It is not likely that the miraculous elements in the Christian religion will be found to be “the produce of its primitive theology, which will fade out of the conception of men as theology advances and becomes purified.” The demonstration of this must not be assumed to be complete because the miraculous is also found in other religions. We must be able to account for it in all of them. It is, indeed, the natural tendency of humanity to magnify and eventually to deify its heroes, to embellish their careers with similar marvels, to apply to them figurative language very liable to be misunderstood, which in later generations hardens into erroneous beliefs. That Christians as well as Buddhists have done so is sufficiently attested by the apocryphal Gospels, but we must not conclude that because there are so many fictitious and counterfeit wonders in currency there can be no real miracles. We must examine each religion on its merits, and its miraculous elements in the light of their purpose and of their actual genesis; and if we do so in the case of Christianity, we will probably discover the one supernatural reality from which the shadows in all other religions are reflected, and to which they all point.[173]
Dr. Rhys Davids, in the Hibbert Lectures, informs us that the early Buddhist conception of Gotama was dominated and transformed by two ideals, neither of which had any necessary connection with the man himself. One of them, due to political experience, made him finally assume in the popular imagination the office of a Universal King; while the other, due to philosophic speculation, invested him with the attribute of Perfect Wisdom. The implied parallel between this conception, coloured as it grew by the sun myths which it incorporated, and the Christian conception of Jesus, suggested by the titles King of Glory and Divine Word, is obvious to everybody. Yet examination of the supposed similarities only reveals essential contrasts between the two sets of beliefs. The political experiences in India which are referred to occurred about two centuries after the death of Buddha. The victories of Chandragupta, resulting in the consolidation of a kingdom such as Indians had never before witnessed, combined with his patronage of the Buddhist monks, may have suggested the idea of the universal monarch. “His achievements recalled the nearly forgotten poetry of the Vedic legends, while the new and popular ethics of Buddha invested him with a righteousness which made him a worthy Lord of the Four Quarters (of the Globe).” So in one of the Suttas,said to be early, and which may have been assuming shape at this time, words like these are put in the mouth of Buddha:—“I am a king, O Sela, an incomparable, religious king; with justice I roll the wheel, the wheel that is irresistible.”[174]With this conception of Cakka-vatti, a glorious king, was connected, avers Dr. Rhys Davids, that of an age in which plenty and peace were to abound as the fruits of righteousness.[175]The idea of a golden age is common to most religions, and as the Western Aryans always preserved it, we may conclude that the branch which reached India carried it thither with them. Soon, however, as the belief in transmigration took possession of them, they seem to have lost it. Their book of the generations of man did not mount higher than the Fall; existence was essentially evil in their thought, and belief in a golden age on earth, either in the past or in the future, was quite inconsistent with the creed which Buddhists inherited or created. The other branch of the Aryan stock so cherished it that it adorns their most beautiful mythologies; but even with them the golden age was always placed in the past, and the world, fallen from good, was supposed to be degenerating from bad to worse. And so it is that the fondest glances of even the happy Greek arenot forward but backward cast, and that sadness mingles with his most mirthful music.
It is possible at least that changes so favourable to the fortunes of the new religion, and the social reforms which followed its extension, may have awakened in the pious the memories of old Vedic faith; and that the victories of Chandragupta may have suggested to the authors of the Suttas the idea of the invincible Buddha advancing through the ages, as the chariot-wheel of the sun disperses the clouds in the heavens. It is certain, however, that neither Buddha nor his earliest disciples ever dreamed of applying the title of Cakka-vatti to or of associating the promise of a better time with himself. To old Vedic faith as supporting his teaching or predicting his mission he never appealed; he ignored all previous teaching: and indeed in ancient Indian teaching, uninspired by either promise or hope, there is nothing prophetic. In the case of Christianity it is quite the contrary. The conception of the Messiah as the righteous and glorious King, under whose reign all the world would be blessed, was not suggested by political experience two centuries after the dawn of Christianity. It was formulated and predicted many centuries before the coming of Christ. The Hebrew, like the Aryan, never lost the memory of a happy past, but, unlike the Aryan, he placedhis paradise not only in the past but in the future. With far richer materials at his command than the Aryan seems to have possessed for painting a vanished golden age, the Hebrew poets made very sparing use of them. A few paragraphs exhaust all they have to say as to the traditions of a paradise that had been lost, but their whole Bible is full of the hope of the good time which is coming to all the world. This hope, centred as it was in their Messiah, Christianity from the very first took up and promised to fulfil. The ministry of Jesus was scarcely begun before it was associated with Him. Among the first questions asked concerning Him was, “Is not this Messias?” Among the earliest declarations made was, “We have found the Messias.” Very soon in His career He confessed, “I that speak unto thee am He!” The Gospels and Epistles would be unintelligible without this perpetual reference to Messianic prediction; it is the golden thread which runs through all the Old Testament and unites it with the New. In its Messianic hope, Old Testament prophecy reached its highest and purest development, and the New Testament claims that in Christ it is finding its fulfilment. It may be alleged of course that the prophecy and the claim are alike delusions, but the prophecy at least was a fact, and its application to Christ was no legendary growthof a later generation, but the original and essential testimony of the earliest Christian teachers.
The other conception of Perfect Wisdom represented by Buddha the Awakened or Enlightened One is also confessedly an aftergrowth. The earliest traces which we have of Gotama after his death disclose him as a man who gained his knowledge by severe struggle, and who therefore, in the estimation of his followers, was a “Jina” or conqueror. As time went on, and his memory rose in the estimation of later generations, the faithful, guided by their belief in transmigration, projected this struggle for Buddhahood further and further into former stages of existence, till at last the idea was conceived that he was only one of a long series of Buddhas, of whom he was not to be the last. The development of this interesting speculation, with its distinctions into Buddhas who only save themselves—Paccekabuddhas—and the Sammâsambuddhas, who appear at very rare intervals, able and willing to save to the uttermost, need not here be traced. It is sufficient to note how unlike and contradictory is this belief to that which dominates in our religion. In Christ we have theonlyMessiah, and He, having once come, we do not look for another. The hope of the Christian is fixed upon His coming again in glory; but it is the coming again of thesameJesus. The unity of Deity colours and pervades all our thoughts of Divine communications with mankind; “there is one God, and one Mediator between God and man.” Consequently the doctrine of the Divine Word formulated in connection with Christ inSt.John’s Gospel represents a very different set of ideas from the conception of Buddha as the Perfect Wisdom, to whom all worlds and all times were open. That conception of Buddha was probably an incorporation into the Buddhist creed from foreign sources, but the idea of Christ as the Son, “unto whom all things have been delivered by the Father,” so that “no one knoweth the Son save the Father, neither doth any know the Father save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to reveal Him,” was a common one among the very earliest Christians of whom we have any trace.St.Matthew,St.Mark,St.Paul,St.Luke all preach Christ, “unto whom has been committed all knowledge and judgment,” “who is before all things, and in whom all things consist,” “the image of the invisible God, in whom it pleased the Father that all fulness should dwell.”[176]
And so it is not in the latest Gospel but in theearliest Scriptures that we have the first indications of this doctrine as Christ the Word, though in the latest, as we might expect, it is more clearly formulated and more fully expounded. Written after the fall of Jerusalem, the destruction of the ancient Church, and the recognition of the Gentiles as fellow-heirs, by one who was quite conscious of the new intellectual position which Christianity occupied in relation to the speculations of Syria and Egypt, and of the dangers which thereby accrued to the faith, its author took up a term very current at the time in theosophic and metaphysical writings, and specially those of Philo, to set forth the truth of the Life whose manifestation he had witnessed. ThatSt.John did not borrow the term from Philo is evident from the very different use which he has made of it, and the very different purpose which he had in view. By it Philo expressed the conception of Divine intelligence in the abstract, whileSt.John employed it to suggest the concrete idea of God’s personal action. Both found it in the Septuagint and the Hebrew traditional lore;[177]but while Philo gave it a Greek,St.John adhered to its Hebrew significance. The first chapter ofSt.John compared with a page of Philo[178]will reveal at once the differencebetween them, and convince us that the teaching of Philo concerning the Logos leads further and further away from the idea of the incarnation which is the foundation-truth of the teaching ofSt.John. His doctrine would be quite unintelligible as an application or continuation of the doctrine of Philo, but it is intelligible and consistent as the final co-ordination of truths concerning the Divine Being disclosed in the Old Testament viewed by a man whose antecedents and modes of thought were very different from those of the Alexandrian sage.[179]
The ideas suggested by the “Angel of the Presence” in the historic and prophetic books, by the “Word of the Lord” in the Psalms, and by “Wisdom” in the Books of Wisdom, indicate the rays which converge inSt.John’s doctrine of the Christ. As one who tarried long after the first generation of Christians had gone to their rest, as one who had not only pondered longer, and in deeper silence, the Life he had seen manifested, but who had found its interpretation in such providences as the spreading of the Churches and the destruction of the State, he was abler to meet the necessities of a wider age, by setting the truth in rounder form and clearer light; but while he expandsand expounds the teaching of the first generation, he adds and introduces not a single element. His testimony is identical with that proclaimed at the Resurrection, that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, and that Christ is the only begotten Son of God.
It is not as one who has acquired truth by long struggle, not as one who has fought or forced His way to light, that Christ presents Himself in the Gospels, but as one who can say: “I am the way, the truth, the life,” “the light of the world.” Yet along with this stupendous demand upon the faith of humanity there is a humility and simplicity undiscoverable in the Buddha of the Pitakas. Self-consciousness, self-reliance, self-culture—these are the phrases most suggestive of the system and of the life of the great Indian sage, while not self-abasement, but self-oblivion, characterises the teaching and life of Jesus of Nazareth. Identity with the Highest, manifested by absolute surrender to Him, is the essence of the Revelation of Christ. Always is the Father confessed to be the source of all grace and truth, and if the Son asks to be glorified, it is that the Father may be glorified in Him. We are certainly not contemplating similarities when we look at the Buddha of the Suttas and the Christ of the Gospels, but contrasts more widely separated than the soul is from the body. In Buddha wehave a historical personage, who can be thoroughly accounted for as the product and outgrowth of his past, and of his environment; in Christ we have one whom no philosophy of history has ever explained. Alone and unapproachable, He meets us as one who is really human, because He has become man, one who has arisen among men to save them, but because He has come through and to them. He is not just one of the many, a son of men, the product of a divinely-trained humanity, but the Son of Man, who as Son of God, incarnated in the nature of all men, has become the Head and Creator of a new humanity. Correct, improve, embellish as we may, the portrait left us of the gentle teacher of Magadha, we never can lift him up to that level which would justify his being worshipped or being addressed, as Jesus of Nazareth has been by the consensus of all the Christian ages, “Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ. Thou art the everlasting Son of the Father.”