupil, on the
one side regal glory and the tyrant’s lust of power, on the other childish innocence
and the industry of the servant—all these pictures enliven his discourse and make
it clear even to those who are children in mind.
They do more than tell us that he spoke in picture and parable.
They exhibit an inner freedom and a cheerfulness of soul in the midst of the greatest
strain, such as no prophet ever possessed before him. His eye rests kindly upon
the flowers and the children, on the lily of the field—“Solomon in all his glory
is not clothed like one of them”—on the birds in the air and the sparrows on the
house-top. The sphere in which he lived, above the earth and its concerns, did not
destroy his interest in it; no! he brought everything in it into relation with the God whom he knew, and he saw it as protected
in Him: “Your Father in heaven feeds them.” The parable is his most familiar form
of speech. Insensibly, however, parable and sympathy pass into each other. Yet he
who had not where to lay his head does not speak like one who has broken with everything,
or like an heroic penitent, or like an ecstatic prophet, but like a man who has
rest and peace for his soul, and is able to give life and strength to others. He
strikes the mightiest notes; he offers men an inexorable alternative; he leaves
them no escape; and yet the strongest emotion seems to come naturally to him, and
he expresses it as something natural; he clothes it in the language in which a
mother speaks to her child.
LECTURE III
IN the previous lecture we spoke of our evangelists and of their silence on the subject of Jesus’ early development.
We described in brief the mode and character of his teaching. We saw that he spoke
like a prophet, and yet not like a prophet. His words breathe peace, joy and certainty.
He urges the necessity of struggle and decision—“where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”—and
yet the quiet symmetry of a parable is over all that he says: under God’s sun and
the dew of heaven everything is to grow and increase until the harvest. He lived
in the continual consciousness of God’s presence. His food and drink was to do God’s
will. But—and this seemed to us the greatest thing about him and the seal of his
inner freedom—he did not speak like an heroic penitent, or like an ascetic who
has turned his back upon the world. His eye rested kindly upon the whole world,
and he saw it as it was, in all its varied and changing colours. He ennobled it
in his parables; his gaze penetrated the veil of the earthly, and he recognised
everywhere the hand of the living God.
When he came forward, another was already at work among the Jewish
people: John the Baptist. Within a few months a great movement had arisen on the
banks of the Jordan. It differed altogether from those messianic movements which
for several generations had by fits and starts kept the nation alive. The Baptist,
it is true, also proclaimed that the kingdom of God was at hand; and that meant
nothing less than that the day of the Lord, the judgment, the end, was then coming.
But the day of judgment which John the Baptist announced was not the day when God
was going to take vengeance upon the heathen and raise up His own people; it was
the day of judgment for this very people that he prophesied. “Who hath warned you
to flee from the wrath to come? Think not to say within yourselves, We have Abraham
to our father: for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up
children unto Abraham. And now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees.”
In that day of judgment it is not being children of Abraham, but doing works of
righteousness, which is to turn the scale. And he, the preacher, himself began with
repentance and devoted his life to it; he stands before them in raiment of camel’s
hair, and his meat is locusts and wild honey. But it is not in the levying of a
band of ascetics that he sees his work, or at any rate his main work. He appeals
to the whole nation, busy with its various trades and callings, and summons it to repentance. They seem very simple truths that he utters: to the publicans he says:
“Exact no more than that which is appointed you”; to the soldiers: “Do violence
to no man, neither accuse any falsely, and be content with your wages”; to the
well-to-do: “He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none, and
he that hath meat, let him do likewise”; and to all: “Forget not the poor.” This
is the practical proof of the repentance to which he calls, and it embraces the
conversion which he has in view. It is not a question of a single act, the baptism
of repentance, but of a righteous life in the face of the avenging justice of God.
Of ceremonies, sacrifices, and the works of the law, John did not speak; apparently
he thought them unimportant. It was on a right disposition and good deeds that everything
turned. In the day of judgment it was by this standard that the God of Abraham would
judge.
Let us pause here for a moment. Questions force themselves upon
us at this point which have often been answered and still are again and again put.
It is clear that John the Baptist proclaimed the sovereignty of God and His holy
moral law. It is also clear that he proclaimed to his fellow-countrymen that it
was by the moral law that they were to measure, and that on this alone everything was to turn. He told
them that what they were to care about most was to be in a right state within and
to do good deeds. It is clear, lastly, that there is nothing over-refined or artificial
in his notion of what was good; he means ordinary morality. It is here that the
questions arise.
Firstly: if it was only so simple a matter as the eternal claims
of what is right and holy, why all this apparatus about the coming of the day of
judgment, about the axe being laid to the root of the trees, about the unquenchable
fire, and so on?
Secondly: is not this baptism in the wilderness and this
proclamation that the day of judgment was at hand simply the reflection or the
product of the political and social state of the nation at the time?
Thirdly: what is there that is really new in this proclamation
and had not been already expressed in Judaism?
These three questions are very intimately connected with one
another.
Firstly, then, as to the whole dramatic eschatological apparatus
about the coming of the kingdom of God, the end being at hand, and so on. Well,
every time that a man earnestly, and out of the depths of his own personal experience,
points others to God and to what is good and holy, whether it be deliverance or
judgment that he preaches, it has always, so far as history tells us, taken the form of announcing
that the end is at hand. How is that to be explained? The answer is not difficult.
Not only is religion a life in and with God; but, just because it is that, it is
also the revelation of the meaning and responsibility of life. Everyone who has
awakened to a sense of religion perceives that, without it, the search for such
meaning is in vain, and that the individual, as well as the multitude, wanders aimlessly and falls: “they go astray; everyone turns to his own way.”
But the prophet who has become conscious of God is filled with terror and agony
as he recognises that all mankind is sunk in error and indifference. He feels
like a traveller who sees his companions blindly rushing to the edge of a precipice.
He wants to call them back at all costs. The time is running out; he can still
warn them; he can still adjure them to turn back; in a single hour, perhaps,
all will be lost. The time is running out, it is the last moment—this is the cry
in which, then, in all nations and at all times, any energetic call to conversion
has been voiced whenever a fresh prophet has been granted them. The prophet’s gaze
penetrates the course of history; he sees the irrevocable end; and he is filled
with boundless astonishment that the godlessness and blindness, the frivolity and
indolence, have not long since brought everything to utter ruin and destruction. That there is still a brief moment left in which
conversion is possible seems to him the greatest marvel of all, and to be ascribed
only to God’s forbearance. But certain it is that the end cannot be very far off.
This is the way in which with every great cry for repentance the idea of the approaching
end always arises. The individual forms in which it shapes itself depend upon con
temporary circumstances and are of subordinate importance. It is only the religion
which has beer built up into an intellectual system that does not make this
emphasising of the end all-important without such emphasis no actual religion is conceivable,
whether it springs up anew like a sudden flame or glows in the soul like a secret
fire.
I pass now to the second question: whether the social and political
conditions of the time were not causes of the religious movement. Let us sec briefly
where we are. You are aware that at thf time of which we speak the peaceful days
of the Jewish theocracy were long past. For two centuries blow had followed upon
blow; from the terrible days of Antiochus Epiphanes onwards the nation had never
had any rest. The kingdom of the Maccabees had been set up, and through inner strife
and external foe had soon disappeared again, The Romans had invaded the country
and had laid their iron hand upon everything. The tyranny of that Edomite parvenu, King Herod, had robbed the nation of every
pleasure in life and maimed it in all its members. So far as human foresight went,
it looked as if no improvement in its position could ever again be effected; the
lie seemed to be given to all the glorious old prophecies; the end appeared to have
come. How easy it was at such an epoch to despair of all earthly things, and in
this despair to renounce in utter distress what had once passed as the inseparable
accompaniment of the theocracy. How easy it was now to declare the earthly crown,
political possessions, prestige and wealth, strenuous effort and struggle, to be
one and all worthless, and in place of them to look to heaven for a completely new
kingdom, a kingdom for the poor, the oppressed, the weak, and. to hope that their
virtues of gentleness and patience would receive a crown. And if for hundreds of
years the national God of Israel had been undergoing a transformation; if He had
broken in pieces the weapons of the mighty, and derided the showy worship of His
priests; if He had demanded righteous judgment and mercy—what a temptation there was to proclaim Him as the God who wills
to see His people in misery that He may then bring them deliverance! We can, in
fact, with a few touches construct the religion and its hopes which seemed of necessity
to result from the circumstances of the time —a miserabilism which clings to the expectation of a miraculous interference on God’s
part, and in the meantime, as it were, wallows in wretchedness.
But although the terrible circumstances of the time certainly
disengaged and developed many ideas of this kind, and easily account for the wild
enterprises of the false Messiahs and the political efforts of fanatical Pharisees,
they are very far from being sufficient to explain John the Baptist’s message. They
do, indeed, explain how it was that deliverance from earthly things was an idea
which seized hold of wide circles, and that people were looking to God. Trouble makes men pray. But trouble in
itself does not give any moral force, and moral force was the chief element in John the Baptist’s
message. In appealing to it, in proclaiming that everything must be based on
morality and personal responsibility, he took a higher point of view than the feeble piety of the “poor,”
and drew not from time but from eternity.
It is scarcely a century since Fichte delivered his memorable
orations here in Berlin, after the terrible defeat which Germany had suffered. What
did he do in these lectures? In the first place, he held up a mirror to the nation,
and showed it its sins and their consequences,—frivolity, godlessness, self-complacency, infatuation, weakness. What did he do next? Did he simply call
them to arms? Arms were just what they were no longer capable of hearing; they had
been struck from their powerless hands. It was to repentance and to inward conversion
that he called them; to God, and therefore to the exertion of all their moral force; to truth and to the Spirit, so that by the Spirit everything might be made new.
By his powerful personality, and in union with friends of a like mind, he produced
an immense impression. He succeeded in opening up once more the choked fountains
of our energy, because he knew the strength from which help comes and had drunk
of the living water himself. No doubt the necessities of the time taught him and
steeled him; but it would be foolish and ridiculous to maintain that Fichte’s orations
were the product of the general woe. They are the antithesis of it. Not otherwise
must we think of John the Baptist’s message, and—let me say it at once—of the message
which Jesus himself delivered. That they appealed to those who expected nothing
of the world or of politics—of John the Baptist, however, this is not directly reported;
that they would have nothing to do with those popular leaders who had led the people
to ruin; that they turned their gaze altogether from earthly things, may also be
accounted for by the circumstances of the time. But the remedy which they proclaimed
was no product of those circumstances. Nay, was not calling people to ordinary morality expecting everything of it bound to seem a
hopeless enterprise? And whence came the power, the inflexible
power, which compelled others? This leads us to the last of the questions which
we have raised.
Thirdly, what was there that was new in the whole movement? Was
it anything new to set up the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of the good and
the holy, in opposition to all the other elements which had forced their way into
religion? Did John the Baptist, did Christ himself, bring in anything that had not
been proclaimed long before? Gentlemen, the question as to what is new in religion
is not a question which is raised by those who live in it. What is there that can
have been “new,” seeing that mankind existed so long before Jesus Christ and had
seen so much in the way of intelligence and knowledge? Monotheism had long been
introduced, and the few possible types of monotheistic religious fervour had long
made their appearance here and there, and had taken possession of whole schools,
nay, of a whole nation. Can the religious individualism of that Psalmist ever be
surpassed in depth and vigour who confessed: “Lord, when I have thee, I ask not
after heaven and earth”? Can we go beyond what Micah said: “He hath showed thee,
O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee but to do justly and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God”? Centuries
had passed since these words were spoken. “What do you want with your Christ?”
we are asked, principally by Jewish scholars; “he introduced nothing new.” I answer
with Wellhausen: It is quite true that what Jesus proclaimed, what John the Baptist
expressed before him in his exhortations to repentance, was also to be found in
the prophets, and even in the Jewish tradition of their time. The Pharisees themselves
were in possession of it; but unfortunately they were in possession of much else
besides. With them it was weighted, darkened, distorted, rendered ineffective and
deprived of its force, by a thousand things which they also held to be religious
and every whit as important as mercy and judgment. They reduced everything to one
dead level, wove everything into one fabric; the good and holy was only one woof
in a broad earthly warp. You ask again, then: “What was there that was new?” The
question is out of place in monotheistic religion. Ask rather: “Had what was here
proclaimed any strength and any vigour?” I answer: Take the people of Israel and
search the whole history of their religion; take history generally, and where will
you find any message about God and the good that was ever so pure and so full of
strength—for purity and strength go together—as we hear and read of in the Gospels? As regards purity, the spring of
holiness had, indeed, long been opened; but it was choked with sand and dirt, and
its water was polluted. For rabbis and theologians to come afterwards and distil
this water, even if they were successful, makes no difference. But now the spring
burst forth afresh, and broke a new way for itself through the rubbish—through the
rubbish which priests and theologians had heaped up so as to smother the true element
in religion; for how often does it happen in history that theology is only the
instrument by which religion is discarded! The other element was that of strength.
Pharisaical teachers had proclaimed that everything was contained in the injunction
to love God and one’s neighbour. They spoke excellently; the words might have come
out of Jesus’ mouth. But what was the result of their language? That the nation,
that in particular their own pupils, condemned the man who took the words seriously.
All that they did was weak and, because weak, harmful. Words effect nothing; it
is the power of the personality that stands behind them. But he “taught as one
having authority and not as the Scribes.” Such was the impression of him which his
disciples received. His words became to them “the words of life,” seeds which sprang
up and bore fruit. That was what was new.
Some such message John the Baptist had already begun to deliver.
He, too, had undoubtedly placed himself in opposition to the leaders of the people; for any man who tells people to “reform,” and at the same time enjoins nothing
more than repentance and good works, always comes into opposition with the official
leaders of religion and church. But beyond the lines of the message of repentance
John did not go.
Jesus Christ then appeared. He first of all accepted and affirmed
the Baptist’s message to its full extent, and he acknowledged the Baptist himself; nay, there was no one of whom he spoke in language of such warm recognition. Did
not he say that among them that were born of women there had not arisen a greater
than John the Baptist? Again and again he acknowledged that his cause began with
the Baptist and that he was his forerunner. Nay, he had himself been baptised by
him, and thereby put himself into the movement which the Baptist began.
But he did not rest there. When he appeared, he, too, it is true,
like John proclaimed: “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand”; but his message
became one of joy as he delivered it. The traditions about him contain nothing more
certain than that his message was an “evangel,” and that it was felt to bring blessing
and joy. With good reason, therefore, the evangelist Luke began his narrative of
Jesus’ public appearance with the words of the prophet Isaiah:—“The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel
to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to
the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that
are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.” Or in Jesus’ own words: “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.
Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly of heart; and ye
shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” These words
dominated Jesus’ whole work and message; they contain the theme of all that he taught
and did. They make it at once obvious that in this teaching of his he left John
the Baptist’s message far behind. The latter, although already in silent conflict
with the priests and the scribes, did not become a definite signal for contradiction.
“The falling and the rising again,” a new humanity opposed to the old, men of God
these Jesus Christ was the first to create. He came into immediate opposition with
the official leaders of the people, and in them with ordinary human nature in general.
They thought of God as of a despot guarding the ceremonial observances in His household; he breathed in the presence of God. They saw Him only in His law, which they had converted into a labyrinth
of dark defiles, blind alleys, and secret passages; he saw and felt Him everywhere.
They were in possession of a thousand of His commandments, and thought, therefore,
that they knew Him; he had one only, and knew Him by it. They had made this religion
into an earthly trade, and there was nothing more detestable; he proclaimed the
living God and the soul’s nobility.
If, however we take a general view of Jesus’ teaching, we shall
see that it may be grouped under three heads. They are each of such a nature as
to contain the whole, and hence it can be exhibited in its entirety under any one
of them.
Firstly, the kingdom of God and its coming.
Secondly, God the Father
and the infinite value of the human soul.
Thirdly, the higher righteousness and the commandment of
love.
That Jesus’ message is so great and so powerful lies in the
fact that it is so simple and on the other hand so rich; so simple as to be exhausted
in each of the leading thoughts which he uttered; so rich that every one of these
thoughts seems to be inexhaustible and the full meaning of the sayings and parables
beyond our reach. But more than that—he himself stands behind everything that he
said. His words speak to us across the centuries with the freshness of the present. It is here that that profound saying
is truly verified: “Speak, that I may see thee.”
Our course in what follows will be to try to learn what those
three heads are, and to classify the thoughts which come under them. They contain
the main features of Jesus’ message. We shall then try to understand the Gospel
in its relations to certain great questions of life.
I.— The kingdom of God and its coming.
Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God runs through all the forms
and statements of the prophecy which, taking its colour from the Old Testament,
announces the day of judgment and the visible government of God in the future, up
to the idea of an inward coming of the kingdom, starting with Jesus’ message and
then beginning. His message embraces these two poles, with many stages between
them that shade off one into another. At the one pole the coming of the kingdom
seems to be a purely future event, and the kingdom itself to be the external rule
of God; at the other, it appears as something inward, something which is already
present and making its entrance at the moment. You see, therefore, that neither
the conception of the kingdom of God, nor the way in which its coming is represented,
is free from ambiguity. Jesus took it from the religious traditions of his nation, where it
already occupied a foremost place; he accepted various aspects of it in which the
conception was still a living force, and he added new ones. Eudemonistic expectations
of a mundane and political character were all that he discarded.
Jesus, like all those of his own nation who were really in earnest,
was profoundly conscious of thee great antithesis between the kingdom of God and
that kingdom of the world in which he saw the reign of evil and the evil one. This was no mere image or empty
idea; it was a truth which he saw and felt most vividly. He was certain, then, that
the kingdom of the world must perish and be destroyed. But nothing short of a
battle can effect it. With dramatic intensity battle and victory stand like a picture
before his soul, drawn in those large firm lines in which the prophets had seen
them. At the close of the drama he sees himself seated at the right hand of his
Father, and his twelve disciples on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel; so objective was this picture to him, so completely in harmony with the ideas
of his time. Now we may take the view—and not a few of us take it—that in these
dramatic pictures, with their hard colours and contrasts, we have the actual purport
of Jesus’ message and the fundamental form which it took; and that all his other
statements of it must be simply regarded as secondary. We may say that they are all variations
of it more or less edifying, variations which were added, perhaps, only by later
reporters; but that the only positive factor is the dramatic hope for the future.
In this view I cannot concur. It is considered a perverse procedure in similar cases
to judge eminent, epoch-making personalities first and foremost by what they share
with their contemporaries, and on the other hand to put what is great and characteristic
in them into the background. The tendency as far as possible to reduce everything
to one level, and to efface what is special and individual, may spring in some minds
from a praiseworthy sense of truth, but it has proved misleading. More frequently,
however, we get the endeavour, conscious or unconscious, to refuse greatness any
recognition at all, and to throw down anything that is exalted. There can be no
doubt about the fact that the idea of the two kingdoms, of God and of the devil,
and their conflicts, and of that last conflict at some future time when the devil,
long since cast out of heaven, will be also defeated on earth, was an idea which
Jesus simply shared with his contemporaries. He did not start it, but he grew up
in it and he retained it. The other view, however, that the kingdom of God “cometh
not with observation,” that it is already here, was his own.
For us, gentlemen, to-day, it is difficult to reconcile, nay,
it is scarcely possible to bridge over, such an opposition as is involved, on the
one side in a dramatic picture of God’s kingdom existing in the future, and on the
other in the announcement that “it is in the midst of you,” a still and mighty power in the hearts of men. But to understand why it was that
with other historical traditions and other forms of culture no opposition was felt
to exist between these views, nay, that both were able to exist side by side, we
must reflect, we must steep ourselves in the history of the past. I imagine that
a few hundred years hence there will be found to exist in the intellectual ideas
which we shall have left behind us much that is contradictory; people will wonder
how we put up with it. They will find much hard and dry husk in what we took for
the kernel; they will be unable to understand how we could be so short-sighted,
and fail to get a sound grasp of what was essential and separate it from the rest.
Some day the knife will be applied and pieces will be cut away where as yet we do
not feel the slightest inclination to distinguish. Let us hope that then we may
find fair judges, who will measure our ideas not by what we have unwittingly taken
over from tradition and are neither able nor called upon to correct, but by what
was born of our very own, by the changes and improvements which we have effected in what was handed down to us or was commonly prevalent in our
day.
Truly the historian’s task of distinguishing between what is
traditional and what is peculiar, between kernel and husk, in Jesus message of the
kingdom of God is a difficult and responsible one. How far may we go? We do not
want to rob this message of its innate character and colour; we do not want to
change it into a pale scheme of ethics. On the other hand, we do not want to lose
sight of its peculiar character and strength, as we should do were we to side with
those who resolve it into the general ideas prevailing at the time. The very way
in which Jesus distinguished between the traditional elements—he left out none
in which there was a spark of moral force, and he accepted none which encouraged
the selfish expectations of his nation—this very discrimination teaches us that it was from a deeper
knowledge that he spoke and taught. But we possess testimonies of a much more striking
kind. If anyone wants to know what the kingdom of God and the coming of it meant
in Jesus’ message, lie must read and study his parables. He will then see what it
is that is meant. The kingdom of God comes by coming to the individual, by entering
into his soul and laying hold of it. True, the kingdom of God is the rule of God;
but it is the rule of the holy God in the hearts of individuals; it is God Himself in His power, From this point of view everything
that is dramatic in the external and historical sense has vanished; and gone, too,
are all the external hopes for the future. Take whatever parable you will, the parable
of the sower, of the pearl of great price, of the treasure buried in the field—the
word of God, God Himself, is the kingdom. It is not a question of angels and devils,
thrones and principalities, but of God and the soul, the soul and its God.
LECTURE IV
WE last spoke of Jesus’ message in so far as it proclaimed the
kingdom of God and its coining. We saw that it runs through all the forms in
which the prophecy of the day of judgment is expressed in the Old Testament, up
to the idea of an inward coming of the kingdom then beginning. Finally we tried
to show why the latter idea is to be regarded as the dominant one. Before
examining it more closely, however, I should like to draw your attention to two
particularly important expressions of it, lying between the extremes of the “day
of judgment” and the “inner coming.”
In the first of them, the coming of the kingdom of God signifies
that the kingdom of the devil is destroyed and the demons vanquished. Hitherto it
is they who have been ruling; they have taken possession of men and even of whole
nations, and forced them to their will. Jesus not only declares that he is come
to destroy the works of the devil, but he actually drives out the demons and releases
men from their power.
Let me here digress a little from our subject. Nothing in the Gospels strikes us as stranger than the frequently
recurring stories of demons, and the great importance which the evangelists attach
to them. For many among us the very fact that these writings report such absurdities
is sufficient reason for declining to accept them. Now in this connexion it is well
to know that absolutely similar stories are to be found in numerous writings of
that age, Greek, Roman, and Jewish. The notion of people being “possessed” was
current everywhere; nay, even the science of the time looked upon a whole section
of morbid phenomena in this light. But the consequence of these phenomena being
explained as meaning that some evil and invisible power had taken possession of
a man was that mental affections took forms which looked as if an alien being had
really entered into the soul. There is nothing paradoxical in this. If modern science
were to declare nervous disease to consist, in great part, of “possession,” and
the newspapers were to spread this announcement amongst the public, the same thing
would recur. We should soon have numerous cases in which nervous patients looked
as if they were in the grip of an evil spirit and themselves believed that they
were so. Theory and belief would work by suggestion and again create a class of
“demoniacs” amongst the insane, just as they created them hundreds, nay, thousands,
of years ago. It is unhistorical and foolish to attribute any peculiar notion or
“theory” about demons and the demoniac to the Gospels and the evangelists. They
only shared the general notions of their time. The forms of mental disease in question
are of rare occurrence nowadays, but nevertheless they are not yet quite extinct.
Where they occur the best means of encountering them is to-day, as it was formerly,
the influence of a strong personality. It manages to threaten and subdue the “devil” and so heal the patient. In Palestine “demoniacs” must have been particularly
numerous. Jesus saw in them the forces of evil and mischief, and by his marvellous power
over the souls of those who trusted him he banished the disease. This
brings us to the second point.
When John the Baptist in prison was disturbed by doubts as to
whether Jesus was “he who was to come,” he sent two of his own disciples to him
to ask him himself. There is nothing more touching than this question of the Baptist’s,
nothing more edifying than the Lord’s answer. But we will not dwell upon the scene.
What was the answer? “Go and shew John again those things which you do hear and
see: the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed,
and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the Gospel preached
to them.” That is what the “coming of the kingdom” means, or, rather, it is there already in this saving activity. By vanquishing and banishing misery, need and disease, by the actual influence
which Jesus was exerting, John was to see that a new day had dawned. The healing
of the possessed was only a part of this saving activity; the activity itself,
however, was what Jesus denoted as the meaning and the seal of his mission. It was,
then, to the wretched, to the sick, and to the poor, that he addressed himself;
but not as a moralist and without any trace of, weak-minded sentimentality. He makes
no division of evils into departments and groups; he spends no time in asking whether
the sick one “deserves” to be healed; he is far, too, from having any sympathy
for pain and death. He nowhere says that disease is salutary and that evil is a
blessing. No! disease he calls disease, and health he calls health. To him all
evil, all misery, is something terrible; it is part of the great realm of Satan.
But he feels the power of the Saviour within him. He knows that progress is possible
only by overcoming weakness and healing disease.
But he goes further. It is by his healing, above all by his forgiving
sin, that the kingdom of God comes. This is the first complete transition to the
conception of the kingdom of God as the power that works inwardly. As he calls the
sick and the poor to him, so he calls sinners also, and it is this call which is
all-important. “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
Here for the first time everything that is external and merely future is abandoned: it is the individual, not the nation or the state, which is redeemed; it is new
men who are to arise, and the kingdom of God is to be at once their strength and
the goal at which they aim. They search for the treasure hidden in the field
and find it; they sell all that they have and buy the pearl of great price;
they are converted and become as children; but thereby they are redeemed and
made God’s children and God’s champions.
It was in this connexion that Jesus spoke of the kingdom of
God which the violent take by force, and, again, of the kingdom of God which
grows steadily and silently like a seed and bears fruit. It is in the nature of
spiritual force, a power which sinks into a man within, and can be understood
only from within. Thus, although the kingdom is also in heaven; although it will
come with the day of judgment, he can still say of it: “It is not here or there,
it is within you.”
At a later period the view of the kingdom, according to which
it was already come and still comes in Jesus’ saving activity, was not kept up by
his disciples: nay, they continued to speak of it as of something that was solely
in the future. But the thing itself retained its force; it was only given another title.
It underwent the same experience as the conception of the “Messiah.” As we shall
see hereafter, there was scarcely anyone in the Church of the Gentiles who sought
to explain Jesus’ significance by regarding him as the “Messiah.” But the thing
itself did not perish.
The essential elements in the message of the kingdom were preserved.
The kingdom has a triple meaning. Firstly, it is something supernatural, a gift
from above, not a product of ordinary life. Secondly, it is a purely religious blessing,
the inner link with the living God; thirdly, it is the most important experience
that a. man can have, that on which everything else depends; it permeates and
dominates his whole existence, because sin is forgiven and misery banished.
This kingdom, which comes to the humble and makes them new men
and joyful, is the key that first unlocks the meaning and the aim of life. This
was what Jesus himself found, and what his disciples found. It is a supernatural
element alone that ever enables us to get at the meaning of life; for natural existence
ends in death. But a life that is bound up with death can have no meaning; it is
only sophisms that can blind us to this fact. But here the kingdom of God, the
Eternal, entered into time. “Eternal light came in and made the world look new.” This is Jesus’ message of the kingdom. Everything
else that he proclaimed can be brought into connexion with this; his whole “doctrine” can be conceived as a message of the kingdom. But we shall recognise this, and
the blessing which he means, still more clearly, if we turn to the sec and of the
sections indicated in the previous lecture, and thereby progressively acquaint ourselves
with the fundamental features of Jesus’ message.
II.—God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul.
To our modern way of thinking and feeling, Christ’s message appears
in the clearest and most direct light when grasped in connexion with the idea of
God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul. Here the elements which
I would describe as the restful and restgiving in Jesus’ message, and which are
comprehended in the idea of our being children of God, find expression. I call them
restful in contrast with the impulsive and stirring elements; although it
is just they that are informed with a special strength. But the fact that the whole
of Jesus’ message may be reduced to these two heads God as the Father, and the human
soul so ennobled that it can and does unite with him—shows us that the Gospel is
in nowise a positive religion like the rest; that it contains no statutory or particularistic elements; that it is, therefore, religion
itself. It is superior to all antithesis and tension between this world and
a world to come, between reason and ecstasy, between work and isolation from the
world, between Judaism and Hellenism. It can dominate them all, and there is no
factor of earthly life to which it is confined or necessarily tied down. Let us,
however, get a clearer idea of what being children of God, in Jesus’ sense,
means, by briefly considering four groups containing sayings of his, or, as the
case may be, a single saying, viz.:—(1) The Lord’s Prayer; (2) that utterance,
“Rejoice not that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice because
your names are written in heaven”; (3) the saying, “Are not two sparrows sold
for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your
Father. But the very hairs of your head are all. numbered”; (4) the utterance,
“What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own
soul”?
Let us take the Lord’s Prayer first. It was communicated by Jesus
to his disciples at a particularly solemn moment. They had asked him to teach them
how to pray, as John the Baptist had taught his disciples. Thereupon he uttered
the Lord’s Prayer. It is by their prayers that the character of the higher religions
is determined. But this prayer was spoken—as everyone must feel who has ever given it a thought in his soul by one who has overcome all inner
unrest, or overcomes it the moment that he goes before God. The very apostrophe
of the prayer, “Our Father,” exhibits the steady faith of the man who knows that
he is safe in God, and it tells us that he is certain of being heard. Not to hurl
violent desires at heaven or to obtain this or that earthly blessing does he pray,
but to preserve the power which he already possesses and strengthen the union with
God in which he lives. No one, then, can utter this prayer unless his heart is in
profound peace and his mind wholly concentrated on the inner relation of the soul
with God. All other prayers are of a lower order, for they contain particularistic
elements, or . are so framed that in some way or other they stir the imagination
in regard to the things of sense as well; whilst this prayer leads us away from
everything to the height where the soul is alone with its God. And yet the earthly
element is not absent. The whole of the second half of the prayer deals with earthly
relations, but they are placed in the light of the Eternal. In vain will you look
for any request for particular gifts of grace, or special blessings, even of a spiritual
kind. “All else shall be added unto you.” The name of God, His will, and His kingdom—these
elements of rest and permanence are poured out over the earthly relations as well. Everything that is small and selfish melts away, and only four
things are left with regard to which it is worth while to pray—the daily bread,
the daily trespass, the daily temptations, and the evil in life. There is nothing
in the Gospels that tells us more certainly what the Gospel is, and what sort of
disposition and temper it produces, than the Lord’s Prayer. With this prayer we ought
also to confront all those who disparage the Gospel by representing it as an ascetic
or ecstatic or sociological pronouncement. It shows the Gospel to be the Fatherhood
of God applied to the whole of life; to be an inner, union with God’s will and God’s
kingdom, and a joyous certainty of the possession of eternal blessings and
protection from evil.
As to the second utterance: when Jesus says “Rejoice not that
the spirits are subject unto you, but rejoice rather that your names are written
in heaven,” it is another way of laying special emphasis on the idea that the all-important
element in this religion is the consciousness of being safe in God. The greatest
achievements, nay, the very works which are done in the strength of this religion,
fall below the assurance, at once humble and proud, of resting for time and eternity
under the fatherly care of God. Moreover, the genuineness, nay, the actual existence,
of religious experience is to be measured, not by any transcendency of feeling nor by great deeds that all men can see, but by the joy and
the peace which are diffused through the soul that can say “My Father.”
How far did Christ carry this idea of the fatherly providence
of God? Here we come to the third saying: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?
and one of them shall not fall to the ground without your Father. But the very hairs
of your head are all numbered.” The assurance that God rules is to go as far as
our fears go, nay, as far as life itself—life down even to its smallest manifestations
in the order of Nature. It was to disabuse his disciples of the fear of evil and
the terrors of death that he gave them the sayings about the sparrows and the flowers
of the field; they are to learn how to see the hand of the living God everywhere
in life, and in death too.
Finally, in asking—and after what has gone before the question
will not sound surprising—“What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole
world and lose his own soul?” he put a man’s value as high as it can be put. The
man who can say “My Father” to the Being who rules heaven and earth, is thereby
raised above heaven and earth, and himself has a value which is higher than all
the fabric of this world. But this great saying took the stern tone of a warning.
He offered them a gift and with it set them a task. How different was the Greek doctrine! Plato, it is true, had already sung the great hymn
of the mind; he had distinguished it from the whole world of appearance and maintained
its eternal origin. But the mind which he meant was the knowing mind; he contrasted
it with blind, insensible matter; his message made its appeal to the wise. Jesus
Christ calls to every poor soul; he calls to everyone who bears a human face: You
are children of the living God, and not only better than many sparrows but of more
value than the whole world. The value of a truly great man, as I saw it put lately,
consists in his increasing the value of all mankind. It is here, truly, that the
highest significance of great men lies: to have enhanced, that is, to have progressively
given effect to human value, to the value of that race of men which has risen up
out of the dull ground of Nature. But Jesus Christ was the first to bring the value
of every human soul to light, and what he did no one can any more undo. We may take
up what relation to him we will: in the history of the past no one can refuse to
recognise that it was he who raised humanity to this level.
This highest estimate of a man’s value is based on a transvaluation
of all values. To the man who boasts of his possessions he says: “Thou fool.”
He confronts everyone with the thought: “Whosoever will lose his life shall save it.” He can even
say: “He that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto
life eternal.” This is the transvaluation of values of which many before him had
a dim idea; of which they perceived the truth as through a veil; the redeeming
power of which—that blessed mystery—they felt in advance. He was the first to give
it calm, simple, and fearless expression, as though it were a truth which grew on
every tree. It was just this that stamped his peculiar genius, that he gave perfectly
simple expression to profound and all-important truths, as though they could not
be otherwise; as though he were uttering something that was self-evident; as though
he were only reminding men of what they all know already, because it lives in the
innermost part of their souls.
In the combination of these ideas—God the Father, Providence,
the position of men as God’s children, the infinite value of the human soul—the
whole Gospel is expressed. But we must recognise what a paradox it all is; nay,
that the paradox of religion here for the first time finds its full expression.
Measured by the experience of the senses and by exact knowledge, not only are the
different religions a paradox, but so are all religious phenomena. They introduce
an element, and pronounce it to be the most important of all, which is not cognisable
by the senses and flies in the face of things as they are actually constituted.
But all religions other than Christianity are in some way or other so bound
up with the things of the world that they involve an element of earthly advantage,
or, as the case may be, are akin in their substance to the intellectual and spiritual
condition of a definite epoch. But what can be less obvious than the statement:
the hairs of your head are all numbered; you have a supernatural value; you can
put yourselves into the hands of a power which no one has seen? Either that is nonsense,
or else it is the utmost development of which religion is capable; no longer a
mere phenomenon accompanying the life of the senses, a coefficient, a transfiguration
of certain parts of that life, but something which sets up a paramount title to
be the first and the only fact that reveals the fundamental basis and meaning of
life. Religion subordinates to itself the whole motley world of phenomena, and defies
that world if it claims to be the only real one. Religion gives us only a single
experience, but one which presents the world in a new light: the Eternal appears;
time becomes means to an end; man is seen to be on the side of the Eternal. This
was certainly Jesus’ meaning, and to take anything from it is to destroy it. In
applying the idea of Providence to the whole of humanity and the world without any
exception; in showing that humanity is rooted in the Eternal; in proclaiming the
fact that we are God’s children as at once a gift and a task, he took a firm grip
of all fumbling and stammering attempts at religion and brought them to their issuer
Once more let it be said: we may assume what position we will in regard to him
and his message, certain it is that thence onward the value of our race is enhanced; human lives, nay, we ourselves, have become dearer to one another. A man may know
it or not, but a real reverence for humanity follows from the practical recognition
of God as the Father of us all.
III.—The higher righteousness and the commandment of love.
This is the third head, and the whole of the Gospel is embraced
under it. To represent the Gospel as an ethical message is no depreciation of its
value. The ethical system which Jesus found prevailing in his nation was both ample
and profound. To judge the moral ideas of the Pharisees solely by their childish
and casuistical aspects is not fair. By being bound up with religious worship and
petrified in ritual observance, the morality of holiness had, indeed, been transformed
into something that was the clean opposite of it. But all was not yet hard and dead; there was some life still left in the deeper parts of the system. To those who
questioned him Jesus could still answer: “You have the law, keep it; you know best yourselves what you have to do; the sum of
the law is, as you yourselves say, to love God and your neighbour.” Nevertheless,
there is a sphere of ethical thought which is peculiarly expressive of Jesus’ Gospel.
Let us make this clear by citing four points.
Firstly: Jesus severed the connexion existing in his day between
ethics and the external forms of religious worship and technical observance. He
would have absolutely nothing to do with the purposeful and self-seeking pursuit
of “good works” in combination with the ritual of worship. He exhibited an indignant
contempt for those who allow their neighbours, nay, even their parents, to starve,
and on the other hand send gifts to the temple. He will have no compromise in the
matter. Love and mercy are ends in themselves; they lose all value and are put to
shame by having to be anything else than the service of one’s neighbour.
Secondly: in all questions of morality he goes straight to the
root, that is, to the disposition and the intention. It is only thus that what he
calls the “higher righteousness” can be understood. The “higher righteousness”
is the righteousness that will stand when the depths of the heart are probed. Here,
again, we have something that is seemingly very simple and self-evident. Yet the
truth, as he uttered it, took the severe form: “It was said of old . . . but I say unto you.” After all, then, the
truth was something new; he was aware that it had never yet been expressed in such
a consistent form and with such claims to supremacy. A large portion of the so-called
Sermon on the Mount is occupied with what he says when he goes in detail through
the several departments of human relationships and human failings so as to bring
the disposition and intention to light in each case, to judge a man’s works by them,
and on them to hang heaven and hell.
Thirdly: what he freed from its connexion with self-seeking
and ritual elements, and recognised as the moral principle, he reduces to one
root and to one motive—love. He knows of no other, and love itself, whether
it takes the form of love of one’s neighbour or of one’s enemy, or the love of the
Samaritan, is of one kind only. It must completely fill the, soul; it is what remains
when the soul dies to itself. In this sense of love is the new life already begun.
But it is always the love which serves, and only in this function does it
exist and live.
Fourthly: we saw that Jesus freed the moral element from all
alien connexions, even from its alliance with the public religion. Therefore to
say that the Gospel is a matter of ordinary morality is not to misunderstand him.
And yet there is one all-important point where he combines religion and morality. It is a point which must be felt; it is not easy to define.
In view of the Beatitudes it may, perhaps, best be described as humility.
Jesus made love and humility one. Humility is not a virtue by itself; but it is
pure receptivity, the expression of inner need, the prayer for God’s grace and
forgiveness, in a word, the opening up of the heart to God. In Jesus’ view, this
humility, which is the love of God of which we are capable—take, for instance, the
parable of the Pharisee and the publican—is an abiding disposition towards the good,
and that out of which everything that is good springs and grows. “Forgive us our
trespasses even as we forgive them that trespass against us” is the prayer at once
of humility and of love. This, then, is the source and origin of the love of one’s
neighbour; the poor in spirit and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness
are also the peacemakers and the merciful.
It was in this sense that Jesus combined religion and morality,
and in this sense religion may be called the soul of morality, and morality the
body of religion. We can thus understand how it was that Jesus could place the love
of God and the love of one’s neighbour side by side; the love of one’s neighbour
is the only practical proof on earth of that love of God which is strong in humility.
In thus expressing his message of the higher righteousness and
the new commandment of love in these four leading thoughts, Jesus defined the sphere of the
ethical in a way in which no one before him had ever defined it. But should we be
threatened with doubts as to what he meant, we must steep ourselves again and again
in the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount. They contain his ethics and his religion,
united at the root, and freed from all external and particularistic elements.
LECTURE V
AT the close of the last lecture I referred to the Beatitudes,
and mentioned that they exhibit Jesus’ religion in a particularly impressive way.
I desire to remind you of another passage which shows that Jesus recognised the
practical proof of religion to consist in the exercise of neighbourly love and mercy.
In one of his last discourses he spoke of the Judgment, bringing it before his hearers’
eyes in the parable of the shepherd separating the sheep from the goats. The sole
principle of separation is the question of mercy. The question is raised by asking
whether men gave food and drink to Jesus himself, and visited him; that is to say,
it is put as a religious question. The paradox is then resolved in the sentence: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have
done it unto me.” We can have no clearer illustration of the fact that in Jesus’
view mercy was the quality on which everything turned, and that the temper in which
it is exercised is the guarantee that a man’s religious position is the right
one. How so? Because in exercising this virtue men are imitating God: “Be merciful, even as your Father in
heaven is merciful.” He who exercises mercy exercises God’s prerogative;
for God’s justice is not accomplished by keeping to the rule, “an eye for an eye
and a tooth for a tooth,” but is subject to the power of His mercy.
Let us pause here for a moment. The history of religion marked
an enormous advance, religion itself was established afresh, when through poets
and thinkers in Greece on the one hand, and through the prophets in Palestine on
the other, the idea of righteousness and a righteous God became a living force and
transformed tradition. The gods were raised to a higher level and civilised; the
warlike and capricious Jehovah became a holy Being in whose court of judgment a
man might trust, albeit in fear and trembling. The two great provinces of religion
and morality, hitherto separated, were now brought into close relation; for “the
Godhead is holy and just.” It is our history that was then developed; for
without that all-important transformation there would be no such thing as “mankind,”
no such thing as a “history of the world” in the higher sense. The most immediate
result of this development may be summed up in the maxim: “What ye would not that
men should do unto you, do ye also not unto them.” Insufficient and prosaic as the
rule may seem, yet, if extended so as to cover all human relationships and really observed, it contains
a civilising force of enormous strength.
But it does not contain the ultimate step. Not until justice
was compelled to give way to mercy, and the idea of brotherhood and self-sacrifice
in the service of one’s neighbour became paramount—another re-establishment of religion—was the last advance accomplished
that it was possible and necessary to make. Its maxim, “What ye would that men should
do unto you, do ye also unto them,” also seems prosaic; and yet rightly understood
it leads to the summit and comprises a new method of apprehension, and a new way
of judging one’s own life. The thought that “he who loses his life shall save it,”
runs side by side with this maxim and effects a transvaluation of values, in the
certainty that a man’s true life is not tied to this span of time and is not rooted
in material existence.
I hope that I have thus shown, although briefly, that in the
sphere of thought which is indicated by “the higher righteousness” and “the new
commandment of love” Jesus’ teaching is also contained in its entirety. As a matter
of fact, the three spheres which we have distinguished—the kingdom of God, God as
the Father and the infinite value of the human soul, and the higher righteousness
showing itself in love—coalesce; for ultimately the kingdom is nothing but the treasure which the soul possesses
in the eternal and merciful God. It needs only a few touches to develop this thought
into everything that, taking Jesus’ sayings as its groundwork, Christendom has known
and strives to maintain as hope, faith, and love.
To proceed: Now that we have established the fundamental characteristics
of Jesus’ message, let us try, in the second place, to treat of the main bearings
of the Gospel as applied to individual problems. There are six points or questions
which call for special attention, as being the most important in themselves, and
consequently felt and regarded as such in all ages. And although, in the course
of the Church’s history, one or other of these questions may have passed into the
background for a decade or two, it has always reappeared afresh, and with redoubled
force:—
(1) The Gospel and the world, or the question of asceticism;
(2) The Gospel and the poor, or the social question;
(3) The Gospel and law, or the question of public order;
(4) The Gospel and work, or the question of civilisation;
(5) The Gospel and the Son of God, or the Christological question;
(6) The Gospel and doctrine, or the question of creed.
By these six questions—the first four hang together, and the
last two stand by themselves—I hope to be able to exhibit, of course only in outline,
the most important bearings of Jesus’ message.
(1) The Gospel and the world, or the question of
asceticism.
There is a widespread opinion—it is dominant in the Catholic
churches and many Protestants share it nowadays—that, in the last resort and in
the most important things which it enjoins, the Gospel is a strictly world-shunning
and ascetic creed. Some people proclaim this piece of intelligence with sympathy
and admiration; nay, they magnify it into the contention that the whole value
and meaning of genuine Christianity, as of Buddhism, lies in its world-denying character.
Others emphasise the world-shunning doctrines of the Gospel in order thereby to
expose its incompatibility with modern ethical principles, and to prove its uselessness
as a religion. The Catholic churches have found a curious way out of the difficulty
and one which is, in reality, a product of despair. They recognise, as I have said,
the world-denying character of the Gospel, and they teach, accordingly, that it
is only in the form of monasticism—that is, in the “vita religiosa”—that true Christian life finds its expression. But they
admit a “lower” kind of Christianity without asceticism, as “sufficient.” We will
say nothing about this strange concession now; the Catholic doctrine is that it
is only monks who can follow Christ fully. With this doctrine a great philosopher,
and a still greater writer, of the nineteenth century, has made common cause. Schopenhauer
extols Christianity because, and in so far as, it has produced great ascetics like
St. Anthony or St. Francis; but, beyond that, everything in the Christian message
seems to him to be useless and a stumbling-block. With a much deeper insight than
Schopenhauer, and with a strength of feeling and power of language that carry us
away, Tolstoi has emphasised the ascetic and world-shunning features of the Gospel,
and erected them into a rule of observance. That the ascetic ideal which he derives
from the Gospel is endowed with warmth and strength, and includes the service of
one’s neighbour, is a fact which we cannot deny; but to him, too, the shunning
of the world is the leading characteristic of Christianity. There are thousands
of our “educated” readers who find his stories suggestive and exciting, but who
at the bottom of their hearts are pleased and relieved to know that Christianity
means the denial of the world; for then they know very well that it does not concern
them. They are certain, and rightly certain, that this world is given
them to be made the best of, within the bounds of its own blessings and its own
regulations; and that if Christianity makes any other claim, it thereby shows that
it is unnatural. If Christianity has no goal to set before this life; if it transfers
everything to a Beyond; if it declares all earthly blessings to be valueless, and
points exclusively to a world-shunning and contemplative life, it is an offence
to all energetic, nay, ultimately, to all true natures; for such natures are certain that our
faculties
are given us to be employed, and that the earth is assigned to us to be cultivated
and subdued.
But is not the Gospel really a world-denying creed? Certain very well-known
passages are appealed to which do not seem to admit of any other interpretation: “If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out and cast it from thee”; “If thy
right hand offend thee, cut it off”; or the answer to the rich young man: “Go
and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven”; or the saying about those who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of
heaven’s sake; or the utterance: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father,
and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren and sisters, yea, and his own life
also, he cannot be my disciple.” These and other passages seem to settle the matter, and to prove that the Gospel is altogether world-shunning and
ascetic in its character. But to this thesis I oppose three considerations which
point in another direction. The first is derived from the way in which Jesus came
forward, and from his manner and course of life; the second is based upon the impression
which he made upon his disciples and was reflected in their own lives; the third
springs from what we said about the fundamental features of Jesus’ message.
1. We find in our Gospels a remarkable utterance by Jesus, as
follows: “John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, He hath a devil.
The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, Behold a man gluttonous and
a wine-bibber.” A glutton, then, and a wine-bibber was he called in addition to
the other abusive names which were given him. From this it clearly follows that
in his whole demeanour and manner of life he made an impression quite different
from that of the preacher of repentance on the banks of the Jordan. Towards the
various fields in which asceticism had been traditionally practised, he must have
taken up an attitude of indifference. We see him in the houses of the rich and of
the poor, at meals, with women and amongst children; according to tradition, even
at a wedding. He allows his feet to be washed and his head to be anointed. Further,
he is glad to lodge with Mary and Martha; he does not ask them to
leave their home. When he finds, to his joy, people with a firm faith, he leaves
them in the calling and the position in which they were. We do not hear of his telling
them to sell all and follow him. Apparently he thinks it possible, nay, fitting,
that they should live unto their belief in the position in which God has placed
them. His circle of disciples is not exhausted by the few whom he summoned directly
to follow him. He finds God’s children everywhere; to discover them in their obscurity
and to be allowed to speak to them some word of strength is his highest pleasure.
But he did not organise his disciples into a band of monks, and he gave them no
directions as to what they were to do and leave undone in the life of the day.
No one who reads the Gospels with an unprejudiced mind, and does not pick his words,
can fail to acknowledge that this free and active spirit does not appear to be bent
under the yoke of asceticism, and that such words, therefore, as point in this direction
must not be taken in a rigid sense and generalised, but must be regarded in a wider
connexion and from a higher point of view.
2. It is certain that the disciples did not understand their
master to be a world-shunning ascetic. We shall see later what sacrifices they made
for the Gospel and in what sense they renounced the world. But it is evident they did not give ascetic practices
the chief place; they maintained the rule that the labourer is worthy of his hire; they did not send away their wives. We are incidentally told of Peter that his
wife accompanied him on his missionary journeys. Apart from what we are told of
an attempt to institute a kind of communism in the congregation at Jerusalem—and
we may put it aside, as it is not trustworthy and, moreover, bore no ascetic character—we find nothing in the apostolic age which suggests a community of men who were
ascetics on principle; on the contrary, we find the conviction prevailing everywhere
that it is within the given circumstances, in the calling and position in which
he finds himself, that a man is to be a Christian. How differently things developed
in Buddhism from the very start!
3. The all-important consideration is the third. Let me remind
you of what we said in regard to Jesus’ leading thoughts. In the sphere indicated
by trust in God, humility, the forgiveness of sins and the love of one’s neighbour,
there is no room for the introduction of any other maxim, least of all for one of
a legal character. At the same time Jesus makes it clear in what sense the kingdom
of God is the antithesis of the world. The man who associates any ascetic practice
with the words “Take no thought,” “Be Be merciful even as your Father in heaven is merciful,” and so on, and puts it upon the
same level as those words, does not understand the sublime character of these sayings,
and has either lost or has never attained the feeling that there is a union with
God in which all such questions as shunning the world and asceticism ire left far
behind.
For these reasons we must decline to regard the Gospel as a message
of world-denial.
On the other hand, Jesus speaks of three enemies, and the watchword
which he gives in dealing with them is not that we are to flee them; rather, he
commands us to annihilate them. These three enemies are mammon, care, and selfishness. Observe that here there
is no question of flight or denial, but of a battle which is to be fought until the
enemy is annihilated; the forces of darkness are to be overthrown. By
mammon he understands money and worldly goods in the widest sense of the word, worldly
goods which try to gain the mastery over us, and make us tyrants over others; for
money is “compressed force.” Jesus speaks of this enemy as if it were a person,
as if it were a knight in armour, or a king; nay, as if it were the devil himself.
It is at this enemy that the saying, “Ye cannot serve two masters,” is aimed. Wherever
anything belonging to the domain of mammon is of such value to a man that he sets
his heart upon it, that he trembles at the thought of losing it, that he is no longer
willing to give it up, such a man is already in bondage. Hence, when the Christian
feels that this danger confronts him, he is not to treat with the enemy, but to
fight, and not fight only but also destroy the mammon. Were Christ to preach among
us to-day, he would certainly not talk in general terms, and say to everyone, “give
away everything you have”; but there are thousands among us to whom he would so
speak, and that there is scarcely anyone who feels compelled to apply these sayings
of the Gospel to himself is a fact that ought to make us suspicious.
The second enemy is care. At first sight it may surprise us that
Jesus should describe care as so terrible a foe. He ranks it with “heathenism.”
It is true that in the Lord’s Prayer he also taught men to pray, “Give us this day
our daily bread”; but a confident request of this kind he does not call care.
The care which he means is that which makes us timorous slaves of the day and of
material things; the care through which bit by bit we fall a prey to the world.
Care is to him an outrage on God, who preserves the very sparrows on the housetop; it destroys the fundamental relation with the Father in heaven, the childlike
trust, and thus ruins our inmost soul. This is also a point in regard to which,
as in respect to mammon, we must confess that we do not feel deeply and strongly enough to recognise the
full truth of Jesus’ message. But the question is, Who is right—he with the inexorable
“Take no thought,” or we with our debilitating fears? We, too, in a measure feel
that a man is not really free, strong, and invincible, until he has put aside all
his cares and cast them upon God. How much we could accomplish and how strong we
should be, if we did not fret.
And then, thirdly: selfishness. It is self-denial, not asceticism,
which Jesus requires; self-denial. to the point of self-renunciation. “If thy
right eye offend thee, pluck it out; if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off.”
Wherever some desire of the senses gains the upper hand of you, so that you become
coarse and vulgar, or in your selfishness a new master arises in you, you must
destroy it; not because God has any pleasure in mutilation, but because you
cannot otherwise preserve your better part. It is a hard demand. But it is not met by any act
of general renunciation, such as monks perform the act may leave things just as
they were before—but only by a struggle and a resolute renunciation at the critical point.
With all these enemies, mammon, care, and selfishness, what we
have to exercise is self-denial, and therewith the relation of Christianity
to asceticism is determined. Asceticism maintains the theory that all worldly blessings are in themselves of no value. This is not the theory to which we should be led if we
were to go by the Gospel; “for the earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof.”
But according to the Gospel a man is to ask: Can and ought I to regard property
and honour, friends and relations as blessings, or must I put them away? If certain
of Jesus’ sayings to this effect have been handed down to us in a general form and
were, no doubt, so uttered, still they must be limited by the whole tenor of his
discourses. What the Gospel asks of us is solemnly to examine ourselves, to maintain
an earnest watch, and to destroy the enemy. There can be no doubt, however, that
Jesus demanded self-denial and self-renunciation to a much greater extent than we
like to think.
To sum up: Ascetic in the primary meaning of the word the Gospel
is not; for it is a message of trust in God, of humility, of forgiveness of sin,
and of mercy. This is a height which nothing else can approach, and into this sphere
nothing else can force its way. Further, worldly blessings are not of the devil
but of God—“Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things;
he arrays the lilies of the field and feeds the fowls of the air.” Asceticism
has no place in the Gospel at all; what it asks is that we should struggle
against mammon, against care, against selfishness; what it demands and disengages is love; the love that serves and is self-sacrificing.
This struggle and this love are the kind of asceticism which the Gospel means, and
whoever encumbers Jesus’ message with any other kind fails to understand it. He
fails to understand its grandeur and its importance; for there is something still
more important than “giving one’s body to be burned and bestowing all one’s
goods to feed the poor,” namely, self-denial and love.
(2) The Gospel and the poor, or the social question.
The bearings of the Gospel in regard to the social question form
the second point which we proposed to consider. It is closely akin to the first.
Here also we encounter different views prevalent at the present moment, or, to be
more exact, two views, which are mutually opposed. We are told, on the one hand,
that the Gospel was in the main a great social message to the poor, and that everything
else in it is of secondary importance—mere contemporary wrapping, ancient tradition,
or new forms supplied by the first generations of Christians. Jesus, they say, was
a great social reformer, who aimed at relieving the lower classes from the wretched
condition in which they were languishing; he set up a social programme which
embraced the equality of all men, relief from economical distress, and deliverance
from misery and oppression. It is only so, they add, that he can be understood, and therefore so he was;
or perhaps—so he was, because it is only so that we can understand him. For years
books and pamphlets have been written dealing with the Gospel in this sense; well-meant
performances which aim at thus providing Jesus with a defence and a recommendation.
But amongst those who take the Gospel to be an essentially social message there
are also some who draw the opposite conclusion. By trying to prove that Jesus’ message
was wholly directed to bringing about an economical reform, they declare the Gospel
to be an entirely Utopian and useless programme; the view, they say, which Jesus
took of the world was gentle, but also weak; coming himself from the lower and
oppressed classes, he shared the suspicion entertained by small people of the great
and the rich; he abhorred all profitable trade and business; he failed to understand
the necessity of acquiring wealth; and accordingly he shaped his programme so as
to disseminate pauperism in the “world”—to him the world was Palestine—and then,
by way of contrast with the misery on earth, to build up a kingdom in heaven; a
programme unrealisable in itself, and offensive to men of energy. This, or something
like this, is the view held by another section of those who identify the Gospel
with a social message.
Opposed to this group of persons, united in the way in which they look at the Gospel but divided in their opinions
in regard to it, there is another group upon whom it makes quite a different impression.
They assert that as for any direct interest on Jesus’ part in the economical and
social conditions of his age; nay, further, as for any rudimentary interest in
economical questions in general, it is only read into the Gospel, and that with
economical questions the Gospel has absolutely nothing to do. Jesus, they say, certainly
borrowed illustrations and examples from the domain of economics, and took a personal
interest in the poor, the sick, and the miserable, but his purely religious teaching
and his saving activity were in no way directed to any improvement in their earthly
position: to say that his objects and intentions were of a social character is
to secularise them. Nay, there are not a few among us who think him, like themselves,
a “Conservative,” who respected all these existing social differences and
ordinances as “divinely ordained.”
The voices which make themselves heard here are, as you will
observe, very different, and the different points of view are defended with zeal
and pertinacity. Now, if we are to try to find the position which corresponds to
the facts, there is, first of all, a brief remark to be made on the age in which
Jesus lived. Our knowledge of the social conditions in Palestine in his age and
for some considerable time previously does not go very far; but there are certain leading
features of it which we can establish, and two things more particularly which we
can assert.
The governing classes, to which, above all, the Pharisees, and
also the priests, belonged—the latter partly in alliance with the temporal rulers—had little feeling for the needs of the people. The condition of those classes may
not have been much worse than it generally is at all times and in all nations, but
it was bad. Moreover, there was here the additional circumstance that mercy and
sympathy with the poor had been put into the background by devotion to public worship
and to the cult of “righteousness.” Oppression and tyranny on the part of the rich
had long become a standing and inexhaustible theme with the Psalmists and with all
men of any warm feelings. Jesus, too, could not have spoken of the rich as he did
speak, unless they had grossly neglected their duties.
In the poor and oppressed classes, in the huge mass of want and
evil, amongst the multitude of people for whom the word “misery” is often only
another expression for the word “life,” nay, is life itself—in this multitude there
were groups of people at that time, as we can surely see, who, with fervent and
steadfast hope, were hanging upon the promises and consoling words of their God,
waiting in humility and patience for the day when their deliverance was to
come. Often too poor to pay even for the barest advantages and privileges of public
worship, oppressed, thrust aside, and unjustly treated, they could not raise their
eyes to the temple; but they looked to the God of Israel, and fervent prayers went
up to Him: “Watchman, what of the night?” Thus their hearts were opened to God
and ready to receive Him, and in many of the Psalms, and in the later Jewish literature
which was akin to them, the word “poor” directly denotes those who have their hearts
open and are waiting for the consolation of Israel. Jesus found this usage of speech
in existence and adopted it. Therefore when we come across the expression “the
poor” in the Gospels we must not think, without further ceremony, of the poor in
the economic sense. As a matter of fact, poverty in the economic sense coincided
to a large extent in those days with religious humility and an openness of the heart
towards God, in contrast with the elevated “practice of virtue” of the Pharisees
and its routine observance in “righteousness.” But if this were the prevailing condition
of affairs, then it is clear that our modern categories of “poor” and “rich”
cannot be unreservedly transferred to that age. Yet we must not forget that in those
days the economical sense was also, as a rule, included in the word “poor.” We shall, therefore, have to examine in our next lecture
the direction in which a distinction can be made, or perhaps to ask, whether it
is possible to fix the inner sense of Jesus’ words in spite of the peculiar difficulty
attaching to the conception of “poverty.” We can have some confidence, however,
that we shall not have to remain in obscurity on this point; for in its fundamental
features the Gospel also throws a bright light upon the field covered by this question.
LECTURE VI
AT the close of the last lecture I referred to the problem presented
by “the poor” in the Gospel. As a rule, the poor of whom Jesus was thinking were
also those whose hearts are open towards God, and hence what is said of them cannot
be applied without further ceremony to the poor generally. In considering the social
question we must, therefore, put aside all those sayings of Jesus which obviously
refer to the poor in the spiritual sense. These include, for instance, the first
Beatitude, whether we accept it in the form in which it appears in Luke or in Matthew.
The Beatitudes associated with it make it clear that Jesus was thinking of the poor
whose hearts were inwardly open towards God. But, as we have no time to go through
all the sayings separately, we must content ourselves with some leading considerations
in order to establish the most important points.
Jesus regarded the possession of worldly goods as a grave danger
for the soul, as hardening the heart, entangling us in earthly cares, and seducing
us into a vulgar life of pleasure. “A rich man shall hardly enter the
kingdom of heaven.”
The contention that Jesus desired, so to speak, to about a general condition of
poverty and distress, in order that he might afterwards make it the basis of
his kingdom of heaven—a contention which we encounter in different forms—is erroneous.
The very opposite is the case. Want he called want, and evil he called
evil. Far prom showing them any favour, he made the greatest and strongest efforts
to combat and destroy them. In this sense, too, his whole activity was a saving
activity, that is to say, a struggle against evil and against want. Nay, we might
almost think that he over-estimated the depressing load of poverty and affliction; that he occupied himself too much with it; and that, taking the moral bearings
of life as a whole, he attributed too great an importance to those forces of sympathy
and mercy which are expected to counteract this state of things. But neither, of
course, would this view be correct. He knows of a power which he thinks still worse
than want and misery, namely, sin; and he knows of a force still more emancipating
than mercy, namely, forgiveness. His discourses and actions leave no doubt upon
this point. It is certain, therefore, that Jesus never and nowhere wished to keep
up poverty and misery, but, on the contrary, he combated them himself and bid others combat them. The Christians who in the course of the Church’s
history were for countenancing mendicancy and recommending universal pauperisation,
or sentimentally coquetted with misery and distress, cannot with any show of reason
appeal to him. Upon those, however, who were anxious to devote their whole lives
to the preaching of the Gospel and the ministry of the Word—he did not ask this
of everyone, but regarded it as a special calling from God and a special gift—upon
them he enjoined the renunciation of all that they had, that is to say, all worldly
goods. Yet that does not mean that he relegated them to a life of beggary. On the
contrary, they were to be certain that they would find their bread and their means
of livelihood. What he meant by that we learn from a saying of his which was accidentally
omitted from the Gospels, but has been handed down to us by the apostle Paul. In
the ninth chapter of his first epistle to the Corinthians he writes: “The Lord hath
ordained that they which preach the gospel should live of the gospel.” An absence
of worldly possessions he required of the ministers of the Word, that is, of the
missionaries, in order that they might live entirely for their calling. But he did
not mean that they were to beg. This is a Franciscan misconception which is perhaps
suggested by Jesus’ words but “carries us away from his meaning.
In this connexion allow me to digress for a moment from our subject.
Those members of the Christian churches who have become professional evangelists
or ministers of the Word in their parishes have not, as a rule, found it necessary
to follow the Lord’s injunction to dispossess themselves of their worldly goods.
So far as priests or pastors, as the case may be, and not missionaries, are concerned,
it may be said with some justice that the injunction does not refer to them; for
it presupposes that a man has undertaken the office of propagating the Gospel.
It may be said, further, that the Lord’s injunctions, over and above those relating
to the commandment of love, must not be made into inviolable laws, as otherwise
Christian liberty will be impaired, and the high privilege of the Christian religion
to adapt its shape to the course of history, free from all constraint, will be prejudiced.
But still it may be asked whether it would not have been an extraordinary gain to
Christianity if those who are called to be its ministers,—the missionaries and
pastors, had followed the Lord’s rules. At the very least, it ought to be a strict
principle with them to concern themselves with property and worldly goods only so
far as will prevent them being a burden to others, and beyond that to renounce them.
I entertain no doubt that the time will come when the world will tolerate a life
of luxury among those who are charged with the cure of souls as little as it tolerates
priestly government. Our feelings in this respect are becoming finer, and that is
an advantage. It will no longer be thought fitting, in the higher sense of the word,
for anyone to preach resignation and contentment to the poor, who is well off himself,
and zealously concerned for the increase of his property. A healthy man may well
offer consolation to the sick; but how shall a man of property convince those who
have none that worldly goods are of no value? The Lord’s injunction that the minister
of the Word is to divest himself of worldly possessions will still come to be honoured
in the history of his communion.
Jesus laid down no social programme for the suppression of poverty
and distress, if by programme we mean a set of definitely prescribed regulations.
With economical conditions and contemporary circumstances he did not interfere.
Had he become entangled in them; had he given laws which were ever so salutary
for Palestine, what would have been gained by it? They would have served the needs
of a day, and to-morrow would have been antiquated; to the Gospel they would have
been a burden and a source of confusion. We must be careful not to exceed the limits
set to such injunctions as “Give to him that asketh thee” and others of a similar
kind. They must be understood in connexion with the time and the situation. They refer to the immediate
wants of the applicant, which were satisfied with a piece of bread, a drink of water,
an article of clothing to cover his nakedness. We must remember that in the Gospel
we are in the East, and in circumstances which from an economical point of view
are somewhat undeveloped. Jesus was no social reformer. He could say on occasion,
“The poor ye have always with you,” and thereby, it seems, indicate that the conditions
would undergo no essential change. He refused to be a judge between contending heirs,
and a thousand problems of economics and social life he would have just as resolutely
put aside as the unreasonable demand that he would settle a question of inheritance.
Yet again and again people have ventured to deduce some concrete social programme
from the Gospel. Even evangelical theologians have made the attempt, and are still
making it—an endeavour hopeless in itself and full of danger, but absolutely bewildering
and intolerable when the people try to “fill up the gaps”—and they are many—to
be found in the Gospel with regulations and programmes drawn from the Old Testament.
No religion, not even Buddhism, ever went to work with such an
energetic social message, and so strongly identified itself with that message as
we see to be the case in the Gospel. How so? Because the words “Love thy neighbour as thyself” were spoken
in deep earnest; because with these words Jesus turned a light upon all the concrete
relations of life, upon the world of hunger, poverty and misery; because, lastly,
he uttered them as a religious, nay, as the religious maxim. Let me remind
you once more of the parable of the Last Judgment, where the whole question of a
man’s worth and destiny is made dependent on whether he has practised the love of
his neighbour; let me remind you of the other parable of the rich man and poor
Lazarus. I should like to cite another story, too, which is little known,
because it occurs in this wording not in our four Gospels but in the Gospel of
the Hebrews. The story of the rich young man is there handed down as follows:
A rich man said to the Lord: Master, what good must I do that
I may have life? He answered him: Man, keep the law and the prophets. The other
answered: That have I done. He said to him: Go, sell all thy possessions and distribute
them to the poor, and come and follow me. Then the rich man began to scratch his
head, and the speech did not please him. And the Lord said to him: How canst thou
say: I have kept the law and the prophets, as it is written in the law, Love thy
neighbour as thyself? Behold, many of thy brethren, sons of Abraham, lie in dirty
rags and die of hunger, and thy house is full of many goods, and nothing comes out
of it to them.
You observe how Jesus felt the material wants of the poor, and
how he deduced a remedy for such distress from the commandment: “Love thy neighbour
as thyself.” People ought not to speak of loving their neighbours if they can allow
men beside them to starve and die in misery. It is not only that the Gospel preaches
solidarity and the helping of others; it is in this message that its real import
consists. In this sense it is profoundly socialistic, just as it is also profoundly
individualistic, because it establishes the infinite and independent value of every
human soul. Its tendency to union and brotherliness is not so much an accidental
phenomenon in its history as the essential feature of its character. The Gospel
aims at founding a community among men as wide as human life itself and as deep
as human need. As has been truly said, its object is to transform the socialism
which rests on the basis of conflicting interests into the socialism which rests
on the consciousness of a spiritual unity. In this sense its social message can
never be outbid. In the course of the ages people’s opinions as to what constitutes
“an existence worthy of a man” have, thank God, become much changed and improved.
But Jesus, too, knew of this way of measuring things. Did he not once refer, almost
bitterly, to his own position: “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air
have nests: but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head”? A dwelling, sufficient
daily bread, cleanliness—all these needs he touched upon, and their satisfaction
he held to be necessary, and a condition of earthly life. If a man cannot procure
them for himself, others are to step in and do it for him. There can be no doubt,
therefore, that if Jesus were with us to-day he would side with those who are making
great efforts to relieve the hard lot of the poor and procure them better conditions
of life. The fallacious principle of the free play of forces, of the “live and let
live” principle—a better name for it would be the “live and let die”—is entirely
opposed to the Gospel. And it is not as our servants, but as our brothers, that
we are to help the poor.
Lastly, our riches do not belong to us alone. The Gospel has
prescribed no regulations as to how we are to use them, but it leaves us in no doubt
that we are to regard ourselves not as owners but as administrators in the service
of our neighbour. Nay, it almost looks as if Jesus contemplated the possibility
of a union among men in which wealth, as private property in the strict sense of
the word, was non-existent. Here, however, we touch upon a question which is not
easy to decide, and which, perhaps, ought not to be raised at all, because Jesus’
eschatological ideas and his particular horizon enter into it. Nor is it a question
that we need raise. It is the disposition which Jesus kindled in his disciples
towards poverty and want that is all-important.
The Gospel is a social message, solemn and overpowering in its
force; it is the proclamation of solidarity and brotherliness, in favour of the
poor. But the message is bound up with the recognition of the infinite value of
the human soul, and is contained in what Jesus said about the kingdom of God. We
may also assert that it is an essential part of what . he there said. But laws or
ordinances or injunctions bidding us forcibly alter the conditions of the age in
which we may happen to be living are not to be found in the Gospel.
(3) The Gospel and the law, or the question of
public order.
The problem dealing with the relation of the Gospel to law embraces
two leading questions: (I) the relation of the Gospel to constituted authority;
(2) the relation of the Gospel to legal ordinances generally, in so far as they
possess a wider range than is covered by the conception “constituted authority.”
It is not easy to mistake the answer to the first question, but the second is more
complicated and beset with greater difficulties; and very diverse opinions are
entertained in regard to it.
As to Jesus’ relation to the constituted authorities of his day, I need scarcely remind you again in express
terms that he was no political revolutionary, and that he laid down no political
programme. Although he is sure that his Father would send him twelve legions of
angels were he to ask Him, he did not ask Him. When they wanted to make him a king,
he disappeared. Ultimately, indeed, when he thought well to reveal himself to the
whole nation as the Messiah—how he came to the decision and carried it out are points
in which we are left in the dark—he made his entry into Jerusalem as a king; but
of the modes of presenting himself which prophecy suggested, he chose that which
was most remote from a political manifestation. The way in which he understood his
Messianic duty is shown by his driving the buyers and sellers from the temple.
In this cleansing of the temple it was not the constituted authorities whom he attacked,
but those who had assumed to themselves rights of authority over the soul. In every
nation, side by side with the constituted authorities, an unconstituted authority
is established, or rather two unconstituted authorities. They are the political
church and the political parties. What the political church wants, in the widest
sense of the word and under very various guises, is to rule; to get hold of men’s
souls and bodies, consciences and worldly goods. What political parties want is
the same; and when the heads of these parties set themselves up as popular leaders,
a terrorism is developed which is often worse than the fear of royal despots. It
was not otherwise in Palestine in Jesus’ day. The priests and the Pharisees held
the nation in bondage and murdered its soul. For this unconstituted “authority” Jesus
showed a really emancipating and refreshing disrespect. He was never tired of attacking
it—nay, in his struggle with it he roused himself to a state of holy indignation—of exposing its wolfish nature and hypocrisy, and of declaring that its day of judgment
was at hand. In whatever domain it had any warrant to act, he accepted it: “Go
and show yourselves unto the priests.” So far as they really proclaimed God’s law
he recognised them: “Whatever they tell you to do, that do.” But these were the
people to whom he read the terrible lecture given in Matthew xxiii.: “Woe unto
you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres,
which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones and
of all uncleanness.” Towards these spiritual “authorities,” then, he filled his
disciples with a holy want of respect, and even of “King” Herod he spoke with
bitter irony: “Go ye and tell that fox.” On the other hand, so far as we can
judge from the scanty evidence before us, his attitude towards the real authorities,
those who wielded the sword, was different. He recognised that
they had an actual right to be obeyed, and he never withdrew his own person from
their jurisdiction. Nor are we to understand the commandment against swearing as
including an oath taken before a magistrate. No one with a grain of salt, as
Wellhausen has rightly said,
can miss the inner meaning of this commandment. On the other hand, we must be careful
not to rate Jesus’ position in regard to constituted authority too high. People
usually appeal to the often quoted saying: “Render unto Caesar the things which
are Caesar’s and unto God the things that are God’s.” But this saying is often misunderstood.
Wherever it is explained as meaning that Jesus recognised God and Caesar as the
two powers which in some way or other exist side by side, or are even in secret
alliance, it is taken in a wrong sense. Jesus had no such thought; on the contrary,
he spoke of the two powers as separate and divorced from each other. God and Caesar
are the lords of two quite different provinces. Jesus settled the question that
was in dispute by pointing out this difference, which is so great that no conflict
between the powers can arise. The penny is an earthly coin and bears Caesar’s image; let it be given, then, to Caesar, but—this we may take as the complement—the soul
and all its powers have nothing to do with Caesar; they belong to God. In a word, the all-important matter, in Jesus’ view, is not to mix
up the two provinces. When we are once quite clear about this, then we may go on
to remark on the significance of the fact that Jesus enjoined compliance with the
demand for payment of the imperial taxes. No doubt it is important to note that
he himself respected the constituted authorities, and wished to see them respected; but in regard to the estimate which he formed of them, what he said is, at the
least, of a neutral character.
On the other hand, we possess another saying of Jesus in
regard to constituted authority which is much less often quoted, and
nevertheless affords us a deeper insight into the Lord’s thoughts than the one
which we have just discussed. Let us consider it for a moment. The fact that it
forms a point of transition to the consideration of the attitude which Jesus
took up in regard to legal regulations in general also makes it worth our
attention. In Mark x. 42, we read:
Jesus called them (i. e., his disciples) to him and saith unto
them, Ye know that they which are accounted to rule over the Gentiles exercise lordship
over them: and their great ones exercise authority upon them. But so shall it not
be among you: but whosoever shall be great among you shall be your minister: and
whosoever of you will be the chiefest shall be servant of all.
Observe here, first of all, the “transvaluation of values.”
Jesus simply reverses the usual process: to be great and to occupy the foremost
position means, in his view, to serve; his disciples are to aim, not at ruling,
but at each being all other men’s servant. Next observe the opinion which he has
of authority as it was then constituted. Their functions are based on force,
and this is the very reason which, in Jesus’ view, puts them outside the
moral sphere; nay, there is a fundamental opposition between it and them: “Thus do
the earthly rulers.” Jesus tells his disciples to act differently. Law and legal
ordinance, as resting on force only, on actual power and its exercise, have no moral
value. Nevertheless Jesus did not command men not to subject themselves to these
authorities; they were to rate them according to their value, that is, according
to their non-value, and they were to arrange their own lives on other principles,
namely, on the opposite; they were not to use force, but to serve. Here we have
already passed to the general ground of legal ordinance, for it seems to be an essential
feature of all law to secure observance by force when called in question.
When we approach the second point, the relation of the Gospel
to legal ordinance generally, we again encounter two different views. One of them—in modern times more particularly maintained, in his treatise on Canon Law, by Professor Sohm of Leipzig, who presents
points of contact with Tolstoi—lays down that in their respective natures law and
the world of spiritual things are diametrically opposed; and that it is in contradiction
with the character of the Gospel and the community founded thereon that the Church
has developed any legal ordinances at all. In his survey of the earliest development
of the Church Professor Sohm has gone so far as to see in the moment when Christendom
gave a place in its midst to legal ordinances a second Fall. Nevertheless he is
unwilling to impugn the law in its own province. But Tolstoi refuses, in the name
of the Gospel, to allow the law any rights at all. He maintains that the leading
principle of the Gospel is that a man is never to insist upon his rights, and
that not even constituted authority is to offer any external resistance to evil.
Authority and law are simply to cease. Opposed to Tolstoi there are others who more
or less positively contend that the Gospel takes law and legal relations under its
protection; that it sanctifies them and thereby raises them into a divine sphere.
These are, briefly, the two leading points of view which are here in conflict.
As regards the latter, there is little that need be said. It
is a mockery of the Gospel to say that it protects and sanctifies everything that
presents itself as law and legal relation at a given moment. Leaving a
thing alone and bearing with it are not the same as sanctioning and preserving it.
Nay, it is a serious question whether even bearing with it is not too much to say,
and whether Tolstoi is not right. The difficulty of the matter makes it necessary
that I should take you back a little way in Jewish history.
For hundreds of years the poor and oppressed in the people of
Israel had been crying out for justice. It was a cry which still affects us to-day
as we hear it in the words of the prophets and out of the prayers of the Psalmists; but time after time it passed unheeded. None of the legal regulations in force
was free from the power of tyrannical authorities, to be distorted and exploited
by them just as they saw fit. In speaking of legal regulations and their exercise,
and in examining Jesus’ attitude towards them, we must not straightway think of
our own legal relations, which have grown up partly on the basis of Christianity.
Jesus was of a nation the greater part of which had for generations been in vain
asking for their rights, and which was familiar with law only in the form of force.
The necessary consequence was that in such a nation a feeling of despair arose in
regard to the law; despair, as much of the possibility of ever getting justice
on earth as, conversely, of the moral claim of law to have any validity at all. We can see something of this
temper even in the Gospel. But there is a second consideration which is a standing
corrective to this temper. Jesus, like all truly religious minds, was firmly convinced
that in the end God will do justice. If He does not do it here, He will do it in the Beyond, and that is the main point. In this connexion there was, in Jesus’ view, nothing objectionable
in the idea of law in the sense of a just recompense; it was a lofty, nay, a dominating
idea. Just recompense is the function of God’s majesty; to what extent it is modified
by His mercy is a question which we need not here consider. The contention that
Jesus took a depreciatory view of law as such, and of the exercise of law, cannot
be sustained for a moment. On the contrary, everyone is to get his rights; nay more,
his disciples are one day to share in administering God’s justice and themselves
judge. It was only the justice which was exercised with violence and therefore unjustly,
the justice which lay upon the nation like a tyrannical and bloody decree, that
he set aside. He believed in true justice, and he was certain, too, that it would
prevail; so certain, that he did not think it necessary for justice to use force
in order to remain justice.
This brings us to the last point. We possess a number of Jesus’
sayings in which he directs his disciples to renounce all their lawful demands, and so forego
their just rights. You all know those sayings. Let me remind you of one only: “But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil, but whosoever shall smite thee on thy
right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law,
and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.” The demand here made seems
to proscribe law and disorganise all the legal relations of life. Again and
again these words have been appealed to with the object of showing either that
Christianity is incompatible with life as it actually is, or that Christendom
has fallen away from the principles of its Master. By way of reply to this
argument the following observations may be made:—(i.) Jesus was, as we have
seen, steeped in the conviction that God does justice; in the end, therefore,
the oppressor will not prevail,
but the oppressed will get his rights. (ii.) Earthly rights are in themselves of
little account, and it does not much matter if we lose them. (iii.) The world is
in such an unhappy state, injustice has got so much the upper hand in it, that the
victim of oppression is incapable of making good his rights even if he tries. (iv.)
As God —and this is the main point—mingles His justice with mercy, and lets His
sun shine on the just and on the unjust, so Jesus’ disciple is to show love to his
enemies and disarm them by gentleness. Such are the thoughts which underlie those lofty sayings and at the
same time set them their due limits. And is the demand which they contain really
so supramundane, so impossible? Do we not in the circle of our family and friends
advise those who belong to us to act in the same way, and not to return evil for
evil and abuse for abuse? What family, what society, could continue to exist, if
every member of it were anxious only to pursue his own rights, and did not learn
to renounce them even when attacked? Jesus regards his disciples as a circle of
friends, and he looks out beyond this circle to a league of brothers which will
take shape in the future and extend. But, we are asked, are we in all cases to renounce
the pursuit of our rights in the face of our enemies? are we to use no weapons
but those of gentleness? To speak with Tolstoi, are the magistrates not to inflict
punishment, and thereby to be effaced? are nations not to fight for house and home
when they are wantonly attacked? I venture to maintain that, when Jesus spoke the
words which I have quoted, he was not thinking of such cases, and that to interpret
them in this direction involves a clumsy and dangerous misconception of their meaning.
Jesus never had anyone but the individual in mind, and the abiding disposition of
the heart in love. To say that this disposition cannot coexist with the pursuit
of one’s own rights, with the conscientious administration of justice,
and with the stern punishment of crime, is a piece of prejudice, in support of which
we may appeal in vain to the letter of those sayings, which did not aim at being
laws or, therefore, at prescribing regulations. This much, however, must be added,
in order that the loftiness of the demand which the Gospel makes may be in no way
abated: Jesus’ disciple ought to be able to renounce the pursuit of his rights,
and ought to co-operate in forming a nation of brothers, in which justice is done,
no longer by the aid of force, but by free obedience to the good, and which is united
not by legal regulations but by the ministry of love.
LECTURE VII
WE were occupied in the last lecture with the relation of the
Gospel to law and legal ordinance. We saw that Jesus was convinced that God does,
and will do, justice. We saw, further, that he demanded of his disciples that they
should be able to renounce their rights. In giving expression to this demand, far
from having all the circumstances of his own time in mind, still less the more complex
conditions of a later age, he has one and one only present to his soul, namely,
the relation of every man to the kingdom of God. Because a man is to sell all that
he has in order to buy the pearl of great price, so he must also be able to abandon
his earthly rights and subordinate everything to that highest relation. But in connexion
with this message of his, Jesus opens up to us the prospect of a union among men,
which is held together not by any legal ordinance, but by the rule of love, and
where a man conquers his enemy by gentleness. It is a high and glorious ideal, and
we have received it from the very foundation of our religion. It ought to float
before our eyes as the goal and guiding star of our historical development. Whether mankind will
ever attain to it, who can say? but we can and ought to approximate to it, and
in these days—otherwise than two or three hundred years ago—we feel a moral obligation
in this direction. Those of us who possess more delicate and therefore more prophetic
perceptions no longer regard the kingdom of love and peace as a mere Utopia.
But for this very reason there are many among us to-day upon
whom a very serious and difficult question presses with redoubled force. We see
a whole class struggling for its rights; or, rather, we see it struggling to extend
and increase its rights. Is that compatible with the Christian temper? Does not
the Gospel forbid such a struggle? Have we not been told that we are to renounce
the rights we have, to say nothing of trying to get more? Must we, then, as
Christians, recall the labouring classes from the struggle for their rights, and
exhort them only to patience and submission?
The problem with which we have here to do is also stated more
or less in the form of an accusation against Christianity. Earnest men in political
circles of a socialistic tendency, who would gladly be guided by Jesus Christ, complain
that in this matter the Gospel leaves them in the lurch. They say that it imposes
restraint upon aspirations which with a clear conscience they feel to be justified; that in requiring
absolute meekness and submission it disarms everyone who wants to fight; that it
narcotises, as it were, all real energy. Some say this with pain and regret,
others with satisfaction. The latter assert that they always knew that the
Gospel was not for the healthy and the strong, but for the broken-down; that it
knows, and wants to know, nothing of the fact that life, and especially modern
life, is a struggle, a struggle for one’s own rights. What answer are we to give
them?
My own opinion is that these statements and complaints are made
by people who have never yet clearly realised with what it is that the Gospel has
to do, and who rashly and improperly connect it with earthly things. The Gospel
makes its appeal to the inner man, who, whether he is well or wounded, in a happy
position or a miserable, obliged to spend his earthly life fighting or quietly maintaining
what he has won, always remains the same. “My kingdom is not of this world”; it is no earthly kingdom that the Gospel establishes. These words not only exclude
such a political theocracy as the Pope aims at setting up, and all worldly dominion; they have a much wider range. Negatively they forbid all direct and formal interference
of religion in worldly affairs. Positively what the Gospel says is this: Whoever
you may be, and whatever your position, whether bondman or free, whether fighting or at rest—your real task in life is always the same. There is only one relation and
one idea which you must not violate, and in the face of which all others
are only transient wrappings and vain show: to be a child of God and a citizen
of His kingdom, and to exercise love. How you are to maintain yourself in this
life on earth, and in what way you are to serve your neighbour, is left to you and
your own liberty of action. This is what the apostle Paul understood by the Gospel,
and I do not believe that he misunderstood it. Then let us fight, let us struggle,
let us get justice for the oppressed, let us order the circumstances of the world
as we with a clear conscience can, and as we may think best for our neighbour;
but do not let us expect the Gospel to afford us any direct help; let us make no
selfish demands for ourselves; and let us not forget that the world passes away,
not only with the lusts thereof, but also with its regulations and its goods! Once
more be it said: the Gospel knows only one goal, one idea; and it demands of a
man that he shall never put them aside. If the exhortation to renounce takes, in
a harsh and one-sided way, a foremost place in Jesus’ words, we must be careful
to keep before our eyes the paramount and exclusive claims of the relation to God
and the idea of love. The Gospel is above all questions of mundane development; it is concerned, not with material things but with the souls
of men.
With this we have already passed to the next question which was
to occupy our attention, and we have half answered it.
(4) The Gospel and work, or the question of
civilisation.
The points which we shall have to consider here are essentially
the same as those which we emphasised in regard to the question just discussed;
and we shall therefore be able to proceed more concisely.
Jesus’ teaching has been felt again and again, but above all
in our own day, to exhibit no interest in any systematic work or calling, and no
appreciation of those ideal possessions which go by the name of Art and Science.
Nowhere, people say, does Jesus summon men to labour and to put their hands to the
work of progress; in vain shall we look in his words for any expression of pleasure
in vigorous activity; these ideal possessions lay far beyond his field of vision.
In that last, unhappy book of his, The Old Faith and the New, David Friedrich
Strauss gave particularly harsh expression to this feeling. He speaks of a fundamental
defect in the Gospel, which he considers antiquated and useless because out of sympathy
with the progress of civilisation. But long before Strauss the Pietistic movement exhibited the same sort of feeling. The Pietists tried
to evade the difficulty in a way of their own. They started from the position that
Jesus must be able to serve as a direct example for all men, whatever their calling; that he must have proved himself in all the situations in which a man can be placed.
They admitted that a cursory examination of Jesus’ life disclosed the fact that
this requirement was not fulfilled; but they were of opinion that on a closer inspection
it would be found that he was really the best bricklayer, the best tailor, the best
judge, the best scholar, and so on, and that he had the best knowledge and understanding
for everything. They turned and twisted what Jesus said and did until it was made
to express and corroborate what they wanted. Although it was a childish attempt
which they made, the problem of which they were sensible was nevertheless of some
moment. They felt that their consciences and their callings bound them to a definite
activity and a definite business; they were clear that they ought not to become
monks; and yet they were anxious, to practise the imitation of Christ in the full
sense. They felt, then, that he must have stood in the same situation as they
themselves, and that his horizon must have been the same as theirs.
Here we have the same case as we dealt with in the last section,
only covering a wider. field. It is the ancient and constantly recurring error, that the Gospel has
to do with the affairs of the world, and that it is its business to prescribe how
they are to be carried on. Here, too, the old and almost ineradicable tendency of
mankind to rid itself of its freedom and responsibility in higher things and subject
itself to a law, comes into play. It is much easier, in fact, to resign oneself
to any, even the sternest, kind of authority, than to live in the liberty of the
good. But, apart from this, the question remains: Is it not a real defect in the
Gospel that it betrays so little sympathy with the business of life, and is out
of touch with the humaniora in the sense of science, art, and
civilisation generally?
I answer, in the first place: What would have been gained if
it had not possessed this “defect”? Suppose that it had taken an active interest
in all those efforts, would it not have become entangled in them, or, at any rate,
have incurred the risk of appearing to be so entangled? Labour, art, science, the
progress of civilisation—these are not things which exist in the abstract; they
exist in the particular phase of an age. The Gospel, then, would have hafl to ally
itself with them. But phases change. In the Roman Church of to-day we see how
heavily religion is burdened by being connected with a particular epoch of civilisation.
In the Middle Ages this Church, anxious to participate to the full in all questions of progress and civilisation, gave
them form and shape, and laid down their laws. Insensibly, however, the Church identified
its sacred inheritance and its peculiar mission with the knowledge, the maxims, and
the interests which it then acquired; so that it is now, as it were, firmly pinned down to the philosophy, the political economy, in
short, to the whole civilisation, of the Middle Ages. On the other hand, what a
service the Gospel has rendered to mankind by having sounded the notes of
religion in mighty chords and banished every other melody!
In the second place, labour and the progress of civilisation
are, no doubt, very precious, and summon us to strenuous exertion. But they do not comprise the highest ideal. They are incapable of filling the
soul with real satisfaction. Although work may give pleasure, that is only one aspect
of the matter. I have always found that the people who talk loudest about the pleasure
which work affords make no very great efforts themselves; whilst those who are uninterruptedly
engaged in heavy labour are hesitating in its praises. As a matter of fact, there
is a great deal of hypocritical twaddle talked about work. Three-fourths of it and
more is nothing but stupefying toil, and the man who really works hard shares the
poet’s aspirations as he looks forward to evening:
Head, hands and feet rejoice: the work is done.
And then, think of the results of all this labour! When a man
has done a piece of work, he would like to do it over again, and the knowledge of
its defects falls heavily on soul and conscience. No! it is not in so far as we
work that we live, but in so far as we rejoice in the love of others, and ourselves
exercise love. Faust is right: Labour which is labour and nothing else becomes
an aversion. We long for the streams of living water, and for the spring itself
from which those waters flow:
Man sehnt sich nach des Lebens Bächen,
Ach! nach des Lebens Quelle
hin.
Labour is a valuable safety-valve and useful in keeping off greater
ills, but it is not in itself an absolute good, and we cannot include it amongst
our ideals. The same may be said of the progress of civilisation. It is, of course,
to be welcomed; but the piece of progress in which we delight to-day becomes something
mechanical by to-morrow, and leaves us cold. The man of any deep feeling will thankfully
receive anything that the development of progress may bring him; but he knows very
well that his situation inwardly—the problems that agitate him and the fundamental
position in which he stands—is not essentially, nay, is scarcely even unessentially,
altered by it all. It is only for a moment that it seems as if something new were coming, and a man were being
really relieved of his burden. Gentlemen, when a man grows older and sees more deeply
into life, he does not find, if he possesses any inner world at all, that he is
advanced by the external march of things, by “the progress of civilisation.” Nay,
he feels himself, rather, where he was before, and forced to seek the sources of
strength which his forefathers also sought. He is forced to make himself a native
of the kingdom of God, the kingdom of the Eternal, the kingdom of Love; and he
comes to understand that it was only of this kingdom that Jesus Christ desired to
speak and to testify, and he is grateful to him for it.
But, in the third place, Jesus had a strong and positive conviction
of the aggressive and forward character of his message. “I am come to send fire
on the earth, and”—he added—“what will I if it be already kindled?” The fire
of the judgment and the forces of love were what he wanted to summon up, so as to
create a new humanity. If he spoke of these forces of love in the simple manner
corresponding to the conditions nearest at hand—the feeding of the hungry, the clothing of the naked, the visiting
of the sick and those in prison—it is nevertheless clear that a great inward transformation
of the humanity which he saw in the mirror of the little nation in Palestine hovered
before his eyes: “One is your master, and all ye are brethren.” The last
hour is come; but in the last hour from a small seed a tree is to grow up which
shall spread its branches far and wide. Further, he was revealing the knowledge
of God, and he was certain that it would ripen the young, strengthen the weak, and
make them God’s champions. Knowledge of God is the spring that is to fructify
the barren field, and pour forth streams of living water. In this sense he spoke
of it as the highest and the only necessary good, as the condition of all edification,
and, we may also say, of all true growth and progress. Lastly, he saw on his horizon
not only the judgment, but also a kingdom of justice, of love, and of peace, which,
though it came from heaven, was nevertheless for this earth. When it is to come,
he himself knows not—the hour is known to the Father only; but he knows how and
by what means it will spread; and side by side with the highly coloured, dramatic
pictures which pass through his soul there are quiet perceptions which are fixed
and steady. He sees the vineyard of God on this earth and God calling His labourers
into it—happy the man who receives a call! They labour in the vineyard, stand no
longer idle in the marketplace, and at last receive their reward. Or take the parable
of the talents distributed in order to be employed, and therefore not to be buried
in a napkin. A day’s work, labour, increase, progress—he sees it all, but
placed at the service of God and neighbour, encircled by the light of the Eternal,
and removed from the service of transient things.
To sum up what we have here tried to indicate: Is the complaint
from which we started at the beginning of this section justified? Ought we really
to desire that the Gospel had adapted itself to “the progress of civilisation”? Here, too, I think, we have to learn from the Gospel and not to find fault with
it. It tells us of the real work which humanity has to accomplish, and we ought
not to meet its message by entrenching ourselves behind our miserable “work of
civilisation.” “The image of Christ,” as a modern historian justly says, “remains the sole basis of all moral culture, and in the measure in which it
succeeds in making its light penetrate is the moral culture of the nations
increased or diminished.”
(5) The Gospel and the Son of God, or the
Christological question.
We now pass from the sphere of questions of which we have been
treating hitherto. The four previous questions are all intimately connected with
one another. Failure to answer them rightly always proceeds from not rating the
Gospel high enough; from somehow or other dragging it down to the level of mundane questions and entangling it in them. Or, to
put the matter differently: The forces of the Gospel appeal to the deepest foundations
of human existence and to them only; it is there alone that their leverage is applied.
If a man is unable, then, to go down to the root of humanity, and has no feeling
for it and no knowledge of it, he will fail to understand the Gospel, and will then
try to profane it or else complain that it is of no use.
We now, however, approach quite a different problem: What position
did Jesus himself take up towards the Gospel while he was proclaiming it, and how
did he wish himself to be accepted? We are not yet dealing with the way in which
his disciples accepted him, or the place which they gave him in their hearts, and
the opinion which they formed of him; we are now speaking only of his own testimony
of himself. But the question is one which lands us in the great sphere of controverted
questions which cover the history of the Church from the first century up to our
own time. In the course of this controversy men put an end to brotherly fellowship
for the sake of a nuance; and thousands were cast out, condemned, loaded
with chains and done to death. It is a gruesome story. On the question of “Christology” men beat their religious doctrines into terrible weapons, and spread fear and
intimidation everywhere. This attitude still continues: Christology is treated as though the Gospel had no
other problem to offer, and the accompanying fanaticism is still rampant in our
own day. Who can wonder at the difficulty of the problem, weighed down as it is
with such a burden of history and made the sport of parties? Yet anyone who will
look at our Gospels with unprejudiced eyes will not find that the question of
Jesus’ own testimony is insoluble. So much of it, however, as remains obscure
and mysterious to our minds ought to remain so; as Jesus meant it to be, and as,
in the very nature of the problem, it is. It is only in pictures that we can
give it expression. “There are phenomena which cannot, without the aid of
symbols, be brought within the range of the understanding.”
Before we examine Jesus’ own testimony about himself, two leading
points must be established. In the first place, he desired no other belief in his
`person and no other attachment to it than is contained in the keeping of his commandments
Even in the fourth Gospel, in which Jesus’ person often seems to be raised above
the contents of the Gospel, the idea is still clearly formulated: “If ye love
me, keep my commandments.” He must himself have found, during his labours, that
some people honoured, nay, even trusted him, without troubling themselves about
the contents of his message. It was to them that he addressed the reprimand: “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into
the kingdom of Heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father.” To lay down any
“doctrine” about his person and his dignity independently of the Gospel was, then,
quite outside his sphere of ideas. In the second place, he described the Lord of
heaven and earth as his God and his Father; as the Greater, and as Him who is alone
good. He is certain that everything which he has and everything which he is to accomplish
comes from this Father. He prays to Him; he subjects himself to His will; he struggles
hard to find out what it is and to fulfil it. Aim, strength, understanding, the
issue, and the hard must, all come from the Father. This is what the Gospels
say, and it cannot be turned and twisted. This feeling, praying, working, struggling,
and suffering individual is a man who in the face of his God also associates himself
with other men.
These two facts mark out, as it were, the boundaries of the ground
covered by Jesus’ testimony of himself. They do not, it is true, give us any positive
information as to what he said; but we shall understand what he really meant by
his testimony if we look closely at the two descriptions which he gave of himself: the Son of God and the Messiah (the Son of David, the Son of Man).
The description of himself as the Son of God, Messianic though it may have been in its original conception,
lies very much nearer to our modern way of thinking than the other, for Jesus himself
gave a meaning to this conception which almost takes it out of the class of Messianic
ideas, or at all events does not make its inclusion in that class necessary to a
proper understanding of it. On the other hand, if we do not desire to be put off
with a lifeless word, the description of himself as the Messiah is at first blush
one that is quite foreign to our ideas. Without some explanation we cannot understand,
nay, unless we are Jews, we cannot understand at all, what this post of honour means
and what rank and character it possesses. It is only when we have ascertained its
meaning by historical research that we can ask whether the word has a significance
which in any way survives the destruction of the husk in which it took shape in
Jewish political life.
Let us first of all consider the designation, “Son of God.”
Jesus in one of his discourses made it specially clear why and in what sense he
gave himself this name. The saying is to be found in Matthew, and not, as might
perhaps have been expected, in John: “No man knoweth the Son but the Father;
neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will
reveal him.” It is “knowledge of God” that makes the sphere of the Divine Sonship. It is in this knowledge
that he came. to know the sacred Being who rules heaven and earth as Father, as
his Father. The consciousness which he possessed of being the Son of God
is, therefore, nothing but the practical consequence of knowing God as the Father
and as his Father. Rightly understood, the name of Son means nothing but the knowledge
of God. Here, however, two observations are to be made: Jesus is convinced that
he knows God in a way in which no one ever knew Him before, and he knows that it
is his vocation to communicate this knowledge of God to others by word and by deed—and with it the knowledge that men are God’s children. In this consciousness he
knows himself to be the Son called and instituted of God, to be the Son
of God, and hence he can say: My God and my Father, and into this invocation
he puts something which belongs to no one but himself. How he came to this consciousness
of the unique character of his relation to God as a Son; how he came to the consciousness
of his power, and to the consciousness of the obligation and the mission which this
power carries with it, is his secret, and no psychology will ever fathom it. The
confidence with which John makes him address the Father: “Thou lovedst me before
the foundation of the world” is undoubtedly the direct reflection of the certainty with which Jesus himself spoke. Here all research must
stop. We are not even able to say when it was that he first knew himself as the
Son, and whether he at once completely identified himself with this idea and let
his individuality be absorbed in it, or whether it formed an inner problem which
kept him in constant suspense. No one could fathom this mystery who had not had
a parallel experience. A prophet may, if he chooses, try to raise the veil, but,
for our part, we must be content with the fact that this Jesus who preached humility
and knowledge of self, nevertheless named himself and himself alone as the Son
of God. He is certain that he knows the Father, that he is to bring this knowledge
to all men, and that thereby he is doing the work of God. Among all the works of
God this is the greatest; it is the aim and end of all creation. The work
is given to him to do, and in God’s strength he will accomplish it. It was out of
this feeling of power and in the prospect of victory that he uttered the words:
“The Father hath committed all things unto me.” Again and again in the history
of mankind men of God have come forward in the sure consciousness of possessing
a divine message, and of being compelled, whether they will or not, to deliver it.
But the message has always happened to be imperfect; in this spot or that, defective; bound up with political or particularistic elements; designed to meet the circumstances of the moment;
and very often the prophet did not stand the test of being himself an example of
his message. But in this case the message brought was of the profoundest and most
comprehensive character; it went to the very root of mankind and, although set in
the framework of the Jewish nation, it addressed itself to the whole of humanity—the
message from God the Father. Defective it is not, and its real kernel may be readily
freed from the inevitable husk of contemporary form. Antiquated nit is not, and
in life and strength it still triumphs to-day over all the past. He who delivered
it has as yet yielded his place to no man, and to human life he still to-day gives
a meaning and an aim—he the Son of God.
This already brings us to the other designation which Jesus
gave of himself: the Messiah. Before I attempt briefly to explain it, I ought
to mention that some scholars of note—and among them Wellhausen—have expressed a
doubt whether Jesus described himself as the Messiah. In that doubt I cannot concur;
nay, I think that it is only by wrenching what the evangelists tell us off its hinges
that the opinion can be maintained. The very expression “Son of Man”—that Jesus
used it is beyond question seems to me to be intelligible only in a Messianic sense.
To say nothing of anything else, such a story as that of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem would have to be simply expunged, if the theory is to be
maintained that he did not consider himself the promised Messiah and also desire
to be accepted as such. Moreover, the forms in which Jesus expressed what he felt
about his own consciousness and his vocation become quite incomprehensible unless
they are taken as the outcome of the Messianic idea. Finally, the positive arguments
which are advanced in support of the theory are either so very weak, or else so
highly questionable, that we may remain quite sure that Jesus called himself the
Messiah.
The idea of a Messiah and the Messianic notions generally, as
they existed in Jesus’ day, had been developed on two combined lines, on the line
of the kings and on that of the prophets. Alien influences had also been at work,
and the whole idea was transfigured by the ancient expectation that God Himself
in visible form would take up the government of His people. The leading features
of the Messianic idea were taken from the Israelitish kingdom in the ideal splendour
in which it was invested after the kingdom itself had disappeared. Memories of Moses
and of the great prophets also played a part in it. In the following lecture we
shall briefly show what shapes the Messianic hopes had assumed up to Jesus’ time,
and in what way he took them up and transformed them.
LECTURE VIII
ALTHOUGH the Messianic doctrines prevalent in the Jewish nation
in Jesus’ day were not a positive “dogma,” and had no connexion with the legal
precepts which were so rigidly cultivated, they formed an essential element of the
hopes, religious and political, which the nation entertained for the future. They
were of no very definite character, except in certain fundamental features; beyond
these the greatest differences prevailed. The old prophets had looked forth to a
glorious future in which God would Himself come down, destroy the enemies of Israel,
and work justice, peace, and joy. At the same time, however, they had also promised
that a wise and mighty king of the house of David would appear and bring this glorious
state of things to pass. They had ended by indicating the people of Israel itself
as the Son of God, chosen from amongst the nations of the world. These three views
exercised a determining influence in the subsequent elaboration of the Messianic
ideas. The hope of a glorious future for the people of Israel remained the frame
into which all expectations were fitted, but in the two centuries before Christ the following factors were added: (i.) The extension of their historical horizon strengthened the interest of the
Jews in the nations of the world, introduced the notion of “mankind” as a whole,
and brought it within the sphere of the expected end, including, therefore, the
operations of the Messiah. The day of judgment is regarded as extending to the whole
world, and the Messiah not only as judging the world but as ruling it as well. (ii.)
In early times, although the moral purification of the people had been thought of
in connexion with the glorious future, the destruction of Israel’s enemies seemed
to be the main consideration; but now the feeling of moral responsibility and the
knowledge of God as the Holy One became more active; the view prevails that the
Messianic age demands a holy people, and that the judgment to come must of necessity
also be a judgment upon a part of Israel itself. (iii.) As individualism became
a stronger force, so the relation of God to the individual was prominently emphasised.
The individual Israelite comes to feel that he is in the midst of his people, and
he begins to look upon it as a sum of individuals; the individual belief in Providence
appears side by side with the political belief, and combines with the feeling of
personal worth and responsibility; and in connexion with the expectation of the
end, we get the first dawn of the hope of an eternal life and the
fear of eternal punishment. The products of this inner development are an
interest in personal salvation, and a belief in the resurrection; and the roused
conscience is no longer able to hope for a glorious future for all in view of
the open profanity of the people and the power of sin; only a remnant will be
saved. (iv.) The expectations for the future become more and more transcendent;
they are increasingly shifted
to the realm of the supernatural and the supramundane; something quite new comes
down from heaven to earth, and the new course on which the world enters severs it
from the old; nay, this earth, transfigured as it will be, is no longer the final
goal; the idea of an absolute bliss arises, whose abode can only be heaven itself.
(v.) The personality of the long-expected Messiah is sharply distinguished, as
well from the idea of an earthly king as from the idea of the people as a whole,
and from the idea of God. Although he appears as a man amongst men, the Messiah
retains scarcely any Messianic traits. He is represented as with God from. the first
beginnings of time; he comes down from heaven, and accomplishes his work by superhuman
means; the moral traits in the picture formed of him come into prominence; he
is the perfectly just man who fulfils all the commandments. Nay, the idea that others
benefit by his merits forces its way in. The notion, however, of a suffering Messiah, which might
seem to be suggested by Isaiah liii., is not reached.
But none of these speculations succeeded in displacing the older
and simpler conceptions, or in banishing that original, patriotic, and political
interpretation of them with which the great majority of the people were familiar.
God Himself assuming the sceptre, destroying His enemies, founding the Israelitish kingdom of the world, and availing Himself of
a kingly champion for the purpose; every man sitting under his own fig-tree, in
his own vineyard, enjoying the fruits of peace, with his foot upon the neck of his
enemies—that was, after all, still the most popular conception of the coming of
the Messiah, and it was fixed in the minds even of those who were at the same time
attracted to higher views. But a portion of the people had undoubtedly awakened
to the feeling that the kingdom of God presupposes a moral condition of a corresponding
character, and that it could come only to a righteous people. Some looked to acquiring
this righteousness by means of a punctilious observance of the law, and no zeal
that they could show for it was enough; others, under the influences of a deeper
self-knowledge, began to have a dim idea that the righteousness which they so ardently
desired could itself come only from the hand of God, and that in order to shake off the burden of sin—for they had
begun to be tortured by an inner sense of it—divine assistance, and divine grace
and mercy, were needful.
Thus in Christ’s time there was a surging chaos of disparate
feeling, as well as of contradictory theory, in regard to this one matter. At no
other time, perhaps, in the history of religion, and in no other people, were the
most extreme antitheses so closely associated under the binding influence of religion.
At one moment the horizon seems as narrow as the circle of the hills which surround
Jerusalem; at another it embraces all mankind. Here everything is put upon a high
plane and regarded from the spiritual and moral point of view; and there, at but
a stone’s throw, the whole drama seems as though it must close with a political
victory for the nation. In one group all the forces of divine trust and confidence
are disengaged, and the upright man struggles through to a solemn “Nevertheless”; in another, every religious impulse is stifled by a morally obtuse, patriotic
fanaticism.
The idea which was formed of the Messiah must have been as contradictory
as the hopes to which it was meant to respond. Not only were people’s formal notions
about him continually changing—questions were being raised, for instance, as to the sort of
bodily nature which he would have; above all, his inmost character and the work to which he was
to be called appeared in diverse lights. But wherever the moral and really religious
elements had begun to get the upper hand, people were forced to abandon the image
of the political and warlike ruler, and let that of the prophet, which had
always to some extent helped to form the general notions about the Messiah, take
its place. That he would bring God near; that somehow or other he would do justice; that he would deliver from the burden of torment within—this was what was hoped
of him. The story of John the Baptist as related in our Gospels makes it clear that
there were devout men in the Jewish nation at that time who were expecting a Messiah
in this form, or at least did not absolutely reject the idea. We learn from that
story that some were disposed to take John for the Messiah. What elasticity the
Messianic ideas must have possessed, and how far, in certain circles, they must
have travelled from the form which they originally assumed, when this very unkinglike
preacher of repentance, clad in a garment of camel’s hair, and with no message but
that the nation had degenerated and its day of judgment was at hand, could be taken
for the Messiah himself! And when the Gospels go on to tell us that not a few among
the people took Jesus for the Messiah only because he taught as one with authority, and worked miraculous cures, how fundamentally the idea of the
Messiah seems to be changed! They regarded this saving activity, it is true, only
as the beginning of his mission; they expected that the wonder-worker would presently
throw off his disguise and “set up the kingdom”; but all that we are concerned
with here is that they were capable of welcoming as the promised one a man whose
origin and previous life they knew, and who had as yet done nothing but preach repentance
and proclaim that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. We shall never fathom the inward
development by which Jesus passed from the assurance that he was the Son of God
to the other assurance that he was the promised Messiah. But when we see that the
idea which others as well had formed of the Messiah at that time had, by a slow
process of change, developed entirely new features, and had passed from a political
and religious idea into a spiritual and religious one—when we see this, the problem
no longer wears a character of complete isolation. That John the Baptist and the
twelve disciples acknowledged Jesus to be the Messiah; that the positive estimate
which they formed of his person did not lead them to reject the shape in which he
appeared, but, on the contrary, was fixed in this very shape, is a proof of the
flexible character of the Messianic idea at the time, and also explains how it was
that Jesus could himself adopt it. “Strength is made perfect in weakness.” That
there is a divine strength and glory which stands in no need of earthly power and
earthly splendour, nay, excludes them; that there is a majesty of holiness and
love which saves and blesses those upon whom it lays hold, was what he knew who
in spite of his lowliness called himself the Messiah, and the same must have been
felt by those who recognised him as the king of Israel anointed of God.
How Jesus arrived at the consciousness of being the Messiah we
cannot explain, but still there are some points connected with the question which
can be established. An inner event which Jesus experienced at his baptism was, in
the view of the oldest tradition, the foundation of his Messianic consciousness.
It is not an experience which is subject to any criticism; still less are we in
a position to contradict it. On the contrary, there is a strong probability that
when he made his public appearance he had already settled accounts with himself.
The evangelists preface their account of his public activity with a curious story
of a temptation. This story assumes that he was already conscious of being the Son
of God and the one who was intrusted with the all-important work for God’s people,
and that he had overcome the temptations which this consciousness brought with it.
When John sent to him from prison to ask, “Art thou he that should come, or do
we look for another?” the answer which he sent necessarily led his questioner
to understand that he was the Messiah, but at the same time showed him how Jesus
conceived the Messianic office. Then came the day at Caesarea Philippi, when Peter
acknowledged him as the expected Messiah, and Jesus joyfully confirmed what he said.
This was followed by the question to the Pharisees,—“What think ye of Christ,
whose son is he?”—the scene which ended with the fresh question: “If David then
call him Lord, how is he his son?” Lastly, there was the entry into Jerusalem
before the whole people, together with the cleansing of the temple; actions which
were equivalent to a public declaration that he was the Messiah. But his first unequivocal
Messianic action was also his last. It was followed by the crown of thorns and the
cross.
I have said that it is probable that when Jesus made his public
appearance he had already settled accounts with himself, and was therefore clear
about his mission as well. By this, however, I do not mean that, so far as he himself
was concerned,. he had nothing more to learn in the course of it. Not only had
he to learn to suffer, and to look forward to the cross with confidence in God,
but the consciousness of his Sonship was now for the first time to be brought to
the test. The knowledge of the “work” which the Father had intrusted to him could not be developed
except by labour and by victory over all opposition. What a moment it must have
been for him when he recognised that he was the one of whom the prophets had spoken; when he saw the whole history of his nation from Abraham and Moses downwards in
the light of his own mission; when he could no longer avoid the conviction that
he was the promised Messiah! No longer avoid it; for how can we refuse to believe
that at first he must have felt this knowledge to be a terrible burden? Yet in
saying this we have gone too far; and there is nothing more that we can say. But
in this connexion we can understand that the evangelist John was right in making
Jesus testify over and over again: “I have not spoken of myself; but the Father
which sent me; he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak.”
And again: “For I am not alone, but I and the Father that sent me.”
But however we may conceive the “Messiah,” it was an assumption
that was simply necessary if the man who felt the inward call was to gain an absolute
recognition within the lines of Jewish religious history the profoundest and maturest
history that any nation ever possessed, nay, as the future was to show, the true
religious history for all mankind. The idea of the Messiah became the means—in the first instance
for the devout of his own nation—of effectively setting the man who knew that he
was the Son of God, and was doing the work of God, on the throne of history. But
when it had accomplished this, its mission was exhausted. Jesus was the “Messiah,”
and was not the Messiah; and he was not the Messiah, because he left the idea far
behind him; because he put a meaning into it which was too much for it to bear.
Although the idea may strike us as strange we can still feel some of its meaning;
an idea which captivated a whole nation for centuries, and in which it deposited
all its ideals, cannot be quite unintelligible. In the prospect of a Messianic period
we see once more the old hope of a golden age; the hope which, when moralised,
must necessarily be the goal of every vigorous movement in human life and forms
an inalienable element in the religious view of history; in the expectation of
a personal Messiah we see an expression of the fact that it is persons who
form the saving element in history, and that if a union of mankind is ever to come
about by their deepest forces and highest aims being brought into accord, this same
mankind must agree to acknowledge one lord and master. But beyond this there
is no other meaning and no other value to be attached to the Messianic idea; Jesus
himself deprived it of them.
With the recognition of Jesus as the Messiah the closest possible
connexion was established, for every devout Jew, between Jesus’ message and his
person; for it is in the Messiah’s activity that God Himself comes to His people,
and the Messiah who does God’s work and sits at the right hand of God in the clouds
of heaven has a right to be worshipped. But what attitude did Jesus himself take
up towards his Gospel? Does he assume a position in it? To this question there
are two answers: one negative and one positive.
In those leading features of it which we described in the earlier
lectures the whole of the Gospel is contained, and we must keep it free from the
intrusion of any alien element: God and the soul, the soul and its God. There was
no doubt in Jesus’ mind that God could be found, and had been found, in the law
and the prophets. “He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the
Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with
thy God?” He takes the publican in the temple, the widow and her mite, the lost
son, as his examples; none of them know anything about “Christology,” and yet
by his humility the publican was justified. These are facts which cannot be turned
and twisted without doing violence to the grandeur and simplicity of Jesus’ message
in one of its most important aspects.To contend that Jesus meant his whole message to be taken provisionally,
and everything in it to receive a different interpretation after his death and resurrection,
nay, parts of it to be put aside as of no account, is a desperate supposition. No! his message is simpler than the churches would like to think it; simpler, but
for that very reason sterner and endowed with a greater claim to universality. A
man cannot evade it by the subterfuge of saying that as he can make nothing of this
“Christology” the message is not for him. Jesus directed men’s attention to
great questions; he promised them God’s grace and mercy; he required them to decide
whether they would have God or Mammon, an eternal or an earthly life, the soul or
the body, humility or self-righteousness, love or selfishness, the truth or a lie.
The sphere which these questions occupy is all-embracing; the individual is
called upon to listen to the glad message of mercy and the Fatherhood of God,
and to make up his mind whether he will be on God’s side and the Eternal’s, or
on the side of the world and of time. The Gospel, as Jesus proclaimed it, has to do
with the Father only and not with the Son. This is no paradox, nor, on the other
hand, is it “rationalism,” but the simple expression of the actual fact as the
evangelists give it.
But no one had ever yet known the Father in the way in which Jesus knew Him, and to this knowledge of Him he
draws other men’s attention, and thereby does “the many” an incomparable service.
He leads them to God, not only by what he says, but still more by what he is and
does, and ultimately by what he suffers. It was in this sense that he spoke the
words, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest”; as also, “The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister,
and to give his life a ransom for many.” He knows that through him a new epoch is
beginning, in which, by their knowledge of God, the “least” shall be greater than
the greatest of the ages before; he knows that in him thousands — the very individuals
who are weary and heavy laden—will find the Father and gain life; he knows that
he is the sower who is scattering good seed; his is the field, his the seed, his
the fruit. These things involve no dogmatic doctrines; still less any transformation
of the Gospel itself, or any oppressive demands upon our faith. They are the expression
of an actual fact which he perceives to be already happening, and which, with prophetic
assurance, he beholds in advance. When, under the terrible burden of his calling
and in the midst of the struggle, he comes to see that it is through him that the
blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the poor have the Gospel preached to them, he begins to comprehend the glory which the Father has
given him. And he sees that what he now suffers in his person will, through his
life crowned in death, remain a fact efficacious and of critical importance for
all time: He is the way to the Father, and as he is the appointed of the Father,
so he is the judge as well.
Was he mistaken? Neither his immediate posterity, nor the course
of subsequent history, has decided against him. It is not as a mere factor that
he is connected with the Gospel; he was its personal realisation and its strength,
and this he is felt to be still. Fire is kindled only by fire; personal life
only by personal forces. Let us rid ourselves of all dogmatic sophistry, and leave
others to pass verdicts of exclusion. The Gospel nowhere says that God’s mercy is
limited to Jesus’ mission. But history shows us that he is the one who brings the
weary and heavy laden to God; and, again, that he it was who raised mankind to
the new level; and his teaching is still the touchstone, in that it brings men
to bliss and brings them to judgment.
The sentence “I am the Son of God” was not inserted in the
Gospel by Jesus himself, and to put that sentence there side by side with the others
is to make an addition to the Gospel. But no one who accepts the Gospel, and tries
to understand him who gave it to us, can fail to affirm that here the divine appeared in as pure a form as it can appear on earth,
and to feel that for those who followed him Jesus was himself the strength of the
Gospel. What they experienced, however, and came to know in and through him, they
have told the world; and their message is still a living force.
(6) The Gospel and doctrine, or the question of creed.
We need not dwell long on this question, as on the essential
points—everything that it is necessary to say has already been said in the course
of our previous observations.
The Gospel is no theoretical system of doctrine or philosophy
of the universe; it is doctrine only in so far as it proclaims the reality of God
the Father. It is a glad message assuring us of life eternal, and telling us what
the things and the forces with which we have to do are worth. By treating of life
eternal it teaches us how to lead our lives aright. It tells us of the value of
the human soul, of humility, of mercy, of purity, of the cross, and the worthlessness
of worldly goods and anxiety for the things of which earthly life consists. And
it gives the assurance that, in spite of every struggle, peace, certainty, and something
within that can never be destroyed will be the crown of a life rightly led. What
else can “the confession of a creed” mean under these conditions but to do the
will of God, in the certainty that He is the Father and the one who will recompense? Jesus never spoke of any other kind of “creed.” Even when he says, “Whosoever
shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in
heaven,” he is thinking of people doing as he did; he means the confession which
shows itself in feeling and action. How great a departure from what he thought and
enjoined is involved in putting a Christological creed in the forefront of the Gospel,
and in teaching that before a man can approach it he must learn to think rightly
about Christ. That is putting the cart before the horse. A man can think and teach rightly about Christ only if, and in so far as, he has already begun to live according to Christ’s Gospel.. There is
no forecourt to his message through which a man must pass; no yoke which he must
first of all take upon himself. The thoughts and assurances which the Gospel provides
are the first thing and the last thing, and every soul is directly arraigned before
them.
Still less, however, does the Gospel presuppose any definite
knowledge of nature, or stand in any connexion with such knowledge; not even in
a negative sense can this contention be maintained. It is religion and the moral
element that are concerned. The Gospel puts the living God before us. Here, too,
the confession of Him in belief in Him and in the fulfilment of His will is the sole thing to be confessed; this is what Jesus Christ meant. So far as the knowledge is concerned—and it is
vast—which may be based upon this belief, it always varies with the measure of a
man’s inner development and subjective intelligence. But to possess the Lord of
heaven and earth as a Father is an experience to which nothing else approaches;
and it is an experience which the poorest soul can have, and to the reality of which
he can bear testimony.
An experience—it is only the religion which a man has himself
experienced that is to be confessed; every other creed or confession is in Jesus’
view hypocritical and fatal. If there is no broad “theory of religion” to be found
in the Gospel, still less is there any direction that a man is to begin by accepting
and confessing any ready-made theory. Faith and creed are to proceed and grow up
out of the all-important act of turning from the world and to God, and creed is
to be nothing but faith reduced to practice. “All men have not faith,” says the
apostle Paul, but all men ought to be veracious and be on their guard in religion
against lip-service and light-hearted assent to creeds. “A certain man had two
sons; and he came to the first and said, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard. He
answered and said, I will not; but afterward he repented and went. And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered and said, I
go, sir; and went not.”
I might stop here, but I am impelled to answer one more objection.
The Gospel, it is said, is a great and sublime thing, and it has certainly been
a saving power in history, but it is indissolubly connected with an antiquated view
of the world and history; and, therefore, although it be painful to say so, and
we have nothing better to put in its place, it has lost its validity and can have
no further significance for us. In view of this objection there are two things which
I should like to say:—
Firstly, no doubt it is true that the view of the world and history
with which the Gospel is connected is quite different from ours, and that view we
cannot recall to life, and would not if we could; but “indissoluble” the connexion
is not. I have tried to show what the essential elements in the Gospel are, and
these elements are “timeless.” Not only are they so; but the man to whom the Gospel
addresses itself is also “timeless,” that is to say, he is the man who, in spite
of all progress and development, never changes in his inmost constitution and in
his fundamental relations with the external world. Since that is so, this Gospel
remains in force, then, for us too.
Secondly, the Gospel is based—and this is the all-important element
in the view which it takes of the world and history—upon the antithesis between
Spirit and flesh, God and the world, good and evil. Now, in spite of ardent efforts,
thinkers have not yet succeeded in elaborating on a monistic basis any theory of
ethics that is satisfactory and answers to the deepest needs of man. Nor will they
succeed. In the end, then, it is essentially a matter of indifference what name
we give to the opposition with which every man of ethical feeling is concerned:
God and the world, the Here and the Beyond, the visible and the invisible, matter
and spirit, the life of impulse and the life of freedom, physics and ethics. That
there is a unity underlying this opposition is a conviction which can be gained
by experience; the one realm can be subordinated to the other; but it is only by
a struggle that this unity can be attained, and when it is attained it takes the
form of a problem that is infinite and only approximately soluble. It cannot be
attained by any refinement of a mechanical process. It is by self-conquest that
a man is freed from the tyranny of matter
Von der Gewalt die alle Wesen bindet
Befreit der Mensch sich der
sich überwindet.
This saying of Goethe’s excellently expresses the truth
that is here in question. It is a truth which holds good for all time, and it forms the essential element in
the dramatic pictures of contemporary life in which the Gospel exhibits the antithesis
that is to be overcome. I do not know how our increased knowledge of nature is to
hinder us from bearing witness to the truth of the creed that “The world passeth
away, and the lust thereof, but he that doeth the will of God abideth forever.”
We have to do with a dualism which arose we know not how; but as moral beings we
are convinced that, as it has been given us in order that we may overcome it in
ourselves and bring it to a unity, so also it goes back to an original unity, and
will at last find its reconciliation in the great far-off event, the realised dominion
of the Good.
Dreams, it may be said; for what we see before our eyes is something
very different. No! not dreams—after all it is here that our true life has its root—but patchwork certainly, for we are unable to bring our knowledge in space and time,
together with the contents of our inner life, into the unity of a philosophic theory
of the world. It is only in the peace of God which passeth all understanding that
this unity dawns upon us.
But we have already passed beyond the limits of our immediate
task. We proposed 1to acquaint ourselves with the Gospel in its fundamental features
and in its most important bearings. I have tried to respond to this task; but the last point which we touched
takes us beyond it. We now return to it, in order to follow, in the second part
of these lectures, the course of the Christian religion through history.
LECTURE IX
THE task before us in the second half of these lectures is to exhibit the history of the Christian religion
in its leading phases, and to examine its development in the apostolic age, in Catholicism,
and in Protestantism.
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN THE APOSTOLIC
AGE
The inner circle of the disciples, the band of twelve whom
Jesus had gathered around him, formed itself into a community. He himself
founded no community in the sense of an organised union for divine worship—he
was only the teacher and the disciples were the pupils; but the fact that the
band of pupils at once underwent this transformation became the ground upon
which all subsequent developments rested. What were the characteristic features
of this society? Unless I am mistaken there were three factors at work in it:
(i.) The_ recognition of Jesus as the living Lord; (ii.) the fact that in every individual member of
the new community—including the very slaves—religion was an actual experience, and involved the consciousness
of a living union with God; (iii.) the leading of a holy life in purity
and brotherly fellowship, and the expectation of the Christ’s return in the near
future.
By keeping these three factors in view we can grasp the distinctive
characters of the new community. Let us look at them more closely.
1. Jesus Christ the Lord.—In thus confessing their belief
in him his disciples took the first step in continuing their recognition
of him as the authoritative teacher, of his word as their permanent standard of
life, of their desire to keep “everything that he commanded them.” But this does
not express the full meaning attaching to the words “the Lord”; nay, it is far
from touching their peculiar significance. The primitive community called Jesus
its Lord because he had sacrificed his life for it, and because its members were
convinced that he had been raised from the dead and was then sitting on the right
hand of God. There is no historical fact more certain than that the apostle Paul
was not, as we might perhaps expect, the first to emphasise so prominently the
significance of Christ’s death and resurrection, but that in recognising their meaning
he stood exactly on the same ground as the primitive community. “I delivered unto
you first of all,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according
to the Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day.”
Paul did, it is true, make Christ’s death and resurrection the subject of a particular
speculative idea, and, so to speak, reduced the whole of the Gospel to these events; but they were already accepted as fundamental facts by the circle of Jesus’ personal
disciples and by the primitive community. In these two facts it may be said that
the permanent recognition of Jesus Christ, and the reverence and adoration which
he received, obtained their first hold. They formed the ground on which the whole
Christological theory rested. But within two generations from his death Jesus Christ
was already put upon the highest plane upon which men can put him. As men were conscious
of him as the living Lord, he was glorified as the one who had been raised to the
right hand of God and had vanquished death; as the Prince of Life, as the strength
of a new existence, as the way, the truth, and the life. The Messianic ideas permitted
of his being placed upon God’s throne, without endangering monotheism. But, above
all, he was felt to be the active principle of individual life: “It is not I that
live, but Christ that liveth in me”; he is “my” life, and to press onwards to
him through death is great gain. Where can we find in the history of mankind any similar instance of men eating and drinking with
their master, seeing him in the characteristic aspects of his humanity, and then
proclaiming him not only as the great prophet and revealer of God, but as the divine
disposer of history, as the “beginning” of God’s creation, and as the inner strength
of a new life! It was not thus that Mohammed’s disciples spoke of their prophet.
Neither is it sufficient to assert that the Messianic predicates were simply transferred
to Jesus, and that everything may be explained by Jesus’ expected return in glory
throwing its radiance backwards. True, in the certain hope of Jesus’ return, his
“coming in lowliness” was overlooked; but that it was possible to conceive this
certain hope and hold it fast; that in spite of suffering and death it was possible
to see in him the promised Messiah; and that in and side by side with the vulgar
Messianic image of him, men felt and opened their hearts to him as the present Lord
and Saviour,—-that is what is so astonishing! It was just the death “for our sins,”
and the resurrection, which confirmed the impression given by his person, and provided
faith with a sure hold: he died as a sacrifice for us, and he now lives.
There are many to-day who have come to regard both these positions
as very strange; and their attitude towards them is one of indifference—towards the death, on the ground that no such significance can be attributed
to a single event of this kind; towards the resurrection, because what is here
affirmed to have happened is incredible.
It is not our business to defend either the view which was taken
of the death, or the idea that he had risen again; but it is certainly the historian’s
duty to make himself so fully acquainted with both positions as to be sensible of
the significance which they possessed and still possess. That these positions were
of capital importance for the primitive community has never been doubted; even
Strauss did not dispute it; and the great critic, Ferdinand Christian Baur, acknowledged
that it was on the belief in them that the earliest Christian communion was built
up. It must be possible, then, for us in our turn to get a feeling and an understanding
for what they were; nay, perhaps we may do more; if we probe the history of religion
to the bottom, we shall find the truth and justice of ideas which on the surface
seem so paradoxical and incredible lying at the very roots of the faith.
Let us first consider the idea that Jesus’ death on the cross
was one of expiation. Now, if we were to consider the conception attaching to the
words “expiatory death” in the alien realm of formal speculation, we should, it
is true, soon find ourselves in a blind alley, and every chance of our understanding the idea would
vanish. We should be absolutely at the end of our tether if we were to indulge in
speculations as to the necessity which can have compelled God to require such a
sacrificial death. Let us, in the first place, bear in mind a fact in the history
of religion which is quite universal. Those who looked upon this death as a sacrifice
soon ceased to offer God any blood-sacrifice at all. The value attaching to such
sacrifices had, it is true, been in doubt for generations, and had been steadily
diminishing; but it was only now that the sacrifices disappeared altogether. They
did not disappear immediately or at one stroke,—this is a point with which we need
not concern ourselves here,—but their disappearance took place within a very brief
period and was not delayed until after the destruction of the temple. Further, wherever
the Christian message subsequently penetrated, the sacrificial altars were deserted
and dealers in sacrificial beasts found no more purchasers. If there is one thing
that is certain in the history of religion, it is that the death of Christ put
an end to all blood-sacrifices. But that they are based on a deep religious idea
is proved by the extent to which they existed among so many nations, and they are
not to be judged from the point of view of cold and blind rationalism, but from
that of vivid emotion. If it is obvious that they respond to a religious need; if,
further, it is certain that the instinct which led to them found its satisfaction
and therefore its goal in Christ’s death; if, lastly, there was the express declaration,
as we read in the Epistle to the Hebrews, that “by one offering he hath perfected
for ever them that are sanctified,” we can no longer feel this idea of Christ’s
sacrifice to be so very strange; for history has decided in its favour, and we
are beginning to get in touch with it. His death had the value of an expiatory sacrifice,
for otherwise it would not have had strength to penetrate into that inner world
in which the blood-sacrifices originated; but it was not a sacrifice in the same
sense as the others, or else it could not have put an end to them; it suppressed
them by settling accounts with them. Nay, we may go further; the validity of all
material sacrifices was destroyed by Christ’s death. Wherever individual Christians
or whole churches have returned to them, it has been a relapse: the earliest Christians
knew that the whole sacrificial system was thenceforth abolished, and if they asked
for a reason, they pointed to Christ’s death.
In the second place: any one who will look into history will
find that the sufferings of the pure and the just are its saving element; that
is to say, that it is not words, but deeds, and not deeds only but self-sacrificing deeds, and not only self-sacrificing deeds, but the
surrender of life itself, that forms the turning-point in every great advance in
history. In this sense I believe that, however far we may stand from any theories
about vicarious sacrifice, there are few of us after all who will mistake the
truth and inner justice of such a description as we read in Isaiah liii.: “Surely
he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” “Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends”—it is in this light that Jesus’
death was regarded from the beginning. Wherever any great deed has been accomplished
in history, the finer a man’s moral feelings are, the more sensible will he be of
vicarious suffering; the more he will bring that suffering into relation to himself.
Did Luther in the monastery strive only for himself?—was it not for us all that
he inwardly bled when he fought with the religion that was handed down to him?
But it was by the cross of Jesus Christ that mankind gained such an experience of
the power of purity and love true to death that they can never forget it, and that
it signifies a new epoch in their history.
Finally, in the third place: no reflection of the “reason,”
no deliberation of the “intelligence,” will ever be able to expunge from the moral
ideas of mankind the conviction that injustice and sin deserve to be punished, and that everywhere that the just man
suffers, an atonement is made which puts us to shame and purifies us. It is a conviction
which is impenetrable, for it comes out of those depths in which we feel ourselves
to be a unity, and out of the world which lies behind the world of phenomena. Mocked
and denied as though it had long perished, this truth is indestructibly preserved
in the moral experience of mankind. These are the ideas which from the beginning
onwards have been roused by Christ’s death, and have, as it were, played around
it. Other ideas have been disengaged,—ideas of less importance but, nevertheless,
very efficacious at times,—but these are the most powerful. They have taken shape
in the firm conviction that by his death in suffering he did a definitive work;
that he did it “for us.” Were we to attempt to measure and register what he did,
as was soon attempted, we should fall into dreadful paradoxes; but we can in our
turn feel it for ourselves with the same freedom with which it was originally felt.
If we also consider that Jesus himself described his death as a service which he
was rendering to many, and that by a solemn act he instituted a lasting remembrance
of it—I see no reason to doubt the fact—we can understand how this death and the
shame of the cross were bound to take the central place.
Jesus, however, was proclaimed as “the Lord” not only because
he had died for sinners but because he was the risen and the living one. If the
resurrection meant nothing but that a deceased body of flesh and blood came to life
again, we should make short work of this tradition. But it is not so. The New Testament
itself distinguishes between the Easter message of the empty grave and the appearances
of Jesus on the one side, and the Easter faith on the other. Although the greatest
value is attached to that message, we are to hold the Easter faith even in its absence.
The story of Thomas is told for the exclusive purpose of impressing upon us that
we must hold the Easter faith even without the Easter message: “Blessed are they
that have not seen and yet have believed.” The disciples on the road to Emmaus were
blamed for not believing in the resurrection even though the Easter message had
not yet reached them. The Lord is a Spirit, says Paul; and this carries with it
the certainty of his resurrection. The Easter message tells us of that wonderful
event in Joseph of Arimathaea’s garden, which, however, no eye saw; it tells us
of the empty grave into which a few women and disciples looked; of the appearance
of the Lord in a transfigured form—so glorified that his own could not immediately
recognise him; it soon begins to tell us, too, of what the risen one said and did. The reports became more and more complete, and
more and more confident. But the Easter faith is the conviction that the
crucified one gained a victory over death; that God is just and powerful; that
he who is the firstborn among many brethren still lives. Paul based his Easter faith
upon the certainty that “the second Adam” was from heaven, and upon his experience,
on the way to Damascus, of God revealing His Son to him as still alive. God, he
said, revealed him “in me”; but this inner revelation was coupled with “a vision” overwhelming as vision never was afterwards. Did the apostle know of the message
about the empty grave? While there are theologians of note who doubt it, I think
it probable; but we cannot be quite certain about it. Certain it is that what he
and the disciples regarded as all-important was not the state in which the grave
was found, but Christ’s appearances. But who of us can maintain that a clear account
of these appearances can be constructed out of the stories told by Paul and the
evangelists; and if that be impossible, and there is no tradition of single events
which is quite trustworthy, how is the Easter faith to be based on them? Either
we must decide to rest our belief on a foundation unstable and always exposed to
fresh doubts, or else we must abandon this foundation altogether, and with it the
miraculous appeal to our senses. But here, too, the images of the faith have
their roots in truth and reality. Whatever may have happened at the grave and in
the matter of the appearances, one thing is certain: This grave was the birthplace of the
indestructible belief that death is vanquished, and there is a life eternal.
It is useless to cite Plato; it is useless to point to the Persian religion,
and the ideas and the literature of later Judaism. All that would have perished
and has perished; but the certainty of the resurrection and of a life eternal which
is bound up with the grave in Joseph’s garden has not perished, and on the conviction
that Jesus lives we still base those hopes of citizenship in an Eternal City
which make our earthly life worth living and tolerable. “He delivered them who
through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage,” as the writer
of the Epistle to the Hebrews confesses. That is the point. And although there be
exceptions to its sway, wherever, despite all the weight of nature, there is a strong
faith in the infinite value of the soul; wherever death has lost its terrors; wherever
the sufferings of the present are measured against a future of glory, this feeling
of life is bound up with the conviction that Jesus Christ has passed through death,
that God has awakened him and raised him to life and glory. What else can we believe
but that the earliest disciples also found the ultimate foundation of their faith in the living Lord to be the
strength which had gone out from him? It was a life never to be destroyed which
they felt to be going out from him; only for a brief span of time could his death
stagger them; the strength of the Lord prevailed over everything; God did not
give him over to death; he lives as the first-fruits of those who have fallen
asleep. It is not by any speculative ideas of philosophy but by the vision of
Jesus’ life and death and by the feeling of his imperishable union with God that
mankind, so far as it believes in these things, has attained to that certainty
of eternal life for which it was meant, and which it dimly discerns—eternal life
in time and beyond time. This feeling first established faith in the value of
personal life. But of every attempt to demonstrate the certainty of “immortality” by logical process, we may say in the words of the poet:
Believe and venture: as for pledges,
The gods give none.
Belief in the living Lord and in a life eternal is the act
of the freedom which is born of God.
As the crucified and risen one Jesus was the Lord. While this
confession of belief in him expressed a man’s whole relation to him, it also afforded
endless matter for thought and speculation. This conception of the “Lord” came
to embrace the many-sided image of the Messiah and all the Old Testament
prophecies of a similar kind. But as yet no ecclesiastical “doctrines” about him
had been elaborated; everyone who acknowledged him as the Lord belonged to the
community.
2. Religion as an actual experience.—The second characteristic
feature of the primitive community is that every individual in it, even the very
slaves, possess a living experience of God. This is sufficiently remarkable; for
at first sight we might think that all this devotion to Christ, and this unconditional
reverence for him, must necessarily have resulted in all religion becoming a punctilious
subjection to his words, and so a kind of voluntary servitude. But the Pauline epistles
and the Acts of the Apostles give us quite a different picture. While they do, indeed,
attest the fact that Jesus’ words were held in unqualified reverence, this fact
is not the most prominent feature in the picture of earliest Christendom. What is
much more characteristic is that individual Christians, moved by the Spirit of God,
are placed in a living and entirely personal relation to God Himself. Dr. Weinel
has lately presented us with a fine work on the Workings of the Spirit and the
Spirits in the Post-Apostolic Age. It contains many passages which take us back
to the apostolic age and treat in greater detail of the matters which Professor Gunkel has so impressively placed
before us in his treatise on The Holy Ghost. The neglected problems of the
extent to which, and the forms in which, the Spirit exercised an influence on the
life of the early Christians, and of the view to be taken of the phenomena connected
with this influence, are admirably discussed by Dr. Weinel. In substance, his conclusion
is that the expressions “receiving” and “acting by” the Holy Ghost signify such
an independence and immediacy of religious life and feeling, and such an inner union
with God, perceived to be the mightiest reality, as could not have been expected
from strict subjection to Jesus’ authority. To be the child of God and to be gifted
with the Spirit are simply the same as being a disciple of Christ. That a man is
not truly a disciple unless he is pervaded by God’s Spirit is a point which the
Acts of the Apostles fully recognises. The pouring out of the Holy Spirit is placed
in the forefront of the narrative. The author is conscious that the Christian religion
would not be the highest and the ultimate religion unless it brought every individual
into an immediate and living connexion with God. This mutual union of a full, obedient
subjection to the Lord with freedom in the Spirit is the most important feature
in the distinctive character of this religion, and the seal of its greatness. The
workings of the Spirit were shown everywhere, in the entire domain of the five senses, in
the sphere of will and action, in profound philosophical speculation, and in the
most delicate appreciation of the facts of the moral life. The elementary forces
of the religious temperament, long held in check by systems of doctrine and the
ceremonies of public worship, were again set free. They showed themselves in ecstatic
phenomena, in signs and wonders, in an enhancement of all the functions of life,
down to conditions of a pathological and suspicious character. The fact, however,
was not forgotten,—and where it threatened to be obscured it was strongly impressed
on people’s attention,—that those strange and violent phenomena were individual,
but that side by side with them there are workings of the Spirit which are bestowed
upon everyone and with which no one can dispense. But “The fruit of the Spirit,”
as the apostle Paul writes, “is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness,
faith, meekness, temperance.” The other feature in the distinctive character and
greatness of this religion is that it does not overestimate the elementary strength
which gave it birth; that it makes its spiritual purport and its discipline triumph
over all states of ecstasy; and that it holds immovably to its conviction that
the Spirit of God, however it may reveal itself, is a Spirit of holiness and of
love. But here we have already passed to the third feature which characterises early Christendom.
3. The third feature is the leading of a holy life in
purity and brotherly fellowship and in the expectation of Christ’s speedy return.
The course which the history of the Church followed resulted in the dogmatic details
in the New Testament being selected for investigation, rather than those parts of
it which depicted the life of the first Christians and exhorted men to morality.
And yet not only are the New Testament epistles largely taken up with these moral
exhortations, but not a few of the so-called dogmatic portions were also written
solely for moral admonition. Jesus directed his disciples to give these exhortations
the first place, and the earliest Christians were well aware that the first business
of life was to do the will of God and present themselves as a holy community. Upon
this their whole existence and their mission in the world were based. There were
two points which, in accordance with Jesus’ teaching, they put first and foremost,
and they were points which at bottom embraced the whole range of moral action
purity and brotherly fellowship. They took purity in the deepest and
most comprehensive sense of the word, as the horror of everything that is unholy,
and as the inner pleasure in everything that is upright and true, lovely and of good report. They also meant purity
in regard to the body: “Know ye not that your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost
which is in you? therefore glorify God in your body.” In this sublime consciousness
the earliest Christians took up the struggle against the sins of impurity, which
in the heathen world were not accounted sins at all. As sons of God, “blameless
and harmless in the midst of a crooked and perverse nation,” they were to “shine
as lights in the world.” It was thus that they were to show of what they were made,
and it was thus that they showed it: to be holy as God was holy, to be pure as
disciples of Christ. Here, too, we get the measure of the renunciation of the world
which this community imposed upon itself. “To keep oneself unspotted from the world” was the asceticism which it practised itself and required of its adherents. The
other point is brotherly fellowship. In joining the love of God with the
love of neighbour in his sayings, Jesus himself had a new union of men with one
another in view. The earliest Christians understood him. From the very first they
constituted themselves into a brotherly union, not in word only but in deed—a living
realisation of what he meant. In calling themselves “brothers,” they felt all the
obligations which the name imposes and tried to come up to them, not by legal regulations but by voluntary service, each according to the measure
of his own powers and gifts. The Acts of the Apostles tell us that in Jerusalem
they went so far as to have a voluntary community of goods. Paul says nothing about
it; and if we are to accept this obscure report as really trustworthy, then neither
Paul nor the Christian communities among the Gentiles took pattern by the enterprise.
They seem not to have been required, nor to have thought it desirable, to order
their lives afresh in externals. The brotherly fellowship which “the holy” were to cultivate, and did cultivate, was distinguished by two principles: “Whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it,” and “Bear ye one
another’s burdens and so fulfil the law of Christ.”
LECTURE X
IT was as their Lord that the primitive community of Christians
believed in Jesus. They thus expressed their absolute devotion to, and confidence
in, him as the Prince of Life. As every individual Christian stood in an immediate
relation to God through the Spirit, priests and mediations were no longer wanted.
Finally, these “holy” people were drawn together into societies, which bound themselves
to a strictly moral life in purity and brotherly fellowship. On the last point
let me add a few words.
It is a proof of the inwardness and moral power of the new
message that, in spite of the enthusiasm arising from personal experience of
religion, there were relatively seldom any extravagant outbursts and violent
movements to be combated. Such movements may have been more frequent than the
direct declarations of our authorities allow us to suppose, but they did not
form the rule; and when they arose Paul was certainly not the only one who was
concerned to put them down. He had certainly no wish to quench the “Spirit,” but when enthusiasm threatened to lead to a repugnance to work,
as in Thessalonica, or when, as in Corinth, there was a superabundance of ecstatic
talk, he uttered some sober warnings: “If any would not work, neither should he
eat,” and “I had rather speak five words with my understanding, that by my voice
I might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue.” Still
more plainly are the concentrated repose and power of the leaders shown in the moral
admonitions, such as we get not only in the Pauline epistles but also, for example,
in the First Epistle of Peter and in the general Epistle of James. Christian character
is to show itself in the essential circumstances of human life, and that life is
to be invigrated, supported, and illumined by the Spirit. In the relation of husband
to wife and of wife to husband, of parents to children, of masters to servants;
further, in the individual’s relation to constituted authority, to the surrounding
heathen world, and, again, to the widow and the orphan, is “the service of God” to be proved and tested. Where have we another example in history of a religion
intervening with such a robust supernatural consciousness, and at the same time
laying the moral foundations of the earthly life of the community so firmly as this
message? If a man fails to be inwardly affected by the faith proclaimed by the
New Testament writers, he must certainly be stirred to the depths by the purity, the
wealth, the power, and the delicacy of the moral knowledge which invests their exhortations
with such incomparable value.
There is another feature of the life of the earliest Christians
which also deserves notice in this connexion. They lived in the expectation of Christ’s
near return. This hope supplied them with an extraordinarily strong motive for disregarding
earthly things, and the joys and sufferings of this world. That they were mistaken
in their expectation we must freely grant; but nevertheless it was a highly efficacious
lever for raising them above the world, and teaching them to make little of small
things and much of great things, and to distinguish between what is of time and
what is of eternity. For a new and powerful religious impulse, which effects its
own influence, to be associated with another factor which enhances and strengthens
that influence, is what we see constantly happening in the history of religion.
With every renewal of the religious experience of sin and grace since Augustine’s
day, what a lever has been supplied by the idea of predestination, and yet
it is an idea which is in no way derived from that experience itself. How much enthusiasm
was inspired in Cromwell’s troops, and how greatly were the Puritans on both sides
of the ocean strengthened by the consciousness of adoption, although this consciousness, too, was only an
adjunct. When the religious experiences of St. Francis developed in the Middle Ages
into a new form of devotion, how much assistance it received from the doctrine
of poverty, and yet this doctrine was an independent force. The conviction which
obtained in the apostolic age that the Lord had really appeared after his death
on the cross may also be regarded in the same light. What we are thus taught is
that the most inward of all possessions, namely, religion, does not struggle up
into life free and isolated, but grows, so to speak, in coverings of bark and cannot
grow without them. In studying the apostolic age, however, it is important to observe
that, not only in spite of the religious enthusiasm but even in spite of the intense
eschatological hopes which prevailed, the task of making earthly life holy was not
neglected.
The three principles which we have emphasised as contributing
most to the characteristic features of primitive Christianity could also, if necessary,
have been brought to bear within the framework of Judaism and in connexion with
the synagogue. There, too, Jesus could have been acknowledged as the Lord, the new
experience united with the ancestral religion, and the society of brothers developed
in the form of a Jewish conventicle. In Palestine, as a matter of fact, this was the form which the earliest
communities took. But the new principles displayed great vigour and pointed far
beyond Judaism: Jesus Christ the Lord is not only Israel’s Lord, but the Lord of
history, the Lord of all men. The new experience of a direct union with God makes
the old worship with its priests and mediations unnecessary. The society of brothers
towers over all other associations, and deprives them of any value. The inner development
which the new tendency virtually comprised began at once: Paul was not the first
to start it; before and side by side with him there were obscure and nameless Christians
in the Dispersion who took up Gentiles into the new society. They did away with
the particularistic and statutory regulations of the law by declaring that they
were to be understood in a purely spiritual sense and to be interpreted as symbols.
There was a branch of the Jewish world outside Palestine where this declaration
had long taken actual effect—it is true, on other grounds—and where the Jewish religion was being freed from its limitations
by a process of philosophical interpretation which was bringing it to the level
of a spiritual religion for the whole world. This development may be regarded in
the light of a preliminary stage in the history of Christianity, and was in many
respects really so. It was the stage on which those nameless Christians entered. It was the path upon
which a deliverance from historical Judaism and its outworn religious ordinances
was capable of gradual attainment. But one thing is certain: it was not the goal
of the movement. So long as the words “the former religion is done away with”
remained unspoken, there was always a fear that in the next generation the old precepts
would be brought forward again in their literal meaning. How often and often in
the history of religion has there been a tendency to do away with some traditional
form of doctrine or ritual which has ceased to satisfy inwardly, but to do away
with it by giving it a new interpretation. The endeavour seems to be succeeding;
the temper and the knowledge prevailing at the moment are favourable to it—when,
lo and behold! the old meaning suddenly comes back again. The actual words of the
ritual, of the liturgy, of the official doctrine, prove stronger than anything else.
If a new religious idea cannot manage to make a radical breach with the past at the critical point—the rest may remain as it is—and procure itself
a new “body,” it cannot last; it disappears again. There is no tougher or more
conservative fabric than a properly constituted religion; it can only yield to
a higher phase by being abolished. No permanent effect, then, could be expected
in the apostolic age from the twisting and turning of the law so as to make room for the new
faith side by side with it, or so as to approximate the old religion to that faith.
Someone had to stand up and say, “The old one is done away with”; he had to brand
any further pursuit of it as a sin; he had to show that all things were
become new. The man who did that was the apostle Paul, and it is in having done
it that his greatness in the history of the world consists.
Paul is the most luminous personality in the history of primitive
Christianity, and yet opinions differ widely as to his true significance. Only a
few years ago we had a leading Protestant theologian asserting that Paul’s rabbinical
theology led him to corrupt the Christian religion. Others, conversely, have called
him the real founder of that religion. But in the opinion of the great majority
of those who have studied him the true view is that he was the one who understood
the Master and continued his work. This opinion is borne out by the facts. Those
who blame him for corrupting the Christian religion have never felt a single breath
of his spirit, and judge him only by mere externals, such as clothes and book-learning;
those who extol or criticise him as a founder of religion are forced to make him
bear witness against himself on the main point, and acknowledge that the consciousness
which bore him up and steeled him for his work was illusory and self-deceptive. As we cannot want to be wiser
than history, which knows him only as Christ’s missionary, and as his own words
clearly attest what his aims were and what he was, we regard him as Christ’s disciple,
as the apostle who not only worked harder but also accomplished more than all the
rest put together.
It was Paul who delivered the Christian religion from Judaism.
We shall see how he did that if we consider the following points:—
It was Paul who definitely conceived the Gospel as the message
of the redemption already effected and of salvation now present. He preached the
crucified and risen Christ, who gave us access to God and therewith righteousness
and peace.
It was he who confidently regarded the Gospel as a new force
abolishing the religion of the law.
It was he who perceived that religion in its new phase pertains
to the individual and therefore to all individuals; and in this conviction, and
with a full consciousness of what he was doing, he carried the Gospel to the nations
of the world and transferred it from Judaism to the ground occupied by Greece and
Rome. Not only are Greeks and Jews to unite on the basis of the Gospel, but the
Jewish dispensation itself is now at an end. That the Gospel was transplanted from
the East, where in subsequent ages it was never able to thrive properly, to the West, is a
fact which we owe to Paul.
It was he who placed the Gospel in the great scheme of spirit
and flesh, inner and outer existence, death and life; he, born a Jew and educated
a Pharisee, gave it a language, so that it became intelligible, not only
to the Greeks but to all men generally, and united with the whole of the
intellectual capital which had been amassed in previous ages.
These are the factors that go to make the apostle’s greatness
in the history of religion. On their inner connexion I cannot here enter into any
detail. But, in regard to the first of them, I may remind you of the words of the
most important historian of religion in our day. Wellhausen declares that “Paul’s
especial work was to transform the Gospel of the kingdom into the Gospel of Jesus
Christ, so that the Gospel is no longer the prophecy of the coming of the kingdom,
but its actual fulfilment by Jesus Christ. In his view, accordingly, redemption
from something in the future has become something which has already happened and
is now present. He lays far more emphasis on faith than on hope; he anticipates
the sense of future bliss in the present feeling of being God’s son; he vanquishes
death and already leads the new life on earth. He extols the strength which is made
perfect in weakness; the grace of God is sufficient for him, and he knows that no
power, present or future, can take him from His love, and that all things work
together for good to them that love God.” What knowledge, what confidence, what
strength, was necessary to tear the new religion from its mother earth and plant
it in an entirely new one! Islam, originating in Arabia, has remained the
Arabian religion, no matter where it may have penetrated. Buddhism has at all
times been at its purest in India. But this religion, born in Palestine, and
confined by its founder to Jewish ground, in only a few years after his death
was severed from that connexion. Paul put it in competition with the Israelitish
religion: “Christ is the end of the law.” Not only did it bear being thus
rooted up and transplanted, but it showed that it was meant to be thus
transplanted. It gave stay and support to the Roman Empire and the whole world
of Western civilisation. If, as Renan justly observes, anyone had told the Roman
Emperor in the first century that the little Jew who had come from Antioch as a
missionary was his best collaborator, and would put the empire upon a stable
basis, he would have been regarded as a madman, and yet he would have spoken
nothing but the truth. Paul brought new forces to the Roman Empire, and laid the
foundations of Western and Christian civilisation. Alexander the Great’s work
has perished; Paul’s has remained. But if we praise the man who, without being
able to appeal to a single word of his Master’s, ventured upon the boldest enterprise,
by the help of the spirit and with the letter against him, we must none the less
pay the meed of honour to those personal disciples of Jesus who after a bitter internal
struggle ultimately associated themselves with Paul’s principles. That Peter did
so we know for certain; of others we hear that they at least acknowledged their
validity. It was, indeed, no insignificant circumstance that men in whose ears every
word of their Master’s was still ringing, and in whose recollection the concrete
features of his personality were still a vivid memory—that these faithful disciples
should recognise a pronouncement to be true which in important points seemed to
depart from the original message and portended the downfall of the religion of Israel.
What was kernel here, and what was husk, history has itself showed with unmistakable
plainness, and by the shortest process. Husk were the whole of the Jewish limitations
attaching to Jesus’ message; husk were also such definite statements as “I am
not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” In the strength of Christ’s
spirit the disciples broke through these barriers. It was his personal disciples
not, as we might expect, the second or third generation, when the immediate memory of the Lord had already paled—who stood the great test.
That is the most remarkable fact of the apostolic age.
Without doing violence to the inner and essential features of
the Gospel—unconditional trust in God as the Father of Jesus Christ, confidence
in the Lord, forgiveness of sins, certainty of eternal life, purity and brotherly
fellowship—Paul transformed it into the universal religion, and laid the ground
for the great Church. But whilst the original limitations fell away, new ones of
necessity made their appearance; and they modified the simplicity and the power
of a movement which was from within. Before concluding our survey of the apostolic
age, we must direct attention to these modifications.
In the first place: the breach with the Synagogue and the founding
of entirely independent religious communities had well-marked results. Whilst the
idea was firmly maintained that the community of Christ, the “Church,” was something suprasensible and heavenly, because it came from within, there was also a conviction
that the Church took visible shape in every separate community. As a complete breach
had taken place, or no connexion been established, with the ancient communion, the
formation of entirely new societies was logically invested with a special significance,
and excited the liveliest interest. In his sayings and parables Jesus, careless of all
externals, could devote himself solely to the all-important point; but how and
in what forms the seed would grow was not a question which occupied his mind; he had the people of Israel with their historical ordinances before him and was
not thinking of external changes. But the connexion with this people was now severed,
and no religious movement can remain in a bodiless condition. It must elaborate
forms for common life and common public worship. Such forms, however, cannot
be improvised; some of them take shape slowly out of concrete necessities; others
are derived from the environment and from existing circumstances. It was in this
way that the “Gentile” communities procured themselves an organism, a body. The
forms which they developed were in part independent and gradual, and in part based
upon the facts with which they had to deal.
But a special measure of value always attaches to forms. By being
the means by which the community is kept together, the value of that to which
they minister is insensibly transferred to them; or, at least, there is always
a danger of this happening. One reason for this is that the observance of the forms
can always be controlled or enforced, as the case may be; whilst for the inner life
there is no control that cannot be evaded.
When the breach with the Jewish national communion had once taken
place, there could be no doubt about the necessity for setting up a new community
in opposition to it. The self-consciousness and strength of the Christian movement
was displayed in the creation of a Church which knew itself to be the true Israel.
But the founding of churches and “the Church” on earth brought an entirely new
interest into the field; what came from within was joined by something that came
from without; law, discipline, regulations for ritual and doctrine, were developed,
and began to assert a position by a logic of their own. The measure of value applicable
to religion itself no longer remained the only measure, and with a hundred invisible
threads religion was insensibly worked into the net of history.
In the second place: we have already referred to the fact that
it was, above all, in his Christology that Paul’s significance as a teacher consisted.
In his view—we see this as well by the way in which he illuminated the death on
the cross and the resurrection as by his equation, “the Lord is a Spirit”—the
Redemption is already accomplished and salvation a present power. “God hath reconciled
us to himself through Jesus Christ”; “If any man be in Christ, he is a new creature”; “Who shall separate us from the love of God?” The absolute character of the Christian religion is thus made clear. But it
may also be observed in this connexion that every attempt to formulate a theory
has a logic of its own and dangers of its own. There was one danger which the apostle
himself had to combat, that of men claiming to be redeemed without giving practical
proof of the new life. In the case of Jesus’ sayings no such danger could arise,
but Paul’s formulas were not similarly protected. That men are not to rely upon
“redemption,” forgiveness of sin, and justification, if the hatred of sin and the
imitation of Christ be lacking, inevitably became in subsequent ages a standing
theme with all earnest teachers. Who can fail to recognise that the doctrines of
“objective redemption” have been the occasion of grievous temptations in the history
of the Church, and for whole generations concealed the true meaning of religion? The conception of “redemption,” which cannot be inserted in Jesus’ teaching in
this free and easy way at all, became a snare. No doubt it is true that Christianity
is the religion of redemption; but the conception is a delicate one, and must never
be taken out of the sphere of personal experience and inner reformation.
But here we are met by a second danger closely connected with
the first. If redemption is to be traced to. Christ’s person and work, everything would seem to depend upon a right understanding of this person
together with what he accomplished. The formation of a correct theory of and about
Christ threatens to assume the position of chief importance, and to pervert the
majesty and simplicity of the Gospel. Here, again, the danger is of a kind such
as cannot arise with Jesus’ sayings. Even in John we read: “If ye love me, keep
my commandments.” But with the way in which Paul defined the theory of religion,
the danger can certainly arise and did arise. No long period elapsed before it was
taught in the Church that the all-important thing is to know how the person of Jesus
was constituted, what sort of physical nature he had, and so on. Paul himself is
far removed from this position,—“Whoso calleth Christ Lord speaketh by the Holy
Ghost,”—but the way in which he ordered his religious conceptions, as the outcome
of his speculative ideas, unmistakably exercised an influence in a wrong direction.
That, however great the attraction which his way of ordering them may possess for
the understanding, it is a perverse proceeding to make Christology the fundamental
substance of the Gospel is shown by Christ’s teaching, which is everywhere directed
to the all-important point, and summarily confronts every man with his God. This
does not affect Paul’s right to epitomise the Gospel in the message of Christ crucified, thus exhibiting God’s power and God’s wisdom,
and in the love of Christ kindling the love of God. There are thousands to-day in
whom the Christian faith is still propagated in the same manner, namely, through
Christ. But to demand assent to a series of propositions about Christ’s person is
a different thing altogether.
There is, however, another point to be considered here. Under
the influence of the Messianic dogmas, and led by the impression which Christ made,
Paul became the author of the speculative idea that not only was God in Christ,
but that Christ himself was possessed of a peculiar nature of a heavenly kind. With
the Jews, this was not a notion that necessarily shattered the framework of the
Messianic idea; but with the Greeks it inevitably set an entirely new theory in
motion. Christ’s appearance in itself, the entrance of a divine being into
the world, came of necessity to rank as the chief fact, as itself the real redemption.
Paul did not, indeed, himself look upon it in this light; for him the crucial
facts are the death on the cross and the resurrection, and he regards Christ’s entrance
into the world from an ethical point of view and as an example for us to follow
“For our sakes he became poor”; he humbled himself and renounced the world. But
this state of things could not last. The fact of redemption could not permanently occupy the second place; it was too large. But when moved into
the first place it threatened the very existence of the Gospel, by drawing away
men’s thoughts and interests in another direction. When we look at the history of
dogma, who can deny that that was what happened? To what extent it happened we shall
see in the following lectures.
In the third place: the new Church possessed a sacred book,
the Old Testament. Paul, although he taught that the law had become of no avail,
found a means of preserving the whole of the Old Testament. What a blessing to the
Church this book has proved! As a book of edification, of consolation, of wisdom,
of counsel, as a book of history, what an incomparable importance it has had for
Christian life and apologetics! Which of the religions that Christianity encountered
on Greek or Roman ground could boast of a similar book? Yet the possession of this
book has not been an unqualified advantage to the Church. To begin with, there are
many of its pages which exhibit a religion and a morality other than Christian.
No matter how resolutely people tried to spiritualise it and give it an inner meaning
by construing it in some special way, their efforts did not avail to get rid of
the original sense in its entirety. There was always a danger of an inferior and
obsolete principle forcing its way into Christianity through the Old Testament. This, indeed, was what actually occurred. Nor
was it only in individual aspects that it occurred: the whole aim was changed.
Moreover, on the new ground religion was intimately connected with a political power,
namely, with nationality. How if people were seduced into again seeking such a connexion,
not, indeed, with Judaism, but with a new nation, and not with ancient national
laws, but with something of an analogous character? And when even a Paul here and
there declared Old Testament laws to be still authoritative in spite of their having
undergone an allegorical transformation, how could anyone restrain his successors
from also proclaiming other laws, remodelled to suit the circumstances of the time,
as valid ordinances of God? This brings us to the second point. Although whatever
was drawn from the Old Testament by way of authoritative precept may have been inoffensive
in substance, it was a menace to Christian freedom of both kinds. It threatened
the freedom which comes from within, and also the freedom to form church communities
and to arrange for public worship and discipline.
I have tried to show that the limitations which surrounded the
Gospel did not cease with the severance of the tie binding it to Judaism, but that,
on the contrary, new limits made their appearance. They arose, however,
just at the very points upon which the necessary progress of things depended, or,
as the case might be, where an inalienable possession like the Old Testament was
in question. Here, again, then, we are reminded of the fact that, so far as history
is concerned, as soon as we leave the sphere of pure inwardness there is no progress,
no achievement, no advantage of any sort that has not its dark side and does not
bring its disadvantages with it. The apostle Paul complained that “we know in part.”
To a much greater degree is the same thing true of our actions and of everything
connected with them. We have always to “pay the penalty” of acting, and not only
take the evil consequences, but also knowingly and with open eyes resolutely neglect
one thing in order to gain another. Our purest and most sacred possessions, when
they leave the inward realm and pass into the world of form and circumstance, are
no exception to the rule that the very shape which they take in action also proves
to be their limitation.
When the great apostle ended his life under Nero’s axe in the
year 64, he could say of himself what a short time before he had written to a faithful
comrade: “I have finished my course; I have kept the faith.” What missionary
is there, what preacher, what man entrusted with the cure of souls, who can
be compared with him, whether in the greatness of the task which he accomplished
or in the holy energy with which he carried it out? He worked with the most living
of all messages, and kindled a fire; he cared for his people like a father and
strove for the souls of others with all the forces of his own; at the same time
he discharged the duties of the teacher, the schoolmaster, the organiser. When he
sealed his work by his death, the Roman Empire from Antioch as far as Rome, nay,
as far as Spain, was planted with Christian communities. There were to be found
in them few that were “mighty after the flesh” or of noble degree, and yet they
were as “lights in the world,” and on them the progress of the world’s history
rested. They had little “illumination,” but they had acquired the faith in the
living God and in a life eternal; they knew that the value of the human soul is
infinite, and that its value is determined by relation to the invisible; they led
a life of purity and brotherly fellowship, or at least strove after such a life.
Bound together into a new people in Jesus Christ, their head, they were filled with
the high consciousness that Jews and Greeks, Greeks and barbarians, would through
them become one, and that the last and highest stage in the history of humanity
had then been reached.
LECTURE XI
THE apostolic age now lies behind us. We have seen that in the
course of it the Gospel was detached from the mother soil of Judaism and placed
upon the broad field of the Graeco-Roman Empire. The apostle Paul was the chief agent
in accomplishing this work, and in thereby giving Christianity its place in the
history of the world. The new connexion which it thus received did not in itself
denote any restricted activity; on the contrary, the Christian religion was intended
to be realised in mankind, and mankind at that time meant the
orbis Romanus. But the new connexion involved the development of new forms, and new forms also
meant limitation and encumbrance. We shall see more closely how this was effected
if we consider
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN ITS DEVELOPMENT
INTO CATHOLICISM
The Gospel did not come into the world as a statutory religion,
and therefore none of the forms in which it assumed intellectual and social expression—not even the earliest can be regarded as possessing a classical
and permanent character. The historian must always keep this guiding idea before
him when he undertakes to trace the course of the Christian religion through the
centuries from the apostolic age downwards. As Christianity rises above all antitheses
of the Here and the Beyond, life and death, work and the shunning of the world,
reason and ecstasy, Hebraism and Hellenism, it can also exist under the most diverse
conditions; just as it was originally amid the wreck of the Jewish religion that
it developed its power. Not only can it so exist—it must do so, if it is to be the
religion of the living and is itself to live. As a Gospel it has only one aim—the finding of the living God, the finding of Him by every individual as
his God, and as the source of strength and joy and peace. How this aim is progressively
realised through the centuries—whether with the coefficients of Hebraism or Hellenism,
of the shunning of the world or of civilisation, of Gnosticism or of Agnosticism,
of ecclesiastical institution or of perfectly free union, or by whatever other kinds
of bark the core may be protected, the sap allowed to rise—is a matter that is of
secondary moment, that is exposed to change, that belongs to the centuries, that
comes with them and with them perishes.
Now the greatest transformation which the new religion ever experienced—almost greater even than that which
gave rise to the Gentile Church and thrust the Palestinian communities into the
background—falls in the second century of our era, and therefore in the period which
we shall consider in the present lecture.
If we place ourselves at about the year 200, about a hundred
or a hundred and twenty years after the apostolic age, not more than three or
four generations had gone by since that age came to an end,—what kind of
spectacle does the Christian religion offer?
We see a great ecclesiastical and political community, and side
by side with it numerous “sects” calling themselves Christian, but denied the
name and bitterly opposed. That great ecclesiastical and political community presents
itself as a league of individual communities spanning the empire from end to end.
Although independent they are all constituted essentially alike, and interconnected
by one and the same law of doctrine, and by fixed rules for the purposes of intercommunion.
The law of doctrine seems at first sight to be of small scope, but all its tenets
are of the widest significance; and together they embrace a profusion of metaphysical,
cosmological, and historical problems, give them definite answers, and supply particulars
of mankind’s development from the creation up to its future form of existence. Jesus’ injunctions for the conduct of life are
not included in this law of doctrine; as the “rule of discipline” they were sharply
distinguished from the “rule of faith.” Each Church, however, also presents itself
as an institution for public worship, where God is honoured in conformity with a
solemn ritual. The distinction between priests and laymen is already a well-marked
characteristic of this institution; certain acts of divine worship can be performed
only by the priest; his mediation is an absolute necessity. It is only by mediation
that a man can approach God at all, by the mediation of right doctrine, right ordinance,
and a sacred book. The living faith seems to be transformed into a creed to be believed; devotion to Christ, into Christology; the ardent hope for the coming of “the
kingdom,” into a doctrine of immortality and deification; prophecy, into technical
exegesis and theological learning; the ministers of the Spirit, into clerics; the
brothers, into laymen in a state of tutelage; miracles and miraculous cures disappear
altogether, or else are priestly devices; fervent prayers become solemn hymns and
litanies; the “Spirit” becomes law and compulsion. At the same time individual
Christians are in full touch with the life of the world, and the burning question
is, “In how much of this life may I take part without losing my position as a Christian?” This enormous transformation took place within a hundred and twenty
years. The first thing which we have to determine is, How did that happen? next,
Did the Gospel succeed in holding its own amid this change, and how did it do
so?
Before, however, we try to answer these two questions, we must
call to mind a piece of advice which no historian ought ever to neglect. Anyone
who wants to determine the real value and significance of any great phenomenon or
mighty product of history must first and foremost inquire into the work which it
accomplished, or, as the case may be, into the problem which it solved. As every
individual has a right to be judged, not by this or that virtue or defect, not by
his talents or by his frailties, but by what he has done, so the great edifices
of history, the states and the churches, must be estimated, first and foremost,
we may perhaps say exclusively, by what they have achieved. It is the work done
that forms the decisive test. With any other test we are involved in judgments
of the vaguest kind, now optimistic, now pessimistic and mere historical twaddle.
So here, too, in considering the Church as developed into Catholicism, we must first
of all ask, In what did its work consist? What problem did it solve? What did
it achieve? I will answer the last question first. It achieved two things: it waged war with nature-worship, polytheism,
and political religion, and beat them back with great energy; and it exploded the
dualistic philosophy of religion. Had the Church at the beginning of the third century
been asked in tones of reproach, “How could you recede so far from where you began? To what have you come?” it might have answered: “Yes, it is to this that I
have come: I have been obliged to discard much and admit much; I have had to fight—my body is full of scars, and my clothes are covered with dust; but I have won
my battles and built my house; I have beaten back polytheism; I have disabled
and almost annihilated that monstrous abortion, political religion; I have resisted
the enticements of a subtle religious philosophy, and victoriously encountered it
with God, the almighty Creator of all things; lastly, I have reared a great building,
a fortress with towers and bulwarks, where I guard my treasure and protect the weak.”
This is the answer which the Church might have given, and truthfully given. But,
someone may object, it was no great achievement to wage war with nature-worship
and polytheism, and to beat them back; they had already rotted and decayed, and
had little strength left. The objection does not hold. Many of the forms in which
that species of religion had taken shape were, no doubt, antiquated and approaching extinction, but the religion itself,
the religion of nature, was a mighty foe. It even still avails to beguile
our souls and touch our heart-strings with effect, when an inspired prophet voices
its message; how much more so then! The hymn to the Sun, giving life to all that
lives, produced a profound and lifelong religious impression even upon a Goethe,
and made him into a Sun-worshipper. But how overpowering it was in the days before
science had banished the gods from nature! Christianity exploded the religion of
nature,—exploded it not for this or that individual; that was already done,—but
exploded it in the sense that there was now a large and compact community refuting
nature-worship and polytheism by its impressive doctrines, and affording the deeper
religious temper stay and support. And then political religion! Behind the imperial
cult there was the whole power of the state, and to come to terms with it looked
so safe and easy—yet the Church did not yield a single inch; it abolished the imperial
system of state-idols. It was to place an irremovable landmark between religion
and politics, between God and Caesar, that the martyrs shed their blood. Lastly,
in an age that was deeply moved by questions of religious philosophy, the Church
maintained a firm front against all the speculative ideas of dualism; and, although
these ideas often seemed to approximate closely to its own position, it passionately
met them with the monotheistic view. The struggle here, however, was rendered all
the harder by the fact that many Christians—and just the very prominent and gifted ones too—made common cause
with the enemy, and themselves embraced the dualistic theory. The Church stood firm.
If we recollect that, in spite of these counter-movements against the Graeco-Roman
spirit, it also managed to attach this very spirit to itself—otherwise than Judaism,
of whose dealings with the Greek world the saying holds, “You had power to draw
but not to keep me”; if we recollect, further, that it was in the second century
that the foundations of the whole of the ecclesiastical system prevailing up to
the present day were laid, we can only be astonished at the greatness of the work
which was then achieved.
We now return to the two questions which we raised: How was
this great transformation accomplished? and, Did the Gospel hold its own amid
this change, or, if so, how?
There were, if I am not mistaken, three leading forces engaged
in bringing about this great revolution, and effecting the organisation of new forms.
The first of these forces tallies with the universal law in the history of religion,
for in every religious development we find it at work. When the second and third generations
after the founding of a new religion have passed away; when hundreds, nay,
thousands, have become its adherents, no longer through conversion but by the
influences of tradition and of birth, despite Tertullian’s saying:
fiunt, non nascuntur Christiani; when those who have laid hold upon the faith as great spoil are joined by
crowds of others who wrap it round them like an outer garment, a revolution always
occurs. The religion of strong feeling and of the heart passes into the religion
of custom and therefore of form and of law. A new religion may be instituted with
the greatest vigour, the utmost enthusiasm, and a tremendous amount of inner emotion; it may at the same time lay ever so much stress on spiritual freedom—where was
all this ever more powerfully expressed than in Paul’s teaching?—and yet, even
though believers be forced to be celibates and only adults be received, the process
of solidifying and codifying the religion is bound to follow. Its forms then at
once stiffen; in the very process of stiffening they receive for the first time
a real significance, and new forms are added. Not only do they acquire the value
of laws and regulations, but they come to be insensibly regarded as though they
contained within them the very substance of religion; nay, as though they were
themselves that substance. This is the way in which people who do not feel religion to be a reality are compelled
to regard it, for otherwise they would have nothing at all; and this is the way
in which those who continue really to live in it are compelled to handle it, or
else they would be unable to exercise any influence upon others. The former are
not by any means necessarily hypocrites. Real religion, of course, is a closed book
to them; its most important element has evaporated. But there are various points
of view from which a man may still be able to appreciate religion without living
in it. He may appreciate it as discharging the functions of morality, or of police; above all he may appreciate it on aesthetic grounds. When the Romanticists re-introduced
Catholicism into Germany and France at the beginning of the nineteenth century,
Chateaubriand, more especially, was never tired of singing its praises and fancied
that he had all the feelings of a Catholic. But an acute critic remarked that Monsieur
Chateaubriand was mistaken in his feelings; he thought that he was a true Catholic,
while as a matter of fact he was only standing before the ancient ruin of the Church
and exclaiming: “How beautiful!” That is one of the ways in which a man can appreciate
a religion without being an inward adherent of it; but there are many others, and,
amongst them, some in which a nearer approach is made to its true substance. All
of them, however, have this much in common, that any actual
experience of religion is no longer felt, or felt only in an uncertain and
intermittent way. Conversely, a high regard is paid to the outward shows and
influences connected with it, and they are carefully maintained. Whatever finds
expression in doctrines, regulations, ordinances, and forms of public worship
comes to be treated as the thing itself. This, then, is the first force at work
in the transformation:
the original enthusiasm, in the large sense of the word, evaporates,
and the religion of law and form at once arises.
But not only did an original element evaporate in the course
of the second century: another was introduced. Even had this youthful religion
not severed the tie which bound it to Judaism, it would have been inevitably affected
by the spirit and the civilisation of that Graeco-Roman world on whose soil it was
permanently settled. But to how much greater an extent was it exposed to the influence
of this spirit after being sharply severed from the Jewish religion and the Jewish
nation. It hovered bodiless over the earth like a being of the air; bodiless and
seeking a body. The spirit, no doubt, makes to itself its own body, but it does
so by assimilating what is around it. The influx of Hellenism, of the Greek spirit,
and the union of the Gospel with it, form the greatest fact in the history of the Church in the second century, and when the fact was once
established as a foundation it continued through the following centuries. In the
influence of Hellenism on the Christian religion three stages may be distinguished,
and a preliminary stage as well. We have already mentioned the preliminary stage
in a previous lecture. It is to be found in the circumstances in which the Gospel
arose, and it formed a very condition of its appearance. Not until Alexander the
Great had created an entirely new position of affairs, and the barriers separating
the nations of the East from one another and from Hellenism had been destroyed,
could Judaism free itself from its limitations and start upon its development into
a religion for the world. The time was ripe when a man in the East could also breathe
the air of Greece and see his spiritual horizon stretch beyond the limits of his
own nation. Yet we cannot say that the earliest Christian writings, let alone the
Gospel, show, to any considerable extent, the presence of a Greek element. If we
are to look for it anywhere—apart from certain well-marked traces of it in Paul,
Luke, and John—it must be in the possibility of the new religion appearing
at all. We cannot enter further upon this question here. The first stage of any
real influx of definitely Greek thought and Greek life is to be fixed at about the
year 130. It was then that the religious philosophy of Greece began to effect an entrance, and
it went straight to the centre of the new religion. It sought to get into inner
touch with Christianity, and, conversely, Christianity itself held out a hand to
this ally. We are speaking of Greek philosophy; as yet, there is no trace
of mythology, Greek worship, and so on; all that was taken up into the Church,
cautiously and under proper guarantees, was the great capital which philosophy had
amassed since the days of Socrates. A century or so later, about the year 220 or
230, the second stage begins: Greek mysteries, and Greek civilisation in the whole
range of its development, exercise their influence on the Church, but not mythology
and polytheism; these were still to come. Another century, however, had in its
turn to elapse before Hellenism as a whole and in every phase of its development
was established in the Church. Guarantees, of course, are not lacking here either,
but for the most part they consist only in a change of label; the thing itself
is taken over without alteration, and in the worship of the saints we see a regular
Christian religion of a lower order arising. We are here concerned, however, not
with the second and third stages, but only with that influx of the Greek spirit
which was marked by the absorption of Greek philosophy and, particularly, of Platonism.
Who can deny that elements here came together which stood in elective affinity? So much depth
and delicacy of feeling, so much earnestness and dignity, and—above all—so strong
a monotheistic piety were displayed in the religious ethics of the Greeks,
acquired as it had been by hard toil on a basis of inner experience and metaphysical
speculation, that the Christian religion could not pass this treasure by with indifference.
There was much in it, indeed, which was defective and repellent; there was no personality
visibly embodying its ethics as a living power; it still kept up a strange connexion
with “demon-worship” and polytheism; but both as a whole and in its individual
parts it was felt to contain a kindred element, and it was absorbed.
But besides the Greek ethics there was also a cosmological conception
which the Church took over at this time, and which was destined in a few decades
to attain a commanding position in its doctrinal system—the Logos. Starting
from an examination of the world and the life within, Greek thought had arrived
at the conception of an active central idea—by what stages we need not here
mention. This central idea represented the unity of the supreme principle of the
world, of thought, and of ethics; but it also represented, at the same time, the
divinity itself as a creative and active, as distinguished from a quiescent, power.
The most important step that was ever taken in the domain of Christian doc trine was
when the Christian apologists at the beginning of the second century drew the equation: the Logos = Jesus Christ. Ancient teachers before them had also called Christ
“the Logos” among the many predicates which they ascribed to him; nay, one of
them, John, had already formulated the proposition: “The Logos is Jesus Christ.”
But with John this proposition had not become the basis of every speculative idea
about Christ; with him, too, “the Logos” was only a predicate. But now teachers
came forward who previous to their conversion had been adherents of the platonico-stoical
philosophy, and with whom the conception “Logos” formed an inalienable part of
a general philosophy of the world. They proclaimed that Jesus Christ was the Logos
incarnate, which had hitherto been revealed only in the great effects which it exercised.
In the place of the entirely unintelligible conception “Messiah,” an intelligible
one was acquired at a stroke; Christology, tottering under the exuberance of its
own affirmations, received a stable basis; Christ’s significance for the world was
established; his mysterious relation to God was explained; the cosmos, reason,
and ethics were comprehended as one. It was, indeed, a marvellous formula; and was
not the way prepared for it, nay, hastened, by the speculative ideas about the Messiah propounded by Paul and other ancient teachers? The knowledge
that the divine in Christ must be conceived as the Logos opened up a number of problems,
and at the same time set them definite limits and gave them definite directives.
Christ’s unique character as opposed to all rivals appeared to be established in
the simplest fashion, and yet the conception provided thought with so much liberty
and free play that Christ could be regarded, as the need might arise, on the one
side as operative deity itself, and on the other as still the first-born among many
brethren and as the first created of God.
What a proof it is of the impression which Christ’s teaching
created that Greek philosophers managed to identify him with the Logos! For the
assertion that the incarnation of the Logos had taken place in an historical
personage there had been no preparation. No philosophising Jew had ever thought
of identifying the Messiah with the Logos; no Philo, for instance, ever
entertained the idea of such an equation! It gave a metaphysical significance
to an historical fact; it drew into the domain of cosmology and religious
philosophy a person who had appeared in time and space; but by so distinguishing one person it raised all
history to the plane of the cosmical movement.
The identification of the Logos with Christ was the determining factor in the fusion of Greek philosophy with
the apostolic inheritance and led the more thoughtful Greeks to adopt the latter.
Most of us regard this identification as inadmissible, because the way in which
we conceive the world and ethics does not point to the existence of any Logos at
all. But a man must be blind not to see that for that age the appropriate formula
for uniting the Christian religion with Greek thought was the Logos. Nor is it difficult
even to-day to attach a valid meaning to the conception. An unmixed blessing it
has not been. To a much larger extent than the earlier speculative ideas about Christ
it absorbed men’s interest; it withdrew their minds from the simplicity of the Gospel,
and increasingly transformed it into a philosophy of religion. The proposition that
the Logos had appeared among men had an intoxicating effect, but the enthusiasm
and transport which it produced in the soul did not lead with any certainty to the
God whom Jesus Christ proclaimed.
The loss of an original element and the gain of a fresh one,
namely, the Greek, are insufficient to explain the great change which the Christian
religion experienced in the second century. We must bear in mind, thirdly, the great
struggle which that religion was then carrying on within its own domain. Parallel
with the slow influx of the element of Greek philosophy, experiments were being made all along the line
in the direction of what may be briefly called “acute Hellenisation.” While they
offer us a most magnificent historical spectacle, in the period itself they were
a terrible danger. More than any before it, the second century is the century of
religious fusion, of “Theocrasia.” The problem was to include Christianity in this
religious fusion, as one element among others, although the chief. The “Hellenism” which made this endeavour had already attracted to itself all the mysteries, all
the philosophy of Eastern worship, elements the most sublime and the most absurd,
and by the never-failing aid of philosophical, that is to say, of allegorical interpretation,
had spun them all into a glittering web. It now fell upon—I cannot help so expressing
it—the Christian religion. It was impressed by the sublime character of this religion; it did reverence to Jesus Christ as the Saviour of the world; it offered to give
up everything that it possessed—all the treasures of its civilisation and its wisdom—to this message, if only the message would suffer them to stand. As though endowed
with the right to rule, the message was to make its entry into a ready-made theory
of the world and religion, and into mysteries already prepared for it. What a proof
of the impression which this message made, and what a temptation! This “Gnosticism,”—such is the name which the movement has received,—strong and active
in the plenitude of its religious experiments, established itself under Christ’s
name, developed a vigorous and abiding feeling for many Christian ideas, sought
to give shape to what was still shapeless, to settle accounts with what was externally
incomplete, and to bring the whole stream of the Christian movement into its own
channel. The majority of the faithful, led by their bishops, so far from yielding
to these enticements, took up the struggle with them in the conviction that they
masked a demonic temptation. But struggle in this case meant definition, that is
to say, drawing a sharp line of demarcation around what was Christian and
declaring everything heathen that would not keep within it. The struggle with
Gnosticism compelled the Church to put its teaching, its worship, and its
discipline into fixed forms and ordinances, and to exclude everyone who would not
yield them obedience. In the conviction that it was everywhere only conserving
and honouring what had been handed down, it never for a moment doubted that the
obedience which it demanded was anything more than subjection to the divine will
itself, and that in the doctrines with which it encountered the enemy it was exhibiting
the impress of religion itself.
If by “Catholic” we mean the church of doctrine and of law,
then the Catholic Church had its origin in the struggle with Gnosticism. It had to pay a heavy
price for the victory which kept that tendency at bay; we may almost say that
the vanquished imposed their terms upon the victor: Victi victoribus legem dederunt.
It kept Dualism and the acute phase of Hellenism at bay; but by becoming a
community with a fully worked-out scheme of doctrine, and a definite form of public
worship, it was of necessity compelled to take on forms analogous to those which
it combated in the Gnostics. To encounter our enemy’s theses by setting up others
one by one is to change over to his ground. How much of its original freedom the
Church sacrificed! It was now forced to say: You are no Christian, you cannot come
into any relation with God at all, unless you have first of all acknowledged these
doctrines, yielded obedience to these ordinances, and followed out definite forms
of mediation. Nor was anyone to think a religious experience legitimate that had
not been sanctioned by sound doctrine and approved by the priests. The Church found
no other way and no other means of maintaining itself against Gnosticism, and what
was set up as a protection against enemies from without became the palladium, nay,
the very foundation, within. This entire development, it is true, would probably
have taken place apart from the struggle in question,—the two elements which we first discussed would have produced it; but that it took place so rapidly and assumed
so positive, nay, so Draconian, a shape, was due to the fact that the struggle was
one in which the very existence of the traditional religion was at stake. The superficial
view that the personal ambition of certain individuals was at the bottom of the
whole system of established ordinance and priesthood is absolutely untenable. The
loss of the original, living element is by itself sufficient to explain the phenomena.
La médiocrité fonde l’autorité. It is the man who knows religion only as
usage and obedience that creates the priest, for the purpose of ridding himself
of an essential part of the obligations which he feels by loading him with them.
He also makes ordinances, for the semi-religious prefer an ordinance to a Gospel.
We have endeavoured to indicate the tendencies by which the great
change was effected. It remains to answer the second question: Did the Gospel hold
its own amid the change, and, if so, how? That it entered upon an entirely new
set of circumstances is already obvious; but we shall have to study them more closely.
LECTURE XII
NO one can compare the internal state of Christendom at the beginning
of the third century with the state in which it found itself a hundred and twenty
years earlier without being moved by conflicting views and sentiments. Admiration
for the vigorous achievement presented in the creation of the Catholic Church, and
for the energy with which it extended its activity in all directions, is balanced
by concern at the absence of those many elements of freedom and directness, united,
however, by an inward bond, which the primitive age possessed. Although we are compelled
gratefully to acknowledge that this Church repelled all attempts to let the Christian
religion simply dissolve into contemporary thought, and protected itself against
the acute phase of Hellenisation, still we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that
it had to pay a high price for maintaining its position. Let us determine a little
more precisely what the alteration was which was effected in it, and on which we
have already touched.
The first and most prominent change is the way in which freedom
and independence in matters of religion are endangered. No one is to feel and count himself
a Christian, that is to say, a child of God, who has not previously subjected his
religious knowledge and experience to the controlling influence of the Church’s
creed. The “Spirit” is confined within the narrowest limits, and forbidden to
work where and as it will. Nay, more; not only is the individual, except in special
cases, to begin by being a minor and by obeying the Church; he is never to become
of full age, that is to say, he is never to lose his dependence on doctrine, on
the priest, on public worship, and on the “book.” It was then that what we still
specifically call the Catholic form of godliness, in contrast with Evangelicalism,
originated. A blow was dealt to the direct and immediate element in religion; and
for any individual to restore it afresh for himself became a matter of extraordinary
difficulty.
Secondly, although the acute phase of Hellenisation was avoided,
Christendom became more and more penetrated by the Greek and philosophical idea
that true religion is first and foremost “doctrine,” and doctrine, too, that is
coextensive with the whole range of knowledge. That this faith of “slaves and old
women” attracted to itself the entire philosophy of God and the world which the
Greeks had formed, and undertook to recast that philosophy as though teaching it
were part of its own substance and unite it with the teaching of Jesus Christ,
was certainly a proof of the inner power of the Christian religion; but the process
involved, as a necessary consequence, a displacement of the fundamental religious
interest, and the addition of an enormous burden. The question, “What must I do
to be saved?” which in Jesus Christ’s and the apostles’ day could still receive
a very brief answer, now evoked a most diffuse one; and even though in view of
the laymen shorter replies might still be provided, the laymen were in so far regarded
as imperfect, and expected to observe a submissive attitude towards the learned.
The Christian religion had already received that tendency to Intellectualism which
has clung to it ever since. But when thus presented as a huge and complex fabric,
as a vast and difficult system of doctrine, not only is it encumbered, but its earnest
character threatens to disappear. This character depends upon the emotional and
gladdening element in it being kept directly accessible. The Christian religion
is assuredly informed with the desire to come to terms with all knowledge and with
intellectual life as a whole; but when achievements in this field—even presuming
that they always accord with truth and reality—are held to be equally binding with
the evangelical message, or even to be a necessary preliminary to it, mischief is
done to the cause of religion. This mischief is already unmistakably
present at the beginning of the third century.
Thirdly, the Church obtained a special, independent value as
an institution; it became a religious power. Originally only a developed
form of that community of brothers which furnished place and manner for God’s common
worship and a mysterious shadow of the heavenly Church, it now became, as an
institution, an indispensable factor in religion. People were taught that in
this institution Christ’s Spirit had deposited everything that the individual man
can need; that he is wholly bound to it, therefore, not only in love but also in
faith; that it is there only that the Spirit works, and therefore there only that
all its gifts of grace are to be found. That the individual Christian who did not
subordinate himself to the ecclesiastical institution relapsed, as a rule, into
heathenism, and fell into false and evil doctrines or an immoral life, was, indeed,
an actual fact. The effect of this, combined with the struggle against the Gnostics,
was that the institution, together with all its forms and arrangements, became more
and more identified with the “bride of Christ,” “the true Jerusalem,” and so on,
and accordingly was even itself proclaimed as the inviolable creation of God, and
the fixed and unalterable abode of the Holy Ghost. Consistently with this, it began to announce that all its ordinances were
equally sacred. How greatly religious liberty was thus encumbered I need not show.
Fourthly and lastly, the Gospel was not proclaimed as the glad
message with the same vigour in the second century as it had been in the first.
The reasons for this are manifold: on the one hand personal experience of religion
was not felt so strongly as Paul, or as the author of the fourth Gospel, felt it; on the other, the prevalent eschatological expectations, which those teachers
had restrained by their more profound teaching, remained in full sway. Fear
and hope are more prominent in the Christianity of the second century
than they are with Paul, and it is only in appearance that the former stands near
to Jesus’ sayings; for, as we saw, God’s Fatherhood is the main article in Jesus’
message. But, as Romans viii. proves, the knowledge of this truth is just what Paul
embodied in his preaching of the faith. While the element of fear thus obtained
a larger scope in the Christianity of the second century,—this scope increased in
proportion as the original buoyancy died down and conformity to the world extended,—the ethical element became less free and more a matter of law and rigorism. In religion,
rigorism always forms the obverse side of secularity. But as it appeared impossible
to expect a rigoristic ethics of everyone, the distinction between a perfect and a sufficient morality already
set in as an element in the growth of Catholicism. That the roots of this distinction
go further back is a fact of which we need not here take account; it was only towards
the end of the second century that the distinction became a fatal one. Born of necessity
and erected into a virtue, it soon grew so important that the existence of Christianity
as a Catholic Church came to depend upon it. The uniformity of the Christian ideal
was thereby disturbed and a quantitative view of moral achievement suggested which
is unknown to the Gospel. The Gospel does, no doubt, make a distinction between
a strong and a weak faith, and greater and smaller moral achievements; but he that
is least in the kingdom of God may be perfect in his kind.
These various tendencies together denote the essential changes
which the Christian religion experienced up to the beginning of the third century,
and by which it was modified. Did the Gospel hold its own in spite of them, and
how may that be shown? Well, we can cite a whole series of documents, which, so
far as written words can attest inner and genuinely Christian life, bear very clear
and impressive testimony that such life existed. Martyrdoms like those of Perpetua
and Felicitas, or letters passing between communities, like those from Lyons to Asia Minor, exhibit the Christian faith and the
strength and delicacy of moral sentiment with a splendour only paralleled in the
days when the faith was founded; while of all that had been done in the external
development of the Church they make no mention whatever. The way to God is found
with certainty, and the simplicity of the life within does not appear to be disturbed
or encumbered. Again, let us take a writer like the Christian religious philosopher,
Clement of Alexandria, who flourished about the year 200. We can still feel from
his writings that this scholar, although he was absolutely steeped in speculative
ideas, and as a thinker reduced the Christian religion to a boundless sea of “doctrines,”—a Greek in every fibre of his being,—won peace and joy from the Gospel, and he
can also express what he won and testify of the power of the living God. It is as
a new man that he appears, one who has pressed on through the whole range of philosophy,
through authority and speculation, through all the externals of religion, to the
glorious liberty of the children of God. His faith in Providence, his faith in Christ,
his doctrine of freedom, his ethics—everything is expressed in language that betrays
the Greek, and yet everything is new and genuinely Christian. Further, if we compare
him with a Christian of quite another stamp, namely, his contemporary, Tertullian, it is easy to show that what they have in common
in religion is what they have learned from the Gospel, nay, is the Gospel itself.
And in reading Tertullian’s exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, and turning it over
in our minds, we see that this hot-blooded African, this stern foe of heretics,
this resolute champion of auctoritas and
ratio, this dogmatic advocate,
this man at once Churchman and enthusiast, nevertheless possessed a deep feeling
for the main substance of the Gospel and a good knowledge of it as well. In this
Old-Catholic Church the Gospel, truly, was not as yet stifled!
Further, this Church still kept up the all-important idea that
the Christian community must present itself as a society of brothers active in work,
and it gave expression to this idea in a way that puts subsequent generations to
shame.
Lastly, there can be no doubt—and while so truth-loving a man
as Origen confirms the fact for us, heathen writers like Lucian also attest it—that
the hope of an eternal life, the full confidence in Christ, a readiness to make
sacrifices, and a purity of morals were still, in spite of all frailties—here, too,
not lacking,—the real characteristics of this society. Origen can challenge
his heathen opponents to compare any community whatever with the Christian community,
and to say where the greater moral excellence lies. This religion had, no doubt,
already developed a husk and integument; to penetrate through to it
and grasp the kernel had become more difficult; it had also lost much of its original
life. But the gifts and the tasks which the Gospel offered still remained in force,
and the fabric which the Church had erected around them also served many a man as
the means by which he attained to the thing itself.
We now pass to the consideration of
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN GREEK CATHOLICISM
I must invite you to descend several centuries with me and to
look at the Greek Church as it is today, and as it has been preserved, essentially
unaltered, for more than a thousand years. Between the third and the nineteenth
century the history of the Church of the East nowhere presents any deep gulf. Hence
we may take up our position in the present. Here, in turn, we ask the three following
questions:
What did this Greek Catholicism achieve?
What are its characteristics?
What modifications did the Gospel here undergo, and how did it
hold its own?
What did this Greek Catholicism achieve? Two facts may be cited
on this point: firstly, in the great domain which it embraces, the countries of
the eastern part of the Mediterranean and northwards to the Arctic Ocean, it made
an end of heathenism and polytheism. The decisive victory was accomplished from the third
to the sixth century, and so effectually accomplished that the gods of Greece really
perished—perished unwept and unmourned. Not in any great battle did they die, but
from sheer exhaustion, and without offering any resistance worth mention. I may
just point out that before dying they transferred a considerable portion of their
power to the Church’s saints. But, what is more important, with the death of the
gods Neoplatonism, the last great product of Greek philosophy, was also vanquished.
The religious philosophy of the Church proved the stronger. The victory over Hellenism
is an achievement of the Eastern Church on which it still subsists. Secondly, this
Church managed to effect such a fusion with the individual nations which it drew
into its bosom that religion and church became to them national palladia, nay, palladia
pure and simple. Go amongst Greeks, Russians, Armenians, etc., and you will everywhere
find that religion and nationality are inseparable, and the one element exists only
in and alongside of the other. Men of these nationalities will, if need be, suffer
themselves to be cut in pieces for their religion. This is no mere consequence of
the pressure exercised by the hostile power of Mohammedanism; the Russians are
not subject to this pressure. Nor is it only—shall I say?—in the Moscow press that
we can see what a firm and intimate connexion exists between Church
and nation in these peoples, in spite of “sects,” which are not wanting here either;
to convince ourselves of it we must read—to take an instance at random—Tolstoi’s
Village Tales. They bring before the reader a really touching picture of
the deep influence of the Church, with its message of the Eternal, of self-sacrifice,
of sympathy and fraternity, on the national mind. That the clergy stand low in the
social scale, and frequently encounter contempt, must not delude us into supposing
that as the representatives of the Church they do not occupy an incomparably high
station. In Eastern Europe the monastic ideal is deeply rooted in the national soul.
But the mention of these two points includes everything that
can be said about the achievements of this Church. To add that it has disseminated
a certain amount of culture would involve pitching our standard of culture very
low. In comparison with Islam, too, it is no longer so successful in doing what
it has done in the past and still does in regard to polytheism. The missions of
the Russian Church are still overthrowing polytheism even today; but large territories
have been lost to Islam, and the Church has not recovered them. Islam has extended
its victories as far as the Adriatic and in the direction of Bosnia. It has won
over numerous Albanian and Slav tribes which were once Christian. It shows
itself to be at least a match for the Church, although we must not forget that in
the heart of its dominions there are Christian nations who have maintained their
creed.
Our second question was, What are the characteristics of this
Church? The answer is not easy; for as it presents itself to the spectator this
Church is a highly complex structure. The feelings, the superstitions, the learning,
and the devotional philosophy of hundreds, nay, of thousands of years, are built
into it. But, further; no one can look at this Church from outside, with its forms
of worship, its solemn ritual, the number of its ceremonies, its relics, pictures,
priests, monks, and the philosophy of its mysteries, and then compare it on the
one hand with the Church of the first century, and on the other with the Hellenic
cults in the age of Neoplatonism, without arriving at the conclusion that it belongs
not to the former but to the latter. It takes the form, not of a Christian product
in Greek dress, but of a Greek product in Christian dress. It would have done
battle with the Christians of the first century just as it did battle with the worship
of Magna Mater and Zeus Soter. There are innumerable features of this Church which
are counted as sacred as the Gospel, and towards which not even a tendency existed
in primitive Christianity. Of the whole performance of the chief religious service, nay, even of
many of the dogmas, the same thing may, in the last resort, be said: if certain
words, like “Christ,” etc., are omitted, there is nothing left to recall the original
element. In its external form as a whole this Church is nothing more than a continuation
of the history of Greek religion under the alien influence of Christianity, parallel
to the many other alien influences which have affected it. We might also describe
it as the natural product of the union between Hellenism, itself already in a state
of oriental decay, and Christian teaching; it is the transformation which history
effects in a religion by “natural” means, and, as was here the case, was bound
to effect between the third and the sixth century. In this sense it is a natural
religion. The conception admits of a double meaning. It is generally understood
as an abstract term covering all the elementary feelings and processes traceable
in every religion. Whether there are any such elements, or, on the other hand, whether
they are sufficiently stable and articulate to be followed as a whole, admits, however,
of a doubt. The conception “natural religion” may be better applied to the growth
which a religion produces when the “natural” forces of history have ceased playing
on it. At bottom these forces are everywhere the same, although differing in the
way in which they are mounted. They mould religion until it answers their purpose; not by expelling what is sacred, venerable, and so on, but by assigning it the
place and allowing it the scope which they consider right. They immerse everything
in a uniform medium,—that medium which, like the air, is the first condition of
their “natural” existence. In this sense, then, the Greek Church is a natural
religion; no prophet, no reformer, no genius, has arisen in its history since
the third century to disturb the ordinary process by which a religion becomes naturalised
into common history. The process attained its completion in the sixth century and
asserted itself victoriously against severe assaults in the eighth and ninth. The
Church has since been at rest, and no further essential, nay, not even any unessential,
change has taken place in the condition which it then reached. Since then, apparently,
the nations belonging to this Church have undergone nothing to make it seem intolerable
to them and to call for any reform in it. They still continue, then, in this “natural” religion of the sixth century.
I have, however, advisedly spoken of the Church in its external
form. Its complex character is partly due to the fact that we cannot arrive at its
inner condition by simple deduction from its outer. It is not sufficient to observe,
although the observation is correct, that this Church is part of the history of Greek religion. It exercises influences which from this point
of view are not easily intelligible. We cannot form a correct estimate of it unless
we dwell more closely on the factors which lend it its character.
The first factor which we encounter is tradition, and
the observance of it. The sacred and the divine do not exist in free action,—we
shall see later to what reservations this statement is subject,—but are put, as
it were, into a storehouse, in the form of an immense capital. The capital is to
provide for all demands, and to be coined in the precise way in which the Fathers
coined it. Here, it is true, we have an idea which can be traced to something already
existing in the primitive age. We read in the Acts of the Apostles that “they continued
steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine.” But what became of this practice and this
obligation? Firstly, everything was designated “apostolic” which was deposited
in this Church in the course of the succeeding centuries; or, rather, what the
Church considered necessary to possess in order to suit the historical position
in which it was placed it called apostolic, because it fancied that otherwise it
could not exist, and what is necessary for the Church’s existence must be
simply apostolic. Secondly, it has been established as an irrefragable fact that
the “continuing steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine” applies, first and foremost, to the punctilious observance of
every direction as to ritual: the sacred element is bound up with text and
form. Both are conceived in a thoroughly antique way. That the divine is,
so to speak, stored up as though it were an actual commodity, and that the supreme
demand which the Deity makes is the punctilious observance of a ritual, were ideas
that in antiquity were perfectly familiar and admitted of no doubt. Tradition and
ceremony are the conditions under which the Holy alone existed and was accessible.
Obedience, respect, reverence, were the most important religious feelings. Whilst
they are doubtless inalienable features of religion, it is only as accompaniments
of an active feeling quite different in its character that they possess any value,
and that further presumes that the object to which they are directed is a worthy
one. Traditionalism and the ritualism so closely connected with it are prominent
characteristics of the Greek Church, but this is just what shows how far it has
departed from the Gospel.
The second point that fixes the character of this Church is the
value which it attaches to orthodoxy, to sound doctrine. It has stated and
re-stated its doctrines with the greatest precision and often enough made them a
terror to men of different creed. No one, it claims, can be saved who does not possess
the correct doctrine; the man who does not possess it is to be expelled and must forfeit all his rights; if he be a fellow-countryman, he must be treated as a leper and lose all connexion
with his nation. This fanaticism, which still flares up here and there in the Greek
Church even to-day, and in principle has not been abandoned, is not Greek, although
a certain inclination towards it was not lacking in the ancient Greeks; still less
did it originate in Roman law; it is the result, rather, of an unfortunate combination
of several factors. When the Roman Empire became Christian, the hard fight for existence
which the Church had waged with the Gnostics was not yet forgotten; still less
had the Church forgotten the last bloody persecutions which the State had inflicted
upon it in a kind of despair. These two circumstances would in themselves be sufficient
to explain how the Church came to feel that it had a right of reprisal, and was
at the same time bound to suppress heretics. But, in addition, there had now appeared
in the highest place, since the days of Diocletian and Constantine, the absolutist
conception, derived from the East, of the unlimited right and the unlimited duty
of the ruler in regard to his “subjects.” The unfortunate factor in the great change
was that the Roman Emperor was at once, and almost in the same moment, a Christian
emperor and an Oriental despot. The more conscientious he was, the more intolerant
he was bound to be; for the Deity had committed to his care not
only men’s bodies but their souls as well. Thus arose the aggressive and all-devouring
orthodoxy of State and Church, or, rather, of the State-Church. Examples which were
to hand from the Old Testament completed and sanctified the process.
Intolerance is a new growth in the land of the Greeks and cannot
be roundly laid to their charge; but the way in which doctrine developed, namely,
as a philosophy of God and the world, was due to their influence; and the fact
that religion and doctrine were directly identified is also a product of the Greek
spirit. No mere reference to the significance which doctrine already possessed in
the apostolic age, and to the tendencies operating in the direction of bringing
it into a speculative form, is sufficient to explain the change. These are matters,
as I hope that I have shown in the previous lectures, which are rather to be understood
in a different sense. It is in the second century, and with the apologists, that
Intellectualism commences; and, supported by the struggle with the Gnostics and
by the Alexandrian school of religious philosophers in the Church, it manages to
prevail.
But it is not enough to assess the teaching of the Greek Church
by its formal side alone, and ascertain in what way and to what extent it is exhibited,
and what is the value to be placed upon it. We must also examine
its substance; for it possesses two elements which are quite peculiar to it and
separate it from the Greek philosophy of religion—the idea of the creation,
and the doctrine of the God-Man nature of the Saviour. We shall treat
of these two elements in our next lecture, and, further, of the two other elements
which, side by side with tradition and doctrine, characterise the Greek Church,
namely, the form of worship and the order of monk-hood.
LECTURE XIII
SO far we have established the fact that Greek Catholicism is
characterised as a religion by two elements: by traditionalism and by
intellectualism. According to traditionalism, the reverent preservation
of the received inheritance, and the defence of it against all innovation, is not
only an important duty, but is itself the practical proof of religion. That is an
idea quite in harmony with antiquity and foreign to the Gospel; for the Gospel knows
absolutely nothing of intercourse with God being bound up with reverence for tradition
itself. But the second element, intellectualism, is also of Greek origin. The elaboration
of the Gospel into a vast philosophy of God and the world, in which every conceivable
kind of material is handled; the conviction that because Christianity is the absolute
religion it must give information on all questions of metaphysics, cosmology, and
history; the view of revelation as a countless multitude of doctrines and explanations,
all equally holy and important—this is Greek intellectualism. According to it,
Knowledge is the highest good, and spirit is spirit only in so far as it knows; everything that is of an aesthetical, ethical,
and religious character must be converted into some form of knowledge, which human
will and life will then with certainty obey. The development of the Christian faith
into an all-embracing theosophy, and the identification of faith with theological
knowledge, are proofs that the Christian religion on Greek soil entered the proscribed
circle of the native religious philosophy and has remained there.
But in this vast philosophy of God and the world, which possesses
an absolute value as the “substance of what has been revealed” and as “orthodox
doctrine,” there are two elements which radically distinguish it from Greek religious
philosophy and invest it with an entirely original character. I do not mean the
appeal which it makes to revelation—for to that the Neoplatonists also appealed but the idea of
creation and the doctrine of the God-Man nature of the Saviour. They
traverse the scheme of Greek religious philosophy at two critical points, and have
therefore always been felt to be alien and intolerable by its genuine representatives.
The idea of creation we can deal with in a few words. It is undoubtedly
an element which is as important as it is in thorough keeping with the Gospel. It
abolishes all intertwining of God and world, and gives expression to the power and
actuality of the living God. Attempts were not wanting, it is true, among
Christian thinkers on Greek soil just because they were Greeks to conceive the Deity
only as the uniform power operating in the fabric of the world, as the unity in
diversity, and as its goal. Traces of this speculative idea are even still to be
found in the Church doctrine; the idea of creation, however, triumphed, and therewith
Christianity won a real victory.
The subject of the God-Man nature of the Saviour is one on which
it is much more difficult to arrive at a correct opinion. It is indubitably the
central point in the whole dogmatic system of the Greek Church. It supplied the
doctrine of the Trinity. In the Greek view these two doctrines together make up
Christian teaching in nuce. When a Father of the Greek Church once said,
as he did say, “The idea of the God-Man nature, the idea of God becoming a man,
is what is new in the new, nay, is the only new thing under the sun,” not only did
he correctly represent the opinion of all his fellow-believers, but he also at the
same time strikingly expressed their view that, while sound intelligence and earnest
reflection yield all the other points of doctrine of themselves, this one lies beyond
them. The theologians of the Greek Church are convinced that the only real distinction
between the Christian creed and natural philosophy is that the former embraces the doctrine of the God-Man nature, including
the Trinity. Side by side with this, the only other doctrine that can at most come
in question is that of the idea of creation.
If that be so, it is of radical importance to obtain a correct
view of the origin, meaning, and value of this doctrine. In its completed form it
must look strange to anyone who comes to it straight from the evangelists. While
no historical reflection can rid us of the impression that the whole fabric of ecclesiastical
Christology is a thing absolutely outside the concrete personality of Jesus Christ,
historical considerations nevertheless enable us not only to explain its origin
but also even to justify, in a certain degree, the way in which it is formulated.
Let us try to get a clear idea of the leading points.
We saw in a previous lecture how it came about that the Church
teachers selected the conception of the Logos in order to define Christ’s nature
and majesty. They found the conception of the “Messiah” quite unintelligible;
it conveyed no meaning to them. As conceptions cannot be improvised, they had to
choose between representing Christ as a deified man, that is to say, as a hero,
or conceiving his nature after the pattern of one of the Greek gods, or identifying
it with the Logos. The first two possibilities had to be put aside, as they were “heathenish,” or seemed to be so. There remained, therefore,
the Logos. How well this formula served different purposes we have already pointed
out. Did it not readily admit of being combined with the conception of the Sonship,
without leading to any objectionable theogonies? It involved, too, no menace to
monotheism. But the formula had a logic of its own, and this logic led to results
which were not absolutely free from suspicion. The conception of the Logos was susceptible
of very varied expression; in spite of its sublime meaning, it could be also so
conceived as to permit of the bearer of the title not being by any means of a truly
divine nature but possessing one that was only half divine.
The question as to the more exact definition of the nature of
the Logos-Christ could not have attained the enormous significance which it received
in the Church, and might have been stilled by various speculative answers, if it
had not been accompanied by the triumph of a very precise idea of the nature of
redemption, which acted as a peremptory challenge. Among all the possible ideas
on the subject of redemption—forgiveness of sins, release from the power of the
demons, and so on—that idea came victoriously to the front in the Church in the
third century which conceived of it as redemption from death and therewith
as elevation to the divine life, that is to say, as deification. It is
true that this conception found a safe starting-point in the Gospel, and
support in the Pauline theology; but in the form in which it was now developed it
was foreign to both of them and conceived on Greek lines; mortality is in itself
reckoned as the greatest evil, and as the cause of all evil, while the greatest
of blessings is to live forever. What a severely Greek idea this is we can see,
in the first place, from the fact that redemption from death is presented, in a
wholly realistic fashion, as a pharmacological process,—the divine nature
has to flow in and transform the mortal nature,—and, in the second, from the way
in which eternal life and deification were identified. But if actual interference
in the constitution of human nature and its deification are involved, then the
Redeemer must himself be God and must become man. It is only on this condition
that so marvellous a process can be imagined as actually taking place. Word, doctrine,
individual deeds, are here of no avail—how can life be given to a stone, or a mortal
made immortal, by preaching at them? Only when the divine itself bodily enters
into mortality can mortality be transformed. It is not, however, the hero, but God
Himself alone, who possesses the divine, that is to say, eternal life, and so possesses
it as to permit of His giving it to others. The Logos, then, must be God Himself, and He must have actually become man. With the satisfying
of these two conditions, real, natural redemption, that is to say, the deification
of humanity, is actually effected. These considerations enable us to understand
the prodigious disputes over the nature of the Logos-Christ which filled several
centuries. They explain why Athanasius strove for the formula that the Logos-Christ
was of the same nature as the Father, as though the existence or non-existence of
the Christian religion were at stake. They show clearly how it was that other teachers
in the Greek Church regarded any menace to the complete unity of the divine
and the human in the Redeemer, any notion of a merely moral connexion, as a death-blow
to Christianity. These teachers secured their formulas, which for them were anything
but scholastic conceptions; rather, they were the statement and establishment of
a matter of fact, in the absence of which the Christian religion was as unsatisfactory
as any other. The doctrines of the identical nature of the three persons of the
Trinity—how the doctrine of the Holy Ghost came about I need not mention—and of
the God-Man nature of the Redeemer are in strict accordance with the distinguishing
notion of the redemption as a deification of man’s nature by making him immortal.
Without the help of the notion those formulas would never have been attained; but they also stand and fall with it. They prevailed, however,
not because they were akin to the ideas of Greek philosophy, but because they were
contrasted with them. Greek philosophy never ventured, and never aspired, to meet,
in any similar way by “history” and speculative ideas, that wish for immortality
which it so vividly entertained. To attribute any such interference with the Cosmos
to an historical personality and the manner in which it appeared, and to
ascribe to that personality a transformation in what, given once for all, was in
a state of eternal flux, must necessarily have seemed, to Greek philosophy, pure
mythology and superstition. The “only new thing under the sun” must necessarily
have appeared to it, and did appear, to be the worst kind of fable.
The Greek Church still entertains the conviction to-day that
in these doctrines it possesses the essence of Christianity, regarded at once as
a mystery, and as a mystery that has been revealed. Criticism of this contention
is not difficult. We must acknowledge that those doctrines powerfully contributed
to keeping the Christian religion from dissolving into Greek religious philosophy; further, that they profoundly impress us with the absolute character of this religion; again, that they are in actual accordance with the Greek notion of redemption; lastly, that this very notion has
one of its roots in the Gospel. But beyond this we can acknowledge nothing;
nay, it is to be observed: (i.) that the notion of the redemption as a deification
of mortal nature is subchristian, because the moral element involved can at best
be only tacked on to it; (ii.) that the whole doctrine is inadmissible, because
it has scarcely any connexion with the Jesus Christ of the Gospel, and its formulas
do not fit him,—it is, therefore, not founded in truth; and (iii.) that as it is
connected with the real Christ only by uncertain threads it leads us away from him,—it does not keep his image alive, but, on the contrary, demands that this image
should be apprehended solely in the light of alleged hypotheses about him expressed
in theoretical propositions. That this substitution produces no very serious or
destructive effects is principally owing to the fact that in spite of them the Church
has not suppressed the Gospels, and that their own innate power makes itself felt.
It may also be conceded that the notion of God having become man does not everywhere
produce the effect only of a bewildering mystery, but, on the contrary, is capable
of leading to the pure and definite conviction that God was in Christ. We may admit,
lastly, that the egoistic desire for immortal existence will, within the Christian
sphere, experience a moral purification through the longing to live with and
in God, and to remain inseparably bound to His love. But all these admissions cannot do away with the
palpable fact that in Greek dogma we have a fatal connexion established between
the desire of the ancients for immortal life and the Christian message. Nor can
anyone deny that this connexion, implanted in Greek religious philosophy and the
intellectualism which characterised it, has led to formulas which are incorrect,
introduce a supposititious Christ in the place of the real one, and, besides,
encourage the delusion that, if only a man possesses the right formula, he has
the thing itself. Even though the Christological formula were the theologically
right one—what a departure from the Gospel is involved in maintaining that a man
can have no relation with Jesus Christ, nay, that he is sinning against him and
will be cast out, unless he first of all acknowledges that Christ was one person
with two natures and two powers of will, one of them divine and one human. Such
is the demand into which intellectualism has developed. Can such a system still
find a place for the Gospel story of the Syrophcenician woman or the centurion
at Capernaum?
But with traditionalism and intellectualism a further element
is associated, namely, ritualism. If religion is presented as a complex system of
traditional doctrine, to which the few alone have any real access, the majority
of believers cannot practise it at all except as ritual. Doctrine comes to be administered
in stereotyped formulas accompanied by symbolic acts. Although no inner understanding
of it is thus possible, it produces the feeling of something mysterious. The very
deification which the future is expected to bring, and which in itself is something
that can neither be described nor conceived, is now administered, as though it were
an earnest of what is to come, by means of ritual acts. An imaginative mood is excited,
and disposes to its reception; and this excitement, when enhanced, is its seal.
Such are the feelings which move the members of the Greek Catholic
Church. Intercourse with God is achieved through the cult of a mystery, and by means
of hundreds of efficacious formulas small and great, signs, pictures, and consecrated
acts, which, if punctiliously and submissively observed, communicate divine grace
and prepare the Christian for eternal life. Doctrine, as such, is for the most part
something unknown; if it appears at all, it is only in the form of liturgical aphorisms.
For ninety-nine per cent. of these Christians, religion exists only as a ceremonious
ritual, in which it is externalised. But even for Christians of advanced intelligence
all these ritual acts are absolutely necessary, for it is only in them that doctrine
receives its correct application and obtains its due result.
There is no sadder spectacle than this transformation of the
Christian religion from a worship of God in spirit and in truth into a worship
of God in signs, formulas, and idols. To feel the whole pity of this
development, we need not descend to such adherents of this form of Christendom
as are religiously and intellectually in a state of complete abandonment, like
the Copts and Abyssinians; the Syrians, Greeks, and Russians are, taken as a
whole, only a little better. Where, however, can we find in Jesus’ message even
a trace of any injunction that a man is to submit to solemn ceremonies as though
they were mysterious ministrations, to be punctilious in observing a ritual, to
put up pictures, and to mumble maxims and formulas in a prescribed fashion? It was to destroy this sort of religion
that Jesus Christ suffered himself to be nailed to the cross, and now we find
it re-established under his name and authority! Not only has “mystagogy” stepped
into a position side by side with the “mathesis,” that is to say, the doctrine,
which called it forth; but the truth is that “doctrine”—be its constitution
what it may, it is still a spiritual principle—has disappeared, and ceremony dominates everything. This is
what marks the relapse into the ancient form of the lowest class of religion. Over
the vast area of Greek and Oriental Christendom religion has been almost stifled
by ritualism. It is not that religion has sacrificed one of its essential elements.
No! it has entered an entirely different plane; it has descended to the level
where religion may be described as a cult and nothing but a cult.
Nevertheless, Greek and Oriental Christianity contains within
itself an element which for centuries has been capable of offering, and still offers
here and there to-day, a certain resistance to the combined forces of traditionalism,
intellectualism, and ritualism—I mean monasticism. To the question, Who is in the
highest sense of the word Christian? the Greek Christian replies: the monk. The
man who practises silence and purity, who shuns not only the world but also the
Church of the world; who avoids not only false doctrine but any statement about
the true; who fasts, gives himself up to contemplation, and steadily waits for
God’s glorious light to dawn upon his gaze; who attaches no value to anything but
tranquillity and meditation on the Eternal; who asks nothing of life but death,
and who from such utter unselfishness and purity makes mercy arise this is the Christian.
To him not even the Church and the consecration which it bestows is an absolute
necessity. For such a man the whole system of sanctified secularity has vanished.
Over and over again in ascetics of this kind the Church has seen in its ranks figures
of such strength and delicacy of religious feeling, so filled with the divine, so inwardly active
in forming themselves after certain features of Christ’s image, that we may, indeed,
say, Here there is a living religion not unworthy of Christ’s name. We Protestants
must not take direct offence at the form of monasticism. The conditions under which
our churches arose have made a harsh and one-sided opinion of it a kind of duty.
And although for the present, and in view of the problems which press on us, we
may be justified in retaining this opinion, we must not summarily apply it to other
circumstances. Nothing but monasticism could provide a leaven and a counterpoise
in that traditionalistic and ritualistic secular Church such as the Greek Church
was and still is. Here there was freedom, independence, and vivid experience; here
the truth that it is only what is experienced and comes from within that has any
value in religion carried the day.
And yet, the invaluable tension which in this part of Christendom
existed between the secular Church and monasticism has unhappily almost disappeared,
and of the blessing which it established there is scarcely a trace left. Not only
has monasticism become subject to the Church and is everywhere bent under its yoke,
but the secular spirit has in a special degree invaded the monasteries. Greek and
Oriental monks are now, as a rule, the instruments of the lowest and worst functions of the Church,
of the worship of pictures and relics, of the crassest superstition and the most
imbecile sorcery. Exceptions are not wanting, and it is still to the monks that
we must pin our hopes of a better future; but it is not easy to see how a Church
is to be reformed which, teach what it will, is content with its adherents finding
the Christian faith in the observance of certain ceremonies, and Christian
morality in keeping fast-days correctly.
As to our last question: What modifications did the Gospel undergo
in this Church and how did it hold its own? Well, in the first place, I do not
expect to be contradicted if I answer that this official ecclesiasticism with its
priests and its cult, with all its vessels, saints, vestments, pictures, and amulets, with
its ordinances of fasting and its festivals, has absolutely nothing to do with the
religion of Christ. It is the religion of the ancient world tacked on to certain
conceptions in the Gospel; or, rather, it is the ancient religion with the Gospel
absorbed into it. The religious moods which are here produced or which turn towards
this kind of religion are, in so far as they can still be called religious at all,
of a class lower than Christian. But neither have its traditionalism and its “orthodoxy” much in common with the Gospel; they, too, were not derived from it and cannot be traced back to it. Correct doctrine, reverence, obedience,
the shudderings of awe, may be valuable and edifying things; they may avail to
bind and restrain the individual, especially when they draw him into the community
of a stable society; but they have nothing to do with the Gospel, as long as they
fail to touch the individual at the point where freedom lies, and inner decision
for or against God. In contrast with this, monasticism, in its resolve to serve
God by an ascetic and contemplative life, contains an incomparably more valuable
element, because sayings of Christ, even though applied in a one-sided and limited
way, are nevertheless taken as a standard, and the possibility of an independent
inner life being kindled is not so far removed.
Not so far removed—entirely lacking, thank God, it is not, even
in the waste shrines of this ecclesiasticism, and Christ’s sayings sound in the
ear of any who visit its churches. On the Church as a Church, apparatus and all,
there is nothing more favourable to be said than has been said already; the best
thing about it is that it keeps up, although to a modest extent, the knowledge of
the Gospel. Jesus’ words, even though only mumbled by the priests, take the first
place in this Church, too, and the quiet mission which they pursue is not suppressed.
Side by side with the magical apparatus and the transports of feeling, of which the ceremony is only the
caput mortuum, stand Jesus’ sayings; they are read in private and in public, and no superstition
avails to destroy their power. Nor can its fruits be mistaken by anyone who will
look below the surface. Among these Christians, too, priests and laity, there are
men who have come to know God as the Father of mercy and the leader of their lives,
and who love Jesus Christ, not because they know him as the person with two natures,
but because a ray of his being has shone from the Gospel into their hearts, and
this ray has become light and warmth to their own lives. And although the idea of
the fatherly providence of God more readily assumes an almost fatalistic form in
the East, and produces too much quietism, it is certain that here, too, it endows
men with strength and energy, unselfishness and love. I need only refer again to
Tolstoi’s Village Tales, which I have already quoted. The picture which they
present is not artificial. But from much also that I have myself seen and experienced
I can testify how even with the Russian peasant or the humbler priests, in spite
of all the saint- and picture-worship, a power of simple trust in God is to be found,
a delicacy of moral feeling, and an active brotherly love, which does not disclaim
its origin in the Gospel. Where they exist, however, the entire ceremonial service
of religion is capable of undergoing a spiritualisation, not by any “symbolical re-interpretation,”—that
is much too artificial a process,—but because, if only the soul is touched by the
living God at all, thought can rise to him even by the help of an idol.
But it is truly no accidental circumstance that, in so far as
any independent religious life is to be found among the members of this Church,
it at once takes shape in trust in God, in humility, in unselfishness and mercy,
and that Jesus Christ is at the same time laid hold of with reverence; for these
are just the indications which show us that the Gospel is not as yet stifled, and
that it is in these religious virtues that it has its real substance.
As a whole and in its structure the system of the Oriental Churches
is foreign to the Gospel; it means at once a veritable transformation of the Christian
faith and the depression of religion to a much lower level, namely, that of the
ancient world. But in its monasticism, in so far as this is not entirely subject
to the secular Church and itself secularised, there is an element which reduces
the whole ecclesiastical apparatus to a secondary position, and which opens up the
possibility of attaining a state of Christian independence. Above all, however,
by not having suppressed the Gospel, but by having kept it accessible, even though
in a meagre fashion, the Church still possesses the corrective in its midst. Side by side with
the Church the Gospel exercises its own influence on individuals. This influence,
however, takes shape in a type of religion exhibiting the very characteristics which
we have shown to be most distinctive of Jesus’ message. Thus on the ground occupied
by this Church the Gospel has not completely perished. Here, too, human souls find
a dependence on God and a freedom in Him, and when they have found these, they speak
the language which every Christian understands, and which goes to every Christian’s
heart.
LECTURE XIV
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN ROMAN CATHOLICISM
THE Roman Church is the most comprehensive and the vastest, the
most complicated and yet at the same time the most uniform structure which, as
far as we know, history has produced. All the powers of the human mind and soul,
and all the elemental forces at mankind’s disposal, have had a hand in creating
it. In its many-sided character and severe cohesion Roman Catholicism is far in
advance of Greek. We ask, in turn:
What did the Roman Catholic Church achieve?
What are its
characteristics?
What modifications has the Gospel suffered in this Church, and
how much of it has remained?
What did the Roman Catholic Church achieve? Well, in the first
place, it educated the Romano-Germanic nations, and educated them in a sense other
than that in which the Eastern Church educated the Greeks, Slays, and Orientals.
However much their original nature, or primitive and historical circumstances, may
have favoured those nations and helped to promote their rise, the value of the services which the Church rendered is not thereby diminished.
It brought Christian civilisation to young nations, and brought it, not once only,—so
as to keep them at its first stage,—no! it gave them something which was capable
of exercising a progressive educational influence, and for a period of almost a
thousand years it itself led the advance. Up to the fourteenth century it was a
leader and a mother; it supplied the ideas, set the aims, and disengaged the forces.
Up to the fourteenth century—thenceforward, as we may see, those whom it educated
became independent, and struck out paths which it did not indicate, and on which
it is neither willing nor able to follow them. But even so, however, during the
period covered by the last six hundred years it has not fallen so far behind as
the Greek Church. With comparatively brief interruptions it has proved itself fully
a match for the whole movement of politics,—we in Germany know that well enough!—and even in the movement of thought it still has an important share. The time,
of course, is long past since it was a leader; on the contrary, it is now a drag;
but, in view of the mistaken and precipitate elements in modern progress, the drag
which it supplies is not always the reverse of a blessing.
In the second place, however, this Church upheld the idea of
religious and ecclesiastical independence in Western Europe in the face of the tendencies, not lacking
here either, towards State-omnipotence in the spiritual domain. In the Greek Church,
as we saw, religion has become so intimately allied with nationality and the State
that, public worship and monasticism apart, it has no room left for independent
action. On Western ground it is otherwise; the religious element and the moral
element bound up with it occupy an independent sphere and jealously guard it. This
we owe in the main to the Roman Church.
These two facts embrace the most important piece of work which
this Church achieved and in part still achieves. We have already indicated the bounds
which must be set to the first. To the second also a sensible limitation attaches,
and we shall see what it is as we proceed.
What are the characteristics of the Roman Church? This was our
second question. Unless I am mistaken, the Church, complicated as it is, may be
resolved into three chief elements. The first, Catholicism, it shares with
the Greek Church. The second is the Latin spirit and the Roman World-Empire
continuing in the Roman Church. The third is the spirit and religious fervour
of St. Augustine. So far as the inner life of this Church is religious life
and religious thought, it follows the standard which St. Augustine authoritatively fixed. Not only
has he arisen again and again in his many successors, but he has awakened and kindled
numbers of men who, coming forward with independent religious and theological fervour,
are nevertheless spirit of his spirit.
These three elements, the Catholic, the Latin in the sense of
the Roman World-Empire, and the Augustinian, constitute the peculiar character of
the Roman Church.
So far as the first is concerned, you may recognise its importance
by the fact that the Roman Church to-day receives every Greek Christian, nay, at
once effects a “union” with every Greek ecclesiastical community, without more
ado, as soon as the Pope is acknowledged and submission is made to his apostolic
supremacy. Any other condition that may be exacted from the Greek Christians is
of absolutely no moment; they are even allowed to retain divine worship in their
mother tongue, and married priests. If we consider what a “purification” Protestants
have to undergo before they can be received into the bosom of the Roman Church,
the difference is obvious. Now a Church cannot make so great a mistake about itself
as to omit any essential condition in taking up new members, especially if they
come from another confession. The element which the Roman Church shares with the Greek must, then, be of significant and critical importance,
when it is sufficient to make union possible on the condition that the papal supremacy
is recognised. As a matter of fact, the main points characteristic of Greek Catholicism
are all to be found in Roman as well, and are, on occasion, just as energetically
maintained here as they are there. Traditionalism, orthodoxy, and ritualism play
just the same part here as they do there, so far as “higher considerations” do
not step in; and the same is true of monasticism also.
So far as “higher considerations” do not step in —here we have
already passed to the examination of the second element, namely, the Latin spirit
in the sense of the Roman World-dominion. In the Western half of Christendom the
Latin spirit, the spirit of Rome, very soon effected certain distinct modifications
in the general Catholic idea. As early as the beginning of the third century we
see the thought emerging in the Latin Fathers that salvation, however effected and
whatever its nature, is bestowed in the form of a contract under definite conditions,
and only to the extent to which they are observed; it is salus legitima; in fixing these conditions the Deity manifested its mercy and indulgence, but it
guards their observance all the more jealously. Further, the whole contents of revelation
are lex, the Bible as well as tradition. Again, this tradition is attached to a class of officials and
to their correct succession. The “mysteries,” however, are “sacraments”; that
is to say, on the one hand, they are binding acts; on the other, they contain definite
gifts of grace in a carefully limited form and with a specific application. Again,
the discipline of penance is a procedure laid down by law and akin to the process
adopted in a civil action or a suit in defence of honour. Lastly, the Church is
a legal institution; and it is so, not side by side with its function of
preserving and distributing salvation, but it is a legal institution for the sake
of this very function.
But it is in its constitution as a Church that it is a legal
establishment. We must briefly see how things stand in regard to this constitution,
as its foundations are common to the Eastern and the Western Church. When the monarchical
episcopate had developed, the Church began to approximate its constitution to State
government. The system of uniting sees under a metropolitan who was, as a rule,
the bishop of the provincial capital, corresponded with the distribution of the
Empire into provinces. Above and beyond this, the ecclesiastical constitution in
the East was developed a step further when it adapted itself to the division of
the Empire introduced by Diocletian, by which large groups of provinces were united.
Thus arose the constitution of the patriarchate, which was not, however,
strictly enforced, and was in part counteracted by other considerations.
In the West no division into patriarchates came about; but,
on the other hand, something else happened: in the fifth century the Western Roman
Empire perished of internal weakness and through the inroads of the barbarians.
What was left of what was Roman took refuge in the Roman Church—civilisation, law,
and orthodox faith as opposed to the Arian. The barbarian chiefs, however, did not
venture to set themselves up as Roman Emperors, and enter the vacant shrine of the
imperium; they founded empires of their own in the provinces. In these circumstances
the Bishop of Rome appeared as the guardian of the past and the shield of the future.
All over the provinces occupied by the barbarians, even in those which had previously
maintained a defiant independence in the face of Rome, bishops and laity looked
to him. Whatever Roman elements the barbarians and Arians left standing in the provinces—and
they were not few—were ecclesiasticised and at the same time put under the protection
of the Bishop of Rome, who was the chief person there after the Emperor’s disappearance.
But in Rome the episcopal throne was occupied in the fifth century by men who understood
the signs of the times and utilised them to the full. The Roman Church in this way privily pushed itself into the place
of the Roman World-Empire, of which it is the actual continuation; the empire
has not perished, but has only undergone a transformation. If we assert, and mean
the assertion to hold good even of the present time, that the Roman Church is the
old Roman Empire consecrated by the Gospel, that is no mere “clever remark,” but
the recognition of the true state of the matter historically, and the most appropriate
and fruitful way of describing the character of this Church. It still governs the
nations; its Popes rule like Trajan and Marcus Aurelius; Peter and .Paul have taken
the place of Romulus and Remus; the bishops and archbishops, of the proconsuls;
the troops of priests and monks correspond to the legions; the Jesuits, to the imperial
body-guard. The continued influence of the old Empire and its institutions may be
traced in detail, down to individual legal ordinances, nay, even in the very clothes.
That is no Church like the evangelical communities, or the national Churches of
the East; it is a political creation, and as imposing as a World-Empire, because
the continuation of the Roman Empire. The Pope, who calls himself “King” and “Pontifex Maximus,” is Caesar’s successor. The Church, which as early as the third
and fourth century was entirely filled with the Roman spirit, has re-established
in itself the Roman Empire. Nor have patriotic Catholics in Rome and Italy
in every century from the seventh and eighth onwards understood the matter otherwise.
When Gregory VII. entered upon the struggle with the imperial power, this is the
way in which an Italian prelate fired his ardour:
Seize the first Apostle’s sword,
Peter’s glowing sword, and smite!
Scatter far the savage horde;
Break their wild, impetuous might!
Let them feel the yoke of yore,
Let them bear it evermore!
>What with blood in Marius’ day,
Marius and his soldiers brave,
Or, by Julius’ mighty sway,
Romans did their land to save,
Thou canst do by simple word.
Great the Church’s holy sword!
Rome made great again by thee
Offers all thy weed of praise;
Not for Scipio’s victory
Did it louder paeans raise,
Nor entwine the laurel crown
For a deed of more renown.
Who is it that is thus addressed, a bishop or a Caesar? A Caesar,
I imagine; it was felt to be so then, and it is still felt to be so to-day. It is
an Empire that this priestly Caesar rules, and to attack it with the armament
of dogmatic polemics alone is to beat the air.
I cannot here show what immense results followfrom the fact that the Catholic Church is the Roman Empire. Let
me mention only a few conclusions which the Church itself draws. It is just as essential
to this Church to exercise governmental power as to proclaim the Gospel. The phrase
“Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus triumphat,” must be understood in a
political sense. He rules on earth by the fact that his Rome-directed Church rules,
and rules, too, by law and by force; that is to say, it employs all the means of
which states avail themselves. Accordingly it recognises no form of religious fervour
which does not first of all submit to this papal Church, is approved by it, and
remains in constant dependence upon it. This Church, then, teaches its “subjects” to say: “Though I understand all mysteries, and though I have all faith, and
though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned,
and have not unity in love, which alone floweth from unconditional obedience to
the Church, it profiteth me nothing.” Outside the pale of the Church, all faith,
all love, all the virtues, even martyrdoms, are of no value whatever. Naturally; for even an earthly state appreciates only those services which a man has rendered
for its sake. But here the state identifies itself with the kingdom of Heaven, in
other respects proceeding just like other states. From this fact you can yourselves
deduce all the Church’s claims; they follow without difficulty. Even
the most exorbitant demand appears quite natural as soon as you only admit the
truth of the two leading propositions: “The Roman Church is the kingdom of God,”
and, “The Church must govern like an earthly state.” It is not to be denied that
Christian motives have also had a hand in this development: the desire to bring
the Christian religion into a real connexion with life, and to make its influence
felt in every situation that may arise, as well as anxiety for the salvation of
individuals and of nations. How many earnest Catholic Christians there have been
who had no other real desire than to establish Christ’s rule on earth and build
up his kingdom! But while there can be no doubt that their intention, and the energy
with which they put their hands to the work, made them superior to the Greeks, there
can be as little that it is a serious misunderstanding of Christ’s and the apostles’
injunctions to aim at establishing and building up the kingdom of God by political
means. The only forces which this kingdom knows are religious and moral forces,
and it rests on a basis of freedom. But when a church comes forward with the claims
of an earthly state, it is bound to make use of all the means at the disposal of
that state, including, therefore, crafty diplomacy and force; for the earthly
state, even a state governed by law, must on occasion become a state that acts contrary to law. The course of development
which this Church has followed as an earthly state was, then, bound to lead logically
to the absolute monarchy of the Pope and his infallibility; for in an earthly theocracy
infallibility means, at bottom, nothing more than full sovereignty means in a secular
state. That the Church has not shrunk from drawing this last conclusion is a proof
of the extent to which the sacred element in it has become secularised. ,
That this second element was bound to produce a radical change
in the characteristic features of Catholicism in Western Europe, in its traditionalism,
its orthodoxy, its ritualism, and its monasticism, is obvious. Traditionalism holds
the same position after the change as it did before; but when any element in it
has become inconvenient, it is dropped and its place taken by the papal will. “La tradition, c’est moi” as Pius IX. is reported to have said. Further, “sound
doctrine” is still a leading principle, but, as a matter of fact, it can be altered
by the ecclesiastical policy of the Pope; subtle distinctions have given many a
dogma a new meaning. New dogmas, too, are promulgated. In many respects doctrine
has become more arbitrary, and a rigid formula in a matter of dogma may be set aside
by a contrary injunction in a matter of ethics and in the confessional. The hard
and fast lines of the past can be everywhere relaxed in favour of the needs of
the present. The same holds good of ritualism, as also of monasticism. The extent
to which the old monasticism has been altered, by no means always to its disadvantage
alone, and has even in some important aspects been transformed into its flat opposite,
I cannot here show. In its organisation this Church possesses a faculty of adapting
itself to the course of history such as no other Church possesses; it always remains
the same old Church, or seems to do so, and is always becoming a new one.
The third element determining the character of the spirit prevalent
in the Church is opposed to that which we have just discussed, and yet has held
its own side by side with the second: it goes by the names of Augustine and
Augustinianism. In the fifth century, at the very time when the Church was
setting itself to acquire the inheritance of the Roman Empire, it came into
possession of a religious genius of extraordinary depth and power, accepted his
ideas and feelings, and up to the present day has been unable to get rid of
them. That the Church became at one and the same time Caesarian and Augustinian
is the most important and marvellous fact in its history. What kind of a spirit,
however, and what kind of a tendency, did it receive from Augustine?
Well, in the first place, Augustine’s theology and his religious
fervour denote a special resuscitation of the Pauline experience and doctrine of
sin and grace, of guilt and justification, of divine predestination and human servitude.
In the centuries that had elapsed since the apostle’s day this experience and the
doctrine embodying it had been lost, but Augustine went through the same inner experiences
as Paul, gave them the same sort of expression, and clothed them in definite conceptions.
There was no question here of mere imitation; the individual differences between
the two cases are of the utmost importance, especially in the way in which the doctrine
of justification is conceived. With Augustine, it was represented as a constant
process, continuing until love and all the virtues completely filled the heart;
but, as with Paul, it is all a matter of individual experience and inner life. If
you read Augustine’s Confessions you will acknowledge that in spite of all the rhetoric—and
rhetoric there is—it is the work of a genius who has felt God, the God of the Spirit,
to be the be-all and the end-all of his life; who thirsts after Him and desires
nothing beside Him. Further, all the sad and terrible experiences which he had had
in his own person, all the rupture with himself, all the service of transient things,
the “crumbling away into the world bit by bit,” and the egoism for which he had
to pay in loss of strength and freedom, he reduces to the one root, sin;
that is to say, lack of communion with God, godlessness. Again, what released
him from the entanglements of the world, from selfishness and inner decay, and gave
him strength, freedom, and a consciousness of the Eternal, he calls, with Paul,
grace. With him he feels, too, that grace is wholly the work of God, but that it
is obtained through and by Christ, and possessed as forgiveness of sins and as the
spirit of love. He is much less free and more beset with scruples in his view of
sin than the great apostle; and it is this which gives his religious language and
everything that proceeded from him quite a peculiar colour. “Forgetting those things
which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before”—the apostolic
maxim is not Augustine’s. Consolation for the misery of sin—this is the
complexion of his entire Christianity. Only rarely was he capable of soaring to
the sense of the glorious liberty of the children of God; and, where he was so
capable, he could not testify to it in the same way as Paul. But he could express
the sense of consolation for the misery of sin with a strength of feeling and in
words of an overwhelming force such as no one before him ever displayed; nay, more: he has managed by what he has written to go so straight to the souls of millions,
to describe so precisely their inner condition, and so impressively and overpoweringly to put the consolation before them, that what
he felt has been felt again and again for fifteen hundred years. Up to the day in
which we live, so far as Catholic Christians are concerned, inward and vivid religious
fervour, and the expression which it takes, are in their whole character Augustinian.
It is by what he felt that they are kindled, and it is his thoughts that they think.
Nor is it otherwise with many Protestants, and those not of the worst kind. This
juxtaposition of sin and grace, this interconnexion of feeling and doctrine, seems
to possess an indestructible power which no lapse of time is able to touch; this
feeling of mixed pain and bliss is an unforgettable possession with those who have
once experienced it; and even though they may have subsequently emancipated themselves
from religion it remains for them a sacred memory.
The Western Church opened, and was compelled to open, its doors
to this Augustine at the very moment when it was preparing to enter upon its dominion.
It was defenceless in face of him; it had so little of any real value to offer
from its immediate past that it weakly capitulated. Thus arose the astonishing “complexio oppositorum” which we see in Western Catholicism: the Church of rites,
of law, of politics, of world-dominion, and the Church in which a highly individual,
delicate, sublimated sense and doctrine of sin and grace is brought into play.
The external and the internal elements are supposed to unite! To speak frankly,
this has been impossible from the beginning; internal tension and conflict were
bound to arise at once; the history of Western Catholicism is full of it. Up to
a certain point, however, these antitheses admit of being reconciled; they admit
of it at least so far as the same men are concerned. That is proved by no less a
person than Augustine himself, who, in addition to his other characteristics, was
also a staunch Churchman; nay, who in such matters as power and prestige promoted
the external interests of the Church, and its equipment as a whole, with the greatest
energy. I cannot here explain how he managed to accomplish this work, but that there
could be no lack of internal contradictions in it is n obvious. Only let us be clear
about two facts: firstly, that the outward Church is more and more forcing the inward Augustinianism into the background, and transforming
and modifying it, without, however, being able wholly to destroy it; secondly,
that all the great personalities who have continued to kindle religious fervour
afresh in the Western Church, and to purify and deepen it, have directly or indirectly
proceeded from Augustine and formed themselves on him. The long chain of Catholic
reformers, from Agobard and Claudius of Turin in the ninth century down to the Jansenists in the seventeenth
and eighteenth, and beyond them, is Augustinian. And if the Council of Trent may
be in many respects rightly called a Council of Reform; if the doctrine of penance
and grace was formulated then with much more depth and inwardness than could be
expected from the state of Catholic theology in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
that is only owing to the continued influence of Augustine. With the doctrine of
grace, taken from Augustine, the Church has, indeed, associated a practice of the
confessional which threatens to make that doctrine absolutely ineffective. But,
however far it may stretch its bounds so as to keep all those within its pale who
do not revolt against its authority, it after all not only tolerates such as take
the same view of sin and grace as Augustine, but it also desires that, wherever
possible, everyone may feel as strongly as he the gravity of sin and the blessedness
of belonging to God.
Such are the essential elements of Roman Catholicism. There is
much else that might be mentioned, but what has been said denotes the leading points.
We pass to the last question: What modifications has the Gospel
here undergone, and how much of it is left? Well,—this is not a matter that needs
many words, the whole outward and visible institution of a Church
claiming divine dignity has no foundation whatever in the Gospel. It is a case,
not of distortion, but of total perversion. Religion has here strayed away in a
direction that is not its own. As Eastern Catholicism may in many respects be more
appropriately regarded as part of the history of Greek religion than of the history
of the Gospel, so Roman Catholicism must be regarded as part of the history of the
Roman World-Empire. To contend, as it does, that Christ founded a kingdom; that
this kingdom is the Roman Church; that he equipped it with a sword, nay, with two
swords, a spiritual and a temporal, is to secularise the Gospel; nor can this contention
be sustained by appealing to the idea that Christ’s spirit ought certainly to bear
rule amongst mankind. The Gospel says, “Christ’s kingdom is not of this world,”
but the Church has set up an earthly kingdom; Christ demands that his ministers
shall not rule but serve, but here the priests govern the world; Christ leads his
disciples away from political and ceremonious religion and places every man face
to face with God—God and the soul, the soul and its God, but here, on the contrary,
man is bound to an earthly institution with chains that cannot be broken, and he
must obey; it is only when he obeys that he approaches God. There was a time when
Roman Christians shed their blood because they refused to do worship to Caesar, and rejected
religion of the political kind; to-day they do not, indeed, actually pray to an
earthly ruler, but they have subjected their souls to the despotic orders of the
Roman papal king.
LECTURE XV
THE point to which we referred at the close of the last lecture
was that, as an outward and visible church and a state founded on law and on force,
Roman Catholicism has nothing to do with the Gospel, nay, is in fundamental contradiction
with it. That this state has borrowed a divine lustre from the Gospel, and finds
this lustre extraordinarily advantageous, cannot avail to upset the verdict. To
mix the divine with the secular, and what is innermost in a man with a political
element, is to work the greatest of mischiefs, because the conscience is thereby
enslaved and religion robbed of its solemn character. It is inevitable that this
character should be lost when every possible measure which serves to maintain the
earthly empire of the Church—for example, the sovereignty of the Pope—is
proclaimed as the divine will. We are reminded, however, that it is just this independent
action on the part of the Church which saves religion in Western Europe from entirely
degenerating into nationality, or the state, or police. The Church, it is urged,
has maintained intact the high idea of the complete self-subsistence of religion and its independence
of the state. We may admit the claim, but the price which Western Europe has had
to pay for this service, and still pays, is much too great; by having to pay so
heavy a tribute, the nations are threatened with bankruptcy within; and,
as for the Church, the capital which it has amassed is truly a capital that consumes.
With all the apparent increase in its power, a pauperising process is slowly being
accomplished in the Church; slowly but surely. Let me here digress from our subject
for a moment.
No one who looks at the present political situation can have
any ground for asserting that the power of the Roman Church is on the wane. What
a growth it has experienced in the nineteenth century! And yet—any one with a keen
eye sees that the Church is far from possessing now such a plenitude of power .as
it enjoyed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when all the material and spiritual
forces available were at its disposal. Since that epoch its power has, in point
of intensity, suffered an enormous decline, arrested by a few brief outbursts of
enthusiasm between 1540 and 1620, and in the nineteenth century. Earnest Catholics,
concerned at this fact, make no secret of it; they know and admit that an important
portion of the spiritual possessions necessary to the dominion of the Church has been lost to it. And again: what is the position of the
Latin nations which, when all is said, form the proper province of the Roman Church’s
rule? There is only one of them which can really be called a great Power, and what
sort of spectacle will it present in another generation? As a state this Church
lives to-day, to a not inconsiderable extent, on its history, its old Roman and
mediaeval history;—and it lives as the Roman Empire of the Romans. But empires
do not live for ever. Will the Church be capable of maintaining itself in the great
changes to come? Will it bear the increasing tension between it and the intellectual
life of the people? Will it survive the decline of the Latin nations?
But let us leave this question to answer itself. Let us recollect,
rather, that this Church, thanks above all to its Augustinianism, possesses in its
orders of monkhood and its religious societies a deep element of life in its midst.
In all ages it has produced saints, so far as men can be so called, and it still
produces them to-day. Trust in God, unaffected humility, the assurance of redemption,
the devotion of one’s life to the service of one’s brethren, are to be found in
it; many brethren take up the cross of Christ and exercise at one and the same
time that self-judgment and that joy in God which Paul and Augustine achieved. The
Imitatio Christi kindles independent religious life, and a fire which burns with
a flame of its own. Ecclesiasticism has not availed to suppress the power of the
Gospel, which, in spite of the frightful weight that it has to carry, makes its
way again and again. It still works like leaven, nor can we fail to see that this
Church, side by side with a lax morality for which it has often enough been to blame,
has, by the mouth of its great mediaeval theologians, fruitfully applied the Gospel
to many circumstances of life and created a Christian ethics. Here and elsewhere
it has proved that it not only carries, as it were, the thought of the Gospel with
it as a river carries grains of gold, but that they are bound up with it and have
been further developed in it. The infallible Pope, the “Apostolico-Roman polytheism,”
the veneration of the saints, blind obedience, and apathetic devotion—these things
seem to have stifled all inwardness, and yet there are Christians still to be found
in this Church, too, of the kind which the Gospel has awakened, earnest and loving,
filled with joy and peace in God. Lastly, the mischief is not that the Gospel has
been bound up with political forms at all,—Melanchthon was no traitor when he expressed
his willingness to acknowledge the Pope if he would permit the Gospel to be preached
in its purity,—but it lies in the sanctification of the political element,
and in the inability of this Church to get rid of what was once of service in particular
historical circumstances, but has now become an obstruction and a clog.
We now pass to the last section in the exposition of our subject.
THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION IN PROTESTANTISM
Anyone who looks at the external condition of Protestantism,
especially in Germany, may, at first sight, well exclaim: “What a miserable spectacle!” But no one can survey the history of Europe from the second century to the present
time without being forced to the conclusion that in the whole course of this history
the greatest movement and the one most pregnant with good was the Reformation in
the sixteenth century; even the great change which took place at the transition
to the nineteenth is inferior to it in importance. What do all our discoveries and
inventions and our advances in outward civilisation signify in comparison with the
fact that to-day there are thirty millions of Germans, and many more millions of
Christians outside Germany, who possess a religion without priests, without sacrifices,
without “fragments” of grace, without ceremonies—a spiritual religion!
Protestantism must be understood, first and foremost, by the
contrast which it offers to Catholicism, and here there is a double direction which
any estimate of it must take, first as Reformation and secondly
as Revolution. It was a reformation in regard to the doctrine of salvation; a revolution in regard to the Church, its authority, and its apparatus. Hence
Protestantism is no spontaneous phenomenon, created as it were by a “generatio equivoca”;
but, as its very name implies, it was called into being by the misdeeds of the Roman
Church having become intolerable. It was the close of a long series of cognate but
ineffectual attempts at reform in the Middle Ages. If the position which it thus
holds in history proves its continuity with the past, the fact is still more strongly
in evidence in its own and not inappropriate contention that it was not an innovation
in regard to religion, but a restoration and renewal of it. But from the point of
view of the Church and its authority Protestantism was undoubtedly a revolutionary
phenomenon. We must, then, take account of it in both these relations.
Protestantism was a Reformation, that is to say, a renewal,
as regards the core of the matter, as regards religion, and consequently as regards
the doctrine of salvation. That may be shown in the main in three points.
In the first place, religion was here brought back again to itself,
in so far as the Gospel and the corresponding religious experience were put into
the foreground and freed of all alien accretions. Religion was taken out of the vast and monstrous fabric which had been previously
called by its name—a fabric embracing the Gospel and holy water, the priesthood
of all believers and the Pope on his throne, Christ the Redeemer and St. Anne—and
was reduced to its essential factors, to the Word of God and to faith. This
truth was imposed as a criterion on everything that also claimed to be “religion” and to unite on terms of equality with those great factors. In the history
of religions every really important reformation is always, first and foremost, a
critical reduction to principles; for, in the course of its historical
development, religion, by adapting itself to circumstances, attracts to itself much
alien matter, and produces, in conjunction with this, a number of hybrid and apocryphal
elements, which it is necessarily compelled to place under the protection of what
is sacred. If it is not to run wild from exuberance, or be choked by its own dry
leaves, the reformer must come who purifies it and brings it back to itself. This
critical reduction to principles Luther accomplished in the sixteenth century, by
victoriously declaring that the Christian religion was given only in the Word of
God and in the inward experience which accords with this Word.
In the second place, there was the definite way in which
the “Word of God” and the “experience” of it were grasped. For Luther the “Word” did not mean Church
doctrine; it did not even mean the Bible; it meant the message of the free grace
of God in Christ which makes guilty and despairing men happy and blessed; and
the “experience” was just the certainty of this grace. In the sense in which
Luther took them, both can be embraced in one phrase: the confident belief in a God
of grace. They put an end—such was his own experience, and such was what he
taught to all inner discord in a man; they overcome the burden of every ill; they
destroy the sense of guilt; and, despite the imperfection of a man’s own acts,
they give him the certainty of being inseparably united with the holy God:
Now I know and believe
And give praise without end
That God the Almighty
Is Father and Friend,
And that in all troubles,
Whatever betide,
He hushes the tempest
And stands at my side.
Nothing, he taught, is to be preached but the God of grace, with
whom we are reconciled through Christ. Conversely, it is not a question of ecstasies
and visions; no transports of feeling are necessary; it is faith that is
to be aroused. Faith is to be the beginning, middle, and end of all religious fervour.
In the correspondence of Word and faith “justification” is experienced, and hence justification holds the chief
place in the Reformers’ message; it means nothing less than the attainment of peace
and freedom in God through Christ, dominion over the world, and an eternity within.
Lastly, the third feature of this renewal was the great transformation
which God’s worship now inevitably underwent, God’s worship by the individual
and by the community. Such worship—this was obvious—can and ought to be nothing
but putting faith to practical proof. As Luther declared over and over again,
“All that God asks of us is faith, and it is through faith alone that He is willing
to treat with us.” To let God be God, and to pay Him honour by acknowledging and
invoking Him as Father—it is thus alone that a man can serve Him. Every other path
on which a man tries to approach Him and honour Him leads astray, and vain is the
attempt to establish any other relation with Him. What an enormous mass of anxious,
hopeful, and hopeless effort was now done away with, and what a revolution in worship
was effected! But all that is true of God’s worship by the individual is true in
exactly the same way of public worship. Here, too, it is only the Word of God and
prayer which have any place. All else is to be banished; the community assembled
for God’s worship is to proclaim the message of God with praise and thanksgiving, and call upon His name. Anything that goes be. yond this is not worship at all.
These three points embrace the chief elements in the Reformation.
What they involved was a renewal of religion; for not only do they denote,
albeit in a fashion of their own, a return to Christianity as it originally was,
but they also existed themselves in Western Catholicism, although buried in a heap
of rubbish.
But, before we go further, permit me two brief digressions. We
were just saying that the community assembled for God’s worship must not solemnise
its worship in any other way than by proclaiming the Word and by prayer. To this,
however, we must add, according to the Reformers’ injunctions, that all that is
to stamp this community as a Church is its existence as a community of the faith
in which God’s Word is preached aright. Here we may leave the sacraments out of
account, as, according to Luther, they, too, derive their entire importance from
the Word. But if Word and faith are the only characteristics of worship, it looks
as if those who contend that the Reformation did away with the visible Church and
put an invisible one in its place were right. But the contention does not tally
with the facts. The distinction between a visible and an invisible Church dates
back as far as the Middle Ages, or even, from one point of view, as far as Augustine. Those who defined the true Church
as “the number of the predestined” were obliged to maintain that it was wholly
invisible. But the German Reformers did not so define it. In declaring the Church
to be a community of the faith in which God’s Word is preached aright, they rejected
all the coarser characteristics of a Church, and certainly excluded the visibility
that appeals to the senses; but—to take an illustration—who would say that an intellectual
community, for example, a band of young men all alike eagerly devoted to knowledge
or the interests of their country, was “invisible,” because it possesses no external
characteristics, and cannot be counted on one’s fingers? Just as little is the
evangelical Church an “invisible” community. It is a community of the spirit,
and therefore its “visibility” takes different phases and different degrees of
strength. There are phases of it where it is absolutely unrecognisable, and others,
again, where it stands forth with the energy of a power that appeals to the senses.
It can never, indeed, take the sharp contours of a state like the Venetian republic
or the kingdom of France,—such was the comparison which a great exponent of Catholic
dogmatics declared to be applicable to his Church,—but as Protestants we ought to
know that we belong, not to an “invisible” Church, but to a spiritual community which disposes of the forces pertaining to spiritual communities;
a spiritual community resting on earth, but reaching to the Eternal.
And now as to the other point: Protestantism maintains that,
objectively, the Christian community is based upon the Gospel alone, but that the
Gospel is contained in Holy Scripture. From the very beginning it has encountered
the objection that, if that be so, and at the same time there be no recognised authority
to decide what the purport and meaning of the Gospel is and how it is to be ascertained
from the Scriptures, general confusion will be the result; that of this confusion
the history of Protestantism affords. ample testimony; that if every man
has a warrant to decide what the “true understanding” of the Gospel is, and
in this respect is bound to no tradition, no council, and no pope, but exercises
the free right of research, any unity, community, or Church is absolutely impossible;
that the state, therefore, must interfere, or some arbitrary limit be fixed. That
no Church possessing the Sacred Office of the Inquisition can arise in this way
is certainly true; further, that to impose any external limits on a community
from the inside is a simple impossibility. What has been done by the state
or under pressure of historical necessities does not affect the question at all; the structures which have arisen in this way are, in the evangelical sense, only figuratively called “Churches.”
Protestantism
reckons—this is the solution—upon the Gospel being something so simple, so
divine, and therefore so truly human, as to be most certain of being understood
when it is left entirely free, and also as to produce essentially the same experiences
and convictions in individual souls. In this it may often enough make mistakes;
differences of individuality and education may issue in very heterogeneous results; but still, in this its attitude, it has not up to now been put to shame. A real,
spiritual community of evangelical Christians; a common conviction as to what is
most important and as to its application to life in all its forms, has arisen and
is in full force and vigour. This community embraces Protestants in and outside
Germany, Lutherans, Calvinists, and adherents of other denominations. In all of
them, so far as they are earnest Christians, there lives a common element, and this
element is of infinitely greater importance and value than all their differences.
It keeps us to the Gospel and it protects us from modern heathenism and from relapse
into Catholicism. More than this we do not need; nay, any other fetter we reject.
This, however, is no fetter, but the condition of our freedom. And when we are reproached
with our divisions and told that Protestantism has as many doctrines as heads, we
reply: “So it has, but we do not wish it otherwise; on the contrary, we want still more freedom, still
greater individuality in utterance and in doctrine; the historical circumstances
necessitating the formation of national and free churches have imposed only too
many rules and limitations upon us, even though they be not proclaimed as divine
ordinances; we want still more confidence in the inner strength and unifying power
of the Gospel, which is more certain to prevail in free conflict than under guardianship;
we want to be a spiritual realm and we have no desire to return to the fleshpots
of Egypt; we are well aware that in the interests of order and instruction outward
and visible communities must arise; we are ready to foster their growth, so far
as they fulfil these aims and deserve to be fostered; but we do not hang our hearts
upon them, for they may exist to-day and to-morrow give place, under other political
or social conditions, to new organisations; let anyone who has such a Church have
it as though he had it not; our Church is not the particular Church in which we
are placed, but the ‘societas fidei’ which has its members everywhere, even among
Greeks and Romans.” That is the evangelical answer to the reproach that we are “divided,” and that is the language which the liberty that has been given to us employs.
Let us now return from these digressions to the exposition of the essential features
of Protestantism.
Protestantism was not only a Reformation but also a Revolution.
From the legal point of view the whole Church system against which Luther revolted
could lay claim to full obedience. It had just as much legal validity in Western
Europe as the laws of the state themselves. When Luther burnt the papal bull he
undoubtedly performed a revolutionary act—revolutionary, not in the bad sense of
a revolt against legal ordinance which is also moral ordinance as well, but certainly
in the sense of a violent breach with a given legal condition. It was against this
state of things that the new movement was directed, and it was to the following
chief points that its protest in word and deed extended. Firstly: It protested
against the entire hierarchical and priestly system in the Church, demanded that
it should be abolished, and abolished it in favour of a common priesthood and an
established order formed on the basis of the congregation. What a range this demand
had, and to what an extent it interfered with the previously existing state of things,
cannot be told in a few sentences. To explain it all would take hours. Nor can we
here show how the various arrangements actually took shape in the evangelical Churches.
That is not a matter of fundamental importance, but what is of fundamental importance
is that the “divine” rights of the Church were abolished.
Secondly: It protested against all formal, external authority
in religion; against the authority, therefore, of councils, priests, and the whole
tradition of the Church. That alone is to be authority which shows itself to be
such within and effects a deliverance; the thing itself, therefore, the Gospel.
Thus Luther also protested against the authority of the letter of the Bible; but
we shall see that this was a point on which neither he nor the rest of the Reformers
were quite clear, and where they failed to draw the conclusions which their insight
into fundamentals demanded.
Thirdly: It protested against all the traditional arrangements
for public worship, all ritualism, and every sort of “holy work.” As it neither
knows nor tolerates, as we have seen, any specific form of worship, any material
sacrifice and service to God, any mass and any works done for God and with a view
to salvation, the whole traditional system of public worship, with its pomp, its
holy and semi-holy articles, its gestures and processions, came to the ground. How
much could be retained in the way of form for aesthetic or educational
reasons was, in comparison with this, a question of entirely secondary importance.
Fourthly: It protested against sacramentalism. Baptism and the
Lord’s Supper it left standing, as institutions of the primitive Church, or, as
it might be, of the Lord himself; but it desired that they should be
regarded either as symbols and marks by which the Christian is known, or as acts
deriving their value exclusively from that message of the forgiveness of sins which
is bound up with them. All other sacraments it abolished, and with them the whole
notion of God’s grace and help being accessible in bits, and fused in some mysterious
way with definite corporeal things. To sacramentalism it opposed the Word;
and to the notion that grace was given by bits, the conviction that there is
only one grace, namely, to possess God Himself as the source of grace. It
was not because Luther was so very enlightened that in his tract “On the Babylonian
Captivity” he rejected the whole system of sacramentalism,—he had enough superstition
left in him to enable him to advance some very shocking contentions,—but because
he had had inner experience of the fact that where “grace” does not endow
the soul with the living God Himself it is an illusion. Hence for him the whole
doctrine of sacramentalism was an infringement of God’s majesty and an enslavement of the
soul.
Fifthly: It protested against the double form of morality,
and accordingly against the higher form; against the contention that it is particularly
well-pleasing to God to make no use of the powers and gifts which are part of creation.
The Reformershad a strong sense of the fact that the world passes away with
the lusts thereof; we must certainly not represent Luther as the modern man cheerfully
standing with his feet firmly planted on the earth; on the contrary, like the men
of the Middle Ages, he had a strong yearning to be rid of this world and to depart
from the “vale of tears.” But because he was convinced that we neither can nor
ought to offer God anything but trust in Him, he arrived, in regard to the Christian’s
position in the world, at quite different theses from those which were advanced
by the grave monks of previous centuries. As fastings and ascetic practices had
no value before God, and were of no advantage to one’s fellowmen, and as God is
the Creator of all things, the most useful thing that a man can do is to remain
in the position in which God has placed him. This conviction gave Luther a cheerful
and confident view of earthly ordinances, which contrasts with, and actually got
the upper hand of, his inclination to turn his back upon the world.
He advanced the definite thesis that all positions in life—constituted
authority, the married state, and so on, down to domestic service—existed by the
will of God, and were therefore genuinely spiritual positions in which we are to
serve God; a faithful maid-servant stands higher, with him, than a contemplative
monk. Christians are not to be always devising how they may find some new paths of their own,
but to show patience and love of neighbour within the sphere of their given vocation.
Out of this there grew up in his mind the notion that all worldly laws and spheres
of activity have an independent title. It is not that they are to be merely tolerated,
and have no right to exist until they receive it from the Church. No! they have
rights of their own, and they form the vast domain in which the Christian is to
give proof of his faith and love; nay, they are even to be respected in places which
are as yet ignorant of God’s revelation in the Gospel.
It was thus that the same man who asked nothing of the world,
so far as his own personal feelings were concerned, and whose soul was troubled
only by thought for the Eternal, delivered mankind from the ban of asceticism. He
was thereby really and truly the life and origin of a new epoch, and he gave it
back a simple and unconstrained attitude towards the world, and a good conscience
in all earthly labour. This fruitful work fell to his share, not because he secularised
religion, but because he took it so seriously and so profoundly that, while in his
view it was to pervade all things, it was itself to be freed from everything external
to it.
LECTURE XVI
THE question has often been raised whether, and to what extent,
the Reformation was a work of the German spirit. I cannot here go into this
complicated problem. But this much seems to me to be certain, that while we cannot,
indeed, connect Luther’s momentous religious experiences with-his nationality, the
results positive as well as negative with which he invested them display the German—the
German man and German history. From the time that the Germans endeavoured to make
themselves really at home in the religion handed down to them—this did not take
place until the thirteenth century onwards—they were preparing the way for the Reformation.
And just as Eastern Christianity is rightly called Greek, and the Christianity of
the Middle Ages and of Western Europe is rightly called Roman, so the Christianity
of the Reformation may be described as German, in spite of Calvin. For Calvin was
Luther’s pupil, and he made his influence most lastingly felt, not among the Latin
nations but among the English, the Scotch, and the Dutch. Through the Reformation
the Germans mark a stage in the history of the Universal Church. No similar statement can
be made of the Slays.
The recoil from asceticism, which as an ideal never penetrated
the Germans to the same extent as other nations, and the protest against religion
as external authority, are to be set down as well to the Pauline Gospel as to the
German spirit. Luther’s warmth and heartiness in preaching, and his frankness in
polemical utterance, were felt by the German nation to be an opening out of its
own soul.
In the previous lecture we touched upon the chief provinces in
which Luther raised an emphatic and still effective protest. There is much upon
which I could also dwell: for example, upon the opposition which, especially at
the commencement of his reforming activity, he offered to the whole terminology
of dogmatics, its formulae and doctrinal utterances. To sum up: he protested, because
his aim was to restore the Christian religion in its purity, without priests and
sacrifices, without external authorities and ordinances, without solemn ceremonies,
without all the chains with which the Beyond was to be bound to the Here. In its
revising ardour the Reformation went back not only earlier than the eleventh century,
not only earlier than the fourth or the second, but to the very beginnings of religion.
Nay, without being aware of it, the Reformation even modified or entirely put aside forms which existed
even in the apostolic age: thus in matters of discipline it abolished fasting;
in matters of constitution it abolished bishops and deacons; in matters of doctrine
it abolished, among other things, Chiliasm.
But with the change effected by Reformation and Revolution, how
does the new creation stand as a whole in regard to the Gospel? We may say
that in the four leading points which we emphasised in the previous lecture—inwardness
and spirituality, the fundamental thought of the God of grace, His worship in spirit
and in truth, and the idea of the Church as a community of faith—the Gospel was
in reality re-won. Need I prove this in detail, or are we to be shaken in our conviction
because, as is surely the case, a Christian in the sixteenth and in the nineteenth
century presents an appearance different from that which a Christian presented in
the first? That the inwardness and individualism which the Reformation disengaged
accord with the character of the Gospel is certain. Further, Luther’s pronouncement
on justification not only reflects in the main, and in spite of certain irreducible
differences, Paul’s train of thought, but is also, in point of aim, in exact correspondence
with Jesus’ teaching. To know God as one’s Father, to possess a God of grace, to find comfort in His grace and providence, to
believe in the forgiveness of sins—in both cases that is the point on which everything
turns. And in the troubled times of Lutheran orthodoxy a Paul Gerhardt succeeded
in giving such grand expression to this fundamental conviction of the Gospel in
his hymns, “Is God for me, then let all,” and “Commit thy ways,” as to convince
us how truly Protestantism was penetrated with it. Again, that the right worship
of God ought to be nothing but the acknowledgment of God in praise and prayer, but
that the love of neighbour is also worship, is taken direct from the Gospel and
Paul’s corresponding injunctions. Lastly, that the true Church is held together
by the Holy Ghost and by faith; that it is a spiritual community of brothers and
sisters, is a conviction which is in line with the Gospel, and was most clearly
expressed by Paul. In so far as the Reformation restored all this, and also recognised
Christ as the only Redeemer, it may in the strictest sense of the word be called
evangelical; and in so far as these convictions, crippled and burdened though
they may be, retain their ascendency in the Protestant Churches, they have every
warrant for being so described.
But what was here achieved had its dark side as well. If we ask
what the Reformation cost us, and to what extent it made its principles prevail, we shall see this dark side very
clearly.
We get nothing from history without paying for it, and for a
violent movement we have to pay double. What did the Reformation cost us? I will
not speak of the fact that the unity of Western civilisation was destroyed, since
it was, after all, only over a part of Western Europe that the Reformation prevailed,
for the freedom and many-sided character of the resulting development brought us
a greater gain. But the necessity of establishing the new Churches as State-Churches
was attended by serious disadvantages. The system of an ecclesiastical state
is, of course, worse, and its adherents have truly no cause to praise it in contrast
with the State-Churches. But still the latter—which are not solely the outcome of
the breach with ecclesiastical authority, but were already prepared for in the fifteenth
century—have been the cause of much stunted growth. They have weakened the feeling
of responsibility, and diminished the activity, of the evangelical communities;
and, in addition, they have aroused the not unfounded suspicion that the Church
is an institution set up by the state; and accordingly to be adjusted to the state.
Much has happened, indeed, in the last few decades to check that suspicion by the
greater independence which the Churches have obtained; but further progress in this direction is necessary, especially in regard to the freedom
of individual communities. The connexion with the state must not be violently severed,
for the Churches have derived much advantage from it; but steps must be taken to
further the development upon which we have entered. If this results in multifarious
organisations in the Church, it will do no harm; on the contrary, it will remind
us, in a forcible way, that these forms are all arbitrary.
Further, Protestantism was forced by its opposition to Catholicism
to lay exclusive emphasis on the inward character of religion, and upon “faith
alone”; but to formulate one doctrine in sharp opposition to another is always
a dangerous process. The man in the street is not sorry to hear that “good works”
are unnecessary, nay, that they constitute a danger to the soul. Although Luther
is not responsible for the convenient misunderstanding that ensued, the inevitable
result was that in the reformed Churches in Germany from the very start there were
accusations of moral laxity and a want of serious purpose in the sanctification
of life. The saying, “If ye love me, keep my commandments,” was unwarrantably thrust
into the background. Not until the Pietistic movement arose was its central importance
once more recognised. Up till then the pendulum of the conduct of life took a suspicious
swing in the contrary direction, out of opposition to the Catholic “justification by works.” But religion is not only
a state of the heart; it is a deed as well; it is faith active in love and in the
sanctification of life. This is a truth with which evangelical Christians must become
much better acquainted, if they are not to be put to shame.
There is another point closely connected with what I have just
mentioned. The Reformation abolished monasticism, and was bound to abolish it. It
rightly affirmed that to take a vow of lifelong asceticism was a piece of presumption; and it rightly considered that any worldly vocation, conscientiously followed,
in the sight of God was equal to, nay, was better than, being a monk. But something
now happened which Luther neither foresaw nor desired: “monasticism,” of the kind
that is conceivable and necessary in the evangelical sense of the word, disappeared
altogether. But every community stands in need of personalities living exclusively
for its ends. The Church, for instance, needs volunteers who will abandon every
other pursuit, renounce “the world,” and devote themselves entirely to the service
of their neighbour; not because such a vocation is “a higher one,” but because
it is a necessary one, and because no Church can live without also giving rise to
this desire. But in the evangelical Churches the desire has been checked by the
decided attitude which they have been compelled to adopt towards Catholicism. It is a high
price that we have paid; nor can the price be reduced by considering, on the other
hand, how much simple and unaffected religious fervour has been kindled in home
and family life. We may rejoice, however, that in the past century a beginning has
been made in the direction of recouping this loss. In the institution of deaconesses
and many cognate phenomena the evangelical Churches are getting back what they once
ejected through their inability to recognise it in the form which it then took.
But it must undergo a much ampler and more varied development.
Not only had the Reformation to pay a high price; it was also
incapable of perceiving all the conclusions to which its new ideas led, and of giving
them pure effect. It is not that the work which it did was not absolutely valid
and permanent in every particular—how could that be, and who could desire it to
have been so? No! it remained stationary in its development even at the point at
which, to judge by the earnest foundation that was laid at the start, higher things
might have been expected. Various causes combined to produce this result. From the
year 1526 onwards national Churches had to be founded at headlong speed on evangelical
lines; they were forced to be “rounded and complete” at a time when much was still
in a state of flux. Then again, a mistrust of the left wing, of the “enthusiasts,”
induced the Churches to offer an energetic resistance to tendencies which they could
have accompanied for a good bit of their way. Luther’s unwillingness to have anything
to do with them, nay, the manner in which he became suspicious of his own ideas
when they coincided with those of the “enthusiasts,” was bitterly avenged and came
home to the evangelical Churches in the Age of Enlightenment. Even at the risk of
being reckoned among Luther’s detractors, we must go further. This genius had a
faith as robust as Paul’s, and thereby an immense power over the minds and hearts
of men; but he was not abreast of the knowledge accessible even in his own time.
The naïve age had gone by; it was an age of deep feeling, of progress, an
age in which religion could not avoid contact with all the powers of mind. In this
age it was his destiny to be forced to be not only a reformer but also an intellectual
and spiritual leader and teacher. The way of looking at the world and at history
he had to plan afresh for generations; for there was no one there to help him,
and to no one else would people listen. But he had not all the resources of
clear knowledge at his command. Lastly, he was always anxious to go back to the
original, to the Gospel itself, and, so far as it was possible to do it by
intuition and inward experience, he did it; moreover, he made some admirable studies in history, and in many
places broke victoriously through the serried lines of the traditional dogmas. But
any trustworthy knowledge of the history of those dogmas was as yet an impossibility,
and still less was any historical acquaintance with the New Testament and primitive
Christianity attainable. It is marvellous how, in spite of all this, Luther possessed
so much power of penetration and sound judgment. We have only to look at his introductions
to the books of the New Testament, or at his treatise on “Churches and Councils.”
But there were countless problems of which he did not even know, to say nothing
of being able to solve them; and so it was that he had no means of distinguishing
between kernel and husk, between what was original and what was of alien growth.
How can we be surprised, then, if in its doctrine, and in the view which it took
of history, the Reformation was far from being a finished product; and that, where
it perceived no problems, confusion in its own ideas was inevitable? It could not,
like Pallas Athene, spring complete from Jupiter’s head; as doctrine it could do
no more than mark a beginning, and it had to reckon on future development.
But by being rapidly formed into national Churches it came near to itself cutting
short its further development for all time.
As regards the confusion and the checks which it brought upon itself, we must content ourselves with referring
to a few leading points. Firstly, Luther would admit nothing but the Gospel, nothing
but what frees and binds the consciences of men, what everyone, down to the man-servant
and the maidservant, can understand. But then he not only took the old dogmas of
the Trinity and the two natures as part of the Gospel—he was not in a position to
examine them historically—and even framed new ones, but he was absolutely incapable
of making any sound distinction between “doctrine” and Gospel; in this respect
falling far behind Paul. The necessary result was that intellectualism was still
in the ascendant; that a scholastic doctrine was again set up as necessary to salvation; and that two classes of Christians once more arose: those who understand the
doctrine, and the minors who are dependent on the others’ understanding of it.
Secondly, Luther was convinced that that alone is the “Word
of God” whereby a man is inwardly born anew—the message of the free grace of God
in Christ. At the highest levels to which he attained in his life he was free from
every sort of bondage to the letter. What a capacity he had for distinguishing between
law and Gospel, between Old and New Testament, nay, for distinguishing in the New
Testament itself! All that he would recognise was the kernel of the matter, clearly
revealed as it is in these books, and proving its power by its effect on the soul.
But he did not make a clean sweep. In cases where he had found the letter important,
he demanded submission to the “it is written”; and he demanded it peremptorily,
without recollecting that, where other sayings of the Scriptures were concerned,
he himself had declared the “it is written” to be of no binding force.
Thirdly, grace is the forgiveness of sins, and therefore the
assurance of possessing a God of grace, and life, and salvation. How often Luther
repeated this, always with the addition that what was efficacious here was the
Word—that union of the soul with God in the trust and childlike reverence which God’s
Word inspires; it was a personal relation which was here involved. But the same
man allowed himself to be inveigled into the most painful controversies about the
means of grace, about communion and infant baptism. These were struggles in which
he ran the risk of again exchanging his high conception of grace for the Catholic
conception, as well as of sacrificing the fundamental idea that it is a purely spiritual
possession that is in question, and that, compared with Word and faith, all else
is of no importance. What he here bequeathed to his Church has become a legacy of
woe.
Fourthly, the counter-Church which, as was inevitable, rapidly
arose in opposition to the Roman Church, and, under the pressure which that Church exercised,
perceived, not without reason, that its truth and its title lay in the re-establishment
of the Gospel. But whilst the counter-Church privily identified the sum and substance
of its doctrine with the Gospel, the thought also stole in surreptitiously: We-that
is to say, the particular Churches which had now sprung up—are the true Church.
Luther, of course, was never able to forget that the true Church was the sacred
community of the faithful; but still he had no clear ideas as to the relation between
it and the visible new Church which had now arisen, and subsequent generations settled
down more and more into the sad misunderstanding: We are the true Church because we have the right “doctrine.” This misunderstanding, besides giving rise to
evil results in self-infatuation and intolerance, still further strengthened that
mischievous distinction between theologians and clergy on the one side, and the
laity on the other, on which we have already dwelt. Not, perhaps, in theory, but
certainly in practice, a double form of Christianity arose, just as in Catholicism; and in spite of the efforts of the Pietistic movement it still remains with us
to-day. The theologian and the clergyman must defend the whole doctrine, and be
orthodox: for the layman it suffices if he adheres to certain leading points and
refrains from attacking the orthodox creed. A very well-known man, as I have been lately
told, expressed the wish that a certain inconvenient theologian would go over to
the philosophical faculty; “for then,” he said, “instead of an unbelieving theologian
we should have a believing philosopher.” Here we have the logical outcome of the
contention that in the evangelical Churches, too, doctrine is something laid down
for all time, and that in spite of being generally binding it is a matter of so
much difficulty that the laity need not be expected to defend it. But if we persist
on this path, and other confusions become worse confounded and take firmer root,
there is a risk of Protestantism becoming a sorry double of Catholicism. I say a
sorry double, because there. are two things which Protestantism will never obtain,
namely, a pope and monastic priests. Neither the letter of the Bible nor any belief
embodied in creeds can ever produce the unconditional authority which Catholics
possess in the Pope; and Protestantism cannot now return to the monastic priest.
It retains .its national Churches and its married clergy, neither of which looks
very stately by the side of Catholicism, if competition with Catholicism is what
the evangelical Churches desire.
Gentlemen, Protestantism is not yet, thank God, in such a bad
way that the imperfections and confusions in which it began have got the upper hand and entirely stunted or stifled its true character. Even those
among us who are convinced that the Reformation in the sixteenth century is something
that is over and done with are by no means ready to abandon the momentous ideas
on which it was based, and there is a large field in which all earnest evangelical
Christians are in complete unanimity. But if those who think that the Reformation
is done with cannot see that its continuance in the sense of a pure understanding
of God’s Word is a question of life and death for Protestantism—its continuance
has already borne abundant fruit in associations like the Evangelical Union—let them at least promote the liberty for which Luther fought in his best days:
“Let the minds of men rush one against another and strike; if some are
meanwhile led astray—well! that is what we must expect in war; where there is
battle and slaughter, some must fall and be wounded, but whoso fights honestly
will receive the crown.”
The reason why the catholicising of the Protestant Churches—I
do not mean that they are becoming papal; I mean that they are becoming Churches
of ordinance, doctrine, and ceremony—is so burning a question is that three powerful
forces are working together to further this development. First there is the indifference
of the masses. The tendency of all indifference is to put religion on the same plane not only with authority and tradition, but also with priests,
hierarchies, and the cult of ceremonies. It puts religion there, and then goes on
to complain of the external character and stationary condition of religion, and
of the “pretensions” of the clergy; nay, it is capable, apparently, at one and
the same moment, of mingling those complaints with abuse, of contemptuously jeering
at every active expression of religious feeling, and doing homage to every kind
of ceremony. This kind of indifference has no understanding whatever for evangelical
Christianity, instinctively tries to suppress it, and praises Catholicism at its
expense. The second of the forces to be taken into consideration is what I may call
“natural religion.” Those who live by fear and hope; whose chief endeavour is
to find some authority in matters of religion; who are eager to be rid of their
own responsibility and want to be reassured; who are looking for some “adjunct” to life, whether in its solemn hours or in its worst distress, some aesthetic
transfiguration, or some violent form of assistance till time itself assists—all
these people are also, without being aware of it, putting religion on the Catholic
plane; they want “something that they can lean upon,” and a good deal else, too—all kinds of things to stir them up and help them; but they do not want the Christianity
of the Gospel. But the Christianity of the Gospel in yielding to such demands becomes Catholic Christianity. The
third force I mention unwillingly, and yet I cannot pass it over in silence; it
is the State. We must not blame the state for setting chief store by the
conservative influence which religion and the Churches exercise, and the subsidiary
effects which they produce in respect of reverence, obedience, and public order.
But this is just the reason why the state exercises pressure in this direction,
protects all the elements of stability in the Churches, and seeks to keep them from
every inner movement that would call their unity and their “public utility” in
question; nay, it has tried often enough to approximate the Church to the police,
and employ it as a means of maintaining order in the state. We can pardon this—let
the state take the means of power wherever it can find them; but the Church must
not allow itself to be made into a pliant instrument; for, side by side with all
the desolating consequences to its vocation and prestige, it would thereby become
an outward institution in which public order is of greater consequence than the
spirit, form more important than matter, and obedience of higher value than truth.
In the face of these three so different forces, what we have
to do is to maintain Christian earnestness and liberty as presented in the Gospel.
Theology alone is unavailing; what is wanted is firmness of Christian character. The evangelical Churches will be
pushed into the background if they do not make a stand. It was out of such free
creations as the Pauline communities were that the Catholic Church once arose.
Who can guarantee that those Churches, too, will not become “Catholic” which
had their origin in “the liberty of a Christian man”?
That, however, would not involve the destruction of the Gospel:
so much, at least, history proves. It would be still traceable, like a red thread
in the centre of the web, and somewhere or other it would emerge afresh, and free
itself from its entangling connexions. Even in the outwardly decorated but inwardly
decayed temples of the Greek and Roman Churches it has not been effaced. “Venture
onwards! deep down in a vault you will still find the altar and its sacred, ever-burning
lamp!” This Gospel, associated as it was with the speculative ideas and the mystery-worship
of the Greeks, yet did not perish in them; united with the Roman Empire, it held
its own even in this fusion, nay, out of it gave birth to the Reformation. Its dogmatic
doctrines, its ordinances of public worship, have changed; nay, what is much more,
it has been embraced by the simplest and purest minds and by the greatest thinkers; it endeared itself to a St. Francis and to a Newton. It has outlived all the changing philosophies of the world; it has cast off like a garment forms
and ideas which were once sacred; it has participated in the entire progress of
civilisation; it has become spiritualised, and in the course of history it has
learnt how to make a surer application of its ethical principles. In its original
earnestness and in the consolation which it offers, it has come home to thousands
in all ages; and in all ages, too, it has thrown off all its encumbrances, and
broken down all barriers. If we were right in saying that the Gospel is the knowledge
and recognition of God as the Father, the certainty of redemption, humility and
joy in God, energy and brotherly love; if it is essential to this religion that
the founder must not be forgotten over his message, nor the message over the founder,
history shows us that the Gospel has, in point of fact, remained in force, struggling
again and again to the surface.
You will perhaps have felt that I have not entered into present
questions, the relation, namely, of the Gospel to our present intellectual condition,
our whole knowledge of the world, and our task therein. But to do this with any
success in regard to the actual situation of affairs would require longer than a
few fleeting hours. As regards the kernel of the matter, however, I have said all
that is needful, for no new phase in the history of the Christian religion has occurred since the Reformation. Our knowledge
of the world has undergone enormous changes—every century since the Reformation
marks an advance, the most important being those in the last two; but, looked at
from a religious and ethical point of view, the forces and principles of the Reformation
have not been outrun or rendered obsolete. We need only grasp them in their purity
and courageously apply them, modern ideas will not put any new difficulties in their way. The real difficulties in the way of the religion of the Gospel remain
the old ones. In face of them we can “prove” nothing, for our proofs are only variations
of our convictions. But the course which history has taken has surely opened up
a wide province, in which the Christian sense of brotherhood must give practical
proof of itself quite otherwise than it knew how, or was able, to do in the early
centuries—I mean the social province. Here a tremendous task confronts us, and in
the measure in which we accomplish it shall we be able to answer with a better heart
the deepest of all questions—the question of the meaning of life.
Gentlemen, it is religion, the love of God and neighbour, which
gives life a meaning; knowledge cannot do it. Let me, if you please, speak of my
own experience, as one who for thirty years has taken an earnest interest in these things. Pure knowledge is
a glorious thing, and woe to the man who holds it light or blunts his sense for
it! But to the question, Whence, whither, and to what purpose? it gives an answer
to-day as little as it did two or three thousand years ago. It does, indeed, instruct
us in facts; it detects inconsistencies; it links phenomena; it corrects the
deceptions of sense and idea. But where and how the curve of the world and the curve
of our own life begin,—that curve of which it shows us only a section, and whither
this curve leads, knowledge does not tell us. But if with a steady will we affirm
the forces and the standards which on the summits of our inner life shine out as
our highest good, nay, as our real self; if we are earnest and courageous enough
to accept them as the great Reality and direct our lives by them; and if we then
look at the course of mankind’s history, follow its upward development, and search,
in strenuous and patient service, for the communion of minds in it, we shall not
faint in weariness and despair, but become certain of God, of the God whom Jesus
Christ called his Father, and who is also our Father.
THE END.