ae She I wat Seve or een ag eo ica, ed, z Cre Z 7 Trae , : S re panes eee Behe Meee Saltese i a ee era See ages Bea at re swede we ree OCT 19 1924 ie ; Ys a <2 d6icar sew a ne ms « , CONCERNING CHRIST ier. a ee « Concerning Christ f A. H.'MCNEILE, D.D. Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Dublin ; Fellow of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. D. APPLETON AND COMPANY NEW YORK : : MCMXXIV PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN Preface SERMONS and addresses originally spoken to a variety of congregations are here arranged so as to form roughly a connected series. The first Part is concerned with the earthly life of Christ—Child and Man—leading to some doctrinal considerations of His Nature and Person. The second Part is similarly arranged: the stories of Passion week, rich in practical lessons for the spiritual life, are followed by a few chapters in which an attempt is made to suggest a line of thought by which to approach the study of the great and complex doctrine of the Atonement. Ideas on religious things to-day change their colours and shapes with kaleidoscopic variety. Nothing can fix them into a permanent pattern. But the one imperative need is that the pattern should be kept at all times in the direct rays of the Sun, that each variety in turn may shine. And therefore no effort of the Christian preacher can be quite wasted if he offers his own fragmentary ideas in ‘the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.’ A. H. MCNEILE. DUBLIN, September, 1923. et i Si ay #8 * 7 ; aa) ae awe a * hs 7 a avasd pe tae 00s as 44 Te Contents PAGB INTRODUCTION.—WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY? > ix PART I. I. THE PREPARATION” - - - - - I 2. THE CHILD - - - - - - 6 3. THE SEARCH - - - - - - II 4. EPIPHANY - - - - - : 16 5. THE Boy - - - - - - 21 6. THE IMAGE oF Gop Se CARRION 47. INSTINCTS - - - : - - 40 8. PARADOXES - - - - - - 49 Q. ECCENTRICITY - - - - ~ - 53 IO. REPENTANCE - - - - - - 59 rr. THE PRINCELY SPIRIT ” - - - 65 12. PRINCIPLES - - - - - - 7 fe 13. THE REAL MAN - - - - - 80 PART II. I. TRIUMPH - - - - - - - 85 2. JUDAS - - - - - - - go 3. SILENCE - - - - - : - 96 4. SIMON THE CYRENIAN - - - - 103 5. PILATE’S PLACARD - - - - = LOO) 6. JOSEPH OF ARIMATHAEA - - - - II4 7. SACRIFICE - - - - - - “Ttg 8. METAPHORS OF SALVATION : - - 126 g. FIRST PRINCIPLES’ - - - - - 133 10. ATONEMENT - . - - - - 139 II. EXPERIENCE - - - - - - 149 vii Introduction WHAT IS CHRISTIANITY ? CHRISTIANITY is Christ; He is its Centre, its Soul, its All. And we are going to meditate on some of the wonderful features of Him and it. When He was on earth He asked “Who do men say that I am?’ There is no doubt that people thought very highly of Him. They felt Him to be really great; far above any ordinary man of His day. They could not tell Him to His face..what they thought of Him; but the disciples knew; they went about among the villages and heard people talk. Some said He was John the Baptist, who had recently been killed by Herod; some said Elijah; others Jeremiah, or one or other of the great prophets of old come to life again. And they were all wrong; He was far greater than any notion that they could form of Him. That is very much what many people do to-day. They have a polite respect for Christianity; they think that it means this and that and the other; they form out of their own minds an inadequate notion of what Christ is; and then they are not satisfied. They picture a Christ suited to their own level of thought, and then realize that the picture is not good enough. For vast numbers of people the fact of Christ has become like a rapidly fading photograph, the features of which have almost gone. The picture is put away in the disused album of outworn memories, and they are content to go on with their ix x INTRODUCTION quiet, respectable, good-natured worldliness as though there never had been a Christ at all. Who do men say that Christ is? Some say, John the Baptist; a strong, stern figure, who cried Repent! He drew men in crowds, that strange, rugged son of the desert. He condemned the Pharisees and Sadducees, he spoke home truths to the collectors of custom and to the Roman soldiers, he denounced to his face Herod the adulterer. But ‘he that is least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he.’ To rebuke sin, however fearlessly, to cry Repent! with a voice however searching, is not Christianity. But many people to-day think it is; Christianity means being good, and denouncing everything wrong. John the Baptist was a stern and solitary ascetic; he came, as our Lord expressed it, ‘neither eating nor drinking’; and the Jews said ‘He hath a devil.’ A life of strenuous self-denial was more than they could stand. And some to-day, who don’t want to deny themselves at any price, think of Chris- tianity as a so-called Gospel, of which the only message is “You mustn't do that.’ Christianity does, indeed, involve self-denial; Christ said quite clearly that no one could be His follower without it. But John the Baptist was a Jew, and nothing but a Jew. If we are insearch for true Christianity we must find something better and larger than the very best Judaism. And others say, Elijah—even further removed from the fullness of Christ; one who brought murderous flashes of lightning to shrivel up a hundred men; one who took the lead in slaughtering INTRODUCTION xl the prophets of Baal en masse; one who, according toS. James’ epistle, prayed for adrought which lasted eighteen months, with all the suffering that that would mean to innocent and guilty alike in the whole population. What do men say that Chris- tianity is? Some say it is a religion of pains and penalties; a religion that says, Be good, for fear of the wrath to come, for fear of the terrible Judge, or the fires of purgatory, or the bitter pains of eternal death. It is strange that while people are quite able to realize that a religion of mere pains and penalties is not a very noble religion, so many still cling to the notion, which thinking Christians have long given up, that the religion of the New Testament is not essentially different from that of the Old; that Christ is the same as Elijah: that God is chiefly and primarily a God who punishes. And this old-world, Jewish notion is carried by some people into the very heart of their Christian theology. A God who punishes must punish someone, and if He doesn’t punish sinners He punishes Christ instead. Many are quite sure that that is not true, but they think that Christianity teaches that it is, and so they think that Christianity is mistaken. And others say, Jeremiah, the sorrowful prophet to whose message no one would listen, ‘Hear ye and give ear for the Lord hath spoken. ... But if ye will not hear, my soul shall weep in secret for your pride; and mine eyes shall weep sore and run down with tears, because the Lord’s flock is taken captive.’ ‘Let mine eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease, for XU INTRODUCTION the virgin daughter of my people is broken with a very grievous wound.’ ‘Oh that my head were waters, and mine eyes a fountain of tears, that I might weep day and night for the slain of the daughter of my people.’ That seems to be the notion that some people have of Christianity; they think of it as a state of mind of sentimental people who occupy themselves chiefly in bemoaning the sinfulness of the world. Oh how wicked everyone is! What terrible power the devil has over the lives of men! The world was wicked enough before the war, and God afflicted it with a very grievous wound for more than four years. But instead of repenting of its sins, it seems to be worse than ever. Industrial strife, political strife, international strife, are bringing Europe to its doom. And Christianity is pictured as standing by, helplessly weeping and wringing its hands over the evil which it can do nothing to stop. The Church of Christ watches her sons being led into captivity to the world the flesh and the devil—Rachel weeping for her children— and powerless to save. Some say that Christ is Jeremiah. The strong religion of the Son of God, which, whether men profess themselves Christians or not, inspires and keeps alive every- thing in Europe that makes for peace and righteous- ness, is supposed to be a pessimistic piety, sad and useless. And if Christ was not one of these three, John the Baptist who stood for repentance and self- denial, Elijah for rebuke and punishment, Jeremiah for sorrow and weeping, then He was thought INTRODUCTION Xlil to be some other prophet. Christianity is some other sentiment, or idea, or philosophy, by itself unsatisfying because incomplete. But who say ye that lam? What is Christianity? The question has been discussed times without number. But yet I think it is the duty of every preacher of the Christian Gospel to sketch for himself the lines along which he proposes to travel to find an answer. It is sometimes said that a seed or germ contains potentially all that is in the full-grown product. But this is an inaccurate use of language. A seed does not grow by un- folding what it already contains. The life, the self, the psyche of the seed possesses the power of taking to itself outside elements, and of adapting and co-ordinating them in such a way as to build them up into a continuously changing instrument of its self-expression, and of discarding elements which were formerly useful but have become useless. What is identical in the full-grown product and in the seed is nothing but the one and the same permanent life or self. And the so-called develop- ment of doctrine can be thought of as analogous. It is the permanent, the persisting essence of Chris- tianity progressively expressing itself. What then is that essence? Like a seed, it is the product of two elements, one of which fertilizes, fructifies the other. Our Creed says that Jesus Christ was ‘conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary.’ That statement accurately corresponds to the description that we can give of the birth of Christianity. It was born of Jewish ancestry; its essence, its very self, includes a permanent element derived from X1v INTRODUCTION its Hebrew past. Jesus Christ was not the Baptist, but no less than the Baptist He preached repentance and self-denial. He was not Elijah, and yet Elijah himself did not recognize more clearly that sin brings pains and penalties. And far more than Jeremiah, He was a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief because of the guilt and sorrows of men. Hebrew morality, obedience to the transcendent God who hates sin, was one element which played its part in the birth of Christianity, contributing its necessary quota to its permanent essence. A so- called Christianity in which morality, righteous conduct, obedience, are absent, means nothing at all. But though born of a Jewish mother, Chris- tianity could not come into being without the supernatural operation of the Holy Ghost. Morality unaided is sterile; it abideth by itself alone, pos- sessing no power of upspringing growth and ex- pansion. Obedience to law cannot give life. It must be rendered productive by the entrance of God’s life into mankind, which is what we mean by the Incarnation. The product of the divine and human elements is Christ in mankind, and that is Christianity. It was not rhetoric but an entire religious philosophy 7m muce when S. Paul said, “To me to live is Christ.’ Our difficulty, of course, lies in relating the earthly life of Christ to His universal life as the spiritual source and centre of the life of all men. I think a stumbling-block in the minds of many is that they identify humanity with the limitations of humanity as we know it. But everything in true humanity, everything in the real man, is in God. The essence of God is perfect goodness, INTRODUCTION XV with love as its primary expression, love that can sympathize, love that must suffer for others, love that redeems. And that essence of God, ‘the Character of His Hypostasis,’ as the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, took an individual human per- sonality, under the conditions of time and space, as the instrument of His Self-expression to men. The same passage of the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks of the Son of God as ‘the Effulgence of His Glory,’ as the light which proceeds from the sun. We can have no sight or immediate knowledge of sunlight as it is in itself. If we could suppose the earth to be surrounded by no atmosphere, sunlight would not appear to us as light. It is revealed by means of the limitations which the atmosphere imposes. It does not cease to be in itself the in- visible and unknowable thing that light really is; but it is only as passing through the atmosphere that it becomes a phenomenon. God’s Essence is manifested to men in the Incarnate Christ, and without the limitations of time and space He ‘who dwells in light unapproachable, whom no man hath seen or can see,’ would be unknowable. The human life of Jesus was the Divine Life re- vealed by being conditioned. But because through Him the Life of God entered into humanity, and because through Him the Love of God suffered in order to save, the Divine-Human Christ is the Life and Atonement of men. All ‘developments’ of doctrine arise from the pressure, the living urge of the essence of Christianity for progressive self- expression. But the permanent essence is that which is born of Hebrew morality fructified by the entrance of God Himself. oP 4 eS ey) ” i ge ve Part I 1. THE PREPARATION. CHRISTIANITY is Christ, and we must ‘consider Him’ from His birth and onwards. But before doing that, it will be helpful to think of the prepara- tion for it in the hearts of His people. In studying any life—and the greatest Life is no exception— it adds to the understanding of it to see how it takes its place historically in the long_ progress of the working out of God’s purposes for the world. Israel had been gradually guided in the direction of the great meaning which Christ’s coming has for us. And this movement of thought is summed up in a few words in the Benedictus, the song of Zachariah (S. Luke 1. 68-79). The careful arrangement of the song is not always noticed. The singer first states the great fact, ‘God hath visited and redeemed His people;’ he meant only His people Israel, but we know that it includes all who should ever become His people in any nation under heaven. That is the Christmas message. And He has done so by one of the house, the family, of His servant David, one who has been ‘raised up’ on the stage of history as ‘a horn of salvation—a mighty salvation—for us.’ The mean- ing of Christ’s coming is stated at the outset— Visitation, Redemption, Salvation. But then, in the second part of the poem, the singer’s thoughts go back behind the present to the long divine preparation for the great event. It I B 2 CONCERNING CHRIST has often been pointed out that while other nations always looked back to a golden age in the past, Israel steadily kept their golden age in the future, an age which would set in when all nations had been conquered, and then God’s chosen people would revel in a luxury of peace, wealth, and world- wide dominion for ever. And prophet after prophet corrected these worldly hopes, and predicted that the good time to come would be only when Israel had been purified from sin. Not till then would they be delivered from their foreign foes and live in the happiness of an ideal nation. The singer thinks of all this when he says, ‘As He spake by the mouth of His holy prophets which have been since the world began, that we should be saved from our enemies and from the hands of all that hate us.’ But the predictions of the prophets were not all. He adds ‘to perform mercy with our forefathers, and to remember His holy covenant.’ If the prophets could be mistaken, God could not, and He had promised. The words refer primarily to the covenant of circumcision, a binding agreement, so to speak, between God and man. And yet to make assurance doubly sure he adds, ‘the oath which He sware to our forefather Abraham.’ ‘By Myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, that in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ And what is this binding covenant and oath? Exactly the same as the predictions of all the prophets, ‘that He would grant unto us that we being delivered out of the hands of our enemies might serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.’ THE PREPARATION 3 That was the preparation by prophecy, covenant, and oath; an age-long hope; ‘the hope of Israel,’ as St. Paul calls it; ‘the hope of the promise made by God unto our fathers, unto which our twelve tribes, earnestly serving God night and day, hope to come.’ In the next piece of the poem the singer, having dealt with the past, returns to the present. We are carried from the Old Testament to the New. He says to his infant son John, “And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest, for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare His way, to give knowledge of salvation unto His people, in the remission of their sins.’ The same message, the same shining hope—salvation. But John was to give knowledge of it; he was to tell people that the undying hope was on the verge of being fulfilled, that he was preparing the way for the very Saviour Himself, And so in the last sentences the singer comes back to where he started, to the great and wonderful fact of Christmas—‘ because of the tender mercy of our God, whereby the Dayspring from on High hath visited us, to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.’ We commemorate Easter every Sunday, but also every Sunday when we sing the Benedictus we sing of Christmas. We have now divided the poem into its four parts—the statement of the Christmas fact, the preparation for it by prophecy, covenant, and oath, the message of John the Baptist that the salvation 4 CONCERNING CHRIST was immediately to come, and lastly the re-state- ment of the Christmas fact. But we can look at it a little more closely, and trace the progress of thought which it contains. God revealed His truth gradually, in many parts and by many methods. And in these twelve verses we see con- centrated the whole development of man’s growing comprehension of the meaning of salvation. It begins with the most simple and primitive notion of early Israel. They were possessed by the idea that God was only the God of Israel, as the first verse of the poem calls Him. The nation and their land belonged to Him, and He tothem. He had no other care, no other love. Being what He was, He was bound to protect them, and to send them a king in the house of His servant David, who would be a horn of salvation to save them from their enemies and from the hands of all that hated them. It was a salvation wrought for them. They could be entirely passive. Whether their lives were good or bad mattered not. Goodness and badness did not enter into the scheme. They were a long way from the Christian hope. Then came the prophets from Amos onwards. They bravely stood forth and told them that they were all wrong; that God was not merely a fighting Chief; He was a Being of moral character, a God of holiness, truth, purity, and love. And that the good time to come could not come until His nation reached a character like His. They must be obedient to His moral com- mands; they must be free from murder, adultery, stealing, false witness, and all other sins against God and against men; and then the hope of Israel THE PREPARATION 5 would be attained. They would serve Him without fear, 1% holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of their hfe. It was a splendid step in advance. Israel drew nearer to God than any other nation on earth before Christ came, because their ideal rose from national sucess to national righteous- ness. And until our ideal does the same—until national self-assertion is transcended by national uprightness—we have not yet reached even to the level of the Hebrew prophets. But they had not yet reached the pie e hope. Merely to be good, not to do wrong things, not to be disobedient to God’s law, is far short of the Christian ideal. And so we move on. The Christian ideal, and nothing less, we must have, or else the divine event of Christmas day was worthless and futile. The Christian salvation is not a passive deliverance, something wrought for us once and for all by the mighty hand of God. And it is not a mere being good, obedience to God’s commands. It is a living and growing thing. Our salvation is not complete until we are complete. And the knowledge of salvation taught by John the Baptist was the knowledge of something that begins with the remission of sins. Christmas, the day of the mystery of the Incarnation, was the beginning of Christ’s own growing life of obedience, ending with the climax of the Cross, And in virtue of that Birth, Life, and Death, our salvation begins with forgiveness, If anyone were to imagine that penitence should be kept for Lent, he would shew that he had not grasped the truth that our salvation must begin at the beginning. If Christmas has in it 6 CONCERNING CHRIST no penitence, it has no joy. It may have parties and presents and feasting and fun, but they are mere pagan merriment unless they are made warm and fragrant with the joy that comes from the remission of sins. But that is only the beginning. Our salvation is a life-long process; a growth, as Christ’s life was a growth from infancy. He is the Dayspring from on High, not only to give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of death; not only to make them come forth from their sins by penitence and the virtue of His Atonement; but also to go on gradually guiding their feet into the way of peace. The world is crying for peace. Each human heart, unconsciously if not consciously, is crying for peace. And it will find it only when it walks in the light of the Incarnate Son of God. 2. THE CHILD. A Baby, tiny, helpless, unconscious. Why does He draw to Himself the thoughts of the world? Why do men, women, and children, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, bow in adoration before Him? Every Christian woman would like to imagine Him lying in her arms. But let us look at Him on the Feast of the Purification, at the moment when He was lying in the arms of a man, the old and saintly Symeon. The words which he spoke will teach us further why Christmas means to us what it does. What he said was not all hope and joy. He said something which sent the holy Mother from the temple with the first beginning of a dark shadow upon her soul: ‘Behold, this Child THE CHILD 7 is set for the falling and rising up of many in Israel, and for a sign that shall be spoken against—yea, and a sword shall pierce through thine own soul also—that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.’ The falling of many. The real spiritual joy of Christmas is not for everyone. Feasts and festivities are not joy. They may be the out- ward expression of it, but for many they are a cloak hiding unsatisfied desires, restlessness, and sin; while for many more they are merely an opportunity once a year, under the pretext of a celebration of Christ’s birth, of gratifying their animal instincts. What were the effects upon the world of the birth of Christ? Centuries before it occurred the prophets, as we have seen, had told Israel something that men found it very hard to understand. Every nation in the world, back to the most primitive savage tribe, has believed in a God or Gods of some sort, and given worship and offered sacrifices in order to please them. But the prophets said some- thing quite new—that the only way to please God was by being good. The primitive man had never connected religion with goodness. (For a good many people to-day the connexion is not very close.) And he was told for the first time that sacrifices and ceremonies were worse than useless without righteous conduct. But if a prophet had been asked, ‘What do you mean by the word Good ?’—what could he answer? He could only hold out a picture of a good man such as he could form in his own mind. All men have some notion of goodness; and the prophets, helped by the Spirit of God, had the highest notion that anyone 8 CONCERNING CHRIST had ever had up to their time. But that was all. It was impossible even for the prophets to picture perfect goodness, because no one had ever seen it. But on Christmas day perfect goodness was seen among men. The Baby was born whose character, all through His earthly growth, was the character of God. And that is why we worship Him; we worship God in Him; we worship Him as God. But what were the effects? The first effect was that every human character short of that was seen to be sinful. If I tried to paint a picture—let us say of the divine Child in His Mother’s arms—I might, if | were very ignorant and conceited, imagine | that my picture was as good as it could be made. But if I saw it held up beside Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, I should hide my head in shame. So the presence of the perfect Ideal stamps every other life as sinful. But it had another effect, sad and terrible; it made some men sin more. A bad heart hates the sight of the perfect Ideal. ‘This is the judgment, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.’ ‘They have both seen and hated both Me and My Father.’ The life and teaching of Jesus Christ were a continual contrast to those of the Jews, and therefore a continual rebuke. And it drove men to murder Him. This Child is set for the falling of many in Israel. And that is equally true of many in our own country to-day. They are ready enough to join in Christmas festivities and amusements; some of them are willing to come to Church, perhaps even to come to God’s Altar. But they don’t like their sins to THE CHILD 9 be rebuked—their selfishness, temper, untruth, uncleanness, or whatever it is. They like their sins, or, at any rate, they dislike the labour of over- coming them. And the thought of the perfect Ideal, from which they are so far removed, only irritates and annoys them. To be like Christ means a good deal of fighting against their natural self; and their natural self is very dear to them. They have no real intention of doing anything except go on as they have gone on for years. And to goon means to get worse. They don’t feel as if they were getting worse, because they feel little that does not affect their bodily senses; but they are in fact storing their inmost soul with more and more sin. Christmas to such a person is a terrible thing. He has been brought face to face with the Ideal born into human life, and he rejects it. And that must lower a man. This Child is set for the falling of many. Every Christmas lowers the man who is not really sorry for his sins, and therefore has no real wish to be forgiven them, or intention of fighting them. But then we can turn and look at the other side of the picture. What does Christmas mean to those who are sorry for their sins, and are trying to get into closer union with the Son of God? Ah! this Nor tongue nor pen can show. The love of Jesus what it is None but His loved ones know. This Child is set for the rising up of many. The old Hebrew thinker who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes 10 CONCERNING CHRIST complained that there was nothing new under the sun. But he lived some two centuries before the event of Christmas day. And that was something absolutely new, a new power among men, a new presence, a new life,a new motive. Many of us will admit that we are like a man whose strength and vitality have been lowered by illness. But if he will only take the right medicines, and eat the right food, and get into fresh air, he can probably be up and strong again with the buoyant vigour of a healthy man. Our sins and mistakes have dragged us down, and made our souls weaker and more helpless. But Christmas brings us the message that we can, with perfect certainty, be restored to health. If we will accept the strength of Christ, and be brave enough to discipline and deny ourselves, and breathe the fresh air of His Spirit by prayer and by learning from His Word, and eat and drink the life-giving food of His Body and Blood, we can conquer our old, old sins, and live such a life as we have never lived before. This Child is set for the rising up of many who have fallen in the past; and we can be of the number. Don’t wait for the beginning of the civil year to make a fresh start. The presence of Christ, who was brought to us at Christmas, can do it for you now. But there are many also—and I write this in Ireland—who have been brought low by trouble, disappointment, terror, depression, loneliness. This Child is set for their rising again to new hope, to a new and satisfying certainty that this life is not the life that matters; that those who have gone from us have only gone a little way out of sight, and that we THE SEARCH II shall again rejoice with them, because the life of Christ Incarnate is in them as in us. When we are depressed it is mostly our body that makes us so. But nothing that happens in this world can be of any particular consequence to those who have Christ in them, the hope of glory. The birth of Christ at Christmas can yet bring to Ireland, and to the world, joy and peace and unity and holiness, because this Child is set for the rising up of many out of their sorrows and pains, their mistakes and sins. So when the angels sing to us, ‘ Glory to God in the Highest,’ it is a call to lift up our hearts. And whether we have been sinful, or whether we have been sorrowful, when we hear the call we can answer with a new meaning and a joyful intention, ‘We lift them up unto the Lord.’ 3. THE SEARCH. To a few persons the presence of the Child was known, but others had to search for Him. The wise men knew that it was a Baby that they wanted to find, but they knew also that He was born as King. And so they came expecting to see a magnificent palace, all minarets and domes and pillars and porticoes, standing in beautiful grounds rich with ancient trees and decked with the choicest flowers. They expected to see numbers of pampered slaves, waiting about to attend the nobles of the court and the guests of the royal house. They expected to see a brilliant throng of visitors passing in and out of the gates, come to bring gifts of homage to the King. They found the Baby, but it was in the very last place where any sane man 12 CONCERNING CHRIST ~ would expect to find a King—in a manger, in a stable, at the back of a small village inn, some miles outside the city walls. The story of Bethlehem has a glamour and a radiance that never seem to grow blurred or faded, however many years we live to hear it. But as flowers yield their scent more richly at one time of the day than at another, so we feel that it is at Christmas that we chiefly love to hear the story. Its fragrance somehow seems less if we hear it, for example, in the middle of the summer. What we must do, therefore, is to distil from it its divine meaning, that we may carry it with us as a sweet essence all the year long. The meaning of the birth of Christ is not only that God sent His Son into the world to die for our sins. It is, indeed, true that He who was laid in the manger by the high road outside the city was also laid upon the Cross by the high road outside the city. But Christmas is more than the first necessary step towards Good Friday. Because God was in Christ, as S. Paul says, He was in mankind; and because Christ is alive and not dead, He is still in mankind. What we have to do is to look for Him, as the wise men and the shepherds looked for Him. And when we search we shall find Him in all kinds of unexpected places and conditions. He is a Rewarder of them that diligently seek Him, but sometimes in very surprising ways. And of this the Christmas story is a symbol. For instance, the stable, which we surround, of course, with a halo of loving imagination, must have been, in fact, a very uncomfortable place. Christian art has made it beautiful, adding mild-looking oxen THE SEARCH 13 and sheep, and perhaps some doves. But the stable of a village inn was probably nothing but the roughest little shanty, where they kept a donkey or two to carry necessaries from the Jerusalem markets for use in the inn. Let us translate the symbol. Is there anything—except pain and violent death— is there anything from which most of us shrink more than from physical discomfort? But when things are uncomfortable, wise men will find Christ there. Some people have to bear much more discomfort in their homes than they allow their visitors to know about. And if they do not make a right“use of it, it can go far to spoil their characters. It makes them irritable and bad-tempered; they are con- stantly having to put up with things that annoy them, things that are not their fault—very often they are not anybody’s fault, but just circumstances; and they grumble, and feel horrid, and take every discomfort as a fresh injury. Discomfort seems the very last condition in which we might expect Christ to be found. But it was exactly there that the wise men found Him, in a sordid, dirty, draughty little shed. Look for the Incarnate Christ as present with you in your discomforts, and you will be able to give glory to the King of Kings. And then there are other people who will say, It is not that my physical surroundings are specially uncomfortable, but my life issocramped. I have to stay at home looking after aged parents or an invalid; I have to spend the whole of my time doing things which haven’t a spark of interest; I have to go every day and sit for hours in a stuffy office, writing or typing; I have to sit and sew; I have to 14 CONCERNING CHRIST sweep, or cook, or wash; I have to stand behind a counter and sell things to troublesome people; I have to teach dull and uninteresting children. If I could only be free to enjoy real life, to expand with real] interests; if I could only spend my time on something important or exciting or permanently useful, instead of this daily round and common task, without which I could not get the necessaries of life. Oh, if I only had enough money to be able to enjoy myself whenever I liked and as much as [I liked! But instead of that, my life is tied and cramped and bound like—what shall we say? like a little Eastern Baby, All meanly wrapped in swaddling bands, And in a manger laid. I beseech you this Christmas to set to work to find Christ there. Call your life a prison if you wish; but, like Paul and Silas, if you have Christ with you, you can sing hymns in prison, and spiritually the doors will burst wide open, and your soul will be as free as the wind, though your body remains tied and bound. ‘ Lord, Thou hast brought my soul out of prison.” ‘I will run the way of Thy command- ments when Thou hast set my heart at liberty.’ But it is not only for the discomforts and the cramping limitations of life that our parable holds good. By the Incarnation the Son of God came not only into human surroundings, but into man- kind. He came to renew the divine Image in every human being, and'therefore we'ought to look for Him in every human being. It is astonishing enough that He was to be found in the form of a Baby. But isn’t it much more astonishing that He can be THE SEARCH 15 found in some of the men and women whom we know? But it is in them that we have to look for Him. The love that believeth all things, and hopeth all things, believeth that Christ is hidden in hearts where He might be least expected, and hopeth to find Him there. Europe is still yearning for peace on earth; and while it is the bounden duty of Christians to strive towards it by every means in their power, nothing will do it more surely than the divinely given sympathy which can find, or at least believe in, the presence of Christ in every man. In very different degrees no doubt. In some hearts the Divine is as tiny and weak and inchoate as a Baby; in others the Christ is being steadily ‘ formed,’ as S. Paul puts it, and has so grown that His presence is perceptible at a glance. But it is just the glorious message of Christmas that it is the Baby that we must look for! If you love everyone, you will find Him in all, and treat them accordingly. You will learn to say, ‘ The Christ who lay in the manger lies, after all, in the heart of that man or woman whom I have always disliked, or feared, or despised; in that person who tries my patience, or who seems to rouse all that is worst in me. Surely the Lord is in that heart, and I knew it not.’ The person in whom the Christ lies hidden as an ungrown Infant will not advertise or display Him; there will be no star in the sky to guide you. Nothing but sympathy will do it, the sympathy that is born of love; the sympathy which helps you to understand what other people must be feeling even in circumstances in which you have never been placed; which helps you to recog- nize what is on the surface, and due to external 16 CONCERNING CHRIST difficulties and influences, and to distinguish it from the real person within; which helps you to pray for them, to be interested in them, even when they appear to be uninteresting or even past praying for. If Christ loves them well enough to come as the Dayspring from the High to visit them, cannot the Christian love them well enough to try and discover Him? For a Christmas message, then, we can take the words out of Herod’s mouth, ‘Go and search dili- gently for the young Child.’ Nothing that we can do will more surely bring glory to God in the Highest and on earth peace. 4. EPIPHANY. The word ‘Epiphany,’ as everyone knows, can be translated ‘Manifestation’; but that does not fully express its meaning. In the New Testament it is used not only of our Lord’s manifestation at His first coming on the earth, but also, and more frequently, of His second coming at the last day. It is found in contemporary writings of the arrival in splendour and pomp of a king or emperor or some other illustrious person. When he visited a country town, many of the inhabitants would see him for the first time. And it was used, with an extended meaning, of the accession of the Emperor Caligula to the throne; he publicly arrived on the stage of history as the supreme head of the empire. And these meanings can be seen in the Christian use of the word. Christ’s second coming was expected with the outward insignia of majesty; but His first coming, although they were absent, was the arrival of our King and God, so that men could see EPIPHANY 17 Him for the first time. And He began His reign over the hearts of those who accepted Him. Here the Bethlehem story offers itself again as a symbol for ouruse. He arrived and reigned first in the heart of His blessed Mother, who had accepted Him when she said, ‘Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it unto me according to thy word.’ And then in the heart of S. Joseph. But after He had come to them, we are told that He was sought out and worshipped by wise men from the East. And that represents the history of the reception of the divine King into the hearts of men ever since. In the first place His mother and S. Joseph were Jews, while the magi were Gentiles. That was the order in which Christianity made each of its early steps. Our Lord confined His ministry to His own nation; but His first disciples, who were all Jews, started out to preach the Gospel to every creature. At first they also were busy in Palestine, and shrank from admitting uncircumcised Gentiles to their number. But S. Paul won the victory of their liberty, and every Gentile Christian to-day is reaping the fruits of his large-heartedness. And now it is the turn of the Gentile so to proclaim the arrival of the King in His beauty that the Jew may return, and, as S. Paul said, be grafted in again. But the story is symbolic from another point of view. Joseph, the village carpenter, was a poor man, while the magi were rich, for they could travel, and offer valuable gifts to the King. The poor came first. And that is the normal order of the King’s reception. When John the Baptist wanted to be sure that our Lord was ‘ He that should come,’ his messengers were Cc 18 CONCERNING CHRIST bidden to go and tell him that ‘to the poor the Gospel is preached.’ Christ proclaimed with startling utterances which He purposely made startling in order to rouse and move His hearers, “Blessed are ye poor,’ “Woe unto you rich.’ And we can see every day that His words contain a large amount of very literal meaning. Money can buy much that human nature hankers after, luxury and amusement, leisure and titles; but it can buy also what is the moral ruin of so many, the deference, the flattery, the popularity, which the poor man seldom gets, and the rich man mostly loses in the twinkling of an eye if he becomes poor. All this is so apt to tie men’s thoughts to earth, and to engross them with the ‘pride of life,’ that it is, as a patent and obvious fact, exceedingly difficult for a rich man or woman to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Extreme poverty, of course, can engross those who suffer from it quite as terribly as wealth. But poverty is not a condition which naturally leads to self-satisfaction; and it is self-satisfaction more than anything else in the world which makes the eyes blind, and the ears deaf, and dulls the conscience, and drugs the soul to sleep. It is easier for the poor man than for the rich to find the King of Kings. Look at the story again. The holy Mother and 5. Joseph, who were unlearned, saw the King before the wise men skilled in the mathematics and astrology of their day. The magi were, for the age in which they lived, really learned men. It was in the pursuit of their learned profession that they saw the star which led them to the Child. EPIPHANY 19 But He was known first to the simple villagers from Nazareth. And for some time in the history of the Church the knowledge of God in Christ was hidden from the wise and prudent, while it was revealed unto babes. The Twelve were unlearned and ignorant men, but they knew Christ before Saul of Tarsus the pupil of Gamaliel. As S. Paul himself said, ‘Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble are called.’ Slaves in Caesar’s household were Christians two centuries and a half before Constantine the first Christian _ Emperor. And so it has always been. The Christian religion throughout the world has normally penetrated upwards from the masses. But underlying this there is a principle which is of force in the spiritual history of each of us. The trained intellect can bring its homage to Christ, but not till Christ has been revealed to the heart through the simplicity of faith. It is easier for the unlearned to accept the King than for the learned— not because the learned can discover that the Christian religion will not bear investigation, as some of them seem to think, but—because the un- learned cannot grasp or realize its greatness and complexity. A man’s religion is, indeed, nobler and more complete when his intellect does homage as well as his emotions and his will, when he can love God with his mind as well as with his heart and soul and strength. It is a higher and a harder stage; and many of the world’s ablest thinkers have failed to reach it. But tust because faith is easier to the unlearned, it is a fact of common experience that the first necessary elements of the revelation of 20 CONCERNING CHRIST Christ come to them sooner than to the wise. The carpenter sees Christ before the magi. And all who belong to the educated class must reach the revelation in the corresponding order. If our intellect has not yet done homage, it is because we have not begun with simple faith. If we try first to prove the things of Christ by argument, we shall never prove them at all. But if our love is lavished upon the divine Man before we have taken steps to prove anything about Him, if we first learn by living experience that He satisfieth the empty soul and filleth the hungry soul with goodness, then we can keep ourselves safely bound to Him by the cords of love while our groping intellect is slowly finding its way, like the magi, from afar. Yet once more. The carpenter and his espoused wife lived in Western Syria. And it was after they knew the King that there came wise men from the East. God has chosen to reveal Himself in Christ to the West before the East. The Day- spring from on High hath visited us. The physical order is reversed in the spiritual; the Sun has risen in the West, and the East, after nineteen centuries, is still in early twilight. Two thoughts suggest themselves with regard to the mission field. When the East found the King for the first time, it offered to Him the products of the East, gold, frankincense, and myrrh. To save souls is not the one and only object of missionary work. The East has treasures of thought and character that Christ wants, treasures without which the Body of Christ is incomplete. It is in order that the Church of Christ may grow nearer to being THE BOY 21 perfectly catholic that we want to get for it the special contributions that Persia, India, China, and Japan can make. And the other thought is closely connected with this. If we could imagine someone going to the magi, and trying to persuade them to come to Bethlehem by arguments, let us say, from Messianic prophecy, can we suppose that they would have come? What brought them was something in their own region of thought, something which appealed to them and not to the West, the star which they discovered in their astrological observations. The millions of the East must be drawn by methods many of which are quite foreign to us. And for that purpose it must be our first and chiefest aim to build up native ministries, who will make their own Churches along their own lines of thought and temperament. If the Christianity of the East is alive, it must grow as a plant in its own soil. And our prayer must be that Christ, Incarnate in His Body the Church, may be so revealed that Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, learned and unlearned, East and West, may learn alike the joy of His Epiphany. 5. THE Boy. This chapter is about children, the immeasurably important people on whom the management of the world will rest in a few years. As Jesus was presented in the temple in substance of our flesh, so we want to present our boys and girls to be the instruments in the hand of God for working out His purposes. We might perhaps imagine the sort of prayers that the holy Mother poured out 22 CONCERNING CHRIST for her Son; but however high and far-reaching were her petitions, God gave her more than she could ask or think in the unimaginable perfection of His life. What prayers are we going to offer for our sons and daughters? We could not ask anything better than that their character in child- hood may be like that of the Captain of their salvation. For the study of His childhood we are entirely dependent on S. Luke. There was an early tradition in the Church that S. Luke was a painter. Whether that is true or not, he was certainly an artist with his pen. He exhibits one of the sure marks of artistic genius; he was able in a very few simple strokes to give a living portrait. Two short sentences, and one short story, and that is all; but it is enough to provide an example to every boy and girl to the end of time. Jesus ‘increased in stature.’ The evangelist was much too good an artist to waste ink on an unnecessary sentence, and yet he took the trouble to mention our Lord’s physical growth. Physical growth does not lie outside the range of religion. God has given us our bodies, and therefore S. Paul says, ‘Glorify God in your bodies, which are His.’ We can imagine for ourselves the hardy, frugal life of the son of a village carpenter among the hills of Galilee. And what it helped to make Him we can see later on in the Gospels. Have you ever thought how strong and healthy He must have been? A delicate man could not have walked from village to village, in all weathers, for months together, with nowhere to lay His head, working THE BOY 23 hard all day, sometimes without leisure even for meals, with the nervous strain of preaching to crowds with an intense longing to influence and help them, and power going out of Him, as He said, with every miracle of healing that He performed. And then, at the end of the day, He could do with little sleep, and often spent the greater part of the night in prayer on the hillside. And when we come to the story of His last hours, we see: that His body must have possessed an iron strength. Think of all that He went through on the night of His betrayal; no sleep but agonized prayer and struggle; then the arrest with its rough handling, the brutal treatment afterwards from the high priest’s servants, the standing at one trial] after another next morning without food or drink, so far as we are told, the painful mocking by the soldiers, the smiting on the head and the crown of thorns. And far worse than all, except the cruci- fixion itself, was the scourging. A Roman scourging was a thing too awful to be described; it is enough to say that it often killed men outright, even when they had not been utterly wearied beforehand. Think of the mental and therefore physical strain of keeping Himself perfectly in hand through it all; “when He was reviled, He reviled not again; when He suffered He threatened not.’ And with all this He was still able to stand after it during the mocking by the soldiers, and then to walk all the way to Calvary, and part of the way to carry the heavy beam of wood to which His hands were to be nailed. May we not say that He glorified God in His body by sheer physical health and endurance? And 24 CONCERNING CHRIST everything that is done for boys and girls as regards their physical welfare can be, and ought to be, undertaken with a spiritual object—to make their bodies as fit as they can be, that they may bring glory to God. Jesus increased in stature. But He ‘increased’ also ‘in wisdom’. The story of His visit to the temple at the age of twelve, when the Jewish teachers were surprised at His understanding and answers, shews that His wisdom was partly book- wisdom. And if children want to be like Him, they will do their school lessons as hard and carefully as they can, not only in order to get on, and pass examinations, and win prizes for their own gratifica- tion and scholarships for that of their parents, but with the one great object of glorifying God with their minds. ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy mind,’ and we must please Him by dedicating to His service the whole of us. But in particular, the Boy Jesus shewed in the temple that He had read His Bible. The writer of this volume has been teaching Divinity students for more than a quarter of a century, and he has found during that time that the number of those who come to their theological training with the least pretensions to any serious knowledge of Scripture is very small indeed. Do make your children read their Bible, and learn lots of it by heart. We cannot measure what it will do for them. But first and foremost it will be an imitation of the Boy Jesus. Body and mind are two of God’s great gifts. But of course there is something greater and deeper —that wonderful thing that we call character. THE BOY 25 Look again at S. Luke’s rapid sketch. Jesus ‘increased in favour with men.’ He was a perfectly delightful Boy. I like to think of Him full of fun and laughter, keeping every one in a good humour, and playing games with other children in the market-place, such as He afterwards spoke of when He was grown up. Can you imagine a boy growing in favour with men without any fun and laughter? And why we should imagine, as some people do, that in after years he gave them up, and was always solemn, I cannot think. He must have attracted every decent-minded person in the place. Everyone must have been struck by the splendid goodness that radiated in His healthy face, the utter truth and purity that shone in His thoughtful eyes. The tongues of men and angels could not describe what that Boy must have been, an arresting Presence in the small country town where everyone knew Him intimately; never conceited or forward, never rough, thoughtless, or unkind, never lazy, never disobedient, never unclean; a Boy without a fault. Most people, if they heard to-day of a boy without a fault, would probably pronounce him a prig. But if he was a prig, it would be because he had a fault, and a bad one. This was a Boy entirely free from the peculiarly obnoxious fault of being a prig. But I should like to dwell for a moment longer on two points. If there is one thing that will make a child increase in favour with other people more surely than anything else, it is to be helpful. Our Lord’s ministry when He grew up was in very truth a ‘ministry’—service to others. ‘The Son 26 CONCERNING CHRIST of Man is come not to be ministered unto but to minister.’ ‘I am among you as He that serveth.’ And I am quite sure that that did not begin when He was grown up. If the child is father of the man, He must have learned increasingly to be helpful from the first moment that He could help anyone. Do teach your children to be helpful. Be constantly helpful yourself, and expect it from them, and you will get it naturally and easily if you begin when they are young enough. Christ has placed in His Church ‘first apostles, secondly prophets, thirdly teachers, then powers, gifts of healing, helps, &c.’ An important part of His great work in the world is done by the young, the hidden, the humble people who help. And no child can be like the Boy Jesus if he is not trying to be a help in as many ways as he can every day. But beside our Lord’s helpfulness, and other beautiful characteristics, by which He grew in favour with men, S. Luke in one sentence gives us what many children find the hardest thing in the world to imitate. On returning to Nazareth with His parents ‘He was subject unto them.’ Obedience; quick, immediate, cheerful, voluntary obedience at home. Boys and girls will usually obey a school teacher, or a scout or guide officer without much difficulty; and all discipline is good. But to be just as willingly obedient at home—that is often the really hard thing, and the really Christlike thing. And our Lord was obedient not only while He was a small child, but the whole thirty years that He lived at home. What about our boys of seventeen, eighteen, nineteen? When they are THE BOY 27 just beginning to grow into young men is the time when they are beginning to be most in need of the great strength of God to keep them imitating the young Man Jesus. What a picture we have before us! But S. Luke has one more stroke in his inspired portrait. Jesus ‘increased in favour with God’. He was always, since His birth, the Beloved Son in whom the Father was well pleased; but still He had to grow in favour with Him. He had small temptations when He was a Child, and He resisted_them all; He had harder temptations as He grew older, and still He resisted them all. He had to learn to say His prayers to begin with, like any other small child; but His prayers grew in depth and intensity and wideness of range as He grew older, and learnt by increasing experience what prayer meant, and what it could do. And He grew in love to God and to men. At each moment His love was perfect for that stage of His life. But it went on growing with His growth, until it became the mighty love of the Man on the Cross. Let us pray for our sons and daughters that they also may grow in favour with men by joy and helpfulness and obedience, and in favour with God by a growing strength against growing temptation, by the increasing width and depth of their prayers, and the increasing width and depth of their love, that the same mind may be in them which was also in Christ Jesus. 28 CONCERNING CHRIST 6. THE IMAGE OF GOD. Up to this point we have allowed ourselves for the most part to dwell in simple meditation on the beginnings of the perfect life. And we might dwell much longer, for the Protevangelium in the opening chapters of S. Matthew and S. Luke is inexhaustible in symbol and significance. But the longer we pause upon the threshold, the more insistent becomes the question, what manner of Man is this, whose presence fills human history, and who calls for the homage and self surrender of all mankind? Needless to say, this chapter will not help to solve the Mystery of Christ, a task in which the theologians of all the centuries have failed. But it is important that we should try to understand, as clearly as we can, what the problem is, and what it is not. This little volume is not a theological treatise, but here and there in the course of it we must put off our shoes from off our feet as we face the deepest and greatest things of our faith. The first thing to be clear about is that the mani- festing of God in human life was not simply a stupendous miracle, standing all by itself, in supreme isolation from the rest of history, but the climax of a series. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And He did it by slow degrees. All matter is an expression of His activity, but vegetables, being endued with life, are a better expression of it than anything inanimate, and animals better still, and man far better than any of them. Man, as the highest animal, came at the top of the scale, immeasurably superior to all that THE IMAGE OF GOD 29 was below him, because he alone was made ‘in the Image of God.’ But he alone failed in his destiny. Nothing beneath him failed; inanimate matter, vegetables, and animals, so far as their own action is concerned, are all without exception exactly what God intends them to be. Not one of them has ever crossed His wishes, or broken His laws, because not one of them has ever been capable of doing so. Not one of them possesses the power which is man’s glory and ruin, and of which he makes use to turn round and reject and thwart and grieve and disobey the God who made him.~ It is the possession of that power which makes man ‘but little less than divine’ (as it is said in Psalm viii. 5), and puts all things under his feet as regards the scale of being. But if man is the climax of creation, it is impossible to think that man as we know him in his weakness and sin can be the final goal which God had in view. The fact of a rising scale makes it certain that He intended a real and complete climax. Man is, indeed, the final goal, but it must be Man without weakness and sin, Man infinitely perfect. And we find a picture of Him in the New Testament, the Firstborn (or Chief-born) of all creation, the Effulgence of God’s Glory, the Impress of His Essence, the Image of the invisible God, Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us look at this word Image a little more closely. We are accustomed, for the most part, to use it of a figure of stone or metal, or of a picture. We sometimes say that a son is the very image of his father; but even then we usually refer to his out- ward, material form and features. The word, 30 CONCERNING CHRIST unfortunately, is not often used of things inward and spiritual. But suppose that a son had the same likes and dislikes as his father to a marked extent; the father is musical and the son is musical; the father is a cricketer and the son is a cricketer; the father is kindhearted and the son is kindhearted; —if it were part of our ordinary language to say that in this or that respect the son is the image of his father, we should be much nearer the meaning that we want. God is Spirit; God is Truth; God is Love. And He made man in His Image, that is, He made him such that he possessed the possibilities of becoming more and more like God, of growing towards the ideal of being His very Image. But all men failed except One. And because He was perfect as His Father in Heaven is perfect, He was the Image—He was not only made ‘in His Image,’ He was the Image—of His Father, the exact repliqua of His Father’s perfection. ‘The Father is God and the Son is God.’ ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.’ We learn, then, that it is personal quality by which man can exhibit what God is like; it is in personal quality that he can grow towards being His Image. And the tendency to forget this has caused most of the difficulties which are felt about the Incarnation. Some have rejected it because others have maintained strange and impossible notions about it. Many people to-day would like to believe it. They are told that Christianity is the religion of the Incarnation, and stands or falls with it. They shrink from giving up the central doctrine of the faith of nineteen centuries. And THE IMAGE OF GOD 31 yet their intellectual honesty forces them to doubt it, because they think it means what it doesn’t really mean at all. They think it means, for example, that the infinite God was transformed by some incomprehensible miracle into a man without ceasing to be God, so that the man, walking the roads and fields of Palestine, could do everything that God could do. Or that God dwelt in a human body, and so dominated and swamped the human personality that for all practical purposes there was no manhood left. Or—and this is a commoner mistake than the other two—that the Godhead and the manhood were two distinct and separate things or entities which somehow dwelt together— either fused or placed side by side—in a human body, so that on some occasions it was the divine Nature that acted, as when He did His miracles, and at others the human, as when He was tired or sorrowful or in pain. Anyone of these does away with the completeness of His humanity. And many who hear them think, ‘I can’t believe that; and anyone who says he can must be either blindly credulous, or insincere. I wonder how many people think that Christians, and the clergy es- pecially, live in a condition of more or less conscious insincerity. Let me say at once that any clergy- man who does not, in his heart of hearts, believe that God was manifested in human life in Christ Jesus, ought not to be a clergyman at all. But what has been said shews that there are more ways of explaining that manifestation than some people have any idea of. I think it may be claimed that the clergy, generally speaking, are not insincere, 32 CONCERNING CHRIST and that the difficulty lies in the minds of those who criticize them. We can first put the difficulty in a sentence, and then examine it. It is commonly thought that if Jesus Christ was the exhibition, the Epiphany, of God, He must have exhibited all the attributes that we ascribe to God. For instance, we say, expressing a real truth, that God is everywhere; we ascribe to Him the attribute of omnipresence. ‘If I climb up into heaven Thou art there; if I go down to Hades Thou art there also; if I take the wings of the morning and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there also shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold me.’ In all the great universe the life and activity of God find their self-expression. But the human Jesus, a Man with a physical body, was not omnipresent. When He lay in the manger His body was in the manger and nowhere else; and when He hung upon the Cross, it was on the Cross and nowhere else. No one would pretend to imagine for a moment that Jesus, the Infant, the Boy, or the Man, was omnipresent. But if God is not omnipresent He is not God. (Not that He is extended in space, but all that exists is the expression of His mind and will.) And yet we hold that Jesus Christ revealed Him perfectly. The moment we think of the matter carefully it becomes self-evident that the Incarnation did not mean the acquiring by a human being of all the divine attributes. Take another. Read such passages as the 4oth chapter of \Isaiah, or the ro4th Psalm, or the four chapters in which God answered Job out of the THE IMAGE OF GOD 33 whirlwind (chaps. 38-41), and see what the Hebrew writers felt about the power of God in Nature. And think further what modern astronomy, and physics, and chemistry, and geology, and all the other physical sciences have taught us of the in- conceivable vastness of His power in the guiding and ruling of matter. And we are not going to ascribe that power to an Infant in swaddling clothes, or to a Boy of twelve, or to a Man of thirty. Our Lord did wonderful things when He was on earth that we call miracles; but so did the apostles afterwards. He and they did them because God the Father gave them the power to do them for His divine purposes. It is entirely true in both cases to say that God did them. But that is not the same as saying that the human Jesus was what is com- monly called omnipotent. The human Jesus was a helpless Infant; quite literally helpless. When He was a Boy of twelve, and a Man of thirty, His control of the forces of Nature was that of a Boy of twelve and a Man of thirty, and no more. The Incarnation did not mean that because He revealed God He was keeping the unnumbered worlds, and the unnumbered systems of worlds whirling in their circuits through space. And yet there was not a moment of His earthly life in which the words were not true, ‘He that hath seen Me hath seen the Father.’ He was not, then, omnipresent, and He was not omnipotent. Now look at one more attribute that we ascribe to God—omniscience. If you were asked this question: When our Lord was an Infant in swaddling clothes, could He know all the D 34 CONCERNING CHRIST languages in the world, past, present, and future ?>— I don’t mean, of course, speak them out aloud, because He couldn’t speak a word; He could only cry like any other baby.—But were all the languages throughout the world’s history present to His con- sciousness? You would at once say, No. He couldn’t even understand what His Mother said to Him as she crooned some Eastern lullaby to send Him to sleep. Could He, as He lay in her arms, or at any other time in His life, understand all the philosophies and religious systems, all the natural sciences, the ingenuities, machineries, and con- trivances that ever had been or ever would be studied or invented by the mind of man? Could He know in detail every thought, every dream, every transient feeling of every human being, past, present, and future? To ask such questions is absurd; and it is something more than absurd when we read in the New Testament that He ‘grew in wisdom.’ Nothing less than I have described can be called Omniscience, and that is an attribute that we ascribe to God. But Omniscience does not grow in wisdom. Jesus asked questions. And He was sometimes surprised; when He heard, for instance, the centurion’s answer, ‘He marvelled.’ But Omniscience cannot marvel, and has no need to ask questions. And He Himself said, ‘Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, not even the angels in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father.’ In other words, He explicitly declared, ‘Omniscience knows of the day and hour, but I donot.’ Isn’tita strange thing that many Christians, who are quite ready to admit that Jesus in His earthly life was THE IMAGE OF GOD 35 not omnipresent and not omnipotent, are terrified if you suggest that He was not omniscient, even though He said so Himself! It is the old mistake. They have formed an idea for themselves that the Incarnation involved the possession of divine attributes; and then they accuse you of denying our Lord’s Divinity if you point out, what the New Testament teaches as clearly as words can do it, that He did not possess the three great attributes which are inseparable from our conception of the Being of God. ~ What then do we mean when we say that Jesus Christ was the Image of God, the perfect human Reproduction of what God is? It is impossible to press too strongly the fact that God’s attributes are not God. The truth of this becomes at once clear if we compare such an expression as ‘God is Omnipresence’ with the New Testament declaration that ‘Godis Love.’ The former conveys no meaning at all. But the moment that you introduce the thought of quality and character you reach the idea of Personality. Perfect love on the negative side means Sinlessness, because all sin is the assertion of self, and on the positive side it means Self-giving, Self-imparting, Self-sharing, Self-sacrifice. All Christ’s miracles and teaching were not Himself; they were necessarily subject to human limitations; He was not omnipotent, and, as He said Himself, He was not omniscient. But it was Himself that was the Revelation, the Epiphany, the Image of God, His entire Personality, His Sinlessness and His Love. At this point some may raise an important 36 CONCERNING CHRIST objection. If Christ’s knowledge was subject to limitations, how can we be sure that He was ab- solutely trustworthy in His teaching on right and wrong? Some of God’s most earnest workers have recently been divided into two camps; and a great part of the controversy is concerned with the ‘inerrancy’ of Christ’s teaching. It is thought by some that if He did not know everything (and, let me repeat, He said Himself that He did not), He may not have known fully and perfectly the moral principles of God. The difficulty arises from the failure to realize that knowledge is of two different kinds, which stand on entirely different planes. Readers of Mr. Lacey’s book, Conscience of Sin, will remember how he points out that Science is one kind of knowledge, Conscience is another kind, i.e. the recognition of a standard. Men’s consciences need to be trained and developed that they may recognize and accept a standard that is always rising. No man except Christ can know and grasp and recognize the perfect, absolute standard, which is the character of God. ‘No man knoweth the Father save the Son.’ That knowledge did not involve what we call omniscience; it involved perfect oneness with God. When Christ laid down moral principles, it was not His intellect that taught Him. It was His intellect that was concerned in such matters as eschatology, and His intellect was subject to necessary human limitations. But in matters of right and wrong His teaching was the expression of Himself, who dwelt in God, and God in Him, with a union that was hindered by no barriers or limitations caused by sin. The THE IMAGE OF GOD 37 inerrancy of His moral teaching was the inerrancy of His character as the Image of God. And with that Christianity stands or falls. Now this helps to explain two things which would otherwise be difficult, two things which are stated, perhaps, in their most difficult form in the Epistle to the Hebrews. The writer says that Christ, ‘though He was a Son, learned obedience through the things that He suffered.’ We must not slur the words ‘learned obedience.’ If language means anything they imply that He knew more about obedience at the end of His life than He did earlier; they imply, in some sense, a moral growth in Jesus Christ. Moral growth, although He was never otherwise than perfect. It sounds like a paradox, almost a contradiction in terms. But the apparent difficulty disappears if we rightly apply what has been said about personal quality. Take an instance of it as an illustration. Our Lord was ‘meek and lowly in heart.’ How did He exhibit it? When He was a small Child He exhibited humility as a small child ought to exhibit it. We picture a quiet, unquestioning obedience, without a trace of crossness or sulkiness; a readiness to believe that older people knew better than He did; a complete absence of forwardness, or talking too much, or giving Himself airs, or being a nuisance. But when He grew older, He went to school at the village synagogue, as all Jewish boys did. And the temptations of a school- boy are greater than the temptations of a small child at home. To be really meek and lowly in heart at the school age was harder than it was a few years earlier. And so His schoolboy temptations, 38 CONCERNING CHRIST His schoolboy sufferings, taught Him more of what the quality of humility involved. Then He became a young man; He reached the age that is full of temptations to do as He liked, and to go where He pleased, to resent opposition, and to think it manly not to accept advice, and manly also to do everything that other young men do, Humility had to encounter increasing difficulties. But He was always humble, and continued to learn more and more what obedience to God meant by the temptations and trials that He suffered. And finally, as a grown man, He was faced with opposi- tion, ridicule, scorn, hatred, which grew almost daily in intensity. What must humility in such conditions have meant to One who was*in the position to make the claims that He made? Com- pare it again with the humility of the tiny Child at His Mother’s knee. The quality is the same, and it was always perfect. But it was exhibited in greater and greater depth and intensity with every stage of growth and change of circumstances. We must understand clearly that perfection is com- patible with growth. A rosebud and a rose can both be perfect, but each has the perfection that belongs to its own stage of development. And so the words begin to stand out with a clearer meaning: “He learnt obedience through the things that He suffered.’ He was never, even in the passing shadow of a secret thought, disobedient. But His obedience necessarily became fuller, richer, more glorious, as He passed through deeper and ever deeper suffering. At any given moment He was a perfect exhibition of the character of God at the THE IMAGE OF GOD 39 stage of spiritual capacity that belonged to that moment. That is the only thing that makes it clear that His temptations were real temptations. And here we can understand a little better the thought that was before us at the end of the fore- going chapter. We may go on boldly to ask, Was the capacity for Jove found in an infant equal to that of the Crucified? No! It is impossible. Listen again to the New Testament. ‘He grew in wisdom and stature and in favour with God and man;’ He grew in favour with God. No theory that we form about our Lord’s divinity must clash with that sentence. He grew in favour with God because He grew in love. At any given moment His love was perfect for a human being at that age, at that stage of growth. But it needed all the sorrows and temptations of life, all the agony of Gethsemane, and then all the agony of Calvary, before His love was fully grown. At every moment from the time when Mary wrapped Him in swaddling clothes till the time when Joseph of Arimathaea wrapped Him in fine linen He was the Beloved, the Son in whom the Father was well pleased, because He revealed the sinlessness and the love of God with the per- fection belonging to each moment. At each mom- ment it was utterly, dazzlingly perfect, and there- fore as Infant, Boy and Man He was the Image of God. And this has already given us a clue to the other difficult verse in the Epistle to the Hebrews: “He was in all points tempted like as we are.’ We feel inclined to ask, How can that be? How could He have, for instance, all the temptations of an I[rish- man in Dublin in the twentieth century? Again, the 40 CONCERNING CHRIST temptations of a man differ in many respects from those of a woman. And there are thousands of millions of different circumstances which make temptations different, and constantly changing, for every human being on earth. How could He experi- ence them all? He could not of course. What the verse means is that since He exhibited all the divine qualities that every man, woman, and child ought to exhibit, He was tempted in respect of every one of those qualities. If our circumstances bring to us temptations to be untruthful, or impatient, or con- ceited, or unkind, or self-indulgent, His circumstances brought to Him temptations to be the same. The ways in which we yield to temptation are often very different from the ways in which He as a Jew of Palestine in those days would have yielded—if He had yielded. But in all points, in respect of all the qualities of His divine character, the temptations to fail in exhibiting the qualities were the same as those ofallmen. But He never failed. He was the Image of His Father, and therefore the climax of creation which man was intended to be. And in Him, strengthened with His strength, saved by His life and death, borne up before God by His intercession, inspired by His Spirit, we can go forward, and by daily prayer, daily penitence, daily struggles we can gradually be transformed into that same Image from glory unto glory. 7. INSTINCTS. Our Lord’s temptations need some further study. Many people, even some of those who read their Bible, when they hear of His temptations think INSTINCTS 41 almost exclusively of the three-fold temptation in the wilderness. Butif He was in all points tempted like as we are, it was a life-time of temptation. One of our human trials is the daily and hourly presence of temptation all our life long. S. Paul describes it in the words, ‘I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind.’ A modern psychologist would express it differently, but it is the same universal phenomenon that he has to describe. We are learning to think of human nature in terms of instinct. And the experts are still discussing the best ways of classifying the instincts; they differ as to which are primary and which are secondary, and even which are instincts and which are not. But all are agreed on the one obvious fact that there is an antagonism, a strain, a clash within the being of man. From the point of view of the moral life we can distinguish broadly between the instincts that make for the assertion and preservation and gratification of Self, and those that make for the yielding up, denying, giving out of Self to men and to God. That was the war that S. Paul felt within him. But what are we to say of Him who was greater than S. Paul? An adequate and satisfying analysis of His psychology has yet to be written,—and will never be written because the mystery of His Person places Him in so many respects outside the region of scientific analysis. We can analyse something satisfactorily only when we thoroughly comprehend all it components. But that does not prevent us from learning as much as we can about Him. We can study His temptations in the light of what we know of our own. 42 CONCERNING CHRIST Temptation is occasioned by the clash of instincts which is natural and inherent in man. In the Epistle of S. James (i. 13-15) a unique attempt is made to deal with the question. God gave man the dignity of responsibility. ‘Let no one say, I am tempted of God.’ The wish to throw that respon- sibility upon Him is a wish to escape from all that is involved in the freedom of the will. Temptation arises from within, from man’s efithuma, his natural and instinctive desire, which is not in itself wrong. S. Luke, for instance, uses the word when he records our Lord’s statement, ‘With desire I have desired to eat this Passover with you.’ But when it is a desire for something which it would be wrong to gratify, when a clash of instincts occurs, it is felt as a peivasmos, a trial or temptation. And S. James says that a man can be affected by it as though he were being drawn and deluded by the evil solicitations of awoman. And, with acontinua- tion of the metaphor, when he yields to the solicita- tion the desire ‘conceives and gives birth to sin.’ Sin, then, according to this line of thought, is the wrong gratification of an instinctive desire. But we ace still left to decide how a wrong grati- fication is to be distinguished from a right one when the desire in either case is instinctive. Mere unrestrained self-assertion we feel sure is wrong; but mere unlimited self-denial, self-neglect, self- abasement is also wrong. And aconsideration of our Lord’s life seems to suggest that the right condition is one of perfect balance between the two, and that anything is wrong by which the balance is disturbed. It is wrong to gratify an instinct to excess, or under INSTINCTS 43 particular circumstances, or in particular ways. Human nature, with the rest of the universe, is built on the lines of paradox, and the solution is not theoretical but practical, the preservation of stable equilibrium. It is impossible to lay down rules for each person as to the extent and the ways in which he ought to deny himself and assert himself respect- tively. But the more highly trained his conscience becomes, the closer that his spirit grows into union with God’s Spirit, the more perfectly he will, in fact, preserve the balance. The life of Jesus Ghrist was quite certainly not one of undiluted self-abnegation. He enjoyed social intercourse; He took real pleasure in the quiet home life of Martha and Mary; He took meals with His friends, with Pharisees, with pub- licans and sinners; He ‘came eating and drinking;’ He loved being with children; He entered with sympathy and zest into the details of the life of the men and women round Him; He delighted in the beauties of Nature. And I am perfectly certain that humour appealed to Him. Without humour it is difficult to imagine that anyone could draw and win and influence the man in the street; and several of His recorded utterance gain greatly in meaning if we picture Him saying them with a smile, or a twinkle in His eye. Further, He took steps on various occasions to preserve His life when it was in danger; and asserted Himself many times with an independence of convention and public opinion that was far removed from self-abasement. And yet with all this His life presents the ideal of self- sacrifice; He ‘pleased not Himself’; He came ‘not to be ministered unto but to minister, and to give 4A CONCERNING CHRIST His life a ransom for many.’ The stress and strain between self-assertion and self-abnegation must always have been felt as a temptation, but every element in His nature retained its rightful place and proportion. We sometimes say that a man has the defects of his qualities, that is, that certain qualities in him are overdone, they are allowed too much prominence as compared with certain other qualities. He is so kind-hearted that he finds it difficult to be stern, or he is too stern in his moral rectitude to be kind-hearted; he is too honest to be always tactful, or he is too tactful to be always honest—and soon. But youcan study the character of Christ as often as you like, and you can never say that there was too much of this or too little of that. The balance was always perfect. The discord from the clash of instincts, which constitutes human trial, was always resolved in a divine harmony. A particular aspect of this which is always with us is the clash between the desire for freedom and obedience to authority—the authority of the church, for example, or of the Bible, both of which appear for some Christians to be non-existent; the authority of the State over its members, of parents and teachers over children, andsoon. (I follow here an illuminat- ing chapter in Dr. Crichton Miller’s The New Psychology and the Teacher.) The aim, of course, of every human being should be that the urge or drive of his nature should carry him along the straight line of his highest and best development. But at the outset of his life he is confronted by an apparent barrier. Authority stands in his way. And there appear to be only two courses open to him. INSTINCTS 45 If his psychic disposition is such that the instinct which makes for the abnegation and abasement of self is predominant, he will yield himself readily to obedience. Obedience in children is a very good thing, and often seriously underrated in these days. And yet a strong-minded but unwise parent can get from such a child an obedience of a kind that will lead him away from his true development. It will not, as he grows up, become more voluntary, and be given because he is learning that what he has been told is good for him. He will obey because he has been psychically forced into the habit of obedience. And if this continues, as sometimes happens, till he is of adult age, the results are very bad. His thoughts and ideas are not really his own but his parents’. All his strongest desires incited by his other instincts are repressed, and it is quite likely that he may in time shew signs of neurosis of one kind or another. At any rate his life has been largely spoilt. We see the same in nations. Russia is suffering at the present time from acute neurosis, due to over- repression by authority in the past. And we see it in religion. The authority of the Roman Church is impressive, and extraordinarily attractive to some minds, because it produces obedience. But at what acost! Inthe Orthodox Church of the East it is the authority of the Creeds and General Councils, which has prevented all development for sixteen centuries. And in Islam, and a certain section of our own people, it is the authority of a Book, the Koran and the Bible respectively. A blind obedience, as we call it, is really a pathological condition in which human nature has been diverted from its true line of progress. 46 CONCERNING CHRIST On the other hand the psychic disposition of the child may be such that the instinct of self-preserva- tion, self-assertion, has the dominant sway. And he will depart from the straight course of development in the opposite direction. Confronted with authority he will rebel, and grow up troublesome, defiant, unmanageable. We see it on a national scale in those to whom all ordered government is abhorrent, and who know no distinction between liberty and licence. And in religion it is represented in many heretics, cranks, and militant enemies of faith and morals. In a large number of cases they were driven into rebellion by unwise parents who made the mistake of over- pressure in religious matters and practices when they were under their authority as children. Here, then, are two directions in which men may move, both of them detrimental to true growth. It might seem a dilemma from which there is no escape. But let us imagine a child whose parents and teachers are so wise that they encourage both these opposing instincts in balanced proportion. That rare achievement is, in fact, the whole duty of every- one in authority over others. That is the aim that lies before the Anglican Communion in the training of the beliefs and lives of its members. And though it is very far from achieving it, it does, I think, approach a little nearer to it than any other Com- munion. There is no need, in any portion of the Catholic Church, moie urgent than a nearer approach to the ideal of a perfect balance between binding and loosing. How, then, will a child thus trained steer INSTINCTS 47 between Scylla and Charybdis?—between blind obedience and rebellion? Authority will not be for him an impassable barrier which diverts him from the true line of progress. It will rather be an atmosphere through which he will pass safely. He will obey, but with increasing voluntariness, as he realizes what is good for him in the commands which he obeys. As he gets older, if his parents and teachers understand their work, he will not be imprisoned in authority, but will nevertheless live the rest of his life shaped and coloured and influenced by it; As he passes through the atmosphere and comes out, so to speak, at the other side of it, he will be able to look back and, if need be, criticize and find fault with parts of it, but also thankfully recognize all that it did for him. It has entered into his psychic disposition, and formed an element in his own strong, voluntary growth. He has passed right through it, to come out at the other side all the better for it, but free. And the authority of the Church and the Bible ought to be of the same kind. We are passing through the atmosphere during the whole of our earthly life, and we must be allowed freedom of conscience, freedom to criticize, freedom to obey voluntarily, while at the same time the Church and the Bible form a part of our very #syche, an element which we have made our own in the healthy, developing life of our soul. I have dwelt on these facts that we may see how perfect an example is to be found in our Lord Jesus Christ. He was confronted with the authority of His parents. And for thirty years He lived in that atmosphere rendering voluntary obedience. But 48 CONCERNING CHRIST as early as the age of twelve He felt Himself at liberty to criticize and to act in independence. “Why is it that ye sought Me? Wist ye not that I must be about my Father’s business?’ And He must have retained the same liberty all the time that He was subject to them at Nazareth. And when the right moment came He felt Himself perfectly free to leave home and live His life as God called Him to live it. He was confronted also with the authority of the Jewish Church and of the Jewish Bible. And what was His attitude? He obeyed the Church volun- tarily. He was regular in His attendance at the annual feasts; He was regular in His attendance at the weekly synagogue; He bade the leper go and shew himself to the priests and offer the gift that Moses commanded. He strove to gain as much advantage as He could from the Church’s authority. Again, He was steeped in the Jewish Bible; He quoted it incessantly, based arguments upon it, and recognized in Himself the fulfilment of all its Messianic predictions. But who can describe the supremacy of His freedom? His freedom to deal with with it as He liked, and with the scribal tradition based upon it; His freedom to interpret it according to His own profound, independent grasp of the deep things that lay beneath it. It used to be said in in the sacred Bible, Thou shalt not do this or that; but I say unto you something much greater and deeper. The law of the Sabbath, the law of ceremonial pollution in general, and of clean and un- clean foods in particular, the law of vows and oaths, the law of divorce, the accepted superiority of the PARADOXES 49 social, intellectual, and religious aristocracy of His day, the racial antagonism to the Samaritans, the uniqueness of the temple as the place where men ought to worship, the official custom of traffic in the sacred courts-—all were less than nothing to Him when they threatened to divert men from the line of true development. The problem of freedom and authority admits of no theoretical solution. But our Lord solved it in practice by retaining the one while He gained all that was to be gained from the other. 8. PARADOXES. Further meditation on His balance of opposites will make us feel the more deeply the mystery of His being. It is often said that we live in an irreligious age, by which is meant that the accepted forms and habits of religion are interwoven much less closely with daily life than they used to be. Religion used to be more conventional, more a matter of duty, but less intelligent; and men to-day are more than ever interested in the problems of religion in their bearing upon life. Above all, whatever controversies wax and wane, men can never rid themselves of the problem of Jesus Christ, and from one generation to another they feel compelled to discuss Him. The tendency of many to-day is to try to escape from the idea that He is a Mystery; it is time, they think to free ourselves from the learned subtleties of dogma and get back to the simple character of Christ, who went about doing good, and whose life and teaching afford the basis of the social Gospel which the world needs. Itis true that a social Gospel which does not E 50 CONCERNING CHRIST rest on Him is bound to fail; but who shall describe for us the ‘simple character’ of Christ? We have learnt something of it already, but let us turn to it again, and see what we find. We are dependent for our knowledge of it upon the impression which it pro- duced upon four writers. And the question calls for an answer, Is the picture which they drew of it a true one? Not, Is the report which they give of His deeds and words accurate inits details? Weare considering a portrayal of character, not a chronicle of events. They were His devoted followers, and it would hardly have been surprising if they had idealized their pictures. Now if a follower of a great religious leader, deliberately or unconsciously, idealized his master’s character, the effect would be that what appealed most to the writer would be seen running through the whole. The character described would be in the main loving, or strong, or humble, or clever and so on, according to the writer’s ideal. And if idealized it would at least be a harmonious whole, with contradictions toned down. A clear cut image would emerge which would compel admiration or the reverse according to the ideas and temperament of each reader. But can any one produce before his mind a clear cut image of the character of Christ? It is full of what we should call the sharpest contradictions. For instance, one evangelist ascribes to Him the words, ‘I am meek and lowly in heart.’ S. Paul confidently appealed to the Corinthians ‘by the meekness and gentleness of Christ.’ It was a characteristic which all who knew anything of Jesus would take asanaxiom. Itis well-known that PARADOXES SI while the Greeks and Romans despised humility, and thought it was fit only for cringing slaves, Christianity, on the basis of Christ’s character, exalted it to a virtue of the first rank. And yet, the Man who was meek and lowly is represented as Himself saying openly that He was so: ‘J am meek and lowly in heart.” Can we conceive of any other humble man saying those words? We hear Him say ‘Come unto Me’; ‘I will give you rest’; ‘take My yoke upon you, and learn of Me’; ‘Can ye_drink of the cup that J drink of?’ ‘Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away’; “Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me and of My words . . of him also shall the Son of man be ashamed.’ Over and over again He said things which in the case of any other man would be con- demned as megalomania. His character, as the Gospels picture it, found room for the two opposites, humility and superhuman claims; meekness and supreme self-assertion. We think of our centuries of literary experience; our development of the art of history; we think of the subtle portrayal of character in our best novelists. And we defy any biographer, any novelist to invent, or to give an idealized portrait of, a character in which utter humility and the majestic use of the word ‘I’ are both felt to be right and natural. Take another point connected with this. Through- out the Gospels there is not a shadow of a hint that our Lord thought there was any sin in Himself. He preaches repentance, He claims authority to for- give sins, He is as stern as man can be against the self-satisfied and insincere; He teaches His disciples 52 CONCERNING CHRIST to pray ‘Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors’; He proclaims that He has come to seek and to save that which lost; He came not to call the righteous but sinners; He speaks of Herod as ‘that fox;’ He calls the Pharisees ‘ blind leaders of the blind,’ ‘a brood of vipers,’ ‘whited sepulchres.’ And yet, on the other hand, an evangelist can report Him as saying, ‘which of you convinceth Me of sin?’ He reveals at every moment that He is human; He lives in dependence upon His Father; He prays to Him, He spends whole nights in praying to Him. But never one syllable to suggest that He was in need of forgiveness. It is outside the subject of this chapter to discuss the question of His sinless- ness; we are considering only the remarkable fact that in a four-fold portrait of a Man, which many declare has been idealized by the writers, He is pictured as being transparently sincere and humble, and yet without one vestige of penitence. In all the biographies of Christian saints that have ever been written penitence and self-abasement have played a large part. A saint who never felt Himself to be sinner would not be a saint, but an obnoxious hypocrite. And Christ pours outupon thescribes and Pharisees His hottest floods of anger for that very sin, that primary and most deadly sin of hypocrisy. And yet no one dreams, or has ever dreamt, of charging Him with hypocrisy. Sincerity shines in Him with the clearness of crystal. It is difficult to describe in words what we mean by sincerity, but we read the Gospels and see it and feel it. And we are faced with the mystery of a character in which absolute sincerity was perfectly combined with a total lack of penitence. ECCENTRICITY 53 How can we go back to the Man Jesus, and con- tentedly base our social Gospel on His words and deeds, without facing the question on what authority He said and did these things? The authority lay not in what He said and did, but in what He was; and that is the central problem of the whole com- plex of Christian dogma, the problem which every creed in Christendom has been an imperfect attempt to solve, and which all the thinkers in the world will never fully understand while this life lasts. Go back to the character of Jesus with increasing wonder, as all do who make any attempt to study it; go back to it as the foundation on which to build a social Gospel, as the source of every inspiration for service and for holiness; go back to it that you imitate Him as Man, and worship Him as God. g. ECCENTRICITY. If we cannot understand Him after nineteen centuries of thought, how far must He have stood beyond the grasp of the men and women with whom He lived on earth. ‘He is beside Himself.’ That is what some of His relatives and friends thought of Him. And later on in Jerusalem we read that the Jews said very much the same: ‘He hath a devil and is mad; why listen ye to Him’? ‘Mad,’ of course was an exaggeration from those who hated and feared Him. But to most people of His day he must have appeared at least what we call eccentric. Look at the word for a moment, and see what it really means. Imagine someone who was entirely absorbed in some not very useful hobby. If he thought of little else, and remained wrapped up in it, 54 CONCERNING CHRIST spending all his time and money on it, and shunning ordinary society, we should say that he was eccentric. The word means ‘away from the centre,’ that is to say, the life and thoughts of an eccentric person revolve round a different centre from that of the majority of people, who accordingly think of them- selves as ‘normal.’ In the machinery of an engine there is something which is called the eccentric, because the centre round which it revolves is differently constituted from the centres round which other parts revolve. And when the word is applied to human beings, with our instinctive feeling of the importance of being normal we think of eccentricity or abnormality as not far removed from madness. And that was exactly what was felt about our Lord. His centre was different from the centre of men and women round Him. His centre was, indeed, that which was intended for man since the Creation, when he was made in the Image of God, but while Christ the Image of the invisible God had clung stedfastly to that centre, every other human being had moved away from it. In Palestine in our Lord’s day the ordinary mass of the poorer population, ‘the people of the land,’ were for the most part entirely engrossed in the labour necessary for their daily bread. But of those who stood out with any prominence in the life of the nation we can distinguish three main groups. They had very diverse ideas and aims, and it might seem at first sight as if each of them would appear eccentric or abnormal or mad to the others. But the fact that they did not, shews that with all their religious and political differences, the real centre ECCENTRICITY 55 of all alike was ultimately the same. The Zealots burned with a consuming passion to make Palestine independent of Rome; they set themselves to rebel at every opportunity against their conquerors, to make government impossible, and at last to throw off the hated yoke and to bask in the sunshine of an exclusive nationality. At the opposite pole were the Sadducees, the priestly party and their followers, who fawned upon their conquerors, and upon the Herods whom Rome allowed to-be their native governors. As a class they were greedy of wealth and petty authority, worldly and irreligious. If a Herod insisted on the Jews discarding circum- cision, and adopting Greek customs, Greek dress and games and habits of life, they were only too ready to fall in with it, because their compliance made the authorities smile upon them, and exalt them to high offices, and add to their wealth. And the reaction from this was the rigid puritanism of the Pharisees. They despaired of their nation as a whole, and were bent on saving their own souls by scrupul- ous obedience to the law, and to the scribal tradition which was being built up to safeguard the law. Some of them, at the same time, longed for the Messiah from heaven, who would not only sweep away Rome, but would sweep away all sinners, and admit the select circle of pious Pharisees, and them alone, to the delights of the coming Kingdom. Think of a heaven composed entirely of pious Pharisees (ancient or modern)! But although these classes in Palestine were so different, none of them, as has been said, thought the others eccentric or mad, because the centre 56 CONCERNING CHRIST of one and all was Self,—Self in the form of national- ism, Self gratified by worldly advancement and wealth, and, the most dangerous and subtle of all, Self under the guise of piety. It was because this was the most dangerous and subtle that our Lord vehemently attacked the scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, and did not trouble to attack the others at all. And to all alike, Jesus Christ appeared to be abnormal, mentally unhinged. ‘Beside Himself’ means exactly the same as ‘eccentric.’ Their centre was Self; His centre was determined by the giving out of Self to others, the subordination of Self to the interests of others, the assertion of Self perfectly balanced by the sacrifice of Self, the balance being kept by the unquenchable desire for the glory of His Father. His centre, in a word, was Love. He went about doing good. We are so accustomed to it, living in a society permeated for nineteen centuries with the Spirit of Christ, that we are not surprised when we meet people who go about doing good. But in that age it was unique, abnormal, eccentric. And though the world to-day admires it up to a certain point, beyond that point it is thought of in the same way. Every Christian who is true to his name, who keeps life centred round the things of God, must be ready to suffer the accusation. Christ and the world are eccentric to one another, because the world of men has moved away from the centre for which it was created. Now let us change our metaphor (though the change is not very great when we examine the ECCENTRICITY 87 matter), and consider another word, more often used than eccentricity, and much more often misused, the word Repentance. English is a great language, but it has some serious limitations. The word ‘repentance’ is Latin in origin, and neither Hebrew nor Greek possesses anything like it. Latin thought during the middle ages throughout Europe was dominated by the legal conceptions of the Roman jurists; and this word is one of its products together with the closely allied words ‘penitence,’ ‘penance,’ and ‘penalty.’ If a man who had sinned was sorry enough to be ready to undergo the requisite penalty, it was thought that he put the matter right with God and with men. In modern times the thought of paying a penalty mostly drops out of sight, and ‘repentance’ is used quite loosely as equivalent to ‘being sorry,’ which means very different things to different people. How can it be made clear to people that ‘being sorry’ by itself will never do a man’s soul any good? That which wins forgiveness is being sorry with the sort of sorrow that makes him start to do better. The Greek word which is commonly translated ‘repentance’ contains the thought that we need; it means ‘the shifting of the mind to a new direction.’ I have committed a sin; if my re- pentance, my being sorry, is to be of the faintest use, it must be sorrow that makes me turn to a new path which leads away from the sin in question. I am afraid there are countless people who think that they have repented of a sin, when they haven’t really repented at all. They felt sorry, and sinned again; and they felt sorry again, and sinned again. 58 CONCERNING CHRIST And the usual result is that they feel less and less sorry as time goes on. They have never really set to work to move—to shift they mind—in a new direction that will lead them away from their sin. Many people tied and bound with the chain of their sins are sorry for being tied and bound; but they don’t break loose. They generally think they can’t. But they can, if the strength of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit have any meaning. Imagine a vessel on the ocean. If the man at the wheel put her on a wrong course, what possible use would it be for him merely to be sorry without putting her back again? The longer he went on being merely sorry the further she would stray from the right direction. For this shifting of the mind the nearest English word we have is ‘con- version.” But this has mostly been confined to the great crisis which some have experienced, a more or less sudden, radical transformation when a soul turns for the first time and surrenders itself wholly to God. But whenever a soul that has been surrendered for years, and is growing in strength and beauty, realizes that it has departed by a hairsbreadth out of touch with God, and is so sorry that it instantly prays to be forgiven and taken back again, so that it is shifted again into the true path, that is conversion, every time. Now this metaphor of shifting the mind to a new direction is not very different from that of shifting to a new centre. The more progress a man makes in the direction which leads to God, the further he travels from those whose minds have not been shifted from their natural, instinctive centre— REPENTANCE 59 devotion to Self. And when he has travelled away from them beyond a certain point, they begin to realize that he has become eccentric. Our Lord, who never sinned, never had to shift His mind to a new direction; He was the only living being who needed no repentance. And His eccentricity moved men to scorn and hatred and opposition, until they had Him murdered. His life is a great appeal to those who would like to imitate Him if they could, but shrink from being thought abnormal, dread being looked down upon as eccentric. It is an appeal to them to risk everything and take the plunge, to cast their nervousness and pride behind their backs, to look to Him for strength and courage, and to forsake all and follow Him, to move to His centre in scorn of consequence. And His life is an appeal also to those who have begun to follow Him. He longs to draw them with the cords of love further and further from their old sins, and to draw them to such sorrow for their present sins that whenever they fail they will invariably and at once turn back to Him, and set their face ever afresh along the road that He trod. Keep Him, keep His Love, as your centre, and all your sins, all your old weak, unstable, frightened, earth- clinging Self will dwindle away in the distance as you move with Him nearer and nearer into union with God. Io. REPENTANCE. Since our Lord was the only human being who needed no repentance, if we want to study an instance of it we must look at someone else. At 60 CONCERNING CHRIST the end of His first recorded sermon S. Peter cried, “Repent and be baptized... for the remission of sins.’ And in another sermon, ‘Repent there- fore, and turn to the wiping out of your sins.’ And John the Baptist said the same, ‘Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand’; and our Lord told the disciples to go out and say the same; and He said the same Himself. One and all they went forth with this primary and important message. Saul of Tarsus, on the road to Damascus, learnt what it meant; and his well known story will serve as an illustration. Think of his state of mind up to that moment—a pious, narrow, rigid puritan, of the straitest sect of the Pharisees. And that in spite of the fact that he had listened to the teaching of Gamaliel, who was famous as one of the most wide-minded and progressive Jews of his day. But although, with the assurance of youth, he probably thought that the Rabbi’s wide-minded progressive- ness was a great mistake, yet some of the things that he said very likely stuck in his mind. And if so, his narrow puritanism was already beginning to kick against some pricks. Then he heard that a little group of Jews had the effrontery to declare that a certain man—from Galilee of all places!— was the Messiah. And such a man! He had laid Himself out to break the Sabbath; He had held up to ridicule some of the scribal rules and casuistries; and He had Himself claimed to be the Messiah. Of course the thing had to be stopped. The authorities were perfectly right in getting the Roman procurator to execute Him as a common criminal. But that only made matters worse, because His REPENTANCE 61 followers insisted that they had seen Him alive. And so Saul persecuted them, and found them immovable in their faith. In relating his experiences afterwards he said, according to the Authorized Version, ‘I compelled them to blaspheme.’ But the Greek really means ‘I tvied to compel them to blaspheme’; and he failed. But when he questioned them or heard them questioned at their trials, they were so obviously honest and convinced, so evidently filled with an impelling inspiration, and so fearless, that the momentary thought shot into his mind, ‘Fancy if they were right after all!’ But he crushed the silly idea down into his unconscious mind; he kicked against the pricks, and shewed that he did so by persecuting these dreadful people the more fiercely. And his kicking and his persecuting were brought to a climax by the sensational death of one of his victims, named Stephen, a Hellenist with advanced heretical views. At his trial he cried out that he saw the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God; at his execution he said, “Lord Jesus receive my spirit’; and he asked this same Master to forgive his executioners, just before the last stone crushed the life out of him. Saul was feeling the pricks so badly that he lashed himself into a fury of zeal. The truth that he had repressed into his unconsciousness was driving him one way, and all his instincts and his past were driving him the other; and he was torn in two. But at last the pressure became too great; he reached the breaking point, and he saw Jesus. He fell prostrate and blind with the last unbearable tension. But the struggle and strain were over; Jesus was the 62 CONCERNING CHRIST Messiah after all; His followers were right after all. It is quite clear what happened to him. It was a change of mind, a change of outlook and ideas and feelings, a shifting of his centre of gravity, a new and different view of everything. His centre had formerly been Self, the saving and rewarding of his own soul by Jewish orthodoxy and Jewish righteousness; it was now the Risen Christ. He was the same man as before, with the same instincts and temperament and powers; and yet a different man, because he was now moving on a different plane, living in a different atmosphere, aiming at different goal. ‘If any man be in Christ he is a new creature; old things have passed away, behold all things are become new.’ S. Paul exhausts his wealth of language in describing the transformation of a non-Christian into a Christian. The reader would find it a fruitful subject for Bible study and meditation. Read through S. Paul’s epistles slowly in your daily readings, making lists under different headings of the various aspects in which he pictures the great change. The non-Christian and the Christian become eccentric to one another. But when Saul had gained this new outlook on everything, so that the entire universe had become a different place to live in, it was natural that he should wish others to share his experience, as he had previously wished to compel others to take his Jewish point of view. We must remember, however, that in his epistles he was writing to those who had begun to share his experience. The change REPENTANCE 63 of mind, the metanoia, which is translated ‘repen- tance,’ was that which led a man in those days to come out of Judaism or paganism into Chris- tianity. In his epistles, therefore, the word is not very frequent, though in his missionary preaching he no doubt used it often enough. But that does not mean that in the present day it is of use only in appeals to Jews and pagans. He wrote at a time when spiritual enthusiasm was at its height. It is true his converts were very young in faith and practice; they made bad mistakes, and had to be corrected. But there had not yet crept upon the Church that deadening paralysis which prevails to-day. Christians were Christians, and not sham ones. To-day everyone in the so-called Christian countries is assumed to be Christian unless he definitely claims to be something else. And conduct on the whole is controlled and kept respectable by generations of Christian influence in Europe. But how many need a change of outlook! They are not led by the Spirit of God; they have no love _ for Christ, and exceedingly little love for Christians. They are immersed in the things of this life, and they have no sort of wish to be immersed in anything else. Religious matters seem to them so entirely uninteresting that they simply bore them when they are brought in contact with them; but for the most part they successfully avoid being bored by having as little to do with them as possible. It was not that sort of thing that S. Paul had to contend with. He was not up against the padded wall of well-behaved worldliness. To-day, a change of outlook, a change of values, a change of centre, 64 CONCERNING CHRIST is the first deep need of ninety-nine men and women out of a hundred. The remaining one per cent. are of two kinds— those who have, gradually or suddenly, experienced the great change, who have ‘repented and turned,’ to use S. Peter’s phrase, and those (a tiny fraction per cent.) who do not need it. I think we must recognize that there are men and women whose heredity and surroundings have been such that their souls are naturally Christian. When our Lord spoke of the ninety and nine just persons who need no change of outlook, while there was irony in His words it did not, I think, extend to every one of the ninety and nine. I do not, of course, mean for a moment that such souls that are ‘naturally Christian’ have no sins to be sorry for. The more directly and earnestly they have set themselves to keep Christ as their centre, the more sorry they become for every sin and mistake and failing that makes them swerve from their true orbit. But there are men and women for whom, ever since they were old enough to think seriously at all, Christ has always been the most prominent figure in the foreground of their life and thoughts and ideals. To know intimately such men and women is a privilege enjoyed by few. But one question remains. What can we do to help people to this change of outlook, this shifting of the centre of gravity from earth to heaven, from Self to Christ? When we ask what it was that helped Saul of Tarsus, we find that it was mainly what he had seen of the lives and characters of Christians. The words ‘I am Jesus whom thou Pree PR INGRE YS SHIRET 65 persecutest,’ identified them with their Master whose Spirit lived in them. And their characters were such that Saul was enabled to form a concep- tion of the Christ far more wonderful and beautiful and loving than any Jewish writings had ever suggested of the Messiah. If you are going to change people it will not be by a display of piety. Saul of Tarsus can never have had the opportunity of seeing the Christians engaged in the act of wor- shipping, unless he did so on occasions when he raided their service and arrested their leaders. Displays of piety mostly irritate those to whom you are eccentric. You will change them mainly by the same two things that influenced him: first by being obviously and unmistakeably good men and women, sincere, true, kind, self-disciplined; and secondly, whenever the need arises, by standing up quite fearlessly for the divine truths which form the mainstay of your life, because you are attached with cords stronger than steel to Jesus Christ your Hero. It is by what you are that those hearts which are still kicking against the pricks, whom Christ is still calling to look at things from His point of view, may be driven to the breaking-point, and learn to say with S. Paul, ‘I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.’ Ir. THE PRINCELY SPIRIT. We have thought of our Lord’s character with the help of a metaphor suggested by the word ‘eccentric,’ and of the great change which men need—a moving from the earthly centre to the heavenly. Let us now drop the metaphor, and F 66 CONCERNING CHRIST think what it was that gave Him His wonderful power of appeal to the men and women among whom He worked. In a Psalm of penitence in which Christians for nineteen centuries, and Jews for yet more centuries, have poured out their soul in sorrow for sin, the writer says, “Uphold me with a free spirit.’ It really means ‘a princely spirit,’ the spirit of a prince, or of a free man, as opposed to the spirit of a slave. That for which he prayed is seen in its glorious perfection in our Lord Jesus Christ. The Gospels are so familiar to us that we do not always realize how thrillingly new and wonderful His words and actions must have been to the people of His day, who were slaves to law, to tradition, to custom, with a narrow and dried-up conservatism that seemed impervious. In the early months of His ministry almost everything that He said and did was a magnificent surprise. Time after time the evangelists reveal to us the effects: “The multitudes heard Him gladly’; ‘they were filled with astonishment’; ‘they glorified God who had given such power unto men’; ‘we have seen strange things to-day’; ‘it was never so seen in Israel’; “what manner of man is this?’; ‘they wondered at the words of grace that proceeded out of His mouth.’ It was because the princely spirit had brought a breath of the air of freedom to a nation of slaves. Look at some of the events strung together in only two chapters of S. Luke’s Gospel, chapters v. and vi. A leper met Him, one whom a long, cruel tradition had made an outcast, the degraded offscouring of humanity, who was compelled to live Wii PRINCELY SPIRIT 67 outside the town, and cover his mouth, and cry “Unclean, unclean!’ to warn every passer-by not to pollute himself by coming too close. But one day the Man with the princely spirit came by. ‘And Jesus put forth His hand and touched him’— touched him!—defiled Himself so that according to Jewish law He was as unclean for the time being as the leper Himself, to say nothing of the risk of catching the disease. What a rush of wonder the sufferer must have felt at being touched, not to speak of healed. Next we read of the paralysed man, let down through the roof into the crowded room where the Lord was preaching. To heal him was wonderful, but much more wonderful was the unheard-of claim that a man could forgive sins. The whole crowd were dumbfounded, stirred to their very depths by the way in which the princely Spirit rose in calm assurance over all the petty ideas that the nation of slaves had ever had about man and his spiritual authority. And then came another shock. The collectors of the public taxes, ‘pub- licans,’ as our Authorized Version calls them, were low class Jews who were unpatriotic enough to do what was felt to be the dirty work of their Roman conquerors; and they were hated and despised accordingly. But we read that our Lord made one of them a member of His closest band of followers, and then actually sat down to a meal with a whole party of them. ‘Publicans and sinners’ were scarcely a shade better than lepers. But the princely spirit saw in them only souls to be saved. Just after that, the disciples, who had begun to come under the influence of that spirit, broke 68 CONCERNING CHRIST Jewish rules by rubbing some grains of corn in their hands on the Sabbath. But the Lord defended their action. Human needs must be allowed in charity to over-ride petty human rules. It was because men were slaves to these rules that they could not see how petty they were. And the same principle was made good once more when He healed the man with the withered hand on the Sabbath, in the synagogue, before the whole august array of scrupulous, conservative, puritanical scribes and Pharisees. And the rest of the chapter, after the call of the Twelve, is S. Luke’s version of the Sermon on the Mount, in every word of which ‘He spake with authority and not as the scribes,’ the authority of the princely spirit. It was the spirit that refused to tithe mint and anise and cummin instead of putting the weightier matters first; the power to strike out new lines of thought, new ideas, new methods, by an inspiration that came from above; the spirit that afterwards flooded the disciples at Pentecost and enabled them to say, ‘Whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto you rather than unto God judge ye, “We must obey God rather than men’; the refusal to be enslaved by what is old and con- ventional simply because it is old and conventional; —it was this princely spirit, this divine exhilaration, that electrified Galilee and drew men in crowds. We can hear the ring of joy in S. Paul’s words, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.’ That is what we need in our life and work, constant breaths of that wide, free air that will help us to put the great, deep things of God first, put iter Ee RINGER ASPIRE 69 the saving of souls first, put charity and deliverance and healing first, and to put last everything little and narrow and petty and selfish and small. And our needs are also the needs of all workers for God at home and abroad. Constant change is a necessary part of human progress in religious and social work as in everything else. And yet it is often a temptation to resent it. A worker is apt to feel that the methods that he is accustomed to, methods that have been good enough for him, ought to be good enough for the younger workers that join him. Pride prevents him from seeing that ideas which were very likely the best that had been reached, say, ten or fifteen years ago, are not necessarily the best now. It needs a rich endow- ment of the princely spirit to make him rise above this resentment, and be humble enough to learn readily and eagerly new things from younger workers, realizing that, as our Lord says in this same fifth chapter of S. Luke, new wine cannot be kept in old skins. Some of our old fixed ideas and habits and methods and peculiarities and crochets may have become, if we only knew it, like the dead bones in Ezekiel’s vision, very many and very dry. But if we pray with real longing ‘Renew a right spirit within me,’ “Take not Thy Holy Spirit from me,’ “Uphold me with a princely spirit, —if we pray ‘Come from the four winds O Breath, and breathe upon these slain that they may live,’ every faculty We possess can spring into new life to fight and work for God. And many other chains we may have which spoil our work—our old selfishness, and laziness, and self-pleasing, and _ self-centredness, 70 CONCERNING CHRIST our old desire to be thought well of, our old critical, grumbling spirit, in short, our old sins. But where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. That is our need, and the need of all workers. And then see the result. The Psalmist says, ‘Uphold me with a princely spirit; then shall I teach Thy ways unto the wicked, and sinners shall be converted unto Thee.’ The world takes a very long time to be converted. That is partly its own fault no doubt; man possesses freedom of will, and can refuse to listen, refuse to be convinced and repent. Many refused even when our Lord was working among them. But very largely—iar more largely than we can calculate—it is due to the spiritual incapacity of the workers. Many workers, clergy included, have not yet reached a true repen- tance, have not yet been lifted by the divine Spirit out of their slavery to sin and self. If there is any- one whom we might have drawn nearer to God, but failed to do so because we were not near enough to Him ourselves, then we must echo the Psalmist’s cry, ‘Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God,’ deliver me from the guilt which I have incurred by not being capable of lifting up a dying soul into new life. Now let us look at our Lord again, and think how His work was done. When He touched the leper, it was not a magic, or a medicine in the physical sense. His touch was, so to speak, a sacrament by which a spiritual result was obtained. God’s stored up energy was available for the sufferer to draw upon, it was ready waiting, had been ready waiting since the first moment of the disease; and REE PRINCELY SPIRIT 71 the princely spirit made it spring into activity, because it made the man co-operate with God. That is faith,—not the blind assent to what our intellect declares to be impossible, but an acceptance of God’s power in such a way as to come out to meet it and grasp it. And all the outward para- phernalia of our work, all the parish machinery by which we try to get hold of people, the clubs and societies and all the rest of it, are like the outward, physical touch, utterly useless unless the divine Spirit is in us which can call forth faith in the sinners whom we try to reach. The leper was one type of a sinner, the paralytic was another. He represents the people who are morally paralysed, too slack, too lazy, too weak, too much enervated by long self-indulgence or want of self-discipline to do anything for their own good. And what did our Lord do? He first assured him of the forgiveness of his sins, and then simply told him to get up; told him to do the one thing that he had probably not attempted for years, to get up, and carry his own mattress, and walk home! And the case of the man with the withered hand was exactly similar; our Lord told him to stretch it out. How was the healing done? There was no magic. But the princely spirit was such that it could gain an entrance into the depths of the man’s being and call into play the power that was within his reach all the time, though he thought he had lost it. If you can be in close touch with God, so close that you can convince a sinner of the divine forgiveness, and the divine strength that is in him, all his long-lost spiritual power will spring 72 CONCERNING CHRIST into new life. But it is clear that nothing but the princely spirit can doit. It is as easy to say ‘Thy sins are forgiven thee’ as to say “Arise and walk.’ It was the divine authority exercised by the Son of Man, because He was in perfect union with His Father, that did the deed. And if any religious worker is in close touch with God, he can go and do likewise. 12. PRINCIPLES. We have seen the princely spirit in action, trans- forming slaves into free men. Now suppose we had learnt only so much about our Lord’s life and no more, suppose we had never read a word of His sermons or discourses or conversations, so that we had to guess for ourselves what the moral teaching would be like of One whose spiritual power thus shewed itself in outward deed, we should say that a nation that was enslaved to rules could not be lifted up to freedom by yet more rules; and therefore that our Lord cannot have been a mere Rabbi, laying down fixed regulations of conduct. He must have declared the broadest and deepest principles of God, which free men could translate into practical daily details for themselves. Any details that He mentioned would be only illustrations of some of the ways in which the principles could be kept. Let us look at His moral teaching as recorded in the Gospels, and see how entirely it answers to our expectations. Someone said to me not long ago, ‘It is impossible to be Christian nowadays.’ It sounded almost as if the speaker meant that at one time it used to be PRINCIPLES 73 comparatively easy to be Christian, but had recently become difficult. Christianity has always been difficult, and always will be, in the sense of needing hard effort. So is music, and scholarship, and football, and everything else that is worth doing. But the particular difficulty referred to in our conversation was that people are so often rude or troublesome or exacting or dishonest, or something, that it is impossible to follow the teaching of the Sermon on the Mount by ‘turning the other cheek.’ There is a widespread feeling that our Christianity is not really the religion of Christ, because no one obeys all the commands in that sermon, and that it is impossible to do so. And while on the one side there is this complaint that the ideal of conduct held up by Christ is too hard for this work-a-day world, on the other side we are assailed by a different one. Ethics has become a department of modern scientific thought. It is studied by many who openly claim to be non-Christian. And some ethical philosophers hold that by claiming Christ to have been morally perfect we bar the road to true ethical advance. If He was perfect, His character was one which can be imitated but never surpassed. But the nature of man is such that he must ever push forward along the line of development. And for this purpose the goal must be a far-off, unknown perfection towards which mankind must strive. A solitary instance of perfection in the first century, they say, is opposed to the general truth which every instructed person to-day takes for granted, that the world-process is a process of becoming. 74 CONCERNING CHRIST Here are two sides to a serious problem: the moral ideal of Christ is something too high to be aimed at, and the moral perfection of Christ is something too high to be postulated! Look first at a sentence in the Sermon on the Mount: “Give to him that asketh of thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn thou not away.’ The modern man objects that if that command were followed as it stands, it would mean indiscriminate charity and unlimited loans; and that would result in social chaos and ruin. An enormous proportion of the human race would decline to do a stroke of work so long as they could keep themselves success- fully by begging and borrowing. As S. Jerome pointed out fifteen centuries ago, the poor cannot obey the command; and if the rich obeyed it, they would soon be unable to do so because they would have nothing left to give or lend. The economics of this complex world make a complete and literal observance of the command simply unthinkable. Again, there are people who want us to resist no injuries, and never under any circumstances to use force; to do away, for instance, with all policemen, and to preserve and improve the well being of our cities by education and kindness. Most of us feel that that also would reduce social life to chaos and ruin. And even the people who deprecate all force never go on to give or lend to everyone that asks them. Look at another instance: ‘Take no thought (i.e. be not anxious) for the morrow, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or wherewithal shall we be clothed?’ What would happen to PRINCIPLES 76 human society if everyone obeyed that command to the letter? We should all throw ourselves on the indiscriminate charity of those who happened to possess food, drink, and clothing, and these commodities would come to an end in an incredibly short space of time. It is true that our Lord’s word means ‘be not anxious’; but temperaments are so different that it is impossible to draw a sharp line between anxiety and prudent forethought. One more instance will be useful, not, this time, from the Sermon on the Mount. Our Lord was unmarried, and He quite distinctly commended those who left wife and children and followed Him, and those who kept themselves unmarried for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake. What would happen if all Christians remained celibate? There would soon be no Christians in the world at all; Chris- tianity would die, and the soul of man would die with it. The sanctity of marriage, which Christ Himself declared to be a primaeval ordinance of God, is one of the foundation stones of human life. All this, of course, is very obvious, and has often been said. We cannot, and we ought not to, obey to the letter the Sermon on the Mount, and some other details in our Lord’s teaching. His moral injunctions are not fixed regulations literally binding upon men to the end of time. But then some people ask, Are you not whittling down the Christian ideal in order to make it possible by making it easier? That is the real question that needs an answer. I would ask the reader at this point to look again at page 36 and read what was said there about 76 CONCERNING CHRIST Christ’s moral teaching and His moral perfection. Perfection is a matter of guality, not a programme of conduct. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that Beethoven’s music is perfect, and that Raphael’s painting is perfect. How are you going to compare them? They are not two perfections. Perfection is a quality, expressed in these two entirely different ways. Again, as has been said, a rosebud is perfect, and the full-grown rose is perfect; but the expression of perfection varies with the development of the flower; it does not remain the same for two days together. Our Lord as a little Boy was perfect, and at the last moment of His life, as He hung upon the Cross, He was perfect. But the expression of His perfection varied with every moment that He grew in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man, and learnt obedience from the things that He suffered. And, finally, He said Himself, ‘Be ye perfect, even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect.’ But the divine, infinite, eternal exhibition of all perfection is not the same as our human, finite, temporal exhibitions of it. And so we begin to see our way to an answer to the philosophical difficulty. If Jesus Christ had been born somewhere in Western Europe, say in the year 1900, instead of in Palestine nineteen centuries earlier, He would now be living on earth a perfect human life. Does anyone pretend to think that that perfection would express itself in exactly the same actions and habits and ways that it did in the life of a Palestinian Jew in the reign of Tiberius? It is only mistaken ideas of Christianity that give a handle to the objectors. We do not want to block PRINCIPLES ay the road of human ethical progress. When we say that we must aim at Christ’s character, we mean that we must aim at the divine quality of perfection which His character continuously and variously expressed as He grew to manhood, not at the particular form and mode of its expression that His time and place and circumstances, during the few months of His ministry, demanded from Him. The Christian ethic requires growth; it demands evolution; Christianity calls upon the race, and the races, in each successive age and period to strive to get nearer to a complete expression of perfection for that age and period. Now if this is the right way to regard the perfection of Jesus Christ, it must be the right way to regard the perfection which He wished to see in those who heard Him deliver the Sermon on the Mount. Think of the situation. There was the decadent Jewish nation, and the great Roman nation rapidly approaching its decadence, with its iron hand upon Palestine, and a medley of other nationalities constantly moving between East and West. And in this welter of politics, philosophies, ideals, and creeds, our Lord picked out a few simple country folk, who could separate themselves from the economics and the cosmopolitan life of their day without doing the slightest harm to themselves or anyone else. He called them to follow Him in poverty and detachment from the world, and gave them rules of conduct which were to mark them out as sharply as possible from the society in which they lived, that they might preach the near advent of the Kingdom of God. The rules of conduct were 78 CONCERNING CHRIST particular expressions of great principles. The principles were eternal, but the specific rules were instances suited to the time and the place and the hearers. Some of them are suitable to some Christians to-day; the saintliness of many members of religious communities who devote themselves to poverty, obedience, and celibacy, is evidence of it. But to make the rules universally binding would be to do precisely what our Lord Himself deprecated. It would mean exalting the letter of His commands at the expense of their spirit. ‘The letter killeth,’ as S. Paul says, ‘but the spirit giveth life.’ It would mean putting a yoke of slavery on those who pray for the princely spirit of freedom. For those few followers at that time and in that country, celibacy, the non-resistance of injuries, indiscriminate charity, and complete detachment of mind from the worry of ensuring to-morrow’s food and clothing, were methods planned with a definite and immediate purpose, and not planned for all human society in the twentieth century. But so far from whittling down the Christian ideal, this way of looking at it makes it harder than ever to reach. It is exceedingly difficult to make an exact and accurate copy of a great masterpiece; but it is much more difficult so to be imbued with the spirit of the Master as to produce an original master- piece of one’s own. But that is what we are called upon to do. It is exceedingly difficult to imitate the manner of life of our Lord and His apostles, and to keep the rules that He made for them; but it is much more difficult to be so filled with His Spirit that we can make rules for ourselves, and PRINCIPLES 79 work out His eternal principles in such a way as to express His perfection in the manner that our modern life demands. Instead of giving charity to every beggar that asks for it, we are to use our money with a full and vivid recognition that it is not our own; that every penny we have is entrusted to us to use in love to God and men. That is far harder than mere charity, indiscriminate, sentimental, harmful, and unwise. Instead of maintaining that we must under no circumstances resist evil, we are to be so filled with love that we shall resist at the right time for the sake of others and the glory of God. And on the other hand we are to be so shining with humility that we shall at the right time accept injuries in long-suffering and silence. That is far harder, and far more in accordance with Christ’s wishes than to obey rigidly and mechanically the bare command to turn the other cheek. And we shall by the same Spirit know whether God wants from us celibacy for the Kingdom of Heaven’s sake, or the sacred and wonderful responsibility of Christian marriage and Christian parenthood. In every detail of life we are treated as grown men, not as children. We are given the hard task, not of mere obedience to this or that rule of conduct, but, of proving, testing, discovering, deciding for ourselves with the help of the divine Spirit what is acceptable unto the Lord. Let no one think” that we are making Christ’s law of none effect; nay, we establish the law. 80 CONCERNING CHRIST 13. THE REAL MAN. The life and character of Jesus Christ are absorb- ing, but we must pass on to think of His death. Before doing so, however, a short meditation may be useful for the purpose of summing up our thoughts about Him who is our life, and our life’s ideal. In I John iv. 17 we read ‘as He is so are we in this world.’ Could anything exceed the boldness with which the writer pictures our kinship with Christ? He speaks as if we had become already what God wants us to be. But that boldness is seen also in many other parts of the New Testament. S. Paul especially revels in the thought. All Christians are saints; they are perfect; they are in Christ, sharing His life like limbs in a body; they are children of God, justified, glorified, dead to sin, sitting with Christ in heavenly places. Though we have not yet reached the ideal, S. Paul is sure that we have it in us to reach it; as far as Christ’s work is con- cerned the thing is done; we have been translated out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of God’s love. And so we are exhorted to walk worthy of the vocation wherewith we are called; to walk worthily as becometh saints; to walk as children of light. These are some of the many ways of describing what we are intended to become. But for our present purpose I want to follow one particular line of thought. A portrait of a man may be an ex- tremely good likeness, but it is not, of course, a real man. You can see something still more like life in the pictures of men and women at a cinema; THE REAL MAN 81 more realistic, but not real men and women. Or, once more, you might see a waxwork figure of a man, with machinery so ingenious that it could walk about and even talk. Wonderfully realistic, but not real. It could do nothing voluntarily; it could feel nothing, know nothing; it would-not enter into human relations with human beings; men would not have to adapt themselves to it in the way that they would to real manhood. But the illustra- tion must be pursued further. Though the wax- work figure is not a real man, it is a real waxwork figure. Why do we call it real? If I dreamt of a waxwork figure, I should think it was real at the time, and in my dream I should treat it, and adapt myself to it, as a real thing. But no one else would. Mankind would not call it real unless it appealed not only to me but to mankind in such a way that all would treat it as answering from every point of view to their idea of a waxwork figure. We call a thing real, then, if it answers in every respect to our idea of it. But when we come to human life, we have to consider not only our ideas, but our ideals. If we watched a child playing tennis for the first time, we might call it tennis if we wanted to speak kindly. But if we watched a final championship match at Wimbledon we could say, That is real tennis; that is the real thing. We should not be speaking, perhaps, with philosophical exactness, but the words would express an important truth. To our minds there are degrees of reality according to the approach that is made to our perfect ideal. If you met aman who would not go to the slightest trouble or danger G 82 CONCERNING CHRIST or inconvenience to save someone’s life, or a man rolling in money who would not give a penny to save his mother from the workhouse, you would say, ‘That’s not my idea of aman’; and you might equally well say, ‘That’s not a real man.’ The true nature of a thing is that which it is capable of becoming. Real is Perfect. Now we see through a glass darkly; now we see what is only partially real. But when that which is perfect is come, then we reach Reality. All these illustrations will help to lead up to the thought that we are trying to study. If we believe in a divine Mind, we must believe that God’s idea, or ideal, of a man is something immeasurably greater than our minds could conceive. To His Mind a man would be perfectly and completely real only if he answered in every respect to the perfect divine ideal. And it follows that not one of us is a perfectly reaalmanorwoman. Weare only partially, relatively real. Most of us are only beginners like the child learning to play tennis. We have before us a long process of practice and improvement. But then we ask, Process towards what? What is God’s ideal of a man? His ideal can be nothing short of perfect goodness. But perfect goodness is what God Himselfis. So His ideal is that man’s character should be a flawlessly perfect reproduction of His. God, in His essential character, is not Power or Law, or Knowledge, or Eternity or any other of the supreme things that we attribute to Him. The essence of God is Goodness, with Love as its primary expression. But since our minds are not His Mind, we could not, from the nature of the case, conceive THE REAL MAN 83 of perfect goodness. And so He shewed it to us. That is what Christianity stands for: that is the message that it gives to the world. The message is not that everyone ought to try to be very good; many prophets and moralists in all ages have preached that. The Christian message is distinc- tively Christian only where it is, in the strictest sense, unique. It is that God, of His own purpose, of His own love, revealed to us perfect goodness. No moral teacher since the world began has been capable of shewing it to us, because from the nature of the case, as has been said, no man could possibly find it out for himself. But we learn what it is by looking at Jesus Christ. When we do that, we do not find Omnipresence, Omnipotence, Omniscience and so on; but we find that which He came to reveal and introduce into the world, perfect Goodness, the very essential Nature of God Himself. The thing was so vast that the disciples could not realize it all in a few months; they could only stand on the brink of the Infinite, and look dimly into the fathomless depths of the character of God. A child cannot of himself imagine an oratorio such as Bach wrote; but even when he hears it, how much does he understand? Hemust become a trained musician, he must make some approach to the mind of Bach if he is to gain a growing understanding of him. The disciples learnt much more by Christ’s Death and Resurrection, and the New Testament is a record of their growing understanding; but the Church has been learning more ever since. As S. Paul says, we must ‘grow up unto Him in all things,’ and it takes the whole world’s lifetime to do that. We are all as 84 CONCERNING CHRIST children beginning to study the divine music; and whatever our advance has been in the spiritual life, we do not yet fully understand the real thing, the perfect goodness of the Real Man. | Part II I. TRIUMPH. In Part I. we began by collecting a few of the thoughts suggested by the stories of our Lord’s infancy and childhood before entering upon the deeper doctrinal problems of His Character and Person. In the same way we can now distil some meaning from the stories of incidents or persons connected with the Passion, before passing on to dwell upon the profound truths involved in it. We begin at Palm Sunday, with the entry into Jerusalem. What a triumph it was! The popular Hero come to His own at last. When He emerged from the seclusion of Nazareth and began His preaching, everyone wondered at the words of grace which proceeded out of His mouth. The common people heard Him gladly because He came announc- ing good tidings to the poor, the despised, neglected masses. He was as living water to men dying of thirst; as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land; as a flood of sunlight to those that sat in darkness; as a breaker of chains to those that were fast bound in misery andiron. And everyone began to ask, ‘Is not this the Leader, the Champion, the King, who has been expected for centuries? The Messiah is about to assert Himself, righteous and having salvation, ruling in the fear of the Lord.’ Then there had come a lull. The wonderful Prophet 85 86 CONCERNING CHRIST disappeared, and went off into seclusion with His disciples. The religious authorities had thought Him a troublesome and dangerous person, who openly defied their cherished traditions and privileges, and they had no doubt been glad that He was out of the way, and hoped never to see Him again. But now He had re-appeared. He was known to be coming up for the Passover; and as the pilgrim bands approached Jerusalem they suddenly gathered round Him, and with a spontaneous burst of joy greeted Him as the Son of David. Was not the parallel with the words of Zechariah too obvious to be missed ?>—‘ Behold thy King cometh unto thee, meek, and sitting upon an ass.’ And they escorted Him to the city with shouts of gladness, while the authorities were gnashing their teeth with rage and envy at seeing how the whole world had gone after Him. It was a great triumph! At least it appeared to be a great triumph. The Evangelists were artists enough to allow the deep irony of the situation to speak for itself. They do not say a single word to suggest that it was not a real triumph. But our Lord knew it. As soon as He reached the city, the whole thing flickered out, and He took very good care that it should. His Kingdom was not of this world. The one element of real triumph in it was the fact that He was deliberately riding to His death. If men had known it they could have sung ‘Lift up your heads O ye gates, and be ye lifted up ye everlasting doors, and the King of glory shall come in.’ But the glory must be reached through shame. ‘The real triumph was reached when He cried, ‘It is finished,’ and TRIUMPH 87 bowed His head and gave up the ghost—the triumph of love revealed and perfected in sacrifice. And the entry into Jerusalem has been,repeated in essence in many a triumph since. For nearly three centuries afterwards, Christians were despised and hated as the enemies of the human race. They were persecuted by emperor after emperor. They were thrown to the lions, smeared with pitch and burnt alive in public, racked and tortured with every conceivable form of cruelty. That was their real triumph. But there came a day when they won over to their side the emperor himself. The con- version of Constantine seemed like a glorious triumph, the beginning of a grand movement to gather the whole civilized world into the fold of Christ. But from that moment the words ‘not of this world,’ written on the heart of the Church, began to fade and grow dim. When Rome was burnt to the ground, the Holy Roman Empire rose from the ashes, and held sway for centuries. But just in so far as she tried to get the best of both worlds—just in so far as she aimed at power instead of crucifixion— she failed in the sight of God. We pass to our own day, and reach another triumph, the triumph of guns over guns. The world kept on reiterating, ‘It was a famous victory.’ But the irony of Palm Sunday was seen again. That which was of eternal value, the element of real triumph in it, was the desire in any human heart for the assertion of righteousness, and the unnamed and unimaginable sacrifices borne for that purpose. If the world will not follow that lead, and be brought nearer to a share in the Cross of Christ, 88 CONCERNING CHRIST the war with its triumphant ending will be entered on the books of Heaven as one of the greatest failures ever known. One word, and one word only, seems to be branding itself upon the hearts of men, and that is ‘money,’ and money especially as a means of buying pleasures and amusements. Money, of course, is a necessity of life; and as long as there are thousands who, through no fault of their own, are unable to get the necessities of life, our civiliza- tion is a surface triumph, rotten at the core. Never- theless the principle stands good: ‘ Ye cannot serve God and mammon.’ We have heard the words so often that they fail to make the least dint in the consciences of many of us. The striving after money, and the material things that money brings with it, has led the world further from God than it was during the time when it was thrilled with the spirit of sacrifice. And if so, the war ended in a triumph which has as yet been no triumph in the eyes of God. In the midst of all this there is the Christian Church, the Body of Christ, the organ or instrument by which He wants to express Himself to the world. And His Self-expression is manifestly incomplete if it does not include sacrifice, crucifixion. Except the world can see in the Church the print of the nails, it will not believe. How then does the Church stand? Where are its triumphs? They are not in anything that the world would count triumphs. If the Church were a good business concern, a thriving co-operative society, if Christians its shareholders were guaranteed not only the joys of Heaven but also 12 per cent. on earth, the world would be more TRIUMPH 89 than affable. It will accept God and mammon; it will accept mammon alone; but for God alone it has no use. Where, then, are the triumphs of the Christian Church? You will find them wherever there is crucifixion, wherever Christ can accurately express His own triumph. You will find them in many over- worked fathers and mothers, clergymen, doctors, nurses, who are spending the last ounce of their strength for others, inspired by the Spirit of Christ Jesus. You will find them in many old and feeble persons, in many who are burdened with pain or weakness, in many quite ordinary people, ignorant or obscure, but who are doing secret service to God by continual and earnest prayer. You will find them in young men and women faced with fearful odds in the temptations of life, but whose strength is as the strength of ten because their heart is pure. You will find them in every man or woman, in any occupation, profession, or trade, in any society, sect, or party, of any race, country, or colour, who puts Christ Crucified first, and everything else in heaven or earth or under the earth second and last. These are they in whom Christ expresses Himself, whose triumph is real and permanent, for whom we can pray with hope and confidence, ‘Make them to be numbered with Thy saints in glory everlasting.’ These were his servants, in His steps they trod, Following through death the martyred Son of God. Victor He rose; victorious too shall rise They who have drunk His cup of sacrifice. 90 CONCERNING CHRIST 2. JUDAS. ‘His words were smoother than butter, having war in his heart.’ ‘Mine own familiar friend whom I trusted, who did also eat of my bread, hath laid great wait forme.’ ‘Have not I chosen you twelve, and one of you is a devil.’ We feel that there is nothing more terrible in human history than the tragedy of Judas Ischariot, the apostle who failed. Whenever he is held up as a warning, it is difficult to escape an attack of self complacency. To com- pare any sins that we have committed with the blackest sin on record places us at once at an advantage. We have never been guilty of any crime compared with his. So we are inclined to imagine until we think carefully about it. But we must remember that what makes a sin bad in the sight of God is not the action itself but the motive. If a man out of work steals a five pound note because his children are starving, and a prosperous trades- man cheats a customer out of 2d., I have no doubt at all that the latter is worse in God’s eyes than the former. If any of us discovers in himself the same motive as that of Judas, all reason for self-com- placency has disappeared. It is nothing but circum- stances which made us different from him. We can, if we like, live in the immediate company of Jesus Christ as he did; we can see His wonderful works, and hear His wonderful words. We have at least as good a chance of becoming disciples as he had. And we are disloyal to our Master every day. I don’t want to whitewash his sin, but I want us to realize that our own are black. JUDAS QI What was the motive of Judas Ischariot? Weare not expressly told, but his storymakes it clear enough. In S. John’s Gospel it is said that he was a thief, and used to steal money from the common purse. But the getting of money was only one result of_his chief inner motive. Think for a moment of the facts. He was engaged in his trade or occupation whatever it was; and there came a day when Jesus passed by and said to him, Follow Me. And he arose and followed Him. The unearthly power of the Lord’s Person drew him as it did the others. In the thrill of the first call the chief motive-power of his being was for the moment overcome, and ceased to work. He had his chance of overcoming it altogether. And if he had given himself in real surrender to the Master who called him, one of the holiest saints in the Church’s calendar might have been S. Judas Ischariot. He left home, then, and followed our Lord. Then he began to see His marvellous works, and to hear His marvellous talks to enthusiastic crowds. But I don’t think it was long before a false note sounded in his heart. The more popular the Prophet of Nazareth became, the more he began to feel it a distinction to belong to His small chosen band of close companions. Jesus has chosen only twelve men, and among them me, Judas! A little later on Jesus came into hostility with the scribes and Pharisees. Judas no doubt disliked the very strict rules of conduct which many of them taught, and he probably enjoyed hearing his Master denounce these religious teachers and call them hypocrites. He could not penetrate to the depths of His moral teaching; and to hear the rules denounced would 92 CONCERNING CHRIST give him an easy feeling that he was free from strict rules. Then came the moment when he learned that Jesus claimed to be the coming Messiah. And because he did not understand Him in the least, he thought that He meant the kind of Messiah that the Jews in general were hoping for—a great Leader who would defeat all their enemies and set Himself up as King in Jerusalem. When He chose to announce Himself, no doubt all these enthusiastic crowds would rally round Him, and by some sudden stroke He would take the throne, which was after all His by right as a descendant of David. And what a splendid time that would be. Think of the glory and honour of it. I, Judas, will be one of the King’s chosen friends, and He will give me part of Palestine to govern, and I shall be rich and prosperous beyond all dreams. And with these sordid hopes in his mind he waited and waited, and nothing happened. But then the day came when our Lord rode in triumph into Jerusalem. And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried saying, ‘ Hosanna to the Son of David, blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord, Hosanna in the Highest.’ And Judas would think, Haha! Now the moment has come. I wondered what He was waiting for; but He was cleverer than I thought. He has only waited till He could be surrounded by the multitude of pilgrims coming up for the Passover. He is gathering them round Him in order to seize the throne. Now for a good time! And he waited and waited, and still nothing happened. Jesus went quietly out of the city night after night, and slept on the Mount of Olives; and this unique chance of JUDAS 93 becoming King was thrownaway. Andat last,inan outburst of resentment and disappointment he must have come to the conclusion that nothing was going to happen. He had wasted all these months in tramping about Galilee, telling people that the kingdom was just going to come; he had given up his trade and his home; he had made himself a poor man; and all for nothing. So he took his revenge, got by it something equivalent to five or six pounds, and then committed suicide. Now what was his life’s motive? His life’s motive was Self. And there are a good many people who under the same circumstances would have done the same thing. Notice the particular way in which, in his case, Self asserted its desires. He thought it was an advantage to himself to belong to a particular group of persons; one of the Twelve, one of the chosen few. And consumed with this thought, all the claims of Jesus upon his life and love and devotion went for nothing. And that is precisely the case with many people to-day. To beamember, for instance, of the wealthy or the well-to-do class is a distinction in itself, which some men and women will do literally anything to reach or to retain. Scrupulous honesty and open-hearted kindness, not to speak of religion, are simply outside the range of their ideas. Religion will do for the poor; and they despise the poor. Others feel perfectly satisfied with themselves because, by the mere accident of birth, they are what are called gentlemen. They are thankful that they are not as other men are, who don’t know how to behave and speak and dress and eat properly. To be a gentleman is so obviously 94 CONCERNING CHRIST the only thing that matters, that religion, worship, love, become so-to-speak ungentlemanly, things that we don’t talk about in polite society. The same thing is seen in other directions. Men and women of literary tastes, scholars, authors, journal- ists, scientists, artists, and so on—some who are members of this or that choice company feel that Jesus is not worth considering. And in schools and universities it is often the company of the athletic, the strong young men who are successful with their muscles. They know that other men or boys who are not so successful admire them and like to be friends with them; they are envied, and sought after, and imitated. And all this absorbs them, and tempts them to feel that religion is—not out of their reach, but—beneath their notice. They and not He are supreme in their little world. Every one of these cases is simply the case of Judas over again. But there is yet another instance, a temptation much more subtle, and that is to let Self assert its claims under cover of being a member of a religious class. Because I perform outward acts of religion regularly and carefully, it doesn’t matter if I sin now and then, especially if my sin is quite quite secret, and no one can possibly know anything about it. There are some tragic cases of business men who come to Church with unfailing regularity, and are respected and honoured members of their congregation, but are living two lives. It is said—some have said it to me—that business simply cannot be carried on in these days of competition with strict and meticulous honesty. You’ cannot get on if you never take advantage of other people’s ignorance or simplicity; JUDAS 95 you cannot get on if you never represent the value of goods to be higher than it really is. You must do as other people do, or you will go under in the rushing stream of the struggle for life. By ‘going under’ they often mean making rather smaller profits than they would like to make. But even if it meant more than that, they are still faced with the Lord’s question, “What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?’ The man who is completely engrossed in the sheer task of keeping himself and his family alive, the man who is perfectly satisfied with his money, or his gentlemanliness, his mental achievements, or his bodily achievements, is not necessarily a hypocrite, whatever other names might suit him. But the man who thinks—and the holiest amongst us is not free from the danger—that because he is religious a few little sins do not matter, that is the hypocrite; that is Judas. And so, if we want to escape his sin, we must set to work to try to bring Self down from its throne. Commune with your own heart, and search out your spirit, in order to be quite clear about the ways in which Self asserts its claim in your life. I don’t mean only the blackest and deadliest sins, that is to say those which a good early training and a good moral environment have led you to feel are the blackest and deadliest. You may be perfectly free from these, and yet find that Self is reigning. A high opinion of your own opinion, or your own powers or qualities; a touchy dislike of being shewn to have made a mistake; a dread of what you feel to be the humiliation of owning to a fault; a cowardly fear of what people will think of you. Ora quickness 96 CONCERNING CHRIST to find fault with others; enjoyment in hearing other people found fault with and run down; sullenness; moodiness; an unforgiving spirit; a lazy thoughtless- ness or selfishness that prevents you from doing small acts of politeness or courtesy at home, or that makes it feel distasteful and a nuisance to have to spend time and trouble in doing something for some member of the family. Or the sort of selfishness that makes some people say of you, ‘ He is so difficult and crochetty that nothing seems to please him.’ In some cases they say, “Of course, poor thing, it’s partly his health; but I do wish he would try a little harder not to be so fidgetty and exacting, and not to make his health an excuse for everything’. I might fill pages with this sort of thing. And it is all Self from beginning to end. It really is worth while to think very carefully about the motive power which rules us, that we be not as ‘ Judas Ischariot who also betrayed Him.’ 3. SILENCE. If Judas was disappointed because our Lord did nothing to uphold His cause, others were surprised that He said nothing. He was brought before the ecclesiastical officials of the day, the high priest and council, who tried to get false witness against Him; no lie was too brazen, no insinuation too base. And the high priest arose and said unto him, “Answerest thou nothing? What is it which these witness against thee?’ He did his very best to extort something from the young Prisoner whom they were determined to kill. But the great official was met by a silence baffling and invincible. SILENCE 97 ‘Jesus held His peace.’ Then He was taken to a still greater official, the procurator who represented the dread power of Rome. ‘And when He was accused by the chief priests and elders He answered nothing. Then saith Pilate unto Him, Hearest thou not how many things they witness against thee? And He gave him no answer, not even to a word.’ And once more, Pilate sent Him to Herod, the provincial official, the half-bred, vulgar sensualist, who had killed one prophet, and was pleased to see another because he hoped to while away half-an-hour of idleness by seeing Him do something magical. “And he questioned Him in many words; but He answered him nothing’. | In the margin of the Authorized Version there is a reference here to Isaiah liti. 3. Our minds perhaps turn to the words in v. 7: ‘He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.’ The words illustrate the meekness and gentleness of Christ. But I feel sure that that does not exhaust the meaning of His silence. He was a despised Prisoner on His trial, but in each case He stood and judged His accusers. They knew that their accusations were false, and the dignity of His impenetrable silence stung them like a lash. It was a momentary vision of ‘the wrath of the Lamb.’ . Jesus was on His trial. And He is on His trial still. I make no apology for the expression.