This passion against sin—this cry for inward purity—is the root of the religion of Jesus, the blessedness of the pure in heart; the warfare of Paul, the spirit against the flesh.
In other psalms, again, is a poignant cry for help and deliverance. It is the expostulation of the soul with Fate, the cry to a Power who should be a friend, but hides his face. There, is a pathetic sense of man's frailty and mortality. "Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my cry; hold not thy peace at my tears, for I am a stranger with thee and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I go hence, and be no more."
Praise for God's greatness and awe for his eternity are joined with the sad sense of man's mortality. "Wilt thou show wonders to the dead? Shall the dead arise and praise thee? Shall thy lovingkindness be declared in the grave? or thy faithfulness in destruction? Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness?"
Very often again the burden is the cry of the weak against the oppressor. Man, wronged by his fellow, cries to God, and can imagine no deliverance save by the ruin of his enemies. The cursing is tremendous. "O daughter of Babylon, happy shall he be that taketh thy little ones and dasheth them against the stones!" At this point is the widest ethical difference between "them of old time" and our own religion. In them, abhorrence of sin was not yet distinguished from hatred of the sinner, and the foes of the Psalmist or his nation were always identified with the foes of God. To hate thine enemy seemed as righteous as to love thy friend.
In a sense we may say the Psalms are a cry to which Jesus is the answer: "Lord, save me, and destroy my enemies!" "Love your enemies, and in loving you are saved."
In the book of Psalms there blends and alternates with the old theory of reward and punishment a later idea,—that goodness carries its own blessing with it,—that better than oil and wine, flocks and herds, health and friends, is the peace of well-doing, the joy of gratitude, yes, even the passionate contrition in which the soul revolts from its own sin and finds again the sweetness of the upward effort and a response to that effort like heaven's own smile. Not, goodness brings blessings, but goodnessisblessed; not, the wicked shall perish, but wickednessisperdition; this is the deep undertone of the best of the Psalms.
Among these hymns are some which are filled with a noble delight in the works of nature,—a fresh, glad pleasure in the whole spectacle of creation, from sun and stars, sea and mountains, to the goats among the hills, and the conies of the rock. There is frank satisfaction in the bread which strengtheneth man's heart and the wine that makes him glad. And all this free human joy in the activities and splendors of nature never so much as approaches the perilous slope towards sensuality. It is everywhere sublimated by the all-pervading recognition of a holy and beneficent God.
What may be said of the Psalms generally is this: they express the most vivid and various play of human emotions,—sorrow, wrath, repentance, joy, dread, hope,—always exercised as in the presence of an Almighty being, holy, righteous, and the friend of righteous men. In this is their abiding power,—this close reflection of the fluctuations in every sensitive heart under the play of life's experiences,—encompassed with an atmosphere of noble seriousness, and outreaching toward a higher Power.
In the story of the Jewish mind, the book of Job stands by itself. It is not so much a stage in the progressive development of a faith, as a powerful and unanswered challenge to the current assertions of that faith. The characteristic idea of Judaism was that God rules the world in the interest of the good man. Not so, says Job, the facts are against it. Hear the complaint of a good man to whom life has brought trouble and sorrow, without remedy and without hope! So stood first the bold arraignment, the earliest voice of truly religious skepticism. Job is skeptical, not from any want of goodness,—he has been strenuously good; even now in all his darkness, "my righteousness I hold fast and will not let it go: my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live." His goodness is of no narrow sort; justice, protection of the oppressed, help to the suffering, these have been his delight; from wantonness of sense he has kept himself pure; not even against wrong-doers and enemies has his hate gone out; he has not "rejoiced at the destruction of them that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him; neither have I suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul." Yet, after a life of this sort, he finds himself bereft, impoverished, tormented. Where is the righteousness of God? He turns to his friends for sympathy. "Have pity upon me, have pity upon me, O ye my friends; for the hand of God hath touched me." His friends for reply justify God by blaming Job. Doubtless you deserve it all: you must have done all manner of wrong, and been a hypocrite to boot! That is all the comfort they give him. Dreary and desolate he stands, no good in the present, no hope in the future. "I cry unto thee, and thou dost not hear me: I stand up, and thou regardest me not. Thou art become cruel to me; with thy strong hand thou opposest thyself against me. I know that thou wilt bring me to death, and to the house appointed for all living."
Upon that gloom the curtain falls. "The words of Job are ended."
The later chapters of the book seem added by successive hands. They introduce a fresh speaker, to help out the argument for God. They make the Almighty speak in his own behalf. His answer is simply an appeal to the wonders of physical nature. Look, vain man, at my works; consider the war-horse, the behemoth, the leviathan; how can your petty mind judge the creator of these? This strikes a note which is still heard in the music of to-day, the awe and reverence before the grandeur of nature which can sometimes soothe the restlessness of man and hush his anxieties, as the harp of David brought peace to the moody Saul. Yet such thoughts do not suffice for the man whose personal suffering is keen. They silence rather than answer the question which presses upon Job.
The story must be otherwise helped out, so some kindly champion of orthodoxy put in a fairy-story climax,—Job got well of his boils, had more sheep and oxen than ever, had other children born to him. And so the difficulty is happily solved!
But the earlier and deeper words remain, with their unanswerable challenge to the comfortable creed that God will always make the good man happy. The book stands, the expression of a typical, a mournful but sublime attitude of the human mind. It is a facing of truth when truth looks darkest, rather than to take refuge in comfortable make-believe. And it shows man falling back on his innermost stronghold of all. If God himself fail me,—if the power of the universe be cruel or indifferent,—yet "my righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go; my heart shall not reproach me so long as I live."
The habitual weapon of the Prophets is denunciation. They pour out on their opponents a wrath which is the hotter because it involves a moral condemnation, and the heavier because it claims the sanction of Deity. Among their exemplars are Samuel deposing Saul, and scaring him from the tomb, and Elijah slaying the priests of Baal. Of the written prophecies the characteristic word is "Woe unto you!" They are the prototypes of Jesus assailing the Pharisees and driving out the money-changers; of the book of Revelation; of Tertullian proclaiming the torments of the damned; of the mediaeval ban on the heretic; of Puritan and Catholic hurling anathemas at each other; of Carlyle, of Garrison. But in the greatest of the prophets the threat is almost hidden by the promise, and instead of cursing there is benediction.
Whoever would get at the heart of the Old Testament, and understand the spell which the religion first of Judaism and then of Christianity has cast upon the world for thousands of years, should ponder the book of Isaiah. It blends the work of two authors, but their spirit is closely akin. In each case the prophet is full of a conviction so intense that he propounds it with perfect confidence as the word of God. By the boldest personification, he speaks continually in the name of God. This was the characteristic method of Hebrew prophecy. The prophetic books all stand as for the most part the direct word of God. This way of thought and speech was possible only to men in an early stage of intellectual development and under the highest pressure of conviction and emotion.
The traditional repute of these Jewish prophets and the record of their words were accepted by both Jews and Christians. Their writings were taken as the authoritative voice of God. The same credit came to be extended to all the ancient books of the Jewish religion,—psalms, histories, genealogies, ritual, and all. But it is mainly the prophecies to which this character originally belonged. The Psalms are, with few exceptions, purely human in their standpoint. In them, it is avowedly amanwho mourns, rejoices, repents, prays, curses, or gives thanks. But in the prophecies God himself is presented as the speaker.
In both the earlier and later Isaiah, God appears as speaking to men in extreme need, in words of incomparable comfort, inspiration, and hope. To whatever special exigency of Israel they were first addressed, the language, stripped of all local references, comes home to the universal human heart in its deepest experiences. To the divine favor this teaching sets only one condition: "Cease to do evil, learn to do well." "Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow." "If ye be willing and obedient." "Say ye to the righteous that it shall be well with them, for they shall eat the fruit of their doings. Woe unto the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward of his hands shall be given him." On the one simple condition of turning from moral evil to good, the blessings of the inner life are promised in every tone of assurance, consolation, promise. "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool." "Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned." "He shall feed his flock like a shepherd; he shall gather the lambs with his arm and carry them in his bosom, and shall gently lead those that are with young." "Sing, O heavens, and be joyful, O earth, and break forth into singing, O mountains, for the Lord hath comforted his people, and will have mercy upon his afflicted."
The most triumphant word in the New Testament, and its tenderest word, both are drawn from one verse in the elder Isaiah: "He will swallow up death in victory, and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces."
The distinctive word and thought of Jesus toward God is first found in the later Isaiah,—"our Father." "Doubtless thou art our father, though Abraham be ignorant of us, and Israel acknowledge us not; thou, O Lord, art our father, our redeemer; thy name is from everlasting." The word recurs, together with an image which by a later than Jesus was made the symbol of an arbitrary divine despotism, but which Isaiah first employed to blend the idea of omnipotent power with closest affection: "O Lord, thou art our father; we are the clay and thou the potter; and we are all the work of thy hand." A similitude is used even gentler than a father's care: "As one whom his mother comforteth, so will I comfort you." "Can a woman forget her sucking child, that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget, yet will I not forget thee."
By the later Isaiah is shown the figure of an innocent sufferer, whose sorrows are to issue in the widest blessing. This sufferer has been interpreted sometimes as typifying the few heroic souls among the people of Israel, sometimes as a prophet in Isaiah's day, last and most fondly as Christ. Whomever the prophet had in mind, the idea goes home to the heart; somehow, undeserved sorrow borne blamelessly, bravely, even gladly, since for love's sake, is to have a celestial fruitage. "Despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;" "he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,"—and at last "he shall see of the travail of his soul, and be satisfied." Then the strain breaks into an exultant tenderness, weaving into one chord the deepest griefs and consolations of woman, the sublimities of nature, all the passion and all the peace of the heart. "Sing, O barren, thou that didst not bear; break forth into singing and cry aloud, thou that didst not travail with child, for more are the children of the desolate than the children of the married wife, saith the Lord. Fear not, for thou shalt not be ashamed. For thy Maker is thy husband, the Lord of hosts is his name, and thy redeemer the Holy One of Israel. For a small moment have I forsaken thee, but with great mercies will I gather thee. In a little wrath I hid my face from thee for a moment, but with everlasting kindness will I have mercy on thee, saith the Lord thy Redeemer. The mountains shall depart and the hills be removed, but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee. O thou afflicted, tossed with tempest, and not comforted! I will lay thy stones with fair colors, and lay thy foundations with sapphires; and all thy children shall be taught of the Lord, and great shall be the peace of thy children."
To such words men and women in all times have clung, and always will cling. For, so first spoke a voice in some soul which in the heart of the storm had found peace. He called it the voice of God. What better name can we give it?
In the prophecies and the psalms we have seen the high-wrought poetry of Israel's religion. For the requirements of daily life there needs a more prosaic, definite, and minute guidance. This the Jew found in the body of usages and precepts which gradually grew up under the care of the priesthood. The prescriptive sanction of habit attached to these observances was at certain memorable epochs exchanged for a belief in the direct communication of the code from heaven. One such occasion was the finding of the "book of the Law" by the high priest, and its presentation and enforcement on king and people which is recorded in 2 Kings xxii. and xxiii. The strong indications are that this was the book known to us as Deuteronomy, and that instead of the rediscovery of a forgotten book there was in truth a new book set forth, claiming the authority of Moses, and enlarging and enriching the traditional observances according to the most "advanced" ideas of the time. A similar occasion, at a later period, is described at length in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The new legislation there imposed in the name of Moses and the fathers—or rather of Yahveh himself, as he spoke to the men of old—was probably in substance the regulations contained in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.
By our standards of judgment, these acts were pious forgeries. The mental conditions under which they were done, the psychologic state which prompted them, the ethical standards which sanctioned them, are matter for curious study. It would be crude to class them as the deliberate and inexcusable crimes which they would be in our day. The claim of a divine authority for human beliefs—the idea that what is morally beneficial may be asserted as historically true—has worked in many strange forms. We see it here in its early phase, among a people in whom, as in mankind at large, the virtue and obligation of truthfulness was a late and slow discovery. The same instinct—to claim for what we wish to believe a sanction of infallible revelation—works in subtle forms to-day.
As to the contents of the Law which thus gradually took form, a distinction may easily be traced even by the cursory reader. The earlier code, Deuteronomy, is full of a generous and lofty temper. It is one of the most impressive documents of the Jewish scriptures. Here is that which Jesus named as the first and great commandment: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might." The teaching of the book is primarily the worship of Yahveh,—a holy, loving, and judging God,—who rewards his people with blessings or punishes them with disasters. Promises and threats are equally distinct and vivid: never were blessing and cursing more emphatic. The morality enjoined is charitable and pure. With an equal insistence is enjoined a certain method and form of worship, including sacrifices at the temple, three yearly feasts, the observance of the Sabbath, the due maintenance of the priesthood, and the utter rejection of all other gods.
When we turn to the other books of the Law, we come into an atmosphere less exalted, and with a multiplicity of ceremonial details. There is endless regulation as to varieties of sacrifice, cleansing from technical uncleanness, and the like. Interwoven with these, as if on an equal footing, are special applications of morality—inculcations of chastity, justice, and good neighborhood. The principles of the Ten Words—themselves an inheritance from a very early day—are applied in many particulars. Occasionally is a lofty sentiment, a clear advance. Thus we find in Leviticus the "second commandment" of Jesus, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
The general increase in rigidity of ceremonial in these books is to be read along with the stern decrees of Ezra as to separation from family and friendly relations with non-Jewish neighbors. It was, in a word, a Puritan reformation. There was just the same combination of heightened moral conviction with urgency upon matters of form and detail, and hostility to all outside of one special church, which belonged to the Puritan. But the Jewish reformer, unlike the English, enlarged instead of simplifying his ritual. It is this interblending of outward observance with moral and spiritual quality which stumbles the modern reader at every page. It was a confusion which needed the spiritual genius of Jesus to dissolve, and the leadership of Paul to definitely renounce.
By the side of the ceremonial element in the Law there ripened gradually an expansion of its moral precepts. The sacred books were expounded by the Scribes. The preacher in the synagogue came to touch the people's heart often more closely and delicately than the priest with his bloody sacrifices and his imposing liturgies. Spontaneity, inspiration, prophetic power, was no longer present, but in the guise of comment and interpretation there grew up a gentler, humaner morality. The moral value of labor and industry came into recognition. There were teachers like Hillel and Gamaliel in whom devout piety and homely practice went hand in hand. In the ethics of Judaism—under all these various forms of "the Law and the Prophets"—the distinctive note, compared with the ethics of Greece and Rome, was chastity. The ideal Greece represented wisdom and beauty; the ideal Rome was valor and self-control; the ideal Israel was the subjugation of sense to spirit, the approach of man to God by purity of life.
The twofold service of Judaism was to impress this special note of chastity on human virtue, and to give to virtue the wings of a great hope. The flowering of that hope was in Christianity; the preparation for it comes now before us.
Under the rule of Alexander's successors the Jewish system, with its mixture of ethics and ritual, came in collision with the ideas and practice of degenerate Greek culture,—pleasure-loving, nature-worshiping, sensual, with gymnastics and aesthetics, tolerant and tyrannical. The two systems were hostile alike in their virtues and vices. The Greek ruler put down with a strong hand the religious and patriotic scruples of his Jewish subject. The Jew bore persecution with the tough endurance of his race, then rose in revolt with the fierce courage and religious fervor of his race. He won his last victory in the field of arms. Brief was the independence, soon followed by inglorious servitude; but its sufferings and triumphs had fused the nation once more into invincible devotion to the Law of their God, and had rooted in their hearts a principle of hope which in varying forms and growing power was to change the aspect of human life.
It seems natural to man to ascribe some impressive origin, some dramatic birth, to the beliefs that are dearest to him. But if we trace back through Christian and Jewish lineage the idea of immortality, we are quite unable to discover the time or place of its beginning. The early Jew thought of death much as did the early Greek,—as the extinction of all that was precious in life, and the transition to a shadowy and forlorn existence in the realm of shades. The Hades of Homer seems much to resemble the Sheol of the Old Testament, though more vividly conceived. The strong, ruddy, passionate life of the Hebrew found as little to cheer it in the outlook beyond death as did the energetic, graceful, joyful life of the Greek. Ancient Egypt had, at least for the initiate, a noble teaching of retribution hereafter to crown the mortal career with fit consummation of joy or woe. Ancient Persia had in its own form a like doctrine. The Hebrews in their servile period caught not a scintilla of the Egyptian faith. In their exile it is probable that they did get some unrecorded influence from their Persian neighbors. Unmistakably, their emigrants to Alexandria, meeting there the nobler form of Greek culture while the Palestinian Jews encountered its baser side, caught some inspiration from the philosophy which followed, though afar off, the noble visions of Plato. Whether Persia or Greece was more directly the source of the new hope which crept almost unperceived into the stern bosom of Judaism is not certain. But the first clear voice of that hope comes from the time of the martyrs. In the second book of the Maccabees is told—probably by an Alexandrian Jew—the story of the men and women who faced a dreadful death rather than disobey the Law of their God. In that last extremity—that confrontal of the soul by the bitterest choice, and its acceptance of death rather than wrong-doing—comes the sudden voice of a hope triumphant over the tyrant. "Thou like a fury takest us out of this present life, but the King of the world shall raise us up, who have died for his laws, unto everlasting life." So in succession bear testimony the seven sons of one mother, herself the bravest of them all. "She exhorted every one of them in her own language, filled with courageous spirit; and stirring up her womanish thoughts with a manly courage, she said unto them: 'I cannot tell how ye came into my womb: for I neither gave you breath nor life, neither was it I that formed the members of every one of you. But doubtless the Creator of the world who formed the generations of man, and found out the beginning of all things, will also of his due mercy give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his laws' sake. Fear not this tormentor, but, being worthy of thy brethren, take thy death, that I may receive thee again in mercy with thy brethren.'"
Just as the death of Socrates inspired in Plato the out-reaching hope of a hereafter, so these Jewish martyrdoms quickened the doubtful guess, the dim conjecture, into fervid conviction. From this period dates the settled Jewish belief in immortality.
The form which that belief assumed is seen in the book of Daniel. That book was a creation of this period, inspired by its sufferings, aspirations, and hopes. The writer, assuming the name and authority of a traditional hero,—by that easy confusion of the ideal and the historical which we have seen before,—blends with stories of unconquerable fidelity and divine deliverance his own interpretation of the world's recent history and probable future. It is an early essay in what we call the philosophy of history, the first recorded conception of a world-drama. Median, Persian, Greek, and Roman monarchies move their appointed course and pass away. God's plan is working itself out, and the culmination is yet to come. In vision the prophet beholds it: the "Ancient of days," with garment white as snow and hair like pure wool, upon a throne like fiery flame, with wheels as burning fire. Thousands of thousands minister before him: the judgment is set and the books are opened. One like the Son of Man comes with the clouds of heaven, and there is given to him dominion and glory and a kingdom which shall not pass away. In his kingdom shall be gathered the saints of the Most High. Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to ever-lasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
This was the figure in which the Jewish imagination clothed the Jewish hope. The national and the individual future blent in one anticipation. The dead were to "sleep in the dust" until the day when the divine kingdom was established, and then were to rise again to life, and according to their deserts were to share the endless glory or shame.
So philosophy makes its essay at the destiny of mankind. So imagination fashions its pictures. And back of philosophy and imagination we trace the elemental and highest forces of the soul. It is martyrdom and motherhood that inspire the immortal hope. Man faces the worst that can befall him—drinks the hemlock or suffers the torture—rather than be false to duty. The mother broods over the life mysteriously sprung from her own, and given back by her as a sacred trust to the service of the right and to an unseen keeping. And to martyr and mother comes the voice, "All shall be well with thee and thine."
Christianity, inheriting from Judaism the belief in immortality, gave it a more central place, and a more appealing force. Of the older religion, the special characteristic—compared with the Greek and Roman world—was the impressing upon a whole people of a law of conduct, in which with a multitude of external ceremonies were bound up the fundamental principles of justice, benevolence, and chastity, enforced by the authority of a personal and righteous God. We see the educational effect upon the religious Hebrew of this clearly personal God. It constantly lifted him out of the littleness of self-consciousness, setting before his imagination the loftiest object. It gave definiteness and impressiveness to his best ideals. And, further, this anthropomorphism, as we name it now, was but the primitive expression of the principle which is central in all forms of religious faith, that man and the universe are in some deepest sense at one, and that man's closest approach to the secret of the universe lies through his own noblest development. That is one way of saying what the Jew felt when his imagination gave to the sternest command and the highest promise the sanction, "Thus saith the Lord."
The Hebrew religion was wrought out under constant pressure of disaster. It was the religion of a proud, brave people, who were constantly held in subjection to foreign conquerors. Hence came a quality of intense hostility to these tyrannical foes, and also a constant appeal to the Divine Power which seemed often to conceal itself. Hence—and from that sorrowful lot of the individual which often matches this national tragedy—hence comes the passionate, pleading, poignant quality through which the Old Testament has always spoken to the struggling and suffering,—with gleams of hope, the more intense from the clouds through which they shine.
The note of the New Testament is exultant. There is keen sense of present evil, endurance, struggle; but there is a deeper sense of a great deliverance already begun and to be perfected in the future. The heart of this new energy, joy, and hope is love for a human yet celestial friend. This love was awakened by a personality of extraordinary nobility and attractiveness. The personal affection inspired imagination and ideality to their highest flights. Its original object became invested with superhuman traits and elevated to a deity. To trace with certainty and minuteness the historic lineaments of the real man is not altogether possible; but the essential truth concerning him is sufficiently plain.
The biographies which we possess of Jesus were written from thirty to a hundred years after his death. In these records memory and imagination are intimately blended. On the one hand, the power and loftiness of his character and words stamped certain traits unmistakably and indelibly on the minds of his followers. But on the other hand, he was so suggestive and inspiring—there were among his disciples natures so susceptible, responsive, yet untrained, and their community was soon fused in such a contagion of passionate feeling unchecked by reason—that the seeds of his words and acts fruited in a rich growth of imagination, which blent closely with the historic reality. And with the central inspiration of his life there mixed in his followers ideas more or less foreign to him, so that the result in the Gospels is a composite which often defies certainty of analysis.
If we read with open mind the Gospel narratives, the foremost, vivid impression we get is of a personage using superhuman power over natural forces for the benefit of mankind. As he is described, Jesus is before all a worker of beneficent miracles. He is a teacher, too, and an unexampled one. But he enforces his teaching by means utterly transcending the credentials of other teachers. He is a tender human friend, but he expresses his friendship by services such as no other friend can render. He allays tempests by a word. He creates bread and wine at will. He heals the fevered, the lunatic, the blind. He raises the dead. In a word, he constantly exercises superhuman power. It is this, not less than the excellence of his teaching, which has distinguished him in the eyes of his worshipers. What is the wisest word about immortality worth—what do we care for what Socrates or Plato said—when here is one who raised Lazarus from the dead and rose himself? What need for any argument or assurance about Providence, when here is one through whom the very order of nature is set aside at the impulse of beneficent love?
But the growing difficulty in really believing the miracles and the growing preference for the purely human elements of the story have led in our time to a different conception.
The secret of Jesus was the idea and reality of a pure and ardent life. His genius lay in showing the possibilities of the human spirit, in its interior harmony and its relations with the world about it.Love your enemies,—in that word he reached the hardest and highest achievement of conduct.The pure in heart shall see God,—with that he put in the hands of the humblest man the key of the heavenly vision.
The Hebrew idea was righteousness, in the sense of chastity, justice, and piety. Jesus sublimated this,—in him chastity becomes purity; in place of justice dawns brotherhood; and piety changes from personal homage to a love embracing earth and heaven.
Jesus taught in parables. A story—an outward, objective fact, something which the imagination can body forth—often facilitates the impartation to another mind of a spiritual experience. The soul has no adequate language of its own,—it must borrow from the senses and the imagination.
The central idea of Jesus is expressed in the saying, "No man knoweth the Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the Father save the Son." That is, man is a mystery except to his Maker; he does not even understand himself. And correspondingly, "No man knoweth the Father save the Son:" only the obedient and loving heart recognizes the Divinity. God is not known by the intellect: he is felt through the moral nature. Peace, assurance, sense of inmost reality, comes through steadfast goodness.
Jesus impressed this idea by the figure of father and son. What symbol could he have used more intelligible? more universally coming home? Like all statements of highest truth, all symbols, it was imperfect; it did not furnish an adequate explanation of the workings of the universe. But, under the homeliest figure, under the guise of the nearest human relation, it expressed the greatest truth of the inner life.
Further, Jesus threw his emphasis where men need it thrown,—not on abstract ideas, but on action. His teaching was always as to conduct. Purity, forgiveness, rightness of heart were his themes.
Above all, he lived what he taught. He left the memory of a life which to his followers seemed faultless. And ever since, those who felt their own inadequacy have laid closest hold on his success, his victory, as somehow the pledge of theirs.
Jesus was a Jew, but in him there was born into the world a higher principle than Judaism. The historic lineage is not to be too much insisted on. When he said, "Love your enemies," "Forgive that ye may be forgiven," he brought into the traditional religion a revolutionary idea. Judaism was largely a religion of wrath. Jesus planted a religion of love.
The tender plant was soon half choked by the old coarse growth, and for many centuries the religion named after Christ had a vein of hate as fierce as the old Judaism. But blending with it, and struggling always for ascendency, was the religion of love, symbolized by the cradle of Bethlehem and the cross of Calvary.
Of the Judaic traits in Jesus, conspicuous was the prophetic feeling and tone. He was possessed with an absolute fullness of conviction, and spoke in a tone of blended ardor and certitude. "He taught as one having authority." He rarely gave reasons. If in his words we find appeal to precedent or argument, it is really as little more than illustration or picture to clothe his own intuition. His followers believed his words, either because of some conscious witness in their breasts, or because their love and reverence for him won for his assertions an unquestioning acceptance.
From Judaism he took the familiar idea of one all-powerful and holy God; a moral ideal which was chiefly distinguished from that of the Greek-Roman world by its greater emphasis on chastity; and also the belief in a constant divine interposition in human affairs, which soon was to culminate in the establishment of a divine kingdom on earth.
Jesus woke in his followers an ardor for goodness, a tenderness for their fellow men, and a supreme devotion to himself. His words went straight to the springs of character. He brushed aside religious ceremonial as of no importance. He sent the searching light of purity into the recesses of the heart. He made love the law of life and the key of the universe. He interpreted love, as a principle of human conduct, by illustrations the most homely, real, and tender. Love is no mere delicious emotion: it is giving our bread to the hungry, ourselves to the needy. It is not a mere felicity of kindred spirits,—love them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use you!
Jesus was the greatest of poets. To every fact, to every idea, he gave its most beautiful and spiritual interpretation. When he speaks of God, his speech is the pure poetry of the soul. Yahveh becomes to him the All-father. His providence is over the lilies and the sparrows. His rain and sunshine are shed on the unjust as on the just. His inmost nature is set forth by the human father meeting his returning prodigal a great way off. His very life is shared with his children. It wells up in Jesus himself: the light in his eyes, the tenderness in his tones, the yearning in his heart,—it ismy Fatherye know in me!
How does that Divine Power appear in the procedure of the universe? What real providence is there for the slain sparrow? What is the actual destiny of those human lives which show only frustration and failure? Jesus does not answer these questions. It does not appear that he tried to answer them. His words are filled with a glad, unquestioning trust. He is not the philosopher seeking to measure life. He is the lover living it, the poet delighting in it.
The secret of Jesus lay in his sense of the "kingdom of God" within him,—of obedience, peace, and joy, which was in itself sufficient. Simply to communicate and impart that was to spread the Kingdom among men.
A teacher like John the Baptist—possessed by the idea of righteousness, and of the world's deficiency, but without tranquillity in his own heart—could look only for a divine interposition, a catastrophe. John is a sort of Carlyle. But Jesus, hearing him, and brooding the deeper truth, goes about proclaiming a present heaven.
The marks of this inner state defined themselves against the conditions of life he saw about him.
Thus, he shows his estimate of wealth in the story of the young ruler."Sell all that thou hast and give to the poor!"
Toward the other prize which men most seek, reputation, his feeling is expressed to the two brethren asking chief places: "He that will be chief among you, let him be your servant."
As to learning, intellectual attainment, his characteristic word is, "Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes." "Be as little children."
The prevalent forms of religious observance he quietly acquiesced in, except where they barred the free play of human charity. Then he set the form aside, as being only the servant of the spirit. "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath."
Such was his attitude toward wealth, honor, intellectual wisdom, ceremonial.
Toward the outcasts, the publican and harlots, his attitude was of pure compassion. Toward the Pharisees it was denunciatory. Wealth of ceremony and poverty of spirit, self-complacency mixed with scorn for others and with hostility to new light and love, roused in him a wrath which broke in lightning-flashes. "Woe unto you! whited sepulchres full of dead men's bones, children of hell!"
In the ethics of Jesus chastity has a high place, yet he has few words about it. His is an exalted and ardent goodness, of which purity is an almost silent element. His effect is like that of a noble woman, whose presence is felt as an atmosphere. When he speaks, his words set the highest mark,—"Be pure inheart."
We may contrast the scene between Jesus and Mary Magdalene with that between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota. The philosopher is proof against allurement, and gives kindly advice, which clearly will have no effect; Jesus, without conscious effort, wakes a passion of repentance which transforms the life. So again we may compare the check which Epictetus prescribes against undue tenderness, "Say while you kiss your child, he is mortal," with the habitual attitude of Jesus toward children,—taking them in his arms, and saying, "Of such is the kingdom of heaven." It is in such scenes as these—in his relations especially with women and with children—that we best see the genius of the heart, the newness which came into the world with Jesus.
While dwelling in an inner realm of joy, he had the keenest sense of the sin and sorrow in men's lives. "He was filled with compassion for the multitude, as sheep having no shepherd." Their epilepsies, leprosies,—the hardness of heart, the insensibility to the higher life,—these moved him with a great pity. Scarcely save in little children did he see the heart-free joy, the natural freedom and happiness, which was his own. The hard-heartedness of the rich, the scorn of the self-righteous for the outcasts, moved his indignation. Thus the holy happiness of his own life was mingled with a profound sense of the trouble of other lives.
His reading of the trouble was very simple: there were but two forces in the world, moral good and evil, God and Satan, and God was shortly to give an absolute triumph to the good.
Among the chief impressions he made was that of commanding power. He must have been full of healthy and majestic manhood. Women and children were attracted to him, as the weak are attracted by the strong. In the storm on the lake, his spirit so rose above the elemental rage—as if upborne with delight by the sublime scene—that his companions forgot their fears, and in the remembrance it appeared to them that the sea and wind grew calm at his word. His strength seemed to impart itself to the weak, his health to the sick. The stories of marvel which richly embroider the whole story are partly the halos of imagination investing a personality which commanded, charmed, inspired.
Sometimes evil was considered the work of wicked spirits,—so especially in cases of lunacy. Over some such cases Jesus had a peculiar power. He even imparted this power to some of the disciples, who caught his inspiration. The disciples, and probably Jesus, believed that this power extended to other sicknesses. Of the uniformity of nature there is no recognition in the New Testament. Man's power over events is believed to be measured by his spiritual nearness to God. "If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed," ye can cast mountains into the sea.
When the soul exchanges its solitary communing for the actual world, it needs to see manifested there the divinity it has felt. Jesus found this manifestation partly in his power through faith to do "mighty works," partly in the expectation of the near coming of the Kingdom.
These in one sense typify the forms in which the religious soul always and everywhere finds the divine presence. Man himself masters the forces of nature, and as he does so has the consciousness of some higher power working through him. And he looks for a better future for himself and for mankind.
But the peculiarity of Jesus—looked at from a modern standpoint—was that he combined the most ardent, pure, and tender feeling and conduct with a simple belief that in the course of events only moral and spiritual forces are to be reckoned with; that man has power over nature in proportion to the purity and intensity of his trust in God; and that the whole order of society is to be speedily transformed by a divine interposition. These ideas were inwrought in Jesus, and blended with his ardor of goodness, his tenderness, his sense of a mission to seek and save the lost.
In his teaching, God feeds and clothes his children as he feeds the birds and clothes the grass. There is no need that they should be anxious about their physical wants. Their troubles will be banished if they will pray in faith. Disease, lunacy, all devilish evil, will vanish before the presence of the trusting child of God. All the injustice and wrong of the world are speedily to vanish through the direct intervention of God. It is the old anthropomorphic idea of God—the idea of the Prophet and Psalmist, wholly untouched by the questioning of Job; become tender, through the mellowing growth of centuries; sublimated in a heart of exquisite goodness and tenderness; and mixed with a visionary interpretation of the world.
What the ruling power of the universe will do he infers from the most attractive human analogy. If even an unjust human judge yields to the importunity of a petitioner, much more will the divine judge listen to the cry of the wronged and suffering. If a human father gives bread to his children when they ask, much more will the divine father.
We are to remember that Jesus shared the inheritance, the education, and the beliefs of the Galilean peasantry of his time. The force in him which winnowed the ideas of his people, selecting and sublimating the higher elements, was an exceptional moral and spiritual insight. This insight guided him far upward in truths of conduct and of emotional life. But it could not suffice to disclose those broad facts as to the procedure of the phenomena of nature which we call science. To the Jew of the New Testament period,—to Paul as much as to the fishermen of Galilee,—the world was directly administered by a personal being who habitually set aside for his own purposes the ordinary course of events. The higher minds of the Greek-Roman world had reached a different conception. Thinkers like Aristotle had assumed the constancy of nature as the basis of their teaching, poets like Lucretius had proclaimed it. But the great mass of the Greek-Roman world still believed, as the entire Jewish people believed, in the habitual intervention of some divine personality. What distinguished and dignified the Jewish belief was that it attributed all such interventions to a single deity who embodied the highest moral perfection, instead of to a mixed multitude representing evil as well as good impulses. All Jewish history was written on this hypothesis. The only records of the past which Jesus knew were the Old Testament and its Apocrypha, in which each crisis of the nation or the individual displayed the decisive interference of the heavenly power. The occurrences which we name miracles were hardly distinguished by the Jew as generically different from ordinary occurrences; they were only more marked and special instances of God's working. That a man especially beloved of God for his goodness should be given power to heal the blind and the lunatic seemed as natural as it was that his loving compassion should win the outcast and his fiery rebuke appall the hypocrite.
It seems clear that Jesus, not less than his disciples, regarded his power over physical ills as just as truly an incident of his character and mission as was the power to inspire conduct and reclaim the erring. What differentiated him from them was that he held the physical marvels of far less relative account than they did. Obscure as the detailed narratives must remain to us, it seems unmistakable that he habitually discouraged all publicity and prominence for his works of healing. His spiritual genius showed him that the stimulation of curiosity and expectation in this direction diverted men from the principal business of life, and the essential purport of his message,—to love, obey, and trust.
The point at which the idea of divine intervention most seriously affected his work seems to have been in his growing expectation of a speedy consummation which should in a day establish on earth the kingdom of truth and righteousness. His earlier teachings include striking utterances upon the gradual development of character in man, the slow ripening of society, as in the parables of the leaven and the sower. Here he was on the firm ground of his own observation and consciousness. But as the problem of his own mission pressed for an explicit solution; as the lofty passion of the idealist, the yearning tenderness of the lover of men, were thwarted and baffled by the prodigious inertia of humanity,—so he was thrown back more and more on that promise of some swift catastrophic judgment and triumph which was the closing word of ancient prophecy, and which seemed to answer the cry of his soul.
The later chapters of the synoptic Gospels are intensely colored with this anticipation of a divine judgment close at hand. The promise, the threat, the tremendous imagery, were dear to the heart of the early church. They fed the imagination of the mediaeval church. But that modern Christianity which finds in Christ the source and embodiment of all its own refined and exalted conceptions is inclined to look away from all this millennial prophecy; to weaken or ignore its significance, or to attribute it to the misconception of the disciples. This modern Christianity fastens its attention on those teachings of purely spiritual and universal truth in which Jesus indeed spoke as never other man spoke. This exclusive insistence on the ethical and spiritual element may suffice for those to whom Christ is an ideal or a divinity. But if we are to study the historical development of our religion, and not merely its present form, it seems necessary to recognize this belief in the Judgment and Advent as a very important factor in the story.
Unless we attribute to his disciples and biographers a misunderstanding almost inconceivable, he identified himself with the Son of Man whom the prophecy of Daniel and the popular belief expected to set up a divine kingdom on earth. The whole story in the later chapters of the Gospels is pervaded by this idea. The powerful imagery of a Day of Judgment, the splendid promises and lurid threatenings, the specific incidents of teaching and event, the overstrained eagerness,—which will not suffer a son to wait to bury his father, or allow a fig-tree to refuse miraculous fruit,—all agree in the presentation of Jesus as absorbed with this tremendous expectation.
That he was on the whole so little unsteadied by this anticipation seems due to his profound, sympathetic sense of the sad and sorrowful elements which somehow mingle with human destiny. He was not thinking chiefly of himself,—not even though he was to be God's vicegerent. What filled his heart, was the destiny of men. He wept over Jerusalem,—he mourned for those who would go away into darkness. The realities of human experience, widened by sympathy, came close home to him.
It seems plain—so far as anything can be plain in the details of the story—that as his mission went on his temper of a pure spiritual idealism changed into a controversy with the leaders of the established religion. He went to Jerusalem, foreseeing that the controversy would there take an acute form, with the gravest issues. At times the presage rose of his own defeat and death. Suppose that were to happen? Still—so spoke his victorious faith—God's cause would triumph. And it would triumph speedily and visibly. So he heartened his followers for any event. "Be prepared—you who are to me brothers and sisters and mother—be prepared even for my death. All the same, my truth will vindicate itself, God will triumph, you shall be saved!"
Jerusalem, it is plain, struck him much as Rome did Luther. Gorgeous buildings, splendid ceremonies, august authorities, and along with it a mass of greed, formality, worldliness.
A solemn sense comes over him that this cannot endure. The disciples childishly marvel at the splendid Temple, but its gorgeousness strikes him as earthly, sensuous, perishable, and he says, "There shall not one stone be left upon another."
His indignation rises and seeks expression in some outward act which shall blaze upon the dull multitude the sense of their sinful state. He goes into the courts of the Temple, drives out the money-changers and merchants, overthrows their tables, scatters all the apparatus of trade. This is the turning-point in his career; he has given an effective handle against him to the formalists and bigots who already hated him, and they speedily bring about his ruin.
The life of Jesus culminates in the scenes of the last night. At the supper, sure now of his impending fate, his willing self-devotion expresses himself in that poetry of humble objects which was characteristic of him, and with passionate intensity. "This bread is my body." "This wine is my blood." "I give myself for you."
The scene in Gethsemane shows the dismay and recoil of the hour when his ardent faith met full the stern actuality. God was not to interfere, defeat and death were before him. All was hidden, save a fate which rose upon his imagination in dark terror. "O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me!" Then comes the victory of absolute self-surrender, "Not my will, but thine, be done."
The birth-hour of the religion of Jesus was that in which he began to declare forgiveness to the outcast and good tidings to the poor. But the birth-hour of Christianity, as the worship of Jesus, was that in which Mary Magdalene saw her master as risen and eternally living.
The impulse which caught up and gave wings to his work just when it seemed crushed came from the heart of Mary. In a spiritual sense the mother of Christianity was a woman who had been a sinner, and was forgiven because she loved much. The faith that sent the disciples forth to conquer the world was the faith that their Lord was not dead but living, not a memory but a perpetual presence. That conviction first flashed into the heart of Mary. It was born of a love stronger than death, the love of a rescued soul for its savior. It sprang up in a mind simple as a child's, incapable of distinguishing between what it felt and what it saw, between its own yearning or instinct and the actualities of the outward world. It took bodily form under a glow of exaltation that knew not itself, whether in the body or out of the body. It crystallized instantly into a story of outward fact. It communicated itself by sympathetic intensity to other loving and credulous hearts. They too saw the heavenly vision. Its acceptance as a reality became the corner-stone of the new society. About it grew up, in ever increasing fullness and definiteness of outline, a whole supernal world of celestial personalities. But the initial fact was the heart's conviction—Jesus lives! Our friend and master is not in the grave, nor in the cold underworld; he is the child of the living God, and he draws us toward him in that divine and eternal life.
To get some partial comprehension of how the belief in Jesus' resurrection took possession of the disciples' minds, we are to remember that during the last months of their master's life he was in a state of tense, high-wrought expectation, which communicated itself to them. Something wonderful was just about to happen. There was to be a sudden and amazing manifestation of divine power, by which the kingdom of God was to triumph and thenceforth to reign. But the way to this consummation might lead through the valley of the shadow of death. In the soul of Jesus a sublime hope and a dark presage alternated and mingled. It is not to be supposed that he held a definite and unchanging conception. Cloud-shadows and sunbursts played by turns across him, with the intensity natural to a soul of vast emotions. Constant through it all was the fixed purpose to be true to his mission, and with victorious recurrence came his confidence in the divine issue. His sympathetic disciples were vaguely, profoundly stirred by this elemental struggle and victory. They too became intensely expectant of some great catastrophe and triumph. After the first shock of the Master's death, all this emotion surged up in them afresh, with their love heightened as death always heightens love, with the fresh and vivid memories of their leader sweeping them on in the current of his purpose and hope and faith. His words were true,—he must, he will, conquer and reign. If he has gone to the underworld, he will live again. "Will,"—nay, is he not here with us now? Is he not more real to our thought and love than ever before? And first in one mind, then in another, the conviction flashes into bodily image. Mary has seen the Master! Peter has seen him! And for a little time—for "forty days"—the electric air seems often to body forth that luminous shape. The story, as it grew with years, took on one detail after another, became definite and coherent, was accepted as the charter and foundation of the little society.
To rightly understand the faith of the disciples in the risen Christ, we must look below the stories of sense-appearance in which that faith clothed itself. What they essentially felt—what distinguished their faith from a mere opinion or dogma—was not a mere expectation, "The deadwillrise;" not a mere fact of history, "Some onedidrise;" it was the conviction and consciousness, "Our friendis living." It was an experience—including and transcending memory and hope—of present love, present communion, present life.
Sight and speech lent their forms to clothe the ineffable experience of Mary and the disciples. For us, the story of outward events—the visible form, the eating of bread and fish, the conversations, the floating up into the clouds—all this fades away as a mirage. The reality below this symbol—the sense of the human friend's continued and higher life—this abides and renews itself; not as an isolated historic fact, but as an instance and counterpart of the message which in every age comes to the bereaved heart—of a love greater than loss, a life in which death is swallowed up.
The religion of the followers of Jesus became a centring of every affection, obligation, and hope, in him.
For the first few years all this was merged in the eager expectation of his return. While this lasted in its fullness, even memory was far less to them than hope. They did not attempt any complete records of his earthly life,—what need of that, when the life was so soon to be resumed? The bride on the eve of her marriage is not reading her old love-letters,—she is looking to the morrow.
That first eager flush had already passed when the earliest gospels were written. By that time hope had begun to prop its wavering confidence, by looks turned back even to a remote past. Hence the constant appeals to the supposed predictions of the Old Testament; hence even the imagining of special events in the life of Jesus to fulfill those predictions.
The Old Testament as conceived by the writers of the New is fantastically unlike the original writings. The Evangelists found Messianic prophecies everywhere. The writers of the Epistles, Paul and the rest, dealt with ceremonies and histories as a quarry out of which to hew whatever allegory or argument suited their purpose.
In Luke's Gospel we first see fully displayed the idea of Christ which took possession of the common mind, and has largely held it ever since,—a personal Savior,—a gracious, merciful, all-powerful deliverer. It is a gospel of the imagination and the heart—inspired by the actual Jesus, but half-created by ardent, adoring imagination.
This conception grew up side by side with Paul's. It is far closer to the popular mind and heart than Paul's idea,—his was philosophic and metaphysic; this is pictorial. Paul has been studied by theologians, but the Gospels have given the Christ of the common people.
The early church was divided into two parties, of which one was led by Paul, who stood for the free inclusion of all who would accept Jesus as the Messiah, and would impose no further requirement of ceremony or dogma, trusting all to the guidance of "the Spirit"—the Spirit of which the sufficient fruit and evidence was "love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance." The other party, led by disciples who had known and followed Jesus himself, maintained that the entire Jewish law was still in force, and treated Paul as a dangerous heretic. To narrate the struggle and the final reconcilement is beyond the purpose of this book, but we must pause a moment on the figure of Paul.
It marks the extraordinary force and vividness of Paul's character, that in a few pages of letters, in which the autobiography is only brief and incidental, he has so displayed himself that few historical characters are more familiar.
We see him,—deep-hearted, vehement, irascible, tender, self-assertive; intensely bent on the higher life; thwarted in that aspiration by unruly passion,—lust of the flesh and pride of the spirit; stumbling, stammering, conquering; a nature full of internal conflict, brought into harmony by one sublime spiritual affection; thenceforth throwing its whole energy into the diffusion of a like harmony throughout this world of troubled conflict.
We see a mind guided in its deepest workings by the realities of personal experience, but wholly untrained in logic, unversed in accurate knowledge; acquainted with history only through the Old Testament; ignorant of the philosophy of Greece; taught by intimate association with many men and women in their deepest personal experiences; familiar by travel and observation with the broad life of the time, and judging it from a lofty ethical standpoint; wholly credulous as to miracle; wholly confident in its own theories—theories gendered in the strangest wedding of fact and fancy; using constantly the form of argument, which often is pure fantasy; illumined by gleams of spiritual insight, which sometimes broaden into pure radiance; striving always to express the conscious fact of a great freedom of the soul which binds it fast to all duty; aiming at a human society dominated wholly and solely by the same spiritual principle; but often clothing both the personal and social ideal in forms of thought which have become obsolete, so that for us to-day his truth has to be stated in other language, and broadened by other truths.
Where Paul has always touched men closest is in the earnestness and difficulty of his struggle for the good life, and in the sense of a celestial aid,—he calls it "the love of Christ,"—which somehow brings habitual victory in the conflict, and sheds peace in its pauses, and gives assurance of ultimate triumph and perfect fruition.
The main theme for which Paul contends in most of his epistles was vital to the life of the early church,—that its members were not to be held to observance of the Jewish ritual. In support of that theme, Paul develops his philosophy of the universe. The main lines of that philosophy are essentially these: that when God had created man, man's sin incurred the penalty of death; that God chose the Jews as his peculiar people, and gave them the code of laws contained in the books of Moses; that the law was too difficult for weak human nature to perfectly obey, so that death still reigned on earth, with dire penalty impending in the afterworld; that God then had recourse to another plan. He sent his Son into the world, who became a man, taking on him that fleshly nature which is the occasion and the symbol of human transgression, but which he wore in perfect holiness. God then caused this fleshly nature of Jesus to die upon the cross, while the spiritual nature outlived the perishing body, appeared in radiant form to men, and returned to the eternal realm. By this visible sign God made proclamation to mankind, "Die unto sin by forsaking sin, and I will give you holiness which issues in eternal life. The death and resurrection of my son, Jesus Christ, are the token and promise of my free gift, which only asks your acceptance. Accept it, by turning from sin, and you shall receive the sense of companionship with Christ, and the consciousness of a divine power working in you and in the world. Of set laws you have no longer need; rites and ceremonies were but the type of the reality which now is freely given to you. Your sole obligation is to love; your fidelity to that shall constantly merge in the sense of joyful freedom; the imperfect attainment of earth shall issue into the eternal felicity of heaven."
In such language we try to restate Paul's philosophy. Thus, or somewhat thus, he thought. Just how he thought we can never be sure, nor does it matter. The mould of his belief was so different from ours that all which closely concerns us is to discern if we can what was the kernel of genuine experience, the permanent reality and truth, which vivified this world-scheme.
In Paul before his conversion we see the man who struggles to conform to a standard of conduct so high, exacting, and minute, that it touches every particular of life, and who yet is beset by a constant sense of failure and disappointment. From this slough of despond he is lifted—how? By the sense of a love which extends to him from the unseen world. It takes form to him as the personal love of one who has lived, has died, and in some inexpressible way still lives. This friendship in the unseen world is the sufficient, the absolute pledge of a God who loves and saves. No matter what be the theory about it, of incarnation or atonement, here is the reality as it comes home: the man Jesus, highest, noblest, dearest, makes himself real and present to me, though long ago he died and was laid in the grave. This one fact carries answer enough for all the craving of heart and soul. That I shall at last triumph over all besetting evils, that the ruler of the universe is my friend, that earth is the vestibule of heaven,—all this I can joyfully believe when once I have the sense of that single human friend still befriending me in the unseen world.
This was what the risen Christ meant to the early church. This was the common belief that bound its two parties, the Jewish and the Pauline Christians, at last into one. This was what gave the full meaning to all the stories of Jesus told over and over and at last written down. This was what fired the common heart of mankind as not the wisdom of Plato nor the nobility of Epictetus had touched it.
Paul's experience is the more remarkable because he had never even seen Jesus in the flesh. He had borne in a sense a personal relation to him, in the fact that he had hated and persecuted his followers. The conviction that he had been in the wrong came to him with a tremendous revulsion of feeling. The poignancy of remorse was followed by an exquisite sense of forgiveness, which shed its depth and tenderness on his whole after-life. In him we first see the power of the personality of Jesus to touch those who never had seen him.
At such points we feel how shallow is the plummet-line with which our so-called psychology measures the "soul" it deals with. The influence, the presence, the living love, of one who has died,—how paradoxical, how unintelligible, to our human science; how significant to our human experience!
What concerns us historically as to Paul is that he was the conspicuous agent in transforming this sentiment into a moral force. The belief that Jesus was risen had great emotional power, but that emotion might easily waste itself, might even undermine the solid foundations of character. Paul held the belief in its literal form, but it had for him a further significance, as the symbol and type of the soul's experience in its every-day walk. The death we are most concerned about is the extinction of evil act and desire. Life—the only life worth thinking of, here or hereafter—is lofty, pure, and tender life. Die to sin, live to holiness, and present or future is safe with God.
Paul's theology is in one sense a passage in a long chapter of pseudo-science. It is one of a series of attempts to explain the universe from a starting-point of fable. These have been the accompaniment—sometimes as help, sometimes as obstacle—of a spiritual life far deeper than the stammering language they found. And it is to be noted that Paul himself when at his best rises above his theology or forgets it. The words of his which have lodged deepest in the world's heart are the vital precepts of conduct, and the utterances of love and hope. In one matchless passage, he celebrates "charity"—simple human love—as the one sufficient, supreme, and eternal good.
Some misconceptions in his philosophy became the fruitful seeds of mischievous harvests. One such seed was the ambiguous sense of "faith"—the confusing of intellectual credence with moral fidelity. This misconception—which underlies much of the New Testament—was an almost inevitable incident of a religion generated as this was. Christianity based itself, in its own theory, on the bodily resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This was offered as a basis for the whole appeal which the church made to the world. Thus Belief—or Credulity—usurped the place among the virtues which of right belongs to Truth.
Another misconception lay in the use of "flesh," the antithesis of "spirit," as the name of the evil principle. Paul indeed uses "the flesh" in no restricted sense of merely sensual sin. With him it equally includes all other forms of wrong, like malevolence and pride and self-seeking. But the nomenclature and the way of thought which it reflected put a stigma on the whole physical nature of man. In that stigma lay the germ of asceticism, hostility to marriage, depreciation of some vital elements of man's nature.
Paul's conception of the church never was fully realized. He expected to see the whole body of believers filled with a "holy spirit," a divine-human inspiration, which should of itself guide them into all truth and duty. Outward law or doctrine there needed none, beyond the acceptance of Christ as God's son who had lived and died and risen. Accept that, and the divine spirit would be given you. No need then of circumcision or sacrifice, of Sabbath or fast, of written code or human ruler. The saint is free from all law but that of love; the company of saints needs no control or guidance but that.
The beautiful ideal shattered itself against a stubborn fact. Love of Christ did not guide his followers into all truth, or into harmony with each other. Paul's life was half spent in a bitter contest with men who loved Christ as well as he did. His epistles are full of the struggle with that great party of Christ's followers who called him a heretic and sought to win away his converts. Suppose any one had asked him: "You say the spirit of Christ will guide his followers into all truth,—why does it not guide these Christian Jews and you into so much of truth as will make you friends instead of foes?"
Paul was hoping too much. The new impulse in the world—sublime, beautiful, full of power and promise—was by no means sufficient to lead the world straight and sure to harmonious perfection. There was no such gift of "the spirit" as to supersede all search, all struggle, all human leadership and human groping. That hope was almost as exaggerated as the expectation—with which in Paul's mind it mingled—of Christ's bodily return. The road to be traveled by mankind was still long and arduous.
Any complete history of the early church must deal largely with the stubborn and bitter contest between the Jewish and Pauline parties,—the champions of the law and the champions of liberty. That contest gave its stamp to the epistles of Paul, and was indeed their most frequent occasion. At a later time the attempt to harmonize the two parties seems to have given birth to the book of Acts, in which history mixes with fiction. But we are here concerned only with such features of the history as made the most vital and permanent contributions to religion, and for this purpose we need only specify the Epistle to the Ephesians.
This epistle opens the heart of the early church. It assumes to be written by Paul, but there are some indications that this name was borrowed by the real author. This assumption of a great name, so common in this age, as in the books of Daniel, Wisdom of Solomon, Enoch, and others, marks a timidity, a deference to authority of the past. Only the greatest, like Jesus and Paul, dared to speak in their own name.
Primarily the epistle is a plea for unity between Jewish and Gentile Christians,—broadening into an appeal for unity between all classes and individuals, an appeal for purity and holiness, in the name of Christ the head. Occasional sentences and phrases will sufficiently show its tenor and spirit.
"That Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith, that ye, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth and length and depth and height, and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fullness of God."
"There is one body and one spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all who is above all and through all and in you all." "Endeavoring to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace."
Each has his appointed place, some as apostles, some as prophets, some for humbler service,—for "the building up of the body of Christ," "till we all come into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ."
"Putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another." "Let him that stole steal no more, but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth."
The note of purity is far higher than in Stoic or Platonist. Uncleanness is spurned with the horror which pure love and holiness inspire.
"Fornication, and all uncleanness or covetousness, let it not be once named among you, as becometh saints. Neither filthiness, nor foolish talking, nor jesting, which are not becoming, but rather giving of thanks. For this ye know, that no whoremonger nor unclean person nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no man deceive you with vain words, for because of these things cometh the wrath of God upon the children of disobedience." "Be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess, but be filled with the spirit."
There is a tender exhortation to husband and wife, based on the likeness of their union to Christ and his church. There is a special word to children, servants, masters. The sweetness is matched by the strength. "Finally, my brethren, be strong in the Lord, and in the power of his might."
The epistle is full of the spirit of a present heaven. There is scarcely any thought of the future, no reference to the second coming, no dwelling on the hereafter. It is all-sufficient, all-uniting love,—Christ, a spiritual presence, as the head—God the Father of all. The love of Christ is a pure spiritual passion. There is no theorizing about him, not even much personal distinctness,—only the consciousness as of some celestial personality. The seen and unseen worlds seem to blend in a common atmosphere.